Let Him Lie (19 page)

“Yes,” agreed Jeanie. “All that's against her. But Mr. Molyneux can't have been killed by a shot from the lower Tower window, and that's in her favour.”

“Who says so? Only Fone! Nobody else professes to know which way Mr. Molyneux was facing when he died. Nobody else saw him die. Perhaps Mr. Fone's mistaken.”

“Or perhaps,” said Jeanie, with a certain malice, for Peter had an admiration for Mr. Fone, and she hoped to make him rise, “Mr. Fone shot Mr. Molyneux himself. Why not?” she went on quickly, as Peter frowned and made a little movement of protest. “Mr. Fone was in the Tower room overlooking the orchard when Mr. Molyneux was shot. Mr. Fone had written a letter to Mr. Molyneux which Tamsin described as threatening— oh, not threatening him with death, more a sort of gipsy's curse affair, as far as I could gather. Mr. Fone was determined the tumulus shouldn't be opened if he could help it, and really seems to have believed hell would be let loose if it were! Also, by his own account he behaved very oddly in going straight home after he saw poor Mr. Molyneux die, without doing anything to help him. Well? All that's against him. What's in his favour?”

Peter smiled, helping himself to a drowned potato.

“Merely that one can't imagine him telling a lie about such an exploit. If he'd been mad enough to think that the end of saving the tumulus justified the means of killing Robert Molyneux, he'd have said so. He's not like ordinary men. Barchard's right there.”

“Ah! Barchard! No, no potatoes, thank you. What about Barchard? He had a motive. He owed Mr. Molyneux two hundred pounds.”

“And where was
he
at the crucial moment?

Jeanie's face fell.

“No good. He was mending leads on the roof at Cole Harbour. He couldn't even have seen Robert Molyneux from there, all the farm buildings are between Cole Harbour and the Cleedons orchard. Besides it's the wrong side. Mr. Molyneux was shot from the northwest and Cole Harbour's more or less south-east.”

“But that's only according to Fone!” Peter reminded her.

“I know, but unless we're to believe Mr. Fone did the murder himself, surely we must accept his word,” said Jeanie a little warmly.

“No, he may have been mistaken.”

“I don't see how. He says Mr. Molyneux looked round towards Cleedons just before he was shot. He says he saw his face. You can't be mistaken about a thing like that.”

“Perhaps not,” said Peter in a rather unconvinced tone. “Are you sure Barchard was on the Cole Harbour roof?”

“Yes. Dr. Hall saw him when he went to fetch his
Archaeologia
.”

“Well, now, what about Dr. Hall?”

Jeanie laughed.

“Well, of course Mr. Molyneux didn't like doctors, did he? But no, Peter. I think we can leave Dr. Hall out of it. No motive.”

“Any other member of the Field Club behave in a suspicious manner?”

“Not as far as I know.”

Jeanie remembered Tamsin's innuendoes about Sir Henry Blundell, but firmly suppressed them. They were too absurd!

There were already quite a lot of people wandering pensively around the sky-lit gallery when they entered. These wore, for the most part, the peculiarly subdued, pale and dejected look of people at picture-shows, who move as if the top-light intimidates them, as well it may. The pictures were ordinary, and Jeanie could sympathise with Peter's remark when they had been half round the gallery.

“Oh, Jeanie, how I do long for a few triangles!”

“Triangles, Peter?”

“Eyes, you know, and triangles, and flashes of lightning, and cubes, things that make you think. I like art to be serious, Jeanie.”

Jeanie smiled.

“Poor Peter, you won't find any abstractions here!”

“No. Nature-lovers to a man, I see,” replied Peter sadly as they moved on. “Hullo!”

He paused, with a look of amused attention, before a painting which was certainly very far from the severe abstractions he had been humorously extolling. It was a portrait, one of those skilfully arranged and careful paintings which induce a slight spiritual nausea in others beside ardent modernists. Jeanie glanced at the catalogue. For Hubert Southey, this was quite a daring portrait. The setting was at least unusual. But how he had subdued the brassy glitter of buttercups in a field, the deep blue of summer shadows on grass, to the polite tints of his own studio-bred and timid mind! Poor old Southey, thought Jeanie, with the friendly scorn of the pupil for the teacher.

