He dealt with Pell’s evidence carefully. Warned them against bias. Directed them as to the law.
The jury retired, remained absent for no more than ten minutes, and returned with a verdict of wilful murder against Alfred Pell.
30
IN THE GANGWAY which had been left down the middle of the hall Miss Silver contrived to find herself beside Mrs Dale Jerningham. With her small habitual cough she attracted her attention.
“How do you do, Mrs Jerningham?”
Tall, slender, Lisle looked down at her. There was to the sharp watching eye instant recognition, something that might have been relief, and then quite unmistakably dismay.
“Miss Silver!”
Miss Silver beamed.
“How nice of you to remember me. I am taking a little holiday in Ledlington. Such a relief to get out of London in this heat—really most oppressive, though of course beautiful weather and so good for the harvest. Perhaps you will come over and have a cup of tea with me one day. I was recommended to a very nice boarding-house—Miss Mellison, Snaith Street—recommended by a friend and really most comfortable.”
“I am afraid—”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be,” said Miss Silver surprisingly.
“Miss Silver—”
Miss Silver smiled and nodded.
“Miss Mellison, 14 Snaith Street, and the telephone number is Ledlington 141. I do hope you will come,” she said, and fell back behind Mary and Mrs Ernest Crisp.
As they came out into the hot sunshine, Dale said,
“Who was that you were speaking to? I don’t know her.”
Lisle looked up with a tinge of colour in her cheeks.
“Nor do I really, I just met her in a train. She’s staying in Ledlington on a holiday.”
Dale was frowning.
“Funny idea of a holiday to come and gape at that poor devil Pell. I don’t know what women are made of. Who is she? What’s her name? Looks like a governess.”
Lisle said, “Yes, she does. Her name’s Silver—Miss Silver.”
He said nothing at all, and all at once she was nervous. How could he know the name? He didn’t know the name. If he didn’t say anything, it was because there was nothing to interest him, nothing to say.
Alicia came over to her, slipped a hand inside her arm, and walked along beside her, talking in a low, confidential voice. It was only the voice that was confidential—there was nothing in what she said. A little hot flame of anger burned up in Lisle. The glow of it reached her cheeks. The village was being provided with a demonstration of sisterly affection, and Lisle rebelled. She had said that she would help Dale, but she had not known that it would be so hard. What she wanted to do was to pull her arm away and walk on. She could walk a good deal faster than Alicia if she tried.
Dale’s hand touched her on the other side. It was a touch which became a hard, compelling grip. It was no good thinking of what she would like to do. She knew what she had to do. She bent her head and gave a due response to Alicia’s talk.
They had only gone a little way, when Mrs Mallam caught them up. She had hurried to do so, and for once in a way her pasty cheeks were flushed. She wore a tightly fitting white dress, a short black and white striped coat, and a solid-looking black bandeau round her thick golden hair. She panted a little as she said,
“I thought I was going to miss you. Aren’t you in a hurry!”
“Well, we are rather.” Alicia Steyne did not trouble to make her voice polite.
Mrs Mallam was not at all easily snubbed.
“My dear, you can’t have an inquest and turn me away from your very door. I don’t think I’ve ever been so thirsty in all my life. The atmosphere in there! I really thought I was going to faint.”
Dale turned to her with a sudden charming smile.
“We’re walking, but I take it you’ve got your car. Be an angel and go along up to the house. Ring till someone comes and say we all want drinks—with lots of ice. It will be a noble act.”
Mrs Mallam beamed.
“Can’t I take someone with me? Your wife—she looks all in.”
Before Dale could answer Lisle had said, “Oh, thank you.” To be saved that hot walk in the sun with Alicia’s arm through hers and Dale shepherding them —Real gratitude flooded her heart. And no one could think it strange or say anything. She felt delivered as she leaned back in Aimée Mallam’s little car. The air flowed past her, cool and reviving.
