by Roy Vickers
‘Furnished rooms are all right when you are single – awful when you’re married.’ Ruth paused, enjoying her moment. ‘You’re going to have Wood Cottage.’
‘But – d’you mean you’re leaving Hemel and want to get rid of it?’
‘No, dear, I don’t mean that. I mean I want you to have it. I shall take Mrs Cumber’s two rooms, and you needn’t worry about me. I shall be quite comfortable.’
Rita was not worrying about Ruth’s comfort. She was feeling that, notwithstanding innumerable small benefits, there was rather too much Ruth in her life. Again came that undefined resentment that had welled up during their dress-talk.
‘But, Ruth – of course, it’s awfully kind of you to offer to sell it to us, as I know you like it, but I doubt whether Herbert could afford –’
‘Darling, there’s nothing to afford! It’s my little wedding present. I was in Barnstaple this morning, and fixed the title deeds, and the rest of it, with a solicitor. It’s all settled bar formalities. You can talk it over with Herbert to-night.’
‘I simply don’t know what to say!’ Rita’s voice was sulky. ‘Ruth, dear, don’t you see it’s impossible! You’re only a little bit better off than we are, and – it’s accepting too much.’
What did it matter how much she gave them. Their life was hers. Her life would be fulfilled in the lives that were to come.
‘Darling, it’s not a matter of giving a present that costs a lot of money. It’s a matter of sharing happiness. You know what a lot you and Herbert mean to me. And we’ve got to look ahead. In a year’s time there may not be only the two of you to consider.’
For a moment Rita was fogged.
‘Do you mean we might have a baby?’
‘Of course I do!’ Ruth laughed happily. Rita laughed, too, but a different kind of laugh.
‘But I shan’t be having any babies.’
‘One shouldn’t say that – it might turn out to be true.’ It was no more than a mild reproof. Then sudden fear clutched at Ruth. ‘Rita – there’s nothing wrong with you physically, that way, is there?’
‘Certainly not!’ The girl bridled. ‘But there’s no need to have all that bother if you don’t want to – and I don’t want to. I’m not the type. And I loathe babies anyway – yells and mess and bother!’
Ruth had the sensation that her body had taken control of her mind. She heard her own voice from outside herself and thought it sounded shrill and venomous.
‘Is it fair to Herbert – to rob your marriage of all meaning?’
‘Oh, be your age, Ruth! That belongs in a tuppenny novelette. And I find it a rather disgusting topic, if you don’t mind.’
One may say that the twentieth-century Ruth Watlington looked on while that part of her was a thousand ages older than history obeyed a law of its own. Without her conscious volition, her muscles stiffened and she stood up. In her arms and thighs was an odd vibration, as if the corpuscles of her blood were colliding.
She heard the iron bracket whistle through the air – then heard a thud, and another. After a timeless period she felt herself going back into her body, understanding that an iris shutter in her brain had contracted until she had been able to see only one thing – that babies were a rather disgusting topic.
The iris was expanding a little. In the reflected moonlight she could see that the bench was glistening with blood. Rita had fallen from the bench and was lying, still.
‘I seem to have killed Rita!’ She giggled vacuously. ‘I wonder what Herbert will say!’ The iris expanded a little more. She became vaguely aware of an urgency of time. She looked at her wrist watch, but had to try again and again before she could concentrate enough to read that it was half past eight. Then it was easy to remember that Herbert would be there at nine.
‘I’d better put Rita in the pool. When Herbert comes to the cottage I can break it to him gently. But dead bodies float, don’t they. Oh well, we’ll manage something just for an hour or so!’ The iron bracket was ready to her hand.
There was blood at the angle of the bracket. She shuddered with a purely physical revulsion, wiped the bracket on the grass. She worked the short end of the bracket under the suède belt, then rolled the body into the pool near the waterfall. In spite of her care, there was a smear of blood on her left hand. Struggling against nausea she washed it off. The moonlight did not reveal that there was also a smear of blood on the sleeve of her yellow jumper.
