She Died a Lady (17 page)

‘That woman (don’t you see?) thought it was her only way out. She really was fond of her husband. She couldn’t bear to hurt him. But she couldn’t give up her boy-friend either. So that hysterical, romantic nature of hers thought of a plan that she imagined suited the case. She wouldn’t just up and run away with Sullivan. But if the husband, and the rest of the world, thought she and Sullivan were dead, they wouldn’t bother any longer.

‘Charmin’ idea. Also characteristic. Dodgin’ the responsibility. Don’t you follow it even yet?’

‘A
ND
if you don’t,’ added H.M., ‘think back!’

Automatically he reached for the pocket that should have held his cigar-case, but found only a toga. He regarded this dismally, and then forgot it.

‘Rita Wainright came to your surgery, in a terrible stew, on the twenty-second of May. She wanted you to do something for her. What were the first words she said to you? I’ll tell you. She said: “I’ve quarrelled with my solicitor. No clergyman would do it, naturally. And I don’t know any J.P.s. You’ve got to …” And then she stopped. Is that true?’

I could not stop nodding.

‘Yes. It’s true.’

‘Sure. And what is it you apply for,’ said H.M., ‘where you’ve got to be recommended and vouched for on personal knowledge by a physician, a lawyer, a clergyman, or a justice of the peace?’

It was Ferrars who answered, sitting up straight.

‘A passport,’ he said.

The image of Rita in my office, with her red finger-nails and her harassed eyes, looking at corners of the ceiling, always stumbling and drawing back on the edge of telling me something, returned in cruel vividness. ‘It’s all such a mess,’ I could hear her saying. ‘If only Alec would die, or something like that.’ And then a quick, furtive look at me, to see how I took it.

But still I protested.

‘It’s fantastic, I tell you! What would they have used for money? Sullivan had practically none, and Rita certainly hadn’t any.’

‘If you remember,’ grunted H.M., ‘you asked her the same question. And it didn’t bother her at all. Not the least little bit in the world, son! Because, d’ye see, she had an answer for it – What about diamonds?’

His eyes travelled up to the portrait of Rita over the fireplace. Only then did I stop concentrating on the face of the portrait; the tantalizing half-smiling face, to remember what I have indicated in this record: that Ferrars had painted her in diamonds. Diamond necklace at the throat, diamond bracelets on her wrists. As the centre of interest shifted, those painted diamonds seemed to wink with sly reminder.

‘You yourself,’ pursued H.M., ‘kept telling me how Professor Wainright loved hangin’ her with diamonds. There’ll be a rule soon that jewellery can’t be taken out of the country; but in the meantime they’re awful negotiable.’

‘But Alec Wainright,’ I said, ‘is practically broke. Those diamonds must be all he has left. Rita would never have taken the diamonds and left him without …’

‘Practically broke,’ murmured H.M. ‘Uh-huh. Did she know he was broke?’

(Truth is a dizzying thing.)

‘Well – no. Come to think of it, she didn’t. Alec told me so himself.’

‘He kept his business affairs strictly under his hat?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And she still thought he was a wealthy man?’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘Let’s clear up the question while we’re at it,’ said H.M. ‘Does anybody know where those diamonds were kept?’

‘I can tell you that,’ interposed Ferrars. ‘In fact, I told you last night. She keeps ’em – or used to keep ’em, anyway – in a biggish ivory box lined with steel, up in her bedroom. You open the box with a little key, like a Yale key only smaller, that’s got “Margarita” and a true-love knot engraved on it.’

H.M. contemplated me, continuing to twiddle his thumbs. His expression remained sour.

‘The husband guessed, of course,’ he said. ‘Every word you quote him as sayin’ on Saturday night proves that. “Kill me? I can see you don’t know my wife. They aren’t planning to kill me. But I can tell you what they are planning to do.” Only, d’ye see, he had it slightly wrong. He didn’t bargain on any fancy fake suicide-pact. He thought they were just goin’ to run away.

‘For what happened? You came in and told him those two had thrown themselves over Lovers’ Leap. And it hit him like a mule’s kick. It dazed him. He screamed out that he didn’t believe it. Then what did he do? He ran upstairs to see if her clothes were there. “Her clothes are still there,” he said when he came down; “but –” and that’s where he held up the little key. Meanin’, my fatheads, that the diamonds were gone.’

There was a silence.

