Return to the Scene

by Patrick Quentin

  At the shallow cliffs above it, they were joined by two tall and impressive colored policemen in white uniforms who slipped out of the shadows. They all skirted the sharp screen of yuccas and century plants to the far end of the beach where the cliffs dwindled to nothing and the smooth turf sloped gently to the beach beside a clump of sweet-smelling, flower-smothered oleanders.

  There the Major called a halt. They all clustered around him, staring at the expanse of sand which stretched before them, gleaming silver in the moonlight.

  “High tide this afternoon was at five-thirty,” announced the Major. “At full flood all this sand is covered, so any marks you might have made this afternoon when you went bathing would have been washed away before dinner. Low tide tonight was at eleven-thirty.” He paused. “The marks I’m going to show you run all the way to the water’s edge which means they were probably made around eleven-thirty, certainly not much earlier.” He added in a very clipped voice: “Just about the time that Mrs. Chiltern—ah— saw Mr. Drake off at the dock.”

  He turned to one of the silent colored policemen. “Sergeant, a flashlight.”

  The officer handed him one. With a little click he sent a powerful beam of artificial light straight across the sand to the lapping fringe of the sea.

  “These are the marks. I want you to see them because the tide’s rising fast and they won’t be there much longer.”

  Kay had been able to see something even in the moonlight. But now, as she peered forward, crowded between Maud and Elaine, there was no mistaking what the Major had meant.

  From a spot almost at their feet, where the grass met the sand, straight down to the water’s edge, the coral sand was scuffed up in a broad irregular path. In the uncertain light it was impossible to detect any distinct impressions in the soft sand, but the general effect was of something having been dragged from the turf, across the beach to the sea.

  “I’d like to know,” said the Major, “whether any of you ladies or gentlemen could tell me what caused that disturbance in the sand.”

  As she stood there, her hand resting on Maud’s arm, Kay could feel the exaggerated attention of the others. Her own pulses throbbed jerkily in her wrists.

  “You probably cannot see,” said the Major, “but there are vague impressions of bare feet there. The whole thing might have been caused by someone without shoes dragging a dinghy down to the water. But you’ve all assured me that no boat was brought here or taken from here by any of you—particularly at a time approximating that at which Drake’s speedboat started from the dock.”

  The silence, broken only by the gentle flop of the tiny waves against the sand, was almost suffocating.

  “In any case I doubt whether that could have been the cause because there are several impressions in the sand which look as if they were made by fingers. If one were pulling a dinghy down to the water, one’s hands would hardly leave marks in the sand.” The beam of the flashlight still played mercilessly. “A much more likely explanation would be some larking around at a bathing party. Somebody—ah—dragging somebody else across the sand into the water.” He paused. “But you have told me there was no bathing party here tonight.”

  He stopped abruptly, switching off the flashlight.

  Once again there was nothing but the silvery moonlight and his huge figure towering above them.

  “Can any of you give me a plausible explanation?” No one spoke. Of course no one spoke. Kay could hear Maud’s breathing, quick, irregular. Suddenly Elaine’s fingers closed around her arm, pressing almost savagely against her skin. Kay did not dare look at her.

  “There is one explanation that would seem to fit the facts.” Major Clifford’s voice, booming around the cove, was very distinct. “I haven’t told you that Thorne’s made a preliminary examination of the body. He’s reported to me on his findings. On Drake’s face there are bruises, scratches—scratches that were made before he died, as if he had been in some sort of struggle. Also, on his temple there’s an abrasion as if he’d been struck by something, struck hard enough to have made him unconscious.”

  Abruptly the Major swung around. He was etched now in front of them, enormous and forbidding, before the tranquil backdrop of the moonlit beach and the sea.

  “Suppose Drake had come down to this spot, suppose he’d met someone here, that there was a quarrel, a struggle, and he’d been hit unconscious. Bare-feet marks on the sand, marks of fingers. If it had happened that way, it would have been easy for the person who had attacked him to have dragged him unconscious across the beach to the sea, towed him through the shallow water to the dock, hauled him into the speedboat, started off for the island, and thrown him overboard halfway there to drown.”

