Fair Warning (13 page)

“I know. Rob feels it, too.”

“I feel,” said Rob, “that I’m damn glad Ivan Godden’s dead, and I think the death he got is too good for him. He was killing Marcia slowly—by torture.”

“Hush, my son.” Verity’s face looked white and twisted as if with pain. “Don’t ever, anywhere, say that again. All this is from your viewpoint. Perhaps mine. But there’s also this. That is only your viewpoint. It remains that someone has murdered Ivan Godden. That there was some motive for it. I wish,” she said suddenly, “that you needn’t go back to that house again, Marcia. I don’t like it.”

Rob looked swiftly at his mother. “You mean—”

“I mean nothing,” said Verity, all but snapping. “Except that murder has a way of—repeating itself. And that no matter what this thing has accomplished—or failed to accomplish—in removing a scoundrel from the earth, it doesn’t follow that it was a good deed from a good motive.”

“Motives,” said Rob slowly. “Why should he be murdered? Marcia, had he any quarrels with anyone? Had he—oh, wronged anyone? Anything like that? I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but after all people don’t as a rule murder just for the fun of it.”

“Not as a rule,” said Verity somberly.

“What do you mean?” said Rob again.

Verity did not explain. “Marcia, what about motives? Do you know of any—enemies Ivan had? Anything like that?”

“No—but I wouldn’t know.”

“Whoever did it,” said Rob abruptly, “had also to have opportunity. That rather—well, limits it.”

Verity said suddenly, “Tell us again, Marcia, just how you found him. What had happened? Everything—if you don’t mind, my dear. I know it’s hard.”

“I went over and over it last night,” said Marcia. She told it again, slowly this time and forgetting no smallest detail. Rob watched her intently the whole time, never taking his dark eyes from hers, but Verity looked into the fire, and Marcia could see only her white profile with its fine, strong nose jutting out a bit sharply because she was so tired and haggard, as if she had not slept.

Toward the last, the part she had not told the police, it became difficult.

“You mean he wasn’t dead yet?” said Verity.

“No.” Marcia swallowed and went on: “He said to hurry and get the doctor. And told me to pull out the knife. I—tried to. Put my hands on the knife, you know. And then he died. Just then. I couldn’t move or think or do anything, and all at once Beatrice came in. From the french doors. And she thought I had killed him.”

“What did she say?”

“She said, ‘How could you have done it!’ I tried to explain. She didn’t believe me. She said, ‘So that’s your story.’ But she didn’t tell the police what she had seen.”

“Why?” said Rob tensely.

“I don’t know.”

Rob frowned. “Beatrice has got to be shut up. I didn’t realize exactly how it was, Marcia. It’s—She can tell it as if she saw you murder him. Is that all of it?”

“Yes.”

“What do the police know?”

“Not that much. I mean, I didn’t tell them about Ivan’s making me pull on the knife. I just said he was dead. And they don’t know what Beatrice said to me. Unless she has told them.”

“I wonder what she’s planning,” said Rob thoughtfully. “I wonder why she hasn’t told yet.”

“She was sending for Ivan’s lawyer when I left,” said Marcia.

“What for?”

“I don’t know. I imagine, from the way she spoke, about his will.”

For a moment no one spoke, and Marcia became aware of a little crescendo of scratches and whimpers at the garden door.

“It’s Bunty,” said Verity and rose and let the little dog tumble frantically into the room and dash for Marcia. She bit and growled and wriggled and panted and came very near to wagging her black little tail quite off her square little body.

“Of course,” said Rob unexpectedly, “it must have occurred to you that Beatrice murdered him.”

“Beatrice!” Marcia’s hand stopped, and Bunty pushed and wriggled against it invitingly.

“Yes, of course. She had the same opportunity you had. She could have murdered him when she came downstairs on her way here.”

“But—why? There’s no motive—”

“There might be,” said Rob shortly. “At any rate, she was one of a very few who had really a perfect opportunity. And she may think you suspect her and be willing to trade silence for silence.”

Later Marcia was to think how close they came to the truth just then and yet how far they were from it. But at the time there was something she was trying to remember. Something fleeting—only half recognized at the time. Some thing—

“The door!” she said. “It closed twice.”

