Murder in Outline

by Anne Morice

  “What sort of drawing?”

  “It was more of a caricature really; of myself and two others. Very clever and rather cruel.”

  “Do you believe she committed suicide?” Toby asked.

  “Now, Toby, don’t encourage her, I beg you!”

  “Naturally, I do,” I said firmly. “I mean, isn’t it obvious? She really had nothing whatever to live for. Except, of course, that she was as jolly as a sandboy, with plenty of money and allowed to do exactly as she pleased, by all accounts. And apart, also, one should add, from the feet that she had enormous talent and the licence to pursue it to her heart’s content; not to mention looking forward to art school next term and a future of glory and renown. Well, what I’m trying to say is, if all that doesn’t add up to a motive for suicide, I’d like you to tell me what does.”

  “That’s all very fine,” Robin said, “but it’s only part of the picture, as you’ve seen fit to present it. There could be another side to this coin.”

  “Okay, Robin, go ahead and describe it.”

  “To start with, you say her mother is dead and her father lives so far away that she rarely sees him. Which means that, besides being something of a misfit, she’s also virtually an orphan. That might have a particularly depressing effect on an occasion of this sort, when all the other girls have their families swarming down for the celebrations. No doubt, she’s had experience of it before and knows so well how they will all break up into merry little self-sufficient groups and she’ll be on the outside, a plain, fat loner, with no one of her own. Shall I go on?”

  “Please don’t!” Toby implored him. “You are breaking my heart.”

  “Not mine, though,” I assured him. “I don’t believe Hattie had a vestige of self-pity and I also get the impression that solitude was something she actively sought. You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “All right, try this for size. She is fat and unattractive, and unlikely to grow out of either condition, being a compulsive eater. She may have made light of it to you, but that doesn’t convince me that for one of her age it wouldn’t have been a worry. Worse than anorexia, in a way, because at least most of them take a sort of mad pride in being so thin and wouldn’t swap it for the world. No compensation of that sort for Hattie. In fact, you told us that she’d admitted as much to Vera.”

  “She had beautiful manners,” I said. “I noticed that at once. It was probably being brought up in diplomatic circles which did it, but she was clever about hitting the tactful and flattering note. She paid me a very graceful compliment within a minute of meeting me and when she heard that Vera’s migraine had caused her to miss the lunch party it was probably instinctive to pull out some nervous complaint of her own and build up Vera’s morale by asking for advice. I don’t suppose. . . .”

  I tailed off at this point because the door had opened and in came Vera and Eddie, both in a white heat of excitement:

  “Now then!” Eddie said, turning to me as soon as the introductions were over. “You who would have been in the upper echelons of the elite of Delphi, does rumour have it right? Is it true that a Waterside girl has jumped in the river and drowned herself, thus putting paid to the jamboree?” Having corrected him on both points, I gave a brief outline of the true story. Hattie’s name meant nothing to him since, being neither pretty nor flirtatious, she had remained far outside his orbit, but Vera collapsed with a shriek on learning the victim’s identity.

  “I say, hang on, old girl!” Eddie implored her, as she threw herself back on the sofa and then closed her eyes, as though in pain. “No need for hysterics. Ghastly shock and all that, but it’s not as though we knew the poor girl.”

  White to the gills and scarcely moving her lips, Vera whispered:

  “Oh yes, we did.”

  “Oh, really? Did we?”

  “Oh yes,” Vera repeated, opening her eyes again. “As Tessa has said, she came and spoke to us on the terrace during the interval yesterday, and also she was looking after the art show when I went in there. It is all so clear to me now. Oh, why did I not say a word about this before? If only I had spoken, perhaps it could have been prevented. Now I must carry some of the blame.”

  “Why’s that? Did she tell you she was planning to kill herself as soon as you left?” Toby asked in tones of mildest curiosity. I could tell that he was already bored by these histrionics and was hoping to cool them, but he had reckoned without Vera, who elected to take the question seriously:

  “Oh no,” she said, leaning forward and opening her magnificent eyes as wide as they would go. “Do you imagine I am such a wicked fool that I would have kept silent about such a thing? No, she did not tell me, and yet in some way I feel I should have guessed. There was some shadow there. It was my wretched intuition . . . instinct, call it what you like.”

  Toby’s expression indicated that his name for it would not have been either of these, but Eddie said with immense relief:

  “Oh well, that’s all right then. Now listen, you lot, why not repair to the privacy of our room, where tooth mugs abound, and push the boat out an inch or two? Too early to order a drink down here on the Sabbath, however much Tessa may bat her eyes at the landlord, but I always keep a flask concealed in my handkerchief drawer.”

  “What exactly did your instinct or intuition tell you?”

  Robin asked, ignoring Eddie’s attempt to head Vera off, which I thought was rather unkind of him.

  “It is so hard to put into the right words. My English is not always good.”

  “There you are, then!” Eddie chipped in at once. “Better not try, that’s my advice. Slippery customers, these instincts and intuitions. Always creeping up on you uninvited and then leaving you in the lurch when you need them.”

