Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (67 page)

Muriel had sat down on a
sofa, and was lighting a cigarette: to the rather prim disapproval of their
hostess, Hunter thought.

“May we have a hot drink?”
Muriel asked crisply. “And then, if you don’t mind, we might walk over and meet
the Bannisters coming from church.”

“Oh, please don’t do
that!” cried the other. She had been standing by the fireplace, her hands
folded and turned outwards. Now she ran across to sit down beside Muriel; and
the swiftness of her movement, no less than the touch of her hand on Muriel’s
arm, made the latter draw back.

Hunter was now completely
convinced that their hostess was out of her head. Why she held such fascination
for him, though, he could not understand. In her eagerness to keep them there,
the girl had come upon a new idea. On a table behind the sofa, book-ends held a
row of modern novels. Conspicuously displayed—probably due to Molly Bannister’s
tact—were two of Rodney Hunter’s detective stories. The girl put a finger on
them.

“May I ask if you wrote
these?”

He admitted it.

“Then,” she said with
sudden composure, “it would probably interest you to hear about the murder. It
was a most perplexing business, you know; the police could make nothing of it,
and no-one ever has been able to solve it.” An arresting eye fixed on his. “It
happened out in the hall there. A poor woman was killed where there was no-one
to kill her, and no-one could have done it. But she was murdered.”

Hunter started to get up
from his chair; then he changed his mind, and sat down again. “Go on,” he said.

*
* *

“You must forgive me if I
am a little uncertain about dates,” she urged. “I think it was in the early
eighteen-seventies, and I am sure it was in early February—because of the snow.
It was a bad winter then; the farmers’ livestock all died. My people have been
bred up in this district for years, and I know that. The house here was much as
it is now, except that there was none of this lighting (only paraffin lamps,
poor girl!); and you were obliged to pump up what water you wanted; and people
read the newspaper quite through, and discussed it for days.”

“The people were a little
different to look at, too. I am sure I do not understand why we think beards
are so strange nowadays; they seem to think that men who had beards never had
any emotions. But even young men wore them then, and looked handsome enough.
There was a newly-married couple living in this house at the time: at least,
they had been married only the summer before. They were named Edward and Jane Waycross,
and it was considered a good match everywhere.”

“Edward Waycross did not have
a beard, but he had bushy side-whiskers which he kept curled. He was not a
handsome man, either, being somewhat dry and hard-favoured; but he was a
religious man, and a good man, and an excellent man of business, they say; a
manufacturer of agricultural implements at Hawkhurst. He had determined that
Jane Anders (as she was) would make him a good wife, and I dare say she did.
The girl had several suitors. Although Mr. Waycross was the best match, I know
it surprised people a little when she accepted him, because she was thought to
have been fond of another man—a more striking man, whom many of the young girls
were after. This was Jeremy Wilkes: who came of a very good family, but was
considered wicked. He was no younger than Mr. Waycross, but he had a great
black beard, and wore white waistcoats with gold chains, and drove a gig. Of
course, there had been gossip, but that was because Jane Anders was considered
pretty.”

Their hostess had been
sitting back against the sofa, quietly folding the little white bag with one
hand, and speaking in a prim voice. Now she did something which turned her
hearers cold.

You have probably seen
the same thing done many times. She had been touching her cheek lightly with
the fingers of the other hand. In doing so, she touched the flesh at the corner
under her lower eyelid, and accidentally drew down the corner of that
eyelid—which should have exposed the red part of the inner lid at the corner of
the eye. It was not red. It was of a sickly pale colour.

“In the course of his business
dealings,” she went on, “Mr. Waycross had often to go to London, and usually he
was obliged to remain overnight. But Jane Waycross was not afraid to remain
alone in the house. She had a good servant, a staunch old woman, and a good
dog. Even so, Mr. Waycross commended her for her courage.”

The girl smiled. “On the
night I wish to tell you of, in February, Mr. Waycross was absent.
Unfortunately, too, the old servant was absent; she had been called away as a
midwife to attend her cousin, and Jane Waycross had allowed her to go. This was
known in the village, since all such affairs are well known, and some
uneasiness was felt—this house being isolated, as you know. But she was not
afraid.”

“It was a very cold
night, with a heavy fall of snow which had stopped about nine o’clock. You must
know, beyond doubt, that poor Jane Waycross was alive after it had stopped
snowing. It must have been nearly half-past nine when a Mr. Moody—a very good
and sober man who lived in Hawkhurst—was driving home along the road past this
house. As you know, it stands in the middle of a great bare stretch of lawn;
and you can see the house clearly from the road. Mr. Moody saw poor Jane at the
window of one of the upstairs bedrooms, with a candle in her hand, closing the
shutters. But he was not the only witness who saw her alive.”

“On that same evening,
Mr. Wilkes (the handsome gentleman I spoke to you of a moment ago) had been at
a tavern in the village of Five Ashes with Dr. Sutton, the local doctor, and a
racing gentleman named Pawley. At about half-past eleven they started to drive
home in Mr. Wilkes’s gig to Cross-in-Hand. I am afraid they had all been
drinking, but they were all in their sober senses. The landlord of the tavern
remembered the time because he had stood in the doorway to watch the gig, which
had fine yellow wheels, go spanking away as though there were no snow; and Mr.
Wilkes in one of the new round hats with a curly brim.”

“There was a bright moon.
‘And no danger’, Dr. Sutton always said afterwards; ‘shadows of trees and
fences as clear as though a silhouette-cutter had made ’em for sixpence.’ But
when they were passing this house Mr. Wilkes pulled up sharp. There was a
bright light in the window of one of the downstairs rooms—this room, in fact.
They sat out there looking round the hood of the gig, and wondering.”

