She Died a Lady (25 page)

Molly was sitting cross-legged on the bright Navajo rug in front of the fire. I sat on the opposite side, smoking the Tried Mixture in the best domestic tradition. And on a cushioned settee facing the blaze was H.M., the old maestro himself, who had come down from London for the weekend to tell us the truth.

And the shock of it was still lingering.

‘Tom!’ cried Molly. ‘Tom! Tom! Tom!’

‘Then,’ I said, ‘Dr Luke was right in his reconstruction after all? That’s exactly
how
the murders were committed. Only …’

H.M. had Dr Luke’s manuscript in his lap. He held it out and riffled the pages, in that fine painstaking handwriting, just as you have finished reading them in print.

‘Y’see,’ H.M. went on, putting down the manuscript on the settee, ‘it’s all here. The doctor himself says, in all innocence, that you can be too close to a man to see him. If that was true when he talked about Alec Wainright, it was a whole lot truer when he talked about his own son.

‘The interestin’ thing about this is how he writes about his son. Study it carefully. In his manuscript, Tom is all over the place. We hear what he said. We hear what he did. We can form a pretty good idea for ourselves of what his nature must have been. But it wasn’t the old doctor’s idea at all.

‘Dr Luke, y’see, never even thought of Tom as a character in the story. Tom was just there, a well-loved piece of household furniture, only mentioned at all because every detail has to go in. He never
watches
Tom. He never understands Tom, or even thinks it’s necessary to understand him.

‘In the first glimpse we get of Tom, he’s snappin’ shut his medicine-case and giving a violent lecture about fools who are indiscreet enough to get themselves talked about over a love-affair. In the last glimpse we get of him, he’s sitting “hollowed-eyed” under the dome of lights in the dining-room, emotionally exhausted and at the end of his string. And the old doctor attributes it to overwork, and chivvies him a bit about it.

‘He never once dreamed he was livin’ in the same house with a robust, strongly repressed man who’d fallen so violently for Rita Wainright that he went stark mad and killed both Rita and her boy-friend when he learned they were goin’ to run away. And, if you watch, you can see the whole thing move towards inevitable tragedy.’

H.M. tapped the manuscript.

‘But d’ye know,’ he added apologetically, ‘it’s awful easy to understand. I’ve got an idea, if you or I were going to write an account that included some member of our own family, we’d write in just exactly the same way that the old doctor did.’

Though the burning logs were exploding and snapping out sparks, nevertheless Molly shivered.

‘What on earth,’ she asked, ‘ever made you think of Tom?’

‘Oh, my wench! Couldn’t you see for yourself, as early as the Tuesday afternoon, that Tom Croxley was quite literally the only one in the whole blinking case who could possibly be guilty? That was the end and the final crownin’ point.’ H.M. blinked at me. ‘
You
saw it, son?’

‘No, I’m hanged if I did!’

‘But I mean,’ persisted Molly, ‘whatever made you think of him in the first place?’

‘Well, my wench,’ said H.M., and looked at her over his spectacles, ‘I think you did.’

‘I did?’

‘Uh-huh. On Monday, after Craft and Dr Luke and I had come from seein’ you and your old man, we were driving out on the main road. Craft asked me what I thought of you. I said I thought you were fine …’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘But that I generally distrusted these wenches who say they’ve got no interest in the opposite sex. It generally means they’ve got a whole lot of interest tucked away somewhere.’

‘Drat you!
Damn
you!’

Molly turned as red as certain sections of the Navajo rug. Despite the reputation for sneering which Dr Luke’s manuscript has given me – it worries me even yet – I did permit myself a modest grin. But Molly came over to sit in my lap nevertheless, and I kissed her in public: which, in Mrs Ferrars, is practically a sign of wantonness.

‘You cut out the canoodlin’!’ howled H.M., blasting back a gush of smoke from the fireplace ‘It was canoodlin’ that got that poor devil into all his trouble.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Molly. ‘Go on.’

‘Well’ I thought of the young feller who’d attended to my toe. Tom Croxley. There was somebody, on the other side of the fence, who before me and you too was always goin’ on about how he had no use for women. He professed to be a real Trappist monk, he did. Women were predatory. Women were this. Women were that. He was one of nature’s bachelors, and don’t you ruddy well forget it. I wondered if he mightn’t be protesting too much.

