They were all watching Simon now with the rapt attention of theatergoers at a play. The girl struck a match and carried it to the cigarette. Her hand was a little too steady.
“It’s a pretty case you’ve worked out against Terry, Major Clifford, but it seems to rest entirely on the assumption that he could have sailed around the island to meet Ivor by the jetty. You say there was no witness to the position of his sailboat at the time of the murder. Unfortunately there was a witness. I’m the witness.”
The Major had stiffened and was watching her with a kind of bristling bafflement.
“I haven’t spoken before,” she said, “because I’m human and didn’t want to get into trouble. But things have gone a little too far now.” Smoke curled from her nostrils. “Last night around eleven-thirty—for what, I believe, are called reasons of my own—I pad-died over to the island from my father’s dock. I was about halfway to the playhouse jetty when I heard Ivor’s boat start from Hurricane House. The moonlight was bright and Terry’s sail, being white, was easy to see. At that moment, which was just a few minutes before the time you’ve decided Ivor was killed, I saw Terry’s sail plainly. It was just where he said it was— way out beyond the island. He couldn’t possibly have tacked in against the wind all that distance to kill Ivor.”
She smiled sardonically around the cigarette. “I’m sorry if it spoils your case. But there isn’t any conceivable way in which Terry could have committed that murder.”
Kay had known, of course, that Simon had taken that trip to the island. But she hadn’t known that she had seen Terry’s sail. Certainly she hadn’t expected her to come rushing to Terry’s defense at so obvious a risk to herself.
Terry was gazing at Simon, his face relaxing some of its agonized tension. There was gratitude in his eyes, frank adoration—but anxiety too.
“Simon, did you really see me? You’re not just saying this to protect me?”
Simon smiled at him with faintly mocking tenderness. “You ought to know by now that I’m not the martyr type.” She turned back to the Major. She was not smiling any more and yet a slight hint of amusement still showed in her extravagantly blue eyes. “Why don’t you pay some attention to me for a bit instead of concentrating your big guns on the Chilterns? I’m tired of being the forgotten woman. Last night at the time Ivor was killed, I was alone in a canoe paddling over to the island from my house. I went within a few feet of the moored rowboat. I could easily have grabbed the rowlock.” Her long lashes, flickering, told Kay just what an effort it was for her to keep up the blasé pose. “And since I seem to be going the whole hog, I might as well tell you that I have something which you haven’t even tried to prove against Terry. I have a motive. Quite frankly, I was not at all sorry to see the end of Ivor Drake.”
It was fantastic that she should have gone to those lengths of frankness to save Terry. Kay remembered her the night before, all flame and fury, mourning Ivor’s death tempestuously, denouncing the Chilterns, sneering at Terry’s love for her. And, remembering that, Kay realized what she was doing now.
This was her way of making amends.
Silence had descended on the room with Simon’s dramatic announcement. Now Elaine’s voice sounded breathlessly: “You can’t think Terry did it any more, Major. He—he hasn’t any motive. And Simon’s given him an alibi.”
The Major was drawing himself up in massive preliminary to speech. Suddenly Dr. Thorne broke in: “I wouldn’t pay much attention to an alibi given him by Miss Morley, Major. After all, she’s been trying to give him an alibi for Miss Lumsden’s death too. She’s obviously lying to shield him.”
Those words, spoken coldly and crisply, staggered Kay as if she’d been struck. Unable to believe her ears, she swung round to look at Tim. When she saw him, she couldn’t believe her eyes either. His face was as cold and crisp as his voice. It was the face of a stranger, a hostile stranger—the coroner’s physician. And, as she watched him, torn between utter incredulity and a stinging sense of having been cheated, she saw him bend, pick up his bag, and lay it down on the table at his side.
“I think this is the time for me to speak, Major.” He was studiedly ignoring the shocked antagonism of the others. “We can certainly discredit Miss Morley’s evidence. And once we do that, your case against Terry is very strong. As Miss Morley pointed out, the only important thing you lack is a motive. I am in a position to show you that he had a very strong motive indeed for wanting Drake dead.”
