Blue Murder (17 page)

“And who is this ‘someone'? Did you tell anyone about your plan?”

“No, no one.”

“Most interesting,” remarked Driver. “So, unless the murder was committed by Constable Files or Superintendent Cheam, the murderer must be a thought-reader!”

“Oh no, no,” protested Arnold. “I didn't tell anyone, but I've got it all written down. You see, it's in a book I'm writing and I described the murder in full detail, just as I did at the police-station.”

Driver began to look interested.

“Did anyone know you were writing about a murder?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, I think so,” said Arnold. “Miss Hardstaffe did, and I daresay I mentioned it to lots of people besides.”

“Could anyone in the house get hold of the manuscript?”

“Well—yes—I suppose that anyone could read it if they wanted to. I keep it in my bedroom, and more often than not, I leave it lying on top of my writing table when I go out.”

“I see,” said Driver. “Now, Mr. Smith, if you didn't murder Mr. Hardstaffe, can you tell me who did?”

“Certainly I can,” affirmed Arnold without hesitation. “It was that German girl, Frieda. She hated him more than I did. She used to call him ‘The Gestapo,' and what German wouldn't put an end to that if he could?”

Driver glanced up at the sullen, sweating, shrinking Jewess, and restrained a quotation.

The burly fifty-year-old chief-inspector (who had been educated at Oxford and was not ashamed of it) had learned to curb that habit of flinging into the air a sudden quotation whose very aptness had only served to irritate his critics. So, if the tortuous twists of Frieda's coarse hair recalled the locks of the Medusa, if her attitude might be likened to that of a creature whose nest had been turned up by a plough in the month of November, 1785, he gave no indication of such thoughts, but waved her silently to the chair in front of his desk.

“You are Frieda Braun?” he asked.

His question evoked neither movement nor reply.

“Come, come,” he said gently, “surely you know your own name.”

The girl remained standing before him. She did not speak.

“Gnädige Fraulein—” he began, but before he had time to say anything more, Frieda sat down in the chair, and, lifting her silly, befrilled apron to her eyes, burst into noisy weeping.

The constable, employed as a kind of human dictaphone by reason of his acute hearing and proficiency in shorthand, stirred uneasily in his chair in the corner, blew out his cheeks, and waggled his ears in a superhuman effort to concentrate on the Inspector's next words.

It had taken the constable many years to learn to write English as it is not spoken, and foreign languages were almost entirely unknown to him. For all the meaning conveyed to him by the last two words, the Inspector might as well have ejaculated “Abracadabra.'

And indeed, the words did appear to hold some magic, for Frieda's tears resolved themselves into tiny sniffs, while she put down her apron and regarded Driver with eager eyes, and the beginning of a smile curved round the corner of her mouth. Then, illustrated by waving expressive hands, she uttered a spate of words which left the constable gasping.

But at the Inspector's next words, he pulled himself together, and began to flick off lines of shorthand underneath the three-dots-and-a-dash which he had jotted down defiantly, at the top of the page.

“Ja,” said Driver.

(Yah! wrote the constable.)

“Yes, yes, I understand, Miss Braun. But we must write down all that you say in English.”

Frieda nodded.

“Ja, ja; me speak English very gut.”

You're tellin' me, thought the constable, hastily amending the last word.

Sorry, continued Frieda, indicating her wet cheeks. “It is those words. Always it is ‘Come here, Jew' in this bad house. You are so kind. I will tell you everything.”

“And we won't go home till mornin',” sighed the constable.

Driver nodded encouragingly at her.

“Then it will be best if I ask you a few questions,” he said.

God bless the bloomin' Inspector! the constable exclaimed to himself. What that man doesn't know about women—and him a bachelor! If I'd known as much about them ten years ago as he does, I shouldn't have to stand what I do from Aggie. But perhaps the Inspector didn't know so much either, ten years ago...

The thought suggested such entrancing possibilities that he had to wrench his mind away to concentrate on his job.

“You are Frieda Braun. You are a refugee from Germany, born in Austria. The police have had no trouble with you. You have reported to them regularly and kept all the rules for aliens in this country. You have not tried to get married to any Englishman so that you would become naturalised...”

