Cover Her Face (29 page)

Suddenly Stephen was back with them and Felix spoke. “Hasn’t this gone on long enough? We’ve heard the evidence. That back door was open until Maxie locked it at twelve-thirty-three a.m. Some time before then someone got in and killed Sally. The police haven’t found out who and they aren’t likely to find out. It could have been anyone. I suggest that we none of us say anything more.” He looked round at them. The warning was unmistakable. Dalgliesh said mildly: “You are suggesting that a perfect stranger entered the house, made no attempt to steal, went unerringly to Miss Jupp’s room and strangled her while, with no attempt at raising the alarm, she lay back obligingly on the bed?”

“She could have invited him to come, whoever he was,” said Catherine.

Dalgliesh turned to her. “But she was expecting Proctor. We can’t imagine that she wanted to make a party of that little
transaction. And whom would she invite? We have checked on everyone who knew her.”

“For God’s sake stop discussing it,” cried Felix. “Can’t you see that’s what he wants you to do! There’s no proof!”

“Isn’t there?” said Dalgliesh softly. “I wonder.”

“We know who didn’t do it, anyway,” said Catherine. “It wasn’t Stephen or Derek Pullen because they’ve got alibis and it wasn’t Mr. Proctor because of his hand. Sally couldn’t have been killed by her uncle.”

“No,” said Dalgliesh. “Nor by Martha Bultitaft who didn’t know how the girl had died until Mr. Hearne told her. Nor by you, Miss Bowers, who knocked at her door and tried to speak to her after she was dead. Nor by Mrs. Riscoe, whose fingernails would inevitably have left scratches. No one can grow nails that length overnight and the murderer didn’t wear gloves. Nor by Mr. Hearne, whatever he might like me to think. Mr. Hearne didn’t know which room Sally slept in. He had to ask Mr. Maxie where he should carry the ladder.”

“Only a fool would have shown that he knew. I could have pretended.”

“Only you weren’t pretending,” said Stephen roughly. “You can keep your bloody patronage to yourself. You were the last person to want Sally dead. Once Sally was installed here Deborah might have married you. Believe me, you wouldn’t have got her on any other terms. She’ll never marry you now and you know it.”

Eleanor Maxie looked up and said quietly: “I went to her room to talk to her. It seemed that the marriage might not be so bad a thing if she were really fond of my son. I wanted to find out what she felt. I was tired and I should have waited till the morning. She was lying there on her bed and singing to herself. It would have been all right if she hadn’t done two
things. She laughed at me. And she told me, Stephen, that she was going to have your child. It was so very quick. One second she was alive and laughing. The next she was a dead thing in my hands.”

“Then it was you!” said Catherine in a whisper. “It was you.”

“Of course,” said Eleanor Maxie gently. “Think it out for yourself. Who else could it have been?”

The Maxies thought that going to prison must be rather like going to hospital, except that it was even more involuntary. Both were abnormal and rather frightening experiences to which the victim reacted with a clinical detachment and the onlookers with a determined cheerfulness which was intended to create confidence without giving the suspicion of callousness. Eleanor Maxie, accompanied by a calm and tactful woman police sergeant, went to enjoy the comfort of a last bath in her own house. She had insisted on this and, as with the final preparations for hospital, no one liked to point out that bathing was the first procedure inflicted on admission. Or was there, perhaps, a difference between prisoners in custody and those convicted? Felix might have known but no one cared to ask.

The police car driver waited in the background, watchful and unobtrusive as an ambulance attendant. There were the last instructions, the messages for friends, the telephone calls and the hurried packing. Mr. Hinks arrived from the vicarage, breathless and unsurprised, steeling himself to give advice and comfort but looking so desperately in need of them himself
that Felix took him firmly by the arm and walked with him back to the vicarage. From a window Deborah watched them talking together as they passed out of sight and wondered briefly what they were saying. As she was mounting the stairs to her mother Dalgliesh was telephoning from the hall. Their eyes met and held. For a second she thought he was going to speak, but his head bent again to the receiver and she passed on her way, recognizing suddenly and without surprise that, had things been different, here was the man to whom she would have instinctively turned for reassurance and advice.

