by Roy Vickers
“The fire broke out between the ground floor and the basement.” The formula for safety was to speak as if to a person other than Marion. “If my cigarette fell on the floor it is possible that I caused that fire.”
Marion was at a loss. The fire story, however true in itself, did not account for that tortoiseshell comb which she had found under his handkerchiefs, when she was distributing the laundry yesterday. She had examined it—found the Hoffmeister mark, which meant that it was as costly as it looked. This morning the comb was no longer there.
“I wish you had mentioned all this at the time—if it’s the fire and nothing else that’s worrying you. I can tell you positively that you did not cause that fire.”
“That, my dear, is an extremely silly remark. You cannot conceivably know anything about it.”
“Can’t you see it, Peter? It’s the corvette-and-braces story all over again. That’s why you simply must consult a psychiatrist. After all, if you’d been wounded and the wound was giving you trouble now, you’d at least ask an ordinary doctor if he could do something about it.”
“So my anxiety for the widow and the child seems to you a mental disease which could be cured by an expert!”
Marion shrugged and left him. He chuckled with self-satisfaction. He had talked about the fire in such a way that nothing had happened except that she had gone off to bed in a huff, which she would have forgotten by morning. He had shown that he could trust himself. There would be no harm in a nightcap.
That night, after he had got into bed and turned out the light, he resisted the impulse to get up and take a last look round the flat. He must play fair with Marion. For as long as they lived under the same roof he would keep his word to her.
The next morning he found that the reading lamp in the sitting-room had been left burning. So Marion was wrong! It did happen, sometimes. He felt excitement creeping over him, giving the illusion that he could feel the blood moving in his veins.
With a glance in the direction of Marion’s room, he shut himself in the sitting-room and locked the door. He stood with his back pressed against the door, contemplating the faint glow from the reading lamp. Net result, waste of a few pence. Net result, Sebastopol House gutted and a mild-eyed widow whose image could never be banished. Generically, the two events were identical.
He crossed the room on tip-toe and switched off the lamp. He walked back to the door and turned the handle, without result. He blinked, turned the handle a second time. Then his eye fell on the key. He turned it and opened the door.
“Now, why in heaven’s name did I lock myself in this room?”
He could not remember why he had entered the room—could not remember what he had done after he locked the door. He had a slight headache. Too much whisky overnight—which, he decided, explained the whole thing.
He resumed his morning routine, as if nothing had happened.
At the end of a month he again journeyed to Gormer’s Green and again drank tea with Mrs. Morprill. He made the acquaintance of her daughter, who was, he thought, too shy for her age. He succeeded in drawing her into an enthusiastic account of a fortunate neighbour’s television set. The next day he sent the child a set. To her mother he wrote: ‘I respect your decision, though I regret it. A toy is not “help” in the sense of our conversation. I hope you will allow Maggie to keep the set. Children can love but they cannot mourn as we do.’
The month after that, he secured Mrs. Morprill’s permission to provide Maggie with a bicycle. Through the child he was hoping to weaken the resistance of the mother. He would rake over their small talk for fragments with which to build up a picture of their life without Morprill.
His home life, seen in outline only, would have suggested that the curtain had fallen on the first Act of their marriage. In the interval, they were stretching a little, looking about and doing their best to entertain each other.
Marion was frankly competing with the shadowy rival whose existence she had inferred from the tortoiseshell comb. That expensive trifle, she decided, was not connected with the nonsense he had talked about the fire. Whoever the girl might be, she was not making much progress. Peter was spending nearly as much time in home activities as before.
For his part, Peter believed that he had fallen out of love with her for no reason that could be summoned to his consciousness. Something had taken the place of his feelings as a husband. Some strong but indefinable attachment made him hurry home in the evenings, as if he could not bear to be without her.
In a sense, he had turned her into a stranger—a woman of whom he knew little except that she had a repertory of pretty tricks. She would chatter breezily about their friends and the trifles of their very comfortable existence. She dressed brilliantly. With colour and line tempered to occasion she could draw his eye and renew his sense of discovery of her. He incited her to deploy her attractions. He was fascinated by his own sensitiveness to her charms—a fascination tinged with guilt, as if he had no right to be charmed by his wife.
The smoothness of this somewhat dangerous relationship was imperilled when he suddenly produced the tortoiseshell comb. It was an evening in July, the day before her birthday. The comb was in its sheath, unwrapped, exactly as she had seen it under his handkerchiefs. He dropped it into her lap.
So the shadowy rival had sent it back!
“What—what is it?” Her tone might have meant anything.
“A comb for your purse—it swivels out of that sheath.”
She gazed at the comb without touching it.
“It’s not the birthday present proper—that’s why you’re getting it tonight.” Her restraint made him suspect that he had bungled somehow. “As a matter o’ fact, I bought that for you some months ago. I actually brought it home—then took it back to the office, for some reason.” He frowned. “I can’t think why.”
“Peter! Was it at the time you were so worried about that fire?”
