Heads You Lose (17 page)

“I’m not so sure,” she said.

He looked at her again and then back to the carpet. “Well—I can take it that you won’t object if I speak to her?”

“It was nice of you to have told me first,” she said, smiling at him. “But you always were a person of the completest integrity, Pen. You know that with all my heart I wish for your happiness.”

“I’ll go now,” he said.

Cockrill was standing in the hall, speaking to one of his men. Pendock was so much concerned with his own tremendous errand that he did not observe that both were white and shaken; he approached with a rather forced cheerfulness and said to Cockrill: “Do you think you could call your minions off for a little while? I want to talk to Fran…”

Cockie swung round and glared at him. “Well, Fran has disappeared.”

“Disappeared! What do you mean?” said Pendock.

“Disappeared—disappeared… can’t you understand English, man?”

Something screeched and clattered in Pendock’s mind. That red mist that had blinded him in his shrinking approach to the body of Grace Morland, descended upon him again; when he knew sanity, he was grasping the lapels of Cockrill’s coat, and mumbling, over and over and over and over again: “Where is she? Where’s Fran? What’s happened to her?”

“This fool has let her go,” said Cockie, shaking off his clutching hands.

Blue-green eyes blazed into frightened brown; but he said more coolly, turning upon the man: “Tell me what happened.”

“She went in here, sir. I could hardly follow her.” He indicated the cloakroom leading off the hall. “She said she wouldn’t be a minute. When she didn’t come out, I knocked and called. I broke open the door, sir. She isn’t there.”

A window was open, the net curtain fluttering inward. There was a mark on the painted sill, but outside the snow had melted right away, and on the stone terrace there were no prints of feet. “Anybody could have got in here,” said Pendock, sick with dread.

“She may have got out,” said the man.

“Got out! Why should she have got out? Where would she go?”

“She might have been sick of surveillance, Inspector,” suggested Pendock, clutching at a straw. “She’s so impulsive and independent and—and high-spirited… Oh, my God! Fran!”

She was nowhere in the house. On an impulse Cockrill stumbled down to the summer-house at the bottom of the garden, and ran along the ditch by the side of the drive. When he got back, James was standing in Fran’s room with an open letter in his hand.

“What are you doing here?” said Cockrill angrily.

“Reading a letter.”

“What letter? Whose letter?”

“A letter from a Mrs. Fitzgerald,” said James, folding it up and putting it into its envelope. “She lives at Monks Row, in Pigeonsford Village.”

“For God’s sake, man, who is this Mrs. Fitzgerald?”

“I’ve no idea,” said James, opening his eyes very wide. “But she writes a filthy letter.”

“Well, whatever it is, has it got a bearing on Fran’s disappearance? I haven’t any time to waste.”

“It may have,” said James, apparently quite unable to hurry. “She says she was at the inquest yesterday, and she makes some very low suggestions about Fran’s behaviour there. She also suggests that Fran is what she calls my paramore, and she says that it’s disgusting to see an English girl keeping a German dog. I think she believes Fran and Aziz are a couple of Fifth Columnists.”

Cockie groaned aloud. “Well, what has this to do with her disappearance? Do you suppose that this woman has carried Fran off?” He looked round the room, frantically longing for action, yet unable to see any action he could take. “What has the letter to do with it?”

James looked surprised. “I thought you’d have seen my point; you know Fran almost as well as I do… It wouldn’t be like her to leave this letter unanswered, would it?”

Cockie sat down on the bed and mopped his brow. “You mean…? You think…?”

“Well, she isn’t much of a hand at writing letters,” said James.

They met her trotting up the drive, quite complacent and happy. “I do hope your bull-dog didn’t get restive, Cockie. I simply had to get away from him for a few minutes. I—I had some business to do in the village; as you wouldn’t let me go there with anyone, I had to go by myself. I asked him to let me go to the huh-ha, and then I just hopped out of the window.”

Cockrill was beside himself with rage. “You have given me and everybody else in the house a very bad fright indeed. Your grandmother’s nearly off her head, your sister’s distracted, Mr. Pendock’s like a madman, and only your precious Captain Nicholl is as cool as a cucumber, choosing his words and drawling them out at the rate of one a minute. I’ve a good mind to put you in gaol for this, by God I have, Francesca!”