Aimée drove slowly. She said in a sympathetic voice,
“Are you all right? It was frightfully hot, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, quite all right.”
“Horrid business. Nasty for you its being your coat and all. Must have given you a kind of feeling that it might have been you.”
Lisle said nothing. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.
They reached the house, and when the drinks had been ordered Mrs Mallam asked to be taken upstairs. As she powdered and lipsticked she returned to the charge.
“Do you think that man did it?”
“It looks like it,” said Lisle in a weary voice.
“I suppose it does. But do you know, I thought he was fond of her. Of course that mightn’t stop him killing her if he was jealous or thought she was going to walk out on him. But I couldn’t help thinking suppose he’d come up behind her and just seen the coat and thought it was you, and thought he’d score off Dale by pushing you over—”
Lisle’s voice cut in clear and steady.
“Please, Mrs Mallam—that’s nonsense. You can’t have listened to the evidence. He took Cissie up there with him. He was talking to her after they got there. He couldn’t possibly have mistaken her for anyone else.”
Aimée Mallam drew a bold cherry-coloured curve with her lipstick. It gave her mouth a queer tilt at the corners—thin, tilted lips, too bright for the pale, plump face.
“Perhaps not—but someone else could. I wonder if anyone did.”
Lisle said, “Please—”
“Your height, wasn’t she, and about your figure? Fair-haired too. When I saw the photograph in the paper I made up my mind to come to the inquest. You see, I couldn’t help wondering—”
“There’s nothing to wonder about.”
Aimée Mallam laughed without amusement.
“Well, I wonder all the same,” she said. “I couldn’t help thinking about poor Lydia—Dale’s first wife, you know. I was only just round a bend of the path when she fell, and I heard her scream. I’ve never forgotten it. They said she was picking flowers. Anyhow she fell and she was killed. It was only your coat that fell and another woman who was killed, but don’t you think there’s something odd about it all?” She slipped the lipstick back into her bag and turned round from the glass. “Look here, I’ll tell you about Lydia. That place where she fell—it wasn’t a dangerous place. She wasn’t climbing or anything like that. There was quite a good wide path along the cliff, curving in and out—you know how those paths do. Well, my husband and I were behind. The others had gone on out of sight, and we heard that awful scream. I ran and got round the corner, and there nearest to me, was Dale looking down over the cliff. And a little way on where the path took another bend—there was Rafe, looking over too. And between them was the place where Lydia had gone over. There was a bush, and it was broken. Alicia and Rowland Steyne had been up the hill—there was quite an easy slope above the path. He was a long way up, she was having hysterics on the inner side of the path. They hadn’t seen anything, only heard the scream. Rafe said he was round the next curve and came running back. Dale said Lydia was picking flowers along the edge, and she told him to go back and see what my husband and I were doing. He said he had just got to the corner when he heard her scream. He didn’t see her fall. He said he was out of sight of the place where he left her. He might have been, you know—the path twisted all the time. So nobody saw her fall. Nobody saw this girl fall either, did they? Except the person who pushed he —if somebody did push her.”
Lisle s
tood and looked at her. She had the feeling that her eyes were fixed. She couldn’t look away. She said in a stiff, unnatural voice,
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“I wonder,” said Aimée Mallam. “And if I were you I should do some wondering too. And there’s something else I’d do, and I wouldn’t wait about, thinking it over either.”
“What do you mean?”
Mrs Mallam gathered up her bag and walked over to the door. With her hand on it—a bare, plump hand with too many rings—she turned.
“I should go back to America.”
31
MISS SILVER HAD tea in the parlour of the Green Man before walking up Crook Hill to catch the bus into Ledlington. Both before and after the inquest she managed to talk to a good many different people. People will always talk about an accident or a murder. In this case there was but one opinion, voiced with varying degrees of heat and animus. Cissie Cole was a good girl. Not one of your go-ahead ones, but a good girl. You couldn’t blame her being fond of that Pell when she thought he was a single man. What she had seen in him the dear knows, but once she knew he was married and it come to anything more she wouldn’t have it, and he pushed her over out of spite. A dozen times Miss Silver had occasion to say, “Dear me—how very shocking!” or “Really one can hardly believe it.” The latter phrase she had always found extremely useful in provoking a flood of corroborative detail.
