by Ellis Peters
“I know,” said George. “Go on.”
“Mr. Armiger made a very spiteful reply, acknowledging his son’s appeal like a business letter, and repeating that their relationship was at an end, and Leslie’s family responsibilities were now entirely his own affair. It was deliberately worded to leave no hope of a reconciliation, ever. He pretended he’d had no idea Leslie ever wanted the barn, but then he ended by saying that since he was interested in the place he was sending him a souvenir of its purchase, and it was the last present they need ever expect from him. As a would-be painter, he said, Leslie might find it an appropriate gift. It was the old sign, from the earlier days when the house used to be an inn.”
“The Joyful Woman,” said George.
“Was that its name? I didn’t know, but that accounts for it. I saw it when Mr. Armiger brought it in for the people downstairs to pack. It was a rather crude painting of a woman laughing, a half-length. They found it in the attics when the builders moved in on the house. It was on a thick wooden panel, very dirty and damaged, the usual kind of daub. One of the firm’s cars took it and dumped it at Leslie’s landlady’s house the day after the letter was written.”
Jean had said nothing about the gift, only about the curt and final letter. But there might be nothing particular in that omission, since the gift was merely meant to be insulting and to underline what the letter had to say. This is all you need expect from me, living or dead, and this is all you’ll ever own of The Joyful Woman. Make the best of it!
“Leslie didn’t write or telephone again?”
“Never again as far as I know. But I should know if he had.”
And all day, thought George, I’ve been writing off a certain possibility because I felt so sure that, firstly, if Leslie did go and ask for an interview Armiger wouldn’t grant it, and secondly, if by any chance he did choose to see him it certainly wouldn’t be to greet him with backslapping heartiness, champagne and a preview of his appalling ballroom. But maybe, after all, that was exactly the way he might receive him, rubbing salt into the wounds, goading him with the shoddy miracles money could perform. On a night when triumph and success were in the air maybe this was much more his mark, not direct anger but this oblique and barbaric cruelty. “He’ll be interested to see what can be done with a place like that, given plenty of money and enterprise, , , ” “He was fair hugging himself.”
“Miss Hamilton, have you got a reasonably recent photograph of Leslie?”
She gave him a long, thoughtful look, as though she was considering whether he could need such a thing for any good purpose, and whether, in any case, denial could serve to do anything but delay the inevitable. Then she got up without a word, and went behind the desk, and brought out from one of the drawers a half-plate portrait, which she held out to him with a slight, grim smile shadowing the corners of her mouth. It had at some time been framed, for George saw how the light had darkened the pale ground slightly, and left untouched a half-inch border round the edges. More recently it had been torn across into two ragged pieces, and then carefully mended again with gum and Sellotape. The torn edges had been matched as tenderly as possible, but the slash still made a savage scar across the young, alert, fastidious face.
George looked from the photograph to the woman behind the desk.
“Yes,” she said. “I fished it out of his wastepaper basket and mended it and kept it. I don’t quite know why. Leslie has never been particularly close to me, but I did see him grow up, and I didn’t like to see the last traces of him just wiped out, like that. That may help you to understand what had happened between them.” She added: “It’s two years old, but it’s the only one he happened to have here in the office. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be any use looking for any of those he had at home.”
George could imagine it. A much-photographed boy, too, most likely. He saw bonfires of cherubic babies, big-eyed toddlers, serious schoolboys, earnest athletes, self-conscious young men-about-town, Armiger’s furnace fed for hours, like a Moloch, on images of his son.
“Thank you, Miss Hamilton. I’ll see that you have it back,” was all he said.
The face was still before his eyes as he went out to his car. Leslie Armiger was not visibly his father’s son. Taller, with long, fine bones and not much flesh. Brown hair lighter than his father’s curled pleasantly above a large forehead, and the eyes were straight and bright, with that slight wary wildness of young and high-mettled creatures. The same wonder and insecurity was in the long curves of his mouth, not so much irresolute as hypersensitive. No match for his father, you’d say on sight, if it came to a head-on clash either of wills or heads. But in spite of the ceremonial destruction of his image, young Leslie was still alive; the bull had pawed the ground and charged for the last time.
