Crooked Wreath (23 page)

“Yes, perhaps I'd better,” said Cockrill; he went indoors in search of his men but, having given his orders, returned immediately to the terrace, where the family had now started on a new tack. Wouldn't it be
too
heavenly if it could turn out to have been Mrs. Brough all the time! Or Mrs. Brough in ‘ collusion with Brough could have murdered Grandfather, and then she could have murdered Brough … Couldn't it possibly have been that …?

“No,” said Cockrill.

“But, Cockie, why
not?
”

“Mrs. Brough was up at the house at eight o'clock on the evening Sir Richard was killed: she had nothing to do with his murder; there wasn't time.”

“Well, she could have killed Brough, afterwards; there could be two murderers.”

“Why should she?” said Cockrill.

“Well, she hated him.”

“Not in that way; not in the murdering way. In any event, why not have waited until he'd collected the money off Philip which they thought he was going to get? Why not let him do the dirty work and get the blame if Philip wouldn't allow himself to be blackmailed? Brough was going to ask for more money, anyway.”

“But that means–it literally means, Cockie, that you think it was one of us?”

“Work it out for yourselves,” said Cockrill.

Bella was looking very pretty that evening; her hair was charmingly done in rather nonsensical curls on the top of her head, her grey frock was becoming, and two modest diamonds glittered in the lobes of her ears. Beside her, Peta was tall and lanky, but she lounged in her chair with her usual extraordinary grace, the wild rose in its hothouse setting, all a-flutter with her elegant little absurdities. Claire sat in the background, very lonely, her face pale under the crown of her corn-coloured hair, but in its resignation, more serene than it had been for many months; next to her, Ellen was dark and vivid, restless, intelligent, alert. Philip sat on the balustrade, his tall, cool glass beside him, and, in his white flannels, had much of his grandfather's grace and charm, though nothing of Sir Richard's unreasonable splendour; and on the steps leading down to the river, Edward perched, his thin brown hands dangling between his knees. A good-looking–on the whole a very good-looking–family; pleasant, ordinary English people in a more than usually pleasant ordinary English setting. Bella, Peta, Claire, Ellen, Philip, Edward … And one of them, reflected Cockrill, was a murderer. One of these six. He wished it were not true, but he knew it was. He had wasted a great deal of time in the past five days, trying to prove anything to the contrary.

Edward bounced a rubber ball down the steps, for Bobbin.

“Definitely one of us, Cockie?” This from Philip.

“Don't ask the Inspector things like that, darling,” said Peta. It isn't etiquette. But doesn't Bella's good lemonade choke you under the circumstances, Cockie?”

It was very hot; and yet, suddenly, there was a chill in the air, a chill of cold fear. It came to them, to each of them as they idled there, that this was no ordinary evening; that the shadow of terror had crept very close upon one of their company, that there was not much longer to go now, before this horrible game of hide-and-seek was to come to an end. As though to give point to the unspoken thought, a siren wailed and was taken up by a second and a third, until all the air was filled with their dismal cries. The sound shattered the icy silence; and as it died away Edward got slowly to his feet and faced them and Cockrill saw that the boy's face was white, that his hands were trembling, that there was a beading of sweat along the line of his hair. He said, speaking slowly and wearily at first, but rising to a pitch of something very much like hysteria: “Cockie, I'm–I'm sick of this, I can't stick any more of it … On and on and on, discussing and arguing and accusing–I'm–I'm sick of it, I can't bear it any more. Why don't you make up your mind and arrest me and take me away and–whatever it is they do …? Surely you can see, surely we can all see plainly enough that it was me–it must have been me … They all know it was me, they've been trying to pretend to you that it wasn't, but they know it was … I don't remember it, I don't think, not really in my heart, that I did it; but–but I do do things that I don't remember, and there you are; the vase was found broken in the drawing-room where the wreath was hanging crooked and I don't remember dropping the vase, so I suppose I don't remember what happened afterwards … I do do these things; I've done them before …” He swung round upon them suddenly and his pale young face stared piteously at them and his thin young hands were half held out in unconscious pleading … “You won't … They won't … I won't be put in a loonie-bin, will I? I couldn't bear that!”

