Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman (11 page)

Bunty’s exclamation was drowned by the shriek of Dominic’s chair. He was on his feet, trembling.

“
No
!” he said faintly, and then, with the flat quietness of desperation: “Please, Dad, I’ve got to talk to you. It’s about that. It’s important.” He looked imploringly at his mother, and his lips were quivering. “Mummy, do you mind awfully—”

“That’s all right, darling,” said Bunty, loading her tray methodically as though nothing out of the way was happening. “I’m going to wash up. You go ahead.”

She made things sound so normal and calm, as she almost always did, that he longed to ask her to stay, but it couldn’t be done that way, he had to have it out with George. She cleared the table, flicked Dominic’s ear very lightly with the folded tablecloth as she went to put it away, and bore off the tray into the kitchen, closing the door firmly after her. They were left looking rather helplessly at each other, neither of them any longer able to doubt that this was a family crisis of the first magnitude. George flinched from it as much as Dominic did; he was tired and out of temper, and he knew it, and this luckless child was inviting trouble even their combined goodwill might not be able to avert.

What was the use of thinking how best to do it, when all that mattered was that it should be done?

“You know I was outside there this evening when Kitty Norris came to ask for you,” said Dominic in the drained tones of despair. “I talked to her before you did. She told me all that tale about pushing Armiger down the stairs because he—he insulted her. But she told me she killed him. She didn’t! You’ve got to believe me. All she did was go away and leave him there stunned. She said—”

“I don’t know why it should be necessary for us to discuss it at all,” said George, laboriously patient with him but desperately unwilling to go on hammering at an affair of which he’d already had about all he could take, “but if I’m supposed to humour you, I will. If she went away and left him there stunned, how did she know it was the champagne magnum that battered his head in? If she wasn’t the one who killed him, if she was gone from the scene and somebody else came in and finished him off, how did she know how it was done? All that was ever made public was that he died of head injuries. So you tell me how she knew—how she
could
know and still be innocent?”

So they had tricked it out of her, questioned and cross-questioned and slipped in catch remarks until she gave herself away. Dominic hated them all, even his father, but not so much as he hated himself for making such an appalling miscalculation. He should have known she’d still insist on going through with her confession, because Leslie must be safeguarded whatever happened to her, Leslie who wouldn’t marry her, thank God, the stupid fool, Leslie with whom she was still so crazily, desolately in love that she couldn’t see anyone else for him. Dominic sat down slowly and carefully at the table, braced his sweating palms upon its glossy surface before him, and said loudly and hoarsely: “She knew because I told her.”

He was glad he’d sat down, however it diminished his dignity, he felt safer that way; his knees would never have held him up, standing. George had lurched forward in his chair and come heavily to his feet. He spread his hands upon the table and leaned over his son, and in spite of himself Dominic wilted. He wanted to close his eyes, but he wouldn’t, because whatever was coming to him, he’d asked for it, he couldn’t complain.

“You
what
?” said George.

“I told her. I told her because I thought then she wouldn’t have to tell you about being there at all. She was going to tell you she’d killed him, and yet she didn’t know anything about him being battered to death, she just thought he’d cracked his skull when he fell down the stairs. So I knew she hadn’t, and how could I let her go on thinking she had? I had to tell her. I couldn’t not tell her.” Resolute in his desperation, he said with an altogether inaccurate suggestion of defiance: “I’d do the same again.”

George said, after a blank and awful pause: “I’ve a good mind to tan the hide off you.”

With all his sore heart Dominic almost wished he would, but with all his lively senses he knew he wouldn’t. There was no getting out of things that way any more, the bolt-hole had been stopped at least two years now. Paying this debt was going to be a whole lot more complicated than that, a whole lot more long-drawn-out and painful. The compensations of being under juvenile discipline had never presented themselves to him before.

“I know,” he said drearily, “but I had to do it. There wasn’t anything else to do. And now I’ve made everything worse for her instead of better.”

“Whether you’ve done that or not, you’ve certainly made it impossible for us to judge how far she’s telling the truth. And you know what else you’ve done, don’t you?” said George remorselessly.

Yes, he knew. He’d undermined the foundations of the house, and shaken the pillars that held up the roof. He wouldn’t have believed himself that he could do such a thing; for a moment half of his heart was with George, astonished and reproachful, half of it with Kitty, injured and imprisoned. Between the two of them he wished he could die.

