Eternity Ring (15 page)

She saw his face set and frowning, heavy with thought. He wasn’t looking at her—he didn’t seem to be looking at anything. She felt a surge of furious pride because it was her doing. She’d stopped him with his hand on the bell—she’d given him something to think about. And there was more to come—a whole lot more. She had never felt so much alive in all her life, or had such a sense of power.

His voice came curtly across her mood.

“All right, that will do. You’d better take the tray.”

Get rid of her, would he? Let that damned old woman send her away? Not much! She gripped the table till her palms were bruised, and flung the words at him.

“You can’t get rid of me like that! I know too much!” Then, as she saw him turn again to the bell, “Don’t! Don’t ring it! Why do you make me say things to you like that? I don’t want to hurt you! But I know you saw her—I know she came here— I heard what she said!”

He turned back rather slowly and stiffly.

“Explain yourself.”

She said, her voice tripping and faltering,

“I only don’t want you to send me away.”

“Don’t start that again. Explain what you said just now.”

“I saw her.”

He gave a short laugh.

“Is that what you call explaining?”

Her thin chest rose and fell.

“You don’t listen—but you’ve got to. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“If you’ve anything to say, will you say it!”

“Yes, I will. You don’t give me a chance. It was last Friday week. Mrs. Barton went out, and she made me change my day so as I’d be out too. Never gives anyone a chance, the old devil— always see me start, she would, before she’d go herself. But I banged the door, and she thought I’d gone and off she went. Well then I come back—I didn’t see why I should be driven out like that—and as I come out on the bedroom landing the telephone went.”

The heavy thinking look had gone from Grant’s face. It was angry now. He said in a cutting tone,

“So you thought you’d listen in.”

Another of those sobbing breaths.

“It wasn’t like that. I wanted to know if it was her—Mrs. Hathaway. I wanted to know if she rang you up, or—or if anyone else did. I—I liked hearing you talk.”

“Oh, you’ve done it before? What did you get this time?”

She flung up her head.

“I heard a woman say, ‘Mr. Hathaway—I want to speak to Mr. Hathaway.’ ”

Mark Harlow turned round from the piano.

“How do you like it?”

Cicely was in front of the fire, standing there in a short brown skirt up to her knees and a high-necked russet jumper. Only the light over the piano was on. Except when the firelight blazed up she was in shadow. Her curls were rumpled. At her feet, as near the fire as he could get, Bramble lay stretched out, his head tilted sideways on one paw, his little crooked black legs straight out behind him like a seal’s flippers. He had had rabbit for his dinner, and slept the deep untroubled sleep of the virtuous and young.

The house round them was quiet. Colonel and Mrs. Abbott were having tea at the Rectory, the one house in the neighbourhood to which he could be lured. The Rector and he would by now be playing the easy-going brand of chess to which both were addicted. Frank Abbott and Chief Inspector Lamb, after turning up at Miss Vinnie’s cottage, had departed into the blue, taking Miss Silver with them. Cicely had driven herself home to find Mark on the doorstep. Since everyone was making mysteries and practising concealments from which she was excluded, she was a good deal more pleased to see him than she would ordinarily have allowed him to suspect. They had just had tea, and he had been telling her that he was to do the music for Leo Tanfield’s new revue.

Cicely came out of some fastness of her own and said,

“What?”

“Darling, how too abrupt!”

“I wasn’t listening.”

If he was angry he didn’t show it, only smiled and said,

“Will you listen if I do it again?”

“All right.”

He did it again. Some brilliant execution, a catch-as-catch-can of sparkling notes, and then one of those half-said, half-sung trifles, cleverly rhymed and accented and not without wit. Melody negligible, performance well up to the mark. He struck a final chord and repeated his “Well?”

Cicely said, “Slick.”

“And what do you mean by that, my sweet?”

“You are not to call me ‘My sweet.’ ”

His eyebrows rose.

“Not even when we’re alone?”

“Certainly not when we are alone.”

He burst out laughing.

“It’s all right in front of the assembled parish gossips, but highly improper when it’s just you and me? Funny little thing— aren’t you?”

