Who Pays the Piper? (19 page)

“William's nothing to go by. He may be gardener at the Vicarage, but that don't say he's got any more sense than he was made with, and so I told him.”

Susan was invaded by a dreadful sense of chill.
Gardener at the Vicarage.…
She said,

“You'd better tell me—it doesn't matter——”

Mrs. Green tossed her head.

“Well then, my dear, he's got hold of a pack of rubbish about you and Mr. Dale—said he heard him fixing up with Vicar to marry you on this very Thursday that'll be tomorrow. And he says if he was Mr. Bill he'd do the same as what he says Mr. Bill done—shoot the life out of anyone that tried to take his girl. Lily come over as white as a sheet, and I took and told him to mind his tongue. ‘Lily won't marry no murderers', I said—‘not while I'm her mother', I said. ‘And it's late enough and you'd better be getting along', I said—‘and you needn't wait for Lily, because I'll be walking up the road with her myself'.”

Susan leaned her forehead upon her hand and said,

“Is it only William—does anyone else think that about Bill?”

“They're a pack of fools!” said Mrs. Green hotly. “Though mind you, they're not blaming him—only one here and there. But I'll say, and I'll stick to it, Mr. Bill never did no such thing—did he, my dear?”

Susan lifted her head.

“No, he didn't do it. But if the police think he did——” Her voice failed.

Mrs. Green regarded her with compassion.

“William, he says it was Mrs. Mickleham that put the police on to Mr. Bill—says she ought to have her neck wrung for it for a cackling old hen. Seems he's working round the house putting in wallflower, and what with the Vicarage windows always open the way they are—and how anyone can abear the draughts passes me—well, what people says with those open windows they can't complain if it's heard. Crying something dreadful Mrs. Mickleham was, William said—and Vicar telling her she only done her duty. Seems she heard Mr. Bill say he was going to kill Mr. Dale, and Vicar made her tell the police, and now she's fit to cry her eyes out. William says it fair sickens him the way he's got to listen to them going on about it. He says he don't suppose he'll ever fancy wallflowers again, the way he's had to plant them and listen to Vicar going on about a citizen's duty. Right down irreligious he talked, and I told him I wouldn't have it in my house, and if Lily was what I brought her up to be she wouldn't have it in hers neither. And he give me a look and says, ‘It'll be my house', and out he goes and bangs the door, and Lily she sets down and cries.”

“Bill didn't do it,” said Susan. “He wouldn't do a thing like that. He was angry, and he said what Mrs. Mickleham heard him say, but—oh, he didn't do it, Mrs. Green! The dreadful thing is that no one seems to have heard the shot except Bill and me. If we could only find someone else who heard it and knew what time it was, it would help Bill. Mrs. Green, if there was anyone who did hear it, you'd tell me, wouldn't you? I know people don't like getting mixed up in this sort of thing, but if you did come to hear anything, you
would
tell me?”

Mrs. Green nodded emphatically.

“And willing, my dear. Not that I can think of anyone that'd be likely to hear a shot round about that sort of time. People aren't so fond of having their windows open as Vicar and Mrs. Mickleham, and most of them with the wireless on as like as not, same as the girls up at King's Bourne, and a good loud band programme it was too. I like something more refined myself, but it's surprising the people that are partial to a band. And you can't hear nothing else when it's on—that's sure enough.”

CHAPTER XXVIII

Frank Abbott walked up and down the study and discoursed on Miss Cora de Lisle.

“She knows more than she has told, I'll swear to that. The longer I think it over, the odder it all looks. I tell you she began by pretending that Dale had sent me over to get back her precious fifty-pound note. But she didn't keep that up. She knew he was dead all right, and she was scared stiff. Of course she must have known that the note would be traced.” He laughed. “It was quite obvious that she'd spent some of it on brandy already. She'd a bottle and glass beside her when I came in. Now you know, she doesn't look to me like a regular soak. I should say she was the sort that goes to it for ginger or for consolation. She'd had some when she came to see Dale at twelve o'clock in the day. Well, if she habitually drank at that hour she wouldn't have got even the fifth-rate job she's just been sacked from. She's the sort that breaks out, not the sort that does it all the time. Well, on Monday she'd got the sack, and the company had gone on and left her high and dry, so she was desperate. Suppose it happened this way. She goes over to King's Bourne—and we know she had a good stiff drink to take her there. She got in past Raby, and she got fifty pounds out of Dale. We know that, and we know she came back to the Crown and Magpie and had another double brandy just after the six o'clock bus had gone. After that, she says, a nice young man gave her a lift back to Ledlington and she doesn't know him or his car from Adam. Now suppose she didn't get that lift, or at least not then. Suppose the double brandy put it into her head that it was a pity to go away back to Ledlington with one fifty-pound note when Lucas Dale had three more of them in his pocket-book—she'd have seen them, as likely as not when he took out the one he gave her.”

