Seeing is Believing (8 page)

‘And I'm sure you're right. This is just a matter of routine, you know. Tomorrow we'd like to have you sign a statement about it. Now, about the shot you heard, as your husband told us.’

So I told him how I had heard a shot, but had taken no notice of it, and after that he thanked me for being so cooperative and let me go. A few minutes after that, he and the sergeant left, and I went out to the kitchen to put together the supper which I had begun on when the two men arrived. We had cold chicken and salad and biscuits and cheese. No one was hungry and no one was much inclined to talk. But as we were finishing, Malcolm said, ‘About the things that Avril will need, if she'll make a list of them I'll go over and do my best to find them.’

‘I think it would be better if I went,’ I said. ‘I'm more likely to be able to find them. But a list would be useful.’

Avril made a list of the few things that she would need for the night, with some notes of where she kept them, and I was about to set out to collect them, when Brian said, ‘I'll come with you.’

‘It's all right, I don't mind going alone,’ I said. ‘The lane's still crawling with policemen. I imagine you could hardly find a safer place.’

‘All the same, I'll come,’ he said. ‘You may have to argue your way into the house and I might be useful.’

So we set out together, Brian carrying a small suitcase while I had Avril's list of what she wanted. She had not even dropped a suggestion that she might get them herself and none of us expected her to do so, but as Brian and I started down the path to the gate, I found myself wondering how long she would actually be staying with us. What we were to collect that evening would be sufficient for one night, but next day, assuming that she would not dream of going back to live in her home, a new supply would be needed. And afterwards, what would she do?
She was welcome to stay with us for the present, but she was unlikely to want to do it for long, and where else would she think of going?

It might be necessary for her to remain in Raneswood, at least until after the inquest, but it seemed to me unlikely that she would want to stay on, now that she was alone and with a house on her hands in which she could not face the thought of living. I thought that she might move to London, except for the problem of the dogs. She and Peter had their small flat there, and that could be a refuge at least for a time, until she had got over the worst of the shock of Peter's death and was able to think lucidly about what she wanted to do with her life.

If she did not think of doing that herself, I thought, I would suggest it to her. Not immediately, of course. I was ready to be a good neighbour for a while. But I was a little afraid that she might find Malcolm and me comfortable sort of people to cling to in her troubles. She and her dogs. I did not much like the idea of giving her dogs a home. How different it would have been if there had been children, I thought. The children that according to Lucille she ought to have had. Of course, it was not too late for her to do something about it now. If she were to remarry and if no children came, might not another husband be ready to adopt a child? There had been a time when Malcolm and I had considered adoption, but he had always had more than enough children to cope with in his work, and I, though I always liked them once they were five or six years old and able to converse rationally, had never had really strong maternal feelings.

We were at the gate when Brian said, That policeman knew all about Fred Dyer.’

‘Yes, so he told me,’ I answered. ‘But he wanted me to say I wasn't sure that it was Fred I saw at the Loxleys’ gate, and he put such pressure on me to say it that I almost did.’

‘But you didn't?’ Brian said.

‘I'm not sure. I believe I admitted it was possible I was wrong, or something near it.’

‘And what do you think now?’

‘Oh, I'm sure it was Fred. That's to say …’

‘Well?’ he said, as I paused.

‘I suppose it just could have been someone dressed up as Fred. I mean, someone in a red wig, and of course his black leather jacket and jeans. You see, there were several rather peculiar things about the situation if it really was Fred. One is that he may have known that Avril was going to be in London, and gone into the house to steal what he could, but he'd have known that Peter would be there. The place wouldn't have been empty.’

‘The motive wasn't robbery,’ Brian said. ‘The inspector told me that there were a hundred and twenty pounds in Peter's wallet, and Avril's jewellery hadn't been touched. No, someone went to that house with the single intention of killing Peter, and when she's more herself Avril may be able to tell us more about that — if she will.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘Only that it could have been convenient for her to be in London when it happened and that she knows more about it than she's likely to tell us.’

‘Brian, what a perfectly horrible idea!’

