A Letter of Mary (28 page)

"You look like a vulture sitting there, Holmes," I growled. Four hours' sleep makes me irritable. The last of the objects I had noticed galvanised a faint activity in my brain cells.

"What is your judgement on the writing?" I asked with eyes firmly closed.

"Your papyrus is definitely from a woman's hand."

"Good. Wake me at seven."

There was no answer, but a minute or so later, a horrible, cold, bristly male person insinuated itself into my cozy nest, stinking faintly of cheap gin and strongly of stale tobacco.

"My dear, sweet wife," it murmured into my tightly blanketed ear.

"No!"

"Russell, my dear."

"Absolutely not."

"Wife of my age, I am going to give you another opportunity to solve this case of yours."

"At this very moment?"

"This afternoon."

I pulled the bedclothes down a fraction and eyed him.

"How?"

"You will go to see Miss Sarah Chessman."

"The witness?" The blankets fell away. "But she's been questioned a number of times. She can't remember a thing."

"She couldn't remember for the police, no." His voice was curiously, ominously gentle. "Perhaps she needs to be asked by someone who knows how best to release answers that lie buried deep in the mind."

I knew instantly what he was talking about, and a cold finger trickled up my spine.

"Oh no, Holmes," I whispered. "Really, no. I couldn't. Don't ask that of me. Please."

"I am not asking anything of you, Russell." His voice was steady and soft, and he knew precisely what he was doing. "I simply thought that if it helped her remember what happened that night, you might think it worthwhile. It is your decision."

"You— Holmes, you utter bastard. Goddamn it, why don't you do it? All you do is play dress-up and prune roses and root around nice tidy automobile salvage yards while I vamp that man and dodge his son's slimy hands, all for nothing, and then you tell me to go mucking around in someone else's nightmare and— oh God." I sat back against the head of the bed and took a deep breath. "Sorry. I am sorry, Holmes. You're right. You're always right, damn you." I turned to him, and lay listening to the steady rhythm of his heart and lungs. "We're down to very little else, aren't we?"

"I honestly do not know. I ought to have kept the evidence I gave Lestrade and worked on it myself. I am seized by the idea that they will make some terrible missteps. Police laboratories can be either as inexorable as doomsday or as flighty as a cage of butterflies, and one never knows. We can wait and see what they produce with those bits of chromium and enamel. Juries do so like motives, though. I cannot escape that thought. But you are right, Russell, there is no reason to rush into the interview with Miss Chessman. No reason at all. And even if the laboratory finds nothing concrete enough to convict on, there is still a choice. Always we have the choice of turning back. The woman is already dead, and I cannot see anyone else being killed if her murderer isn't caught."

I raised up and looked at him, and I saw myself reflected in his grey eyes.

"I can't believe I heard that," I said. "You must believe me fragile indeed to have even thought of it. Of course we go on. We have no choice. The choice was made weeks ago, when we invited her to Sussex. That doesn't mean I have to like it, though."

"No, it does not mean that. You'll think about seeing Miss Chessman?"

"I'll go this evening, when she gets home from work."

He said nothing, just warmed me until it was time for me to leave for work. Why I was returning to the Edwards house, I was not certain, as it was fairly obvious now that the trail led elsewhere. Partly, it was that I had said I would be there, and explanations on the telephone might prove difficult. There was also the fact that I did not wish to waste the work I had done in Oxford the day before, and I felt some responsibility to the book. Mostly, though, it gave me something to do to take my mind off of the cold pit in my stomach. I dreaded my own past and the pain that could well be dredged up while helping Miss Chessman recover her memories of Dorothy Ruskin's death. Coping with Edwards and son would keep the cold sweats at bay.

I determinedly kept the colonel to the book all morning, and by the time Alex rang for lunch, I had given him the outline, two sample chapters, and the name of an editor whom a friend in my college had recommended for the purpose. Over lunch, I told the colonel that I was being called back home and would have to leave London by the end of the week, most terribly sorry. I was glad that young Gerald was not around.

