Death Has a Small Voice (11 page)

She crossed the brook, climbed wearily over another stone wall, and stepped down into a lane. Without any hesitation, or any thought, Pam turned to her right and followed the little lane. Inevitably, it climbed a hill. Pam put one foot grimly in front of another.

At the top of the hill, the lane pitched down. A hundred feet down the slope, on her left, there was a small house. Pam walked to the gap in the wall in front of the house and turned and walked up to the house, putting one foot in front of the other. She did not look to either side. She reached the door of the house and knocked, and knocked again.

After a time there was sound from within the house, and then lights went on. The door opened.

A tall man in his thirties stood at the door, and tightened a robe around him. He was blond; he had a long narrow face and a wide thin mouth, which now widely expressed surprise.

“Well,” he said, “hello.” He looked at her again. “Hello, hello,” he said. “What—”

“My name is North,” Pam said. “Pamela North.” She was conscious that she mumbled.

“Come again?” the man with the thin face said.

Pam said, “I'm lost—I—”

“You do look it,” he said. He opened the door. “Motor smash? Come in and—” He stopped.

Pam had raised both hands, palms outward. She was backing away.

“Hold it,” he said. “Come in here and—” Pam was backing away. “I'm perfectly respectable,” he said. “Wait. My name's Lyster. Perfectly respectable bloke, for a journalist. You—”

Pam turned.

“I say!” Alec Lyster called after Pam North as she ran from the house, from a man who pronounced “again” to rhyme with “pain,” who might be—

She ran past a station wagon parked to one side of the drive. She reached the lane and turned left, and ran along it, stumbling.

Alec Lyster stood for a moment looking after her. Then he walked, taking long strides, to the station wagon.

The sound was loud in the still night as the motor caught. Hearing it, Pam North left the lane and went over a stone wall. She lay behind it, in deep grass.

But
was
it? Pam thought.
Was
it the same voice?

Bill Weigand was explanatory; he was logical; he was patient. Jerry North listened, dully.

There was nothing to suggest that Pam had been in this rambling house at any time. There were, indeed, indications that she had not. Hilda Godwin had been dead for several days; almost certainly she had been dead before Monday night, when Pam had gone to the office of North Books; Inc., with the recording she had—again this was almost, but only almost, certain—received in the mail. It was after that that she had been in the coal bin of the little house on Elm Lane and had left a handkerchief there, by accident or by design. There was evidence that a trunk, probably the trunk from which the swollen body of Hilda Godwin had now been removed, had also been in the basement of the Elm Lane house.

But there was nothing to indicate that the trunk had not been removed from the basement and taken to the country long before Pam had been locked in the coal bin. If one had to guess, one would guess that it had been; that trunk and body had been in the country house since, perhaps, Sunday. Assuming Hilda had been killed in New York—and that was only hypothesis—and brought to the country for burial, there would have been no reason to delay the transportation.

“There may have been,” Jerry said. “We don't know what reasons he may have had.”

Bill agreed to that. He had said it was a guess. He was only saying he thought it the most probable guess. He was saying only that, so far as they knew, Pam had been last in New York. He was only saying there was nothing to indicate she had been at any time in this rambling house.

They were in a room—a small room, book-filled—off the square central hall. The whole house was lighted; the whole house was full of State policemen. Mullins was with them; they were looking everywhere, for anything.

“I have to get back,” Bill Weigand said. “We've got to get things going there. I think you should come with me.”

“I think she was here,” Jerry said. “I know what you have to do—what your job is.”

“If I thought—” Bill began.

“I know,” Jerry said. “All the same, you've got your job.” He moved a hand out, slowly. “This,” he said. “Hilda Godwin murdered and crammed into a trunk. But I've got to find Pam. I—”

But Mullins was standing in the doorway. Jerry and Bill looked at him.

“There's a room upstairs,” Mullins said. “Locked up, and no key. The boys are—”

There was a sound of impact from above, of rending wood.

