The Department of Dead Ends

by Roy Vickers

  ‘There you are, sir!’ said Rason who, with Karslake, was in the side street at the bottom of Wakering’s garden. ‘You can hear him digging. I knew if he’d still got the shaft he’d fish it out, provided we scared him – and provided we let him think he still had a chance to get rid of it.’

  Fearing suicide, they waited until Wakering opened the door to let himself out for lunch and a rest.

  ‘Anything to say, Wakering, before we finish digging up that driving shaft?’

  ‘No statement,’ answered Wakering.

  But he eventually made one in the witness box. The jury believed his tale about the red carnations, especially as he had entered the car without a lethal weapon. He was released for good behaviour when he had served seven of the ten years to which he was sentenced for manslaughter.

  The Yellow Jumper

  Chapter One

  The execution of Ruth Watlington sent a shudder through respectable, middle-class Britain. If she had in some way repudiated her upbringing, by becoming a crook or a drug-addict, or a ‘bad woman’, it would have been more comfortable all round. As it was, her exposure created the suspicion that the impulse to murder is likely to seize almost anybody who has enough animal courage to see it through. It was not even a crime passionel, although scented hair, moonlight playing on running water, and a wedding became subsidiary factors – particularly the moonlight on the running water.

  This is in no sense a love chronicle; but we must for a moment concern ourselves with the romantic vapourings of poor Herbert Cudden, the mathematical master at Hemel Abbey, a girls’ boarding-school in Devonshire.

  At eight-thirty on May 2nd, 1934, a week before the summer term opened, he was alone in the empty schoolhouse putting the finishing touches to his syllabus. His thoughts kept sliding to a young, modern languages mistress, Rita Steevens, who had come, fresh from the University, a couple of terms ago.

  An under-vitalized man, he had been astonished at his own boldness in proposing marriage to her, still more astonished when she accepted. Incidentally, he had been very grateful to his friend and colleague, Ruth Watlington, for inviting Rita to share her cottage.

  Daydreaming of this young woman, he visualized her in the dress in which he had last seen her. Now, if he had simply remembered that she had looked delightful in whatever she was wearing, it would have been better for his own peace of mind in later years. He was not the kind of man who understands women’s dress.

  Nevertheless, he happened to visualize Rita in what women call a pinafore dress, though he did not know the term. He visualized a pale green, sleeveless dress with a short-sleeved underbodice of yellow – the dress that was eventually produced at the trial after the police had, as it were, walked clean over it without seeing anything in it but the bloodstains.

  So much for the dress. As for the moonlight – the full moon, which on that day rose at six thirty-seven in the afternoon, was already tingeing the dusk when Cudden crossed the campus and dropped the syllabus in the letter box of the headmistress’s house.

  Skirting a playing-field, he crossed a spuriously antique bridge over the Brynn, a sizeable trout stream of an average depth of a dozen inches, with many a deep pool which made it dangerous to children, though the swift current would generally carry them to safety. Feeling his thirty-six years as nothing, he very nearly vaulted the stile giving on to the wood – part of the school estate – that ran down the side of the hill to the village of Hemel, where most of the teaching staff were accommodated.

  He was wearing a mackintosh. A man of many small anxieties, he nearly always carried a mackintosh. Presently he turned off the track, to Drunkard’s Leap – a pool in the Brynn some ten feet in breadth and some forty feet deep. When Rita was half an hour overdue he lit a cigarette. When the cigarette was finished he was not impatient. He sat down on an old bench like a park seat. As he did so, the centre plank fell out.

  ‘Funny! The screws must have rotted out of the bracket.’ He ran his hand along the bench, noticed, without interest, that the bracket itself was no longer in position. Rita was later than usual.

  The stream, tumbling over rocks into the pool, threw up a spray, and for the first time he saw a rainbow of moonlight. He must remember to point it out to Rita. Below the rainbow, the moon shimmered on the turbulent surface of the pool, so that the pool itself seemed to be made of liquid moonlight.

