Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman (20 page)

The discrepancy jolted him seriously, and he opened his eyes to make sure he wasn’t dreaming, but closed them again very quickly because the effort was very painful. However, he’d had time to see the face that was bending over him, and there was no doubt about it, it was his father. Well, if that was how he felt about things it didn’t look so bad, not so bad at all. Dominic had expected at the very best to find himself in the doghouse. Maybe if you’re really going to kick over the traces in a big way it pays to get yourself half killed in the process. Even if it does hurt.

Drifting a little below the surface of full consciousness, he remembered the one thing he had to get settled, the only thing in the world that really mattered.

“It wasn’t Kitty,” he said, not very distinctly but George understood. “You do know now, don’t you?”

“Yes, Dom, we know now. Everything’s all right, everything’s fine, you just rest.”

He was sinking unresisting into a stupor of weariness and relief, tears oozing between his closed eyelids into George’s shoulder, when a sudden appalling sound startled him into full consciousness again. Someone had laughed loudly and angrily, a discord harsh as a scream.

He opened his eyes wide, his wrung nerves vibrating, and beyond George’s head and Duckett’s solid shoulders, beyond Jean and Leslie clinging hand in hand, he saw a wild creature in a torn black suit, her cheek cut by flying glass, long black hair dangling in great heavy locks round her face, a bloodstained Maenad wrenching ineffectively at her pinioned wrists, her mouth contorted as she spat defiance.

“All right, yes, I killed him. I don’t care who knows it. Do you think you can frighten me with your charges and your cautions? All right, what if I did kill him? It isn’t capital murder, don’t think you’re going to kill me, that’s something you can’t do. I know the law, I’ve had to know it. Twenty years,” she shouted hoarsely, “twenty years of my life he had out of me! I could have married a dozen times over, but no, I had to fix my sights on him! Twenty years his bitch, being patient, waiting for that bag of a wife of his to die—”

Dominic began to shake in his father’s arms, and then to sob convulsively. He couldn’t help it, and when he’d begun he couldn’t stop. All that black and white dignity, all that composure and discipline, she ripped them to shreds and threw them in his face. He couldn’t bear it. He burrowed his throbbing head desperately into George’s shoulder, whimpering, but he couldn’t shut out the sound of her voice.

“—and then still waiting after she was dead, and still no reward. Bide my time, I’ve done nothing all my life but bide my time, and what did I ever get out of it but
him
! And then suddenly
her
on the telephone, that fool of a girl yelling for help to me—
me
!—and bleating that he was planning
to marry her
! And what was I to get, after I’d given him years of my life? Nothing, none of my rights, just the same old round, his letters to type in the daytime, and him in my bed when he felt like it—and her,
her
holding the reins! Yes, I killed him,” she panted, her breast heaving, “but it wasn’t enough. He ought to have been conscious. He ought to have felt it more—every blow! There ought to have been some way I could kill him ten times over for what he did to me!”

HE REMEMBERED NOTHING of the drive home in the van, with George nursing him anxiously in his arms, and Leslie driving as gingerly, so Jean said afterwards, as if he had an ambulance load of expectant mothers aboard instead of just one. He was conscious but totally astray. Very slight concussion, so the doctor said, and his recollections would sort themselves out coherently enough later on; but this part of the evening never came back. They put him to bed, and dosed him with something that gradually took the pain away but took the world away with it. “He’s all right,” said the doctor. “We’ll keep him under light sedation to-morrow, and by evening he’ll be right as rain.”

He woke once in the night, struggling and crying out fiercely, loosing in his dreams the resistance he had restrained by force a few hours earlier. Bunty brought him a drink, and he gulped it down greedily, asked her wonderingly what was the matter, and fell asleep again on her arm. Towards dawn he began sobbing violently in his sleep, but the fit subsided when she bathed his hot forehead and soothed him back into deeper slumber; and in the morning he awoke hungry, alert and loquacious, though still somewhat pale and tense, and wanted to talk to his father.

“This evening,” said Bunty firmly. “Right now he’s busy arranging about getting Miss Norris released. That’s what you were worrying about, isn’t it? You take it easy and stop fretting, everything’s under control.”

“Oh, Mummy!” he said reproachfully, almost offendedly, “you’re so darned
calm
.” He wouldn’t, she thought, have chosen that word if he could have seen her face when they brought him home. He took a rapid retrospective glance at the memories that were beginning to assemble themselves into some sort of shape, and asked coaxingly: “You’re not very mad with me, are you?”

“Well, you know,” said Bunty amiably, putting away the thermometer which confirmed that his temperature was normal, “maddish.”

“Only maddish? Well, look, Mummy, I overspent my expense account. Those gloves were twenty-three and eleven, I never knew they cost so much. Any good my putting in a claim?”

“We can’t let the detective lose on the job,” she said comfortably. He wasn’t feeling quite as tough and skittish as he pretended, but it was better not to notice that. “I’m surprised you didn’t just go to Haywards for them, and get them put down to my account.”

“Well, hell!” said Dominic, confounded. “I never thought of that.”

