Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman (5 page)

“Well,” said Duckett, stirring discontentedly, “give me all you’ve got.”

George gave it, including his own accidental contact with Bennie during the evening.

“And those other two? What account have they given of their moves from ten o’clock on?”

“Clayton was sitting in the car out front when I left, which would be several minutes after ten. He says he moved the car into the yard about twenty past, as he saw no sign of Armiger coming back, and he was in the pub until closing-time, had one pint of mild, and that’s all. From half past ten until nearly eleven he hung around by the car. Still no boss. Then Calverley asked him to come into his own sitting-room, and he was there with Calverley and Mrs. Calverley all the time from then on. All three vouch for that. Bennie was clearing up in the bars with the other waiters, and keeping an eye open for Armiger returning, so that he could give Clayton the item. Around half past eleven Calverley and Clayton began to think they ought to investigate. They’re all used to doing what Armiger says and making no fuss about it, but they’d also be blamed if anything came unstuck and they didn’t deduce it by telepathy and come running, so whatever they did was pretty sure to be wrong, it was only a question of which was wronger, to butt in on him when he didn’t want them or to be missing when he did. I won’t say they were worried about him, but they were getting worried about their own positions with relation to him. Come midnight, they said to each other, better risk it. And they walked in solidly together and found him like this. The only period they don’t cover for each other is approximately half past ten to eleven, but I fancy you’ll find the indoor staff can account for Calverley for most of that time, too. Clayton could have moved around outside without being observed. I haven’t had time to see the others yet, but they’re waiting for me.”

“So many more mouths to shut,” said Duckett. “Those three will have spread the load by now.”

“You know, I doubt it. Don’t forget, this place only opened to-night, and all the staff except Bennie Blocksidge seem to have been brought into the district from all over. None of them knows the others yet. And when this drops on a bunch of strangers it’s just as likely to shut their mouths as open them. After all, somebody killed him, it might be the bloke sitting next to you.”

“Get on to ’em, anyhow. When we finish here and take him away I’m leaving you holding it, George. Ring me early, and I’ll send you a relief.”

“I’ll stay with it all day,” said George firmly, “if it’s all the same to you.” He wanted to be sure of an undisturbed night rather than an uneasy and solitary sleep during the day. “Want me to contact Armiger’s solicitors, or will you do that?”

“
Cui bono
?” said Duckett absently. “I’ll get on to them myself. You make what you can of the bunch here, and I’ll send Grocott to help you with the day staff when they come in, and the list of people who were in the pub last night.”

George left them still busy with cameras and flashes, and went to interview the frightened maids and waiters and the pretty, bleached blonde who was Mrs. Calverley. He got as little from them as he had expected, but deduced from the frozen silence in which he found them that they had justified his forecast by withdrawing into themselves rather than sharing their fears. Laboriously he put together an account of Armiger’s movements during the last hour or two of his life. Shortly before ten, according to Mrs. Calverley, one of the waiters, a young man named Turner who lodged in Comerford, had come into the saloon bar and relayed some message to Mr. Armiger, who had excused himself to his friends and followed him out. A couple of minutes later he had returned, gone straight to his party and had a word with them, and then gone out again. It appeared that this must have been when the anonymous young pal arrived to see him, for what he did next was to bounce into the servery by the dining-room, help himself to a magnum of champagne, and make off in the direction of the side door, bumping into Bennie and giving him his orders with regard to Clayton and the car on the way. No one had again seen him alive.

By the time George had done with the last of them it was almost daylight, and the ambulance had long since taken the dead man away, though Johnson was still in possession of the ballroom, indefatigably combing every hospitable surface for prints. George took himself home for a bath and breakfast and a brief and troubled conference with Bunty, and then took himself off again before Dominic should come scurrying downstairs and begin to ask questions.

He called at the house where the waiter lodged, and found him sitting in his room poring over the day’s runners, half-dressed and not yet shaven. Turner was a Londoner, pale with the city pallor on which summer has no influence, thin and sharp-eyed and dubious of Comerford already. He wouldn’t last long, he’d be off back to town. Meantime he might well be detached about all the people involved in this case, since he knew none of them. He wasn’t worried about being visited by the police, only puzzled and intrigued.