  So he described it to the Coroner – liquid moonlight. Then, he said, a light cloud crossed the moon so that the rainbow and the shimmer faded out. Instead, a diffused glow enabled him to see beneath the surface of the pool. And a few feet beneath the surface of the pool, below the current, he saw Rita Steevens.

  For some seconds, he supposed, he gazed at the staring eyes, at the hair lightly swaying, as if stirred by a sluggish breeze. Then the cloud passed, and he could again see nothing but the shimmering surface of the pool.

  He shaded his eyes, lurched to and fro, trying to escape from the angle of light. He grabbed the loose beam of the bench, intending to bridge the rocks of the waterfall to get a new angle; but he stumbled, cutting his hand on a splinter of the beam, which splashed into the pool and was carried away.

  He related that he shouted at himself as if he were someone else. ‘Pull yourself together, man! You were dazzled by the moonlight, and you’ve had an hallucination. You were thinking of Rita, and beginning to fear she had met with an accident, and you visualized your fear. How could she be sort of standing up under the water like that?’

  He half believed it. The other half sent him scurrying from the pool down the track to the village.

  ‘Check up at the cottage anyway,’ he muttered. ‘Better not mention the hallucination – make people laugh. It’s partly that damned syllabus. Anxiety complex!’

  Fortunate that Ruth Watlington’s cottage was so near! At the end of the track through the wood, he did not vault the stile; he took it slowly, regaining his breath, coming to terms with his panic. A hundred yards of scrub, then the cottage, built at right angles to the lane that wound its way to the village. Slowly across the scrub.

  Already he could discern the wicket gate of the cottage garden. And there – a dozen feet away – were the yellow sleeves, the pale green dress, grey-white in the moonlight. He bounded forward. As he snatched her in his arms his nostrils were filled with the scent he had never perceived on any other woman – the scent of gardenia.

  ‘Oh, my darling – thank God – had a ghastly hallucination! Thought I saw you standing up drowned – in Drunkard’s Leap.’ Her head was resting on his shoulder. The scent of gardenia spurred him – he could have vaulted innumerable stiles. ‘Speak, Rita, darling!’

  ‘But I’m not Rita!’ cried Ruth Watlington. ‘What on earth is the matter with you, Herbert?’

  He swung her round so that she faced the moon.

  ‘It must be this dress,’ she said. ‘Rita wore it once and didn’t like it, so I took it off her hands.’

  He gaped at her, his senses in a vacuum in which his one clear impression was the scent of gardenia, almost as sharp as when, but a moment ago, her head had lain on his shoulder.

  ‘I thought the hallucination, or whatever it is, was about me, and you seemed hysterical, or I wouldn’t have –’

  ‘Then perhaps it wasn’t hallucination!’ he gasped. ‘Where is Rita?’

  ‘By now she’s at Lynmouth, where she is spending the night with her cousin, Fred Calder, and his wife. They’ve got a bungalow there. Mr Calder rang up before Rita came in. She had just time to catch the eight-fifty bus. She asked me to phone you, which I did. Effie Cumber – one of the kitchen-maids, in case you don’t know – took the message. I told her you’d be in your classroom. But I’m afraid I forgot till about nine.’

  ‘I left a little before nine. Then Rita never went near Drunkard’s Leap!’ He laughed at his own fear, though it wasn’t a wholesome laugh. ‘Yet – it was horrible! I can’t believe it wasn’t real.’

  ‘Well, come in first and tell me al
l about it. I keep a bottle of brandy for emergencies. I think you have been over-working on that syllabus … Oh, you’ve cut your hand, it’s bleeding! I’ll try and bind it up for you, though I’m very bad at anything to do with blood.’

  ‘It’s nothing. Must have cut it when I fell down.’

  He followed her into the sitting-room of the cottage, stopping in the hall to hang up his mackintosh.

  As is known, he stayed there for about an hour, leaving before eleven, slightly fuddled with brandy. Ruth’s purpose was to delay investigation. No police system, however scientific, could be expected to solve the riddle of why she should want to create the delay. The pool was obviously useless as a permanent hiding-place. Once she had made her getaway, as she had, it would not have mattered to her if the police had found the body a few minutes later.

