Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman (16 page)

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Dominic, dismayed. “I’d better not butt in on you if you’re working.”

“No, come in, it’s all right.” Leslie closed his book and pushed the whole pile aside, stretching his cramped shoulders. “I’m glad to have an excuse to stop. There’s nothing new, is there? About Kitty?”

Dominic shook his head. “You haven’t been to see her again, have you?”

“Not yet, it’s no use asking too often, you know, they wouldn’t let me. Is there something else I can help with?”

“Well, there is, as a matter of fact. You’ll probably think it a funny thing to ask, but it’s about this picture of yours. If you wouldn’t mind telling me all that stuff about how somebody tried to get it back, I think it might help me. Because I’ve got a sort of theory, but I don’t know enough about the details to know yet if it makes sense.”

“You think The Joyful Woman may be mixed up in the business?” asked Leslie, studying him curiously through the haze of smoke. The queer thing about the kid was that there was nothing queer about him; tallish, pleasant-looking, reasonably extrovert, healthily certain of himself, taking himself a bit seriously at this stage, but then he’d be odd if he didn’t. You could drop him among his kind in any public school, and he’d fall on his nice large feet and wriggle a place for himself on the spot. You could imagine him keeping well in the swim at whatever he touched, perhaps one notch ahead of average at games and two or three notches ahead at his books, with enough energy left over for a couple of reasonably intelligent hobbies, say climbing at one extreme and amateur theatricals at the other, and perhaps one amiable lunacy like an immoderate passion for fast motor-bikes or a weakness for blonde bits on the side. Wonderfully ordinary, and yet here he was taking a proprietorial hold on a murder case, and bringing all his down-to-earth qualities to bear on a situation so unordinary that the result was pure fantasy. For a moment Leslie looked at him and couldn’t believe he had his focus right, the components tended so strongly to fall apart into different dimensions. I suppose, he thought, in this setting we all look a bit out of drawing; it’s only his being so young that makes it more marked in his case.

He sat down with him and told him the whole history of The Joyful Woman over again from the beginning, while Dominic followed with quick questions and hopeful eyes. Jean came in half-way through the story and brought him a mug of chocolate and some biscuits; she had grown up with three young brothers, and was used to feeding boys on principle at frequent intervals.

“So the idea is that this dealer, this Cranmer, had dropped the hint to your father that the thing was valuable.” Warmth and eagerness had come back into Dominic’s eyes, and a calculating gleam; it was working out as he’d thought it might. “But it was Mr. Shelley who came to see you.”

“On my father’s behalf, of course.”

“But why of course? You only know that because he told you so. Look, suppose it happened this way. Cranmer sees some definite possibility in the picture, he knows your father must have thrown it out as worthless, and he knows it may be worth a great deal. He decides it would pay him to keep in with your father, so he telephones the office to warn him. But just by chance he misses him. They put him on to Mr. Shelley, and he tells him what he thinks, that his boss should think again, he’s giving away a small fortune. But instead of passing on the message Mr. Shelley does a bit of quick thinking. He’s sure by then that you and your father are never likely to heal the breach, so you won’t be comparing notes. And he sees a better use to make of this stroke of luck. You sit on it and keep quiet, he says to Cranmer, and you and I can do a deal and share the proceeds between us, never mind Armiger. And he comes to you with that story about your father having thought better of his mean joke, and sent him to offer you the five hundred pounds instead of the picture. You said he had the money in cash. Didn’t that strike you as odd?”

“Not particularly. My father would think nothing of shuffling that much about in cash. But I agree it makes your version possible. I agree it might have seemed quite an easy way of getting hold of the sign too. But surely if the old boy had been in it for himself he wouldn’t have dared to take it any farther after I turned him down? It was too risky.”

“But if the stake was big enough? You refuse him, so he comes back and steals your father’s letter, which is the only actual proof of ownership. He’s banking on it that you won’t touch your father in any way, having seen how you feel—not to take anything from him, not to see him, not to talk to him, but also surely not to make a public accusation against him over this business. He’s betting you’ll just write it off in disgust, and not do anything about it at all, because of course you’re not going to be told the picture has any value, Cranmer will see to that end of it. Just commonplace rubbish! So you were supposed to think, what’s the point, the joke will be on him, let him have it and much good may it do him! The silly old fool jumped to conclusions just because it leaked out to him that we’d consulted a dealer, and now he’s made himself just about as big an ass as he is a rogue, so let him hang the thing on the wall to remind him how he got too sharp and cut himself.”