Yes, he said, some time before ten, maybe five minutes or so, he couldn’t be exact, he’d been passing through the hall and a young man had walked in at the door and buttonholed him, and asked for Mr. Armiger. Didn’t give a name, just said ask Mr. Armiger if he can spare a few minutes, say it’s important and I won’t keep him long. And he’d delivered the message, and thought no more about it, and Mr. Armiger had gone out to his visitor, who had waited in the hall for him. That was the last Turner had seen of either of them, because he’d been back in the dining-room after that. Did he know the young man? He knew nobody here, he’d only just come. Could he describe him? Well, there was nothing special about him. Young fellow about twenty-five or twenty-six. Dark overcoat and a grey suit. No hat. Tallish but not tall, cleanshaven, brown hair, nothing particular to notice about him. But he’d know him again if he saw him. Or a photograph? Well, probably, but you can’t always tell with photographs. He could try. Why, anyhow? What did they want him for? What had happened?

George told him, in the shortest and most startling words he could find, watching the cigarette that dangled from a colourless lip. The ash didn’t even fall, but at least Turner’s eyes opened fully for the first time, staring at George with a curiosity and excitement in which he could see no trace of fear or even wariness. The unmistakable tint of pleasure was there. Nothing against the boss, you understand, but after all, he’d hardly clapped eyes on him a couple of times, and it isn’t every day you get up this close to a murder.

“Go on!” he said, gleaming. “Well, I’ll be damned!” And so he might, but not, thought George, for anything to do with Armiger’s death. “You reckon it was this fellow I saw who done it?”

“It’s merely one line of inquiry,” said George dryly. “What I’m trying to do is to fill in all the details of the evening, that’s all. What time did you leave the job last night?”

“About twenty to eleven.” The thought that he might have to account for himself had not shaken his confidence in the slightest. “I got back here before eleven, the old girl’ll tell you the same. What’s more, one of the other blokes walked back with me, name of Stokes, you’ll find him just up the street here, Mrs. Lewis’s.” He pushed the paper aside, not even the runners could win back his attention now. “Can you beat it!” he said, and whistled long and softly. “And they think they’ve got all the life down home!”

George went down the dingy stairs turning over in his mind the irony of this last comment, and betting himself, though without relish because he was on a virtual certainty, that Turner would be in for work before his time that day, if never again.

The news hadn’t got out yet, or at least it was not yet public property, for there was no crowd dawdling hopefully about The Jolly Barmaid when George returned to its bright new doors. He put in a call to Duckett, outlined his moves up to date, and the little information he had gleaned from them, and settled down to compile, with Bennie Blocksidge’s help, a list of people who had been present at the gala opening on the previous evening. There would be no opening hours to-day, that was out of the question with the emperor dead; and once half past ten arrived and the first customer was brought up short against a closed door and a laconic notice, the secret wouldn’t be a secret long.

By the time their list was as complete as their combined memories could make it, Grocott and Price were on the premises and waiting for orders. George unloaded the more promising of the routine calls on to them, and went to telephone Duckett again. By this time even solicitors should be working, and “
Cui bono
?” was still one of the leading questions. Had Armiger really cut off his son completely, or had he only threatened him and left him to stew a while in his own juice? Not in the hope of bringing him to heel, since marriage can’t be sloughed off as easily as all that even to satisfy an Armiger; but perhaps merely out of spleen, to punish him for his rebellion with a taste of poverty, before taking him back chastened and amenable.

And plus an ex-clerk wife who would be a constant reminder of a defeat to her unloving father-in-law? No, it wasn’t easy to imagine it, after all. George turned a thumb down as he dialled Duckett’s number. About a hundred to one Leslie didn’t figure in the will, unless in some peculiarly hurtful and humiliating way. And Armiger’s wife was some years dead, and he had no other child. So somebody was due for a windfall. He wouldn’t disseminate his empire, living or dead. Nor was it really conceivable that he would have neglected to make a revised will, or even postponed it for a period of reflection. He had never reflected, but always charged, and this time would be no exception.

“I talked to old Hartley,” said Duckett. “The terms of the will won’t be much help to us at first glance, but they’re interesting, very interesting. Seems he had his old will destroyed and dictated the terms of a new one the very day he threw his son out. The boy isn’t so much as mentioned. Might as well be dead, apparently, to his father.”

“I’ve been betting myself,” said George, “that he wouldn’t let his pile be divided up. Right?”

