Give a Corpse a Bad Name (13 page)

‘No,' said George, ‘I'll just stick around.'

‘Good, and don't forget yourself.' Toby parked the car and went on to ring the front-door bell of The Laurels and to ask for an interview with Mrs Milne.

She was in the sitting-room, sitting close to the fire, when the maid showed them in. She was wearing a black dress, close-fitting and long; against it her rings glittered with vivid reflections of the firelight. She looked up at them with a smile and rose. There was a quiet about her this afternoon, a stillness that was unfamiliar.

‘Did you meet my daughter on your way here?' she asked when they were seated. ‘Oh, she was going to the village, was she?' She made a soft sound that was perhaps a laugh. ‘It's odd, you know, to remember that once it seemed quite easy to be a mother. One fed the child, and washed her, and dressed her, and called the doctor if she was ill, and tried to give her a nice time. But it's very difficult to decide the scope of one's responsibilities towards a more or less grown-up person. I've tried to interfere more, perhaps, than I ought. But now I've—I've decided to give in. I haven't told her yet, but I've decided.' She looked down at the fire with that same distant, introspective smile. ‘At any rate,' she said, ‘it's a peaceful feeling, giving in.'

‘You've been trying to prevent her marriage, haven't you?' said Toby.

She nodded. ‘She won't be happy if she marries Adrian. She's a simple child really; she's got simple childish tastes, and her ideas are pretty childish and simple. And Adrian won't let that alone. He's already stopped her playing the jazz she really likes, and convinced her that she ought to be playing Chopin. He's injected psychological catchwords. He's trying to make her something she isn't capable of becoming. It'll exhaust her and fret her and end up by destroying her—if he isn't bored with her in a year, which is really the most probable thing.'

‘And yet you've decided to give in.' Toby's eyes were keeping a thoughtful watch on hers.

‘What else can one do?'

He shrugged.

‘As a matter of fact,' she added, ‘I don't really mean to let her marry till she's twenty-one, which is just about a year from now.' Then she gave him an amused look and said: ‘I'm afraid I'm taking for granted that you're interested in my family affairs.'

‘It's not a mistake,' he assured her. ‘And now look at this.' He held out the anonymous letter.

She took it. She read it. She handed it back and looked him in the eyes.

Anna Milne's face was not one that betrayed much of what she was feeling or thinking. A minute or two ago it had expressed the calm, the satisfaction, almost, of resignation, and a sort of casual friendliness. Now a slight tightening of the muscles had wiped that out. It had become mask-like.

‘This time,' she said, ‘I don't understand.'

‘I think I can explain—if,' said Toby with a sudden harshness in his voice, ‘it's really necessary.'

‘Please do,' she said.

He folded the piece of paper away in his pocket-book. ‘You see,' he said, ‘there's a pair of trousers missing in this case. Of course, you didn't know that.'

‘No,' she said.

He smiled. ‘All right, you didn't. But it—'

‘Mr Dyke,' she cut in, ‘if you're going to be rude to me you can drop out of this. The police can see that letter and deal with it as they think best. They'll do it, at least, without unnecessary insult.'

He leant forward and answered her earnestly: ‘Look here, Mrs Milne, you're in a mess. You know it and you're frightened. What's more, you're worn out with being frightened. When you're worn out you make mistakes. You're making a mistake now. You ought to pool with me all that you know about those trousers. It's not an important mistake, because I think I know most of what it's necessary to know, but later on you'll find yourself making worse ones. Well, if I were you I'd guard against that by turning honest. Plant some of your trouble on me; I'm not going to be worn out for a long time yet.'

‘How do I know,' she replied coldly, ‘that you didn't write those letters to yourself?'

He sighed impatiently. ‘There, that's what I mean. You'd never say a damnfool thing like that if you were in your right mind. If I knew enough to write myself these letters, I'd know enough to start blackmailing you right away—because that's what you're getting at, isn't it? I'd have no possible motive except blackmail.'

