She Died a Lady (24 page)

‘They waited until the tide got high enough. The soil in that backyard is almost as soft as sand at any time; and on that particular night it was made still more moist with rain. So they simply walked out the path to Lovers’ Leap again, this time pushing ahead of them … do I have to elaborate? What did they push ahead of them?’

Molly Grange put her hands to her forehead

‘
A garden-roller
,’ she breathed.

Then again the immensity of silence took us all. The sun was broadening and strengthening against the windows; it felt uncomfortably hot now, under the crazy-quilt spread.

‘The same garden-roller,’ Molly persisted, ‘that Willie Johnson says Mr Wainright stole from him.’

I admitted it.

‘Sir Henry there,’ I said, ‘noticed yesterday that the whole expanse of ground had been kept in smooth, very smooth, condition. That meant rolling of course: though I was ass enough never to think of it.

‘So those two went down the path. An iron garden-roller, weighing four hundred pounds or more, would easily flatten out and obliterate the first false sets of footprints. They simply walked behind it and left honest footprints about which there need be no hocus-pocus. We can see now why the toes of the prints were indented – they were not running, but pushing. We can see why the length of step was exactly the same in both people – it had to be.

‘No
track
of the roller would be left, because the path was outlined by lines of pebbles. The roller was four feet wide. Now I remember it: Johnson told us so when we met him full of beer, on the Baker’s Bridge road Monday; only he said “long” instead of “wide”. The path was four feet wide, as we know. All they had to do was keep the roller inside the pebbles, so it wouldn’t run over any of them and make them sink into the earth.’

‘But could they
see
to do that?’ demanded Ferrars, whose throat was working. ‘After dark?’

‘Easily. The sky had cleared then, as I told Molly on Monday. And the pebbles, if you recall, were painted dead white – which is the colour we use to guide us during the deepest black-out. Craft himself joyfully pointed out how they could be seen in the dark.’

Belle, who was still staring out of the window, had lighted a cigarette. The sun must have blinded her. She spoke viciously.

‘I wonder who thought of that stunt?’ Belle said. ‘Barry or the floosie?’

Molly made a sharp gesture, disregarding this.

‘And then?’ she prompted.

Now I came to the ugly part.

‘The mechanics, my dear, were simple. When they got to the edge at Lovers’ Leap, they just pushed the roller over. Craft himself admitted he hasn’t looked at the foot of that cliff.

‘They dived or jumped over, whichever suited them best, into very deep water. All they had to do was swim along the line of the cliffs until they reached the cliff-face hole leading to the Pirates’ Den. The water comes almost to its edge at high tide. If they did it earlier, they could have left a rope hanging over.

‘And if they weren’t certain of finding the place, that would be easy too. They could have left a lighted candle – I found one there myself, last night – in a niche where it would be shielded from draughts, would make the water gleam, and yet wouldn’t throw much light out at sea.

‘They climbed into the Pirates’ Den, took off their bathing-suits, and got dressed again. It was simple; it worked like a charm; nobody was ever likely to suspect. In a few more minutes they’d be on their way, with suitcases, to the old studio and Sullivan’s motor-car. There was only one thing they hadn’t taken into their calculations. I mean the murderer.’

It was a situation at once normal – a bright Wednesday with the chickens clucking in the fowl-run – and yet at the same time grotesquely abnormal. Three faces – Molly’s, Belle’s, and Ferrars’ – were turned towards me. I started to take a sip of lukewarm coffee, but my hand shook and I had to put the cup down.

I was thinking of that cave, the Pirates’ Den, on Saturday night. The dim candle burning in the niche. Sullivan and Rita getting dressed, guiltily scurrying, and Rita crying because she was leaving her home. And then someone who crept down the tunnel from the land-side, with white and distorted face, to fire point-blank against their bodies before they could lift a hand.

‘Look,’ Belle said rather hoarsely.

Stubbing out her cigarette in a soap-dish on the wash-stand, she coughed out a gust of smoke and slipped round the edge of the bed.

Afterwards – I was thinking blankly – it would have been easy. Simply roll the dead bodies out into the sea, and drop the suitcases after them. They received so few injuries from the fall, as the post-mortem doctor had pointed out, not because they were dead when they fell from a height, but because they never had fallen from a height at all. It was the current, banging those limp corpses against rocks, which had battered them half unrecognizable.