By evening he was pronounced fit to talk as much as he liked. Later it might be necessary to take an official statement from him, but for the moment what mattered was that he should get the whole thing off his chest to his father as soon as George came home.

“Is it all right?” asked Dominic eagerly, before George could even move up a chair to the side of the bed. “Kitty’s free?” He couldn’t altogether suppress the tremor in his voice when he uttered her name.

“Yes, it’s all right, Kitty’s free.” He didn’t say any more, it was for her to do that. Dominic knew what he’d done for her, nothing George might say could add anything to his glory, and he certainly wasn’t going to take anything away from it. “You needn’t worry any more, you did what you set out to do. How does your head feel now?”

“Sore, and I’ve got a stiff neck. But not so bad, really. What was it she hit me with?”

“You won’t want to believe it. A rubber cosh loaded with lead shot, the kind the Teds favour.”

“No!” said Dominic, his mouth falling open with astonishment. “Where would she get a thing like that?”

“Can’t you guess? From one of her club boys. She confiscated it from him a few weeks ago, with a severe lecture on the iniquity of carrying offensive weapons.” Alfred Armiger hadn’t survived to appreciate the irony, but by the grace of God Dominic had. “What was it that put you on to her in the first place?”

“It was Jean’s doing, really. I got to thinking how all the people involved had known Mr. Armiger for years, and wondering why one of them should suddenly pick on that night not to be able to stick him a moment longer. And I thought the real motive must be something that had happened that very evening, something that changed things altogether for that one person. So after we got to know about Kitty’s phone call, and it seemed likely that the person she called might be the one, this sudden motive thing sort of got narrowed down into something that was said in that phone call. I made a smashing case on those lines against Mr. Shelley, and tried it on Leslie and Jean. And straight away Jean said no, it couldn’t happen like that. She said Kitty wouldn’t run to a man, but to a woman. She said,” said Dominic, steeling his hesitant voice to use the adult words Jean had used, firmly and authoritatively as became a man, “that Kitty had just suffered a kind of sexual outrage, almost worse than the ordinary kind, with that beastly old man making a pass at her that wasn’t even a pass, but just a cold-blooded business deal. And you see—what made it much worse—”

He turned his head on the pillow and stared steadily at the wall. He couldn’t say it, even now. What made it much worse was that she was still in love with Leslie, and his father’s complacent proposal must have seemed to her horribly shocking. “Jean said in those circumstances she’d go to a woman if she had to have help,” he said, controlling the level of his voice with determination. He wasn’t quite himself yet, he cried easily if he wasn’t on his guard.

“I see,” said George, remembering how in the night Bunty had reorientated him with much the same phrases and sent him off after the same quarry, though by slower and more orthodox methods. “So you thought of one woman at least who was older, who was well known to her, and who’d been on the scene with her that evening.”

“Yes. And I thought what Kitty could have said to her that might make her suddenly want to kill Mr. Armiger, and you see, it was there as soon as I began looking for it.” Yes, it was there to be found, though he shouldn’t have known enough to go looking for it. There isn’t much boys miss; even the gossip they disdain their knowing senses record accurately. “I wouldn’t mind betting,” said Dominic, “that Kitty’s the one person who didn’t even know what they said about him and Miss Hamilton. She’s so
apart
from those things. Even if you told her something like that it would go in one ear and out the other. She doesn’t hear what doesn’t interest her.”

George wasn’t prepared to follow him into the shadowy sweet hinterland of Kitty’s mind; there was no permanent place for either of them there.

“So you decided as we couldn’t find the gloves to try a gigantic bluff and pretend that you had. How did you set about it?”

Dominic told the whole story, glad to unburden himself; it was difficult to recapture the fear now, in this familiar and secure place, but there were times when he trembled.

“I went there after I knew old Shelley’d left, and pretended I wanted to talk to him, and that it was something about the case. As soon as she bit like that and suggested I should tell her instead I felt sure I was right about her. And when I told her I’d found the gloves, and they were a woman’s—letting on I thought they must be Kitty’s, and wanted to suppress the evidence—well, then it began to look even more promising, because right away she said I could give them to her and she’d deal with them. Meaning me to understand, she’d destroy them. Well, I mean people just
don’t
stick their necks out like that, not to a chap they’ve hardly set eyes on before, and don’t know at all. Do they? Not without a pretty urgent reason of their own. She tried to make me tell where I’d found them, and what they were like and all that, so she could make sure whether she really had anything to fear or not, but I laid on a sort of hysterical act, and she couldn’t get any sense out of me. And you know, she couldn’t afford to take even the least risk of my tale being true. Even if the odds were a thousand to one against my having anything that mattered to her, she couldn’t afford to let even that one chance slip by. So she said give them to her. And if I’d done it then and there I don’t know what she’d have done, because long before that I could feel her thinking that I was just as dangerous to her as the gloves themselves, and she had to get rid of both of us. I was acting pretty emotional, I bet she was thinking to herself, this little ass will never be able to keep his mouth shut, some day he’ll blab to his father. I think she’d have seen to it that something happened to me right there in the office, because everyone else had gone, and with the car she’d have been able to take me somewhere miles away to dump me. But I said I hadn’t got them on me, on account of the chaps at school being naturally a bit casual with one another’s things, and I’d bring them to her when I came in for my music lesson at night. You should have seen her jump at it! Nobody’d ever know we were going to meet, and if I vanished nobody’d ever think of her. She suggested she’d wait for me at the end of the road when she came from the club. And she impressed on me that I wasn’t to say a word to a soul. So then I was absolutely sure. She
had
got rid of some bloodstained gloves somewhere close to the barn that night, and she
had
killed Mr. Armiger. Why else should she prepare a set-up like that?”

