Slade drew up before No. 13, and he and Clinton passed into a hall. On one wall was a dark brown board with the names of tenants painted in gold letters. As it happened, they were all “Mr and Mrs” save one—Mrs Edwards.
“Looks our likeliest bet,” Slade agreed with Clinton, who pointed to the name.
Mrs Edwards lived in Flat 10, which proved to be at the top of a five-storey flight of stone steps. Slade rang the bell. The door opened, and they were confronted by a man in dark clothes, with a carnation in his buttonhole.
“Good afternoon, Mr Prines,” said Slade. “This is a surprise.”
The photographer fell back at the sight of the two Yard men.
“Good God!” he exclaimed. “What—”
“I think it would be better if we conversed inside,” Slade suggested.
Reluctantly the short man allowed them entry. He was as nattily dressed as when the detectives had visited him at his studio in Ryechester, but in place of his easy smile there was now a look of perturbation.
“Who is it, Peter?” called a woman’s voice. A deep, rich contralto.
The woman herself appeared as the Yard men entered a neatly furnished sitting-room.
“I—”
She looked at Prines, who had followed them, after closing the outer door. The photographer was a picture of well-dressed dejection.
“Lily, dear, these gentlemen are police officers. I—I think they will have some questions to ask us—er—you.”
He dropped into a chair. The woman looked at her unexpected visitors, and Slade knew what both Milligan and Stevens had meant when they had emphasized the woman’s eyes. They were large, very blue, rather strange eyes to find in a face with such force and strength to it. The big blue eyes of a doll-face in the face of a woman who had personality and a will of her own.
“I am Inspector Slade of Scotland Yard,” Slade introduced himself. “This is my assistant, Sergeant Clinton. We would like to know why you visited the flat of John Doyce and where you procured the key.”
She sat down, her back very straight.
“You are to be complimented,” she said, in that same deep contralto. “I thought I had been—circumspect.” She glanced at Prines, who now looked as though he had eaten something which had violently disagreed with his digestion. “I was hoping to keep out of this investigation,” she told Slade, returning her attention to the Yard man, “but I can see now that my hope was futile. I should like to ask one question, however, before you—er—begin.”
Slade inclined his head in acquiescence.
“Do you know who I am?”
She said it as though she expected to surprise her visitors.
“Well—no, to be really truthful,” Slade confessed. He didn’t like to say he thought she was a woman Doyce had cast off.
“I’m Mrs John Doyce.”
The announcement pulled both Slade and Clinton up with a jerk. A gleam came to the sergeant’s eyes.
“So he was married,” he murmured.
“Do I have to produce what are popularly called one’s marriage lines?” she retorted, reading into Clinton’s remark something he had not meant.
“No, Mrs Doyce—”
“I prefer to be called Mrs Edwards. It’s a compromise, actually. My maiden name was Edwards, but I am married.”
There was a shade of defiance about the way she said this. Slade realized that he wasn’t going to find this woman altogether tractable, unless she was dealt with very diplomatically.
“I think,” he said, “it would be better if you told me the story in your own way, Mrs Edwards. I can see there is a story.”
“A very ordinary one,” she said. She sat down, smoothed her dress, and looked at them again with those strangely large eyes. She seemed to be gauging them and what she was about to say at the same time. “First let me say I come from Ryechester. That may mean something to you.”
Slade acknowledged this with a nod.
“It begins to mean quite a lot,” he said.
“John Doyce lost his head after Mary Kindilett’s death,” she went on. “I don’t know why. But he did. He wasn’t in love with her. He’s never been in love with any woman. I know that now—or, rather, I’ve known it some considerable time. But I didn’t know it when he began coming into the saloon bar of the Fox and Ferret. You see, I was a barmaid there.”
She gave the information simply, without trying to lend the words any false meaning.
“He was fascinating, vital, and very interesting to me, who had seen nothing of life outside Ryechester, which is really a very circumscribed country town.”
“Er—pardon me,” Slade interrupted. “May I ask how you came to be a barmaid?”
She smiled. She was sensitive of the implied compliment in the detective’s question.
“My father was a school-teacher. He died of cancer, and had not been able to save much. I just had to turn to and take the first job I could. I had no false pride.”
Prines began a protest.
“Really, Lily, you don’t have to—”
But she silenced him. “Peter,” she said, “it isn’t your husband that’s been murdered, but mine. I must get my position made very clear to the police. There’s plenty of room for misunderstanding.” She added ruefully, “That’s what was discovered by every one who became friendly with John Doyce.”
“You were saying,” said Slade, “that you found him attractive.”
“I did. I shouldn’t have married him unless I thought myself in love with him. I found out when it was too late that what I felt for John Doyce wasn’t love. It wasn’t anything deeper than a passing infatuation. But at the time I had little knowledge of the tricks one’s emotions can play. Otherwise—”
She looked at Prines, and her glance softened.
“Yes, I would have married you, Peter, and saved myself years of unhappiness.”
The photographer smiled at her.