  Nor did anybody attribute any special importance to Herbert Cudden’s assertion that, in mistaking Ruth for Rita, he was misled not only by Rita’s dress, but also by Rita’s particular perfume. Yet Ruth Watlington was convicted – thanks to Detective-Inspector Rason of the Dead Ends Department – for no other reason than that she had put on the dead girl’s dress and worn her perfume.

  Chapter Two

  After a stiff brandy, Herbert gave Ruth details of the now supposed hallucination.

  ‘But the pool is forty feet deep!’ objected Ruth. ‘If there had been a body under the surface it would have been at the bottom, and you couldn’t have seen it without a strong searchlight.’

  ‘I know. But one doesn’t think of things like that at the time.’

  He told her about it all over again, and then, his fear banished, they talked about Rita in general, an absorbing topic to both. This conversation has been grossly misunderstood by the commentators, who said that it revealed Ruth as an hysteric, titillating her own terror by talking about the woman she had just murdered. Her showing him her scrapbook of babies’ photographs was stigmatized as the height of hypocrisy – alternatively, as indicating a depth of morbid cruelty which would almost justify a plea of insanity.

  Whereas the truth is that, if Ruth had been a hypocrite, she would never have committed the murder. ‘The schoolmarm who beat Scotland Yard’ would have had short shrift if the police had been able to grasp that, though she was capable of murder, she was not capable of insincerity, cruelty, or greed.

  At the time of the murder, Ruth was thirty-seven; would have been physically mistakable for thirty if she had not affected a certain dowdiness of dress. She was trim and springy, athletic without a touch of thickness. A truth about herself that she did not know was that the right touch here and there would have converted her into a more than ordinarily attractive woman. When she was sixteen, a boy of her own age had kissed her at a party, to her own satisfaction. Three days later she overheard the boy laughing about it to another boy. There was a loutish reference to her own over-estimation of her charms.

  The incident distressed her sufficiently for her to confide in her young stepmother, for whom, in defiance of tradition, she entertained a warm affection. It did not occur to her that Corinne Watlington, who was only seven years older, might be sexually jealous.

  ‘Men are rather beastly, you know,’ explained Corinne Watlington. ‘They lure you on with flattery and then laugh at you. It’s as well to be on guard, or you may find yourself humiliated where you least expect it.’

  Ruth did not want to be humiliated, so she went on guard – so effectively that the young men of her generation dubbed her a prude and a codfish, and left her out – which made her manner more brusque than ever.

  Following Corinne’s advice, Ruth concentrated on a career. She won a scholarship to Oxford, generously resigning the bursary, as her mother had left her some two hundred pounds a year. She represented the University in lacrosse, tennis, and fencing. She took honours in history and literature, doing so well that she was invited to read for a Fellowship, but declined, as she wished to teach the young. She was appointed to Mardean, which was then considered the leading school for girls who required genuine education.

  When she was twenty-seven she found herself thinking too intensively about one of the classical masters. In this emotion there was no echo of the boys at the parties. Indeed, she hardly thought directly of the man himself. She thought of herself in a house, just large enough, with a very green lawn on which very young children – hers – were playing. Somewhere in the background, giving substance and security to the dream, was the classical master.

  Ruth resigned her appointment. She went to Paris; not being analytical, she did not know why she spent six months as a volunteer worker in a crèche. But the babies here were vaguely unsatisfactory, and she started the new school year at Hemel Abbey, a praiseworthy but undistinguished replica of Mardean on a less ambitious scale.

  Here began that rare association with Herbert Cudden which baffled the romantically minded commentators. From the first she was able to talk to Herbert without any artificial coldness. From a different angle, he found something of the same restfulness in her, for he had always been self-conscious with other women. Ruth, obviously, would never expect him to make love to her. There sprang up, hardly a deep friendship – rather an intimate palliness utterly untouched by romance.

