Give a Corpse a Bad Name (22 page)

Her harsh voice hesitated. It was as if, for a moment, she were wondering whether to let herself go, to let out of herself some of the old misery and anger. But with her brooding eyes on Daphne she went on with her story, keeping it bare of all detail.

‘After about a year we went to South Africa. Henry said he'd never get on in England. I was glad to go and escape from creditors and charitable friends, uncomfortable memories and all the rest of it. Unfortunately those accumulated in South Africa even faster than at home. After another eighteen months I left him. And then—' she gave a laugh—‘then the chase began. My idea was to save up enough money to get back to England without him, but wherever I went he followed, and with pathos and threats got the money out of me. At first I didn't actually hide from him. But I took to it quite soon, only he was amazingly cunning at finding me. Have I mentioned the streak of almost mad, deliberate cruelty in him? It showed only now and then, two or three times in the years I knew him, but … Anyway, I got enough money together at last to get back to England with Daphne. I know you remember that voyage, Daphne, though not much that went before. I know you don't remember Henry Rhymer. I'd already started creating for you the picture of Tony Milne—who wasn't quite an invention, but was very like Giles. We got to England and—'

‘But,' said Daphne suddenly, coming out of her tense stupor with a flinging up of her head and a blazing of blood in her cheeks, ‘—
but I was born in nineteen seventeen
!'

Her mother nodded. ‘Henry had let some friends of his in South Africa know the date of his marriage. So we decided, when we went over, that we'd take a year off your age. You were small and babyish-looking; no one thought there was anything queer about it.'

‘But,' said Daphne, her voice high and strained, ‘when my birthday comes next week I'll be twenty-one, not twenty!'

‘Yes, that's quite true.'

‘And you've been letting me think I was twenty, and telling me I wouldn't be able to marry Adrian till I was twenty-one. You've been playing a trick on me!'

‘Daphne—'

‘You have, you've played a trick on me! And after what your own parents did to you. I'll never forgive you. It's so mean and—and—it' s
so mean
!'

‘But, Daphne, it's quite, oh, it's quite different. Giles wasn't like …'

‘Oh yes, my father was the man
you
loved, while Adrian's only the one
I
love. I know you hate him, but you can't do anything about it now. I'll marry him next week. I'll marry him the very day after my birthday—'

‘Ahem.' It was Inspector Whitear. ‘If you wouldn't mind, Miss Milne, allowing your mother to continue …'

By no expression on her face did it show that Daphne had heard, yet, as if the set features of her mother were more than she could bear to look at, she made a dive out of the room. Anna Milne let a slow breath escape her. Her skin had a white and withered look; the deep tone of the lipstick on her tightly closed lips seemed almost purple against it.

She turned her head to Whitear. ‘It's fifteen years since I got back to England. I worked at one thing and another, then I had a little luck with journalism, some short stories and things. Then I tried my hand at a novel. I thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world when I got fifty pounds for it. I called myself Wendy Bartlemy. I've been successful—that's to say, I've made money and I've made myself a not too reputable name. But I never let a photograph of myself get into any newspaper, I never granted an interview. Fear's a thing that dies hard—never dies, sometimes. If I left the faintest trail behind me, Rhymer, I was sure, would pick it up. Sometimes, after ten years, twelve years, I said to myself that I'd lost all rationality, and that there couldn't be the slightest harm in letting myself be known. But something always checked me. And at last, after fifteen years, he found me …'

Whitear shifted his chair a little. Eggbear, who had been frowning at the floor, cleared his throat. Toby folded up the newspaper he was still holding into neat folds. George sat still, regarding himself from across the room in the convex mirror over the fireplace, as if he could never grow tired of the shape it made of his face.

Toby rose to his feet.

‘And now,' he said to Whitear, ‘you've got your motive all nice and plain. Opportunity, motive, and three anonymous letters. What else have you got?'

‘This,' said Whitear, and took from his pocket, wrapped in a cloth, the whisky flask that George had looked for vainly that morning.

‘Let me explain,' said Whitear.

He rose and splayed his feet on the hearth-rug. He exuded quiet dignity.