I put my hands up over my eyes.

‘Are you saying,’ continued Belle, ‘that you know who knocked off Barry and that floosie?’

‘I rather think so.’

You could hear Molly Grange’s breath whistle; she could hardly seem to breathe. She was now half standing, with one knee on the bed.

‘Not – somebody we know?’ Molly asked.

‘Who else could it be, my dear?’

‘Not somebody from –
here
?’

A throbbing in my throat wouldn’t stay quiet.

‘It depends on what you mean by “here”, Molly.’

‘Well?’ demanded Ferrars. ‘This strikes fairly close to home. We’re listening. Who did kill them, then?’

I took my hands away from my eyes.

‘Forgive me, Mr Ferrars,’ I said, ‘but I think
you
did.’

Pause.

I hated the man and I couldn’t help hating him. Acting may be an admirable thing in its way, but we have had too much of it in this business.

To judge by his look, you would have imagined him to be a man almost startled out of his wits. Ferrars very slowly got up out of my Morris chair. One lock of fair hair fell across his forehead, after the fashion of the Führer.

‘Me?’ he yelped, and made an elaborate pantomime of pointing at his own chest. ‘
Me
?’ Then his breath came out in a great gust. ‘In Satan’s name, why?’

As for myself, I wasn’t in any too good shape either. I upset the coffee-cup, and Belle had to come and take the tray away.

‘Why?’ Ferrars kept shouting.

‘You were friendly enough with Rita,’ I said, ‘to paint her picture with an expression on her face which nobody has ever noticed there except perhaps Sullivan. Do you understand what I mean?’

Ferrars swallowed. His glare flashed towards Molly, who stood as though transfixed.

‘I understand what you mean, yes. I – I painted her as I saw her. Come-hither and – and that kind of thing. But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything.’

‘In addition to being no anchorite, Mr Ferrars, you live on Exmoor and you would know very well where to sink a car. Then there’s your very gentle treatment of Mrs Sullivan, when she fainted just after she jumped out of that same car in the quicksand on Sunday. You were acquainted with Mrs Sullivan and you’re fond of her. But there’s another thing too.’

‘Lord of high hell,’ cried Ferrars, and passed his hand across his forehead, ‘but this is a fine way to go on before the one girl I actually do …’

‘When we were bringing Mrs Sullivan out of the old studio late Monday afternoon, you saw her and you said, “Belle Renfrew!” But that’s not all you did. You whacked your hand against the side of the car.’

‘Well? What if I did?’

‘Mrs Sullivan had just been telling us how the murderer, the man in anguish, the man who drove her to the quicksand the night before, had walked up and down that studio striking his hand against the Packard car. I’m suggesting, Mr Ferrars, this was what made her – when she saw you – turn round and run blindly back towards the studio. Even if she did not, and does not, consciously recognize you as the same man.’

Belle’s eyes moved slowly round.

Ferrars lifted his hand as though to stroke something again; but he only stared at it, and dropped it at his side.

‘Whatever else you do,’ he begged, ‘don’t go psychoanalytic on me. I can’t stand it. This is too serious. Have you got any
proof
of all this tommy-rot?’

‘Unfortunately, no. You saw to that.’

‘I saw to it? How?’

If I had been allowed to keep a spent cartridge-case and two bathing-suits, which I found in the Pirates’ Den last night, I might have shown Superintendent Craft a good deal. What can I show him now? I suppose I ought to be grateful to you for not shooting me; but gratitude isn’t exactly the emotion I feel towards the man who killed Rita Wainright. It
was
you with the gun, wasn’t it?’

Ferrars took a step forward.

‘Half a second,’ he said sharply. ‘You say last night. At what time last night?’

‘At just one o’clock in the morning, to be exact. You were absent from home in your car, if you remember, at half-past twelve.’

Molly, still half standing with one knee on the bed, now got to her feet. Well-repressed anger, incredulity, perplexity, and also perhaps jealousy had all been present in her expression to some degree; she showed, in a few seconds, more emotion than I had ever observed in her before. I told them the whole story, then.

‘But Paul couldn’t have been anywhere near the Pirates’ Den at one o’clock this morning!’ Molly cried. ‘He was …’

‘Just a minute, son,’ interposed a quiet voice.