Ferrars, slowly shaking his head from side to side, kept his gaze mainly on the carpet. Once he glanced up at the portrait, and muscles tightened down his lean jaws.

‘Are you saying,’ Ferrars interposed, ‘that Mr Wainright was going to
let
them take the diamonds?’

‘Sure.’

‘Even though he’d have not very much money left?’

‘There are people like that, son.’ H.M.’s voice was apologetic. ‘The evidence shows Alec Wainright was one of ’em. But can you wonder he’s feelin’ a bit tired and sick and disgusted with the world?’

As I saw the picture take form, as I recognized the essential rightness of each detail, it seemed impossible to argue any longer or to doubt H.M.’s version. And can you doubt, even if you wish, the evidence of a consulate which shows you passports and visas?

But, even granting this were so, why was it necessary to curse and thrash at the memory of Rita? As H.M. had suggested, the thing was absolutely characteristic of Rita. She brought down destruction; but she meant well. She had nearly killed Alec; but that had not been her intention. If it was essential to praise Alec, was it also essential to blame Rita?

‘As for Mrs Wainright and Sullivan – we’ll call him Sullivan – you can see what they had to do,’ continued H.M. ‘She had to get a new passport. He had to bring his car down here from London, and hide it away in the studio, so they could slip quietly away when the trick had been worked.’

‘Away, sir?’ prompted Superintendent Craft.

‘Sure. First up to Liverpool. Then, gettin’ rid of the car, across to Ireland and Galway. Next, they had to destroy
every
photograph of themselves. Why? Lord love a duck! They were shortly goin’ to figure as the victims of a terrible tragedy. The newspapers would come snoopin’ after photographs to print.’

Craft nodded.

‘I see, he said thoughtfully. ‘They couldn’t have someone – from the American Consulate or the British Passport Office, for instance – see the newspaper pictures and say, “Here! That’s not Mrs Alexander Wainright and Mr Barry Sullivan. That’s Mr and Mrs Jacob McNutt, who are now on the high seas headed for America.”’

H.M. spread out his hands.

‘If you want any more evidence,’ he growled in my direction, ‘just think of what happened on Saturday night.

‘Who chose a Saturday night, which was the maid’s night off? Rita Wainright. Who had the gardener Johnson sacked, because he was a snooper? Rita Wainright. Who vetoed her husband’s suggestion to make the party bigger, and insisted on just you four? Rita Wainright.

‘Finally, what
time
did these love-birds choose for their dramatic hocus-pocus? Nine o’clock, naturally. And why? Because Alec Wainright is a news-fiend. As soon as the soothin’ voice of Joseph Macleod or Alvar Liddell is heard in the land, he becomes deaf and blind to everything else. He wouldn’t interfere when they left this room. Nobody would interfere. The husband was too engrossed, and the guest was too embarrassed.

‘Mind you, Rita’s conduct then wasn’t all actin’. Not by a jugful! All that emotionalism, all that carryin’ on, was almost as real to her as though she meant to kill herself. When she stroked the hair on her husband’s head, she meant it. When the tears started streamin’ out of her eyes, she meant that too.

‘In a sense, gents, she
was
leaving this life. She was sayin’ good-bye. She was cutting off, with what she thought was a sharp knife, her old life and her old associations. You can call it affected nonsense, if you like; but the point is that she didn’t see it as that. Oh, no. Out she goes. And the handsome Sullivan – who’s a little bit nervous about walkin’ off with five or six thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds – goes after her.’

H.M. scowled, and cleared his throat.

Ferrars, who was lighting the familiar cherrywood pipe, glanced up briefly. The glow of the match showed his sinewy wrists, and the hollows under his cheek-bones as he drew in smoke.

‘Tell me one thing, governor.’ He blew out the match. ‘About this Barry Sullivan, or Jacob McNutt.’ Again the catlike smile flickered under the long nose. ‘Was he really in love with the woman, or was he only interested in diamonds?’

‘Well … now. I never met the feller. Judgin’ from the descriptions of him, notably his wife’s –’

‘You mean Belle?’

‘Yes. I should sort of hazard a guess that it was a good deal of both. His conscience didn’t prevent him from doin’ what he oughtn’t to do; it just prevented him from enjoying it. But you can follow their conduct on Saturday night. They rushed out of this room. And then …’

Superintendent Craft spoke softly.

‘Yes, sir. And then what?’

‘I don’t know!’ roared H.M. ‘I haven’t got the ghostiest trace of a notion. The old man’s completely stumped and flummoxed.’

