No Love Lost (25 page)

I never went anywhere so willingly. Izzy and I curled up under a rug at the back of the car and shivered together. Shock makes one cold. I had learnt that in my A.R.P. days, but I'd never realized it before. My hands were icy, and to make things really horrible I had begun to imagine I could smell again the damp, chill reek which had come up from the well. I knew this was hysteria and I had got myself on a very tight rein, but when the boy drew up at the school gates I begged him not to bother to disturb Williams and swore through chattering teeth that I'd call him myself. He drove off gratefully and I fled down the path to the Headmaster's Lodging. I could not stand any more just then. I wanted to be alone more than anything in the world.

The hall struck cold when I opened the door and the first thing I saw was my own note to Victor, telling him to telephone the Superintendent about Rorke, propped up on the hall table. It might have been a hundred years since I had put it there, and it brought home the awful thing that had happened to Victor more vividly than anything else could have done. I snatched up the paper and crumpled it into a ball. I was glad of Izzy. Without him the house, empty and surrounded by empty buildings, would have been fearful. But he kept close to me, very much aware of all that was happening and very much on my side.

I went straight up to my bedroom. To run up and downstairs with boiling water seemed too difficult, so I thought I'd do without the tea and the bottle. I kicked off my shoes and pulled
off my suit and only then remembered that all my things were packed. I found the right suitcase at last and got out my thickest dressing-gown and some slippers. I gave Izzy some water and stripped the blankets off the bed. I though if I could roll myself in them and curl up in a sort of bundle I might possibly get warm again. I also thought I might take a couple of the sedative sleeping-pills which Dorothy had given me last holidays when she spent a week-end with me while Victor was away. I did not remember packing these and I looked into the empty chest to see if the tiny phial could have slipped under the paper with which the drawers were lined.

The first thing I found was the roll of blotting-paper which I had taken from Victor's desk, left there ready for me to show him as soon as he came in. I took it out and tore it up. I tore it into little square pieces and let them float down in a shower into the wastepaper basket. Poor Victor! At least we had both been spared one beastly half-hour, and if Amy Petty of all people could protect his reputation so at least could I.

Then I went back to my search for the sleeping-pills, but I could not find them anywhere and as I was growing colder and colder I got on to the bed and tried to doze. It was hopeless. My head began to throb violently and I could not stop shivering. Also, of course, I couldn't stop thinking. Finally I got up and went down to the dining-room and lit the gas fire. Izzy came and sat on the rug with me and the heat slowly soaked into our bones.

I suppose it was about an hour later when the detective came. He made such a noise hammering at the door that I was quite angry with him when at last I got down to the hall to answer the knock. I had thought it must be Williams and the sight of the sturdy fresh-faced young man in the clumsy blue suit took me by surprise.

‘Hullo,' I said, ‘what is it?'

‘It's the police, madam.' He was breathless, as if he had been running. ‘I am a detective officer. Will you allow me to enter?'

Now even in England policemen do not talk quite like this unless they are very young or very new to the job. I decided he was both. He had taken a slanting glance at my old flannel
dressing-gown which covered me most decorously from chin to toe, and a deeper scarlet had stained his cheeks. I thought I should probably make him most comfortable by being as formal as he.

‘Of course,' I said. ‘I've been sitting by the fire in my room upstairs – my
dining
-room. Would you like to come up there?'

He thought he would and clumped after me up the stairs, treading as cautiously as if he thought the parquet were glass. Once in the dining-room, he sat down on the extreme edge of a hard chair and I took the low one by the fire.

‘Well?' I inquired at last.

He cleared his throat. ‘My orders were to stay with you, madam.'

‘Stay with me?'

‘Yes, madam. I understood that a Mrs Williams from the lodge gates would be available to sit with us, and I called on her as I came in. But she, I understand, has been took bad and her husband is seeing to her. They have sent for a Mrs Veal. Meanwhile I must ask you to stay where you are and await the Superintendent.'

He finished with a gasp and grew redder than ever.