“I’m not set on your doing it in front of anybody, but it wouldn’t mean anything if you did.”

“And it hasn’t to mean anything?”

“No, Mark.”

He got up from the piano and came over to stand beside her. The lazy teasing note went out of his voice.

“Look here, Cis, how long is this going to go on?”

“How long is what going to go on?”

“This marriage of yours. Why don’t you get out of it?”

“That’s so easy, isn’t it!”

“Well, people are doing it every day.”

Cicely said nothing.

“Well? What about it?”

She did speak then, tilting her head and looking up at him.

“I’m not talking about my marriage. It’s my affair, not anyone else’s.”

“And a nice lot of ingrowing repressions you’ll get that way! When you don’t talk about a thing it gets you down. Civilized people talk these things out—they don’t sit on them and hatch them into tragedies. I don’t know why you and Grant split, but there it is—you’re living in one house, and he’s living in another. And you don’t speak. You can’t expect people not to notice. If you’re going to make it up with him, make it up, and I’ll be friends with you both as I was before. But if you’re not going to make it up, there’s no sense in going on like this. Get quit of what’s only a farce and give yourself—and me—a chance.”

Cicely raised her eyebrows. Her tone cut like ice.

“Is this a proposal?”

“Cis!”

“Is it?”

“My God, you’re hard!”

“You asked for it.”

“I asked you why you didn’t get a divorce.”

“Very well, I’ll answer that. It’s quite simple—Grant won’t play. I can’t divorce him unless he gives me cause, and he won’t give me cause. He could divorce me in three years’ time for desertion, but he won’t do that either. So that’s where we are.”

He stared at her, surprised and taken aback.

“Isn’t there any way out?”

“No, there isn’t.” She went on without any break. “I think your last modulation was a bit abrupt. I’ve an idea it would sound better this way.” She walked over to the piano and played a few chords. “Like this… Yes, that’s better.”

He followed her. They stood side by side looking down at the keyboard.

“I don’t know—I rather want it to be abrupt. In fact I might even accentuate the discord. Cis, isn’t it any good—you and me, I mean?”

“No, it isn’t. And don’t keep on making me say it, or I shall lose my temper. If you really want a discord, have it, but I think you’re wrong. The stuff’s too light to take it—you want to keep it light and slick.”

You can travel a long, hard way without any movement of the body. Grant Hathaway still stood by the hearth, the hand which had dropped the bell thrust deep into his trouser pocket. Agnes Ripley had not moved at all. She gripped the table edge against which she leaned as if she would never let it go. But she no longer knew that she was gripping it. Her mind was too disturbed, too tormented, to have room for sensations other than its own. In the short time which had passed the relationship between Grant and herself had changed immeasurably, they were no longer employer and employed, they were man and woman. And they were no longer the worshipping woman and the man who has no use for her. That was gone too— terribly lost and gone. There flared between them now that old fundamental antagonism which is implicit in the relationship of man and woman. Civilization has overlaid it with codes of conduct, religion has tamed and poetry sublimated it, but it is still there, a thing to be reckoned with, its native savagery ready to break out if once the barriers are let down.

They were down now. The words which Agnes had been pouring out could never be taken back. She had screamed them out with a naked lack of shame. There had been an awful pleasure in it. To stand there and say, “You killed them both, but I love you—I don’t care how many people you’ve killed, I love you”—this was the relief for which everything in her had ached. It wasn’t her love, it wasn’t her rage which spoke. It was something that rushed through her, making her its mouthpiece, intoxicating her with its power. She heard her own words as if they were not her words at all.

“Louise Rogers—that was her name. How did I know that, if I didn’t hear her say it? Perhaps even the police don’t know it yet. But I could tell them—I could tell them a lot of things. I could tell them everything I heard. I could tell them what she said on the telephone. I could tell them how you watched for her to come and let her in. I could tell them some of the things she said to you, because I heard them.”

Grant’s eyes dwelt on her in an appraising manner. He said in a quiet matter-of-fact tone,

“You’re crazy.”

A new hot flow of words came rushing through her.