‘I'm not very serious about it,’ he said as we reached the Loxleys’ gate, ‘only in any case of murder I believe the first person to be suspected is always the husband or wife. And you must admit it's convenient for her to have such an unbreakable alibi.’

‘Perhaps Fred has an alibi too.’

‘So you aren't too sure the man you saw was him.’

‘I don't know, I don't know!’ I was bewildered and a little angry. ‘Let's not talk about it. It only confuses me. Let's get Avril's things and go home.’

But getting Avril's things was not so very easy. There were a number of men in the house, but Detective Inspector Holroyd was not there, nor was the young sergeant
who had accompanied him when he came over to us, and we had to convince a sceptical uniformed sergeant that we were the neighbours with whom Mrs Loxley was staying and that we had only come to collect a few things for her.

In the end, he let us in, but when we went upstairs to the bedroom that she had shared with Peter, a man followed us up to it and stayed inside the room, watching us as I packed a nightdress, a dressing gown, slippers, a brush and comb and a toothbrush and toothpaste that I found in the bathroom that opened out of the bedroom, into the suitcase that Brian had carried. I did not try to select any of the cosmetics from the array of them on the dressing table. She had not put them on her list. But I added a cardigan that I found lying on a chair, in case she should need it in the morning, and some handkerchiefs. If she suffered any more wild storms of weeping, she might need them, I thought. The man watched me stolidly, and followed us when we went downstairs and along the lane to our gate. He did not leave us until he had seen us go safely in at it.

Visitors had arrived during our absence. Lucille Bird was seated on the sofa, from which she had displaced the retriever, which had gone into a corner of the room to sulk. Kevin, of course, had come with his mother and was sitting beside her. They must have walked up from their house in the heart of the village, as their Mercedes was not in the lane. It did not surprise me to see them there, as Lucille would never want to be left out of a drama. She gave Brian and me a brief nod as we came into the room, but did not interrupt what she was saying.

‘… fingerprints,’ she was saying. ‘Of course they'll look for fingerprints. But that's normally useless nowadays. We've all read too much about them in detective stories to know that one should never set out to commit a crime without wearing gloves. Ask Kevin. He's always reading the things. He'll tell you no one would think of
committing a murder, or even a burglary, without gloves. Isn't that true, Kevin?’

‘Yes, Ma, dear, quite true’ he answered. Her stern, sharp-featured face managed to produce a small smile, as if it were a minor triumph to have induced Kevin to agree with her. In fact, I had never heard him do anything else. But his plump, pink cheeks looked paler than usual and it seemed to me that his air of wilting under her gaze was particularly pronounced.

‘I think they've been looking for fingerprints,’ I said. ‘There was a lot of a greyish sort of dust everywhere. But if they find Fred's fingerprints in the house, it won't mean anything, will it, Avril? Didn't you generally give him a cup of tea when he was working for you. So his prints would be there as a matter of course, at least in the kitchen.’

She gave a heavy sigh. It looked as if she had been crying again while we had been gone. Her face looked drained and blank, with reddened eyelids.

‘Yes, I always made him a cup of tea and he'd come in for it and we'd generally sit and have a gossip in the kitchen,’ she said. ‘But he's been all over the house, doing odd jobs for us at different times. He put a new washer on one of our bathroom taps, and hung a few pictures we'd bought in the drawing room, and mended the electric lamp in the hall when the flex got broken. If it's true that Frances saw him at the gate and he went into the house and murdered Peter, he'd no need to wear gloves.’

‘But was this man you saw wearing gloves, Frances?’ Lucille asked me, her tone sounding as if she were putting me through an examination.

‘I don't think so,’ I said. ‘I don't know. I didn't notice …’ But there I stopped, because all of a sudden I seemed to see the man clearly, and something that had been worrying me obscurely about him ever since I had seen him became certain in my mind. He
had
been wearing gloves. And that, in Fred Dyer, had seemed very
strange. ‘Well, perhaps he was,’ I said. ‘Really I'm inclined to think so after all.’

‘You aren't sure?’ Malcolm asked.

‘Not a hundred per cent. But I believe he may have been.’

