Designs on Life (16 page)

He was not, until he reached it, looking for a murderer, but only for the motive for a suicide. Yet as soon as he had entered the Bournes’ sitting-room, he started to ask himself certain questions. Why, for instance, did a patch of the carpet look as if it had been recently washed? Why was the heavy brass poker on the hearth so bright that it could only have been cleaned that morning, when the other fire-irons and the brass fender had the faint tarnish which in the atmosphere of Bardley clouded metal surfaces after a day or two? Why were Mary Bourne’s eyelids swollen with weeping and her eyes blank with fear?

Oliver Bourne had not yet come home from the school. When the inspector, accompanied by a self-effacing sergeant, rang the doorbell, Mary had been sitting by the fire, mending one of Roddie’s jerseys, while Roddie had been playing in a corner, adding a wing to his cathedral. He took no notice of the inspector’s arrival, or of the things that he and Mary said to one another about Sidney Sankey, for when Roddie set to work, designing, building, creating, he was wholly absorbed. Even when his mother and the stranger started talking about him he did not pay much attention, because, of course, as people always did, they just talked about how dangerous it was for a little boy like him to be playing with matches, and that was pretty boring.

“Yes, we were worried to death when he started it,” Mary said, “and we tried to get him interested in bricks and Meccano and everything else we could think of. And I suppose that was our mistake. The more we tried to keep matches away from him, the more set he was on matches and nothing but matches. You know how children are. And they were difficult to keep away from a boy who’s as active as he is. He’d find them wherever we hid them. So we gave in and got him to promise he’d only play with the ones we gave him and only in the corner over there, away from the fire.”

“And he keeps his promises?” the inspector asked.

“Oh yes,” Mary said. “A promise… “But that reminded her of the promise that Roddie had given her the day before and of what would happen if he broke it, and her voice dried up. She had to clear her throat before she could go on. “A promise is a very serious thing to a little boy.”

“And you give him safety matches,” the inspector said, “in the non-safety sort of box, so that he can’t possibly light them.”

Mary was surprised at how quickly he had guessed Oliver’s device for protecting Roddie from the dangerous consequences of his passion.

“Yes, and my husband uses up the non-safety matches on his pipe, keeping them in the safety match-boxes we’ve emptied,” she said, “and we leave them up there on the mantelpiece and Roddie never touches them because of his—his promise.” On that word her voice dried up again. She raised a hand that felt icy cold to her mouth.

She knew now what it was that she had forgotten the evening before when she had seen Oliver searching through Sidney’s pockets to recover the packet of cigarettes which he had guessed would inevitably have found their way there and which would certainly have Oliver’s fingerprints on it. She had forgotten the box of matches, which she had actually seen Sidney pocket at the same time as the cigarettes, as she came into the room with the tea-tray. She had forgotten them because she had not wanted to remember. With the unconscious craft of her new fear of her husband, she had kept her secret to herself until she knew that the police also knew it.

That they did know it was clear, for there were the two match-boxes, or two just like them, side by side in the inspector’s hand.

Oliver Bourne, coining in at that moment, saw them also, understood how he had blundered in his absent-mindedness, helping himself to one of Roddie’s boxes, and thought, as he had thought the day before, that he had again caught Mary in an act of betrayal. His rage was as sudden and violent as it had been the day before, yet it was still against Sidney Sankey and all that he had done to the Bournes, beginning with his crazy instruction of a child of five in the pleasure of playing with matches. It was at the image of Sidney Sankey that Oliver hurled his lighted cigarette, though where it fell was on Roddie’s cathedral.

It was as if Sankey’s dream of revenge, the dream that he had discarded in horror, had after all come true.

The cathedral roared into a sheet of flame. Mary screamed and snatched at Roddie. As she swung him away, one of his shoes caught a corner of the drawing-board on which the cathedral stood and overturned it on to the new net curtains that she had been hemming.

But it was not Roddie’s clothes, or Mary’s, that the flames leapt to consume. It was at Oliver, who was standing nearest, that they sprang, at the same moment as the quiet sergeant wrenched at the hearthrug and hurled it at the burning mass in an attempt to smother the flames.

