“There were only three alternatives—accident, suicide, or murder—and no one could believe it was an accident.”
“Why should it be a suicide?”
“Well, there was this girl—Elizabeth Sinclair.”
Inwardly I heaved a sigh of relief. So we’d got to the heart of the story at last—the third side of the triangle, without which there’s no story at all.
“People used to ask me sometimes—aren’t you afraid of someone trying to steal your handsome husband now that he’s away from home so much? But I wasn’t. Oh, there might be incidents, but a sensible wife shuts her eyes to them. He was away three or four days on end sometimes. Frankly, I didn’t see how he could afford to leave me. It’s a cruel thing to say about a dead man, Miss Browne, but—well, charm’s like anything else: it gets tarnished, and thirty-six is different from twenty-four, which was his age when we married. It appeared he’d met this girl—she was barely twenty-one—and it had been love at first sight for both of them.”
“I thought you said he couldn’t afford to keep a wife. Or did Elizabeth have money?”
“She was the only daughter of a very rich man—the only child—and she’d get everything.”
“Unless Daddy married again.” I took for granted he was a widower.
Her mouth hardened. “You didn’t know Victor. He’d have insisted on a prenuptial settlement—and he’d have got it. I don’t say Daddy would have approved, but Elizabeth was the kind no man can resist. Now, there was a heroine for you, Miss Browne. Dark and slender and—glowing. You remember Shelley’s moon-maiden, with white fire laden? She made me think of that. I only saw her the once, you know.”
“You mean he brought her?” Victor was proving himself less and less like one of my heroes.
“She brought herself. ‘I thought if I came in person, perhaps you’d understand,’ she said. ‘Oh, how can you want to hold onto him when you know it’s me he loves? Why won’t you divorce him, Mrs. Hughes? You’ve had twelve years—’
“And, of course, Victor could live another thirty. But not with this girl, I decided. If I’d been tempted to yield before, I was iron-hard now.
“ ‘Surely she made you see—’ That was Victor talking, when he came home.
“ ‘So it was your idea?’ I said. ‘I might have guessed it. You must be mad if you think I’d make it possible for you to ruin that girl’s life,’ I said warmly.
‘She’s made for better than secondhand goods.’ “ ‘I won’t give her up,’ Victor said.
“ ‘There’s no law to stop your setting up house,’ I agreed. ‘But would Daddy like that?’ He raged, but he didn’t move me. ‘You’ll only marry her over my dead body,’ I said. Have you ever noticed, Miss Browne, how often clichés come home to roost?”
“But it was Victor’s dead body,” I pointed out. “Yes.”
“And there was talk of murder.”
“It’s what the police would have liked to believe,” she said bitterly. “I suppose you can hardly blame them. You don’t get promotion by arresting motorists for illegal parking.”
“You want to be careful,” I advised her sharply, “You never know who may be sitting next to you in a place like this. There’s an ex-Superintendent Humbolt who comes here sometimes.” He was one of the few useful contacts I’d made at the clinic; he’d helped me out of knotty problems once or twice when my heroines had been more feather-brained than usual. I knew what he’d say about Victor. Never trust charm, it’s the most powerful weapon in the devil’s armory. I’ve heard him say that more than once. “But why should anyone think it was murder?”
She went off at a bit of a tangent. “If you saw someone who’d cheated you sitting on a balcony, say, and a chimney pot started to topple, and you knew it would hit him and you didn’t yell out, would that make you a murderer?”
It wasn’t the sort of problem I’ve ever been called on to solve. Murder’s taboo in my kind of tale. “Accessory before the fact?” I hazarded.
“Ah, but whose accessory? You can’t be accessory to a force of nature—but what else caused the chimney pot to fall?”
“A good question,” I agreed. I wondered what the pious would say. An Act of God? Not very complimentary to God, of course. Not that I supposed a chimney pot had actually played any part in this story. And of course it turned out to be just an analogy.
But talk about clichés! The truth was almost as incredible—the truth as she told it, that is.
It seems that it was Victor’s custom to make their after-dinner coffee.
