Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman (15 page)

ON MONDAY MORNING, about an hour before Alfred Armiger was escorted to the grave, against all predictions, by a grim-faced and sombre son, Kitty Norris made a formal appearance of about two minutes in court, and was remanded in custody for a week.

She sat quietly through the brief proceedings, without a smile or a live glance for anyone, even Raymond Shelley who appeared for her. Docilely she moved, stood, sat when she was told, like a child crushed by the burden of a strange place and unknown, powerful, capricious people. Her eyes, hollowed by the crying and the sleeplessness which were both past now, had swallowed half her face. They looked from enemy to enemy all round her, not hoping for a gap in the ranks, but not actively afraid. She had surrendered herself to the current that was carrying her, and whatever blows it dealt her she accepted mutely, because there was no help for it. It was heartbreaking to look at her. At least, thought George, who had brought her to the court, Dominic was spared this.

In the few minutes she spent in court the news had gone round, and there was a crowd waiting to see her come out, and one lone cameraman who erupted in her face before George could shelter her. He ought to have known that Kitty Norris, whose clothes and cars and dates had always made news, couldn’t escape the headlines even on this first unheralded appearance in her new role. For the first time the lovely, hapless face came back to life. She shrank back into George’s arm, frightened and abashed, mistaking raw curiosity for purposeful malignance. He half lifted her into the car, but even then the eyes and the murmurs followed her, gaping alongside the windows as she was driven away.

“Why should they be like that?” asked Kitty, shivering. “What have I ever done to them?”

“They don’t mean any harm, dear,” said the matron comfortably, “they’re just nosy. You get used to it.”

There ought to be something better to say to her than that, thought George, suffering acutely from the brushing of her sleeve against his, and the agonising memory of her warmth on his heart; and yet this queer comfort did seem to calm her. She expected nothing from him, and it was not upon his shoulder that she let her head rest as she was taken back to prison.

“You’ll have to brace up, you know, Kitty,” he said as he helped her out of the car, himself unaware until he had said it that her name was there on his lips waiting to slip out so betrayingly.

“Why?” said Kitty simply, looking through him into a bleak distance.

“Because you owe it to yourself—and to your friends who believe in you.”

The cords of his throat tightened up, outraged that he could ask them to give passage to such unprofessional sentiments. And he told himself afterwards, nursing the smart of being misunderstood, that he deserved no better than he got. For Kitty smiled suddenly, affectionately, shortening her range so that for a moment she really seemed to see him. Then she said in a gentle voice: “Oh, yes, I mustn’t let Dominic down. You tell him I’m coming out fighting when the bell goes. With him in my corner, how can I lose?”

Well, thought George grimly as he drove back towards the centre of Comerbourne, that’s properly accounted for me. The invisible man, that’s all I am, an office, not a person, and an inimical office at that. And it hurt. He knew he was making a fool of himself, but that only made the smart worse. Jealousy is always humiliating; jealousy of your own young son is an indignity hardly to be borne.

The very soreness of his own nerves, and the small, nagging sense of guilt that frayed the edges of his consciousness, made him very affectionate and attentive to Bunty, and that in itself was dangerous, for Bunty had known him a long time, and was a highly intelligent woman in her artfully unpretentious way. But long familiarity had made George so unwary with her that even his occasional subtleties tended to be childishly innocent in their cunning. She loved him very much, and her security of tenure was unshakable.

After the long, fretting days with so little accomplished George would wake out of his first shallow, uneasy sleep to the ache of his own ineffectiveness, and reach for Bunty not as a consolation prize, but as the remedy for what ailed him; and she would open her arms and respond to him, half awake, even half awake knowing that she was called upon to be two women, and sure she could without extending herself be all the women George would ever want or need. It was mostly in the middle of the night that he confided with the greatest ease and benefit. It was in the early hours of Wednesday morning that he told her about his precariously based conviction that the person Kitty had called to her aid on the night of the crime was in all probability the murderer of Alfred Armiger.

“But wouldn’t she have suspected as much herself, afterwards?” asked Bunty. “She wouldn’t keep silent about it, surely, if she thought it over and came to that conclusion herself? No earthly reason why she should protect a murderer, even if he did bring her some petrol.”

