Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman (6 page)

“Oh,
no
!” said Kitty in a gasping sigh that seemed to contain disappointment and consternation and rage inextricably mingled, and something else, too, a kind of desperation for which no effort of his imagination could account. “Oh,
God
, no! I hoped he’d never really done what he threatened—or if he had done it I hoped he’d taken it back. I mean about
Leslie
! He always swore he hadn’t and wouldn’t, but then even if he had he wouldn’t have been able to admit it, you see. And now—Oh,
damn
him!” she said helplessly. “Why? There was no possible reason, the thing never arose. He knew I didn’t need it, he knew I shouldn’t want it.
Why
?”

“He had to leave it to someone,” said George reasonably, “and he had a free choice what he did with his own, like everyone else. There’s no need for you to feel responsible for someone else’s deprivation, you know, it was none of your doing.”

“No,” she said dully, and let the monosyllable hang on the air as though she had meant to add something, and then could find no suitable words for what she wanted to say. She got up again resignedly to see him out, punctilious in accompanying him to the door, but all the time with that lost look in her eyes. When the door had closed between them he made three purposeful paces away from it towards the stairs, and two long, silent ones back again. She hadn’t moved from the other side of the door, she was leaning against the wall there, trying to think, trying to get hold of herself. He heard her say aloud, helplessly: “Oh, God, oh, God, oh,
God
!” in childish reproach, as though she was appealing to an unreasonable deity to see her point of view.

What had he done to her? What
was
it he’d done? Granted she didn’t want the money, granted she thought it ought to have gone to Leslie, she needn’t have received the news as though it embodied some peculiarly insidious attack upon her. He couldn’t say he hadn’t provoked any interesting reasons, the trouble was he didn’t know how to make sense of them now he’d got them.

He went down the carpeted stairs displeased with himself, almost ashamed, not even trying to make the odd pieces of jigsaw puzzle fit together, since they were so few and so random that no two of them touched as yet; and there, leaning negligently on the Morris, when he reached it, was Dominic.

He was a little out of breath, having run all the way to the car while George was coming down the last flight of stairs; but George was too preoccupied with other things to notice that. The bright inquisitive smile looked all right, the “Hallo, Dad!” sounded all right, and George didn’t look closely.

“Hallo!” he said. “What are you doing here?”

It was the third time Dominic had skipped his school lunch and made do with a snack in the town, in order to have time to walk slowly up and down Church Lane in the hope of catching a glimpse of Kitty. The telephone directory had supplied her address, once she herself had told him her name. He hadn’t yet quite recovered from the shock of strolling past the open door of the block and seeing the unmistakable shape of his father slowly descending the last turn of the stairs; and if it hadn’t been for the sudden inspiration the sight of the car had given him, he would have been running still.

“I’ve been on an errand for Chuck,” he said, mastering his breathing with care. Chuck was the least offensive of the several names by which his house-master was known to the upper school.

“Here?” said George, divining an improbability even where he had no reason to feel suspicious.

“To the rector,” said Dominic firmly, jerking his head towards the corner of the churchyard wall. Blessedly the rector was a governor of the school and chaplain to its cadet corps. “I saw the car and hung around on the offchance. As it’s getting round to half past twelve I thought with a lot of luck you might buy me a lunch.”

On reflection George thought he might. Beer barons may die, but the rest of the world still has to eat. “Get in,” he said resignedly, and took his offspring to a restaurant not far from the school, so that there should be no risk of his being late in the afternoon. “What about Chuck? Can the answer wait?”

“No answer,” said Dominic. “That’s all right.” The odd thing was that he didn’t feel as if he was lying at all; it was quite simply unthinkable to let the truth be seen or known, or even guessed at, though there was nothing guilty or shameful about it. Privacy as an absolute need was new to him. Ever since starting school at five years old he’d lied occasionally in order to keep something exclusively for himself, like most children, but without ever reasoning about what he was doing, and only very rarely, because his parents, and particularly his mother, had always made it easy for him to confide in them without feeling outraged. This was something different, something so urgent and vital that he would have died rather than have it uncovered. And yet he had to do things which would expose him to the risk of discovery; he had to, because what was his father doing there in the block of flats where Kitty lived? What was he doing there, the morning after old Armiger was killed, the morning after Kitty’d been with him at The Jolly Barmaid? “Your girl-friend was there—” And now this visit. They’d have to see everyone who’d been there, of course, but why Kitty, so soon?

“You’re on this murder case, aren’t you?” he said, trying to strike the right note of excited curiosity. “Mummy told me this morning old Armiger was dead. What a turn up! I never said anything to the fellows, naturally, but it leaked in around break, with the milk. It’s all over the town now, they’ve had half a dozen people third-degreed by this time, and one or two arrested.”