“And why,” asked George gently, “didn’t you come to me then and tell me everything? Why did you have to go through with a thing like that all by yourself? Couldn’t you have trusted me?”

The note of reproach, however restrained, had been a mistake. “All right, I know, I know!” said George hastily. “It wasn’t proof, and you felt you had to provide the proof. But did it have to be by using yourself as live bait?”

“Well, having gone so far I sort of couldn’t stop. And if I’d told you you’d have stopped me from going on with it. You’d have had to. I could
do
a thing like that, but
you
couldn’t
let
me do it. You don’t blame me, do you?”

“I don’t blame you, I blame myself. I ought to have made it possible for you to rely on me more.” That wasn’t the way, either; self-reproach seemed to have a worse effect still on Dominic. “Never mind,” said George gently. “You did what you felt you ought to do, let’s leave it at that for now. How did you know what sort of gloves to provide? That must have been a headache. If they were wrong, one glance and she’d know you were lying.”

“But then she’d also know I suspected her and was trying to trap her, wouldn’t she? And that would have come to the same thing, she’d still think it essential to get rid of me while she had this chance. So it didn’t matter. But I did try to do the best I could. I saw she hadn’t got gloves on when we left the office, so I went along to see her to the car, and sure enough she had them there in the locker, and they were plain short black kid and quite new, hardly creased at the joints yet. So I thought the safest bet was that she bought a pair as like the ones she threw away as possible, and I rode back into town and got some like them. I ran the tap on them and crumpled and soiled them and tried to age them a bit, and even then I wrapped them up so she should only get a glimpse of them.

“And you know all the rest,” said Dominic, lying back in his pillows with a huge sigh. “I couldn’t know my note to Leslie Armiger would be held up like that, or I’d have said eight o’clock instead of half past.”

“I should think so,” said George warmly. “Turned nine when they located me at the garage near her place, and no sign of you or the Riley by the time we got to Brook Street. If it hadn’t been for young Leslie—” He dropped that sentence quickly, for his own sake as much as for Dominic’s.

“Suppose she goes back on her confession? Will you still be able to get a conviction without the real gloves?”

“Oh, there’ll be no trouble there. Her car’s full of traces of blood, all the seams of the driving-seat show it. The leather’s been washed, but she made the usual mistake of using hot water, and in any case you can never get it out of the threads. And we’ve recovered the zip fastener of the black skirt she wore that night, and two ornamental buttons from the front pleat, all metal, out of the furnace ashes from the flats where she lives. The jacket she must have thought wasn’t marked, she sent it to a church rummage sale, but we’ve traced it. The right sleeve is slightly splashed with blood, too. Oh, yes, we’ve got a case. She must have knelt on the floor beside him, I should think—anyhow she found it necessary to burn the skirt. No wonder the hem of Kitty’s dress was stained where it brushed hers.”

Looking fixedly at the edge of the sheet which he was folding between his fingers, Dominic asked abruptly: “Did you see her to-day?”

“Who, Ruth Hamilton?”

“No,” said Dominic, stiffening. “Kitty. When they—when she was released.”

“Yes, I saw her.”

“To speak to? How did she look? Did she say anything?”

“She looked a bit dazed as yet,” said George carefully, remembering the stunned purple eyes that had stared bewildered at freedom even when it was put into her hands. “Give her a day or two, and she’ll be her own girl again. At first the truth was just one more shock to her, but she was coming round nicely the last I saw of her. She said she was going out to get her hair done and buy a new dress.”

Dominic lay silent. His diligent fingers lagged on the hem of the sheet. He kept his eyes averted.

“And she said she’d like to come and see you to-night, if you were well enough to have visitors.”

Dominic rolled over and sat up in a flurry of bedclothes, eyes flaring golden. “No! Did she, though? No kidding?” He had clutched at the bright promise with all his might, but caution made him give it a second look. “I suppose you went and told her I had to be kept quiet,” he said suspiciously. They needn’t think he hadn’t heard them talking about him last night, even if he’d been in no mood to argue then.

“I told her there was nothing the matter with you but a swollen head. I don’t suppose she’ll manage to reduce that any,” said George, grinning, “but anyhow she’ll be here about eight o’clock. You’ve got a quarter of an hour to cover the worst ravages.”

Dominic was half out of bed, yelling for Bunty. George tucked him back again firmly, and brought him his new dark green silk dressing-gown, his last birthday present that was too good to be worn except on special occasions. “You stay where you are, and don’t squander your advantages. You look very interesting. Here you are, get busy on the details.” He dropped comb and mirror on Dominic’s bed, and left him to his bliss.