Fair Warning (28 page)

He said suddenly, “I suppose you know that you are saying things that can be used against you?”

It would sound silly and sententious and not really true if she said it was because somewhere in all that mass was the truth. She said nothing, and in that moment hated Jacob Wait as much as he hated her. But she also feared him.

He did not seem to expect a reply.

“Who put the arsenic in the cupboard and when?”

She didn’t know.

And she didn’t know, either, why Ancill had fled.

“Had anything at all happened just before he left? What were you doing? Where were you? When did you first discover he was gone?”

“We were in the library, talking of—of Rob’s arrest. Gally was telling of the night Beatrice was murdered and how he had come up to the butler’s pantry for cigarettes. Then he noticed the—oh, a glass paperweight Ivan was fond of had disappeared. And he kept talking of it, and finally we called Ancill to see if he knew anything of it. Ancill had gone by that time.”

“A glass paperweight! Describe it.”

She did so in detail.

“How long has it been gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“A day—a week—two weeks?”

Marcia searched her memory.

“I can’t actually remember seeing it since the day Ivan was injured—a month ago,” she said finally. “But I’m not certain.”

“The day the knife was hidden; the day the arsenic disappeared. Three weapons of death were in this room. Ivan Godden was injured so seriously he nearly died that day. A month later he is recovered, comes home, and is murdered—also in this room. Did you know there was a duplicate key to the french doors over there?”

“No!”

“There is. Ancill told me. He told me also that it’s been missing for some time. He didn’t know how long—perhaps—” said Jacob Wait slowly—“he thought perhaps a month. Who was here in this house the day your husband was injured in the auto accident?”

“Ancill. Emma Beek and the housemaid. Beatrice, myself, Ivan. Dr. Blakie. And then they phoned that Ivan was injured, and we sent for Rob and Mrs. Copley to take us to the hospital.”

“Galway Trench was not here?”

“No.”

“Were any of those people in this room? Alone?”

“I don’t know.” He waited, and she added reluctantly, “They might have been.”

“Could any of them have hidden the knife and the arsenic—perhaps, even, the paperweight—in that cupboard over there without being observed?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so. It was all very confusing. We were putting on coats—hats—telephoning the hospital. Dr. Blakie went on ahead, and we followed.”

He waited a moment, looking at her with dark, heavy-lidded eyes which seemed to focus, not on her, but on the events of that day over a month ago.

“It’s a very odd thing,” he said thoughtfully, “how things always seem to return, somehow, to that day. It’s as if there were a hub there somewhere. As if something significant and important had happened that day. Let’s go over it again.”

She thought fleetingly of the night of Ivan’s death when they had questioned her so long and when March eighteenth began to repeat itself so insistently in those questions.

But there was nothing new to tell him; nothing she had not told him many times over.

She pushed her hair back from her temples with a weary little gesture and began it again.

The quarrel with Ivan about the little black dog, Bunty. The entrance of Ancill with that fatal package of things from the hardware store. Ivan’s picking up the dandelion knife, holding it in his beautiful fingers, commenting on its being slender and sharp like a dagger. The package left on the desk, Ivan’s saying not to worry about the dog being destroyed, that Ancill would see to it. His approaching her, saying he would kiss the tears away, and her own unexpected defiance. The three long red marks appearing on Ivan’s white cheek.

She told it now unflinchingly, thinking only of Rob.

“Then you took the dog to the Copleys’?”

Yes. And Mrs. Copley said she would keep it. No, she hadn’t told them of her quarrel with Ivan; she’d told them of it only later, when his—Wait’s—questions brought it out. Yes, she supposed Ancill had heard that quarrel.

“And when you returned here, were the tools still on the desk?”

Yes, she thought so.

“What happened then?”

Repetition again. Ivan had been injured. Mrs. Copley had sent for Dr. Blakie to look at the dog, hoping that with a clean bill of health from the doctor Ivan would permit her to keep it. He had looked at it and then had stopped to tell Marcia that the dog was all right. And while he was there they had got the message that Ivan was hurt. The doctor had gone at once to the hospital where they took Ivan; Beatrice had sent for Rob, asking him to take them into town, and his mother had come, too. They had all gone to the hospital. Dr. Blakie operated at once; they’d returned late that night. But she remembered nothing at all of the package on the desk. There had been, naturally, considerable confusion.

