Eight Murders In the Suburbs (4 page)

“I have no memory at all of the act itself, Inspector. I can only say that it was fixed in my mind that I must—get close and strike upwards.”

The inspector blinked, hesitated, then tried another line.

“It was after ten-thirty, anyhow, you said—after he had locked up for the night. How did you get in?”

“Again, I can't tell. I can't have hammered on his door, or someone would have heard me. I might have—I must have—got in by his window. I regret to confess that on on occasion I did enter his apartment that way in order to remove my cat, which would not come out when I called it.”

“How did you get into the yard? That door is locked at night.”

“Probably Jenkins left the key in it—he is very negligent.”

“So you have no memory at all of anything? You are working out what you think you must have done?”

Miss Paisley remembered that she had prayed for calm.

“I appreciate the force of your remark, Inspector. But I suggest that it would be a little unusual, to say the least, for a woman of my antecedents and habits to accuse herself falsely for the sake of notoriety. I ask you to believe that I sat in that chair at about ten-thirty, with a fair amount of light from the sunset—that my next clear memory is of starting up in the chair at a quarter to three, noticing that the light was on. Also, there were other signs—”

“Right! We accept that you got out of that chair—though you don't remember it. You may have done other things, too, but I'll show you that you didn't kill Rinditch. To begin with, let's have a look at the murder knife.”

Miss Paisley went to the cupboard.

“It isn't here!” she exclaimed. “Oh, but of course—! I must have—I mean, didn't you
find
the knife?”

Graun was disappointed. He could have settled the matter at once if she had produced the knife—which had indeed been found in the body of the deceased. A knife that could be bought at any ironmonger's in the country, unidentifiable in itself.

“If you had entered Rinditch's room, etcetera, you'd have left fingerprints all over the place—”

“But I was wearing leather riding gloves—”

“Let's have a look at 'em, Miss Paisley.”

Miss Paisley went back to the cupboard. They should be on the top shelf. They were not.

“I can't think where I must have put them!” she faltered.

“It doesn't matter!” sighed Graun. “Let me tell you this, Miss Paisley. The man—or, if you like, woman—who killed Rinditch—couldn't have got away without some pretty large stains on his clothes.”

“It wouldn't have soaked through the lumber-jacket,” murmured Miss Paisley.

“What lumber-jacket?”

“Oh!—I forgot to mention it—or rather, I didn't get a chance. When I sat down in that chair at ten-thirty I was wearing a green suede lumber-jacket. When I came to myself in the small hours, I was not wearing it.”

“Then somewhere in this flatlet, we ought to find a ladies' lumber-jacket, heavily blood-stained. I'll look under everything and you look inside everything.”

When the search had proved fruitless, Miss Paisley turned at bay.

“You don't believe me!”

“I believe you believe it all, Miss Paisley. You felt you had to kill the man who had killed your cat. You knew you couldn't face up to a job like murder, especially with a knife. So you had a brainstorm, or whatever they call it, in which you kidded yourself you had committed the murder.”

“Then my meat-knife, my old riding gloves and my lumer-jacket have been hidden in order to deceive you?” shrilled Miss Paisley.

“Not to deceive me, Miss Paisley. To deceive yourself! If you want my opinion, you hid the knife and the gloves and the jacket because they were
not
bloodstained. Brainstorm, same as I said. Maybe you'll remember sometime where you put 'em.”

Miss Paisley felt giddy. Graun steadied her into the armchair.

“You don't need to feel too badly about
not
killing him,” he said, smiling to himself. “I'll tell you something—you'll be reading it all in a day or two. At seven o' clock this morning, a constable found Jenkins trying to sink a bag in the river. That bag was Rinditch's, which was kept under the bed o' nights. And Jenkins had two hundred and thirty odd quid in cash which he can't account for.”

Miss Paisley made no answer. She had kept her calm but had achieved nothing. The rather conscious nobility of purpose which had driven her to confess her crime was shrinking into an effort to save face.

