“It’s an old ring,” he said.
“Wasn’t the ring she wore every day,” volunteered the observant Mrs. Springer.
“Perhaps it was his?”
“If it was his he would have taken it,” she said defiantly. “He took everything he knew about.” “All right,” said Coffin. “So it was her ring. She had two wedding rings. Lucky girl,” He picked it up. “May I take it? I’ll give you a receipt.”
“You needn’t bother. I don’t want it back. I wish I’d never touched the thing,” and she shuddered.
“You may be right,” said Coffin. “You may be right.”
Chapter Seven
In the middle of Oxford, at Gloucester Green, stands the bus station used by long-distance buses running from London, the Midlands and the South. The bus station stands arrogantly in the centre of academic Oxford while the railway station is inconveniently and coyly in the suburbs; tradition has it that the nineteenth-century townsmen denied the noisy and dirty railways access to the city. Whether this tradition is true or not, and who is alive now to say if it was so, it is certain that it is a good deal handier to arrive in Oxford by bus than by train; and if you are coming from London you have the advantage of approaching Oxford through its loveliest aspect—over Magdalen Bridge and up the High Street—instead of past the gas-works and the cemetery.
The bus station is lively, noisy, and bewildering. Overlooking it is a small house which is the home of the local Baby Clinic; there are always rows of babies in prams and go-carts, sitting there, tethered, but far from passive, while Mother has a last anxious word with Sister about the extra half-ounce Suzy didn’t gain, or the naughty naughty habits of wee William. Next door to the Clinic, very providentially, is a little tea-room where travellers, busmen and mothers find comfort.
Leaning against the window of this restaurant was Rachel. She had spent this fine warm day going back and forth from her rooms to Gloucester Green to meet her mother and father, only to find that her puzzling and distracting parents had never even left Paris. Later she found an apologetic and expensive telegram telling her this and explaining that by delaying another day and a half they could travel excursion and save two pounds; they said nothing about the extra hotel bill which this would let them in for and the brandy and the scent that would get bought, and it had probably not occurred to them.
Rachel shifted wearily on her feet. Then she stared in surprise.
She could see Joyo walking slowly along by the row of prams and staring into each face.
One aspect of Joyo has not received much attention: she was passionately interested in babies; not fond, mark you, or longing, or wistful, but interested. They were strange mystifying little animals to her because her experience had of necessity ruled out any contact with them. She often looked into prams, fascinated by the round, fat, pink faces. If the mother saw her looking, supposedly in admiration, Joyo had noticed there was one comment always made to her. “He’s so strong-willed.” There may be parents who think they have got a weak-willed child, if so Joyo never met them. Joyo herself regarded the little creatures with awe, fear and superstition. She would never have actually touched one but she always offered it a nervous proprietory smile. When one cried (and they constantly did cry at the sight of the large, grinning face thrust at them), she took this as a bad omen and hurried on depressed.
Rachel’s attitude to babies was quite different; she was a member of a prolific family; she had a married sister and a young brother at the Dragon School (a preparatory school in Oxford) and so she was more matter-of-fact. Instinctively she felt that one day she would be the mother of a family herself and, therefore, must forearm herself with scepticism to avoid sentimentality.
Rachel watched Joyo hanging over a pram. She saw her pick up a rattle and politely return it to the occupant who promptly threw it out again. Joyo picked up the rattle again: obviously this game had been going on for some minutes.
Rachel was considerably surprised to see her.
“Hello,” she said doubtfully, adding, “I wasn’t sure if it was you.”
Joyo was disconcerted to see Rachel, whom she avoided if she could, and as she had better eye-sight than the girl, whose large eyes were very short-sighted, this was not difficult. Her reaction was aggressive; she had heard from Marion that attack was the best form of defence; not by direct example (on the contrary, Marion was invariably amiable and polite), but because Joyo made a point of reversing whatever Marion did.
“You can see it’s me.”
“I don’t have my spectacles on.”
