Sting of Death

by Shelley Smith

  “There’s no use talking about it, Edmund. Will you ring for Alice? I want to get on with my packing.”

  He came closer.

  “Alice is out.”

  “Out?” she echoed in alarm.

  “I sent her away.”

  She put her hand to her face. She said vaguely, “Why?”

  “Because I want to hold you in my arms just once more,” he said huskily with his cheek against hers. “Darling,” he whispered, kissing her throat, “darling!” He picked her up in his arms, and she tried to push him away with a dignified gesture, but her hands only feebly pawed the air. She felt deliciously helpless, drunk. He fastened his teeth gently on her laughing lip, and she gave a little animal cry of pleasure as she felt herself sinking on to the bed, sinking down with him into darkness...into sleep...

  He looked down on her as she lay there, with a queer considering expression on his face. He tucked a pillow more comfortably under her cheek and covered her with a spread.

  “Sleep sound, my pretty,” he said softly.

  He “borrowed” the Packard and drove down to Hawkswood, leaving the car on the Common and taking the short cut through the copse up to the house. The ladder someone had left leaning against the upper windows gave him an idea. He drew on a pair of brown kid gloves and pulled a shabby tweed cap low over his eyes. He slipped in at the side entrance into the cloakroom and locked the door. In the glory hole under the stairs he found a battered box of tools and took out a screwdriver, a piece of wire, and a pair of pliers. It was while he was looking for his old battle-dress, that he wore for cleaning the car when he was at home and kept in the glory hole for convenience, that he came across something else – a child’s grotesque mask in stiffened calico, a merry bucolic face with chubby red cheeks, a smiling mouth, and sightless eyes of cobalt blue with pierced pupils for the wearer to see out of. He slipped it on and replaced his cap. Then he climbed into the khaki suit and put the tools in a pocket.

  You would have thought to see him run up the ladder with a rag in one hand that he must be a window cleaner, even when he stepped over the window sill, inside.

  It is one thing to arrange for a person to be electrocuted accidentally next time they turn on their bedside lamp; it is something very different to walk into their bedroom and find them already dead...murdered...by someone else.

  It gave Edmund a ghastly “turn” to see that jewel in Linda’s breast like a malevolent yellow eye winking in the late ray of sun. His instinct was immediate flight, but the sight of that jewel arrested him. As if he could fail to recognize it! Had he not given it to Genevieve himself? With an uprush of terror he recollected her unreasoning haste to get away. If he had not returned in time she would have left without seeing him again, without a word of explanation. Now all that seemed inexplicable in her behaviour was explained. To steady himself, he lit a cigarette. There was so little time in which to eradicate all traces of the crime and Genevieve’s presence. He rubbed his handkerchief hastily over any polished surfaces she might be supposed to have touched, and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray.

  With his gloved bands he removed the hatpin from Linda’s heart. It was as he had hoped: there was no blood externally. As he carried her in his arms out of the room he was momentarily startled by a glimpse of himself in the mirror: the lifeless bonhomie of his expression combined with the crude pink and white colouring made an effect that was terrifyingly sinister.

  Linda’s fist, grasping the silver chain she wore round her neck, caught on the newel post, and the weight of her falling body dragged her arm free. She lay in a huddled heap in the shadow where the foot of the stairs curve round. So might she have fallen accidentally if she had leaned over the balustrade too far.

  The sound of children laughing floated up to Edmund as he ran nimbly down the ladder. A lady’s bicycle leaned against the garage and he grabbed it. It was of course much too small; he was obliged to balance on it like an organ grinder’s monkey. Behind him a voice cried out joyously: “Daddy!”

  Involuntarily he looked over his shoulder.

  He saw Jane’s face break into circles of terror before she began to scream…The sound pursued him down the drive…

  As Edmund drove into Brook Street he glanced up automatically at the top flat, and went cold. It was dusk and the windows he expected to see as dim blanks were blazing with warm gold. That could only mean Genevieve was awake – which was unthinkable. She should have remained asleep for about eight hours; he had been depending on her to provide him with an unconscious alibi, since she would never know that he had left her side.

