Dead Man's Quarry (38 page)

“Why not?” asked Felix in a muffled voice.

“For one thing the dead man was tattooed on the leg with Charles Price's initials. Marshall might, of course, have shot him in the leg or otherwise obliterated those tell-tale initials. But there were bound to be pretty close investigations. No doubt Charles had talked of his wrongs pretty freely during his journey. There would be awkward witnesses to a tale of imposture, and awkward questions asked. And Marshall's own credentials and his own tattoo-marks would not have born too close a scrutiny. Oh, yes, he also was tattooed with the initials of Charles Price. He did it himself, with Lion's red ink and a darning needle, that night you stopped at Highbury Down and he insisted on taking the single room. The tattoo-mark was a thing Clytie Price hadn't known about. He heard of it for the first time when you sat in that shed on the first day after he joined you at Worcester and exchanged reminiscences. He must have thanked his lucky stars at the time that you were led to mention it. Otherwise he might have joined your river-bathing parties and shown a tell-tale undecorated leg.” Isabel gave the faint shadow of a smile.

“He made an awful mess of it,” she said pensively. “It was horribly inflamed for a day or two. Clytie thought we'd have to call in a doctor, which would indeed have been awkward. But it got better.”

“I think,” went on John, “the murderer must have had a dreadful moment when he stood there with Charles's body at his feet, and realized that he had all to lose and nothing to gain; realized that Charles Price was dead for ever, and that Gavin Marshall must come to life again, as a hunted murderer. There was only one thing to be done. To make it as sure as possible that no question of identity should be raised. So he crouched under the hedge and dressed the dead man in his tweeds, and himself put on poor Charles's clothes. He felt in the pockets, I think, and found little there except a couple of apples stolen from the Tram Inn orchard, which he pitched over the quarry edge. There was no money. So he took about fifteen pounds from the wallet that had been his own a moment ago—enough for emergencies. He was a Canadian, and it did not perhaps occur to him at first that five-pound notes are dangerous things. He took two five-pound notes.”

Isabel nodded.

“Yes. And then afterwards he remembered some yarn he'd read in a magazine about tracing criminals through the numbers on notes. And he hid them in a field. We didn't know this until yesterday. And meanwhile Clytie had been in possession of the notes, all unknowing. She was furious,” said Isabel meditatively, “and they had the very devil of a row yesterday evening.”

“The other contents of the pockets,” went on John, “he left undisturbed. He even remembered to take off his blood-stone ring. But that defeated him. It wouldn't go on the dead man's finger.”

“I wonder,” said Rampson thoughtfully, “why he didn't leave the raincoat with the body.”

“I think,” said John, “that he feared that before he got clean away he might meet with somebody who knew him as Sir Charles Price. And the clothes he had changed into were dirty and disreputable and quite different from the tweed suit he had been wearing. He thought it best to stick to the raincoat for a while. So long as he wore it his appearance was hardly changed, and he could, if necessary, be Sir Charles Price. Well, having made sure that he had missed nothing, he pushed the dead Charles over the quarry edge and after him he pushed the bicycle he thought was his own, but which happened to be Letbe's. Lord, it must have been nerve-wracking to do all that in daylight! But, as the coroner remarked at the inquest, this is wild, thinly populated country. Nobody saw him. He picked up young Smiler's bicycle and the revolver and walked back towards the road. He must have been startled when Morris Price appeared on the scene. But then it appeared providential. Had not the murder been committed with Morris Price's initialled revolver? For Marshall, being one of those men who never feel safe unless they are carrying weapons, had borrowed the revolver out of the library to take on this peaceful cycling tour. His own, as I discovered to-night, was out of action. In a moment the scheme had formed itself in his mind of planting the murder on Morris Price. Motive, opportunity, publicity—all were ready-made for such a course. He slipped the superfluous ring unobserved among the cushions in Morris's car. He conveyed the impression to Morris that you had all gone through the quarry fields; he led him through; he walked with him as far as the quarry; he let him return alone.

