Mask of Innocence

by Roger Ormerod

  I wondered what might provoke a laugh, whether it would crack the mask. I waited for her to speak. She put an elbow on the chair arm and rested her chin in her palm, so that the tenor of her voice was restricted to the bare essentials of intonation.

  ‘I was wondering when you and your wife were intending to leave, Mr Patton.’

  It would, I thought, have been considerably more simple to convey our marching orders through Miss Torrance.

  I smiled, wondering why she’d gestured to a chair if she was in so much of a hurry to get rid of us. I hadn’t taken the seat. ‘We can get from underfoot at any time, Mrs Searle.’

  ‘It’s Lady Searle, but I would prefer the simpler Theresa — or Tessa. Please make it Tessa. And I was going to ask you to stay, you and your wife. Not to leave. You misunderstood me.’ There was a small reproach there.

  But she had given me, even now, no hint of her feelings on the matter. She wished us to stay, but there was no welcome in her voice.

  I took the seat at last. ‘We came,’ I said, ‘simply to bring Mary for the reading of the will. That’s over, and we’ve outstayed our welcome, I thought. But if you...well, I’m not sure what you’re asking.’

  ‘Have you any urgent need to hurry away?’

  ‘None at all. The whole family’s here. We include Mary in the family. And the two dogs...’

  She flicked a little finger free from beneath her chin. In the background of her impassivity, it was a dismissive gesture. ‘No difficulty there, I’m sure,’ she assured me.

  I shrugged. ‘Then I suppose...we can stay as long as you...overnight, whatever.’

  ‘Until it’s finished,’ she said. One eyebrow was raised discreetly.

  ‘Until what is finished?’

  I wasn’t certain how I should handle this. I was having to extract every word from her, as though I had her in an interrogation room, and yet it was she who was doing all the leading. She needed, perhaps, just the odd comment here and there, to keep things flowing and to indicate that I knew what we were talking about. At this time, I didn’t, so it was difficult.

  It was clearly something she had no wish to say, and she was inviting me press her into saying it. Uneasily, I felt it to be very like a seduction. A verbal seduction.

  Now she was leaning slightly forward, her chin still supported, her eyes focused on mine as though she was aiming a weapon at me. No...her gaze was focused, more specifically, on my right eye. My hand stole towards my pocket. I had a yearning to have something with which to occupy my fingers and an excuse to glance away from her from time to time.

  ‘Smoke if you wish,’ she said, realising the meaning of my movement. ‘Rowland wouldn’t smoke in here, but I’ve always wanted him to. Can you understand that, Mr Patton?’

  ‘Richard,’ I murmured, reaching out my pipe. I didn’t need to fill it. I thumped my pockets to locate the lighter, realising that she was forcing me into doing this, into the lighting of my pipe and the smoking of it, where her husband had presumably felt himself to be too much of a gentleman to smoke in his lady’s boudoir.

  ‘And no, I’m afraid I can’t understand,’ I had to admit.

  She sat back suddenly, as though defeated. ‘And Geoffrey told me you’re a policeman! Where’s all that ability towards deduction? You disappoint me, Richard. Really you do.’

  ‘You’ve set me too deep a problem,’ I told her. ‘And I’m not a policeman, now. Retired. And by Geoffrey, I assume you mean Mr Russell? Your solicitor. But in what way is it relevant that I was in the police?’

  ‘It’s just...’ She lifted her free hand and stared at her nails. ‘I hoped you would understand, without tiresome explanation, why I wished Rowland would smoke his pipe in here.’

  I lit my pipe, leaned back and blew smoke at the ceiling, and tried one possibility. ‘Because you like the smell?’

  She shook her head, the tightly curled hair dancing. ‘Because now you’re relaxed. Not defensive, not offensive. Relaxed.’

  Then I understood. She was telling me about her husband. ‘He didn’t relax?’ I was very casual.

