Was It Murder?

by James Hilton

  “I still don’t quite follow.”

  “You will in a moment. The details of the plan were my own, but the conception—the broad outline—was agreed to by both Guthrie and myself. Briefly, our idea was to stand by, unknown to the lady, and watch what happened in a particular set of circumstances. To that end I composed the unique and original character of Geoffrey Lambourne, visited Oakington, saw our heroine, and found her particularly charming. But it was you whom I wanted to see most of all. I wanted to tell you all about my poor, imaginary brother. I must say I was rather proud of the way I carried it through, especially afterwards, when I noted its effect upon you.”

  “You mean that it was all a pack of lies that you told me?”

  “By no means. It was an impersonation founded to a large extent upon the truth. Lambourne really had left a will in Mrs. Ellington’s favour, and I’m pretty certain it was for the obvious reason. In fact, though I never met the fellow, I wouldn’t mind betting that my own interpretation of him was a good deal more accurate than Guthrie’s.”

  Guthrie interposed: “Quite probably. I never pretend to do that sort of thing. Psychological jerry-building doesn’t appeal to me temperamentally, though I admit it has its uses.”

  Cannell went on: “You see, Mr. Revell, the chief reason for not believing Lambourne guilty was the obvious fact that he wasn’t at all the sort of man to do such a thing. Not much of a reason for a chap like Guthrie, but you and I, perhaps, are human enough to let it weigh. At any rate, by telling you the sort of man Lambourne was, I very successfully convinced you that he couldn’t have been the criminal, didn’t I?”

  “You mean that you wanted me to reach that conclusion?”

  “Oh, much more than that. I wanted you to begin an entirely new attempt to solve the Oakington riddle on your own. You did so. And all the time I wanted you to become more and more friendly with the pretty lady. You did that, too. I wouldn’t have minded if you’d even begun to suspect her a little—in fact, part of my Geoffrey Lambourne impersonation was aimed to lead you gently in that direction. But it didn’t work—and, anyhow, everything else went according to plan, so that one little point hardly mattered. The great thing was that sooner or later she should get to know that you were investigating the case on your own, and that the whole thing wasn’t finished with, as she had supposed. I guessed she’d play Delilah to your Samson, and a particularly fascinating Delilah, too. Guthrie’s not so sure—her style of looks doesn’t appeal to him. He and I, of course, were watching all the time. We had our eye on her as she became more and more worried lest her earnest young lover should stumble accidentally on the truth. Rather refined torture for her, when you come to think of it, but not more than she thoroughly deserved. Night after night she knew that you were sitting up in your room, pondering over the problem to which she alone was the answer. You saw her looking pale and worried, and you thought in your innocence that her husband was the cause of it. But he wasn’t—it was you yourself.”

  “Which was what you had intended?”

  “Precisely. We knew her weak spot, and when you know that about your enemy, the battle’s half won. Her weak spot was FEAR. Even when she was in an absolutely secure position, she couldn’t put away from her the terror of being discovered. Twice, under the stress of this fear, she had given way to panic, and Guthrie and I were quite certain she would do it a third time. We were watching and waiting for it, and in the end—though not in the way we had foreseen—it came.”

  Revell gulped down what was left of his brandy. “But I don’t like it,” he cried, thickly. “I’m beginning to see your game, and I don’t like it a bit. It seems to me like damned, dirty work. Why couldn’t you have stayed on at Oakington and watched her openly? If she was so terrified of me, surely she’d have been still more terrified of you?”

  Cannell shook his head. “Think—we were detectives,” he said quietly. “We had absolutely no locus standi at Oakington except as servants of the law. If we had stayed, we should have had to arrest somebody— we should have had to make out a case—and there WAS no case. Don’t forget that. How could two detectives foist themselves indefinitely on a public school merely to terrify someone against whom there wasn’t a shadow of legal evidence? Impossible, my dear boy, and I’m sure you can see it was. It was a clear case for private enterprise—for the gifted amateur —and particularly for the amateur who was an Old Boy of the School and whom the Headmaster could appoint as a temporary secretary without attracting undue attention.”

  “Good heavens—you mean that Roseveare was in the game, too?”

  “He helped us, yes. It was necessary.”

  Revell glared at his two companions with eyes that grew more angry with every second. “I see,” he exclaimed, not too coherently, for he had drunk quite enough. “I was a decoy, eh? You couldn’t get any evidence yourself, so you used me to pull the irons out of the fire for you!” His face was flushed; the drink he had taken gave his rage a certain dream-like quality of which he was curiously aware as he continued. “I suppose, since you couldn’t prove the other murder, you rather hoped she’d murder me to give you a chance of proving that?”

  Cannell shook his head sadly. “My dear Revell, that is unjust to us. We had no idea you were in personal danger—we had no idea that her third moment of panic would take the form it did.”

  “It was your letter to me that sent things off with a bang,” interposed Guthrie. “Fortunately I was keeping an eye on your room that night— I’d seen her in it with you a bit before the thing happened. Then when I saw some vague person leaning out of the dormitory window towards yours I guessed something was wrong and I raced up as quick as I could. You owe your life to that bit of spying, Revell.”

  “And after all,” said Cannell, “you weren’t hurt—though it was only by the greatest of good fortune, I know—”

  A slow, dull pain was tearing through Revell’s head. “Not hurt, eh? NOT HURT? To be fooled all the time—to—to have you two prying and spying—oh, damnation—it’s more than I can stand—I’m going—I’m going—” He lurched up from his chair, spilling the remains of the coffee and upsetting the brandy glasses. His head throbbed; there was a monstrous dark blur before his eyes; he had been a fool, he reflected, to have that second brandy.

  The two detectives were helping him, one on either side. There was a halt in the restaurant, where Guthrie paid the bill, even for the cocktail that Revell was supposed to have stood him, for Revell was far beyond remembrance of such a detail. He was, in fact, barely sober enough to walk the dozen yards or so across the restaurant to the street-door.

  Out on the pavement, while a uniformed porter went for a taxi, he heard Guthrie saying: “By the way, Revell, this Oakington affair’s going to make the devil of a stir when it comes on at the Assizes, you know. A Fleet Street friend of mine asked me this morning if I’d do a few articles about it after the trial, but of course I had to refuse—not professional, you know. But I mentioned you—cracked you up no end—said you were absolutely in the thick of it and knew the dame from A to Z. So I wouldn’t be surprised if you hear something pretty soon. ‘Mrs. Ellington as I Knew Her’ —that sort of thing, you know. And if you take my advice, you won’t accept a penny under a hundred quid for the job—they’ll give it you if you stand out firm enough.”

  And he heard Cannell saying: “Don’t think too hardly of us. We did the only thing that was to be done, and in the only way it could be done. You helped us tremendously—it all, in the end, depended on you.”

  He felt them shaking his hand and hoisting him into a taxi; he heard the door bang to; then, with a sideways lurch as the cab started, his head and face lolled on to the unpleasantly-tasting cushions.

  He was in a drowsy coma when the cab pulled in at the Islington kerbside. The driver left his perch, opened the door, and with cheerful good humour wakened him and helped him out. “It’s all right, sir,” he said, as Revell began to fumble in his pockets. “You don’t owe me nothin’. Th
e other gentlemen made that all right. Shall I ring the bell, sir, or do you think you can manage?… Very good, sir, thank you. Mind the step…”

  Two minutes later Revell was safely sprawled in his favourite arm-chair. Mrs. Hewston was out, enjoying her weekly pilgrimage to the grave of the late Mr. Hewston. There was no occupant of the house save the large cat that purred a welcome about his legs.

  He was calmer now, and inclined to vary his self-pity with a touch of cynicism. Yes, it had all been the very devil of a business, but a hundred quid for a series of articles was good money, and there was the Head’s cheque for twenty-five, too—not ungenerous for three weeks of pretended secretaryship… Mrs. Ellington as he knew her, eh? Well, well, perhaps he could make it readable. He could describe her dark, lustrous eyes, her pert little nose, the queer little romp of laughter that she had sometimes, her soft yielding kiss… ah, no, no, he could hardly go as far as that. Not in newspaper articles, at any rate; but it might be worked into his epic poem, somehow.

  She was, and he still thought so, the most charming, the cleverest, and altogether the most devilish female he had ever known, and he knew that in later life he would always thrill at the thought that he had almost been murdered by her. What a brain she had had, and what a personality, and what powers of acting and imagination! If only she had turned such qualities to good account instead of bad—if, for example, she had used them to run a West-End beauty parlour or to stand for Parliament…

  But he felt himself becoming trite; such reflections, perhaps, were best left to provincial J.P.s. Later in the day, when he was less drunk, he came to the sudden and startling decision that he would, after all, join the New Guinea expedition. He would write his Mrs. Ellington articles beforehand, and then, gorged with gold, set out for the great open spaces where a man could live a man’s life and all that sort of thing. What was more, the youthful hero of his epic poem, surfeited with the tribulations of the world, should join a precisely similar expedition and for a precisely similar reason. He and his author had both, for the time being, done with civilisation. More particularly, even, they had done with women. Women were…

  Needless, however, to follow the matter into too intense detail. Time, the Great Healer, with the help of a strong gin-and-tonic, had restored considerable ravages by midnight; indeed, it was round about then that Revell completed a stanza which expressed, through the narrative experience of his hero, what he believed to be the exact truth of the matter. He thought of Mrs. Ellington, no longer with bitterness, but with a tranquil, almost an ennobling sadness of mind and heart…

  …And when he thought of her, a strange emotion Linked her mind with lands he might explore; She was the mystic continent and ocean, The far-flung island and the distant shore; And in a dream he drank the magic potion, Sweeter than wine, that made his spirit soar Till he was Cook, Columbus, and Cabot, Frobisher, Livingstone—in fact, the lot!

  * * *

  THE END