The Crimson Rooms (40 page)

By now I had some experience of prison routine,
the unlocking of numberless doors and gradual immersion into a stifling interior ever more remote from the street outside. Wheeler was waiting for us in an interview room that had the sole luxury of a high, barred window, open a fraction. In the moment before he rose to greet us, he was even more depressed-looking than before, as if his jowls and shoulders had been dragged down by weights. He might have been boneless, slumped into his soft, heavy body. I could not see him as a fighter, sinuous and brave; I could not imagine him rushing forward to battle. A prison officer stood in one corner, arms folded in a posture of utter indifference.

But when Wheeler saw us, he got to his feet, more animated than I’d ever known him before. “Well?”

Breen shook his hand. “Nothing much to report as yet. But I’ve brought my colleague Miss Gifford to see you. She’s done a great deal of work on your behalf and has lots of questions.” Wheeler showed no sign that he remembered me but sank down in his chair, as if he’d used his last ounce of energy. “I’m just Miss Gifford’s escort,” added Breen. “It didn’t seem right to send a lady on her own to a prison, so I’ll get on with some work while she’s talking to you. Forget I’m here.” And he settled himself as if he were snugly in his office, extracted a heap of papers from his briefcase, and unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen.

I was wearing the same blouse as on my trip to Chesham with Thorne—I could scarcely bear to dress in anything else. But these days I understood the effect of a woman’s uncovered wrists and throat, and when I took off my jacket and hat, I was aware that the gaze of all three men, even Wheeler, flickered over my exposed flesh.

“Mr. Wheeler, I’m here because I believe you didn’t kill Stella. However, at the moment we can’t find another suspect so we have to prove to the jury that it was impossible for you to have done it because you had no motive. In fact, quite the opposite. Do you understand? So I’d like to talk to you, if I may, about you and Stella. I thought I’d start by asking about before the war. When you left, Stella was just a little girl, really. Twelve.”

He said nothing.

“You fought bravely. We’ve read the reports. You joined a regiment recommended by your employer. So you were among your friends.”

Not a word.

“And Stella wrote to you all that time. It must have been a comfort to receive her letters. But she was still very young and you didn’t expect her to marry you when you got back. All these years since the war, you never seem to have put pressure on her. Her sister, Julie, says Stella might have married any number of men but she chose you.”

Wheeler sat with one arm flat on the table, head low, mouth so slack that a line of saliva trickled onto his sleeve. The prison beyond the interview room muttered and boomed and clanged, and I was reminded of the Good Samaritan Home and those other pent-up lives.

“Mr. Wheeler, I went to visit your mother-in-law in Acton where I saw your wedding photographs and talked at length to Mrs. Hobhouse. Meanwhile, Mr. Breen has spent time with your own family who told him you’d kept all the letters Stella wrote you during the war. We’d like to use them as evidence during the trial, if we may, to show how devoted you were to each other.” Still he said nothing and my voice rose and quickened. “You see, the prosecution is going to find it very hard to prove that you shot your wife in cold blood simply for the insurance money, especially given the length of your courtship and your faithfulness to each other. We think that’s a wholly implausible argument.” Wheeler suddenly looked up, and the glance from his gray, moist eyes was startling, as if he knew and felt more than he could ever say. “So the prosecution will also try to show other reasons why you might have killed her. And one of them might be that you were jealous about her. Your mother-in-law says you were jealous sometimes, is that true?”

A further sinking of the shoulders.

“Stella loved dancing, didn’t she?”

Suddenly he smiled; a sad smile but full of fond memories. For the first time I noticed that he had unusually good, very white teeth.

“And I’m told that you, on the other hand, never danced.”

He shook his head.

“That must have been hard for you.”

Another piercing glance. “I loved to watch her dance,” he said in his low, sorrowful voice and I felt a thrill of triumph that he’d spoken to me at all. “I loved to see her happy.”

Breen, who had been scribbling notes in the margin of a letter, paused to take his pen apart and inspect the ink holder.

“I’m sure you wanted her to be happy, Mr. Wheeler,” I said softly. “Tell me about Stella’s dancing.”

He leaned forward and studied his damaged hand. “I would go down to the Palais with her and watch. I’d buy her a drink or two, she preferred lemonade when she was dancing. She used to wear little frocks, showed a lot of leg, and soft shoes, and after she had her hair cut she wore a slide to stop it falling over her eyes, but it always did in the end. Because she went wild. Her arms and legs would fly up so fast I could scarcely see them. She was such a wonderful dancer others used to stand still and watch. She knew all the latest, Charleston, the lot. She used the word
syncopation
all the time. She’d practice on the pavement and at home, singing to herself, ‘At the Jazz Band Ball’ and such; ‘It Had to Be You.’ ”

“Did she have any special partners?”

“She’d dance with anyone, the girls from work, her sister Julie. Sometimes a young man would ask her but after one or two dances she’d point me out and swap partners so they didn’t get ideas.”

“Was there ever a man she danced with more often? One she seemed fond of?” He gave me such a baleful, dismayed look that I quickly added: “I believe sometimes she went dancing when you weren’t with her.”

“I didn’t mind her going dancing with the girls as long as it wasn’t down the Trocadero. I didn’t like that place.”

“I was talking to one of Stella’s workmates, Carole. She said one morning in April Stella came to work having been out all night. Do you know anything about that?”

“What do you mean, all night?”

“Carole said she was late to work and her clothes were unchanged from the day before, and her sister Julie says the same, there was one night that Stella didn’t go home.”

“Well maybe she did stay out. It’s not a crime. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

But he was so rattled that I suspected he had known nothing about that missing night and was in danger of clamming up while he pondered its implications. “And after you were married?” I asked gently.