  So it was out now! In spite of their desperate attempts, in spite of Dr. Thorne’s extraordinary switch to their side, Major Clifford with his dogged logic had led them remorselessly to—this.

  The scent of the oleanders, trailing toward her in a faint breeze, was sickeningly sweet.

  “Murder!” The word came high and shrill. In the daze of her thoughts, Kay had not recognized the voice until she saw Alice Lumsden, white and tense, close at the Major’s side. “You think Mr. Drake was— murdered!”

  “I think that a theory of murder fits the facts exactly—except for one thing.”

  The Major, dark and rocklike in the moonlight, had turned squarely to Maud. Kay was staring at her too, all the strength ebbing out of her. She had never seen Maud look like that before, never seen her sister’s face helpless, her eyes staring with the blind terror of a rabbit caught in a snare.

  The Major’s voice was unexpectedly soft.

  “Are you still sure, Mrs. Chiltern, that you saw Mr. Drake start off the island in his speedboat?”

  He paused.

  “Are you still sure that it was Mr. Drake and that he was perfectly conscious and—alive?”

  Chapter Seven

  IN THE TAUT MOMENTS that followed the Major’s question, attention was focused on Maud. Kay knew that all their futures hung by her answer. If Maud was trapped into admitting that she had lied about what had happened at the dock, the only stumbling block to the Major’s murder theory would have been removed. Inevitably they would all be caught up in the relentless cogs of the police machine from which none of them could escape unscarred.

  “Well, Mrs. Chiltern,”—the Major’s voice boomed again—“are you still sure you saw Drake start the speedboat himself and go off toward the island alone?”

  Kay had never taken her eyes from her sister. Maud’s face, so completely off guard a moment before, had recovered control miraculously.

  “I’ve already told you what happened at the dock, Major,” she said. “If you don’t believe me, there’s really no use in my saying it again.”

  “But the Major’s theory could still be true.” It was Alice Lumsden who broke in, a sharp eagerness in her voice. “Mr. Drake could have left Mrs. Chiltern at the dock the way she said and then come back again after she’d gone.”

  Calmly Maud turned to the nurse. “If Ivor had left and come back, we would have heard the speedboat stop and start again. The sound of the motor is very clear across the bay. I’m sure we’re all agreed that the motor started only once tonight.”

  She shifted her attention to the Major, watching him with gentle sternness as if he were a ten-year-old child. “In my opinion, Major Clifford, you exaggerate the importance of those marks on the sand. Children, anyone, could have swum here and played on the beach. And as for the extraordinary conclusion you draw from them—I suppose in your position you have to consider every possibility. But Mr. Drake was our very good friend and he was engaged to marry my daughter. Wouldn’t it have been a little kinder to have spared us this—tonight?”

  The sheer brazenness of that counterattack was magnificent. Kay was almost sure now that her sister had not told the truth about those crucial moments on the dock. But no one could have guessed it from her expression of mild reproof. The Major was obviously fl
ustered. Flustered and rather angry.

  “Interesting to have your opinion, Mrs. Chiltern. But it’s just as well to let me run my job in my own way.” He gave a significant “hrmph.”

  “Well, since you’ve made your position clear there’s nothing much more we can do tonight.”

  “I agree,” said Maud. “It’s very late and I would like the children to get some sleep.”

  “Sound idea. You’ll all need it.” The Major was definitely hostile now. “I’ll be round again in the morning to get down to this more thoroughly. In the meantime I’m leaving a man here at the swimming beach. I don’t want any of you to come here or to go to the island without my permission. Is that understood?”

  “Why, of course, Major.” Maud nodded tranquilly. “Alice, you’ll help Mr. Chiltern back to the house, won’t you? Don, if the Major’s man wants to make himself coffee or anything in the night you’ll let him use the kitchenette in the cottage, please. Come on, children. You too, Simon, dear. Good night, Major.”

  Like a mother hen with her brood, Maud hustled them all away from the beach.

