Ladies’ Bane (24 page)

“What harm! She had taken Geoffrey, hadn’t she! But that wasn’t the reason. I may have my emotions, but I don’t let them interfere with business. We had to have money. And then it turned out that there was not so much as we thought, and that Allegra couldn’t even leave her share to Geoffrey whilst you were alive. So you came into it. She had to have your money, and then Geoffrey would have it all.”

“When Allegra had been got out of the way?”

“Oh, yes. An overdose-so easy with a morphia addict.”

“And me? That push in the back on the island at Wraydon-that wasn’t really meant for Allegra, was it? It was meant for me.”

“Clever, aren’t you!” said Jacqueline Delauny. Her whole voice and manner had coarsened. “But I wasn’t on the island, you know.”

“The Professor was,” said Ione-“Professor Regulus Mactavish-The Great Prospero. And now I will tell you something you don’t know. I heard him talking in a London fog. He had his foot in a half-open door, and he was saying that he wouldn’t risk his neck for less than two thousand pounds.”

It was a shot in the dark, but when Jacqueline caught her breath and came out with “Where-where were you?” she knew that it had come off. She said,

“I followed him-we met Jim Severn. You gave the Professor his orders, but he wasn’t very good at carrying them out, was he?”

“He’s a fool!” Jacqueline’s voice was full of scorn. “I was born in the show business, and he has been useful once or twice. His daughter can’t do without our stuff, and he’ll do most things to get it for her. But when the island business didn’t come off he wouldn’t go on-said it wouldn’t be lucky for any of us.” Her voice went down into sombre depths. There was a silence before she said in quite a casual tone. “So I had to take it on myself. And meanwhile Flaxman started in to blackmail Geoffrey. He heard Margot say that he had told her she could have the rope. Well, he had to be got out of the way before I could deal with you. Child’s play of course. The fool was running after Nellie Humphreys-I knew he slipped out to see her most nights. Easy enough to get word to her father-of course he never knew it came from me. After that I only had to watch my opportunity. Actually it fell out better than even I could have planned. The violent row and the charge of shot-well, they were just plain gifts from the gods. I’m born lucky, you know. Whatever Prospero may say! So that finished up the Flaxman business, and I was ready to deal with you.”

Ione had become less and less able to feel anything at all, but at this moment she felt a crawling horror. It might have been the matter-of-fact way in which Jacqueline spoke of Flaxman’s death as a slight but necessary preliminary to her own murder, or it might have been that the shock which she had received was passing, and with it the merciful numbness it had induced. She said,

“You can’t reckon up your luck till the end-and the Professor warned you.”

Jacqueline had a sudden startled look. There was angry protest in her voice.

“Prospero! I tell you he had cold feet! Him and his Scotch second sight! He can’t come that sort of stuff over me-I’ve known him too long! I tell you I was born in the show business! And I’d have been there still if I hadn’t had the wits to climb out of it! Prospero’s my uncle-do you hear? He’s my mother’s brother, and that poor girl his daughter is what I might have been if I hadn’t got out! Fell from the high wire when she was no more than a kid! And a cripple for life! That’s why she has to have the dope! You and your smug complacency, what do you know about the way people live? You’ve always had money-background-security, where I’ve only had what I could get for myself! And what I’m going to get is everything that you have always had! And I’m going to enjoy shooting you to get it! There’s something heavy coming now-as soon as it is right under the windows I shall shoot! I hope you’re ready-“ The jeering note slackened on the last word and petered out.

Through the noise of the approaching lorry Ione was aware of movement in the hall. She did not hear Jim Severn’s hurried tread, but she felt it. All lesser sounds were lost in the approaching roar, but under her feet the floor-boards shook.

Things take so long to tell, and they happen so quickly. What had reached Ione reached Jacqueline a bare second later. Her voice failed. The door, already partly open, was kicked wide. A large bright green earthenware jug came hurtling through the air to send Jacqueline Delauny crashing back against the wall. The noise of the breaking china with all the weight of a full jug of water behind it was joined with the appalling racket outside. The solitary shot which missed everything except a hideous Majorcan vase was hardly noticeable in the general din.