“Were these people—Dr. Blakie, Mrs. Copley, Rob Copley—alone in the library during that time?”

“That day, you mean? March eighteenth? I don’t know. I suppose any of them could have been; no one would have noticed. I couldn’t possibly say.”

“Or if Galway Trench happened to have the duplicate key to the french doors, he could have been in the room without anyone knowing it?”

“I suppose so,” said Marcia.

“Delia couldn’t remember seeing the arsenic, or the knife that was used in the murder, when she put the package away the next morning,” said Jacob Wait. “Looks as if it had vanished the day of March eighteenth. Looks very much as if Rob Copley put it in that cupboard for future use in case Ivan Godden did not die. Yes, it looks as if that’s what happened.” His eyes were preoccupied, seeing something in the distance. “He knew Godden was seriously injured; he was to take you to the hospital. One big thought obsesses him—suddenly, without expecting it, Godden is in danger and may die; if he dies he’ll have Godden’s wife.
But suppose he doesn’t die
! In the face of that sudden glimpse of the future
if
he dies, Copley can’t face the possibility of his getting well. And while he’s waiting perhaps for you to be ready to go to the hospital, he sees three weapons of death on the desk before him. Three weapons of death.” The dreamy, imaginative look left the detective’s sallow face, and he said suddenly, snapping out the words, “He’s under great emotional stress—it’s the beginning of the thing that, actually, led up to that climax four weeks later when Ivan Godden returns cured. He says to himself: ‘
If
he doesn’t die now, he must die later.’ And here are three easy means of that death, every one of them traceable to the household. He realizes that, living so near you, it will be an easy matter to arrange to do it when you are out of the house. He thinks you are already gone the night of his mother’s dinner party, for he sees your wrap—which Beatrice unluckily has worn—and even the dinner party has been arranged to take you away from the house.”

“There’s something wrong there,” thought Marcia; something wrong—but he swept on before she could, groping, find it.

“He puts the things in the cupboard on an impulse; a prompting to secure them for possible later use. Perhaps—just then—it’s only an impulse; a result merely of that unfortunate combination of a desire to murder and means to murder. Anyway, he puts all three in the cupboard; if they are found there in the meantime it doesn’t matter. And he’s beside himself; a man under such a strain wouldn’t be have very sensibly. And Godden does get well, and that emotional load has been growing all that time, growing until the night Godden returns, it reaches its climax; he sees him threaten you—or so it looks to him. Sees him actually put his hands on your throat as if to choke you, and Ancill enters and—”

“Ancill told you?”

He blinked again and came back to the present day and moment. His face lost its look of mobility and became just bored and tired. He said; “Yes. So you see we must find so valuable a witness.”

“A witness against me, that is, and against Rob,” thought Marcia. She didn’t say it, but he knew she was thinking it.

“Why did you put the raincoat in the closet?” he said suddenly. “Did Copley wear it when he came to murder your husband? And then forget and leave it in the room? So when you came down and found Godden dying even before you went to him, you saw the raincoat and put it in the closet to shield Copley.”

“
No, no
—it was as I told you—”

“And that night you came to find the letter you’d hidden in the cupboard. And you saw the arsenic?”

“Yes—at least—”

“It was described by the hardware store clerk: a small sack of heavy paper, wrapped tightly and tied. It was seen in the cupboard the night he was murdered, but we weren’t looking for arsenic; we didn’t know anything about arsenic. And that’s where your letter was, when Beatrice Godden saw the knife there—she must have found the envelope which she later gave me. And the letter.”

Marcia could hear pulses pounding heavily in her ears. Of course, he would see that—they ought to have known— they ought to have known … He was so certain he didn’t even wait for her reply; he said, with a queer, scornful look, “We’ve known or at least strongly suspected that she must have had the letter, since the time it came into our hands and we saw what it was. She had the envelope; when she gave me the envelope she said only she had found it in the house and knew nothing of the letter it must have enclosed; she pretended she didn’t know the handwriting. I don’t know her motive; probably, mainly, it was to divert suspicion from herself to you. Then when we knew you had been searching the cupboard we knew you were after something and gave things a more thorough search ourselves. But the arsenic had already been removed; removed before we knew there had been arsenic. I don’t know why it was apparently taken out and dumped in the pool, unless—unless the murderer simply wanted to get rid of it. However, we weren’t, naturally, very surprised when the letter turned up. We figured there was something of the kind. But Beatrice’s probable possession of it is part of our case against Copley. He had a motive for killing her.”