“Of course not, but naturally she must have called on some person she knew intimately and could trust absolutely. In real life nobody treats a murder investigation like an impersonal puzzle in a book, and suspects everyone who had an opportunity or a motive; to some extent you’re bound to go by what you know of them. There are people it could be and people it couldn’t be. Your family, your friends, they’re immune. This man was immune. If you were in a hole, and you yelled to me for help and I came, and afterwards there was a body around to be accounted for, would it enter your head that I might be the killer?”

“Never in a million years,” said Bunty. “But there’s only one of you for me. I might look sideways at almost anyone else.”

“What, Dom, for instance? Or old Uncle Steve?”

She thought of her bumbling old sheep of a paternal uncle and giggled. “Darling, don’t be funny! That sweet old fool!”

“Or Chris Duckett, say?”

“No, I see what you mean. The only people you’d consider letting in on your scrape would be people you couldn’t possibly suspect of anything bad. But if someone actually put it into your head afterwards, mightn’t you just begin to wonder? Have you put it to Kitty that way?”

“I’ve put it every way I can think of.” The words that visited his lips when he thought of Kitty came spurting out of him in breathless bursts of indignation and anxiety, impossible to disguise however he muffled them by nuzzling in Bunty’s hair. He could never deceive Bunty worth a damn, anyhow, he gave up trying. “All along she’s simply ignored questions about that telephone call. She knows we know she did ring somebody. But still she—no, she doesn’t deny it, she just pretends not to understand, or else she doesn’t even pretend, she just sits there and shuts her mouth and isn’t with us any more. I’ve tried, and Duckett’s tried. Nobody can get anything out of her. Of course I’ve told her whoever she called may very well be the murderer. I’ve urged her, I’ve threatened her, I’ve bullied her—it’s only made it worse. She’s more determined than ever not to give him away.”

“Because she doesn’t believe he had anything to do with it,” said Bunty.

“No, she doesn’t believe it. There’s no talking to her.”

“So she thinks she’d only be shifting her own trouble on to someone else just as innocent.”

“And that we’d be just as dead set on getting a conviction against him as we must have seemed to be against her,” said George bitterly. Suddenly abjectly grateful for Bunty’s presence and her oneness with him, that sturdily refused to be changed by any outer pressures or even by the helpless convulsions of his overburdened heart, he turned and wound his arms about her, burying his face in the warm hollow of her neck. She shifted her position gently to make him more comfortable, hugging him to her heart.

“And Chris Duckett still thinks she did it?”

He mumbled assent, too tired to free his mouth. The slight movement was like the beginning of a kiss; he turned it into one.

“So between the chief hell-bent on getting a conviction against her, and you just as hell-bent on getting one against someone she’s certain is equally blameless, and who’d be equally helpless if she once dragged him into it, no wonder the poor girl’s just giving up the fight and refusing to say a word.”

George came out of ambush to protest indignantly that he wasn’t hell-bent on any such thing, that nobody was trying to convict for the sake of a conviction, that there was a logical case for investigating X’s movements very carefully. He outlined it, and in the quietness there in the small hours it sounded even more impressive than it had when Dominic had propounded it on Sunday evening, in terms that might have been conjured out of George’s own mind as a direct challenge to him.

“If it’s like that,” said Bunty at last, “and she won’t talk for you, why don’t you turn somebody loose on her for whom she
will
talk? I don’t know Kitty as you do—” Her hand caressed George’s cheek; he hoped she wasn’t comforting him for the undignified pain of which she couldn’t possibly know anything, but he was dreadfully afraid she was. “—But I can’t help feeling that if you got Leslie Armiger to question her she might break down and tell everything. I may be wrong,” said Bunty kindly, well aware that she was not wrong, “but they almost grew up together, and I gather they’re fond of each other.”

“But that’s just what I can’t do,” said George.

“Why not?”