  In her first year she bought Wood Cottage. A few weeks after she had settled in she cut the first of the baby pictures from a magazine. In six months, when she had cut another dozen, she began to paste them into a scrapbook. During the years that followed, the number of pictures grew. There was nothing secret about it. She would snap village babies with her Kodak, explaining that she was fond of pictures of babies, though they were so difficult to take. All the same, she never showed the scrapbook to anybody until she showed it to Herbert on the night of the murder.

  Herbert used the cottage almost as a club. He came at routine times, always to lunch on Wednesdays and Sundays. She allowed him to pay half the cost of the food and a few pence over in part payment of the village woman who prepared it. Thus nearly nine years slipped by before Rita Steevens came and changed Ruth’s perspective.

  One evening, when the pupils were away for the half-term week-end, Ruth met Herbert and Rita together, and was astonished by the look she surprised in Herbert’s eyes. For a second she had seen him young, vigorous, commanding – definitely among ‘the men’ – in Corinne’s sense of the word. An hour later he came to the cottage and told her, as a great secret, that he had fallen in love with Rita. Ruth expressed sincere delight. A new, inner life was opened to her.

  At first, Rita was cold, almost suspicious. She accepted Ruth’s offer to share the cottage with indifference, bargaining shrewdly over her share of the expenses. By the end of the term she had yielded and was accepting Ruth as mentor and general benefactor.

  Ruth was determined – one might say fiercely determined – that life should give to Rita what it had denied to Ruth. She positively groomed those two for each other, and without a single back-thought of malice. In her dream life, Ruth had already elected herself an honorary auntie.

  A little before six on the night of the murder, while Rita was visiting in the village, Calder had rung to ask Rita to catch the eight-fifty bus – the last – and spend the night at Lynmouth. As the bungalow had no telephone, Calder would meet the bus on the chance of Rita coming. Ruth said she would deliver the message if Rita returned in time.

  But when Rita came in, shortly after seven, Ruth did not deliver the message. It was the only occasion on which she treated Rita improperly – her selfish motive being that, living by deputy in Rita, she wanted Rita to meet Herbert as arranged. Also, she had just completed her plans for the wedding present, and wanted to tell Rita, and enjoy her surprise.

  ‘You aren’t meeting Herbert until nine,’ she said some time later. ‘Let’s go and sit up at the pool. It’s such a lovely night, and I’ve heaps to talk about. I’ll disappear before Herbert comes.’

  ‘Righto! This tweed suit is a bit too schoolmarmy for Herbert. D’you think t
he suède belt you gave me would go with it?’

  ‘It would be just right. I hoped you would wear it.’

  Ruth, herself dowdy, had become the arbiter of dress. Ruth had designed the pinafore dress of pale green with the under-bodice of yellow and had it made by a London-trained woman living in semi-retirement as the village dressmaker. Ruth added: ‘What do you think of my new jumper?’

  ‘The collar is too high for you – and I don’t like yellow!’ Remembering the pinafore dress in the wardrobe upstairs, Rita hastily amended: ‘I mean, not that mustardy yellow! You’re better at dressing me than yourself. I wonder why! Ruth – why is it?’

  ‘I suppose because I wish I had been like you when I was your age.’

  Rita felt resentful without knowing why. She was absent-minded as they set out together, reaching Drunkard’s Leap before eight.

  ‘Mind, darling, you’ll tear your dress!’ There was light enough for Ruth to notice that the iron bracket of the bench had worked loose. ‘The screws have rusted away. They ought to have been painted. I’ll tell Miss Harboro.’ Ruth tugged the bracket and it came clean away, a flat iron bar three feet long with a right-angle turn of three inches. She leant it against the bench so that the estate handyman would see it. They sat down, and Ruth turned the conversation in the direction of her wedding present.

  ‘You and Herbert – your heads are in the clouds, as they ought to be. You haven’t thought, for instance, where you’re going to live, have you?’

  ‘Oh, Herbert’s looking round for something. He likes that sort of thing. And if he can’t find anything, there are lots of furnished rooms in the village.’

  Though it was barely dusk, the full moon shimmered on the surface of the pool. It was a lovely spot, thought Ruth, for Herbert and Rita.