I was puzzled and uneasy. It seemed to me very extraordinary that the Superintendent had not telephoned.

‘Why does he want to see me?'

The full pink lips closed in a line. ‘That, madam, I cannot say.'

‘I see,' I murmured, and there was a long silence during which Izzy made the most thorough examination of the visitor's boots which any sleuth alive could have achieved.

The pause went on and on and finally I just had to say something or burst. I said, ‘Have you been a detective long?'

‘Two weeks.' His face was beetroot red. ‘When we've done two years in the uniformed police we're allowed to volunteer for the plain-clothes branch. I volunteered.'

Because anything was better than the awful breathy silence, I went on asking him about himself, and since, presumably, he had had no orders to prevent it he went on answering me. I learned that he was about twenty-two, was ambitious, was going
to get married – nearly married, he said he was – and that he liked dogs but kept pigeons. Gradually I wore down his excessive formality and he hitched himself a little further back in his chair.

He was telling me how lucky he was to have been chosen for the exalted brotherhod of the County C.I.D. when he forgot his caution altogether.

‘It's a privilege to serve under “Uncle”, madam. You wouldn't believe. When he sent me out here today I was as proud as if I'd got the Police Medal.'

I gaped at him. ‘Good heavens,' I said, ‘the Superintendent can't be your uncle too?'

That made him laugh and we were buddies. ‘I didn't ought to have said that,' he confessed. ‘It slipped out. That's the sort of thing you have to be so careful about. One slip and you've got a black mark against you. It's a nickname the Superintendent's got. He's always been known by it, ever since he was first in the force. Everybody calls him by it to themselves. You can't help it. You'll find you will.'

‘He sounds pleasant.'

‘Pleasant?' My visitor's laughter was derisive. ‘Not half! He's pleasant all right. He's wonderful.' He shook his head admiringly. ‘You think he's your father and mother rolled into one and then – crash! He's seen right through you and bit your head off.'

I made no comment. There seemed little to say. The two-week detective was not looking at me. He was smiling with the fatuous delight of hero-worship.

‘He thinks of everything, Uncle does,' he murmured. ‘Look at today. The second they see the bullet wound he turns to me. “Root,” he says, “this ain't accident, it's murder. You nip down to ‘is wife, don't let her out of your sight until I come” … oh, lor'!'

His dismay was as comic as anything I had ever seen in my life, but I had heard his words and every drop of blood in my body felt as if it had congealed. We sat staring at one another.

‘You'll have to explain,' I said at last.

‘I daren't, I daren't, m'm. They'll send me back to the uniformed branch and –'

They'll sack you altogether if you don't use your head,' I said brutally. ‘Come on, out with it. Do you realize you're talking about
my husband
? You can trust me not to give you away if you're not supposed to talk, but you certainly can't leave it like this.'

He licked his lips. Poor young man! He'd never make a policeman.

‘I don't know much more, m'm,' he muttered. ‘I went and told you about the lot, I'm afraid. That's all there was. We thought we were going to an accident but when we got there Sergeant Rivers – that's my sergeant – got down the well and tied a rope on the chap who was drowned. We heard him holler something as if he was surprised, and then we all pulled.' He considered me helplessly. This'll just about finish me, this will,' he mumbled wretchedly. ‘Diane, that's my young lady, said I'd never be any good at this lark, and it looks as if she's ruddy well right.'

‘What happened when you pulled?'

The body came up. That was when Uncle stepped forward. “'Ullo 'ullo 'ullo,” he says, and shouts down to the sergeant, “Got a gun down there, Charlie? Have a look for one, will you, now you're there,” and he turns to me and tells me what I've just told you. If you tell …'

I did not hear any more.

Murder.

Victor murdered, shot presumably, although it sounded a spot diagnosis unless Detective Root was trying to spare me gruesome details. After the first paralysed moment I decided it was nonsense. It was too incredible. It simply couldn't have happened. Victor, of all people. Who would want to kill Victor?

