Heads You Lose (13 page)

“You told her yesterday?”

“Yes,” said Fran, not meeting her sister’s eyes.

But that morning she had turned at the door of the library and cried out to Cockie that
she
knew nothing about James’s marriage; had looked at Fran as though to beg her to keep quiet…

“Wasn’t it
peculiar,”
said Fran in a sad, small voice.

Pendock sought out the Inspector. “Look here, Cockrill, I’m going to ask you a favour. If I stay in this house a moment longer I shall go off my head. I’ve always walked a lot and I simply must get some exercise. Couldn’t you let me go out on the downs and stretch my legs a bit?”

“No,” said Cockie crossly, for he had been interrupted in the middle of a most elaborate timetable.

“Oh, but Cockrill—look. I feel absolutely stifled here. Do let me go…”

“What do you want to go for?” said Cockie irritably.

“I tell you, I want to walk. That’s all. I won’t stop anywhere or speak to anyone, I won’t do anything but simply walk. Couldn’t you let me go?”

“I could let you go with a guard, I suppose,” said the Inspector ungraciously.

“Oh, God, that’s no good. It’s the very feeling of being guarded, cramped up mentally and physically, that I want to get away from.” He turned like a caged animal, wounded and desperate, driven by something more than the mere desire of an hour or two of exercise. “Well—all right,” he said hopelessly.

Cockie raised his bright little eyes and looked him in the face. “Mr. Pendock—you are under at least some suspicion for the murders of Grace Morland and Miss le May. How am I to know that you aren’t planning some kind of a get-away?”

Pendock looked horrified, “
I’m
under suspicion?”

“Of course. You’re all under suspicion.”

“But, Inspector, I was in bed…”

“I know, I know, I know,” said Cockie wearily. “You are all as innocent as the babe unborn and the two unfortunate ladies murdered each other and replaced their own heads by post-mortem muscular contraction. I know.” He pointed suddenly across the village to where the downs rolled out above and beyond. “Now look here—from this house I shall be able to watch you if you walk to the Tenfold Ridge and down again. You ought to be through the village and out of the valley in a quarter of an hour; and from then on I shall keep you in sight.” He interrupted Pendock’s gratitude to add: “But you must have someone with you. Captain Nicholl had better go.”

Pendock’s face fell. “He won’t walk a yard if he can help it.”

“Well, what about Mr. Gold?”

“He’d come. I expect he’d love it. But wouldn’t either of them help me in my dash for liberty?”

“That’s my business,” said Cockie briefly. He took out his watch. “You must be back in two hours. And no nonsense: straight up to the ridge and down again. I shall have a squint through glasses now and again, so don’t try bribing any of your local adherents to understudy you.”

Henry was delighted to go. They collected Aziz and set off through the village among the doubtful glances of many whom Pendock had befriended in other days, now all quite ready to throw stones if stones were put into their hands. The evacuees had not been so thrilled since a bomb had fallen two doors away, at home, in dear old Whitechapel. They asked eagerly of Pendock’s tenants: “Is it true that ’is father done in ’is mother?” and the villagers who had waxed fat and comfortable and happy under generations of Pendocks replied regretfully that it was not strictly true; though the lady had died very young and there might be something in that. “And what’s more she died abroad,” added Mrs. Porter, the green-grocer’s wife, leaning across the counter with rather special care because she was shortly expecting her sixth.

A rustle of excitement passed among the evacuees. They said darkly: “Wot—at Ostend or somethink of that?”

Mrs. Porter did not think that Mrs. Pendock had died at Ostend. “Well, never mind—as long as it was abroad,” said the evacuees cheerfully, for who knew what dark things might not go on abroad, what with them casinos and things; and here was this grand-looking gentleman right in their midst, right in this dead-and-alive little village where people drank their milk straight from the cow and not out of nice hygienic tins, and only the ladies of the gentry went into the pub; here he was follering in his father’s footsteps and who knew where it would end? They gazed after him with respectful horror.

Pendock was unmoved. “People are all the same. This very same lot will fall over themselves to rejoice with me when the whole thing’s cleared up and ‘the House’ is free from suspicion. I don’t care two hoots what they think.”