In the walk back to the cottage, something approaching normality returned, and she realized what she had done. She had no thought of concealment, once she had told Herbert. She would then tell the police that she had killed Rita, but she would not tell them why, and they could not make her.
Chapter Three
As she crossed the scrub to the cottage she heard the church clock chiming nine. Perhaps Herbert had finished his work. She hurried into the cottage and rang the school. A kitchenmaid answered. ‘Will you please go over to Mr Cudden’s classroom, and tell him that Miss Steevens is sorry that she cannot keep her appointment.’
She turned on the reading lamp. Again came nausea as she saw a smear of blood on the sleeve of her yellow jumper – a smear half the size of the palm of her hand. She whipped off the jumper. She took it to her room, dropped it in the laundry basket, and put it out of her mind.
There was no moral shrinking from what she had done. She even felt a certain exultation, tinged with an unease which had nothing to do with fear of the hangman. She took it for granted that her own life was, in effect, at an end, and this gave her an immense freedom.
She went into Rita’s room. It held a faint fragrance of unknown flowers. In the wardrobe was the light green dress and the yellow bodice.
‘Oh, I wish I had been Rita!’
She took off all her clothes, put on Rita’s. Last, the yellow bodice and the light green dress. Then a spot of Rita’s scent on her hair and the merest dab behind the ears.
‘I do look nice! What a pity! It’s only waste. I wonder what was wrong with me?’
Downstairs and into the air. Her life’s history floated before her. Rita’s clothes helped her to review her past from the angle of a young woman who had no fear that men would lure her on with flattery and then laugh at her.
She was actually thinking of the classical master when Herbert’s arms closed round her. For a moment she let her head rest on his shoulder, then realized that he had mistaken her for Rita.
The need for personal explanation shattered the mood in which she had wanted to break the news to him. Besides, she saw now that it would save him so little that she was entitled to think of herself. To-morrow, when they found the body, life for her would end. To-night she would enjoy an hour of his soothing friendliness for the last time.
When she had made him believe the hallucination theory, she indulged in the child’s game of make-believe. ‘Let’s pretend’ – that things were as yesterday, and that she had not murdered Rita. She nearly told him about her gift of the cottage, but it would have meant discussion, and she wanted to ask him a question. As the minutes passed the question became more and more important to her. The answer, if it were the right one, would help her to face the gallows with a calm mind.
‘Have another brandy.’
‘Just a little one, and then I must hop off. Another thing Rita wants to do when we’re married –’
She shirked putting the question to him directly. To help her approach, she produced her scrapbook. The whole of the first page was taken by one ebullient baby who had advertised a milk food.
Herbert grinned and turned the pages. ‘Ah, I used to know one just like that – same expression and everything! And when they look like that, they grab your nose if you get too close. This is a jolly book! Why have you never shown it to me before?’
‘Herbert, are you and Rita going to have babies?’
‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t. I’ve got a bit in the stocking, and so has she.’
‘Oh, I am glad!’ There was a turbu
lence in her that he must have sensed.
‘And I’m glad you’re glad. Ruth, dear, you can scream for the village policeman if you like, but I’m going to kiss you.’
When he kissed her, Ruth knew what it was that had been wrong with her. She also knew that to talk of robbing a man of fatherhood did not belong in a tuppenny novelette.
‘I’m only thirty-seven – there’s still time!’ she told herself when he had gone. Murder could never be justified, and she would never so deceive herself. But a form of atonement for having taken life seemed to be open to her.
Chapter Four
On the following morning, at about seven-fifteen, Herbert Cudden’s landlady took his shoes out of doors with a view to cleaning them. It was, in a sense, unfortunate for Scotland Yard that Police-Sergeant Tottle happened to amble by on his bicycle.
‘Good morning, Mr Tottle. Your George’s garden is a credit to the family. Oo! You don’t ’appen to have had a nice murder, I suppose? Look at these!’
