Authors: Christianna Brand
No fool, after all, Mrs. Hartley! Mr. Bindell reflected that these simple people had often very direct and rational minds. But he had been ready for it, anyway. ‘You saw what a glossy print it was? He would—no doubt pore over the stuff: gloating over it, you know. The whole lot will be covered with his fingerprints.’
‘I see,’ said Louisa. ‘So—?’
‘One word from me in my position—one whisper going the rounds at a Rotary luncheon, one anecdote confided in a pub when we’ve all had a drop too much… Not nice for a young daughter, Mrs. Hartley, growing up in a small town like this.’
‘No,’ said Louisa, very white. She wasted no more words. ‘How much?’
‘There are sixteen of them. Say a thousand pounds each. And you buy them outright: no hang-over. But one by one,’ said Mr. Bindell. ‘One by one. I can’t have you selling out sixteen thousand pounds’ worth of stock and being unable to account, frankly and openly, for the reason. And who knows?—in time values in the pornographic market may rise.’
She did not haggle: she acquiesced at once. He might have been alerted by that, but he was not; he knew her simple soul and that in it there was room for nothing but her precious Linda. And over the next year or two, she could find the money easily enough: it wasn’t worth her putting up a fight. ‘Next Monday evening, then, at my office? Half past six, by the side door—I’ll leave it ajar—after the staff have gone home. I often stay on and work late.’
‘I’ll come if it’s raining,’ she said. ‘If it isn’t, I’ll come the first evening after that, that it does.’
‘Raining?’
‘I’d better not be seen, Mr. Bindell, making regular visits to your office out of hours. And there’s no disguise like an umbrella, is there?’
Shrewd, very shrewd: and quick off the mark with it too. ‘But unnecessary,’ he said. ‘It’s all offices round there, there’s never a soul about in the evenings.’
‘There’ll be even fewer about,’ she said, ‘if it’s wet.’
And on Monday it was wet; and she took him a thousand and four weeks later another thousand—hurrying through the deserted streets, head down against the driving rain: wearing a long, belted macintosh and with an umbrella up. They wasted no time. He would leave the door open, and be sitting waiting at his desk, a few papers scattered there relating to Harold Hartley’s affairs just in case they should be disturbed. And she would slip in and go up to his room on the first floor and hand over the small envelope with the notes in it and wait, unaffronted, while he checked them. And he would hold out the large envelope containing the pictures, and allow her to select one—she did it steadily, not averting her eyes, though her cheeks would go first pale and then flush deeply—and tuck it into the big hand-bag she was careful to take with her; and so with hardly a word spoken, go her ways.
And meanwhile at home she swept and cleaned and polished as though—as though, now that he was gone, she would sweep and clean and polish away every touch, almost every memory, of Harold Hartley’s past presence there. The only thing she did not polish—did not even touch—was the ugly, black revolver in the bedside drawer.
But on the third occasion she took the revolver out of the drawer, handling it carefully, wrapping it in a silk scarf; and put it in the large handbag. And this time she took no money with her.
She had thought it all out very carefully, reducing it to its simplest elements. Now she carried no open umbrella but clutched about her head and face a plastic ‘pixie-hood’; and she had hoicked up the long macintosh by its belt so that the skirt came hardly down to her knees, and scuttled along with a wibble-wobbling gait on her highest heels… In the hall of the offices she dropped off the macintosh, slipped over her head a large plastic bag in which she had cut a hole for her face and another for her (rubber-gloved) right hand. So attired and holding the revolver, she walked without flurry up the stairs to Mr. Bindell’s room.
He went very white when he saw the gun; whiter still when he took in the significance of the plastic covering. He stammered: ‘For God’s sake…! Don’t shoot…! Take them, take the whole lot, I’ll never tell a soul, I swear it—’
‘Not even an anecdote in a pub?’ she said, quoting, ‘—when you’ve all had a drop too much.’ And she pointed the gun at the left side of his chest and, giving herself no time to think, pulled the trigger. It was stiffer than she’d expected and for a moment the whole thing seemed strong and alive in her hand; and there was more noise than she’d hoped—Harold had told her the gun was fitted with a silencer and she’d rather relied upon that. But at any rate, it did its work. At that range, it could hardly fail—and Mr. Bindell who had been unpleasant enough in life, was now most unpleasantly dead.