Carried away by his own eloquence, Dominic had lapsed into language which he suddenly realised might by conventional standards be thought offensive in the circumstances. Even if you thought about the dead like that you weren’t supposed to say it, and even if Leslie had no reason whatever to love his late father he was supposed to observe certain rules and maintain certain attitudes. And you never know how conventional unconventional people may be just beneath the skin. He paled to the lips, and then flushed bright red to the hair. “I say, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be shooting off my mouth like this, it’s terrible cheek. I really am sorry! I should have remembered he was your father, and all that—”

“That’s all right,” said Leslie with a rueful grin. “I might very well have taken it just like that. I probably should have, if I hadn’t happened to reach my limit just about then. Don’t mind calling my dad names, that’s the last thing he’d have kicked about. One of the better things about him was that he didn’t snivel about his virtue while he pulled off his sharp deals, he just slapped them down gleefully and said in effect: Go on, beat that! Carry on, you’re doing all right.”

“You really didn’t mind? It was a hell of a cheek. But you see how important it could be if Shelley actually could have reasoned like that. There he is, sure you won’t bother to claim the picture once Cranmer says your father’s disputing its ownership, but just let the whole thing go, and put all the dirty work down to your father. So Shelley and Cranmer can quietly dispose of the goods and share the proceeds. And then suddenly out of the blue, when he’s home after getting back from the pub that night,
Kitty rings him up
.

“You said he was one person she might very well turn to in her trouble. She blurts out everything to him, and asks him to come and get her away. She doesn’t realise she’s telling him anything very terrible when she says that you’ve been there in the barn with your father—because you know he told her it was you he was going out to see—but just think what it would mean to Shelley! The very thing he was sure wouldn’t happen had happened. Instead of letting the whole thing drop you’d gone rushing off to your father, to pitch into him about the dirty trick he’d played you. Then of course he wouldn’t know what you were talking about, and he’d say so, and the whole business would come out. And finish for Shelley! He’d been with your father—how many years? Just think what it would mean to him to be kicked out now and have to start afresh with your father against him, maybe even to be disgraced publicly and have a charge laid against him. But there’s Kitty on the phone, babbling that she’s pushed your father down the stairs and he’s lying there in the barn unconscious. It’s now or never if Shelley wants to shut down on the scandal for good, and keep hold of his share in the picture deal. So he tells Kitty yes, don’t worry, just stay there, he’s on his way. And he gets out the car and drives like hell back to the barn. And kills your father.”

They were both gazing at him with wide and wary eyes, in wonder and doubt. Leslie said in a tight, quiet voice: “It could have happened, I suppose. It would certainly seem like the end of the world to him if Dad turned against him. And I’m not saying he wouldn’t have gone the limit against him in the circumstances. He didn’t mind a little sharp practice, he expected it and he could deal with it—but if there was a lot of money involved—And then, his vanity would be desperately hurt if he found out that for once he hadn’t been the smartest operator around.”

“And when you pitched into him about pinching his own letter, he did deny all knowledge of it, didn’t he?”

“He did,” agreed Leslie dubiously, “but he could just as well have been lying like a trooper, I took it he was. Still, I suppose it could have happened like that.”

Jean had sat silent and intent throughout this exchange, her eyes turning from one face to the other as they talked, her chin on her fists. She made a sudden movement of protest. “No, it couldn’t,” she said, “it didn’t. I’m sorry, boys, there’s just one thing wrong with it, but it makes it all wrong. Oh, I’m not saying it couldn’t be Mr. Shelley who did it, but if so, it didn’t happen like that.”

They had both turned to stare at her. “Why not?” they asked together.

With the gentle reasonableness and absolute authority of a kindergarten teacher instructing her brighter charges, Jean told them.