Stephen, left alone, recognized his misery for what it was, an overmastering pain which had nothing in common with the dissatisfaction and ennui which he had previously thought of as unhappiness. He had taken two drinks but realized in time that drinking wasn’t helping. What he needed was someone to minister to his misery and assure him of its essential unfairness. He went in search of Catherine.

He found her kneeling before a small case in his mother’s room wrapping jars and bottles in tissue paper. When she looked up at him he saw that she had been crying. He was shocked and irritated. There was no room in the house for a lesser grief. Catherine had never mastered the art of crying appealingly. Perhaps that was one reason why she had learnt early to be stoical in grief as in other things. Stephen decided to ignore this intrusion on his own misery.

“Cathy,” he said. “Why on earth did she confess? Hearne was perfectly right. They would never have proved it if she’d only kept quiet.”

He had only called her Cathy once before and then, too, he had wanted something from her. Even in the moment of physical love it had struck her as an affectation. She looked up at him. “You don’t know her very well, do you? She was only
waiting for your father to die before she confessed. She didn’t want to leave him and she promised him that he wouldn’t be sent away. That was the only reason why she kept silent. She told Mr. Hinks about Sally when she walked back to the vicarage with him earlier tonight.”

“But she sat so calmly through all the disclosures!”

“I suppose she wanted to know just what happened. None of you told her anything. I think she worried most thinking that it was you who had visited Sally and locked the door.”

“I know. She tried to ask me. I thought she was asking me if I was the murderer. They’ll have to reduce the charge. It wasn’t premeditated after all. Why doesn’t Jephson hurry and come? We’ve telephoned for him.”

Catherine was sorting a few books she had taken from the bedside table, considering whether to pack them. Stephen went on: “They’ll send her to prison either way. Mother in prison! Cathy, I don’t think I can bear it!”

And Catherine, who had grown to like and respect Eleanor Maxie very much, was not sure that she could bear it either and lost her patience.

“You can’t bear it! I like that! You don’t have to bear it. She does. And it’s you that put her there, remember.”

Catherine, once started, found it hard to stop and her irritation found a more personal expression.

“And there’s another thing, Stephen. I don’t know what you feel about us … about me if you like. I don’t want to talk about this again so I’m just saying now that it’s all over. Oh, for heaven’s sake get your feet out of that tissue paper! I’m trying to pack.”

She was crying in earnest now like an animal or a child. The words were thickened so that he could only just hear them.

“I was in love with you, but not any more. I don’t know what you expect now, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all off.”

And Stephen, who had never for one moment intended that it should be on, looked down on the blotched face, the swollen protuberant eyes and felt, irrationally, a spasm of chagrin and regret.

One month after Eleanor Maxie had been found guilty on the lesser charge of manslaughter, Dalgliesh, on one of his rare off-duty days, drove through Chadfleet on his way back to London from the Essex estuary where he had laid up his 30-foot sailing-boat. It was not much out of his way, but he did not choose to analyse too precisely the motives which had prompted him to these three additional miles of winding, tree-shadowed roads.

He passed the Pullens’ cottage. There was a light in the front room and the plaster Alsatian dog stood darkly outlined against the curtains. And now came St. Mary’s Refuge. The house looked empty with only a lone pram at the front door steps to hint at the life inside. The village itself was deserted, somnolent in its tea-time five o’clock calm. As he was passing Wilson’s General Stores the front door blinds were being drawn and the last customer was leaving. It was Deborah Riscoe. There was a heavy-looking shopping-basket on her arm and he stopped the car instinctively. There was no time for indecision or awkwardness and he had taken the basket
from her and she had slid into the seat beside him before it had struck him to wonder at his boldness or her compliance. Stealing a quick glance at her calm uplifted profile, he saw that the look of strain had gone. She had lost none of her beauty but there was a serenity about her which reminded him of her mother.