‘After all, he was Rita Wainright’s doctor.
Somebody
had to write that passport recommendation for her, if Dr Luke didn’t. Why, for instance, was Rita so infernally upset when she came chargin’ in on that twenty-second of May to see Dr Luke – claimin’ she wanted sleeping-tablets but really to wangle a passport recommendation? Why? He asked her himself why she didn’t go to Tom. And she hadn’t any adequate answer to it. Was it because, if she couldn’t face Luke with the request, she’d have to go to Tom? And if so …

‘Oh, my eye!

‘A little bit of the picture started to emerge. Y’see, I didn’t at all like one part of Dr Luke’s conversation with Alec Wainright on the very night of the two murders.

‘In Dr Luke’s office, Rita swore to him she’d never been unfaithful to her husband. She seemed almost too dewy and sweet about it. Dr Luke, in turn, told this to Alec Wainright. And Alec
laughed
. “But then,” Alec said, “I can see why she wouldn’t tell.” It meant nothing at all to the bewildered doctor. But to my nasty suspicious mind it meant a good deal. What about Tom and Rita as lovers?

‘Next, on Tuesday morning, we fell slap over the explanation to a point that had bothered me like blazes since the beginning.’

Here H.M. paused abruptly.

A vague and vacant expression came over his face, as though he were turning over something in his mind. He seemed to be mumbling to himself. With a muttered word which sounded like apology, he reached into his inside pocket and took out an envelope. On this he began to write with the stub of a pencil.

His voice now sounded hollow and ghostly, as though he were tasting the words.

‘Rothbury. Rowfant,’ he said. He cocked his head on one side, the better to study what he had written. ‘H’mf. Roxburgh? Royston? Rugeley? Palmer the poisoner lived at Rugeley. Uh-huh.’

We stared at him.

Molly was too polite to comment, and I was too startled. H.M. thoughtfully returned the envelope to his pocket, and sniffed.

‘The point that bothered me from the beginning,’ he argued, with a ferocious scowl, ‘was this. This murderer – whoever he was, and however he did it – has got a practically perfect crime. First, it’s five to one the bodies will be washed out to sea and never found. Second, even if they are found, the status quo won’t be much different if nobody ever comes across the gun that did it.

‘Then why, why,
WHY
did the silly dummy go and chuck down the .32 automatic in a public road? It gave me burnin’ pains in the brain. It just wasn’t sensible, however you looked at it. The only reasonable explanation seemed to be that he didn’t mean to chuck it down and couldn’t help chuckin’ it down: in other words, he lost it.

‘On Tuesday morning, Craft and I went to see Belle Sullivan at Dr Luke’s house, when the little gal had just spent her first night there. We wanted to ask her about photographs of Barry Sullivan. But, just incidentally and in passin’, we learned something that made my hair curl. Tom Croxley had a hole in the lining of his coat-pocket. The little gal wanted to mend it for him.’

Molly sat up so abruptly that, perched across my lap, she nearly burned her cheek against the bowl of my pipe.

‘It’s in the manuscript,’ said H.M. ‘The old boy chronicles it in innocence and faithfulness, when those two were talkin’ the night before.

‘But it made me gibber a little. Here was another bit of evidence fittin’ in about the poor, blind, crazy bloke who committed those murders and cried like a baby beside his victim’s motor-car. Next, only a little later, came the point that put the tin hat on it.

‘My whole case – my whole ruddy case – was based on the assumption that Rita and Barry were goin’ to do a bunk to America, taking Alec Wainright’s diamonds with them. It was made of diamonds. It was built for diamonds. Then we went up to the bedroom and opened that ivory jewel-box. And there were the blinking diamonds, as large as life and twice as shiny. For a second, I admit, it had the old man floored completely.’

‘I still don’t understand about those diamonds,’ said your correspondent. ‘They were what turned the scale at the inquest. People hereabouts still firmly believe it was a suicide-pact. If the diamonds were there …’

‘Oh, my son!’ said H.M. ‘Don’t you see that the diamonds were in the jewel-box because somebody returned ’em?’

Here he bent forward.

‘Looky here. What about Alec Wainright himself? Hasn’t
he
had anything to say about it?’

Molly looked at the floor. ‘Professor Wainright’s moved away from here. He never has said anything at all. Dr Luke was his only friend anyway. He – I think he got over the tragedy; but he can’t get over the war.’