“After we was married it was a bit different. Mainly because of money. She didn’t have her own money anymore, except the housekeeping. The rent and the wedding, the honeymoon and all took most of what I had and we was saving to buy our own house.”

“So how did the two of you spend your evenings, after you were married?”

“Talk. She would sew bits and pieces to her dresses. I was always very tired after work with all those figures and the traveling. She wanted a gramophone or radio, we was hoping for one as a wedding present but it didn’t happen. Too pricey, I suspect. And anyway, we needed practical things, sauce-pans, cutlery. We was intending to go out more, once we’d saved a bit more money. Stell loved the pictures. Anything. Charlie Chaplin.”

“Did she seem happy?” That word again, but now I felt I could use it with authority.

There was a ponderous silence. “Stella was never happy,” he said at last. “I knew her most of her life, since she was a very young girl, and I never knew her happy. I tried to make her happy. She said I made her happy but I didn’t. In the end I thought, well, maybe if I marry her, she’ll be happy.”

The prison officer shifted his weight. Breen’s pen hovered over a document.

“Why wasn’t she happy?” I asked.

“Who knows? Sometimes she said she was bored. She wanted more than she could ever have. She was always saying, ‘If only this,’ ‘if only that.’ And she would set her heart on a new pair of shoes or a hat, as if they would make her happy. Sometimes I was doubtful about marrying her because she was so restless and discontented but then I thought, she says she wants to be wed, maybe if we have children, they’ll make her happy.”

He leaned toward me as if desperate to confide. I remembered Nicholas, the kiss in the hedgerow, thistles, briar rose, and I touched Wheeler’s hand, near where there were scars instead of fingers. “Stephen. When you were married, was it all you hoped for, at night? You had waited for her such a long time.”

He gave me a burning, wounded look. “It was all I’d hoped for.”

I now dipped into my briefcase and took out the scrap of paper I’d found in Stella’s sponge bag. “We found this. Do you recognize it?”

He knit his brow and drew the paper toward him across the table. “Where d’you find it? I don’t know what it’s about.” He touched it again, puzzled over it, and shook his head. Next, with fast-beating heart, I took out the bronze dancer and placed her on the table, where she was utterly incongruous, the only perfect, lovely thing in the room. Wheeler stared dully. “What d’you bring that old thing here for?”

“You’ve seen it before?”

“’Course I seen it. Couldn’t stand the thing. Wouldn’t have it in the house. I didn’t know she’d kept it.”

“Where did she get it from?”

“Heck knows. She got hold of it shortly before the wedding. Said she’d bought it as a little present to herself. Waste of money, I told her.”

“We’ve had it valued. We think it’s worth more than fifty pounds.”

He was all gray at that moment, a swamp of misery, and it was clear that he had known the dancer was valuable and that there was no innocent explanation.

“Mr. Wheeler, I must ask you this. Do you think the dancer might be a present from a man who . . . ?”

He got up, sallow, furious. “She would never. My Stell. Never. Never. She wouldn’t dare. She wouldn’t hurt me. She told me, she swore to me.”

I let his words settle before I persisted: “So you did discuss the possibility that she might have been . . .”

“You seen a picture of my Stell. She was lovely. The loveliest-looking girl I ever seen in my life. Don’t you think I would worry that she might fall for someone else? Look at me. Look at the state of me. A cripple. Old. Can’t dance, can’t earn enough to buy her treats. She was all I ever wanted. I dreamed of her all my life—the thought of her kept me going through the war. She knew that. She knew. She would never be so cruel. She didn’t have to marry me but when she did, I thought that would be the end of her wanting all kinds of other things.”

“And wasn’t it?”

Silence.

“When you say
other things
, do you mean other men?”

Another agonized look. “I don’t know. I didn’t believe it possible there wouldn’t be, you see. I called at the café often. I knew there was men watching her. I thought it would end, once we was married and she was out of that place.”

“And yet you still suspected her.”

“I thought a baby would stop all that sort of trouble, that I’d never have to worry about her again.”

“But of course, it was far too soon after your marriage for Stella to have conceived.”

The little room was very hot and airless with just the slit of an open window. Breen’s voice cut in, matter-of-fact. “Stephen, whose idea was the picnic, yours or Stella’s?”

“Idea? Well, hers, I think. I can’t remember.”

“And tell me again, what happened while you were up on the hill. Did you suggest you went down to the pub or did she?”

“I don’t know. Me, I suppose. She wasn’t bothered.”

“What happened then?”

“I’ve told you a million times, nothing happened. I left her. I went to have a beer. I come back and she was gone.” He buried his face in his arm and wept.

Then, out of the blue, Breen said: “In the war there was an incident when you were picked to form part of a firing squad, do you remember?”

Silence.

“Describe to me what took place that morning.”

But Wheeler was weeping too hard to reply.

On the way back in the cab,
Breen asked: “How is it looking to you, Miss Gifford?”

“It looks to me like he was eaten up with jealousy, sir.”

“In which case we’re done for. The man is so coherent there’s no way we can attempt to prove he is mentally unfit. Thorne was right.” His bright eye fixed on me. “Thorne telephoned, by the way. Said he’d talked over the fitness-to-plead question with Hardynge and Wainwright. Wheeler was far too competent an employee, they suggest, right up to the Monday after the murder. And his behavior in prison has been impeccable. If he’d maintained his silence it would have been another matter but you’ve heard how lucid he is. There’s no chance of us winning on that. So it’s back to motive. We won’t tell the police about the dancer until we’ve found out its provenance and what happened on that missing night. When we’re in possession of all the facts, we will decide what to do with them. But I tell you one thing, Wheeler is making very deliberate choices about what he discloses. He’s a dark horse, in my opinion, brighter than I used to give him credit for.”