‘No,’ said Cockie; ‘I don’t suppose it could.’ The police had found nothing in Tedward’s house by the time he left, to confirm his theory of the trick with the telephone; but it could have been done. And if it had been done.…
A small cushion flew past the window and landed with a soft thud in the garage drive below the kitchen. ‘Oh, blink!’ said Melissa. ‘She’s begun again!’ She put down her half-finished cup of tea. ‘I’d better go up; it doesn’t so much matter at the back of the house but it’s awful right out here on the main road.’
Mrs. Evans, however, was sitting on the sofa, the picture of innocence, busily pinning a lace cap on her hair which was balanced on her knee. She unhurriedly clapped it back on to her head at sight of Inspector Cockrill, where it sat rather crookedly on top of what was already there, the lace cap crowning it all. Melissa went across automatically and set it straight, skewering it into position with a couple of pins. ‘Thank you, Melissa; and thank goodness you’ve come, dear, now you can relieve me of this horrible child.’ She smiled tenderly at her great-granddaughter. ‘Would you believe it, she’s now started throwing things out of the window. The things these children think of!’ She smiled with delighted mischief at Cockie, standing in the doorway, delicately embarrassed at the episode of the hair. ‘Do come in, Inspector, and don’t stand there.’
Melissa swooped upon the child and bore her out, Emma squealing like a pig, whether with rage or delight it was hard to tell. Mrs. Evans gestured to a chair with a thin old hand, weighted down with unfashionable thick, gold rings. ‘Sit down, dear Inspector Cockrill, and talk to me. Really, after an hour of tick, tock, the nursery clock, you can’t think how welcome a civilized chat will be.’
Cockie sat down in the chair across the fireplace from her. ‘Help yourself to some sherry—well, never mind if you’ve just had tea, they’ll mix up in the end; there’s the decanter beside you. No, not for me, thank you—I’m much too old and dotty to be allowed to drink: under the fumes of alcohol, God knows what I might get up to!’ She eyed him brightly with her teasing glance.
‘God might have His doubts—but I think you’d know all right,’ said Cockie, teasing back.
She gave him an almost imperceptible wink. ‘You’re much too discerning.’
‘I won’t give you away,’ he said, laughing.
‘You see it—well, it gets very dull up here.’ She sat silent, her hands lying quiet in her lap, her lovely, thin old face looking down, brooding, at the heavy rings with their multitude of little sparkling stones. ‘Life was so gay in the old days, Inspector, and there’s so little left of it now—the old, gay, well-to-do, careless, flirting days, when I was a girl, when I was a young married woman. I was a great flirt, you know, really an accomplished flirt; you might almost say a professional flirt. My husband encouraged me; he loved to sec me making my conquests, he said it would be a waste to neglect such a gift.’ She relapsed for a moment into a daydream. Cockrill, beginning to suspect where all this was leading, put in a gentle murmur. She came at once out of her abstraction and her voice took on a tinge of purpose. ‘And it was quite a gift, Inspector, it really did amount to a touch of genius to be able to flirt as we did in those days—so gracefully and delicately, to be able to break hearts just a little and not too much; and ones own heart not at all. And all innocent and above-board and unhurtful, not like the furtive scrabblings of nowadays; or scrabblings not nearly furtive enough. It’s all physical now and not intellectual at all, as far as I can see; all do and no talk. Of course with us it was all talk; and perhaps that was bad too in its way—perhaps we were sex-repressed, only of course we didn’t have a name for it so it did seem to trouble us less.’ She shrugged delicately. ‘The modern people would say that it did trouble us, underneath. They’d say that that’s why I throw things out of windows in my old age.’
When it came to protecting Thomas, old Mrs. Evans was obviously not going to be far behind. At this rate, however, confession would not come till midnight. He said nothing about a new theory and a new suspect, but gently prodded the wandering sheep in the direction in which it apparently wanted to go. ‘Rosie, at least, won’t be throwing things out of windows in her old age.’
‘No, indeed,’ said Mrs. Evans. She was silent again, her head bent over her hands. She said: ‘Of course, Inspector, it’s not always just because I’m bored that I throw things out of windows.’
‘You mean you really are—some of the time at any rate—what you like to call “dotty”?’
‘Don’t you think it may be a bit dotty to think it fun to throw things out of windows?’
