Who Pays the Piper?: An Ernest Lamb Mystery

by Patricia Wentworth

  “Not that she’s got anything to tell, Miss Susan. And of course I can’t be too thankful it wasn’t her that found him. Lily’s always been what you might call easy upset, and you can say what you like, it’s an upsetting thing for a girl to come in as it might be to draw the curtains and find a man with the back of his head shot off. Lily, she managed to slip down last night while Mrs. Raby was having forty winks, which she do, and she said to me as I might be speaking to you now, ‘Mum’, she said, ‘if they’d have arst me to clean up after it, I couldn’t have done it’. That’s what she said, and I don’t blame her.”

  Susan sat down rather suddenly on one of the kitchen chairs.

  “Please, Mrs. Green—”

  Mrs. Green turned round from scrubbing the dresser and patted her on the shoulder with a fat, damp hand.

  “There, my dear—don’t you take on. Lily’s just the same—turned as white as a sheet when I arst her whether she’d seen him.” She went back to her scrubbing. “And I told her straight, ‘It’s all very well to say Oh, Mum! and start looking like a drop of yesterday’s skim milk, but you’ll have to see all sorts before you’re through, same as I’ve done, and no good making a mealy mouth over it either. Births and deaths is things we’ve all got to see’.”

  “But not murder,” Susan said in a strained, breathless voice.

  Mrs. Green looked quickly over her shoulder and away. She was a fresh, upstanding woman with a lot of yellow hair and a big rosy face. She had seen Susan christened, and had seen her nearly every day since then. She considered that she could say anything she chose within the bounds of reason, and she was so full of curiosity and kindly feeling that the reasonable bounds were going to be pushed as far as possible. Because what she wanted to know was whether William Cole was telling lies when he said he had heard Mr. Dale asking the Vicar to marry him and Miss Susan this very Thursday, and she didn’t mean to stir a foot out of the Little House until she did know. William might be gardener up at the Vicarage, and he might be walking out with Lily—and she’d no objections to that—but that wasn’t to say she was going to take everything he said for gospel. And he might say what he liked, Miss Susan wasn’t the kind to play fast and loose, because that was a thing you couldn’t hide, no matter how hard you tried—not from all the other women anyhow. Men, of course, were shocking easy deceived for all they thought themselves so clever, and a great temptation it was for the women that had to live with them. But a woman couldn’t deceive the other women, no matter how hard she tried. And Miss Susan hadn’t any cause to try, because she wasn’t that sort.

  She picked up her pail and walked to the other end of the dresser. Susan looked after her. She saw broad shoulders, a strong neck, a large bun of yellow hair. She thought, “She knows what people are saying. Everyone will talk to her because of Lily. She’ll know what’s being said up at the house, and she’ll know what’s being said in the village—she’ll know whether anyone heard that shot. If it only weren’t so difficult to talk about it. But I’ve got to—it’s for Bill. We must find someone else who heard the shot. I’ve got to make her talk.”

  Even at that moment she could have laughed at the thought, because the difficulty was to stop Mrs. Green talking. But she was kind, and Susan had known her all her life.

  Mrs. Green moved her pail again, and started on the kitchen floor. Susan took hold of her courage and began.

  “Mrs. Green—what are they saying about it in the village and—up at the house? I—I can’t ask anyone else.”

  Mrs. Green sat back on her heels with the scrubbing-brush in her hand.

  “And who should you ask if it wasn’t me?” she said in a voice of warm interest and kindness. “And I wouldn’t have spoke of it if you hadn’t brought it up, though it went to my heart to see you looking the way you do. But since you have brought it up, well then, what I say is, don’t you take any notice of what’s been said and they’ll stop taking notice of you.”

  This was not very encouraging.

  “But I want to know what is being said.”

