Eight Murders In the Suburbs (24 page)

There floated in her mind's eye the day of her mother's funeral. All that trouble having a baby and struggling to bring her up in decency, and then have a man wear her as a hair shirt! Her hand closed on a table knife. A moment later, she dropped it and giggled. How silly! You couldn't kill anybody with a table knife.

She could go back to London again. She would need a refresher course. She would also need, she now understood, a strength of character which was beyond her reach. Actually, of course, she would go on being a hair shirt. The niche reserved for the housing of her self respect had been walled up, so it didn't matter any more what she did.

The mind of Elsie Potter was barely capable of grasping a moral abstraction. She did not put it to herself that Jeremy Grantham was subjecting her personality to a form of protracted murder from which, being herself, she could not escape. In its own thought forms, her intuition perceived that he was using her as a guinea pig for an experiment in moral rectitude—that to him her hopes and fears, her good and ill temper and her attempts at companionship, were all part of the experiment.

Nor, at this stage, did she consciously set herself to the task of murdering him. She was a creature of reaction. She found herself spending more and more time in day-dreaming about killing. Just killing in general.

In this matter the films were obviously unreliable. You shot a man; and if he was a bad man he died at once. But if he was a good man he often turned out to be only slightly wounded, or at least he lived long enough to deliver one of those speeches that sometimes made you cry. Perhaps Jeremy would be rated as a good man. Anyhow, she hadn't a gun.

The fantasy persisted throughout the winter. Her self-respect, which had given no trouble when it had a niche of its own, now asserted itself in a disturbing manner. She was eating and sleeping badly. At times she would wander about the house for an hour on end: at other times she would sit stock still neglecting her few duties, thinking of nothing at all.

The sudden passing of her melancholy can be timed, almost to the minute. It occurred at a little after half-past ten on the first night of June, 1934. They had been to the pictures. On the hall table, addressed to Grantham, was a brown paper package, much bespattered with sealing wax.

“That's the Report Book!” said Grantham. “Bewley must have brought it just after we left. That means the committee are in a hurry. We shall have to look sharp about filling it in.”

“We can begin now, if you like?” said Elsie indifferently.

“Certainly not! You're tired, my dear, and so am I. You can start on it tomorrow while I'm at the office. It's—hm! ten thirty-one, to be precise. The staff has gone to bed.” And then came that dreadful little speech he made every night throughout the summer months. “I may as well go and turn off the gas main. No need to take unnecessary risks!”

Gas was used for cooking and for stoves in the upper rooms. In the winter, it was left on at the main because they liked to use the stove when going to bed. The hypothetical risk of fire was no greater in summer than in winter. Yet, nearly every night of summer he had that absurd little excuse about unnecessary risk. If only he would put it into other words sometimes—

The gas!

It was as if the words had been shouted inside her brain. The listlessness slipped from her with her cloak. The childish fantasies of guns and poison and pushing people over cliffs vanished in a clear-cut plan. Every detail flashed instantly into place, making a single picture in her mind's eye.

Grantham had put the package in the morning room and passed through the baize door to the kitchen quarters. Elsie hurried up to their bedroom, whipped off an undergarment and thrust it into the flue of the gas stove, above the asbestos and out of sight.

Jeremy's bed was nearer the gas stove. She would have to walk round in the dark. She measured the distance with her eye—had time to pace it out before he appeared. She did not know that she was smiling.

“Elsie, my dear, you look happy!”

“Do I! I expect that's because I feel better.”

“I am so very glad. When you are miserable, I get the feeling that everything I have tried to do for you has achieved nothing.”

That was what made him miserable—the fear that the experiment was failing and that he was wearing the hair shirt for nothing. She warned herself not to get angry with him or he might lie awake.

She succeeded in keeping him pleased with himself and he did not lie awake. She had suffered much from his snoring, before she had grown used to it, but now she was glad of it. She slipped out of bed, took her measured paces to the gas stove. The films were reliable instructors in the danger of fingerprints, so she turned on the tap of the gas stove with the hem of her nightdress.

Shutting the window was the next step. If the sashes screamed as they did sometimes the noise might wake even Jeremy and she would have to say that she was too hot and was trying to open it wider.

She applied pressure gradually and the sashes did not scream. The snoring maintained its even timing. The door was ever so much easier than the window.

On her way downstairs in the dark, two of the stairs creaked. Even if the servants heard it on the top floor, which was unlikely, they would take no notice.

In the hall, she stood for a minute or more in the dark, listening. Then she passed through the baize door to the kitchen quarters. She did not turn on the light. The blinds had not been drawn, and there was enough light from the stars.

In the act of touching the main tap, she snatched back her hand. Over the sink, a dishcloth was hanging, to dry. With the cloth, she turned the main tap full on. With the cloth, too, she turned one of the taps of the cooker, to check: when the low hiss of the gas told her that she had made no mistake, she turned it off. She replaced the dishcloth on the hanger above the sink.

Back through the baize door to the morning room, which Jeremy called his study. She sat down and contemplated the fact that the gas was flowing up the pipe into the room in which Jeremy was sleeping.

The servants would get up at seven, and at eight would bring early tea for Jeremy. She must sit in that chair until half-past six. It was now only a little past midnight.

Suppose she failed? Suppose Jeremy woke up before the gas had time to kill him and came downstairs and found her there? She laughed silently. She would tell him that she had tried to kill him—and let him see if he could make amends for that!

He wanted to make her happy. He would succeed, tomorrow. She gave little thought to the life of well-fed indolence, believing that the law compelled a husband to make provision for his wife.

She began to wonder why the dawn was so long in coming. With summer-time, you ought to be able to see it at about three, in June. Again and again her eyes travelled to the window. Then the clock in the hall struck one.

