Let Him Lie

by Ianthe Jerrold

  “I don’t know why it is,” pursued Agnes, “but your voice seems just to be pitched on a note I can’t bear. I—I twang all over. Where’s the eau-de-Cologne? My head aches horribly!”

  Eyes averted, standing rigid, Miss Wills put the scent spray in Agnes’s feebly stretched-forth hand. She could be sulky, then. Jeanie looked across the bed at the girl’s exaggeratedly cold expression and stubborn posture. Couldn’t she, at a time like this, take Agnes’s pin-pricks with a smile? But, of course, they were not pin-pricks to her, but dagger-blows. A female Malvolio—that was her type. To be generous, guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannon-bullets...

  “Oh, don’t stand there and stare at one another!” uttered Agnes peevishly. “Say something, Tamsin, for Heaven’s sake! You get on my nerves! What are you thinking about?”

  “I was wondering where Mr. Fone was,” said Tamsin frigidly.

  “Mr. Fone!”

  “Yes. He wasn’t with the other members of the Field Club downstairs. He was in the top Tower room when—it—happened. I saw him. He was by himself.”

  “What about it?”

  “I was only thinking it was funny that he should have been sitting there by himself, and that he should have gone home now.”

  “Why? What are you talking about?” Agnes’s head rolled fretfully on the pillow.

  “You asked me what I was thinking about. I’ve told you.”

  Jeanie visualised the higher Tower room, a little octagonal chamber with a large mullioned window overlooking from on high the green lawn sloping down towards the orchard. It and the room below it in the Tower were used as—gun-rooms. Jeanie looked searchingly at Tamsin. Was it possible that the girl intended to convey—? yes, apparently she did.

  “You can see the orchard from the Tower-room window,” pursued Tamsin coolly. “When I looked out, I could see Mr. Molyneux quite plainly. It’s only about a hundred yards away. Of course, it was an accident, just someone shooting rooks, but still, it’s funny, there doesn’t seem to have been anybody out shooting at the time. I just happened to go into the Tower room—”

  “What for?” asked Jeanie, hoping to disconcert the odious girl. She succeeded. Miss Wills blinked and hesitated.

  “Oh, I just happened to! And Mr. Fone was there, sitting on the window-seat. I suppose I looked surprised, because all the other Field Club people were down in the old kitchens. He was looking out of the window. He said he was tired, and was sitting down to rest his legs. I thought it was a funny place to choose for a rest, up at the top of that staircase! I went away. A few moments afterwards I heard a shot. That’s all. You asked me what I was thinking about, and I’ve told you.”

  “Where were you when you heard the shot, then, Miss Wills?”

  Once again the girl blinked, as if the question took her by surprise. Jeanie had an instant impression that she was wondering whether to tell the truth or not. Almost at once, she answered:

  “In the lower Tower room. I was—I was looking for Sarah.”

  “I see. Then you must have seen the thing happen?”

  “No, I didn’t. When the shot went off, I’d turned away from the window and was going out of the room. I saw you,” she added coldly to Agnes, “going across the lane. You must have seen it happen. You asked me what I was thinking about and I’ve told you.”

  Agnes struggled up on to her elbow and looked with eyes wide and wild from Tamsin to Jeanie, from Jeanie to Tamsin. She had gone extraordinarily pale.

  “But do you mean,” she uttered brokenly, “that— that—?”

  “What, Agnes?”

  “Jeanie! Does she mean that—that Robert’s death— wasn’t an accident?”

  Jeanie realised that this notion, which, thanks to Myfanwy’s antics, had never been quite absent from her own mind, was new, new and horrible, to Robert’s widow.

  “Don’t think of it before you need,” said Jeanie pitifully. “She doesn’t know! No one does!”

  “But it was an accident! Tamsin, how can you? You’ve never liked Mr. Fone since you asked him to marry you and he refused!”

  “I didn’t!” cried Tamsin, trembling, with suffused eyes.

  “You did! How you can bring yourself to suggest—! Mr. Fone is a friend of Robert’s!”

