When Last I Died (25 page)

" Unless it's someone playing the fool," said Muriel with weak annoyance.

"Bound to be," said Mrs. Bradley reassuringly. "If we look about we're almost bound to find them, unless they've cleared off by now, which I rather suspect they would do if they've been here on mischief bent."

"But they couldn't have known I was coming. I didn't even tell
you
I was coming. It was just—just a sudden fancy to see the place again. Of course, I'd never have dared to come alone, but as you said you would be here...."

How well she did it, thought Mrs. Bradley, dispassionately interested in such a convincing display of protective colouring; how extraordinarily well, the nervous, over-strained, weak and clinging little ... murderess. Her voice hardened.

"Yes, but I'm here with work to do. I don't require, or particularly desire, company."

"Oh, you won't mind me. I shan't interfere," said Muriel. "I expect, as you say, it was someone thinking to scare us. Ah, well, it all seems quiet enough now. But, you know, when I first heard that mouth-organ thing which seemed to come from the top of the house, I really thought for a minute that it was—that it was the fairies, or something."

"Oh, no," said Mrs. Bradley, "you did not. You thought it was those poor ..." She watched the razor coming slowly round from behind the murderess's back, and suddenly cried, "What's that?"

She cried it out so loudly that her voice rang through the house. At the same instant a shrill whistle came from the direction of the scullery, and, as Muriel's face grew pale, a sound stranger and more eerie than any that had so far been heard that night seemed to come from the courtyard outside. Part of it was homely enough—the steady clop, clop of a heavy horse, the sound of the hoofs muffled by the courtyard weeds—but, mingled with this was another sound, unusual to most men's ears, but apparently familiar, in some horrid and personal sense, to the wretched, guilty woman who had now dropped the razor on the floor.

"The cover of the well! They're here! They're here! They've come to be revenged on me! Go away! Go away! Go away! Leave me alone, you little fiends!" she shrieked at the top of her voice.

The sounds ceased. Mrs. Bradley picked up the razor.

"I think you dropped this," she said.

"I?" faltered Muriel, recoiling. "I don't know what it is! I never saw it! Didn't you hear what I heard?"

"I only heard someone screwing down a coffin lid," said Mrs. Bradley, quietly as before. "Or could it have been the trapdoor down to the cellar? Listen! Do you hear it too?"

She half-turned, and at that instant Muriel opened the razor and made a sudden slashing attack. Mrs. Bradley, who had been waiting to do so, side-stepped, and banged her on the elbow with a cosh which she had drawn from the deep pocket of her skirt when she had half-turned away.

"
Listen!
" she said again.

Muriel was moaning with the agony of the blow on the elbow, but her moans of pain changed suddenly to a dreadful cry of terror. From beneath their feet came the sound of someone digging. She was in a state of hysterical panic when the inspector stepped out of the kitchen to make the arrest. She made a full and babbled confession on the way to the station.

"Hark, now everything is still, The screech-owl and the whistler shrill, Call upon our dame aloud, And bid her quickly don her shroud!"

W
EBSTER
.

"THE thing is," said Ferdinand," when did you first suspect her, mother?"

"I don't know," replied Mrs. Bradley.

"Genius," said Caroline, without (her mother-in-law thought) much justification for the compliment.

"I thought you were convinced of Bella's guilt."

"I was."

"Well, then, you must know when your ideas changed."

Mrs. Bradley was silent for a minute or two. One would have said that she was in contemplation of the hedge which divided part of her garden from the paddock. "I don't know," she repeated, "but if I am being asked to hazard an opinion, I would say that I was convinced of Bella's guilt until I went to see her down in Devon."

Ferdinand nodded, as his mother turned her basilisk eyes on him.

"Personally," he said, "I did not think anything could disprove Bella Foxley's guilt. The ancient, wealthy aunt, the blackmailing cousin, the dangerous and criminally minded boys, and the golden opportunity of making herself safe for life by assuming the identity of a murdered sister—the thing seemed self-evident, fool-proof, satisfactory and horrible."

"But it
wasn't
altogether satisfactory," said Mrs. Bradley, "as I realized the moment I began to examine it from Bella Foxley's point of view. If you assume for a moment that Bella was
not
guilty, you get a different impression entirely of the course events may have taken. You get the impression, for instance, that every ill deed we had attributed to Bella could just as well have been performed by Muriel."