"Mary, look, is it because—"

"No, Colonel, it is not because of anything you have or have not done. Or your son, for that matter. I have enjoyed working here, and I hoped more would come of it. In fact, I think we could have become friends." A statement, I realised, that gave a half truth, an emphatic truth, and, to my own surprise, a further truth. "I did not realise that my prior commitments would return to claim me quite so soon, and I'm sorry about it all."

"No apologies necessary, Mary. You are a most mysterious lady, though. I wish I had come to know you better. Would that be possible, do you think?"

"Colonel, I doubt that you'd like what you learnt. But, yes, perhaps I shall reappear, mysteriously, if you like. Now, I wanted to talk to you about that fifth chapter. I really do think you should consider a few pages on family structure and the subtler powers of the woman in Egyptian society...."

TWENTY-ONE

phi

At 5:20, my week's pay in my handbag, I stood outside the building where Miss Sarah Chessman lived. Seven minutes later, I saw a woman matching her description alight from a crowded omnibus and clack purposefully down the street towards me, a small woman with glossy shingled hair, wearing clothes that had been carefully tailored for a woman who weighed a few pounds more than she did just now. The deliberate set to her jaw and shoulders made me wonder how long she could stretch her reserves, and as she drew near, I could see the pallor of her skin and the tautness next to her eyes and the slightly haunted look I had often, in the past, seen in my own mirror. She took out her key, and as she moved past me to the door, I held out a meaningless but official-looking card which Lestrade had prepared for me.

"Miss Chessman?" I asked politely.

She jumped as if I had screamed at her, and when she looked up from the card, she had on her face a look of pure loathing.

"Oh, bloody hell, not again!"

She jammed her key into the lock, slammed the door violently open, and stalked into the building.

"Miss Chessman?" I called after her.

"Come in, for Christ's sake. Let's get it over with. But it's the last time, do you hear? Absolutely the last time."

I followed her up to her tiny flat and closed the door behind me. The room was painfully neat, and the way in which she went automatically to the wardrobe to brush her coat and hang it up and to place her hat on the shelf told me that it was not a temporary tidiness, but a permanent state. Like its occupant, the room was glossy, smooth, and designed to allow no one entrance without permission. Both room and woman were very different from the teary, newly affianced flosshead I had expected to find. This was going to prove even more difficult than I had anticipated.

She was, however, nervous and could not quite hide the fact. She went to a cupboard and poured herself a drink, straight gin, without offering me anything. She took a large swallow, went to a table near one of the two windows, took a cigarette from a japanned tin box, and made a great show of inserting it into a holder and lighting it. She stood and puffed and drank and looked down at the passing cars, and I waited motionless, hands in pockets, for her to gain control of herself. Finally, she stubbed the cigarette out in a spotless ashtray and went back to the drinks cupboard. She spoke over her shoulder.

"I've already told you people everything I can remember. Three nights last week and once on the weekend, one bloody set of police after another. You'd think I'd run her down, the way the questions come."

"I'm not from the police, Miss Chessman." The mildness of my reply turned her around, and she ran her eyes over me as I stood there patiently. "The card was given me so you would know I was here with their permission."

"Then who are you? The newspapers?"

"No." I had to smile at the thought.

"Who, then?"

"A friend."

"No friend of mine. Oh, you mean a friend of hers, that woman?"

"Of that woman, yes."

I thought for a minute she would tell me to go, but abruptly she threw up one hand in a lost little gesture, and seemed even smaller.

"Oh, all right. Sit down. Can I give you something?"

"A small glass of the gin would be nice." I did not intend to drink it, but it established the community of the table. She brought it and her own refilled glass and sat opposite me. I thanked her.

"Really," she said, subdued, "I cannot help you. I've told everyone everything I can remember. You're wasting your time."

"She was my friend," I said simply. "You were the last person, aside from her murderers, to see her alive. Do you mind awfully, going through it again? I know it must be very painful for you, and I'll understand if you can't bring yourself to do it."

