Cover Her Face (26 page)

“She liked amusing herself with people,” said Felix. “They can be dangerous playthings. Obviously one of her dupes thought that the joke had gone far enough. It wasn’t you by any chance, was it Maxie?”

The tone was deliberately offensive and Stephen took a quick step towards him. But before he could answer they heard the clang of the front door-bell and the clock on the mantelpiece struck eight.

By common consent they met in the business room. Someone had arranged the chairs in a half circle around the heavy table, someone had filled the water carafe and placed it at Dalgliesh’s right hand. Sitting alone at the table with Martin behind him, Dalgliesh watched his suspects as they came in.

Eleanor Maxie was the most composed. She took a chair facing the light and sat, detached and at peace, looking out at the lawns and the far trees. It was as if her ordeal were already over. Stephen Maxie strode in, threw Dalgliesh a glance of mingled contempt and defiance, and sat down by his mother. Felix Hearne and Deborah Riscoe came in together but did not look at each other and sat apart. Dalgliesh felt that their relationship had subtly altered since the unsuccessful play-acting of the night before. He wondered that Hearne should have lent himself to so palpable a deceit. Looking at the darkening bruise on the girl’s neck, only half hidden by the knotted scarf, he wondered more at the force which Hearne had apparently found it necessary to use. Catherine Bowers came in last. She flushed as she saw their eyes on her and scurried
to the only vacant chair like an anxious probationer arriving late for a lecture. As Dalgliesh opened his dossier he heard the first slow notes of the church bell. The bells had been ringing when he first arrived at Martingale. They had sounded often as a background to his investigation, the mood music of murder. Now they tolled like a funeral bell and he wondered irrelevantly who in the village had died; someone for whom the bells were tolling as they had not tolled for Sally.

He looked up from his papers and began to talk in his calm deep voice.

“One of the most unusual features of this crime was the contrast between the apparent premeditation and the actual execution. All the medical evidence pointed to a crime of impulse. This was not a slow strangulation. There were few of the classical signs of asphyxiation. Considerable force had been used and there was a fracture of the superior cornu of the thyroid at its base. Nevertheless, death was due to vagal inhibition and was very sudden. It may well have taken place even if the strangler had used considerably less force. The picture on the face of it was of a single unpremeditated attack. This is borne out, too, by the use of hands. If a murderer intends to kill by strangulation, it is usually done with a cord, or with a scarf, or stocking, perhaps. This isn’t invariable, but you can see the reason for it. Few people can be confident of their ability to kill with the bare hands. There is one person in this room who might feel that confidence, but I don’t think he would have used this method. There are some effective ways of killing without a weapon and he would have known them.”

Felix Hearne murmured under his breath, “But that was in another country and besides, the wench is dead.” If Dalgliesh heard the quotation or sensed the slight tensing of muscles as
his audience controlled the impulse to look at Hearne he made no sign but went on quietly: “In contrast to this apparent impulse in the deed we were faced with the evidence of the attempted and partial drugging of the victim which certainly indicated an intention to render the girl insensible. This could have been with the object of getting into her bedroom more easily and without waking her or of murdering her in her sleep. I dismissed the theory of two separate and different attempts on her life in the same night. No one in this room had any reason to like Sally and some of you may even have reason to hate her. But it was straining credulity too far seriously to consider that two people chose the same night to attempt murder.”

“If we did hate her,” said Deborah quietly, “we weren’t the only ones.”

“There was that Pullen boy,” said Catherine. “You can’t tell me that there was nothing between them.” She saw Deborah wince at the solecism and went on belligerently.

“And what about Miss Liddell? It’s all over the village how Sally had found out something discreditable about her and was threatening to tell. If she could blackmail one she could blackmail another.”

Stephen Maxie said wearily: “I can hardly see poor old Liddell climbing up stack-pipes, or sneaking in at the back door, to face Sally alone. She wouldn’t have the nerve. And you can’t imagine her seriously setting out to kill Sally with her bare hands.”

“She might,” said Catherine, “if she knew that Sally was drugged.”

