Grant smiled involuntarily. There was an engaging childlikeness about the
boy.
Then he shook himself mentally, like a dog coming out of water.
Charm. The most insidious weapon in all the human armory. And here it was,
being exploited under his nose. He considered the good-natured feckless face
dispassionately. He had known at least one murderer who had had that type of
good looks; blue-eyed, amiable, harmless; and he had buried his dismembered
fiancée in an ash pit. Tisdall’s eyes were of that particular warm opaque
blue which Grant had noted so often in men to whom the society of women was a
necessity of existence. Mother’s darlings had those eyes; so sometimes, had
womanizers.
Well, presently he would check up on Tisdall. Meanwhile—
“Do you ask me to believe that in your four days together you had no
suspicion at all of Miss Clay’s identity?” he asked, marking time until he
could bring Tisdall unsuspecting to the crucial matter.
“I suspected that she was an actress. Partly from things she said, but
mostly because there were such a lot of stage and film magazines in the
house. I asked her about it once, but she said: ‘No names, no pack drill.
It’s a good motto, Robin. Don’t forget.’”
“I see. Did the outfit Miss Clay bought for you include an overcoat?”
“No. A mackintosh. I had a coat.”
“You were wearing a coat over your evening things?”
“Yes. It had been drizzling when we set out for dinner—the crowd and
I, I mean.”
“And you still have that coat?”
“No. It was stolen from the car one day when we were over at Dymchurch.”
His eyes grew alarmed suddenly. “Why? What has the coat got to do with
it?”
“Was it dark- or light-colored?”
“Dark, of course. A sort of gray-black. Why?”
“Did you report its loss?”
“No, neither of us wanted attention called to us. What has it—”
“Just tell me about Thursday morning, will you?” The face opposite him was
steadily losing its ingenuousness and becoming wary and inimical again. “I
understand that you didn’t go with Miss Clay to swim. Is that right?”
“Yes. But I awoke almost as soon as she had gone—”
“How do you know when she went if you were asleep?”
“Because it was still only six. She couldn’t have been gone long. And Mrs.
Pitts said afterwards that I had followed down the road on her heels.”
“I see. And in the hour and a half—roughly—between your
getting up and the finding of Miss Clay’s body you walked to the Gap, stole
the car, drove it in the direction of Canterbury, regretted what you had
done, came back, and found that Miss Clay had been drowned. Is that a
complete record of your actions?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“If you felt so grateful to Miss Clay, it was surely an extraordinary
thing to do.”
“Extraordinary isn’t the word at all. Even yet I can’t believe I did
it.”
“You are quite sure that you didn’t enter the water that morning?”
“Of course I’m sure. Why?”
“When was your last swim? Previous to Thursday morning, I mean?”
“Noon on Wednesday.”
“And yet your swimming suit was soaking wet on Thursday morning.”
“How do you know that! Yes, it was. But not with salt water. It had been
spread to dry on the roof below my window, and when I was dressing on
Thursday morning I noticed that the birds in the tree—an apple tree
hangs over that gable—had made too free with it. So I washed it in the
water I had been washing in.”
“You didn’t put it out to dry again, though, apparently?”
“After what happened the last time? No! I put it on the towel rail. For
God’s sake, Inspector, tell me what all this has to do with Chris’s death?
Can’t you see that questions you can’t see the reason of are torture? I’ve
had about all I can stand. The inquest this morning was the last straw.
Everyone describing how they found her. Talking about ‘the body,’ when all
the time it was Chris. Chris! And now all this mystery and suspicion. If
there was anything not straightforward about her drowning, what has my coat
got to do with it anyway?”
“Because this was found entangled in her hair.”
Grant opened a cardboard box on the table and exhibited a black button of
the kind used for men’s coats. It had been torn from its proper place, the
worn threads of its attachment still forming a ragged “neck.” And around the
neck, close to the button, was twined a thin strand of bright hair.
Tisdall was on his feet, both hands on the table edge, staring down at the
object.
“You think someone
drowned
her? I mean—like
that
. But
that isn’t mine. There are thousands of buttons like that. What makes you
think it is mine?”
“I don’t think anything, Mr. Tisdall. I am only eliminating possibilities.
