Blue Murder (15 page)

For, in this house, she had bad dreams...

She shivered again as she moved slowly about her various tasks in the kitchen quarters, then, on a sudden thought, she made her way into the large, warm kitchen where Cook was already preparing breakfast.

“I am hungry,” she announced. “I will have my breakfast now.”

“Ho, will you?” replied the cook placing a plump hand on her hip. “Have you laid the breakfast table?”

“Yes.”

“And done the drawing-room?”

“The drawing-room? But yes.”

“But no!” was the reply. “I know when you're telling lies, my girl, if no one else in this house does. Go on now, be off with you, and get that room finished or there'll be murder done. 'Ee well, it's bad luck to say that, but you're that aggravating.”

“But that room—he is so cold,” protested Frieda. “I am not use to work without breakfast.”

The cook sniffed.

“Time you was then, lass. Go on. No drawing-room, no breakfast. And who do you reckon you are, coming into my kitchen and ordering your meals?” She eyed the tearful girl more softly, and took a tin out of the cupboard.

“Thinking about your home again, I suppose, and worriting over your ma. That'll get you nowhere. We all have our bits of troubles. Here's a cake for you. Now be off!”

Frieda's face lit up with pleasure, and she hurried off, munching the stale cake.

Like a child she is, thought Cook. A little kindness works wonders with her, the poor creature.

Frieda crammed the last bit of cake into her mouth as she reached the drawing-room door. She wiped her fingers down her apron, unlatched the door, then picked up dustpan, brush, and dusters, and shouldered herself into the room.

For a moment she did not notice anything out of order in the room, but when she had advanced as far as the hearth, she saw that the light was on.

She halted.

“Please?” she said.

For the room was not empty as it usually was at this early hour. The rose-coloured light from the huge standard lamp fell softly upon the figure of Mr. Hardstaffe seated in his favourite chair.

“Please?” repeated Frieda.

He did not stir, and, shrugging her shoulders, she dropped heavily on to her knees in front of the fire-place.

“You are asleep,” she said aloud in English.

She spread a dust-sheet over the hearth-rug, and dropped the heavy brass fire-irons onto it with satisfying clangour.

“Asleep!” she repeated more loudly.

She glanced at the empty tantalus and glass on the table, and sniffed.

“No!” she exclaimed. “You are drunk. Like a pig!”

A little startled by her temerity, she looked sideways at the motionless form of the schoolmaster, but gaining courage from his immobility, she went on, “Always you are not drunk, but always you are a pig!”

She tinned to her task of cleaning the hearth, and picked up one of the andirons to polish its shining legs.

Miss Hardstaffe calls these the dogs just to make fun of me, she muttered to herself. I wonder that she thinks it so funny. She tells me to clean the dogs, and when I say it is not my place to do that—I am a parlourmaid, not a kennel-maid—she tells me not to be impertinent, for these are the dogs. As if I didn't know that dogs have four legs! But at least these are clean, not like her dogs!

She cleaned out the ashes, swept the hearth, and lit the fire. Then she replaced the “dogs” with their attendant brasses and went across to the window to jerk back the heavy velvet curtains.

She saw that the window was wide open, shivered again, and closed it with an emphatic bang.

These English! These Christians! Always trying to freeze themselves except at night when she had to fill bottles for their beds with hot, but not boiling, water. What people! What a climate!

She snapped out the light, replaced the stopper in the cutglass decanter, picked up an ashtray, scattering the ash and cigarette ends on the carpet, and walking round the back of the armchair, peered over it at the silent man.

“Pig!” she exclaimed, then started back.

For a second, she stood rocking on her feet as if she had just received a blow between the eyes. And in that fraction of time, a kaleidoscope of shifting horrors came to her mind. Rubber truncheons, screams of pain too horrible to bear, the sickening crunch of a crushed skull, sticky jags of broken bone, coagulated clots of blood...

But this man wasn't a Jew.

“You are not drunk. You are dead!” she said aloud.