“What’s that? Quick, Marcia, what do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. But I heard Beatrice go downstairs, and then I heard the outside door close. It’s heavy, you know, and there’s a sort of jar when it closes that you—oh, recognize. Well, a few moments later I thought I heard it again. But that’s all. I was hurrying—thinking of so much—that’s all.”

“Hush!” It was Verity, and she said in a louder voice, “Come in.”

Stella, the Copley housemaid, opened the door. She was seething with not very well repressed emotion and said that a Mr. Wait was outside wanting to see Mrs. Godden. And that he’d said he would also see Mr. Copley and Mrs. Copley.

There was an instant’s silence. Verity’s mouth looked curiously gray. Then she said, “Very well. Send him in.”

Stella fluttered.

“He—he’s been asking me questions. Shall I t-tell—”

The words came on a gulp.

Verity’s face became rigid.

“Certainly,” she said at once. “We have nothing to hide.”

“Aww—” said the girl in a kind of wail and vanished.

“Now, what—” murmured Verity. “What can they have been inquiring—”

“If they get any sense out of Stella it’s more than we’ve ever been able to do,” said Rob brusquely and went to Marcia. “Marcia! Don’t look so white and terrified. I won’t let him hurt you. Darling—oh, my dear, we’re going to be married and you’ll be my wife always—and—”

“Married,” said Marcia. Ivan Godden’s face rose suddenly before her, pale, with blank bright eyes and shadowy, secret indentations at the corners of his mouth. “Married—and let them say you murdered him? No, Rob—”

“But you—”

“Good morning, Mr. Wait,” said Verity. “You wish to see us?”

He didn’t wish to see them at all. He was very tired and hadn’t had much sleep the night before and didn’t like the way the case was shaping up. By this time he ought to have got a confession out of somebody. Well, perhaps he could now, since he’d talked to the cook and since that hellcat of a sister-in-law had had her way. Better do things shipshape while he was at it. He began, as usual, with no preliminary whatever:

“Mrs. Godden, I want you to go back again to the day of March eighteenth.”

“Y-yes,” said Marcia, her mouth suddenly dry.

“On that day your husband was injured in an accident and went to the hospital. When he was admitted the nurse says there were, besides his other injuries, three long scratches on his face. These, however, were not a result of the accident. They were already there and were seen when Ivan Godden got into the car. Before the accident took place. How did they get there?”

“I—”

“So you quarreled with your husband. Don’t trouble to deny it, you were overheard by one of the servants. And the quarrel reached such proportions that it came to physical violence. Didn’t it? And your husband’s automobile ride immediately afterward very nearly had a fatal ending.”

“See here, Mrs. Godden does not have to answer all this—”

“Just a minute, Copley, I’m coming to you. There’s something else that happened that day. I have here a duplicate of the bill from the hardware store where the knife that was used to murder Ivan Godden was purchased. It’s—quite a bill!” He took it from his inner pocket and looked at the scribbled slip. “Two pounds of bluegrass seed. One pair hedge shears. Three paintbrushes. One dandelion knife. A four-ounce package arsenic. Delia, your housemaid, took the articles from the desk in the library and put them away. She remembers exactly what was there. The grass seed, the hedge shears, the paintbrushes, and one old-fashioned dandelion knife. One knife only. And”—he thrust the slip of paper back into his pocket again and looked at Marcia as if he would have preferred to look at anything else in the world— “and no arsenic,” said Jacob Wait.

There was a packed, dreadful silence. Suddenly Bunty fancied Jacob Wait’s ankle and made a small dash toward it, and Verity bent and scooped her up under one arm and held her, her face gray with horror over the wriggling little dog.

Verity had said murder was like something unchained. Something let loose.

“Where’s the arsenic, Mrs. Godden?” said Jacob Wait.

“I—but I—I don’t know anything about it. I—”

“You didn’t mention it last night. You named everything else in that convenient order from the hardware store, but not the arsenic. Why?”

“I—forgot it.” She had. Altogether. But how fatally false her own voice rang!

“Oh, then you knew it was there?”

“Look here,” said Rob. “Godden wasn’t killed with arsenic. What do you—”

“Oh, yes—Copley.”

He reached, deliberately into his pocket again. Marcia’s heart pressed suffocatingly against her throat, and she thought she could never breathe again. He had a square white envelope, and he turned to Verity and thrust it before her eyes.

“Whose handwriting is this?” he said.

Perhaps Verity knew it was no use to try to evade. Perhaps she couldn’t have evaded.