“Lady in Red Gloves. It's awfully daring, as a matter of fact, for poor old Harmless Hubert. That little bit of red, you know. I expect he felt awfully dashing putting that together.”

“But, Jeanie, don't you realise? It's the Handleston Helen!”

Jeanie started, and looked at the picture with a livelier interest.

“Of course! Mrs. Barchard told me he painted her picture sitting among the buttercups! She's attractive, isn't she?”

“Yes. Lots of glamour.”

“Is she a little like somebody I know?”

“Yes,” said Peter at once. “She's a little—a
very
little—like you.”

“Like
me
? Oh no, Peter!”

Jeanie flushed and stared at the portrait, half flattered, for it was of a pretty woman, half irritated, as one is at the thought that one may not, after all, seem quite unique to one's friends.

“Oh yes, Jeanie! Not really like, just a chance resemblance, but her face is the same shape as yours, and her eyebrows are a little bit the same.”

He spoke seriously, as though he had made a study of Jeanie's eyebrows, and she blushed still deeper.

“
I
think she's a little, weeny bit like—Agnes.”

“Agnes!”

Yes, it was a remote likeness to Agnes Molyneux that Jeanie had seen in the portrait. There was a distinct look of Agnes about the straight delicate nose, the cleft narrow chin.

“I don't see the slightest resemblance,” said Peter.

“Well, it's not a very good portrait, anyway,” said Jeanie. “But the buttercups are awfully like buttercups, and the gloves are awfully like gloves, and the brooch is—good Heavens! It's awfully like a brooch I bought once!”

Jeanie leant forward to have a closer look. Hubert Southey, though a landscape painter by profession, was by nature, his critics often to his disgust remarked, a painter of still-life. His buttercups might be dulled, his sunlight dimmed, and the faces of his sitters stiff with fatigue and strain; but his jewels were jewels that their makers would recognise with pleasure, his gloves were calculated to rouse the enthusiasm of a leather-worker, his hats were models from which milliners might copy and never be in doubt over the choice of straw. He could, in his way, paint.

And he had painted at Valentine Frazer's white neck a large star-shaped brooch of zircons.

Six years before, when Jeanie had first heard that her beloved Miss Drake was to be married, she had much exercised her youthful mind over the subject of what to give as a wedding present. The school was of course making a presentation, but Jeanie longed to give some personal thing by which Miss Drake could always remember her. And at the Caledonian Market one day in the holidays she had seen just the thing—a star-shaped zircon brooch in a setting of Indian silver of distinctive and charming design. Jeanie had bought it, spending a great deal more than a schoolgirl could properly afford. And Agnes had said that she adored it and could never have a brooch she would like better.

And now that very brooch of glittering zircons was painted at the neck of the Handleston Helen, as Peter had called her. There was a little stone missing from one of the rays, as Jeanie well remembered. Jeanie stared and stared at that painted brooch. The provoking, naughty, if somewhat fixed smile above the brooch drew her glance upwards, the painted eyes twinkled into hers.

“Ah, how do you do, Miss Halliday. I hope that look of dismay doesn't mean you don't like my picture?”

Jeanie turned with a little start.

“How are you, Mr. Southey? No, I'm admiring your picture, and so is my friend, Mr. Johnson. He knows the model.”

As she spoke, Jeanie suddenly became acutely aware of the local gossip, and a stupid feeling of embarrassment came over her. She began to utter quickly platitudes about the exhibition. She saw a faint surprise at her manner reflected behind Hubert Southey's spectacles, and after a few reciprocal compliments upon Jeanie's work he returned to the subject of his own.

“Yes, rather a new departure for me,” he uttered complacently. “I enjoyed doing it, too. One gets sick of studio portraits, don't you know. One wants the sunlight.”

Yes, one does
, silently commented Jeanie's professional mind, looking at those buttercups,
and one doesn't get it
. Her unprofessional mind noted Hubert Southey's extraordinary unconcern. Anybody might think from his carefree manner that the man was a regular Don Juan!

“That was a wonderful sitter, too,” went on Hubert Southey, stroking the back of his head. “She had a great capacity for sitting still without losing sparkle, don't you know.”

He spoke as if regretfully.