  ‘With me...never.’ She laid both hands on the chair arms. Her fingers curled, as though she needed to grip something, and hold it. ‘Rowland was always, in here, cool, polite, distant, attentive — and I was nothing to him.’ Her voice was flat, toneless. ‘His wife. You must understand, it was necessary for him to have a wife, in his position. It was expected of him, because of the succession. I was chosen, like shuffling a pack and selecting a card. I could ride, I could shoot — but never have — I could dance, but at balls and never at dances. But I was chosen, and that was that. I had no choice. Put it this way — I was brood mare to produce his progeny. Two boys, one to inherit the baronetcy, and a reserve boy in case of accidents. I was very lucky in that respect. Don’t you think I was lucky, Richard?’

  I was finding it to be annoying to be embarrassed in this way. She now knew I had been a policeman, but no longer had an official standing, and she was using the situation as a means of unloading past grievances. I was a nonentity — in the middle. Heaven knows I’d been faced by many matrimonial embarrassments, and was hardened against them, but she could know nothing about the degree of hardness. She watched my eyes bleakly for a sign of withdrawal.

  ‘In what way,’ I ventured, ‘have you been lucky?’ I hoped that she couldn’t detect how much I resented her attitude.

  ‘It would have been so thoughtless — and wasteful — if I’d produced girls. Now — don’t you find that amusing?’ But her eyes were hard, the blue now an icy chill. It was clear that she’d never had anything to laugh at. ‘Once he had the two boys, you’d have thought he’d have been satisfied. But no. He wanted a girl. Yearned for a girl. And his brood mare couldn’t foal for him this time. Now don’t you find that ironical? And so...Mary Pinson.’

  She was quite calm about this, her emotions not, apparently, touched. It had probably taken a long while, and a considerable amount of practice, before she had been able to come to terms with her marriage. It had drained a great deal from her.

  ‘Why are you telling me this, Tessa?’ I asked, as gently as I could.

  ‘I want you to understand.’

  ‘I can’t see that it matters whether or not I understand.’

  ‘Yes. It does matter.’ And now, at last, her voice faltered. She lowered her eyes.

  ‘I know about Mary Pinson,’ I told her quietly. ‘So does my wife. I can’t see that it’s affected the situation — not very much, anyway.’ It could well have been, I thought, that she resented the inheritance of £10,000.

  She didn’t react as I’d expected. Her eyes seemed now to be staring beyond me. Then, without any change in her tone, she went on, ‘I’m going to marry Geoffrey Russell. As soon as the will’s gone through, and he’s no longer involved with me in a purely legal manner, I intend to marry him.’

  ‘Does he know?’

  Even that didn’t provoke her, though it had been facetious, which was what I’d intended.

  ‘I think he guesses. By that I mean that he guesses he doesn’t have to wait very long for me to be out of mourning. Then he will ask me, and I shall say yes. Yes, yes, yes! I’ll shout it from the rooftops. And I can be free of this...this prison, which is what it’s been all these years.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear your intentions,’ I assured her. It was quite true; I’ve always hated to see people unhappy. ‘But I still don’t quite understand why you’re telling me this. Your friend Geoffrey’s told you I was a policeman. That involved criminal law. I can’t...If it’s advice you’re asking me for, I can’t see in what way I can help. There’s no criminal matter anywhere around here — nothing for me to pick up and look at.’

  There was only the peculiar contradiction that Paul had been in France at the time when he was supposed to have been making distracting quarrelling sounds in his father’s presence. And that could not be described as criminal — though the cover-up of Paul’s absence might well be descri
bed as suspicious.

  Then, because she had in no way responded, not even so far as the flicker of an eyelid, I added, ‘Not even what seems to have been a conspiracy to hide the truth about your husband’s death.’ It was a random venture, just to see what would or would not shock her into reaction.

  She leaned forward again, but it was the other palm beneath her chin now, and my left eye on which she focused. ‘And what, exactly, do you mean by that, Richard?’

  ‘The truth of how your husband died, and you knew very well, Tessa, what I meant. The story you must have concocted with your no doubt personal physician, something persuasive to present to the Coroner in order to explain the fall.’

  ‘There was no inquest.’

  ‘I know that. It was because the doctor was sufficiently persuasive to convince the Coroner that he didn’t need to hold an inquest.’

  ‘The doctor raised no difficulties,’ she said with a hint of a smile, no doubt at my naivety. ‘He was quite satisfied, I can assure you.’

  I shook my head solemnly. ‘Not quite satisfied, I think, otherwise the story wouldn’t have needed to be backed up by a poor story of Jeremy and Paul shouting in the background and creating a distraction.’

  She clapped her hands together. Once. ‘How splendid. At last you’re being a detective. How very clever of you.’

  I was determined not to be distracted. ‘It’s a bit thin, isn’t it, that your husband — I’ll call him Rowland, it’s easier — that Rowland, who’d used that staircase all his life, should trip himself up because he was looking in all directions for the source of the shouting? Just a little thin. You have a good doctor, Tessa. Not on the Health scheme, I would guess.’

  Just the smallest hint of a frown came and went in a second between her eyes. ‘Health scheme?’

  I was suddenly aware of the extent to which she had become isolated from reality, almost confined between these grey walls.

  ‘A free availability of medical treatment to anybody,’ I explained. ‘But you, I assume, wouldn’t avail yourself of that. Your doctor’s simple check that Rowland was dead, and the certificate to cover it, must have attracted a very robust fee.’

  ‘How would I know that?’

  ‘If you paid it,’ I said patiently.

  ‘But I didn’t. Jeremy would have attended to that.’

  I couldn’t reply at once. My mind was racing, computing the possibilities. Jeremy had been home. Had he been shouting at himself? Eventually, I managed to say, ‘Then that seems to clear the matter. I can’t understand why you felt it necessary to consult me.’ Consult! My mind was still with the doctor; I still saw him there, kneeling at the foot of those stairs. And listening.

  She said, ‘Because it isn’t finished, what happened that day, that evening. It was eight o’clock. Two minutes past eight, if you want to be precise. That time is fixed in my memory. It was eight o’clock when Rowland walked out of this room. So...two minutes past. It’s the truth I wish to tell you, Richard. And something legal I want to ask you.’

  She sat back again, and now there was a small amount of emotion expressed on her face. Perhaps that was the reason she had sat back, so that I wouldn’t observe it. Suddenly, I felt an intolerable pity for this woman, an almost stifling sympathy. I saw her, for the first time, as the no doubt beautiful young woman who had come to this house — as a brood mare, as she’d expressed it herself — and had had to learn, quickly and irrevocably, that she had no feelings to express here, that feelings were of no importance, that she had no one to whom she might offer them. She was offering them to me now. How could I hesitate in extending an understanding?

  Oh, how I wished that Amelia was with me!

  I smiled. ‘Please ask. I’m sure it can’t be serious.’

  ‘Isn’t murder serious?’ she asked, with a wry little twist to her lips.

  ‘That surely wasn’t the question you intended. I’m sorry. I distracted you. Ask your intended question, and I’ll try to answer honestly.’

  She said nothing for a long while. Then she gave a small sigh. ‘It must be more than thirty years since I’ve dared to trust anyone. You’ll have to forgive me if I...if I hesitate.’

  ‘There’s no hurry.’

  She lifted her chin. ‘Then tell me, Richard...that doctor’s decision, that it was an accident. Can it be altered — overridden by any other authority?’

  It would have been a tragedy if I’d shown surprise, even glanced away from the appeal in her eyes. I had her trust; I would have rejected it with one wrong gesture, one unconsidered word.

  ‘If any evidence conflicting with an accident got into the hands of the police,’ I told her, ‘it would have to be investigated.’

  ‘But you’re not now a policeman.’

  ‘I still feel like an officer of the law, with duties. Unwritten, but duties.’

  ‘And if I must tell you—’

  ‘No, please. Let me say this. I’ve got no witness to what you might intend to say. No witness, therefore, to how far I choose to ignore what you tell me. As a duty, I mean. Personally, I’d feel free to speak to nobody.’

  ‘Your wife...’

  ‘I’d like to have her here.’

  ‘Then please — will you ask her to come in?’

  ‘Certainly.’ And with relief.

  I knew she had to have a few moments in which to collect herself, though she still seemed to be in complete control. It had taken a great deal of effort to reach this brittle strength. That a tiny crack in it was now visible was evidence that the strain on her was almost overpowering. The basis of it was in no way belittled by the lack of emotional expression, rather was it strengthened in that it showed signs of breaking.

