Fair Warning (18 page)

Beatrice said suddenly, “The police are bunglers. I could have solved this murder long ago if I chose to do so.”

Marcia’s head jerked toward the two there at the coffee table as if it had been on a wire. Beatrice’s black eyebrows were level, her hand steady at its task, the stream of coffee unwavering.

“You see,” said Beatrice, “I saw the dandelion knife. It was hidden in the cupboard. The cupboard,” said Beatrice, glancing at Marcia, “at the east of the french doors in the library. It was there the afternoon of the murder. It and— some other things. I’ve not told the police—not yet.”

“She means the letter,” thought Marcia, staring back helplessly at Beatrice.

And Gally’s cup crashed out of his hand and down upon the floor.

A
NCILL CAME AT BEATRICE’S
summons to pick up the small pieces and wipe up the coffee stains. His back was disapproving, and Beatrice looked at the pieces and said in an expressionless way, “The Minton cups.”

She went upstairs shortly after that. And she had no more than gone when Rob came.

“I had to come,” he said.

But they couldn’t talk. For just then the policeman in the hall ambled past the doorway, paused to look at them and went on.

Rob turned to Gally. “Talk to him,” he said in a half-whisper. “Sit out there in the hall. Cough if he comes to the door again.”

Gally looked reluctant.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll try. But he won’t talk. I tried this afternoon. What’ve you been doing, Rob? Have you seen the papers?”

“Yes,” said Rob rather grimly. “Where’s Beatrice?”

“Gone upstairs,” replied Marcia. “Was the doctor—”

He nodded, meeting her eyes. He knew, then, about the letter.

Gally paused on his way to the door, tiptoed back toward Rob with extravagant caution and said in a stage whisper, “Beatrice says she knows who did it.”

“What’s that?” said Rob sharply. “What do you mean? What did she say? Who?”

“Oh, she wouldn’t say anymore,” said Gally. “That is, I didn’t ask her. She’s not exactly a pal of mine, you know. But she said she could have solved this murder long ago if she’d wanted to.”

“Beatrice says that?” said Rob slowly. He looked at Marcia. “What does she know besides—”

He checked himself abruptly, and Gally said, without noting that pause, “You tell him about it, Marcia. I’ll watch Brother Bill in the hall. Between us, I think Beatrice did it.”

With a gleam of his more customary cheerfulness, Gally disappeared.

“What does she mean?” said Rob. “The letter? He told me—Dr. Blakie. Do you think we can get it away from her, Marcia?”

Marcia shook her head.

“There isn’t any way, Rob. But I don’t think that was all she meant. You see, she says she saw the—the dandelion knife. Yesterday afternoon. It was in the cupboard—the same cupboard where she found the letter, and where, later, the detective must have found the envelope.”

“So that’s it!” He looked thoughtfully at her. “Has she told the police about seeing the knife?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Oh, Rob, what are we going to do about the letter?”

He glanced at the door and took her suddenly in his arms.

“That’s why I came,” he said, holding her tightly. “To tell you not to worry about it. We know now where it is. We’ll do something about it—I don’t know just what, but something. So long as she’s inclined to trade silence for silence—”

“But, Rob, she may give it to them any moment.”

“I know. It’s a chance. But trust me, Marcia—”

Gally coughed frenziedly in the hall. By the time the policeman passed the doorway again, Marcia was sitting on the divan and Rob standing near the table.

“I’d better go,” said Rob in a low voice. “But, Marcia—don’t take any chances. I don’t want to frighten you, but—after all—just last night—”

He stopped again, looking at her with dark, worried eyes.

She knew he’d been about to remind her that it was only last night that Ivan was murdered. That someone had murdered Ivan, that that knife hadn’t found its own way into a man’s heart—that the house was big and old and shadowy, that there might be ways into it and out of it. That they didn’t know who had done it. That it might be any of them. Must be one of them. And yet could not be, for there were only, the servants. Herself. Beatrice. Gally, now.

“Did you know,” said Marcia, “that Gally’s staying here? Beatrice invited him.”