‘Rhymer,' he said, ‘was drunk when he died.'

No one questioned it.

‘Very well,' said Whitear. ‘He was drunk. But not only was he drunk; he had drunk whisky a very few minutes before he was killed.'

He looked round at them all again. Mrs Milne gave a nod, but something about it suggested that she had no idea what he had said and had nodded merely out of automatic politeness.

As he continued, however, she made an effort to bring her attention back to him.

‘We all know,' said Whitear, ‘that this flask—' he held it up—‘has been suggested as the possible container of the whisky. We've found no other container. We all know that if it was the container, then the whisky must have been given to Rhymer by Mrs Milne herself. Now, Mrs Milne maintains that she did not handle the flask since the time of the big accident last December, except to refill it on the evening of the same day. According to her gardener, however, it was half full on Tuesday, the day of the accident that concerns us, yet on the Friday—' Again he peered round at them all. Toby muttered impatiently. ‘On the Friday it was empty! A curious flask. It empties itself, one must suppose, by evaporation through a closed stopper. Decidedly curious. And yet, you'll be interested to know, that isn't its most curious habit. This is a flask that polishes itself.'

Toby was derisive. ‘If you mean there are no fingerprints—'

But Whitear raised his hand. ‘There
are
fingerprints. There are your own—and those of your friend—er—George, and Eggbear's. When you were looking at the flask yourselves it was handed round from one to the other, I believe. Very clear prints they are too, on a fine polished surface. The gardener's also appear, a finger and thumb, a bit smudged, just below the stopper. He says he handled it gingerly because his hands had earth on them. He also verifies what the maid says—the one who refilled the flask for him. She says she was cleaning the silver at the time, and had on a pair of gloves. That explains why her prints do not appear. She's certain too that she didn't give the flask a wipe over. Now—' He made another of his effective pauses; his voice, when he continued, was very gentle. ‘Now can anyone explain to me why that flask had none of Mrs Milne's fingerprints on it?'

She gave a start. Her cigarette sprayed ash on to the carpet. Yet it was more as if it had been the mere mention of her own name, jerking her mind back to what was happening, rather than the question itself, that had contained the shock. All the time Whitear had been speaking she had kept glancing towards the door as if she thought Daphne might reappear at any moment. Her face had the absentmindedness of brooding passion.

No one answered the question. One of Toby's hands was caressing his long chin.

Whitear said softly: ‘Who polished the flask?'

He waited. He added: ‘And why?'

In the convex mirror on the wall the room and the people in it had the look of a carefully composed picture.

‘Who was it,' said Whitear, ‘who removed from the flask the prints that Mrs Milne must have made when she handled it at the time of the December accident, and when she was refilling it afterwards? Very likely they would not have been clearly identifiable, but who, in that case, removed the blurred impressions? Who polished it some time between Tuesday and Friday—because if the polishing had been done earlier than the Tuesday the gardener's prints would have shown on it again. It was only on the Friday that he gripped it so delicately by the neck.'

‘I know you're going to say that it was I,' said Mrs Milne wearily, ‘but why should I remove my fingerprints from my own flask?'

He turned on her swiftly. ‘Because,' he said, ‘there were other fingerprints as well—the fingerprints of Henry Rhymer.'

Toby swung himself up from his chair. He stood there stretching. ‘And I thought,' he said, ‘that perhaps you'd really got somewhere. Listen, Whitear, I'll tell you a few things you ought to know. The first is that Mrs Milne is not a crackbrained idiot. She's a fool, and in some ways she's nervously unbalanced, but I've noticed no signs of mental deficiency.'

She murmured words of thanks.

‘Go ahead,' said Whitear.