“Now you’re looking at me in a nasty suspicious way just like that baby did. Don’t you burst into tears.”
“Perhaps he didn’t like you,” said Rachel. “Don’t wonder,” she thought, meeting Joyo’s keen cross gaze.
“No, I know what it is. I can see it now, you and he don’t trust me.”
Rachel shook her head. She was finding it very difficult to make sense of Joyo.
“It’s written all over you. Anyway, why were you watching me?”
“I’m meeting my parents.”
Joyo laughed. “Where are they? Can’t see them.” She knew she was being unwise, rash, stupid even, but she could not stop. She was as good as accusing Rachel of being suspicious of her, in her circumstances, the last thing she should do.
Rachel was indeed bristling with suspicion, but the bewildering events of the last weeks had eaten away her usual assurance.
One day she was an ordinary girl (as far as any Boxer could be ordinary) conducting a more or less unsatisfactory love affair.
On the next day she was plunged into mystery, living in a mad, looking-glass land. The only good thing seemed to be that Ezra was turning out to be a stronger character than she had expected.
“I think you are being extraordinary,” she said, with as much poise as she could.
“Oh, I don’t blame you for being suspicious,” replied Joyo. “It’s been a funny business all round.”
“Still is,” said Rachel sharply.
“Exactly. Still is.”
“What are you getting at?” asked Rachel in a wondering voice.
“You were at the inquest, you know. The police think that the man was sitting there in the kitchen in Chancellor Hyde Street. Just sitting, when he got stabbed. Ask yourself, is it likely? A grown man, and strong enough, too, sitting there letting himself be stabbed?”
Rachel shrugged.
“No. You can’t believe it. But then ask yourself what position he could have been in that would have made him helpless.” She paused, then went on: “Supposing he was kissing her?”
“Why should he kiss her?”
“Supposing he was her husband. Suppose that!”
There was a pause. Not far away babies were crying, people talking, buses coming and going; all was bustle and noise. But Joyo and Rachel were in a pocket of silence, private to them.
“Why are you telling me this?” asked Rachel eventually.
“Because it is what you think already. It is, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Rachel after a further pause. “Yes.”
Without saying goodbye to Joyo, to whom indeed she would have found it difficult to use even the time-hackneyed phrase for farewell (she did not think God could be with Joyo), Rachel turned and went away.
But she understood that she could not leave things there, that she would have to go to Chancellor Hyde Street and make one more attempt to get things straight.
If not, then the police. There was really no alternative.
Coffin decided to go to Oxford himself. He was received by his colleagues at St. Aldates kindly, but naturally with caution. He was a stranger from London, an unknown quantity. The little they had been able to learn by careful and discreet tapping of the only source open to them, had not been reassuring. The source, an elderly superintendent named Winter, already morosely considering retirement, had said: “Very lively. Oh, a lively boy.” Uneasily conscious that people touc
hing live wires were liable to get burnt, Oxford resolved to handle him with gloves. So Coffin, bouncing along, half inclined to view his trip to Oxford as holiday, wearing his bright new tweeds (Best Appian Mixture, sir) was stopped half-way. However, he bore himself bravely, used by now to the effect he had on people, although he was always puzzled by the alarm his energy and vitality caused.
“Yes, well, that’s the poor little fellow,” he said when he had looked at the dead face. “How did it happen?”
“That’s something we haven’t got quite clear yet,” they told him grimly.
“Better ask his wife.”
“We didn’t know he had one.”
“No, you’re behind the times. He was looking for her.” Coffin told them his story.
“So she stabbed him? Seems a bit arbitrary.” Oxford was inclined to be sceptical.
“Oh, you can’t tell between husband and wife. Doesn’t need to be an obvious motive. Look at the Spens case, and the Wallace murder, and the Fraser dismemberment, all of them husband and wife crimes, and all, as far as an outsider could see, pretty well motiveless. The truth is in a marriage you just can’t tell where the rub is, only the toad beneath the harrow knows. Anyway by all accounts she did have a motive: she didn’t want to be his wife.”