"That means, though, that the aunt died accidentally," said Ferdinand. "Bella was the only person to have had a motive there for murder."

"Not necessarily," replied his mother. "Bella certainly had the motive, for she stood to gain by the death, but if she could be blackmailed successfully, Tom and Muriel stood to gain something too. It was a clever plot, but it was apparent, before I suspected Muriel at all, that Tom was somewhere involved. It was evident that Bella had not written that diary."

"The diary?"

"Yes. You've read it. You know what the mistakes and discrepancies were. Some of the mistakes could, but others could
not,
have been made by a single author, especially if that author were Bella. Collaboration was indicated—an unheard-of thing in a genuine diary."

"I see what you mean. But there was no way of telling which part was Bella's own work, was there? And, even if there were, the only other part-author of the diary, as you say, could have been Tom. At least, let's put it that the collaborator couldn't have been Muriel."

"There was no need for it to have been Muriel. I spoke just now of a plot. But, to revert to the diary itself, it seemed to me to indicate that the writer had a rather pleasing style, and a definite, although possibly rudimentary, sense of form. Of course, we must admit that Bella may have possessed both these literary qualities, but Tom, as a practising writer (he made some of his income out of articles for journals devoted to psychical research, you will remember), was the more likely author, on the whole, in my opinion. Still, one cannot generalise about such things, for it is a well-known fact that people whose powers of conversation are crude, boorish, unready, or even, for all social purposes, non-existent, can sometimes contrive to express themselves, when in receipt of pen and paper, in unexceptionable prose."

"I don't see, all the same, why you think two people wrote the diary between them," said Caroline.

"I don't know that they did. Bella was an unconscious collaborator. What interested me, and caused me to investigate the matter in the first place, were the ending of the diary, abrupt yet undramatic, and the mistakes in fact which were apparent almost at a glance and which became ludicrously obvious as soon as one began to examine the matter.

"Then came the very odd fact that, although the diary continued long past the time when everyone concerned had left Aunt Flora's house, the diary itself remained there. That seemed very curious."

"Last entries faked? Written beforehand ?" said Ferdinand.

"It added to my idea that there was a plot. The plot, of course, came into being when Bella helped Pegwell and Kettle-borough to escape from the Institution. Well, the arrangement between Bella and Tom was that the boys should remain hidden in the haunted house, where Tom could make good use of them in faking the
poltergeist
phenomena, and where, Bella hoped, they would be safe from the police.

"That, I fancy, was as far as Tom was prepared to go, and, apart from Muriel's confession, I could not prove much of what follows.

"One thìng which Tom never allowed for, of course, was the horrid jealousy which his necessary collusion with Bella over the boys evoked in Muriel. This jealousy led Muriel, later on, to kill him and to see that Bella was charged with the murder."

"Didn't Bella know who had killed Tom?" Caroline enquired.

"She thought it was the boys. She does not seem to have suspected Muriel of that until now."

"Then did Muriel kill the aunt?"

"It is most likely. But it doesn't matter now, in one sense, whether she did or not. The death of the aunt suggested to Tom this further plot to continue to blackmail Bella—not that he did anything so crude, I imagine, as to extort money by threats, or anything of that kind. Bella loved him, and he found it easy enough to get the money. It was, of course, very much more than those small amounts suggested at the trial. It was, very possibly, the half which was supposed to have gone to Tessa, although Bella did not admit it."

"Well, he wrote the diary, intending to type it out later and threaten Bella with it if ever it became necessary to apply a little pressure. He purposely sent it to the house to Eliza Hodge, being pretty sure that the old servant would take care of it without being unduly curious about it. Then he wrote the anonymous letters and drove Bella almost mad, I should imagine, by the accusations of murder contained in them. Then he fell out of the window that first time, and allowed her to believe that the boys had pushed him out."

"And that gave Muriel the idea of how to kill him without being suspected?" asked Caroline.

"Yes. She has now confessed it. I had an inkling of what had happened—I think we all had—when we heard about the button which was found in the dead man's hand."

