Cover Her Face (27 page)

    Stephen Maxie said wearily: ‹I can hardly see poor old Liddell climbing up stackpipes, or sneaking in at the back door, to face Sally alone. She wouldn't have the nerve. And you can't imagine her seriously setting out to kill Sally with her bare hands."

    "She might," said Catherine, "if she knew that Sally was drugged."

    "But she couldn't have known," Deborah pointed out. "And she couldn't have put the drug in Sally's beaker, either.

    She and Eppy were leaving the house as Sally took the beaker up to bed. And it was my beaker she took, remember. Before that they were both in this room with Mummy."

    "She took your beaker in the same way that she copied your dress," said Catherine. "But the Sommeil must have been put in it later. No. one could want to drug you."

    "It couldn't have been put in later," said Deborah shortly. "What chance would there have been? I suppose one of us tiptoed in with Father's bottle of tablets, pretended to Sally that it was just a cozy social call, and then waited until she was bending over the baby and popped a tablet or two into her cocoa. It doesn't make sense."

    Dalgleish's quiet voice broke in:

    "None of it makes sense if the drugging and the strangling are connected. Yet, as I said, it was too great a coincidence that someone should have decided to strangle Sally Jupp on the same night as someone else set out to poison her. But there could be another explanation. What if this drugging were not an isolated incident?

    Suppose someone had regularly been doping Sally's evening drink. Someone who knew that only Sally drank cocoa so that the Sommeil could safely be put into the cocoa tin. Someone who knew where the drug was kept and was experienced enough to use the right amount. Someone who wanted Sally discredited and out of the house, and could complain if she persistently overslept. Someone who had probably suffered more from Sally than the rest of the household realized and was glad of any action, however apparently ineffective, which would give her a sense of power over the girl. In a sense, you see, it was a substitute for murder."

    "Martha," said Catherine involuntarily.

    The Maxies sat silent. If they had known or guessed, none of them gave a sign.

    Eleanor Maxie thought with compunction of the woman she had left weeping in the kitchen for her dead master. Martha had stood up at her entrance, her thick coarsegrained hands folded over her apron. She had made no sign when Mrs. Maxie told her. The tears were the more distressing for their silence. When she spoke her voice had been perfectly controlled, although the tears still ran down her face and dripped over the quiet hands. With no fuss and without explanation she had given in her notice. She would like to leave at the end of the week. There was a friend in Herefordshire to whom she could go for a time. Mrs. Maxie had neither argued nor persuaded. That was not her way. But, bending now a courteous and attentive gaze on Dalgleish, her honest mind explored the motives which had prompted her to exclude Martha from the death-bed and interested itself in this revelation that a loyalty which the family had all taken for granted had been more complicated, less acquiescent than any of them had suspected and had at last been strained too far.

    Catherine was speaking. She was apparently without apprehension and was following Dalgleish's explanation as if he were expounding an interesting and atypical case history:

    "Martha could always get Sommeil of course. The family were appallingly careless over Mr. Maxie's drugs. But why should she want to dope Sally on that particular night? After the scene at dinner Mrs. Maxie had more to worry about than Sally's late rising. It was too late to get rid of her that way. And why did Martha hide the bottle under Deborah's namepeg?

    I always thought she was devoted to the family."

    "So did the family," said Deborah dryly.

    "She drugged the cocoa again that night because she didn't know about the supposed engagement," said Dalgleish.

    "She wasn't in the dining-room at the time and no one told her. She went to Mr. Maxie's room and took the Sommeil and hid it in a panic because she thought she had killed Sally with the drug. If you think back you will realize that Mrs. Bultitaft was the only member of the household who didn't actually enter Sally's room. While the rest of you stood around the bed her one thought was to hide the bottle. It wasn't a reasonable thing to do but she was beyond behaving reasonably. She ran into the garden with it and hid it in the first soft earth she found.