‘On that thrice-celebrated Saturday night, just after Dr Luke discovered the footprints, Alec hurried upstairs to see whether Rita’s clothes and the diamonds were there. You got that?’ H.M.’s forehead wrinkled hideously. ‘He found the clothes, but he didn’t find the diamonds when he opened the box. So he came downstairs with the little key. Now follows the curious and very significant adventures of that key.

‘When Wainright collapsed, Dr Luke absent-mindedly stuck the key in his own pocket and walked away with it. When he remembered it next morning, you remember what he did. He gave it to …’

‘To Tom,’ supplied Molly. ‘Dr Luke told me so himself.’

‘To Tom, that’s right. And asked Tom to take it back to Alec. Which Tom did, because we found the key in Alec’s hand. And that’s not the most fetchin, and rummy part of the business either.

‘What was the situation at “Mon Repos”? Two nurses, a day nurse and a night nurse, were with Alec Wainright every second of the time beginnin’ late Saturday night. Tom Croxley didn’t take the key back until Sunday morning, when the nurses were on duty.

‘If somebody – the murderer – returned those diamonds to the box, it was done between Sunday morning and late Tuesday afternoon. Who could ’a’ done it? Here we come up against the very revealing if at first upsetting fact of the nurses’ testimony. The nurses say that
nobody
,
nobody at all
, has set foot in that sick-room day or night. Burn me, haven’t Craft and I had good reason to know it? They wouldn’t even let the police in.

‘But when the nurses say “nobody”, of course they wouldn’t include the doctor in attendance. For, as we know from Dr Luke, Tom Croxley had been goin’ out to see Alec twice a day. If nobody but the doctor had been there, it must have been the doctor who returned the diamonds.

‘Ain’t that fairly simple?

‘And nothing easier. What would be the only occasion when a nurse would dare leave her patient for any time at all, when he’s in a condition like that? It would be when the doctor ordered her to go out of the room for something, leavin’
him
on guard.

‘Tom Croxley knew Alec Wainright was broke, with very little between him and starvation. Why? Because Dr Luke told him all about it – see manuscript – after that conversation Dr Luke had with Alec on Saturday morning, when the party for the night was arranged.

‘Tom liked Alec. He also felt guilty as blazes. He wasn’t any leerin’ monster: he was a violent-tempered feller of thirty-five who’d gone completely scatty on the subject of Rita Wainright. He didn’t give a curse about money – Superintendent Craft can tell you that – any more than his father did. He certainly had no use for the five or six thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds he snaffled in the luggage of those two when he murdered ’em in the Pirates’ Den.

‘And it was no good chuckin’ ’em into the sea with the rest of the luggage, when the husband needed ’em. So he returns ’em. They weren’t taken away in those blue-velvet cases, unless I miss my guess: they were taken loose when Rita removed ’em. All Tom had to do was carry ’em back in his pocket, send the nurse out of the room, open the ivory box with the key that was there, and replace ’em in their separate cases. Finish.

‘But you can see now why I said Tom Croxley was the only one in the case who could ’a’ been guilty. Because he was the only one, by the evidence, who could have returned the diamonds. Any objection?’

We hadn’t.

Molly got up again and moved to the other side of the fireplace, where she sat down cross-legged. The fire was flaring higher, now, a streaming and crackling pillar which turned Molly’s face pink, so that she had to shield her eyes, and illuminated every corner of the old stone studio.

H.M. spoke vacantly.

‘St Ives, Saltash,’ he murmured. ‘Scarborough. Scunthorpe. Sedgemoor. Southend. Sutton Coldfield … the Ashford gal was drowned there …’

But here I had to protest at this gibberish, whatever it meant.

‘Listen, maestro,’ I began. He gave me no chance to continue.

‘You’ll now be able,’ he said, with an evil look which silenced both of us, ‘to fill in the details for yourselves. Rita’s mysterious boy-friend, who used to sneak out to the studio with her on Baker’s Bridge road, was Tom Croxley.

‘He was the feller that you’ – H.M. looked at Molly – ‘almost saw that afternoon in April, when Rita came tearin’ away from the studio in her car. How do you describe her after that incident?’ He picked up the manuscript and leafed through it. ‘Uh-huh. “She looked all tousled and mad, with a martyred expression as though she hadn’t been enjoying herself at all.”

‘And of course she hadn’t. Tom wasn’t any beauty – Belle Sullivan called him an ugly son of a so-and-so – but I expect he suited her well enough until the grand passion came along. Barry Sullivan.