She Died a Lady (19 page)

‘They’re all right in my studio. But I don’t want you to go parading round the country in ’em. Hang it all, what would old man Grange say if he heard I had a guest who ran around dressed up as an ancient Roman?’

‘So that’s it. Hey?’

Ferrars merely pointed to the clothes.

It was twenty minutes later when we stood, in the pallor of the late afternoon light, staring at the last footprints made on earth by Rita Wainright and Barry Sullivan.

They were framed in the path outlined by the tiny white-painted pebbles. Their very simplicity made them so maddening. Superintendent Craft stood at one side, stroking his chin with the indulgent air of a man who has a winning hand. Ferrars, frankly beaten, sat on the back steps. H.M. – now much less offensive to the eye in ordinary attire except for one carpet slipper – bent as far over as his corporation would permit to peer at the tracks.

‘Yes, sir?’ promoted Craft, with a high and lofty air of amusement.

H.M. lifted his head.

‘There are times,’ he said, ‘when you remind me so much of Masters that my gorge rises. Oh, lord love a duck! These are perfectly honest footprints. There’s no flummery about ’em.’

‘That’s what I kept telling you, you know.’

H.M. put his fists on his hips.

‘You noticed,’ he suggested, ‘that the toes are indented? As though they’d been running?’

Craft’s tone was dry. ‘Yes. We noticed it. They
were
running, as you can tell by the length of the stride. But not running very fast. Just hurrying, as you might say.’

H.M. shook his head dismally from side to side.

‘I say, son, do you mind if I walk on top of ’em? I notice they’re the only part of this stretch that hasn’t been messed up.’

‘Go ahead and walk all you like. As I told you, we’ve got plaster casts at the police-station.’

H.M. started down the path. Even with no rain since Saturday night, his own footsteps sank heavily. Using great caution with his injured toe, he limped down towards Lovers’ Leap. Here, stepping on the little semi-circle of humped, coarse grass, he deliberately peered over the edge. It was a sight which made my stomach turn over, even at that distance; a head for heights must be a fine thing, and it did not seem to bother him in the least.

‘Find anything?’ called Craft.

H.M. turned round, his fists on his hips, against the skyline. The breeze from behind belled out his linen coat. His eye moved first right, and then left, over the rest of the expanse – now scored with many footprints, including all our own and the track of his wheel-chair. He looked long at the geometrical designs in white-painted pebbles. Then his voice came loudly down-wind.

‘Oi!’

‘Yes, sir?’

He pointed with a big flipper.

‘This place was kept pretty neat and smooth before people started gallopin’ all over it. Those pebbly bits, like Euclid having some fun at the seaside. And the pebble-edged path. Could they be used for any hocus-pocus?’

‘You mean could anybody walk on them? Just try a few and see.’

With the heel of his right foot, gingerly, H.M. tested them; and they sank into the ground. That was no good either.

‘But see here, son. Haven’t they got any purpose?’

‘Nothing will grow here,’ Craft pointed out. ‘They’re ornamental. Also,’ he grinned sepulchrally, ‘you can see them in the dark.’

An expression of vast bewilderment overspread H.M.’s face. Still shaking his head, he lumbered back up the four-foot path towards us. Once again he stopped to peer at the footprints.

‘It’s a bit rummy,’ he said, ‘how those two kept step in their runnin’. Almost as though —’ He paused, massaging his chin, and he did not continue.

‘Now come on.’ The abrupt sharpness of Craft’s voice startled me. ‘Let’s not waste any more time. In the name of sense, Dr Croxley, why don’t you
admit
you stole that gun out there, and let’s all go home to tea?’

‘You’re making an awful mistake, son,’ H.M. said quietly.

‘Very well, sir.’ Craft spoke from deep in his throat. ‘I’m making a mistake. Let’s leave it at that, until tomorrow morning at the inquest. Shall we?’

‘But listen, man! This suicide-pact business is all eyewash! You say they made all these elaborate plans to run away. Then, on the spur of the moment, while listenin’ to
Romeo and Juliet
, they suddenly changed their minds and rushed out to glory. If they did that, where did they suddenly pick up the gun – which nobody’s been able to identify since?’

Craft shook his head.

‘I don’t say that’s what they did, Sir Henry.’

‘Then what do you say?’

