Design for Murder (23 page)

Ralph, about to pour himself some more brandy, stopped
with the bottle in his hand and looked at me.

“Surely,” he said, “nobody suspected Ursula of sending an anonymous letter?”

“Well, yes. As she couldn’t
produce her copy of the maga
zine, she had to be regarded as a suspect. And there were sev
eral other things too.”

“Such as what, for heaven’s sake?” He put down the
brandy bottle again without pouring any.

“For a start, Ursula knew very well—because I had told
her so myself—how vital the matter of timing was to me. You see, I wasn’t able to bring any proof that I hadn’t reached the
Coach House until after twelve-fifteen that day. And if we
suppose that the sender of the letter was also Oliver’s mur
derer...”

“A big assumption!”

“Is it? The only reason for that letter must have been to divert suspicion from the real killer.”

“And was it seriously believed possible that Ursula Kemp had killed Oliver?”

“It was I
who thought she must have done, but Neil was inclined to dismiss the idea. He was very interested in Ursula,
though, because he thought she might well know something
which would throw light on Oliver’s death.” I sighed. It was all so terribly involved, and much of it was irrelevant now,
anyway. “You see, Ralph, it very much looked as if Oliver
had been blackmailing someone.”

He made a startled exclamation. Then he demanded ur
gently, “How on earth did they work out such a ridiculous theory?”

“It’s not so ridiculous. You see, Oliver used to pay large
sums of cash into his personal account at the bank every now
and then ...”

“The bloody fool.”

I stared. “What do you mean?”

Ralph stood up abruptly and strode across the room. “I just meant, what a fool to imagine that he could get away with
blackmail. He’d be certain to be found out in the end,
or...”

“Or get himself murdered,” I whispered.

“Well, yes
...
that’s obviously what happened.” Ralph turned round to face me. “So it was Baxter?”

“Was it?” I said slowly. All of a sudden I had been shaken
with an extraordinary conviction that Neil and I were on the wrong track. I felt excitement, triumph ... and at the same
time a crawling sense of fear.

“Well, it
must
have been Baxter. Who else?” Ralph gave an
uneasy laugh. “Why are you looking so petrified, Tracy?
You’re perfectly safe. Even if Baxter spots your car outside, he won’t try to follow you in here.”

I clenched my fists, desperately trying to keep calm, desper
ately trying to grasp a coherent line of reasoning without giv
ing Ralph any clue as to how my brain was working.

Was this just an emotional reaction, I debated frantically,
because, despite all the damning evidence stacked up against
Tim, I still couldn’t bear to acknowledge that he was guilty?
This sudden, dizzying suspicion about Ralph ... what, in
truth, was it based on? Nothing more than his rather curious reaction to the suggestion that Oliver had been blackmailing someone. As though this were something that Ralph already
knew about.

How, though, could I ever hope to convince Neil that it wasn’t just another of my hare-brained theories? Keep talking, that was all I could do now. Keep on talking to Ralph and
hope that something decisive would emerge.

So, clutching at words feverishly and stringing them to
gether, I began, “Of course it doesn’t
have
to have been Tim.
I mean, it’s conceivable that it could have been Ursula, after
all. If Oliver had known something about her, about her past
...
and was blackmailing her. And, in sheer desperation,
Ursula killed him.”

Ralph cut across me, “But if they think that Ursula might have killed Oliver, then who do they imagine killed
her?”

A sense of elation thrust through my fear. Wasn’t this just
what I’d wanted, a fatal slip on Ralph’s part? Neil had been
most insistent that Ursula’s death must continue to be thought
of as an accident. I had said nothing to anyone. And neither,
obviously, had the police.

I drank down the rest of my brandy, and stood up.

“Sorry to have panicked on you like that, Ralph. It was
silly of me. But I feel a lot better now, so I’ll be going.”

“Going where, Tracy?”

“Home, of course.”

“I thought you were terrified of Baxter,” he said.

“Well, he’s obviously not followed me, has he? Besides, the police are sure to have picked him up by now.”

Ralph made a negative face. “I can’t let you take the risk. No, you’ll be better off staying the night here with us.” He glanced at the French clock on the mantel. “Grace won’t be
back for an hour or more, but...”

“I can’t stay the night,” I protested. “I mean, I haven’t got any things with me. Besides,” I hurried on to forestall his
dismissal of this objection, “my supper is in the oven and it’ll be burnt to a cinder if I leave it.”

Ralph tapped his thumbnail against his teeth as he thought that over.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll come to your cottage with
you now, and you can turn off the oven and get some night things at the same time. Then we’ll return here.”

“No honestly, there’s no need ...”

He interrupted me, “I’ll be much happier having you stay here. And I’m sure that Grace will be, too. She’d never for
give me if I let you out of my care, and something happened.”

“Nothing
will
happen,” I insisted.

“I insist. Now let’s go.”

Outside, the village street was deserted. It was a serenely
beautiful night, the thin crescent of moon floating in a cloud
less sky directly above the church tower.

I drove the short distance to Honeysuckle Cottage and
drew up outside.

“I won’t be a minute,” I said, jumping out.

My plan was to phone Neil the instant I was inside. But to
my dismay Ralph got out of the car, too, and followed me up
the garden path. I didn’t even have the chance to slam the
front door in his face because his arm came over my shoulder, holding it open until he was inside too.

“I thought you said you’d left your supper in the oven,” he
commented, sniffing the air.

Useless to pretend. With a forced little laugh, I said, “Well
I only told you that as an excuse, Ralph, because I didn’t
want to put you and Grace to the trouble of having me stay
the night.”

