The Lily Hand and Other Stories (11 page)

‘Strangled?' I felt my knees give under me, and leaned hard on the edge of his desk to keep myself upright.

‘There was a small amount of blood smeared around,' he conceded thoughtfully, ‘but it wasn't hers. She put up quite a struggle. The man who did it left most of the skin of his wrists and forearms under her fingernails. An all too usual end for a woman of her type. She's been running at least three men on strings since her husband went to gaol; she was bound to get herself knocked off sooner or later.'

I couldn't speak for a moment, I felt so lightheaded and sick with relief. I'd had Frank Willard's lean wrists in my hands only a few hours ago, while I coaxed the gun out of his fingers; I knew he hadn't a scratch on him. The police didn't want him, weren't even interested in him.

Who was it he'd seen creeping down the stairs, then? A real man, after all; not a hallucination? Had he been right in feeling that she was already dead? Had he run headlong into her murderer? Someone who looked like enough to himself to drive him out of the house in superstitious terror? If so, he might be able to help the police, and the truth would have to come out. Well, I was the only one who'd lied about it, not he; no one could hold that against him.

With difficulty I asked my question casually, ‘What time was she killed?'

‘Not twenty minutes before the constable found her, most probably. Certainly not before one o'clock.'

She'd been alive, then, when Frank entered the house, alone and waiting in her room for whichever of her admirers was due that night. And, but for the grace of God and the apparition on the stairs, Frank would surely have walked in upon her and shot her dead, and himself after her.

‘As late as that? Then the fellow who did it couldn't possibly have got far,' I said, hardly knowing what I was talking about, I was so demoralized with relief.

‘He didn't,' said the Inspector simply, and jerked his head towards the door behind him. ‘Between you and me, he's in there now, safe and sound, and I hope by this time he's talking. Not that it'll make much difference whether he does or not, his hands and wrists are just about clawed to pieces. They won't have much trouble matching up the debris from under her nails with his injuries. Fellow by the name of Clandon, a bookie. Not the sort of man I'd try double-crossing, if I were a woman, but she was no judge of men.

‘An inquisitive neighbour saw his car drive away. We put out a call for it less than an hour after we found her. And picked him up at Shelworth, heading south.' He added kindly, ‘You know, you don't look too well, George. Missed your sleep over that lame dog of yours? I'd go home and snatch a few hours rest if I were you.'

I'll never know how much he knew. Maybe nothing. Maybe he only had a feeling that I'd lied to him. He'd had plenty of practice in detecting lies, and I hadn't had much in telling them. But even if he knew more, even if Willard had left traces of his presence in the house, they weren't interested. They had the man they wanted.

Maybe I wasn't looking well, but I felt wonderful, I felt reprieved. For myself and for Willard, too.

I went home and sat by his bed, and told him every word that had passed, except for my lie and the comments on Eileen. He thawed into sensibility and intelligence as I talked; in those few minutes he came a long way back from wherever it was he'd been heading – disintegration, mental collapse, the abdication of humanity.

He kept saying, ‘I didn't kill her! I didn't kill her!' in a voice of stupefied delight. And at the end he said, but quite gently now, ‘Then if it wasn't a sending I met on the stairs – what was it?'

‘An image of grace,' I said, ‘to turn you back in your tracks, and head you in the direction of life.'

And he looked back at me without a smile, but with the grave wonder of somebody waking from sleep, and said, ‘Yes. Yes, that's what it must have been.'

But it was only three or four weeks later, when the inquest and the police-court hearing were already over, that we found out the exact mechanics of mercy. Willard was her heir, of course, since she'd never made a will, and when he had to go to the house and look over all the stuff there to see what he wanted to keep and what was to be sold, he asked me to go with him. It wasn't fear or superstition – he was clear of both by then – it was a natural human reluctance to go alone into a place that had so many painful memories for him.

It was evening when we went in, and heavily overcast, and the hall was in half darkness because the bulb had blown. I went up the stairs first, and when I stepped on to the midway landing I came face to face with myself, all in an instant, as the faint light from the first-floor corridor window fell upon me after the comparative darkness below.

