So Bad a Death (31 page)

He looked surprised.

“It might be important,” I said. “Please try to remember.”

“It may have been only once. It was a still, heavy night. The sound seemed to reverberate.”

“Only once,” I repeated thoughtfully, half to myself. I had heard two noises. If what Doctor Trefont said was correct, the other sound
must have been the gunshot. And I was all for changing the time of the murder to an earlier hour. I gave a small sigh.

I felt very tired again. Interest in the doctor's story had superseded nervous exhaustion for a while. But the disappointment regarding the time of the murder caused me to slump once again. I did not care if Doctor Trefont was the killer himself, as long as he drove me home.

However, in the car my thoughts were aroused once again. This was accomplished by a reference to Connie Bellamy. Doctor Trefont repeated his request that I should go to see her.

“Try and rid her mind of the obsession that she was deliberately pushed,” he urged.

“You don't believe her, Doctor?”

“It is not good for her to have the idea,” he parried.

We were passing the Hall gates. There was no light showing, neither in the Lodge nor through the poplar trees from the house.

I said: “You are quite right. The shock of the fall is bad enough. I had a nasty spill myself, coming down the drive there.”

There was a small glow from the dashboard, just enough for me to watch the doctor's face for a change of expression. He felt the sidelong glance and turned his eyes from the road for a minute.

“You must be very careful,” he said gently.

The remainder of the journey passed in silence. I was thinking hard. I had found a common denominator in this stumbling business. The Cruikshanks. In fall one, in the Hall drive, the estate agent had been near at hand. In the crowd waiting for the bus after the pictures that night was his sister, Maud. It was not pleasant to remember the expression on their faces that day at the shop, when I first knew that Cruikshank had come back to Middleburn.

IV

John gave one or two ostentatious sighs. Finally he asked, in the grudging tone of one who has been awakened and wants only to go back to sleep, if I had enjoyed the show. I almost said: “What show?”

“Yes, thanks, quite good,” I told him.

It was fortunate that his interest in films was negligible. I would have found it difficult to recall any particular part of the programme. My mind was full of the subsequent events of the evening.

Thoroughly wearied both mentally and physically, I tried to put them out of my head to be dealt with in the calmer light of day. The memory of Connie Bellamy's trembling voice asserting that she had been pushed was very strong. I tried to forget it.

All right, she was pushed. Leave it at that until morning. Wait until you have had some sleep. Think of something else not quite so grim.

I thought of Doctor Trefont and his revelations concerning the Holland baby. An extraordinary story. So strange that in my exhausted condition the knowledge he had imparted seemed almost fantastic. A feeling of vacillation took hold of me. I was unable to reach any decision regarding Doctor Trefont. Did I trust him or not? Was he playing a quixotic game or one entirely for his own benefit?

I turned to Connie again and a more personal disturbance shook me. That fall of hers was closely allied by its continuity to my own in the Hall drive. The underlying suspicion that she had been mistaken for me gave rise to horrid meditations.

In spite of my endeavours to banish these thoughts and to concentrate on more mundane matters, they kept rolling around in my head. I dropped off into an uneasy sleep. There seemed to be no dividing line between wakefulness, sleep and the suddenness with which I became fully conscious again. An indefinable apprehension increased with each stage. A fear, which developed to a superlative degree when I realized what had awakened me.

It was Tony's voice. A pitiful sobbing of terror such as adults rarely experience in the same way as children. I sat up at once groping for the bedside light. Tony may have had a nightmare and was calling out in his sleep. But my own state of mind was still so overwrought that I could not go back to sleep without making sure.

John raised himself on one elbow, blinking into the light.

“Tony!” I said, “something is wrong.”

John muttered something but I did not catch what he said.

I ran down the passage switching on the lights. “Coming, Tony,” I called loudly. “Coming.” I did not feel like a sane person just then. I had had enough to bear earlier in the night. Tony's terror was communicated. When I reached the nursery door, the sight that met my eyes sent me into a frenzy.

The room was a muddle of pulled-open drawers. Little boy clothes and toys were scattered everywhere. Tony sat bolt upright in his cot, his eyes wide open with the unreasoning fright of childhood. At the foot of his cot a black-draped figure was bent almost double, rummaging amongst the bedclothes.

I went completely overboard and began screaming for John. That was my last coherent thought. The rest was just a confused jumble, in which I could not bear John or Tony out of my sight. The sense of loneliness and fear that they were coming to some harm nearly drove me mad.

Gradually I pulled myself together somehow. It was mainly owing to John, his firmness and his gentleness. He put Tony into bed with me and I clung to the child, trembling from head to foot.

Presently, when I was calmer, John left me. I think he went to make a telephone call. Needless to say, the black figure, as I thought of the person who had entered Tony's room through the low window, had got away as soon as I appeared on the scene. Later I remembered it as odd that the exit was not made when Tony began calling. I know now that the person was desperate in a search for something and risked capture until the very last moment.

Tony fell asleep, his warm, round body snug against my own. I thought how poorly I had lived up to his conception of everything that was secure. All I did was to stand in the doorway of the nursery and shriek my head off. I had not even the good sense to switch on the light and endeavour to recognize the black-cowled shape.

John came back after a while with a tray of tea. His face was set and stern. He is a man slow moved to wrath, my husband, the type all the more to be feared when in anger. Perhaps it was just as well that the intruder was not caught that night. John might have found himself in a ticklish position of investigating a murder when he himself was a killer also.

I smiled at him and held out my left hand. Tony slept with his head on my right shoulder. My hand was gripped so hard that the ring cut into my finger. He bent across me to look into Tony's face.

