by Ellis Peters
“Yes?” said George. It was not the precise opening he had expected, but it was apposite enough; there was no getting away from the gloves.
“You know what I mean. Those gloves of Leslie’s were O.K., but somebody must have had some pretty fouled-up gloves to dispose of after that night, mustn’t they? The bottle was plastered right to the cork. And I could tell, the way you all pounced on even the possibility of those old painting gloves being the ones, that that was what you were looking for and hoping for. I mean, anything else the murderer had on might be marked, but his gloves definitely would, and he definitely was wearing gloves. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. So?”
“Well, you never did say, but was Kitty wearing gloves that night?” He didn’t ask it with any sense that the answer was going to prove anything, he wasn’t as simple as that. But it was a necessary part of the development of his ideas.
“Not indoors,” said George at once. “But she could very well have had some in the car. When she was dressed up for the evening she’d probably wear them for driving.”
“Yes, but you’ve never found any stained gloves among her things.” He didn’t ask, he asserted, waiting with sharp eyes levelled for a reaction, and whatever he got satisfied him. “Well, bearing this glove question in mind, I’ve been thinking exactly what happened that evening. If I’ve got it right, she dashed out of the barn to run home, and in a few hundred yards she ran out of petrol. There she is in a panic, she thinks she’s done something dreadful, injured him badly, maybe even fatally, she’s got to get away, she daren’t call a garage or anything. She runs to the telephone box and calls up some friend she can trust, says where she is, says come and bring me some petrol, a can, or even a tube to siphon it, anything, just to get me home. Don’t say a word to anyone, she says, and come quickly. I’ve done something terrible. And she blurts out all about it; she’d be in such a state she wouldn’t be able to help it. Now suppose this person she calls has good reason to want Armiger dead. He might not ever have thought of doing anything about it until now, but now it suddenly strikes him, this is it, this is for me! There’s Armiger knocked cold in the barn, a sitting target if only he stays out until I can get round there, and there’s somebody else all lined up to take the blame. I don’t say he’s absolutely made up his mind to kill him, but it’s just too good to miss having a close look at the set-up. Obviously there are risks, he may only have been knocked out for a few minutes, he may be conscious by the time this fellow gets there, he may even have gone. But what is there lost if he is? If he’s gone, that’s it. If he’s up off the floor and hugging his headache all you need do is fake concern, help him to his car, and go off and reassure Kitty. And if Armiger’s still lying where Kitty left him, and still dead to the world, well, there you are, a chance in a million.
“So he goes all right, he goes like a shot off a shovel, not to Kitty but to the barn. And sure enough, there’s Armiger still out cold, and the chance in a million has come off.”
“Go on,” said George quietly, studying the intent face that stared back at him across the table. However hotly they both denied it, there must be something in this likeness Bunty was always finding between them, especially when they annoyed her. It was like having a mirror held up to his own mind. Often enough before, when the same interest had preoccupied them both, he had found Dominic hard on his heels at every check, like an echo; but now he was no longer sure who was the echo and who the initiator. “Go on, let’s see what you can do with the details.”
“I can fit them in,” said Dominic. “All of them. This fellow’s all keyed up for action, but he hasn’t really believed in it until then. No weapon, you see, no real preparations. That would be like tempting providence. He’s wearing gloves simply because he’s been driving on a coldish night. Now he takes the chance that’s really been offered to him at last. The minute he comes in at the door and sees Armiger still lying there, he grabs at the nearest weapon he sees, the plaster statuette from the alcove just on the right of the door. I heard you say what they were like, and how surprisingly light and hollow they turned out to be. He snatches it up to brain Armiger with that, but heaves it away again in disgust on the spot because it’s such a silly, light thing it couldn’t brain a mouse. It smashes against the wall, and he rashes up the stairs and grabs the bottle instead, and lets fly with that again and again until it smashes, too. And then he comes to his senses with Armiger pretty obviously dead, and he’s got to get rid of the traces. Especially the gloves. And quickly, that’s the point. Within a few hundred yards of where he is he’s got to jettison those gloves. Because, you see, he’s got to go on to Kitty and get her off the scene as he promised, otherwise whoever doesn’t connect him with it when the murder comes out, she will. The whole beauty of the set-up is that nobody shall know. He can afford to let the police find their own way to Kitty. He can’t afford to leave her or her car where they are, and have her picked up in circumstances so tight that she’ll have to come out with the whole story, and say: ‘I called so-and-so to come and help me, and he swore he would, but he never came.’ Because even if that didn’t give her ideas, it would certainly give them to you people, wouldn’t it?”
