Authors: Christianna Brand
‘And over the four years since then, people have been—following you?’
‘Only on and off,’ said Sari. (The same sort of strange men hanging about the convent when she’d been having... The nuns had been angels of goodness, keeping her safe and close, keeping her secrets: her secrets and Aldo’s.)
Charlesworth sat in the big armchair, staring back at her. He said at last: ‘But these people—your husband’s people—?’
‘The marriage was not precisely the event of the year for them, was it? Their princeling and heir with a tuppenny little film starlet. They’re fabulously rich, unimaginably rich and, pirate ancestor or not, nowadays terribly grand.’
‘Yes, but—’ He said again, helplessly. ‘People in that sort of position—you were divorced from their son, you were over and finished with: what harm could they wish you?’
‘They could wish me dead,’ said Sari.
But it was Vi Feather who was dead.
Vi Feather. Dead, murdered, lying scrunched up and horrible in that narrow space at the back of the car. Sari lifted her head. She said: ‘So you see it
was
all true, wasn’t it? They did want to kill me, didn’t they? Only they got poor Vi Feather by mistake.’
The long afternoon waned away and with it something of that almost chilling frivolity and insouciance. He took her through the adventure of the tree, her return home, and she answered quietly and rationally. No stranger turned up, meanwhile, to collect the Halcyon; she seemed to have the wrong telephone number, she had thrown the piece of paper away. She refused absolutely to remember her own registration number, couldn’t find the log book, had never had any log book, was ap-solutely certain... The Halcyon was a brand new model, just out, and specifications of owners had not yet found their way into the police machine. He’d check it in the end, of course, but meanwhile—what a nuisance women were! He sent her back for a further search of the big, scattered, untidy apartment and talked in turn briefly to the widow, to the fat girl, to the Italian. The Italian came from the south, had met them only recently—through Mr Rufie Soames who had spoken to him at a—well, at a club. Mr Ethelbert Wendover, however, had known her from her filming days, conceded cagily that she had been a bit difficult—she was a nervy, temperamental creature and had made like a film star and, so early in her career, didn’t get away with it. Yes, it was true about the young prince—a very young prince indeed; she had met him at the studio, through a friend, and really he had been at the root of the trouble, always tempting her to play hookey. Yes, one understood that she had actually married him. Divorced? Well, annulled: there was no divorce in San Juan which was a Catholic country. Mr Charlesworth opined airily that anyway, with these papists, it was just a matter of handing over a bundle of used notes, wasn’t it?—and the Pope fixed all the rest. Mr Ethelbert Wendover smiled upon him with a kindly pity.
The Chief Superintendent put them all on ice and sent for Rufie.
Rufie had swallowed down about a million tranquillisers but they hadn’t mixed too well with the first frantic swiggings of brandy and he simply couldn’t get back into self-control. Beneath the pale flare of Shelley-like locks, his face was ashen, white hands clenched so tightly that the rings bit sharply into his shaking fingers. Yes, he’d gone round to Etho’s last night, just to—well, just to talk and play records. Yes, despite the weather; he didn’t mind storms—some people were terrified of storms but he thought they were rather fun, and after all, how many of all the millions of people ever got struck by lightning? ...Yes, he’d known Sari from her filming days, only slightly then but he’d got in touch through Etho when she came to London and kept up with her ever since; she was so gorgeous, so sweet, so ap-solutely special... Yes, he supposed you could say he’d known Vi Feather in those days too but not tickly well, not as a person—he’d been working on the costume designs and after all she’d been only a dresser. No, for heaven’s sake, never set eyes on her since, not until—not until today... No, the Halcyon hadn’t been there when he got home last night, he’d already told them that a thousand times; and yes, Sari had arrived back soon after he did. Yes, she told him about the stranger and the fallen tree. And about being followed. He fell suddenly into a terrible weeping. ‘We never believed her when she said all these things about being followed, people wanting to kill her and all that. But see what’s happened now!’ And he looked as though he would be sick, would vomit up into the hand clapped over his mouth; blue eyes blurred and staring. ‘Supposing it had been Sari! All huddled up there, so—disgusting... We were all so wrong, we did nothing to help her.’ Suppose it had been Sari, lovely, beautiful, darling Sari! He got up and blundered away so that the handsome Chief Superintendent shouldn’t see him blowing his nose, so unromantic! ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, returning, the tears drying on his white cheek bones. ‘I took all these pills and on top of alcohol you simply go beresk.’ Rufie’s top favourite word with the Eight Best Friends was beresk; they were terrified of his finding out that he said it wrong and always used his pronunciation themselves, considerably to the astonishment of those outside the secret.