“Right. He was a born amasser, he didn’t want things to disintegrate after he was gone, either. There’s a long list of minor legacies to staff, not one of ’em interesting to us, you wouldn’t consider killing a mouse for the amounts he considered a due reward for service. Mind you, he paid good wages living, I don’t think it’s meanness, it’s just this empire-building tendency of his. But the residue of his property, after payment of these flea-bites, is left to—did I hear you make a guess?”

“You did not,” said George. “My mind’s a blank. He didn’t, by any chance, think of the possibility of grandchildren, and leave it in trust for them?”

“Not a hope. The whole dynasty is cancelled, he’s making a new and surprising start. The name is Katherine Norris, George. And what, if anything, do you make of that?”

AND WHAT
DID
George make of it? Just plain spite? A reaction towards Kitty Norris simply because Leslie had veered off from her and married someone else? A way of hitting Leslie as hard as possible by so pointedly deflecting his expectations into the lap of the girl he wouldn’t marry? Not a gesture of consolation to Kitty, Armiger wasn’t quite as clumsy as that, surely, even when he was angry. Or was there more to it than met the eye? Plainly this represented a move to amalgamate Armiger’s Ales and Norris’s Beers and vest the lot in Kitty after his death; but might it not be intended primarily as a move in a game which was to be played with Armiger very much alive and in shrewd command of his forces? Kitty would be welcome to the show after he was dead, provided he ran it while he was alive. His naming her as his heiress might well be an earnest of good faith designed to bring off a deal which had so far eluded him, and the deal could only be the acquisition of Norris’s to add to his own barony here and now. After all, with Leslie out of the picture Armiger was making no sacrifice in declaring his intention of leaving everything he had to Kitty, since he had no other close relatives, and he couldn’t take his fortune with him. He had to dispose of it somehow; how better than by buying a present gain with it, while he was here to enjoy it?

Supposing there existed a tentative proposition for a merger, thought George, and Miss Norris’s manager was holding off—as he understandably might, for once the two firms were joined there wasn’t much doubt who would turn out to be the boss—wouldn’t such a disposition for the future strengthen Armiger’s hand considerably? What had he to lose, in any case? If he failed to get what he wanted this will was as easily revoked as the previous one. It was at least worth a try. What Armiger wanted he usually got, hence the ferocity and finality of his reaction on the one occasion when he failed in his aims.

George got out his car and sat behind the wheel, and thought out his next move without haste. A rum set-up, when you came to think of it, old Norris making Armiger’s right-hand man trustee for his daughter, but the three men had been fairly close friends, and nobody had ever questioned Shelley’s integrity; it seemed to work well enough in practice. He didn’t know whether the trust was wound up now that the girl was of age, or not. There were a lot of relevant things he didn’t know, and on the face of it he had very little right so far to inquire into them. There was only one person he had a perfect right to see about Kitty Norris’s movements and affairs, and that was Kitty Norris. She had been at The Jolly Barmaid last night, she had been with Armiger, he had spoken to her, among others, just before he went off happily to display his latest garish toy; and sooner or later George would have to see her. It might as well be sooner, he decided, and started the car.

Kitty had a flat in Comerbourne, not far from the main shopping centre, but tucked away in a quiet street in the lee of the parish church, and therefore clear of the business traffic which made the town bedlam all through the day. Even there, however, parking was a problem, and George had to take his Morris a good way past the house in order to find a vacant space into which he could insert it. He was lucky, the red Karmann-Ghia was there at the kerb, so Kitty was in. It was nearly noon when she opened the door to him, in a sweater and skirt and a pair of flat, childish sandals, and gazed at him for a moment with nothing in her eyes but patient bewilderment, waiting for him to state his business.

“My name is Felse,” said George. “I’m a police officer, Miss Norris.” The bewilderment vanished so promptly, she stepped back from the doorway so instantly, that he knew she knew. “You’ve heard already about Mr. Armiger?”

“Mr. Shelley telephoned me,” she said. “Come in, Mr. Felse.”

She was looking at him, he noticed, with a certain grave curiosity which he thought was not all for his office but partly for himself, and he was human enough and male enough to be flattered and disarmed by her attention. Some people cannot look directly at you in conversation even when they have nothing to hide; Kitty, he thought, would look straight at you even if she had a guilty secret to hide, because it was the way she was made, and she wouldn’t be able to help it.

