Rehearsals for Murder (17 page)

“Sorry,” said Toby, “I've given you the wrong thing. Here's the prescription.” He held another piece of paper alongside the paper in Charlie's hand. “But they're both in your handwriting, aren't they, Widdison?”

Charlie, standing close to him, stared into his face. “Where did this come from? I think you've some explaining to do.”

“I think you have, too, Widdison. Suppose you tell me why you removed my cheque from Lou's bag. And,” said Toby, “why did you telephone, asking me to come down?”

“
L
et's go to my room,” said Charlie.

The three of them went there.

They seated themselves.

But as soon as he had sat down Toby stood up again and started walking about. “Well,” he said impatiently, “why did you take that cheque?”

Charlie's eyes were following him. “How did you know it was me?”

“Had to be you or the murderer,” said Toby. “Even if it turns out you're both the same person, still has to be one or the other of you.”

“Why?”

Toby swung round on him. “The cheque was in Lou's bag. And Lou, all day, was holding onto that bag like grim death. We know the murderer got at it some time or other and could have taken out the cheque at the same time as putting in the poison. But you could have got at it, too, when you climbed in by the window and had some minutes alone in Lou's room. Lou wasn't clutching her bag then. Unless we've been told all wrong, though, and Lou was really leaving her bag round all over the place, I don't see who else could have got at it.”

Charlie nodded. “Yes, that was when I took it.”

“Why did you take it?”

Charlie was silent. Then he said: “After all, I don't think I'll tell you. Sorry.” He gave a charming smile and added in his most fluting, most apologetically hesitant tone: “You see, it'd be—well, impossible to explain without going into all sorts of things that—aren't my business at all.”

“Are they Gillett's business?”

A flutter of the eyelids counteracted the effect of the firmness on Charlie's face.

Toby said: “I've just been having a talk with Gillett.”

Charlie raised his slim shoulders and let them fall again.

“All right,” he said, “I'll assume you know so much that I can't give anyone away.”

“That's fine,” said Toby.

He sat down again.

“You see,” said Charlie, “I knew some weeks ago that Lou was pregnant. As a matter of fact, she came to me to make sure about it. I'd a sort of idea it was Colin who was mixed up in it. She didn't tell me, but she asked me whether I didn't think that increased knowledge of life might improve the work of a scientist as much as it should an artist's; I think the point of that, you see, was that she felt it was wrong of her to have had anything to do with him when she wasn't really in love with him and she wanted to convince herself that she'd done something for his good, or for the good of science or something; anyway, I thought it pointed pretty straight at Colin.”

Toby nodded. George was rattling his dice together in his pocket and looking somewhat too attentive for a man who has lost his hearing.

“Well then,” said Charlie, “when I was up there in her room, with her lying dead, and I knew it was going to turn out to be murder I thought: ‘This means trouble for Colin.' It never occurred to me, you know, that Colin himself might have done it. It isn't that I know him awfully well or that we're particularly friends; it was just that it never occurred to me that it might have been him. I think, you know, if Colin committed a murder he'd pick up the nearest heavy thing and hit with it.”

“Yes,” said Toby, “and hit a good many more times than was necessary to get over his own horror at it.”

“Yes—just like that. Well then, I was taking a quick look round to see if there was anything interesting lying about and I came on your cheque. I knew the name—I've read articles of yours; I knew you'd been mixed up in murder inquiries. And I got an idea.”

Toby grunted comprehendingly. “All the same, why remove the cheque?”

Charlie grinned. “I just wanted to make sure you'd come.” He took a monogrammed leather case out of his pocket, extracted from it Toby's cheque and handed it to him. “I didn't really know anything about you, you see. I didn't know what connection you had with Lou, but it struck me it might be a good thing having you round.”

Toby meditatively tore the cheque into small pieces. “I've wasted a lot of curiosity about this cheque,” he said. He let the fragments flutter onto the carpet. “I still don't know why Lou wanted it. Or do I know?”

Charlie said nothing.

“Widdison,” said Toby, “you've said nothing yet about that other piece of paper with your writing on it.”