“Yes, it was.” The fire and his own concern with it were crystal clear and always would be. He remembered coming home—taking the comb out of his note-case—
“Darling, it’s exactly what I wanted!” The shadowy rival was proved to be but a shadow. She enlarged on the theme of the profound usefulness of a tortoiseshell purse-comb. Her sudden enthusiasm surprised without interesting him.
Why had he not given her the comb at the time? The fire was irrelevant. While she prattled, he tried hard to remember why he had put the comb in the office safe. He had lost the intuitive fear that, in certain circumstances, he might not be able to hold his own demons on the leash.
The leash was torn from his hand by the comparatively trivial accident of his car being stolen—more accurately ‘temporarily removed from the possession of its owner’, as it was found abandoned and undamaged after a couple of hours.
The next morning brought perfect summer weather. It was traditional that he should make a holiday of her birthday—traditional also that they should bathe in the sea at Honsworth Wood. They set off in the car after breakfast, packing a picnic basket.
Shortly before midday he was running the car off the coastal road on to the strip of grass that gave on to the ‘wood’—a score or so of stunted trees at the cliff head, a landmark on a bleak coastline. The ‘ritual’ of parking, of which she had so often complained, consisted of altering the leads from the distributor so that the engine could not fire a complete cycle. He was about to lift the bonnet, but abandoned his intention when he heard her laugh.
“I’m getting better, aren’t I?” His good temper was genuine because he had forgotten that he had ever resented her objection to the system.
“You’ve practically cured yourself and I think you’re marvellous.”
They undressed in the car, put on sand-shoes, passed through the trees. At the head of the cliff, which was not sheer, was a wooden bench which had probably never been sat on. A rough track led to the beach.
“I’m bound to get cold before you do, Peter.”
“No
shirking. Button that cap up properly.”
It all seemed very natural and jolly. On their honeymoon he had insisted on her swimming instead of pottering. Tradition was observed, but in five minutes she was out of breath, and left the water. He saw her climbing the track, watched her disappear through the trees. Some five minutes later she was sitting on the bench, still in her swimming suit, combing her hair. By this time, he was getting cold himself.
When he reached the cliff-head, she patted the bench.
“Let’s sit here for a bit!”
“Not without my beer. I’ve been doing some work.”
“Then bring the basket back with you and let’s have lunch here, just as we are. I’m frightf’ly hungry.”
“Rightho!” he answered over his shoulder. Idly she watched him, admiring the youthfulness of his form—he moved like an athlete of twenty. Minutes passed. When he came back through the trees, the springiness had gone out of him. And he was empty handed.
“You’ve forgotten the lunch basket,” she shouted when he was some thirty feet away. He made no answer and did not quicken his pace.
“I thought we were going to have lunch here,” she said, as he reached the bench.
He stared down at her.
“The car has been stolen,” he said.
“What! It can’t have been! I went to it when I left you, because I got my hair wet—there was no one about then.” When her imagination had grasped the fact, she wailed: “With our clothes and everything! What on earth are we going to do?”
She wondered why he did not answer. He was usually calm and helpful when anything went wrong. His eyes were still on hers, but they were not focusing her.
“You can’t stand there mooning about it,” she grumbled. “You must do something.”
His eyes came into focus, looked at her as if with sudden recognition.
“Now, you know! It does happen—sometimes. What you don’t know is that the lamp in the sitting-room has been left burning—sometimes.”
“Peter!” she screamed. “Snap out of it, Peter! Let go of me!”
“The corvette was sunk. The fire—”
The fire-gong sounded in his brain. He was conscious enough to know that he was in ecstasy and that he was killing Marion, whom he hated.
“Before we have it fair copied, Mr. Curwen, I’ll run over the main points. When you last saw your wife alive, you were in the water and she was at the cliff head, proceeding in the direction of the car?”
“Correct!” Curwen was sitting at county headquarters, a police overcoat covering his swimming suit. “She had been in the water with me for about five minutes, when she said she had had enough.”
“About ten minutes later,” continued the superintendent, “you left the water and followed the course taken by your wife, expecting to find her waiting for you in the car? Your car was missing? You caught sight of the body of your wife lying close to where the car had been parked and partly concealed by a clump of ferns? You perceived that your wife was dead, and noticed marks on her throat suggesting to you that she had been strangled? You carried the body into the so-called wood and partly covered it with ferns, after which you waited in the road and, after a short lapse of time, stopped a motor cyclist and asked him to call the police? It is your belief that deceased was killed by the person or persons who stole the car?”
“I don’t quite like ‘belief,’ Superintendent. I think I said ‘guess.’ What about making it ‘inference’?”
Presently his car was brought in by the Brighton police, who had found it in a side street. The police handed him his clothes and the note-case—which, as he had explained, was concealed on a special little shelf under the dash—but would not allow him to touch the car.
Beyond this, the police made no restrictions. There were no signs that the murder had been planned. The theory that a husband is the first suspect when a wife has been murdered was weakened by the theft of the car, which could not have been anticipated. Curwen took an afternoon train to London.
