‘A good ten minutes, miss. I used to pass the remark to Mrs Mercer many and many a time. “Nothing to go by that church clock of yours,” I used to say. “And all very well for you that’s got a watch, but many’s the time it’s given me a turn, and all for nothing.” They’ve put it right since, someone was telling me, but I don’t go that way now so I couldn’t say for sure.’
‘Did you hear anything besides the shot?’ Hilary was dreadfully afraid of this question, but she had to ask it or be a coward. And immediately she knew why she had been afraid. Panic looked at her out of Mrs Ashley’s eyes and a trembling hand went up and covered her mouth. Hilary shook too. ‘What did you hear? You did hear something—I know you did. Did you hear voices?’
Mrs Ashley moved her head. Hilary thought the wavering movement said ‘Yes.’
‘You heard voices? What voices?’
‘Mr Everton’s.’ The words were stifled against the woman’s palm, but Hilary caught them.
‘You heard Mr Everton’s voice? You’re sure?’
This time the movement of the head was almost a jerk. As far as Mrs Ashley could be sure of anything she was sure that she had heard James Everton’s voice.
‘Did you hear any other voice?’
Again the wavering movement said ‘Yes.’
‘Whose voice?’
‘I don’t know, miss—not if it was my last word I don’t, and so I told Mrs Grey when she came and arst me, poor thing. It was only just so I could say there was someone there quarrelling with Mr Everton.’
Quarrelling...Hilary’s very heart was sick. Damning evidence against Geoff—damning corroboration of Mrs Mercer’s evidence. And not bought, not cooked up, because this woman had nothing to gain. And she had held her tongue. She had been sorry for Marion, and she had held her tongue.
Hilary drew in her breath and forced herself on.
‘You didn’t hear anything the other person said?’
‘Oh, no, miss.’
‘But you recognised Mr Everton’s voice?’
‘Oh, yes, miss.’
‘And you heard what he said?’ Hilary was pressing her hard.
‘Oh, yes, miss.’ And at that her voice broke in choking sobs and her eyes rained down tears.
One bit of Hilary wondered furiously how anyone could produce such a continuous flow, whilst another bit of her was cold and afraid on the edge of knowing what James Everton had said. She heard herself whisper: ‘What did he say? You must tell me what he said.’
And then Mrs Ashley, with her face in her hands, choked out, ‘He said—oh, miss, he said, “My own nephew!” Oh, miss, that’s what I heard him say—“My own nephew!” And then the shot, and I ran for my life, and that’s all. And I promised poor Mrs Grey—I promised her faithfully that I wouldn’t tell.’
Hilary felt perfectly cold and stiff.
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ she said. ‘The case is closed.’
TEN
HILARY WALKED ALONG Pinman’s Lane with heavy feet and a much, much heavier heart. Poor Marion—poor, poor Marion, coming here with a flickering hope as Hilary had come, and hearing this damning evidence as Hilary had heard it. Only much, much worse for Marion—unbelievably, dreadfully worse. She mustn’t ever know that Hilary knew. She must be able to believe that she had shut Mrs Ashley’s mouth on the evidence which would certainly have hanged Geoffrey Grey.
She turned the corner of Pinman’s Lane and walked back blindly along the way by which she had come. Was it well to save a man for years, monotonous years, of deadening prison life? Wouldn’t the sharp wrench have been better—better for Geoff, and better for Marion too? But even in retrospect she shrank back from the thought. There are things beyond enduring. She shuddered away from this one, and came back with a start to the outside world.
She must have taken a wrong turning, for she was in a street she did not know at all. Of course she didn’t know any of the streets really, but this one she was sure she had never seen before—little raw houses, barely finished yet already occupied, semi-detached, with one half of a house painted bice green and the other half mustard yellow, red curtains in one family’s windows, and royal blue next door, and roofs tiled in every imaginable shade. The effect was very new and clean, and the houses like bright Christmas toys just unpacked and set out all in a row.