“I’m making investigations into Mr. Armiger’s death, and there are points on which I think you may be able to help me, if you will. I promise not to keep you very long.”

“I wasn’t doing anything,” she said, leading him into a big, pastel-coloured room, lofty and unexpectedly sunlit, for she lived on the fourth floor, and the buildings opposite were lower, and showed her only their roofs. “Please sit down, Mr. Felse. May I get you a drink?” She turned and looked at him with a small, wry smile. “It sounds like a Raymond Chandler gambit, doesn’t it? But I was just going to have a sherry, actually. And after all, you’re not a private eye, are you?”

“More of a public one,” said George. It wasn’t going as he’d expected, but he was content to let it wander; it might arrive somewhere very interesting if he let well alone.

“I hope you like it dry,” said Kitty deprecatingly. “It’s all I’ve got.” The hand that proffered the glass was not quite steady, he saw, but there was every excuse for that tremor.

“Thanks, I do. I’m afraid it must have been a great shock to you, Miss Norris—Mr. Armiger’s death.”

“Yes,” she said in a low voice, and sat down directly in front of him and looked straight at him, just as he’d forseen she would have to do. “Mr. Shelley and Miss Hamilton both rang up to tell me,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe it. You know what I mean. He was so alive. Whether you liked him or not, whether you approved of him or not, there he was, and you couldn’t imagine the world without him. And there were things about him that were admirable, you know. He was brave. He came up with nothing, and he took on the world to get where he got. And even when he had so much he wasn’t afraid. People often learn to be afraid when they have a lot to lose, but he was never afraid of anything. And he could be generous, too, sometimes. And good fun. If you were a child he wasn’t afraid or ashamed to play with you like a child—even though there was really nothing childish left in him. I suppose it was because children made good playthings for him, because we were satisfied with lots of action, and never made difficulties of principle for him like grown-ups do. It was very easy to get on with him then. And very hard afterwards.” She looked down into her glass, and for the first time George saw, as Dominic had seen, the essential sadness of her face, and like Dominic was dumbfounded and engaged by it, inextricably caught into the mystery of her loneliness and withdrawal.

She moved, he thought, as though her course was set, and her own volition had nothing to do with it, having aligned itself long ago with some other influence which was disposing of her. Not Armiger’s influence, or she could not have talked of him like that. Perhaps not any man’s, only a tide of events in which she felt herself to be caught, and which she had to trust because she had no alternative.

“We’re all imperfect,” said George, trying to speak as simply as she had done, and hoping he didn’t sound as sententious to her as he did to himself. “I think he’d like what you’ve just said of him.”

“There was a great deal that I had against him,” she said, choosing her words with scrupulous care. “That’s why I want to be fair to him. If there’s anything I can tell you, of course I will.”

“You were with him last night, at least for part of the evening. Towards ten o’clock, so I understand from one of the waiters, someone asked Mr. Armiger to spare him a few minutes, and Mr. Armiger went out to speak to him. He then came back and spoke to you and the other people at his table, before leaving again. Is that right?”

“I didn’t look at the time,” she said, “but I expect that’s accurate enough. Yes, he came back to us and said would we excuse him for a quarter of an hour or so, he had to see someone, but he’d be right back, and he hoped we’d wait for him.”

“That’s all he said? He didn’t mention a name, or anything like that?”

“No, that’s all he said. And he went, and then Ruth said she had to get back, because she was expecting a call from her sister in London about a quarter to eleven, she’d promised she’d be in at that time. That’s Miss Hamilton, you know, Mr. Armiger’s secretary. And as Mr. Shelley had brought her he had to leave, too, so I was on my own. I thought at first I would wait, and then I didn’t, after all. I was tired, I thought I’d have an early night. I think it must have been just after a quarter past ten when I left, but maybe someone else might know. The car gets quite a lot of attention,” said Kitty without a trace of irony in her voice or her face, “someone may have seen me drive off.”

Someone had; Clayton had, as he chafed and cursed in his boss’s Bentley in front of The Jolly Barmaid, five minutes or so before he resigned himself to a long wait and moved the car into the courtyard. He had watched her drive out from the car-park and pull out to the right on her way to Comerbourne; and devoted car-enthusiast though he was, it was doubtful if he had been looking at the Karmann-Ghia, “I see,” said George. “So you’d be home by soon after half past ten, I suppose.”