I murmured against his ear: “Tomorrow he will have forgotten all about it.”

John turned a hard inquiring glance on me. His anxiety was too great for him to ask, “And you? What about you?”

I wriggled free of Tony and said in a would-be matter-of-fact voice, “Is that tea for me? I'd love some.”

The reflection in the dressing-table mirror of the pair of us prosaically drinking tea was a crowning touch to the nightmarish incident. The snack was reminiscent of those highly uncomfortable midnight feasts of school days—which, after all I had gone through during the last few hours, was ludicrous. It had the good effect of resurrecting my sense of humour and proportion.

All the same I was glad when John said as we settled down at last, Tony still at my side: “I am not going to worry you now with questions, Maggie. Just forget everything. We'll deal with things in the morning. I promise you that there will be no repetition of tonight's performance.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I

John's promise took a concrete form. A metaphorical description that could be almost literal. Constable Cornell, to whom he had assigned the job of watchdog, was not unlike a lean slab of putty-coloured stone. Inquisitive remarks made no impression on his smooth hard surface.

Early the next day this police constable put in an appearance at the back door.

“Hullo,” I said.

“Morning. Constable Cornell,” he announced, running the words together. I had difficulty in separating and defining them. “'Spector sent me.”

“Did he? What for?” I thought John must have forgotten something. He ignored my question. “Mind if I sit here?” asked Constable Cornell from the back porch.

“Not at all. Like a cup of tea?” Constable Cornell's peculiarity of speech persuaded imitation.

He accepted John's large breakfast cup with a laconic word of thanks, and sat down with it on the steps.

“Er—are you staying long?” I asked this stray cat who had landed on my doorstep.

“Dunno.” He took a loud sip from his cup and stared down the yard to the row of golden poplars. His taciturnity was irritating.

“I have to go out presently,” I said, knowing full well that I did not.

“Oke,” he replied. “Where can I change?”

I gaped at him.

He waxed a little more eloquent. “Get into civvies. People don't like being followed by a uniform.”

Light broke at last. It was not a stray cat that had adopted me, but a watchdog.

“Inspector Matheson sent you,” I said triumphantly.

“Th's right.”

Very nice of John, I thought to myself. But I don't know how I am going to like being shadowed and watched all day and every day. It might prove a source of embarrassment. I was glad that Constable Cornell saw part of my point of view, in so much that he undertook to change out of his blue uniform. Walking through Middleburn trailing a policeman behind me would be worse than having a string of dogs at my heels.

I showed him to the small tool-room at the end of the porch. “You needn't get ready yet. I'll let you know when I am going.”

“Oke.” Then he spoke at the greatest length I was ever to hear from him. It was an overture he used with all his shadowees. “Shan't worry you. Won't notice me after a while. Never lost a body yet. Don't intend to start.”

I caught an underlying warning. I was not to try any funny business with Constable Cornell, like attempting to give him the slip.

“You seem the pick at your kind of job,” I said politely. Constable Cornell nodded, quite in earnest. He was the best. There was no need for him to proclaim it in words.

The knowledge that someone was waiting my pleasure gave me the fidgets. I dithered about the normal household tasks like a newly-wed. Now and then I went into the kitchen to glance at Constable Cornell through the window. He remained on the steps, staring vacantly at the poplars. His attitude of having nothing to do and all day in which to do it was soothing. If he was content, why should I worry?

I was glad of his company when it came to tidying the nursery. I had not fancied going into that room with the remembrance of the previous night still vivid in my mind. I noticed that Tony had
been avoiding his room too, and worried a little. A child's memory might be short, but impressions often last until late in life. I knew I would have to overcome my reluctance in order to remove any subconscious fear that might lurk in his small brain.

I went to the nursery according to schedule with as much nonchalance as I could muster. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Tony hesitate in the passage. I opened the door, whistling loudly. John had made a cursory clean-up. The screen had been replaced in the window, and the drawers and cupboards closed. A few articles were still scattered on the floor, while Tony's cot was a jumble of bedclothes.

I opened the window wide as though to cleanse the room of a foul odour, and began to pick up the scattered clothes. Tony watched me from the door in silence. I continued my tuneless whistling.

By the time I came to stripping his bed he had advanced into his room and had started pulling at the drawers. I turned around and grinned at him. He relaxed still further and began to roam about the nursery. He even paused to stare out the window. I heaved a faint sigh of relief as I swung the mattress over. In so doing something fell onto the floor between the wall and the cot. Tony heard it and got down on his hands and knees to crawl under the cot.

“What is it, fellah?” I asked, remaking the bed. He came out flushed and with a piece of fluff on his hair. He held one hand behind his back, eyeing me obstinately.

“Show,” I commanded, holding out my hand.

Tony gave a small sigh and brought his hand round. I opened his fist and stared down at a baby's dummy. It took me a minute to remember how he came to have such a thing. I took it from him, closing his hand over a sweet in compensation.

Holding the dummy gingerly by the yellow string attached through its handle I thought very deeply. I remembered its first appearance rather than when it turned up again. The yellow string had a familiar look. It was the same dummy I had taken from Yvonne Holland's baby and thrown away over the golf course. That was the day of my visit to the Middleburn Community Centre. The dummy had lain in the grass of the fairway unperceived.

Then Tony's sharp glance lighted on it during our walk. It took his volatile fancy. I remembered how Daisy Potts-Power, to my mortification, had laughed at him. That was the night the Bellamys came to dinner. The night Tony developed an unusual and inexplicable illness, and the Holland baby a similar complaint.