“And you let him do it, even after you’d refused him a divorce?” My most addle-pated heroine would have had more sense than that.
“If he’d meant to—to do away with me—he’d never have chosen anything so obvious.”
“Sometimes the most obvious thing is also the most subtle.”
“Anyway, that night—it was a few days after our conversation about Elizabeth and I thought he was accepting the situation—he’d just brought in the coffeepot and tray when the phone rang. I went to answer it, expecting it to be for me. But it was for Victor. When I came in he’d just poured out the coffee. ‘Well, that was quick,’ he said. ‘Or was it a wrong number?’ ‘It’s for you,’ I told him.
“ ‘Chaps do choose the most inconvenient times,’ he grumbled, looking at his coffee. ‘He might have waited another five minutes.’
“ ‘It’ll take five minutes to cool—or are you afraid I might lace it with arsenic while you’re out of the room?’ I said.
“He stared. ‘That’s a nice thing for a wife to say to her husband.’ He jammed the cup down. ‘Don’t let yours grow cold. I poured it out’—and he went off, shutting the door behind him. It’s funny, Miss Browne, how trifles can hold your attention. I hadn’t thought anything about his pouring out both cups till he called my attention to it, and it made me wonder. You see,
he knows—knew—I love everything piping hot, and if it had been Leila Hope on the phone—the call I’d expected—well, it’s always ten minutes before she hangs up.
“I’d picked up my cup, but now I put it down and crept over and opened the door. The telephone was in an alcove in the hall, so that I could hear without being seen. Victor was laughing and joking, then suddenly his voice changed. ‘I’m very anxious about her,’ he said. ‘She gets these moods, you can’t reason with her, and she’s inclined to be morbid. I can neither laugh nor argue her out of it.’
“I shut the door and came back to my chair. So that was his game, I thought.
I was to be represented as being eccentric, so that anything might be expected of me. Automatically I picked up the coffee, and then the notion came to me.
I’m not a writer, Miss Browne, though I’m quite a reader. And being alone so much I’d had time to think. And I wondered why he’d been so anxious that I drink my coffee hot. It wasn’t like him to worry about things like that. And then his saying I was morbid.”
I interrupted rather brutally. “So you decided he’d poisoned the coffee and then gone off to telephone. But how did he know it was going to ring then?”
“He could have arranged it, knowing I’d probably answer. Oh, I didn’t think he intended murder. He knew the surviving partner would be the first suspect, and there was no one but ourselves in the house. But don’t you see, that meant he could tell any story he liked! I thought he’d put in enough of whatever it was to make it necessary to call a doctor, who’d say it was attempted suicide, and then later, if, for instance, I fell under a subway train or something—I don’t drive a car—everyone would remember the first time.” “Why didn’t you pour the coffee out of the window?” I suggested sensibly.
“I didn’t think of that, only of upsetting the table, and that would have meant breaking the cups; but then I’m not clumsy, so I’d have aroused his suspicions at once. Besides, I didn’t see why he shouldn’t be—what’s the phrase?”
“Hoist on his own petard?”
“That’s it. Biter bit.
So—oh, Miss Browne, I switched the cups. I thought it would serve a dual purpose—make him uncomfortable and let him see I knew what he was up to. I thought of it as a self-protective measure.”
“And when he came back?”
“I’d finished my cup, and he drank his—well, mine really. Then we each had a refill, and soon after he said he was tired and how about bed? Happy
dreams, he said. Those were the last words I ever heard from him. When I went in next morning with a cup of tea—we had separate rooms by then,
since I’d found out about Elizabeth—oh, it was clear he wasn’t going to be interested in tea any longer.
“The doctor said he must have been dead for quite some time; and he couldn’t give a death certificate, he’d have to inform the coroner. That’s when the horror suddenly became real. You’re very clever, Miss Browne, not to have crimes in your books. People who like violence can get it in the newspapers. The police were in and out of that house like—like mites in a cheese.”
“What was it he’d taken?”
