Heads You Lose (10 page)

The door of the cupboard began to creak.

She scrambled out of bed to shut it, thrusting her toes into fur-lined mules that lay by the side of her bed; and all of a sudden the room was not so friendly, the familiar shadows were taking on strange and eerie shapes, and all about her was a tension of something that up to now she had hardly understood; she knew that for the first time in her life she was afraid. She sat rigid on the edge of the bed, clutching the eiderdown about her with shaking hands. A white face glimmered at her out of the gloom, and her own dark eyes stared back at her, wide with fear, from the mirror on her dressing-table. A woman’s voice, vicious and gloating, whispered unceasingly: “Fran’s next; Francesca’s next…”

Supposing that in the cupboard was crouching a murderer—somebody not quite human, a crazy creature idly swinging to and fro that hatefully creaking door; supposing again that the door were swinging, not idly, but with a deadly purpose behind it—to make her do just what she was doing, to make her walk across the room to close it, into the reach of hands stretched forth to kill! In her mind she began to recite a conversation, herself very polite and reasonable, trying to explain, trying to argue, trying to temporise… “‘But why should you want to kill me?’ I said to her; ‘I haven’t done you any harm, have I?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘you haven’t done me any harm,’ and she peered out of the cupboard at me, and her eyes were queer and shiny and my grey dress was hanging over her head and round her face. ‘It’s just that I
want
to kill,’ she said, ‘and you’re next on my list…’”

She jumped suddenly off the bed and, running across the soft carpet, pushed-to the door of the cupboard before she could give herself any more time to think. The black-lined curtains were billowing in at her wide-open window. She went to the window to shut it lest the draught from it should be swinging the cupboard door. A man’s voice called up from the terrace: “Who’s there? What’s that?”

It made her jump, but after all it was comforting. “It’s me. Francesca Hart,” she called back, leaning out of the window.

Footsteps moved up the terrace; she could hear the scrunch of boots against the dry snow. “Just stay there a minute, Miss Hart, and let me see your face. Half a moment while I flash my torch.”

Fears came crowding back. After all the murderer might not be a “she.” Pretend for a moment that it was a man; and that the man had killed Cockie’s guard out on the terrace and now was luring her to look out of the window and into the eyes of death! Supposing he should be climbing up to the sill to grasp her by the throat as she stood at the window; supposing he had a rope and flung it round her neck as she leant out, and dragged her down to the ground…!

There was a blinding light in her eyes, followed immediately by soft, black darkness. The voice called again: “All right, Miss. Thank you. Mustn’t make any mistakes, must we? You go to bed and to sleep, Miss; I’ll be watching out for you.”

“Good-night,” she called; and put her head out again to add: “I hope you’re not terribly cold. I’m so sorry to give you all this trouble.”

The window was closed and the curtains closely drawn. Somehow it was not so easy to start across the room again and get into bed. “Never again will I be superior about people who aren’t brave,” she vowed, and forced herself to leave the shelter of the curtains, to pass her own white ghost in the mirror and jump like a shot rabbit into the warmth and comfort and security of her bed. She sat curled up against the pillows, her shaking hands clasped against the silk and lace of her nightie, trying to still the thudding of her heart.

The curtains hung motionless now across the big window. The corners of the room were deeply shadowed in the gentle lamplight, but with shadows that she and Venetia had known from their childhood, from the days when there had been two little beds in this dear old room, when Pen and Granny had come and kissed them and tucked them up, and gone down to something grand and mysterious called Dinner that went on until the Middle of the Night… She supposed that Pen had been quite young then, but he had seemed very old to them. His father had been alive, a terrifying old man whose kindly advances they had found themselves unable to welcome…

She fell into a doze, still sitting curled up at the top of her bed, propped against the big white pillows. Her hands released their hold and lay with curling fingers outside the eiderdown. A soft dark curl fell over her face; she stirred and moved her head against the pillow to push it back.

Slowly the door of the cupboard began to open.

Inspector Cockrill was standing on the terrace briskly rubbing his face with his hands and stretching his aching limbs after a brief rest on Pendock’s “comfortable sofa.” He was paralysed by the sight of Constable Troot galloping across the grass towards him, his mouth opening and shutting idiotically, his arms flailing the innocent morning air. “They’ve got her, sir; the devils… they’ve got her, sir…”

“Got who? For God’s sake…” He stumbled down the steps and started to run across the lawn.