  “Well, as to that,” said Mrs. Green, dropping her brush back into the bucket and getting off her heels into a position better suited to gossip—“as to that, you might say it was a bit of all sorts. There’s some says it was a tramp—him having those pearls in the house which is a thing that gets about. And what’s the sense of it, is what I’ve always said—and him a bachelor gentleman with no one to show them off. So some says it was a tramp, or burglars from London which comes to the same thing and a deal pleasanter than having to think that it’s anyone local. But up at the house Lily says they’re strong for thinking it was the ’Merican gentleman on account of the way Mr. Raby and Robert Stack can say that he and Mr. Dale were going on. Most uncomfortable Mr. Raby said it was from the very first minute he come into the house—what you might call hinting and passing the sort of remarks you don’t pass, not without you want to make yourself as right down unpleasant as you can, short of coming plump out with it. All the way through lunch and dinner it’d go on, Lily says, and Robert Stack coming out of the dining-room with a grin on his face, and Mr. Raby as vexed as vexed. Lily says it was easy to see how nervous it made Mr. Phipson. He’s not one that’d like being mixed up in quarrels, and Lily says he was going about like a cat on hot bricks. They were all thinking it’d come to a real old-fashioned row between Mr. Dale and the ’Merican gentleman, because Mr. Dale wasn’t the sort to put up with a lot of that kind of thing. But nobody thought it’d come to murder.”

  Susan let out a deep breath which made an “Oh!”

  Mrs. Green nodded vigorously.

  “And well you may say so, Miss Susan. Quarrelling’s what we’ve all done in our time, and no harm meant and none taken if it don’t go on too long, which we was brought up to kiss and be friends before sundown, and a very good rule too. But murder—that’s a regular unnatural thing. Mr. Raby says the ’Merican gentleman couldn’t adone it along of being in his bath, and him in his pantry where he could hear the pipes thumping. But Lily says to me, ‘Why, mum’, she says, ‘that’s all nonsense. The pipes thumping don’t go for no more than what someone’s been running the taps upstairs. Bath water running don’t mean the ’Merican gentleman was in it having his bath’. That’s what Lily says. Nothing to stop him turning on the taps and coming down and shooting Mr. Dale and up the stairs to the bathroom—that’s what Lily says. Her and William Cole had the best part of a quarrel over it because he said she’d no call to say it and ’ud be getting herself into trouble with the police if she didn’t look out.”

  “What does William think?” said Susan.

  Mrs. Green was well away. Just a little prod now and then and she would cover the whole range of Netherbourne opinion. But for some reason this particular prod seemed to fail of its effect. Mrs. Green reddened to the roots of her yellow hair. She said with energy,

  “William’s nothing to go by. He may be gardener at the Vicarage, but that don’t say he’s got any more sense than he was made with, and so I told him.”

  Susan was invaded by a dreadful sense of chill. Gardener at the Vicarage.… She said,

  “You’d better tell me—it doesn’t matter—”

  Mrs. Green tossed her head.

  “Well then, my dear, he’s got hold of a pack of rubbish about you and Mr. Dale—said he heard him fixing up with Vicar to marry you on this very Thursday that’ll be tomorrow. And he says if he was Mr. Bill he’d do the same as what he says Mr. Bill done—shoot the life out of anyone that tried to take his girl. Lily come over as white as a sheet, and I took and told him to mind his tongue. ‘Lily won’t marry no murderers’, I said—‘not while I’m her mother’, I said. ‘And it’s late enough and you’d better be getting along’, I said—‘and you needn’t wait for Lily, because I’ll be walking up the road with her myself’.”

  Susan leaned her forehead upon her hand and said,

  “Is it only William—does anyone else think that about Bill?”

 
“They’re a pack of fools!” said Mrs. Green hotly. “Though mind you, they’re not blaming him—only one here and there. But I’ll say, and I’ll stick to it, Mr. Bill never did no such thing—did he, my dear?”

  Susan lifted her head.

  “No, he didn’t do it. But if the police think he did—” Her voice failed.

  Mrs. Green regarded her with compassion.

  “William, he says it was Mrs. Mickleham that put the police on to Mr. Bill—says she ought to have her neck wrung for it for a cackling old hen. Seems he’s working round the house putting in wallflower, and what with the Vicarage windows always open the way they are—and how anyone can abear the draughts passes me—well, what people says with those open windows they can’t complain if it’s heard. Crying something dreadful Mrs. Mickleham was, William said—and Vicar telling her she only done her duty. Seems she heard Mr. Bill say he was going to kill Mr. Dale, and Vicar made her tell the police, and now she’s fit to cry her eyes out. William says it fair sickens him the way he’s got to listen to them going on about it. He says he don’t suppose he’ll ever fancy wallflowers again, the way he’s had to plant them and listen to Vicar going on about a citizen’s duty. Right down irreligious he talked, and I told him I wouldn’t have it in my house, and if Lily was what I brought her up to be she wouldn’t have it in hers neither. And he give me a look and says, ‘It’ll be my house’, and out he goes and bangs the door, and Lily she sets down and cries.”