“But she couldn’t have known,” Deborah pointed out. “And she couldn’t have put that drug in Sally’s beaker, either. She and Eppy were leaving the house as Sally took the beaker up
to bed. And it was my beaker, she took, remember. Before that they were both in this room with Mummy.”

“She took your beaker in the same way that she copied your dress,” said Catherine. “But the Sommeil must have been put in it later. No one could want to drug you.”

“It couldn’t have been put in later,” said Deborah shortly. “What chance would there have been? I suppose one of us tiptoed in with Father’s bottle of tablets, pretended to Sally that it was just a cosy social call, and then waited until she was bending over the baby and popped a tablet or two into her cocoa. It doesn’t make sense.”

Dalgliesh’s quiet voice broke in: “None of it makes sense if the drugging and the strangling are connected. Yet, as I said, it was too great a coincidence that someone should have decided to strangle Sally Jupp on the same night as someone else set out to poison her. But there could be another explanation. What if this drugging were not an isolated incident? Suppose someone had regularly been doping Sally’s evening drink. Someone who knew that only Sally drank cocoa so that the Sommeil could safely be put into the cocoa tin. Someone who knew where the drug was kept and was experienced enough to use the right amount. Someone who wanted Sally discredited and out of the house, and could complain if she consistently overslept. Someone who had probably suffered more from Sally than the rest of the household realized and was glad of any action, however apparently ineffective, which would give her a sense of power over the girl. In a sense, you see, it was a substitute for murder.”

“Martha,” said Catherine involuntarily. The Maxies sat silent. If they had known or guessed, none of them gave a sign. Eleanor Maxie thought with compunction of the woman she had left weeping in the kitchen for her dead master. Martha
had stood up at her entrance, her thick coarse-grained hands folded over the apron. She had made no sign when Mrs. Maxie told her. The tears were the more distressing for their silence. When she spoke her voice had been perfectly controlled, although the tears still ran down her face and dripped over the quiet hands. With no fuss and without explanation she had given in her notice. She would like to leave at the end of the week. There was a friend in Herefordshire to whom she could go for a time. Mrs. Maxie had neither argued nor persuaded. That was not her way. But, bending now a courteous and attentive gaze on Dalgliesh, her honest mind explored the motives which had prompted her to exclude Martha from the death-bed and interested itself in this revelation that a loyalty that the family had all taken for granted had been more complicated, less acquiescent than any of them had suspected and had at last been strained too far.

Catherine was speaking. She was apparently without apprehension and was following Dalgliesh’s explanation as if he were expounding an interesting and atypical case history: “Martha could always get Sommeil of course. The family were appallingly careless over Mr. Maxie’s drugs. But why should she want to dope Sally on that particular night? After the scene at dinner Mrs. Maxie had more to worry about than Sally’s late rising. It was too late to get rid of her that way. And why did Martha hide the bottle under Deborah’s name-peg? I always thought she was devoted to the family.”

“So did the family,” said Deborah dryly.

“She drugged the cocoa again that night because she didn’t know about the proposed engagement,” said Dalgliesh. “She wasn’t in the dining-room at the time and no one told her. She went to Mr. Maxie’s room and took the Sommeil and hid it in a panic because she thought she had killed Sally with the
drug. If you think back you will realize that Mrs. Bultitaft was the only member of the household who didn’t actually enter Sally’s room. While the rest of you stood around the bed her one thought was to hide the bottle. It wasn’t a reasonable thing to do but she was beyond behaving reasonably. She ran into the garden with it and hid it in the first soft earth she found. It was meant, I think, to be a temporary hiding-place. That’s why she hastily marked it with the nearest peg. It was by chance that it happened to be yours, Mrs. Riscoe. Then she went back to the kitchen, emptied the remaining cocoa powder and the lining paper into the stove, washed out the tin and put it in the dustbin. She was the only person who had the opportunity to do these things. Then Mr. Hearne came into the kitchen to see if Mrs. Bultitaft was all right and to offer his help. This is what Mr. Hearne told me.” Dalgliesh turned a page of his dossier and read: “She seemed stunned and kept repeating that Sally must have killed herself. I pointed out that that was anatomically impossible and that seemed to upset her more. She gave me one curious look … and burst into loud sobbing.”