Curwen assessed his position much as a speculator might assess his own crash on the Stock Exchange. On a different Exchange, Curwen had crashed and now adjudged himself a moral bankrupt—a conception that held a ray of hope. A bankrupt could qualify for discharge and rebuild his credit. He would so live that, at the end of his life, he would have caused more happiness than unhappiness. He assumed, with honest indifference to his own peril, that it would be impossible to convict him. In London, he took the underground to Gormer’s Green.
He told Mrs. Morprill that his wife had been murdered, giving her the version he had given the police. He spoke in tragic terms, without hypocrisy, because he saw the death of Morprill and the death of Marion as a single tragedy.
“There is a certain sameness in the way you and I have been treated by life,” he said. “In a little while, I hope you will feel as I do—that is, I hope we shall be seeing each other more frequently.”
The mild eyes looked troubled, as if they understood too much.
“I don’t really know what to say to that, Mr. Curwen.” For the first time since he had known her, she was groping for words. “I think—I’m sure—I ought to confess that I haven’t been quite straightforward with you. About my husband, I mean.”
He was badly startled.
“I simply can’t imagine your being anything but straightforward,” he said.
“It was your kindness and all the things you’ve done for Maggie that sort of tied my hands. First, it was you never saying anything about Henry when I tried to coax you. Then, the last time you were here, I spoke about him being a tall man, and before you left, I spoke about him being a short man. And you won’t mind my saying it now, Mr. Curwen, but I don’t believe you know which he was. I don’t believe you ever knew him.”
“Then you’ll have to think up some reason why I should seek you out and tell you lies about my having a moral obligation to him.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been anything Henry did for you, could it! And I never thought you were telling lies, Mr. Curwen.” She paused, then forced herself to continue: “When Maggie was thanking you for the bicycle, I watched you looking at her. And then I sort of caught you looking at me in the same way. It’s because we stand for the same thing to you.”
“And you know why?”
When she answered she avoided his eye.
“I only want to say that I shall always think of you as a good man, Mr. Curwen. It’s little enough to say, but I do hope it will be a help to you. And, please, we don’t want you to give us any more things. I promise that, if I’m ever unable to look after Maggie, I’ll ask your help, for Henry’s sake. And—we’d better not see each other, though I do hope you won’t think it’s because I’m ungrateful or—or anything like that.”
In the underground, he tried to re-shape the theory of working for a discharge from moral bankruptcy. What could one do if one’s mild-eyed creditors refused payment? He was still seeking the answer when he reached his flat, to find the local superintendent waiting outside the front door.
“On the back seat of your car,” said the superintendent, when they were inside the flat, “was a lady’s swimming cap, wet on the inside, and a towel, part of which was damp. Analysis returns sea water in both cases. Do you agree that this points to deceased having entered the car before she was attacked?”
Curwen nodded. “Presumably, she was dragged from the car.”
From a brief case the superintendent produced two envelopes. The first contained a cracked purse-mirror, which he replaced as being unidentifiable. The second envelope contained a tortoiseshell comb, with sheath.
“Did you buy this comb at Hoffmeister’s on the fourth of March last? And did you give it to your wife?”
“Yes, to both questions.”
“That comb was found close to the bench at the cliff-head, approximately one hundred and twenty yards from the spot where you told us you found the body. Don’t say anything, please, until I’ve finished. W
e think that your wife went to the car, removed her swimming cap, towelled herself a little, then took that comb and mirror to the bench, no one molesting her. While she was on the bench waiting for you, the car was stolen—which she didn’t know, unless you told her before you strangled her.”
“Good enough, Superintendent.” Curwen spoke absently. He was thinking, ‘I can beat that widow and child by making a will in their favour. If I don’t die morally solvent, I shall at least have paid something into court.’
Before they started, the superintendent accepted a drink. On the way to the police station the two men became quite friendly. Curwen admitted that he had expected to escape detection.
“Speaking off the record,” said the superintendent, “your plan was okay, but you’re not the right type. The man who stands the best chance on a job like this is the fussy sort, with an eye for small details that might cause trouble. You know? The chap who thumps the doors of a car to make sure they’re properly shut. The chap who turns back to make sure he’s switched the stove off—which he always has. Checks and double-checks everything. Gets on people’s nerves.
“Take your case f’rinstance. We could never have charged you if you’d thought of going back to that bench to check—to make sure she hadn’t dropped something that might give you away. See what I mean? Little things like that!”
PART FOUR
A SENTIMENTAL HOUSE AGENT
Chapter One
Before sentencing James Bladlow to death, the judge—following a strange convention of our courts—explained to the prisoner how richly he deserved to be hanged. The crime, he asserted, was a sordid one without a single redeeming feature. From the moment Bladlow set eyes on Miss Henson—the judge did not doubt—he had planned to destroy her. He had enticed this elderly but inexperienced woman to occupy the top floor of his house. For four years, under the guise of friendship, he had systematically obtained control of her fortune. With diabolical cunning he had placed himself beyond reach of the law. But for a tangential accident, he would never have been brought to trial.