While Kay stared at him with growing horror, he opened the medical bag, took out the folder, leafed through it, and picked out the forged check with Terry’s confession attached to it. He moved toward the Major, holding the papers in his hand. He said: “When you read this, Major, I think you’ll find it speaks for itself.”
Kay had lost almost all sense of reality then. As the fragile edifice of her cloud-cuckoo-land romance fell shattered at her feet, she felt nothing but her own burning shame and anger. She had let him fool her not only into betraying Terry, but also into losing her own self-respect.
Willingly, without the slightest hesitation, she had destroyed evidence which could have incriminated Tim Thorne far more than this evidence incriminated Terry. She had saved his skin and he was repaying her generosity by doing this.
This was happening to Terry. And it was her fault, because of the way Tim’s mouth curved, the way his dark eyes tilted at the corners—because for the second time in her life she had been a fool about a man.
She had hated Tim Thorne once that evening. Now she hated him again—passionately, beyond the compass of words.
Dimly she was aware of him, standing there, cool, impervious, Terry’s confession still in his hand. She waited for the moment when he would give the paper to the Major. But it didn’t come. Instead Tim turned and gazed around the room. His pale face was set with a strange unapproachable determination.
“I don’t like having to do this to Terry,” he was saying very softly. “But murder is murder—particularly when it is committed twice. Unless someone can think of a way to make it unnecessary, I shall have to show the Major this document.”
He paused, gazing down at his dark hands and then up again. “Of course there’s still a lot of things to discuss.” He was looking at Maud. “There’s the fact that Alice Lumsden’s body was moved, for example. And then there are all the other things too. The pajama pants, the marks in the sand—and the light-green cushion with the dark-green stripes.”
That meant nothing to Kay. Nothing at all. But, through the veil of her anger, she saw the faces of the others, blurred in a mist. She saw Gilbert’s eyes, bright, hectic, she saw Maud’s lips half parting in a little stifled gasp. She saw Terry, staring gauntly. But it was at Elaine that her gaze stopped.
Elaine had risen. As if what Tim Thorne had said had been some terrible, hypnotizing spell, she moved slowly toward him. Her face, white beneath the dark, gleaming hair, had the numbed, unreal expression of a sleepwalker.
Then, for one second, her eyes, glancing at Don, showed stark, almost unbearable anguish. She crumpled into a chair. She buried her face in her hands. Despairingly through the sobs that racked her slight body, she breathed: “I can’t bear it—not any longer. I can’t let him do that to Terry. I’ve been in hell long enough. I’ve got to—I’m going to tell the truth.”
Chapter Twenty
IN THE EXCRUCIATING SILENCE which followed Elaine’s outburst, Tim Thorne moved across the room to Terry, Without a word he handed him the forged check and the confession. That was really the one thing Kay understood.
Miraculously, for some unknown reason, Tim had given the papers to Terry without showing them to the Major.
Her anger, which still blazed unabated, confused her powers of reasoning. All she knew was that something dreadful had come—and that it had come through Tim Thorne.
She saw the room as a disconnected sequence of images. Major Clifford staring in blank bewilderment; Terry clutching the papers in uncertain, white-knuckle
d hands; Elaine, slight and forlorn, her face still buried in her hands, her body shaking with sobs.
Tim Thorne moved to her, laying his hand on her shoulder. He was looking at the Major.
“I think Elaine would prefer to talk to me alone. Would you mind leaving us?”
The Major snorted. “But…”
“Please. You’ll understand it all soon enough. Just let us be together. Go away. Come back again in an hour.”
“But this is a police interrogation,” began the Major dazedly. “It is essential…” Then, as if he couldn’t remember what was essential, as if his own astonishment, coupled with a British allergy to tears, was too much for him, he let the sentence peter out. He gave one harassed look around the room. And then, shrugging, he muttered: “Have it your own way, Thorne. I’ll go. But I’ll be back in exactly an hour.”