It was just four o’clock, and Dominic was walking up Hill Street on his way to the bus stop. Since he had to pass the main police station it was his habit to call in, on days when he hadn’t biked to school, on the offchance that George might be there with the car, and ready to go off duty; and sometimes he was lucky. To-day George picked him up at the corner and took him to the office with him while he filed his latest report; then they drove home together.
“One little call to make,” said George, “and then we’ll head for our tea. You won’t mind waiting a minute for me? It won’t take long.”
“And then you’ve finished for the day?” Dominic’s anxious eyes were searching his face surreptitiously, and trying to read the mind behind it. He would have liked to ask right out if anything positive had turned up, if Kitty was safely and irrevocably out of the affair; but how could he? They had had a family code for years in connection with George’s work, governed by rules none the less sacred for being unformulated; and once already to-day he’d been warned off from infringing them. One did not ask. One was allowed to listen if information was volunteered, and to suggest if participation was invited, but never to ask; and a silence as inviolable as the confessional sealed in all that was said within the framework of a case. He contained the ache within him, and waited faithfully, but it hurt.
“Don’t know yet, Dom, it’ll depend on what I get here.” He was turning into the empty parking-ground of The Jolly Barmaid. “If my man’s here I shan’t be five minutes, whatever the outcome may be.”
But it did not take even five minutes, for Turner was sitting in the curtained public bar, cigarette on lolling lip, devouring the racing results, and it needed only one good look at Leslie Armiger’s photograph to satisfy him.
“That’s him. That’s the young bloke who come asking for Mr. Armiger. Stood on the doorstep to wait for him, but I saw him in a good light when he first come in. Different clothes, of course, but that’s him all right, I’d know him anywhere.”
“You’d swear to him?”
“Any time you like, mate. About five to ten he walked in, and Mr. Armiger come out to him, and that’s the last I saw of ‘em.”
“Thank you,” said George, “that’s all I wanted to know.”
He pocketed the photograph and went back to the car thinking grimly: Home by ten, were you, my lad! So you’ve solved the problem I’ve always wanted to get straightened out, how to be in two places at once. Now I wonder if you’ll be willing to tell me how it’s done?
CHAPTER VI.
LESLIE ARMIGER WAS not a happy liar. There was almost as much relief as fright in his eyes as he looked from the photograph to George’s face and back again. Jean came to his side, and he put his arm round her for a moment, with a curiously tentative gesture of protection, as though he had wanted to clasp her warmly, and either because of George’s presence or his own predicament or her aloofness he could not.
“The best thing you can do now,” said George sternly, “is tell me everything. You see what happens when you don’t. You, too, Mrs. Armiger. Wouldn’t it have looked infinitely better if you’d told the truth in the first place, rather than leave it to come out this way?”
“Now wait a minute
!” Leslie’s sensitive nostrils were quivering with nervous tension. “Jean had nothing to do with this. She hasn’t got a time sense, never did have. She merely made one of her vague but confident guesses, saying I was in by ten.”
“And picked on a time and a few details that matched your story word for word? That tale was compounded beforehand, Mr. Armiger, and you know it as well as I do.”
“No, that isn’t true. Jean simply made a mistake, , , “
“So you backed up her statement rather than embarrass her? Now, now, you can do better than that. Have you forgotten that your statement and hers were made at the very same moment, something like a mile apart? My boy, you’re positively inviting me to throw the book at you.”
“Oh, Christ!” said Leslie helplessly, dropping into a chair. “I’m no good at this!”
“None at all, I’m glad you realise it. Now suppose we just sit round the table like sensible people, and you tell me the truth.”