  He parked the car in the side turning and scrambled out of his battledress, chucking it with the mask behind the back seat. Caution advised him against using the front entrance, because even if Genevieve were awake, this was no moment to be seen and perhaps remembered – for Genevieve’s sake as much as for his own. The bathroom window was still open, just as he had left it a few hours earlier. As he stood in the twilit bedroom, the door open a crack, he could hear voices, murmuring... In a little while they grew louder as they came into the hall. He heard an unfamiliar male voice say, “I’m sorry to have missed your husband. I should like to have congratulated him. Ask him to look me up; I’d like to have a word with him.”

  He heard Genevieve murmur in her rich drawl, and then a little laugh. “Ha-ha-ha!” echoed the man, and then briskly made his farewells, and the door slammed behind him.

  When Genevieve pushed open the bedroom door and saw him standing there, dark, motionless, tail as a spectre in the half light, she gave a small scream and flung out her hand to the switch.

  “How you frightened me!” she cried. “I didn’t know it was you. For a moment, I thought – ” She shook her head and, with something of an effort, said: “What are you doing here, Edmund?”

  “Who was that?”

  “That was Dr. Paul. Edmund; why have you come back? Where have you been?”

  “Who’s Dr. Paul?”

  “Oh!” she said impatiently. “The man I knocked down in Hyde Park that first evening. Surely you haven’t forgotten.”

  “What did he want?”

  “To see me,” she said lightly.

  “Too bad you opened the door... You ask me where I’ve been. To Hawkswood.” He paused significantly. “I saw Linda.”

  “Oh, Edmund,” she said wearily. “I don’t want to hear any more about that. It no longer concerns me. Can’t you understand?”

  “But this does, doesn’t it?” he said, balancing the pin on his gloved palm. “You didn’t want to leave it behind you, surely.”

  “Why; no,” she said, taking it in her hands. “You gave it to me. I didn’t know I’d left it there. Where did you find it?”

  “Where you left it, I presume: in Linda’s heart.”

  But the words didn’t touch her brain. She felt so queer and sad, and now this reminder of Edmund and their sweet love brought tears pricking to her eyes, and to conceal them she bent her head and pretended to be absorbed in polishing the rusty-looking shaft with her finger.

  “Look,” she said, showing him the brown mark on her pink skin. “What is it?”

  He said laconically: “Blood.”

  This time she did hear and with a startled face cried:

  “Blood! But how horrible!” and let it fall, so that it rolled off her lap and across the carpet. As she scrubbed at her finger, the other words belatedly reached her brain, and she asked with uneasiness:

  “What did you mean just now, Edmund – ‘in Linda’s heart’?”

  “It was in Linda’s heart. The blood on the pin is her blood. Are you trying to tell me you didn’t know she was dead?” he said with sardonic incredulity.

  “I know! How should I know?” But there was terror in her face. “How can she be dead? Is this some macabre joke? I won’t believe you.”

  “If you didn’t kill her, why the desperate hurry to get away?”

  �
��If I didn’t kill her!” Genevieve repeated in a sort of hoarse treble like a boy’s breaking voice. “Why on earth should I kill her? Are you out of your mind?”

  “So that I should be free to marry you, perhaps?” Edmund added thoughtfully. “I imagine that would be what the Prosecution would suggest.”

  She wanted to say, Why should anyone think I want to marry you? Then the recollection of the child she carried supplied the terrible answer. Through the dark mist enveloping her, she heard Edmund say:

  “That was why I removed the pin. If no one saw you come or go, you ought to be safe enough... The real danger now is that damned Dr. Paul of yours. Pity you answered the door.”

  Dully she heard herself ask why.

  “He may become a rope round our necks, that’s all.”

  “A rope round our necks,” she echoed through her fingers. “What does that mean?”