She dropped her eyes, drawing her hand across them. ‘All right,' she said fretfully, ‘I'm sorry. But please go on and tell me about the trousers. I want to understand.'

He said nothing for a moment. ‘Very well,' he said then, ‘we'll play it your way. You were at the inquest on the man who was killed, weren't you? Question luckily doesn't need an answer; I saw you there. Well, at the inquest a Mrs Quantick of Wallaford testified that he'd spent Monday night in her house. He left on Tuesday morning, carrying a suitcase. Presumably he'd meant to pack all his belongings and take them away with him, but somehow he managed to forget a jacket. It was a navy blue jacket, and he left it hanging in a cupboard in the room he'd slept in. In one of its pockets was Shelley Maxwell's passport, though that isn't what's important at the moment. What's important is that there was probably a pair of trousers belonging to that blue jacket, and if there was, those trousers must have been in the suitcase. Of course the jacket may have been an odd one; if I hadn't had this letter I don't suppose I should have started thinking about trousers at all. I know the trousers he was found in were tweed, and most people don't wear blue jackets with tweed trousers if they can help it, but I dare say some of them do, and, as I was saying, until I got this letter, I hadn't got trousers on my mind at all. But now I've been given this prod in that direction, I must say that the only significant pair of trousers I can think of are the ones that probably belonged to that blue jacket, and which are probably in the suitcase. In my opinion the probability is that there are other interesting things in the suitcase too, though that may be merely a romantic embroidery on the fact that the suitcase has disappeared. The police discovered that it was deposited in the station cloakroom in Wallaford on the Tuesday morning, but the next morning it was collected by some unidentified person, and since then it hasn't been seen. All we can get out of the cloakroom attendant about that person is that he was a tall, dark man with glasses. So far I haven't run into any tall, dark men with glasses connected with this case, and I'm making no guesses at who he is—'

‘I'm ready to guess,' she interposed, ‘that, whoever he is, he's the person who's been writing you these letters.'

‘Possibly. Only what the second of these letters implies, if you haven't realized it yet, is that you're the person who's in possession of the suitcase. If you had the suitcase, if its contents were so dangerous to you that you had to burn them, then there was something about that accident on the Purbrook road that was different from anything that's come out about it yet. Don't you understand? Don't you see where this letter's trying to put you?'

She nodded. ‘Of course I see. Someone's exercising a lot of ingenuity to get me arrested for the murder of Shelley Maxwell. That was obvious from the first letter. What I couldn't understand was what these mysterious trousers had to do with it. Now you've made that clear. As I see it, someone, probably this tall, dark man—by the way, do you ever wear glasses, Mr Dyke?—this someone, who of course knows where the trousers are, saw me making a bonfire the other afternoon, and thought what a clever thing it'd be to tell you it was these trousers I was burning. Don't you think—' she smiled at him—‘he's got you sized up rather well? He seems to know just what sort of things you'll take seriously.'

Toby shifted irritably in his chair. ‘Anyway,' he said, ‘you
were
making a bonfire. I'm glad we haven't got to go round and round that too.'

‘What d'you take me for?' she asked. ‘Smoke goes up, doesn't it? Even a high laurel hedge doesn't conceal smoke. But, if you think about that for a moment, d'you think that if I'd wanted to destroy something secretly I should really have chosen as public a method as a bonfire?'

‘The question is,' he replied, ‘what's your story about what you actually did burn.'

‘Autumn leaves,' she answered promptly. Then, at the look on his face, she burst out laughing. Toby laughed too. George, grave-faced, sat and watched them laughing at one another, she with a nervous helplessness, he with sardonically encouraging amusement.

‘Oh, dear,' she said after a minute, wiping the hysterical tears away from her eyes, ‘that was silly of me—and very rude to my gardener, if you think that we're well on into January. As a matter of fact, what I was burning—'

Toby stood up. ‘If your sentences are going to begin with ‘as a matter of fact' then I
know
there's no truth to be got out of you. And if it wasn't trousers you were burning—' he glared at her with a look of malevolence—‘my dear Mrs Milne,
I don't care what it was
!'