“But no,” Frieda said indignantly. “Me engage to marry German.”

“He is not in England?”

“He is in concentration camp in Poland—perhaps. But I wait for him,” she replied with dignity.

Poor devil! thought Driver.

“You were the first one to find Mr. Hardstaffe dead,” stated Driver.

“No.”

“But—” He looked surprised. “You found him in the morning in the drawing-room?”

“But yes, I see him then. The one who kill him is first.”

A gleam of suspicion kindled in the Inspector's eyes.

It was a nice point, he conceded to himself. But wasn't it rather too clever, too glib for one who professed to understand English “very gut”? If she were indeed pretending to have less knowledge of the language than she actually possessed, it would not have been so difficult for her to read Arnold's manuscript as he had imagined. And, for that matter, many people could read a foreign language quite well although their conversation in it was elementary.

Well, this was just another thing for him to find out.

“You had no doubt that he was dead?”

“Please?”

The constable was so delighted with the reply that he broke the point of his pencil on the word.

Driver swore, under his breath, and selected a fresh combination of words, which he pronounced with exasperated lucidity.

“When you saw Mr. Hardstaffe—he was dead?”

“Yes.”

The dark eyes widened in an apparent endeavour to impress the Inspector with their owner's innocence.

“How did you know that he was dead?”

Frieda broke into the answer with a “pouf” of disdain.

“I see his head, no? It is enough. In Nürnberg I see many men with those heads. But,” she added as an afterthought “they are Jews.”

She spoke simply, without emotion, and Driver suppressed a shudder.

It offended his sense of propriety that any woman should have learned to accept such hideous sights as the normal happenings of life.

Could any woman, he asked himself, remain quite sane in such circumstances? Or would her mind gradually become so distorted that she would ultimately commit some such atrocity herself? Could it be that, in her changed sense of values, a human head had become a thing of blood and splintered bone, so that the sight of Mr. Hardstaffe's head above the low back of the chair, and the knobkerri on the wall, had assumed some affinity in her mind, and provided a temptation too strong for her to resist?

“You hated Mr. Hardstaffe, didn't you, Frieda?”

“Yes, I hate him. He is bad man,” she said.

“He was like the Gestapo, you said?”

“It is true. Always he tells tales to Miss 'Itler.”

“You hate Hitler and the Gestapo. You would have killed them all if you could. But instead of doing that, you killed this Gestapo, didn't you? You killed Mr. Hardstaffe at midnight, and ran away leaving the light burning. In the morning, you were afraid to go into the room again. Cook has told me that you tried to keep out of the drawing-room. You wanted someone else to find him first.' You murdered him, didn't you? Didn't you?”

“Please?” was Frieda's aggravating reply.

Driver jumped to his feet and, walking round the table, waggled his pencil in front of her eyes.

“I say you murdered Mr. Hardstaffe!”

“It is not. I do not. Me good girl,” protested Frieda. “At night I go to bed. I am tired, but very tired. I am not use to work all day. I go to sleep. I do not kill him.” Suddenly her self-control snapped. She flung herself at Driver's feet, clutching at his shoes. “No, no, I do not kill him,” she cried. “Don't send me back to Germany. Me good girl.” The Inspector shuffled his feet in embarrassment, and raised the weeping girl to her feet.

“If you didn't do it, you have nothing to be afraid of,” he said somewhat sententiously. “But Miss Hardstaffe tells me that you hate her and her father, and often say you would like to murder them.”

“She!” Frieda spat out the word venomously. “If she is dead one day, yes, I shall be murderer. But now it is she that is one. She kill her father and mother, I tell you. I know. I see much evil and murder in Nürnberg, and I know. And one day—” She moved closer to the Inspector and gazed at him with a look so malevolent that, involuntarily, he moved a step backwards... “One day, I kill her with my hands—like this!”

She twisted her hands in a sudden pressing, screwing movement, held the pose in silent hatred for a few seconds, then once more, she burst into uncontrollable, searing sobbing, and ran out of the room.