She held up the shoes. The rim of the sole and the back of one heel was caked with dried blood.
‘Don’t you touch ’em until I’ve seen ’em,’ barked the sergeant.
‘Don’t be silly! I was only joking – it can’t be human blood. They’re Mr Cudden’s. As if –’
The sergeant took the shoes and examined them.
‘Take me up to his room,’ he ordered.
When he had succeeded in waking Herbert Cudden, the latter’s reactions were, from the police point of view, ideal.
‘Oh, my God!’ It was almost like a woman’s scream. ‘I shall go mad.’ He leapt out of bed, thrust Wellingtons over his pyjamas. ‘You’d better come with me, Sergeant. Give me those shoes.’
‘Here, what’s it all about, Mr Cudden?’
‘Oh, shut up, please! I must see Miss Watlington at once, or I tell you I shall go mad. Hang on to the shoes if you like, but come with me.’
Ruth was startled into wakefulness by hearing her name called while Herbert and the sergeant were still fifty yards from the cottage. She was in her dressing-gown and at the doorway almost as soon as they were.
‘That hallucination!’ Herbert was out of breath. ‘Blood on my shoes – show them to her. Look! It wasn’t hallucination, Ruth. Rita was murdered on the bank and thrown in. We must drag Drunkard’s Leap.’
‘Will one of you kindly explain –’
‘Oh, all right then! I’ll tell you.’
It was Herbert who poured out the tale of the previous evening’s experiences, of his discussion with Ruth, and the reasons for their joint conclusion that he had suffered an hallucination.
‘Then as I understand it, after what you’d seen – or what you only thought you’d seen – you came to this cottage, and – is this your mackintosh by any chance?’
The mackintosh was hanging huddled on a peg in the hall. The sergeant pulled it out fanwise. The whole of the seat and part of the back were covered with congealed blood.
‘How did that blood get there? On your mackintosh and on your shoes?’
‘It must be her blood. That must have been done when I sat on the bench.’
‘And what’s the matter with your hand that you’ve got that bandage?’
‘Oh, hell to these footling questions! Sergeant, for heaven’s sake do something! Can’t you see that she has been murdered?’
The sergeant had never handled murder. This was unlike any he had read about. For one thing, the suspect was positively directing the investigation.
While Tottle, at Ruth’s suggestion, was ringing the Lynmouth police to find out whether Rita had spent the night at Calder’s bungalow, Ruth went upstairs to dress.
On a hanger on the door was the yellow underbodice. She put it in her wardrobe. Over a chair hung the pale green sleeveless dress. As she picked it up, she caught her breath. At the back, a little above the waist-line, was a distinct blood stain. For a moment she had a sense of eeriness, as if blood would meet her everywhere. Then she remembered.
‘That was done when Herbert put his arm round me before I bound up his hand.’
She dropped the dress into the laundry basket – on top of the blood-stained yellow jumper. She looked down at them, trying to assess their danger to herself. Then she shrugged her shoulders, and went on dressing. She had an almost superstitious belief that if destiny intended her to atone for her crime it would protect her from the police.
By ten o’clock they had found the body in Drunkard’s Leap, its position explained by the fact that the iron bracket had jammed between two outcrops of rock some eight feet below the surface. By midday the county police had occupied the village. Detailed statements were taken from Cudden and Ruth, covering everything, even including Ruth’s visit to her solicitor to arrange for the conveyance of the cottage to Herbert Cudden and his wife. The police took away for microscopic analysis Herbert’s mackintosh and shoes and Ruth’s yellow jumper and the pale green sleeveless dress. The analysis revealed that the blood on Herbert’s garments had been exposed to the air for at least half an hour before it had adhered – which bore out his statements about the times of his movements.
Analysis of the skirt and jumper showed that the blood was newly shed when it had adhered – which bore out the joint statement that Herbert mistook Ruth, outside the cottage, for Rita – and that he had touched her, after he had cut his hand by the pool. It might have been Rita’s blood. But only if the joint statements of Herbert and Ruth could be shown to be false – which was deemed to be impossible.
