The Riddle of the River (24 page)

‘And then Ivy got pregnant,’ she went on, without the slightest pretence of obscuring this brutal fact under the euphemisms that we habitually use for it. ‘We thought everything was up with us. A few more months and she’d lose both her jobs, plus the baby to keep. She was sick about it. We spent the whole night crying in each other’s arms. It was the loss of everything we had gained; back to the mud for me, even worse for her, the loss of her work as an actress. I never saw her so desperate. She went up to Cambridge to see the old gentleman, with some idea of telling him what was happening and begging him for help. He was never a very generous old fellow; he never gave her more than a few shillings, but he was fond of her, and very rich. It seemed like her last chance.

‘She stayed away three days and came back radiant. She threw herself in my arms and told me everything was going to be all right. It was better than she could have dreamt of. The old gentleman had given her nothing but a pat on the back and a few coins – but something much, much better had happened. In those three days, Ivy had fallen in love, and someone had fallen in love with her. She’d left desperate, she came back wildly happy. ‘‘I love him, Jenny,” she told me. ‘‘I
can’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe it. Maybe even you wouldn’t understand.” ‘‘Of course I would,” I told her. ‘‘Except it sounds too good to be true.” ‘‘It’s true,” she promised me. ‘‘Only we can’t tell anyone. It has to be a secret till we’re actually married. He’s getting a licence – we can marry in a week or two, and then everything will be all right. It will be all right, Jenny! He has some money – not too much, but it’ll do. We’ll leave all this right behind us and move away.” She wouldn’t tell me anything more; wouldn’t tell me his name, anything about him. But it was like she was walking on air. He wrote to her twice in the next week, telling her the marriage was fixed. I started to believe in this unbelievable piece of luck. Ivy was so beautiful, anything was possible. She’d even told him about the baby. He wanted to adopt it, bring it up as his own. He must have been wild about her. A week later, the old gentleman asked her to come up to Cambridge to host some party of his. ‘‘I’ll go,” she told me, ‘‘it’s for the day before my wedding, Jenny! It’ll be like a goodbye to him. He’s been good to me.” She never came back. She didn’t write or wire. I didn’t know anything; I just thought she’d got married, and perhaps the new husband had whisked her off on a honeymoon somewhere. Only I couldn’t believe she didn’t write to me. I wanted to find her so much that I looked through her letters and read the ones he’d sent her, trying to figure out who he was. But I couldn’t tell, I couldn’t make out his name and there wasn’t an address.

‘Then the police came to see me and told me Ivy had been murdered in Cambridge, the very night she went up there. She’d been dead for days and I hadn’t known it! Oh, I was sick, there aren’t any words for what you feel when you find out that your best, your only friend is dead, and you had no
idea. She was on the threshold of her life and she was killed. I tried to think who could have killed her, and why. Then I knew that it must have been the young Mr Archer – him, there, that I had never seen, that I didn’t know where he lived. Who else could it have been? Once she didn’t need him and his bloody key any more, she could have told everyone about what he’d been doing. She could have told his father, and got him cut off without a shilling. I made sure he’d done it; I swore I would kill him myself. I saved up every penny to buy myself a train ticket; I vowed I’d find out where he lived and kill him with my own hands. It was easy to find out where he lived. I looked in a Directory.’

As though the fact that her story had suddenly reached the present moment, she seemed to remember that she was in Philip Archer’s presence. She turned back to him suddenly and stiffened, and raised the knife again. ‘I never expected to see a helpless rat like you,’ she said. ‘But who cares? I’ll kill you anyway.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Philip Archer suddenly. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I was her fiancé. I was going to marry her.’

His words fell into a stunned silence, that lasted. We both stared at him.

Was it possible?

‘You’re a liar,’ said Jenny Wolcombe. ‘Even after Ivy was engaged, she went on hating young Mr Archer. We talked about him – she said she’d
never
speak to him again. I told her we could get revenge, but she said she was too happy now, it would be enough to forget he had ever existed.’

