“Frieda? Oh no, she never did it. A bit queer she is, right enough, but so’d we be if we’d been through half what she has. I never did hold with Jews, me being a good Church of England Christian, but I don’t hold with torturing an animal, let alone a decent-living human-being, and the bits of tales that girl manages to tell you would fair make your hair curl. She hadn’t had a good meal for months before she got to this country. As for murdering anyone, why, the girl’s at her wits’ end to stay here. She might kill herself if Miss Leda gave her the sack, but she was fond of the mistress like we all were in the kitchen. She’s slow over her work, I’ll admit, but she’d learn if Miss Leda would give over tormenting her: a fair down on her she has, her being a foreigner, but as I say, you might as well have a down on a sausage-dog for being a German. They can’t neither of them help it. The girl’s all nerves. And tired...! She falls asleep whenever she sits down. It isn’t fair the way Miss Leda goes on at her. She never calls her by her name in the kitchen. ‘Jew’, she calls her. ‘Come here, Jew’, and ‘Go and do that, Jew’. It isn’t right, sir.”
“But what about these violent rages she flings herself into? Mightn’t she do some harm to anyone then?”
“Bless you, no,” was the comfortable reply. “They’re no more than a child’s tantrums. If she’d been going to murder anyone in this household, it would have been Miss Leda. It’s my belief that she puts on these little ways just to annoy Miss Leda, and I don’t blame her, though it’s not my place to say so.”
The Cook paused for breath.
“Did you hear anything strange on the night Mrs. Hardstaffe died?” asked Cheam.
“Me? Not a thing, nor likely to. Our bedrooms are over the kitchens and we go up by a different staircase. Vicky—that’s Briggs, but you’ll know that—did come into my bedroom when I was in bed reading ‘Maria Marten or The Murder in the Red Barn’. A fair start she gave me, I can tell you. She said the mistress had been fair wiping the floor with the master, but I told her to get to bed and mind her own business.”
“Have you any idea who killed your mistress?”
“No, nor nothing anyone says will make me believe she was murdered. She did it herself, the poor soul. Tired of struggling against them two and their Goings On, that’s what it was, you can depend on it, sir. Why don’t you let her be? She’s happier now than she’s been for years.”
CHAPTER 17
The little Jewish maid entered the room furtively, and stood with her back to the door. In her dark eyes was the kind of expression you see in the eyes of a back-alley cat, which wonders why any human being wearing boots refrains from kicking it, and, suspecting a trap, keeps its distance.
“Come over here,” requested Cheam.
“Please?”
He beckoned, and pointed to the chair in front of his own.
The girl moved forward heavily on her black wardroom slippers, and stood, perspiring and afraid, before him.
“I want to ask you a few questions,” he said.
Frieda clasped her hands together.
“But I know nothing,” she said vehemently. “Nothing!”
“You know that Mrs. Hardstaffe is dead?”
She nodded.
“And you know that she did not die naturally. Someone has killed her.”
“I know, I know. It is dreadful!”
“Do you know anything about it?”
The dark brown eyes dilated.
“Me? But I tell you I know nothing.”
Cheam sighed. It was difficult to frame his questions within the three-hundred-word vocabulary of a two-year-old child.
“Did you like Mrs. Hardstaffe?”
For the first time since she had entered, the haunted look faded from her eyes.
“But yes. I like her so much. Very kind. Always I do things for her and she say ‘tank you’ so nice. Her voice soft not like that other. She....”
Her gesture made her opinion of Leda quite clear, and Cheam, reflecting that such gestures seemed international and universal, wondered whether the British Navy was responsible for inventing them.
“Mrs. Hardstaffe was killed by morphia,” he stated.
“I understand.”
“You know what morphia is?”
She nodded.
“It is an unusual word in English. Where did you learn it?”
“Please?” She frowned in some perplexity, then her face cleared as his meaning became clear to her. “But it is German. In Germany we say always morphium.”
“I see.” (Must get hold of an English-German Dictionary, he thought). “And what do you know about—er —morphium?”