OCTOBER CAME IN cold and gusty, with squally days and ground frosts at night; the grass in front of the main offices of Armiger’s Ales stopped growing and shrank into its winter sleep, and the leaves began suddenly to fall from the trees thicker than rain, until the pure, slender skeletons showed through the thinning, yellowing foliage against a blown and blustery sky. Inside, the full heating system was put into use for the first time that season. Ruth Hamilton, coming down the stairs at five o’clock on Thursday evening, listened to the moaning of the wind outside the long staircase window and hunched her shoulders. It was going to be a stormy night; the last fine spell had broken, and the last traces of summer had blown away in a day.

Old Charlcote, the pensioner who manned the janitor’s desk in the hall, had come out of his cage and had his coat on already. Miss Hamilton was usually the last of the staff to leave, he often had occasion to curse her inflexible sense of duty, though never above his breath, she being the force she was in the affairs of the firm. He was just pulling on his home-knitted navy-blue mittens, the tail of one eye on the clock, the other on the stairs, and only a very small part of his attention indeed on the person who was doing his best to engage it. What on earth did a boy from the grammar school want here at this hour—or, for the matter of that, at any hour?

“What is it, Charlcote?” asked Miss Hamilton, sailing authoritatively across the polished floor from the foot of the stairs. “Is anything the matter?”

Why couldn’t she have been just one minute later? The kid would have been safely off the premises, and they all could have gone home. Now that conscience of hers would probably insist on probing into the last recesses of whatever the little pest wanted, and he’d have to hang about for an hour or more before he’d be able to lock up and get out.

“Nothing we can do anything about, miss. This young fellow was asking for Mr. Shelley, but he’s left about ten minutes ago. I don’t suppose it’s anything very urgent.”

The boy, gripping his school-bag very tightly under his arm, said vehemently: “It
is
urgent. I did want awfully to talk to him to-night. But I suppose if he’s gone—” The constrained voice faded out rather miserably. The eyes, large and anxious and very bright, dwelt questioningly upon Miss Hamilton’s face, and hoped for a sign of encouragement. She thought she saw his lips quiver. “It’s difficult,” he said. “I don’t know what I ought to do.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Shelley left a little early to-night. He has a lot of work on his hands just now.” She didn’t go into details; what could this child know about the case that was preoccupying Ray Shelley’s time and thought? “I’m afraid you won’t be able to contact him to-night, I know he has an appointment, and they’re liable to be at work most of the evening.” The appointment was with counsel, and would include an interview with Kitty. “Won’t to-morrow do? He’ll be in tomorrow.”

“I shan’t be able to skip school,” explained the boy with self-conscious dignity. “I should have been earlier, to-night, only I had to stay for rugger practice. I did hurry, I hoped I might be in time.” He had certainly hurried his shower, there were still traces of playing-fields mud beneath his left ear and just along the hairline beneath the thick chestnut thatch at his left temple. Miss Hamilton’s shrewd eyes had not missed them; she knew quite a lot about boys. There was something decidedly wrong with this one, behind that composed, strained front of his; it showed no less clearly than the tide-marks.

“Haven’t I see you before somewhere? I’m sure I ought to know you.”

A pale smile relaxed the fixed lines of his face for a moment. “We played your club a couple of times this summer, I expect you saw me at tea. I bowl a bit—spins, not awfully good. My name’s Dominic Felse.”

“Felse? Not the same Felse—isn’t that right, the detective-sergeant?”

“He’s my father,” said the boy, and clutched his bag even more tightly, with a sudden contortion of nervous muscles, as though he had shuddered. “It’s something about the case that I wanted to talk to Mr. Shelley about.”

“But your father surely wouldn’t—”

“He doesn’t know,” said Dominic with a gulp. “It’s just an idea of my own that I thought I ought to put to Mr. Shelley.”

There was no doubt about it, some intense agitation was shaking him, and if he received the slightest encouragement he would let go the tight hold he had on himself and pour out whatever was on his mind. She was used to receiving and respecting the confidences of boys, some of them a great deal tougher propositions than this well-brought-up child. She cast a glance at the clock. Charlcote was looking significantly at it too. His time was his time, he had no intention of seeing anything pathetic in this nuisance of a boy, and he had been careful to block his ears against every word of this unnecessary conversation.

“Will I do?” she asked gently, and catching the eloquent roll of Charlcote’s eyes heavenward in mute but profane appeal, suppressed a grim smile. “If I can help you, you’re welcome to come in and talk to me.”