‘Have you tried imagining this thing that you think took place?' said Toby. ‘Have you made a picture of it in your mind and tried to
see
what must have happened? Let me touch it in a bit for you. She sees the man Rhymer ahead of her, she stops her car, gets out and talks to him—that's your idea, isn't it?—and gives him a drink from her flask. He's so tight it's easy for her to push him over and then drive her car over his head. OK. Then she remembers her flask. Rhymer held it while he drank; it's got his fingerprints on it. So she takes it out of the pigeon-hole on the dash and polishes it up. OK. But, Whitear, since it's her own flask, will she be careful to handle it so that her own prints don't reappear? Will she hold it with her handkerchief? Will she do the job wearing those heavy, fingerless, fur-backed driving-gloves you probably found in the pigeon-hole, when it'd be so much easier to slip her hand out? If there were any reason to conceal her fingerprints it'd be worth the trouble, but there isn't one. That's why I made the remarks about her sanity; she'd know there weren't any reasons. She's a quick-thinking, practical woman; she might make mistakes, but not mistakes of that kind. She'd hold the flask naturally in her hand, polish it up and put it back; her own marks'd be all over it. No, Whitear, if you want the person who polished it up you've got to look somewhere else. If you want the person who emptied it you've got to look somewhere else. If you want the person who murdered Henry Rhymer you've got to look somewhere else!'

Whitear's face was set but his voice had its usual politeness. ‘Indeed? And where is that, Mr Dyke?'

‘If you'll come for a little ride in my car, I'll show you.'

Eggbear's head jerked up from his still frowning contemplation of the carpet.

‘Coming?' said Toby.

Suddenly indecisive, Whitear's gaze escaped from Toby's, only to meet the strained, sharp gaze of Mrs Milne. Quickly his eyes shifted from meeting her intensity. Eggbear made a movement towards the door. The sergeant said nothing, yet his reliance on Toby was so apparent that it affected Whitear like a puff of wind swelling a sagging sail. He shrugged his shoulders and said something vague, but he took a step towards the door. Triumph gleamed on Toby's face. He looked past Whitear to Mrs Milne, and, very faintly, she smiled.

But on that ravaged face a smile was curiously dreadful.

Outside, the four men took their places in the old Sunbeam. Before starting, however, Toby got out of the car and ran into the house once more. He was gone only two or three minutes. Returning and starting the car, he steered them on to the familiar road to Purbrook. Whitear sat beside him, Eggbear and George behind. Toby and George irritated Whitear by insisting on singing to themselves as they drove along, and singing different tunes. Eggbear sniffed at the darkness and said that a thaw was coming.

‘And if it do, us'll be pickin' violets for a pastime; the bed's just a mist o' buds,' he told them. ‘Needs only a spot o' warm to bring'n on.'

The lights of the car picked out bare hedges, a labourer and a dog, the corpse of a rabbit in the middle of the road. With its slow dignity the car lumbered along. Twice the lights flickered and went out, and Toby had to stop his song to tell George to get down and see to them. Whitear fidgeted but contained his impatience and curiosity.

At length, beyond Purbrook, they came to the grey stone cottage, ‘the converted cow-house, rapidly reverting to its original beliefs,' as Adrian Laws had called it. Beside the lonely road, with the silence of the moor pressing upon it, and the darkness swallowing it again the moment the lights of the car had slid across its face, it was desolate as the dream of a fear-ridden mind. Eggbear muttered that he didn't know how a young chap could live there all alone.

With Eggbear's torch showing them the neglected path, they hurried up to the door. Toby did not knock, and the door, unlocked as the doors of country cottages often are, yielded at once as he thrust his hand at the latch. Dim light met them, the dim light of an oil lamp, turned low, alight in the sitting-room. The sitting-room door stood wide open.

They stood there, the four of them grouped silently in the small, dark kitchen, staring at what was before them. Then Whitear strode through, to look down into the dead face of the young man, lolling in his big armchair, and to stoop and pick up from the floor the revolver that had slipped from the limp hand.

Eggbear, breathing hard, looked round at Toby.

‘What was it you told'n, Toby, when you telephoned, back to The Laurels?'

‘Did you see me telephoning?' said Toby.

‘No, but I allow that's what you done when you went back into the house.'

After an instant's pause and preparing to follow Whitear, Toby replied: ‘All I told him was that I'd found a piece of twisted wire.'

‘—And if he hadn't killed himself,' said Toby, later that evening, ‘we might never have been able to do anything about it. We could have brought the anonymous letters home to him all right, but we'd probably have had to let the murder roost.'