by Alec Waugh
He recalled a lecture he had heard at Oxford on the structure of tragedy. “The end,” the lecturer had said, “is foreseen in the beginning. When the denouement is reached the audience recognizes that no other climax was possible, that given those characters, in that situation, against that background, the drama could not have worked to any other close. Yet at the same time in the working out of the plot, each new step, each new incident must surprise the audience. The audience must be kept guessing all the time as to what is going to happen next, even though it knows subconsciously how the threads will be unraveled.
“If you will look at your lives as you live them day by day, week by week, month by month,” the lecturer had said, “you will feel that everything in life is unpredictable, that we are all the victims of chance: that because we start out one morning without an umbrella, because a telephone bell rings when we are leaving the house and we decide to run back and answer it, because we wear a light suit instead of a dark one, because we travel by a bus instead of by a tube, we meet by chance the person who for good or bad will revolutionize our life. It all seems to turn on chance.
“Yet ninety-nine times in a hundred when a man of forty looks back on the last fifteen years, he sees that he is in more or less the position and condition that he might have expected for himself. It has worked out according to plan. And when he looks at the lives of his friends, he will see that very few of them have surprised him, that they have all more or less followed the road on which their feet seemed set when they were young. Yet for them as for you each day has brought its own unexpected rewards, problems, and discomfitures. Life is an adventure because every day is different: that is why a good play must be exciting, but never forget that it is one of the functions of the play to show behind that hour by hour, day to day excitingness, the eternal forces that control the wind and tides of human action, working out their own inevitable pattern.”
It was strange to reflect that when he ultimately did look back toward this night, he would see his progress to that point in terms of an inevitable logical process of effect and cause.
From the road outside came the sound of brakes: then of two low voices. Female and masculine. The female voice was Muriel’s. He glanced at his watch. Quarter to two. But there was a moon, bathing picnics lingered on; the voices hushed, but he heard no sound of feet upon the stairs; of a door opening; no creak of boards on the veranda. He ought to go, he did not want to spy. Yet he did not want to interrupt them. The minutes passed. Then there was the sound of a car being put in gear. A male voice whispered “good-night,” then a soft footfall on the stair. Perhaps she would not come out here.
But Muriel was feeling the need of quiet reverie. He saw her in silhouette against the sky. She came toward him with a slow, gliding walk.
“Hullo,” he said.
She did not start. She pulled a chair forward and sat beside him. She stretched out her legs and crossed her hands behind her head. She looked out over the sea, across which a waning moon drew its long line of ruffled silver. He could not read the expression of her face. But her profile, her whole pose had an air of calm. They sat there silent, side by side; conscious of one another, grateful for the knowledge that they did not need to speak, that they were in tune, respecting each other’s problems if not understanding them, savoring the beauty of the night.
Peace lay upon their hearts, as it lay upon the hearts of so many who had been distracted a few weeks earlier on the night of the Governor’s cocktail party. Euan and his father and young Archer, Maxwell and Sylvia, Jocelyn and Julian Fleury, Mavis and Margot and David Boyeur, they had all been in their separate ways distracted, frustrated, perplexed that evening. Tonight they had each in their separate ways found their way to harbor, at the very moment when in the offices of The Voice of Santa Marta high bundles of the next day’s issue were awaiting delivery at daybreak.
Chapter Twenty
1
Maxwell left town early. He wanted to drive in the cool, he also wanted to surprise his laborers, to see how much they did in his absence. Within ten minutes of his return, he had changed his clothes and was on his horse: he did not get back till half-past twelve.
“I’ll be ready as soon as that punch you’re fixing is,” he shouted.
“Hurry,” she called back. “For once there’s some real news in the paper.”
“What is it, tell me.”
“They’ve found the wallet.”
“What wallet?”
“Carson’s.”
He was glad that she could not see him at that moment. They talked in novels of bleaching under your tan. He felt as though every drop of blood had been drained out of him. He walked round to the stables, slowly; mechanically undid his pony’s girth.
“Hi, George, unsaddle Susie,” he called out.
Carson’s wallet. So it had been Carson’s wallet on the Colonel’s desk. How had it got there? What did its presence there purport? Why had it been reported? There must be a reason. Who had found it?
He must not hurry, he warned himself. He must not look over-interested. He would shower at his normal pace; behave as though nothing of concern to him had happened.
He picked up the punch and sipped.
“Fine. I needed that,” he said. “Let’s see the paper.”
It was headlined across three columns. Colonel Carson’s Wallet. Finder detained. Then across double columns. Sensational Discovery. Police have clue at last.
He put down his glass. He rested his hand against a chair. He pressed down on it. Steady, he told himself, steady. Keep your head. He read the paragraph. It was only six lines long. The meat was in the headlines.
“It doesn’t tell us much,” he said.
