“Fine. And now perhaps the other young lady will tell me what she did last night.”
There was a moment’s pause before Helen replied. “I was on John’s launch,” she said at last. “John Murchison, that is. I was there from after supper till a quarter past midnight.”
She stopped. In accordance with his habit, the Inspector said nothing. Finally Helen went on:
“John was there, of course, and two friends of his. Then—then some time around midnight, I can’t remember exactly when, we ran out of gin, and John said he’d go to the Land of Promise and try and get some more. I—we waited a bit, and he seemed a long time about it, and at a quarter past I thought I’d better go home. I’d said I’d be in early, you see,” Helen added spitefully, and I could visualise the look which she gave her mother.
“Yes,” said the Inspector thoughtfully. “And as I understand it, you met Mr. Foss on your way back?”
“That’s right. He asked if I’d seen the kids anywhere. I hadn’t, so I came on home.”
The Inspector’s voice was placid. “You were up at the time, Mrs. Porteous?”
“Yes, Mr. Watt.” Mrs. Porteous was plump, homely, and slow-moving, and her speech mirrored her perfectly. “I was a bit worried, you know.…”
“Oh, mother…” Helen began impatiently.
“Yes, dear, I know.… Not of course that there was anything wrong in Helen’s being out, Mr. Watt. But when it got to midnight, and I heard Charley come home singing from the Land of Promise, I thought I’d just have a look outside the door to see if there was any sign of my girl. It was then I saw that Charley had fallen down outside his door.”
The Inspector spoke sharply. “You’re sure it was Charley?”
“Of course it was. Who else would it have been?”
“But could you definitely see that it was?”
“No,” Mrs. Porteous admitted. “But all the same I’m quite sure——”
The Inspector interrupted her—impatiently, I thought. “What time was this?”
“A minute or two after midnight.”
“Uh-huh. And you just left him lying there?”
“I knew the night air would soon bring him round, Mr. Watt. And indeed it did. When I next looked out, he was gone.”
“What time did you next look out?”
“It was close on ten past. Naturally I kept glancing at the clock, since I was anxious about Helen.”
“And at that time there was no one lying outside Charley’s house at all?”
“No, no one.”
“After that Mr. Foss and Anne turned up?”
“Yes. A little after the quarter. I found Margaret wasn’t in her bed, and Mr. Foss set out to search for her and Daniel. It was then that Jessica left. A minute later Helen arrived, and a minute after that, Margaret.”
I don’t think that anything further was said which had a bearing on the case. The Inspector thanked Mrs. Porteous for the tea and took his departure, and after a discreet interval I took mine. I didn’t see him again until nearly an hour later. Eventually I found him standing near the lock and staring out across the Estuary, his hands pushed into the pockets of his untidy brown raincoat. It was low tide, and the horizon was unusually clear—a sign, I knew, of rainy weather in the offing. The wind was freshening, and clouds were beginning to obscure the sun.
I went up to him.
“Well, well,” he said when he saw me. “With your talent for eavesdropping—and Miss Margaret’s—you must know nearly as much about the case as I do.”
I blushed.
“And what’s your opinion of it all?” he asked.
“I suppose really it depends on the two bodies,” I said, fearful of being thought a fool.
“It depends on the two bodies,” he assented gravely. “Which was Murchison? The one lying outside Charley Cooke’s door from 12.02 to 12.10? Or the one lying there from 12.16 to 12.20?” He paused. “Well?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“There’s no doubt it was the second one,” he told me.
“Why?” I demanded.
“For the good and simple reason that if it was the first, Charley must have dragged it to the edge of the lock some time between 12.05 and 12.10. And in that case either Margaret or Captain Vanderloor would have heard. You can’t perform that sort of operation in complete silence.”
“I see,” I said slowly. “Then Mr. Murchison’s was the second body, and Charley took it to the lock between 12.16 and 12.20, when Anne and my father were in with Mrs. Porteous. And he’d just come back from doing that when Dad found him leaning against the door.”
“You’ve got it.”
“But in that case when did the Maoris attack Mr. Murchison?”
“Pretty certainly between 12.10 and 12.15.”
“But Margaret and Captain Vanderloor would have heard that.”
“I don’t think so. Some of these natives have got the art of making a silent attack pretty perfect. The only thing that troubles me is whether Margaret and Vanderloor could have seen anything that was going on on the other side of the canal.”
“No,” I said definitely. “It was much too dark.”