And, amazingly, he was gone.
Dr. Thorne glanced round at the others. He looked very tired now.
“Perhaps you’d leave us too. All of you.”
Elaine had sat up in the chair. She wasn’t crying any more. Her face was white, utterly without expression, like a doll’s.
Don went to her, pushing roughly past Tim. He looked down at her with a kind of fierce, anxious protectiveness.
“What is it, Elaine? What is he doing to you? If you want me…”
Elaine gave a little shiver. In a voice cold as dry ice, she said: “Go away, Don. Don’t talk to me— please.”
He went, like a dog that had been slapped. Simon had moved to Terry and slipped her hand into his. The two of them followed Don out of the room in silence.
Kay looked at Gilbert and Maud. They were close together, Maud standing by the wheel chair, her hand on her husband’s arm. Gilbert looked at her and then at Tim.
He said quietly: “As Elaine’s father and potentially her lawyer, I think I should stay and hear what you have to say.”
“I shall stay too.” Maud’s voice was firm, final.
Tim glanced at both of them, moistening his lips. “Very well. If you feel that way, I suppose you have the right.”
His gaze moved to Kay then. She wasn’t ready for it. She had been standing, half in a daze, watching like a spectator from outside. The sudden impact of his gaze was too much for her. Turning sharply, she moved away and up the cedar stairs.
When she reached her room, she didn’t turn on the lights. Her head throbbing, she went to her bed and sank down on it, stretching out on the cool spread. She felt bruised, desolate.
You can bear just so much, she thought. A wave of self-pity surged through her. As she lay there on the bed in the darkness, her thoughts were steady, in the harness of logic again, and she knew what was happening downstairs. Somehow Tim had found the solution. And he had used the evidence against Terry as a weapon to intimidate Elaine who had been walking along some dark, terrible path of lies.
The first seething flurry of her anger against Tim had spent itself now that she could be reasonable and knew he had never intended to hand over Terry’s forgery confession to the Major. If she had had the wit to realize it, he had made his point clear to her earlier—in the library.
You don’t want to go on condoning murder indefinitely, do you?
Tim was right, of course. That second corpse, lying huddled there in the rain, had changed everything. It had plunged them back into reality, dispelled that strange, mirage world where right had been wrong, where the police had been the enemy and where duty lay only with her friends—whether murderers or not.
Yes, they had been living in a mirage which had faded now. However glad they may have been that Ivor had died, life could not be endurable for any of them until this ghastly thing was over.
It was time to wake up.
Time to wake up! When she was still so pitifully unprepared for that awakening.
She tried not to think about it, or about Tim either—Tim whom she had known in the mirage and who had turned out to be the one to disperse it. Her anger, fostered by her own shame, still rankled far deeper than logic could follow. He had wanted the evidence against Terry preserved just as much as he had wanted the evidence against himself destroyed. He had achieved both ends through her. And, in doing so, he had tricked her into feeling something which, after the wound of Ivor, she had never wanted to feel for a man again.
That was really the point, she thought in a moment of clairvoyance. That was why she could never forgive him—not because he had pretended to love her, but because he had made her pretend to herself that she loved him.
Gradually, as she lay there, the room’s darkness became opalescent and she saw through the uncurtained window that the moon was shining.
She pushed herself up and crossed to the sill. The storm had passed, leaving no trace behind. The huge, pale moon, hanging in a cloudless sky, bathed in silver light the lawn with its shadowy hibiscus, the wooden dock, and beyond it the shining expanse of the bay. After the storm, Bermuda had magically recaptured its tranquil loveliness. From Kay’s window, everything looked exactly as it had looked the night before— except that there were no lights in the playhouse, no light on the dock, no speedboat whirring away from the jetty toward the island.
Ivor’s speedboat.
Watching that serene, silver landscape, it seemed fantastic that so much could have happened since last she had been at this window. Ivor and Alice dead. And, for each of the rest of them, a life radically changed, a life that could never quite be the same again.
