Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)
Page 24
“Then I remembered that I was to coach Miss Watson at three and, thinking things out, I made the plan of taking the body down in the canoe. I gather that you have found my rug, which I took from my boathouse to cover the body and which I afterwards flung into the bushes in Ferry House garden. You have also found the wet and muddy trousers and shoes, which I discarded in exchange for the old ones I usually keep in the boathouse for gardening. Miss Watson may remember those. I worked out further details of the plan as I paddled down.
“When I left Persephone College at four I returned to Ferry House garden, where I had moored the canoe near the derelict boathouse. My idea was to upset the canoe, so that the body would be found in the river and a verdict of accidental death returned at the inquest. In that way, I thought, there was no danger that either I or anyone else would be suspected. I pulled the canoe a little way up above the fork of the New Lode to a bank beneath which, I thought, the water was deep enough for the body to be swept out into the stream, but I was unable to carry out even this plan to its conclusion. I slipped on the bank and the canoe floated away beyond my reach, without upsetting. I could do nothing more but fling the paddles after it.
“No one is in my confidence. My housekeeper, Mrs. Bingham, knows nothing.
“What is the use of facing a trial and giving, not only my own private affairs, the muddy sediment of my life, but many things also which others should be allowed to keep secret, to the public to gape at and conjecture upon? Technically I am not guilty of murder, yet how can I stand up to fight that charge when my conscience gives the verdict: Morally guilty?
“Do you consider that such self-recrimination as this is extravagant, if what I have written is true? Although you are well acquainted with crime, you may not realize the effect upon the mind of a man who has a particular abhorrence of crimes of violence, of the conviction that he is morally guilty of one. Myra Denning’s relationship to my daughter, Pamela, intensifies the horror of this idea, round which my mind has revolved during three frightful days and nights. I have faced Pamela once since Friday afternoon, but I cannot face her again.
“In the top right-hand drawer of my desk are some letters and photographs for Pamela. I cannot write to her. I had planned a conversation with her in which she would learn the whole truth and would be as honest and generous as her mother always was. When the opportunity for that conversation came, it had become impossible to tell her the truth. Yet perhaps she knows. I can only pray that she may show that same high courage which her mother had, and that she may make her own life so fine an achievement that in the general scheme of things it may be counted as atonement for her father’s failure.”
THE END