“It tells us that there was a wallet missing. We didn’t know that before.”
“Didn’t we?”
“How could we have?”
Indeed, how could they have. He knew. They didn’t. That was the trouble. He kept forgetting what they knew and what they didn’t know: what Whittingham knew and what the public knew. He remembered hearing an officer who had worked in intelligence during the war remark on the difficulty of remembering whether you had acquired a piece of information from gossip, a newspaper, or a top secret source. It forced you, he had said, to discuss in public nothing but gallantry and athletics. That was his problem now. He knew everything, while the public knew practically nothing.
“It’s very vague about the man who had the wallet. I wonder why they don’t give the name,” she said.
“I suppose they want to keep the real man guessing.”
“The real man. But why shouldn’t the man who had the wallet be the right man?”
“If he were, he wouldn’t be carrying it around with him.”
“Then what’s your explanation of his having it?”
“I’d say that the man who killed Carson took his wallet, took out the money, flung away the wallet, and this laborer discovered it. Then one of the police found it on him.”
“It’s very ingenious of you to have thought of that.”
Was it, or was it too ingenious. Surely it wasn’t. Wouldn’t this explanation have occurred to any reasonable person who read detective stories. Sylvia never read them. That was why it had not occurred to her.
“But if that’s the case, why do the police say that its discovery is so valuable,” she said. “The paper says ‘sensational discovery.’ “
“Papers always say that kind of thing. It’s their busines to exaggerate.”
“I know, but in a case like this …”
She hesitated, dubious.
“The paper must have got this news from the police. The police must have encouraged them to think it was important.”
“That’s to stop the public worrying. The police like to throw out sops to keep the public quiet, until the public has lost interest.”
“In England, possibly, but not here surely, where everyone knows everybody. The paper says it’s a valuable clue. If what you s
ay is true, I don’t see that it’s a clue at all.”
He thought fast. In what way could it be a clue. He didn’t see that it was any use at all, unless … a sudden frightening thought had struck him.
“If they know where the pocketbook was found, they know where the murderer went that night. That gives them some indication of the area in which he lives.”
“It doesn’t say where they found it.”
“Doesn’t it?” He reread the paper. “No more it does. But it must have been some help to them to know.”
The knowledge that it must have been disturbed him. It would limit the scope of their inquiry. Or would it? Why should they think that it had been flung there by the murderer on that night? He could have kept it on him, waiting for an opportunity to throw it into a cane field, far from where he lived.
He might have; but that’s not what I did, Maxwell told himself. I wanted to get rid of that wallet and watch as soon as possible. I did not want to have them found on me. I was afraid that I might have a car accident: I didn’t even drive home by the longest road, if I had it would have looked suspicious: to be found late at night on the leeward coast road. How would I have explained that? I did what the average man would have done in my position; made for home by the quickest road and got rid of the watch and wallet at the first available opportunity. That’s what ninety-nine in a hundred men would have done in my position; Whittingham unless he’s an idiot knows it. And he’s not an idiot.
He picked up his glass and sipped at it. He would have given a lot to gulp at it and then ask Sylvia for another. But that would be unusual. He must not do anything unusual.
“As I see it, the discovery of that wallet is really of no use to the police at all. If they had had a lucky break in some other direction, it might help; but not otherwise.”
He said it as much as possible to reassure himself. Sylvia was still unconvinced.
“You may be right, but I believe you are assuming that the murderer is cleverer than he is. You are trying to imagine how you would have behaved if you had done the murder.”
“What?”
“You are thinking, how should I behave if I had gone into Carson’s that night as a thief, and then been disturbed and got into a fight and killed him. And I’m sure that you’re right in saying that that’s how you would have behaved if you had found yourself in such a predicament. But you are not a thief. You did not break into Carson’s house. It was another type of man who did. And that man would have behaved differently because he was a different type. The average thief is stupid and ignorant. If he hadn’t been stupid, he’d have gone to the police straight away and told them that he killed Carson in self-defense. If he’d done that, he’d only have been charged with manslaughter. You know how the courts always take the side of the colored man. That’s what you would have done in his position. Think of all the films you have seen in which a man has killed someone by mistake and has got into all kinds of trouble by running away, by trying to hide the traces. You’d never have made a mistake like that. This man did. He was a stupid fellow. He ran away and then held on to the wallet and was caught with it.”
“Then why do you think the police haven’t arrested him?”
“Because they haven’t enough evidence. They prefer to watch him. He may have an accomplice.”
“You may be right.”
She might indeed be right. So many of the things she had said were true. Why had he thought that he could get away with it? Why hadn’t he followed his first impulse and gone to the police? She had guessed three-quarters right and quarter wrong because she had assumed that a sensible man always acted sensibly. Whittingham had more experience of the irrationalities of the human mind. Whittingham would also recognize that there were additional possibilities; he could afford to wait. But was there any reason to suppose that he had not to some extent argued along the same lines as Sylvia. Perhaps he had been inclined to assume that the man with the wallet had come by it illegally. He might see the wallet as a clue.