“Then it looks as though all we’ve got to do is find the wife. Want to try it, Coffin? We’ve only got some thousands of women in Oxford. Not counting the undergraduates, maybe she’s one of them.”
Before he left they had some information to give him.
“We found out where he lived in Oxford. His landlady came forward and identified him. He’d cleared out the day before the murder. But he’d left a book behind in the room.”
“What was it?”
“It was what’s known as The Bride’s Book. Our Wedding, it said on the cover. Very unusual for the groom to treasure it. But he seems to have been an unusual sort of groom. Or perhaps the bride left it behind. This book is meant to contain photographs.”
“And did it contain photographs?” asked Coffin quickly.
“No. It was empty. He had some photographs in his pockets when he left though. The landlady saw them. Whether they were from the book or not we do not know.”
“Were there photographs on the body?”
“No. By the time we got to him there were no photographs at all.”
“My first move will be to go round to Chancellor Hyde Street,” said Coffin.
“Nobody there but Dr. Marion Manning and the woman who does her housework,” they said.
“Two women,” pointed out Coffin, and taking up his new brown-green hat (tones in wonderfully with the tweed, sir), he departed.
He walked up St. Aldates, and towards the crowded Cornmarket, enjoying every minute of the walk.
The crowds thickened at Cornmarket. Coffin found himself part of a steady stream of people all going in one direction, and once in it was not easy to get out. He was wedged in on either side. He found that this stream was bearing through the doors of the biggest Woolworth’s he had ever seen. With a desperate effort he clung to the door and turned to face the other way and also the cross, red face of the housewife pushing behind him. “Excuse me, madam,” he said squeezing past. He got to the gutter, but not before a piece of vanilla ice-cream had somehow attached itself to his collar. He stood there mopping at the ice-cream and breathing heavily.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” said a sympathetic man, picking up his hat for him; it had been badly trampled upon.
“I thought I’d never get out,” said Coffin simply.
“I know.” There was understanding in the man’s voice. “You should never have come in on a Friday if you aren’t used to it. Takes practice.”
Eventually, Coffin emerged at the end of the crowded Cornmarket into the comparative emptiness of St. Giles. He breathed out. He looked back at the crowd behind him, composed of visitors from America and Scandinavia, town people, country people in for the market, undergraduates, and people down from London and Birmingham for the day, and sighed for the peace and quiet of East London.
He was standing outside the ornate hotel named after Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph. In America, or even perhaps in London, such an hotel would have been called, no doubt, The Churchill, but Oxford, with characteristic self-assurance, had named it The Randolph.
An elderly, well-dressed, and beautiful American woman came out of it as Coffin stood there looking.
“You know, Ada,” she said to the older, even better-dressed, but less beautiful woman who was with her, “I can’t believe it is good manners to call an hotel by the Christian name of a peer.”
“He wasn’t a peer, dear,” said Ada, who seemed well informed. “Only the son of a duke. It’s a courtesy title, nothing really.”
“Well, but all the same, it’s familiar. They wouldn’t have done it with us. Now I think I can say that as a family we’ve had more hotels, hospitals, and centres named after us than any in the States.”
“And banks, and railways, and motor cars, and oilwells, and mineral deposits, don’t forget, Margaret,” reminded her companion. “I always expect your family to do the first real estate deal on the moon when we eventually get there.”
Margaret ignored this. “Except maybe the Rockefellers, I concede a mite of rivalry there, but we’ve been at it longer, but with us it is always the full name, three initials and all, never just the Christian name.”
“No,” said Ada firmly, “and since the men in your family are always called John I can well see it would not have done.”
Fastening their little ties of sable and mink more firmly round their lovely, if ageing, necks, they passed on. A group of undergraduates came tumbling down the steps after them.
