Crooked Wreath (19 page)

“Peta dear, Claire hasn't suggested …”

“Yes, she has. Just because she couldn't have done it herself, she thinks she can lightly accuse other people of it. Well, if you ask me, Claire, you're the one and only person in this family who
might
have done it! I wouldn't believe it of Bella or Edward or Philip, not if I'd seen them doing it with my own eyes; but as for you …”

“For heaven's sake, you fool, do you think I would kill Grandfather for the sake of three or four thousand miserable pounds?”

“Yes, I do, if you wanted it badly enough. You never think of anyone but yourself.”

“Well, will you explain why I should want it at all? I've got a job and I don't owe a penny in the world, and strange though it may seem to your evil mind, I'm not even being blackmailed!”

“You've got a job for the moment, but only because all the decent journalists are in the forces. Good Lord, after all these years in Fleet Street, you hadn't even enough pull to get us a little peace and quiet in all this filthy publicity! As soon as the men get home from the war, you'll be out on your ear–and then what?”

This was too shrewd a blow for Claire to essay to contradict it, but the very truth stung her to further fury. “Just because I don't choose to lower my standards, to write vile grammar and hateful snappy paragraphs. And, anyway, the same goes for you … Being a V.A.D. now, doesn't mean you'll be able to earn a living after the war, it counts for nothing, absolutely nothing, in proper nursing; so what will
you
do if you find you're cut out of Grandfather's will? God knows you never earned a penny until you had to join the Red Cross, to dodge the services or munitions …”

“Of course, there's the likelihood of your both marrying,” suggested Cockie, sweetly, scattering powdered dynamite.

Peta just lifted one eyebrow.

It was not prettily done, but both of them were far beyond consideration of good manners or good feeling. In both, the deeply running blood of their grandmother welled up to the surface; that little hot-blooded hybrid, whose much advertised poise and control had risen always and only from indifference.

In vain Bella wept and interceded; Edward, ruefully grinning, tried to inject placatory facetiæ; Philip and Stephen sat white and ashamed, each on the arm of a chair in the little sitting-room.

“… and at least I'm not frittering my youth away hanging round the neck of a man who doesn't want me,” finished Claire, passionately, at the end of a two-minute tirade.

“You–you insufferable little beast!”

“You sneering little show-off!”

“You murderess!”

“If either of us is a murderess, Peta, it's you, for the simple reason that it
can't
be me!”

“Oh, can't it?”

“No, it can't.”

The family burst into deprecatory beseeching. Cockrill said: “How do you suggest, my dear Peta, that Claire could have killed your grandfather?”

“I couldn't have; she can't!”

Peta stood looking about her wildly. “You
could
have! You were the one who'd have liked to, and you did–you could have! I don't know how but–my God, Cockie, I do see now; I can see now how she could have done it! Claire, you did, you
did
kill him, poor Grandfather! You little beast, you little murderess, you
did, you
killed him!” She burst into tears.

Claire faced her, white and shaking dreadfully. “
How
could I? You know perfectly well I never went near the lodge that night; you saw for yourself my one line of footsteps up to the window and my one line of footsteps running back, as I made them that morning.”

“As you made them the night before,” said Peta.

There was an utter silence. Claire spoke at last, and now her voice was much quieter, and only her little hands hung twitching at her sides. “What do you mean, Peta?”