She used it to Mrs Mottle, the landlady of the Green Man, when she brought in the brown teapot with the bright blue band round it and a plate of rock cakes. The milk-jug and sugar-basin already stood on the parlour table, which was of figured walnut with a single massive leg. The top, much valued, was protected by a number of thick mats crocheted in shades of olive green and salmon pink. An old metal tray with gilt scrolls and a pattern of painted red and blue flowers rested upon two of these mats, whilst a fern in a rose-pink pot had another all to itself in the middle of the table.
Mrs Mottle set down the teapot beside the milk-jug and sugar-basin on the tray, pulled up yet another mat for the rock cakes, and heaved a responsive sigh. She was a buxom woman, short and stout, with a quantity of frizzy black hair only just beginning to be touched with grey, and cheeks as firm and red as Worcester Pearmains.
“Ah—you may well say so!” she said. “And I’m not one that thinks badly of men, because take them all round, well, there’s good in them same as there is in most of us. But what I do say and always have said is that some of ’em’ll do anything, and you can’t get from it.”
Miss Silver gave a timid cough.
“Dear me—I suppose so. And of course you must have such opportunities for observing them. Human nature must be quite an open book to you.”
“Well you may say so!” said Mrs Mottle. “Men talk free and easy over their beer. Not as I wouldn’t soon put a stop to language or anything of that sort, and my husband too—there’s nothing of that sort goes on in our house. But human nature, that’s another thing—there it is and you can’t help noticing it. That Pell now, he’d come in most nights, and how he’d the face after it come out about him being married passes me. But there—some have got face enough for anything, and he’d come in here as bold as brass, and so soon as he’d got into his second glass he’d begin to let himself go and—talk of not believing things—you wouldn’t credit what he’d say.”
“Really? How very interesting. What sort of things?”
“All sorts,” said Mrs Mottle with gusto. “And just as well for him they weren’t brought up at the inquest.”
“Dear me!”
“Saying what he’d do to anyone that crossed him. Why, I heard him with my own ears—nobody ever came to any good once they got across him. That was after Mr Jerningham give him the sack, and it wasn’t only a fortnight later that Mrs Jerningham was as near killed as makes no difference with the steering of her car broke through. And not saying he done it, but there’s more than one has their own thoughts about it. And he could have done it easy if he had a mind, and it was only the night before he set down his glass hard enough to crack it and said how he always got his own back on those who got across him. And I told him straight, ‘That’s not the kind of talk I’ll put up with, not while I’m behind the bar.’ And he laughed and said, ‘You wait and see!’ and went out, and a good riddance.”
Miss Silver began to pour herself out a cup of tea.
“What a good-looking family the Jerninghams are,” she observed. “I was quite struck by it at the inquest. Lady Steyne—really very pretty. She is a cousin, is she not? And Mr and Mrs Jerningham—such a very good-looking couple. And the other cousin, Mr Rafe Jerningham—”
She heard nothing but good of the Jerninghams from Mrs Mottle. Mr Jerningham had a very feeling heart. There weren’t many gentlemen would go with their wives same as he did to see poor Miss Cole, and kindness itself, as she told me with her very own lips. And a pleasure to see him married to such a sweet young lady. “Lost his first wife in an accident in Switzerland a matter of ten years ago, and took him all this time to get over it and put his mind on someone else. Not like some people I could name, and him such a good-looking gentleman and all.”
Miss Silver put milk and sugar into her tea.
“Did you know the first Mrs Jerningham?”
Mrs Mottle had got as far as the door. She leaned a firm shoulder against the jamb and shook her head.