“I should have liked,” added he, “don't you know, to have kidnapped her!” He gave a little laugh at his own daring. His mild eyes behind their horn-rimmed spectacles shone with a boyish and innocent mirth. “Yes, don't you know, I should have liked to have packed her up among my gear and taken her back to Chelsea!”

“Oh yes?” uttered Jeanie faintly, summoning a responsive smile. Yes, certainly she must revise her careless estimate of Hubert Southey's character. Why, the old villain seemed positively to be enjoying his own disingenuousness!

“Only,” said the villain, putting the crowning touch to his mendacities, his neat pointed beard fairly twitching with naughty merriment, “what would Dora have said? Eh? What would Dora have said, don't you know?”

With this piece of daring, he took his leave and went off to greet another of his many friends, leaving Jeanie and Peter gazing after him.

“Dora?” echoed Peter interrogatively.

“Miss Southey.”

“A cool hand, isn't he, Jeanie? Don't you know?”

Jeanie smiled, though she felt troubled, too, not liking the slight earthquake feeling of insecurity which accompanies the readjustment of one's ideas about a respected teacher.

“Yes, indeed he is.”

“Well, I suppose Handleston gossip doesn't reach as far as Chelsea. He probably doesn't realise what a Byronic reputation he's got in these parts.”

When Jeanie, about to close her garden gate behind her and go for a lonely walk in Cole Harbour woods, saw a blue-clad stiff figure approaching up the road, she nearly dashed the gate to and ran back up the path to hide. It was Marjorie Dasent, and Jeanie did not want to see her. She did not know how she should greet her. She could not speak to her naturally, knowing what she knew.

But it was too late to retreat. Marjorie hailed her from fifty yards away, and she had to wait at the gate until the other girl came up, her hands thrust into the pockets of her mannish navy jacket, her black felt hat well crammed down on her head. Marjorie looked much as usual. Her rather self-consciously long masculine stride was the same as ever. Her complexion had its usual somewhat wind-nipped, ruddy look. Her greeting to Jeanie was as self-confident, as loud and hearty, as though in some other avatar she had walked the quarter-deck.

“Good afternoon! Heel, Caesar!” cried Miss Dasent sternly, somewhat to Jeanie's surprise. The words, however, were addressed to no illustrious shade, but to a barrel-shaped old black spaniel who had been doing his best to keep up with his owner's stride and now came sniffing and wagging hopefully towards Jeanie as though he thought she might set a kinder pace.

“You walking my way, Miss Halliday? Lovely day for a walk, isn't it? Aren't dogs a nuisance?”

“I've always thought so,” replied Jeanie with sincerity.

Marjorie smiled, for in her innocence she thought Jeanie was indulging in facetiousness. Mechanically returning the smile, Jeanie thought: Is this the girl I'm suspecting of murder? Is this the girl whose rifle was found hidden under a culvert? The girl who saw Robert Molyneux die and said nothing about it? It seemed impossible to believe such things of this innocent, middle-aged child, with her wind-nipped, high-bridged nose, mild diffident blue eyes and circumscribed set of ideas! Perhaps a shadow fell upon Jeanie's face and Marjorie saw it, for her smile faded. She said uncertainly:

“I really don't know what I'd do without Caesar. It's rather lonely for me now that Father's getting so old. Caesar's practically my only companion. You'd probably think me quite demented if you heard me talking to Caesar sometimes.”

A little irritated by this dog-talk, Jeanie agreed.

“I expect I should.” She eyed the shuffling spaniel without enthusiasm as he sniffed at a rabbit-hole and decided that it was too much trouble to do more than sniff. “He must be a perfect store-house of interesting information. Do tell me what you talk to him about.”

Marjorie looked at Jeanie dubiously. Her good-humoured blue eyes seemed of a sudden cautious and grey. She said with doubtful jocosity:

“Oh, all the secrets of my life, you know!”

“Such as?”

“Well!” Miss Dasent laughed uneasily, stealing a hurt, frightened look at her unresponsive companion, who was swinging along at her side at a pace that almost outmatched her own. “All sorts of things! I don't know!”

Jeanie contemplated the obese and unhappy creature labouring along in front of them. She was irritated and embarrassed. She did not want Marjorie Dasent's company. She wanted to be alone. She hated walking along with a person at whose eyes she dared not look for fear of the distrust and horror that might be read in her own. Her resentment made her take the cold plunge that the turn of the conversation suggested.