Stephen sat on the balustrade beside Philip, very silent, his cigarette smoking itself out between his fingers. When the family flutter had died away, he got to his feet and pushed forward, took Edward by the arm and forced him into a chair. “Look, old boy–I told you down by the river today that I knew you weren't mentally unbalanced. Now I know something very much more to the point. You aren't a murderer either. I don't just think. I know.”

Edward stared up at him, exhausted; half sullen, half eager. It was pitiful to see the gradual dawn of hope on the immature young face. “All that business about the crooked wreath,” said Stephen, speaking more to Cockrill now than to Edward. “That was all a plant to shift the blame onto him, poor kid. If a thing hung crooked it might catch his attention and cause him to glance up quickly at it; and it's a perfectly good medical fact that in people subject to fugues and automatism and what-not, glancing up quickly may bring on an attack. Whether it was Edward who dropped the vase or not, I don't know: Claire found it broken on the floor when she came into the house just before nine, didn't you, Claire? But do you remember what I said to you when I came into the hall and you were picking up the bits?”

“You just said was it Edward again?–didn't you, Stephen?”

“Not quite,” said Stephen. “I said–I must have said something more like, ‘
Not
Edward this time?' Can't you remember?”

Claire looked half-hopeful, half-incredulous. “Well, I can't exactly remember the words. I know I said that it must have been him, because he'd just been in, and Peta had been teasing him and he was a bit upset and so forth; I'm afraid I just took it for granted that he'd dropped the vase … I've always thought so, all along.”

“We all thought so,” said Bella. “We know the vase was dropped and broken and the water and roses spilt: we saw it next morning, all of us. And the wreath over Serafita's picture was hanging askew …”

“So Edward said just now,” said Stephen. “The wreath was hanging askew.”

“Well, Stephen, so it
was
,” said Peta.

“Not when I saw it,” said Stephen.

Edward got up slowly from his chair. He was absolutely white now, his hands shaking, the sweat rolling down his forehead; he faced them again, pathetically young and coltish in his adolescent weediness, but with a dignity about him, a passion of pain and disillusion and bitterly contemptuous reproach that had nothing in it of childishness. “
You
did this to me! One of
you
did this to me! You let me go through this hell … You let me think that I was mad and a murderer, a dangerous lunatic not fit to be loose on the world … Not fit to play with the baby, not fit to sleep alone in a room without the man of the family near, to protect the others, not–not fit to …” He broke down for a moment. He said: “This has been torture, the most horrible kind of torture. None of you can know what it's been like; you can't know what it's like not even to be certain that you're thinking sensible thoughts … You suddenly wake up and think, ‘Perhaps this is all just drooling idiocy, perhaps I don't really know what's going on about me, perhaps I'm living in a sort of dream not recognizing what people are actually saying to me … You–you make jokes and pretend you don't care, but all the time you're driving yourself mad thinking that perhaps people are only humouring you by smiling and pretending to respond, perhaps you're not even talking sense, perhaps you think you're a poached egg or–or Queen Victoria, or something, like the funny stories about lunatics … You–you wake up in the night and think and wonder, and–and dread being taken away to some terrible place, and then say to yourself that perhaps that's part of a ‘persecution mania,' and you make a terrific effort all over again to seem as if you're normal and don't care … And one of you did this to me! One of you broke the vase and spilled the water and arranged the wreath, so that all this hell should fall on me … Not to speak of the fact that I had to believe myself a murderer …”

Bella rose, putting out her hands to him. “Oh, Edward, darling, for God's sake …”

“Don't touch me, Bella,” he said. “I don't want anyone to touch me or come near me. One of you, one of my own family,
one of my own family
, let me think I was mad. One of my own family …”

Peta said: “Darling, don't go on and
on
saying ‘one of my own family.'”