“I know. I have it,” she replied eagerly.
“Where did you get it from?”
“But I bring it from Germany. My doctor, a friend, he give it.”
“Why?” persisted Cheam.
“For me to eat.” She became animated. “You do not understand? No. Because you are not German Jew. You say ’Itler is bad man, must be kill. But if you are not Jew, you do not know how bad. You understand bombs and Luftwaffe, but you do not understand Gestapo and torture if you are not Jew like me. I am told to get up from my bed one night. I must go to the frontier. If I do not go, I am sent to Poland in cattletruck or to concentration camp. I am not pretty enough to keep for Germans. But perhaps I do not get to frontier, and so I must have morphium. It is better then to die, being a Jew.”
She gazed at his unaltered expression, and with a shrug of her shoulders, reverted to her former manner.
“You do not understand,” she said. “You are not German Jew.”
Cheam, feeling considerably shocked and endeavouring successfully to conceal it, continued with his questions.
“When did you last see Mrs. Hardstaffe?”
“Please?”
He repeated the question in altered form.
“Saturday night it is when I am in bed.”
“In bed? She came to your bedroom?” asked Cheam, in some surprise.
“No. I go to her room. I am asleep. I hear voices. I awake. Cook is talking to Briggs. They say he quarrel with her, so when they are quiet, I go to see Mrs. ’Ardstaffe.”
“Whatever for?”
“To see she is all right. I like her so much. She is so kind to me.”
“What an extraordinary thing to do!” exclaimed Cheam. “Why did you do that?”
“She is kind. I have no friend but her. I am afraid the Gestapo kill her.”
Poor thing, thought Cheam. It’s turned her brain.
Frieda achieved a smile.
“I make joke,” she explained. “You not understand? Miss ’Ardstaffe I call Miss ’Itler: Mr. ’Ardstaffe is Gestapo.”
“You don’t like Mr. Hardstaffe?”
“Like him? I hate him! But she! She is worse.” Her face grew fiendish. “She is evil. One day I kill her!”
“With morphia?” asked Cheam.
“With morphia, no. With my hands—so!”
My God! she means it, thought Cheam. She’s capable of murder all right. Needs watching.
So you went to Mrs. Hardstaffe’s bedroom. Did you see her?”
“I knock, but no answer. I open the door. It is dark. I go away. In the morning, I know they have kill her, and I am afraid.”
“Why?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“I know Miss ’Itler will say it is me who kill her. ‘The Jew is not safe, she shall say, and she shall put me in concentration camp or madhouse.”
“That’s nonsense!” exclaimed Cheam. “Why should she want to do that?”
“You do not know her. She is not what you think. She is evil. I know. I am young and she is old, but I know. I have seen much evil.”
Cheam rose to his feet.
“This morphia,” he said. “Where do you keep it?”
“Upstairs: I shall show you.”
He followed her up the main staircase and through the swing door into the servants’ carpetless wing.
Her
room was in quaint contrast to the more colourless bedrooms at the other end of the house. Cheam thought he had never seen so many pieces of embroidery collected into the space of four small walls. Embroidered hair tidies, brush-and-comb bags, and slipper bags; embroidered containers for umbrellas, spills, matches; embroidered boxes of all sizes and shapes; even embroidered panels and pictures.
She went across to a large box clamped with iron bands, and lifted the lid.
“This box only I can bring from my country. If you wish, I sell you some things—all embroidered—very cheap.”
“No, thank you,” replied Cheam. “I want the morphia.”
“I get it.”
She plunged her hand beneath the many articles which it still contained, then withdrew it, looking puzzled.
“I forget. It is the other side,” she murmured, pushing her hand down again.
But again when she held her hand out, it was empty.
Cheam, who had wondered where she could have concealed the package to elude his searchers’ experienced fingers, was silent.
Frieda tumbled to her knees beside the heavy box, while little beads of sweat gathered on her forehead and rolled down her face.