“They would,” said George tranquilly. “The number of people who can do this job better than I can, it’s a wonder I ever hold it down at all. Who’s the favourite?”

A sprat to catch a mackerel was fair enough. Dominic trailed his bait and hoped for a rise. “That chap Clayton. I bet you didn’t know he was under notice, did you?”

“The devil he is!” said George, wondering if Grocott had collected this bit of information yet, wondering, too, from which school theorist the item of news had come.

“Then you didn’t know! Old Armiger’s gardener’s son is in our form. There was a blazing row three days ago over hours, Clayton pitched right in and said he wouldn’t stand for being shoved around all hours of the day and night, and Armiger threw it up at him that he’d done time for larceny once and once for receiving a stolen car, and he was bloody lucky to have a job at all—”

“Language!” said George mechanically, drawing in to the kerb.

“Sorry; quoting. And then he fired him. Did you know he had a record?”

“Yes, we knew. A record ten years old. Not enough to hang him.”

“It isn’t capital murder,” said Dominic.

“I hope you’re not going to turn into a lawyer in the home,” said George. “I was using a figure of speech.”

He locked the car, and ushered his son before him into the dining-room of The Flying Horse. They found a table in a corner, and settled purposefully over the menu. Bad timing, thought Dominic, vexed. I shall have to come right out and ask.

“Are you on to anything yet?” The ardent face, the earnest eyes, these would pass muster with George; it was Dominic himself who suffered, making this enforced use of a travesty of something so real and so important to him. His father
was
wonderful, and he
did
feel a passionate partisan interest in any case his father was handling. But here he was putting on the appropriate face for his own ends, parodying his own adoration, and it caused him an almost physical pain when George grinned affectionately at him, and slapped him down only very gently.

“Just routine, Dom. We’ve hardly begun, there’s a long way to go yet.”

“Who was it you had to see in Church Lane? There aren’t any suspects there, are there?”

After a moment of consideration George said calmly: “I’d been to see Miss Norris. Just as I told you, pure routine. I’m working my way through a whole list of people who were on the premises last night, that’s all.”

“And no real leads yet? I don’t suppose
she
was able to tell you much, was she?”

“Practically nothing I didn’t know already. Get on with your lunch and stop trying to pump me.”

And that was all he was going to get, for all his careful manipulations. He tried once or twice more, but he knew it was no good. And maybe there was nothing more to extract, maybe this was literally all. But Dominic wasn’t happy. How could he be, with murder passing so close to Kitty that its shadow came between her and the sun?

YES,” SAID Jean Armiger, “I’ve heard the news. It’s in the noon papers, you know. I’ve been expecting you.”

She was a slender dark girl, with short black hair clustering closely round a bold, shapely head. Her face was short, broad and passionate, and her spirit was high. She couldn’t be more than twenty-three or twenty-four. She stood squarely in the middle of her ugly, inconvenient furnished bed-sitting-room on the second floor of Mrs. Harkness’s seedy house in a back street on the edge of town, facing George and the full light from the window, and scared of neither. The slight thickening of her body beneath the loose blue smock had robbed her of her quick-silver lightness and precision of movement, but its unmistakable qualities were there in every motion she made with her hands and head. For some reason, perhaps because Kitty had a way of dimming everyone else around her, George hadn’t expected anyone as attractive as this, or as vivid. Jean, as Wilson had said, was quite a girl. It wasn’t so difficult, after all, to see how Leslie Armiger might contrive to notice her existence, even in Kitty’s presence. He had grown up on brotherly terms with Kitty.

“You’ll understand, I’m sure, that we have routine inquiries to make. Were you at home last night, Mrs. Armiger?”

She curled a lip at the phrase, and cast one flying glance round the room he had dignified by the name. True, there was a cramped make-shift kitchenette out on the landing to be added to the amenities, and a shed in the garden where Leslie was allowed to keep his easel and canvasses and colours. But—home?

“Yes,” she said, forbearing from elaborating on the glance, which had been eloquent enough. “All the evening.”

“And your husband?”

“Yes, Leslie was here, too, except for a little while, he went out about half past nine to post some letters and get a breath of air. He was in the stores packing orders all day yesterday, he needed some fresh air. But it was only for about half an hour.”

“So he was home by ten?”

“I think it was a little before. Certainly by ten.”

“And he didn’t go out again?”

“No. You can check that with him, of course,” she said disdainfully. At this very minute, if all had gone according to plan, Grocott would be asking Leslie Armiger the same questions, discreetly in the manager’s office, at Malden’s, so that the staff, no doubt already agog, shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he was due to be arrested any moment; but Jean didn’t know that, of course. George wasn’t even sure why he had taken the precaution of arranging these two interviews to take place simultaneously; he had no reason as yet to distrust this young couple rather than any other of the possible suspects, but he had learned to respect his hunches. And if they had no lies to tell he had done them no wrong.