“Silly girl.”

“I
...
I’ll just pop upstairs and collect a few things.”

He shook his head. “Don’t trouble, Tracy. D’you know, my dear, I’m thanking my lucky stars that you bumped into me this evening. Up until you spilled it all out just now, I had no idea that things were moving so fast. And so dangerously.”

I made a last attempt to bluff it out. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, Ralph.”

“Oh, yes you have. You don’t know all the details, perhaps,
but enough to stop me getting away with it.”

I gave up, feeling almost a sense of relief. “So you’re admit
ting that it was you who killed Oliver?”

“There’s not much point in trying to deny it now, is there?”

“And Ursula, too?”

He grimaced. “I slipped up there, didn’t I, letting out that I knew her death wasn’t accidental. You have rather a trans
parent face, Tracy ... fortunately.”

“But why?” I whispered in a strangled voice. “Why did you kill them, Ralph?”

“You answered that question yourself, my dear, you and
your astute young police inspector. Oliver was blackmailing me, and he did it once too often. That morning in the studio, he was demanding even more from me. And fast. It was the
final straw, and I completely lost my head. The thing was
done almost before I realised. When I heard your car drive into the courtyard, I wiped my fingerprints off the statuette
and ran down the staircase.”

“And what about Ursula?”

“I had to kill her, too, I had no option. Stupidly, I’d let her
guess that I was the one who’d killed Oliver, and she was get
ting squeamish. I dared not take the risk that she’d give me
away.”

I stared at Ralph, sheer bewilderment to some extent overriding my fear of him.

“However did you come to let Ursula Kemp guess that
you’d killed Oliver? How did she get involved in the situation?”

Ralph’s face tightened. “There’s a very simple answer to
that question. Kemp was an assumed name. Her real name
was Ursula Ebborn.”

“Ebborn?”

“Yes. She was my wife.”

In my astonishment I took a backward step and stumbled against the bottom stair.

“You and Ursula ... were once married?”

“We still were,” he said grimly. “Ursula was my legal wife.
I bitterly regret it now, but my marriage to Grace was
bigamous. Ursula had left me and gone abroad, and I never
expected to see or hear from her again. So it seemed pointless
to cause a lot of upset for poor Grace. As you know, she’s inclined to be a bit strait-laced.”

“And Oliver had somehow discovered this? That’s the
reason he was blackmailing you?”

“Not right at the start,” said Ralph. “He only found out
about Ursula quite recently. She let it slip out, apparently. It
was that extra hold on me that made Oliver greedier than
ever. He really put the screws on hard, and he got what he de
served.”

“But
...
but I don’t understand ...”

Ralph sighed. “What does it matter, Tracy? Understanding the rest can’t do a thing to help you.”

Only now, I think, did I fully understand that Ralph intended to kill me. Sick with panic, I wanted to turn and es
cape from him. But the only possibility open to me was up the
stairs, and that would be senseless. So I desperately played for
a little more time ... even though I couldn’t see how more
time would help me.

“If
...
if Oliver only just found out about you and
Ursula,” I stammered, “what was he blackmailing you about before that?”

Ralph shrugged impatiently. “He discovered that I was dip
ping into the various farm accounts and decided he
wanted a share. He thought it was a clever way of extracting more cash from the estate than his father was willing to allow
him. So, with the two of them on my back, I had to step up
the amount I was taking.”

“You mean that Ursula was demanding money from you as well as Oliver?”

“Yes, that was why I first began to help myself from the
till,” he explained. “My bitch of a wife, who had deserted me
years before for another man, seemed to think that she was
entitled to come back and be maintained by me. Ursula had
been living in Canada with this chap, but when he died she
returned to this country. She traced me here to Steeple
Haslop, found that I was doing very nicely, and decided to
settle down here and demand a regular income from me in
exchange for not exposing my second marriage as bigamous.
Rather than wreck my whole life, I paid up. It wasn’t all that
difficult to juggle the accounts, especially since Sir Robert
was in no condition to keep a close eye on things.”

“And ... and how did Oliver find out what you were doing?” I prompted.

“He happened to come into the estate office late one evening, when I was there alone making a few little adjustments
to the books. Oliver Medway, damn him, might not have possessed much in the way of a business brain, but he was a cun
ning swine and he guessed at once what I was doing. No
doubt he regarded it as quite natural that I should be feather
ing my own nest. It was just the sort of thing he’d have done himself, in my position.”

Ralph fell silent, choked with bitterness. I felt a curious
stab of emotion which I recognised with surprise as pity. He’d
made a first class job of being agent at the Haslop Hall estate,
everyone agreed on that, and I could appreciate his reluctance to cheat Sir Robert. But his past life had caught up with him, and he’d been driven to it.

I’d always liked Ralph Ebborn and, apart from his recent
coolness concerning Sebastian, he had always seemed fond of
me. It struck me now that although he had already killed
twice, he still had qualms about killing me in cold blood. Per
haps that was why he had been persuaded to talk so much.
And if I were judging his frame of mind correctly, there lay
my only, slender hope of escape.

The silence was shattered by the telephone bell. Ralph and I looked at one another.

“Are you expecting a call?” he asked.

“Yes,” I replied quickly. “That’ll be Neil.”

As I moved towards the phone on the hall table, Ralph put
out an arm to bar my way.

“No you don’t,” he said threateningly.

We stood there frozen into stillness, both of us staring at
the phone. It rang ten times, then with a final ring it subsided
into silence.

The interruption seemed to have changed Ralph’s mood.
He gave me a look that was almost pleading look.