  However, Robin and Vera now seemed to have entered into a private world of their own, for they both ignored him and continued to speak exclusively to each other. Perhaps he was hoping that she would come up with some new and genuine motive for suicide, thereby scotching any ideas I might have about alternatives, for he said: “But you definitely did get the impression that all was not well? Why was that? Did she tell you she was depressed? Unhappy?”

  “No, it was not so definite. Just a feeling I had.”

  “What feeling?”

  “That here is someone very lonely, with everything bottled up inside and no one to confide in. She was so plain and untidy-looking too, which must have been hard for her at Waterside, where looks count for so much.”

  “Then I really believe you have nothing to worry about,” Robin said, all at once appearing to lose interest. “And you certainly shouldn’t blame yourself in any way. How could you possibly have foreseen that she would kill herself, still less have taken steps to prevent it, when all you had to go on were such vague impressions?”

  I had seen him use these tactics before, though never with such a casebook response as Vera’s:

  “This is not all I had,” she replied sharply. “There was reason too for what you call these vague impressions.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “You would like to hear?”

  “As you wish.”

  “Or, better still, why not thrash it out over a snort upstairs?” Eddie suggested. “More comfortable, what?”

  “If she had not been so lonely as I am telling you,” Vera continued relentlessly, “why would she have talked to me as she did? Why does she have to confide in someone who is an absolute stranger?”

  “In what way did she confide in you?”

  “By telling me how much she hates being so fat and how, in spite of this, she is still unable to stop herself from eating. She is almost in tears about it and asking my advice, which I try my hardest to give her. But what I should have done, if it has not been for this terrible headache, was to realise how serious it was and how near she has become to being desperate.”

  “Yes, I see,” Robin said thoughtfully. “That does put rather a different complexion on it. So you honestly believe she was in a really
bad state?”

  I wondered that he should encourage her in these fatuous excesses, since it must have struck anyone who had spent two minutes in Vera’s company that her chief driving force was self-dramatisation. Having talked to Hattie myself immediately after Vera left, I knew the version we had just heard to be the wildest flight of fancy and I was convinced that, as with her migraine, it was just another device for focusing attention on herself.

  Eddie’s reactions, on the other hand, were more surprising. For the second time in two days, to my personal knowledge, his tiresome wife had succeeded in knocking him off balance and he was literally twitching with embarrassment at the performance she was throwing together now. He made at least three more attempts to put an end to it by getting us all upstairs for a drink, but it was not until he received some active support from Toby that the breakthrough was achieved.

  Robin and I were the last to leave the room and I paused in the doorway to allow the others to go ahead, before muttering:

  “And if you believe you now have proof that Hattie killed herself, you must be daft, Robin. I should call Vera about the most unreliable witness who ever crossed your path.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t trying to prove anything,” he replied meekly. “I was simply curious to see how far she would have to go before Eddie literally throttled her into silence.”

  TEN

  (1)

  As I had foreseen, Robin and Toby flatly refused to sit through either of the two winning performances, although they did undertake to put in an appearance at the prize-giving ceremony after tea. Weather permitting, this was to be held in the garden, with the circular veranda serving as a platform. Needless to say, with Constance Bland in command, the weather that day was sublime.

  The brunt of the prize-giving had been allotted to Eddie, with one of the governors backing up with special awards for essays and things of that sort, but one small task had been reserved for me, namely to present the cup for the best drama entry.

  A local farmer had been bludgeoned into lending his meadow, on the opposite side of the road to the main Waterside entrance, but parking space was still at a premium, so I accepted Eddie’s offer of a lift with him and Vera. Inevitably, during the journey the subject of Hattie’s death cropped up again and Eddie said he supposed there would have to be an inquest. When I assented he started plying me with questions as to when it was likely to be and whether we should be required to attend. These were matters on which he would have done better to consult Robin, but since he had omitted to do so, I promised to try and let him have the answers before he left for London.

  To my relief, Vera had become very subdued now and hardly contributed a word to this discussion, although she could not resist casting sighs and mournful looks at the sign outside the art exhibition, as we passed it on our way to the theatre. I noticed that it was still open for business, indicating that Connie had not lost her nerve and that it would take more than the sudden death of the principal exhibitor to upset her schedule.

  Seats had been reserved for us in the front row, but I remained in mine only long enough to shuffle through the programme and ascertain that it contained no mention of an understudy taking over from Belinda Jameson. Then, explaining to the Harpers that I intended to put this performance to the acid test by viewing it from the back of the circle, I got up and made my way through the foyer and out into the sunlight again.

  The cucumber sandwiches girl was on duty this time, but luckily she was showing some other visitors round and they were all standing with their backs to the entrance, surveying the portrait of Hattie’s father.

  Dipping the desk pen into the silver inkstand, to lend a touch of verisimilitude to the proceedings, I turned back the page of the open Visitors’ Book and studied the previous day’s entries.

