Hollow Crown (10 page)

‘I suppose Molly must have put it somewhere when she went to bed,’ said Edward, ‘but I admit I can’t see it anywhere.’

Harbin came into the room and stared impassively at the dead woman. ‘I guess I shouldn’t have said what I did a moment ago,’ he said to Edward.

Edward ignored him and went over to the window, which was open. The Virginia creeper was strong and had entwined itself round a drainpipe to make an easy climb for a fit man – or woman.
There was no obvious sign of it having been used as a ladder, however. He checked himself. That was something for the police to consider, not him. ‘Leo, I think the best thing we can do is to
leave the room as we found it until the police have a chance of examining it.’

Harbin said, ‘You say Mrs Harkness did not seem suicidal to you, Lord Edward, when you last spoke with her. When did you have this conversation?’

‘Just before I turned in – about midnight. I suppose I was the last person to see her alive.’

‘And you heard nothing during the night?’ Harbin persisted.

‘No,’ Edward said shortly, ‘did you?’

‘Nothing.’

It was suddenly borne in on him that the police would expect some straight answers from him to some fairly obvious questions and he did not know how far he could go in answering them truthfully.
They would want to know what he had been talking to Molly about so late at night, for one thing. The police would assume he had slept with her unless he told them about Dannie and he couldn’t
do that. They would soon hear the stories that he had been Molly’s lover in Kenya. Untrue they might be, but he could never disprove them. Damn and blast! He was now going to pay for taking
his pleasure so unwisely last night. He had heard nothing in the night. Why? Probably because there was nothing to hear but perhaps because, after making love to Dannie, he had fallen into a deep
post-coital sleep. Had
she
heard anything? He must talk to her as soon as possible to ‘get their story straight’. He grimaced. He hated the idea of lying to the police but,
unless she gave him permission, he couldn’t drag Dannie into it. Could he tell the police why he was in the house in the first place? Not without Mrs Simpson’s permission. Oh God! What
a mess!

Pickering returned from telephoning. ‘The police and Dr Fisher will be with us shortly, sir,’ he said to Scannon.

‘Very good,’ Scannon said abruptly. ‘Who did you speak to?’

‘Inspector Lampfrey, sir.’

‘Lampfrey? Oh yes, I remember him. Didn’t he come here when Lady Biggar lost her diamonds?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I ought to ring the Chief Constable though. Dear me! Dear me!’

Scannon made a visible effort to pull himself together and, as far as Edward could tell, his agitation was unfeigned.

‘Did Mrs Harkness have a maid with her, Pickering?’ he barked.

‘No, sir, she did not. I offered her Betsy – one of the housemaids – to help her dress, but she said she had no need of anyone.’

‘I see. Dear me! What a . . . Look, I think the best thing is if we all go down and wait in the drawing-room for the police to arrive. There’s nothing else we can do here. Pickering,
lock the door and keep hold of the key until the police arrive.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Lord Edward, may I have a brief word with you?’

Scannon led Edward into a small room he used as a study, closed the door and began immediately to abuse him. ‘For God’s sake, what the devil did you do to the poor girl last night to
make her take her own life? Or did you put something in her drink and do it for her? And what about the letters? Did she give them to you?’

‘No, I . . . ’

‘I told Weaver I thought you’d make a mess of things but, by God, I never imagined it would come to this! To have one of my guests die and the police crawling all over the house. And
what do we say about why you were interrogating the woman in the middle of the night, eh, Corinth? What do you say to that? My God . . . ’

‘Steady on, Scannon, this is nothing to do with me . . . ’

‘Nothing to do with you that the moment you start talking to this bloody woman she dies!’

‘I had a perfectly reasonable conversation with her about the letters – a conversation we were going to continue today. There was no hint that she would take her own life and I
certainly don’t believe she did. Either she took an overdose of her sleeping draught by mistake or someone murdered her and probably took the letters.’

‘You don’t mean the stuff she had stolen was actually in her bedroom and you didn’t get hold of it?’

‘How could I? I wasn’t going to knock her about until she parted with them, was I?’