It was when she was thinking they looked like toys that she heard a footstep behind her, and in the moment of hearing it she became conscious that the sound was not a new one. It had been going on for quite a long time, probably ever since she had turned out of Pinman’s Lane. It had been there, but she hadn’t been listening to it. She listened now, walking a little faster. The footsteps quickened too. She looked over her shoulder and saw a man in a Burberry and a brown felt hat. He had a fawn muffler pulled well up round his throat, and between hat brim and muffler she had a glimpse of regular features, a clean-shaven upper lip, and light eyes. She looked away at once, but it was too late. He lifted his hat and came up to her.
‘Excuse me, Miss Carew—’
The sound of her name startled her so much that she forgot all the rules. If people speak to you in the street, you don’t say anything, you just walk on as if they hadn’t ever been born. If you can manage to look as if you had been brought up in a refrigerator, so much the better, and you simply mustn’t blush or look frightened. Hilary forgot all these things. A bright annoyed colour sprang to her cheeks, and she said, ‘What do you want? I don’t know you.’
‘No, miss, but if you’ll excuse me I should like a word with you. I was on the train with you the other day, and I recognised you at once, but of course you wouldn’t know me unless you happened to notice me in the train.’ His manner was that of an upper servant, civil and respectful. The ‘miss’ was reassuring.
Hilary said, ‘In the train? Do you mean yesterday?’
‘Yes, miss. We were in the carriage with you, me and my wife, yesterday on the Ledlington train. I don’t suppose you noticed me, because I was out of the carriage a good part of the time, but perhaps you noticed my wife.’
‘Why?’ said Hilary, looking at him rather disconcertingly. Her bright no-coloured eyes had the frank stare of a child.
The man looked past her.
He said, ‘Well, miss, I thought you two being alone in the carriage as it were—well, I thought perhaps you might have got into conversation.’
Hilary’s heart gave a little jump. Mercer—it was Mercer. And he thought perhaps she had talked to Mrs Mercer in the train, and that Mrs Mercer had talked to her. She didn’t believe for a moment that he had recognised her yesterday. Of course he might have. Mrs Mercer had recognised her, and Mrs Thompson had, but all the time Mercer was in the carriage she had sat looking out of the window, and when he came back she herself had gone out into the corridor and stayed there until the Ledlington stop. He had stood aside to let her pass, and of course he might have recognised her then, but she didn’t think so, because if he had, and if there was anything he wanted to say, he could have followed her down the corridor and said it there. No, he had got it out of his poor draggly wife afterwards and now he wanted to find out just what the poor thing had said. How he had found her, she just couldn’t imagine, but when she thought about it afterwards she wondered whether he had been at Solway Lodge on some business of his own or of Bertie Everton’s and had seen her looking in through the gate, or whether he had followed her all the way from the flat. Both these thoughts gave her a nasty creepy feeling down the back of her neck. She said with no perceptible pause, ‘Oh yes, we talked a little.’
‘Begging your pardon, miss, I hope my wife didn’t make herself troublesome to you in any way. She’s quiet enough as a rule or I wouldn’t have left her with a stranger, but as soon as I came back into the carriage I could see she’d been working herself up, and when I saw you turning the corner of the road just now I thought I would take the liberty of catching up with you and saying I hope she didn’t say anything she shouldn’t or give any offence
. She’s quiet enough as a rule, poor thing, but I could see she was all worked up, and I shouldn’t like to think she’d offended a young lady that was connected with a family where we’d been in service.’
Hilary turned that bright look on him again. A very superior, well-spoken man, but she didn’t like his eyes. They were the blankest eyes she had ever seen—light, hard eyes without a trace of expression in them. She thought of Mrs Mercer weeping in the train, and she thought a man with eyes like that might break a woman down.
She said, ‘You were in service with Mr Everton at Solway Lodge?’
‘Yes. A very sad affair, miss.’
They were walking along between the bright toy houses. Hilary thought, ‘I’d rather live in one of these than under those dripping trees at Solway Lodge.’ Everything clean, everything new. Nobody else’s sins, and follies, and crimes, and loves, and hates hanging around. Little gay bandbox rooms. A little gay garden where she and Henry would prodigiously admire their own marigolds, their own Canterbury bells, their own Black-eyed Susans.