I think it was that final question which brought the position home to me. I think it was only when I asked it of myself that the elementary and obvious answer occurred to me.
I
was the person with real cause to hate him.

I totted up the motives as Tinworth knew or guessed them and added the new personality which Mrs Raye had invented
for me and had already discussed with her husband, the Chief Constable. And finally there was my own behaviour during the past thirty-six hours! Steadily, and with the reientlessness of a machine, my mind played the record back. There was my conversation with Mrs Raye, my lie to Maureen. I'd actually told her that Victor was in the house! My lie to Mrs Veal. My lie, heaven help me, even to the Superintendent. And then there was my bicycle ride. Who could swear where that had taken me? There was my reluctance when the Flower Club ladies wanted me to go to the cottage. There was my behaviour when I got there, the dusting and the tampering with the luncheon carton. As I sat remembering, it seemed as if every tiny thing I had done during the whole time could be misconstrued.

I felt beads of sweat coming out on my hairline and I stole a fearful glance at the detective, but he was lost in his own misery and sat there glumly, staring at his feet. On and on the dreadful catalogue of circumstantial evidence piled up in my mind until I was almost frantic. I found I was searching for replies to imaginary cross-questioning, explaining, twisting, trying to wriggle out of the net which I had woven for myself.

An hour passed and then another, but there was no sign of the Superintendent. Nobody telephoned. The detective sat on, moody and silent, afraid to open his mouth.

At dusk Mrs Veal arrived in a great state. She had not got the Williams message until she had come in from ‘the pic'chers' and ‘could never forgive herself' for the delay. Fortunately for me, she diagnosed my condition as shock and not terror, and she bundled me into bed and made tea and brought hot-water bottles. She let Izzy out for a run and promised to feed him, and she did not try to talk to me. I think she sized up the unfortunate Detective Root and decided that for information he was the better bet.

At first he wanted to sit in the room with me but she was so scandalized and so scathing that once more he failed in his duty and was prevailed upon to sit on the stairs outside. For a long time I could hear the drone of her questions and the wariness of his monosyllabic replies.

I drank the tea and lay looking at my suitcases. I could not tell whether it would be worse to unpack them again very quickly, or to say that I had thought that Victor and I were going on holiday at once. Either was impractical because I'd packed everything I owned, so I lay there and just thought.

The Superintendent arrived about midnight. His appearance was quiet and sudden, like an amiable demon's in a children's play. He made no sound at all. One moment I was dozing with my eyes closed against the bright light, and the next, when I opened them, there he was smiling at me from the middle of the room. As soon as I set eyes on him I knew who he was and why he had got his nickname. He was plump and grey-haired and amusingly ugly, with a face which could have been designed by Disney. His eyebrows were tufts over bright little eyes which danced and twinkled and seemed ever stretched to their widest. His old tweed clothes were a little too tight for him, so that he looked disarmingly shabby, and his step was the lightest and most buoyant I have ever seen. The moment I saw him I felt assured.

He waited for the effect to sink in and then he said, ‘Awake?'

‘Yes. Yes, I haven't slept.' I scrambled into a sitting position. ‘I know who you are. I've been waiting for you. What have you found out?'

He spun round and flicked on every remaining light, and, in continuation of the same movement, took up a chair and sat down astride it so that he was looking at me from over its back.

‘Everything,' he replied, and his movements had been so swift that there did not seem to have been a pause between question and answer. ‘How much do
you
know?'

I remembered the unhappy Detective Root, at this moment trembling on the stairs no doubt.

‘I know that my husband was found in the well.'

His brows shot up, but his eyes still twinkled, intelligent, worldly, bright with secret entertainment.

‘But you found him, didn't you?'

‘Mr Jackson found him. I looked first, but I hadn't a torch.'

‘Nor you had. A very nasty thing to happen to a young girl.
A dreadful experience. I'm not going to ask you if you were fond of him because you won't want to be asked anything like that yet. It's too soon. It'll only upset you.'