Green for Danger (31 page)

She raised her prisoned hands and took one of his and kissed it and held her cheek against it, and said, very softly: “Thank you,” and leaned back against him with a little sigh of gratitude, like a child.

Eden pushed forward. He cried eagerly: “William—
William
…! Surely, Inspector, you're not going to accuse her of having tried to kill William? She was in love with him. She was going to marry him.…” He added in his impatient way, speaking across the silent Esther as though she had not been there: “You don't suggest that that was all false? You don't suggest that it wasn't true that she loved him?”

“Of course she loved him,” said Major Moon sadly, looking down as she sat with closed eyes, her head against his arm. “That night that she became engaged to him—anyone who saw her then must have known that she was happy, and in love. She was transformed. She shone like candlelight in this ugly, grey old place. She forgot the past and looked only to the future, she glowed with gaiety and love and happiness. She was so lovely in her radiance, that I fell in love with her in that one moment; I never knew real love before … but I fell hopelessly in love with her like any callow boy.” He looked down at her again and added, with terrible sadness: “Twice a murderess, and, God help me, I love her still.…”

“What will poor William do?” cried Woody, her big heart numb with misery for all this sorrow and cruelty and pain.

Frederica shook her head with her own little off-hand, contemptuous gesture. “Oh, William'll be all right; he'll look after himself. He's been getting on perfectly well all this time with Chalk and Cheese, if all I hear is true.…”

Sergeant Bray's heavy footfall sounded in the lobby outside. As he appeared at the door, Barney, who had remained quietly in the background, came forward. He put into words what they had all been aching to ask: “But
why
?”

Esther sat with bent head and did not reply. Cockrill and Bray stepped forward. Woody cried, as though to hold them back, as though to postpone for just another few moments that terrible moment to come: “Inspector, you
must
tell us that; you
must
explain to us. We—she was our friend. We—we loved her. We knew her so
well
…” She put her hands to her face and burst again into bitter tears.

Cockrill was not sorry to put off, for a little while longer, his ugly duty. He said, pausing: “You should know, Miss Woods, if anyone should. You were there when she told us—almost in so many words; that night when we talked outside the theatre door.”

“That night we told her about the operation to William's leg?” said Woody, looking up through her fingers with tear-bright eyes.

“She was worried about the operation,” said Cockrill thoughtfully. “She said she couldn't bear to think of him ill and in pain; she said it wasn't the danger—she knew there was no danger. But ten minutes later she was white and trembling, she was saying that William would die under the anæsthetic. She knew he would. She was going to kill him, herself. In that few minutes, she had made up her mind.”

“But for heaven's sake—why?”

“Because of something you said.”

They had almost forgotten Esther's presence: they spoke of her as though she were not there. Woods blurted out, wretchedly: “
I
said something? What could I have said?”

“I suppose they hadn't talked very much about the past,” said Cockrill, not directly answering her. “She and her William, I mean. He told her the important things, of course, about his private life, and life in the Navy, perhaps; but they didn't have very much time together, and I expect they mostly looked ahead into the future. There was a lifetime ahead to discuss the little things—to tell about the time before he joined up, for example. She didn't know, until you told her that evening, that he'd worked with Higgins.…”

“In the rescue squad!” said Woods, hardly above her breath.

“In the rescue squad that left her mother to die,” said Cockrill; and Esther slid slowly off the stool and lay in a motionless heap upon the ground.

3

“She's fainted!” said Cockrill.

“She's dead,” said Moon, and he added softly: “Thank God!” and crossed himself.

Cockrill flung himself on to his knees beside the limp body. Esther's eyes were half-open, the pupils pin-points of black, her skin was cold and clammy to his touch; even as he knelt beside her the laboured respirations faltered and flickered out. He looked about him wildly: “What is it? What's the matter with the girl?”

“Is she dead?” said Gervase, standing over them.

“She's dying anyway.” He cried imperiously to Major Moon: “You know something about this! What is it? What has she done to herself?”

Moon did not seem to hear him. Barnes came over and knelt down and took Esther's hand and pushed aside the steel bracelet and felt her wrist. To Cockrill, fuming impatiently, it seemed an eternity before he said slowly: “It's no use; she's dead.”

“For heaven's sake, can't you
do
something?” cried Cockrill, frantically. “All you doctors and nurses—isn't there anything you can
do
? Can't you give her artificial respiration?” As they remained unmoving, standing in a silent ring, looking down sadly at the body, he flung himself across her and began clumsily to try to revive her himself. Woods started forward, almost as though in protest; but Frederica crouched down beside the body and, stroking with her little hand the shining, colourless hair, said softly: “Don't worry, darling. He can't do anything. She's dead.”

Cockrill gave it up. He left the body lying on the floor and, standing over it, faced them all sternly. “This is
your
doing. You did this! You wanted her to die.”

“How could we have borne anything else, Inspector?” said Barnes simply, not contradicting him.

“You knew that she was dying. All of you.”