But she wasn’t ever going to have a house with Henry now. Mercer’s words echoed faintly in her mind—‘A very sad affair.’
She blinked sharply twice and said, ‘Yes, it was.’
‘Very sad indeed. And my wife not being very strong in her head, she can’t properly get over it, miss, and I should be very sorry if she’d annoyed you in any way.’
‘No,’ said Hilary, ‘no, she didn’t annoy me.’ Her voice had an abstracted sound, because she was trying to remember just what Mrs Mercer had said...‘Oh, miss, if you only knew.’ That was one of the things. If she only knew what? What was there for her to know...?
She didn’t see Mercer look sharply at her and then look away, but his voice came through her thoughts.
‘She’s in very poor health, miss, I’m sorry to say, and it doesn’t do to let her talk about the case, because she gets all worked up and doesn’t hardly know what she’s saying.’
Hilary said, ‘I’m sorry.’ She was trying to think what else Mrs Mercer had said...‘I tried to see her.’ Her—that was Marion—poor Marion, with the trial going on. ‘Miss, if I never spoke another word, it’s true as I tried to see her. I gave him the slip and I got out.’
Mercer’s voice came through again.
‘Then she didn’t say anything she oughtn’t to, miss?’
‘Oh no,’ said Hilary a little vaguely. She wasn’t really thinking about what she said. She was thinking about Mrs Mercer giving her husband the slip, with Geoff being tried for murder and the Mercers the chief witnesses against him. And Mrs Mercer had tried to see Marion, tried desperately. ‘Miss, if I never spoke another word, it’s true as I tried to see her.’ The woman’s very tone of horror sounded in her mind, and the way her light wild eyes had been fixed as she whispered, ‘If she’d ha’ seen me,’ and then, ‘She didn’t see me. Resting—that’s what they told me. And then he came and I never got another chance. He saw to that.’ It had meant nothing to her at the time. It began to mean something to her now. What had Mrs Mercer been going to say, and what chance had been missed because poor worn-out Marion had been persuaded to take a brief uneasy rest...?
Mercer was saying something, she didn’t know what. She wrenched away from that train journey and turned on him with a sudden energy.
‘You were a witness at Mr Grey’s trial—you were both witnesses?’
He kept his eyes down as he answered her.
‘Yes, miss. It was very painful to me and Mrs Mercer. Mrs Mercer’s never got over it yet.’
‘Do you believe that Mr Grey did it?’ The words came to Hilary’s lips without thought or purpose.
Mercer looked at the pavement. His tone had a note of respectful reproof.
‘That was for the jury to say, miss. Mrs Mercer and me we had to do our duty.’
Something boiled up in Hilary so suddenly that she nearly lost her self-control. She felt a strong uncivilised urge to slap Mercer’s smooth, well-featured face and give him the lie. Fortunately it was nearly, and not quite. Civilised young women do not slap butlers’ faces in the street—it simply isn’t done. She turned hot and cold all over at her narrow escape and walked a little faster. The new road had run into an old one, and she could hear the roar of a thoroughfare not too far away. She wished passionately to catch a bus and leave Putney and the Mercers to their own devices.
He still kept up with her and went on talking about his wife.
‘It’s no use raking things up that’s bound to be painful to all concerned, and so I’ve told Mrs Mercer many a time, but being weak in the head—it’s her nerves the doctor says—she kind of harps on the case and blames herself because she had to give evidence. But as I said to her, “You’re bound to say what you know, and no blame to you it if goes against anyone.” “You can’t tell lies,” I said, “not on your Bible oath in a court of law, you can’t. You’ve got to tell what you’ve seen or heard, and it’s the judge and the jury that does the rest, not you.” But there, she goes on harping on it, and I can’t stop her. But as long as she didn’t annoy you, miss—I’m sure you’d be one that would make allowances for her not being what you might call quite right in the head.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Hilary.