He might have saved Bourne if Bourne had let him. But he only fought him off, trying madly to escape both from the man and the fire. And in a sense Bourne did escape from the police, for he died that night of shock and burns in the hospital.

Nobody saw the letter until they moved the dead old man. His head had covered it as he lay sprawled across the desk, and while the photographers had taken their photographs and the fingerprint men had done their work, the envelope had remained hidden. But when at last the ambulance men had lifted the body on to the stretcher to take it out of the room, there was the letter, lying on the blood-stained blotter, stamped and addressed.

A letter, of course, was to have been expected. It had been the absence of one that had given Detective Superintendent Mellor the itchy feeling that this was not the simple suicide that it had appeared at first glance. Suicides nearly always leave letters. And the dead man’s housekeeper, who had found the body after she had got home from a visit to her sister and had telephoned the police, had told them tearfully that Mr. Crick was the kindest of men, the most considerate. But it was not the act of a kind and considerate man to end his life without leaving behind the letter that said that no one but himself was to blame for his death.

However, there was the letter on the desk, so perhaps it was suicide after all.

The envelope was slightly splashed with blood and the writing on it was shaky, but it was perfectly legible and it was addressed to Detective Superintendent Mellor.

That took him by surprise.

He had the envelope fingerprinted before he opened it and was told that there were only smudged prints on it, except for one on the stamp, and that the probability was that they had all been made by the dead man. It was the same with the single sheet of paper that Mellor found in the envelope.

The letter was brief.

“Sir, This is to confess to you that I am the murderer of Miss Christine Beddowes, of The Beeches, Grove Avenue. I will not go into my motive for killing her, except to say that I had thought that we were to be married, but apparently I was mistaken. Now I find that I cannot live with what I have done and am about to take my own life. I am, Yours, etc., A. Crick.”

Mellor showed the letter to Sergeant Arkell, who was standing beside him.

Arkell remarked, “Very formal. Signs it as if he was writing to the newspapers.”

“He was a solicitor,” Mellor said. “Perhaps that made him formal about murder. A. Crick—I wonder what the
A
stood for.”

“Arthur, sir.” The housekeeper, a wrinkled little woman who appeared, now that the body was gone from the room, to have lost the fear that she had had at first of coming into it, looked expectantly at Mellor, as if she hoped to be allowed to read the letter too.

He did not show it to her.

“Do you know a Miss Christine Beddowes?” he asked.

“Miss Beddowes who lives next door? Yes, of course I do,” she said.

“Did Mr. Crick know her well?”

“I don’t know what you mean by well,” she said. “He was a neighbourly sort of man, always said good morning and that kind of thing, but she wasn’t his sort.”

“In what way not his sort?”

She shrugged her shoulders in a way that expressed a certain disapproval of Miss Christine Beddowes.

Mellor put the letter back into its envelope.

“Well, it’s time we went next door,” he said to Arkell. “I suppose that’s where we’ll find her. There’s no point in trying to conceal a body if you’re going to kill yourself too straight after the murder—though it’s true the letter sounds as if he didn’t know he’d feel like suicide till after he’d done the job.”

“Murder?” the housekeeper cried. “Who’s talking about murder? Who murdered who?”

“That remains to be seen,” Mellor said. “But I’m afraid we’re going to find Miss Beddowes next door with a bullet through her brain. I hope to God he made a neat job of it. If there’s a thing I hate, it’s a messy shooting.”

Mellor strode out of the room and Arkell followed him.

They went next door to The Beeches, a spacious bungalow which was almost hidden from the street by a high beech hedge. But Mellor, as it turned out, had been only partly correct about what they would find there. He had been right in thinking that Miss Beddowes would be at home, but when she opened the door to them, it was evident that she had no bullet in her brain, or anywhere else in her well-proportioned body. She was a slender woman of about twenty-eight, with bright greenish eyes touched up with a good deal of eye-shadow, heavy, straight hair of a not very convincing shade of auburn, that fell to her shoulders, and she was wearing a pale green housecoat of some thick, luxurious-looking silk.