The sharp jingle of the keys was like an expletive. “It’s all right, Charlcote,” she said, relenting. “You can just leave the outside door and go. I’ll lock up when we come out, you needn’t wait.”

The old man had his coat buttoned and his cap in his hand before he could finish saying smugly: “It’s my duty to lock up in person, miss, but of course if you care to give orders to the contrary—”

She wanted to say: “Get out, you silly old fool, before I call your bluff,” but she didn’t; he had ways of manipulating the heating system when he was aggrieved, or mismanaging the tea round, it was never worth while taking him on in a long-term engagement. “Consider it an order by all means,” she said briskly, “and run off home to Mrs. Charlcote at once. I’ll make sure we leave everything in order.” And she took Dominic firmly by the arm and marched him towards the stairs. “Now, come along up to my room, we may as well be comfortable.”

“May I really? You don’t mind?” He let himself be led away gratefully; she felt him trembling a little with relief and hope, though the trouble didn’t leave his face. It was something that couldn’t be so easily removed, but at least it could be investigated and possibly shared. She brought him to her own office and put him into the visitor’s chair, and pulled up a straight chair to the same side of the desk with him, where she could watch his face and he wouldn’t be able to evade her eyes. Not that he seemed to want to; he looked back at her earnestly and unhappily, and when she helped herself to a cigarette to give him time to assemble himself he leaped to take the matches from the stand and light it for her. Very mannish; except that his fingers were shaking so that she had to steady his hand with her own, and if the touch had been just a shadeless impersonal she thought he would have burst into tears there and then.

“Sit down, child,” she said firmly, “and tell me what’s the matter. What is all this about? What is it you want with Mr. Shelley?”

“Well, you see, he’s Miss Norris’s solicitor, and I thought the best thing I could do was come to him. Something’s happened,” said Dominic, the words beginning to tumble over one another on his tongue, “something awful. I’ve just got to tell somebody, I don’t know what to do. They’ve been looking everywhere—did you know?—for the gloves. The police, I mean. They’ve been looking for them ever since it happened. And now—”

“Gloves?” said Miss Hamilton blankly. “What gloves?”

“The murderer’s gloves. They say whoever killed Mr. Armiger was wearing gloves, and they must have been badly stained, and they think they must have been hidden or thrown away immediately after the murder. They’ve been looking all over for them, to clinch their case. And I’ve been looking for them, too, because,” he said, raising desperate eyes to her face, “I was absolutely sure they wouldn’t be Miss Norris’s at all, if only I could find them. I was sure she was innocent, I wanted to prove it. And I have found them,” he ended, his voice trailing away into a dry whisper.

“Then that’s all right, surely,” she said in carefully reasonable tones. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? I suppose you’ve turned them over to your father, and now everything will be all right. So what are you worrying about?”

He had put down his school-bag beside him on the floor. His hands, deprived of this anchor, gripped each other tightly on his knees. He looked down at the locked and rigid fingers, and his face worked.

“No, I haven’t turned them in. I haven’t said a word to a soul. I don’t want to, I can’t bear to, and I don’t know what to do. I was so sure they’d be a
man’s
gloves. But they’re not! They’re a woman’s—They’re
Kitty’s
!”

The knotted hands came apart with a frantic jerk, because he wanted them to hide his face, which was no longer under control. He lost his voice and his head, and began to cry, in shamed little gulps and hiccups he tried in vain to swallow. Miss Hamilton put down her cigarette carefully in the ashtray and took him by the shoulders, shaking him first gently and then peremptorily.

“Now, this is silly. Come along, tell me about it.
Where
did you find them? How did it happen that you found them, if the police couldn’t?”

“I shouldn’t tell you,” he got out between gulps, “I oughtn’t to tell anyone. It just
happened
. If I told you—you’d have to tell lies, too.”

“Oh, now, look, I’m trying to help you. If you don’t tell me everything how can I judge the importance of these gloves? You may be quite mistaken about them, they may not be the ones at all. You may be fretting quite needlessly.”