‘As I see it, they first intended to go, just as you showed. But before then, maybe several days before, Mrs Wainright had a change of heart. She persuaded Sullivan to join her in the suicide-pact. They had a last fling at listening to the
Romeo and Juliet
play, and then they did it. Remember: there’s no sign that they took any clothes with them. Not a suitcase or bag or anything. And they must have had clothes ready, if they meant to bolt.’

(This, I had to admit, was true enough.)

For a moment H.M. stared straight ahead of him. Then he snapped his fingers.

‘Diamonds!’ he muttered. ‘I was almost forgetting the diamonds!’

‘What about them?’

‘The diamonds they took with ’em!’

‘But we don’t know they did take any diamonds. That’s a deduction of yours. We haven’t looked in this famous ivory box, because the nurse wouldn’t let us in. Consequently –’

H.M. stopped him.

‘But if the diamonds are gone, or there’re imitations substituted for real ones, ain’t that good enough evidence those two meant to do a bunk? Rita Wainright wouldn’t rush away with thousands of pounds’ worth of jewellery if she meant to commit suicide?’

Craft pondered this.

‘Yes, sir, that sounds reasonable enough. Unless, of course, she’d converted them into cash beforehand.’

‘We’d better get up to that bedroom, Doctor,’ H.M. said to me. ‘That is, if it can be managed?’

‘It can be managed.’

Here, at last, was hope. Nobody comprehended better than your obedient servant that I was in both an awkward and a dangerous position. Craft was in no pleasant frame of mind. He meant business. If they were going to press this charge of taking a very expensive motor-car, in order to sink it in Exmoor quicksand, I failed to see what I could do about it. The mere grotesqueness of the charge made me boggle and splutter, as though I had been accused of holding up a bank or dynamiting a railway line. But it was no less serious for all that.

When we went into the house, I am ashamed to confess, there was one time when I had tears of wrath in my eyes.

I explained the situation to Mrs Grover, the day nurse, who stood aside disapprovingly as we went in. Alec was still asleep. The room was dim now, its furniture making shadowy outlines against the whitish blinds.

H.M. went over and gently took the key out of Alec’s limp hand.

‘Please!’ said Mrs Grover.

Her voice seemed to rap out harshly, too loud a noise. Ferrars, who lurked outside the door and would not come in, merely pointed to the dressing-table. Craft went over and raised a blind, again to the disapproval of the nurse. Opening the drawer of the dressing-table, H.M. lifted out the heavy ivory box. Into its lock he fitted the key with the engraved word and the true-love knot.

When he opened the lid, we saw that the box was lined first with steel and then with dark-blue velvet. Cases were piled inside: cases long, cases round, cases square, cases oval: all of the same dark-blue velvet, with white satin inside. I counted sixteen of them as H.M. put them out on the dressing-table. Only one of them, a bracelet-case, was empty. The only stone represented was a diamond.

‘Imitations,’ growled H.M., as little heaps and curves of glittering stones built up into a kind of fiery scrap-heap. He was rapidly opening one case after another, and flinging it aside. ‘Imi …’

But he did not go on. Instead he rested his hands for a moment on the dressing-table, as though supporting his own heavy weight. He picked up one of the cases – it contained a diamond pendant, I remember – and limped over to the light of the window.

There he studied it, hitching up his spectacles firmly, and turning down the corners of his mouth. I remember the slate-blue sea behind him, the red horizon, and the shifting glitter against his hands. Each one of those articles he scrutinized with a fiendish care, taking each to the window. When he had finished, and closed his eyes as though to rest them, his face had taken on a poker-playing impassiveness; it might have been made of wood.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘Slight miscalculation.’ His tone was without inflexion. ‘They’re not imitations. They’re real diamonds.’

On the bed, Alec Wainright opened his eyes. Though it was difficult to tell, I think he smiled.

And softly, just behind us, Superintendent Craft was laughing.

M
OLLY
G
RANGE
and Belle Sullivan were standing at the gate when I got back to Lyncombe.

They made an attractive picture. Molly was taller than Belle, perhaps less well developed in what Tom would portentously call the mammary and gluteal regions. Belle’s grey eyes were intensified by thin black pencilling, her mouth was dark red and even her brown curls seemed to shine, whereas Molly had none of these things. Yet, despite the charm of our visitor, my money is and always will be on Molly.

Instead of driving into the garage, I left my car at the front door and got out into the half-dusk. It was Molly who spoke.

‘Dr Luke, where on earth have you been? You look tired to death.’

‘Out at the Wainrights’. I’m all right.’