I saw Philip open his mouth and close it again.
Julian
. His own brother.

‘I loved her,’ he said. ‘She was going to marry me. I wrote the letters you found.’

I stepped forward quickly, removing the two letters from my bag, and held them out to him.

‘Here they are,’ I said. ‘You say you wrote these? Can you prove it?’

His forehead flushed as he saw them; he took them from me with a look of unspeakable pain.

‘The handwriting?’ I said gently. With a gesture of his head, he indicated the writing-table, covered with his manuscripts. Jenny took the letters and moved over to it. I followed her.

The handwriting was Philip’s
– it was absolutely identical! I had assumed the letters I saw on the hall table were Julian’s, when in fact they were Philip’s. I had made a horrific mistake, and I reproached myself bitterly, because it had never occurred to me…not for one second, that the ardent lover who wrote passionately to the beautiful girl might have been one and the same as the man who now sat on the sofa in front of me, automatically excluded from my mental image of what a lover should be. I felt ashamed.

‘Look at these,’ said Philip, reaching into the pocket of his jacket and removing a wallet, from which he extracted three or four small, ill-written notes. Jenny snatched them from him, trembling. All were identical in handwriting to the crumpled letter that little Cedric had found in the armchair in Heffers. All were modest little missives bearing the same essential content –
I can’t believe I have found love…I would never have thought it…I thought I had seen too much of men to ever love…this is happening because you are different from all the others…in just a few days I can tell the world that I love you…it happened so quickly that I still can’t believe
it…yet
I believe you…perhaps one has to suffer as you have to be what you are…your Ivy, your loving Ivy, your Ivy forever…

The knife fell to the ground with a clang. No one picked it up. Jenny let her arms fall to her side.

‘It was you?’ she said softly. ‘You?’ She looked down at him, at his ravaged face. ‘But then, I don’t understand. Who killed her? Why did she have to die?’

‘Jenny,’ I said, ‘listen to me. I won’t let her killer go free. I’ll find him. I swear it.’
How could the murderer be anyone but Julian Archer,
I thought,
alibi or no alibi
? But I was afraid to mention his name. Clearly it had not yet occurred to Miss Wolcombe that Philip Archer might have a brother, but it could not be long before she learnt it or thought of it by herself. I was anxious to avoid this. Such a man should undergo the full rigour of the law, not swift death by the violent blade of an angry girl ready to yield her own life in the taking of his.

‘Listen to me,’ I said again, with all the calm I could muster. ‘I need your help. You have helped me a great deal already by everything you have told us here. I need to ask you more questions. I want you to go straight to my house and remain there. Look; here is the address, and here is some money to take a cab. Go there and tell my husband or my housekeeper that I have told you to wait for me. I will come as soon as I can. You will help me, and we will find the murderer together.’

I handed her a card, and she took it docilely. Her passion was entirely spent and she seemed exhausted. Glancing at the address, she nodded wearily, moved toward the door, passed through it and reached back to close it behind her. Then she
paused in the doorway and stared back at Philip for a long moment.

‘I was wrong,’ she said very softly. ‘You’re the only one who brought her any happiness. Forgive me my words.’

‘There is nothing I wouldn’t forgive Ivy’s friend,’ he said. She turned to go, and he buried his face in his hands. It is rare, but there are times when men weep.

As an observer remembered it:

Cowering together against the wind, anxiously attentive, we waited. And suddenly, after the raising of the flag, we perceived the first tickings! Silently and invisibly, the message had been borne across the space from the rocky coast, ferried across by that mysterious medium, the ether.

I stood near him, feeling absolutely helpless. What can one say or do in the face of such distress? I stretched out my hand to lay it on his shoulder, then took back the pathetically insignificant gesture. I wanted to talk about Julian, but dared not speak his name.

I remained hesitating for no more than a minute before my thoughts were distracted sharply by the sounds of shouting and turmoil in the street below. I started up at once. I had sent Jenny away, because it seemed urgent to me that she leave before the thought that Philip Archer must have a brother became concrete in her mind, with the possibility of instant verification to hand.