Whoever had found the wallet would have certainly contradicted himself under interrogation. Though the whites and the near whites believed that the courts took the side of the colored man, the colored man talked of the white man’s law. In the plantation days a dark man was not allowed to give evidence in court against a white. Whoever had found that wallet must have lied. His manner would have bred suspicion.
Suppose sufficient evidence accumulated to warrant his arrest? It would not be the first time that an innocent man had been tried for murder. How would I feel, Maxwell thought, if an innocent man were in the box for a crime I had committed? It was the kind of situation that occurred in novels, that you never expected to have happen in real life, not in your own life. Would he have the nerve to sit in court while a man was being tried for a crime he had committed; would he have the patience to await the verdict, banking on the man being acquitted? Was he to be exposed to that test?
The maid stood in the doorway. “Lunch is ready mistress.”
He finished his punch with a quick gulp.
“I’m thirsty. I’d like a beer,” he said.
“I’ll have one too.”
He held out his hand. She took it and drawing herself to her feet, let her weight rest against his arm. She lingered there, smiling up at him. Never had he felt so close to her. Never had he felt so far away.
2
Two mornings later Preston returned from his round of the estate to find a constable seated on the veranda, talking to his wife. He had called, he said, to ask Mr. Preston if he could remember what he had been doing on the night of Carson’s death.
“I can’t recall that we did anything,” he said. “That means that we did nothing, that that night was the same as every other night. We remember the few occasions when we do anything unusual.”
“Have you any method of checking up on that?” the constable inquired. He had risen to his feet as Preston came onto the veranda. He was tall, stiff, formal. In his white tunic, with the high collar buttoning at the throat, the blue serge trousers and heavy thick-soled black leather boots, he looked very incongruous against a background of palm trees and bougainvillea.
“I don’t keep a diary myself but I think my wife …”
Mrs. Preston laughed.
“Every Christmas I receive from my Aunt Eleanor a Smythson pocket diary. Every Boxing Day I write to tell her that it is exactly what I needed and every December thirty-first I find that I have made not a single entry on its pages.”
“Wouldn’t your servants remember if they had been given the day off. Do you yourself, sir, check the morning roll call at the boucan? Wouldn’t your overseer’s roll call help?”
“I suppose it would. But it would be a great nuisance. Is it all that important?”
“Colonel Whittingham, sir, considers that it is most important. He wants to know who was in town that evening and who was in the country; and what everyone who was in the country did.”
A checking over of the estate muster roll and of the grocery books eventually satisfied the Prestons that that night had been for them like three hundred and fifty other nights of the year, quiet and eventless.
“Did no one call on you?” the constable asked.
“Who is there that could call on us. We have no neighbors, except the Fleurys, and we rarely see them except in town.”
“Did anyone borrow your car?”
“No.”
“Could anyone have taken it for the night, without your knowing?”
“I keep the keys locked inside my desk.”
“Then that, sir, answers everything. Thank you very much. I am most sorry to have inconvenienced you.”
He took out his notebook, flipped over a number of pages and made a mark against an item on a list.
“You seem to have set yourself quite an investigation, constable.”
“I am calling on every house along the windward coast whose owner possesses a car.”
On the following afternoon
Preston passed Maxwell driving to the point. He stopped his car.
“How did you manage with the constable?” he asked.
“What constable?”
“The one who was out here yesterday, asking what each of us was doing the night Carson caught his packet.”
“He never came to me.”
“Didn’t he? He said he was calling on everyone who has a car.”
“What did he want to know?”
“Whether I was in that night, whether anyone came to see me, whether anybody could have used my car. He was asking everyone, so he said.”
“He didn’t need to ask me. He knew where I was. I’d been to Whittingham about it. I’m in a peculiar position. I passed Carson’s house, at the exact time when the murderer was in it. With any luck I should have met the man. Whittingham and I checked over my movements thoroughly.”
Had his voice sounded as casual and offhand as he had meant it should? His brain was racing, he wanted to close his eyes, to lie flat on his back in the dark and let the river of this distracting mood flow over him. But he had to sit here on his pony, erect under the midday sun, composed and indifferent.
“I never knew that,” Preston was saying. “To think of your actually passing the house at the very time. Perhaps you should consider yourself lucky; if he had killed one man, he might have killed another. Fancy my not hearing that. It shows how out of touch I get, down here on the estate.”
“You ought to get into town more often.”
“How can I with Jane and the two children. I can’t leave them alone out here. This is the most unsettled section in the island.”
“It won’t be after the elections. There’ll be a New Deal then.”