She put down the revolver upon the desk, stripped off the rubber glove and the spattered plastic. A gun, its origins untraceable—fingerprints on it of a man unknown, who could never be known, for his fingers, prints and all, were to ashes returned and in her well-polished home, no trace of him remained. But a man’s fingerprints, that was the point: not a woman’s. And a common, household, rubber glove, worn over a glove—firstly to obviate fingerprints inside the rubber, secondly to allow for a size that a man might have worn. And a plastic bag, never touched by her own fingers… And nothing in the world—for Mr. Bindell himself had been the careful one, the secretive one—to connect herself with him: not, at any rate from the lethal point of view.
She had brought with her a large envelope, addressed to herself at home, and ready stamped. Into this she put the envelope containing the photographs. In the hall she put on her macintosh again, belted it up very short and on her high-heeled shoes wibble-wobbled herself out of the side door again and into the rainy evening.
She had marked a convenient pillar-box between her home and the office. She now returned to it and there posted the envelope; in a dark corner behind it, let down the macintosh to its full length, took off the plastic hood, dried it carefully and rolled it away in its little plastic case. The handbag had been chosen, long in advance, to accommodate a folding umbrella. In her own image again, without the furtiveness and certainly without the wibble-wobble, she returned to Mr. Bindell’s office; tried the front door, put on a puzzled air, went round to the side door at last—went in, shaking the wet umbrella, called up the stairs, mounted to Mr. Bindell’s door—shrieked like any startled woman upon seeing the blood-stained figure sprawled across the desk, ran to him, made such futile attempts as anyone might make to do something, anything… Pushed aside the horrid black gun, picked up the plastic with fastidious finger-tips and quickly dropped it again; at last picked up the telephone… (‘Well, I may just have touched things—if there are any fingerprints on them, then I must have, but I was so shocked I hardly knew what I was doing… And blood, yes, there may be blood on me, on my clothes,—but I did try to lift his head, I did handle the blood-spattered telephone…’) Meanwhile, however, she contented herself with dialling the police. ‘Do please come quickly! It’s dreadful. Yes, Mr. Bindell—you know, the solicitor. Yes, I came to see him on business—the papers are right here on his desk; he said to drop in any time, he’d be working late…’
The investigations took simply ages. It was not for several months that widowed Mrs. Hartley felt the time ripe to call upon widowed Mrs. Bindell. ‘I thought I should have a word with you about Linda’s acceptance to Hallfield School.’
‘That matter comes up before the Board on Tuesday,’ said Mrs. Bindell—by this time well back in harness.
‘Then Linda will start with Joy next term,’ said Louisa—and it was a statement.
‘If
we decide to admit her,’ said Mrs. Bindell.
‘I think you’ll decide to admit her all right,’ said Louisa. She produced a large envelope and slid out a couple of glossy black and white prints. ‘Disgusting, aren’t they?’
‘Where on earth—?’ cried Mrs. Bindell, absolutely shocked.
‘That night I found your husband dead,’ said Louisa. ‘I told the police that I touched nothing in his office, Mrs. Bindell, but that wasn’t quite true. He had evidently been taken by surprise when the murderer came: this—filth—was spread out on the blotter in front of him.’ Mrs. Bindell opened her mouth as though to speak but shut it again. ‘I happened to have a large handbag and I gathered the things up and brought them away with me. I thought,’ said Louisa, limpidly, ‘that you wouldn’t care for them to be found by anyone else. No one wants a scandal; and you, with all the work you do in this town—Board of Governors at Hallfield, for example—you’d be particularly susceptible, wouldn’t you?’ Mrs. Bindell tried again to speak and again fell silent. ‘You’re going to suggest, perhaps,’ said Louisa, ‘that I can’t prove that these pictures belonged to him? But these people—well, pore over this kind of stuff, so I’ve been told: sort of gloating over it, you know: and this glossy paper will be covered with his fingerprints.’
Mrs. Bindell seemed to think about it, sitting in a saggy heap, all the bounce and arrogance gone from her. She said at last, arriving surprisingly quickly on the whole at a proper conclusion: ‘How much shall I have to pay?’