  As they left, Kay caught one last glimpse of Dr. Thorne. He had moved to Don’s side and was speaking to him softly. He turned his head to look at her. She was very conscious of his gaze following her as she moved away up the path to the house.

  When they reached the living room, a pale, silent group, it was still Maud’s subtle strength that preserved the weak semblance of normalcy. She turned to Simon.

  “Simon, dear, with your mother and father away I can’t have you going back to that house alone. You must stay here. There’s a second bed in Kay’s room. I’m sure she won’t object.”

  “Of course not,” said Kay.

  Maud moved to Elaine, kissing her cold cheek. “Good night, darling. Try to get some rest.” Then she turned to Terry.

  There was a hesitancy in her that took Kay vividly back to the last time those two had been together, that tense moment at dinner when Terry, glaring down the table at his mother, had said: I’d rather be dead than be the way you are.

  In spite of the dreadful thing which had slashed through their lives since then, Kay could see the memory of that scene reflected in her sister’s face now. Uncertainly Maud said: “Good night, Terry.”

  For a moment Terry watched her, his face very white. Then impulsively he pulled her toward him and kissed her cheek with clumsy tenderness.

  “ ’Night, Mother. And—and I’m sorry.”

  That little reconciliation was poignant. But to Kay it was rather ominous too.

  Would it, she wondered, have been effected if Ivor Drake had not been—dead?

  The party broke up in silence. Somehow, to Kay, that silence was worse than the most uncontrolled scene could have been. They had all been virtually accused as potential murderers. And yet they showed no surprise, no shock, no indignation.

  They just went to bed in silence.

  It made Kay peculiarly conscious of her own extraordinary position too. Ivor had died. Yes—she might as well admit it—Ivor had been murdered. But never for a moment had it occurred to her to treat Major Clifford as anything other than an enemy who must be balked at every turn.

  That was her attitude toward the police!

  And, as she moved up the steep, sweet-smelling cedar stairs with Simon Morley, she felt increasingly uneasy. There was no hope of seeing Elaine now till morning, and until Elaine had been given a chance to explain the facts which seemed so dreadfully to implicate her, Kay would have to walk very warily. The tempestuous, enigmatic Simon was the last person she would have chosen to face at a moment like this.

  The two girls entered the raftered Bermudian bedroom. Kay felt a little twinge of anxiety as her gaze rested on the copper vase where she had hidden the bathing cap. Whatever happened, Simon mustn’t be given a chance to find the cap. She mustn’t be given a chance to see Rosemary’s diary, either. Kay had been hoping to destroy it or at least to put it in some hiding place where it would be permanently safe from prying eyes. Now that Simon was here, it would have to stay in her pocketbook precariously until the morning.

  Simon had dropped down on one of the beds, curling her slim stockingless legs under her. Behind their long lashes her blue, chameleon eyes were watching Kay.

  “You’ll want pajamas,” said Kay awkwardly. “I can lend you some.”

  She pulled open a drawer in the cedar tallboy and chose two pairs of pajamas, one white silk for herself, another leaf green for Simon.

  Simon took hers in silence. Casually she pulled off her sweater, stepped out of her skirt, and moved to the vanity, a lovely, sun-tanned figure curving out of delicate white lingerie. She sat down on the cedar stool in front of the mirror and ran a comb through her glossy hair.

  Kay sat down on her own bed, stripping off her stockings, hoping against hope that Simon would not break the stiff, electrically charged silence.

  But she was doomed to disappointment. The other girl’s reflected face above the smooth bare shoulders was still watching her from the mirror.

  Suddenly, in a voice that tried to be far more steady than it was, she said: “Why did you tell that lie about my being with you when you went over to the island?”

  Kay said cautiously: “I thought you’d rather not have the police know you were over there in Ivor’s playhouse alone.”

  “In other words you were generously giving me an alibi?”

  “If you like to put it that way.”

  “I don’t like to put it that way at all.” Simon swung around on the stool, staring at her. “You gave yourself an alibi just as much as you gave me one.”

  “I didn’t have to hide the fact I’d gone to the island alone.”

