The Woman in the Wardrobe Page 11

  He hesitated.

  “Last night,” he said finally. “I had to see if she was all right. So I walked up and threw pebbles at her window till she came down. We went into the garden.”

  “I see. Then you must realise what an uncomfortable situation she is in.”

  “Situation? I don’t know that I do. Her story’s alright to me.”

  “You’re naturally prejudiced,” Verity smiled. But Winnidge’s eyes blazed angrily.

  “You mean you don’t believe her?”

  “Shall I say that at the moment the facts don’t permit me to?”

  “Here—that’s enough of that! What Alice says is the living truth—no matter how funny it sounds!…”

  “I see she told it all to you last night.”

  “Yes, that’s right. She did.”

  “Or did you tell it all to her the night before?”

  There was a sudden pause. Winnidge had turned ghastly pale.

  “What?” The man’s voice was hoarse and his hands were trembling. “What are you trying to say?… You don’t believe my story?… Why don’t you ask that looney Tudor?… Well?…”

  “Your story has a more respectable witness than that,” said Verity, getting up and dusting himself carefully. “I have a minister of the Gospel to vouch for your act of violence in the square at Amnestie.”

  Winnidge gaped at him and sweat broke out on his face. Mr Verity walked past him, and then he stopped.

  “Don’t take me for a fool,” he said quietly. “Good afternoon. And I shall always be interested in any story of yours—even when it comes through the mouth of your fiancée.”

  Chapter IX

  All the way across the dusty road over the grass to the conifer tree, all the time he stirred Rambler with his foot and helped him to rise, Mr Verity felt the maddened stare of Winnidge resting on him.

  “Not guilty?” asked Rambler sleepily.

  “Not innocent, at any rate of desire. The capacity of this young couple for righteous hatred is really amazing—it compels my admiration. When he spoke about hitting Maxwell, there was a look on his face—like a crusader who had just skewered Saladin.”

  “Then he did hit Maxwell, as I suggested?”

  “Yes. Hence the bruise on the face and the blood in the hall. Hence, too, the vicar’s story.”

  Verity recounted the whole interview. When he had finished, Rambler nodded with pleasure.

  “Good. I see you incline to my alternative solution, which we were about to discuss just before arriving here.”

  “That the two were accomplices? Yes. Where logic leads we needs must follow.”

  “Substitute, as I said, Winnidge for Cunningham—”

  “Let’s substitute them in a tea-shop,” said Verity, dabbing at his forehead.

  They quickened their steps into Amnestie.

  ‘The Lantern’ was a tiny, stifling room, crowded with small circular tables on which the waitress had placed uniform cloths of yellow-check, salt and pepper in cellars, oil and vinegar in bottles, mustard in egg-cups, and shiny plates reading ‘The Thistle, Morecombe’.

  “Such parsimony defeats me,” declared Verity. “There is nothing more disenchanting than auction-bought china. What are you having?”

  They had the set tea. This cost two shillings, and was mainly little triangular sandwiches filled artfully with lettuce. Through the windows they could see the doors of ‘The Bellows’ firmly closed until evening.

  “Ridiculous!” snorted Verity. “No one needs to drink in the evening—except a mellow handful of old fisher-folk. Alcohol in the afternoon is the most infallible cure for things I know.”

  Rambler said nothing, but started rummaging in the cake-plate.

  “Besides, I want to go into that particular pub just as soon as it opens. Winnidge claims to have been in there when he first heard the news of the murder.”

  “He probably was,” said Rambler.

  “I want to know how he took it. Mellow handsful of fisher-folk make amazingly accurate observers of that sort of thing.”

  A selection from ‘The Chocolate Soldier’ came softly through the loud-speaker. The two detectives lit cigars and had soon almost vanished in the smoke. ‘The Lantern’ began to look, as well as feel, like a Turkish Bath, and the waitress choked as she cleared away.

  “You were substituting Winnidge for Cunningham,” prompted Verity.

  “So I was. You see, the first thing we do must be to find an accomplice for Alice. That is the only logical answer.”

  “Well?”

  “Let us take the evidence as we now have it. Alice did the locking-up, but, for reasons you gave me earlier on this afternoon, it is unlikely that she was acting on her own initiative.”

  “Exactly. No one could have been at once so clever about small details and so stupid about big ones.”

  “No one, you mean, acting on her own. But look at this thing as the work of an accomplice and it all becomes comprehensible.”

  “I think it does.”

  “Of course it does. It’s fairly obvious that some pre-arranged plan was carried out in Maxwell’s bedroom. It is also fairly obvious that the plan was bungled. As Dr Pelham pointed out to us last night at dinner, it is difficult to think of criminals bungling things quite as we do in ordinary life. Now why was this plan bungled? Why? I’ll tell you. Because it was not properly mastered.”

  “You mean that the plan was the invention of Winnidge?”

  “Exactly. Invented by Winnidge and carried out by his Alice. Now look at his story:—it can be right in every particular but one. That is, he could have shot Maxwell in that square, and not just socked him on the jaw.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting that Tudor met him in the hall? According to Winnidge Maxwell came round as they were talking.”

  “I said shot—not killed. He shot him again when he found that his first bullet had merely wounded him. He obviously had a silencer on his gun—that was why neither the vicar nor the vicar’s sister, nor Mr Swabber nor Mr Paxton heard the shot. Later he could have tossed it into the sea.”

  “That certainly fits in with Swabber’s story of hearing someone fall on to the floor next door, and then there being silence. Up to that time there had been moaning, remember.”

  “I do remember!” said Rambler, rubbing his hands with glee. “Shall I go on?”

  “But of course. One thing worries me, I must confess. A man you shoot in the back is apt to bleed rather profusely. We only found a small stain of blood at the foot of the stairs.”

  “It is not inevitable that he would bleed profusely,” said Rambler, reaching through the tobacco-smoke for another éclair. “However, we might be able to verify that with your Mr Tudor.”

  “That’s if he’s still on speaking terms with me. It must have been pretty dark in the vestibule all the same.”

  “True, but he may be able to tell us something of interest. Anyway, let me proceed. After killing him properly, Winnidge creeps up to Alice’s room and gives his instructions. Remember again that Mr Swabber gives fifteen minutes as the interval between the door closing and the car starting up; and Winnidge himself says he walked about before going home. What does he say he was doing?”

  “Thinking,” said Verity.

  “Well, he was, of course—and quickly. I suspect she must have told him about Cunningham’s gun—and that set him thinking. He knew the evidence against him was pretty strong, didn’t he?”

  “Did he?”

  “Well, apart from what Tudor had seen, he knew that Maxwell might have that letter of his, warning him to leave Alice alone. He obviously tried to find it that night—you may recall how our invaluable Swabber heard someone going noisily round the bedroom. I should say the mess we found there resulted at least in part from his frantic search.”

  “That sounds reasonable.”

  “You see, he wasn’t to know that others, actually in the hotel, were involved with Maxwell as deeply as he was.”

  “He must have gu
essed Cunningham was, when he heard about his arriving with a gun.”

  “Yes I think he must. And that started something in his mind.”

  “You mean he told Alice to steal Cunningham’s gun and put it beside the corpse?”

  “Exactly. She must have stolen it while he was sleeping. There wasn’t much time.”

  “Amazing!”

  “It took a certain amount of nerve, I agree.”

  “She has it,” said Verity shortly.

  “Oh yes, she has it. And she needed it to do what she had to do. You can be sure that the wardrobe was his idea. He told her to tie her ankles up inside it, probably showed her how to make a convincing knot. The object was simple enough: it wasn’t sufficient that Cunningham’s gun be found in the room by the dead man’s side. Oh no—it would be far better if Miss Burton were there to testify that Cunningham was on the scene in person.”

  “It was subtle not letting her identify him until she had heard him speak.”

  “Very subtle. It made it look far less like a deliberate attempt to incriminate him.”

  “How very amusing!” said Verity, beating Rambler by a finger’s length to the last jam-tart. “Miss Burton sits in a wardrobe by a dead man’s side preparing to testify that she saw a man kill him. All of a sudden that man walks through the door.”

  “No, first Paxton appeared. Then Cunningham.”

  “Sorry, I was forgetting Paxton. It was quite a busy morning in the Maxwell bedroom.”

  “It certainly was. She must have been terrified. That’s why, after her second visitor, she locked the door and the window. Panic always seems to overcome these women accomplices at the last moment. If only she’d left them alone!”

  “And kept her own prints off the gun!”

  “Yes, nothing can excuse that. It was just a piece of downright stupidity.”

  “I excuse it,” said Verity. “It is helping you to solve a murder.”

  “I don’t like give-aways,” said Rambler peevishly. “And that’s exactly what this is. The whole plan was bungled from start to finish. It was not a bad plan, as plans go: but unfortunately Winnidge had to rely on its being carried out by someone who didn’t quite understand what she was doing.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “Well, someone who couldn’t keep all the little details in her head at any rate. That’s why she remembered to put the key in the wardrobe beside her, for example, but yet made such dreadful bloomers with the pistol and the window. Fragments of the plan were done right—but most of it was hopelessly botched in the panic of the moment.”

  “The whole thing is pleasingly Greek,” said Verity after a pause. “We can only understand Plato’s conception of the material world if we view it as an imperfect copy of an ideal original; like Plato, we have glimpsed an ideal plan through the distortion of its bungled copy.”

  “But Plato,” said Rambler, getting up, “had the whole world to supply him with distorted evidence for the existence of his undistorted plan: we have only a small bedroom. It is a thousand pities that we have to guess so much.”

  The waitress, still choking from the cigar-smoke, presented the bill. They had consumed eleven cakes between them.

  At the door of ‘The Lantern’ they parted. ‘The Bellows’ had just opened and one or two of the town’s thirsty were already straggling towards its door. Detective Inspector Rambler went to slake with them, and find out what he could about the reactions of Ted Winnidge to the news of Maxwell’s death. Mr Verity, meanwhile, went slowly back to ‘The Charter’.

  He found Jackson sitting over a late tea by the pool in the garden. At the other end, nearest the hotel, some of the old ladies who peopled its upper storeys were grouped together on little canvas chairs, engaged in subdued speculation. Under the apple-tree Colonel Rainchart was snoozing fitfully, and among the thick flower-beds behind him his dashed little puppy was sneezing distressedly into the pollinic air.

  “Excellent!” said Verity, sitting down beside him and eyeing the Swiss Rolls. “I’ll join you!” The deck-chair bulged dangerously beneath him.

  “Had a good time?” asked Jackson.

  “Solved the case, nigh-on,” said Verity.

  Over his second tea the old man narrated the events of the afternoon in careful sequence, from the time when he had entered Winnidge’s garage to the recent parting from Rambler.

  “So he thinks it’s a partnership, does he?”

  “It’s what the evidence adds up to.”

  “I suppose it is,” said Jackson slowly. “I suppose it is.”

  He seemed a little stupefied by the sun, and was watching the silver fish which still within their water-circle wandered through reflected branches.

  “Has anything fresh occurred here?”

  “Nothing but a whole crowd of journalists from London asking for you. I gave them some of the story and let them take a few photos. It was the least I could do.”

  “Rabble!” The light of battle kindled again in the old man’s eye. “I wish I had been there! I really wish…”

  “And I interviewed Mr Paxton again.”

  “About the prints on the gun?”

  “Yes. I asked him to describe all his movements to me after he had climbed through that window. He confessed he’d picked up the weapon out of curiosity, without thinking what he was doing. Of course he dropped it again pretty quickly once it had sunk in. Or so he says.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  Jackson looked pleadingly at the old man.

  “It’s easiest to, isn’t it?”

  “Much. And there’s nothing really lazy-minded about it, either. Paxton’s fairly well down on my list of suspects. The person who did this had an accomplice. One must always keep fast to that.”

  “Yes. Paxton’s out as far as I can see.”

  “And now you must excuse me,” said Verity. “I’ll join you at ‘The Bellows’ in about half-an-hour. It is most urgent that I see Mr Tudor.”

  “Mr Tudor?” Jackson stared foolishly.

  “Yes. It sounds a dreadful prospect, I admit, but what can I do? After all, he may be able to tell us whether Maxwell had a bruise on his jaw or a bullet in his back in the small hours of Wednesday morning. It’s just possible he may have seen.”

  “Yes, but—but—”

  There was a look of alarm on the Inspector’s normally placid face, which Verity did not fail to catch.

  “Whatever’s the matter?” he demanded brusquely, pulling himself out of his deck-chair and standing upright. “It’s a perfectly routine business.”

  “Yes, but don’t you see, Mr Verity—he’s disappeared!”

  “He’s—what?”

  “There were several phone calls for him this afternoon, but no one could find him anywhere. Of course I didn’t give it much thought, but now—”

  “Now he has become a most important witness. Nay, a vital witness!”

  “I understand that, sir. I never imagined such a thing.”

  “No more did I. When was he last seen?”

  “Miss Framer says he wasn’t at lunch. Apparently we were the last to see him in here this morning.”

  “I saw him after that. We walked down to the post office and back. But where did he go after that? Damn it, he can’t have disappeared!”

  “Well, no one can find him—which amounts to the same thing,” said Jackson, rising too.

  “No, it doesn’t at all!” said Verity sharply. He was plainly discomposed. “There is always tragedy about people who disappear. People whom ‘no one can find’ are a very different matter altogether: they’re always quite safely developing photographs or playing the organ somewhere. Mr Tudor is just the kind of man to do both.”

  “Yes,” said Jackson doubtfully. “He’ll probably turn up for supper as if nothing has happened.”

  “Nothing will have happened!” shouted Verity with more insistence than conviction. “I tell you he’s tracing pedigrees somewhere as happily as can be!”

 
A blended murmur of curiosity and disquietude arose from the other end of the garden. Mr Verity moderated his tone.

  “He’d better be,” he said, and stumped off into the hotel.

  Once in the lounge he hesitated. The cool within afforded intense relief from the glare of the open, and he was tempted to sit in one of the green velvet armchairs and thumb through half a dozen ‘Spheres’ before supper. And yet, pleasant as it was there, the old man could not stay at ease. He felt puzzled and restless, and vaguely conscious that what he really needed was a long, hard think in a darkened room. He wandered out into the hall, then into the street: it was deserted and beautiful in the rich light of a gathered summer evening. He went back to the hotel, but the hall was empty: Miss Framer was nowhere to be seen. He had just settled himself in the lounge when Colonel Rainchart marched in from the garden, his little dog under his arm.

  “Excuse me,” said Verity, “but have you seen Mr Tudor?”

  The Colonel barked; so did the dog.

  “Mr Tudor!… Everyone wants Mr Tudor! As if I’d have seen him! Shouldn’t be surprised if they’d taken him away, that’s what! Not a bit surprised!”

  He passed stiffly out of sight. Mr Verity sighed and reached for a ‘Sphere’. There was the picture of a hapless sea-diver, a Mr Mayne-Allison, clambering up the side of a ship out of the Yellow Sea. Underneath, Mr Mayne-Allison was quoted as saying, “Believe me, the octopus is really the friend of man.”

  Outside the insects were buzzing tirelessly. Mr Verity yawned and put down the magazine: he was more oppressed than ever by the thought that somewhere, not too far away, lay a solution to this tangled business. Rambler’s theory was logically right; everything pointed to its being the only answer; and yet it was somehow too ingenious to fit the case. Alice and her Ted were simple people: they would murder in a simple way. Any crime of theirs—and they were perfectly capable of doing murder several times over—would be straightforward and passionate: neither would have the wit or the desire to coil so subtle a skein of deceit about the deed. Yet it was obvious that some sort of plan had been adopted… And, because they were both simple people, it was likely that some details of it had been written down—at any rate by her. There was just a chance that in Alice’s bedroom something… some small scrap…