“One of the barbiturates. I don’t understand about medicine—I’m never ill, neither of us ever was. I hardly take an aspirin six times a year. Of course,
they searched everything, almost took the paper off the walls, but they
couldn’t find even an empty vial. And seeing that I practically never went to a doctor they couldn’t have traced the stuff to me, however much they’d wanted to.”
“Where did they think he got it from?”
“No one knows, but he did travel for a firm of pharmaceutical chemists at one time. He could easily have got it that way, though I’ve heard you can get hold of drugs even without a doctor’s prescription. But that was only the beginning. Accident was ruled out—which left suicide or murder. Everyone said he wouldn’t have committed suicide, and I didn’t think he would myself.”
She paused, but I wasn’t letting her stop there. It’s not often an hourand-a-half wait in a clinic can bring you a plum like this. “So it had to be murder?”
“Only it couldn’t be. What advantage did I gain from his death, I asked them. I didn’t inherit a penny—in fact, after the funeral I had to pay a large tailor’s bill—he was very dandified about his clothes. If I’d wanted to be rid of him I had only to walk out. I had my own means, you know.”
“You didn’t think of telling them the simple truth?”
Her eyes stared at me, as round as pennies. “Well, naturally I thought of it; and naturally I held my tongue. There was no proof and if I let them know I had a suspicion—well, there was only my word for it that I hadn’t doped the coffee. They wouldn’t have got a conviction, I know that, but the mud would have stuck to me for life. Anyway, the verdict was death from barbiturate poisoning, with insufficient evidence to show how it had been administered.
“But that was bad enough. I was conscious of very odd looks wherever I went, and people in shops suddenly and mysteriously didn’t have the things I wanted. A little later I changed back from Ruth Hughes to Ruth White— they’re neither of them conspicuous names, are they?—and I came south. In London they might never have heard of Victor Hughes and quite likely they hadn’t. Anyway, it’s like that hymn you learn at school. ‘They fly forgotten as a dream—’ ”
“And in London you met Willy?”
“Well, that was three years ago. I still had my capital and I went into partnership with a woman who ran an agency. I supplied the competence and she supplied the charm, which seemed to me quite a fair division of labor.
When I met Willy—he was so different from Victor they might hardly have belonged to the same species.”
“And yet they say that when people marry again, they always choose the same type,” I reminded her.
“I suppose there has to be an exception to every rule. Victor had been so popular, but Willy seemed so—so neglected. He’d been a widower for years, had a bookshop, and was the studious type. The shop had great potentialities, but, oh, Miss Browne, the confusion in it, everything so hugger-mugger it would take a week to find anything a customer wanted. Willy lived—very uncomfortably—in two rooms above the shop. The first time I invited him back to my apartment for a meal he said, ‘This is what I call a home. I’ve seen nothing like it since Edna died fifteen years ago.’
“He was so vague—if he’d been in Victor’s shoes the police wouldn’t have found any trouble at all in believing he’d taken the stuff himself thinking it was saccharine. I had a sense of responsibility towards him. That was the start. Of course, it was never like Victor, but I was forty-five by then, an age when your ardor has cooled off. And then, when once you’ve been married— even if it hadn’t worked out too well—well, it seems unnatural to be living alone.
“Anyway, we got married. I kept up my interest in the business—Willy had the shop, you see, and it wasn’t as though we were likely to have a family—and weekends we worked among the books. I tell you, Miss Browne, you wouldn’t recognize the place now. It’s got quite a reputation. We can tell customers right away if we’ve got what they want in stock, and, if not, where we can get it and how long they must wait. A few months ago we put in a manager, a very capable fellow of about forty-five—sometimes I say to Willy, I don’t know how we’d get on without Mr. Brett. It means Willy isn’t tied down so much, he can go to book sales, have a bit of private life. Mr. Brett’s a bachelor—it doesn’t seem to matter to him how long hours he works.”
I only had time for one more question before her name was called. “Did you tell Willy about Victor?”