“There you are, then. Charley Cooke comes home from the Land of Promise just after twelve. He tumbles down on his own doorstep. Some time before ten past he recovers and goes inside, so that when Mrs. Porteous looks out, she sees no one there. Then along comes Murchison, heading for the Land of Promise. He left the launch about twelve—neither Helen nor the other two people could tell me anything more definite than that. The Maoris, who’ve had their eye on his bank-roll and have been lying in wait, follow him, strike him down, rob him, drop the weapon quietly into the canal, and do a bunk. Enter your father, who mistakes the body for Charley Cooke. While your father’s in with Mrs. Porteous, Charley comes out of his house, sees Murchison, and drags him to the lock.”
I considered this. “Yes,” I said, “I suppose so….”
“Vanderloor had gone below,” he explained, “Margaret had run up the canal to meet you, and the others were indoors. So no one would have heard.”
“No one would have heard,” I pointed out, “if Charley had pushed him into the lock there and then.”
“Ah, but look at the pool of blood,” he said. “Murchison must have lain there at least five minutes.”
“Oh, yes, of course.” I was annoyed with myself for forgetting this.
“So that’s the set-up, it seems to me. Charley left him there, and someone pushed him in.…” The Inspector paused, and there was an uncertain look in his eye. “I don’t think I should be telling you all this.…”
He looked back over the Estuary. Down at the bend a sailing dinghy was visible, skimming across the shallow water. The gulls were quarrelling fiercely over a small fish stranded on the mud.
“You can’t mean it was my father,” I said boldly, “because he was with Anne from a quarter past twelve onwards.”
I reflected, and realised what he was thinking. “Aunt Jessica?” I said in a small voice.
For a long time he was silent. Then:
“I’ve been looking into possible motives, you see,” he said almost absently, “and she is the only person having a motive and lacking an alibi. She went back alone to the Land of Promise.… You don’t like her, do you?”
“No,” I answered slowly, “but all the same …”
“She’s a bit cracked, you know.” He tapped his forehead meaningly. “I don’t think it’ll get as far as a trial. They’ll put her in a home, and she’ll be quite well looked after.”
I said: “She hated Mr. Murchison because of Helen.”
“Uh-huh. And there he lay, unconscious and right on the edge of the lock. It couldn’t have needed much strength to shove him in.… Well…”
He turned away, to gaze again at the Estuary. The wind was still rising, and the sailing dinghy had passed out of sight.
“Pretty view,” he said. “I’d like to paint that some time.”
“I turn out a daub now and again.” The Inspector sighed, and I noticed that for the first time that morning he was with out a cigarette. “Well, I’ll have to be getting back to Har ford.”
We returned to the Land of Promise in silence, each of us occupied with his own thoughts. My father was working in the kitchen garden, and the Inspector went to speak to him. I watched them for a moment. My father was leaning on his spade; he said nothing, and his expression hardly changed. Then I went slowly into the house.
Anne was not in the kitchen, but Aunt Jessica was. She sat swaying back and forth in the rocking-chair, and she was talking slowly and quietly to herself. The grey woollen dress had a damp stain down the front, and a broken tea-cup lay at her feet. Tiny drops of sweat stood out on the smooth yellow skin of her face, and her eyes were as blank as the windows of an empty room. What she was saying had no coherence or meaning at all. At first she didn’t notice me, but when eventually she became aware of my presence she made as if to leave the rocking-chair and come towards me. I ran from the room in terror. She was still talking, in that gentle, insane monotone, when they took her away.
The Maoris were never found. Since Murchison’s watch was discovered in a pawnbroker’s shop in Liverpool, it was thought that they had taken ship and left the country. Certainly they never reappeared at the Basin. As the Inspector prophesied, Aunt Jessica did not come to trial. The death of Murchison had permanently turned her brain, and she was sent to a Home Office institution, where my father visited her regularly every month. She never spoke of what had happened, but the police were in no doubt about her guilt. My own apprehension subsided little by little, as I realised that she would not recover her reason. I suppose I ought to excuse myself for saying that, since, after all, Aunt Jessica was innocent of the murder. But I could not bear the thought that an interlude of sanity might reopen the case and direct the attention of the police to the person whom I knew to be guilty.
Nine years have passed since the events of which I have spoken. In that time much has happened. When Hitler invaded Poland, Captain Vanderloor was given the command of a large merchant vessel. He visited us, staying at the Land of Promise for a night, just after he had had the news, and we celebrated his return to bigger things. A month later he went down with his ship, torpedoed in mid-Atlantic. Helen Porteous became the mistress of a second-rate engineer (and a petty swindler into the bargain), and I believe had a child by him. There was much less yachting at the Basin. The eel-boats were replaced by small, fast vessels which brought engineering supplies from Sweden. There were sporadic bombing attacks.
