Cover Her Face (7 page)

“Have you really knocked hard?” she inquired. Martha hesitated. Mrs. Maxie knew what that meant. Martha had not chosen to knock very hard. It was suiting her purpose better to let Sally oversleep. Mrs. Maxie, after her broken night, found this pettiness too much to bear.

“You had better try again,” she said shortly. “Sally had a busy day yesterday as we all did. People don’t oversleep without reason.”

Catherine opened her mouth as if to make some comment, thought better of it, and bent her head over her tea. Within two minutes Martha was back and, this time, there was no doubt of it. Anxiety had conquered irritation and there was something very like panic in her voice.

“I can’t make her hear me. The baby’s awake. He’s whimpering in there. I can’t make Sally hear!”

Mrs Maxie had no memory of getting to the door of Sally’s room. She was so certain, beyond any possible doubt, that the room must be open that she beat and tugged ineffectually at the door for several seconds before her mind accepted the truth. The door was bolted on the inside. The noise of the knocking had thoroughly woken Jimmy and his early morning whimpering was now rising into a crescendo of wailing fear. Mrs. Maxie could hear the rattling of his cot bars, and could
picture him, cocooned in his woollen sleeping-bag, pulling himself up to scream for his mother. She felt the cold sweat starting on her forehead. It was all she could do to prevent herself from beating in mad panic at the unyielding wood. Martha was moaning now and it was Catherine who laid a comforting and restraining hand on Mrs. Maxie’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry too much. I’ll get your son.”

“Why doesn’t she say “Stephen”?” thought Mrs. Maxie irrelevantly. “Stephen is my son.” In a moment he was with them, accompanied by Deborah. The knocking must have aroused them for Catherine could not have fetched Stephen so quickly. He spoke calmly.

“We’ll have to get in by the window. The ladder in the outhouse will do. I’ll get Hearne.” He was gone and the little group of women waited in silence. The moments slowly passed.

“It’s bound to take a little time,” said Catherine reassuringly. “But they won’t be long. I’m sure she’s all right. She’s probably still asleep.”

Deborah gave her a long look. “With all this noise from Jimmy? My guess is that she won’t be there. She’s gone.”

“But why should she?” asked Catherine. “And what about the locked door?”

“Knowing Sally, I presume that she wanted to do it the spectacular way and got out through the window. She seems to have a penchant for making scenes even when she can’t be present to enjoy them. Here we are shivering with apprehension while Stephen and Felix lug ladders about, and the whole of the household is disorganized. Very satisfying to her imagination.”

“She wouldn’t leave the baby,” said Catherine suddenly. “No mother would.”

“This one apparently has,” replied Deborah dryly. But her mother noticed that she made no move to leave the party.

Jimmy’s yells had now reached a sustained climax which drowned any sound of the men’s activities with the ladder of their entrance through the window. The next sound heard from the room was the quick scraping of the lock. Felix stood in the doorway. At the sight of his face Martha gave a scream, a high-pitched animal squeal of terror. Mrs. Maxie felt rather than heard the thud of her retreating footsteps, but no one followed her. The other women pushed past Felix’s restraining arm and moved silently as if under some united compulsion to where Sally lay. The window was open and the pillow of the bed was blodged with rain. Over the pillow Sally’s hair was spread like a web of gold. Her eyes were closed but she was not asleep. From the clenched corner of her mouth a thin trickle of blood had dried like a black slash. On each side of her neck was a bruise where the killer’s hands had choked the life from her.

“Nice-looking place, sir,” said Detective-Sergeant Martin as the police car drew up in front of Martingale. “Bit of a change from our last job.” He spoke with satisfaction for he was a countryman by birth and inclination and was often heard to complain of the proclivity of murderers to commit their crimes in overcrowded cities and unsalubrious tenements. He sniffed the air appreciatively and blessed whatever reasons of policy or prudence had led the local chief constable to call in the Yard. It had been rumoured that the chief constable personally knew the people concerned and, what with that and the still unsolved business on the fringe of the county, had thought it advisable to hand over this spot of trouble without delay. That suited Detective-Sergeant Martin all right. Work was work wherever you did it, but a man was entitled to his preferences.