Even at that hour of day the effect was devastating. I recoiled upon Willard as he followed me up. And then I saw him spring out of the obscurity at my shoulder, and everything crystallized into mere glass and the trickery of the restricted light.

I ought to have known. She was a woman who knew how to get what she wanted. Everything she wanted. Not only the Meissen china and the ivory cabinet, but also the full-length Venetian mirror, framed in black glass, that was too big to fit happily into any of her rooms, and had to be set up here on the dark wall at the turn of the stairs, where there'd never been a mirror before.

That's one thing for which I shall be grateful to Clandon as long as he lives, in gaol or out. It turned out he was the one who gave it to her.

The Linnet in the Garden

In the courtyard of the Golden Bear, Nanynka was singing as she pegged out the kitchen cloths to dry. The pure, soft notes of her voice rounded to fill the whole well of the yard between the high, stone-faced walls and the single, sickly plane tree in the square of grass quivered with the reduplication of sound.

It was the only place where Nanynka found it safe to sing. If she had ventured to lift up her voice in the corridors of the house, or on the staircase, Madame Groh would have been out of the bureau in an instant, stretching out her long neck and hissing like an angry swan. Once she had stretched out her thick, mannish hand, too, and boxed Nanynka's ears for her audacity. But here in the dingy yard she could let the pent-up notes flow out of her lips and ring against the stone, eddying upward magically large and strange; and no one who mattered would hear. Only the penurious and ineffective had rooms overlooking this narrow well. The old gentleman on the first floor was stone-deaf into the bargain. The shabby but refined lady on the second floor would close her window and draw the curtain to mark her disapproval of kitchenmaids who sang at their work, but she was too well aware of her low standing with Madame Groh, and the precarious hold she had upon her cheap lodging, to make any complaint. And the young gentleman who had the wretched little back room on the third floor – ah, he was different! He would prick up his ears at the first rising notes, and run to flatten against the windowpane his rather long, rather inquisitive, incorrigibly optimistic nose, craning close to try and catch a glimpse of the singer, and remaining there still and quiet until she had gone back reluctantly into the dark cave of the kitchen. For he was the one person about the Golden Bear who recognized Nanynka's singing as music, and took pleasure in listening to it.

Nanynka was thinking about him as she stretched up her slender young arms in their muslin sleeves, and pushed down the pegs over the folds of the great linen tablecloth. Nowadays she thought about him a great deal. His name was Hugo Meyer, and he was a student at the instrumental school attached to the Opera, and sometimes he was even allowed to play in the orchestra when its numbers had to be augmented for some great occasion. He was very young, only about nineteen – Nanynka, at seventeen, did not consider herself very young any more, but that was different: she was a girl, and alone in the world, had had to fend for herself for more than a year now. But Herr Meyer was a young man of education, and had been looked after tenderly by a mother, and perhaps sisters, whom he had left behind somewhere in the country when he came to make his way in the city. He was quite helpless about such matters as landladies, and money, and the laundering and mending of linen.

The first thing she had ever noticed about him had been the cobbled rent disfiguring the skirt of his good grey coat, and it had vexed her so much, and stirred in her so illogical a sense of pity and tenderness, that she had braved Madame Groh's wrath in order to creep up the back stairs to his room one day when he was away at a rehearsal in his everyday blue, and abstract the coat from his meagre wardrobe. She had taken it to her pallet on the attic landing, and there strained her eyes far into the twilight in unpicking his scamped work, drawing threads from the turned-up part of the hem and making a beautiful, flat almost invisible darn which even his mother, she thought proudly, could not have bettered. The young gentleman might not even notice, but some day the mother would notice and wonder.

But he had noticed. On Sunday, when he had put on the coat to go to church, she had seen him come down the stairs, frowning down every few steps at the transfigured darn, and searching his mind for an explanation. And that was the first time he had ever spoken to her. Suddenly at the foot of the stairs he had raised his head, and seen her shrinking back at once towards her stony retirement in the kitchen, her hands hidden under her coarse apron as though the sight of them might betray their part in the mystery which engrossed him; and he had halted, and smiled, and turned back on an audacious impulse, as surprising to him as it was to her, to say directly:

‘You are the one who sings in the garden!'

