by Ellis Peters
He held the ashtray up to Neil’s face, and with the tip of the file traced along the faint lines of ink letter by letter. ‘Here’s only part of a word to start with, but it’s clear what it was. “—stament of me, Richa—” And then a bit that’s cracked through, and then “—lier, of Silmin—” The name of his house in Dorset is Silmington, isn’t it? This is all that’s left of Hellier’s last will and testament. The one he wasn’t allowed to finish. The one I was to have witnessed – if he’d lived long enough to sign it.’
CHAPTER VII
In this one hour, by heaven, I do
Penance for all my sins!
Act 2
There was nothing left to him now, no refuge in anger, or argument, or even surprise, no point in speaking at all, since he could say only one inadequate and unconvincing thing over and over, and that they were never going to believe. He sat down again slowly on his bed, and clutched his head between his hands, and stared blankly ahead into a frozen loneliness, as though they had already left the room and locked the door upon him.
‘Well?’ prompted Neil gently, when the silence had begun to vibrate like a bowstring.
‘I know nothing about it. I didn’t burn it. I didn’t put it there.’ His lips moved stiffly, and the voice that came out of them had the mechanical intonation of hypnosis.
Braced back against the wall, Susan stood clinging with fingers and shoulders and rigid spine to hold herself upright. She looked as if she might faint. Why? Wasn’t this what she’d been aiming at all along?
‘I think you should satisfy yourself of the genuineness of the evidence. That’s only fair.’ Astonishing how patient, how solicitous they could be when they were sure of their man. He was the scapegoat, all right, and holy. He lifted the load from every one of them, the innocent as well as the guilty. Now that they were free of fear for themselves, they could afford to be wonderfully kind to him.
They put the ashtray on his knees, carefully avoiding draughts that might have fanned the fragile shreds apart. They brought the watchmaker’s glass and put it into his hand, and with soft encouragement, as to a rebellious child, coaxed him to read the fragmentary words for himself and admit their significance. They brought Richard’s engagement book and held it before him so that he could compare the handwriting, and see for himself that there was no deception. And there was none; he wasn’t trying to assert that this scrap of paper was not what they claimed for it. They even brought him a stiff drink, and heaven knew he needed it.
‘It does appear to be the sheet of notepaper he borrowed tonight to make a will, doesn’t it? You’ll agree to that?’
‘Yes. But I know nothing about it. I never touched it.’
‘And it is his handwriting. You’re satisfied about that?’
‘It seems to be. But I don’t know how it got here. I didn’t bring it.’ The schnapps had brought up two hectic rings of colour on his cheekbones, startling against his pallor. He looked like Petrouchka distraught; even that straw-coloured hair of his fitted into the picture.
‘Better tell us about it, Laurence. No need to make bad even worse. What have you done with the rest of the tablets? Or did you use them all?’
‘I haven’t seen them. I never saw the phial until now. I tell you I know nothing about all this. Someone’s planted the things on me.’
‘That’s hardly reasonable. You know yourself that ever since you roused the doctor we’ve taken every precaution. We’ve operated in twos, and nobody’s been alone for more than a matter of seconds. No, a frame-up is hardly the most likely explanation of all these damning facts that are piling up against you, you know. There’s a much simpler one.’
There was, and they were happy with it, because it lifted the weight from them.
‘The phial was well hidden. If Franz hadn’t handled the book, but only looked at it, it would never have been spotted.’
‘I’ve told you I know nothing about it, I didn’t touch the tablets, I didn’t kill Richard. There’s nothing else I can say.’ And he was sick to death of saying that, he wouldn’t repeat it again. What was the use?