As the car turned into the drive of Martingale he hesitated but she gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head and he drove on. The beeches were golden now but the twilight was draining them of colour. The first fallen leaves crackled into dust beneath the tyres. The house came into view as he had first seen it, but greyer now and slightly sinister in the fading light. In the hall Deborah slipped off her leather jacket and unwound her scarf.

“Thank you. I was glad of that. Stephen has the car in town this week and Wilson’s can only deliver on Wednesdays. I’m always running out of things I’ve forgotten. Would you like a drink, or tea or something?” She gave him a quick mocking smile. “You aren’t on duty now. Or are you?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not on duty now. Just indulging myself.” She did not ask for an explanation and he followed her into the drawing-room. It was dustier than he remembered, and somehow more bare but his trained eye saw that there was no real change, only the naked look of a room from which the small personal change of living has been tidied away.

As if she guessed what he was thinking, she said: “There’s only me here most of the time. Martha has left and I’ve replaced her by a couple of dailies from the new town. At least, they call themselves dailies but I can never be sure they’ll turn up. It adds spice to our relationship. Stephen is home most weekends, of course, and that helps. There will be plenty of time for a good clean-up before Mummy comes home. It’s
mostly paperwork at present, Daddy’s will and death duties and lawyers fussing.”

“Ought you to be here alone?” asked Dalgliesh.

“Oh, I don’t mind. One of the family has to stay. Sir Reynold did offer me one of his dogs but they’re a little too bite-happy for me. Besides, they aren’t trained to exorcise ghosts.”

Dalgliesh took the drink she handed him and asked after Catherine Bowers. She seemed the safest person to mention. He had little interest in Stephen Maxie and too much interest in Felix Hearne. To ask after the child was to evoke that golden-haired wraith whose shadow was already between them.

“I see Catherine sometimes. Jimmy is still at St. Mary’s for the present and Catherine comes down with his father quite often to take him out. She and James Ritchie will get married, I think.”

“That’s rather sudden, isn’t it?” She laughed.

“Oh, I don’t think Ritchie knows it yet. It will be rather a good thing really. She loves the child, really cares about him, and I think Ritchie will be lucky. I don’t think there’s anyone else to tell you about. Mummy’s very well really and not too unhappy. Felix Hearne is in Canada. My brother is at hospital most of the time and terribly busy. Everyone’s been very kind though, he says.”

“They would be,” thought Dalgliesh. His mother was serving her sentence and his sister was coping unaided with death duties, housework and the hostility or—and she would hate this worse—the sympathy of the village. But Stephen Maxie was back at hospital with everyone being very kind. Something of what he felt must have shown in his face for she said quickly: “I’m glad he’s busy. It was worse for him than for me.”

They sat together in silence for a little time. Despite their apparent easy companionship Dalgliesh was morbidly sensitive to every word. He longed to say something of comfort or reassurance but rejected each of the half-formulated sentences before they reached his lips. “I’m sorry I had to do it.” Only he wasn’t sorry and she was intelligent and honest enough to know it. He had never yet apologized for his job and wouldn’t insult her by pretending to now. “I know you must dislike me for what I had to do.” Mawkish, sentimental, insincere and with an arrogant presumption that she could feel about him one way or the other. They walked to the door in silence and she stood to watch him out of sight. As he turned his head and saw the lonely figure, outlined momentarily against the light from the hall, he knew with sudden and heart-lifting certainty that they would meet again. And when that happened the right words would be found.

P. D. James is the author of twenty-one books, most of which have been filmed for television. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Departments of Great Britain’s Home Office. She has served as a magistrate and as a governor of the BBC. The recipient of many prizes and honours, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991 and was inducted into the International Crime Writing Hall of Fame in 2008. She lives in London and Oxford.