Two small components, light as air, of Mr Charlesworth’s collage floated across his line of vision and out again. He grabbed at them mentally, but they were gone. Oh, well, he thought, I’ll switch off and they’ll come back to me when I’m not thinking about it. He brought Mr Soames back to cases. ‘If Miss Morne is telling the truth, then this is the stranger’s car?’
Well of course, said Rufie, staring. One had to believe that now. How else could...? He made a gesture of repugnance. ‘How else could—it—have got there? Poor Sari just drove back not knowing it was there.’
‘But how could this woman’s body have got into his car? He was coming back
towards
Wren’s Hill. The woman was working there in the cinema.’
‘I suppose’, said Rufie intelligently, ‘that a cashier doesn’t stay till the end of the evening. After the feature film started, she’d pack up, hand over the takings and go home. And if he—well, met her, or took her, or whatever you like—beyond where the tree fell later, on the London side—’ That, suggested Rufie, could be why he was in such a panic to get on.
‘Turning his car over to an unknown woman, complete with dead Miss Feather in the back of it?’
‘And then doing a bunk? You may never hear from him again.’
This possibility had not escaped Mr Charlesworth who had already set on foot suitable arrangements; though in view of Sari’s total lack of any help in identifying the stranger, it had hardly been a promising outlook. Yes, he’d given her a ‘phone number but the paper had got all wet, you couldn’t make it out properly and the wrong people kept answering, so she’d chucked it away—he’d get in touch with her. As for his appearance, he’d been tall but otherwise she’d no idea what he had looked like. They’d both had their hats pulled down over their ears, coat collars turned up, heads bent down to keep the wind from absolutely blowing their eyelashes back into their eyes; it had been pitch dark and teeming with rain and most of the time they’d had a vast great fallen tree between them, branches and the lot. There was nothing in the way of personal property in his car, as there had been nothing in her own; neither car could have been on the roads for more than a week or two at most. So all that was a great help! Charlesworth’s men would be coping with fingerprints and all the rest of it, and of course they would soon check on the owner of the car. But by that time, as Rufie had said, the stranger, if he existed, might be anywhere.
If he had existed. Mr Charlesworth, with regrettable reluctance, gave himself over to consideration of the possibility that he never had existed—that this was Sari Morne’s own car.
Vi Feather had come up out of the past—the somewhat mysterious past with its marriage into an unwelcoming nobility, its history of nameless threats and followings. She had asked for money. Blackmail? But then would Sari have mentioned it?—there had been no need. Unless of course she had known, though she now denied it, that someone had been listening who might later inform on her. ‘Contents of handbag?’ he said, slightly challengingly to Sergeant Ellis.
But Ginger by name, ginger by nature; the sergeant was by no means always playing games. He listed without troubling to refer to the paper he held, a collection of Miss Feather’s possessions: cosmetics, toilet tissues, comb, mirror, plastic coin purse, unremarkable for anything but a universal grubbiness. There had been an imitation leather notecase with odds and ends of paper in it and a single pound note. There was a good deal of small change loose in the bottom of the handbag, and a crumpled note, pushed down at one side. That sounded as though money had in fact been handed over and thrust, perhaps hastily, furtively, into the handbag; but Miss Sari Morne would hardly be susceptible to blackmail to the tune of a single pound note. On the other hand... First instalment? A ‘refresher’? Had Vi perhaps waited outside the cinema—for her outer clothes had been wet through—and then made the demand? Been in the car perhaps from the beginning, from the beginning of the drive home?