“Beatrice! Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I’m glad. I hated your being so alone in the house. Oh, my darling, if I could just take you away, now—take care of you—”

He was so near. It was so good to have him there. The very touch of his hand and tone of his voice warmed and strengthened her.

But he didn’t dare stay long. And their talk was spasmodic and not satisfactory, with Gally and the prowling policeman in the hall and the rest of the house so silent that every word they said seemed to be caught up and multiplied and carried away to other ears.

Mainly, of course, he wanted to reassure her, somehow, about the letter in Beatrice’s possession. But the curious bit of evidence Beatrice had so unexpectedly revealed to them seemed to interest him, too, for he kept returning to it.

“Hidden in the cupboard, she said?”

“Yes.”

“On the afternoon before the murder. And when did the knife disappear?”

“Nobody knows,” said Marcia. “Or if they do I haven’t heard.”

“Of course you know what it means?”

“That somebody in the household put it there?”

“Yes. Intending to use it later.”

Marcia nodded.

“I know. But it’s only what the police have been saying—or implying—from the first. It’s why they questioned me so much about the knife last night. There wasn’t any doubt ever that it was a—a knife that belonged here.”

He looked at her strangely.

“Are you going to tell the police this thing about Beatrice seeing the knife in the cupboard?”

“I don’t know—I—”

“Well, don’t,” said Rob abruptly. “After all, that’s where the envelope was found, too.” He added suddenly, “When you put it there did you see the knife?”

She hadn’t, of course. She hadn’t opened the door. She explained it to Rob briefly and he listened, watching her with those intent, dark blue eyes.

“Well,” he said finally, “you’d better try to get some rest and sleep. You look as white as a lost little ghost. Remember, if you get scared or anything happens, yell like hell.”

It was shortly after that that he went away, Gally following him to the gate.

But in spite of Rob’s and Dr. Blakie’s half-expressed misgivings, the night was a quiet one. Too quiet, with only the blurred figures of policemen moving here and there through the wet blackness and, that night, no sounds of footsteps about the lily pool.

The next day, too, was quiet, with the newspapers guarded, callers and telephone inquiries from friends adroitly weeded out by Ancill, and nothing to be seen of either Verity or Rob.

It was a warm, misty day, with shrubbery and paths wet and the leather chair in Ivan’s library damp and sweaty to touch. Unseasonably warm as it had been unseasonably cold, but still wet.

Once toward noon Jacob Wait came again and talked to Marcia alone in the front drawing room, where the old mirror over the mantel was faintly misted and the mahogany arms of the chair sticky if you let your hand lie on them. All his questions were repetitions; things he had asked many times before. She replied steadily, exactly as she had previously replied. But when at length he went away she felt troubled and uncertain. As if waves continually battering at foundations might in the end carry them away.

She asked him no questions. She knew that he would tell her only what he wished to tell her. Besides, her own inquiries might, somehow, reveal something to him. Better say nothing.

She felt shaken and uncertain but still sure that she had given him no new evidence and that she had revealed no more than he already knew. But an hour after he’d gone, more men came to search the house. Again and far more thoroughly—going steadily from room to room, requesting keys with quiet authority, doggedly searching shelves and bureau drawers and store closets.

It was queerly disturbing. As if they had lost their right to private citizenship. Their house was not their castle. They had no reticences.

It was also as unsettling and bewildering and depressing as a terribly thorough house cleaning. Gally took early refuge in the game room in the basement—his billiard game, Marcia thought once, was almost certain to improve and was already rather better than a young man’s with his way yet to make ought to be.

Beatrice let them go through her study and then barricaded herself therein with the door locked. They must have been looking for something very small and something very easily hidden, for they went even to the kitchen and, later, were exploring the third-floor attic.

That day was, however, in many ways more difficult than the preceding day. Then a kind of nervous tension had helped, had kept them keyed up, scarcely believing the situation that was there. But on the second day there was no incredulity. It had happened. Ivan Godden had been murdered, and they were all of them suspect.

It was not a pleasant thought.