“Yes, that’s true—I’m crazy—about you. Right away from the first—but you never noticed me. And what’s she got that you wouldn’t notice anyone else? A little bit of a brown thing that nobody could say was anything in the way of looks! And when she went away I thought, ‘Well, maybe he’ll notice me now,’ but you never!”

“Agnes, you’re crazy!”

Just for a moment the anger in her failed, as flame will leap and fail. Her voice broke.

“I’m not asking for much, but you could be kind to me. Why aren’t you kind to me?”

A look of sharp distaste flickered across his face. The fire flared again. She pelted him with screaming words.

“I could hang you, couldn’t I? If I went to the police and told them what I know, they’d hang you! Because you killed that Louise Rogers! And you killed Mary Stokes because she knew! You killed them both! You killed them—you killed them—you killed them!”

All at once he shouted at her, as angry as she.

“Be quiet, damn you!” He took a long stride towards her, and saw her flinch. He went on to the door and flung it open. “Get out and stay out! And you leave this house in the morning!”

She had straightened herself up. Her hands were numb when she let go of the table—she couldn’t feel them at all. The hot words were all gone. She had let them loose, and they had done something, she didn’t know what. They were gone. Now she was cold. Hot anger makes you feel wonderful. But the hot anger was all gone, with the hot words. Now she was cold. He had looked at her as if she was muck in the street, and she was cold. Words strung themselves in her mind—“Bitter cold—bitter—” The cold and the bitterness possessed her now, just as the hot fury had possessed her.

He told her what she had to do. She walked out of the room past Grant without looking at him and went to do it.

Chief Detective Inspector Lamb sat in the Lenton police station with Inspector Smith to keep him company and Sergeant Abbott to take notes of what Albert Caddie’s girl would say when Constable May had rounded her up and brought her in. Albert Caddie was not being charged—not just yet—but he was under detention. Whether he was charged or not would depend a good deal on what Miss Maisie Traill had to say.

Whilst they waited the Inspector held the floor. It became obvious that Scotland Yard had not a monopoly of bright ideas. Inspector Smith had some too. He had been having them all the afternoon. With a wooden face which concealed his opinion that Harold Smith was a very bright boy indeed and undoubtedly destined to rise to the top of the class, he now held forth, not dogmatically, but with a modest consciousness that he was worth listening to.

“There is an idea that has occurred to me, sir—I don’t know if it has to you—about this Mr. Ferrand.”

“What about him?” Lamb’s voice could hardly have been less encouraging.

Frank Abbott leaned gracefully back on the hard wooden chair, crossed his legs in a negligent manner, and prepared to enjoy himself. The Chief wasn’t liking this case. He was fogged, foxed, and flummoxed, to draw words from his own expressive vocabulary. When this happened someone was due to have his head bitten off. This time it wasn’t going to be Sergeant Abbott’s head. Smith, though he didn’t know it, was a ram in a thicket. He proceeded in the voice that matched his face.

“This Mr. Ferrand—I don’t know if it’s struck you, but we’ve only got his word for all this story about Mrs. Rogers having her jewels stolen and coming down here to look for the man that stole them. To my mind it’s a pretty thin sort of tale.”

Lamb’s eyes dwelt on him without pleasure, but he held his fire.

“Did you get through to the Bull at Ledlington?”

“Yes. She stayed there like he said. He wouldn’t invent anything like that, because he’d know we would check up on it. She stayed there all right, from January second to January fifth. I spoke to the hall porter, and he says he doesn’t remember giving her any address on an envelope. If she had dropped one, he would have given it to her. He wouldn’t have given her anyone else’s envelope—why should he? As for two gentlemen coming in for drinks, he would be more likely to remember an evening when they didn’t come in—if it ever happened, which it didn’t. So there’s no corroboration of what Mr. Ferrand says, and it came into my mind to wonder whether he hadn’t made the whole thing up.”

“Why?”

“Well, what came into my mind was this. Suppose he’d killed the girl himself. In love with her, jealous of her—well it’s the sort of thing that happens every day. Who says she borrowed his car and drove down here alone? Mr. Ferrand does. Well, suppose she wasn’t alone, suppose he was with her—or suppose he met her somewhere. Then there’s a quarrel and he kills her. All he’s got to do is drive the car to Basingstoke and leave it there while he catches a London train.”