‘Very well,’ said Neil, with a heavy sigh. ‘That’s how it will have to stand. We shall test the phial for prints, too, but I don’t suppose that will add much to what we know.’ He was deeply troubled by the blank hopelessness of the pale face before him, stained with those clownish scarlet discs on the cheeks; and on impulse he sat down beside Laurence and laid his hand on the taut fist clenched on the young man’s knees. ‘Listen to me, Laurence. You yourself must see that in the circumstances there’s nothing we can do except hold both you and the evidence until we can hand over this case to the police. All the relevant material, the glass, this tube, that stuff in the ashtray, and all our personal statements will go into Herr Mehlert’s safe. And you’ll have to stay here in your room, under lock and key. You understand that? I’m sorry, but we can’t take the responsibility for leaving you at liberty. I’ll see that you have some exercise, and you can ask for anything you need. But this is murder. We have a duty to hold you safely until the proper authorities can take you off our hands. It will be up to them how they proceed after that.’
‘And in the meantime,’ said Laurence in a thin, bitter voice, ‘the chap who did kill Richard can take his time about covering the rest of his tracks.’
‘I didn’t say investigations will stop.’
‘No, you didn’t say it.’
Neil rose. His eyes, heavy-lidded with weariness, looked round at all the silent faces that stared in upon them. ‘We’d better go,’ he said, ‘and leave him alone. Maybe tomorrow we can talk more sensibly.’ He caught the doctor’s eye as they moved obediently towards the door. Laurence heard the whispered query: ‘D’you think it’s all right to leave him?’
‘Yes,’ he said loudly, ‘it’s all right to leave me. I’ve got no morphine, and I wouldn’t make use of it if I had. I’m going to survive, make no mistake about that, if only to see somebody damned for this. Now get out, the lot of you! Get the hell out of my room!’
It was McHugh who remembered to pluck the key from the inner side of the lock and transfer it to the outer. A practical man, McHugh. As long as there was something positive to be done, some expenditure of energy to be experienced and enjoyed, he didn’t care whether it was crash-landing a plane in the mountains or playing detectives with carbon paper and magnifying glass on the track of one of his passengers. As though action had for him some intrinsic virtue of its own; good action, bad action, any action, maybe even killing. Except that he was one of the two who had nothing whatever to gain by Richard’s death.
The door was closed firmly. Laurence strained his ears, and heard the key turn in the lock. In the sudden quietness sounds carried all too clearly, or else his hearing was sharpened by indignation and fear. The murmur of voices outside came back to him distinctly.
‘Oughtn’t we to tell his mother?’ That was McHugh again, the crisp voice toned down as low as it would go.
And Neil answering, in a muted howl of exasperation: ‘Oh, for God’s sake, haven’t you been busy enough for one night? Let the poor woman sleep!’
That warmed him for a moment, that note of detestation and compassion from Neil; but in the silence after they were all gone he sat on the bed with his head in his hands until he grew cold to the heart. Once he heard slow, laboured footsteps on the stairs and along the main corridor, and knew from the weight and caution of these movements that they were bringing up Richard’s body. That made two of them exiled here in the night, islanded from their own kind. He felt nearer to Richard now than to any of the others, even his mother. Thank God she was under a sedative, and she’d sleep. Let the poor woman sleep! He was grateful to Neil for that.
He lay down on the bed, fully dressed as he was, and spread his arms on the pillow, and buried his face between them. The discarded diary slid down into the hollow against his armpit, and settled uncomfortably there, and he had not the strength or the heart to stir himself and push i
t away. He tried to think, to feel his way back through every detail of the nightmare for the flaw which would let him through to the truth; but he was so sick with misery and so sore with indignation that he was conscious of nothing but his own pain.