  Quickly I went across the corridor. Amelia was standing by the window.

  ‘Richard...’

  ‘Can you come in, love?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘No time to explain. She wants to tell me something. I may need help.’

  ‘Then let’s not leave her alone too long, Richard.’

  I held the door open into Tessa’s room, and Amelia preceded me. Tessa had her head back, her eyes closed. She opened them as she heard the door latch click.

  ‘I hope he hasn’t been bullying you,’ said Amelia.

  It provoked a smile. A tiny and tentative smile. Maybe smiling hadn’t been used very often, either.

  ‘Quite the reverse, I’m afraid,’ said Tessa. ‘But please take a seat. That’s right, where I can see you. Richard, there’s another chair over there in the corner.’

  I fetched it. She was doing her hostess act. I sat. It was now Amelia whom Tessa faced.

  ‘I wanted advice on a legal problem,’ she explained. ‘I don’t quite understand why, but clearly your husband needed you.’

  ‘We share confidences,’ Amelia explained. ‘It saves time.’

  ‘How very lucky you are.’ Tessa nodded to confirm this judgement. It was an aspect of married life she had not experienced. ‘What were we saying, Richard?’

  ‘You were about to tell me something which you weren’t certain I might keep secret.’

  ‘You, Richard?’ Amelia asked. ‘Of course it would be secret.’

  ‘It was a question,’ said Tessa, ‘of whether he would have to report a crime, if one was confided to him.’

  ‘If he discovered one, yes, it would be his duty,’ declared Amelia solemnly, looking straight into those blank blue eyes. ‘If he was told, that too. If it was confided, no.’

  ‘You’re so certain.’

  ‘I wouldn’t allow him to report it.’

  ‘Even a serious crime?’

  ‘Even that.’ Amelia didn’t hesitate. I’d have kissed her, if it hadn’t been quite the wrong time.

  ‘Even murder?’ It was little more than a whisper.

  ‘That,’ said Amelia, ‘would depend on who killed whom, and why. Don’t you think, Richard?’

  I nodded agreement. ‘That would certainly be the criterion.’

&nbs
p; ‘Very well. It was I who killed Rowland.’

  Amelia bit her lip. I said, ‘How did you kill him, Tessa?’ I was trying to make the question sound casual.

  ‘I pushed him down the stairs. There was no quarrel between the two boys, of course not. Paul wasn’t here. I was behind Rowland at the head of the stairs, and I pushed him.’

  Once again, a hesitation would have been disastrous. My mind was skating all round it, and I had to say something.

  ‘And there was no distracting shouting?’

  ‘There was shouting.’

  ‘Jeremy?’

  ‘Not Jeremy. He was in the gallery at the time.’

  ‘Then who was shouting?’

  She stirred uneasily in the chair, no longer able to maintain any pose of indifference. ‘It’s of no relevance — it was not distracting. I pushed him, and he fell.’

  ‘If there was shouting, then somebody was near. It would’ve been an...an inappropriate time to push Rowland...if there was any possibility of a witness.’

  ‘The shouting was from the kitchen area,’ said Tessa, a dullness, a weariness now entering her voice. ‘The door was open. It was distinct shouting.’

  ‘You must tell me who was doing this shouting, Tessa. It’s very relevant.’

  She hesitated. Her eyes switched briefly to Amelia, then returned to me. ‘If I tell you...’ She left it on a query.

  ‘You’ll have to let me make up my own mind, on that.’

  ‘On whether you’ll have to rush straight round to the local police station?’

  ‘No. On whether it can be discounted.’

  She hesitated again. ‘I don’t think it can,’ she said at last.

  ‘Then you must certainly tell me,’ I said, more firmly now.

  ‘Very well. It was Charles Pinson. Charlie, they call him.’

  Mary’s brother?

  ‘But he doesn’t work here,’ said Amelia, just before I could. ‘We met him on our way here. He told Mary...wasn’t it something like Corrie Lane, Richard?’

  I knew she’d remembered quite clearly. She was simply trying to make the tone more chatty, lighter, to lessen the gravity of what Tessa was telling us.