Any Shape or Form (15 page)

“Delighted.” As he crossed the room, his wife watched him. When he had gone, she turned to Redfield; now serious and sympathetic, she showed for the first time what must have been part of her professional quality: “Mr. Redfield, this is a terrible thing. If there weren't any ladies present I'd say a hell of a thing.”

“Yes, it's very bad for us all.”

“The cops don't seem to know what they're doing.”

“They're puzzled; we all are. Now of course you'll be staying tonight. Let me see—we must rearrange—”

“Oh, no, thanks,” said Mrs. David. “I have a room engaged in the inn at Old Bridge. I'll just get on my bike and go there. I'll be coasting half the way, from what I remember of the trip up.”

“But I absolutely must insist—!'

“No, thanks. I have no luggage or anything, and I wouldn't put you out for anything. You must be pretty well upset now.”

“Well, the Drummonds are staying; but—did you get your suitcases, Blanche?”

Blanche Drummond, who had been gazing at Mrs. David Malcolm as if in a fearful fascination, said yes, the suitcases had come.

“The Drummonds have the suite next to mine, in the south wing,” chattered Redfield, “with a bath between. I could put you in the corner room, and you could share the bath with Mrs. Drummond. And Walter Drummond could go into the yellow room at the head of the stairs, and share
my
bath.”

“No, thanks,” repeated Mrs. David. “I haven't even a toothbrush.”

“I might lend you something, Freddy,” said Cora Malcolm in a dry voice.

“I'd split the seams, dearie,” said Mrs. Malcolm. “No, I'll just wander off. The cops want me to come back tomorrow, so I'll be here. It's mighty kind of you, Mr. Redfield, but when you come right down to it, I wasn't invited and there isn't any reason from your point of view that I should have been. I guess everybody including myself will be perfectly satisfied to have me down at the inn.”

Malcolm came in carrying a big silver tray, which he had loaded with a siphon, a bottle of whisky, glasses, and ice. He set it down on the table which Abigail had cleared of her cards. Redfield got up and went to help him pour drinks.

“Are the police making you stay here?” asked Mrs. David, addressing Gamadge with a certain interest.

“No, my cousin Abigail and I are going home. She lives just down the hill.” Gamadge came to light her cigarette.

“What lets you out?” she inquired in a confidential tone.

“We didn't know the deceased lady well enough to murder her,” replied Gamadge, also lowering his voice.

“That's why they're letting me off.”

Redfield had approached with her highball, and caught her last remark. “But why on earth
should
they detain you, Mrs. David?” he asked.

She took the glass from him and drank some of its contents with every sign of gratification. Then she wiped her lips with her handkerchief and answered Johnny in her earlier manner—the raffish one: “Well, I got to Rivertown a little early, at three-two. I had a picnic in the woods, and I kept off the highways, and I might have been right on hand when the tragedy occurred. They don't think I was, of course, but they want me to stick around until they find the other outsider—the one that really shot Mrs. Archibald Malcolm.”

Everybody in the room was looking at her, and a long silence followed her speech. Then Blanche Drummond said: “What an extraordinary coincidence: Your happening to come up to Rivertown when you did, and then going off on a bicycle for the whole afternoon.”

Mrs. David Malcolm took another gulp of highball, took another cigarette from a box offered by Gamadge, and looked about her. David Malcolm came forward with a lighted match. She accepted the light from him without acknowledgment, looked at Blanche Drummond through smoke, and then replied:

“No coincidence, Mrs. Er…I came up because I heard that my husband and his sister had come, and I knew they were coming to meet their stepmother. I wanted to find out right away whether she was really going to give them two thousand apiece a year. I was interested. It would mean that I could live decently without wearing my feet off in some hospital. These war times, you have no idea; and I'm tired of private work.”

“But nursing is such a wonderful job,” said Blanche, in a gentle, admiring tone. “I don't see how you can want to give it up.”

Mrs. David Malcolm looked at her for some moments, then drained her glass and put it down. “I'll try to get along without it,” she said, “when Dave gets his money.”