She took out sheets, cloths, corsets, shoes, a hat, beads, an umbrella, a pair of candlesticks, a case of spoons, and threw them in a heap on the floor, muttering in German.
At last she looked up at Cheam with terror in her eyes.
“It is gone,” she exclaimed. “She has taken it. Now I know she will kill me!”
CHAPTER 18
After an intensive search had failed to produce the missing morphia, Cheam detached himself from the hysterical clutches of the weeping maid, and went downstairs. As he entered the drawing-room for his hat, a tall, dapper man, dressed in immaculate town-cut black suit, rose from one of the chairs.
“Superintendent Cheam? May I have a few words with you? I’m Stanton Hardstaffe.”
“Certainly, sir. Very pleased to have the opportunity. This must be a sad home-coming for you.”
“Yes. It’s terrible about my mother. I shall never forgive myself. I ought to have known it would happen one day if she stayed in this house. When are you going to arrest him?”
“Arrest whom, sir?”
Stanton tapped an impatient foot on the carpet.
“My father, of course. You must know that he did it.”
“What makes you think that?” asked Cheam, glancing over his shoulder, and noting with satisfaction that the constable whom he had left in the room was already moving his pencil over his notebook.
“Good heavens, man!” exclaimed Stanton. “You must have been wasting your time if you haven’t yet discovered that my father’s whole married life has been dedicated to making my dear mother’s very existence unbearable. If she’d been an American, she’d have got a divorce years ago, but you know what the laws in this country used to be like, dusty and logical, and after they were altered, she felt too old to bother. Oh, she did go to a lawyer for advice once, but all he could say was, ‘I’m sorry but I’m afraid you’ve got no case.’ Perhaps you haven’t found out what a hypocrite my father is. He’d have gone into the witness-box with that bland, smiling, schoolmaster manner of his, and he would have killed her evidence flat, even if she had got together enough courage to give it. Then she would have been worse off than ever because he’d have taken an even greater delight in making her suffer in private as well as humiliating her in public. The Gestapo simply wouldn’t be in it!”
Cheam blinked. This was the second time within the hour that Mr. Hardstaffe had been compared with this hated organisation.
“If you realised all this, Mr. Stanton,” he said, “how is it that you were content to leave your mother here without even coming to see her?”
“Content!” said Stanton bitterly. “Of course I wasn’t content, but what could I do? When I first left this house, we arranged to meet regularly at a friend’s house, but of course he got to know about it and created a scene. So at last she refused to come.”
“So you never saw her alive again?”
Stanton smiled.
“That’s what my father thinks,” he said. “But I loved my mother, and I’m not such a nit-wit that I couldn’t think of some way of seeing her. We met every year. Doctor Macalistair was in the scheme—he used to paint the most lurid picture of what would happen if Mother didn’t go abroad every year. She used to come to stay with us before getting the boat. One year, the three of us went for a cruise together, my wife, Mother, and me. I managed to get a long leave, and Mother paid for the trip. We had a heavenly time.”
“I don’t see why your father should have needed any persuasion to let her go abroad. If what you say is true, I should have thought he’d have been glad to get rid of her for a bit,” remarked Cheam.
“He just didn’t like her spending so much money.”
“But it was her own money.”
Stanton laughed.
“He didn’t look at it like that. He’d married her, so he regarded her worldly goods as his.”
“That’s twisting the marriage service a bit, isn’t it?” asked Cheam.
“He’d twist anything.”
“H’m,” said Cheam. “Then I can’t understand why she left all her money to him.”
“Oh, she didn’t,” returned Stanton. “She wasn’t quite as simple as he thought. Those quiet women never are. She made a will in my favour, and my solicitor has the will, so that there’s no chance of anyone having destroyed it.”
Cheam sat up, and took notice.
“Really? When was it signed?”
Stanton looked mildly surprised.
“About three years ago, I think,” he said. “It’s all in order, I assure you. She told me she wanted me to inherit everything. She said Leda and my father had succeeded in making her life hell, and she’d make sure that neither of them had a penny of hers.”