Fran was horrified, terrified, penitent. Tears poured down her face as she embraced them all in turn. “Darlings, I’m so sorry; I never thought for a moment that you might think something had happened to me. Pen darling, I’m so sorry; don’t look so white and shaky, you’re making me feel perfectly awful. Gran darling, I’m
so
sorry; Cockie dear…”

“Don’t you so-sorry me,” said Cockrill, flinging a newly rolled cigarette into the fire in his agitation. “You’ve behaved abominably, and if you didn’t think, you should have. I’ve a good mind, a very good mind, to put you in prison; at least you’d be safe there, and out of mischief too. What were you doing in the village?”

Fran’s face went pink. “I went to see a woman called Mrs. Fitzgerald. She wrote me a most horrible letter, and I had to go and tell her that she was wrong…”

“Good God, child, because some evil-minded villager makes ugly suggestions about you and Nicholl…”

She looked at him through her tears. “Oh, it wasn’t
that.
What does it matter if she thinks James and I have had an occasional bodge. It was much worse than that.”

For one wild moment Pendock thought she was upset by the ridiculous things that had been said about her dog; but as he held out his hand to her, she flung herself into his arms and sobbed out against his shoulder that of
course
she hadn’t meant to be cruel about Pippi and poor Miss Morland, of course she hadn’t meant to sneer at them and suggest that nobody had cared for them, or that they hadn’t got any friends; couldn’t people understand that she only wanted to be honest—not to be hypocritical, not to say a lot of sloppy, idiotic things about them just because they were dead…

He knew that any shoulder would have done, that she would have dragged anybody’s handkerchief out of their breast-pocket, and dried her eyes on it and smiled up, sniffing gratefully, into their eyes. But he held her in his arms, and she lay trembling against his heart; and he was, for a little while, happier and more satisfied than he had been for many months past.

A man strolled unconcernedly into the little station at Tenfold and asked for a ticket to Piddleport, the next station along the line. It was a clear and moonlit night; he spent the few minutes before the 11:25 was due, in chatting to the porter-cum-ticket-collector, and when the train came in, spoke a few words to the guard, and climbed aboard. As they began to move he stood up on the seat in the otherwise empty carriage and, removing the blue-painted bulb from its socket in the ceiling, laid it carefully in a corner; five minutes later he opened the door of the carriage and climbed out on to the running-board; two minutes later he let go his hold and, pushing himself backwards and away from the train, tumbled into a ditch by the side of the line; one minute later he was running, a hand clasped to his shoulder, across the lawns towards the little summer-house in the Pigeonsford grounds.

James knocked softly on the library door. “I say, Inspector, could I have a word with you?”

“Come in, Captain Nicholl,” said Cockie cheerfully. He was refreshed by a good night’s sleep and, moreover, he thought that now, with a little more checking up, he could lay his murderer neatly by the heels. “What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to go into Tenfold,” said James, with anxious modesty. “I wondered if you could just let me off for an hour or two. I’ll take my watch-dog, if I must… in fact I’m getting so fond of him that I don’t like to think of being without him.”

“What do you want in Tenfold?” asked Cockrill, swivelling to and fro as gaily as a schoolboy in Pendock’s desk-chair.

“Well, I wanted—to tell you the truth, Inspector, you’ll think it very comic, no doubt, but I’ve got a rather snappy theory about how these murders were committed. I just wanted to work out the details, and then I’ll tell you all about it—if you’re interested.”

Cockie grinned at him mockingly. “Well, well, well; you’re turning into a Sherlock Holmes, are you? It may interest you to know that I also have a very interesting theory as to how the murders were done, Captain Nicholl; but as it doesn’t concern you, I don’t see why you shouldn’t have a little jaunt. Your theory takes you to Tenfold, does it?”

James lowered his eyes and was understood to say that it was, vaguely, connected with Tenfold.

“All right. Go along. You needn’t take Johnson, unless you’re really so much attached to him that you can’t bear to be parted. I make only one stipulation: that you don’t mention this theory of yours to anyone else until I tell you that you may. Anything else you want?”

“No, no, rather not,” said James, making joyfully for the door. “It’s very good of you to let me go. Thanks awfully. Nothing else I want at all.” He seemed quite animated.