Cockrill shrugged. ‘It depends how bored you are, I suppose.’
She gave him her twinkling smile. ‘Well, I really am dreadfully bored; but it’s true that—sometimes I do find that I’ve been out of control, I find that the thing’s got a little bit beyond me and I haven’t been responsible for some of the throwings. It’s like—it’s like letting yourself doze off and then waking up and finding you’ve been to sleep.’
‘And that’s the kind of sleep you were in on the night of the murder. That’s what you want to tell me?’
She clasped her thin fingers; he could see that the heavy rings made pink marks, pressed sharply against the faded white skin. ‘You’re a very intelligent person, Inspector; I’ve always known that. But not at first; I was as wide awake as you are—and that’s saying something!—when Matilda left me; having helped me to take off this top-knot of mine and undone my staylaces. She had to hurry away and leave me to get on with it because she had left her guest all alone; and she still had the baby to do.’ She repeated it. ‘She’d left him all alone, you see; and she still had the baby to do.’
‘Yes,’ said Cockie. ‘I see.’
‘Innocence is a curious thing,’ said old Mrs. Evans, dreamily, and yet very wide awake. ‘I think of Rosie as, essentially, an innocent. I think that what she has, she gets from me—I think she’s a born flirt. Perhaps if I’d lived nowadays, I wouldn’t have been “sex-repressed” either; I don’t know because I never had the opportunity to be other than I was. But Rosie did; Rosie had unlimited opportunity to carry the whole thing a stage further—a great many stages further—than I did. I can’t take credit to myself for not being what she is; I didn’t have the chance, that’s all; and when things went wrong, I couldn’t blame her for taking the chance that I might have taken if I’d had it. But I’ll tell you who I could blame—I could blame the one who had taken advantage of her innocent flirtatious-ness and taught her to carry it all those steps further; who has started her on a road that gets less and less innocent all the way. I could blame him.
‘I see,’ said Cockie again.
‘And of course being so dotty,’ said Mrs. Evans, eyeing him guilelessly, ‘I’d hardly be responsible if the thing preyed on my mind till I … I mean, they don’t hang potty old women like me, do they? A nice, gay, criminal-looncy-bin, I suppose, and after all one couldn’t say that was dull!’
Cockrill sat forward, his elbows on his knees, rolling a cigarette with quick movements of his stained, brown fingers. ‘You’re telling me this because of Thomas, I suppose?’
‘You do see that Thomas is protecting me?’
‘Everyone thinks that Thomas is protecting someone.’
‘Who else but me?’ said Mrs. Evans. ‘It could only be me or Matilda. And it isn’t Matilda.’
‘How can you be so sure of that?’ said Cockie, quickly.
‘My dear—do you think Matilda would have kept silent for one moment? Don’t you think she’d have been proclaiming it from the housetops that Thomas was innocent?’
‘She has the child to consider.’
‘Even for Emma, Matilda wouldn’t let Thomas suffer, not for one moment, for a thing she’d done. And it wouldn’t do the child all that much good—either way, it would have one parent a murderer. No, no, of course it wasn’t Tilda; you know that, Cockie, you know her too well. And Thomas would know it too. So there’s onl
y me. Melissa Weeks isn’t in the thing at all, why should she be?—and anyway, Thomas wouldn’t risk his neck for her; and Rosie was with Tedward, so it couldn’t be Rosie.’
‘Of course, Thomas would suffer to protect Rosie.’
‘But Rosie’s out of it.’
‘Would he suffer, do you think, for Tedward? If he thought the murder was justified?’
‘Tedward was with Rosie,’ said Mrs. Evans, shrugging. ‘So it doesn’t arise.’
‘If it did arise, Mrs. Evans—if Tedward could have killed this man, if the murder could, in your minds, have been justified—would you do this for him? Not for Thomas, but for Tedward?’
Mrs. Evans was silent for a long, long time. She said, at last: ‘Do you know something against Ted Edwards?’
‘It’s just possible—that it may have been possible—for him to have done this thing. And in that case …?’
