Fair Warning (22 page)

“I am not,” said Marcia. “And if you must search my house, you will please do so either after—or with—my lawyer.”

She wasn’t at all sure of her legal ground; probably she had none. But it was reasonable, and she stared straight back into his dark, mournful eyes.

“All right,” he said suddenly. “Anything you say. Look here, Mrs. Godden. I want your help. I want you to understand that we blame ourselves very much for the thing that happened last night. We have tried to protect you and the other people in this house and we failed. And I want you to understand that we will do everything in our power to protect you from now on. But naturally—until we find the murderer and lock him up—” He broke off the sentence, looked at her dreamily for a moment, as if he’d forgotten her existence, and then went on in a matter-of-fact way: “I’m going to tell you just where we stand. What we have to work on. I’m telling you because, frankly, I need your help. There may be things you could explain—things that have no connection with the crime but that confuse us. Anything like that—” Again he stopped invitingly, but she made no reply.

He leaned back in the chair—Beatrice’s businesslike swivel chair; how well Marcia knew the slight creak of the spring!

“First,” he said, “there’s no evidence of a thief—a burglar caught in the act and killing to make his escape. We’ve canvassed every possibility of that thoroughly, and there is no evidence of it at all. Also nothing about the household is missing—according, at least, to the servants and to Miss Godden. And to you. We haven’t given up the notion, of course; but the way things stand just now, I think we can eliminate it unless new evidence turns up. And that would have to be pretty strong. For you must know yourself that everything points to the murderer being on intimate terms with the household—so that he knows the arrangement of the house, the time when the servants are busy in the back of the house, the weapons which were in both cases things that were in use about the household. Either he acted without premeditation and snatched the first thing at hand or he had planned the crimes and knew that he could find such a weapon—knew it was here waiting his hand. The scissors—well, we’ll come to that later; Dr. Blakie and this young Copley fellow both told me of your—distressing experience.”

She wished she could read his dark eyes but couldn’t.

“And as to the dandelion knife—that appears to have been hidden for later use. We knew that—after lengthy questioning of the servants, none of whom had seen it after its arrival or at least remember it. But your cousin—is it?”

“Galway Trench? Yes.”

“Yes. He told us last night that Beatrice Godden had seen the knife in the cupboard of the library the very day of Ivan Godden’s murder. So quite evidently it was hidden there at any time during the past four weeks, in preparation for Godden’s return. Are you listening?”

“Yes. Yes.” Well, she hadn’t let Gally know about the letter; he couldn’t tell that in his awful candor.

“I’m just covering a few of the main points briefly, you know. No need to bore you with all the routine mass of investigation we have to do—often fruitlessly. The main thing, of course, that has concerned us is the motive.”

“Motive?”

“Yes. You see,”—his eyelids were low and he looked very bored—“there might be exactly three motives. A quarrel somebody had with your husband—a quarrel that wasn’t settled with his death, and thus Beatrice’s murder had to follow. Although I must qualify that, too; your cousin also tells us that she boasted of having evidence, and of being able to solve the problem. Did she tell you what that evidence was?” He shot the question at her suddenly.

Marcia gripped her hands together and said, “No.”

“And you have no idea at all as to what it was?”

“No.”

“Did it concern—say—Robert Copley?”

“I don’t know.”

He waited a moment, watching her, and she made herself look steadily back at him.

“Oh,” he said finally. “I thought she might have told you more. Well, anyway, we have been able to discover no quarrel he had had in particular with any outsider.” His look sunk deeply into her own as he said “outsider,” as if to remind her that they did know that she, Marcia, had quarreled bitterly with Ivan Godden. “Very well, then; if we eliminate vengeance or wanting to get him out of the way for some business reason—which does not seem to exist—there remains money. And love,” said Jacob Wait, as if he were talking of a sack of potatoes.

It was unexpected, and Marcia’s heart gave a great leap of terror. A terror she must not let him see.

“We have, of course, looked into the situation about money. According to your cook, your husband made—
and signed—
a new will the afternoon of the day he was murdered. We know about it and about the contents of it, although your sister seems to have possessed herself of the will and passed it over to the lawyer before we had a chance to search your husband’s desk.”