  It was by no means a certainty that anyone who had gone there with any but innocent motives would have left a written record of the fact, but, on the other hand, so long as there was a chance of having been seen going inside, attempting to conceal the fact by not signing might have aroused still more suspicion. Moreover, Hattie, with her vested interest at stake, had been extremely diligent on this point and was unlikely to have let anyone off.

  There were only three signatures below my own, those of Norah Patterson, Edward Harper and Tina Blundell, in that order. It was a pity that they had not been required to state the exact time of their visits, but at least the position of Eddie’s name between the other two made it safe to assume that all three had arrived separately. This could hardly be described as a world-shaking discovery and yet, as I took a last look at the page before turning it over again, I had the nagging feeling that there was some significance to be found in it, if only I could nail it down. It continued to elude me, however, and just then the cucumber girl’s voice came floating out behind me, all clear tones and careful diction:

  “She’s not here just at present, unfortunately,” she was saying. “Poor girl was taken ill yesterday and had to be whipped off to the hospital. But I’ll tell her what you said and I know she’ll be awfully thrilled.”

  There was no saying whether the speaker believed her own words or not, because even Waterside acting standards were high enough for a statement of that kind, however untruthful, to come tripping of the tongue without a stammer or blush; but, in any case, it sounded as though Connie’s delaying tactics were succeeding and that if, by any chance, the press had been tipped off, the news must have come in too late to catch the Sunday papers.

  On my way out I came face to face with Madam coming in. She appeared to be in a great hurry, but pulled up when she saw me, looking startled and annoyed.

  “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “What’s wrong now?”

  “Nothing much,” I replied. “As far as I know.”

  Her expression changed to one of nervous confusion. “I do beg your pardon, Miss Crichton . . . you must think me . . . this is the second time . . . the fact is, I thought you were over at the theatre.”

  “Strictly speaking, I should be, but my presence isn’t really necessary this afternoon and I wanted to take a last look at Hattie’s pictures.”

  She accepted the challenge, saying: “So you’ve heard?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask who from?”

  “Tina told me.”

  “Ah yes, she would have, of course.”

  “I’m staying with her, as you know, so it would have been rather difficult for her to have kept it from me.”

  “Oh yes, I quite see that; and in any case I don’t really approve of all this hushing up.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it simply isn’t practical. You can’t keep a thing of that kind hidden for long. There’ll be countless rumours flying round before the day is out and in the end that will do even worse damage.”

  “You’re probably right,” I admitted. “Someone in the hotel at Gillsford has already got hold of a story about a girl here having drowned herself.”

  “Pity she didn’t, if you ask me,” Madam said crisply. “I’ve no wish to be callous, but it would have made it slightly easier to pass it off as an accident. As it is . . .”

  “You don’t think it can have been?”

  While we talked she had been moving backwards, a step or two at a time and appearing to do so almost unconsciously, but I guessed that it was a deliberate precaution against our being overheard and she did not answer my question, except by a slight shake of the head.

  “And I suppose no one yet knows how it happened?” I asked, keeping pace with her gradual retreat.

  “Not that I’ve heard. The . . . examination was to be carried out this morning. They invited Dr. Bland to attend, but I don’t think he’s back yet. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must leave you. I’ve got rather a lot on my plate today and I’m running late, as it is.”

  She turned her back on me and walked away, not very rapidly, but with her effortless, yet purposeful, cat-like movement showing to great advantage, and I
reflected that whatever had brought her in such a hurry to the art exhibition had not, after all, been so very pressing.

  (2)

  Three hours later the final curtain came down on the Waterside festivities and there must have been a welcome slowing down of pulses for all those in the know when, with gathering momentum, the parents and visitors drifted away down the drive and still no whisper having circulated concerning Hattie’s death.

  Mrs. Bland had borne up amazingly well and, so far as I could tell, there had not been a single spasm or fainting fit to mar the regal image. Game to the end, she stood by the front door, shaking hands and bestowing smiles on the favoured, carefully averting her eyes from those not quite grand enough to merit this mark of attention.

  Her husband was no less heroic. He remained at her side, exchanging good-humoured remarks with everyone who passed, the very picture of a friendly, benign man who had just spent the jolliest afternoon imaginable and acting the part so skilfully that he almost convinced me that, after all, Hattie had died from natural causes.

  The Harpers had been among the first to leave and Robin and Toby, as I discovered too late, had also slunk away in a rather deceitful fashion immediately after the prize-giving ceremony. Doubtless, each party had assumed I would be going with the other, but in fact I found myself faced with the prospect of a four-mile tramp to Gillsford, or else tracking Tina down and hanging about until she was ready to leave.

  Being already hot and tired, it was not a difficult choice and I was in luck too, because she had left her car in the same place as before and it was unlocked. After a wait of only ten minutes, just long enough for the bulk of the traffic in the meadow to be on its way and out of ours, she climbed into the driving seat, with the familiar grim expression clouding her face.

  “That was quick,” I told her. “I had resigned myself to languishing here for at least half an hour.”