‘Get away, get away!’ I heard the shouted words outside, ‘or we’ll call the police! Creatures like you are not wanted here!’

I bounded down the stairs and ran into the street, in time to make out Jenny, running at full tilt and already at the far end of Petty Cury, disappearing around the corner, and a flushed, angry group of customers clustered at the door of Heffers.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘A crazy woman came in here and threatened the manager,’ was the reply.

‘I saw her first,’ said a lady. ‘She came out of that door right there and stared into the shop window, then she strode in, and
went up to him and asked him his name. When he answered, she flung herself at his throat like a wildcat, screaming and scratching!’

‘It was all we could do to push her outside,’ added another gentleman, pulling down his cuffs and smoothing his hair.

‘Like a jilted lover,’ said the lady. ‘She must be quite mad.’

‘Didn’t you come out of the same door just now?’ someone else suddenly asked. ‘Do you know who that woman is?’

‘Ah, n-no,’ I stammered, deeply dismayed by this turn of events. My confusion and horror was increased by the sight of Julian Archer himself stepping into the doorway of the shop, clearly back from his expedition. His face bore a long, scarlet scratch, but he seemed calm. I stared at him with fascination. I had found this man charming and pleasant; I had not noticed in him the traces of cruelty so perceptible in his father. And they were still as invisible as they had been. His face lit up with a warm smile upon seeing me. I bit my tongue and forced myself to stretch my lips in return; then with a little nod, I turned on my heel and hurried off after Jenny as fast as was seemly and before any awkward questions could be asked.

I made my way home, talking to myself to calm my anxiety. I didn’t know if Jenny would have gone to my house or not, but I was afraid of the girl; I thought her mental state dangerous, and feared what she might do both in my house and out of it. I was more certain than ever that Julian Archer must be the murderer, yet still unable to put together a convincing version of the chain of events. At every point in my story there was some little, niggling contradiction necessitating an unrealistic explanation.
How could he have known Ivy was in the bookshop?
He could not have seen her
arriving, and from what Jenny had told us, it did not seem possible that she would have exchanged even a word with Julian Archer, let alone arranged a secret meeting. And even if she had accepted such a meeting for some reason (some kind of blackmail?), surely she would not have sat down comfortably to pen a letter to Philip at the very moment she was expecting his brother to enter the shop? What was she doing in the shop at all? Writing a letter and preparing herself to go upstairs and – as was now clear – slip it into the hand of her beloved behind his brother’s back, in order to afford him a moment of joy before the morrow.

Reaching home, I hastened inside and found Arthur on the sofa reading the newspaper, no sign of a distraught woman to be seen. Quickly I sat next to him, removed the paper from his hands, set it aside to gain his full attention, and told him the gist of everything that had occurred.

‘Arthur, I didn’t know what to do with her! I’m afraid she’ll do someone a mischief, or get herself hurt,’ I said.

‘What are
we
to do with her?’ he replied with understandable dismay.

‘Please watch over her for a day or two, if she comes here,’ I said. ‘Do not let her wander away by herself. She has realised who Julian Archer is; I believe she realised on her way downstairs that Philip Archer must have a brother – I expected her to see it even sooner. Then she must have spotted him through the shop window and recognised him by his physical similarity to his father, whom she met in London. If she did not thrust her knife into his breast to the hilt then and there, it is only because she had left it upstairs. I am afraid she is stalking him even now. I wish I knew where she was.’

‘Is he the girl’s murderer?’ he asked me.

‘Oh, Arthur, I think he must be, but he has a perfect alibi. I don’t know what to do! But even if I can prove that he is, she mustn’t be allowed to attack him. Keep her from harming him and herself, Arthur. If only she would come here.’

We sat down to dine together; Arthur was exactly as always, but I was unpleasantly tense with waiting. And finally, she came. The knock snapped sharply on the door, I flung it open, and she dropped almost into my arms, dishevelled, exhausted and in a state of mental disturbance bordering on despair.

