Silent Nights (22 page)

This journey had upset a painfully acquired serenity. She was really fatigued, the motion of the ship, the clatter of the train still made her senses swim.

“Thank you, Lucy, dear,” she said, in quite a humble way, then leaning her head in her hand and her elbow on the table, she began to weep.

Lucy regarded her quietly and drank another glass of wine.

“It is the house,” whimpered Mrs Crosland, “coming back to it—and those pearls—I never had a necklace like that—”

She thought of her friends, of her so-called successful life, and of how little she had really had.

She envied this young woman who had escaped in time.

“Perhaps you had an accomplice?” she asked cunningly.

“Oh, yes, I could have done nothing without that.”

Mrs Crosland was interested, slightly confused by the wine and the fatigue. Probably, she thought, Lucy meant that she was engaged to some young man who had not been approved by Martha. But what did either of them mean by the word “accomplice”?

“I suppose Charles Crosland helped me,” admitted his widow. “He married me and we went to Italy. I should never have had the courage to do that alone. And by the time he died, I had found out about music, and how I understood it and could make money out of it—” “Perhaps,” she thought to herself, “Lucy will not want, after all, to come with me to Italy—what a relief if she marries someone. I don't really care if she has found a ruffian, for I don't like her—no, nor the duty, the strain and drag of it.”

She was sure that it was the house making her feel like that. Because in this house she had done what she ought to have done so often. Such wretched meals, such miserable silences, such violences of speech. Such suppression of all one liked or wanted. Lucy said:

“I see that you must have suffered, Mrs Crosland. I don't feel I can be less formal than that—we are strangers. I will tell you in the morning what my plans are—”

“I hardly came from Italy in the Christmas season to hear your plans,” replied Mrs Crosland with a petulance of which she was ashamed. “I imagined you as quite dependent and needing my care.”

“I have told you that you are the greatest possible service to me,” Lucy assured her, at the same time taking up the pearls and hiding them in her bosom. “I wear mourning when I go abroad, but in the house I feel it to be a farce,” she added.

“I never wore black for my parents,” explained Mrs Crosland. “They died quite soon, one after the other; with nothing to torment, their existence became insupportable.”

Lucy sat with her profile towards the fire. She was thin, with slanting eyebrows and a hollow at the base of her throat.

“I wish you would have that dress altered to fit you,” remarked Mrs Crosland. “You could never travel in it, either, a grey satin—”

“Oh, no, I have some furs and a warm pelisse of a dark rose colour.”

“Then certainly you were never kept down as I was—”

“Perhaps I helped myself, afterwards—is not that the sensible thing to do?”

“You mean you bought these clothes since Martha's death? I don't see how you had the time or the money.” And Mrs Crosland made a mental note to consult the lawyers as to just how Lucy's affairs stood.

“Perhaps you have greater means than I thought,” she remarked. “I always thought Martha had very little.”

“I have not very much,” said Lucy. “But I shall know how to spend it. And how to make more.”

Mrs Crosland rose. The massive pieces of furniture seemed closing in on her, as if they challenged her very right to exist.

Indeed, in this house she had no existence, she was merely the wraith of the child, of the girl who had suffered so much in this place, in this house, in this Square with the church and the graveyard in the centre, and from which she had escaped only just in time. Lucy also got to her feet.

“It is surprising,” she sighed, “the amount of tedium there is in life. When I think of all the dull Christmases—”

“I also,” said Mrs Crosland, almost in terror. “It was always so much worse when other people seemed to be rejoicing.” She glanced round her with apprehension. “When I think of all the affectations of good will, of pleasure—”

“Don't think of it,” urged the younger woman. “Go upstairs, where I have put everything in readiness for you.”

“I dread the bedroom.”

The iron bell clanged in the empty kitchen below.

“The waits,” added Mrs Crosland. “I remember when we used to give them sixpence, nothing more. But I heard no singing.”

“There was no singing. I am afraid those people at the corner house have returned.”

Mrs Crosland remembered vaguely the crowd she had seen from the cab window, a blot of dark in the darkness. “You mean someone has been here before?” she asked. “What about?”