“I shall have to report this to the chief, of course,” said George. “I blame myself more than you. There’s nothing to be done but tell him that I’ve been consistently indiscreet. I’d no right to allow you such easy access to information in the first place, it was thoroughly unconstitutional behaviour, and I should have known better. It was unreasonable to expect that you could refrain for ever from shooting off your mouth, I suppose.” But he had expected it; he’d been so sure of it, in fact, that it had never occurred to him to question his discretion at all. Only now that he’d lost that absolute trust did Dominic know how to value it.

“I didn’t do it lightly,” he said, flinching. “I never have before.”

“Once is all it takes. I shall have to see Superintendent Duckett in the morning and take the responsibility for this myself. That’s putting it squarely where it belongs.”

“I’m sorry,” said Dominic abjectly. “Do you have to?”

“Yes, I have to, in fairness to you as well as to Kitty. If he asks for my resignation he’ll be within his rights.” That was cruel, because he was virtually sure that Duckett, things being as they were, the case as good as closed, and this particular item of evidence now so much less vital than Dominic supposed, would hardly even bother to listen to him, and quite certainly be unable to muster more than a token reprimand. “In future, of course,” he said, “I shall have to make sure I don’t talk about a case when you’re within earshot. I’ll take good care this doesn’t happen again. And you’ll give me your word here and now not to meddle in this affair any more. You’ve done damage enough.”

“I can’t! I
won’t
! I tell you Kitty didn’t know until I told her. You’ve got to believe me. Don’t you see there isn’t really any evidence against her apart from that? Dad, you’ve got to let her go now, don’t you see that? You’ve no right to hold her now that I’ve told you about it. She’s innocent, and if you won’t prove it, I’ll damn’ well do it myself.”

George had had more than enough. He opened his mouth to say something for which he would quite certainly have been sorry next moment, and which would have cost Bunty days of patient, cunning negotiations to put right again between them; and then the violent young voice that was shouting at him cracked ominously, and stopped him in his tracks, and he was saved. He looked again, and more closely, at the pale, raging face and the anguished eyes that didn’t avoid his searching stare, because the case was too desperate for considerations of dignity to have any further validity.

Understanding hit George like a steam hammer. Someone you’re used to thinking of as a child, someone who sounds like a hysterical boy, suddenly looks at you with the profound, solemn, staggering grief of a man, and knocks the breath out of you. It won’t last, of course, it isn’t a constant yet, he’ll be back and forth between maturity and childishness a hundred times before he loses the ability to commute. But it’s the first plain prophecy of things to come, and it’s hit him deadly hard. Oh, God, thought George, utterly dismayed, and I teased him about her! How dim can you get about your own kid?

Treading with wincing care, as though even a loud noise might start them both jangling again like shaken glasses George went and sat down at the table opposite his son. In a soft, reasonable voice he said: “All right, boy, you owed me that. I haven’t been fair to you. This is the first time you ever let me down, and that’s not a bad record, all things considered. I don’t really think you did it lightly, I don’t really under-value your reasons. I don’t blame you for not being willing to contract out. Probably in your place I should do exactly the same as you’ve done. And since I’m the person who’s to blame for breaking all the rules in the first place, and I’ve been doing it for years, I may just as well do it just once more, and tell you how the case really stands now. It won’t make you any happier,” he said ruefully, “but it may settle your mind. Since Kitty Norris told us her story to-night we’ve been working hard at the details. We’ve questioned all the tenants of the block of flats where she lives, and we’ve found a couple on the ground floor who heard and saw her come in that night, not at half past ten, as she said at first, nor at ten past eleven, as she says now, but just after midnight. She declines to account for that missing time.”

“They could be mistaken—” began Dominic strenuously.

“I didn’t say she denied it, I said she wouldn’t account for it.” The voice was gender and gentler. “And that’s not all, Dom. We also brought in the clothes Kitty wore that night. I saw her, she had on a black silk dress with a full skirt, I didn’t have any trouble picking it out. She had an Indian scarf, too, a shot red and blue gauze affair with gold embroidery. To tell you the one thing that fits in nowhere, since I’m telling you the things that do fit, only too well, the end of the scarf has a corner torn off, and we haven’t been able to find a trace of it so far. The left side of the skirt of the dress has several smears along the hem, not easily visible because of the black colour, but enough to react to tests. They’re blood. The same group as Armiger’s. Her shoes I didn’t notice, but we found them, by one spot of brown on the toe of the left one. That’s blood, too, Dom. The same group. Armiger’s group, but not Kitty’s. We tested.”