“Maybe, you still sort of feel you killed Rinditch?” Miss Paisley nodded assent. “Then remember this. If the brain can play one sort of trick on you, it can play another—same as it's doing now.”

Inspector Graun had been very understanding and very kind, Miss Paisley told herself. It was her duty to abide by his decision—especially as there was no means of doing otherwise—and loyally accept his interpretation of her own acts. The wretched Jenkins—an abominable man, who had made her a laughing stock for years—would presumably be hanged. Things, reflected Miss Paisley, had a way of coming right, in the end.

After a single appearance before the magistrate, Jenkins was committed on the charge of murder and would come up for trial in the autumn at the Old Bailey. Miss Paisley removed her interest.

One evening in early autumn, Miss Paisley was sitting in her armchair, reviving the controversy as to whether her father had made a mistake about the croquet lawn. She found new arguments in his favour, which had to be refuted. In her eagerness she thrust her hands between the folds of the upholstery. Her fingers encountered a hard object. She hooked it with her fingernail, then with her finger—and pulled up her dead cat's collar.

She held it in both hands while there came vivid memory of peering through Mr. Rinditch's window, Jenkins beside her, and seeing the collar in the waste paper basket … The buckle was still unfastened. The leather had been cut, as if with a razor. She read the inscription: her own name and address
(£1 Reward For Return)
.

“I took it out of that basket—
afterwards
!” She re-lived the ecstatic moment in which she had killed Rinditch. The cloud in her brain, having served its purpose, was blown away. Every detail was now clear cut. Strike UP, as the cat had struck—then leap to safety. She had pulled off a glove, to snatch the collar from the basket and thrust it under the neck of her jumper, had put the glove on again before leaving the room and making her way to the river. Back in her chair she had retrieved the collar.

And here it was, between her thumb and finger! Miss Paisley was not legal minded, but she knew quite certainly that this was evidence. Evidence which she ought to report to the lawyers who were defending Jenkins.

Gone was the exaltation which had sustained her in her first approach to the police. She stood up, rigid, as she had stood in the hall while listening to the scratching on the panel, refusing to accept an unbearable truth. Once again she had the illusion of being locked up, aware now that there could be no escape from herself. All the events in the orbit of the murder which, a moment ago, had been silhouetted with terrifying sharpness, were now induced to fade.

There remained the collar—evidence irrefutable, but not wholly inescapable.

“If I keep this as a memento, I shall soon get muddled and accuse myself of murder all over again! What was it that nice inspector said—‘If the brain can play one trick on you it can play another.'”

She smiled as she put the collar in her purse, slipped on a coat and walked—by the most direct route, this time—to the 17th century bridge. She dropped the collar into the river, knowing that it would sink under the weight of its metal, unlike the blood-stained lumber-jacket and the riding gloves which she had weighted with stones scratched from the soil of the old cemetery.

In a letter written on the eve of execution, Arthur Penfold seems to share the judge's astonishment that a man of his calibre should turn to murder to extricate himself from a domestic difficulty. A student of criminology could have told Penfold—if not the learned judge himself—that murder eventuates, not from immediate circumstance, but from an antecedent state of mind.

The murder occurred in 1935. The antecedent state of mind was created five years earlier, on an October evening when Penfold, returning from the office, found a note in his wife's handwriting on the hall table.

Penfold, an only child of very doting parents, was born in 1900. At twenty-five he inherited the family business, a wholesale agency for technical inks—almost any ink except the kind one uses with a pen. His mother had died the previous year. For three years he lived alone in the twelve-roomed house, with an acre of garden, in the overgrown village of Crosswater, some twenty miles out of London. The house was vibrant with memories of a benevolently autocratic father, whose lightest wish became his wife's instant duty—whose opinions on everything she accepted as inspired wisdom. In April 1931 Arthur Penfold married and eagerly set about modelling his life on that of his father.

Of his bride we need note only that she had been an efficient business girl, a rung or two up the ladder, that she was physically attractive and well mannered—the sort of girl his friends expected him to choose. They had been married six months to a day when he found that note in the hall—six months, he would have told you, of unalloyed happiness. A wife who—
ex officio
, as it were—liked all the things that he liked, lived for the great moment of the day when he returned home, to regale her with small talk of his achievements in business. There was not, he would have asserted, a single cloud in his matrimonial sky.