“H’m,” said Cheam again. “I’m afraid that will isn’t valid, sir,” he said.
“Isn’t valid? Rot! Why, I tell you...”
Cheam waved his hand in the air.
“Oh, I don’t question that it was drawn up quite legally,” he said. “But she made a later one a few days before she died. In it, she left everything unconditionally to your father.”
Stanton’s face grew fiendish in expression. He clenched his fists, and beat them against his temples.
“No,” he shouted. “No, no, no!”
“Very disappointing for you, sir, I know.”
Cheam sounded almost apologetic.
“It isn’t that,” said Stanton, when he had recovered himself a little. “It’s the thought of what he must have done to her to force her to sign it. I tell you she wanted me to have that money. She didn’t change her mind about that, I’m quite sure.” He struck a clenched fist against the open palm of his other hand. “That’s what she wanted to see me about, of course. And I failed her!”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
Stanton turned to him again, and spoke earnestly.
“She wrote to me—oh, I don’t know whether she got the letter out of the house unnoticed, or whether someone read it first—asking me to come to the house on Saturday night.”
“That was the night she was murdered.”
“Do you think I don’t remember that, Superintendent!” he returned savagely. “Don’t you see that I might have saved her life if—if I’d come? She told me to wait outside, and she would come down to let me in.”
“So you didn’t come?”
“No!”
He flung himself into a chair, and shielded his face with his arm.
“I’m sorry,” said Cheam, “but the only thing to be done now is to find her murderer and bring him to justice.”
“It’s up to you, Superintendent.” Stanton passed a spotless handkerchief over his forehead, then stood up again. “It couldn’t be anyone but my father. I’d give something to know what deviltry he used to make her sign that will.”<
br />
Suddenly he moved forward and thrust a forefinger towards Cheam’s astonished face.
“I know. Of course. The horse-whip!”
“Horse-whip?” gasped Cheam. “Why, what do you know about that?”
Stanton appeared not to have heard him.
“I ought to have guessed at once,” he said. “You know I left home years ago owing to a serious quarrel with my father? It happened like this. I heard screams coming from their bedroom, and went in to find him thrashing her with a horsewhip. She was crouching on the bed with her clothes torn and her back lashed and bleeding. I’m a Hardstaffe, so I have a temper, too, and somehow I wrenched the damned thing out of his hand and gave him a dose of his own medicine. Like all bullies, he’s a coward at heart, and I thrashed him till he crouched in a corner of the room blubbering for mercy. I moved Mother’s things into the adjoining bedroom, locked the door, and took the key away, and I told him then that if he ever dared to lift a horsewhip to her again, I’d kill him.
“And, by God, I will!”
CHAPTER 19
Superintendent Cheam, accompanied by a constable, crossed the ashphalt playground flanking the village school. They entered the front door, and saw on their right a green-painted door with the words “Head Master” stencilled in cream. Cheam knocked, and thinking that he heard a reply through the confused babel of voices issuing from the five separate classrooms, turned the knob and entered the study. Mr. Hardstaffe’s arm slipped from Charity Fuller’s slim waist as he swung round to face the intruders.
“What the devil do you mean by walking in without knocking?” he blazed.
“Good morning, Mr. Hardstaffe,” was Cheam’s affable reply. “I did knock, and thought I heard you say ‘Come in’, but I can see that I was mistaken. I’m sorry, sir, but there’s a lot of noise outside in the corridor.”
“Oh dear!” exclaimed Charity. “It must be my class. I’d better go back to them, that is, if you’ve quite finished with these papers, Mr. Hardstaffe.”
“Yes, yes, go along. I’ll see them some other time. I can’t attend to figures while the Superintendent’s here.” No, that you can’t, my lad, thought Cheam. Not to the kind of figure you’ve got your eyes on now, anyway. She’s a good-looker this red head: plenty of “It”, or whatever they call it nowadays. But it fair beats me what a girl like that can see in a wizened little fellow like you.
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