“—breaking it down,” Mullins said. “It looks like maybe—”

Jerry was brushing past Mullins, by then, and Bill Weigand was after him. Mullins followed Weigand.

“—somebody's been locked up in there,” Mullins said, and followed the others up the stairs.

It was not immediately apparent whether anyone had been locked in the small room on the second floor. The window was open, and that, since the house would normally have been closed between visits to it by Hilda Godwin, was suggestive. It was several minutes before they found the opening in the ceiling of the closet, and found that a current of cool air came down through it. They found the attic space quickly, then, and the open window at the end of it. By that time, Mullins, working with a trooper, had found prints.

Pam North had been there. At a guess, she had been there recently. She was not there then.

When they were outside the house, throwing the beams of strong lights against it, picking out the little window near the roof, it was not hard to guess which way she had gone. The roof of the house sloped gradually, ended a few feet above the back porch roof which sloped at the same angle. They examined the ground, then.

A woman had dropped from the porch roof; her narrow, sharp-heeled shoes had dug deeply into soft earth. She had staggered backward, off balance, and sat down hard in soft earth, leaving an impression neatly round.

“Pam!” Jerry North said, with conviction.

She had got to her feet again. She had almost fallen into the wide, shallow excavation in the middle of a cleared garden plot. She had gone around it, and she had been running—running away from the house, down a slope. Beyond the cleared square of the garden she had left no tracks they could find in the darkness, even with the best of flashlights.

Jerry could not stop. He ran down the slope, the beam from his flashlight leaping ahead of him.

“Go with him, Mullins,” Bill Weigand said. Mullins went.

Three strands of barbed wire made a fence at the bottom of the slope. The beams from two flashlights moved along the fence; it was that from Jerry's which stopped on a small piece of cloth which dangled from a barb on the fence's lowest strand.

It was wool; it was beige wool. Jerry was almost certain. He and Mullins went under the fence.

Beyond it they picked up again, briefly, the signs of someone's passage through tall grass, among bushes. They found, in an area bare of grass, one footprint. They went on to a stone fence, covered luxuriantly with heavy vine. Here and there the vine still carried the bright red leaves which ivy flaunts in autumn.

“That's poison ivy, huh?” Mullins asked. “Seems to me—”

But Jerry North was already going over the wall, through the ivy.

“Jeeze!” Mullins said. Mullins followed Gerald North. He followed him into the swamp beyond the wall.

Bill Weigand watched them go, saw them stop at the bottom of the first slope and examine something; saw them wriggling under the barbed wire fence. He went back into the house, and conferred with the sergeant; then with a physician from the Medical Examiner's office.

At a guess, Hilda Godwin had been killed Saturday night or Sunday. She had, almost certainly, been strangled. It was probable that the body had been put into the trunk within a short time after death. They would see what else they could find out, using knives and chemical reagents. So—

“She was a poet,” Bill said, abstractedly. “She wrote love lyrics, I'm told.”

“Well,” said the physician, without emphasis.

There was nothing more to do in the rambling house beyond South Salem, in upper Westchester—nothing more for an acting captain, Homicide West. There was much to do in town, now that they knew. There was the little house in Elm Lane to be taken apart for what might be hidden in it; there was the past to dig into. And some time, if possible, there was sleep to be got.

“When Mullins gets back—” Acting Captain Weigand began to the State Police sergeant. But he stopped.

A tall, handsome man in his middle forties stood in the doorway and looked at them, his regular features grave, his eyebrows faintly lifted.

“Oh,” he said. “Captain Weigand. Something's happened?”

“Yes,” Bill Weigand said. “Miss Godwin's dead, Mr. Wilson.”

The rather full, well-shaped lips of Professor Bernard Wilson parted; the well-shaped head shook slowly from side to side.

“Dead,” Wilson said. “That is shocking, Captain. She was so young. So alive. Dead.”

His voice grew heavier as he spoke. It was as if realization came only slowly into his mind, and the shock of realization.

