Heads You Lose (12 page)

“But darling, he
didn’t.
I mean, I knew. He told me that night in the orchard, and of course he was going to arrange about a divorce.”

“Oh, Fran, you might have told
me.”

“I was going to, Venetia, naturally; but the very next morning poor Miss Morland was killed and I didn’t get a chance, and then I suddenly thought of something and I began to worry like hell. You know the night before Miss Morland had told Trotty that she had somebody in the ‘hollow of her hand’? well—” she looked apologetic—“it seems very dramatic and silly, but I thought she might have meant James; I didn’t know what to do, Venetia, I was worried to death. I thought the police would be asking questions and the fewer people who knew about James being married to Pippi, the better. Your face always gives you away, darling; you simply can’t tell lies. And we might have had to tell some lies.”

“I can’t make head or tail of what you’re talking about, Fran,” said Venetia. “Begin at the beginning, for goodness’ sake, and tell me all about it. If there are any lies to be told, I’ll tell them for you all right.” She added deliberately: “And for James too, if he needs them.”

Fran smiled at her, and for no reason her eyes were suddenly filled with tears. “Thank you, sweetie; it was nice of you to say that. I don’t think he will need them now, but I’m glad you feel that way about him.”

“But tell me about Pippi,” said Venetia.

“Oh yes, Pippi. Well, you see, we knew James was keen on me, didn’t we? But only because it sort of stood out a mile, not from anything he said, because he never did say anything. In other words he wasn’t going to ask me to marry him until he’d settled about a divorce and all that. Then that afternoon that Miss Morland was here to tea, Pen rather showed his hand; and James was afraid I might say yes to Pen before I knew that he, James, was in the running—which, as a matter of fact, after your lecture about not waiting to fall madly in love with someone, I might have. He asked me to meet him that evening and talk to him, and he was going to tell me then; but during dinner Pippi rang up from Torrington station and said that she was going to the cottage and that she wanted to see him…

“How did she know he was here?”

“Well,
I
don’t know, darling—she rang up the mess or something, I suppose—anyway, he met her in the orchard at about ten o’clock; he couldn’t meet her in the house, because of course Miss Morland didn’t know they were married.”

“But when were they married, Fran? Why didn’t we know? Why didn’t they tell us?”

“Oh yes, I forgot that. Well, he married her ages ago, when they were both about twenty or something. They had met each other a lot down here in the summer holidays, when we still hardly knew either of them, and they got very thick, sailing and so forth. I should think, knowing Pippi, that she led poor James up the garden a bit, because if he’s a bit of a goof now, it’s nothing to what he was then; anyway, he went on seeing her in London, after one particular summer, and finally they got married. James was up at Cambridge and Pippi was on tour in some show or other, so they didn’t live together or have a home or anything; and what was more important, they were terrified of James’s uncle finding out. You know the old boy was terribly straitlaced, and the bare fact that Pippi was an actress would have sent him up in blue smoke apparently, and of course he was all for James waiting till he was about forty and a pillar of the Firm, and then marrying somebody pretty worthy—I mean a mayor’s daughter or something like that; so they kept it all a deathly secret and James just sent Pippi money out of his allowance, which was a pretty hearty one, and they saw each other now and again when they were both in London, and by the end of a year or so they were both already sick of the whole affair. Pippi had kept her stage name, of course, and nobody knew that James was married; they decided they’d go on like that till either of them actually wanted to be free. It seemed a good idea to James, poor innocent, because of course a divorce would have packed him up completely with his uncle; and as for Pippi—well, she’s dead and all that, but one can’t help saying that she knew that one day James would come in for a lot of money, if she could spin it out (being paid pretty comfortably for nothing, in the meantime) till the old boy died. Anyway, they just saw each other occasionally, but only as ‘brother and sister’ as the papers say; and then James began to fall for me.”

“Well, I’m glad it was only that. I mean only a ‘boy and girl romance,’ again as the papers say, and not a whole history of loving and living together and having a home and so forth, before James fell in love with you.”

“Ah, but you’re more romantic than me, Venetia,” said Fran, laughing.

