Poison In The Pen (19 page)

Jason Leigh lifted the latch of Mr. Barton’s gate, walked up to the side door, and knocked upon it. The work on which he had been employed was of the nature to develop what is often called a sixth sense, though it may perhaps more properly be considered to be a heightening of the other five. As he stood knocking on the door of Gale’s Cottage he felt tolerably sure that he was being watched. It was not really dark outside, but it was dark enough for there to be a light in the front sitting-room of Willow Cottage. All the rooms next door looked either to the front or to the back. Only a staircase window commanded a view of Mr. Barton’s sideways-facing door. It is true that by leaning out of the nearer of the two front bedrooms such a view could be obtained, as Miss Silver had discovered on the night of Connie’s death, when she had watched Mr. Barton come home with his cats. But while Jason stood on the doorstep knocking nobody leaned from any window, and the sensation of being watched connected itself in his mind with the stairway and the narrow pane of glass which lighted it. No one had leaned out, but he had a feeling that someone had drawn back in a hurry and then stood there watching him.

His mind gave an impatient jerk. The Miss Waynes had always been great collectors of gossip like Mettie Eccles and half a dozen more of their kind, and Miss Renie would be waiting to see whether he got in past Mr. Barton’s guard. When he did, she would be disappointed. And with that the key turned, the door swung in, and he stepped across the threshold. There was enough light from the open kitchen door to pass him through.

James Barton locked the door behind him and took him to the lighted room with a friendly hand on his shoulder. The curtains were drawn, the lamp lit, and the cats laid out in front of the fire, but whereas they had not moved a whisker for the Chief Constable, they now rose, stretched, and came to rub themselves against Jason Leigh.

Jason had a name and a word for each of the seven— Achan—Abijah—Ahithophel—Agag—Abimelech—Abner —Absalom. Mr. Barton came as near a smile as he ever did.

“They don’t forget a friend. Animals don’t mostly, and cats are the choosiest of the lot. If they like you they do, and if they don’t like you they don’t, and that’s all there is about it.”

The cats went and lay down again. The two men seated themselves. After a while Barton said,

“When do you go off again?”

Jason laughed.

“Probably I don’t.”

“Quitting?”

“Probably. I have an urge to farm. I trained and did a couple of years after the war, you’ll remember, and I feel like taking it up again.”

Barton had picked up his pipe and was filling it.

“Why?”

“I’m thinking of getting married.”

“Then you’re a damned fool.”

“Not when it’s Valentine.”

Barton gave him a quick hard look.

“And what do you expect me to say to that?”

“If you’re a fool you’ll say all women are alike! But they’re not, any more than all men are. If you say what I expect you to say, it will be that there’s only one Valentine and I’m lucky to get her.”

There was a long pause. Barton struck a match and lit up. When he had got the pipe going he said in his deep throaty voice,

“No, you can’t expect me to say that—not when you know how I feel about women. But if there ever was one who was different from the rest, it was her mother.”

Jason looked across at him with a spark in his eyes.

“And what did you know about Mrs. Grey?” he said.

James Barton met the look.

“Just what anyone couldn’t help knowing. She was good, and something had broken her heart and she wasn’t one that could live without it. And when I say she was good, I don’t mean that she was what is commonly called a good woman, which is a way of speaking that can be stretched to cover all the pettiest and meanest of vices. So long as you don’t borrow your neighbour’s husband or step outside the bonds of your own marriage you may be mean, jealous, quarrelsome, deceitful, a spendthrift, a pinch-penny, a nagger, a doubter, and as vain as the devil, and yet be accounted a virtuous woman. Mrs. Grey had another kind of goodness than that. I didn’t speak to her more than three times. Once when she came in upon us when I was in the study with the Colonel. He named me as an old friend, and she said ‘How do you do, Mr. Barton?’ and I said, ‘How do you do?’ And two other times, when she said it was a fine day—that was one of them. And she was afraid it was going to snow—that was the other. But there was something in her that was like a light shining in a window. When you see goodness like that, you can’t blaspheme by saying it isn’t there. The girl has a touch of it, I’ll grant you that.”