“There has been an accident, I think. Someone was hurt—”

“But what could that have to do with us?”

“Nothing, of course. But they said they might return—”

“Who is ‘they'?”

Mrs Crosland spoke confusedly and the bell rang again.

“Oh, do go, like a good child,” she added. She was rather glad of the distraction. She tried to think of the name of the people who had lived in the house on the opposite corner. Inglis—was not that it? And one of the family had been a nun, a very cheerful, smiling nun, or had she recalled it all wrongly?

She sat shivering over the fire, thinking of those past musty Christmas Days, when the beauty and magic of the season had seemed far away, as if behind a dense wall of small bricks. That had always been the worst of it, that somewhere, probably close at hand, people had really been enjoying themselves.

She heard Lucy talking with a man in the passage. The accomplice, perhaps? She was inclined to be jealous, hostile.

But the middle-aged and sober-looking person who followed Lucy into the parlour could not have any romantic complications.

He wore a pepper-and-salt-pattern suit and carried a bowler hat. He seemed quite sure of himself, yet not to expect any friendliness.

“I am sorry to disturb you again,” he said.

“I am sorry that you should,” agreed Mrs Crosland. “But on the other hand, my memories of this house are by no means pleasant.”

“Name of Teale, Henry Teale,” said the stranger.

“Pray be seated,” said Mrs Crosland.

The stranger, this Mr Teale, took the edge of the seat, as if very diffident. Mrs Crosland was soon fascinated by what he had to say.

He was a policeman in private clothes. Mrs Crosland meditated on the word “private”—“private life”, “private means”. He had come about the Inglis affair, at the corner house.

“Oh, yes, I recall that was the name, but we never knew anyone—who are they now—the Inglis family?”

“I've already told Miss Bayward here—it was an old lady, for several years just an old lady living with a companion—”

“And found dead, you told me, Mr Teale,” remarked Lucy.

“Murdered, is what the surgeon says and what was suspected from the first.”

“I forgot that you said that, Mr Teale. At her age it does not seem to matter very much—you said she was over eighty years of age, did you not?” asked Lucy, pouring the detective a glass of wine.

“Very old, nearly ninety years of age, I understand, Miss Bayward. But murder is murder.”

Mrs Crosland felt this affair to be an added weariness. Murder in Roscoe Square on Christmas Eve. She felt that she ought to apologize to Lucy. “I suppose that was what the crowd had gathered for,” she remarked.

“Yes, such news soon gets about, Ma'am. A nephew called to tea and found her—gone.”

Mr Teale went over, as if it were a duty, the circumstances of the crime. The house had been ransacked and suspicion had fallen on the companion, who had disappeared. Old Mrs Inglis had lived so much like a recluse that no one knew what she possessed. There had been a good deal of loose money in the house, the nephew, Mr Clinton, thought. A good deal of cash had been drawn every month from the Inglis bank account, and very little of it spent. The companion was a stranger to Islington. Veiled and modest, she had flitted about doing the meagre shopping for the old eccentric, only for the last few weeks.

The woman she had replaced had left in tears and temper some months ago. No one knew where this creature had come from—probably an orphanage; she must have been quite friendless and forlorn to have taken such a post.

“You told me all this,” protested Lucy.

“Yes, Miss, but I did say that I would have to see Mrs Crosland when she arrived—”

“Well, you are seeing her,” remarked that lady. “And I cannot help you at all. One is even disinterested. I lived, Mr Teale, so cloistered a life when I was here, that I knew nothing of what was going on—even in the Square.”

“So I heard from Miss Bayward here, but I thought you might have seen someone; I'm not speaking of the past, but of the present—”

“Seen someone here—on Christmas Eve—?”

Mr Teale sighed, as if, indeed, he had been expecting too much. “We've combed the neighbourhood, but can't find any trace of her—”

“Why should you? Of course, she has fled a long way off—”

“Difficult, with the railway stations and then the ports all watched.”