At the sound of her own voice, she screamed, dropped tantalus and tray, and ran out of the room, making grotesque gurgling noises in her throat.

Chief Inspector Alan Driver of New Scotland Yard placed his note-book on the square-topped oak table in the breakfast room, as if staking a claim, and looked up as Leda entered the room.

“Miss Hardstaffe?” he inquired, “I am chief inspector Driver. This is Lovely.”

A look of supreme indignation spread over Leda's face.

“Really! I've no doubt that you have a certain interest in your work, Inspector,” she said coldly, “but I hardly think that is a suitable way of describing the murder of my parents to me.”

Driver apologised profusely.

“I'm extremely sorry, Miss Hardstaffe,” he said. “I'm not very good at introductions. I should have said that this is my assistant, detective-sergeant Lovely.”

Lovely, completely inured to the extraordinary situations in which his surname could place him, acknowledged Leda's frigid greeting with equanimity.

“I don't want to worry you with questions if it will upset you,” went on Driver, “but if you could spare me a few minutes, I should be glad of your help.”

Leda was silent for a moment, then,

“All this probing into things... can't it be stopped?” she burst out. “My mother's dead and Daddy's dead. What does it matter who killed them, to anyone except them?”

“There's such a thing as Justice,” remarked the Inspector.

“But if Daddy murdered my mother, as you all seem to think, and someone killed him for that, isn't that justice?” Driver shook his head.

“It might do for the Frozen North,” he said, “but it isn't good enough for Scotland Yard. And there's no proof yet that Mr. Hardstaffe did murder your mother. The inquiry must go on. But if you'd prefer me to interview the others in the house first, I will certainly do so. This affair has been very upsetting for you.”

Leda was, indeed, a changed woman. She had none of the cheerful, arrogant manner so typical of her. She spoke quietly, and was not ashamed to show her grief. Her eyes were swollen with tears, and, in her dress of unrelieved black, she looked drab and lifeless, and plainer than ever.

“Thank you, Inspector,” she replied, “but I'd rather get it over now. I believe in facing the unpleasant things in life. It isn't so much losing both my parents in this tragic way, it's—my father. We have always been such pals. He depended on me for everything. It's horrible to think that he had to be killed in that way.”

Driver nodded his sympathy. There was nothing he could say to make things better. It was a most terrible thing for any woman to have to face, and although she was not a type whom a man wanted to try and comfort, he was none the less sorry for her.

Nevertheless he did not forget that although she had no apparent connection with the murders, she was not above suspicion, and his voice assumed a more official tone as he said, “Won't you sit down, Miss Hardstaffe?”

“I'd rather not, if you don't mind,” replied Leda. “I'm not in the habit of sitting down much except for meals, and to-day I feel restless. But please don't stand yourself. You have your notes to write, I know. I suppose you won't smoke? Well, I will, if you don't mind. It may steady my nerves a bit. You see, I can't get used to the idea that Daddy isn't here. I keep expecting him to walk in through the door, and it's rather—upsetting.”

She lit her cigarette, and inhaled deeply. Then, sensing the Inspector's hesitation, she said,

“Please don't take any notice of this. I'm all right really. If other women can stand up to incessant bombing, I guess I can stand a few questions. Go right ahead.”

“I understand that you witnessed your mother's last will.”

“Yes. I and the German maid, Frieda.”

“Did you know the terms of that will at the time of witnessing it?”

“Yes.”

“And did you ever mention them to your father?”

“Certainly not. I should never be guilty of such a breach of confidence,” she replied indignantly.

Driver nodded his approval.

It was, he thought, just what you'd expect from Miss Hardstaffe.

“Did it occur to you as strange that she should make a will in which you and your brother were not mentioned?”

“I can't say that it did,” said Leda. “She was always making new wills and cutting one of us out.”

“Then you will be surprised to learn that, as far as we know, she made only that will and one other over a period of many years?”

Leda shrugged her shoulders.