“That's supposing,” said Inspector Lamb in a particularly stolid voice.

“I said so, didn't I? More coming. Suppose she goes round the house the way she did when she saw Cathy O'Hara—she leaned in at the window and talked to her, you know. Well, we know that window was open on Monday evening. She looks in and sees that Dale is alone. She sees too that the glass door to the terrace is ajar, and she goes round there and walks in. After that—anything. Cora rather drunk and possibly quite abusive. Dale, who had just been touched for fifty pounds, certainly very angry. He may have got out the pistol to frighten her and have put it down on the table. She may have snatched it. He wouldn't be really on his guard with a woman—and a woman who had been his wife. No one will ever know just the way it went—if it went that way. In the end he's not taking any more. He goes to ring the bell, and she shoots him as he turns.”

Lamb pursed his lips.

“Too much imagination—that's your trouble,” he said. “If she came here to get those fifty-pound notes, why did she go away without them?”

“Because she was scared out of her life. She'd lost control and killed him. The only thought she'd have in the world would be to get away before anyone came—get rid of the revolver and run. And if we find the nice young man who gave her that lift, I think we'll find it was nearer seven than six when he picked her up. Meanwhile I'd like to know whether they've been able to dig up anything about her record at the Yard.”

Lamb nodded.

“There was a call just now.”

“Well, have they got anything?” A keen look had displaced Frank Abbott's usual air of languor.

“Depends on what you call anything,” said Inspector Lamb.

“What was it?”

Lamb regarded him composedly.

“All worked up about this, aren't you—set on making out it was this Cora de Lisle because young Carrick's one of your own sort and you like his girl.”

Frank Abbott whitened.

“You haven't got any right to say that, Inspector.”

Lamb sat back, filling his chair.

“Well, I'm saying it all the same, my lad—and something else that you can put to it and keep. You can't go looking for a criminal and say, ‘This is a chap I like, so he didn't do it and I've got to find someone else', or. ‘This chap turns my insides, so he'll do'. And no need to look at me like that, young Abbott. When I've got something to say I'm going to say it. See? What we're looking for every time is facts—lots of potty little facts that you wouldn't give a damn for if you took them one by one, but when you add them up they make something. You can't shirk facts, and you can't bend them. You've got to take 'em as they come and see what they add up to. Perhaps it's the answer you'd like it to be, and perhaps it isn't. That's not my business nor yours. And here's a little fact about Miss Cora de Lisle. She was in a bit of trouble two years ago over a shooting act at the Old George at Hoxton. There was another girl, and she got hurt. It wasn't serious, and there wasn't enough evidence to show that it wasn't just the sort of accident that does happen once in a way in these turns, but it seems there had been a quarrel, and if Miss de Lisle wasn't drunk she was as near it as makes no matter, and the girl who was hurt went about saying some pretty nasty things. There's your fact, Frank, and you can put it away with the others.”

“Thank you, sir.” Face and voice were both respectfully non-committal.

Lamb looked at him pretty straight and said,

“I wonder. But you will some day, if you don't now. Now here's a job for you. Go down to the Little House and measure the women's shoes. We haven't fixed anyone up with that footprint yet. Pity you couldn't get one of Cora de Lisle's whilst you were about it.”

Frank Abbott half closed his eyes and called up the picture of an impatient foot in a shabby tinsel shoe.

“Long—narrow—a good deal arched—about nine inches—I'd say she took a five.”

“And what would you guess Miss Lenox?”

“Oh, hers will be a five. Foot a bit wider than the other, but of course she was wearing a country shoe, and Cora had on a gimcrack evening slipper.”

“When she came here on Thursday morning she had on a pair of old black strap shoes, a good deal trodden over—Miss O'Hara's description, and she doesn't miss much, I should say. Her own feet are too small,” he added hastily.

“Unless she was wearing Susan's shoes.”

Lamb turned his shoulder.

“Get along down to it! And be on the look out for any sign of clay on a shoe. There's clay where that puddle is—that's why it holds the wet—and I haven't noticed it anywhere else about the place. To my mind, whoever made the foot-mark had been into that puddle, so you keep a bright look out for traces of clay.”

CHAPTER XXIX

The bells of the Little House rang in the kitchen. Mrs. Green looked over her shoulder and saw that it was the front door bell which had just rung. She looked at Susan, who was mixing batter, and Susan nodded.

“If you don't mind, Mrs. Green——”

Mrs. Green said, “Well, I've just about finished that floor,” and got up. She wiped her hands on her apron and walked through the dining-room and hall at a leisurely pace, humming Jerusalem the Golden as she went.

The sight of the elegant young man on the doorstep gave her what she afterwards described to Lily as a turn. “‘Is Miss Lenox at home?' that's what he said, and, ‘Can I see her? I'm Detective Sergeant Abbott'. As if I didn't know that, with you describing him to me, let alone me seeing him with my own eyes coming out of the Crown and Magpie after he'd been talking to Mr. Pipe. So I left him in the hall, which is good enough for detectives whether they're got up to look like gentry or not, and went and told Miss Susan. And she put her batter to the one side, which if it was me I wouldn't have minded keeping him waiting a bit, and washed her hands under the tap and out she went to him. And what do you suppose he wanted? Well there, I'd better tell you, for you'd never guess—every blessed pair of shoes in the house. And the way he looked them over, if he'd taken a magnifying glass to them I wouldn't have been surprised.”

Susan, accompanying Frank Abbott on his round of inspection, began by wondering what he could possibly want with their shoes, and ended with the conviction that the answer was a very frightening one. She met his first demand with incredulity.

“You want to see our shoes?”

“If you don't mind, Miss Lenox.”

Of course this was the merest form, because, however much she minded, it would make no difference to this polite and inexorable young man.

She took him upstairs to Cathy's room first. Cathy had gone down to the village, so there would be one pair of shoes unaccounted for, but when he had looked at the others, from the little silver slippers to the brogues which looked as if they had been made for a child, Detective Sergeant Abbott didn't seem to think it mattered about the missing pair.

“Your cousin has a very small foot. I suppose she takes a four.”

“A small four. These”—Susan touched the silver slippers—“these are only three and a half.”

He appeared to lose interest after that, and she took him along the passage to Mrs. O'Hara's door, where she knocked.

Mrs. O'Hara said “Come in” in her plaintive voice, and Susan opened the door.

Frank Abbott, not at all embarrassed, entered a bedroom which contained more furniture than he could have believed possible. The room was of a fair size, running through the house from front to back, but the suite of mahogany furniture imported from King's Bourne stood around the walls in gloomy, towering masses and reduced the floor space to a minimum. There was a four-poster bed with a canopy. There was a vast wardrobe. There were chests of drawers, a double wash-stand with a marble top, two bedside tables, a large dressing-table, a pier glass, and various chairs. An elderly but still handsome carpet covered the floor and disappeared beneath the furniture. There was no colour-scheme. The curtains, of a nondescript brocade, were quite unrelated to the bed furnishings, which were of an uninteresting blue, or to the carpet, which was passing from its original crimson and green to a dull rose and grey.

Mrs. O'Hara, in a mauve dressing-gown, occupied a massive easy chair upholstered in one of those Victorian tapestries which were designed not to show the dirt. After some forty years of wear the stuff was still intact, but all traces of pattern were now submerged in a general olive gloom. It had not occurred to the generation which had evolved all this solid, deep-toned mahogany, or to Mrs. O'Hara who had inherited it, that its warm red-brown might be repeated, heightened, illustrated by a whole range of beautiful shades from chestnut and terra cotta through rosy gold to golden rose.