This, evidently, was what bothered him. Immense in his purple-bordered toga, apparently forgetting his toe altogether, he lumbered up and down in front of the fireplace. He removed the laurel-wreath, eyed it distastefully, and put it on the radio. Then he said:

‘Now follow this, my fatheads. This is what we know.
Between nine o’clock and nine-thirty, those two walked out to Lovers’ Leap. There they disappeared. But they didn’t jump and they didn’t mean to jump.’

Craft nodded, though he had a dubious frown.

‘Son, there are two possible explanations,’ H.M. pursued fiercely. ‘Either (a) they somehow got down the face of the cliff. Or (b) they somehow walked back to the house again, ready for their getaway in Sullivan’s car.’

Craft sat up abruptly. Ferrars glanced at me in a puzzled way, taking the pipe out of his mouth, but I could only shrug my shoulders.

‘Stop a bit!’ the superintendent urged. ‘In that case, what becomes of the murders being committed on the edge of the cliff?’

H.M. made a face.

‘Oh, my son! You don’t still think the murders were committed on the edge of the cliff?’

‘It’s the assumption I’ve been proceeding on, yes.’

‘Then it’s a wrong assumption.’

Craft came as near a sputter as the intense gloominess of his expression would permit. He tapped the point of his pencil on the notebook.

‘I’d like to hear some proof of that, sir.’

‘All right. We’ll try a little.’ H.M., hitching up the toga as though he were carrying a load of bed-linen, turned to me. ‘Doctor, you were sittin’ in here with Professor Wainright. The back door of this house was open. Between you and the outside there was only that thin swing-door to the kitchen’ – he pointed – ‘with a space under it where you could feel a draught. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘If those two were shot on the edge of the cliff, a Browning .32 automatic was fired twice out there. Did you hear any shots?’

I thought back. ‘No. But that’s not necessarily unusual or anything like proof. It’s fairly windy up here. When the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, to carry sound away …’

‘But the wind wasn’t blowin’ in the wrong direction, dammit! You yourself kept saying, several times, how the wind blew straight in your face when you went out there. You even felt it in here.’ H.M.’s sharp, disconcerting little eyes fixed on me. ‘How was it the sound of the shots didn’t carry? Oh, and if anybody starts gibberin’ about silencers, I retire to bed.’

There was a long silence.

Craft tapped the point of his pencil on the notebook.

‘What’s your idea, sir?’

‘It’s this,’ H.M. returned with hideous earnestness. ‘Those two love-birds thought they had an
aes triplex
, fool-proof method of provin’ they’d committed suicide. And so they had.

‘They went out and worked it. It probably didn’t take ’em long. Then they’d go
away
from here, away from this district, to get their car and hop it. They were probably gone at shortly past nine o’clock. But the murderer caught ’em. The murderer shot both of ’em at close range, and pitched the bodies into the sea.’

‘H’m,’ said Craft.

‘Y’see, it’s not the conduct of the murderer that’s puzzling to the point of the magical. This murderer is a fairly straightforward chap. You notice what he had to do on the followin’ night, Sunday? He had to get rid of Sullivan’s car, so that nobody would suspect any hanky-panky on the love-birds’ part, and the business could still pass as a suicide-pact. So he drove the car out to Exmoor and ran it into quicksand. Don’t you remember that Belle Sullivan saw “two little booklets like road-maps, one blue and the other green, stuck into the side pocket”?’

‘Well, sir?’

‘They weren’t road-maps. They were passports. A blue British and a green American. But Belle Sullivan had never travelled abroad, so she couldn’t tell.’

H.M. sniffed.

Hurling one corner of his robe over one shoulder, he took a broad and challenging look at all of us, and sat down again. His manner remained as earnest as ever.

‘Let me repeat,’ he insisted. ‘It’s not the scheme of the murderer that’s baffling to the point of the magical. Here we got a reverse twist. What we want to know is the scheme of the ruddy
victims
.’

Ferrars tapped the stem of his pipe against his teeth. ‘You mean to go out there and not come back?’

‘Sure. Son, it’s really got the old man dizzy this time. I said a minute ago that they either (a) somehow got down the face of the cliff. Or (b) they somehow walked back again without leavin’ any trace. I know, I know!’ He shushed Craft with a fierce gesture as the superintendent started to protest. ‘Both of those explanations are absolute eyewash.’

‘You’re quite sure of that?’