Rehearsals for Murder (4 page)

“Yes, I tried to make her tell me.”

“And she was just hysterical, evasive and muddled up?”

Vanner broke in: “Then you know yourself, Miss Merton, why she didn't want to go back to your flat?”

“No,” she answered composedly, “Lou was always getting into states of mind I didn't understand at all.”

“Well,” said Toby to Vanner, “shall I go on?”

Vanner grunted.

Toby continued: “She wouldn't go back to her flat and she was very anxious not to go to a hotel.”

“Why?” said Vanner. “Hadn't she the money?”

Druna explained: “She'd been brought up to believe that if she stayed a night alone in a hotel she'd be abducted. Besides”—and she gave her unexpressive smile—“she was rather fond of putting herself in compromising situations and then behaving platonically. She got some sort of thrill from it. Poor Lou, she was terribly undeveloped. I think I know what Mr Dyke is leading up to telling you: it's that although he allowed Lou to spend the night at his flat it was all perfectly innocent. You can believe him; it almost certainly was.”

A smothered sound came from Roger Clare. Toby glanced at him. Clare was looking at Druna with intense dislike on his face.

Vanner addressed Druna: “Miss Merton, have you ever seen this cardigan here?”

Druna looked at it distastefully. “No,” she said.

“Didn't it belong to Miss Capell?”

“It did not.”

Vanner looked at Toby. “Well?” he said.

Toby shrugged. “She'd a very bad cold; perhaps she'd borrowed it from someone to keep her warm. All I know is she left it behind. She was gone in the morning by the time we got up, and there the thing was, over the end of the bed where she'd slept.”

“So you thought you'd return it to her, eh?” said Vanner. “How nice. Thought you'd return it to her just the same evening as she goes and gets herself murdered—very nice, very nice indeed.”

“Yes,” said Toby woodenly, “I thought I'd return it to her. George and I had nothing special to do, and it was a lovely summer evening, so we thought we'd combine a run in the country on George's motorcycle with returning the cardigan. We came down here and then we heard this news——”

“Heard it how?” barked Vanner.

Toby's face showed a bland sort of surprise. “Mr Clare here told us all about it.”

“Oh, Mr Clare told you, did he? At the garden gate, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Toby, “at the garden gate.”

“
And how
” said Vanner fiercely, swinging round on Roger Clare, “
did you know anything about it?
”

A slight catch of the breath sounded close to Toby. It was Eve Clare, who, since her first exclamation when her husband came into the room, had not addressed a single word to him; only, from time to time, she had let her eyes dwell upon him, their expression lifeless. But that lifelessness was so inappropriate to her vivid face that it had revealed how deliberately she found she had to school herself to regard him.

Clare's face still had on it the look of contemptuous dislike that had appeared there while Druna was speaking. There was the weariness too of a deeply felt horror.

“I knew that Lou was dead,” he said, “because about an hour ago I telephoned. Someone told me she was dead.”

“Where did you telephone from?” Vanner asked.

“My flat in town.”

“Why did you telephone?”

“I wanted to ask Lou—I mean I wanted to ask about Lou——” He stopped. Taking a hold of himself, he started again. “I wanted to ask whether Lou and Vanessa—that's my daughter—whether they'd got away all right. Miss Capell was taking Vanessa down to Devonshire to some relatives of hers.”

“I've been telling the inspector about that,” said Eve.

“Ah yes,” said Roger, without looking at her.

“Whom did you speak to on the telephone here?” asked Vanner. “Mrs Clare?”

Eve shook her head.

“I don't know who it was,” said Roger.

“It was I,” said Druna.

The very quiet voice she used managed to turn the simple statement into something of threatening significance.

“And,” she went on when she had had her effect, “there's a question I should like to ask you, Mr Clare. When you telephoned why did you begin by speaking in an assumed voice?”

A flush spread over his face. “What d'you mean?”

“When I picked up the telephone,” said Druna, “you began by saying: ‘Can I speak to Miss Capell?' with such a violent cockney accent it just screamed amateur theatricals.”

“Hey,” said Vanner quickly, “you asked for Miss Capell, did you? You asked
for
Miss Capell although you thought she'd taken your daughter off to Devon this morning?”