I've been here less than an hour, she told herself with the first twinge of anxiety. She had no idea that time could drag like that. Sitting alone and quiet in the dark, suppose she were to fall asleep in that chair? The danger was too real to be ignored. She adjusted the window blinds, then turned on the light, determined to do something that would occupy her mind.

To occupy her mind was no easy task, even when others were co-operating. She looked round the room. There were plenty of Jeremy's books, but these, she knew by experience, positively induced sleep. Finally she hit on an intelligent compromise. You never dropped off to sleep when you were writing. And there was the Report Book for the committee which Jeremy had asked her to work on during the day.

She was soon immersed in the work. There were the names, numbers, of everybody who had taken part in last year's Fair—local notabilities, local nobodies and stall and booth holders. Page after page contained blanks for figures and comments to be filled in from the secretary's notes. She had done all the filing herself under Jeremy's direction. Millard's name occurred among the locals, with a suggestion that he should be invited to join the committee. She looked at Jeremy's note. There were two notes, one of which had been struck out. This she promptly deciphered—four lines to the effect that Millard was a man of substance and a good mixer. The later note, dated ten days previously, was in different vein:
‘Objection: Financially v. insecure.'

She bore Millard no malice for calling her a hair shirt. That very morning she had let him linger at her coffee-table for a couple of minutes: he had stuck to the safe topic of the next Fair. To bar him because, one day, he might be hard up seemed a very mean sort of reason. Against Millard's name she wrote
‘Recommended.'

Dawn broke unnoticed by Elsie. By twenty past six she had finished the whole job. Illogically, she felt pleased, because Jeremy had thought it would take both of them longer than five hours.

Presently she went upstairs. Damp towels, she suspected, would be useless against gas. She must hold her breath, or she would be killed herself. With one hand on the door knob, she took three slow, deep breaths.

Then she opened the door, shut it, went to the gas stove, removed her undergarment from the flue, and was back on the landing with the door shut, without having drawn breath.

After a brief rest, she again breathed deeply, then repeated her performance, except that this time she opened the window. She had not looked at Jeremy's bed, but she knew that he was not breathing.

She waited on the landing, listening for the servants' alarm clock. The moment she heard it begin to ring she slipped back into the bedroom and into bed, with her back to Jeremy's bed. The room smelt horribly of gas, and she kept her head under the bedclothes. She knew that she was risking her own life. The gas was still flowing into the stove. If it was going up the flue, she would live. If it was coming into the room she might die. There would be a full hour before Mildred came with the tea.

Her calculations were wrong on two points. First, that she underestimated the effect of the remaining gas which produced first nausea and then unconsciousness. Secondly she ignored the escape of gas when she had opened the door. The staff smelt it on the way downstairs. But it was twenty-five minutes to eight before they located the escape.

Elsie came to consciousness in the bed in the spare room with a doctor in attendance—which is to say that, at this stage, she was remarkably lucky.

The preliminary questioning by the police had been simple enough. Elsie was saved from nervous anxiety by her profound ignorance of the resources of the law. Her defence rested, as it were, on a simple formula: “I shall tell everything, except that I left the room—and let 'em get on with it.”

Nevertheless, the formula did not save her from a grilling in the coroner's court. She recognised the Coroner as one of Jeremy's friends, first seen at an early dinner party, who had ‘dropped off.' He asked her one or two unimportant questions, rather starchily, she thought. But it was the police solicitor who questioned her for nearly an hour, coming uncomfortably near the truth.

He had been instructed that there were no fingerprints of any kind on the main tap in the kitchen quarters: on the tap of the stove was a single impression made by the housemaid who had turned it off when she entered the bedroom, at seven thirty-five. There were other, unwritten instructions, delivered with a nod if not a wink, inspired by local gossip.

The solicitor puzzled Elsie by taking her through her own movements for the whole of the day preceding the discovery of Grantham's death.

“After breakfast, my husband left for the office as usual. I read the papers a bit, and then went shopping.”

Details were demanded of the shops visited and even of her purchases. Elsie was irritated but not in the least alarmed.

“This shopping expedition took two hours and ten minutes. Did you require all that time to purchase a few groceries and three pairs of stockings?”

“I don't know—I don't look at my watch that often!” She raised her wrist, glanced at her jewelled watch, shook it and began to wind it. “Besides, I did have morning coffee at Gentall's, and I don't suppose I hurried over it.”

“Quite so! You took coffee with a friend, perhaps?”

“No!” She hesitated. “Wait a minute—now I come to think of it, a friend did sit at my table for a few minutes before I left.”

“Now that you—come to think of it, Mrs. Grantham, can you tell us whether the friend was a woman—
or a man
?”

“It was a man, as a matter o' fact. But I don't see why we should drag his name into all this, especially as it will be in the papers, I daresay.”

The solicitor smiled at the jury with some eloquence. At an inquest there are few rules of evidence beyond those imposed by the sitting coroner—a legal anomaly which is sometimes exploited by the police, in the interests of justice.

“I will not press you for the name of your—er—friend, Mrs. Grantham. I will ask you only one question about him. Is he an expert—or rather, was he at one time an acknowledged expert—in
poison gases
?”

There was a rustling sound in the court. About a third of those present knew that Millard had been a senior gas officer.

“You are going too far, Mr. Tranter,” growled the Coroner. “Mrs. Grantham, you need not answer that question.”

“I couldn't even if I had to, because I don't know. And anyway, what we talked about was the Fair, which was all he wanted to see me about, knowing I helped my husband with the organisation work.”

The solicitor harked back to the time schedule, making her account for every moment of her day.

“On returning from the film theatre—at what time did you reach your home?”

“I can tell you exactly. As we came into the hall, my husband said it was too late for us to start doing anything. ‘It's ten thirty-one, to be exact,' he said, and suggested we should go straight to bed.”