Give a Corpse a Bad Name (21 page)

‘I reckon you've guessed it already. On the twenty-seventh of November, 1917, there was a marriage between Henry Rhymer and Anne Milton. Anne Milton was the daughter of the Reverend Edward Milton; she'd been born and bred in the parish. There was some sort of scandal about her, though whether it was Rhymer caused it or some other man, people don't seem sure now. She was twenty at the time, and here's her picture.' He tossed a photograph across to Toby.

With George looking over his shoulder, Toby examined it. It was a snapshot of a young woman in the uniform of the wartime VAD. She was pretty, yet less pretty, perhaps, than anyone, guessing at the youth of Anna Milne, might have expected. Without the grimness that marked it now, the grimness that, in a way, seemed to disfigure her face, it was oddly characterless. But without any question Anne Milton was Anna Milne; the strongly defined features, the dark, deep-set eyes, were the same, as well as something in the poise of that slimmer, lighter body.

Toby handed the photograph back to Whitear.

‘And that makes her a murderess?' he asked.

Whitear gave him an amused look. ‘It gives her a motive for being one. Consider. Mrs Milne of The Laurels with her mink coat and her Bentley, her servants and her expensively educated and sheltered daughter—and Henry Rhymer, drink-sodden, down and out. Casting no aspersions on the state of matrimony, isn't there a motive in that?'

Toby was fiddling with a piece of twisted wire he had taken out of his pocket.

‘Mrs Milne,' he remarked, ‘is a woman of humane and kindly character.'

‘Really?' said Whitear derisively. ‘Is that so? If you ask around the place, Mr Dyke, you'll find she's got the name of being one of the toughest propositions they've had around here for a long time.'

Toby replied evenly: ‘I asked around the place. When her gardener has toothache she pays for treatment and wants to buy him some false teeth. She doesn't mind if he swipes her whisky when he's feeling queer. When her cook's sister has too many children she tries to pay for her visit to a clinic. She doesn't get much gratitude, in fact her attempts at benevolence are probably thoroughly ill-judged, but the intention's above criticism. And she's able to win the liking and respect of that lonely, comic old woman up at Chovey Place.'

‘You do it well, Mr Dyke—doesn't he, Eggbear?' said Whitear good-naturedly. ‘But I can't believe you're wholly serious. Perhaps you'd like to come along with us now to The Laurels to watch over the good lady's interests, eh?' His violet eyes twinkled.

Eggbear suddenly leaned forward and took the piece of wire from Toby.

‘What's this you got here?' he asked.

Toby tweaked it out of his hand and put it back in his pocket. ‘When Whitear tells me what else he's got on Mrs Milne that's making him so pleased with himself,' he answered with a sour grin, ‘perhaps I'll tell you.'

They covered the distance to The Laurels in the hired Sunbeam, the only car handy that would take the four of them. Both Toby and Eggbear were silent and thoughtful. Whitear, as usual, was gay and talkative, while George sat with his hands round his knees, keeping up a nervous, tuneless humming.

About halfway there, Eggbear asked Toby where he had found that piece of wire. Toby told him that it had risen, like a phoenix, out of the ashes. Eggbear frowned and turned to stare with dissatisfied eyes at the cottages they were passing.

Their arrival interrupted some of Daphne's desultory piano-playing. Her few remarks to them, while they waited for Mrs Milne, were disconnected, almost meaningless. She moved near to Toby, but this time it was not he that her eyes continually sought, but Whitear. His eyes were plainly contented to meet them.

Mrs Milne, with her usual composure and air of indifference, came in presently, but not until she had kept them waiting for several minutes. Her shrewd glance took in Whitear, and she seated herself so that she faced him directly.

He was obviously more impressed by her than he had expected, and while he hesitated for a moment, revising, perhaps, his first remark, Toby stole his opening.

‘He's going to address you as Mrs Rhymer,' he said, ‘and watch you flinch. Also, if he knows his duty, he's going to warn you that anything you say may be written down and used as evidence—'

‘Mr Dyke!' said Whitear stormily.

Eggbear permitted himself a faint smile.

Mrs Milne, lighting a cigarette, remarked: ‘I consider myself warned. Go ahead, Inspector.'