Mrs. Evans got up and stood before the fire, her frail hands hooked on to the high mantelpiece, looking down into the glowing coals. ‘In that case … Well, this is a family affair, Inspector. Tedward, to all intents and purposes, is one of us; as far as Raoul Vernet’s death is concerned. Rosie is at the centre of it all—and Tedward’s in love with Rosie, poor man. If he killed Raoul Vernet on Rosie’s account—yes, I’d “do this” as you call it, for Tedward too.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘Whatever you mean by “this”.’
‘I mean a confession of murder; that you believed Raoul Vernet to be Rosie’s seducer and took advantage of Matilda’s being cooped up in the nursery with the child, to creep downstairs, take him unawares in the hall and hit him on the head and murder him.’
‘Standing on the stairs, a bit above him,’ said Mrs. Evans, ‘one could add a good deal of force to the blow. It was rather horrible when he didn’t quite die.’
‘Would that be why you rang up?’
‘I couldn’t just leave him lying there bleeding, could I? Of course, it seems silly trying to get a doctor for him when I’d just done my best to kill him.’ She added that it was a bit like preventing murderers from committing suicide so that they wouldn’t die before you hanged them, only the other way about if Cockie saw what she meant. ‘If he’d died outright, that would have been another matter.’
‘So you rang up pretending to be him?’
‘Well, I couldn’t say it was me, could I? I thought I improvised rather brilliantly.’
Inspector Cockrill thought that Mrs. Evans was improvising pretty brilliantly now. ‘If his life had been saved.…?’
‘Well, it would have taught him a lesson anyway,’ said Mrs. Evans, shrugging.
‘But I meant where your safety was concerned.’
‘Oh, well, as to that—I didn’t think actually he could have seen who it was. And if he had and he’d died and whilst he was dying he’d said something to Tedward—I knew I’d be safe with Tedward. If he’d survived.…’
‘Yes; if he’d survived and had seen you.…?’
She shrugged again. ‘I don’t think I thought about it then; if I did, I suppose I thought it would have been worth it. I’ve only got a few more years to live and they couldn’t hang me, could they?’
‘They could put you in prison,’ said Cockie.
She turned back to the fire again, not looking at him. ‘What—a dotty old thing like me?’
‘The legal definition of dottiness is that you’re unable to judge whether an action’s right or wrong. But you say you knew.’
She lifted her head and he saw that she was very tired, that the thing was becoming an effort to her, almost more than she could carry through. She drove herself forward, however, into the final spurt. ‘I knew? Knew what?’
‘Knew what you were doing when you killed this man.’
Mrs. Evans glanced at the window, glanced at the cushions on the sofa, looked back at the window again and picked up a cushion. She said vaguely: ‘Did I kill someone?’
‘Isn’t that what you’re confessing to the police?’
‘Me—confessing?’ said Mrs. Evans. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She put down the cushion slowly on the sofa. ‘My dear Inspector—do use some of your wonderful intelligence. If I’d been going to confess, do you think I wouldn’t have sent for that young Charlesworth days ago, and saved my poor boy all this? Of course I can’t confess. “How do you know?” they’d say; because you see, if I did know that would be prison for me, the rest of my days; the most frightful frustration because it would be so dull that I’d long to throw cushions every minute, and yet no windows low enough to throw them out of! No, no, of course I knew nothing about it, of course I had to wait and—just put the idea into your head and start you all on the road to finding out. From this moment forward, I shall deny every word of it; if I prove to have killed him, then I had no idea what I was doing, poor mad old thing.’ She smiled at him but her hands were shaking and her eyes were bright with tears. ‘I don’t remember anything about that night till Matilda came up and told me what had happened; and I don’t remember a word of this conversation with you.’ She sat down on the sofa with a bump. ‘So there! From now on—it’s up to you. Only do be quick and find me out.’
He went over and sat down beside her and took her trembling hand. ‘Don’t worry too much,’ he said. ‘Thomas will be safe, without this sacrifice. And as for proving anything against you—I wouldn’t know where to begin.’
‘You could begin with my wig,’ said Mrs. Evans. ‘Matilda took it off for me before she went to do the child. You just ask her if, when she came up to tell me the man was dead, she didn’t notice that it was on again?’
Matilda, as it happened, had meanwhile come in and was sitting downstairs in the office; Melissa had made yet another pot of tea. ‘I was just coming up, Cockie, to rescue you from Gran.’