Roger Clare began to tremble. It was a curious sight, the trembling of this self-assured, solidly built man; it revealed a tension of nervous fury directed against the girl Druna.

“I did nothing of the kind, and the voice I used was my own!” His face was still dark red. “She's telling lies—I don't know why, but she's telling lies. It's spite of some sort, or she's unbalanced. I don't know why she should, but she's telling lies.” His voice was rising, beginning to lose control.

Druna suddenly leant on the table behind which Vanner was seated. “Lou Capell was my friend!” she said dramatically.

“When you answered the telephone,” Vanner said to her, “what did you say?”

“I said——”

But at that moment, ringing through the house, cutting across question, answer, truth or lie, ripping at the nerves with almost unendurable shrillness, came a scream of mortal terror.

A
t least a dozen people moved when that scream sounded.

The cry had come from upstairs.

From upstairs, a moment after it, a small figure shot itself down the staircase into the midst of the group below.

“Vanessa!” cried Eve Clare.

But it was not into the arms of her mother that the child threw her violently shuddering body. In her headlong rush down the stairs she had managed to see where, among the week-end guests, strangers and policemen thronging the hall, an elderly woman was standing. It was round this elderly woman that her arms made a convulsive clutch, and against her broad bosom that the child hid her face.

“Vanessa dear, what
has
happened?” said the woman. “Vanessa, what is it?”

Her voice was a deep one with unusual fullness of tone; when she used it quietly it had the soothing quality possessed by any strength controlled to mildness. She looked down at the child's dark head and placed a hand, a broad hand roughened by gardening, on the rumpled hair; then she looked up at Eve Clare and with her eyes gave some kind of signal.

Eve leant suddenly against the newel post. She looked for a moment as if she were entirely exhausted, only there was a curious indifference on her face. Roger Clare looked at her with a sort of intent blankness. But he looked at her only for an instant; as he turned his head towards the child and the short, spread figure of the woman to whom she was clinging it was anger that gave his eyes their intentness.

“What's happened? Why's she frightened? Why are these things happening?” he demanded roughly.

Vanner had gone leaping up the stairs. Reappearing after a minute or two he said: “I can't see anything wrong. The door into Miss Capell's bedroom's shut; she can't have seen the men or anything in it.”

“Vanessa,” said Mrs Fry in her soft, deep, reassuring voice, “come and sit on my knee and tell me all about it. Did something hurt you?” She was gently disengaging the child's arms from their desperate hold.

Vanessa allowed it but kept her head pressed against her aunt's bosom as if she were terrified of what she might see if she looked round. Mrs Fry sat down on a chair and drew the child onto her knee.

“Now then, tell me.” It was strange to hear that voice coming from the short, ungainly woman with her square, heavy-featured face, prim grey hair, shapeless knitted jumper and tweed skirt. Only her eyes matched it, cool, blue eyes with a steadiness and intelligence that gave her plain face character.

Vanessa was silent. She was a slight child, very delicately made, with a miniature neatness about her hands and the feet that hung down bare below the hem of her dressing gown. Her hair was a glossy black; it had a faint, soft wave in it, curling up at the tips. But there was something too finely drawn, too nervous about her, something too exaggerated about her delicate grace.

At her silence and at the way in which she kept her face hidden against the knitted jumper, a man said: “Wouldn't it perhaps be best, Nelia, to take her somewhere by herself? Or”—and he looked round the group that still crowded the hall—“perhaps we'd better move ourselves. She's very shy; I expect we're too many for her.”

He smiled hopefully at Vanner. He was a small man, perhaps as old as seventy, and wore green, hand-woven tweeds on his bony limbs. His shirt was of tussore; his tie was orange. His face, small and round and undistinguished, had a quantity of vague white moustache upon it and sun-reddened, wrinkled skin.

Vanner took no notice of him, and Nelia Fry, looking up for a moment, said: “I think the inspector may be interested in what she's got to tell us, Dolphie.”

“Quite, quite,” said the little man fussily, and, turning back to the inspector, added: “I'm Adolphus Fry, by the way. Mrs Clare's uncle. Vanessa lives with us. So nice for us, we do enjoy it. But she's a very nervous child, dreadfully nervous. I think it was her diet that was the trouble. Imagine, when she came to us first she wouldn't touch brown bread. She didn't care for tomatoes either. But now——”

“Do be quiet, Dolphie,” said Mrs Fry, and he subsided.