Anna Milne and Toby Dyke looked at one another speculatively across the two or three feet that separated them.

Both of them had keen and intelligent faces, both had a grimness about the jaw, both were blatant in their curious study of one another.

Anna Milne smiled. ‘Mr Dyke,' she said, ‘please sit down. We haven't nearly finished our talk.'

He smiled too, indulgently. He answered: ‘That needs demonstrating.'

‘Very well,' she said, ‘listen to this. Suppose I were to engage you to find the writer of these anonymous letters.'

His smile broadened. ‘Just that?'

‘Just that,' she said.

‘The writer of the letters, nothing else at all?'

‘I'm not interested in anything else.'

‘Dear me,' said Toby.

‘At any rate,' said Anna Milne, ‘sit down.'

Toby started to walk about the room. His manner had become preoccupied, his black brows met above the beak of his nose. She watched him with a certain anxiety and with an obvious irritation at his movements.

After a moment she began hesitantly: ‘The fee—'

‘You leave the fee to Toby,' George advised her. ‘He'll see it's big enough.'

She rose suddenly and stood in Toby's way. They looked again into one another's faces.

‘Mr Dyke—'

‘Yes, it's a good idea in a way,' he answered. ‘If you employ me I can make you do what I tell you. That's the correct relationship between employer and employee. And the first thing you'll do—' He stopped and said instead: ‘My God, but you're scared, aren't you?'

She nodded.

‘And if I ask you why, if I ask you to give me your confidence, if I waste any more time over the question-and-answer business, I'll get nothing out of you but tricks and dodges.'

She drew a difficult breath and said: ‘It's unreasonable of me to be scared—I know that. But it's a horrible feeling, this—this malignity.'

‘I repeat,' said Toby, ‘if I ask, it will only be given me good and thick. Right. Then action's the thing. Come on, get your coat.'

‘My—?'

‘Coat,' said Toby, ‘and hat, or anything else that'll come in handy when you're paying calls on people who've just been celebrating a funeral. No,' he went on quickly, as her eyes darkened and her lips curled back for a furious reply, ‘I like my own rules best for this cut-throat game. I always turn up six cards in dummy before I start bidding.'

Toby refused to be driven in Mrs Milne's car. He also refused to drive her in the one he had hired. He pointed out that when they had concluded their visit to the Maxwells they might wish to go different ways. So it was with his car following hers that they approached Chovey Place.

In his seat beside Toby, George muttered half to himself: ‘Now why? Why? You know all about that, I suppose. You know why she first says she thinks you're the cove who's been writing the letters, and then employs you to find out who he is—oh yes, you know all that! You know what you're playing at now too, oh yes, oh yes!'

‘Her first manœuvre,' said Toby, ‘was just an odd dodge for gaining time, on the old line that attack's the best method of defence. You know what Lord Baldwin said about that.'

‘No,' said George.

‘The second—'

‘What did he say?'

‘George, this is a serious matter, so serious that we can't afford to bring party politics into it. The second manœuvre, I was going to say, was most probably a dodge for keeping me under her eye. That doesn't mean she won't be glad if I find out who's actually been writing these letters, but it means—at least, she thinks it means—that she can do a bit of interfering when we start finding out some of the things she's keeping dark. She's crooked as a swastika, that woman. At least …'

‘Eh?'

‘Oh, hell, wipe out the crooked, and say she's one of the people who's dead sure that the end justifies the means.'

George grunted. ‘And you're going along to Maxwells now because why?'

‘Because it's the place she didn't want to go to. Wouldn't take us there this morning, would she?'

George grunted again. The blue eyes in the pink circle of his face were contemplative. He said nothing for a while. His next remark, when it came, was: ‘Tobe, she's mighty attached to that daughter of hers, shouldn't you say? A very loving mother, eh?'

‘Yes—and yet thinks she's a fool.'

‘Nothing in that,' said George authoritatively.

He was silent again. He was absent-mindedly smoothing the palms of his hands against one another; he was also sucking at his teeth, producing little chirps of sound.