She was sitting in the little round summer-house down by the railway track, propped against the wooden wall in a strange stiff attitude, her hands hanging awkwardly at her sides; and her head had been severed from her body and sat crookedly on her mangled neck, tied there by a bright woollen scarf. He could not have recognised the dreadful face that leered at him, blotchy and purple, with distended eyes; but his stomach heaved with a sort of insane relief when he saw that the hair was not soft and dark, but a short, coarse crop of auburn, almost like a cap. Fran was safe; but Pippi le May was dead.

H
E DREW HIS HAND
across his eyes and, shuddering, looked again. Beside him, the constable stared with labouring breath, biting his finger-nail. The Inspector said at last: “Well, there it is. She’s dead.”

Troot wiped damp fingers on the seat of his trousers. “Yes, sir.”

“We must get the doctor at once and remove that scarf; but we know what we shall find. You’d better stay here, Troot, till I send someone else along. I must go back to the house.”

The summer-house was boarded in on two sides, but the rest was formed of lightly crossed branches, open to the sunshine and air. Against the boarding the snow had piled in a drift, eighteen inches deep. There were one or two half-dried puddles on the floor of the hut that might have been made by wet or snow-covered shoes, but otherwise no footprint and no sign. Around them lay the wide expanse of the lawns, sloping towards them from the house and down to the stream; and out of his childhood some memory was clamouring in the Inspector’s head for recognition. He could see the dim, sexless face of his school-teacher and smell for a moment the chalky smell of the blackboard; and he was a small boy again, reciting in a gabbling monotone:

“At Linden when the sun was low,

All bloodless lay the untrodden snow…”

All bloodless. Untrodden.
Untrodden!

A diagonal track where Troot had strolled casually down from the terrace, had suddenly quickened his pace, had stood for a moment staring and then had turned and run, stumbling, back to the house. Parallel tracks where he and Troot had come loping down together. No other mark at all. He picked his way round to the back of the little hut and looked about him: to the railway line thirty feet to the left, to the little stream fifteen feet away, and right across the drive as far as the eye could see, there was no mark at all upon the flat white surface. All bloodless lay the untrodden snow… He walked slowly back to the house, examining his own tracks and those of the constable as he went.

A man was sitting quietly on a chair on the landing outside Fran’s room. Cockrill called him down and spoke to him softly: “Anything to report?”

“Nothing, sir. The young lady called out in the night; her dog, sir, he’d gone to sleep in the cupboard, and he must have woke up and she saw him push open the door. Mr. Pendock came out of his room, and we both went in to the young lady and calmed her down. Nothing else at all, sir. Nobody’s moved all night.”

“Have
n’t they?” said Inspector Cockrill dourly, and rolled himself his first cigarette. He sent the man back to his post and went out on to the terrace below Fran’s window. “Anything to report?”

“Nothing, sir. Miss Hart came to the window and shut it, and I called up and saw to it that she was all right; otherwise nothing’s happened at all, sir.”

“Has
n’t it?” said Cockie, and grinned quite horribly. “Well, take the car and go down at once to the village; ring up Torrington and tell them to send the doctor immediately… if the old man’s still away, young Newsome’ll have to do. And tell them to send a man to mend this bloody telephone.” He stumped back into the library and, lighting the electric fire, crouched over it, rubbing his frozen hands.

Before the family was awake, the house was swarming with men. Cockrill stood among them, huddled in his great-coat, his hat sitting sideways upon his head, directing operations with vigorous sweeps of his arms; his stubby brown fingers fumbled ceaselessly with a chain of cigarettes.

Young Dr. Newsome, so called to distinguish him from Old Dr. Newsome, his father, came into the hall; he was a tall, nice-looking boy, with his crop of curly gold hair, and beneath an air of conscious sophistication, hid an exuberant joy of living. He was highly excited by what appeared to be going to be a chain of murders at Pigeonsford, but he only said carelessly, handing over a doubtful-looking package: “Here’s the scarf you wanted. I wrapped it up to keep it from messing things. The head was off all right.”