“When he had seen him depart in his car, he buried the revolver in a fairly obvious place, disguised his appearance as much as he could, walked over on to the Wensley road and cycled off. I don't know what he did then. I fancy he hid on the Forest that night. I fancy he hid in this very hut, and left the incriminating raincoat here among the bracken. I imagine that young Smiler's bicycle is waiting here in some bracken patch to be discovered. It's a strange thought. Morris Price and he may have passed close to one another that night on the loneliness of the Forest. Suppose they had met.”

There was a silence. Nora, Rampson and John sat looking at the light of the oil-stove, white and feeble now in the strengthening daylight. Felix at the window gave a long sigh. Suddenly Isabel began to speak in a cold, unemotional voice:

“My father was a portrait-painter. He was very successful—for a time. When I was a schoolgirl he was making five thousand a year and spending seven thousand.”

Perceiving a faint surprise in her listeners' faces, she smiled a little and said:

“You're wondering what that's got to do with it. It hasn't anything. It's—perhaps—an attempt to excuse my part in this. But why excuse it?” She sat with her chin on her hands and looked sombrely at the ground. “One is—what one is.”

“No, Isabel, that's a counsel of despair!”

It was Nora who spoke and stretched out an uncertain hand. Isabel looked at her gravely from under her heavy lids and ignored her gesture.

“No, it's not that,” she said. “Despair . . . I've never known despair, but only discontent. He was a jolly soul, my father, and a fairish painter, and a marvellous spender. How he enjoyed, how he adored, his success! He thought it was going on for ever, I suppose, but of course it didn't. Great artists can go on for ever, perhaps, but not the clever ones exploiting an amusing trick. There are too many of them waiting in the wings. He lost his vogue and he lost his money. He put down the first to the machinations of fellow-painters and critics”—Isabel smiled a faint, ironic smile—”and the second to my mother's extravagance. As for me, he had brought me up to think myself a genius and to despise work. I wasn't much use to him. Do you know”—she paused and stared out through the doorway into the cold light of the morning—”still, at the bottom of my heart, there lives that childish me that nothing'll teach, that childish phantom of superior gifts and cleverness. Still, at the bottom of my heart, I despise the industrious journeymen of art, like you, Nora. Despise you, envy you, and—fear you. So ordinary, so slow, so—yes, even stupid you seem to me, but you take everything
I
ought to have. Success, money, everything you get in the end, with your maddening patience and your stupid good-temper. You get it, and you don't know what to do with it. And if you don't get it, you're just as good-tempered, just as placidly happy, being somebody's wife or teaching in a school. The itch for success, for recognition, for a proud place in the world—you don't know what it is! All the same,” said Isabel, with a sudden change to a lighter, cooler tone, “I like you, Nora. Well, that's all about me. I deserted the sinking ship—I was only helping it to go down faster, anyhow, and went with my cousin Clytie to America. America didn't want us particularly. I got one or two jobs fashion designing, rotten jobs, and I was a mannequin for a little while, and then I joined a touring company, which failed. And then another touring company, which chucked me out. And all the time we hadn't enough money.

“When I first met Gavin Marshall, Clytie was keeping a boarding-house in Montreal. I was staying there in the intervals of finding loathsome jobs and losing them again. Oh, it was beastly! Gavin had had rather the same sort of life as mine—he'd been an actor, and a tram-conductor, and a farmer. It was when he was farming that he fell in with Charles Price. They bought a bit of land between them, on borrowed money, and went into partnership trying to farm it. But Gavin couldn't stick to anything long, and I should think Charles was a pretty hopeless sort of person. And they came a cropper. And then Charles got pneumonia, and Gavin cleared out and left him.”

“Left him alone?”

“Yes. I didn't know that at the time. This is what I've heard during the last few days. Yes, we've been extremely frank with one another during the last week, Gavin and Clytie and I. Lord, I'm glad it's over! Gavin just told us at first that he knew Charles had been living under another name and was dead. But apparently he wasn't dead when Gavin scooted with their joint possessions, only nearly. Unfortunately for everybody he recovered. You know the rest. Oh, Lord!”

Isabel suddenly sprang to her feet and stretched her arms above her head with a laugh.