“If, Freddy, if!” Malcolm came and took her glass away to be refilled. “The word at present seems to be ‘if.' My reversionary rights in my father's estate never looked more precarious.”

“You're the damndest fool,” observed his wife equably. “Never mind, I've got you and Cora out of worse jams than this, you might remember. I'll stick around and get you out of this one.”

Cora said: “Freddy, did you really think we'd try to cheat you?”

Redfield, unable to bear the turn the conversation had taken, sputtered: “Mrs. David! These young people—always speak of you with the deepest gratitude. We all know what you did for them—”

She interrupted in her casual way: “Nineteen forty is a long time ago, Mr. Redfield.”

Abigail got up. “I'll be going on home, Johnny. Telephone me tomorrow when I'm wanted.”

He went up to her and took her hands: “Abby, I can't tell you how much I regret all this for you!”

“It's not as bad for me as for the rest.”

“I'll just get you a torch.”

He bustled after her into the hall. Gamadge drained his highball, said good night, and followed them, to find Griggs assisting at the conversation in the living room from the wings—i.e., a position outside the door—while Redfield rooted in the stair cupboard and Abby waited on the front doorstep.

Griggs took hold of Gamadge's arm: “Would you come back?”

“If you want me. Why?”

“This woman—this Mrs. David Malcolm. I'd like to talk her over. I can't make her out. She hasn't a ghost of an alibi, and you might say she has a motive, and her excuse for being here is thin. But she's so cocky I don't make her out. I'm having them watch her to Old Bridge, and watch the inn.”

“I supposed you would.”

“Can you come back after you've seen Miss Ryder home?”

“If you like, of course.”

Johnny produced the torch, and Gamadge and Abigail went off into the freshness of the night. Abigail, who never risked being overheard by persons she wished to discuss, waited until they had left the house behind, and then spoke in a tone of quiet horror:

“That frightful woman. That nurse.”

“Not a type you're accustomed to, Abby.”

“Can it be a type? I shouldn't think there could be others! Where can she have come from? She's a barbarian; where can she have had her training?”

“You can remain quite a barbarian if you really try, training or no training,” said Gamadge.

“That unfortunate boy couldn't have been more than twenty-one or -two when she roped him in.”

“I suppose he was glad enough to hang on to that rope she threw him when he was in that ditch on the French road.”

“Any decent human being would do what she did for them if possible. And she reminds them of it!”

“Ought they to need reminding?”

“How old can she be?”

Gamadge's torch was picking out pine cones and fallen leaves on the trail. He said: “About Blanche Drummond's age, probably. Thirty-five, I should say.”

Abby was silent for a minute. At last she said: “I hope you don't mean to compare them?”

“Well—I don't think, Abby, that Mrs. David Malcolm is any tougher than Blanche is about money.”

“Henry, how can you talk like that? How can you? Think of that marriage! He was probably half out of his wits in that hospital, and his sister couldn't bear the match and came home first. Blanche—Blanche—she's just lost her head. She'll get over it. It's just a fancy. It's not for
money.
How could it be, when he's so obviously tired of the whole thing?”

“You saw the whole thing?”

“Certainly not, just a glimpse or two last summer and today.”

“Until now it's been the men who have run after Blanche. Do you think she'll easily believe that he can be tired—for keeps?”

“I certainly don't believe that Blanche Drummond would commit a crime for money!”

“You only think Mrs. David Malcolm would because she's so ill-bred.”

“Henry, you do annoy me. Wouldn't you
prefer
it to be Mrs. David Malcolm?”

Gamadge said gloomily that if it came to that he never liked to see bounders brought low. “Unless they're criminals, of course; and even then it's so awful when they cringe.”

“I never can make you out. It's much more tragic for the other kind.”

“Exactly. And they can stand it better.”

Miss Ryder stopped talking; it was in silence that they arrived at the cottage.

Gamadge saw her safely in, saw that her old cook was in, lighted lights, locked windows, told Abigail to forget about him until morning, and at a quarter to ten climbed the hill back to Idlers.