Muttering something peevishly to himself, Whitear tackled the job before him. ‘Mrs Rhymer—I mean Mrs Milne—' He floundered, realizing his effect was not to be saved.

‘Milne,' she said, ‘is what I'm used to, but Rhymer is correct.'

At Toby's side Daphne gave a little gasp. It left her mouth hanging open with a childish look of horror. Her face had gone quite white.

Whitear ploughed on: ‘You are Anne Milton, married to Henry Rhymer in 1917—'

‘Yes, yes,' she said impatiently. ‘It'll be quickest if you let me give you an account of the facts. Ever since I heard from Mr Dyke of the last anonymous letter he received I realized that sooner or later I should have to do that. If you'll just listen for a few minutes I can—'

‘One moment, ma'am,' said Whitear. His handsome face was stern. ‘At the inquest on the late Henry Rhymer you stated that you were unable to identify the corpse. You now admit that that evidence was false.'

‘No, Inspector. At the time of the inquest I had an uncomfortable suspicion that the man I'd killed might be my own husband—what one might almost call a superstitious suspicion. For the only
fact
I possessed that suggested it to me was the fact that the man came from South Africa. Also, perhaps, the feeling that my luck couldn't last for ever, that sooner or later he'd turn up. But you wouldn't expect me to offer evidence as tenuous as that. When I looked at the body I definitely didn't recognize it. I hadn't seen my husband for about fifteen years. Of course, having just been told that this unknown man was from South Africa, and that he was drunk, the thought that he might be my husband was present in my mind. But I felt no certainty on the matter. And then no less a person than Sir Joseph Maxwell gave evidence that it was his son who'd been killed … No, I don't think I'll get into trouble over any of that, Inspector.'

Whitear looked at her quite unbelievingly.

Her ringed fingers flashed as she tapped her cigarette on the edge of an ash-tray. ‘I know what you're going to say,' she said. ‘You're going to point out that at the time of the inquest I already had in my possession the missing suitcase, and had even got as far as burning its contents before—'

‘Mother!' Daphne interrupted shrilly. She was trembling violently.

Mrs Milne went straight on:—‘before the inquest began, only, as it happens, there was nothing in that suitcase that pointed to the man being anyone but Shelley Maxwell.'

‘Then why,' said Whitear swiftly, ‘did you trouble to burn it?'

‘I didn't burn the suitcase,' she replied. ‘It's upstairs in my box-room. I only burned what was inside it—that's to say, a pair of flannel trousers, a toothbrush, a shaving-brush—the razor's in my dressing-table drawer—and a copy of an old newspaper. There were one or two handkerchiefs too, I think, and a shirt.'

‘But why,' said Whitear, ‘did you trouble to burn those things?'

‘Because I didn't like the way they'd come into my possession. I thought there was something decidedly sinister about it.'

‘Indeed? Having taken the cloakroom ticket from your husband's pocket as he lay by the roadside, you then sent your daughter—no, I beg your pardon, you sent some friend of yours first, to collect the suitcase from Wallaford and deposit it in Knightsteignton, then you sent your daughter to collect it from there, confusing the trail for us as far as you could. And you say there was something sinister in that. Well, I agree with you, ma'am, but—'

‘But it wasn't like that!' Daphne broke in. ‘It came by post, and it was my fault for going and getting it when mother said we'd better not do anything about it.'

Whitear turned to her. With a young, pretty, nervous girl before him, his sternness became more impressive.

‘Would you mind repeating that more understandably, Miss Milne?' he said. ‘
It
came by post. The suitcase came by post?'

‘No, no, the ticket. It came on Thursday morning. It was in an envelope addressed to mother—just the ticket and nothing else.'

‘On
Thursday
morning?'

‘Yes, on Thursday. I know it was. I'd just got back from London the evening before, and I hadn't seen mother at all because she was out to dinner. And when I came down to breakfast she was sitting there just opening the envelope. I noticed it because it was a funny-looking envelope; the address was done in block letters with a pencil. I asked what it was, and mother said she didn't know; she said it must be a joke or something. Then she showed me the ticket, and I said I'd go to Knightsteignton and see what it was, but she told me not to, and threw the thing into the wastepaper-basket. But I pulled it out afterwards and went off to Knightsteignton and got the suitcase. She was frightfully angry about it, and went straight off to Knightsteignton herself to ask who'd left the suitcase there. And she told me not to tell anyone—anyone at all—what had happened, and she burnt the things in the suitcase. Then next day the police came, and I thought it was about the suitcase, and I was simply terrified. But I didn't tell anyone, I didn't tell a soul, not even Adrian. I wanted to tell someone, terribly. I nearly told Mr Dyke, but I didn't!'