  “Oh, no. You just went to borrow a book from Ivor. Borrow a book!” Simon threw down the comb, the heavy slave bracelet on her wrist jangling. “As if I believed that. As if I believed anything any of you said. You and your family and Don—you’re all the same. Ivor’s dead. He’s—he’s been murdered.” She gave a hard little sob. “And you’re all of you—glad.”

  “Simon, you mustn’t…”

  “Why mustn’t I say it? It’s true, isn’t it? I know all about you. Ivor told me. You romanced around with him three years ago. Then you heard he was marrying your niece and you ran screaming down to save her. And I heard what Don said to you on the dock this morning.” She gripped a handle into a small tight fist. “You both wanted to stop the wedding. And you stopped it all right. How can you dare say you’re not glad Ivor’s dead?”

  Kay sat on the bed, looking into Simon’s white blazing face beneath the cloudy mass of chestnut hair, wondering with growing dread how much Ivor had told her and why. This girl with her lightning anger, her probing insight, and her incalculable knowledge was going to be far harder to handle, far more dangerous than Dr. Thorne.

  “You mentioned Don,” Kay said. “This morning on the dock Don accused you of wanting to see Ivor dead. You didn’t deny that.”

  Simon tossed her mane of hair. “As if I’d bother to deny anything that crazy boatman said.”

  “Perhaps you couldn’t deny it because it was true.”

  “True!”

  “A lot of people did want to see Ivor dead, you know.”

  “People that were jealous of him, that’s all.” Simon leaned forward on the stool, one hand fluttering over the bare skin of her shoulder. “People who were jealous because he was attractive and clever and rich and glamorous. Cheap little people like the Chilterns who fed on him like parasites and then, just because he wasn’t stuffy and mealy-mouthed the way they are…”

  Kay looked at her, finding amazingly that pity was mingled now with her anxious exasperation. “So you were in love with him,” she said.

  That sudden statement checked the rapid flow of Simon’s words. The girl sat stone still, the heightened pallor of her cheeks throwing into vivid relief the slashed scarlet of her lips.

  “What right have you to say that?”

  “
Because it’s written all over you. You loved him and he’d thrown you over for Elaine.”

  “So that’s how you’ve got me figured out!” Simon’s laugh tilted dangerously off key. “The butterfly broken on the wheel. You’re just like the rest of your family. You Chilterns with your tidy little setup for making prudery pay dividends. You couldn’t understand me any more than you could understand Ivor. I was in love with him. Yes. And he was in love with me. Not in your dreary, corseted Victorian way, but really in love. And he’d always have gone on loving me because we were made up out of the same fiber. We were both of us adult. Oh, he was intrigued by Elaine, of course. But just because she was cold and unapproachable, something different. We used to—to laugh about her together, Ivor and I.”

  The rancid cynicism of those words was horrible, even more horrible because Kay could so plainly hear the ghost of Ivor talking in them through Simon. In spite of her exotic make-up and her brittle poise, Simon Morley seemed so pathetically young and naive now. Young and naive enough to have been fooled into thinking that Ivor’s calculated immorality was sophistication and that she in her tawdry little affair had been his great, understanding love!

  Simon’s voice was running on breathlessly: “You think I was jealous because Ivor was going to marry Elaine. Jealous! Do you suppose it would have made any difference between Ivor and me?” Her eyes suddenly bright, she added: “But the wedding was all a myth anyway. Ivor would never have married Elaine after what happened this evening.”

  “This evening? What do you mean?”

  “You pretend you don’t know? You pretend you don’t know why I was in the playhouse waiting for Ivor tonight?”

  “Of course I don’t know. How could I?”

  “Then it will give me great pleasure to tell you.” Some of the unbridled near-hysteria was gone now. “This evening I was at home alone. About ten-thirty I was bored and lonely. I paddled over here in my canoe. Yes, I might as well admit it. I came because Ivor was here again and because just to be near him meant something. I strolled up to the house. I saw he was playing bridge with all you people. I didn’t go in. I went back to the dock. I saw lights in Don’s cottage, heard voices. I thought it might be Terry, someone to talk to. I went there and looked in at the window. Guess what I saw.”