  “They hang you for murder in this country... Come!” he said sharply. “Don’t lose your nerve, for God’s sake! Pull yourself together...! I only meant that his coming ruined the perfectly good alibi I’d carefully prepared.”

  It took her a little while to work that one out. She had a shamed recollection of submitting to his embrace and then falling into this heavy slumber...

  She said sternly: “You arranged it. You gave me something to make me sleep, didn’t you...? So that I shouldn’t know you’d gone away. You thought I’d still be sleeping when you got back and you’d be able to crawl in beside me and pretend you’d been there all the time.”

  She stared at him with her hands over her mouth.

  “Why do you look at me like that?”

  “You killed her,” she whispered. “I see. It was a plot. You killed her with my pin. Who but you would choose that particular pin – the one you knew was mine because you had given it to me yourself.”

  “You’re hysterical. Why should I want to incriminate you? And I didn’t kill her, I assure you; and if I had, it would not have been like that. Besides, I brought the pin back, so where’s the incrimination?”

  “You had to show me what you’d done. You couldn’t expect me to take your word for it without proof. That was all you wanted it for, as a hold over me, to keep me from leaving you.”

  “Don’t be a little fool!”

  “Do you dare to deny it? Then what was this elaborate arrangement of an alibi for?”

  He stared at her in silence and then said:

  “It’s no use beating about the bush. There isn’t time. I’ve often wanted to kill Linda since I’ve known you and there seemed no other way out because she was so obstinate about divorce. I was so afraid of losing you today that I thought I would kill her. It didn’t seem to me too high a price to pay for you. No, listen, I meant to kill her, but when I got there she was already dead.” He added in a low voice: “I thought you must have done it. So I ‘covered up’ as well as I could. Tried to make it look like an accident. Please believe that’s the truth. I know now I was mistaken; whoever killed her, it wasn’t you... That’s all the ‘plot’ there was about it.”

  She gave a strange dry little laugh.

  “All! That was all the plot...just to use me as a screen to protect your own precious skin. I was to be dragged into a horrible scandal. I was to be innocently involved in a hideous murder trial. I was to perjure myself. I was to be exposed to ridicule and scorn as ‘the other woman.’ My private life was to be dragged through the mud, subjected to every ruthless glare of publicity, from my personal belongings to my most sacred beliefs, for every dirty-minded man and woman to gloat over. And that, you say, was all! ...And to think that if it had not been for Dr. Paul I should have known nothing about it...! How could you! How could you do this to me, whom you are supposed to love!” She was trembling all over with the violence of her heart’s thundering. She still had a queer dazed feeling that this was happening in a dream, it seemed too vivid, too dreadful for real life; it was like no reality she had ever known. With shaking hands she struggled to fasten the straps on her cabin trunk.

  Incredulously, with disgust in his voice, Edmund said: “You’d let me hang! I do believe you’d let me hang sooner than have the world think badly of you. How very odd! I had no idea you were capable of such baseness.” He thought contemptuously, She has the mind of a servant girl. And it seemed to him that now he really did see through all her pretensions to the shallowness and commonplace vanity beneath. It was her illusory delicacy that had fooled him. She was nothing. Worthless. Stupid. Without substance. A beautiful but hollow shell played on by the wind. His first impression had been right, as first impressions always were; it was a wonder that he could have deluded himself for so long.

  What was in his mind was not pretty.

  He picked up the topaz pin in his handkerchief and weighed it pensively in his hand. Genevieve wondered if the shuddering contempt she felt for him showed on her face. Now she read meanness into his thin-lipped mouth and brutality into the pugnacious jaw. She remembered how repulsive she had found him before she fell in love with him. She wondered that she could ever have permitted those hands to touch her, that mouth to kiss her own; the mere thought of it turned her deadly sick now, and she imagined she must have been temporarily out of her mind that she could have fancied herself in love with him all this while. She felt for him now a passion of hatred as keen as her previous passion of desire. That she could ever have endured his embrace caused her a sickening self-contempt. There was a world of loathing in her eyes when they met his. They glared at one another like animals. It was as if scales had fallen from their eyes and each saw the other’s soul naked and ugly, and they were ashamed.