All I wanted you to do was to account for any garment owned by you which had
buttons like that. You say you had one but that it was stolen.”
Tisdall stared at the Inspector, his mouth opening and shutting
helplessly.
The door breezed open, after the sketchiest of knocks, and in the middle
of the floor stood a small, skinny child of sixteen in shabby tweeds, her
dark head hatless and very untidy.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I thought my father was here. Sorry.”
Tisdall slumped to the floor with a crash.
Grant, who was sitting on the other side of the large table sprang to
action, but the skinny child, with no sign of haste or dismay, was there
first.
“Dear me!” she said, getting the slumped body under the shoulders from
behind and turning it over.
Grant took a cushion from a chair.
“I shouldn’t do that,” she said. “You let their heads stay back unless
it’s apoplexy. And he’s a bit young for that, isn’t he?”
She was loosening collar and tie and shirt band with the expert detachment
of a cook paring pastry from a pie edge. Grant noticed that her sunburnt
wrists were covered with small scars and scratches of varying age, and that
they stuck too far out of her out-grown sleeves.
“You’ll find brandy in the cupboard, I think. Father isn’t allowed it, but
he has no self-control.”
Grant found the brandy and came back to find her slapping Tisdall’s
unconscious face with a light insistent
tapotement
.
“You seem to be good at this sort of thing,” Grant said.
“Oh, I ran the Guides at school.” She had a voice at once precise and
friendly. “A
ve
.ry silly institution. But it varied the routine. That
is the main thing, to vary the routine.”
“Did you learn this from the Guides?” he asked, nodding at her
occupation.
“Oh, no. They burn paper and smell salts and things. I learned this in
Bradford Pete’s dressing room.”
“Where?”
“You know. The welterweight. I used to have great faith in Pete, but I
think he’s lost his speed lately. Don’t you? At least, I
hope
it’s his
speed. He’s coming to nicely.” This last referred to Tisdall. “I think he’d
swallow the brandy now.”
While Grant was administering the brandy, she said: “Have you been giving
him the third degree, or something? You’re police aren’t you?”
“My dear young lady—I don’t know your name?”
“Erica. I’m Erica Burgoyne.”
“My dear Miss Burgoyne, as the Chief Constable’s daughter you must be
aware that the only people in Britain who are subjected to the third degree
are the police.”
“Well, what did he faint for? Is he guilty?”
“I don’t know,” Grant said, before he thought.
“I shouldn’t think so.” She was considering the now spluttering Tisdall.
“He doesn’t look capable of much.” This with the same grave detachment as she
used to everything she did.
“Don’t let looks influence your judgment, Miss Burgoyne.”
“I don’t. Not the way you mean. Anyhow, he isn’t at all my type. But it’s
quite right to judge on looks if you know enough. You wouldn’t buy a washy
chestnut narrow across the eyes, would you?”
This, thought Grant, is quite the most amazing conversation.
She was standing up now, her hands pushed into her jacket pockets so much
the much-tried garment sagged to two bulging points. The tweed she wore was
rubbed at the cuffs and covered all over with “pulled” ends of thread where
briars had caught. Her skirt was too short and one stocking was violently
twisted on its stick of leg. Only her shoes—scarred like her hands, but
thick, well-shaped, and expensive—betrayed the fact that she was not a
charity child.
And then Grant’s eyes went back to her face. Except her face. The calm
sureness of that sallow little triangular visage was not bred in any charity
school.
“There!” she said encouragingly, as Grant helped Tisdall to his feet and
guided him into a chair. “You’ll be all right. Have a little more of Father’s
brandy. It’s a much better end for it than Father’s arteries. I’m going now.
Where is Father, do you know?” This to Grant.
“He has gone to lunch at The Ship.”
“Thank you.” Turning to the still dazed Tisdall, she said, “That shirt
collar of yours is far too tight.” As Grant moved to open the door for her,
she said, “You haven’t told me
your
name?”
“Grant. At your service.” He gave her a little bow.
“I don’t need anything just now, but I might some day.” She considered
him. Grant found himself hoping with a fervor which surprised him that he was
not being placed in the same category as “washy chestnuts.”
“You’re much more my type. I like people broad across the cheekbones.
Good-bye, Mr. Grant.”