“My—son’s,” she said as if she were choking.

M
ARCIA’S HANDS CLUNG TO
each other. And her whole soul and being clung to one small fact that emerged from a rocking, crashing world.

It was the envelope he held. It was only the envelope he held.

And quite suddenly and clearly she remembered the tiny separate swishes the letter
and
the envelope had made as they fell into the cupboard.

The envelope argued the possession of the letter. But still it was the envelope he held.

Luckily, however, she didn’t speak. Her voice and her words would have been too sure to betray her and to betray Rob. And as she stared at Jacob Wait, Rob stepped forward so he towered over the sallow, mournful little man. His voice was perhaps too deliberately steady and his eyes too blue. He said, “What of it?”

“Uh?” said Jacob Wait.

“I said, what of it? The envelope, I mean.”

So Rob was thinking the same thing. That it might be the straw that would save them all from drowning.

“Well,” said Jacob Wait, “you didn’t send an empty envelope to Mrs. Godden.”

“Certainly not.”

There was a pause. Jacob Wait’s eyes were unfathomable pools of black, hiding all his knowledge but giving somehow a guarantee that it existed. He would bring the letter out. He would tax Rob with it then and there.

Verity, looking very white, said abruptly and rather hastily, as if to forestall any statement from Rob, “There’s no stamp and no postmark on the envelope. It might have been addressed—carrying some trivial message—any time during the past few years.”

Wait’s brown eyes shifted to Verity briefly.

“Your housemaid delivered it yesterday,” he said in a bored way. “The message was not trivial. It was urgent.”

They had the letter, then, too. Or was it bluff?

Rob had to know. His chin moved a little jerkily, he pulled a package of cigarettes from his pocket and said directly, “There’s no secret about it. I wrote a note to Mrs. Godden reminding her of my mother’s dinner party last night. Have a cigarette?”

Well, it would end the horror of that suspense, anyway. The detective would have to say, now, “No, you didn’t. That wasn’t why you wrote to her. We know why it was written, because we have the letter. And in it was a threat against Ivan Godden. We know.”

But he didn’t. His heavy lids drooped over his eyes, and he took a cigarette from the package Rob extended and said enigmatically, “In that case Mrs. Godden will show us the letter, I’m sure.”

Was he encouraging them to walk further into an entangling web of lies and half-truths? Was he opening the door to a trap?

Rob turned so his back was toward Wait and he faced Marcia, and under pretense of extending the package of cigarettes to her gave her a compelling look. He wanted her to talk. The only thing she could do was subscribe to his story.

She said, in a voice that seemed to come out of the top of her head, “Why, certainly. If I can find it.”

“Any doubt about your being able to find it, Mrs. Godden?” said Jacob Wait too kindly.

“See here,” said Rob in a conversational way that stopped short of belligerence. “What do you mean by this?”

“You,” said Jacob Wait, “are not exactly in a position to make demands, Copley. Mrs. Godden, wasn’t Robert Copley the subject of your quarrels with your husband? You may as well tell us the truth, you know.”

“No. Never,” said Marcia almost violently. “There was no reason to quarrel with my husband about him—or anyone else.”

He looked at her through smoke. A pretty young wife, his look said, another man—or men—husband murdered. He said, “What about this quarrel on the day your husband was—in an accident?” His tone implied that it was not an accident.

“Better tell him,” said Rob coolly, and all at once Verity sat down as if to save herself from falling.

“We quarreled, yes,” said Marcia, still in a tight voice which seemed to come of its own volition. “But the—quarrel was over my dog, Bunty.”

Wait glanced at the dog and seemed very bored.

“What had the dog done?”

“She hadn’t done anything,” said Marcia. “It was just that—my husband thought she wasn’t well. That she should be destroyed. I didn’t think so.”

Verity said suddenly, “Ivan Godden was a very peculiar man, Mr. Wait. You may as well know it—if you don’t already. He gave the dog to Marcia about a year ago. She grew rather fond of her. Then quite suddenly, a month or so ago, he decided to have Ancill—the chauffeur—take the dog and kill it. He told Marcia the dog was ill. The dog was perfectly well.”

“How do you know?”

Verity shrugged. “You can see for yourself. However, I offered to keep the dog for Marcia—Mrs. Godden. And I had our friend, Dr. Blakie, look at the dog immediately. He said there was nothing wrong with her.”