The thoroughfare was most helpfully near. She walked faster and faster. That was at least six times Mercer had told her that Mrs Mercer wasn’t right in the head. He must be very anxious for it to soak right in. She wondered why. And then she thought she knew. And then she thought that if he said it again, she would probably scream.
They emerged upon the High Street, and her heart jumped with joyful relief.
‘Good morning,’ she said, ‘I’m catching a bus.’ And caught one.
ELEVEN
HILARY SAT IN the bus and thought. She thought about the Mercers. She thought a great deal about the Mercers. Mrs Mercer might be off her head, or she might not, Mercer was uncommonly anxious to make it clear that she was off her head—he kept on saying it every five minutes. There was something in Shakespeare—how did it go—‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’. Mercer was rather like that about Mrs Mercer—he protested so much that you couldn’t help having the feeling that perhaps he was overdoing it. ‘What I tell you three times is true.’ That was Lewis Carroll in The Hunting of the Snark. That seemed to fit Alfred Mercer very well. If he went on saying that Mrs Mercer was mad often enough it would be believed, and to all intents and purposes mad she would be, and nobody would take any notice of what she said.
An idiotic rhyme cavorted suddenly amongst these serious deliberations:
If I had a husband like Mrs Mercer,
I should want him to be a sea-going purser
And go long voyages over the main
And hardly ever come home again.
Quite definitely and unreasonably, she didn’t like Mercer. But that didn’t necessarily mean that he was telling lies. You may dislike a person very much, and yet they may be telling the truth. Hilary reflected on this curious fact, and decided that she must not allow herself to be biased. Mercer might be speaking the truth and Mrs Mercer might be off her head, but contrariwise he might be telling lies and Mrs Mercer might be what she had appeared to Hilary to be—just a poor thing, a dreep—a frightened poor thing with something on her mind. If there were ever one chance in a thousand that this was true, something ought to be done about it.
Hilary began to consider what she could do. The Mercers had left the train at Ledlington. She could, of course, go down to Ledlington and try to find Mrs Mercer, but just how do you begin to look for a stranger in a strange place like Ledlington she really had no idea. What she wanted was someone to talk the whole thing over with. How could you think a thing like that out all by yourself? What you wanted was someone to say ‘Nonsense’ in a loud commanding voice and having said it, to take up his stand on the hearth rug and lay down the law with that passionate indifference to argument or contradiction which was one of Henry’s most marked charac
teristics. But she probably wasn’t ever going to see Henry again. She blinked hard and stared out of the window of the bus. There really did seem to be an unnecessary amount of misery in the world. She would never have believed that she could have thought with yearning of Henry laying down the law. What was the good of thinking about Henry when she wasn’t going ever to see him again and couldn’t possibly ask his advice?
Hilary gave herself a shake and sat up. What was there to prevent her from asking Henry’s advice? They had been friends. They had thought they would like to be married, and had become engaged. And then they had found out that they didn’t want to be married and had become disengaged. Considered rationally, the next step should be a reversion to friendship. It was completely irrational to be dead cuts with a man just because you weren’t going to marry him.
With a slightly quickened pulse, and in what she told herself was a calmly deliberative frame of mind, Hilary decided that she would go and see Henry and ask his advice. She must talk to someone, and she couldn’t talk to Marion. She would be calm and perfectly friendly. At their last interview she had been scarlet in the face with rage. She had stamped, she had come very near to screaming at Henry. But that was because he simply wouldn’t stop talking or let her get in a word edgeways. It would be pleasant to show him that she could behave with poise and dignity, polite but aloof, courteous, and unruffled.
She left the bus, and walked on air. She was going to see Henry, and only half an hour ago she had never expected to see him again. She looked at her watch and found it was half-past twelve. Suppose Henry had gone out to lunch. Well, suppose he had—‘I can see him some other time, can’t I?’ Something that felt as heavy as a lorry-load of bricks crashed down on Hilary’s spirits. Easier to bear the thoughts of never seeing Henry again than to feel that he might be out now, at this very minute, when she had counted on seeing him. ‘Please, please, please don’t let him be out!’
Case Is Closed Page 8