‘Result of telephone call to the pub, sir,’ said Ginger, turning over the pages of another report. ‘Landlord looked into the car, took a particular interest because it was the new Cadmus Halcyon. Looked well into the interior; can swear there was nobody there, and no body either, not even lying on the floor behind the front seat, or he’d have seen it.’ The lady had brought the car close up to the door so as to have the shortest distance to run in out of the rain, and he’d been able to see all over it. Looked with special interest to see what leg room there was at the back: a lot of these posh cars failed in that. Agreed that a body might lie there unobserved by the driver, unobserved by anybody getting in and out of the driving seat—especially hastily, coming in out of the dark in all that storm; but when the car drove away from his pub, there’d been nothing there, nobody there.
Hidden in the boot then, perhaps? But why move it from that hiding place to another so much less secure? Ginger with maddening efficiency whipped out the relevant report. No sign whatsoever—in this brand new, unmarked car—of anything ever having been in the boot, let alone a body, the clothes soaked with rain.
She hadn’t been killed in the car. Strangled, but not in the car: not, for example, killed in the front passenger seat and hauled or pushed over to lie in the back. No: she had, they thought, been dead before she was put there. The murderer had opened the offside door and pushed in the body as far as it would go, and then, most likely, gone round to the other door and dragged it the rest of the way. But she had definitely been dead by then; perhaps quite a long time dead. Speaking off the top of his head, said the doctor, and without benefit of post mortem—she had died some time before midnight.
She had been out in the storm. The rain had run off the shiny surface of the plastic mac, but the mac was smeared with mud; shoes, woollen gloves, even the horrid matching little woollen cap, all thick with still damp mud. Hair tousled, hanging over her face. A hand-to-hand struggle? Well, could be. But equally, a struggle through the storm, stumbling, tripping perhaps, throwing out a gloved hand to stop herself from falling, actually falling, muddying her coat, the woolly cap tumbling off, being clapped back again over the streaming wet hair...
But where? But when?
Waiting by the roadside? Had Sari found her waiting by the roadside, somewhere between the pub and home—and leapt out into the rain and strangled the woman and dragged her into concealment at the back of the car? But why do such a thing? Why not leave the body where it fell? Why strangle her anyway?—with a big, powerful car at one’s disposal, with a storm of rain to wash away all signs, why not just run the woman down and leave her lying? ‘Call Mr Soames back here a moment,’ said Charlesworth.
Rufie had sat all this time at the far end of the room in a dream of abstraction, his white face, like the face of a mime, expressionless, almost witless, staring into space. Charlesworth said: ‘When Miss Morne came in last night—of course she would have been wet through?’
‘Soaked,’ said Rufie. ‘I had to rub her down like a horse, poor love, and a great double brandy, a thing she simply never touches in the ordinary way.’
‘And covered in mud?’
‘Well, her boots of course, and they were clean when she went out, I did them for her myself this morning—she’s so naughty about her things and they’re so gorgeous, all that lovely leather, Gucci, you know; madly expensive but I always tell her, it’s so much worth it.’
Such devotion to Sari’s wardrobe might well prove instructive. ‘And her beautiful leather coat?’ said Charlesworth, guilelessly. ‘I noticed it hanging up to dry. Muddy too?’
‘Well, not to say muddy, but all smeared with green, and scraped, too tragic. Which shows how wicked it was of me’, said Rufie, ‘not to have realised that it was true about the tree. It must all have come from pushing through to the other side. And her gloves too, the leather all scratched.’
Had Vi Feather fought back for her life, against the choking hands in their wet leather driving gloves? ‘A good thing Miss Morne happened to be wearing—them,’ said Charlesworth, rather unhappily.
‘Well, but my
dear,
on a night like that—’
‘I only mean that she might have got her hands scratched.’
‘Oh, that would have been too awful!’ said Rufie. ‘Her hands are so perfect.’ His own right hand had two or three strange little scratches across the back of it and he very, very surreptitiously pulled down his cuff to cover them. But he was immeasurably thankful for his beloved Sari. ‘You see she did force her way past the tree, after all. She did meet the stranger. It
isn’t her
car,’ he said.
She came into the room. The long legs were slender in their tight blue jeans, the brilliant green woolly, deliciously top- heavy above them. Her hair stood on end, lit from beneath with its extraordinary glow. She held out a long pale green card to Charlesworth. ‘You kept saying the log-book,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a book. It’s just a sort of bit of paper.’