“We shouldn’t be likely to miss the implications,” agreed George.
“He may not actually have planned on forcing Kitty to take the blame. If the chips fell that way, there she was. But probably he hadn’t anything against her, and rather preferred that she should get away with it, too, as long as he was all right, of course. Anyhow, he had to go through with the rescue part of it as though he’d rushed straight to her. This part in the barn can’t have taken many minutes, he wasn’t long delayed. So he’d got to get rid of the gloves. He’d got to meet Kitty, talk to her, handle the petrol can. He couldn’t afford to leave blood about in the wrong places, or let Kitty see it and take alarm. He daren’t put the gloves in his pocket or anywhere in his own car, they’d be certain to leave marks. So you see, what it boils down to is that he’d got to jettison them or hide them somewhere before he met Kitty.”
“You have thought it out, haven’t you?” said George. “Go on, how does he get rid of them?”
“There’s not too much scope and not too much time, is there? He hadn’t time to go far from the road, he had to stay out of sight of Kitty. He lets himself out of the barn carefully, closing the door with his left hand, because that glove wouldn’t be so saturated, it might only be splashed here and there. I don’t think he’d leave the gloves anywhere inside, even if there was a hiding-place, because of the door handle. Better smears of blood on it than fingerprints. Then he peels off the gloves, letting them turn inside-out as he pulls them off, and probably rolling the right one inside the left, to get the cleanest outer surface he can. I’ve been over the ground, there’s a drain grid close to the back of the barn, that’s tempting, but too obvious, because unless there was a strong flow of water going down, and there wasn’t, gloves would lodge under the grid, and anyhow it’s the first place the police would look, , , “
“The first place they did look. After the barn itself, of course. Go on.”
“Then there’s just the road, the hedge-banks and ditches, and the hanging wood opposite. Seems obvious, but I should think it takes an awful lot of men an awful long time to search the whole of a wood that size, or even just the strip alongside the road, because he hadn’t time to go very far inside. And all the ground there is so covered with generations of leaf-mould, they could hunt and hunt, and still might miss what they were looking for. Anyhow, that’s what I should have done, rushed up into the wood and shoved them somewhere down among the mould. And then he goes on to Kitty’s rescue, arriving all steamed up and concerned for her, dumps the petrol in her tank for her, and tells her to go home and not worry, she’s making a fuss about nothing, the old fool’s sure to be all right. And Kitty, you said she was wearing a dress with a wide skirt, she’s so relieved to see him she keeps close to him all the time they’re th
ere together, and her skirt brushes against his trouser legs, where the blood’s splashed, and a drop falls from his sleeve on her shoe. In the dark there neither of them would know. And that’s it, all your evidence. Have I missed anything out?”
George had to own that he had not; he had accounted for everything.
“You’re quite sure he must have killed Armiger before he sent Kitty home, and not after?”
“Well, of course! He wouldn’t stay unconscious for ever. If this chap had gone first to Kitty I doubt if he’d ever have had the impetus or the nerve left to go back and look if opportunity was still waiting for him.”
He had seemed utterly sure of himself until he came to the end, but when George sat thoughtfully silent he couldn’t stand the strain. He’d poured out all his hopes into that exposition, and he was trembling when it was done. His eyes, covertly hanging upon George’s face, pleaded for a sign of encouragement, and the brief silence unnerved him. If he’d only known it, George was still staring into a mirror.