When he reached the gap in the Redfield hedge he noticed a faint wandering light somewhere in the grounds. He put his face against the wire where he had put it that afternoon, and was startled when the figure of Apollo shone out from the darkness, glowing as with the phosphorescence of decay. The light vanished, to reappear lower down, and Gamadge remembered that there was a policeman in the grounds.

“I'm getting the creeps, as usual,” he told himself, “and why not?”

He found the kitchen end of the house in darkness, and saw a light in the Debenhams' cottage. They had finished work for tonight.

Stromer open the front door for him. “Mr. Redfield and the lieutenant are in the studio,” he said. “Everybody else went up to bed early—Mrs. Drummond quit first and started the rest of them. That blonde of Malcolm's was too much for the party.”

Gamadge, raising an eyebrow, went through the living room to find Griggs slowly pacing the length of the studio, and Redfield sitting near the fire. He looked up. “Well, Gamadge, thank God the day's almost over. Get yourself a drink, will you, if you want one? I'm exhausted. That woman—she's too much for me. How did the boy ever bring himself—but those are the things one never understands. I don't know what I supposed she was like—some untutored little person, harmless but tiring, with a certain ephemeral charm. But this...! Griggs, why don't you drop all the nonsense about the Malcolm children, and concentrate on her? She's truly terrifying. She'd do anything. She's probably murdered half a dozen rich patients for their cash and jewelry.”

“I'm concentrating on her,” said Griggs. “Gloves, for instance—a nurse would think of gloves right away. She packed a gun in France, told me so. Doesn't care what she tells me. She's so impudent that I'm afraid she
has
an alibi, and wants us to arrest her and make fools of ourselves. She just grins at me and asks how she could have known she'd get a shot at Mrs. Malcolm with a rifle. And if she's in collusion with those twins, all I can say is that they're all better actors than Shakespeare.”

Nobody correcting this slip, he went on:

“Wasn't it Malcolm that suggested the crow shooting, Mr. Redfield?”

“He simply expressed a wish for a rifle, after I'd complained of the crows. I was as much to blame for the crow shooting as he was. Shouldn't you say so, Gamadge?”

Gamadge replied that as he remembered it, the whole thing was quite casual and unpremeditated.

“The woman asked me that question,” said Redfield, “while I was taking her up to her room.”

Gamadge, who had an arm on the mantel, gripped the ledge with his hand as he turned to look down at the speaker. “While you
what
?”

“Oh, that's true, you aren't abreast with the times at all.” Redfield made a face of wry amusement. “She stayed.”

“Mrs. David Malcolm is staying here tonight?”

“Didn't you hear me invite her?” Redfield gave a short laugh.

“But she refused; and I must say, Johnny, that although you were doing your best, your invitation was perfunctory.” Gamadge's hand dropped from the mantelshelf, and he sat down opposite Redfield. “She reconsidered?”

“Well, you'll be as surprised as I was, Gamadge; Blanche persuaded her.”

Gamadge stared.

“Fact, absolute fact, and I was never so surprised in my life. After you'd gone she came and sat down beside Mrs. David, told her how rotten the inn is—it's no great shakes, I'm afraid, they don't seem to have even their quota of meat, unless they eat it all themselves—and said she had a little silk wrapper in her bag that Mrs. David could certainly use for a nightgown.”

“And Malcolm's wife accepted the offer of the little silk wrapper and the other half of Blanche's suite?”

“Yes; she said she liked the idea of a good bed after all. So Blanche went up to unpack the wrapper, and I took Mrs. David up and installed her. I didn't rout out poor Tilly. I apologized for it, or tried to, but Mrs. D. wouldn't listen; said she was capable of turning her own bed down. Blanche came in with the wrapper, Mrs. D. approved, and Blanche retired. I investigated the stores in the bathroom, and then bowed myself out.”

Gamadge said after a pause: “If it's not too much of an imposition, Johnny, I'll ask you to put
me
up—a sofa will do.”

“My dear boy, delighted. Sofa? You'll be comfortable on the day bed in my study upstairs, and we shan't bother each other—the bath's between us. But…” He frowned. “May I ask why? The woman may very well be a murderer, and I'm not too happy about having her here; but we have Stromer, and we have Griggs.”