The servants had a tendency to congregate in the kitchen and talk in low voices, becoming immediately silent if Marcia or Beatrice came within hearing or seeing distance. Delia was nervous and did not dust the stairs and had already begun to sidle away if you approached her unexpectedly in the shadows of the hall. Emma Beek, however, flourished like a fat white mushroom and watched everything and everyone from the kitchen hall. It was not nice, that sly espionage. Marcia, entering the hall or descending the stairway, would see the door to the kitchen passage closing silently, furtively.

The day wore on, and still there was no sign of Rob or Verity.

Once Marcia, peering across the garden toward the Copley house, saw a man at the garden wall. It was not Rob, but there was something familiar about the angle of the hat and the narrow shoulders, and suddenly he straightened and became the detective, Jacob Wait. She watched as he went on to another stretch of the wall and bent absorbedly over it. What was he looking for? She watched his slow progress to the foot of the garden and out of sight, but if he made any discoveries or conclusions it was not apparent. Later, she saw someone at the lily pool, but owing to the obscuring vines of the summerhouse could not tell whether it was Wait or someone else.

It was later, too, that Marcia, happening near the telephone extension in the upper hall, answered when it rang and was told it was the hardware store wanting to speak to Mr. Wait.

“We have the information about that package for him now,” said the voice.

Ancill’s voice came in just then from another extension, saying Mr. Wait was not there, and after a moment Marcia hung up and stood there staring at the telephone without seeing it.

Package. The whole package of garden tools and supplies?

She tried again to recall, as she had already tried over and over again, the package from the hardware store as Ancill had placed it on the desk that morning of March eighteenth. There’d been brown paper wrapping, gleaming hedge scissors; paintbrushes. Two dandelion knives—one of which was short and sharp like a dagger. She could still see Ivan’s white fingers holding it, hear him commenting on its sharpness and probable efficiency. She shuddered away from that. She could not remember the arsenic, though she did remember Ancill naming it in his list of purchases. Yet certainly there was a faint, hovering recollection concerning it. As if somewhere she had seen a package that might have been the arsenic. But it was a vague recollection and remained only that. Later, too, Dr. Blakie telephoned, but it was only to ask Beatrice, who went to the telephone, if they knew anything of the inquest.

“Nothing,” said Beatrice. “I don’t know what they are waiting for, I’m sure.”

For an indictment, thought Marcia with a quick, ugly clutch of terror.

He did not ask for Marcia, or if he did Beatrice did not tell her.

Beatrice said nothing at all to Marcia. But knowledge and the security that knowledge gave her were in her eyes every time she looked at Marcia. And her strange boast of the previous night kept repeating itself in Marcia’s mind during that long, queer day.

A day during which there was at last time—too much time—to think. To go over and over again helplessly every smallest detail of that incredible period of time since Dr. Blakie, standing there spinning the globe in the library, had told her that Ivan was about to return.

But at the end of it she was no wiser than she had been.

Although she knew that there were at least one or two things she could do, one or two questions to which she might supply answers. Unless the answers only propounded other questions.

One of the obvious courses was to discover the hiding place of the letter. But she had no liberty to search for it with the men from police headquarters still in the house. Through with their prolonged search now, and again questioning Delia in the dining room. She wondered again what the servants had told them. What small things, forgotten and unimportant, would be remembered now and told so that, in the light of what had happened, they would seem significant, full of ugly meaning.

Perhaps nothing. Though Ancill had no liking for her. And there was no way of knowing what went on under that cloak of respectability and smoothness.

At five-thirty exactly they left. At six, the policeman in the hall—Mawson again, she noted—got up and strolled kitchenward as a faint odor of coffee floated through the air.

Dinner would be at seven. Beatrice had vanished. Gally was nowhere to be seen. It was cloudy and already growing dark, and—it seemed for the first time since Ivan had returned—the house was empty and quiet and unobservant.

It was a good time to accomplish one small bit of investigation on Marcia’s own part, and that concerned the queer matter of the silver wrap.

True, there was no particular object, so far as Marcia could see, in Beatrice’s borrowing the wrap for any reason other than the one she had stated. If she had wished to establish an alibi for the time of Ivan’s murder, then she would have wished to establish it for herself, not for Marcia, and would have seen to it that a wrap of her own lay there prominently displayed in that upstairs room at the Copley house.