by Roy Vickers
He turned up his collar and adopted a slouch—he would be safe from recognition unless he came face to face with an acquaintance. He reached the gate of Oakleigh more than half an hour before his usual time. He observed that the lights were on in the kitchen but nowhere else. Madge, evidently, was still at the vicarage. He must get in without the cook and housemaid hearing him.
He used his latchkey silently, hung up his coat and hat and crept into the drawing-room. He switched on the stove and put The Best of Wilcox on an occasional table where Madge would be sure to see it—it would serve as a diversion. Now and again he chuckled to himself, as if he were taking rather sly measures to prevent the club secretary from learning that a friend had broken one of the rules.
He was still alone at five to six when, straining his cars, he could hear the train coming in, then rumbling away. Dangerously soon, he heard Madge’s latchkey.
“Why, Arthur! You’ve beaten me! You must have galloped from the station!”
“I caught the earlier train—miserable day and not much doing at the office. I was dozing off when I heard your latchkey.”
She was facing the occasional table—staring at the moonbeams and cupids. She looked disappointed—held the book as if she resented its presence in the house.
“It’s not for you!” he laughed. “It’s a Wilcox anthology. Out today! I thought Aunt Agnes might like to have it.”
“Oh, Arthur, how kind of you!” Her voice was unsteady. With unwonted impulsiveness, she threw her arms round his neck. He was unaware that this was the first time she had volunteered a caress. “Let me take it to her tomorrow morning—please—I want to tell her how you thought of it for her.”
Almost reverently, she replaced the book on the little table.
“As you like, dear!” The daily help would arrive at Dalehurst about eight in the morning. The alarm would come, probably, while they were having breakfast.
After dinner Madge slipped away, to reappear in gum boots and mackintosh.
“I promised the vicar I’d take some things to Mrs. Gershaw. I shan’t be long.”
“It’s a filthy night—let me go for you.”
“No, thanks! There’s a lot of explanation and—and their telephone is out of order.”
As soon as his wife had left the house, Penfold became uneasy. It would be all right, he kept telling himself, provided she did not ‘run round’ to Dalehurst with that wretched book. Presently he remembered that she had put it back on the occasional table. He swung round in his chair. The book was no longer on the table.
Gershaw lived less than a hundred yards away. In half an hour Penfold’s nerve began to fail. He had endured an hour and five minutes before Margaret returned.
“What’s the matter, Madge?”
“Aunt Agnes is dead. Someone has killed her!”
“Nonsense! How d’you know? Have you been to Dalehurst?”
He had to repeat the question.
“Dr. Delmore saw me from his car and stopped. Just now!”
That was all right, then! Sympathy for a bereavement was indicated. He made a suitable exclamation, would have taken her in his arms.
“I want to be alone, Arthur.”
She walked past him, up the stairs to her room. She had never behaved like that before. The house suddenly seemed stiflingly hot. He opened the front door and stood in the porch—was there when the police came.
It was soon obvious that they had found nothing that need disturb him. They did not insist on seeing Madge, were content with his account of her movements and his own. They were even chatty, told him that Dr. Delmore, passing in his car, had seen the light in the drawing-room of Dalehurst and the french window swinging in the wind and had gone in to investigate. He had telephoned the police and, on the way home, had spotted Mrs. Penfold in the road and told her. There was, Penfold assured himself, nothing to worry about.
Chapter Four
At the inquest, Dr. Delmore testified that death had taken place between five and six o’clock and was due to heart failure caused by partial asphyxia resulting from strangulation. Margaret Penfold stated that she had lunched at Dalehurst, leaving at a quarter to three to go to the vicarage. Mrs. Blagrove had seemed to be in normal health, was expecting no visitor. She was confident that deceased had no personal enemy. Arthur Penfold was not called.
Police evidence revealed that the latch of the french window had been lifted with a penknife, and so clumsily that the woodwork had been chipped. The ground had been too wet to yield footprints of any value. The Coroner was encouraged to believe that an unpractised crook had assaulted deceased intending to make her disclose the whereabouts of valuables, and had then taken fright—there had been no robbery. The jury returned the obvious verdict and expressed gratification that the local police had been prompt in asking the aid of Scotland Yard.
On taking over, Chief Inspector Karslake ordered an intensive search of the drawing-room for some personal trace of the killer.
“She was on that settee when he attacked her. He must have been leaning well over. Try the folds of the upholstery—between the seat and the back.”
The result was disappointing. Between the folds of the upholstery were found three thimbles, two pairs of scissors, nine handkerchiefs and a book in its dust jacket: The Best of Wilcox.
“That’s too thick to have slipped down, sir—must’ve been pushed down.”
Karslake examined the book. A new copy—and there was nothing to distinguish it from any other copy in the edition. He opened it in the middle.
“Poetry!” He glanced back at the moonbeams and cupids. “Love stuff. And she was 64! Didn’t want to be caught at it. Check on the local booksellers—she probably bought it herself. Try those curtains.”
Karslake collected relevant gossip from the local superintendent, then set about eliminating the Penfolds. Margaret was easily disposed of because her movements were checkable up to six o’clock, when the cook and housemaid heard her talking to her husband in the drawing-room.
Penfold’s statement that he had arrived at Crosswater station at five three was confirmed by the ticket collector. His servants had not heard him come home, so could not deny that he might have come straight home from the station. This was a negative alibi which left the theoretical possibility that Penfold might have behaved as, in fact, he did behave, but there was no single item of evidence in support. Innocent persons, in the orbit of a murder, often had no alibi.
Moreover motive, in Penfold’s case, was apparently lacking. There was no known quarrel, nor conflict of interest. The Penfolds were financially comfortable. Mrs. Blagrove’s income had been derived from an annuity. To Mrs. Penfold she had left a sum in cash, her furniture and her house. But the house had been bought on mortgage and the whole estate would doubtfully yield fifteen hundred pounds.
After the inquest, the feeling of tension passed from Penfold. In so far as he thought clearly about his crime, he reasoned that the police would find evidence against him at once or not at all. For the rest, he had not planned to kill a fellow creature. He had been the unwitting instrument of fate, in whose hand he was soon able to detect a measure of poetic justice.
Madge’s general demeanour caused him no unease, though she cut short his not infrequent attempts to express condolence. She spoke hardly at all. However, ten days after the murder—on the evening of the day when Scotland Yard abandoned further work in the locality—she shook off her lethargy.
“I shall not go into mourning for Aunt Agnes,” she said, in the drawing-room after dinner. “It wouldn’t express anything to me.”
“As you please, dear.” His voice was low and a little funereal. “I think people will understand—you have been so brave!”
“Oh no! But I have woken up! The shock did it—the shock of learning that some frightened lout who wasn’t even a proper criminal had killed that dear, inoffensive woman. But the worst shock was finding that I myself—that I—instead of feeling grief-stricken, I felt as if a huge
weight had been lifted off my shoulders.
“The feeling of relief didn’t go away after a few minutes, as I thought it would. It stayed—it grew. For a few days I thought myself a fow kind of beast with no proper human feelings. Then I began to understand. I had let Aunt Agnes down for years—and myself—by always being so terrifically grateful.”
“But my dear!” protested Penfold. “That was a very charming trait in your character.”
“It wasn’t!” The blunt contradiction made him sure that she was still suffering from shock. She went on: “I let it turn me spiritually into a poor relation, incessantly grateful and ever so anxious to please. Something the vicar had said to me three or four years ago put me on the right track. I loved Aunt Agnes very deeply. I shall love her all my life and shall go on wishing she were alive so that I could tell her I wasn’t fair to her nor to myself—nor to my husband!”
“But I have no complaint, Madge, except perhaps—”
“It started our marriage on the wrong foot. I’m ready to start again—I mean, from the beginning—if you are, Arthur. Are you?”
“My darling, how can you ask!”
No, she did not want to be kissed, just then. She was so clear on that point that he felt a little ruffled—it was so unlike her. Almost undutiful.
“We’ll take each other on our merits,” she said and smiled. “I start at zero—you start one up. I mean—I want to tell you that I was—stirred—when you bought that book for poor Aunt Agnes. You’ll say it was a trifle. But it pointed in the right direction, Arthur dear.”
She was talking, he thought, a little incoherently, letting her tongue run away with her. But she was overwrought, poor child, and he would let it pass without comment.
“I need a change after what’s happened,” she went on. “We’ll have a second honeymoon, Arthur! I want us to shut up the house for a month and stay in a nice hotel in London. You can go to the office, if you have to, but in the evenings we’ll have fun.”
‘Fun’ sounded a little ominous, but this was no time to damp her spirits.
“A second honeymoon!” he echoed. “Just what we both need! I know of a quiet little place, one of the old City inns—”
“But I don’t want a quiet little place! I want the Savoy or the Waldorf. I know it will cost a huge amount but—listen! I saw the solicitor the other day. He says it will be about eighteen months before probate is granted, but in the meantime his firm is lending me five hundred pounds—in a proper business way, of course. I want you to take two hundred of that. More, if it isn’t enough.”
He would not take her money because, in the morning, she would modify her plans and they would not go to the Savoy. But they did go to the Savoy and he did take her money, though he earmarked funds to give it back to her when her ‘mad mood’ had passed.
Strangely, he caught something of the mad mood himself. They were both comparatively new to theatre going. And Madge discovered that, after the theatre, you could go to a cabaret. Indeed, there were remarkably few forms of entertainment in London which she failed to discover.
Most of the time he enjoyed himself, while in her company. She could be merry or quietly companionable—provocative sometimes, but never obedient. It was as if there had been some meaning in that high-falutin nonsense she had talked about herself—as if the death of Aunt Agnes had released a coiled spring in her nature. The ‘second honeymoon’ joke was taking on a queer kind of reality. To him it was a revolutionary conception of the relationship of husband and wife. But the month, he reminded himself, would pass. And the coiled spring would have uncoiled itself.
When he was apart from her it seemed a very long month—and a not altogether respectable one, at that—she expected him to treat her as if he had never kissed her before. At the end of the office day, he missed his railway journey and found himself counting the days to be endured before he would slip back into the groove that had become second nature—his way of life, in the protection of which he had killed Mrs. Blagrove.
When the holiday was over they parted at the hotel, he for the office, she for their home. Sitting in the train that evening, he visualised Madge listening for his footstep on the gravel path, opening the door before he could reach it. It did not happen. He let himself in and stopped short in the hall—he smelt the new paint before his eye had taken it in.
The hall, the staircase, the dining-room, the drawing-room—new paint, new wallpaper! He wandered aghast from one room to another. The Landseers had gone from the walls of the dining-room! The Holman Hunt in the drawing-room had been replaced with a modern original! Some of the furniture had been re-upholstered, some banished, and there was a new carpet in the drawing-room.
When she came in twenty minutes later, he was still struggling with his anger.
“Well! D’you like it?” she asked eagerly. She was entreating his approval.
“My dear, I am too astonished to form any opinion. Did it not occur to you, Madge, to consult me before making sweeping alterations in my house?”
“Is it your house, Arthur—or our house? Of course I oughtn’t to have done it on my own, but I had to take a risk! I had the feeling that everything in the house was practically as it had been when your parents married.”
“It was indeed! But what was wrong with it?”
“We have to give ourselves every chance, Arthur—or we shall be slipping back into the old ways.”
The last words rendered him speechless. Slipping back into the old ways was precisely what he desired. He could find no means of making her understand. They were in the dining-room. He strode to the sideboard. The tantalus was still there. He took out the whisky decanter—nearly dropped it when she spoke.
“Not whisky for me,” said Madge. “Gin and orange, please.”
That was another shock. Never before had she taken a drink in the home, except during a party, when she would make a glass of sherry last the whole time. He hesitated, then began to mix the gin. She had turned herself into a different kind of woman and intended to stay so. He was not angry now, only afraid.
“Let’s drink to our future, Arthur.”
“To our future!” And what sort of future? She no longer interpreted his wishes as her duties—she was compelling him to accept some give-and-take principle of her own. She expected her tastes to be consulted equally with his, and she demanded that he should woo her afresh for every caress.
With a sense of discovery he remembered how he had sat alone in the drawing-room that night, wondering whether she had ‘run round to Dalehurst with that wretched book.’ Until he had removed the doubt, there would be nothing for it but abject surrender.
“I’m afraid I’ve been a bit bearish over the decorations, darling. Sorry! Come and show me everything, and I’ll tell you how much I like it all.”
She was sweetness itself whenever he made an effort to please her—but the effort had to be successful! Not that she required to be pleased all the time—she was as ready to give as to take. It emerged, however, that the month of madness at the Savoy, shorn of its expensive indulgence, was to be the blueprint for their married life. A kind of marriage which he had never contemplated and did not want.
Most evenings, in the train, he would decide to put his foot down. But when he got out of the train—you could just see the gables of Dalehurst from the arrival platform—other considerations would arise. So he would say nothing when he found a cocktail party in progress at home—nor when Madge was absent, at some one else’s party—nor when she said she was sorry but she could never understand stories about business deals.
In June, five months after the Savoy holiday, he contrived to meet Gershaw as if by chance, when the latter was leaving his office for lunch, and enticed him to a drink.
“Madge seems to have got over her bereavement, but the fact is she has had a partial lapse of memory.” He brought in an anonymous psychiatrist. “Now, I do remember that she went out after dinner saying that she had a message for Mrs. Gershaw from the vic
ar and she must go in person, because your telephone was out of order. Can you possibly tell me, old man, how long she was with you?”
“Phew! That’s a bit of a contract. My wife let her in—I was in the drawing-room, with the door open. I heard them chattering away in the hall and presently I butted in to ask your wife to have a drink, but she said she couldn’t stay. I didn’t notice the time. Call it three minutes—five, if you like. Best I can do! But I can tell you definitely she’s wrong about our telephone. It was on the telephone that we heard that night about the—about Mrs. Blagrove.”
That was nearly all that Penfold wanted to know.
“Was Madge carrying anything, Gershaw?”
“Don’t think so—oh yes, a book, loosely wrapped in newspaper. The rain had softened the paper and I offered her a satchel. But she found she could get it into the pocket of her mack—I remember pulling the flap over it for her.”
So she would have had time to go to Dalehurst and get away, with a margin of minutes, before Dr. Delmore came on the scene. Penfold felt a profound unease and wished he had not tackled Gershaw. After all, there was no proof that she had gone to Dalehurst. The book was not necessarily the Wilcox book. And she might have gone to someone else with another message from the vicar. He decided to let the whole matter drop and found that he could not. The riddle travelled home with him every evening and even intruded on the outward journey, so that his attention would wander from the morning paper.
As he could not shake it off, he tried to stare it out of countenance. Let it be granted that Madge did go to Dalehurst and did know that her aunt was dead before Dr. Delmore stopped her in the road and told her. What did it matter? Was it to be supposed that she went through the open french window and, in a very few minutes—never mind the shock!—saw something, not seen by the highly trained detectives, which told her that he had killed Aunt Agnes? Utterly absurd! Therefore he would put it out of mind.