“Who was that?” Tisdall asked, in the indifferent tones of the newly
conscious. “Colonel Burgoyne’s daughter.”
“She was right about my shirt.”
“One of the reach-me-downs?”
“Yes. Am I being arrested?”
“Oh, no. Nothing like that.”
“It mightn’t be a bad idea.”
“Oh? Why?”
“It would settle my immediate future. I left the cottage this morning and
now I’m on the road.”
“You mean you’re serious about tramping?”
“As soon as I have got suitable clothes.”
“I’d rather you stayed where I could get information from you if I
wanted.”
“I see the point. But how?”
“What about that architect’s office? Why not try for a job?”
“I’m never going back to an office. Not an architect’s anyhow. I was
shoved there only because I could draw.”
“Do I understand that you consider yourself permanently incapacitated from
earning your bread?”
“Phew! That’s nasty. No, of course not. I’ll have to work. But what kind
of job am I fit for?”
“Two years of hitting the high spots must have educated you to something.
Even if it is only driving a car.”
There came a tentative tap at the door, and the sergeant put his head
in.
“I’m very sorry indeed to disturb you, Inspector, but I’d like something
from the Chief’s files. It’s rather urgent.”
Permission given, he came in.
“This coast’s lively in the season, sir,” he said, as he ran through the
files. “Positively continental. Here’s the chef at the Marine—it’s just
outside the town, so it’s our affair—the chef at the Marine’s stabbed a
waiter because he had dandruff, it seems. The waiter, I mean, sir. Chef on
the way to prison and waiter on the way to hospital. They think maybe his
lung’s touched. Well, thank you, sir. Sorry to disturb you.”
Grant eyed Tisdall, who was achieving the knot in his tie with a
melancholy abstraction. Tisdall caught the look, appeared puzzled by it, and
then, comprehension dawning, leaped into action.
“I say, Sergeant, have they a fellow to take the waiter’s place, do you
know?”
“That they haven’t. Mr. Toselli—he’s the manager—he’s tearing
his hair.”
“Have you finished with me?” he asked Grant.
“For today,” Grant said. “Good luck.”
“NO. No arrest,” said Grant to Superintendent Barker over
the telephone in the early evening. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt
about its being murder. The surgeon’s sure of it. The button in her hair
might be an accident—although if you saw it you’d be convinced it
wasn’t—but her fingernails were broken with clawing at something. What
was under the nails has gone to the analyst, but there wasn’t much after an
hour’s immersion in salt water…‘M?…Well, indications point one way
certainly, but they cancel each other out, somehow. Going to be difficult, I
think. I’m leaving Williams here on routine inquiry, and coming back to town
tonight. I want to see her lawyer—Erskine. He arrived just in time for
the inquest, and afterward I had Tisdall on my hands so I missed him. Would
you find out for me when I can talk to him tonight. They’ve fixed the funeral
for Monday. Golders Green. Yes, cremation. I’d like to be there, I think. I’d
like to look over the intimates. Yes, I may look in for a drink, but it
depends how late I am. Thanks.”
Grant hung up and went to join Williams for a high tea, it being too early
for dinner and Williams having a passion for bacon and eggs garnished with
large pieces of fried bread.
“Tomorrow being Sunday may hold up the button inquiries,” Grant said as
they sat down. “Well, what did Mrs. Pitts say?”
“She says she couldn’t say whether he was wearing a coat or not. All she
saw was the top of his head over her hedge as he went past. But whether he
wore it or not doesn’t much matter, because she says the coat habitually lay
in the back of the car along with that coat that Miss Clay wore. She doesn’t
remember when she saw Tisdall’s dark coat last. He wore it a fair amount, it
seems. Mornings and evenings. He was a ‘chilly mortal,’ she said. Owing to
his having come back from foreign parts, she thought. She hasn’t much of an
opinion of him.”
“You mean she thinks he’s a wrong ‘un?”
“No. Just no account. You know, sir, has it occurred to you that it was a
clever man who did this job?”
“Why?”
“Well, but for that button coming off no one would ever have suspected
anything. She’d have been found drowned after going to bathe in the early
morning—all quite natural. No footsteps, no weapon, no signs of
violence. Very neat.”