“Don’t you?” said Henry, picking up this brave challenge as he did everything that could be of interest or present a new point of view. “You’re a very lucky man if you don’t. Personally I feel as though tadpoles were wriggling up and down my spine, and after all
I
don’t know them—they’re nothing to me. Do you really not mind?”

“Why should I? It’s only instinct, not reason. They’re nice people, really; I don’t know much about the evacuees, of course, though I saw a lot of them when they first came and I was fixing up for their reception and so on; but the villagers are good, simple, straightforward folk. It’s just that they’re sheep—like the vast majority of the human race. Why should I be hurt by what they think? Anyway, it’ll all be cleared up in a day or two…”

“Do you think so?” said Henry gravely. “Myself, I’m not so sure. To me it all looks very queer and ugly and very frightening indeed.”

They turned out of the village and began to climb the gentle ascent to the downs. Aziz ran before them with the busy, important look that Fran called “swinging his brief-case.” Pendock said slowly: “It’s queer, of course; and ugly, of course; but what is there to be frightened of? We’re safe enough, really.”

“Do you think we are?” said Henry coolly.

“Well, we’ve got the police guard.”

“The police guard didn’t help Pippi,” said Henry sombrely. “Anyway, I didn’t mean that sort of danger. I meant that sooner or later Cockrill is going to pick on one of us and clap us into gaol. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t; after all he’s got to have something to show for three decapitations.”

As they climbed the hill out of the village Pendock’s mind began to swing round to confidence. He said reasonably: “He couldn’t do it. There’s another person mixed up in all this who hasn’t appeared yet, and once they turn up we’ll have nothing to worry about. I grant you it’s odd about the hat and again about the scarf; but we were all together when that ’phone call was made, and that’s the beginning and end of it. There must be someone else.”

“But how did that person get out of the house, Pendock? That’s what hasn’t been explained. She was telephoning when you came out of the drawing-room; we’ve established the time sufficiently to prove that she was either still on the ’phone or else that she’d just finished the call. As you didn’t see her in the hall she must have been in the library. On your way upstairs you locked the front door; well, how did she get out?”

“Back door,” suggested Pendock doubtfully.

“The only way you can get to the back door is through the servants’ hall and the kitchen, and Constable Whatsit was drinking coffee in there with the rest of the staff. Anyway, the back door, like everything else in the house, was found locked and bolted on the
in
side.”

“That applies to us too,” said Pendock. “I could have got in and out because I’ve got a key to the front door, only as it happens, I didn’t. But none of
you
could.”

It was like coming out of a fog, to be striding over the downs in the cold crisp air, with the world all white about them; he felt as though he had been stifled down in Pigeonsford, stifled in doubts and suspicions and vague, uneasy fears. Here he could breathe freely and think clearly and without small prejudices. For the first time he faced with courage the thought of the threat to Fran: he took it in his hands and broke it apart and examined it, and much of his terror and foreboding crumbled with it. “After all, Fran
wasn’t
next,” he said aloud. “It was all just an empty threat to draw attention from Pippi le May. I believe, I do believe, that the whole thing has been directed against Miss Morland’s family; somebody wanted to wipe them out and they used all these tricks to try and involve us at Pigeonsford. …”

“But what about the girl in the copse? She wasn’t connected with Miss Morland.”

“Oh, the girl in the copse had nothing to do with it,” said Pendock, swinging his stick almost light-heartedly, trudging along through the snow. “Somebody wanted to do away with Miss Morland and her cousin; the business in the summer had never been explained, so they thought they would confuse the issue by committing the murder in a rather similar way. I don’t believe there’s any other connection.”

“I got rather confidential with my bodyguard this morning,” said Henry, who could draw confidences from a boa-constrictor. “Apparently there were some very odd points about Miss le May’s murder. Did you know, for example, that the body was surrounded by acres of snow, untrodden by human foot?”

“Good lord—is that so?”

“And moreover, the police have turned the house upside down, as we’ve very good cause to know, and they haven’t found a weapon. My chum firmly believes that Pippi le May murdered Grace Morland and that Grace has come back with a chopper from the other world, and done the same for Pippi. The police seem to think that she may have been killed somewhere else and then dumped in the summer-house; but, either way, she had to be got there, and the other person had to get away. How the devil was it done?”