He whirled round with a face of cold fury. “God help me, Peta, I believe you would walk through a battlefield, looking at the wounded men lying there in the mud–and make a joke of it!”

“Summer time, darling,” said Peta. “No mud.”

They were both very white.

“No one should know better than you, Edward,” said Ellen in her matter-of-fact voice, “that the Marches are never more flippant than when they're minding about something very much. As for your family–well, most of us aren't exactly your family, my dear, are they? That's what you seem to mind most, that one of your own flesh and blood should do this to you, so perhaps it'll make you feel just a little better if you remember that, after all, you're not a March. If
I
did this thing–but I didn't actually–well, I'm not your family at all; and Peta and Claire and Philip–they're only half-cousins, or whatever it is; you've only got a grandfather in common, haven't you? You and I, Teddy, we're outside this lot, really, aren't we? I only belong to it through Philip. Your grandmother was Bella. Theirs was Serafita. You and I and Bella, we haven't really any part, darling, in the ancestor worship and ballet-dancing and rose-wreaths and coloured gloves.…”

Her level voice went on and on, trying to calm and soothe him; she knew that it did not matter very much what she said. While she spoke, Cockrill got up quietly and, almost unobserved, went into the house. He went into the drawing-room and stood for a little while underneath Serafita's portrait, looking up at her. “You have a lot to be responsible for, my dear,” he said to the smiling face, and so returned to the terrace again and sat down quietly in his chair. Ellen had stopped speaking and they all sat silent while Edward still stood, towering above them, given over to his ashen rage. “One of you, one of
you!
Letting me bear the blame … I'll tell Cockie; I'll tell him everything we've worked out; he thinks it couldn't have been any of you and so it must have been me … But it could have been
any
of you; I'll tell Cockie; I'll make him see …”

“Oh, Edward,
darling
…!” pleaded Bella.

He turned on her furiously. “Keep quiet! Keep
quiet!
If–if it hadn't been for you filling me up with stupid nonsense, taking me to see the wrong kind of doctors, phony ones, sensational ones who told me I might do things and made me experiment and want to see if it would really happen … Making me think I was queer and different …” He broke off, then shouted, standing over her, both of them white and shaking, both almost in tears: “If I'm mad,
you're
mad! If I'm mad, where did I get it from? Perhaps
you
killed Grandfather, perhaps you did squirt poison over his food–you could have! Perhaps
you're
mad, Bella; if I am, why shouldn't
you
be?”

“But the whole point is that you're not, Edward,” said Stephen in his quiet way. “And if you're not, there's no reason to suppose that Bella is. And unless she was mad and did it without a motive, she surely wouldn't have killed Sir Richard; why should she?”

Edward turned away with a sort of half-movement, like a hurt animal. “Well, I don't know … Anyway, it was one of you. Wasn't it, Cockie? Her or Peta or Claire or Philip or–who's left?–Ellen.”

“It was one of six people here,” said Cockrill, steadily.

“Well, all right, counting me.” He looked round him almost as though he were the centre of some game at a children's party. “It couldn't be Ellen, because of Brough. And it couldn't be Philip because we don't really believe, not seriously, that he isn't Philip; and, of course, Dr. Newsome wouldn't have made such a mess of the time-of-death business. We were silly to think of that.”

“Thank you,” said Philip, sarcastically; but one couldn't really resent what he said, poor desperate boy.

“So that leaves–it leaves Peta and Claire. And Claire–well, Peta showed, that day, how Claire could have gone up the path the night before and killed Grandfather and come away; and only pretend to go up it the next morning and see him sitting in the window.” He looked rather frightened; and shame-faced. “Well, you heard Peta say it, Cockie;
I
'
m
not telling you. It–it could have happened.”

There was a silence. Claire said at last, “Well–Ellen?”

“Yes?” said Ellen.

“Aren't you going to tell Edward about that morning? You were standing on the balcony outside your bedroom; you could see right over the bushes at the edge of the drive–you could see down to the lodge. You must have seen me walking up the path to the French window, and running down again.
You
know that I really did go up the path.”