“We shall do that, of course,” he said disingenuously. “Tell me, Mrs. Armiger, have you had any contact with your father in-law since your marriage? Ever seen him or spoken to him?”

“No, never,” she said firmly, with a snap which said plainly that that was the way she had wanted it.

“Nor your husband, either?”

“He hasn’t seen him. He did write to him once, only once, about a couple of months ago.”

“Trying to effect a reconciliation?”

“Asking for help,” said Jean, and bit off the consonant viciously and clenched her teeth on silence.

“With your consent?”

“
No
!”

She wasn’t going to much trouble to hide her feelings, but she hadn’t intended to spit that negative at him so bitterly. She turned her head away for a moment, biting her lip, but she wouldn’t take it back or try to soften it now it was out.

“With what result?”

“With no result. He sent a contemptuous answer and refused to do anything for us.” She had been grateful for that, it had salved the fierce pride Leslie had involuntarily injured by making the appeal.

“And there’s been no further approach?”

“None as far as I know. But I’m sure none.”

After some inward debate George told her the terms of Armiger’s will; it seemed a justifiable line of inquiry. “Does that come as a surprise to you, Mrs. Armiger?”

“No,” she said steadily. “Why should it? He had to leave his money to someone, and he had no relatives left that he hadn’t quarrelled with.”

“You didn’t know of this plan of his to make Miss Norris his heiress?”

“All we knew was that Leslie was written off for good, so it no longer concerned us. His father had made that very plain.”

She was turning the narrow wedding ring upon her finger, and George saw that it was loose. The cheek on which the dark hair curled so lustrously was thinner than it should have been, too, perhaps with too much fatigue and worry, carrying the child, running this oppressive, cramped apology for a home and working part-time to eke out the budget; or perhaps with some other strain that gnawed at her from within. Something terrifying and destroying had happened to her when Leslie caved in and wrote to his father, something he might never be able to undo. Thanks to that unrelenting old demon of a father of his, he had another chance to come up to her expectations, if he had it in him; but after that one slip he had to prove it, up to then probably she’d been serenely sure of him. And yet George could see Leslie’s point of view, too. He must love his wife very much, or he wouldn’t have burned his boats for her sake; and to see her fretting here, to think of his son spending the first months of his life here, was surely enough to bring him to heel, however reluctantly. You could even argue that his attitude was more responsible than hers. What was certain was that by that one well-meant gesture he’d come dangerously near to shaking his marriage to pieces.

“I won’t trouble you any longer, Mrs. Armiger. Thank you for your help.”

He rose, and she went with him to the door, silent, disdaining to add anything or ask anything. Or hide anything? No, she would do that, if she had to. Maybe he’d soon know whether she was already hiding something.

The stairs were dark and narrow, the house smelled of oilcloth, stale air and furniture polish. Mrs. Harkness’s frigid gentility would never stand many visits from the police, even in plain clothes. George had already observed that no telephone wires approached the house, and that there was a telephone box only fifty yards away at the corner of the road. He drove away in the opposite direction, but turning left at the next by-road came round the block and parked under the trees within sight of the bright red cage, and sat watching it for a quarter of an hour, twenty minutes, twenty-five; but Jean Armiger didn’t come.

That pleased him; he had liked her, and he wanted her on the level, and though he had suffered some reverses in the past he had never yet learned to be sufficiently wary of the optimism with which he viewed the motives and actions of those people who made an instant good impression upon him. However, he went through the motions of scepticism; he wouldn’t commit himself to believing absolutely in her until he’d called Grocott, who was back in the office by now waiting for the telephone to ring.

The call tended to confirm his view that Jean was honest, and her testimony reliable. Young Leslie, called discreetly into conference from his dusty warehouse behind the big shop in Duke Street, had told a story which tallied at all points with his wife’s. Instead of going straight back after posting his letters he’d gone for a walk round by the park. He hadn’t been away quite half an hour, because he was certain the church clock hadn’t struck ten when he let himself into the house again. All very simple and entirely probable, and there had certainly been no contact between husband and wife. Yet the result, perversely, was to make George turn and take another look at his dispositions; and there was still room for doubt. As Jean had so unwisely revealed that she knew, Duckett’s bald statement was in the noon papers. Armiger had been found dead last night on the premises of The Jolly Barmaid with severe head injuries; foul play was, by implication, taken for granted, though Duckett had avoided committing himself. That was enough to alert both the dispossessed son and his fiercely loyal wife; guilty or innocent, they would know they must shortly account for their movements on that evening, guilty or innocent they might find themselves without a surety except each other, and make haste to co-ordinate the details of their story before the questions were asked. There’d been time for a telephone call between the appearance of the early editions on the streets and George’s two-thirty deadline. Depressed, George searched for the vindicating detail which should justify him in throwing this doubt overboard, but he couldn’t find one. Given the intelligence Jean certainly did not lack, there could have been collusion.

