The Riddle of the River (14 page)

‘But what did you talk about, all the time you were together?’

‘Well – did we talk? Yes, I suppose we talked at dinner, when – well, Kathleen thought I was having dinner with my acting friends…well, I suppose I
was
. Oh, what nonsense. God, it’s awful, sordid.’ He passed his hand over his eyes, and continued abruptly. ‘Anyway, we only ever talked about the theatre. It’s my passion and it was hers. She told me how she had wanted to act ever since she was small, and I told her what I admired about her playing. We discussed interpretations of Shakespeare and other roles. She had an interesting grasp of characters. She told me that she knew immediately whether she would be able to play a role or not, and there were many that she couldn’t play. She said she had something inside that told her whether she could identify and
be
the character, or not. I learnt a great deal about acting from her, even though she considered herself a mere beginner. It was all fascinating for me. But I don’t see how it helps you.’

‘It does and it doesn’t,’ I said. ‘It does help give me a picture of the way she was. But I need more. More understanding, and more facts.’

‘I can’t think of any more facts. I’d give
my right arm to know more, to know who killed her. You know that, don’t you? I’ve just given up my honour.’

‘Not at all,’ I observed crisply. ‘You haven’t given up your honour just by
telling
me about all this. Telling has nothing to do with it.’

‘Then why does it feel exactly as though it does?’ he said. ‘I’ve felt a hundred times more ashamed telling you this than I ever felt while doing it.’

‘Something is wrong there,’ I remarked, ‘but I have no time to figure out what it is. It’s a job for someone in the church, not for me. What I want you to do is to identify the flat where you met her. You said it was near Piccadilly. Take a map and go up and down every single street on both sides until you find it. Peer inside every door. I’m going to look for ‘‘Jenny”.’

Two young men emerged on the edge of the sun-drenched field which rolled away in front of the imposing stucco villa, to the cypress-covered hills in the distance. One of them thrust a tall pole decorated with a homemade white flag into his brother’s hands. A servant followed them, puffing under the weight of a large apparatus.

‘Run, run all the way to the other side of the field!’ he cried. ‘Giovanni will carry the stuff. Set it down on the other side, and as soon as you hear the signal, raise the flag, way up high so I can see it.’

This morning began rather dully. I ruminated over a gloomy sense of failure in the train to Cambridge, in spite of all that I had learnt. I had not been able to see Kathleen alone; she returned home quite late, and Ernest was present at breakfast. I could only stare at her, but for all that I did so, I could see nothing but a woman whose happiness and gaiety, while not intact, still held the upper hand in her temperament. Her attitude towards her erring husband was both tender and cheerful. Her kindness to myself, her friendship, the generosity with which she insisted on preparing a small lunch basket to carry on the train, all seemed to form a screen in front of my eyes behind which I was simply unable to perceive a murderess. Yet there is a motive there – and one which might be even deeper than it looks. Perhaps Ivy had written to her, demanding that she divorce her husband; perhaps Kathleen’s refusal to do so was the cause of Ivy’s recent coolness towards him. Maybe – although it wouldn’t square very well with the significant words
beginning a completely new life
.

I tried in vain to resort to that basic element of the detective’s work: establishing the alibi. I asked her about her regular theatre nights and her other social activities, but there was no getting an accurate picture of her Tuesday evenings. Tuesday was her regular bridge night, she said, but before I
could sigh with relief, she added cheerfully that as often as not, she didn’t go. And I felt uncomfortable asking directly about the 21st of June. I filed the bridge evening away in my mind for future reference if necessary.

Before boarding the Cambridge train this morning, I did make another attempt to establish contact with the mysterious Miss Wolcombe, whom in my mind I had already identified with the ‘Jenny’ referred to by Ernest. I rose extremely early and made my way quickly to the house, hoping that the young woman would not yet be abroad. But I learnt from the landlady that she had packed her things and left already, late in the night.

I found myself in a most annoying position. The landlady proudly displayed the empty, carefully swept room to my eyes; one of the beds had already been replaced by a small chintz-covered sofa.