Dominic shut his eyes, but he couldn’t stop seeing the silver sandals glittering in her hands at the Boat Club. They wouldn’t be the same shoes, but he couldn’t stop seeing them.

“I’m sorry, old man,” said George. He rose and drew away gingerly; the front view of Dominic was beginning to be too precarious, he moved considerately to the rear. The slender shoulders were braced and motionless. “It isn’t the end of the world, or of the case, either,” said George, “but it’s no good pretending that the outlook’s rosy, Dom. I had to tell you, in justice to you. Don’t take it too much to heart.”

He laid his hand for an instant on Dominic’s shoulder, and let his knuckles scrub gently at the rigid cheek.

Dominic got up abruptly and steered a blind course for the door, and blundering past Bunty fled for the stairs. Bunty looked after him, looked at George, and hesitated whether to follow. It was George who said warningly: “No!” and shook his head at her. It couldn’t be cured that way, either.

“Let him alone,” said George. “He’ll be all right, just let him alone.”

BY THE TIME he came down to breakfast next morning he had thought things out for himself, and arrived at a position from which he did not intend to be moved; that was implicit in the set of his jaw and the pallid resolution of his whole face, which seemed to have moved a long stage nearer to its mature form overnight. By his puffy eyelids and the blue hollows under his eyes thinking was what he’d been doing all through the hours of darkness when he should have been sleeping. He arrived at the breakfast table composed and quiet, greeted his parents punctiliously, to show there were no dangerous loose ends dangling, and made himself more mannishly attentive to Bunty than she had ever known him. Gravely she played up to him; having two men in the house was going to be interesting. She had no real complaints against George, but having a rival around wasn’t going to do him any harm, and she was going to enjoy herself. If only it hadn’t had to happen to him this way! She and George had spent the early hours of the morning in subdued and anxious colloquy over him, and it was difficult not to betray that they were watching him with equal anxiety now, intensely aware of every consciously restrained movement he made, even of the hesitations and selections that preceded every word he spoke.

“About last night, Dad,” he said, embarking at last with a shivering plunge which he did his best to make look normal. “I’ve been thinking what I ought to do. I’ve thought over everything you said, and—and thanks for telling me. But there’s one thing I know absolutely, and it’s evidence to me even if it isn’t to you—I mean you can’t possibly
know
it as I do. When she talked to me Kitty
didn’t know
how Mr. Armiger was killed. So she couldn’t possibly be the person who killed him. I don’t expect you to be sure of that, because you didn’t see her and hear her, but I did, and I am sure. So all the other things you’ve found out against her can’t really mean that she’s guilty, there has to be some other explanation for them.”

“We shall still be working on it,” said George, “trying to fill up all the gaps. I told you, the case isn’t closed yet.”

“No. But you’ll be trying to fill up the gaps with one idea in mind. The logical end of your gap-filling is a conviction, isn’t it?”

George, moved partly by genuine bitterness and partly by a blind, brilliant instinct for the thing to say that would make them equals, asked with asperity: “Damn it, do you think I like this solution any better than you do?” He didn’t even care, for the moment, whether Bunty caught the smarting note of personal resentment in that, provided it bolstered Dominic’s developing ego.

The blue-ringed eyes shot one rapid, startled glance into his face and were hastily lowered again. They would be stealing measuring looks in his direction with increasing frequency from now on.

“Well, no, I suppose not,” said Dominic cautiously. The tone suggested that he would have liked to linger inwardly over the implications, if there had not been something infinitely more urgent to be considered. “Only I start from what I know, and it makes the whole thing different for me. And so—well, maybe I might get somewhere different, and find out things that you wouldn’t. You can see that I’ve got to try, anyhow.”

“I can see you feel you have to,” agreed George.

“You don’t object?”

“Provided you don’t impede us in any way, how can I object? But if you do happen on anything relevant, don’t forget you have a duty to pass it on to the police.”

“But I suppose that doesn’t mean
you
have to tell
me
anything!”

The tone was so arrogant this time that George revised his ideas of the nursing this developing ego needed; it seemed, on the whole, to be doing very well for itself, and there was no sense in letting it get out of hand. “No,” he said firmly. “And after what happened yesterday that can hardly surprise you.”