“How did he look?”

“Not too bad. A bit shocked, naturally, but he didn’t pretend they’d been on good terms, or that he was terribly cut up. Even if he was, actually, he wouldn’t let you see it. A very reserved chap, and a bit on the defensive, too.”

“Scared?”

“I wouldn’t say scared. But he’s well aware that he’s in a spot to attract, shall we say, the unwelcome attentions of the nosy public as well as ours. He’s no fool, and he knows his affairs are common property. Knows his strongest card is that he had nothing to gain by killing his dad, too.”

“Did he take pains to call your attention to the fact?”

“You underestimate him,” said Grocott with a short laugh. “He’s giving us credit for seeing that much ourselves. He just seemed to me to be leaning back on it for reassurance every time the going looked a bit rough.”

“How does he get on with the drivers and warehouse men?” asked George curiously. Such little communities don’t always take kindly to young men of superior education and manners accidentally dropped among them, especially if the alien tends to keep himself to himself.

“Surprisingly well. They seem to like him, call him Les, and let him mull in with them or keep quiet according to how he feels. Main thing is, I think, that there’s nothing phoney about him. He doesn’t try to be hail-fellow-well-met or drop his accent and pick up theirs. They’d soon freeze him out if he did, but he’s a lot too sensible for that. Or too proud. Either way it’s worked out to his advantage.”

The picture that emerged, thought George as he walked back to his car, was an attractive one, but he had to beware of being disarmed by that into writing off Leslie Armiger as innocent. Money is not the only motive for killing. There on one side was the heiress, already so wealthy that the money motive was no motive at all, and on the other side this young couple, very poor indeed but with nothing whatever to gain by Armiger’s death. He was of some potential value to them still so long as he remained alive, since in time he might have relented and taken them into favour after all. Especially with a grandson or granddaughter on the way. On the other hand, those who knew him best had said that he was extremely unlikely to change his attitude—and anyone can let fly in a rage, even with nothing to gain by it but the satisfaction of an overwhelming impulse of hatred and a burning sense of injury.

And there were others who didn’t love him, besides his own son. Clayton, that quiet tough in uniform, had turned out to be under notice, and Armiger had apparently tossed his prison record in his teeth when they fell out, and told him he was “bloody lucky to have a job at all.” Had that been merely a shaft at random, or meant to suggest to him that Armiger could, if he chose, make it practically impossible for him to find alternative employment anywhere in the Midland counties? People have been killed for reasons a good deal less substantial than that. And there was Barney Wilson, who had been done out of the home on which he’d set his heart, merely to satisfy Armiger’s spite against his son. That way the injury might smart even more fiercely than if the blow had been aimed directly at him. And others, too, people who had done business with Armiger to their cost, people who had worked for him.

Sitting there in the car contemplating the width of the field wasn’t going to get him anywhere. George hoisted himself out of a momentary drowsiness and drove to the head office of Armiger’s Ales, which was housed in a modern concrete and chromium building on a terrace above the cutting of the river. The main brewery was down behind the railway yards, in the smoke and grime of old Comerbourne, but the headquarters staff had broad lawns and flowering trees spread out before their windows, and tennis courts, and a fine new carpark for their, on the whole, fine new cars. Miss Hamilton’s Riley was the only old one among them, but of such enormous dignity and lavish length that it added distinction to the whole collection.

She drove it well, too, George had often seen her at the wheel and admired her invariable calm and competence. As often as not there would be two or three callow teen-age boys in the car with her when she was seen about at week-ends in summer, recruits from the downtown youth club she helped the probation officer to run. Maybe love of that beautifully-kept old Riley had been the saving of one or two potential delinquents within the past few years.

Raymond Shelley was just crossing the entrance hall when George appeared. He halted at once, obviously prepared to turn back.

“Do you want to see me? I was just on my way out, but if you want me, of course—” He had his briefcase under his arm and his silver-grey hat in his hand; the long, clear-featured face looked tired and anxious, and there was a nervous twitch in his cheek, but his manners would never fall short of the immaculate, nor his expression fail of its usual aristocratic benevolence. “One of your men was in this morning, so I rather assumed you’d done with us for to-day. I was going out to see Miss Norris. But I can easily telephone and put it off for an hour or two.”

“Please don’t,” said George. “I’ll talk to Miss Hamilton, if she’s free. You go ahead with whatever you were planning to do.”

“You’re sure? Naturally if there’s anything further I can do to help I’ll be only too pleased. I’ll bring you to Ruth’s room, at least.” He reached a long, thin hand to the polished balustrade of the staircase and led the way. “We have already accounted for ourselves, of course,” he said with a wry smile.