“I’m ready to marry you any time you say, Lily. I’ve been waiting ever since you turned me down in favour of Doyce.”
The woman’s gaze met Slade’s frankly.
“You see, Inspector,” she said, “I was luckier than I deserved to be. I had two suitors. It was my misfortune that I chose to marry the wrong one. Poor Peter here wasn’t so outwardly attractive, and I failed to read them aright. I married John Doyce. I think, Peter, you wanted to strangle me when I told you.”
Prines got to his feet and pushed his hands into his trousers pockets.
“Strangle you, Lily? No. But I knew you were being a fool. I went home and told myself I too was a fool still to bother my head about you. But—there it was. I did. I said I’d see you through.”
“And you did, Peter. You’ve been splendid, patient. Four years—”
Prines revealed just how much he cared for her by hurriedly covering a chink he saw in her armour.
“You see, Inspector,” he explained, “Mrs Edwards has always had a horror of divorce courts. Her father divorced her mother when she was quite small. Well, I understood how she felt, and was prepared to wait,” he added.
Slade found himself regarding this unusual couple afresh, trying to assess them in the light of these new values he had discovered.
“That was why you didn’t divorce Doyce?”
“That was why, Inspector.”
Slade nodded thoughtfully. “You say he asked you to marry him after Mary Kindilett’s death?”
“Yes. The publicity of the inquest, and the way people talked—Ryechester had more than its share of scandalizing gossips, as Francis Kindilett found—and you found, too, didn’t you, Peter?”
Prines gave her a quick smile, moved closer and patted her shoulder.
“Everything’s going to be all right now, Lily dear,” he assured her.
She returned his smile and t
hen faced Slade again.
“I think her death shook him,” she resumed. “Marriage suddenly offered an escape. From what? From what people were saying, from himself maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, he asked me to marry him, and I was flattered. The life he held out was very tempting, as he pictured it. We were married. I suppose for a month—two months—we were happy. I was. Then it all crashed. I learned the truth about him. I suppose, with my home background, it hit me extra hard. It seemed to. I—I hated him. To give him his due, he wanted a divorce. He didn’t mince words, and made no attempt to spare my feelings. He could be damnably candid. Perhaps that was the essence of his charm for so many women, his brutal candour about them. They felt themselves understood. Anyway, he told me he had made a mistake, that our marriage couldn’t really mean anything to him, that he was the sort of man who shouldn’t be married. I think he rather liked, at times, to paint himself in dark tones. It gave him a morbid satisfaction. A psychiatrist could probably give his particular complex a name. But I mustn’t digress.”
She paused to smooth her dress again. It was as though the action helped to smooth her thoughts also.
“He only became difficult when I told him I wouldn’t divorce him. And I think he realized it was hopeless to expect a solution from the reverse procedure. He knew he wouldn’t be given an opportunity,” she added, her voice hardening perceptibly. “We had to compromise. Because I suddenly hated him I insisted upon receiving an allowance, and I came to London. I thought I could lose myself better in a large city. But you probably won’t understand that.”
“Indeed I do,” Slade told her. “You have been here how long?”
“Nearly four years. It’s seemed three times as long as that. I have a job. It doesn’t pay me much. Otherwise I would have given up the allowance when I ceased hating him. Hate dies very quickly, you know.”
This last was uttered in an introspective tone.
“You have not quarrelled recently?”
She looked up, eyes large and bright.
“Quarrelled?” The word surprised her. “No. Why should we? I became philosophic about my husband before I left Ryechester. But you, Peter”—she turned again to the photographer—“it’s been difficult, hasn’t it?”
Prines walked nearer to Slade. He took his hands from his pockets and folded his arms.
“I’ve been in love with Mrs Edwards, Inspector, since before she married Doyce. I am still in love with her. I think that gives me some—er—protective right.”
He looked uncomfortable. Slade said nothing, waiting for what was to come.
“I think we should both like to know,” Prines forced himself to continue, “why you are interested in her at this stage. She did not kill her husband. Surely, after four years of—”
His newly developed vehemence left him all but speechless.
“I am not suggesting Mrs Doyce killed her husband,” said Slade coldly. “The fact remains that he was murdered. She may know something that will help us find the murderer.”
The woman’s gaze dropped.
“I was at the inquest,” she said. “The coroner said that the police—”
She hesitated.
“We are still anxious to procure any fresh evidence,” said Slade guardedly. “Evidence that would point to some one’s hating your husband—enough to kill him.”
“But, Inspector,” said Prines, “you surely don’t think—Why, I mean to say—”
“Did you hate him, Mr Prines?” asked the detective bluntly.
With an accusatory query directed at himself the man was more at ease than had it been directed against the woman.
“I could have killed him cheerfully—four years ago,” he affirmed. “But four years is a long time, and, if she will pardon me, Mrs Edwards is an unusual woman. I have found her a great example. She has taught me patience and, I hope, fortitude.”
It might have been pompous, but somehow it wasn’t. There was a simplicity about the man’s delivery that robbed his words of any sententiousness. Slade found this hard to credit. His every instinct was to suspect the man, yet the evidence of his eyes and ears confounded reason.