Jean had drawn back from them, hesitating for a moment. She said quietly: “I’ll make some coffee,” and slipped out to the congested kitchenette on the landing; but George noticed that she left the door open. Whatever her private dissatisfactions with her husband, she would be back at his side instantly if the law showed signs of getting tough with him.
“Now then, let’s have it straight this time. What time did you really come home?”
“It must have been about ten to eleven,” said Leslie sullenly. “I did go to that pub of his, and I did ask to see him, but I give you my word Jean didn’t know anything about it. All she did was get worried because of the times, because there was three-quarters of an hour or so unaccounted for. But I never told her where I’d been.”
George had no difficulty in believing that; it was implied in every glance they cast at each other, every hesitant movement they made towards each other, so wincingly gentle and constrained. It was clear that they knew how far apart they stood, and were frightened by the gap that had opened between them. That fiery girl now so silent and attentive outside the half-open door was suffering agonies of doubt of her bargain. Had he, after all, the guts to stand up to life? Was that disastrous appeal to his father only a momentary lapse, or was it a symptom of inherent weakness? George thought they had fought some bitter battles, and frightened and hurt each other badly; but now he was the enemy, and they stood together in a solid alliance against him. He might very well be doing them a favour just by being there.
“Then you’d better tell her now, hadn’t you?” he said firmly. “It’ll come better from you than from anyone else. And she may be a good deal happier about knowing than about not knowing.”
“I suppose so.” But he didn’t sound convinced yet, he was too puzzled and wretched to know which way to turn. He swallowed the humiliation of being lectured, and began to talk.
“All right, I went out to post my letters, and then I kept going, and went straight to the pub and asked for my father. I didn’t want to go in, I just stuck at the door until he came out to me. And I didn’t happen to see anybody I knew, the waiter was a stranger, that’s why, when this thing blew up this morning, I was fool enough to think I could just keep quiet about being there. But you mustn’t blame Jean for trying to help me out.”
“We won’t bring your wife into it. Why did you go and ask for this interview? To make another appeal to him?”
“No,” said Leslie grimly, “not again. I was through with asking him for anything. No, I went to get back from him something of mine that he’d taken, or if I couldn’t get it back, at least to tell him what I thought of him.” He was launched now, he would run. George sat back and listened without comment to the story of the first appeal, and the answer it had brought, the cruel and gloating gift of the old inn sign as a memento of Leslie’s defeat and his father’s victory. He gave no sign that he was hearing it for the second time that day.
“Well, then just two weeks ago something queer happened. He suddenly changed his mind. One evening after I got home old Ray Shelley turned up here positively shiny with good news. I knew he’d done his best for me at the time of the bust-up, he was always a kind soul, and he was as pleased as Punch with the message he had for me. He said my father’d thought better of what he’d done, come to the conclusion that though he’d still finished with me it had been a dirty low-down trick to needle me with that present of his. Said he now saw it was a mean-spirited joke, and he withdrew it. But being my father he couldn’t come and admit it himself, he’d given Shelley the job. He was to take back the sign, and he’d brought me five hundred pounds in cash in its place, as conscience money, not forgetting to repeat that this was positively the last sub. we could look for. He said he couldn’t leave me to starve or sink into debt for want of that much ready money, but from now on I’d have to fend for myself.”
Jean had brought in the coffee and dispensed it silently, and because her husband in his absorption let it stand untasted at his elbow she came behind him and touched him very lightly on the arm to call his attention to it. She could not have ventured contact with a complete stranger more gingerly. He started and quivered at the touch, and looked up at her with a flash of wary brown eyes, at once hopeful and wretched. The shocks that passed between them made the whole cluttered, badly lit room vibrate like a bow-string.
“Go on,” said George peremptorily. “What did you say to his offer?”