‘Arthur dear. I am terribly sorry and utterly ashamed of myself, but I can't stick it any longer. It's not your fault—I have no complaint and no excuse. I shall stay with Mother while I'm looking for a job. I don't want any money, please, and I'll agree to anything as long as you don't ask me to come back—Julie.

P.S.—There isn't another man and I don't suppose there ever will be.'

Julie remained unattached for three years. Then she wrote Penfold begging for divorce, as she wished to remarry. Penfold chivalrously insisted that he should be the one to give cause, so that she could start again untainted with scandal. He did not hate Julie, but he did hate himself and to a somewhat dangerous degree.

He was the fourth generation of his family to live in that house. The Penfolds were of the local aristocracy and ‘knew everybody,' meaning fifty or so of the more prosperous families in a largish suburb. Arthur Penfold—though no one claimed him as an intimate friend—was popular, in the sense that no one disliked him nor ever suggested excluding him. He was of medium height, with thin, sandy hair, a little ponderous in manner, self-centred but not boastful. When he was deserted, for no apparent reason, ‘everybody' agreed that he had been abominably treated and was entitled to sympathy.

While Julie was with him, his own happiness had been obvious to everybody. He had taken for granted that Julie was happy too. How could you have a happy husband and an unhappy wife? But, somehow, you had!

Why had she left him? Too late, he tried to imagine her point of view. It was uphill work, because he knew nothing of her intimate personal history, her tastes, her hopes, her fears. In the sense in which married lovers explore each other's personality and impulse, he knew nothing at all about her—had desired no such knowledge. It escaped him that this might be the reason why Julie had thrown in her hand.

In the sympathy of the neighbours he saw only pity for a man who had some taint or defect, unknown to himself, which made his society intolerable to a normal woman. How could he doubt that behind a mask of friendliness, the neighbours were laughing at him!

There was a certain tragic grandeur in the idea of a man with a taint that baffled definition. In a short time, he began to believe in it.

The desertion was followed by three years of bitter self-contempt, during which every friendly greeting was held to mask a sneer. Irrelevantly, he felt a little better when the divorce was completed. In the summer he accepted an invitation to stay with a cousin who was the vicar of Helmstane. Here he met Margaret Darrington, who became his second wife.

Margaret was twenty-four and a beauty, though she seemed not to know it. Her clothes, expensive but ill-chosen, verged on dowdiness. She lacked the assurance of a girl specially gifted by nature. Her intelligence was adult, but her temperament was that of a prim young schoolgirl with a talent for obedience. At their first meeting, Arthur Penfold, perceiving the talent for obedience, wanted to marry her much more than he had ever wanted anything.

“A very grave young person,” the vicar told him. “She lives with an honorary aunt, to whom she is devoted—er—excessively so!” The vicar pulled himself up. “Perhaps that was a mean remark in the special circumstances!” He told a tragic tale. In the 1914 war, when Margaret was six, her mother had been killed in an air raid on London, while the child was in Helmstane with a Mrs. Blagrove. Scarcely had Mrs. Blagrove finished breaking the news to the liftle girl when a War Office telegram announced that her father had been killed in action. Mrs. Blagrove cherished the orphan, adopted her and did her best to fill the role of both parents.

“With indifferent success, I fear,” finished the vicar. “Margaret is a dear girl—she helps me with the parish chores, which is convenient for me but not really the sort of thing she ought to be doing. She has lost her place in her own generation and shows no desire to find it. I would guess that she is, perhaps, unadventurous—a little afraid of life.”

Too afraid of life, in fact, to run away from a husband, who would stand between her and the world, which she need apprehend only through his eyes. Penfold required no further information about the girl nor her intimate personal history, nor her tastes, nor her hopes, nor her fears. For their first date, he asked her to meet him in London for lunch and a matinée.