“That’s what I like about The Randy,” one shouted. “It makes you feel welcome. I hadn’t been in there for six months, and they knew my name …”
“Anyone would know your name, Henry,” said a friend. “You tell them enough. Besides, you’re memorable.”
This was true, conceded Coffin. The young man was six feet tall, with a vast head of red hair.
“They actually knew me,” said Henry. “The porter said ‘Hope you’ll stay Head of the River, sir’ and he gave me my dinner jacket that I left there the night Torpids was over last spring. I am glad to get it back. I have missed it.”
Coffin got out his map of the town and realised he had to walk straight ahead to get to the house he wanted. He walked on, having enjoyed his glimpse of life in Oxford. Indeed, he was enjoying the whole trip. He had discovered the man he was looking for and although he was dead and Coffin had yet to break this news to his sister, he himself was in the best of spirits. He was glad to be on his own; Oxford, thinking no doubt that it had best keep an eye on this stranger from London, had suggested, quite strongly, that it should send a constable with Coffin, but he, even more strongly, had refused. He had his map, he pointed out, and after all no one could ask his questions but himself.
Soon he found the house where Dr. Marion Manning lived without difficulty. He thought it looked a pleasant little place, although he raised his eyebrows at the garden. He saw a curtain move in the house next door. “Some old woman watching,” he thought. The Major replaced the curtain and moved back further into his room. Another policeman. Well, it would be interesting to see what change this one got out of next door; the Major had been watching events there with interest since the murder. (He had, of course, told the police all he knew, but it did not seem to have helped them much, or if it had then they hadn’t said so.) He watched Coffin ring the bell again. “I’ll be surprised if she even opens it,” he told himself. You couldn’t see everything from his house; but with a spy-glass, and the Major had some excellent binoculars, you could see a great deal. “You’d think she had two heads, really you would,” he said to himself. “Or is she trying to disguise herself?”
Coffin rang the bell for a third time and this time he leaned on it and did not move until he heard
feet; he knew as well as the Major did that someone was at home. He could smell that someone was at home, he could hear faint sounds.
Presently the door did open, in an irritable kind of way as if the opener wished the caller to the devil. This was roughly true.
Inspector Coffin saw Joyo, although, of course, he did not know this at the time; what he saw was a woman with fierce brown eyes and wildly waving hair who stood before him with arms crossed and feet stockily apart as if daring him to cross the threshold.
“There’s no one home,” she announced sourly, and as it happened, untruthfully.
Joyo was alarmed at the sight of Coffin; the full awfulness of what she had done was beginning to come home to her; further, she realised intuitively and at once, that Coffin was the first person she had met so far who would pierce her mystery. And she saw this because Coffin had kind eyes and regarded her with interest and understanding, not with irritation and scorn as so often happened; she feared understanding and interest like death.
“Dr. Manning?”
“She’s out,” said Joyo fiercely; she would not help this man by one degree; he could see far too sharply for himself as it was.
“Is there anyone else at home?”
“No one lives here except Dr. Manning.”
“And the woman who helps her in the house?” said Coffin, who had been briefed by his Oxford colleagues. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” said Joyo, after a pause; she resented this summing-up of her appearance; she did help Marion in the house, but she was more, much more. “We are close friends. I help her out.” The lie meant nothing to her, she told it cheerfully: it would take a psychologist to distinguish between what was true and false in that anyway, she thought with amusement.
Coffin was puzzled by this woman; from her looks she was a rather violently coloured specimen of the type he often met penny plain in his own district, the working woman, independent and friendless. The dead man’s sister had not been unlike her. This coloured mask was stupid and cross, and yet, behind it, Coffin could swear he saw intelligence and apprehension. All the same she was blocking him in a stupid way: she must know he could get hold of Dr. Marion Manning if he wanted to, could find out all he really chose to, and she could not really hope to stop him. Why try? Unless she was frightened. He sighed; he was too experienced to equate fear with guilt. Some of the most innocent souls were also the most frightened, but fear made his job immeasurably harder.
Death Lives Next Door Page 11