‘Miss Wolcombe came last night, and I gave her your note,’ she explained. ‘She got all her things together at once—’ I did not say anything, but imagined clearly enough that the landlady had exerted strong and immediate pressure to obtain such a result, ‘and went off somewhere in a cab. I guess she had found new lodgings already.’

‘Did she not leave an address, for you to forward her post?’ I said.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘She said to keep it for her, and she would come back in a little while for it.’

‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘I quite wanted to make her acquaintance, because a friend of mine spoke to me recently of a young woman called Jenny Wolcombe. I thought it might be she. Is her first name Jenny?’

‘Yes, it is,’ she told me, a little surprised.

‘She must be the same person,’ I said. ‘Do you know if she has a profession?’

‘A profession? I don’t think Miss Wolcombe has a profession. She didn’t go out to work, if that’s what you mean. She had rather irregular hours. She even spent a day or two away from time to time, but other times, she would spend the whole day in her room, sometimes not even getting out of bed until evening. She had very strange habits; I’m not sorry she’s gone.’

‘And her friend who shared the room?’ I asked, following a sudden impulse. ‘Was she strange as well?’

‘Oh,’ she said, taken aback. ‘Miss Elliott was all right. She was a theatre actress. A funny profession, that, strutting about like a peacock in fancy dress. But she was a nice enough creature. At any rate, she’s gone, they’re both gone, now. Are you going to bring your things here today?’

‘I have only this bag for today,’ I told her. ‘I need to bring down more things from Cambridge. Let me pay a week’s rent, and I will go up to Cambridge today and return as soon as I can.’ I rather reluctantly handed her five shillings, consoling myself with the notion that they should be considered as inevitable out-of-pocket expenses. And it did give me a place to stay next time I should come down to London. Ernest’s flat was becoming a most embarrassing place for me to be.

I went up to the room, closed the door, and opened my small case upon the bed. Out came the combinations, the petticoat, the stays, the collar, the nightdress, the ribbons, the extra shoes in case it rained, the hairbrush and the pins. I laid them out on the bed and looked at them with the eye of a detective, interrogating them, asking them what they revealed about their owner. They looked back at me, reassuringly,
neither too new nor used to excess, worthy and reliable, reasonably fashionable, yet not suggestive. I read from them an accurate picture of my own social status.

I picked them all up and arranged them carefully in the wardrobe and in the drawers of the dresser. I ran my fingers to the very back of the latter as I did so, and peered underneath them as well, hoping against hope to find some further trace of her sojourn, some abandoned scrap, but there was nothing.

Having thus taken possession of my new lodgings, I went out again, taking only Kathleen’s little basket, and making my way to Liverpool St, where I caught the next train to Cambridge, with a peculiar feeling of passing from one life to another. Once settled back in a corner seat with nothing to do, my frame of mind descended progressively into gloominess. I had lost all trace of Jenny Wolcombe, unless she chose to communicate with me in writing, and I had not succeeded in meeting anyone else who could tell me the kind of thing about Ivy Elliott that I really needed to know. Ernest, while giving me a piece of information which completely changed the fundamental basis of the problem, had also proved incapable of furnishing me with the only concrete fact that, I felt, might truly lead me to the grasp of the circumstances of her daily life which alone could yield the solution of her murder: the address of the flat where she used to take him, and where it was to be assumed that she pursued that part of her professional life which was not devoted to acting.

And as for what I had learnt about her from him, it only made things more difficult. He had used the word
prostitute
, a word which conveyed no real knowledge to me, which
induced nothing more than the automatic reflex reaction of a high-minded shudder accompanied by the dutiful feeling of Christian pity which society has engraved into our mentalities, obscuring all efforts at true understanding.

What do I know of the life of a prostitute, the mentality of a prostitute, the people and places frequented by a prostitute? How does one learn about such things? Had I encountered Ivy Elliott in life, would we, in reality, have exchanged even a single word? How, then, could I manage to perceive her voice and thoughts, after her death? I wanted to do so; I longed to do so. Could death, in a case such as this, remove rather than create a barrier?