‘You didn’t tell me he had a brother,’ she said immediately.

‘It is not for you to act!’ I said severely, preparing a drink for her to which I added a dose of laudanum.

‘I waited all this time for him to come out, the rat, but he never did,’ she said, trembling. ‘It got dark, so I came here. But he won’t escape me.’

‘You did right to come,’ I said gently but firmly, handing her the drink and ringing to ask Mrs Widge to provide her with dinner on a tray, and Sarah to prepare the spare bedroom for her.

Sarah and I got her to bed soon after, and I did not waste much time in following, taking the precaution of leaving the bedroom door open, however, in case she might think of sneaking away during the night. I slept badly, my confused dreams circling obsessively around Julian’s alibi, his alibi, his alibi. The alibi came entirely from his brother – well, his brother and the guest – but how tightly did it really hold? Philip had spoken to the police with no inkling of his brother’s guilt. Would he now realise that he must think over the evening again? I resolved to visit him again as soon as the morning was reasonably advanced.

I rose early, shaking the night’s cobwebs from my brain, and took my early morning tea out into the garden to think. Arthur and Jenny were both still asleep; I could hear Sarah moving about in the nursery. I wanted to wait a little longer before going to see Philip, at least until Arthur should be up and alert to watch over Jenny.

‘Miss Duncan!’ I started as I heard the bright, eager whisper from some distance away, in the street. If the voice had said ‘Vanessa’, I might almost have taken it to be Pat in its muffled enthusiasm. I jumped up and approached the garden gate.

‘Mr Archer!’ I gasped. The old gentleman was standing there, leaning on the gate, peering in.

‘So this is where you live?’ he said, flashing his toothy leer in my direction. ‘I got your address from the Darwins.’

I nodded quickly, awkwardly. It could only be a matter of time before my different identities amongst the members of this circle came to a clash. A matter of time which might easily be reduced to no more than a few seconds, should Sarah happen to emerge into the garden with the twins now, and should they, as they undoubtedly would, run to me calling out ‘Mamma!’

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I came to see if you still meant to come to the Kingstown Regatta with me. It’s tomorrow, you remember? I’m taking the train up today. I couldn’t get away earlier, but I’ll join with a couple of friends there who sailed up in my yacht. It’s a wonderful event; you’d enjoy it enormously, you know. You promised you’d manage to get away from here for the day. Do you think you can?’

‘Oh,’ I said, recalling suddenly that I had indeed made such a promise, at a time when it seemed expedient, and
wondering what I ought to do. I looked at Mr Archer, thinking rapidly: Ivy had come straight from
his
house to Heffers – carrying
his
money. So much money – why so much? He had spoken of three pounds, one of the witnesses had said a roll of bank notes; yet Jenny had said he never gave her more than a few shillings. She had gone to the bookshop carrying all that money. Why? Why?

Could the elderly gentleman in front of me have played some part in her death, in some way that I could not yet completely comprehend?

It was not certain, but it was possible; it would have been enough for him to wait for her perfectly natural, voluntary departure from his party, at the hour of her own choice, witnessed by any number of his guests, and then as she left, to communicate the exact time to his son. He would know just how long it would take for her to walk the distance, something very close to half an hour; they must have done it together any number of times. Certainly I knew almost to the minute how long it took me to walk to town from my own house, ten minutes or so nearer than his.

And if he received such a message, Julian would have no need to look out of the window or feel anxious about her arrival; he would know to within a minute or two when she was likely to arrive, he could content himself with slipping downstairs at the right time and either finding her there or waiting for her.

Yet what kind of a message could the father have sent to the son, across a town, instantaneously?

Telepathy
?

‘Yes, I’ll come,’ I said abruptly. ‘I’m free tomorrow, but I can’t get away today. Can I get up there by a night train?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Night express to Liverpool, and early morning ferry over to Dublin. Then there’s a short train to Kingstown. Look about for me, my girl; you’ll find me easily enough, I think, and if you don’t, meet me at the Anchor Hotel at midday.’