“You may search again through the cellars if you wish,” said Lucy. “I am sure that my aunt won't object—”

Mrs Crosland put no difficulties in the way of the detective, but she felt the whole situation was grotesque.

“I hope she escapes,” Mrs Crosland, increasingly tired and confused by the wine she had drunk without eating, spoke without her own volition. “Poor thing—shut up—caged—”

“It was a very brutal murder,” said Mr Teale indifferently.

“Was it? An over-draught of some sleeping potion, I suppose?”

“No, Ma'am, David and Goliath, the surgeon said. A rare kind of murder. A great round stone in a sling, as it might be a lady's scarf, and pretty easy to get in the dusk round the river ways.”

Mrs Crosland laughed. The picture of this miserable companion, at the end of a dismal day lurking round the dubious dockland streets to find a target for her skill with sling and stone, seemed absurd.

“I know what you are laughing at,” said Mr Teale without feeling. “But she found her target—it was the shining skull of Mrs Inglis, nodding in her chair—”

“One might understand the temptation,” agreed Mrs Crosland. “But I doubt the skill.”

“There is a lovely walled garden,” suggested the detective. “And, as I said, these little by-way streets. Anyway, there was her head smashed in, neatly; no suffering, you understand.”

“Oh, very great suffering, for such a thing to be possible,” broke out Mrs Crosland. “On the part of the murderess, I mean—”

“I think so, too,” said Lucy soberly.

“That is not for me to say,” remarked the detective. “I am to find her if I can. There is a fog and all the confusion of Christmas Eve parties, and waits, and late services at all the churches.”

Mrs Crosland impulsively drew back the curtains. Yes, there was the church, lit up, exactly as she recalled it, light streaming from the windows over the graveyard, altar tombs, and headstones, sliding into oblivion.

“Where would a woman like that go?” asked Lucy, glancing over Mrs Crosland's shoulder at the churchyard.

“That is what we have to find out,” said Mr Teale cautiously. “I'll be on my way again, ladies, just cautioning you against any stranger who might come here, on some pretext. One never knows.”

“What was David's stone? A polished pebble? I have forgotten.” Mrs Crosland dropped the curtains over the view of the church and the dull fog twilight of evening in the gas-lit Square.

“The surgeon says it must have been a heavy stone, well aimed, and such is missing. Mr Clinton, the nephew, her only visitor and not in her confidence, remarked on such a weapon, always on each of his visits on the old lady's table.”

“How is that possible?” asked Mrs Crosland.

Mr Teale said that the object was known as the Chinese apple. It was of white jade, dented like the fruit, with a leaf attached, all carved in one and beautifully polished. The old lady was very fond of it, and it was a most suitable weapon.

“But this dreadful companion,” said Mrs Crosland, now perversely revolted by the crime, “could not have had time to practise with this—suitable weapon—she had not been with Mrs Inglis long enough.”

“Ah,” smiled Mr Teale. “We don't know where she was before, Ma'am. She might have had a deal of practice in some lonely place—birds, Ma'am, and rabbits. Watching in the woods, like boys do.”

Mrs Crosland did not like this picture of a woman lurking in coverts with a sling. She bade the detective “Good evening” and Lucy showed him to the door.

In the moment that she was alone, Mrs Crosland poured herself another glass of wine. When Lucy returned, she spoke impulsively.

“Oh, Lucy, that is what results when people are driven too far—they kill and escape with the spoils, greedily. I do wish this had not happened. What sort of woman do you suppose this may have been? Harsh, of course, and elderly—”

“Mr Teale, when he came before, said she might be in almost any disguise.”

“Almost any disguise,” repeated Mrs Crosland, thinking of the many disguises she had herself worn until she had found herself in the lovely blue of Italy, still disguised, but pleasantly enough. She hoped that this mask was not now about to be torn from her; the old house was very oppressive, it had been foolish to return. A relief, of course, that Lucy seemed to have her own plans. But the house was what really mattered: the returning here and finding everything the same, and the memories of that dreadful childhood.

Lucy had suffered also, it seemed. Odd that she did not like Lucy, did not feel any sympathy with her or her schemes.