“They are the ones, I know they are. And they’ll say—they’ll say she—” He was trying to master the hiccups that were convulsing him, and to all her patient questions he could make no better answers than a few grotesque, incoherent sounds. It was quite useless to persist, he was half hysterical already. She released him and went into the small cloakroom which adjoined her office, and came back with a glass of water. She presented it to his lips with an authority there was no gainsaying, and he drank docilely, scarlet and tearful, still heaving with convulsions of subsiding frequency and violence. “There’s blood on them,” he gasped between spasms. “What am I going to
do?

She stood back and looked at him thoughtfully, while he knuckled angrily at his eyes and muffled his hiccups in a crumpled handkerchief.

“Is that what you were going to ask Mr. Shelley?”

He nodded miserably. “He’s her solicitor, and—and I thought maybe I—I could just give them to him. I thought maybe he’d take the responsibility, because I—I—”

“You could destroy them,” said Miss Hamilton deliberately, “if that’s how you feel. Destroy them and forget all about it.”

“No, I
couldn’t
!. How could I? Don’t you see how I’m placed? My father—I feel
awful
! He
trusts
me!” He struggled momentarily with an all too evident inclination to relapse into tears again. “But it’s
Kitty
!”

Sixteen-year-olds miserably in love are a pathetic sight, and his situation, she saw, was indeed pitiable. Whatever his resolution the issue was certain; he’d never be able to bear the burden for long, sooner or later out it would all come tumbling to his father. Meantime, someone had to lift the immediate load from him.

“Listen to me, Dominic,” she said firmly. “You’re quite sure in your own mind, aren’t you, that Kitty didn’t kill Mr. Armiger?”

Where, she was wondering, did Kitty manage to pick up this improbable adorer, and how on earth did they get on to Christian name terms? But Kitty had always been incalculable in her attachments.

“Then have the courage of your convictions. Don’t say a word to Mr. Shelley. He’s a legal man, it would be cruel to pass the buck to him of all people. You can give the gloves to me. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not afraid to back my own judgment.”

Dominic’s long lashes rolled back from large eyes gleaming with bewilderment and hope; he stared at her and was still.

“Law or no law,” she said with determination, “I’m not prepared to help to send Kitty to prison for life, even if she did kill an unscrupulous old man in self-defence. And like you, I’m very far from convinced that she did.
I’ll
take the responsibility. Let’s consider that it was I who found them.”

“Oh, would you?” he said eagerly. “If only you would, I should be so relieved.”

“You needn’t even know what I do with them. Give them to me and forget them. Forget you ever found them.”

“Oh, I’d be so grateful! I haven’t got them here, because I’ve just come straight from school, you see, and I couldn’t risk carrying them about with me all day. The fellows can be awfully nosy, without meaning any harm, you know—and suppose somebody got hold of those? But I’ve got to come into Comerbourne again for my music lesson to-night, may I bring them to you then?”

“Yes, of course. I have to go to the club for part of the evening, though. Where does your music teacher live?”

He told her, brightening every moment now, his voice steady and mannish again. It was in Hedington Grove, a little cul-de-sac off Brook Street, near the edge of town. “I leave there at nine. I usually catch the twenty past nine bus home to Comerford.”

“You needn’t worry about the bus to-night,” she said good-humouredly. “I shall be finished at the club by then, I’ll pick you up at the corner of your teacher’s road, on Brook Street, and drive you home. I’ll be there at nine. Is that all right?”

“Fine, of course, if it isn’t troubling you too much. You’ve been most awfully kind.” He scrubbed once more at his eyes, quickly and shamefacedly, and smoothed nervous fingers through his hair. “I’m awfully sorry I was such an ass. But honestly I didn’t know what to do.”

“Feel better now?”

“
Much
better. Thanks
awfully
!”

“Well, now suppose you trot in there and wash your face. And then run off home and try not to worry. But don’t say a word to anyone else,” she warned, “or we should both be in the soup.”

“I won’t breathe a word to a soul,” he promised fervently.

She shepherded him down the stairs again into the silent hallway, and out into the darkness, and switching off the last lights after them, locked the door. The boy was beginning to feel his feet again now, and to want to assert his precarious masculinity all the more because she had seen it so sadly shaken. He hurried ahead to open doors for her, and accompanied her punctiliously across the forecourt to the parking ground where the big old Riley waited.