“Not to say know—there wasn’t many that did. She used to come visiting here when she was Miss Lydia Burrows. That was in old Mr Jerningham’s time, but she and Mr Dale went off travelling after they were married. A bit of an invalid she was, and not supposed to stay in England for the winter—and after all she might just as well have stayed as fall down one of those nasty precipices and get herself killed!”
Miss Silver sipped from a cup with a pattern of pink and gold roses, the pink very bright, the gold very shiny.
“How extremely shocking!” she said.
“Picking flowers or some such,” said Mrs Mottle vaguely. “And then old Mr Jerningham died and Mr Dale come in for the property. And of course we all thought he’d marry again, so young as he was and all, but no—seemed as if he hadn’t got a thought for anything except the place. Up early and down late, and building cottages here and putting on a new roof there. He come in for a lot of money from his wife, and seemed all he wanted to do was to spend it on the place—left the girls to Mr Rafe.”
Miss Silver sipped again.
“The good-looking cousin. Yes, indeed—I can imagine that he would be popular with the ladies.”
Mrs Mottle’s firm red cheeks wobbled as she laughed.
“All over him like bees in a lime tree,” she said. “And what’s a young gentleman to do? He can’t afford to get married, and there isn’t a girl anywhere around that’ll leave him alone. His works, you know, up at the aircraft place—clever as they come, Mr Rafe is. But Saturday afternoons and Sundays it’s tennis games and golf games, and bathing parties and boating parties and picnic parties. Not that there’s any harm in it, and as to anyone saying there’s any harm in Mr Rafe, well, they won’t say it a second time, not to me anyhow! You’re only young the once, and why shouldn’t you have a good time—that’s what I say!”
“And Mr Rafe has a good time?”
Mrs Mottle laughed again—a full, jolly laugh.
“It’s not his fault if he don’t, nor the girls’ neither.”
32
ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK that same evening Inspector March was enjoying a tête-á-tête with Miss Silver in the small back sitting-room which Miss Mellison had placed at their disposal. It was a very small room, and for its size it contained a surprising variety of objects. Besides the gentleman’s armchair in old-gold stamped velvet in which the Inspector reclined, and the lady’s ditto upon which Miss Silver sat primly upright, there were two occasional chairs with shiny backs and pseudo-brocade seats finished off with an incredible number of brass-headed nails; a gimcrack table which support
ed a palm in a bright blue pot; a bamboo plant-stand on the top of which another palm was precariously balanced; two footstools, one crimson and one blue, of the kind found in old-fashioned church pews; a model of the Taj Mahal under glass; two clocks, both wrong; a pair of vases in Mooltan enamel; a row of brown wooden bears from Berne, and a motley collection of pictures. If Miss Silver lifted her eyes she beheld photographic enlargements of Miss Mellison’s parents, he very stout and jolly, she very pinched and fretful, while the Inspector had an excellent view of four faded water-colours and an engraving which depicted the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by Queen Victoria. Blue plush curtains had been pulled back as far as they would go. An inner pair, of Madras muslin, moved gently in the breeze from the open window which was really a door opening upon a small garden gay with hollyhock, phlox, snapdragon, and nasturtium.
Randal March contemplated his hostess with just the hint of a smile and said,
“Well, here we are. May I ask how you are accounting for yourself—and for me?”
Miss Silver was engaged upon the sleeve of her niece Ethel’s jumper. She took four needles to a sleeve. They clicked and twinkled in her plump, capable hands as she replied,
“My dear Randal, I am surprised at you. What is there to account for? I used to be your governess. I am taking a little holiday in Ledlington, and what is more natural than that my old pupil, with whose family I have always remained upon the most affectionate terms, should drop in for a friendly chat? Miss Mellison was most interested and most kind. She at once offered me the use of this pleasant little room. I showed her your dear mother’s photograph and the group with you and Margaret and Isabel. We agreed that you had really changed very little.”
Randal March put his head back and laughed.
In the Balance Page 15