  He said with terrible cheerfulness, his lips pulled back in the semblance of a smile:

  “Well, now we know where we are, don’t we? It’s simply a question of providing me with cover for those few hours when I was covering up your tracks – as I thought. I know it won’t be easy to persuade you, but this – ” he held up the pin – ”may encourage you to cooperate. It’s got a nice set of your fingerprints on it where you handled it just now, and a little of Linda’s blood. The police would regard it as quite a trophy, wouldn’t they?”

  She said softly, intensely: “I would rather hang, myself, than do anything to help you! Nothing you could threaten would make me lie for you. Nothing you could do would make me stay.”

  “No?” he said. And smiled.

  She imagined herself escaping...and his footsteps pounding after her down the stairs...those iron fingers catching her hair, pulling her back, and pressing the scream into her mouth again...

  With a tremendous effort she made herself say coolly and deliberately:

  “Don’t be so absurd! You can’t keep me here against my will; I’m an American citizen.”

  He laughed: perfectly genuine laughter.

  It was that which frightened her into a panic, so that she tried to get past him to the door...

  His arm was like a bar crushing her chest... She felt trapped, frantic, maddened with fear...striking with her sharp heels, digging her nails in like claws...

  He cried: “Ah! You vixen!” and struck her on the side of the head so hard that she staggered wildly, waving her arms, and tripped backwards over a valise lying in her path. Then she lost balance completely, and fell, cracking her head loudly on the ironbound corner of her cabin trunk.

  “Oh God, you’ve killed me!” she cried. A look of alarm and vexation passed over her face. She groaned slightly once or twice, but she made no attempt to move.

  When Edmund went across to her, he found it was as she said: he had killed her.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 10

  No one at the Rivoli Cinema, Howcester, remembered a patron answering to the description of Ivor Campion on the afternoon of Wednesday the 10th. No usherette had noticed a man with a limp. The girl at the pay desk did not recognize the dark face in the photograph. It was no go.

  No one recollected him a
t Timothy White’s either.

  “But why should they remember me?” protested Ivor. “I didn’t even buy anything there. They didn’t have what I wanted. It’s a gadget for cleaning gutters, a sort of wire scoop for raking dead leaves and rubbish out of the tops of drainpipes. Maybe it wasn’t Timothy White’s even. How should I know? I just went into the first ironmongers I saw. What of it? Are you supposing I never went to Howcester?”

  “No, Mr. Campion. We know you went.”

  “The barber will remember. I go every week.”

  “Yes, he does. You had an appointment for three o’clock, and you kept it.”

  “Why all the fuss then?”

  “You could have caught the three-thirty back to Hawkswood. You could still have killed Mrs. Campion at four, tipped her over the stairs in an attempt to make it look like accident, and then made your official entrance, just after six.”

  It took Ivor quite a few moments to regain his pose of studied nonchalance. He reminded himself that it was futile to get angry with their solemn stupidity. What did one expect of county police? He sneered back at them coolly.

  “I’ve never heard such utter nonsense. In real life people never have proper alibis, you ought to know that. Actually, it’s too absurd, because as it happens I was very fond of poor little Linda. I mean, mere opportunity isn’t enough, you know,” he explained condescendingly. “What you need is proof.”

  “Oh, as for proof,” said Inspector Trevor patiently, “we have plenty of that.” He began hunting through a sheaf of loose papers in his dossier.

  It’s curious how small a thing can unnerve one if the circumstances are just right. Ivor knew perfectly well that he had nothing to do with Linda’s death (apart from a wretched twenty-four hours when her death was still thought to be “accident,” and he had feared that perhaps she had deliberately hurled herself over the banister because of what he had said to her earlier); and yet Trevor’s cool assurance that he had proof up his sleeve was enough to make Ivor panic, with a sense of guilt that was all the worse for not being reasonable.