‘Do you realize this is the second time you’ve missed your tea in two days? Tom’s furious.’

‘Then Tom will just have to be furious, my dear.’

‘You’re a prodigal parent, that’s what you are,’ said Belle, who was smoking a cigarette and getting lipstick all over the end of it. ‘Who were with you? That big fat guy with the wheel-chair? The one who called me a liar when I said I was married?’

‘Yes. And Superintendent Craft and Paul Ferrars.’

Molly’s blue eyes narrowed. ‘What’s Sir Henry up to now, Dr Luke?’

‘To tell you the truth, he was dressed up like a Roman Senator.’

Both girls stared back at me, with slowly dawning enlightenment. Then they turned to each other and spoke together.

‘The Emperor Nero,’ they said.

‘Have you heard about him too?’

‘Have we heard about him?’ echoed Belle. ‘Jesus H. Christ!’ She took a quick puff at her cigarette before removing it to make an excited gesture with it. ‘Have we heard about anything else?’

‘It was Harry Pierce,’ Molly explained, ‘and that man Willie Johnson.’

‘And I was right in the middle of it,’ amplified Belle.

‘Johnson! Where is he now?’

‘He’s in the can.’

‘What can?’

‘The hoosegow,’ Belle said impatiently. ‘They arrested him.’

‘I can’t say I’m exactly surprised. But –’

‘Boy,’ said Belle, ‘you should have seen what happened! I was standing here at the gate, like this, talking to that fellow Pierce. He’d been over here about six times. It wasn’t more than twenty minutes after two, not closing-time yet.

‘This Pierce was just saying to me, “And I ’ope, ma’am, we’ll ’ave no more of what I might term the reign of terror in these parts,” when I looked up and saw a guy on a bicycle, just coming like a bat out of hell. Boy, was he travelling!

‘Pierce’s eyes start to pop out, and he runs out in the road and waves his arms and yells, “You keep away from my house, Willie Johnson, you keep away from my house.” And I guess that must have scared the guy on the bicycle. Because he skids, and turns clean over, and goes bicycle and all straight like a bat out of hell through the doors of Pierce’s saloon-bar.’

‘Not
again
?’

‘Yes, again,’ returned Molly. ‘It was the most dreadful crash you ever heard. Much worse than yesterday.’

‘But that wasn’t the worst of it,’ Belle assured me. ‘Up comes the cop, and up comes everybody. He started – I mean Johnson started – telling a story we could hear clear across the street.’

‘About the Emperor Nero?’

‘That’s right. He said the Emperor Nero met him on the Baker’s Bridge road yesterday, and gave him a ten-shilling note. Then, because he – I still mean Johnson – was a condemned sinner, he spent the money on liquor and today the Emperor Nero started chasing him in a flying throne with wings. Of course, they just figured he had the screaming mimis and they threw him in the hoosegow. But now I’m not so sure.’

Molly did not seem certain about anything.

‘Father was here too,’ she volunteered. ‘He had to see a client at Lynmouth. I asked him whether he could do anything for the Johnson man, and he surprised me.’

‘How?’

‘He said he would,’ Molly replied naïvely. ‘Or at least that he’d try.’

‘Come into the back garden, both of you,’ I said. ‘I want to talk to you. There’s news.’

They must have seen it was serious. I could even have guessed Molly had been expecting it.

‘We have news for you too,’ she said.

In the garden, where the wicker chairs stood under the apple-tree, I motioned them to sit down and wondered how to start.

‘
You’ve
been all right?’

‘Oh, I’m swell.’ Belle’s face was expressionless. She dropped her cigarette on the ground and trod it out. From her sleek appearance, the trim green frock, the tan stockings and shoes, you would never have identified her as the hysterical girl of twenty-four hours ago.

‘They tell me,’ she went on, ‘that I’ll have to stay and identify Barry’s body at the inquest to-morrow. I’ve probably lost my job at the Piccadilly, but what the hell? I persuaded a nice bank-manager down in Lynton to cash a cheque for me, so everything’s fine.’

‘They’ve treated you well?’

‘People have been swell.’ She smiled at Molly. ‘The men have been sympathetic, too. They say my mind needs distraction, and they’ve all tried to date me up. One wants me to go to the Valley of Rocks. Another to Dartmeet, whatever that is. Another says to see the caves in the cliffs. I’d kind of like to take a boat-ride and see those caves.’