Jason was oddly moved. His friendship with James Barton went a long way back to a day when, at ten years old, he had plunged into single combat with a bull-terrier in defence of one of the current cats, an earlier Ahithophel, who would usually have been more than a match for any dog but had in this instance just been disabled by a stone thrown by one William Clodd. The stone broke Ahithophel’s leg, and the bull-terrier got him by the scruff, after which several more boys and dogs joined in and the garden of Gale’s Cottage became a pandemonium into the midst of which James Barton erupted with a broom in one hand and a poker in the other. Everyone having taken to flight except the bull-terrier, from whose jaws Ahithophel had to be prised, Jason was invited in for the stanching of wounds. He had two bites, but he won James Barton’s heart by insisting that Ahithophel’s need was greater than his own. After which he was more or less free of the cottage and Tommy Martin let him go there.

They talked now in a desultory manner, with frequent intervals of silence. It was during one of these, when Jason had strayed over to the bookshelves which covered the whole of one wall, that Barton said,

“I had the Chief Constable here to see me, but you’ll have heard that, I suppose. Everyone knows everything in Tilling Green.”

Jason made some sort of a sound, noncommittal and of an uninterested nature, following it up with,

“Where on earth did you pick this up?”

“What have you got there? Oh, the Wonderful Magazine. Picked it up on the stall at the corner of Catchpenny Lane in Ledlington. Full of nice examples of early nineteenth-century credulity, including a particular account of a case of spontaneous combustion.”

Jason laughed.

“I don’t know that credulity stopped in the early nineteenth century. If a thing is wonderful enough, somebody will believe it. Anything to escape being dull.”

There was a pause, after which James Barton said,

“Tilling Green can’t have been exactly dull for the last ten days.”

“I suppose not.”

“Do you know, as far as I’m concerned none of it had happened until this man March came to see me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t go out in the daytime unless I have to. When I have to, I don’t speak to anyone and nobody speaks to me except in the way of business across a counter, so I don’t hear any of the scandals with which the Green enlivens the tedium of its days. I was not aware, for instance, that the police are more than half inclined to suspect that Connie Brooke was murdered, and that they are quite sure Roger Repton was. And that being that, I am only surprised they don’t add in that other girl too, Doris Pell, and make a job of it. They can then tack the three of them on the anonymous letters that have been going around and lay the lot at my door.”

Jason looked over his shoulder.

“Is that March’s line, or did you think it up for yourself?”

James Barton said, “I was one of the last people to see Roger alive. He wanted to know what about it.”

Jason pushed the Wonderful Magazine back into its place on the shelf and came back to the table. He was frowning.

“His wife was the last to see him—no, Mettie Eccles when she brought him his tea.”

“Fortunately for me. But I could still have put cyanide into the whisky.”

“Why should you?”

“Oh, just an urge to kill my best friend, I suppose.”

“March can’t really think—”

Barton blew out a cloud of smoke.

“Perhaps not. Or—perhaps. I don’t suppose he has made up his mind. And that being the case, what happens if I tell him something which might point the finger of suspicion at somebody else?”

Jason made a quick impatient movement.

“You mean Scilla—Scilla Repton. The finger is pretty firmly pointed in her direction already. He was going to divorce her, you know—or perhaps you don’t.”

Barton nodded.

“Yes, he told me. He was a fool to marry her. I could have told him so, but for that sort of folly nobody takes advice. It’s like any other kind of poison, you must get it out of your system yourself. But sometimes it kills you first, or kills everything in you that has any interest in living.”

Jason said quickly, “What do you know?”

Barton drew on his pipe.

“Oh, just something—something.”

“What?”

“Nothing to do with Roger.”

“With what? With whom?”

Barton blew out his smoke.

“Perhaps not with anyone at all.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“I don’t know—I’m thinking about it. I’d like you to do some talking first. Just tell me the whole thing right through as you know it—the letters, Doris Pell, that whey-faced Connie. Nothing to her one way or the other I always thought, but she gets herself mixed up in a murder! Now why did she want to do that?”

“I don’t suppose she did want to.”