Mrs Fry tried again: “Now, Vanessa, you know there's nothing to be afraid of——”

Roger Clare broke in: “For God's sake, leave her alone! Why d'you keep pestering her?”

“I expect she's just had a nightmare,” said a fair-haired woman of about forty. She was erect and energetic looking, with a healthy plumpness and a natural complexion. Her expression had a sardonic coolness. “I should put her to bed and give her a dose of something.” She let some cigarette ash fall onto an expensive rug.

But Vanner himself took up the questioning of the child. Bending and placing one hand on each of his knees so that his head was on a level with hers, he said with clumsy, fruity familiarity: “Now, little girl——”

At that a titter sounded from Toby Dyke.

But when Toby found himself the object of the curious gazes of everyone there the titter ended abruptly. However, they turned back, most of them, to the spectacle of the inspector trying to coax information out of the stubbornly silent child. Only one, a young man, kept on with his scrutiny of Toby. It was Charlie Widdison.

He and the only other young man in the party were standing side by side with the air of being very detached spectators—only the other young man was not being a spectator of anything in particular. He was looking hard at nothing, had looked at nothing from the moment when he came into the hall. He was a shock-haired youth with a stringy, coltish body and a vivid, immature face. The shirt he wore was torn, his flannel trousers were stained and his canvas shoes had been punctured by his toenails. The way he looked at nothing had an air of impatience about it; it was the look that people have when events intrude upon, yet cannot check, some all-absorbing flow of introspection.

The inspector had no luck with Vanessa. She only muttered at him without turning round: “Go away.”

He shrugged his shoulders and said to Mrs Fry: “Maybe your husband's right, madam, and she'll talk to you best if we do go away. Probably this lady's right, besides, and it's only nightmare. Now there was a question I wanted to ask Mrs Clare when——”

But at that point Vanessa, who had edged her face round a little to snatch a glimpse of the room, said suddenly in a husky whisper: “I saw a policeman.”

“Eh?” said Vanner quickly.

Mrs Fry frowned at him warningly, but Vanessa, wriggling herself upright on her aunt's lap, looked him squarely in the face. All nervousness had vanished; she even looked rather pleased with herself.

“I saw a policeman upstairs,” she said.

“Come, come,” he said, “you don't mean you saw a policeman and that frightened you.”

She nodded seriously, though a small smile was beginning to twitch at the corners of her mouth.

“But
I
'
m
a policeman,” said Vanner, “and you're not frightened of me, eh?”

Vanessa smiled at him broadly.

“Come now,” he said confidentially, “what did you
really
see?”

“I saw a policeman,” she said. Suddenly she raised her voice and began to declaim in a high singsong while her eyes danced with mischief: “I saw a policeman, I saw a policeman, I saw a policeman. …”

Roger Clare broke in harshly: “Be quiet!” Then he muttered: “Frightened of a policeman—
my
child!”

Mrs Fry looked up at him severely. “Anyone's child may develop unreasonable fears, Roger—particularly if its experience of family life is not very satisfactory.”

He looked at her with contemptuous resentment.

Vanessa said in a loud, conversational tone to Inspector Vanner: “I was frightened of the policeman walking about in my house.”

“But you aren't frightened any more, are you, Vanessa?” said Eve, coming forward.

Vanessa smiled and shook her head.

“Then suppose you come along up to bed again,” said Eve. “I'll go with you and tell you a story.”

The life went out of Vanessa's face immediately.

Mrs Fry gave a slight shake of her head. “Perhaps it'd be better if I took her, Eve dear,” she said. “She's more used to me. Now, Vanessa, you're going to be a good girl, aren't you?…” And for a moment or two she coaxed and commanded. Of course there were protests; but Vanessa's moods, it seemed, could alter quickly, for quite suddenly she was yawning and hiding her face against her aunt again and saying she wanted to go to bed. Mrs Fry took her upstairs. Eve, with a shrug, turned to Vanner and said: “I apologize for the interruption. You were just going to ask me some question about a letter, weren't you?”

He nodded briskly. “But on second thoughts I'd like a word with this—gentleman first.” With a peremptory nod to Toby Dyke he signalled him into the dining room.