“I refused it.” He was taking heart now from the very impetus of his own feelings, remembering his injuries and recovering his anger. The guarded voice warmed; there was even a note of Armiger’s well-tuned brazen music in it when he was roused. “I’d had it, I was done with the whole affair, it could stay as it was. It’s a pity it was poor old Shelley who got the blast, after all he’d tried to do for me, but there it was. So the old boy went off very upset. He even tried to get me to accept a loan out of his own pocket, but even if I’d have taken it in any case, and I wouldn’t, I couldn’t from him. I know him, even with all he makes he lives right up to his income, sometimes over it. We tried to soothe him down as well as we could, because, damn it, it wasn’t his fault. He said he hoped we wouldn’t cut ourselves off from him completely, couldn’t he come down and see us sometimes, he’d like to be sure we were all right, and of course we said come any time, if he could bear the place we’d be glad to see him. And we gave him all the gen, because the old bag downstairs objects to having to answer the door for our visitors, though she never misses taking a good look at them, in case there’s anything fat in it to shoot over the garden fence to the other harpy next door. She leaves the front door on the latch while she’s in, so that anyone who comes to see us can walk right up. And we even told him where to find the key of our room, in case he ever called a bit too early and wanted to wait for us. I know,” said Leslie, catching George’s faintly puzzled and inquiring eye. “You’re wondering if all this detail is really relevant. It’s relevant, all right! The day before yesterday, while we were both out in the afternoon, somebody got into this room and pinched my father’s letter.”
“The letter! The one accompanying the gift of the sign? But why should anybody want to steal that?”
“If you can think of more than one explanation you’re a better man than I am. There is only one. Because my father really wanted that sign back. That was why he sent Shelley on his errand. He wanted it, and it was even worth five hundred pounds to him to get it. And when that attempt flopped his next move was to remove the only proof that he ever gave it to me. Without that, its ownership would be a matter of his word against mine, and where do you think I’d be then?”
“That’s not quite true, you know,” said George reasonably. “Miss Hamilton typed that letter, she knows exactly what was in it, and has already told me all the facts about that gift. There would also be the testimony of the people who packed and delivered it to you. So it wouldn’t have been a matter of your unsupported word.”
Leslie laughed, with some bitterness but even more honest amusement. “Re
ally, you don’t know the kind of set-up he had with his staff, do you? Hammie may have been beautifully open with you now he’s dead, but if he’d been still alive she’d have done and said whatever he wanted, she always did, it’s the cardinal point in her terms of reference. She wouldn’t have remembered anything that could make things awkward for him, don’t you think it, and neither would the lads in the office, or the bloke who drove the van. Oh, no, that wouldn’t complicate things for him. The letter was the only evidence in black and white. My father wanted that thing back, he was prepared to give five hundred to get it, and when that failed he started to clear the ground so he could claim the thing anyhow, even though I hadn’t seen fit to part with it.”
“Are you suggesting that Mr. Shelley was a party to this trick?”
“No! At least, not consciously. God, I don’t know! I’ve never known how far he was aware of the uses Dad made of him. It went on all the time, whenever he needed a nice, benevolent front that would soften up the opposition. You must have seen them in action. Can you be totally unaware when you’re being used as a cover man? For years and years? Maybe he shuts his eyes to it and hopes for the best, maybe he really doesn’t see. Naturally he didn’t simply go back and say: Easy, old boy, you just walk in, the door’s on the latch, and they keep their key on top of the cupboard on the landing. Nothing like that. But he told him, all the same, consciously or unconsciously, because there’s no other way he could have known. And he came, he or somebody else for him. Somebody’d been here, and the letter was gone.”
“You didn’t ask Mrs. Harkness if she’d seen the caller? She must have been in, or the street door would have been fastened.”
“She was in, and I bet she knows who it was who called, but what’s the good of asking her? She’d simply deny any interest in my visitors, and get on her high horse and turn nasty, because she knows damn’ well I know she’s always got her kitchen door ajar snooping and listening. I couldn’t even begin to ask her.”