It wasn’t only the burning sense of injury; there’s a lot of injustice in the world, it wasn’t his first encounter with it, though it might well turn out to be his last. It wasn’t even the pure physical and mental terror he felt for himself, though that was real enough. Fear ought to be illogical when you have done nothing wrong, but who really believes the law invariably arrives at truth? No, worst of all was the sense of betrayal. If it had been left entirely to that eager beaver, McHugh, to snatch the ground from under his feet and bring down the roof on him to bury him, it wouldn’t have hurt quite so much, because he would still have had a kind of comfort, and some battered fragments of his own internal security. But that Susan should be the one to stick the knife in his back! Why? Why? She couldn’t believe she was telling the truth. This was no honest, flustered, damn-fool mistake on her part, she wasn’t the kind to mix up her memories or get scared to trust her own senses. She knew what she’d seen. She knew he could not possibly have dropped anything into Richard’s glass without her seeing it, and she knew she hadn’t seen anything of the kind. Not mistake, but malice. And why, for God’s sake? Why should she want to do this awful thing to him? What had he ever done to her? And after this evening! No, yesterday evening, of course, it was already Christmas Day, and not so long before dawn now. After that interlude of peace together, unbearably sweet to remember now, and unbearably bitter, why should she turn on him and betray him like this? He sank his teeth into the back of his hand, but the small localized pain didn’t help at all, he hardly felt it.
He must keep his head. He must believe that this array of cooked evidence against him was full of flaws, and that the police, when they managed to get here, would find them and pick the whole edifice to pieces. You can’t prove a man a murderer when he isn’t one. Or can you? Can you, if desperate enough? He thought back feverishly through the annals of British justice, and had not so far to go before he came up against a case which cast considerable doubts on its infallibility. About Austrian law he knew nothing. Maybe there wasn’t any death penalty here. He shrank indignantly from the spark of wretched hope that thought kindled in him, furious to think he might have to be grateful for the outrageous gift of a life which was his by right, take it with the smear of guilt still on it, and be thankful for it.
He began to curse under his breath, pouring out into the pillow all the foulest words he knew, against McHugh, against Richard’s murderer, whoever he might be, against Susan, against all of them. His repertory was neither extensive nor impressive, and that didn’t ease him, either. He remembered the tracks of his mother’s nails like strings of little red beads down Susan’s cheek, and shrank with loathing and distaste for everything and everybody, himself included. And in this miserable case he drifted unawares into an exhausted sleep.
He awoke sharply to cold and stiffness, and a small, persistent sound as light as the nibbling of mice. He lay shivering, and listened to it as to something left over from a dream, and after a while his sick senses cleared a little, and he was aware of direction and time, the first, faintest foreshowings of the dawn, the dark radiance of a sky still unexpectedly clear of snow. The little tapping sound went on and on, until it drew his attention to the pale panels of the door. Someone was rapping with a fingernail; it must have gone on for a long time before it penetrated his sleep. He lay silent, staring at the wood as though he could see through it to the person waiting outside.
Close to the crack of the door a voice breathed: ‘Laurence!’ He made no move, but it went on and on, tapping and whispering: ‘Laurence! Can you hear me? Laurence, are you awake?’
What more did she want? Couldn’t she be satisfied with what she’d done, that she must come pestering him with self-justifications, too? Bitterness boiled up into his mouth in a rush of gall, and welled into his eyes like tears. He wanted to keep silence and let her pick at his door all the rest of the night, but the voice became an abominable agony with its tireless, urgent repetition of his name.
‘Go away!’ he said quietly but aloud.
‘Laurence, I must talk to you—’
‘You’ve talked enough. Leave me alone!’
‘Only for a moment! Please! I want—’
‘I don’t. I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want to see you. If you don’t go away and let me alone I’ll rouse the house. If they want me to behave they can damn’ well protect me from you, at least.’
‘Laurence, please, I beg you—’
He swung his feet to the floor and sat trembling, hating her, hating himself, unable to draw back from the course on which he was already launched like a leaf on a tide.
‘Go to hell!’ he said in a vicious whisper. ‘That’s my last word.’
Silence, and then the smallest of sounds outside the door, stealthy sounds that made no sense until he closed his eyes and let all his consciousness pass into the sensitivity of his hearing. Then he saw her clearly. She was standing pressed against the closed door, one hand on the handle, the other flattened against the wood, and her cheek pressed just above the handle. The cheek was wet. It was the left one, with the scratches on it, and she laid it upon the unyielding wood of his door, and let the slow, painful tears well from under her closed eyelids. He heard the faint, rhythmic cachinnations of her breath as she laboured to suppress what otherwise would have been tearing sobs. Then she felt her way lamely along the wall and crept away, and in a little while silence filled the corridor.