‘Well, for God’s sake, we ought to search her room before the police arrive.’

‘That’s not a good idea, Scannon,’ Edward said evenly.

‘Why not? Are you yellow?’

‘No, Scannon, but . . . ’ they heard the front door bell pealing, ‘it’s too late and in any case it would have been totally irresponsible.’

‘But what do we tell the police?’

‘I have been thinking about that. I believe you ought to telephone Joe Weaver and get him to speak to Mrs Simpson. She must be told what has happened straight away and that we have no
alternative but to tell the police the truth and trust to their discretion. We don’t need to give them any details about what the letters were – just that Molly had stolen them and I
was trying to get them back without causing a scandal.’

‘Without causing a scandal . . . pfff! I suppose this isn’t a scandal?’

‘If we don’t tell them what I was doing here, they’ll think of all sorts of motives for her killing herself – if that’s what they decide happened – and when,
as is inevitable, they find we have been concealing the obvious motive, it will all get horribly messy. What sort of man will they send us?’

‘Inspector Lampfrey. He’s all right,’ Scannon said, calming himself with an effort. ‘I’ll go and ring the Chief Constable as soon as I’ve spoken to Lampfrey
and impress on him how important it is to keep all this as quiet as possible . . . So, we’ll just say Molly was an old friend of both of us and we were trying to persuade her not to be a damn
fool. But heavens!’ Scannon was looking aghast. ‘It’s just struck me. If she was murdered, someone here – someone in this house did it. And the letters . . . where are they?
They may be half-way to Fleet Street or even America by now.’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘Oh Christ! The King will blame me for this and . . . ’

At that moment, there was a knock on the door and Pickering entered. ‘Inspector Lampfrey has arrived, sir, and he would be grateful for a word with you.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Scannon said and, throwing one further look of disgust at Edward, went out of the room. Edward sighed and then rubbed his forehead with his hand as if to wipe away
sweat. It was a gesture he often made at moments of extreme pressure and he had no idea he made it. Then, pulling himself together, he followed his host out of the room.

He hesitated in the corridor and then, instead of going downstairs, he made his way back to his room. He didn’t know if it was callous of him but he felt he could not meet the policeman
until he had shaved and dressed. Fenton was not in the bedroom but he had laid out his clothes on the bed. Edward was about to go to the bathroom at the end of the passage when he saw that the
screen in the corner of his room had been moved to reveal the door which it normally concealed – the door which connected his room with Molly’s. On an impulse, he went over to it and
tried the handle. It was unlocked. He knew he ought to have been surprised but he was not. There was no key on his side of the door. He hesitated and then turned the doorknob and entered
Molly’s room. He noticed that there was no key on Molly’s side of the door either. A screen, similar to the one in his room, blocked his view. He peered round it and was once again
shocked to see the body on the bed. The foolish but so very much alive woman, whom he had threatened and cajoled the night before, was now so very dead.

A tide of sadness swept over him. He knew it would be only a matter of seconds before the police were in the room so he looked about him for some obvious hiding place in which Molly might have
secreted Mrs Simpson’s love letters. He opened the cupboard. One thing struck him immediately. The bottle of veronal she said she had kept in it was not there now. He glanced round the room
but there was no sign of it. He saw a small brown leather attaché case – hardly bigger than a lady’s handbag – in the corner of the room. He went over and tried to open it
but it was locked. He thought for about half a second and then, hearing the sound of approaching feet, took up the case and returned with it to his own room, closing the door behind him. He thrust
it under the bed as if the very sight of it made him feel as guilty as an Egyptian tomb robber. It was odd that robbing a dead person seemed so much worse than stealing from a live one. He replaced
the screen and then sat on the bed and thought. Someone had opened the door connecting his room and Molly’s between the time Fenton had tried it – say six o’clock the previous
evening – and when he woke up. That person could only be Dannie. He supposed it was just possible someone had opened the door from Molly’s side but for what possible reason? No, it had
to be Dannie.