“I see no reason why I should.”

“Just that I want to know,” said Toby.

“But, you see,” came the sweet, reasonable, fluting tones, “it has nothing to do with you, with Lou, with murder——”

“But with Druna, no?” said Toby. “It came from her flat.”

For a moment Charlie experimented with the effect of a complete blankness of countenance. But the blankness cracked across with his usual smile. “Well, what about it?”

“The idea was a holiday in France, wasn't it? Fare five pounds, pension fifty francs. You were working out the cost.”

Charlie nodded.

“When was this to be?” asked Toby. “I shouldn't worry about discretion; she's not got much herself.”

“It was to have been in July or August,” said Charlie. “Rotten idea, looking so far ahead. I—I'm rather hoping she's forgotten I ever suggested it.”

“I don't think she has,” said Toby.

“No,
I
don't think she has,” said Charlie.

Toby bent. One by one he picked up the fragments of the cheque from the carpet and stowed them away in his pocket.

“This looks like a merely impertinent question,” he said, “but it isn't; it's rather important. It was you who suggested that holiday to Druna?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Were you going to pay her share of it?”

“Good heavens, no, why should I?”

Toby drew a deep breath, “At any rate, that's one part of the chaos sorted out. Come on, George, let's see how Vanner's getting along.”

Vanner's temper had not improved during the course of the day.

“Would you believe it,” he said as Toby and George joined him in the dining room where he had again established himself, “there's not one of this crowd except Miss Gask who has anything like an alibi for this afternoon. Widdison and Merton alibi each other, but I reckon they might do that anyhow. Miss Gask was sitting on the lawn all the afternoon, knitting; the servants say they saw her there. But Mrs Clare was in the wood alone—says she was just sitting there, thinking; Gillett had time alone in the cottage before lunch when he could have rigged up the apparatus; Professor Potter dropped the child at The Dolphin and from then on until you went out to see him at the Victor Hildebrand Institute was alone; Mr Sands says he went to his bedroom after lunch and spent the next couple of hours washing his shorts in hot water to see if he could bleach them.”

“And did he bleach them?” said Toby.

When Vanner swore, sounding very tired, Toby added: “Only if he did bleach them you might almost believe his story. Have you decided how Clare was induced to go to the cottage? Did someone telephone?”

“No,” said Vanner. “We know how he was got down there. It's nasty, Dyke. I'm more worried than I can say. This complication of the child… look.” He had a sheet of paper on the table before him and he handed it to Toby. “This was found in Clare's room at The Dolphin.”

Toby took the paper and read what was written on it. The words were typed.

“I must speak to you. Meet me in Colin's cottage this afternoon about half-past two. It is too dreadful. Please don't fail me.”

“Look at the back,” said Vanner.

Toby turned the sheet over. On its back, also typed, were the words: “For Daddy.”

Toby returned the note to Vanner.

“That's the typewriter there,” said Vanner, and he nodded his head at a portable typewriter in its case which stood on the floor beside a small writing table. “It's Mrs Clare's.”

“Then,” said Toby, “somebody typed that note, gave it to Vanessa and told her to give it to her father.”

Vanner nodded heavily. “And then removed her so that she couldn't say who had given her the note.”

“That's what it looks like,” said Toby.

“I know what you're going to say,” said Vanner. “How did they know she wouldn't blurt out something about it before she went off to have her lunch with her father?”

“That isn't what I was going to say,” said Toby, “but it's a point, certainly. Of course, there are some kids you can trust to keep their mouths shut if you've asked them to; I rather think she was one of that kind—fond of secrets and mystifications and all that. And then again—perhaps she didn't get the note
before
she started out. She'd company as far as The Dolphin.”

“I'd thought of that,” said Vanner.

“But what I was going to say was this,” said Toby. “She was seen getting into that train by herself. Is it the sort of thing she's ever been known to do before?”