He stole a look at Clinton, and the knotted expression on the sergeant’s face was proof that he was finding the situation as difficult to assess as was his chief.
“Peter didn’t kill my husband,” said the woman. “Nor did I. Both of us have read the papers. We can’t prove we didn’t send that package—or, at least, I can’t. You were in Ryechester on Saturday, weren’t you, Peter?”
“Yes. Had to make arrangements for photographing the wedding of a councillor’s daughter. Elaborate show, but poor food,” added the Society critic.
“And you were in London, Mrs Edwards,” said Slade, conceding a point by using the name she was known by.
Her smile acknowledged the concession.
“Yes, I didn’t go out till the afternoon, but as I live alone in this flat I can’t prove that. But the papers said a man handed the package in at the District Messenger’s office.”
Slade caught Clinton’s puzzled glance. The sergeant was stumped. It looked as though they were wasting their time by remaining. They had got nowhere, and their most hopeful lead had suddenly petered out.
“Why did you go to your husband’s flat?” Slade pursued. “It would clear things considerably if I knew that.”
For some seconds she remained silent. Prines took out a cigarette-case and absently lit a cigarette.
“Sorry,” he said, turning to the others. “I was forgetting. Smoke?”
The Yard men declined, but the woman took a cigarette. As she lit it from Prines’ match she sat back.
“I’ll tell you. It was a stupid impulse, Inspector. As I told you, I was at the inquest this morning, and heard about the police being ready to wind up the case. That made me remember something.”
She paused. The others waited, none offering any comment.
“I remembered that just after I was married my husband had a letter from Francis Kindilett. It was a very bitter letter. My husband told me he would keep it. One day, he said, it might come in handy. I don’t know what he meant, exactly. But I did know he put that letter away. Whether he replied to it or not I can’t say. But I thought perhaps the police haven’t found it. I thought—Well, I saw Mr Kindilett’s face at the inquest. He looked worried to death, and I suddenly made up my mind to get that letter, to avoid any misunderstanding. You see, the newspaper report about the investigation in Ryechester made it plain that the old tragedy was being brought out and aired again. And—” She broke off. “That’s why I went to the flat.”
“Did you find the letter?” asked Slade.
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “But I expect you know that. It occurred to me afterwards that I had acted hastily. The police would have been through my husband’s correspondence already.”
XV
After Office Hours
From a ’phone kiosk at the corner of Clifficks Gardens, Slade rang up Morring’s private address and was lucky enough to find the footballer at home.
“I want to go through Doyce’s desk at the office. Can you meet me there in half an hour?” the Yard man asked.
“Yes, certainly.”
Slade went back to the car.
“He was in,” he told Clinton. “He’s meeting us at the office in half an hour. Got the address there?”
The sergeant again consulted his notebook containing names, addresses, and telephone numbers.
“Mallin’s House, Peckbourne Street. That’s in the City, off Moorgate.”
Slade drove south, while the sergeant spoke his thoughts aloud.
“I don’t think Prines is the sort to commit murder. Anyway, he wouldn’t have waited all these years and then screwed up his courage, unless there had been a sudden development. And so far as we know there
hasn’t been. She didn’t say there had. Funny, she should still be wearing her wedding-ring.”
“No, I think that’s consistent with her outlook. She felt bound to Doyce. She was his wife. Only death could alter that.”
“Death has,” Clinton ruminated. “Convenient for them. I suppose they’ll get married somewhere in Town quietly and go back to face Ryechester. That’ll take some pluck, if the gossips are as bad as she made out.”
“She’s got the pluck.”
“And it would be asking too much for him to pull up his roots. He’s doing pretty well just now.”
“True. But he’s very much in love with her. Not in a youthful, demonstrative way. He’s the steady-flame type, Clinton, burns on and on. He’d throw up the Ryechester business if it would make her happy. Point is it wouldn’t. Obviously she’s been the one who has made sure he’s kept pegging away where he had a chance of success. I don’t think he’d be much without her. Four years ago he was running around snapping shots for the Ryechester Chronicle. Then she got married and the marriage went on the rocks. She cast adrift, and Prines started going ahead. Her work, as I see it.”
Clinton digested this.
“Certainly looks that way, as you make it out. I wonder if he realizes it.”
“I think so. What she says goes with him. Well, I wish them luck. They deserve a bit after waiting this long.”
Clinton went off at a tangent.
“Queer, the way Doyce got himself tied up after the Kindilett girl’s death. Must be something in it.”
“As I see it,” said Slade slowly, “Doyce broke up her engagement—”
“Mary Kindilett’s?”
“Yes. I’ve mentioned this before. Now it looks fairly certain. He broke up her engagement out of what? Spite? Perhaps. Devilment? Perhaps. We don’t know. But we know she went to that dance with him. Perhaps he was careless. Probably let slip something that told her the truth. That he had lied to her about her fiancé, and that tipped her emotions over.”
“Which makes her death suicide.”
The Arsenal Stadium Mystery Page 17