“Because
he’s the one
! Because in spite of one snag I can’t get round I’m almost sure it was Leslie.” He felt her stiffen in disbelief, her fingers stilling in his hair. “I know! He isn’t on the telephone! He remembered to remind me of that. I know, but look what he has to gain, he and nobody else.” He poured out the whole of it, physically half asleep on her shoulder, but mentally, agonisingly wide awake, sensitive to every breath she drew, almost to every implication she was reading into his words.

“Still, I don’t see how it could have been Leslie,” said Bunty firmly when he had done.

“I know, I told you, I don’t, either. No telephone—there’s no getting past it.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant I don’t see how it could have been Leslie, because even if she could have called him, I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t.” She told him why. When she ended he was asleep, his mouth against her cheek. She kissed him, and he didn’t wake up. “Poor old darling!” she said, and went to sleep embracing him.

But when he awoke before dawn he remembered everything she had told him, and sat up in bed abruptly. The whole thing to be re-thought from the beginning, a new cast to be made. He lay down very softly, to avoid disturbing Bunty, and began to go over the ground yet again in his mind, inch by painful inch.

He came home that night late and on edge after a day of furious but so far unproductive activity, and it was no pleasure, the mood he was in, to have Dominic spring out of the living-room at him before he could so much as drop his brief-case and hang up his hat. The mirror had just presented him with the image of his forty-one-year-old face, fretted and drawn with tiredness, with straight brown hair greying at the temples, and he was afraid receding a little too, when there erupted into the glass, beside it the sixteen-year-old copy, fresh as new milk, just-formed, with lashes like ferns and a thatch as thick as gorse, a face as yet so young and unused that all the anxiety and trouble in the world couldn’t take the springy freshness out of it. The contrast wasn’t comforting; neither was the look Dominic fixed on him, waiting with held breath for the news he’d almost given up expecting.

“Sorry, boy,” said George, “we haven’t found them yet.”

Dominic didn’t move. The anxious eyes followed every motion with a hopeless concentration as George hung up his coat and made for the stairs. In his own mind he had given them until this evening; if they hadn’t found the gloves by now it was no use relying on it that they ever would, no use waiting any longer for the turn of luck it didn’t seem as if they were going to get. Luck’s hand would have to be forced. When logs coming down a river jam, somebody has to set off a charge to release them and start them flowing again. Dominic did not particularly fancy himself as a charge of dynamite, but extreme measures were called for. And this time it was in any case impossible to confide in George, because the kind of shock tactics Dominic had in mind would not, and could not, be countenanced by the police. One word to George, and the whole thing would be knocked on the head. No, he had to do this alone, or if he had to ask for help it mustn’t be from his father. And before he ventured he had to make sure he hadn’t left any loopholes for want of sufficient briefing. There were still things he didn’t know; by the terms of their toleration agreement he couldn’t go to his father for them, but what he wanted to know Leslie Armiger could tell him.

“I’m going out, Mummy,” said Dominic, following Bunty into the kitchen. It was already well past eight o’clock, and she was surprised, but she didn’t ask him where or why, she merely said: “All right, darling, don’t be too late.” She was a nice mother, he was suddenly moved to engulf her in a bear’s hug before he fled, but she was holding a hot iron, so he didn’t do it. She hadn’t even said: “But you haven’t finished your homework!” though he hadn’t. Any other mother would have been all too liable to nag, the way he was skimping his work these days.

He got out his bike and rode into Comerbourne, and let himself into Mrs. Harkness’s front garden by the low iron gate. There was an outside bell for the Armigers, but they didn’t always hear it, you had to walk in at the front door and climb the stairs and tap on the door of their room.

Leslie was sitting over a pile of books at the table, in his shirt-sleeves and a cloud of cigarette smoke. Dominic might not be doing his homework, but Leslie was, with dedicated concentration. He’d come down from Oxford without a degree, having behaved there as his father had fully intended him to behave, tossing his liberal allowance about gaily, playing with zest, painting with passion, cutting an engaging figure socially and working only just enough to keep him out of trouble, and perhaps a little over to appease his tutor after every grieved lecture, purely out of liking for the old boy, and as a concession to his conservative ideas of what universities were for. That left him with a lot of leeway to make up now, when marriage and responsibility had put a sharp end to his prolonged adolescence.