"Well, it was rather silly of Bella to go and visit Tom so late at night," said Caroline. Mrs. Bradley looked benevolently at her daughter-in-law, and agreed.

"There is one thing I don't understand," said Ferdinand. "How did a comparatively frail woman such as Muriel contrive to get the two boys battened down under hatches in that cellar? I should have thought the lads would have popped up the well whilst she was screwing down the trap-door, or vice-versa."

"Oh, Bella helped her over that."

"So Bella
is
partly guilty?"

"No, but it flummoxed her at the trial. Tom must have told her that the boys had pushed him out and were dangerous. She suggested that they should shut the boys up until they had decided what was the best thing to do about them. She knew, of course, that, following the information which she was going to give at the inquest, it was almost certain that Bella would be arrested for murdering Tom. After that, Muriel dared not keep the boys alive in case they could witness against her. The probability was that they had been fast asleep at the time, but her guilty conscience would not allow her to run any risks.

"When Bella had been acquitted of the murder of Tom, she knew, from the way in which Muriel had given her evidence, that she had an implacable enemy, and she knew the reason for it. It was to escape from Muriel's hatred, I think, that she assumed Tessa's identity, although I am certain that she never suspected that Muriel had killed Tom. She did think, though, that Muriel had choked Aunt Flora.

"I myself had some glimmering of the truth, I think, when I realized that there was a curious little entry which seemed to leave a kind of time-gap in the diary. This gap was that the diary failed to explain what on earth made the whole four of them—Bella Foxley, Tom, Muriel and even Eliza—leave the old lady alone in the house on the day that she died. I could not believe that even the most irresponsible and heartless people would have done such a thing, and, when I questioned Eliza, I discovered that, as a matter of fact, they did not. Eliza herself was there, and either Bella or Muriel.

"Now there was, in connection with this entry, too, an interval unaccounted for by the author—whether Bella or Tom—between seven o'clock and that 'little later on in the evening ' during which Aunt Flora died."

"But it doesn't prove anything," protested Caroline.

"It proves that whoever wrote the diary was a liar, and a liar about the most important event mentioned," said Ferdinand. "Mother, presumably, became interested in Bella Foxley before she obtained Eliza's evidence, but the discrepancy between that evidence and the evidence of the diary was proof-presumptive, I should say, of foul play."

"Yes, but Tom
wanted
to indicate foul play," persisted Caroline.

"I know," said her husband soothingly, "but it was that— and I expect, the other curious mistake about the colour of the old lady's hair—which made mother think that there might be something worth investigating."

"I am glad you mention the hair," said Mrs. Bradley, "for that indicated that whoever wrote the diary could not have gone in to see the old lady. The fine imaginative passage about the dirt in the parting—you remember ?—proved positively that whoever the author was, it could scarcely have been either Bella or Muriel, both of whom, according to old Eliza, spent time in the sick-room, a thing which Tom did not do, being afraid, on the one hand, we are asked to believe, that the old aunt might think he had come for what he could get—a thought repugnant to his nature—and, on the other, that he detested illness—a more likely explanation, I feel."

"And were you positive, before Muriel confessed, that she was the murderer of the two boys?" asked Caroline.

"Yes. I don't want to go into details which you would not care to hear, but it was obvious that the boys' bodies had been buried before they had decomposed. Now they could not have been buried by Tom, for he was dead, and they could not have been buried by Bella, because before they were dead she would have been in prison. That left Muriel, and I have a statement from the old caretaker to show that Muriel visited the haunted house some days after the inquest to do some gardening, he thought."

"Silly mistake to bury them at all," said Ferdinand.

"I can't see how you knew she would confess if you could get her to the haunted house to try to kill you," said Caroline.

"I based the theory upon a discovery I made earlier in the investigation," explained Mrs. Bradley. "I discovered that Muriel was superstitious. She indicated to me once that she didn't really think it was wise to counterfeit psychical phenomena. Therefore, when she came to the haunted house that night to kill me because I had allowed her to know what I had against her, she concluded that the sounds she heard, striking home as they did to a mind over-burdened with guilt, were proof of something that she had half-believed all her life—that there really are such things as ghosts, and that occasionally they take a quite uncomfortable interest in human affairs."