“I'm afraid I ceased to be surprised at anything Mother did, years ago,” she replied. “She certainly told us all enough times that she was making new wills, but I'm not surprised that she didn't. She told us all that there was morphia in her sleeping-draughts, and it wasn't true.”

“Do you think it likely that your father murdered his wife, to get her money?”

“No. I don't believe he knew about it.”

“I see,” said Driver. “Then you believe he got rid of her, thinking it would never be found out, so that he would be free to marry Charity Fuller.”

Leda gasped.

“I didn't say that. I don't know—”

“But that's what you think?”

She looked at him in sudden admiration.

“Yes. Now I understand why they sent you from Scotland Yard,” she said. “Yes, that's what I do believe. I didn't realise that there was anything between them until the night she dined here when Daddy—” She broke off as if unable to pronounce the words, and looked at him appealingly. “It came as rather a shock to me. There was no mistaking the—the intimacy between them. Daddy seemed to be parading it for my benefit, and though I had no sympathy with Mother's behaviour when she was alive, I didn't like this. Daddy was too old for that kind of thing, but I suppose that's just when you begin to feel that way.”

Driver paused for a moment.

“Do you know whether your father made a will?” he asked.

“No. I shouldn't be surprised if he didn't,” she replied. “He was very rigid about school affairs, but rather careless over personal matters. Mother was far more business-like about money, though few people would believe it.”

“I see,” said Driver. “Now I must ask you about your father's murder. When did you first learn that he was dead?”

Leda put her hand over her eyes for a moment, as though she wished to blot out the memory of the last sight of her father, which Driver's words had revived.

“Before breakfast. I was just coming down stairs into the hall when Frieda ran out of the drawing-room and proceeded to have hysterics all over the house. I followed her into the kitchen, but she gabbled at me in German, and I couldn't make sense of what she was saying, so I went back to see if I could find out what had frightened her. I—found—him.”

She described the scene accurately in a voice little louder than a whisper, while the Inspector listened, ignoring the several signs of her distress.

“Do you know of anyone who could have had a motive for murdering your father?” he asked.

“Yes, I—well, no, not exactly,” she faltered. “That is, I know of several people who have threatened to murder him. He was a man whom you either liked or disliked very much, and he rather prided himself on this. There was a certain amount of jealousy at the school from the Staff. Then, he was a great disciplinarian, and the parents didn't like him for that. And, one way and another, people were always threatening to get even with him for some real or imaginary grievance.”

She told him about Ramsbottom's threat in some detail. “Yes, we must certainly look into all that,” agreed Driver. “But personal antipathy is scarcely enough motive for murder, and most people utter threats without any intention of carrying them out, I'm glad to say: otherwise we should be a much-overworked department at the Yard. There must have been a much stronger motive that induced someone to murder him so brutally. Something that affected the murderer deeply.

“If you, for instance, had been very fond of your mother, and believed that your father had killed her, you might have decided to take matters into your own hands and administer justice yourself. Especially if you knew that, as your father had left no will, both his money and that he'd inherited from your mother would be divided between your brother and yourself—”

Leda turned pale, and, forsaking the hearth in front of which she had been standing, stumbled to the chair she had previously refused, and rocked herself backwards and forwards, her face covered.

Driver jumped to his feet.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “I forgot—I didn't mean—”

Leda shuddered, then looked up at him with frightened eyes.

“My brother,” she whispered. “That's who you mean, isn't it? My brother! Oh no, I can't believe it!”

Inspector Driver's chief fault was an inclination to sum up people at a first meeting. He was well aware of this tendency, however, and although he could not prevent his mind from receiving and storing such impressions, he could and did avoid placing too much credence in them.

He thought Stanton Hardstaffe too suave in manner and in dress. There was too much accent on the accessories of his clothes, which made Driver over-conscious of the creased roll across his own waistcoat. Stanton's trousers were exquisitely creased, the bottom button of his coat carefully left undone, his handkerchief arranged with precision, his tie correctly askew. In Mr. Hardstaffe Senior's young days, he would have been dubbed a masher or la-di-da boy.