She looked astounded, as though her eyes would drop out of her head. “Of course not! All that happened to Mrs. Victor Hughes, and to me at least she’s as dead as her husband. Nothing whatever to do with Willy.” Then her name was called and she jumped up with the eagerness of all new patients. I saw that she’d left her umbrella leaning against the chair, but I supposed she’d come back for it. I got down to my proofs at last; a while later I heard a creak as some heavy body descended alongside mine.
A voice said, “Well, Miss Browne, still at it, I see?”
I looked up and there was my old friend, ex-Superintendent Humbolt,
though he doesn’t insist on his former title any more. Pulling rank, he calls it.
“This is a day of encounters,” I said. “I haven’t seen you for a long time.” “Come for my semiannual checkup,” he told me. Fact is, my sight’s not what it used to be. There’s one disease none of the doctors can cure, and that’s Anno Domini. And a good thing for the race it can’t. We’d all be living in trees like chimps—there wouldn’t be anywhere else to live.”
“Oh, come on,” I jollied him. “You’re not that old. I was wondering if you could give me some advice.”
“I knew it,” he said mournfully. “All you ever want of me is a chance to pick my brains.”
“It’s a point arising from a story,” I explained, carefully not saying it was one of mine. “If you’d been married to a man who tried to murder you, and later on you decided to marry again, would you tell Husband Number Two about Number One?”
“I’d never put the notion of murder in any husband’s mind,” he replied promptly.
“That solves my problem,” I told him, and then he shook out his newspaper and I got to work.
A bit later a rather diffident voice said, “I was looking for my wife, and I believe this is her umbrella.” And I looked up to see the rather vague-looking man who’d come with the “late” Mrs. Victor Hughes.
“It’s quite a relief,” he told me. “I thought I’d lost her.”
An odd sound, like a bear chuckling to itself in a sardonic sort of way,
came from behind the open newspaper.
“You want to be careful you don’t make a habit of it, Willy.” The newspaper was lowered. Ex-Superintendent Humbolt might appear to be grinning but his voice was the voice of Jehovah. “This ’ud be the third, wouldn’t it?
It never pays to overdo things. People get such str
ange ideas. Funny, you know.”
“I don’t call that very funny,” said Willy. “I’m surprised at you, Mr. Humbolt.”
“Your wife’s seeing one of the doctors,” I intervened quickly. “I don’t suppose she’ll be long.”
“Don’t want to get caught up in the rush hour on the underground,” Humbolt went on, and Willy said, “I’ve got the car. We live out at Sheepshot now, and Ruth doesn’t drive. Still, it’s a nice house and a big garden. My wife enjoys gardening.”
“Nothing wrong with gardening so long as you don’t dig too deep.” I had never thought that Humbolt could be so malicious. And then she came hurrying back, saying, “Oh, Willy, did I keep you long? I had to wait, and the doctor thinks I should come again in six weeks.”
“It’ll be Harley Street for you next time, my dear,” said Willy.
“You must meet Miss Browne, Martita Browne, the famous writer. You know.” She didn’t pay any attention to Humbolt. After all, she’d never set eyes on him before.
* * *
“Why did you say that, about losing wives?” I demanded, as soon as the couple was out of earshot. I simply had to know. If an angel had summoned me with a trumpet at that moment, I wouldn’t have heard.
“The object of the police is to try and prevent crime,” Humbolt said in his deceptively quiet way. “Poor Willy! He’s lost a couple of wives already. Such a careless fellow—or could I be wrong? I mean, no doctors, no deathbeds. Number One was drowned in the South of France. They’d only been married two years. Something went wrong, the boat overturned, he kept swimming round and diving for her; they saw him from the shore, but he couldn’t find her. She was under the boat, and they said she must have hit her head on something that knocked her out.
“Then about three years later he married again. It was the Costa Brava this time, and he was miles away, sunbathing. She’d taken the car—she brought that and some other very nice bits of goods you’d not turn your nose up at, Miss Browne, to the marriage—and had gone to visit friends. When she didn’t come back he got anxious, phoned the friends’ house, but she’d never arrived. Then he called the authorities, but you know how it is in Spain. Mañana!” He looked at me questioningly.
Sequel to Murder: The Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries Page 30