Mellor identified himself and the sergeant and asked if they might come in.

“Of course,” Miss Beddowes said. “I’m glad you came. I saw the police cars and the ambulance next door, and I knew something awful must have happened, and I thought of coming over to ask if I could help, but then I thought I’d only be in the way, and that if you wanted me you’d come here.” She led them into a big, bright sitting-room furnished with what Mellor thought were some very oddly shaped chairs and low tables, and with some strange sculptures standing about that consisted mainly of holes. “Has something happened to poor Mr. Crick?”

“He’s dead,” Mellor said. “Shot, sitting at his desk. His housekeeper found him.”

“Shot? D’you mean he shot himself? He committed suicide?” Her voice went high and shrill. Her voice was the least attractive thing about her. It was high and nasal. “But why? Why ever should he do a thing like that?”

“His letter said it was a suicide,” Mellor replied. “But it also said he’d murdered you, which happens not to be true. So perhaps the rest of it isn’t true either. What do you think about that, Miss Beddowes? We thought perhaps you could help us to sort it out. First, had you ever been engaged to him? His letter implied that you had. Had you broken it off recently?”

She sank down into one of the deep armchairs, the skirt of her housecoat flowing out around her.

“I don’t understand it,” she said. “He wrote that he’d murdered me? Whatever could he have been thinking about? And we were never engaged—certainly not. Well, that’s to say… ” Her fingers plucked at the silk of her skirt. There was rather more tension in her face than Mellor had noticed at first. “Perhaps it’s just possible he misunderstood our friendship. It never occurred to me before, but he was an old-fashioned sort of man, you know. He may have taken me more seriously than I realised. How sad—how terribly sad. Because his mind must have gone at the end, mustn’t it, if he believed he’d murdered me? And he was such an intelligent man.”

“When did you see him last?” Mellor asked.

“Two or three days ago,” she said. “At the weekend. Yes, it was on Sunday. He came in for a drink before lunch, as he often did.”

“Did you quarrel?”

“Oh no. No, it was all just as usual. I think we talked mainly about our gardens. We generally did. We hadn’t much else in common. He didn’t stay for long.”

“How long have you known him, Miss Beddowes?”

“About a year. He called on me with a basket of vegetables from his garden soon after I moved in. He was always very kind. He was a widower, you know, and I think he was lonely.”

“But on Sunday he seemed to you quite normal? Not depressed, not excitable, not overwrought?”

She gave a shake of her head. But then she frowned.

“As a matter of fact, I did wonder if he wasn’t feeling well. He was more silent than usual. But I didn’t give it much thought. He was a quiet sort of man.”

“You see, he did a rather strange thing this evening,” Mellor said. “Apart, I mean, from confessing to a murder that he hadn’t got around to committing. He put a stamp on the letter he left on his desk, addressed to me. I find that distinctly strange.”

“A stamp?” she said. “Is there anything strange about putting a stamp on a letter?”

“Who was going to post that letter?” he asked. “Not Mr. Crick himself. And when his housekeeper found him, as he must have known she would, she called the police in the natural way, by telephone.”

Miss Beddowes gave a bewildered shake of her head. “I don’t understand. I can only think that if he was in the state of mind to think that he’d murdered me, he didn’t know what he was doing.”

“Of course, that’s possible,” Mellor agreed.

“A stamp’s a very small thing,” she said.

“Very small. All the same, I’d like to know how you spent the evening, Miss Beddowes. Say from about eight o’clock to ten.”

She stiffened in her deep chair. “How
I
spent it? What are you thinking of?”

“I’m thinking,” Mellor said, “that Mr. Crick, having a legal sort of mind and wanting to leave everything in proper order, might have written his letter to me earlier in the evening, intending to come here, kill you, then on his way home post his letter—there’s a letter-box just outside, I noticed—then go home and kill himself. But something prevented him doing what he intended. Somebody could have known just what he was going to do and got into his house and shot him before he himself could commit murder.”

“Someone?” She pressed a finger against her breast, pointing at herself. “Me? You’re thinking of me?”

“I only asked you how you spent the evening,” he answered.