She knew by his startled eyes and sudden fiery blush that he was by no means in the habit of pursuing the maids in the inn, and was at a loss how to continue, or indeed how to conclude, the encounter he had thus initiated. And she herself was seized by such a violent access of shyness that she could only stammer: ‘I hope, sir – I hope it don't offend you. I won't do it if it offends you!' – groping behind her for the knob of the door, and averting her eyes in confusion from his face.

‘Oh,
no
!' he said quickly and eagerly. ‘I beg you, don't deprive me—' But she had darted with lowered head through the doorway, and left him standing there, staring at the closed door.

Now why or how he should have proceeded with such unmasculine logic from her singing to her needlework she could not guess; but the next time he happened to encounter her crossing the flagged passage from the scullery with a pile of dishes, he had taken up the conversation from a new angle.

‘Someone has done me a secret kindness … Look! Do you know who it could be?' And he spread out the mended skirt of his coat for a moment under her eyes.

‘I can't tell, sir,' she said, looking round in a panic in case the kitchen door should be open and the cook listening. ‘Indeed, sir, I can't. I work down here in the kitchen. You should ask the chambermaid.'

He made a derisive face at this. ‘She is old and sour, and knows I have no money for extra services. No, this is the work of young, keen eyes and elegant small fingers, don't you think? Perhaps I should express my thanks to Madame, and ask her to convey them to my benefactress?'

‘Oh, no, don't do that!' begged Nanynka, in self-betraying dismay, and caught herself back from further protest into indignation. ‘If you please, sir, you are hindering me in my work and I shall be scolded on your account!'

All his boldness, which was considerable and unexpected in one usually so diffident, had left him at this, and he had cast down his eyes and begged her pardon like an abused child, and made off very meekly; yet the swing of his shoulders as he went had no very subdued look about it.

That was the episode which had driven her to her landing bed, and the square of cracked mirror she kept on the ledge of the wall there. She had looked into it earnestly, for the first time in her life seeking something more than cleanness and neatness in her own appearance. The pale, young, wondering face had looked back at her almost indulgently, with eyes coloured like periwinkles in spring, and the mouth had smiled very faintly, the lips curling close, like two rose-petals folded together. Under the limp muslin cap she had seen her own curls struggling loose, live coils of sunlight. She was charmed by possibilities which had never before occurred to her. She put away the mirror, still smiling, and reached a hand under her mattress to touch the flat wooden box where her treasure lay.

There had never been anyone in her life before to whom she could even have considered showing that secret and wonderful and fragile thing. Now she foresaw, distantly and half reluctantly, a day when she might take it out of its hiding place and lay it in Hugo Meyer's hands. She was not yet sure; but she had never so much as wondered until now.

‘Green woods of homeland, my joy and my pleasure …' sang Nanynka, for once not thinking of her lost homeland at all. She watched the foreshortened lozenge of the third-floor window, and waited for the bright, beech-brown crest to appear, and the wide forehead, and the hopeful, questing nose, and the gay, impudent, bashful eyes peering down for a glimpse of her. He wore his hair short, in the new fashion, and it curled so lavishly on his neck and temples that sometimes she caught herself thinking how well it would have looked drawn back into a ribbon, like that powdered hair she remembered so well from another garden, a garden so different from this stone-walled pit behind the Salzburgergasse. But this time the eager head did not appear. It was her ears, not her eyes, which caught the evidence of his presence.

The note of a flute took up the air from her lips, whispered in unison with her for two lines of the song and then took flight in an airy
obbligato
all round her voice, dancing as rapidly and tenderly as the light that played through the leaves of the plane tree. It was as though he had taken her hand. No, it moved her far more and confounded her far less than such a gesture would have done. She was filled with a sweet and violent excitement, a passion of gratitude, to think that he could take up with such familiar kindness an air from her distant countryside. For he was not merely following her, he anticipated the cadences of the tune, embroidering it with confident arabesques. He was playing something he knew. She thought of the talisman in the box under her mattress, and now she was sure. Some day he would be made the confidant in the central secret of her life, and some day he would hear another song.