“Phew!” ejaculated Sergeant Lovely, pushing his fingers through his stiff brush of hair so that it looked like a corn field desecrated by hikers. “She's a queer customer and no mistake. A bit touched if you ask me. Do you think she did it?”

“I think she's capable of unpremeditated murder,” was Driver's cautious reply. “I wish I knew how far her evidence is limited by her lack of proficiency in the English language. It might be worthwhile getting hold of an interpreter to find out.”

“But you speak German yourself, sir,” Sergeant Lovely pointed out.

The inspector laughed.

“Forget it!” he said. “That wasn't German, that was Psychology. I only know about a dozen words and three of them rang the bell, that's all. And by the way, Constable, you'd better forget them too.”

The Constable ran a grateful pencil through the strokes and curves on his pad which combined themselves phonetically into a kind of Cockney-Australian sentence, “Garn a digger fer oi line,” of which he could not even guess the meaning.

“Well,” the Inspector went on, “I suppose I've seen nearly all the people who had cause to murder the old man.”

“Bless you, no, sir,” replied Lovely. “If you want to interview everyone who'd threatened to do him in, you'll have to see the whole village, I reckon. But I don't know that you'd get much out of them, being a stranger. They all seem to hang together.”

“They will if they're guilty,” replied Driver grimly. “What did they think of Mrs. Hardstaffe then?”

“Oh, the old lady was different, sir,” the Sergeant replied. “They all respected her. They're old-fashioned in these Northshire villages. They hold that it's a woman's place to marry and keep house and bear children, whatever her station in life, and they judge her according to the way she does those things. As for a man: he's judged according to the way he treats his wife and children. If he sticks to them, and never looks at another woman, he's known as a good man. But if he lets his eye do a bit of roving now and again, they call him a bad kind of a man!”

“I see. So Mrs. Hardstaffe was a good woman, and her husband was a bad man. Simple enough. But they were both of them murdered; and the moral of that is— Who's there?”

He whipped round sharply with the sudden feeling that he was being watched, then relaxed as he met the gaze of two wondering blue eyes which regarded him steadily from a height of about two feet.

Resolutely banishing from his mind the jingle of words which reminded him that he could only stand and stare, Driver looked down at the solemn little face.

‘‘Well?” he said.

Then feeling that his tone was too official for the occasion, he repeated the word in a voice pitched in the falsetto.

The child continued to regard him with an unwavering, concentrated gaze which made Driver conscious, for the second time that day, that his trousers were baggy at the knees and that he had outgrown the circumference of his waistcoat.

“Paul! Paul! Oh, he's here, Nanny. I'll bring him back myself.”

The pretty, brown-haired girl smiled at the Inspector, as she came into the room and took the child's hand.

Driver, at first sight, thought of her as a girl in her teens, until the thin gold wedding ring on her finger made him think again.

“I hope Baby hasn't been a nuisance,” she said, in an attractively husky voice. “He's just at the disappearing age, and doesn't understand that it's naughty to run away from Nanny.”

“Oh no. We were just getting acquainted,” replied Driver, clucking at the child as if it were a hen. “I'm Chief-Inspector Driver of New Scotland Yard. This is Lovely.”

She blushed.

“Well, I—thank you,” she murmured.

“Detective Sergeant Lovely,” said Driver, firmly avoiding his assistant's gaze. “You, I take it, are Mrs. Hardstaffe.”

“Yes. They all call me ‘Mrs. Stan' or ‘Mrs. Betty' in the village, but I suppose I'm really the only Mrs. Hardstaffe in the family now.”

“Very sad, madam. We have some unhappy cases to investigate at times.”

Mrs. Stanton smoothed her son's unruly hair.

“It must be a rotten job sometimes,” she agreed. “Rather like having to censor other people's letters, but just as necessary, I suppose.” She paused, then added, I know it's your duty to dig into people's private affairs, but all the same it does seem a pity, now that both Mr. and Mrs. Hardstaffe are dead, to disturb them. Couldn't the whole beastly affair be left alone?”