“Mr. Wilkes spoke: ‘I don’t
like this,’ he said. ‘You know, gentlemen, that Waycross is still in London;
and the lady in question is in the habit of retiring early. I am going up there
to find out if anything is wrong.’”

“With that he jumped out
of the gig, his black beard jutting out and his breath smoking. He said: ‘And
if it is a burglar, then by Something, gentlemen’—I will not repeat the word he
used—‘by Something, gentlemen, I’ll settle him.’ He walked through the gate and
up to the house—they could follow every step he made—and looked into the
windows of this room here. Presently he returned looking relieved (they could
see him by the light of the gig lamps), but wiping the moisture off his
forehead.”

“
‘It is all right,’ he said to them; ‘Waycross
has come home. But, by Something, gentlemen, he is growing thinner these days,
or it is shadows.’”

“Then he told them what
he had seen. If you look through the front windows—there—you can look sideways
and see out through the doorway into the main hall. He said he had seen Mrs.
Waycross standing in the hall with her back to the staircase, wearing a blue
dressing-wrap over her nightgown, and her hair down round her shoulders.
Standing in front of her, with his back to Mr. Wilkes, was a tallish, thin man
like Mr. Waycross, with a long greatcoat and a tall hat like Mr. Waycross’s.
She
was carrying either a candle or a lamp; and he
remembered how the tall hat seemed to wag back and forth, as though the man
were talking to her or putting out his hands towards her. For he said he could
not see the woman’s face.”

“Of course, it was not
Mr. Waycross; but how were they to know that?”

“At about seven o’clock
next morning, Mrs. Randall, the old servant, returned. (A fine boy had been born
to her cousin the night before. ) Mrs. Randall came home through the white dawn
and the white snow, and found the house all locked up. She could get no answer
to her knocking. Being a woman of great resolution, she eventually broke a
window and got in. But, when she saw what was in the front hall, she went out
screaming for help.”

“Poor Jane was past help.
I know I should not speak of these things; but I must. She was lying on her
face in the hall. From the waist down her body was much charred and—unclothed,
you know, because fire had burnt away most of the nightgown and the
dressing-wrap. The tiles of the hall were soaked with blood and paraffin oil,
the oil having come from a broken lamp with a thick blue-silk shade which was
lying a little distance away. Near it was a china candlestick with a candle.
This fire had also charred a part of the panelling of the wall, and a part of
the staircase. Fortunately, the floor is of brick tiles, and there had not been
much paraffin left in the lamp, or the house would have been set afire.”

“But she had not died
from burns alone. Her throat had been cut with a deep slash from some very
sharp blade. But she had been alive for a while to feel both things, for she
had crawled forward on her hands while she was burning. It was a cruel death, a
horrible death for a soft person like that.”

There was a pause. The
expression on the face of the narrator, the plump girl in the brown dress,
altered slightly. So did the expression of her eyes. She was sitting beside
Muriel; and moved a little closer.

“Of course, the police
came. I do not understand such things, I am afraid, but they found that the
house had not been robbed. They also noticed the odd thing I have mentioned,
that there was both a lamp
and
a
candle in a candlestick near her. The lamp came from Mr. and Mrs. Waycross’s
bedroom upstairs, and so did the candlestick; there were no other lamps or
candles downstairs except the lamps waiting to be filled next morning in the
back kitchen. But the police thought she would not have come downstairs
carrying both the lamp
and
the candle as well.”

“She must have brought
the lamp, because that was broken. When the murderer took hold of her, they
thought, she had dropped the lamp, and it went out; the paraffin spilled, but
did not catch fire. Then this man in the tall hat, to finish his work after he
had cut her throat, went upstairs, and got a candle, and set fire to the
spilled oil. I am stupid at these things; but even I should have guessed that
this must mean someone familiar with the house. Also, if she came downstairs,
it must have been to let someone in at the front door; and that could not have
been a burglar.”

“You may be sure all the
gossips were like police from the start, even when the police hem’d and haw’d,
because they knew Mrs. Waycross must have opened the door to a man who was not
her husband. And immediately they found an indication of this, in the mess that
the fire and blood had made in the hall. Some distance away from poor Jane’s
body there was a medicine-bottle, such as chemists use. I think it had been
broken in two pieces; and on one intact piece they found sticking some
fragments of a letter that had not been quite burned. It was in a man’s
handwriting, not her husband’s, and they made out enough of it to understand.
It was full of—expressions of love, you know, and it made an appointment to
meet her there on that night.”

Rodney Hunter, as the
girl paused, felt impelled to ask a question.

“Did they know whose
handwriting it was?”

“It was Jeremy Wilkes’s,”
replied the other simply. “Though they never proved that, never more than
slightly suspected it, and the circumstances did not bear it out. In fact, a
knife stained with blood was actually found in Mr. Wilkes’s possession. But the
police never brought it to anything, poor souls. For, you see, not Mr.
Wilkes—or anyone else in the world—could possibly have done the murder.”

*
* *

“I don’t understand that,”
said Hunter, rather sharply.

“Forgive me if I am
stupid about telling things,” urged their hostess in a tone of apology. She
seemed to be listening to the chimney growl under a cold sky, and listening
with hard, placid eyes. “But even the village gossips could tell that. When
Mrs. Randall came here to the house on that morning, both the front and the
back doors were locked and securely bolted on the inside. All the windows were
locked on the inside. If you will look at the fastenings in this dear place,
you will know what that means.”