‘She’s been quite sane all afternoon,’ said Melissa who persisted in regarding Mrs. Evans as a candidate for immediate certification with only occasional lucid periods. ‘Really quite all there—hasn’t she, Inspector?’
‘Quite all there,’ said Inspector Cockrill. When Melissa had gone off to the dining-room for the sherry decanter he said: ‘What’s this about her hair?’
‘Her hair?’
‘The old lady’s false hair. She now says she had it on when you went up to her room—after first seeing the body.’
Matilda reflected. ‘Well, yes; she did have it on. I noticed it with about a quarter of my mind. I’d taken it off for her when I first went upstairs.’
He sat in a characteristic attitude, his narrow behind perched on the edge of a chair, knees parted, elbows on knees, hands dangling between them, tobacco-stained fingers playing with a cigarette. ‘I don’t suppose it means anything. She heard the commotion in the hall over the body and reached out and clapped her toupée on, so as to be respectable in case of emergencies.’
‘She’d have to have arms ten feet long; it was on her dressing-table. She must have got out of bed to get it; and if so, why go back?’
Melissa returned with the sherry and went through a routine genteel fuss about accepting a glass. Tedward came in with Rosie. They both looked white and weary and Rosie had been crying. She pulled off her silly little hat and fluffed out her fair hair and fished a lipstick out of her handbag and plastered a further layer on her scarlet mouth; but she did it all absolutely automatically. Tedward went to the fireplace and turned and faced Cockie. ‘I hear that you made some discoveries at my house this morning.’
Rosie was certainly, as Cockrill had said earlier, a very bad person to collushe with. He stopped rolling the cigarette for a moment and was still, looking back into Tedward’s eyes. ‘Yes. And you know what we discovered?’
‘You worked out how some trick could have been played with the telephone. That doesn’t mean that it was played, however? I mean, there’s no proof?’
‘I expect Charlesworth’s men have looked into all that by now,’ said Cockie. ‘Scratches on the sill and so forth.’
‘
I see. The dear friend of the family, of course, has duly Told All?’
‘I am a policeman first and a friend of the family next,’ said Cockie. ‘You all knew that.’ He glanced at the clock. ‘I daresay Charlesworth will be coming round.’
‘I daresay,’ said Tedward, sourly. He went over and sat down beside Rosie on the sofa, taking her hand in his. She left it there, hooking an arm through his arm, leaning against him confidingly; he looked down at her with a little, loving, comforting smile and it came to Cockie, watching them, that, despite the discrepancies in age and temperament, here perhaps would have been the answer to all Rosie’s troubles—though he doubted, wryly, whether with marriage to Rosie, poor Tedward’s heartaches would have been at an end. Tedward pulled himself together a little. He gave a brief, apologetic smile. ‘I’m sorry, Inspector. Of course you have a plain and simple duty to do. Matter of fact, you actually got in ahead of me. I was going to Charlesworth myself.’
‘You too have joined the Protection of Thomas Society?’
‘I was going to confess to the murder of Raoul Vernet; if that’s what you mean.’
‘It’s an epidemic,’ said Cockie.
‘The others are trying to be heroic. It’s easy enough when you didn’t do it—not such fun when you really did!’
‘You haven’t been in the first rush,’ agreed Cockie.
Matilda lay back, withdrawn from them, staring into the fire. Thomas in a police station cell, Thomas in that terrible little narrow dock with his pale hair all on end, Thomas herded together with criminals in a—would they actually take her Thomas in a Black Maria, a sort of hideous, horrible, music hall joke? And Thomas in the hospital ward of a prison, moving in a sort of resentful dream through a whole crowd of other men ‘on remand’, real criminals, real murderers; there had been a case in the paper the other day of a man who had raped and strangled a girl he never had seen before, and another of a man who had injured a woman in a pub fight, stabbing her horribly with broken glass—would they be there with Thomas?—men like that, all living together in a prison ward, bed next to bed, eating with them, companion to them—all watched, every movement studied, every word, to see whether they would, when the time for trial came, be ‘fit to plead’. What did Rosie’s grubby little sins matter, compared with this? She was a tart, just a natural born tart, poor child, and here was Thomas, with all his quiet goodness and integrity, living like a murderer among murderers, closed in with low understanding and cruelty and vileness.… I hate her, she thought; I hate her for this and I always shall.…
Fog of Doubt Page 13
