Fair Warning (23 page)

They’d said nothing of an inquest upon the murder of Beatrice. But that, of course, was because they believed the two murders inseparable. And it was delayed because Larch County had its own regulations, its own small political machine, its own favorites. Apparently Jacob Wait was one. It added to his importance and thus to the weight of threat he offered against them.

So he’d looked around among Beatrice’s things all he wanted to. But had he looked in the unlikely places? In the hiding places? Common sense told her he had, and that he’d done, by reasons of his experience, a much more thorough job of that search than she could do. But she knew that Beatrice had had that dangerous—terribly dangerous—bit of paper. So she searched.

Through the orderly desk. Behind three etchings of skyscrapers and one of the steel work of a bridge. Under the thin old oriental rug. Along the chairs for loose upholstery; among the springs of the creaking desk chair. In all possible and a number of impossible places.

Her hands were dusty and her hair was disheveled and her heart like lead when Rob found her there. He closed the door behind him.

“Oh, Rob!” she wailed. “I can’t find it. What could she have done with it?”

He made a quick gesture of caution and looked at her with blue, hungry eyes.

He had to see her, he said; and he had a funny notion he was being watched.

“Trailed, I mean,” he explained. “I’d better stay just a minute.”

Marcia pushed her hair out of her eyes and left two dusty streaks on her temples.

“What shall we do?”

“Go right along from one minute to the next,” said Rob rather grimly. “Did Wait question you this morning?”

She nodded.

“He knows everything,” said Rob. “Everything, that is, except about Beatrice seeing you with your hands on the knife. And about the letter—and about us—though he suspects—”

But he agreed with her about the letter. If the police had found it they would have arrested him—or both of them—at once. It was the thing they needed. The thing they must have.

“Suppose,” said Marcia—“suppose she had it somewhere about her—suppose whoever murdered her took it—suppose—”

Rob took her hands roughly.

“Don’t suppose too much,” he said. “Do you love me, Marcia?”

Did she love him? She went into his arms with soul-shaking joy in their warmth, binding her to him, as if they were her rightful fortress and refuge.

But it was wrong. She would only bring him danger. She pulled away, and he saw it in her face, for he drew her tighter against him and kissed her eyes so they had to close on that thought.

“Don’t think it,” said Rob, his mouth against her face. “Don’t think of anything, but that I love you.—Funny,” he said abruptly. “Every time you say that or think it, it’s as if it were the first time.”

But it was a stolen moment.

Someone came along the hall, and Rob reluctantly freed her and listened, frowning.

“Someone’s asking for you,” he said. “Sounds like Gally.”

It wasn’t. It was Dr. Blakie, looking white and tired and saying he’d come to see Mrs. Godden.

Rob went with her into the library to see him, both of them uncomfortably conscious of the plain-clothes man in the hall, who lounged against the hall table reading the morning paper—which was rather remarkable, for the headlines, at least, were upside down.

“Is that the one?” said Marcia under her breath.

Rob understood her.

“I don’t know. It’s only a feeling—and somebody I never saw before turning up everywhere I go. And my brown suit’s gone.”

“Your—
what
?”

“My brown tweed jacket. The one I wore last night. Hello, Dr. Blakie.”

“How are you, Marcia? Hello, Rob. Shut that door, will you, Rob?” He looked disapproving and added quietly, “Is this wise?”

“Me coming here?” said Rob cheerfully. “Not at all. But I feel like a different man.”

“I suppose so.” He smiled a little but warned them. “They’re watching every move you make, you know. Both of you. All of us, for that matter. Did Rob tell you, Marcia, about the inquiry last night?”

“No,” said Rob. “Except that Gally told the police everything he knew.”

“Where is Gally this morning?” asked Dr. Blakie. “Have you seen him?”

“Probably sleeping,” said Marcia. “He seemed pretty—upset about the inquiry; I saw him for a moment after it was over last night.”

Dr. Blakie and Rob did not look at each other. Dr. Blakie walked around Ivan’s desk and stood leaning against it and looking at the carpet, and Rob strolled to the bookcases, which reflected scraps of his lean, rather grim face and a flash of dark blue eyes and his brown hands.

“Nice collection of titles,” he said and opened the case and ran his finger along the ranks of books.

