“I thought that if I could cover up what had really happened it would be passed over more easily and there wouldn’t be so much fear of the newspaper reporters making a sensation out of it. If I’d only stopped to think clearly I’d have realized how much worse I was making things by not telling the truth, but at the time I was too flustered, too shocked by what I’d done to see the wisest course to adopt.”
She looked Penross full in the face, without flinching.
“I told you that Adrian and I were joking,” she said. “It wasn’t true. We weren’t joking. We were quarrelling.”
“What,” said Penross, “was the subject of the quarrel?”
“Can’t you guess?” she said, and there was a bitter twist to her lips. “It was over Lester—Mr. Imleyson. I thought everybody in Falporth knew about Lester and me. That’s why I tried to hush things up. I knew what the busybodies would say as soon as they heard that Adrian had been shot.”
Penross said:
“I’m sorry if I’m treading on delicate ground, Mrs.Carthallow, but had there been any other quarrels with your husband over the same cause?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, with the bitterness echoed in her voice, “there’d been other quarrels. People sometimes thought Adrian was a mild-tempered, tolerant person but he wasn’t really like that at all. Sometimes he would get into a violent temper when he wouldn’t be responsible for what he was doing.
“When I came back yesterday he started asking me questions about Mr. Imleyson. He considered that I’d been seeing too much of him. He didn’t like what he called the fact that everybody was talking about us. In moods like those he was beyond reason. He’d just go on and on, becoming more violent, as though he was deliberately driving himself into a fury.”
She was staring in front of her now, her arms clutching the chair.
“I suppose I should have been sensible enough to act differently, knowing Adrian as I did. I should have known that he was making such a scene because he knew that there were no servants in the house to overhear him. But I didn’t stop to think. He was so—so abusive. I just couldn’t stand it. I tried to argue with him, tried to make him see how he was exaggerating everything, and naturally it only made him angrier than ever.
“He suddenly turned to his desk and took out his revolver. I think he only meant to frighten me but at the time he looked as though he really intended to do me some harm. I caught at his arm and tried to take the gun away. We struggled for several seconds, Adrian trying to wrench his arm free while I did my best to hold on to him, hoping he’d realize what he was doing and become calmer.”
“Just where,” interposed Penross, “did this struggle take place?”
“We were both by the desk,” she said. “In fact, we were half across it.” She closed her eyes as though in an effort to reconstruct the scene and call back the details to her mind. Her sentences came jerkily. “Adrian was leaning forward. My weight was preventing him from getting up. His left elbow was resting on the desk so that he could support himself. The gun must have been underneath us somehow. I remember Adrian making a movement to twist out of my grasp and then the gun went off.
“It was horrible. He didn’t make a sound. When I bent over him I saw his head. I felt sick. I believe I almost fainted. I was still stunned by the sound of the revolver going off and I can’t remember clearly what I did then. I know I put the gun back on the desk and then sat down in a chair. The next thing I can recall is trying to think out what I ought to do.
“I suppose it was then that I realized how it would look to people outside. Every little incident would be twisted to make it seem as black as possible. All the scandalmongers would be busy. Perhaps I was frightened for myself, too. There was no one else in the house. I knew they might even say that it wasn’t an accident; that I’d shot Adrian deliberately. . . .”
She lowered her head and the concealing lock of hair came down.
“I told you I didn’t think of the telephone, Inspector. I did think of it. But I knew that Mr. Tremaine was down on the beach and I thought that if I could get him into the house before the police came he would be able to act as a witness. His evidence might help to show that Adrian’s death was an accident, so that there mightn’t be too many questions asked, after all.”
She looked up at Penross again and there was a desperate, pleading note in her voice.
“Please believe me, Inspector. That’s the whole story. I haven’t kept anything back this time.”
“You’re prepared to sign another statement setting down what you’ve just told me?” Penross asked.
She nodded.
“Yes. Of course. You’ve every right to be suspicious of me, Inspector. But you won’t need any more statements after this one.”
Penross was looking at her reflectively. He said:
“There’s something I’d like you to see, Mrs. Carthallow.”
Immediately she was on her guard. It seemed to Mordecai Tremaine, watching her for every sign, that he could see her mental defences go up.
“Yes, Inspector?”
“I’ve been looking round your husband’s studio,” he said, and waited.
It did not seem to convey anything to her.
“Adrian did a great deal of work down here,” she said, almost disinterestedly. “He thought the setting of this house gave him inspiration.”
It sounded as though she might have intended to be ironic but there was nothing in either her face or her voice to confirm it.
“Have you been to the studio lately?” said Penross.
“You mean since I came back yesterday?” She shook her head. “No. As a matter of fact I don’t think I’ve been anywhere except here and in the lounge.”
“I’d be glad if you’d come with me now.”
She rose obediently to her feet. Once more a little procession made its way up the narrow stairs. Penross said, over his shoulder:
“I believe your husband was doing a portrait of you, Mrs. Carthallow.”
“Yes.” She added, after a pause. “It isn’t unusual, you know, for an artist to wish to paint his wife.”
“No,” said Penross. “I wasn’t thinking there was anything unusual in that.”
He walked across the room to where the easel stood and swung it quickly round. Helen Carthallow had just come through the door and she stared full at the canvas.
Her eyes dilated. She gave a gasp and her hand went to her lips. She said, whisperingly:
“When—when did it happen?”
“I don’t know,” said Penross. “Do you?”
“No,” she said. “No.” There was a piteous note in her voice. She looked as though she was going to fall. Jonathan Boyce moved instinctively towards her. But she remained on her feet, staring at the portrait, and after a moment or two she said:
“It must have been Adrian. He must have done it before I came back. I didn’t know—I didn’t realize he would have taken it so hard.”
“You said,” remarked Penross, “that sometimes your husband displayed a violent temper. Was it usual for him to destroy his work if he felt dissatisfied with it?”
“You mean would he lose his control like—like this?” She hesitated. “It didn’t happen often,” she said. “Adrian used to say that the artistic temperament was all nonsense, and that if he didn’t turn out a good picture it was because his workmanship was faulty.”
“But you think he did this?”
Penross indicated the portrait. Again she hesitated.
“Yes,” she said at last. “Although he was much more balanced about things as a rule I have known him act like it before. Besides,” she added ingenuously, “who else could have done it?”
Penross ignored the question. He said:
“That was what I wanted you to see. I was hoping you’d be able to help me clear it up. It’s only a small point, of course, but I like to feel that everything’s nicely explained. Now, if you’ll be good enough to come with me we can have your statement typed ou
t ready for you to sign.”
He led the way out of the room and she followed him without further comment. Mordecai Tremaine watched them go with troubled eyes.
He was quite certain that whatever Adrian Carthallow might have thought about that portrait he would never have desecrated it so savagely with those vicious slashes of colour.
6
THERE WERE THREE deck-chairs on the terrace in front of Arthur Tyning’s house overlooking the sea. In the right-hand chair Jonathan Boyce sat chewing thoughtfully at an empty pipe. In the left-hand chair Mordecai Tremaine was puffing out unnecessary clouds of tobacco smoke and struggling so hard against a desire to cough that he was going red in the face. After much tribulation he had schooled his stomach to take to a pipe without bringing public disgrace upon him, but there were still times when rebellious nature took a delight in making his role of the Great Detective, smoking his way to a solution of the latest mystery, an extremely difficult one to maintain in comfort.
The centre chair was empty. Its very emptiness lent to it an air of expectancy and importance. I, it seemed to be saying, am the set-piece of the evening. Without me there can be nothing.
A shadow fell across it. Boyce said:
“Sit down, Charles. Mordecai’s been jumping up and down like a jack-in-the-box the whole evening looking to see if you were in sight.”
Tremaine lowered his pipe—not without a certain secret thankfulness.
“What,” he said indignantly, “about you?”
Jonathan Boyce grinned.
“All right,” he said. “We’ve both been waiting for you. What goes on, Charles?”
Penross sat down in the vacant chair. He took out his pipe and began to fill it carefully.
“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “To talk it over with you. It ought to be simple. Adrian Carthallow, the famous artist, is accidentally shot. There are obituaries in all the newspapers, there’s an inquest in which the coroner says how sorry he is for the widow, the verdict is death by misadventure and that’s that. I don’t think.”
Mordecai Tremaine said:
“Are you doing anything about Helen Carthallow?”
Penross paused in the act of lighting his pipe.
“Meaning?”
“She made a statement yesterday telling you just how it happened. You found out that it couldn’t have happened that way at all. So today she made another statement. The real one this time. The one that didn’t leave any ends untied. I don’t doubt that you’ve already discovered that the second statement is just as much a fairy tale as the first.”
“What,” said Penross, “makes you think so?”
“I’ll save my theory,” returned Tremaine. “You tell me.”
“You’re right, anyway,” said Penross gloomily. “And I’m damned if I like it. I’ve a feeling that if I was doing my duty I’d be asking for a warrant for her arrest on a charge of murder. But I can’t do it. I don’t want her to be guilty. I’m hoping that you’ll be able to see something I’ve missed.”
Jonathan Boyce said:
“It won’t do, Charles. You’re a policeman. You can’t afford to start being sentimental. If she killed him she’ll have to pay for it and that’s the end of it.”
But his voice betrayed him. Mordecai Tremaine said, soberly:
“You’re as bad as any of us, Jonathan. Because she has a pretty face neither of us wants to see the truth even if it staresat us. But how do we know that she’s as attractive inside as she is outside? I’ve seen more of her than either ofyou and I can’t make up my mind about her. Loveliness can be ugly when you probe deep into it. But suppose youbring us up-to-date, Charles. You mentioned this morning that Carthallow was killed by a bullet fired at close quarters.”
“You saw the results,” said Penross. “According to the doc the gun must have been held against his temple. You know just what kind of mess it made. The bullet finished up in the picture rail of the wall behind him. Which,” he added, “is where things start to go wrong.”
“You did all you could, Charles,” observed Mordecai Tremaine, “to get her to tell you a story that would hold together.”
The inspector gave him a shrewd glance.
“You’re on the right track,” he said. “I’ve been over the photographs a dozen times and I’ve checked them in the study itself. But I can’t do anything about it. If you draw a straight line from the point where Helen Carthallow said she was standing when she was struggling with her husband through the place where she said his head must have been when the gun went off it ends somewhere in the ceiling.”
Jonathan Boyce grunted sympathetically.
“I see what you mean, Charles. It’s the sort of thing you can’t ignore.”
Mordecai Tremaine said:
“At a time like that she wouldn’t have been too certain of what was going on. Imagine it for yourself. The two of them struggling over the desk and with Carthallow holding the gun. Suddenly there’s a flash and an explosion. She looks down to see that her husband is dead and since he’s been hit at close range with a heavy calibre weapon it’s a sight to unnerve any woman. Surely it’s reasonable to suppose that she might have made a mistake over what actually happened in those awful moments?”
Penross nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s reasonable. That’s why I gave her a chance to explain. I’ve done all I could. More, in fact, than I should have done.”
Boyce was drawing away on his pipe now, his brow creased frowningly.
“There’s no possibility,” he asked, “that she was mistaken? After all, it must have been a terrifying experience for her.”
“You were there,” said Penross, “when she was telling me how it happened. Did she look as though she was confused and uncertain?”
“No,” admitted Boyce reluctantly.
“I’ve tested it all ways,” said Penross, “and to get a line to that bullet hole you’ve got to imagine the gun placed against Carthallow’s head in such a manner that it’s obvious that it must have been held there deliberately. It’s impossible to reconstruct the same situation in the course of the kind of struggle that Mrs. Carthallow described. Besides, she said that her husband took the gun out of the drawer and that he was holding it whilst she was trying to prevent him using it. The gun’s been checked, of course. And the only fingerprints on it belong to her.”
There was a long silence. Mordecai Tremaine was the first to break it. He said:
“I don’t think, Charles, that it can end there.”
“It looks,” Penross said, “all too much like the end to me.”
Mordecai Tremaine pushed his pince-nez back from their precarious balancing point on the end of his nose. There was a light in his eyes as though he was straining after an idea that had floated across his mind, exciting him with its possibilities, but that he had not been able to persuade to adopt a definite form.
“Helen Carthallow is an intelligent woman. If she killed her husband why didn’t she make up a story that would sound convincing? Why, for instance, didn’t she say in the beginning that there’d been a struggle and that the gun had gone off accidentally? It would have aroused less suspicion than the story she did tell about Carthallow giving her the gun and getting her to pull the trigger.”
“She was scared,” said Penross. “She was speaking the truth when she said that she didn’t want to admit that there’d been a quarrel—and a violent one—because she didn’t think anybody would believe it had been an accident. She probably argued that there would be less chance of suspicion against her if she made out that she’d been joking with her husband and had merely done what he told her to do, even if it did sound an odd sort of thing for him to have said, than if she used the story of a quarrel and the gun going off during the struggle. After all, Carthallow had the reputation of being a queer sort of chap. It wouldn’t be out of keeping with his character.
“But she overlooked the fact that it would be plain that the shot must have been fired at cl
ose quarters. When I showed her that her story wasn’t going to carry her over that hurdle, she knew that the only thing she could do was to try the quarrel version, after all, and take a chance on getting away with it.”
Mordecai Tremaine was not satisfied. He shifted restlessly in his chair and the wooden frame creaked protestingly.
“Do you think she did overlook it, Charles? Is it possible that Carthallow shot himself?”
“If you’re asking whether the wound could have been self-inflicted in the sense that it would have been physically possible for Carthallow to have held the gun to his head in just that position, the answer is yes. The bullet went in at the right temple, and the right temple is the favourite spot for suicides. But,” said Penross, “if Carthallow did shoot himself his fingerprints would have been on the gun.”
“If he did kill himself,” persevered Tremaine, “would Helen Carthallow have any reason for wanting to hide the fact?”
Jonathan Boyce inserted himself into the conversation.
“I can think of two possibilities,” he said. “The idealistic angle that she wanted to protect her husband’s memory, and the cynical one that she wanted to collect his insurance money. Maybe the company will pay out for accidental death but suicide is a different proposition.”
“You mean,” said Penross, “that she might have wiped his fingerprints off the gun and left her own? It seems to me to be a pretty frightful risk for a woman to take.” He gave each of his companions a long, searching look. “This case,” he said, “is difficult enough already.”
“It’s a pleasant thought,” Boyce remarked, “that I’m on holiday and that this is your worry.”
Mordecai Tremaine was staring out over the cliffs.
“I don’t suppose,” he said casually, “there was anyone else at Paradise yesterday afternoon?”
“I’ve tried it,” said Penross briefly. “I went up to Mrs.Eveland’s and had a word with Matilda Vickery. I dare say you know that she can see the bridge leading to Paradise from her bedroom window. It’s one of her occupations, poor soul, to watch the people who go up to the house. Since the place had been empty for a day or two there wasn’t much doing yesterday. She didn’t have much difficulty in recollecting who’d been across the bridge.
So Pretty a Problem Page 6