Venetia laughed too. “I expect you’re quite glad yourself, in spite of being so hard-boiled.”

“Yes, I am, quite. Anyway, the thing is that Pippi, the day before she came down here, had seen in the papers that James’s uncle had died and duly left him the packet; and on the strength of it she’d turned down her own boy friend, who’s been going for years, and had come down to tell James that she could do with a few more conjugal rights. And James meets her with the information that he wants a divorce to marry somebody else!”

“Oh, heavens, Fran, what a muddle. And how very—I mean, it
is
rather sordid, darling.”

“Yes, I know, but it can’t be helped. After all, it wasn’t poor James that made it sordid; he was terribly upset about it, but having arranged with me to come out to the orchard, he couldn’t just say nothing, so he told me all about it, and asked me if I would marry him if he did manage to get the divorce. By that time he’d started telling me, so he had to go on, and stop being the little gentleman and never disclosing his true feelings.”

“But how did you get out of the house?” said Venetia, her mind on more practical matters than the ethics of James’s proposal. “I thought the front door was locked, and you can’t unlock it, even from the inside, without the key.”

“Yes, it was locked. It was a bit of a shock to me when I realised that, because James was already out in the orchard, waiting for me… actually, he was talking to Pippi, but of course I didn’t know that; and he’d made the date with me before she rang him up. Of course I told Pen he was in bed. You see, knowing how Pen felt, I didn’t want to upset him by being seen in a huddle with James, especially if nothing was going, to come of it, and at that time I didn’t know if anything was: in fact I still don’t. But if Pen was going to be in love with me, it was only fair to hear James’s side too, wasn’t it?”

“Well, but how did you get out, Fran? You tell a story in the most muddled way I ever heard in my life.”

“It’s you asking questions that muddles it. Where was I? Oh yes, at the front door. Well, it wouldn’t open, so I went to the back door; that has a Yale, and it wasn’t bolted because Bunsen was out at Tenfold. I went out that way and left the latch fastened back so that we could get in again; when we came back we simply clicked the door to, and it was just as I found it.”

“But
Fran
—that means that anyone could have got into the house and taken your hat from the hall!”

“But no one could have known that the back door would be open for that ten minutes or so; and as it was, it didn’t matter if they did, because the box was still quite all right when we came back through the hall. Don’t agitate: I’ve told Cockie all about it. Anyway, I went down to the orchard and there was James, and he was so sweet and it was so lovely!”

“I’m sure it was,” said Venetia, laughing at her.

“No, but honestly. There was the most marvellous moon, and the trees looked all silver and the downs were white and the stream gurgling away under the bridge… Pigeonsford looked like a big black mass standing up across the lawn…” She added, laughing: “And it was terribly cold!”

They came to the end of the field. Their bodyguard joined them for a moment. “If you don’t mind, Miss, I think you’d better turn back here; you can turn again at the other end if you want to, but the Inspector wouldn’t like it if I let you go further from the house than this.”

They turned obediently. “So we decided to go in,” said Fran from where she had left off. “We thought that now everyone was in bed we could sit in the library and talk it over by the fire. So that’s what we did.”

“What time was that, Fran?”

“Very soon after eleven. We came up to the house and went into the library and shut the door and sat over the fire and talked, and James kissed me a good deal. He was awfully sweet, no funny business or anything like that. He
is
nice, Venetia.”

“How long were you in the library with James kissing you a good deal and no funny business?”

“Oh, hours. Of course we were talking, and James was telling me about Pippi, and I was trying to discuss with him whether it would be a good idea for me to marry him; but he was rather one-sided about that.”

Venetia laughed again. “You
are
a funny child, Fran. Fancy asking poor James to make up your mind for you! Don’t you know it yourself?”

“Well, I feel as if I do, Venetia. At least I feel very sloppy about James and I like being kissed by him and at first I minded quite a lot about his having been married to Pippi; but I’ve felt like that about a lot of other people—I couldn’t be certain if it was the genuine article, in fact I don’t see how one can tell. You said yourself earlier that afternoon to choose somebody to marry that I didn’t love too painfully, like you love Henry, so I was trying to make out if James would like to marry me under those terms… I mean if I turned out to be not wildly in love with him…”

“I see,” said Venetia, still smiling.