“O.K.,” said Dominic, abashed and retreating several years. “Sorry!”

He rose from the table with a purposeful face, and marched out without saying a word about his intentions. It was Saturday, so at least he was saved from fretting barrenly over books he wouldn’t even be able to see, and lectures that would be double-Dutch to him. Bunty followed him out into the garden, where he was grimly pumping up the tyres of his bicycle. She didn’t ask any questions, she just said: “Good luck, lamb!” and kissed him; she thought she might justifiably go as far as that, it was what she’d always done and said when she was sending him out to face some dragonish ordeal like the eleven-plus examination or his first day at the grammar school. He recognised the rite, and dutifully raised his head from his labours to offer his mouth, as engagingly and as inattentively as at five years old; but instead of scrubbing off the kiss briskly with the back of his hand and leaning hard on the pump again, he straightened up and looked at her with the troubled eyes that didn’t know from minute to minute whether to be a boy’s or a man’s. The first three ages of man were batting him back and forth among them like a shuttlecock.

“Thanks, Mummy!” he said gruffly, preserving the ritual.

She tucked a ten-shilling note into his pocket. “An advance against your expense account,” she said.

For a moment he wasn’t sure that he was being taken seriously enough. “I’m not kidding,” he said sternly, scowling at her.

“I’m not kidding, either,” said Bunty. “I don’t know the girl, but you do, and if you say she didn’t do it that goes a long way with me. Anything on the level I can do to help, you ask me. Right?”

“Right! Gosh,
thanks
, Mummy!”

It wasn’t just for the ten shillings, which at first he’d suspected of being a bribe to him to cheer up, it wasn’t even for the offer of help and support, it was for everything she’d implied about his relationship with Kitty: that it was adult, that it was real, that it had importance and validity, and was to be treated with respect. He experienced one of those moments of delighted love for his mother, of startling new discoveries in his exploration of her, which are among the unexpected compensations of growing up. And Bunty, who knew when to vanish, sailed hastily back into the house feeling almost as young as her son.

Flashes of pleasure and warmth, however, did nothing to solve the problem of Kitty, and the shadow and weight closed on him again more oppressively than ever as he straddled his bicycle and rode out of Comerford by the farm road that would bring him out close to The Jolly Barmaid. In the grassy verge by the cross-roads he put one foot to the ground and sat gazing at the house, thinking hard. People had almost given up standing about staring at the place by this time, the centre of attention had shifted now to wherever Kitty was likely to be. The news was out, in morning papers and news bulletins and by the ever-present grapevine that twined across the back fences of the villages and burrowed its roots into the foundations of the town.
Kitty Norris
! Can you
believe
it?

The vulgar new sign in its convolutions of wrought-iron gleamed at the edge of the road. The doors would not be opened for business until after the funeral, for which permission had been given at yesterday’s adjourned inquest. How it would have annoyed Armiger to have to forgo a week-end’s takings just because someone was dead. The funeral, they said, would be on Monday, and Raymond Shelley was seeing to the arrangements, not Leslie Armiger. The conventionally-minded, with magnificent hypocrisy, were already beginning to censure Leslie for want of filial feeling, and were quite certain in advance that he wouldn’t go to the funeral. Why in the world, wondered Dominic, should he be expected to? He’d been expressly dismissed from his position as a son, and forbidden to feel filial; if he suffered any regrets for his ex—or late—father it constituted a gesture of generosity on his part, it wasn’t in any way due from him. And what did he feel now for Kitty, who had flown slap into the net to make sure he should not be snared? He must know by now. Everybody knew. Even when Dominic rode past the first farm cottages the air felt heavy and tremulous with the reverberations of the news, and two women with their heads together over the fence could only be retailing the rich imaginary details of Kitty’s fall.

Dominic began to follow the course Kitty had taken that night. Here she had halted before sweeping out in a right-hand turn and heading for Comerbourne; it had then been about a quarter past ten. Somewhere on her way she’d changed her mind and wished she’d stayed; somewhere before the next right-hand turn into the lane that wound its way to Wood’s End, and there brought her into the rear farm road, the ridge-road from the back of The Jolly Barmaid, that followed the old contour track between the upland fields and the low, moist river meadows. Probably she’d driven this stage slowly and cautiously; she was a fast driver by inclination but not a reckless one, and at night the frequent bends and high hedges of the lane contained and shrouded even the beams of headlights.