They stood looking down at her silently; Woody with tears running unashamedly down her raddled cheeks, Frederica white and pitiful, Major Moon with bent grey head and shaking hands, Gervase and Barney were quiet and sad, but there was a deliberate determination about their mouths. “This is a very grave matter,” said Cockrill, at last. “You've deliberately connived at her death. You've assisted a murderer in evading justice. For all I know you contributed to her death. I can see it now—you've been playing for time. All of you. Every time I tried to speak to her, every time she showed signs of collapse … one of you drew my attention away. You knew from the first—from the moment I accused her.…”

“Not from the first; not all of us,” said Barnes, glancing around him. “But I suppose, finally, all of us recognised the signs. The excitement, the flushed face, the bright eyes, the dryness of the mouth, the gradual torpor.…” He said to Major Moon, as though it were a routine matter of medicine: “Death was extraordinarily rapid, though. It can't be more than ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.…”

“She got some into a vein,” said Major Moon briefly. “Not all of it; there are two puncture marks—it's not very easy to do on yourself, but she's got good veins … and she must have got a little in.”

“You've been supporting her all this time, Moon,” cried Cockrill furiously. “Unless you'd held her, she'd have fallen down, long ago!” He swung round upon them all, dancing with impotent rage. “You are accessories after the fact. I shall charge you all with it.…”

Major Moon looked up from a consultation with his shoes. “Oh, no, Cockie—I don't think you'll be able to do that.”

A brightness came into Eden's eyes, Barney raised his head, the two girls looked up with an air of expectancy at the tone in the old man's voice. He continued blandly: “You haven't even found out yet what she died of.”

Flushed face, bright eyes, exhilaration diminishing into unconsciousness, death ensuing with unusual rapidity because ‘it' had been given into a vein. Cockrill asked, jerking it out ungraciously, a load of doubt and fear very heavy on his heart: “Very well, then— what did she die of?”

“She died of an injection of morphia—self-administered,” said Eden, and could not keep a hint of mocking laughter from his voice.

“Morphia?
Mor
phia?” He pointed suddenly to the pool on the floor. “Then, for God's sake—what's this?”

“That's the antidote, Inspector,” said Major Moon; and added with his gentle smile: “And
you
knocked it out of my hand!”

CHAPTER XIII

B
arney and Frederica sat in the garden of a pleasant little Kentish pub, drinking shandies and waiting for Woody and Eden to arrive. “Is this one of William's beers?” asked Frederica, holding her glass to the light.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Barney. He added: “Poor William!”

“I don't think he's ‘poor William' at all,” said Freddi tartly. “Even before—even while we were still all being suspects, he was flirting with Chalk and Cheese; and I saw him the other day walking down the road from Godlistone with some girl hanging on his arm.”

“Well, he's still a bit lame, I expect, darling; perhaps she was holding him up.”

“Holding him up my foot!” said Mrs. Barnes.

Barney thought it all over quickly. He said, at last: “You know, Freddi, I doubt very much whether William was ever as serious as all that about Esther. He'd known her such a short time! I've always wondered, I wondered even then, if it wasn't more a case of William flirting with her, and Esther taking it all to mean more than it really did. Esther was very inexperienced in the ways of the world. If a young man told her he adored her, she probably thought it couldn't mean anything but that he wanted to marry her. William's a bit of a gay dog with the lovelies; and personally I think Esther took him too seriously. I don't say that he didn't care for her, and wasn't perfectly willing to marry her when he suddenly found himself committed to it; and I may be quite wrong, but I don't believe he was so deeply in love with Esther that he'll never get over it.”

“It must have been a dreadful shock to him,” acknowledged Frederica.

“Yes, I think it was. Moon had a rotten time breaking the news to him.”

“Poor old Major Moon,” said Freddi, and now her matter-of-fact little voice did take on a tinge of tenderness, a tear did well up into her wide grey eyes. “Just like him when he was going through hell himself, to take on the job of explaining to William—who didn't care half as much.… I wonder if Woody and Gervase have heard about him?”

Woods and Eden appeared, walking along the road from the hospital. “We ordered a couple of shandies for you,” said Barney, pushing the big glass mugs across the wooden table. “Would you rather have something else?
We
can use these if you would.”

The shandies, however, were just right for a summer evening, after a dusty walk. “Have you heard about Major Moon?” asked Woody, as soon as she had gulped down half her pint.

“Yes, we saw it in
The Times
to-day.” Freddi picked up a paper from a neighbouring table. “Here it is again: ‘Heroic Surgeon Decorated. Posthumous Reward for Gallantry in Air Raid.' I should think it was gallantry, though it was useless gallantry. He must have known the woman couldn't be alive.”

“Higgins' rescue squad ‘knew' Esther's mother couldn't be alive,” said Eden.

Frederica stared at him. “Do you think that's why he insisted on going? To sort of …? Well, sort of because of Esther?”

“I should think so,” said Barney. He added, “I wish to heavens I'd been there.”

“I'm very glad you weren't, darling,” said Frederica immediately. “What would have happened to me?”

“That is an extremely typical remark, Mrs. Barnes,” said Woody, laughing.

“Well, I don't mean that; I meant that a lot of people had something to lose if Barney died; and Major Moon hadn't got any relations or anything, and I don't suppose he minded dying a bit. He was so terribly unhappy after Esther.… It was like seeing a ghost wandering about the hospital, going on doggedly with his work, making his little jokes and smiling his ghastly little smile, and getting paler and thinner and more mumbley every day. Personally I'm glad Major Moon was killed in the air-raid. He died doing something for somebody else, which was just like him, even if it
was
quite useless; and I'm sure he didn't want to live. He loved Esther too much ever to be happy again after—after we knew.”