Lamb’s eyes bulged ominously.

“And who shifted the body to the Forester’s House on the Saturday evening and buried it in the cellar? Do you think Ferrand came back? And if he did, how did he know about the Forester’s House, and how did he know there was a cellar under it? It took us long enough to find when we knew it was there, but a strange Frenchman with a corpse on his hands in the dark, he finds it as easy as kiss your hand. Tchah!”

Simultaneously with this explosive sound and the thump of the Chief Inspector’s fist upon the table the door opened and revealed Constable May, large, fresh-faced, ingenuous.

“Miss Traill is here, sir.”

Maisie Traill came into the room in a cheap tight-waisted coat, a skirt which cleared the knee, and high-heeled shoes which gave her a tilting walk. Her almost albino fairness had been carefully decorated. Lashes originally white were now quite unbelievably dark. Black eyebrows rose in a pencilled arch above pale grey eyes. A scarlet Cupid’s bow was plastered unconvincingly over the thin line of the lips. She was bare-headed, the light shone down on a mane of brightened hair. She rolled her eyes, settled herself in a chair, and said,

“What’s cooking?”

Frank Abbott sat up and took his pad.

Lamb said, “Just a few questions, Miss Traill.”

“Pleased, I’m sure.” Her voice was like all the rest of her, thin and brittle.

Lamb, who had a weakness for girls, being a good deal under the influence of three affectionate daughters, found himself for once inclined to severity. He had to make a conscious effort to speak with his usual bluff kindliness.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling us what you were doing between nine and ten o’clock on the evening of Friday, January eighth.”

Miss Traill giggled.

“I don’t keep a calendar in my head. Friday—well, let’s see— that’s last Friday week. Five o’clock? I work at Brown and Felton’s. They close at half past five in winter, so I come out and meet my boy friend—see?—and we have a bit of a snack and go to the pictures.”

“I’m afraid I must ask your friend’s name.”

She gave him a hard stare.

“Whatever for? Hasn’t done anything, has he?”

“His name, Miss Traill.”

A shrewd, niggardly astuteness prompted her. If Albert had been getting himself into trouble, she was through. It didn’t do to get on the wrong side of the police. She tossed her head and said,

“Albert Caddie. Know him?”

“You say he met you at half past five on the afternoon of Friday the eighth?”

“That’s right.”

“How long was he with you?”

Maisie giggled again.

“We went to the pictures like I said—had something to eat first—come out about half past ten.”

“He was with you the whole of those five hours?”

“Well, except for five minutes here and there.”

“Known him long?”

“Not so very.”

“How long?”

“Couple of weeks.”

“Know he’s a married man?”

The light grey eyes stared hardily.

“What’s that got to do with me?”

Lamb grunted. He hated to see a girl that way. Real bad bringing-up she must have had. Wanted smacking. He drummed with his fingers on his knee.

“Well, what about the next day, Saturday the ninth—did you meet him then?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What time?”

“He came to my place about five. Saturday’s our half day.”

“Stay there?”

“For a bit.”

“And then?”

“Went to the pictures—the other house. We were there till half past ten.”

“And day before yesterday, Saturday the sixteenth—see him then?”

“Why shouldn’t I? I told you it’s my half day. We went to my place for a bit, and then we were at the Rose and Crown playing darts.”

“What time did you go there?”

“Must have been getting on for eight o’clock. We come away about ten.”

He went on questioning her, and got the same short, dry answers, sometimes accompanied by a roll of the eye, sometimes by a mechanical giggle. There were no inconsistencies, no contradictions. If Maisie Traill was to be believed, Albert Caddie could not have murdered Louise Rogers at dusk on Friday the eighth, afterwards driving her car to Basingstoke. He could not have shifted the body and buried it round about six o’clock on Saturday the ninth. And he could not have murdered Mary Stokes after Joe Turnberry left her at eight-fifteen on Saturday the sixteenth.

For what Maisie’s word was worth, Albert had three clear alibis. Unfortunately for him her word didn’t seem to be worth a great deal.