Marcia sat down in the leather chair. She pushed her hair back again and looked absently at her dusty fingers and pulled the skirt of her white shirtwaist dress with its neat, tailored pleats straight across her knees.

“What’s Gally done?” she said directly.

Neither answered for a moment. The long, brown-curtained room was somber and full of shadows, and the french windows looked out on a dull, dark day. Dr. Blakie turned uneasily and pulled on the light of the green-shaded desk lamp behind him, and a little pool of light lay clear on the desk top and less clear in a circle about the desk. Dr. Blakie was observing her thoughtfully from above that pool of light. Rob took out a book and blew dust from it and replaced it, and Marcia said again a little sharply, “What’s he done?”

“Now, Marcia,” began Dr. Blakie peaceably, and Rob turned and said abruptly:

“It’s not what he’s done, Marcia. It’s just—well, he talks so damn much. He needn’t have told what Beatrice said—I mean that she had evidence against the murderer.”

“Why not?” said Marcia stormily. “He doesn’t know what her evidence was.”

“Gally’s all right,” said Dr. Blakie. “But he did talk a lot last night. It’s just as well not to confide in him, you know.”

“I haven’t confided in him. Except about the will—”

“He told that, too,” said Rob. “Although, to do Gally justice, I think it came as no news to them.”

“Oh, they knew it,” said Marcia. “Wait told me.”

“You saw him this morning? I told him not to disturb you before afternoon,” said Dr. Blakie.

She told of the interview swiftly, dreading, when it came to telling it, to speak of Wait’s talk about motives. Of the things Wait had said. She forgot, on the face of more urgent concerns, the matter of Gally’s unbridled tongue.

Dr. Blakie looked at Rob when she’d finished, and Rob returned the look.

“They were getting at that last night,” said Dr. Blakie. “It was—quite a session. At least you were out of it, Marcia.”

“That was queer,” said Rob thoughtfully. “What Wait said about the scissors. How did he look?”

“I don’t know. A little—” Marcia thought back and said suddenly, “He looked as if he were a little amused about something. Or as if he didn’t believe me.”

“Did he talk to you much of the affair last night? I mean, of your being locked in the sewing room at the time of the murder?” asked Dr. Blakie.

“No, not much.”

Again the two men carefully did not look at each other, and Marcia said quickly, “Why? Does he doubt that?”

Dr. Blakie left the desk and prowled lightly around the room, and Rob sat astride a straight chair and leaned his chin on his arms against the back of it.

“You’d better tell her, Rob,” said Dr. Blakie from the french windows.

Rob wriggled a little and said, “It’s nothing much, Marcia. Only he suggested—just suggested, you know; no need for you to be alarmed—that you had provided yourself with an alibi on purpose. Said doors
could be
locked from the inside. Said it was simple if you knew how.”

“But I don’t—I didn’t—”

“I know. I know. But he made a sort of point of it; tried to pin Gally and me down about unlocking the door. Who did it? Was the key in the lock? We said it was. He said it couldn’t have been on the floor. I said no. That I’d turned it myself in the lock. Gally got one of his honest spells and began to dither around, trying to remember. The truth was, we were both so excited we didn’t know what we were doing. I stuck to it that the key was in the lock and I myself turned it, and then Gally got the idea and backed me up. But I don’t know whether we did you good or harm, for I’m afraid he saw that we were trying to keep you out of it.”

“He has evidently seen a good deal,” said Dr. Blakie. “More than I thought. He’s—tricky. Leads you to think whatever serves his purpose at that time. According to what he said of motives to Marcia, he’s got the—situation between you two sized up pretty accurately. Is there any possible way in which he could know it? Up to the murder, that is?”

“No,” said Rob. “Unless he’s clairvoyant.”

“No maid who has guessed anything of it and whom he might question so adroitly that she didn’t know she was being pumped?”

Rob looked suddenly uncomfortable.

“No. Unless Stella—my mother’s housemaid. She—saw something once. But he has no proof. What were the things he said he wanted to know, Marcia?”

“Who was the man in the library,” repeated Marcia. “Was anything missing from the house. Who locked me in the sewing room. And if I knew anything about the broken cocktail glass. And, of course, he talked of the dandelion knife having been hidden in the cupboard.”

“That’s a point, you know,” observed Rob dubiously. “It certainly indicates that whoever murdered Ivan knew exactly where that knife was.”