And in one of these Margaret Porteous was killed.
I had been called up, and was far away in Yorkshire when it happened. My father wrote to me about it, and for minutes after reading his letter I sat in the crowded, noisy mess as though stunned. Margaret and I had drifted apart as we grew older, a shyness lay between us, intensified in my case by a sense of my obvious inferiority, for she, at seventeen, was a slender, almost ethereal girl, while I, a year older, was as clumsy and loutish as young men generally are at that age. My only comfort now—and it’s so petty a consideration in the circumstances that I’m almost ashamed of mentioning it—is that she must have been aware of what I knew, and yet trusted me implicitly. To what happened during that night neither of us ever referred. And perhaps it was that, as much as anything else, which fixed such a gulf between us in the years that followed.
I had always thanked God that the doctor had interrupted us before I was able to tell the Inspector about the blood on my shoes. Now I’m not so sure. If they had put her in a reformatory, Margaret would be alive now. Alive.… I ought really to say, existing. Perhaps things are better as they are. I don’t know.
Once I had begun to think about it, it was all obvious enough. The bloodstains on my shoes could not have been picked up on the way back to the Land of Promise, for Margaret and I returned by the outer gates of the lock, and there was no blood on the ground as far along as that. So I had stepped in it when we first crossed the canal, by the inner gates of the lock. That, you will remember, was just after midnight. By that time, then, Murchison had already been attacked. But Charley Cooke had only just set off for home, and so could not have had time to drag the body to the side of the lock. It seemed, then, that it must have been beside the lock that Murchison was originally attacked by the Maoris. He was not lying there, however, when Margaret and I crossed the canal, for it was light enough for us to see that no one was about, and consequently, as the blood trail showed, he must have been already by Charley Cooke’s doorstep, where either he dragged himself in search of assistance or he had been dragged by the Maoris. So this was the first of the two bodies that were seen lying there—the one that was gone when Mrs. Porteous looked out at ten past twelve. Charley Cooke had taken it back to the lock, the second blood trail being superimposed on the first. Afterwards he returned, fell in a stupor, and was seen by my father.
There was only one difficulty about this theory: Charley Cooke could not have dragged Murchison to the lock in complete silence, and yet both Captain Vanderloor, on the deck of the Vrijheid, and Margaret, awaiting me beside the Yacht Club hut, swore that they had heard nothing at all. I knew, as soon as I had got this far, that they must be lying. Yet Captain Vanderloor had not committed the murder, for it was established that he had not left his ship. If he was lying it could only be because he knew that Margaret had pushed Murchison into the lock, and wished to shield her. And she, of course, was lying to save herself. After the thing was done, it was an easy matter for her to return along the tow-path and meet me by the Maori house-boat.
Why did she do it? Certainly, I think, because of her sister Helen. The night we saw Murchison making love to Helen— her mother’s grief at the relationship—Aunt Jessica’s sexobsessed prejudices—these things, to a sensitive child of thirteen, would probably be more than enough to inspire the easy act which resulted in Murchison’s death. She must have heard Charley dragging him to the lock, gone to investigate, and found him lying there, seen the easy way, and taken it.… I sometimes wonder if, as she grew up and discovered that what had so disgusted and horrified her was, after all, the merest commonplace, a sense of guilt deepened in her. Yet I am inclined to think, after all, that it was not so. Children and adults have very different values about some things—death, in particular. If you have read A High Wind in Jamaica, you will remember the indifference of the other children to the death of John. I believe that Margaret felt just such an indifference—amounting in the end almost to forgetfulness—about Murchison, and it remained with her until she was killed.
A week before the raid I was home on forty-eight hours’ leave, and it was then that I saw Margaret for the last time. I was helping my father carry a sail from the Yacht Club hut to the Land of Promise, and she was standing at the very edge of the Estuary, gazing across it as the Inspector had done six years previously. The tide was full, and an east wind that whipped the grey water into millions of little wavelets was tangling her fair hair and moulding the old mackintosh which she wore against the lines of her body. She did not look round, and I, poor fool, hesitated to speak to her because of some trivial squabble we had had on my previous visit. She lies in Hartford churchyard. Now and again I put flowers on the grave.
1I had better say at once that Captain Vanderloor definitely did not leave the Vrijheid after he returned to her from the Land of Promise.
FOR NORA, SHEILA AND ELSPETH
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © 1953 by Bruce Montgomery
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