James Barton nodded.

“Just a step in the dark and nothing there. Well, go on— let me have the whole thing so far as you know it.”

“I wasn’t here when Doris Pell was drowned, I’ve seen one of the letters and a nasty bit of work it was, and Tommy’s Mrs. Needham has kept me well up to date with what the village is saying. So here goes.”

He told the story as it had come to him, making a plain narrative out of the bits and pieces, and there emerged the basic fact of the anonymous letters. Doris Pell had drowned because of them. Connie Brooke had said she knew who wrote them, and she had died. Roger Repton had said he knew who wrote them, and he had died.

When Jason had finished, a silence fell between them. It went on for a long time. In the end of it James Barton spoke.

“This girl Connie—she came back across the Green on the Wednesday night, and Miss Eccles with her?”

“Yes.”

“And said good-night at Holly Cottage and went on by herself to the Croft?”

“Miss Eccles says so.”

“Meaning there’s no proof that she did?”

“No, there’s no proof.”

“So she could have gone on with her to the Croft, and gone in with her and seen to it that she had enough of those sleeping-tablets in her cocoa to make sure she’d not wake up again.”

Jason nodded.

“Yes, it could have happened that way.”

“And it was Miss Eccles who took Roger his tea and was the last, the very last, to see him alive, and the first to find him dead. And then she cries out and accuses his wife. Quite a case to be built up against Miss Mettie Eccles, isn’t there?”

Jason was watching him intently. He said,

“Quite a case. It’s between her and Scilla, I should say, with the odds on Mettie Eccles in Connie’s case, and on Scilla in Roger Repton’s. Which I suppose is why there hasn’t been an arrest. Logically, the whole thing ties up with the letters— Doris, and Connie, and Roger. And as far as Roger is concerned Scilla is heaven’s gift to the police. It’s Connie’s case which is the snag. How in the world did Scilla Repton contrive to spirit Miss Maggie’s sleeping-tablets into that bedtime cocoa? There doesn’t seem to be any way she could have done it. And that goes for everyone else except Miss Mettie, who knew about the tablets though she says she particularly warned Connie not to take more than one, and could quite easily have gone the whole way home with her and drugged her cocoa. The alternative theory is, I gather, that the cocoa was drugged whilst Connie was at the party at the Manor, and that the drugging was quite irrespective of Miss Maggie’s tablets. Which would be a bit of a coincidence, but not really anything to boggle at, because apparently everybody had been talking about Connie not sleeping, and that could have put the idea of how to silence her into the mind of the person who wrote the letters.”

James Barton said in a slow, considering manner,

“Would you say it was about fifty-fifty as between Mrs. Repton and Miss Eccles?”

“I don’t know. I suppose it would be. Just about, if it weren’t for the fact that I can’t for the life of me see how Scilla Repton could have drugged that cocoa. She was on show at the Manor from a quarter to eight when the dinner guests began to arrive until the party broke up. She couldn’t have gone across the Green to the Croft during that time, and if it was done before that, Connie would have been in the house and the cocoa wouldn’t have been made. Because, you see, Scilla would have had to dress, and I don’t suppose that would be just a case of off with one thing and on with another. Make-up takes time, and Scilla’s is quite an expert job, I should say. So if you were going to suggest that she nipped down one way whilst Connie and Miss Eccles were coming up by another, I can assure you that she wouldn’t have had the time.”

Barton said equably,

“I wasn’t going to suggest that. If you would stop talking, I was going to tell you something.”

Jason laughed.

“So you were! Or were you? I believe what you said was that you were thinking about it. Well, let’s have whatever it was.”

James Barton leaned forward across the line of the sleeping cats and knocked out his pipe against the open stove. Then he sat back again, cradling the briar in his hand. After a moment he said,

“I went for a walk. I do most nights. With the cats.”

“What time?”

“Some time getting on for eleven. I didn’t look at the clock. Abner wanted to go out, so then they all wanted to go. So we went round the Green.”

“Were the cars coming away from the Manor?”

“Nary car—nary anyone at all. All the way till we came by the Croft. And then there was someone.”

“Who?”