“Everyone acts as if they're completely astonished at it. And they say she hadn't any money to buy herself a ticket, though that's easy enough to explain: her father might have given her some pocket money. And kids do take queer notions into their heads sometimes and do things that make everyone gape. I remember when I was about six years old I started off eastwards to try and catch the next month—walked seven or eight miles and got lost and had to be brought home again by the police. Oh, if it was just her going off by train like that I might not be so worried about it. But it's the note, Dyke; she knew who gave her that note. That's what makes it so ugly.”

“That's right.” Toby gave his knuckles a vicious crack. “Somebody she knew, somebody she trusted, gave her some money, gave her some instructions and packed her off—where? But there's something phony about it, Vanner.”

“I know, I know,” said Vanner. “It doesn't really make sense, because either they've got to produce her sometime or not produce her. If they produce her she'll still be able to remember who gave her the note; if they don't produce her, well, it means either that someone's got to follow her up to town, pick her up from wherever she's been sent to and then finish the job of getting rid of her—in which case they're running a great risk, because we're not letting any of this lot get very far without someone having an eye on them—or else it means there's someone in London ready to do that part of the job. And that's what I'm afraid of.”

“I suppose you've considered the possibility that it was Clare himself who sent her off to London?”

“First thing I thought of,” said Vanner. “Seemed to me he wasn't too keen on the child's having much more of Mrs Clare's corrupting influence. But she hasn't turned up—anyway, not yet—at his London flat, and we don't know much at present about where else he might have sent her. But, as a matter of fact, I don't care for the idea. It's a bit of an irresponsible thing to do, sending a child like that off to London by herself. And Clare didn't strike me as an irresponsible kind of man.”

“I'm afraid you're right.”

“Still, it doesn't make sense.”

“Tobe!” It was George, standing at Toby's elbow and speaking suddenly so loudly that both Toby and Vanner started. “Tobe, I reckon it was the little girl took this note along to her father. See what it says on the back: ‘For Daddy'?”

Toby sighed. Vanner muttered a sarcastic “You don't say!”

“Oh,” said George, looking from one face to the other, “you'd thought of that, had you? Sorry, I couldn't hear properly what you were talkin' about. It's just that I reckon I know how she got hold of the note. But maybe you settled that too?”

“Go ahead,” said Toby, and then, as George's countenance remained wooden, bellowed: “Go ahead!”

“Well,” said George, but at that moment the telephone rang.

Vanner picked it up.

He spoke into it, listened, spoke, put it down, looked at Toby.

“She's been seen,” he said.

“In London?”

“At Waterloo. The ticket collector noticed her. He saw a little girl in a blue silk dress and a white straw hat standing waiting near the barrier looking up at everyone who passed as if she were expecting someone to meet her. And then a man came up and spoke to her, and after a minute the two went through the barrier together and went away. He says he noticed it specially because they made such a rum-looking pair. He was a tall, sick-looking bloke, the man says, about forty or so, in a flash new suit with bits of jewelry, but his shirt was dirty and his shoes were all cracked across.”

“Tobe,” said George, “shall I go on with what I was sayin'?”

But Vanner continued: “He says they acted as if they'd never seen each other before and both wanted to make sure they'd got hold of the right person. And he says he thought it looked so queer he nearly pointed 'em out to someone to keep an eye on them.”

“Then why the hell didn't he?” said Toby. “This helps like the devil, it does!”

“Tobe,” said George, “this note here… I reckon the little girl had it in that cute little bag she carried.”

Though Toby's glance in his direction was not encouraging George went on: “Remember it? She'd got a little patent-leather bag, just like a grown-up lady's, and she was swingin' it round, showin' it off. Well, I reckon that when she wasn't lookin' someone slipped this note inside, the same as they slipped something into Lou's bag. Then the kid went off to meet her father, and you bet she opened her bag sometime to take out her hanky or something, and there was the note: ‘For Daddy.' So she hands it over, and he thinks, of course, it's a note from Mrs Clare, and there you are.”

Toby shook his head. “She knew who gave her that note. Otherwise she wouldn't be missing now.” He stood up. “Well, good luck with it,” he said to Vanner.