“Oh, Lord! If Clytie could hear me sitting here and telling you all this! Well, she'll know soon enough, I suppose.”

She yawned ostentatiously, dropped her arms and picking up her coat shook it carefully and began to put it on.

Nora said huskily:

“When you and—and he caught me up beyond Hereford, I was frightened of you as well as of him, Isabel. But you saved my life, didn't you?”

“Yes,” said Isabel pensively. “I suppose so. I can't help liking you, Nora. But it wasn't only because of that. I really do draw the line at murder. Besides! What good could it have done? When the game's up, it's no use making a fuss and doing unnecessary damage. And anybody but a fool could see that the game was up then. The game's up, now.”

Nora rose to her feet with cheeks that slowly paled again and a sudden foreboding in her eyes.

“Isabel,” she murmured, going hesitatingly closer to the other girl, “you won't—you don't intend—”

The two looked at one another. Isabel laughed then, and put out her hand with a maternal gesture as though to touch Nora's pale cheek, and dropped her hand and laughed again.

“No, child. Nothing would induce me to. I've told you—I don't know the meaning of the word despair. Besides”—she glanced at John—“I'm not as handy with poisons as my delightful Cousin Clytie. Oh, but I'm almost glad the game is up! It was never worth the candle! Clytie and Gavin! Whatever happens to me now, I'm free of them for ever. When I go to—whenever they put conspirators and accessories after the act of murder, I shall be free—free of everything except myself. And I shall never be free of that. But don't worry about me, Nora. Sometimes I hate, I hate, I hate my self. But most of the time, oh, how my self amuses me!”

“And now,” said Rampson, “do, John, let's go back to London. It's been a nice holiday, a peaceful, refreshing change of scene, but I seem to remember that I've got work to do.”

They were sitting in the pleasant dining-room of the Feathers in Penlow, looking out on the narrow High Street and smoking after-lunch cigarettes.

“I
did
want to get through to the Welsh coast,” said John regretfully, with an amused eye on his friend's anxious face. “I say, is this a specially comfortable and peaceful inn, Sydenham, or is it only the change from the electrical atmosphere at Rhyllan Hall? I'm beginning to recuperate nicely.”

“Oh, it's a very decent pub,” said Rampson firmly, “but we're not going to recuperate here. London's the place to recuperate in after a holiday. You know,” he went on pensively, “I'm awfully glad you were right over that affair, but you had no business to be. I still maintain that your methods were hopelessly unscientific. I wonder what'll happen to Isabel. Think she'll get off lightly?”

John sighed.

“Depends what you call lightly. She'll get a stretch, no doubt, though her counsel will probably manage to persuade the judge that she was under Clytie's thumb.”

“She ought to have informed the police at once,” said Rampson, shaking his head, “instead of making herself an accessory in that idiotic fashion.”

John stirred restlessly and sighed again.

“Of course she ought to,” he agreed. “And yet—to give a man away when he comes to you for shelter—a man you know—a fellow-conspirator—there's something horrible to the feelings in such behaviour, however much it may appeal to reason. One can only go back to the beginning and say she ought never to have got herself in such a position. She ought never to have touched the scheme at all. Which is only to say that there's something in her too good for such dingy, silly things. I can think of Clytie and the wretched Marshall with equanimity. But—I'm a sentimentalist, I suppose—the thought of Isabel hurts and depresses me. I hate to see a fine character stultified. She has brains. She has what's rarer, courage. Need she have made such a mess of things as this? We shall probably have to give evidence at the trial, you know, when it comes off. I hope she'll get off lightly, and do something sensible with the rest of her life. But don't let's talk of it now.”

“I suppose,” said Rampson, in contemplative after-luncheon mood, “Felix and Nora will make a match of it, eh?”

“Sure to,” said John, carefully dropping his cigarette-end in his coffee-dregs and watching it sizzle.

“Do you know—” began Rampson, and stopped, looking curiously at his friend.

“I don't. Enlighten me.”

“I thought for a moment—nothing.”

With deep interest John watched his cigarette-end swelling and beginning to disintegrate.