“She did not die naturally?” Wilson said, and there was no question in his voice.

“No,” Bill said. “She was strangled, Mr. Wilson. Several days ago. Her body was there.”

He gestured toward the trunk, which stood where they had found it; stood open, but now empty.

Wilson looked at the trunk, and there was an expression of horror on his face.

“Several days,” he said. “In—” he nodded toward the trunk.

“Yes,” Bill Weigand said.

“How horrible,” Wilson said. “How very horrible it must have been.”

“Yes,” Bill said again. “It always is.”

“She was so beautiful,” Wilson said. “Really beautiful.”

“There's no use thinking about it,” Bill said. He waited. He waited pointedly.

“I live near by,” Wilson said. “That is, I have a cottage along the road. I use it mostly in the summer, of course. But I happened to be there tonight.”

“Did you?” Bill said.

“Yes,” Wilson said. “I was working. It is a good place to work, especially at this time of the year. I am doing a critical—” He stopped. “You don't care about that,” he said. “I saw the lights—something woke me and I saw the lights. I suppose I heard sirens?”

“Probably,” Bill said.

“They must have wakened me,” Wilson said. “When I saw the lights I realized something was wrong. I came down the road and saw the police cars.”

His voice was fully under control, by then. The uncertainty which shock brings was no longer in it.

“Of course,” Wilson said, “I realize there is nothing I can do. I thought there might be.”

“When did you come up?” Bill asked him. “Did you see anything? Hear anything?”

Wilson hesitated. He said that he realized, now, that he had seen something. If something had happened that night? He was told something had.

Then, Wilson told Bill Weigand, speaking slowly and carefully, in the modulated voice of his profession, with the careful word choice of his profession, it was possible he could help. What he knew meant nothing to him; it might help others, better trained in evaluating evidence.

“Right,” Bill said. “Go on, Mr. Wilson.”

Wilson went on. He started with the drink he had had at the Four Corners, where Weigand had seen him, and they had talked with Shaw, with Alec Lyster. As he left the restaurant, Bernard Wilson had planned merely to go to his apartment uptown and read for a time before going to bed. But, as he walked toward the subway, he had had an idea. Or, more exactly perhaps, something he wished to say had suddenly come clear in his mind.

“I'm writing a—” Wilson said, and did not end the sentence immediately, except with a shrug. “Call it a critical history,” he said. “I've been working up here all summer, coming up this fall whenever I had the time free. Most of my material is here.” When he said “here” he waved generally to his left, presumably indicating his house.

Having tomorrow free—he hesitated, corrected himself—having today free, Wednesday free, he decided to spend the evening in the country and get on with it. He had, therefore, picked up his car and driven to South Salem. He had arrived at about half past eight and had got to work. Oh yes—he had stopped for a sandwich on the way. He worked by a window from which he could look out and down at Hilda Godwin's house. “The old Somerville place, they call it,” he said.

Bill merely nodded to that.

He had, he thought, been working less than an hour when he saw the lights of a car approach the Godwin house. The car drove up to the front of the house and stood there, for a time, with the lights on. He saw someone moving, once passing between him and the lights but for the most part keeping on the other side.

“I supposed, of course, that Hilda had arrived,” Wilson said. “That is, I supposed she had been here for several days and had been out to dinner somewhere and was coming home.”

“Right,” Bill said. “Go on.”

The lights had gone on in the house, and after a time the lights of the car had been switched off. Wilson had gone back to work; he had thought, vaguely, that if the lights were still on when he finished for the evening, he might walk down and say “hello” to Hilda Godwin.

But after about an hour, or perhaps three-quarters of an hour, the lights went off in the Godwin house, the lights of the car went on, the car backed and turned and left. Hilda, he decided, had stopped by for something, had got it, had gone again.

That was all; he realized it was not much. He had gone back to work; about midnight he had gone to bed. The sirens, he supposed, had wakened him. He had looked out and seen the lights, guessed something was wrong, come to do anything he could.