Her face softened, and I caught a glimpse of the person her friends saw, when her formidable defenses were down. She would have few friends, I thought, but they would be lifelong.

"Do you know, you're the first person who has said that to me? Every other one acted like I had all the feelings of a phonograph record."

"Yes, I know. I should hate having to be a policeman, having to grow all hard and impersonal to keep from being eaten up by it all. I'm sorry they were so awful to you."

"Oh, well, it wasn't that bad, I guess. The worst of it was the way they wanted every last detail, where was I standing, and where was the beggar sitting, and did the screeching sound come after she fell or as she was falling, and all the time all I could think of was the sound of—" She stood up and went for another cigarette, then pulled the harshness back up around her voice. "It's stupid, really, but I keep thinking of the time when I was nine and I saw my dog get crushed under a cart. Try telling a Scotland Yard chief inspector that." She laughed, and I knew that she would not help me, not in the way I needed her to help me, unless I could shatter that smooth surface. It would cost me a great deal to buy her cooperation, and there was no guarantee that the results would be worth the expense. I studied her glossy, smooth hair and well-cut clothes, and felt too tall and unkempt and poorly clothed, and I knew again that I had no choice. I exhaled slowly.

"May I tell you something?" My soft question brought her attention around to my face, and what she saw there brought her, wary, back to the chairs. I told her then the story I had given to only two other people in my life. It was a simple story, a terrible story, of an automobile that strayed from its side of the road and what happened when it met another automobile at the top of a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and what happened to the only survivor, the child who had been the cause of it: me.

It was a cruel thing to do, telling her that tale with the hideous, ever-fresh guilt lying naked in my face and voice. My coin was pain, my own pain, and with it I bought her. By the time I finished, she was, unwillingly, in my debt, and I knew that the drained starkness in her face was a reflection of my own.

"Why are you telling me this?" It was almost a whisper. "What do you want from me?"

I answered her indirectly but honestly.

"You have to remember that I was only fourteen. For several weeks, I ranged from states of near catatonia to violent fits of self-destruction. And amnesia. I could not remember the accident at all, not while I was awake, until a very good and amazingly sensitive psychiatrist took me on. Yes, you begin to see the point of it now. With her help, I learnt to get it under control, at least to the point that I could take it out and look at it. The nightmares took longer, but then I ... didn't have her help for more than a couple of months."

"Do you still have nightmares?" This was more than idle curiosity asking.

"Not of the accident, not anymore."

"How did you get rid of them?"

"Time. And, I told someone who cared. That took a long time."

"To tell?"

"To work up to the telling."

I waited while she fussed with another cigarette. Her short hair fell perfectly from the razor-sharp line down the centre of her scalp.

"What did she do to make you remember? The psychiatrist?"

"A number of different things, many of which would be inappropriate here. Are you by any chance expecting your fiancé this evening?"

My question confused her, but she answered willingly.

"Yes. He said he'd be here at six-thirty." It was five past.

"After he gets here, with your permission and his, I'd like to think about something, a little experiment. Have you ever been hypnotised?"

Her eyes grew slightly wary.

"Hypnotised? Like with a swinging watch, 'you are getting sleepy,' and that? I was at a party once where someone was doing it, making people walk through the fountain and such, but they were all pretty tipsy to begin with."

"What I'm talking about is quite different, and that's why I'd like your friend here before we make any decisions. I don't want to hypnotise you, and I certainly don't want to make you jump into a fountain or bark like a dog. What I should like to do, with your full cooperation, is to help you hypnotise yourself, so you can root around for any minor details you may have forgotten about that night. You know, sometimes the mind works a bit like those straw Chinese finger tubes, where the harder you pull against them, the more difficult it is to get loose. Having the police hammering away at you has only made the mind put up a wall to protect itself, and the idea of hypnotism is to allow you to relax and see through some peepholes in the wall." This was an entirely inadequate explanation, but its homeliness would satisfy and reassure. "You would be in charge, not I, though I'd like to have Mr O'Rourke here so that you feel perfectly safe about it."