  “Bill didn’t do it,” said Susan. “He wouldn’t do a thing like that. He was angry, and he said what Mrs. Mickleham heard him say, but—oh, he didn’t do it, Mrs. Green! The dreadful thing is that no one seems to have heard the shot except Bill and me. If we could only find someone else who heard it and knew what time it was, it would help Bill. Mrs. Green, if there was anyone who did hear it, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you? I know people don’t like getting mixed up in this sort of thing, but if you did come to hear anything, you would tell me?”

  Mrs. Green nodded emphatically.

  “And willing, my dear. Not that I can think of anyone that’d be likely to hear a shot round about that sort of time. People aren’t so fond of having their windows open as Vicar and Mrs. Mickleham, and most of them with the wireless on as like as not, same as the girls up at King’s Bourne, and a good loud band programme it was too. I like something more refined myself, but it’s surprising the people that are partial to a band. And you can’t hear nothing else when it’s on—that’s sure enough.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Frank Abbott walked up and down the study and discoursed on Miss Cora de Lisle.

  “She knows more than she has told, I’ll swear to that. The longer I think it over, the odder it all looks. I tell you she began by pretending that Dale had sent me over to get back her precious fifty-pound note. But she didn’t keep that up. She knew he was dead all right, and she was scared stiff. Of course she must have known that the note would be traced.” He laughed. “It was quite obvious that she’d spent some of it on brandy already. She’d a bottle and glass beside her when I came in. Now you know, she doesn’t look to me like a regular soak. I should say she was the sort that goes to it for ginger or for consolation. She’d had some when she came to see Dale at twelve o’clock in the day. Well, if she habitually drank at that hour she wouldn’t have got even the fifth-rate job she’s just been sacked from. She’s the sort that breaks out, not the sort that does it all the time. Well, on Monday she’d got the sack, and the company had gone on and left her high and dry, so she was desperate. Suppose it happened this way. She goes over to King’s Bourne—and we know she had a good stiff drink to take her there. She got in past Raby, and she got fifty pounds out of Dale. We know that, and we know she came back to the Crown and Magpie and had another double brandy just after the six o’clock bus had gone. After that, she says, a nice young man gave her a lift back to Ledlington and she doesn’t know him or his car from Adam. Now suppose she didn’t get that lift, or at least not then. Suppose the double brandy put it into her head that it was a pity to go away back to Ledlington with one fifty-pound note when Lucas Dale had three more of them in his pocket-book—she’d have seen them, as likely as not when he took out the one he gave her.”

  “That’s supposing,” said Inspector Lamb in a particularly stolid voice.

  “I said so, didn’t I? More coming. Suppose she goes round the house the way she did when she saw Cathy O’Hara—she leaned in at the window and talked to her, you know. Well, we know that window was open on Monday evening. She looks in and sees that Dale is alone. She sees too that the glass door to the terrace is ajar, and she goes round there and walks in. After that—anything. Cora rather drunk and possibly quite abusive. Dale, who had just been touched for fifty pounds, certainly very angry. He may have got out the pistol to frighten her and have put it down on the table. She may have snatched it. He wouldn’t be really on his guard with a woman—and a woman who had been his wife. No one will ever know just the way it went—if it went that way. In the end he’s not taking any more. He goes to ring the bell, and she shoots him as he turns.”

  Lamb pursed his lips.

  “Too much imagination—that’s your trouble,” he said. “If she came here to get those fifty-pound notes, why did she go away without them?”

  “Because she was scared out of her life. She’d lost control and killed him. The only thought she’d have in the world would be to get away before anyone came—get rid of the revolver and run. And if we find the nice young man who gave her that lift, I think we’ll find it was nearer seven than six when he picked her up. Meanwhile I’d like to know whether they’ve been able to dig up anything about her record at the Yard.”

  Lamb nodded.

  “There was a call just now.”