Natural enough, when she changed her mind, to go round like this instead of turning and driving back along the high road; natural enough, that is, if she only made up her mind when the cross-roads came in sight, and what could be more likely? A cross-roads is an invitation to pause, to think again and confirm your direction. So she turned down here, saying to herself: I will, I’ll have one more go at making him see reason.

A third of a mile or so, and the lane brought her to the next right-hand turn, under the signpost at Wood’s End. Hardly a village, just a few farm cottages, the long drive of the farm, one tiny shop, and a telephone box. And from here to the right again, into the old road, and maybe just over a quarter of a mile to go to the tall boundary wall of The Jolly Barmaid. She had parked “along there under the trees by that little wood.” When he reached the spot it was easy to see why, for the road broadened there into a wide stretch of trampled grass on the left, like an accidental lay-by under the hanging wood, and there she could get off the road. For by that time it must have been nearly, if not quite, half past ten, closing time at the pub, and though most of the customers would be using the main road, there was always the possibility that some of the countrymen would be leaving by this way.

Dominic dismounted, and pushed his bike slowly the last fifty yards or so from the place where she had parked to the rear exit from the courtyard. It was not a gate but a broad opening in the high wall, blocked with two iron posts so that no cars could drive out that way. The barn-ballroom was quite close, she had only to cross this remote corner of the yard to the doorway and walk in. And there Armiger had waited for her, full of his new plan, entertaining no doubts of her complacency.

How long had it taken, what happened in there? Not long, surely. She trying to get him to listen to her plea for Leslie, he riding over everything with his great schemes for the future, and convinced that she was with him; like two people trying to convey to each other two conflicting urgencies, without a word in common in any language. If she had reached this place about half past ten, or a little later, allowing for parking and locking the car and perhaps for some final hesitation, Dominic estimated that she must have taken flight well before eleven. Armiger would never let the exposition of his deal take him more than a quarter of an hour, he went straight at things. There was a pretty good indication of the times involved, too, in Kitty’s declaration that she had reached her flat by about ten past eleven; granted that was discredited by the evidence of her neighbours, yet it must be the time she had felt she ought to give, the correct time to round off the version of her movements which she wanted to have believed. Between ten and five minutes to eleven she came running out of the ballroom and left Armiger lying at the foot of the staircase, thought Dominic with certainty.

And then what? She would want only one thing, as she herself had said, and that was to get away. Would she drive on to the next turning and go right round The Jolly Barmaid again to the main road? Or turn there under the trees and drive back by the way she had come? She’d turn, he decided, after only a moment’s thought; this way was quieter and also shorter. There was plenty of room to turn under the trees. Almost certainly she headed back towards Wood’s End. And in fourteen or fifteen minutes she should have been home. Why wasn’t she?

He thought over and round it, and he was sure that was the only point on which she had lied. And why? There was an hour lost. Whatever she’d done with it, he was quite certain she hadn’t gone back and killed Alfred Armiger, so why wouldn’t she tell them what had happened during that missing time? Because there was someone else involved? Someone equally innocent, whom she refused to harm?

Her whole desire had been to get away. If she hadn’t done it it was because she couldn’t.

He had begun to push his bike back towards Wood’s End, trailing his toes in the fallen leaves under the trees. He chose to walk because his mind was grinding over the meagre facts so slowly that his feet had to keep the same pace. Here she turned and drove back, and yet she didn’t get home to Comerbourne until after midnight. She was going along here, probably fast, running away from her sense of outrage and frustration and shame; and somewhere along here fright fell on her, too, the dread that she ought to have waited to make sure how badly he was hurt; but by then it wouldn’t stop or turn her, it would only drive her on all the faster. So why didn’t she get home soon after eleven, as she should have done?

And then he knew why.

It was so simple and so silly that it had to be true. He heard the busy low note of the engine cough and fail, felt the power die away, and saw Kitty reach for the tap with one impatient toe, to kick it over on to the reserve, and then draw back furious and exasperated because it was on the reserve already, and yet once again she’d done her inimitable trick. Half the day she’d probably been saying to herself cheerfully: “Plenty of time, I’ve got a gallon, I’ll call at Lowe’s before I leave Comerbourne, I’ll look in at the filling station at Leah Green—” making easy promises every time the necessity recurred to her, until it didn’t recur to her any more.