Jim Severn, having swung his missile, followed it. Jacqueline lay crumpled up at the foot of the wall with sherds of green pottery scattered about her and a copious flood of water soaking into everything within reach. The revolver had flown out of her hand and lay between the windows. Jim Severn went across and picked it up. He remembered to use a handkerchief to wrap it in.

Ione got to her feet and went slowly across to where Jacqueline lay. She had not known whether her legs would carry her. They did, but she couldn’t feel them. First she was sitting on Louisa’s little upright chair whilst Louisa’s bedroom jug flew past her and the shot which was meant to put an end to Ione Muir went off harmlessly and only broke a vase. Then she was standing looking down at Jacqueline and wondering if she was dead. Wig and bonnet had slipped. A strand of wet black hair clung to the old-fashioned coat. There was blood from a deep fast-bleeding cut. It crossed an outflung wrist, and the blood ran down into Jacqueline’s hand. Did people bleed when they were dead? She didn’t think they did. She went down on her knees in the wet and began to knot her handkerchief round the arm above the cut. Jim Severn was ringing up the police.

It was late enough when Jim and Ione were free to go. Looking back to the time before the police arrived, it seemed as if it had lagged endlessly. Water and blood upon the floor, water and blood upon their hands. All that hatred and passionate feeling which had so horribly impended quite mute, quite still, as if it had never been. Jacqueline Delauny was alive. There was a pulse in the wrist and breath between the pallid lips, but it was like being in the room with a dead person. Presently they were not so sure that she was unconscious. Jim Severn kept himself between her and the windows. He had no intention of letting the police arrive to find them with a suicide on their hands.

After the police took over time moved into its second phase, a kind of dreadful hurry. Coming and going of the police surgeon-an ambulance-the removal of Jacqueline Delauny-the taking of fingerprints-the taking of statements from Jim, from Ione, from Mrs. Robinson.

“You’re sure she said that she was Miss Blunt’s cousin?”

“Now what do you take me for, Inspector? Do you suppose I’d have let her have the key to go up if I hadn’t thought it was all right? Half took a letter out of her bag and said Miss Blunt had asked her to meet the other lady here-got her name pat and all. ‘I suppose Miss Muir hasn’t come yet?’ she said. ‘I’m a little early. I’ll just go up and open the flat.’ Very pleasant spoken she was, and how was I to think of there being anything wrong? There’d be an elderly lady here to see Miss Blunt every so often. Not that I ever had a real look at her, but you know how it is-these old things in their black clothes, why you don’t take any particular notice of how they look.”

A very voluble witness. It took time to confine her statement to matters of fact.

Ione’s statement swam in her head. Describing what had happened only made it seem less like anything real. She was here, in Louisa’s room, and a policeman was writing down what she said, but it just did not seem to be one of the things you can believe. The policeman looked at her rather oddly once or twice. Presently he said, “Are you all right, miss?” and she found herself saying very slowly and carefully,

“Yes-I-think-so-”

She shut her eyes while he read her statement over to her, and heard the words go by. They were her words, but they meant less than ever now. She wrote her name, and the pen fell out of her hand upon the floor.

After that there was a fuss. Jim seemed to be angry, and Mrs. Robinson had made her a cup of tea. She was lying on Louisa’s tight, hard sofa. Someone was saying that there was a taxi waiting. Jim Severn took her home in it. She thought of it that way. He might have been a properly married husband taking her home and scolding her most of the way because she had given him the fright of his life. In between he said things like “Darling, are you all
right
? Are you quite
sure
you’re all right?”-all incoherent and emoted. And she lay back against his arm and felt his shoulder warm and strong under her cheek.

It was Jim’s turn to be scolded when they got to the flat. Nannie took charge with a will.

“I never heard of such goings on! And hours past her lunch-no wonder she’s faint! But I’ve got a good drop of soup won’t take a minute to warm, and a nice dish of cheese and egg all ready to put in the oven for tonight. And then into Miss Barbara’s bed you go, Miss Ione, for there’s nothing like a good sleep when you’ve had an upset!”

It was late when Ione woke. Barbara’s room was dark except for the square of a window. The curtains had not been drawn. They hung straight and black on either side, and between them there was light reflected from a lamp in the street below. As she rose on her elbow, the door was very gently opened. In the sort of voice which would not wake the lightest sleeper Nannie spoke her name.

Ione sat right up.

“Is it frightfully late? I feel as if I’d slept for hours.”

“And so you have, my dear.”

The light was switched on and Nannie came over to draw the curtains.

“Eight o’clock, and time you had something more inside you-going without your lunch the way you did! I’m sure I haven’t patience with Mr. Jim, and so I told him! And I was to ask whether you would have something on a tray, or if you would feel equal to coming in on the sofa and having your supper with him. There’s a nice housecoat of Miss Barbara’s you can slip on and not trouble to dress. And it’s no use your saying a word, because she’d be giving it to you with both hands if she was here. Loving and giving, that’s Miss Barbara from a child. So you take and put it on, my dear, same as she’d want you to.”

Barbara’s housecoat was dark blue velvet, the softest, warmest thing in the world, and the most comfortable. It made her eyes look dark and her skin very white. It was nice not to have to put on the black suit again. Getting away from it seemed to lengthen the distance on the other side of which Jacqueline Delauny had talked about murder.

She said in a sudden startled voice,

“There won’t be anybody coming round-from the police?”

Nannie looked grim.

“Only over Mr. Jim’s dead body is what he said he told them. So I shouldn’t think nothing about it.”

Ione turned tragic eyes on her.

“But, Nannie, I oughtn’t to be here. There’s my sister-Allegra! I ought to have gone down to her at once! I don’t know what happened to me-”

Nannie sniffed.

“Clear wore out and no lunch,” she said. “To say nothing of shootings and all sorts. And you needn’t to worry about Mrs. Trent, because there’s a Miss Silver rang up to say she was going over to stay with her until you came down, and you wasn’t to worry, because she was quite all right. Not taking a lot of notice was what she said.”

No, Allegra was still in her dream. Things didn’t really reach her yet-only if it was anything to do with Geoffrey-That seemed to get through. She would be all right with Miss Silver.

She went into the sitting-room to meet Jim, and he took both her hands and kissed them. And then Nannie came in with the soup.

She kept on coming in and out. Sometimes she stayed and talked-about Barbara, and about Barbara’s husband and her children-about Jim when he was a little boy. “And that obstinate, I never knew a child to touch him!” And whatever she said it was all as if Ione was part of the family and it was proper and right that she should know these things.

When she had finished clearing away Jim came and sat down on the sofa beside Ione.

“No one can stop Nannie talking,” he said. “But she doesn’t generally talk so much-about Barbara and me. I think perhaps she thinks you ought to know the worst.”

“She said you never changed.”

“I don’t think I do-much. Would you find it dull?”

“I don’t think so. I’m not very changeable myself-I mean about my friends.”

“I wasn’t talking about friends. I was talking about us.”

She said rather faintly,

“It’s too soon, Jim.”

He looked surprised.

“I don’t know what there is soon about it. I knew at once-well anyhow the second time for certain. And then I tested that by staying away, and it only got stronger. You did say once that you felt as if you had known me a long time.”

She looked up, began a smile, felt it tremble, and looked down again.

He said, “You see?” and put his arm round her. “And when I was waiting in the hall in that blasted flat and I didn’t know whether we were going to bring it off or not-well, I’m not going to tell you what I felt like then, but things don’t hurt as much as that unless they are for always. Of course you can have as much time as you want-if you really want it, but I hope you don’t. You see, you won’t want to go and live in that flat of Louisa’s now-at least I shouldn’t think you would.”

Ione was unable to repress a shudder.

“Oh, no!”

“Well, I supposed you would feel like that, so I thought it would be a good plan to get married, and then you could come and live here.”

She looked up again, this time with spirit.

“Darling, people will do most things for a flat, but Ï draw the line at marriage.”

His arm tightened.

“You are to be serious! How did you feel when you knew I was bringing you here?”

Ione said, “Safe.”

“I felt as if I was bringing you home. I want to know whether you felt that way too.”

Ione had one of her impulses. What did it matter how long they had known each other in the stupid measurements of time? What did it matter what people thought, or what people said? This was the place where she belonged.

Jim’s voice was insistent.

“Ione, didn’t you feel like that-
didn’t
you?”

With something between a laugh and a sob she put her head down on his shoulder as she had done in the taxi and said,

“Yes, I did.”