  “That’s all you know! I’ve been seeing to the letters since Peter went, and I know better!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mr. Molyneux had a threatening letter only yesterday from Mr. Fone!”

  “Threatening! What about? What are you talking about?”

  “About opening the tumulus. You know.”

  “Oh, that! Really, Tamsin, you are an idiot! You’ll be saying next that Mr. Fone that Robert—that Mr. Fone—”

  Suddenly Agnes’s face, to which spite had lent a flush and a spirit, grew woeful again. She turned helplessly to Jeanie, in tears.

  “But, Jeanie! It was an accident, wasn’t it?”

  “My dear, I don’t know,” uttered Jeanie helplessly.

  “Well, you asked me what I was thinking about and I’ve told you,” reiterated the odious Tamsin stubbornly.

  Chapter Five

  POLICE INQUIRY

  “May I stay? Mrs. Molyneux would like it.”

  “Certainly, Miss Halliday. We’ll take you next.” Agnes, who had five minutes ago implored Jeanie not to leave her, now dropped her eyelids and looked weary, as at the fussing of a too-solicitous friend. They were in the little panelled room that lay next to the hall and was usually called the parlour. There was a big flat-topped desk in the room, but nobody sat at it. Superintendent Finister sat at a small side-table, and another policeman, a note-book open in front of him, sat sideways at its end. Some feeling of delicacy, Jeanie supposed, had prevented Sir Henry from bringing poor Molyneux’s desk into use. Sir Henry stood with his back to the window.

  “This is Superintendent Finister,” he added. “We won’t keep you longer than we can help, Mrs. Molyneux.”

  “I’m very sorry to have to trouble you at all, madam,” added the superintendent. Jeanie had seen him in Handleston. He was very tall, spare and saturnine, with deep lines in his cheeks and a bristling dark moustache. Without his cap he looked very human and intelligent. The other policeman, burly, red-faced and bald, conformed to a more usual type.

  “You can’t help it,” murmured Agnes.

  She looked at Sir Henry, who responded with a melancholy, sympathetic smile. Finister made a respectful pause, fiddling with his pencil and looking at Agnes with dark lively eyes more adapted to express a sardonic than a sympathetic humour.

  “May we have your account/’ he asked gently, “of what happened this afternoon?”

  “What happened?” echoed Agnes, looking frightened. “But I don’t know what happened!”

  “I mean,” the superintendent corrected himself, “the course of events from your own point of view. I understand you first made the discovery?”

  “Yes.”

  “What took you to the orchard?”

  “I went to remind my husband to come in and receive the guests. The Handleston Field Club—our guests—had arrived. My husband was working in the orchard and wanted to go on as long as possible. But of course when our guests came in—”

  “I see. When did the Field Club actually arrive?” Agnes looked vague.

  “I don’t know. I was in my room, dressing. They were in the old kitchen when I came down at a quarter-past three. At least, Bates said so.”

  “It was ten minutes to three when we came in to Cleedons and went to the old kitchens,” said Sir Henry Blundell.

  “Oh, had you been there all that time, Sir Henry? I do hope Tamsin or somebody looked after you properly! Robert was very anxious to get his fruit-trees done, or he would have been with you.”

  She began to cry helplessly. There was a pause, while Sir Henry looked out of the window, Finister gazed with grave attention at the fire-place, and Jeanie strove to console Ag
nes and stem her tears. The burly policeman with the notebook looked with rosy concern at the two ladies.

  “I’m sorry!” said Agnes at last. “Only, it seems so dreadful now to think, if he had come in earlier, he would have been—this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Superintendent Finister made the smallest sympathetic sad grimace. Many things were dreadful, it seemed to say, in this dreadful world: dreadfulness was almost the order of nature.

  “What time was it when you went out, Mrs. Molyneux?”

  “Oh, what time did I say I left my room? At a quarter-past three. And I just—I just spoke to a few people—I mean, to one or two of the servants—I mean, to Bates, to ask if the Field Club had come, and—and he said they had, and I went out to tell my husband.”

  “At twenty-past three, then, at latest?”