‘Then that makes it even less certain that the man at the gate was really Dyer,’ Malcolm said. ‘As Avril said, he'd have had no need to conceal his fingerprints. But if he was someone else got up to look like Dyer, it could have been important for him to leave no prints behind.’

The doorbell rang.

I went to answer it, expecting more policemen.

But the two people on the doorstep were Fred Dyer and Sharon Sawyer.

‘You needn't look so afraid of me,’ Fred said. ‘I'm not a murderer. Sharon can prove it.’

I took them into the sitting room.

Lucille gave an exclamation that sounded almost like a small scream. Kevin got to his feet and stood looking helpless and bewildered, as if he were waiting for his mother to tell him how to behave. Malcolm and Brian also rose. The Belgian shepherd barked. The retriever growled. The Labrador was too deeply asleep to take any notice of the newcomers.

Malcolm introduced Fred and Sharon to Brian. That Lucille and Kevin knew them he took for granted. But he need not have introduced Fred to Brian. Fred gave him a sardonic smile and said, ‘Evening, Mr Hewlett.’

‘Evening, Jack,’ Brian responded.

‘Fred in the present company, if you don't mind,’ Fred said.

‘It won't make much difference,’ Brian said. ‘I've told them of our previous acquaintance.’

‘I might have known you would. But you haven't had a chance yet to tell it to my girlfriend. Sharon, this gentleman knew me before I came to Raneswood. He can tell you some things about me I've never got around to telling you.’

‘Is that true?’ Brian asked. ‘Have you really not got around to telling the poor girl about your past?’

‘Why should I?’ Fred asked. ‘I came here to get away from it, didn't I? And just what is that past that I should have told her about? That I worked in a garage and that some stories got around about me that I didn't like. You
don't need telling, do you, Mr Hewlett, that there was never any evidence against me?’

As usual, his accent was puzzling me. Basically, I felt, it was that of a reasonably well-educated man who had taken pains to cover this fact by a careful imitation of the local accent. It might be the other way about, of course, and that the local accent was natural to him and that he had made an effort to acquire what he thought appropriate for a man of the middle class.

Sharon was looking at him with a shy, puzzled gaze. She was a slim, pretty girl of about twenty-three with a mass of fair, curly hair tied back from her face with a scarlet ribbon, a small, triangular face, wide at the temple, pointed at the chin, with big, earnest blue eyes, a neat little nose and a wide, delicately shaped mouth. She gave the impression of being very diffident and very serious. I wondered how she and Fred had ever become lovers and whether he was her first, or if her appearance of innocence was an illusion.

‘Please sit down,’ I said, and turned the Labrador firmly out of the chair that he had annexed and pushed another chair up beside it so that they could stay together.

But as I did so, Lucille rose to her feet. After one intimidating glance at the two, she had been careful not to look at them and to act as if she were unaware of their presence.

‘Well, Kevin and I will be going home, Frances dear,’ she said. ‘I don't think we can be of any help to you. But if we can be, of course let me know. Avril, good night. You know you have all our sympathy.’

With nods to Malcolm and Brian but giving no sign that she recognized the existence of Fred and Sharon, unless it was by a slight increase of the hauteur of her usual manner, she took Kevin's arm and swept him out of the room. Fred and Sharon sat down side by side on the sofa that she had abandoned and the Labrador crawled sleepily back into the chair from which I had turned him out.

‘You'll want to know why we've come,’ Fred said. ‘It's to straighten out one or two things that we were told by the police. Of course, they've been to see us. They came as soon as they'd been here, I believe, and had a talk with Mrs Chance.’ He gave me one of his strange looks at that point that seemed directed straight at me and yet to be looking at something far beyond me. As I had often thought before, there was something very chilling about it. I had never seen any look of warmth on his face, which had always made me feel a certain uneasiness in his presence.

‘Forgive me if I'm wrong, Mrs Chance,’ he went on, ‘but didn't you tell them you saw me at the gate of Mr and Mrs Loxleys’ house just a short time before the probable time of the murder?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You said you were sure you saw me there?’