“You could guess it from the way it was set. What was the weapon, do you know?”

Dr. Newsome did not know and he hated to admit it. He said, taking the cigarette out of Cockie’s hand and lighting his own from it: “The head seems to be more—well, wrenched off, than cut. It’s almost—” he paused with a deprecatory air—“it’s almost as though two hands, two enormous hands, had seized the poor girl and twisted her head right off.”

Cockie treated this statement with more respect than at first sight it appeared to deserve. He said, after a little thought: “Not the same as Miss Morland? Not the same as the girl in the wood?”

“No. Miss Morland’s head was hacked off with the chopper—you can see where the blunt edges of the axe have torn the flesh; the first, of course, was cut clean off with the scythe. This is quite different; I can’t tell without the P.M., naturally, but as I say, it’s just as if two hands had choked the life out of the girl as they wrung off her head…”

Cockie drew long and deeply on his cigarette. “We’ve found no weapon,” he said at last, looking up at the doctor with thoughtful bright brown eyes. “Could this thing actually have been done by hands?”

“Not by human hands,” said Newsome, and looked round for his instrument bag.

A sergeant came in from the garden, wiping his snowy boots on the front-door mat. “Well, sir, there’s no sign of anything. We’ve shovelled the snow away from all around the hut and there’s no weapon there; it isn’t in the stream, for she’s running as clear as glass; no sign of a footmark, no sign of a weapon, and no sign of blood.” He shrugged his shoulders as if he, for one, gave up the puzzle.

“We’ll let the household come down now, and then we can look through the bedrooms,” said Cockie briefly. As the man turned away he called him back. “Bray—you’re a sane sort of fellow with no funny notions, and you’ve had a good look at the place where the body was found… Supposing the girl was murdered there, or even taken and put there after death, is it your opinion that the killer could have got away and left, as you’ve seen for yourself, no footprints in the snow?”

“Not on human feet,” said the man, meeting the bright brown eyes.

Photographs, finger-prints, alibis… the family was permitted to come downstairs and was herded into the dining-room and there left in charge of a police-sergeant to drink quantities of coffee and nibble at bacon and toast. Upstairs their rooms were ransacked without success; there was no trace of blood, nothing that might conceivably have been used as a weapon, no sign that anyone had been outside the house during the previous night. Constable Wright, sniffing dreadfully, became all excited at the discovery that Pendock’s shoes and overcoat were damp; but Pendock had seen Pippi home and had come back to the house through fairly heavy snow. The shoes that they had worn on their walk by the river had been drying by the kitchen fire and appeared to be undisturbed. Bunsen’s coat was wet and his shoes were slightly wet, consistent with his having ridden to and from Tenfold, through the snow, on his bicycle. Otherwise clothes, shoes, everybody’s possessions, all were clean and dry and free from the slightest sign of any nocturnal adventure.

Sergeant Jenkins was dispatched again for interviews with Dr. Newsome and the district nurse. Dr. Newsome said, hopping, that Bunsen’s sister was slightly better, that he believed her brother had been over to see her on the previous evening, that it was nothing to do with him anyway, and that he was in a devil of a hurry to get off on his rounds; the district nurse said that Bunsen had visited his sister again, as he had on the night of Miss Morland’s death; that he had remained with her until about eleven, when he had made preparations to go, finally leaving the cottage at about ten past; and that if Sergeant Jenkins had nothing better to do than to go round asking silly questions, she
had.

It would certainly have taken the old man, feeble and shaky as he was, an hour or nearly an hour to ride the four hilly miles through the snow; the rest of the staff, having had impregnable alibis for the time of Grace Morland’s murder, might, unless one were to allow for a quite extraordinary coincidence, safely be absolved from suspicion of complicity in Pippi le May’s. Inspector Cockrill, it is true, made ample allowance for coincidence, but he could find no confirmation of guilt in any of them, and they remained free from suspicion throughout the rest of the case. Bunsen also, it appeared, might be safely dismissed. Cockie, with a sigh, concentrated his attention upon the six original suspects, kept an open mind in respect of a person or persons unknown, and endeavoured to find comfort in the thought that Pippi’s death did, at least, remove one potential suspect from the confusion of his investigation.