They sat facing one another, silent for a few moments. Then Vanner sighed and said: “Well, what
did
bring you down here?”

Toby stared at him before replying, and Vanner, shifting irritably in his chair, said: “If you think you can make trouble you'd better remember your coming here is suspicious enough for there to be plenty of trouble waiting for you.”

Toby yawned.

Vanner gave a thump to the table in front of him. “Why did you come?”

Leaning back and crossing his long legs, Toby said: “I got a telephone call.”

“Oh, you got a telephone call. Someone rang you up and said: ‘I do so admire your newspaper articles, Mr Dyke—won't you come down for the weekend?' Oh yes. And what else?”

“Listen, Vanner,” said Toby, “you're a worried man. You bungled the last murder job you had.”

“What brought you down here, Dyke?”

“A telephone call.”

Vanner suddenly leant forward over the table. “From Roger Clare, eh? He knows you; he told you to come. I knew that from the beginning.”

Toby shook his head. “I don't know who it was.”

“But you came straightaway down here. Didn't lose much time, did you?”

“No, I didn't lose much time.”

“Though you didn't know who it was who was phoning? Might have been a hoax, mightn't it?”

“Yes,” Toby assented equably, “it might have been a hoax.” He looked down at the toe of one shoe. “Wasn't, though.”

“Now, Dyke, are you going to tell me the truth? What brought you down here? I can check up quickly enough.”

Toby nodded. “The truth is that someone telephoned and told me in a voice that was obviously disguised that Lou Capell was dead.”

“Man or woman?”

“I'm not sure.”

“And that was all?”

“No, they also told me that my cheque had been removed.”

“Ah-h!” The sound came with a wheeze of satisfaction. Vanner smiled benignly at Toby. “Then they hoaxed you after all, my lad, they hoaxed you after all.”

Toby went on looking at the toe of his shoe.

Vanner grinned. Tapping his large white teeth with the point of his pencil, he said: “She'd cashed it, you know, Dyke.”

“Yes?” said Toby.

“She's got fifteen pounds in her bag—ex-act-ly fifteen pounds—with a rubber band round the notes.”

Toby's face was blank.

Suddenly Vanner leant forward again, thrusting his grin towards him: “And where the hell does that cardigan come in?”

“It belongs to the porter's wife.”

“You went and borrowed it from her simply to give you an excuse for coming down?”

“That's right.”

“And what d'you mean by giving me misleading information about——?”

“Oh hell,” said Toby impatiently, “I didn't think it'd mislead you for a moment. Not you, Vanner. But I thought it might be a good idea to mislead other people.”

“I see.”

“I didn't know what to make of that telephone call. I thought probably it was a hoax. I even thought it might be Lou herself, wanting to give some friends of hers a bit of fun. But she'd been round at my flat the night before, in floods of tears, begging me for fifteen pounds. Of course, that might have been a part of the hoax, only I didn't think Lou was that much of an actress. She wouldn't tell me why she wanted the money, said she'd ‘promised' not to. Also she wouldn't go back home because she didn't want to run into that girl Druna. Well, if I'd really tried to make her tell me what it was all about perhaps I could have. I was worried that I hadn't. It was really that worrying, I suppose that brought me down here.” He shrugged again. “D'you like that story any better?”

Vanner looked noncommittal. Thoughtfully he started to draw a pattern on the top of the table. Toby frowned at this activity. Vanner said: “Blast!” licked one finger and tried to erase the marks. While he was rubbing at them he asked: “Where were you between four and six-thirty this afternoon?”

“Why four and six-thirty?”

“That's my business. Where were you?”

“At the office,” said Toby.

“Think anyone 'll remember you were there?”

“My visits there are rare enough to make quite a deep impression. But look here, Vanner”—Toby leant forward, snatched the pencil from Vanner's fidgeting fingers and put it down firmly on the table—“without referring unnecessarily to that episode a year or two back when you and I saw such a nice lot of each other, don't you think it's a good idea having me around?”

“A good idea having
you
——” Horrified astonishment choked Vanner's voice. His hand groped wildly for the pencil.

“You know, Vanner”—Toby twitched the pencil out of reach—“Balder was guilty. I knew that as well as you did. If you hadn't been such a fool——”