“Well, say something!” burst out Dominic, his voice quaking with tension. “Damn you, you just sit there! You don’t care if they send Kitty to prison for life, as long as you get a conviction. You don’t care whether she did it or not, that doesn’t matter. You’re not doing anything!”
George, coming out of his abstraction with a start, took his son by the scruff of the neck and shook him, gently enough to permit them both to pretend that the gesture was a playful one, hard enough to indicate that it wasn’t. The flow stopped with a gasp; in any case the onslaught had shocked Dominic a good deal more than it had George.
“That’s enough of that. You hold your horses, my boy.”
“Well, I know, I’m sorry! But you do just sit there! Aren’t you going to give me anything back for all that?”
“Yes, a thick ear,” said George, “if you start needling me. If you’d been anywhere near that wood of yours since noon to-day you’d have found it about as full of policemen as it’ll hold, all looking for your gloves, as they’ve been doing in various places, more or less intensively, ever since we were sure there must have been gloves involved. Maybe we’re not as sure as you that they’ll be in a logical place, but we’re just as keen as you are to find them. We even have open minds, believe it or not, on such minor points as whether a few small smears of blood on the hem of a dress are really adequate, in the circumstances. You’re not the only one who can connect, my lad. We’d even like to know who it was she called that night. You be working on that one, and let me know when you’ve got the answer.”
He was aware, by the sharpness and intelligence of the silence that followed, that if he had not said too much he had been understood too well. Dominic resettled his collar with great dignity, studying his father intently from the ambush of a composed and inscrutable face.
So it’s like that, said the bright, assuaged eyes. I see!. They may be looking for the gloves to clinch their case, but you’re not, you’re looking for them to break it. You don’t believe she did it! What did I tell you? I knew you’d come round to my way of thinking in the end. He was understandably elated by the knowledge, comforted by not being alone any longer in his faith, but there was something else going on behind the carefully sustained calm of that freckled forehead, something less foreseeable and a good deal more disturbing. He was glad to have an ally, and yet he fixed upon him a look that was far from welcoming. He saw too much, recognised his own sickness with too sharp a sensitivity in someone else, and most penetratingly of all in his father. He’d longed for an ally, but he didn’t want a rival.
“I am working on it,” said Dominic deliberately. “What’s more, I think I’m on to the answer.” But he did not say that he was going to share it, with his father or anyone. Saint George had sighted another banner on the horizon. It was going to be a race for the dragon.
CHAPTER XII.
ON MONDAY MORNING, about an hour before Alfred Armiger was escorted to the grave, against all predictions, by a grim-faced and sombre son, Kitty Norris made a formal appearance of about two minutes in court, and was remanded in custody for a week.
She sat quietly through the brief proceedings, without a smile or a live glance for anyone, even Raymond Shelley who appeared for her. Docilely she moved, stood, sat when she was told, like a child crushed by the burden of a strange place and unknown, powerful, capricious people. Her eyes, hollowed by the crying and the sleeplessness which were both past now, had swallowed half her face. They looked from enemy to enemy all round her, not hoping for a gap in the ranks, but not actively afraid. She had surrendered herself to the current that was carrying her, and whatever blows it dealt her she accepted mutely, because there was no help for it. It was heartbreaking to look at her. At least, thought George, who had brought her to the court, Dominic was spared this.
In the few minutes she spent in court the news had gone round, and there was a crowd waiting to see her come out, and one lone cameraman who erupted in her face before George could shelter her. He ought to have known that Kitty Norris, whose clothes and cars and dates had always made news, couldn’t escape the headlines even on this first unheralded appearance in her new role. For the first time the lovely, hapless face came back to life. She shrank back into George’s arm, frightened and abashed, mistaking raw curiosity for purposeful malignance. He half lifted her into the car, but even then the eyes and the murmurs followed her, gaping alongside the windows as she was driven away.