Louisa had handed over two thousand pounds to Mr. Bindell. Say another thousand for pain and stress, not to mention what might, she supposed, be called ‘danger money’. ‘I’ll take three thousand down,’ she said. ‘That’s to settle—well, a kind of debt. And then of course there’s the matter of Linda getting into Hallfield. After that…’ She shrugged. ‘I’m not hard up, Mrs. Bindell; financially I shall be quite safe—now. So it won’t be a matter of cash. Just as long as my Linda gets along happily and successfully in Sanstone. Of course the right school is going to help, and then she and Joy might take some course together, modelling or whatever it is they’ll have set their hearts on by then; and of course knowing the right people helps too, and going to all the parties…’ She returned the envelope to her bag. ‘The secret will be safe with me,’ she said
. ‘I
don’t go to Rotary lunches or get drunk in pubs.’ And she fastened the bag with a snap and got up to leave. ‘Monday afternoon, perhaps, you could drop the money in at my house?—when you call to invite me to run a stall at the bazaar you’re organising for Lady William. I’ve never been asked even to help there; and though to be honest I don’t think I’ve missed much, still, everybody else goes and I’d like to know Lady William. I believe her children are charming, and the boy’s about three years older than my Linda… One never knows, does one?’ She thought it over for a moment, puzzled. ‘Now what exactly would his title be?’
‘The Honourable,’ said Mrs. Bindell, flat voiced.
‘It’s going to be a great help,’ said Louisa, ‘having you to help me over little things like that.’
Linda and Joy were skipping again, Roy being up at the house ‘key-holing’. He joined them, breathless, and seized up the rope. He addressed his song to Linda.
‘Cod, skate, sturgeon, shark—
Your mother’s on the blackmail lark!
Whale, walrus and sea-cow—
She’s
got the feelthy peectures now!’
‘No?’
said Linda.
‘Yes, she has,’ said Roy. He went on skipping.
‘Sea, lake, river, pool—
So you’re going to Hallfield School’
‘No?’
cried Linda and Joy, together this time, excitedly.
‘Yes, you are; and what’s more,’ said Roy, skipping again—
‘Men and horses, hare and hounds—
You’re going to get three thousand pounds,
And go around with Joy and me
And marry the ar-is-toc-racy…’
He stopped skipping altogether and they all rolled about with laughter, hugging one another triumphantly.
‘Well, honestly, can you believe it?’ said Linda, when at last they stopped, exhausted. ‘Grown-ups!’
‘What a flap if any of us so much as cheats a bit at school!’
‘I suppose this means that it really was my mother who shot your father?’
‘Of course it was,’ said Roy. ‘She knew these floozies had been going to his office after hours—all Sanstone knew it. Just hoicked up her skirt and looked like a teen-ager trying to walk like Marilyn Monroe. The police thought some boy-friend or father or someone had been watching, and went in and did for him. Of course they knew nothing about the blackmail.’ He exchanged a suddenly exultant glance with his sister. It might some day be profitable to be the only ones in the world who knew that Mrs. Hartley was a murderess.
Linda saw nothing of the glance. ‘It’s jolly decent of you to take it like this.’
‘Oh, well, we didn’t like him very much, did we, Roy?’
‘We don’t like any grown-ups very much,’ said Roy.
‘And I must say, considering that he was blackmailing her with the Feelthy Peectures after my father died—he did deserve what he got.’
‘M’m. On the other hand,’ said Roy, ‘your father had been blackmailing
him
with them for years. So it was really only tit for tat.’ And he caught up one end of the rope and Joy caught up the other and Linda flew into the middle; and as they turned and skipped, they all three gaily sang,
4‘Tit for tat and knick for knack—
The biter bit the biter back.
Hound hunts fox and fox hunts hound—
Oh, what a merry old merry-go-round!’
‘And devoted, I hear,’ he says. ‘David and Jonathan,’ he says. ‘In fact you might properly be called,’ he says, with that glitter in his eye, ‘blood brothers?’
Well, he can sneer but it’s true we was pally enough, Fred and me, till Lydia came along. Shared the same digs in the village—Birdswell’s our village, if you know it?—Birdswell, in Kent. Everyone in Birdswell knows us—even if they can’t easily tell the difference between us—and used to say how wonderful it was, us two so alike, with our strong legs and big shoulders and curly red hair, like a kid’s: and what a beautiful understanding we had, what a bond of union. People talk a lot of crap about identical twins.
Lydia couldn’t tell the difference between us either—seemingly. Was that my fault? Fair enough, she was Fred’s girl first—unless you counted her husband, and to some extent you did have to count him: six foot five, he is, and it isn’t only because he’s the blacksmith that they call him in the village, Black Will. But she switched to me of her own accord, didn’t she?—even if I wasn’t too quick to disillusion her, the first time she started with her carryings-on, mistaking me for Fred.
‘I
can’t help it if she fancies me more than you, now,’ I said to Fred.