“I mean that you made the footprints the night before,” said Peta, stifling her tears, speaking almost in a whisper. “Just after nine o'clock; after you'd seen to the baby. There'd have been time then; you were away for twenty minutes or more while we were all listening to the news out on the back terrace; the Turtle and Mrs. Brough would be safely in the kitchen, and Brough had gone off to his fire watching. The paths had been sanded. You–you took the poisons out of Philip's bag–Stephen interrupted you when you were in the drawing-room doing it, and you were startled and knocked over the vase. It all fits together like a piece of machinery. You ran across the lawn and then walked carefully up the path to the window; of course, Grandfather let you in, and you told him some story and he let you give him an injection; you probably said that Philip thought he ought to have something to do his heart a little good, as he was staying alone down there; then you–yes, you got the glass from the kitchen, or if Grandfather had already got it, you only noticed it, but anyway, you put a drop of coramine in there to muddle things up; just like you to be so cool and uncaring, Claire–you never really loved poor old Grandfather! Perhaps you knocked against the telephone–anyway, you had to wipe it. And then, finally, you drew back the curtain. That's always been a mystery; who drew back that curtain, and why it was done. It was done for a jolly good reason; you wanted to see in, the next morning … Then you ran away down the path, leaving your footsteps going up the path and coming down again; it was you who carefully drew Philip's attention to them the next morning! You said they were the footprints you'd just made; but they weren't–you'd made them the night before. You stood on the drive, twenty feet away and looked in at the window, to where Grandfather was sitting, dead … You never went near the lodge that morning at all!”

Claire stood absolutely silent, not moving, and Peta threw herself into Belle's arms and again burst into a storm of tears.

11

E
LLEN WAS RELEASED
from her incarceration on the morning after the funeral. She took a tender farewell of her jailers, adding with much laughter that she would probably soon be back, accepted her bail from the magistrates with an ironical smile, and, like a jaunty little ship with her paint unscratched and her flag still flying, was convoyed safely home. Bella chugged down from the terrace to meet her as, with her escort of battleship and two destroyers (“And me the dirty little dinghy with one small boy madly cheering,” said Edward.), she sailed across the green lawns. The baby was wearing her best white smock in her mother's honour, with a chain of forget-me-nots which Bella had made while she waited; and nothing could have been more satisfactory than the way in which, for the very first time, Antonia actually did say “Blut-blut-blut,” which everybody perfectly recognized as meaning “Mum-mum-mum.”

Bella had a tray of drinks ready and they all got mildly tight before lunch. “It's the first time we've felt sort of relaxed and reasonable since Philip came up that morning and told us that Grandfather was dead … It's got worse since you've been away, Ellen,” said Peta, holding the gin bottle up to the light, and deciding that it would do just one more round. “We've all been on edge and hateful and suspicious and cross. Last night Claire and I let our back hair down and had the most frightful slanging match, didn't we, Claire?”

“
Sheer
Serafita,” agreed Claire, in Ellen's own phrase.

“
I
taunted Claire with her spinsterhood …”

“And
I
said Peta was throwing herself at Stephen's head …”

“Well, so she is,” said Ellen, laughing and holding out an apologetic hand to Peta.

“I know, but she needn't have gone and said it bonk out in front of Stephen; only fortunately it never entered his head that she meant him, and now I suppose he thinks I have a secret passion for some doctor at the hospital, only I haven't because they're all married and about a hundred, anyway.”

“The being married part wouldn't occur to Claire as a deterrent,” said Ellen.

Edward crashed gaily in on the ugly little pause. “And also, Nell, we had a great scene out here, Bella broke down and made a dramatic speech about how she really hates Swanswater …”

“Because of the hang-over from Serafita …”

“And we all got most terribly emotional and Peta wanted to come out at night and dig up all the roses just to show our devotion …”

Ellen looked mildly astonished at this original way of displaying devotion. She said, “Well, of course, it's obvious that Bella, of all people, couldn't have had any motive for murdering Sir Richard. She lost nothing if the first will stood, and if the second will was signed it only gave her something she didn't want.”

“The question now remains,” said Philip, “whether Bella didn't want Swanswater so much that she would commit murder to prevent herself from getting it.”

“We forgot to tell you, Ellen, that Brough had a theory about Bella having squirted the poison onto Grandfather's food from the window sill …”

“And, my dear, Peta's worked it out most brilliantly that Claire could have made the footprints the night before …”

“And then it's most peculiar about Peta's fingerprints …”

“You seem to have been having a wonderful time while I've been away,” said Ellen dryly. “Before the inquest the great idea was that nobody could have murdered Sir Richard; now nearly everybody could have; and you've added Brough to the–” She had been going to say, “to the bag,” but for once considered Bella's feelings, and trailed off into a mumble.