“Parachute!” suggested Pendock, smiling, watching Aziz as he tunnelled his way through the snow, his tail moving like a small black periscope against the white surface.

“A parachute isn’t much good at taking off again,” said Henry, responding to his smile. His eager mind toyed lovingly with the problem. “I suggested tennis rackets tied over the shoes and of course skis and all the winter sports dodges; but my man says there just weren’t any marks at all. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

“It might be, if it hadn’t happened in my garden,” said Pendock ruefully.

“I thought somebody might have got away by the railway line,” continued Henry cheerfully. “Walking along balancing on the rails, you know. That wouldn’t leave any prints. But apart from the fact that it’s difficult to do a tight-rope act along slippery rails at the best of times, and rather more so when you’re encumbered by a headless body—or any other kind of body, for the matter of that—it would still leave a distance of fifteen to twenty yards to be covered between the railway line and the summer-house.” He stopped suddenly, and his face was alive with a sort of mischievous enlightenment. “I say! Didn’t you tell me that Grace Morland’s maid had been a tight-rope walker?”

For a moment the sheer coincidence was almost too much for Pendock; but he laughed and pushed aside the whole idea. “She can hardly walk along the ground these days, poor old Trotty, let alone a tight-rope; and anyway, she was a trapeze artist, not a wire-walker. Besides which she’s old and feeble and everything else you can think of.
Besides
which she owed an awful lot to the Morland family, and now that Grace is dead, loses a good home and a comfortable job and has only a pittance to live on in place of it.”

“For all you know she loathed the family like poison,” insisted Henry, reluctant to abandon his brilliant brain-wave, though he did not for a moment really believe in it. “For all you know, her legs are as strong as yours or mine. Who says she’s a cripple? Trotty says so; no one else.”

“An eminent specialist from London said so some years ago,” said Pendock, laughing at him. “And various doctors and nurses and masseurs at Torrington Cottage Hospital say so to this day; otherwise I must admit that her claims are quite unsubstantiated.”

“Well, I’m sorry about it,” said Henry. He added apologetically: “It’s a shame to joke about it; but up here everything seems very remote and unimportant, doesn’t it?”

They had reached the crest of the downs and now leant, puffing, against a boulder, looking down on the rolling, snow-covered grassland stretching out ahead of them; and back to where Pigeonsford stood out, big and black and square, on the rising ground the other side of the valley. Henry Gold, who all his life had been a Londoner, knew for the first time that strange sense of proportion that comes of watching, from a lonely height, the little works of man. He looked down upon the small black ants toiling in the valley, and knew that he was God; he looked up at the glazed white bowl of the winter sky, and knew that he was the least of the little ants, scurrying this way and that in futile endeavour to avoid extinction by the careless feet of time; it frightened him a little, but he felt cleansed and chastened by the loneliness and silence. He looked at Pendock leaning quietly against the rock beside him, and felt easier with him, more genuinely loyal towards him, than he had for many hours past. He realised that in all the horror of these dreadful two days, his values had slipped a little, and that though he had not for a moment consciously suspected his friends, his mind had retreated into a sort of reticence, a sort of unformulated doubt. Now he could see so clearly that some person was involved in the murders other than the six of them, and all the uneasiness was banished from his mind. It seemed that Pendock had undergone a similar purification for he said, smiling, as they started back down the hill: “There’s nothing like heights, even a gentle height like this, to bring one back to one’s senses. I didn’t realise it before, but do you know I was almost suspecting
you
!”

“I was definitely suspecting you,” said Henry, smiling back at him. “Of course I didn’t realise it either, but as you say, being up on a hill and out of the world pulls you together a bit. I do see now that there must have been somebody else; if only because otherwise it would
have
to be you!”

They both thought this an excellent joke. “But how do you make it out, anyway?”

“Well, unless we subscribe to my bodyguard’s theory of post-mortem revenge on the part of Miss Morland, it couldn’t be anyone else, could it? I mean, we don’t seriously suppose that somebody put poor Pippi’s body in the summer-house and marched off, whistling, leaving no footprints where he trod. He left footprints like anybody else. But the footprints were covered up. By snow, of course.”