Change for all of them. And for one of them… With a little shiver Kay thought of those things, meaningless to her, which had taken on a sinister, almost heraldic significance. The white pajamas; the marks on the sand; the light-green cushion with the dark-green stripes; and—she had almost forgotten it— Elaine’s split, silver bathing cap which she had found clutched in Ivor’s hand.
Downstairs the riddle of those things was being solved. Soon they would all be forged into a chain, a chain that would manacle—whom? Faces, like ghosts, flitted before her eyes. Elaine herself who had become so appallingly entangled with Ivor alive and Ivor—dead. Don who had been caught too in the web that bound her. Gilbert, hating the man who had tortured his son, hating him helplessly from his wheel chair; Terry, with the wounds of the forged check and Simon to avenge. Simon who had loved and been cheated. And Maud.
Maud who loved her children more than herself, who had lied shamelessly to protect them; Maud who had moved Alice’s body.
She had not realized how impossible this period of waiting would be. She put her hand on the window sill, steadying herself, staring out across the bay, trying to think of nothing but the impersonal beauty of the night.
And then, at last, there was a tap on the door. It opened and Elaine came into the room.
Kay, feeling a little dizzy, saw her niece standing in the path of the moonlight, unconsciously recreating that other moment when she had stood there—in her white taffeta wedding dress.
“Elaine!” Her own voice sounded cracked, alien. “Is—is it all over?”
“Yes.” Elaine came to her, putting a small cold hand on her arm. “It’s all over. Dr. Thorne wants to see you. He’s in the slave cottage—waiting for you.”
“He? He wants to see me?”
“Right away.” Elaine’s hand, lying on her arm, uncurled and her fingers pressed into Kay’s skin. “I didn’t know the truth,” she breathed. “You’ve got to believe me. I never knew all the truth. Whatever happens, please don’t blame me too much. It’s been so frightful. And all the time I was trying to do what—what seemed best to do.”
Kay understood nothing except the desperate pleading in her niece’s voice. Impulsively, because she couldn’t bear to see her suffering, she bent and kissed her cheek.
“Please, Kay—go to Dr. Thorne. Later, perhaps, there’ll be a chance for you and me.”
Elaine slipped away, out of the room. Then Kay heard the door down the corridor close behind her.
She did not think much about w
hy Tim should want to see her. The mere fact that she would have to see him kept everything else out of her mind. What was left of her control was pathetically threadbare. Her hands were trembling. She couldn’t steady them. Automatically she left the room and moved down the cedar stairs to the living room.
It was empty. The French windows were open. Out on the terrace, the air was heavy with the scent of camellias. She passed down the steps, over the moonlit lawn which had no more reality than an illustration from a fairy tale.
The slave cottage loomed ahead, nestling in tall, dark cedars. There were lights in the windows. She reached the door. Her heart pounding, she pushed it open and stepped into the room beyond.
Tim Thorne was standing by the plain wooden table still piled haphazard with Don’s ponderous law books. His back was to her, and the first thing she noticed was that he was wearing one of Terry’s tweed jackets. His own, of course, had been soaked in the storm. Perhaps he had been wearing Terry’s coat in the living room, but she had not realized it until now. Somehow that jacket, a little too long for him, a little too frivolously collegiate, disarmed her, touched her.
She said: “I’m here.”
He turned abruptly, his dark face startled out of a reverie. “Kay.”
He came to her, not smiling, his eyes shadowed with weariness. He was not at his ease. And that uncertainty heightened the adolescent effect of the tweed jacket. She had prepared no resistance against this new, oddly appealing quality. In spite of herself, she felt a crazy desire to comfort him.
She struggled against it, trying to make anger come again.
He said: “You’re angry at me. I know it. You’re angry because I used that evidence against Terry after you’d destroyed the evidence against me. You mustn’t be angry, Kay. I had to do it. It was the only way to force the truth.”
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