  “Well, have they got anything?” A keen look had displaced Frank Abbott’s usual air of languor.

  “Depends on what you call anything,” said Inspector Lamb.

  “What was it?”

  Lamb regarded him composedly.

  “All worked up about this, aren’t you—set on making out it was this Cora de Lisle because young Carrick’s one of your own sort and you like his girl.”

  Frank Abbott whitened.

  “You haven’t got any right to say that, Inspector.” Lamb sat back, filling his chair.

  “Well, I’m saying it all the same, my lad—and something else that you can put to it and keep. You can’t go looking for a criminal and say, ‘This is a chap I like, so he didn’t do it and I’ve got to find someone else’, or, ‘This chap turns my insides, so he’ll do’. And no need to look at me like that, young Abbott. When I’ve got something to say I’m going to say it. See? What we’re looking for every time is facts—lots of potty little facts that you wouldn’t give a damn for if you took them one by one, but when you add them up they make something. You can’t shirk facts, and you can’t bend them. You’ve got to take ’em as they come and see what they add up to. Perhaps it’s the answer you’d like it to be, and perhaps it isn’t. That’s not my business nor yours. And here’s a little fact about Miss Cora de Lisle. She was in a bit of trouble two years ago over a shooting act at the Old George at Hoxton. There was another girl, and she got hurt. It wasn’t serious, and there wasn’t enough evidence to show that it wasn’t just the sort of accident that does happen once in a way in these turns, but it seems there had been a quarrel, and if Miss de Lisle wasn’t drunk she was as near it as makes no matter, and the girl who was hurt went about saying some pretty nasty things. There’s your fact, Frank, and you can put it away with the others.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Face and voice were both respectfully non-committal.

  Lamb looked at him pretty straight and said,

  “I wonder. But you will some day, if you don’t now. Now here’s a job for you. Go down to the Little House and measure the women’s shoes. We haven’t fixed anyone up with that footprint yet. Pity you couldn’t get one of Cora de Lisle’s whilst you were abo
ut it.”

  Frank Abbott half closed his eyes and called up the picture of an impatient foot in a shabby tinsel shoe.

  “Long—narrow—a good deal arched—about nine inches—I’d say she took a five.”

  “And what would you guess Miss Lenox?”

  “Oh, hers will be a five. Foot a bit wider than the other, but of course she was wearing a country shoe, and Cora had on a gimcrack evening slipper.”

  “When she came here on Thursday morning she had on a pair of old black strap shoes, a good deal trodden over—Miss O’Hara’s description, and she doesn’t miss much, I should say. Her own feet are too small,” he added hastily.

  “Unless she was wearing Susan’s shoes.”

  Lamb turned his shoulder.

  “Get along down to it! And be on the look out for any sign of clay on a shoe. There’s clay where that puddle is—that’s why it holds the wet—and I haven’t noticed it anywhere else about the place. To my mind, whoever made the foot-mark had been into that puddle, so you keep a bright look out for traces of clay.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The bells of the Little House rang in the kitchen. Mrs. Green looked over her shoulder and saw that it was the front door bell which had just rung. She looked at Susan, who was mixing batter, and Susan nodded.

  “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Green—”

  Mrs. Green said, “Well, I’ve just about finished that floor,” and got up. She wiped her hands on her apron and walked through the dining-room and hall at a leisurely pace, humming Jerusalem the Golden as she went.

  The sight of the elegant young man on the doorstep gave her what she afterwards described to Lily as a turn. “ ‘Is Miss Lenox at home?’ that’s what he said, and, ‘Can I see her? I’m Detective Sergeant Abbott’. As if I didn’t know that, with you describing him to me, let alone me seeing him with my own eyes coming out of the Crown and Magpie after he’d been talking to Mr. Pipe. So I left him in the hall, which is good enough for detectives whether they’re got up to look like gentry or not, and went and told Miss Susan. And she put her batter to the one side, which if it was me I wouldn’t have minded keeping him waiting a bit, and washed her hands under the tap and out she went to him. And what do you suppose he wanted? Well there, I’d better tell you, for you’d never guess—every blessed pair of shoes in the house. And the way he looked them over, if he’d taken a magnifying glass to them I wouldn’t have been surprised.”