    It was meant, I think, to be a temporary hiding-place. That's why she hastily marked it with the nearest peg. It was by chance that it happened to be yours, Mrs. Riscoe. Then she went back to the kitchen, emptied the remaining cocoa powder and the lining-paper into the stove, washed out the tin and put it in the dustbin. She was the only person who had the opportunity to do these things. Then Mr. Hearne came into the kitchen to see if Mrs. Bultitaft was all right and to offer his help. This is what Mr. Hearne told me." Dalgleish turned a page of his dossier and read:

    "She seemed stunned and kept repeating that Sally must have killed herself. I pointed out that that was anatomically impossible and that seemed to upset her more. She gave me one curious look… and burst into loud sobbing."

    Dalgleish looked up at his audience. ‹I think we can take it," he said, "that Mrs. Bultitaft's emotion was the reaction of relief. I suspect, too, that before Miss Bowers arrived to feed the child Mr. Hearne had coached Mrs. Bultitaft for the inevitable police questioning. Mrs. Bultitaft tells me that she didn't admit to him or to any of you that she was responsible for drugging Sally. That may be true. It doesn't mean that Mr. Hearne didn't guess. He was quite ready, as he has been throughout the case, to leave well alone if it were likely to mislead the police. Towards the end of this investigation, with the faked attack on Mrs. Riscoe, he took a more positive line in attempting to deceive."

    "That was my idea," said Deborah quietly. "I asked him. I made him do it."

    Heane ignored the interruption and merely said: ‹I may have guessed about Martha. But she was perfectly truthful. She didn't tell me and I didn't ask. It wasn't my affair."

    "No," said Dalgleish bitterly. "It wasn't your affair." His voice had lost its controlled neutrality and they looked up at him startled by his sudden vehemence.

    "That has been your attitude throughout, hasn't it? Don't let's pry into each other's affairs. Don't let's be vulgarly interested. If we must have a murder let it be handled with taste. Even your efforts to hamper the police would have been more effective if you had bothered to find out a little more from each other. Mrs. Riscoe need not have persuaded Mr. Hearne to stage an attack on her while her brother was safely in London if that brother had confided in her that he had an alibi for the time of Sally Jupp's death. Derek Pullen need not have tortured himself wondering whether he ought to shield a murderer if Mr. Stephen Maxie had bothered to explain what he was doing with a ladder in the garden on Saturday night. We finally got the truth from Pullen, but it wasn't easy.

    "Pullen wasn't interested in shielding me," said Stephen indifferently. "He just couldn't bear not to behave like a little gent! You should have heard him telephoning to explain just how oldschool-tie he was going to be. Your secret is safe with me, Maxie, but why not do the decent thing? Damn his insolence!"

    "I suppose there's no objection to us knowing what you were doing with a ladder," inquired Deborah.

    "Why should there be? I was bringing it back from outside Bocock's cottage. We used it during the afternoon to retrieve one of the balloons which got caught up in his elm. You know what Bocock is. He would have dragged it up first thing in the morning and it's too heavy for him. I suppose I was in the mood for a little masochism so I slung it over my shoulder.

    I wasn't to know that I'd find Pullen lurking about in the old stables.

    Apparently he made a habit of it. I wasn't to know, either, that Sally would be murdered and that Pullen would use his great mind to put two and two together and assume that I'd used the ladder to climb into her room and kill her. Why climb in anyway? I could have got through the door. And I wasn't even carrying the ladder from the right direction."

    "He probably thought that you were trying to cast suspicion on an outside person," suggested Deborah. "Himself, for instance."

    Felix's lazy voice broke in:

    "It didn't occur to you, Maxie, that the boy might be in genuine distress and indecision?"

    Stephen moved uneasily in his chair.

    "I didn't lose any sleep over him. He had no right on our property and I told him so. I don't know how long he'd been waiting there but he must have watched me while I put down the ladder. Then he stepped out of the shadows like an avenging fury and accused me of deceiving Sally. He seems to have curious ideas about class distinctions. Anyone would think I had been exercising droit de seigneur. I told him to mind his own business, only less politely, and he lunged out at me. Pd had about as much as I could stand by then so I struck out and caught him on the eye, knocking off his spectacles. It was all pretty vulgar and stupid. We were too near the house to be safe so we daren't make much noise. We stood there hissing insults at each other in whispers and grovelling around in the dust to find his glasses. He's pretty blind without them so I thought I'd better see him as far as the corner of Nessingford Road. He took it that I was escorting him off the premises, but his pride would have been hurt either way so it didn't matter much. By the time we came to say good night he had obviously persuaded himself into what he imagined was an appropriate frame of mind. He even wanted to shake hands! I didn't know whether to burst out laughing or to knock him down again. I'm sorry, Deb, but he's that sort of person."