He grimaced. It occurred to him that he had probably left fingerprints on the door handle in Molly’s room but there was going to be so much to explain anyway he really couldn’t worry
about it. He heard the door to Molly’s room open and the sound of feet as one or possibly two police officers went over to examine the body. He cursed. They would soon notice that the door
connecting her room to his was unlocked. What if they searched his room before he could remove the attaché case? He was beginning to wish he had left it where it was. Was it safe under his
bed? He looked around the room but, big though it was, there weren’t many obvious places in which to hide an object as bulky as a handbag. He went over to the fireplace and peered under the
chimney piece. He thought he could see a ledge there. Yes! He could feel there was. Without further ado, he removed the case from under his bed and stuck it up on the ledge, managing to get some
soot on his hands and dressing gown as he did so.

Then he marched out of his room, past a police constable on guard outside Molly’s room, who looked at him with some surprise, and into the bathroom where he shaved and washed himself and
his dressing gown sleeve as thoroughly as he could. Twenty minutes later, bathed – the water had been almost cold but nonetheless welcome – shaved and dressed in a suit of heather
mixture, he walked downstairs with as much of an air of innocence as he could muster.

Inspector Lampfrey was cool but not hostile. In fact, his courtesy was rather alarming. Only a fool would have heard his slow Wiltshire burr and put him down for a country bumpkin. The silence
with which he listened to Edward’s account of his conversations with Molly suggested not disbelief but ironic detachment, as if he had heard every story ever told but was quite prepared to
hear them again. As Edward completed his account of what had happened the previous night, there was silence. Lampfrey regarded him with clear grey eyes which seemed to weigh him up and judge him.
He was glad that, on reflection, he had decided to tell the truth – though not quite the whole truth. He doubted whether he could have withstood for long the disconcerting habit the Inspector
had of leaving long silences after a question had been very fully answered. It encouraged the witness to tell more than was wise or reveal himself through some inappropriate joke or comment about
someone else.

While he was waiting to be interviewed by the Inspector, Edward had had another word with Scannon. The latter had spoken to Joe Weaver and then to the Chief Constable who had been told why it
was necessary the press should be kept in ignorance of Molly’s death for as long as possible. They were bound to find out sooner or later – there would have to be an inquest for one
thing – but, if the coroner was able to find that she had died of an accidental overdose of veronal, there wouldn’t be much of a story. In the meantime, it was agreed that every
assistance was to be given to Inspector Lampfrey short of telling him in detail the contents of the stolen letters. Edward would never have agreed to anything less. He was in an awkward enough
position as it was, without putting himself absolutely in the wrong by withholding information from the police. There was one thing he held back from the Inspector and that was finding Catherine
Dannhorn in his bed when he had got back from his late-night interview with Molly.

He had not had a chance of talking to Dannie. Rather annoyingly, he had discovered, when he had gone down to breakfast, that she had ridden out early with Boy Carstairs and had not yet returned
and, it was to be supposed, remained in ignorance of Molly’s death. However, he assumed she would not volunteer that she had been in his bed instead of her own. In fact, there were several
reasons for his deciding to be silent on this one point – perhaps too many reasons to be entirely convincing. He had been told as a child that if one decided to make an excuse for behaving
badly, then one should limit it to one. The more excuses one made, the less weight they carried. But, of course, he wasn’t actually lying; merely being gentlemanly. Gentlemen do not talk
about their sexual adventures. But this wasn’t it exactly. He also did not wish to seem promiscuous, unscrupulous or unprincipled. He might not have much respect for middle-class morality but
he fancied the Inspector would look at him with those cool eyes of his and find him wanting. What this all boiled down to was that he was embarrassed. It was not like him to jump into bed with a
woman he had only known a few days and whom he had never spoken to at any length, let alone kissed. His escapade, as he termed it in his own mind, was lust pure and simple. Could lust be pure, he
wondered? He wasn’t certain it was even simple now he came to think about it. His feelings for Dannie were surely more complex than lust, weren’t they? He had been hit by a thunderbolt;
he was obsessed, he was captivated – all these; but he was not ‘in love’. He was almost sure he was not in love.