“I thought you might want to borrow a bicycle,” said Cockie, still with his mocking smile.

James had, as a matter of fact, already borrowed a bicycle. He pedalled majestically down the drive and through the village, and began the ascent of the downs beyond. Half a mile onwards, on the fringe of the rolling grassland, he came upon a solitary small disused hut and, dismounting, wheeled his bicycle in and propped it against the crumbling wall. A bus was coming down the hill past Pigeonsford, and in ten minutes would be through the village and climbing the hill towards him. He began to examine the shed.

Part of the roof was intact and would have kept the earthy floor free from rain or snow. In the dry dust he could distinctly see the marks of the treads of a bicycle tyre; against the wall where his own borrowed machine now stood, there were smears where another had recently been propped; in the dust was a skid-mark as though it had been lifted away from the wall, the wheel brushing along the ground. He lit a cigarette and strolled out on to the downs.

The bus overtook him and he signalled to it to stop. Twenty minutes later he alighted in Tenfold village, and making his way to the railway station, asked the time of the next train to Piddleport.

The porter looked at him oddly, but vouchsafed that there was one in an hour. “You don’t get many people travelling from here, I suppose?” said James with elaborate carelessness, and proffered a cigarette.

The porter refused the cigarette and replied that they did not.

“What’s the last train?” asked James, pursuing a more definite line of inquiry. “Would that be the 11:25?”

The porter said that it would.

“Pretty empty, I suppose?” said James again, lighting his own cigarette. The porter replied that it was and it wasn’t.

James sighed patiently; this seemed to be getting them nowhere, fast. He leant uncomfortably against the doorpost, opposite what was fast becoming his adversary, and jingled the money in his pockets, searching for inspiration. Inspiration came.

“Those snowy nights there must have been nothing doing at all?” he suggested, producing half a crown, and beginning to toss it nonchalantly and catch it in the same hand.

The effect was magical. There had been very little doing indeed, said the porter immediately, thrusting his cap to the back of his head and settling himself more comfortably against his side of the doorpost. The night that poor Miss Morland from Pigeonsford Cottage had been killed, had been very cold, though you couldn’t call it snowy: only ’arf a dozen people had come on to the platform; most of them would be going through to Medlicombe, he supposed, for that was the only big station beyond Piddleport. No one he knew; but then he hadn’t been here long and hardly knew any but the Tenfold people by sight. The next night was colder still and really snowing ’ard. He remembered particular, because only three people had caught the train: a lady and a gent together and a gent who had run on to the platform at the last minute and fair snatched the ticket out of his hand and bolted into an empty carriage. Pore old soul, he was puffing and panting that hard that the porter had made sure he would bust a gut before ever he got aboard. He didn’t remember having seen ’im before, unless it was on the previous night—the night Miss Morland died—when a rather similar old gent had made one of the six. He wiped his hand across his mouth and opined that talking was always thirsty work.

So remarkable a collection and presentation of just the facts he wanted, appeared to James to warrant assuagement of however handsome a thirst. He paid up accordingly and made his way out of the village.

A great deal of questioning failed to elicit the address of Bunsen’s aged sister. He knew that she was unmarried, but a Miss Bunsen was unknown to anyone in Tenfold. He explained at last that the lady was old, and very ill, and finally that her brother was butler to Mr. Stephen Pendock of Pigeonsford House. The village rocked with laughter and informed him that he wanted Miss Burner.

There was definitely only one lady answering to his description, and James made his way, discomfited, to Miss Burner’s cottage. A district nurse opened the door to him and said that that was nice, because now he could sit with the patient while she popped out for some Benger’s Food.

Bunsen’s sister reminded James a little of Lady Hart, nor was she any less gracious or self-assured. She received him charmingly, and there was a little subdued merriment over his very natural difficulty in locating her. Her brother, she said with affectionate candour, was perhaps not very quick to take a joke and had never quite understood; but years ago, when they were little girls, dear Miss Venetia Hart, that was, and her sister, Miss Fran, they had christened him Bunsen, and she did believe that Mr. Pendock had forgotten that he had ever had any other name. Hadn’t the gentleman heard his real name at the Inquest?