“Beatrice knew,” said Marcia.

Dr. Blakie turned away from the window.

“Look here,” he said. “Has anybody besides Ancill mentioned this man in the library? Let’s have Ancill in here and ask him some questions ourselves. It seems to me,” said he slowly and very precisely, “that we’ve rather neglected Ancill.”

He came willingly enough. Came and stood there respectfully until Dr. Blakie told him to sit down, and then with an effect of reluctant obedience he sat on the very edge of a chair and even so maintained an air of impeccable respectfulness and dignity, which took, Rob said later, some doing.

And he was—or seemed—willing enough to talk.

Yes, the police had questioned him many times and in much detail, but he could tell them only what he knew. And that was that, shortly after he had taken Mr. Godden’s dinner to him—“for the last time,” said Ancill somberly—he had gone through the hall and had heard voices from the library. No, no one had rung, and he hadn’t let any visitor in. If he was let in the front door, someone else—he did not quite look at Marcia—had opened it.

“I did not,” said Marcia. “I know of no visitor at that time.”

Ancill bowed his head.

“And you recognized the voice?” said Dr. Blakie.

No, he hadn’t. At least, he hadn’t been sure. He had only thought it sounded like Mr. Copley. But perhaps, he added, looking into space, perhaps that was because he had assumed that the visitor had been let in the french doors and thus, naturally, was Mr. Copley. Mr. Copley usually came that way.

“What did you do then?”

He’d gone directly to the kitchen. Mr. Godden had said he would ring if he wanted anything and he did not ring. Ancill and cook had had their dinners and had been busy. He had not been called to the front of the house until Mrs. Godden had come downstairs and had found Mr. Godden murdered.

Miss Godden was already there when he entered the library.

“And you’re sure it was a man?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied with an oblique glance at Rob.

Dr. Blakie sat in silence for a moment, his face intent and thoughtful, and Rob took up the questioning.

“About this dandelion knife,” he began.

“Yes, sir,” said Ancill, shifting his glance from Rob at once.

“When did you bring it into the library?”

It was obviously a question he had answered many times.

“I brought it into this room on the day of March eighteenth in the morning. It had just arrived with some other things from the hardware store. It was wrapped in brown paper. Mrs. Godden and Mr. Godden were in the room, and I was under a definite impression that I interrupted them.” He paused to cough; as a gesture it was a masterpiece, for it indicated at once reluctance, politeness, and discretion. Thus that there was something going on which he did not wish to tell. Which was better left untold. It had probably been that cough, thought Marcia, which gave the detective his first hint of their quarrel. Ancill resumed: “I left the entire package there on the desk, seeing that Mr. Godden was engaged. I do not remember seeing the knife again—until the night of the murder. Delia says that when she dusted the room the morning after Mr. Godden was injured, she put the whole package together and carried it to the shelf in the garage where garden tools are kept. But she was excited—you’ll remember Mr. Godden was injured the afternoon of the eighteenth and our extreme anxiety during the next few days—and she did not look at the contents. Did not, that is,” he added with nice exactness, “note just what was there beyond a glance which showed her that the package contained garden supplies. That is all I know. I understood from recent questioning that Miss Beatrice saw the dandelion knife in that cupboard the afternoon of the murder. If it was there, I did not know it. Is that all, sir?”

Rob, looking a little overwhelmed at the efficient note attending Ancill’s flood of information which was no information, muttered, and Dr. Blakie said, “But you are perfectly certain there was a man talking to Mr. Godden?”

“Oh, yes, sir. There’s no doubt at all.”

“Do you know anything about this broken cocktail glass?” asked Rob, recovering.

He didn’t know that. And for an instant he seemed faintly perplexed.

“It’s like the nutmeg,” he said, looking toward Marcia. “I don’t understand it at all.”

“Nutmeg?” cried Rob.

“It’s nothing,” said Marcia hurriedly, because she had been visited by a flash of something like inspiration, and leaned forward. “Ancill,” she said, “did you tell the police about the goldfish in the pool?”

He looked at her then. Directly into her face for the first time in all those years. His eyes were a slate gray tinged with yellow and were baffling in expression. No more baffling, however, than what he said, for he looked straight at her and said politely, “What goldfish, madam?”