Detective Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgliesh did not reply but swung himself out of the car and stood back for a moment to look at the house. It was a typical Elizabethan manor house, simple but strongly formalized in design. The large,
two-storeyed bays with their mullioned and transomed windows stood symmetrically on each side of the square central porch. Above the dripstone was a heavy carved coat of arms. The roof sloped to a small open stone balustrade also carved with symbols in relief and the six great Tudor chimneys stood up boldly against a summer sky.

To the west curved the wall of a room which Dalgliesh guessed had been added at a later date—probably during the last century. The French windows were of plate glass and led into the garden. For a moment he saw a face at one of them, but then it turned away. Someone was watching for his arrival. To the west a grey stone wall ran from the corner of the house in a wide sweep towards the gates and lost itself behind the shrubs and the tall beeches. The trees came very close to the house on this side. Above the wall and half-concealed behind a mosaic of leaves he could just see the top of a ladder placed against an oriel window. That presumably was the dead girl’s room. Her mistress could hardly have chosen one more suitably placed for an illicit entry. Two vehicles were parked behind the porch, a police car with a uniformed man sitting impassive at the wheel and a mortuary van. Its driver, stretched back in his seat and with his peaked cap tilted forward, took no notice of Dalgliesh’s arrival while his mate merely looked up perfunctorily before returning to his Sunday newspaper.

The local superintendent was waiting in the hall. They knew each other slightly as was to be expected with two men both eminent in the same job, but neither had ever wished for a closer acquaintanceship. It was not an easy moment. Manning was finding it necessary to explain exactly why his chief had thought it advisable to call in the Yard. Dalgliesh replied suitably. Two reporters were sitting just inside the door
with the air of dogs who have been promised a bone if they behave and who have resigned themselves to patience. The house was very quiet and smelt faintly of roses. After the torrid heat of the car the air struck so cold that Dalgliesh gave an involuntary shiver.

“The family are together in the drawing-room,” said Manning. “I’ve left a sergeant with them. Do you want to see them now?”

“No, I’ll see the body first. The living will keep.” Superintendent Manning led the way up the vast square staircase talking back at them as he went.

“I got a bit of ground covered before I knew they were calling in Central Office. They’ve probably given you the gist. Victim is the maid here. Unmarried mother aged twenty-two. Strangled. The body was discovered at about seven-fifteen a.m. this morning by the family. The girl’s bedroom door was bolted. Exit, and probably entrance too, was via the window. You’ll find evidence of that on the stack pipe and the wall. It looks as if he fell the last five feet or so. She was last seen alive at 10.30 p.m. last night carrying her late-night drink up to bed. She never finished it. The mug’s on the beside table. I thought it was almost certainly an outside job at first. They had a fête here yesterday and anyone could have got into the grounds. Into the house, too, for that matter. But there are one or two odd features.”

“The drink, for example?” asked Dalgliesh. They had reached the landing now and were passing towards the west wing of the house. Manning looked at him curiously.

“Yes. The cocoa. It may have been doped. There’s some stuff missing. Mr. Simon Maxie is an invalid. There’s a bottle of sleeping dope missing from his medicine cupboard.”

“Any evidence of doping on the body?”

“The police surgeon’s with her now. I doubt it though. Looked a straightforward strangling to me. The PM will probably have the answer.”

“She could have taken the stuff herself,” said Dalgliesh. “Is there any obvious motive?”

Manning paused. “There could be. I haven’t got any of the details but I’ve heard gossip.”

“Ah. Gossip.”

“A Miss Liddell came this morning to take away the girl’s child. She was here to dinner last night. Quite a meal it must have been by her account. Apparently Stephen Maxie had proposed to Sally Jupp. You could call that a motive for the family, I suppose.”