Dalgliesh looked up at his audience. “I think we can take it,” he said, “that Mrs. Bultitaft’s emotion was the reaction of relief. I suspect, too, that before Miss Bowers arrived to feed the child Mr. Hearne had coached Mrs. Bultitaft for the inevitable police questioning. Mrs. Bultitaft tells me that she didn’t admit to him or to any of you that she was responsible for drugging Sally. That may be true. It doesn’t mean that Mr. Hearne didn’t guess.

“He was quite ready, as he has been throughout the case, to leave well alone if it were likely to mislead the police. Towards the end of this investigation, with the faked attack on Mrs. Riscoe, he took a more positive line in attempting to deceive.”

“That was my idea,” said Deborah quietly. “I asked him. I made him do it.”

Hearne ignored the interruption and merely said: “I may have guessed about Martha. But she was perfectly truthful. She didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my affair.”

“No,” said Dalgliesh bitterly. “It wasn’t your affair.” His voice had lost its controlled neutrality and they looked up at him startled by his sudden vehemence.

“That has been your attitude throughout, hasn’t it? Don’t let’s pry into each other’s affairs. Don’t let’s be vulgarly interested. If we must have a murder let it be handled with taste. Even your efforts to hamper the police would have been more effective if you had bothered to find out a little more from each other. Mrs. Riscoe need not have persuaded Mr. Hearne to stage an attack on her while her brother was safely in London if that brother had confided in her that he had an alibi for the time of Sally Jupp’s death. Derek Pullen need not have tortured himself wondering whether he ought to shield a murderer if Mr. Stephen Maxie had bothered to explain what he was doing with a ladder in the garden on Saturday night. We finally got the truth from Pullen, but it wasn’t easy.”

“Pullen isn’t interested in shielding me,” said Stephen indifferently. “He just couldn’t bear not to behave like a little gent! You should have heard him telephoning to explain just how old-school-tie he was going to be. Your secret is safe with me, Maxie, but why not do the decent thing? Damn his insolence!”

“I suppose there’s no objection to us knowing what you were doing with a ladder?” inquired Deborah.

“Why should there be? I was bringing it back from outside Bocock’s cottage. We used it during the afternoon to retrieve one of the balloons which got caught up in his elm. You know what Bocock is. He would have dragged it up here first thing
in the morning and it’s too heavy for him. I suppose I was in the mood for a little masochism so I slung it over my shoulder. I wasn’t to know that I’d find Pullen lurking about in the old stables. Apparently he made a habit of it. I wasn’t to know, either, that Sally would be murdered and that Pullen would use his great mind to put two and two together and assume that I’d used the ladder to climb to her room and kill her. Why climb in anyway? I could have got through the door. And I wasn’t even carrying the ladder from the right direction.”

“He probably thought that you were trying to cast suspicion on an outside person,” suggested Deborah. “Himself, for instance.”

Felix’s lazy voice broke in: “It didn’t occur to you, Maxie, that the boy might be in genuine distress and indecision?”

Stephen moved uneasily in his chair. “I didn’t lose any sleep over him. He had no right on our property and I told him so. I don’t know how long he’d been waiting there but he must have watched me while I put down the ladder. Then he stepped out of the shadows like an avenging fury, and accused me of deceiving Sally. He seems to have curious ideas about class distinctions. Anyone would think I had been exercising
droit de seigneur
. I told him to mind his own business, only less politely, and he lunged at me. I’d had about as much as I could stand by then so I struck out and caught him on the eye, knocking off his spectacles. It was all pretty vulgar and stupid. We were too near the house to be safe so we daren’t make much noise. We stood there hissing insults at each other in whispers and grovelling around in the dust to find his glasses. He’s pretty blind without them so I thought I’d better see him as far as the corner of Nessingford Road. He took it that I was escorting him off the premises, but his pride would have been hurt either way so it didn’t matter much. By the time we came
to say good night he had obviously persuaded himself into what he imagined was an appropriate frame of mind. He even wanted to shake hands! I didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or to knock him down again. I’m sorry, Deb, but he’s that sort of person.”