And they had planned to keep that from them. What other blunders had they made? What other admissions they did not know were admissions?

He shot up his cuff with a deft motion, glanced at his watch, and said briskly, “If Beatrice had the letter and didn’t give it to me, there was a reason for that. And—you knew she had the letter and Rob Copley knew she had the letter—so he killed her—”

“If he killed her for the letter, he would have destroyed it! He wouldn’t have sent it to you. It wasn’t Rob—”

“He would have destroyed it if he’d found it,” said Jacob Wait. “Perhaps he couldn’t find it. But he knew that she knew of it—he had to silence her. And he knew that she threatened his alibi—such as it was—the night Godden was—”

He stopped.

He was looking straight at her with those dark, heavy-lidded eyes and didn’t see her. Didn’t see anything in the room. Didn’t ask another question or make any other comment. He stared into space for an utterly still moment, and so spell-like was his look that Marcia herself was held by it. And then he turned and walked out of the room. Out of the house into the rain, with Gally running to peer through the curtains after him.

Gally returned, perplexed and anxious.

“Now what?” he said. “Now what’s he going to do?”

“He knows Beatrice had the letter,” said Marcia heavily. “He knew it from the first—that is, suspected it because she had the envelope and the letter reached them the day after she was murdered. It’s—as we knew it would be—the motive they attribute Rob. Now he knows it was in the cupboard; I told him that.”

Verity said nothing.

After a moment Gally went to Marcia and patted her shoulder and put his arm comfortingly around her.

“Don’t worry, honey,” he said. “We’re doing the best we can.” He was, however, a little cheerful. “At any rate they didn’t arrest me. Not yet, anyhow. They’ll probably take us all together, Marcia.”

“Didn’t he ask you any questions about your presence in the house when Ivan was murdered?” asked Verity.

“None,” said Gally, still cheerful. “Oh, he asked if I heard anything—say, somebody coming down the stairs. I knew he meant Marcia, so I said no, nobody but Beatrice. If you want to know what I think, I think he suspected something of the sort all along.”

He looked thoughtful and had an afterthought.

“He asked about the scrap of something white I saw, too. And about knocking at the french doors, and the doors being open, and going in when Ivan looked up and saw me and said to come in. But I didn’t say a word about hearing Rob say he was going to kill Ivan. I was just passing the other side of the evergreens, you know, Marcia. And I will admit it gave me a kind of shock to hear you and Rob talk and to know how things were between you. Not that I blame you,” he added hurriedly. “Ivan was a—hell, I wouldn’t blame you for killing him yourself. But it did give me a kind of shock, and then when Rob said he was going to kill him, I thought, ‘Least said soonest mended and a good job done.’ Anyway, I just waited till you’d both gone and then went around to the library doors. Rob sounded,” said Gally reflectively, “as if he meant it. But I’ll never tell—unless, of course, I have to to save myself.” Verity uttered a queer smothered word or two and turned away, and Miss Wurlitz came hurriedly forward.

“Now, Mrs. Copley,” she said soothingly, “don’t take it so hard.”

When Verity went home after dinner the nurse went with her.

“I’ll just see she gets off to sleep,” she said to Marcia. “She looks awful. You’d better get some rest yourself, Mrs. Godden. I won’t be long.”

They went away through the twilight and rain. The dripping evergreens closed about them, and then the dusk of the street.

Gally watched them go, sighed, and lighted the lamp in the hall, wondering audibly what had happened to the usual policeman sitting in the hall or prowling just outside the front door.

“He’s probably in the kitchen,” said Marcia.

“Funny,” said Gally after a pause, “how empty the house seems. When Ancill was around you always felt him—I mean, you felt as if he was likely to turn up at any moment—as if he was watching you—there’s a word for it—ubiquitous,” said Gally with a small triumph and added that he was going for a walk.