‘I see,' said Whitear non-committally.

‘It's true,' she said sharply, ‘every word of it!'

‘Just so. Now, Mrs Rhymer—' he turned back to the older woman, taking something from his pocket—‘isn't this a copy of the same issue of the newspaper as the one you destroyed?'

She glanced at the paper he held out to her.

‘Yes.'

‘Is it in all respects the same?'

‘The copy I destroyed,' she said, ‘was a perfectly ordinary copy, except that in one of the margins, against a report of a speech by Sir Joseph Maxwell, there was a comment in pencil: “The wise in heart will receive commandments, but the prating fool shall fall.” I was completely puzzled by it, because I recognized the handwriting as Lady Maxwell's.'

Toby stretched out a hand. ‘May I see?'

He took the paper as Whitear went on: ‘Yet you thought it necessary to destroy that paper?'

While Mrs Milne was replying that, as she had already told him, the way in which the suitcase had been thrust upon her had made her exceedingly uneasy and she had therefore done her best to remove all traces of it, Toby unfolded the paper and glanced from page to page. It was a typical local daily, with columns devoted to a list of people who had sent floral tributes to a churchwarden's funeral, and more columns to those who had sent silver cruets to someone else's wedding. One whole page was occupied by a report and by photographs of some amateur theatricals. The play was a thriller called
The Return of Mr Chan
. Mr Chan, it appeared, was a suave and insinuating Chinese with a liking for inserting daggers with jewelled hilts between the shoulder-blades of public-school-educated
Britons
. Mr Chan had been acted by Adrian Laws. A photograph showed that only a little make-up had been necessary to turn his smooth, oval face into one quite presentably oriental. Daphne had acted the fair young girl whom a curly-haired young man, unknown to Toby, spent most of the three acts rescuing from Adrian's clutches. Major Maxwell had acted Daphne's father. Half-way down the page a photograph showed the head and shoulders of Mrs Milne. Beneath it the caption ran: ‘Mrs Anna Milne, of The Laurels, Chovey, who produced the play.'

Toby looked up. Although she had been speaking to Whitear, her eyes, he found were on him.

He remarked: ‘So this is once that the picture of Wendy Bartlemy did get into the papers.'

‘Yes—and look at all the trouble it's caused me.'

‘It was, of course, by that picture,' said Whitear, ‘that your husband traced you.'

‘Yes. I'll tell you all about it if only you'll give me a chance. Daphne, you may as well stay and listen to this, unless you'd rather not.' Her voice was colourless, but her eyes on her daughter were filled with emotional defiance.

Daphne was tense. She said nothing, but she did not move.

Mrs Milne began: ‘You've traced the fact that I came from Riverfield in Hampshire. My father was vicar there. During the war I worked as a VAD at a convalescent home in the neighbourhood. I was engaged to a man called Giles Wrothesley. I wanted to marry him when he came home on leave in the spring of nineteen-seventeen, but my parents wouldn't have it. I was only twenty. So we did the next best thing. About four months later he was killed.' She stubbed out her cigarette and lit a fresh one. ‘Two months before Daphne was born I married Henry Rhymer. He was a South African—just a good-natured, easygoing being in a uniform, that was all I knew about him. And so far as it went it was correct; it was out of sheer kindness that he married me. I was desperately grateful. At that time there'd been no opportunity for his other qualities to show, his congenital dishonesty, his sottishness, the streak of sadism that came out whenever he found that a person despised him. I knew that he was weak, not very intelligent, in most ways a negligible kind of person. But that casually made gift of respectability to me and my daughter filled me with the belief that he was one of those “fine, simple, gallant souls whose kindness and gentleness count more than all the intelligence in the world”—you know the sort of idea. Wonderful what imagination can do! Daphne was born while he was back in France. As soon as I was able I went to London and got a job. When Henry came back I kept him. I was proud to be able to do it. Then I was less proud but still dutiful …'