If this can be credited, we had entirely forgotten Sir Henry Merrivale. Throughout the whole turmoil he had said not a word. He was sitting only a few feet from my bed, his big hands folded over the head of his cane. The cigar had burnt down to within a quarter of an inch of his mouth. He squinted down at it to see whether it was still lighted; finding it was not, he took it out of his mouth and dropped it into the ash-tray.

Then he sniffed, and got up.

‘Y’know, Doctor,’ he remarked, ‘I got to congratulate you.’

‘Thanks.’

‘That’s a real good reconstruction,’ argued H.M., ‘and burn me if it’s not! It’s neat, it’s simple, it’s well thought out. The two sets of footprints, the roller, the miracle that wasn’t a miracle. I like it myself. It’s a pity, in a way –’ he ruffled his hands across his big bald head, and peered down over his spectacles – ‘it’s a pity there ain’t a word of truth in it.’

Ferrars did not sit down into his chair; he dropped down into it.

Since I was sitting down myself, nothing of this sort could have happened to me in bed. But I now know what it feels like when your ordered universe flies apart even more than under the shock of war.

‘Y’see,’ he went on with an air of apology, ‘I thought of that myself. Last night I had a lot of fellers in gum-boots explorin’ the foot of the cliff at low tide. And there wasn’t any garden-roller there.’

‘But it’s got to be there! Maybe it was …’

‘Pinched? By one man? Oh, my son! Four hundred pounds of iron, among jagged rocks with the water pourin’ in?’

I tried to hold hard to reason.

H.M. rubbed the side of his nose, glowering at Ferrars.

‘And one other thing, Doctor. Be awful careful how you tell this story, especially since you’ve got that lad there mixed up in it. For last night, anyway, he’s got an alibi as cast-iron as the garden-roller.’

Belle looked around wildly.

‘Are we all going nuts? she inquired. ‘I could have sworn the doctor had it bang on the nose. It sounded right, every word of it. It was tied up so you couldn’t have doubted it if you wanted to. If that didn’t happen, what in the name of the sweet Christ did happen?’

H.M. regarded her very steadily for a long time. Then his face smoothed itself out again to blankness. He sounded troubled and tired and old.

‘I dunno, my wench,’ he said. ‘It appears we’ve got to start again, and do a whole lot of sittin’ and thinkin’.’

Here he rubbed his nose again.

‘But I expect,’ he added, ‘they’ve got the old man licked at last. In London, as maybe you’ve heard, they say I’m no good any longer. I’m outmoded and an old fossil and I don’t know how things ought to be run. And I expect they’re right. Anyway, goo’-bye. I’m goin’ across to the “Coach and Horses” and sink myself in a pint of beer.’

‘But see here!’ I shouted after him. ‘How did you know I was out at that cave, if you say you found me?’

He hesitated in the doorway, but he did not return and he did not reply. Leaning on his cane, he lumbered out into the hall. Mrs Harping later said he passed her with a scowl so ferocious and evil that she dropped her duster and nearly screamed. All I can say is that I heard him going slowly, bumpingly – and, I thought, rather blindly – down the stairs to the front door.

POSTSCRIPT AND EPILOGUE

BY PAUL FERRARS, R.A.

H
ERE
ends the manuscript prepared by Dr Luke Croxley. It is not finished as its author intended it to be finished, but it can stand as a separate entity.

Dr Croxley met his death during the night of the first great air-raid on Bristol: November 25th, 1940. He died in circumstances characteristic of him. He died performing an emergency operation in a blazing building, at utter disregard of his own life, after toiling for seven hours in the midst of that inferno from the foot of Castle Street to the top of Wine Street.

The irony of this story I do not mean to discuss. But I must mention it. This manuscript was written to prove – as he contended to the end – that Rita Wainright and Barry Sullivan did not commit suicide, but were murdered.

Therefore it is fortunate he never learned that the murderer of those two, the murderer he had been pursuing with such patient determination, was his own son Tom.

I
N
my studio at Ridd Farm, on Exmoor, this affair may be said to have ended on a very cold and foggy night towards the beginning of February, 1941.

Molly and I – Molly has been Mrs Ferrars since July – had built an immense fire in the cobblestone fireplace, which in itself is big enough to drive a small car through. The burning logs threw red-and-yellow light up across brown rafters and a glass roof obscured by blackout curtains.