I suddenly remembered the séance – the table, shuddering and tilting under my fingers, and the strange knockings, and the young, wailing voice.

‘No, but that can’t have been real,’ I told myself firmly. ‘It must have been Mrs Thorne, moving the table with her knee or some such mechanism.’ Although I could not see how one could produce such movements, or such sounds, with one’s knee…and surely a famous physicist like Sir Oliver Lodge, well-known for his important researches on magnetic waves, could not possibly be taken in by crude, foolish trickery! I really did not know what to think. I gave up wondering about it, and determined to ask Arthur’s opinion as soon as I should arrive home.

It was a joy to find myself there finally, and I relieved my feelings by describing the séance to him in detail. I explained as frankly as I could – searching inside myself to the very best of my ability – that it seemed equally impossible to me to believe that I had witnessed a manifestation of spirits, or that the strange phenomena had been caused by some kind of
complicated, unimaginable system of cheating. He laughed.

‘In cases like this, one might as well simply suspend disbelief,’ he said reassuringly. ‘I’d be amazed if the thing yielded any useful piece of information, though. According to what I’ve heard, they’re usually vague enough to be irritating. Still, you’re not the only person puzzled by such things. No physicist can resist at least wondering how it might work. Some declare they have found explanations, and others that those explanations are insufficient. And so it goes on.’

‘Who claims to have found an explanation?’ I asked. ‘What is it?’

‘The most famous by far is Michael Faraday’s,’ he said. ‘He was England’s foremost researcher on the relation between electricity and magnetism until Maxwell. Faraday was an experimentalist, and I remember that he did some controlled experiments with table-tipping in his old age, and published some articles refuting the spiritualists claims. I really don’t remember where he published them, but I can try to find out for you tomorrow if you like.’

‘Oh, I would like that,’ I said. ‘I don’t think the
table-tipping
is the most important aspect of this case, to be sure, and yet…I don’t wish to leave any stone unturned.’

‘Perhaps this is another stone, then,’ he said, handing me a letter. ‘It came this morning. It’s addressed to Miss Duncan, here in your very own house. Isn’t that strange? Who could possibly know you by your maiden name and yet know that you live in this house?’

Taking up a paper knife, I sliced open the elegant envelope. Out fell a neatly printed dinner invitation:

followed by a prettily handwritten message from Mrs Darwin, professing to be delighted to meet a young friend of her dear acquaintance Mrs Burke-Jones.

I blessed Mrs Burke-Jones inwardly, and showed it triumphantly to Arthur.

‘Our nearby neighbours, just up at the bridge,’ I told him.

‘The brood of very active children, you mean?’ he asked.

‘Yes, the Darwins. He is the son of Charles Darwin, I learnt recently. Oh, I do wish you could come with me, but it’s really impossible this time. What a bother. I’m sure they’re most interesting people. But Mrs Burke-Jones organised this for me, and I asked her to introduce me to them by my maiden name – I really
cannot
be known for who I am. It’s for detecting purposes!’

‘But they might recognise you,’ he said. ‘I mean, I know we don’t know them, but I know who they are from seeing them pass in the street and it is to be supposed that the process is symmetric.’

‘Oh, I don’t think they know me,’ I said. ‘We hardly ever see the parents, and when we do, I don’t think they see us. Mr Darwin is always fussing over his rugs and trying to make sure he’s well-wrapped. I think he must be either ill or hypochondriac. As for Mrs Darwin, I’ve seen her only rarely, and she seems always in a great hurry. And even if the children do recognise my face, how should they know what my name is? I’m not worried.’

The handkerchief was adequate to signal success from the fields in front of the villa. It would not be seen if Alfonso went to the far side of the hill behind the house. For this he was armed with a hunting rifle, and he marched sturdily off, up the narrow path past the farm buildings. It was the end of September now, and the vines were heavy with purple grapes, the air golden. The walk over the rim of the hill took twenty minutes. Alfonso led, followed by the farmer Mignani and the gardener Vornelli. Finally Guglielmo, watching tensely from a window, lost sight of the small procession as it dropped over the horizon.

In the distance, a shot echoed down the valley.