“In the circumstances I think I could,” said Dalgliesh. The bedroom was white-walled and full of light. After the dimness of the hall and corridors bounded with oak linen-fold panelling, this room struck with the artificial brightness of a stage. The corpse was the most unreal of all, a second-rate actress trying unconvincingly to simulate death. Her eyes were almost closed, but her face held that look of faint surprise which he had often noticed on the faces of the dead. Two small and very white front teeth were clenched against the lower lip, giving a rabbit-look to a face which, in life, must, he felt, have been striking, perhaps even beautiful. An aureole of hair flamed over the pillow in incongruous defiance of death. It felt slightly damp to his hand. Almost he wondered that its brightness had not drained away with the life of her body. He stood very still looking down at her. He was never conscious of pity at moments like this and not even of anger, although that might come later and would have to be resisted. He liked to fix the sight of the murdered body firmly in his mind. This had been a habit since his first big case seven years ago when he had
looked down at the battered corpse of a Soho prostitute in silent resolution and had thought, “This is it. This is my job.”

The photographer had completed his work with the body before the police surgeon began his examination. He was now finishing with shots of the room and the window before packing up his equipment. The print man had likewise finished with Sally and, intent on his private world of whorls and composites, was moving with unobtrusive efficiency from door-knob to lock, from cocoa-beaker to chest of drawers, from bed to window-ledge before heaving himself out on the ladder to work on the stack-pipe and on the ladder itself. Dr. Feltman, the police surgeon, balding, round and self-consciously cheerful, as if under a perpetual compulsion to demonstrate his professional imperturbability in the face of death, was replacing his instruments in a black case. Dalgliesh had met him before and knew him for a first-class doctor who had never learned to appreciate where his job ended and the detective’s began. He waited until Dalgliesh had turned away from the body before speaking.

“We’re ready to take her away now if that’s all right by you. It looks simple enough medically speaking. Manual strangulation by a right-handed person standing in front of her. She died quickly, possibly by vagal inhibition. I’ll be able to tell you more after the PM. There’s no sign of sexual interference but that doesn’t mean that sex wasn’t the motive. I imagine there’s nothing like finding a dead body on your hands to take away the urge. When you pull him in you’ll get the same old story, ‘I put my hands round her neck to frighten her and she went limp.’ He got in by the window by the look of it. You might find fingerprints on that stack-pipe but I doubt whether the ground will be much help. It’s a kind of courtyard underneath. No nice soft earth with a couple of handy sole marks. Anyway, it
rained pretty hard last night which doesn’t help matters. Well, I’ll go and get the stretcher party if your man here has finished. Nasty business for a Sunday morning.”

He went and Dalgliesh inspected the room. It was large and sparsely furnished, but the overall impression it gave was one of sunlight and comfort. He thought that it had probably previously been the family day nursery. The old-fashioned fireplace on the north wall was surrounded by a heavy meshed fireguard behind which an electric fire had been installed. On each side of the fireplace were deep recesses fitted with bookcases and low cupboards. There were two windows. The smaller oriel window against which the ladder stood was on the west wall and looked over the courtyard to the old stables. The larger window ran almost the whole length of the south wall, giving a panoramic view of the lawns and gardens. Here the glass was old and set with occasional medallions. Only the top mullioned windows could be opened.

The cream-painted single bed was set at right-angles to the smaller window and had a chair on one side and a bedside table with a lamp on the other. The child’s cot was in the opposite corner half-hidden by a screen. It was the kind of screen which Dalgliesh remembered from his own childhood, composed of dozens of coloured pictures and postcards stuck in a pattern and glazed over. There were a rug before the fireplace and a low nursing chair. Against the wall were a plain wardrobe and a chest of drawers.

There was a curious anonymity about the room. It had the intimate fecund atmosphere of almost any nursery compounded of the faint smell of talcum powder, baby-soap and warmly aired clothes. But the girl herself had impressed little of her personality on her surroundings. There was none of the feminine clutter which he had half expected. Her few
personal belongings were carefully arranged but they were uncommunicative. Primarily it was just a child’s nursery with a plain bed for his mother. The few books on the shelves were popular works on baby care. The half-dozen magazines were those devoted to the interests of mothers and housewives rather than to the more romanticized and varied concerns of young working women. He picked one from the shelf and flicked through it. From its pages dropped an envelope bearing a Venezuelan stamp. It was addressed to: