The Woman in the Wardrobe Page 9

  “Yes. I went to make a last appeal to him to go away and leave me in peace.”

  “Did he listen?”

  “No. He told me he would never let me go—never!” Her eyes narrowed at the recollection. “I hated him then as I had never hated even him before. I would have killed him then and there if I’d had anything to do it with! I would! I don’t care who knows it!”

  “But what did you do in fact?”

  “I ran out of the house and down to Ted’s house. I told him that Maxwell was here again, and bothering me!”

  “He didn’t know before that?”

  “No. I told him all that had happened on those last four days—how he’d made me bring him his meals and then, in his room…”

  “And then what happened?”

  Alice Burton stood rigid in the garden, her eyes closed and her fists clenched tight.

  “I was wild—excited like I’ve never been before! I wanted him to kill him—yes, to kill him then—that evening—in front of me! He told me to go back to the hotel.”

  “And then?”

  There was a pause. In the heat the insects were buzzing furiously; thin-stalked flowers were drooping; the continual flare of the sky was intolerable. Mr Verity turned his head and saw the white face of Miss Framer glaring down at them from a first floor window.

  “And then?” he repeated.

  But Miss Burton was calmer now, aware again of her position.

  “He told me not to be a fool,” she said carefully, “and sent me home.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he and Maxwell never met?”

  “No—not then.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  She caught sight of Miss Framer at the window, and shivered a little.

  “I must go in now…”

  “Did they ever meet?” Verity asked precisely.

  “Yes, but Ted never knew it at the time.”

  They started walking back to the house under the baleful glare of the Manageress, who did not budge.

  “I’m afraid I still don’t understand.”

  “Well, you see, Maxwell always used a false name when he went out at nights. He hired a taxi about three times, to drive him along the front.”

  “I know that. But Ted?”

  “Was the driver. He owns one of the two taxis here.”

  “I see. But they never knew each other?”

  “Oh, Maxwell knew who Ted was; I’m sure of that. That was probably the main reason why he liked going out. I think he enjoyed just sitting in the back of the car while Ted drove him around, not knowing who he was. That was like him.”

  “And you’re sure Ted didn’t know?”

  “Perfectly. Ted never knew who the man was—not till the Tuesday night, that is.”

  “Then you told him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I understand,” said Verity, moving aside to let her pass indoors. “He never knew until a few hours before the murder.”

  Chapter VIII

  She turned quickly, with a sudden realisation of what she had just said.

  “No! I didn’t mean that! Ted didn’t drive Maxwell that night—I swear he didn’t!”

  Inside the lounge Jackson was still sitting at the table. By his side stood a little clerical gentleman.

  “This is the vicar,” said Jackson. “It seems he has something to tell us.”

  “Yes,” said the little man, clasping his hands and bobbing like a lady’s maid. “I’m sorry I’ve been so long coming, but you see I’ve had a bit of a tussle with my conscience.”

  “Well, you can save it until Inspector Rambler gets here,” said Verity. “It’s far too hot to repeat things.”

  His blue eyes sparked malevolence at the vicar. Mr Verity’s detestation of the present-day Church was well known; and to her officers—“all of them on the losing side”—he showed nothing but contempt.

  The vicar bobbed again: though he really only dipped his head, it looked as if he were using his whole body. “My name is Robertson,” he said.

  “And this is Mr Verity,” said Jackson.

  “Oh!”

  The little man looked pleased to know him. The monotony of his smile immediately began to irritate the detective.

  “Have you had lunch?” he demanded.

  “Well, no, as a matter of fact, not.”

  “Then you’ll have it with us.” He turned to Alice, who had been waiting behind him. “Be so good as to lay four places in here, Miss Burton. The vicar is staying to lunch.” He turned back again to the Rev. Mr Robertson. “I trust three and sixpence is not beyond your means?”

  “No, indeed; but the fact is I have a perfectly adequate meal awaiting me at the vicarage.”

  “Good. You can give your cook the night off. I have been told that you can enjoy here the finest shrimps on this stretch of coast.”

  The good man looked unhappy.

  “Oh dear—I’m afraid I am allergic to shrimps.”

  “Pooh!” said Verity magnificently. “Allergy is merely one of modern man’s substitutes for individuality!”

  Fortunately at this moment Rambler came in from the garden.

  Over lunch Verity renewed his observations on the decline of ancient authority—but this time to a clerical listener. The Rev. Mr Robertson found himself being examined like a suspect.

  “You have a large number of worshippers within your parish?” the old man asked.

  “No, alas!” said the vicar, pronouncing the word to rhyme with ‘pass’, “my flock is a small one.”

  “Such, I presume, it always has been. But in the days of the Wars of the Roses it was at any rate more devout—and the parson more influential. How would you have liked to have lived then?”

  “You forget,” said the vicar, greatly daring, “that in those days I should have had to be a Roman Catholic.”

  “And that thought displeases you?”

  “But naturally.”

  “At any rate, people would have been aware of you—and you yourself would have been aware of them. In those days morals were as low (or high) as they are now: the only difference is that then people settled their important bills with you in the Vestry; now the only sort of payment they recognise as important is with Miss Framer in the vestibule. I really feel sorry for you.”

  “Sorry for me?” Mr Robertson smiled nervously.

  Rambler and Jackson continued to eat in dogged silence.

  “Certainly I feel sorry for you. In the old days you were expected to sally out of your pulpit: you weren’t imprisoned in it. It was part of your job to grasp the Beast by its horn and send it back to Babylon.”

  “Really, Mr Verity—”

  “Nowadays,” said the old man relentlessly, “we are all told that the Englishman’s home is his castle—and this is considered sufficient to guarantee for him a privacy that can profit him nothing. In the days when all respectable Englishmen really lived in castles, you never found anyone asserting anything so silly.”

  Mr Robertson drew himself up with passable dignity.

  “I can only assume you are a Catholic yourself,” he said.

  “You are quite wrong, my dear vicar,” said Mr Verity, swallowing the last of his shrimps. He lowered his voice. “Please don’t imagine I am blaming you for your faith, or for the collapse of it in others. They have had more temptations than you.”

  Mr Robertson looked inexpressibly shocked.

  “No—you misunderstand me. It’s not the Inner Light I’m concerned with for the moment, but the Outer Darkness. The Inner Light may help—but it’s not enough to deal with something like Maxwell.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “A moment ago I said that in the Middle Ages you would have been more aware of other people. They would have let you be more aware of them, if you see what I mean.”

  “No,” said the vicar. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Inspector Jackson permitted himself a grin.
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  “Well, you’d have been a fighter, parson—a man of God and a man of the people. You’d have fought their battles for them, not only with the Horned Beast, but with the ghosts that flickered about the gravestones and the witches that rode over the chimneys. You’d have been everywhere and known everybody: you’d have wielded the trident of dogma and the rod of chastisement with equal dexterity. And when they asked you, you would have swamped the whole village in holy water. Something like Maxwell wouldn’t have stood a chance. He’d have been stoned out of the parish—or else tied down whilst you made an attempt at exorcism.”

  “You still believe in the man’s unmitigated evil?” said Rambler. “I don’t understand it. You never even knew him.”

  “Thank God, I did not! I am a diabolist, parson: I once looked on the face of the devil. His face was black. Throughout a long life I have collected many statues, but never have I possessed the only statuary I fully understand: I mean the work of the great primitive civilisations that knew some of the truth about evil. The Greeks were foolish enough to confuse it with ignorance; the Romans even identified it with neglect of duty. But the Assyrians who took blunt instruments and hacked out those towering giants in stone—they knew evil. Their giants carry thongs: they grip savage beasts in their huge hands and glare as they tear them apart. The Phoenicians knew evil that put up Moloch, and fried their babies between his legs.”

  There was a pause. Alice brought the coffee.

  “Why do you always get like this at mealtimes?” asked Rambler heavily, as if he really wanted to know the answer. Verity lit a cigar, but otherwise kept an impressive silence. “Now, vicar,” his friend resumed, “you said you had something to tell us. I’m afraid that Mr Verity has not allowed you to say very much about it as yet. Could you please enlighten us now?”

  But Mr Robertson was too bewildered to speak at all for a minute, and it needed two cups of indifferent coffee to loosen his tongue and soften the provocation of Mr Verity’s muddled tirade. When it came, however, his story was short and clear.

  At about five-forty-five on the morning of the murder, he had been standing at the window of his bedroom overlooking the square at the end of the street. It had been a sweltering night, and he had been quite unable to sleep. As he stood there breathing the cooler air from outside, a car came rattling down the street and drew to a stop near the post office. It was very light by this time, so that the vicar had been able to recognise the two men who got out of it. One was Winnidge; the other a newcomer to ‘The Charter’ whom description had since revealed to have been Maxwell.

  “They were talking very loudly,” Mr Robertson continued eagerly, “but I’m afraid I couldn’t hear what they were saying!”

  “But not for want of trying hard, I daresay,” put in Verity.

  “They had evidently chosen this place as the scene for some sort of quarrel. I think they were about to come to blows.”

  “What do you mean, you think?”

  “Well, you see, at this moment my sister called me from her bedroom to ask what I was doing.”

  “You mean you left the window?”

  “Well, yes, I must confess I did.”

  “Go on.”

  “When I came back, Mr Winnidge was carrying Mr Maxwell over his shoulder.”

  “You’re sure it wasn’t the other way about?” asked Verity.

  “Quite sure. He put him beside him on the front seat, and then got in himself and drove off.”

  “Why didn’t you report this before, sir?” asked Jackson.

  “Well, you see, I had to go up to town yesterday. I only heard about the murder when I came back.”

  “And then?”

  “Well, then came this tussle with my conscience I was telling you about. I mean—well, really it didn’t seem right to—to give him away, did it?”

  “I don’t follow, sir.”

  “Well, after all, Mr Winnidge is one of my parishioners. He intends to settle here for good, so they say. Whereas this man Maxwell—”

  “Was the stranger in your midst?” suggested Rambler.

  “No, the devil in your midst,” cried Verity. “Good for you, parson! Good for you! You’re a fine fellow, do you hear?”

  “Yes,” said the little man bewilderedly. “I thought I was doing wrong.”

  “So you were,” said Verity. “You were making Inspector Jackson’s job a thousand times more difficult.”

  “Yes, so I realised. That’s one of the reasons why I came round here in the end.”

  “And you were committing a crime by withholding information.”

  “Oh dear, I suppose I was.”

  “And you still haven’t told us all we want to know,” said Rambler. “For instance: was Mr Maxwell dead, do you think?”

  “Oh, I really couldn’t say.”

  “Did you hear a shot?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Did your sister?”

  “No, she didn’t either. She told me to come round here from the first—but I wasn’t so sure. Matilda’s always right…”

  “You realise, sir,” said Jackson, “that you might have been instrumental in sending an innocent man to the gallows?”

  “Clichés, always clichés,” said Verity to himself. Out loud he commended the vicar again with a “Have a cigar, parson.”

  “Thank you, no. Not at midday.”

  Verity frowned and lit up another for himself.

  “But,” Rambler pursued doggedly, “he did seem hurt?”

  “Oh, yes, indeed. He looked unconscious to me, at the least. He may very well have been dead… Oh, dear—I do see how foolish I have been…”

  “Never mind that now. Can you remember anything else?”

  “Well, when he was put inside the car—by the driving seat—I recall that he fell forward against the front window.”

  “Did he, indeed?”

  “Yes, I recall that distinctly.”

  “Good!” said Verity, rising precipitately. “There’s no shooting without blood. Let us ring for a taxi.”

  Rambler rose too.

  “I shall go and telephone,” he said. “Thank you, vicar. You have been most helpful. I hope to see you later. As you are my host, Verity, you can take care of my meal.”

  Mr Verity paid reluctantly for his guest, and, on his own insistence, for Mr Robertson too. Then he showed the little man very courteously off the premises.

  “Now I’ve done my duty by the Church,” he said to Jackson, coming back into the lounge.

  “Yes, Mr Verity.”

  “Incidentally, I don’t think there’s any use in picking up Winnidge yet. How would it be if Mr Rambler and myself just slipped down and gave him a preliminary interview?”

  “As you please,” said Jackson cheerfully. “I’ve got all my work cut out going over this stuff again. What was the girl telling you out there this morning?”

  Verity told him.

  “It’s as I observed to you when first we met her, Jackson. She may easily have done it—for the best of noble reasons.”

  “Yes, sir.” He fiddled with his empty coffee cup. “Inspector Rambler’s set on this idea of an accomplice, isn’t he?”

  “Of course. Aren’t you?”

  “I suppose I am; it’s the only way out, isn’t it?”

  “Well, then, why the hesitation?”

  “It’s nothing, sir. I was just thinking.”

  “Yes?”

  Verity sat down again at the littered table. Jackson waited for Alice to clear off the dessert plates and the used tumblers before adding:

  “About the Manageress.”

  “Miss Framer?”

  “Yes. She’s a woman with a past, if ever I saw one.”

  “Every woman like that has what you call a Past. Something which long ago shrivelled up the woman in her. That livid face-powder is a perverse kind of mourning for a departed femininity.”

  Jackson stared.

  “I mean,” he said, “that she had the opportunity an
d she probably had the motive.”

  “Oh, never mind the motive if she had the opportunity! Motives keep popping up all over the place here. The whole trouble is that so many people wanted to kill Maxwell, and so few could have done.”

  “Well, she had the opportunity, didn’t she? She had the pass-key. That means that she could have killed Maxwell earlier on and then locked the door afterwards, and come downstairs again as if nothing had happened.”

  “You mean she knew all along that Maxwell was dead when Paxton came running down the stairs shouting ‘Murder’?”

  “Yes—why not?”

  “And she only pretended to lose the pass-key?”

  “Yes—so that she could plant it later under Cunningham’s chair!” Jackson was clearly pleased with himself.

  “It’s an interesting line to work on,” Verity agreed. “Of course you can’t account for the presence of Miss Burton in the wardrobe.”

  “No, not at the moment. I suppose it does come back to the accomplice theory in the end.”

  “I think it does. Of course she and Miss Burton could have worked together—but it’s an unlikely idea. There seems little point, either, in leaving her trussed up.”

  “No, there doesn’t seem much,” Jackson said moodily.

  “And further: even if there were no waitress trussed up inside the wardrobe, there’d still be certain difficulties in the way. The gun, for instance, bears the prints of every suspect in the hotel—but unfortunately not hers.”

  “There could be another gun, sir,” said Jackson, piqued at being so easily demolished.

  “There could be,” agreed the old man. “Search her room, if you like. But I doubt if you’ll find anything of value. Besides, when a .45 revolver—recently fired—is found next to a corpse—recently dead—it is not unreasonable to suppose that revolver to be the murder weapon.”

  “No, sir,” said Jackson, reddening.

  “And remember that I was there in the hall when the news was told her. She fainted.”

  “That could have been a fake.”

  “It wasn’t. She was evidently very shocked.”

  “None of that ‘triumph’ you saw on the other one?”

  “Good Lord, no! She was just frightened. Afterwards she was probably very relieved indeed—because she’s obviously involved somewhere.”