The Coroner’s jury would have censured Herbert for his over-readiness to believe he had experienced an hallucination, had not Ruth generously insisted that the blame, if any, should be wholly hers. The Court returned a verdict of murder against person or persons unknown.
Chapter Five
The school term opened in a somewhat strained atmosphere. True, that only three of the hundred and fifty pupils were withdrawn on account of the scandal. But there was an unhealthy interest in the events. The head-mistress explained that poor Miss Steevens had been killed by a madman who did not know what he was doing – a theory that was helped by a Press attempt to link the case up with a maniac murder in the North of England.
Ruth let the backwash of the murder splash round her, without giving it her attention. Scotland Yard rented all available rooms in the village inn. As there were apparently no clues they used the drag-net, checking the movements of every man within twenty miles and every automobile that could have been used. They would apply to Ruth now and again, mainly for information about the dead girl’s habits.
In three weeks they packed up, leaving a pall of suspicion over the whole countryside. In due course the mackintosh and the shoes, the pale green sleeveless dress and the yellow jumper, minutely documented, were sent to the Department of Dead Ends.
Herbert’s visits to the cottage became more frequent. At first he would sit in silence, assured of Ruth’s sympathy. In time she loosened his tongue and let him talk himself out of his melancholy.
The strong forces in her nature which had produced the brain storm at Drunkard’s Leap were now concentrated upon the purpose with which she had successfully drugged her conscience. At a moment of her choosing, Herbert Cudden was over-whelmed by those forces. The moment occurred at the end of the summer term.
Again we are not concerned with the detail of the method by which that formidable will induced a transference to Ruth of the emotion which Herbert had felt for Rita. It suffices to say that it happened according to her plan. They could write to the head-mistress after the ceremony, she said, but they need not announce their marriage until the autumn term. As they particularly wished to avoid newspaper publicity they would be married by registrar in the East End of London.
This can hardly be called a tactical blunder on Ruth’s part because, as far as the police were concerned, she had exercised no tactics. She did not know that a great many persons who wish to marry more or less in secret, particularly bigamists, regula
rly hit on that same idea. So the East End registrars invariably supply the police with a list of those applicants who obviously do not belong to the neighbourhood.
They each took a ‘suitcase address’ and applied for a three-day licence. Detective-Inspector Rason received the notice on the second day.
‘Oh! So it was a triangle after all!’ he exclaimed, without logical justification. ‘And now they’re getting married on the quiet. That probably means that they cooked up all the hallucination stuff together. Anything they said may have been true or may not.’
He took out the yellow jumper, the pale green sleeveless dress, and the mackintosh, which, with the iron bracket, was the only real evidence he had. In the garments there was no smell of gardenia.
‘But Herbert said the dress Ruth was wearing was Rita’s dress and that it smelt of gardenia. Well, it doesn’t! Perhaps the scent has worn off in three months. Better put a query to the Chemical Department.’
He had difficulty in finding the proper form, still more difficulty in filling it up. So instead, he sought out his twenty-year-old niece.
‘When you put scent on your dress, my dear, how long does the dress go on smelling of it?’
‘Oh, uncle! You never put any on your dress. It isn’t good for the dress and the scent goes stale – and your best friends won’t tell you. You put it on your hair and behind your ears.’
So if there had been a smell of gardenia it meant that Ruth had deliberately applied it – the other girl’s perfume. But maybe there had been no smell of gardenia. And maybe it wasn’t Rita’s dress.
Presently his thought crystallized.
‘If Ruth was really wearing Rita’s dress and Rita’s scent, Herbert is telling the truth. If not – not! Wonder how far we can check up on the dress itself.’
He searched jumper and dress for a trade mark and found none. ‘Then the dress must have been home made. Or perhaps the village dressmaker.’