“Anyway, we sat there talking it over, and imagine our horror when we heard voices outside and somebody seemed to be saying something to Granny, calling up to her window; and then feet came running downstairs and through the hall and out of the front door. We couldn’t think what was the matter unless it was a warden about the lights showing; but, anyway, we thought we’d better hop upstairs and go to bed as if we’d been there all night. So we did. I scrambled out of my clothes and got into bed, and when Granny and Pen came in I pretended to be sound asleep; they never dreamt that I hadn’t been there all night,” said Fran innocently. “James says he actually fell asleep, but of course he was even quicker into bed than I was.”

“I noticed you hadn’t taken off your make-up,” said Venetia. “I was going to tell you about it and say you’d ruin your skin.”

“Did you notice it? So did Cockie, the old devil. We thought we’d better explain to him, in case he found out for himself and thought there was more in it than there really was; but I asked him not to tell Granny or anybody, as there didn’t seem to be any point, and she would have thought it dreadful for me to be sitting up all alone with James. Funny thing,” said Fran, as so many of her generation have said before her, “that elderly people never will believe that anyone can remain moral after eleven o’clock at night.”

“But the man Pippi saw in the orchard—don’t you remember? She said she was walking there about half-past ten and she saw a man—why, Fran, she must have been with James then.”

“Yes, of course she was. He was the only man she ever saw in the orchard. You see, after Grace Morland was found, there wasn’t an opportunity for them to talk to each other and discuss what they were going to tell and what they weren’t going to tell. So when we were all having breakfast that morning, and Pippi came in—you remember?—James said to her: ‘What were you doing last night at half-past ten?’ meaning what have you told the
police
you were doing, and Pippi saw what he meant immediately, and said that she’d told them she was alone; and just in case they should know there’d been someone else in the orchard at that time, or in case James should want to say he’d been there too, she made up a story about having seen a man strolling there, though she didn’t know who it was. It was jolly quick of her, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t see why she didn’t tell the truth straight out.”

“I should think it was because of Grace Morland’s peculiar remark about the hollow of her hand,” said Fran doubtfully. “Trotty must have told Pippi in the morning after Grace Morland was found dead, though of course
we
didn’t know about it till later on. Pippi thought Grace must have seen her and James from her bedroom window—you know how the orchard comes right up under the side windows of Pigeonsford Cottage. She thought James might be involved in some way, so she played for safety by not saying anything to the police. Then yesterday afternoon she got rid of Pen while he was walking with her and James by the river, and they talked the whole thing over; and after we came back from the walk James told me, and we all three went to Cockie—in easy stages of course, not together—and told him exactly what had happened. The only thing we didn’t say was that Pippi was married to James; we thought we could just tell him later on if it began to matter—it didn’t seem to have anything to do with Grace. Of course, now that poor Pippi’s dead, it had to come out.”

They crossed over the railway line and back into Pigeonsford grounds. “I’m afraid it’s been a terrible shock to Gran.”

Fran walked beside her sister with bent head, her hands in their big fur gloves linked behind her back. She did not reply.

“Gran’s so frightfully against divorce and things like that,” went on Venetia, pursuing her own train of thought. “I’m afraid she’d have been awfully upset in any case; I don’t think she’d have liked you to have married James, you know, if she’d known he’d been married already.”

“She did know,” said Fran in a muffled voice.

Venetia stood stock still, looking at her twin with wide-open, startled eyes. “You’d told her?”

“Yes. I told her yesterday, when we were walking by the river. I got her to say that she thought James was the right man for me to marry and all that, and then, when I knew what she really thought of him as a person, I told her about his being married to Pippi, and asked if she’d mind me marrying him if he was divorced. She was frightfully upset and said it was absolutely impossible; especially as Pippi looked like making a fuss and not letting him go too easily now that he’s come in for his money.”