Laurence turned and flung himself face down into the pillow, and hugged it to him frantically to stifle the convulsions of responsive grief that passed shuddering upwards from his lungs and knotted agonisingly in his throat. He didn’t understand anything, he was hopelesly lost. He hated her, and he was sick with shame at having hurt her. It should have been some consolation to him to hear her cry, and instead it was the final, the insupportable anguish. He choked on the tears her tears had started out of him, and fell brokenly asleep again with the horrid taste of self-disgust in his mouth.
CHAPTER VIII
Then hold your peace, withdraw,
And wait in patience till I need your evidence.
Act 3
No more snow had fallen in the night. The morning of Christmas Day came in a frosty glitter of sunshine, and the vast undulating masses of white seemed to have condensed and hardened. On the gentle slopes just above the village half a dozen children were out on skis. Little things of three and four went feather-stitching merrily up the hill, empty-handed, disdaining sticks, and came rollicking down again as lightly as leaves. When they fell they fell like flakes of snow, and every bit as serenely. Their voices made a constant babel like little treble cow-bells, a rippling sound that seemed to be an attribute of the air, the day, and the place, an emanation of innocence. The sky at midmorning was coloured like an inverted harebell, and all the shadows in the folded planes of snow were blue.
Susan, coming down very late, met Franz Mehlert in the hall, and he smiled and greeted her with a flashing of white teeth out of the thicket of his beard. She had very little knowledge of German and understood nothing except ‘nice weather’, but she heard in his voice and saw in his smile the same desire to comfort and sustain she had heard and seen up there on the mountain, when he came looming out of the night and offered them shelter and rest. All distresses fell within the field of his monumental, calm kindness, but some he could help, and some he could not, and he knew no way of distinguishing between them here. These chance visitors, these most unfortunate strays from another world, were so far out of his scope, and so absorbed in themselves, that he knew in his blood and bones that it would be waste of effort trying to understand them. They were only sojourners, they would go away again as soon as they could, having learned nothing. But he could still feel sorry for them. A
nd the girl was pitiful. She had seemed to be a cocksure young person enough when she came, travelled, efficient, a product of the modern secretarial college. She looked like any other distraught young girl now, pale as her white blouse, with the dull red scratches distorting one cheek, and great hollows under her too-brilliant eyes, hollows bluer than the shadows in the snow. Synthetic cataclysms she could probably have dealt with, but the natural immensities, like death and anger and hate, disconcerted and overwhelmed her.
And yet she had a grave and quiet look about her, too, as though she was aware of having changed direction. Perhaps she would learn something, after all, from this bad experience; something about her own identity.
She said: ‘Guten Morgen, Herr Mehlert!’ and returned him the ghost of his warming smile, but she could not talk to him. She did not even remember, in her tired condition, the German for ‘Merry Christmas’, or she would have offered it as a reasonable wish from her to him. In spite of crime and death, in spite of his pity for the dead and the living, it was entirely fitting that he should enjoy the deeper content of the season, and be in no way ashamed of it. But her tongue felt thick and clumsy, and her brain would not work. She went on into the dining room.
Trevor Mason was sitting alone over breakfast, a magazine spread open beside his plate. She sat down opposite him, returning his subdued greeting as disconsolately. It was an ordeal to face any one of her companions this morning, but as well Trevor as any.
‘So it didn’t snow, after all.’
‘No. Mehlert says two or three days of this weather could open the track. They’ll probably begin to cut through from this end today, even if it is Christmas Day. But if the wind veers again there may be more snow.’ He got up from his chair, and went to look out from the window, drumming nervously on the pane with his long fingers. ‘The sooner we get out of here the better. Three days I can just about face, but much longer and I shall be ready for the psychiatrists. If there was even a telephone line working I could stick it.’