“You—” said Marcia and stopped.

“There is only one time,” said Jacob Wait rather dryly, “when she could have taken the will, and that was during the few moments immediately following your husband’s death, when according to your own stories she was left alone with the body. So we knew that she must have known of its existence.”

And Beatrice had thought they wouldn’t know; had thought they couldn’t discover it; had offered to trade silence for silence. Marcia had a swift, strong memory of Beatrice’s face, the way she had looked at her and put her hands on her shoulders and thrust her back against the desk. She closed her eyes to force the image away, and Jacob Wait was saying, when she succeeded:

“… Beatrice benefited very largely by this will. But, contrary to general belief, murders are not really, very often, induced by wills. In the first place the provisions of a will are usually a secret. In the second place there is as a rule a much more deeply personal motive for murder.” He paused there an instant, as if to let it sink into her. “However, for that reason and several others—opportunity, temperament, discord with her brother”—how did he know that? thought Marcia suddenly. General observation? Or the nurse at the hospital who heard them quarreling?—“for those reasons we were more and more inclined to suspect Beatrice. Until—last night.”

“Then it’s the same—murderer?” She whispered the last word in spite of herself.

“Looks like it. Same method of murder.” His eyelids drooped a little further, and he said on a sudden tangent, “By the way, you knew the scissors well, I suppose. I mean, you had used them many times?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What for?”

“Oh—clippings mostly. Or opening packages. Anything heavy or thick.”

“So when you thought of scissors to open the—clothes-bags, you thought of those.”

“Naturally. I was on the second floor; my manicure scissors would have been useless.”

“Oh. You came down after this pair of scissors, then?”

“Yes.”

“And saw no one?”

“No. That is—”

“What?”

“I was only going to say that I thought someone was in the library. That is, someone had been in that library just a few minutes before I came down, for the light was turned on and then off again. And—I remember when I went into the room just for an instant I thought Gal—” She caught herself and said, “I thought someone was there. But when I turned on the desk light there was no one. I took the scissors and went up to the store closet.”

“I see.” Something about it made it seem that he doubted her; as if he were saying that she had told a good story but it was only that. “And then you were locked into the store closet during the time the murder had to take place and let out afterward?”

“Yes.” There was still that doubtful tinge about his questions, and she found herself explaining, describing it—repeating now and then.

He said finally, “So you used the scissors often. Well, to get back to the question of motive. And of—other suspects.”

He needn’t have said that. And it put her, as he had intended it should, on the defensive, in a state of mind to defend herself and others and to tell him things that would, according to her viewpoint, back up her defense. And that might be revealing.

“There are several things pretty obvious about the two murders. Whoever did it had access to the house, knew its ways—knew where to find a weapon. Knew where—according to what your cousin Galway Trench has told us—to hide a weapon until ready for use. So consider this, please, but don’t say anything until I’ve finished my argument. Consider this: A young, beautiful woman, married to a man who is deliberately and intentionally cruel to her. She is unable to—or at least she does not—free herself. Perhaps she’s afraid of the man. Perhaps her vitality has been so sapped that she hasn’t the strength to combat him. Or perhaps she hasn’t—yet—a sufficiently strong and urgent motive for leaving him. That is,” said Jacob Wait, sighing, “she hasn’t—yet—fallen in love with another man.—No, wait, please, Mrs. Godden; I asked you not to speak until I’d finished. That’s better.—Now then, suppose another man is in love with her; desperately, furiously in love with her. Suppose the husband is injured and comes very near to death—so near that the other man has a glimpse of what it would mean to him if he were to die. But the husband doesn’t die. He’s saved by almost a miracle of skill in the face of all odds against him. Saved and cured.