“Why should they be like that?” asked Kitty, shivering. “What have I ever done to them?”
“They don’t mean any harm, dear,” said the matron comfortably, “they’re just nosy. You get used to it.”
There ought to be something better to say to her than that, thought George, suffering acutely from the brushing of her sleeve against his, and the agonising memory of her warmth on his heart; and yet this queer comfort did seem to calm her. She expected nothing from him, and it was not upon his shoulder that she let her head rest as she was taken back to prison.
“You’ll have to brace up, you know, Kitty,” he said as he helped her out of the car, himself unaware until he had said it that her name was there on his lips waiting to slip out so betrayingly.
“Why?” said Kitty simply, looking through him into a bleak distance.
“Because you owe it to yourself, and to your friends who believe in you.”
The cords of his throat tightened up, outraged that he could ask them to give passage to such unprofessional sentiments. And he told himself afterwards, nursing the smart of being misunderstood, that he deserved no better than he got. For Kitty smiled suddenly, affectionately, shortening her range so that for a moment she really seemed to see him. Then she said in a gentle voice: “Oh, yes, I mustn’t let Dominic down. You tell him I’m coming out fighting when the bell goes. With him in my corner, how can I lose?”
Well, thought George grimly as he drove back towards the centre of Comerbourne, that’s properly accounted for me. The invisible man, that’s all I am, an office, not a person, and an inimical office at that. And it hurt. He knew he was making a fool of himself, but that only made the smart worse. Jealousy is always humiliating; jealousy of your own young son is an indignity hardly to be borne.
The very soreness of his own nerves, and the small, nagging sense of guilt that frayed the edges of his consciousness, made him very affectionate and attentive to Bunty, and that in itself was dangerous, for Bunty had known him a long time, and was a highly intelligent woman in her artfully unpretentious way. But long familiarity had made George so unwary with her that even his occasional subtleties tended to be childishly innocent in their cunning. She loved him very much, and her security of tenure was unshakable.
After the long, fretting days with so little accomplished George would wake out of his first shallow, uneasy sleep to the ache of his own ineffectiveness, and reach for Bunty not as a consolation prize, but as the remedy for what ailed him; and she would open her arms and respond to him, half awake
, even half awake knowing that she was called upon to be two women, and sure she could without extending herself be all the women George would ever want or need. It was mostly in the middle of the night that he confided with the greatest ease and benefit. It was in the early hours of Wednesday morning that he told her about his precariously based conviction that the person Kitty had called to her aid on the night of the crime was in all probability the murderer of Alfred Armiger.
“But wouldn’t she have suspected as much herself, afterwards?” asked Bunty. “She wouldn’t keep silent about it, surely, if she thought it over and came to that conclusion herself? No earthly reason why she should protect a murderer, even if he did bring her some petrol.”
“Of course not, but naturally she must have called on some person she knew intimately and could trust absolutely. In real life nobody treats a murder investigation like an impersonal puzzle in a book, and suspects everyone who had an opportunity or a motive; to some extent you’re bound to go by what you know of them. There are people it could be and people it couldn’t be. Your family, your friends, they’re immune. This man was immune. If you were in a hole, and you yelled to me for help and I came, and afterwards there was a body around to be accounted for, would it enter your head that I might be the killer?”
“Never in a million years,” said Bunty. “But there’s only one of you for me. I might look sideways at almost anyone else.”
“What, Dom, for instance? Or old Uncle Steve?”
She thought of her bumbling old sheep of a paternal uncle and giggled. “Darling, don’t be funny! That sweet old fool!”
“Or Chris Duckett, say?”
“No, I see what you mean. The only people you’d consider letting in on your scrape would be people you couldn’t possibly suspect of anything bad. But if someone actually put it into your head afterwards, mightn’t you just begin to wonder? Have you put it to Kitty that way?”
