by Roger Bax
Her voice trailed off. “I think that’s all,” she said after a moment. “I expect you’ll want me to sign it.”
“Oh, darling …” murmured Marion brokenly.
Barbara dropped on one knee beside her and for a second pressed her cheek against Marion’s hand. “You poor dears—I’m sorry to have brought all this on you. Please try to forgive me.”
Then she got up lightly, and walked over to Dennis Gwynn. “Thank you, Dennis. I’ll never forget what you did.”
James said ironically, “I suppose, Mr. Gwynn, that you saw at least some of this from the church tower?’
Gwynn’s blue eyes met the inspector’s. “I shall be happy to swear it in court. I, too, have no sense of guilt.”
“Bah!” said James.
Chapter Thirty Four
The Scotland Yard men were on their way back to London, their duty discharged. James was unusually pensive and it was not until they were entering the suburbs that he showed any disposition to discuss the Appleby affair. And then he wasn’t very cheerful.
“Not a nice case, Maddox,” he said. “I like the tidy ones, where the murderer’s a thoroughgoing villain and there’s some satisfaction in bringing him to justice. It would have given me real pleasure to put Hutton in the dock. Instead of that, he’s brought to book outside the law and we have to arrest a girl who’s actually a victim.”
Maddox made a sympathetic sound. He was feeling that way himself.
James chewed on his pipe. “Damned annoying family, of course. Too much pride and temper. Lot of anarchists, if you ask me.” He gave a rather mirthless laugh. “Just imagine that old man sitting up in his bedroom concocting that rigmarole about him and Hutton at the graveside! Absolutely shameless. I’ve never known a case where so many people lied so brazenly and with such imagination.”
“Never mind, sir,” said Maddox consolingly. “You caught them out in the end.”
“‘We,’ Sergeant.”
Maddox looked pleased. “It’s funny that I should have had that idea of two people being buried in one grave, right at the beginning of the case, and then have forgotten about it afterward.”
“At least you sowed the seed. Actually, the thing that really put me on to it was that odd business of Fred Pepper not seeing his watch when he came back on the Friday afternoon. That worried me from the beginning. After all, he was searching for it. According to his account, it must have been there on the Friday morning, not there on the Friday afternoon, and somehow back there by Saturday evening, which didn’t make sense. I wondered how he could possibly have missed it, and then I began to see daylight. I thought of him digging there, and the watch slipping out of his pocket into the grave unnoticed, and I realized that he could have thrown it up on to the mound with a spadeful of soil and covered it with the next spadeful, so that when he came back in the afternoon it actually wouldn’t have been visible. But in that case, how did it get back into the grave? The only possible explanation seemed to be that someone else had disturbed the soil later, and with a missing body to find and one we were pretty certain had been taken to the churchyard, that was all I needed. Of course, I couldn’t be sure, but it seemed likely that Hutton had thrown up more soil on to the mound and that as he’d scraped it down again—right at the end—the watch had been exposed and had slid back into the grave. And I reckon that’s what must have happened.”
Maddox was suitably impressed. For a while he sat quietly reflecting on various aspects of the case. “I’ll tell you one thing that surprised me a bit, Chief—you charging Barbara Rutherford with complicity in the Thornton murder and not with killing Hutton.”
“Well, at that point I still wasn’t absolutely sure. Until she told her story, it wasn’t easy to guess at her motives—it certainly never occurred to me that she was a disillusioned confederate. And although I thought the old man was probably shielding her, I couldn’t completely rule him out. I never believed that he’d done it by accident, of course—even in your second childhood you don’t fire two shots by accident—and anyway an accident would have been altogether too much of a coincidence with Mrs. Thornton lying buried underneath. I did think he might have done it deliberately, and the fact that Gwynn was prepared to swear that he’d seen the old man fire the shots made things more difficult. At the same time, I had serious doubts about Gwynn’s story, because I remembered that right at the beginning of the case he’d told me that he’d seen the Ancient in the garden at about six-thirty, and if it was him he was trying to protect, I didn’t think he’d have said that. It was a bit tricky at the end—just as well that Barbara Rutherford cleared everything up for us. At that stage, of course, she didn’t have much choice.”
“What do you think will happen to her?” asked Maddox.
James frowned. “I should say it depends very largely on whether the jury can understand her frame of mind when she helped Hutton with Wanda Thornton’s body. I imagine that’ll worry them more than the actual shooting of Hutton. Even when you make all allowances, it was pretty horrible, and she did put on a remarkably two-faced act afterward. There’s no doubt she’ll get a recommendation to mercy, but I should think it’ll be some time before she’ll be held to have purged her offense.”
“I think she’s had a tough break,” said Maddox.
“The law’s the law, Sergeant. If people flout it because it doesn’t happen to fit their particular case, they have to pay the penalty. I’ll say this for Barbara Rutherford—I don’t imagine she’ll do any whining.”
“What about Gwynn? He led us a fine dance.”
“He certainly did. We could run him in, all right. Still, no point in being vindictive. He’s got guts, too.”
“He must have been absolutely devoted to her. Talk about stubborn! I wonder if he’ll wait for her?”
“I wonder,” said James. He gave Maddox a quizzical glance. “Would you?”
Copyright
First published in 1951 by Hutchinson & Co.
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © Roger Bax, 1951
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