  Agnes looked dubious and frightened, as though time were a spectre and haunted her. She had been punctual enough in the old days at school. But life at Cleedons, reflected Jeanie, revolved so much around her will and her convenience that she had grown out of the habit of watching the clock.

  “Well, perhaps. I suppose so! Or a little later...”

  “About twenty-past three,” murmured the burly policeman, writing.

  “And then?”

  “I—I went to the orchard.”

  Agnes’s voice faltered, and her eyes widened and seemed to grow dark, approaching horror.

  “Yes. What way did you go?”

  Finister’s steady voice had a bracing effect.

  “I went out of the Tower door and across the lawn and out through the gate by the garage. Across the lane. The orchard gate’s just there. I—I saw a kind of movement in the orchard. I can’t explain! A sort of movement, something falling. I didn’t know what it was. You know how you see things sometimes without realising what you’ve seen. It was like that. There was a shot and at the same time something falling in the grass. I wondered what on earth Robert had let drop out of the tree. I thought the shot had startled him and he’d dropped his coat or—or something. I thought it was funny the thing he’d dropped should have a boot on it!”

  A giggle escaped Agnes, and as if that hysterical giggle rather than her recital horrified her, she gave a sob and turned blindly towards Jeanie. After a moment she went on:

  “You see, I saw it was Robert who’d fallen out of the tree, but I didn’t know it was! I just thought it was something he’d dropped. Everything was just the same. There was a cart rattling about. And a bird singing. And then I suddenly sort of knew it was Robert. I ran towards him. I ran. I ran!” she iterated piteously, and Jeanie had to suppress a mental picture of her friend creeping unwillingly, slowly, in horror across the grass. “I thought at first perhaps he’d fainted or had a stroke or something.”

  She spoke fast now, on short sobbing breaths, holding Jeanie’s hand in a hot dry clasp.

  “But he hadn’t!” she wailed suddenly, and her tears came. “Oh, please! I saw—I saw he’d been shot. Blood, I saw blood,” said she, mastering herself and speaking in a matter-of-fact level voice, the sharp nails of her fingers digging into Jeanie’s palm. “I saw blood and I knew he’d been shot. Rabbit-shooting always makes me sick. Only this wasn’t as bad as rabbit-shooting, really. Because I simply didn’t believe it. Not for ages. I ran all round the orchard, kind of gasping to myself. And I went out of the orchard. And—and I thought I was going to faint or something. And Jeanie came. Oh. And there was Myfanwy Peel. Or did I imagine it? What was she doing there, I wonder?”

  “Myfanwy Peel?” murmured Finister, prompting her.

  “Mrs. Peel. Sarah’s mother. Robert’s brother’s widow. Yes. I met her walking up the lane, but I can’t think what she can have been doing here. I said: ‘Robert’s dead.’ At least, I think I said it. I tried to say it. She didn’t answer. She looked awfully queer. I wanted her to help me, you see. I would have asked anybody. I felt so awful, I felt so sick! But she wouldn’t, she just went on up the lane. And I saw Jeanie—Miss Halliday, you know—looking out of the stable-loft window. And I thought: It’s no use, I must lie down. I don’t remember after that. That’s all. May I go now?”

  She looked piteously at Sir Henry. She was of that fair, fragile type from which tears seem to wash the last remnants of colour and vitality. She looked wretched, poor Agnes, like a doll that has been left out in the rain.

  “There’s only one thing,” said Superintendent Finister, “that I wish we could fix, and that’s the time. You say you left your room at three-fifteen?”

  “Yes. Yes,” said Agnes nervously.

  “And went almost at once to the orchard, so that you would be at the orchard gate at three-twenty or at most three-twenty-five?”

  “Well—I don’t know! I didn’t have a watch. I didn’t look at the time. I might have been earlier.” Her eyes, which had been flickering nervously about the room, shot a quick glance at the superintendent’s face. “Or later,” she added.

  “You see, we have two independent witnesses, Miss Tamsin Wills and Sir Henry Blundell, who say they were aware of the time when they heard the shot and that it was then twenty-five minutes to four.”

  “That is so,” agreed Sir Henry.

  Agnes said tremulously:

  “Yes, well—it might have been. I talked to Bates. I didn’t hurry.”

  “Oh, it’s of no great importance,” Finister assured her soothingly. “But naturally we have to fix the time of the—shot, and your evidence seems to make it earlier than three thirty-five.”

  “No, I don’t say that! I don’t know! I left my bedroom at a quarter-past three, that’s all I know!”

  “Could you possibly cast your mind back and remember exactly what you did between then and coming to the orchard gate?”

  “I—I suppose I can!”

  Agnes paused so long that Sir Henry Blundell turned his head inquiringly from his contemplation of the last autumn leaves.

  “I—I went downstairs.”

  “Immediately?”

  “Yes. Yes, immediately. And Bates was in the hall. And he said that the Field Club had arrived. And I said: ‘Where are they?’ And he said: ‘In the old kitchen, looking at the devil’s oven.’ And I said: ‘We’ll have tea at four; I expect that’ll give them plenty of time.’ And he said—oh, I expect he said ‘Very good,’ or something, and I—”

  There was another pause.

  “Well—I just looked at the flowers to see if they were fresh, and they were, and then I went out at the Tower door. I thought, shall I take a mackintosh? but it wasn’t raining, so I just put on some galoshes—”

  “Where were the galoshes?”

  “In the lowest Tower room. It’s used as a cloakroom. That’s why I went that way. And I went across the lawn—not quickly, you know, quite slowly, thinking about planting some new shrubs. And—and—”

  “And as you came to the orchard gate you heard a shot?”

  “Yes. I should think it could easily have been three thirty-five by then, couldn’t it?”

  Superintendent Finister shook his head.

  “No, what you’ve told us couldn’t have taken twenty minutes. Seven at the outside, I should say. Are you quite sure, Mrs. Molyneux, you didn’t do anything else? Speak to anybody else in the house, for instance?”

  “Of course I’m sure!” Suddenly Agnes’s pale rain- washed face flushed with uneven colour. She looked from Finister to Jeanie. Her eyes were both frightened and angry. “Why do you ask that?” she demanded shrilly.

  Jeanie saw the surprise on Superintendent Finister’s face give way to a grave, thoughtful look. He looked very seriously at Agnes. He only said, however, quietly: “It’s important to fix the time, you see, of the shot, and I thought possibly you had had a talk with one of the staff or somebody and had forgotten it.”

  Agnes bent her head. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, her whole slight figure tense. “I see. I’m sorry. No, I don’t think I did. No, I didn’t, I’m sure. May I go now? I’ve had a
bout as much as I can bear.”

  “Certainly. We’re very sorry to have had to trouble you at all.”

  “So sorry, so sorry,” murmured Sir Henry, turning from the window and holding out his hand. He smiled in melancholy fashion, squeezing Agnes’s little fingers. Her tears brimmed over.

  “Thank you, Sir Henry. No, I won’t go through the hall. I can’t face all those people! No, Jeanie! It’s all right! I’d rather be by myself!”

  She went slowly through the door to the Tower. Jeanie heard her steps dragging along the stone passage, up the wooden uncarpeted stairs, slowly, slowly, then suddenly accelerating, pattering quickly up the stairs with heels quickly clicking along the wooden passage overhead. Jeanie, listening to that sudden astonishing acceleration, saw her own surprise reflected in Superintendent Finister’s look. And once again she saw his look of surprise melt into a glance thoughtful, grave, even severe.

  Jeanie gave her own evidence quickly. She produced an effect, she saw, by her account of Myfanwy Peel and her antics with the revolver. Finister, Sir Henry and even the sergeant all became alert, gazing at her with a sudden bright surmise. She could not but see, herself, that around Myfanwy Peel the motive and the weapon and the opportunity all most opportunely grouped themselves. Yet she could not bring herself to believe that Myfanwy Peel was a murderess, and did her best to damp any such belief that might be taking shape in Superintendent Finister’s mind. She stressed the fact that the revolver was unloaded.