They broke into a flurry of repudiation. “Whoever could have killed Grandfather,
none
of us could have killed Brough. Cockie can't make out how the murderer can have got in and out of the lodge … There were simply acres of untrodden dust between him and the door …”

And the old irritation was at work again. All very well for Ellen to start dragging in Brough when, after all, this was something
she couldn't
have done; all very well for her to be so snooty about them all getting horrid and accusing each other … After all, she had been away from it; it might have been awful in prison, but not more awful than having to go to poor Grandfather's funeral, being stared at and talked about, staring at each other and talking about each other, going over and over this thing like a cageful of squirrels. Who
was
Ellen, anyway? Not one of themselves, not really; just an outsider, that was all–sitting there calmly receiving their welcoming attentions, taking it all so much for granted, treating them like so many eager children jumping through their little hoops for her entertainment, mildly reproving them for quarrelling with each other while she had been away. “She makes me mad,” said Peta to Edward, punting up the river that afternoon in the lazy sunshine, escaped for a while from it all. “It's utterly irrational, Teddy, but last night I felt as if nothing really mattered as long as the beastly old magistrates let Ellen out of prison today, because it was so awful for her; and now she's out and, well, honestly, I begin to wish all over again that it was her that had done the murders, and then at least we, the real family–you and me and Philip and Claire and Bella–could be clear of all this horrible suspicion.”

A kingfisher held for a moment all the world's blue in its darting flash through the branches at the river's edge. The willows dipped green fingers into the running stream, shaking them with a scatter of brilliants in the breeze to dry. On either side the quiet cows browsed in the flower-starred fields and behind them Swanswater lay, white and rambling, in its ordered pattern of dark oak and pale larch and burning copper beech. Edward forgot for a moment the ugly puzzle that obsessed their minds. “When I hear the word ‘England,' Peta–this is what I think of. Don't you?”

“Yes, only there ought to be cricket.”

“The boys who would be playing cricket are up there in bombers, I suppose, or under the sea in submarines, or just marching about on land–but all killing people.”

“And here we are in all this fuss and excitement and horror because one man is dead; two men, with Brough–but both old and at the end of their lives anyway.”

“It does seem strange,” said Edward. His young muscles rippled in his thin arms as he stretched with unconscious grace, hand over hand up the punt pole. “If only I could know for certain that I didn't do it, I could go to a real proper psychologist and get him to say that there was nothing wrong with me and–and go and be a pilot or something, Peta. Don't you think I could?”

“I should think you could, darling, if you were absolutely un-phony about it; only I think, if you don't mind my saying so, that you ought to go in for something not so spectacular as being a pilot, because that's always been a part of your sort of mixed-up neuroses and things. I mean, you do dramatize yourself a bit.”

Edward immediately had a vision of himself splendidly sinking his identity in some humble job in the most appallingly dangerous part of the army; doggedly enduring the deadly monotony of carting high explosives from continually burning buildings. “Corporal Edward Treviss–there can be no fuss, no public recognition, you understand, but the C. in C. has asked me to say a quiet word to you. We're proud of you in the regiment, my boy!” But after a moment he said, miserably: “Well, anyway, Peta, what's the use? Even if it's not proved that I did it, I shall always be afraid that I did.”

“Unless someone
else
is proved to have done it.”

“Well, but that would only mean one of us, and in a way it would be worse. In a way I'd rather believe it was me; at least I wouldn't have been cruel and wicked; I'd only have been barmy.”

“Oh, Edward, you are sweet,” said Peta.

They moored the punt and scrambled ashore at a tiny island where they had played and picnicked as children. “I don't know whether I would rather it was me than Ellen,” corrected Edward, thoughtfully, as they threw themselves down in the long cool grass and sucked through straws at the lemonade bottles with which Bella had provided them. “I can't go as far as that. But you and Bella and Claire, of course, and–well, I
think
I'd rather it was me dotty than Philip sane.”