‘I’ll be there!’ I promised. ‘But oh, please go away now. I’ll be in trouble if anybody sees you.’ And I cast an anxious glance over my shoulder at the house, which was still silent.

He winked at me and left, to my great relief, and I went inside and found Arthur seated at the dining room table, enjoying coffee, toast and sausages. I extracted his promise to look after Jenny for the next two days. He did not look enthusiastic, but I sketched the situation clearly enough to make him understand that it was no joke, that it might indeed be a matter of extreme danger, and in spite of his obvious doubts, he squeezed my hand and promised not to let her out of his sight. And I scrambled into my boots and snapped off a button with the button-hook, in my haste to return to Petty Cury.

I arrived in front of the flat trembling with haste and anxiety. A glance told me that Julian Archer was already working in the bookshop, and I rang at the door of the flat, pressing myself against the wall in case he should look out. Simpson opened it, and I rushed into the hall and told him that I must speak to Mr Archer at once. He went up, and I followed on his very heels.

Philip was standing at the head of the stairs when I reached the second floor, supported on his crutches. He held out his hand to me, and gripped mine with a grasp full of nervous, bony strength.

‘I hoped you would come back,’ he said. ‘I still don’t understand – I need to understand.’

I entered the sitting room, and he struggled after me and sat down in his wheeled chair. I sat on the sofa, and leant towards him. An electric current flowed between us, much stronger than the feeling Sir Oliver had managed to induce in me with all his experiments.

‘Mr Archer,’ I said, grasping the nettle, ‘who murdered Ivy Elliott?’

‘Don’t you think I’ve asked myself that question?’ he said, his mouth twisted. ‘If I could tell you, I would.’

‘But you can, can’t you?’ I said. ‘The police say that you gave him a complete alibi.’

‘You’re talking about
Julian
?’ he said, looking up sharply. ‘My brother did not kill her – it’s impossible! Even if he did do the dreadful, horrible things that Miss Wolcombe told us yesterday, making them work in my father’s flat, forcing them to pay him, that doesn’t make him a murderer, for God’s sake! Not my own brother! Anyway, I
know
he did no such thing. The police told me that she was killed between midnight and one o’clock in the morning of the twenty-second, and he was here with me for that whole evening, and the whole night. He can’t have killed her, no!’ He stopped for a moment, heaving, looking not unlike a man who has just run a long distance. Suddenly his lips parted and he murmured almost inaudibly, ‘And yet…’

‘And yet?’

‘There is something,’ he said. ‘I believe now – I am sure – that he had found out about the marriage. Once I found Ivy’s letters to me disarranged on my desk, and wondered about him. But I didn’t ask, and he never said a word. Still, the more I think about it, the more I am certain that he did know. I know him so well!’

‘And you think that would constitute a motive?’ I asked gently. ‘I mean, a stronger motive than what Miss Wolcombe surmised, that Ivy might tell others about his – his, ah, activities?’

‘That wouldn’t be a motive at all,’ he replied. ‘Ivy would never have spoken of all that again once she had got right away from it. She was not vindictive.’

‘You may be right,’ I said. ‘But why would your brother kill her rather than let her marry you?’

‘Rather than let
me
marry
her
,’ he said bitterly. ‘Don’t you see? Ivy was expecting a child, who would have become
my
child. A son, perhaps. She was sure it was a little boy.’

‘A son?’ I repeated slowly, wonderingly. ‘A son? To inherit? Do you mean that
your
son would inherit the Archer fortune if Julian did not have a son?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘My son would inherit the Archer fortune in any case. I am the older brother, not Julian.’

I was stunned. Why had I never even thought of this?

‘You?’ I said. ‘But – but Julian talked about the fortune at table…I understood that he was the heir…and I saw his portrait in your father’s study at Chippendale House! I thought that only the Archer heirs were painted there.’