“Oh, before, I expect. It only takes me ten minutes, even counting putting the car away. Oh, God!” said Kitty, recollecting herself too late, as usual. “I shouldn’t be telling you that, should I?”

“I’m incapable of working it out without a pencil and paper,” George reassured her, smiling. But even when she made you laugh there was something about this girl that had you damn’ near crying, and for no good reason. She wasn’t heartbroken about Armiger, she’d stated her position with reference to him punctiliously; shocked she might well be, but that wasn’t what had got into even her smile, even the sweet, rueful clowning that came naturally to her.

“May I ask you some personal questions about your affairs, Miss Norris? They’ll seem to you quite irrelevant, but I think if you care to answer them you may be helping me.”

“Go ahead,” said Kitty. “But if it’s business it’s odds on I won’t even know the answers.”

“I understand that your father left his estate in trust for you, dying as he did when you were quite a child. Can you tell me if that trust terminated when you came of age?”

“I know the answer to that one,” she said, mildly astonished, “and it did. I can do whatever damn-fool thing I like with my money now, they can only advise me. Actually it all goes on just the same as before, but that’s the legal position.”

“So if a merger was proposed between Armiger’s and Norris’s it would be entirely up to you to decide whether you wanted to go through with it?”

“Yes,” she said, so quietly that he knew she had heard the further question he had not asked. “He did want that,” she said, “you’re quite right. He’s been working at it for some time. The people at our place weren’t very keen, but he was like the goat in that silly song, and I dare say he’d have busted the dam in the end. But nothing had happened yet, and now it doesn’t arise any more.”

“And what did you want to do?”

“I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted not to know about it, I wanted to be somewhere else, and not to have to think about it at all. I’d have been glad to give it to him and get rid of it, myself, but after all, people work there, a lot of people, and it means more to them than it does to me. One ought not to own something that matters more to other people. If I knew how to set about it, or could persuade Ray Shelley to understand what I wanted, I’d like to give it to
them
.”

George had a sense of having been drawn into a tide which was carrying him helplessly off course, and yet must inevitably sweep him, in its own erratic channel, towards the sea of truth. He certainly wasn’t navigating. Neither, perhaps, was she, but she swam as to the manner born with this whirling current, its overwhelming simplicity and directness her natural element. She meant every word she said now, there was no doubt of that, and she expected him to accept it as honestly; and confound the girl, that was exactly what he was doing.

Trying to get his feet on to solid earth again, he said: “This idea of uniting the two firms wasn’t a new one, was it? Forgive me if I’m entering on delicate ground, but the general impression is that Mr. Armiger had the same end in mind earlier, and meant to achieve it in a different way, by a direct link between the two families.”

“Yes, he wanted Leslie to marry me,” she said, so simply that he felt ashamed of his own verbosity. She looked up over her empty glass, and he saw deep into the wide-set eyes that were like the coppery purple velvet of butterfly wings. You looked down and down into them, and saw her clearly within the crystal tower of herself, but so far away from you that there was no hope of ever reaching her. “But it was his idea, not ours. You can’t make these things for other people. He ought to have known that. There never was any engagement between Leslie and me.”

A moment of silence, while she looked steadily at him and her cheeks paled a little. He had one more question to ask her, but he let it ride until he had risen to take his leave, and then, turning back as if something relatively unimportant had occurred to him, he asked mildly: “Do you happen to know the terms of Mr. Armiger’s will?”

“No,” she said quickly, and her head came up with a sudden wild movement, the velvet eyes enormous and eager upon his face. He saw hope flame up in her as though someone had lighted a lamp; a word, and something like joy would kindle in the crystal tower of her loneliness. What was it she wanted of him? Beyond the relatively modest needs of her car and her wardrobe and this almost cloistral flat of hers, money seemed to mean very little to her. He had to go through with it now, because he had to know if what he had to tell her was what she wanted to know.

“He’s left everything to you,” said George.

The light in her was quenched on the instant, but that was the least of it. She stood staring at him open-mouthed, and the colour drained slowly from her face. Her knees gave under her, she reached a hand back to grope for the arm of a chair, and sat down dazedly, her fingers clenched together in her lap.