“Now then, perhaps, during the husband’s absence, the young wife has reached a climax. Even a decision. Perhaps she’s discovered she wants to leave her husband. Perhaps she’s fallen in love, too.—Wait, please!—But she’s still under the influence of the husband, still reluctant, for some reason, to leave him. She wants to delay—to wait—to procrastinate. Women do. But the lover is impatient. Can’t see or understand her quandary. And all at once this period of freedom on the part of the woman—this foretaste of what life might hold for them both without the husband—comes to an end. The husband is well. And—about to come home again. To the other man it is unendurable. Becomes altogether unendurable. It is a climax that is more than he can bear. And to spur him on is the knowledge that the husband—Well,” said Jacob Wait, “the young wife is in real danger from him. So the very night the husband returns, the other man—murders him.”

“No,” said Marcia in a small dead voice.

“Love motive,” said Jacob Wait in a bored way. “What do you think of it?”

How did he know so much? Surmise? Intuition? Or just a good guess, based on his own observations and his cruel knowledge of people? But if he had proof he would use it. He wouldn’t waste time trying to get her to talk.

For he wanted her to talk.
He wanted her to talk.
Why, of course! That was his object and his aim. Well, then, say nothing. Nothing. Bite your lips together if necessary, but say nothing. A word, a look, one denial, even, might betray Rob into his hands.

So she said nothing.

“Of course,” resumed Jacob Wait in a disarming manner that was even more perilous than his look of accusation, “of course, you might reply. You might go down the list of the men involved—or who seem to be involved—in the murders. You might say that Ancill is a house servant, devoted to his master—”

“Ancill!” cried Marcia and realized he had said it to rouse her to speech and choked it back.

“You might say Gally Trench—obviously devoted to you—is too guileless a youth to murder and then to conceal it—thus far—successfully.”

Gally! She said nothing that time, though, and had the minor satisfaction of seeing that Jacob Wait looked very slightly annoyed.

“Or you might say,” he went on, “that if Dr. Blakie had wanted to murder Godden he could have simply let him die on the operating table and no one would have been the wiser. When a surgeon,” said Jacob Wait, looking very bored and as if he hated everybody concerned, “has got his hands inside a man’s abdomen, nobody in the world can say what he’s doing. Or there’s Robert Copley.” He stopped there and simply looked at her.

He had meant, probably, to take her by surprise, but she’d known it was coming and kept her face still and her eyes inexpressive. Partially, at least, she must have succeeded, for all at once he got up and took his hat from the desk top. In the heavy silence Marcia could hear a bell ringing somewhere, the tread of feet coming down the stairs.

“Think it over,” said Jacob Wait abruptly. “You are— occasionally—a sensible woman. And here are a few things I’d like to know if you can see your way clear to telling me: Who was the man in the library the night your husband was murdered? Is anything at all missing from his things—or from Beatrice’s? Who locked you in the sewing room last night? And what is this? Or rather how did it get where it was found?”

He took it from his pocket and put it into Marcia’s cold, reluctant hand, and she did, then, say something, for it was a small piece of glass—broken glass with a beautiful, shattered design.

“It’s rock crystal,” she said. “It’s from—I mean it’s like—”

“It’s from a cocktail set in your own china cupboard,” he said. “There are eleven glasses left, and your servants insist that they knew of none being broken. And this was found up the street at the entrance of the Larch Street sewer. The other pieces had evidently been washed into the sewer intake by the rains.”

He took it from her.

“And don’t forget motives, Mrs. Godden. You see, if love is the motive for your husband’s murder, then Beatrice was very likely murdered because she knew too much. Your cousin, indeed, told us she had boasted of it. Very useful witness, your cousin. Well, if you think of anything you want to tell me, I’ll be somewhere around. And, by the way, I’ve already looked around in here as much as I want to.”

S
HE MIGHT HAVE KNOWN
it. Otherwise he wouldn’t have given in so readily. She’d been a fool to think for an instant that she could outsmart him. She had only played into his hands by showing her eagerness.

She sat looking blankly at the dark wooden panels of the door for a long time after he’d gone before she realized that if he had found Rob’s letter he would have pounced at once. It was the thing he needed. The thing to make him a case. The thing to prove his premises about motives. It would be, in that curiously delayed inquest, the clinching point of evidence.