    Eleanor Maxie spoke for the first time:

    "It is a pity that you didn't tell us about this earlier. That poor boy should certainly have been spared a great deal of worry."

    They seemed to have forgotten the presence of Dalgleish, but now he spoke:

    "Mr. Maxie had a reason for his silence. He realized that it was important for you all that the police should think that a ladder had been available within easy reach of Sally's window. He knew the approximate time of death and he wasn't anxious for the police to know that the ladder hadn't been returned to the old stable before twenty past twelve. With luck we should assume that it had been there all night. For much the same reason he was vague about the time he left Bocock's cottage and lied about the time he got to bed. If Sally was killed at midnight by someone under this roof he was anxious that there should be no lack of suspects. He realized that most crimes are solved by a process of elimination. On the other hand I think he was telling the truth about the time he locked the south door. That was at about twelve thirtythree and we know now that at twelve thirty-three Sally Jupp had been dead for over half an hour. She died before Mr. Maxie left Bocock's cottage and about the same time as Mr. Wilson of the village store got out of bed to shut a creaking window and saw Derek Pullen walking quickly past, head bent, towards Martingale. Pullen was hoping, perhaps, to see Sally and to hear her explanation.

    But he only reached the cover of the old stables before Mr. Maxie arrived, carrying the ladder. And by then Sally Jupp was dead.

    "So it wasn't Pullen?" said Catherine.

    "How could it have been," said

    Stephen roughly. "He certainly hadn't killed her when he spoke to me and he was in no condition to turn back and kill her after I had left him. He could hardly see his way to his own front gate."

    "And if Sally was dead before Stephen got back from visiting Bocock, it couldn't have been him either," pointed out TO Catherine. It was, Dalgleish noticed, the first time that any of them had specifically referred to the possible guilt or innocence of a member of the family.

    Stephen Maxie said:

    "How do you know that she was dead then? She was alive at ten-thirty p.m. and dead by the morning. That's as much as anyone knows."

    "Not really," replied Dalgleish. "Two people can put the time of death closer than that. One is the murderer, but there is someone else who can help too."

    There was a knock on the door and Martha stood there, capped and aproned, stolid as always. Her hair was strained back beneath her curiously high oldfashioned cap, her ankles bulged above the barred black shoes. If the Maxies were seeing in their mind's eye a desperate woman, clutching to herself that incriminating bottle and homing to her familiar kitchen like a frightened animal. She looked as she had always looked and if she had become a stranger she was less alien than they now were to each other. She gave no explanation of her presence except to announce "Mr. Proctor for the Inspector." Then she was gone again and the shadowy figure behind her stepped forward into the light. Proctor was too angry to be disconcerted at being shown thus summarily into a roomful of people obviously occupied with their private concerns. He seemed to notice no one but Dalgleish and advanced towards him belligerently.

    "Look here, Inspector, I've got to have protection. It isn't good enough. I've been trying to get you at the station. They wouldn't tell me where you were, if you please, but I wasn't going to be fobbed off with that station sergeant. I thought I'd find you here. Something's got to be done about it."

    Dalgleish considered him in silence for a minute.

    "What isn't good enough, Mr. Proctor?" he inquired.

    "That young fellow. Sally's husband.

    He's been round home threatening me. He was drunk if you ask me. It's not my fault if she got herself murdered and I told him so. I won't have him upsetting my wife.

    And there are the neighbours. You could hear him shouting his insults right down the avenue. My daughter was there, too.

    It's not nice in front of a child. I'm innocent of this murder as you very well know, and I want protection."