Heads You Lose (22 page)

“I’m mad!” he thought. “God forgive me, I’m mad, and I’m murdering Fran. I did this to Grace Morland and I did it to Pippi le May and now I’m doing it to Fran and I can’t stop myself.” He had a memory of those bleeding stumps of necks, of the swing of the hatchet and the sickening scythe of the train; and above all, of the body of the girl in the wood, lying so quietly with the flashy little brooch laid neatly on her breast. “Her neck… her neck… I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The thought of it, the sight of it, the terrible smell of the blood…”

There was a swirling blackness about him and then the sunlight again, and he had Fran’s throat in his hands and was forcing her head back, squeezing her throat and forcing her head back; he knew he would break her neck. “I must stop,” he thought. “This is Fran—Fran whom I love; I don’t want to hurt her—it’s Fran.” But his hands would not obey. Again there was a sharp, sweet, sickly pain in his leg, and the wave of sanity returned.

Grace Morland. Lying in the ditch, made horrible and disgusting by the bright little hat perched on her lolling head. “She shouldn’t have sneered at Fran; she came running up to the house and said she had seen Fran kissing James in the orchard; she said filthy things about her, obscene and filthy things… I killed her, I strangled her and hacked off her ugly head. She shouldn’t have sneered at Fran…”

The darkness descended upon him again, great waves of horror and helplessness and despair. He got a sort of backward glimpse of Pippi as he had come upon her at the telephone in the hall; of her staring eyes and suddenly faltering voice, of the feel of his hands about her throat, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing… as he was doing to Fran. But this was Fran, not Pippi: this was Fran. Something behind him in the tunnel was dragging at his legs.

“I’m going to kill her,” he thought. “I love her, but I’m going to kill her. I’m mad, I can’t stop myself.” And through the chaos of his mind a thought, straight from the great, good heart, beat like a gong. “I ought to be destroyed. I’m dangerous. I ought to be dead.”

Hands were dragging at him. A voice cried: “Shoot! Why don’t you shoot?” A voice said, agonised: “I daren’t; I should hit the girl.” Fran had a revolver, somebody had given her a revolver; voices were crying: “We can’t get him off you. Shoot! Press it against his body and shoot!
SHOOT
!”

He tore the revolver out of her grasp and pointed it round him blindly, not knowing what he did. He held Fran braced against his body; she was calling out to him, pleading with him: “Pen, let me go! Pen, don’t you know me? It’s Fran. Pen, let me go!”

He must get to her throat again. His fingers began to curl for the feel of it, for the sweet, warm feel of her throat, Fran’s throat, who would never be his. I ought to be dead. I ought to be destroyed. I’m mad, I’m dangerous, and this is Fran. I ought to be dead.

Good and Evil: heart and mind wrestled together in the few black seconds that lasted a hundred years. I, Pendock, I’m mad. I’m dangerous. I’m nothing better than a mad dog; I ought to be destroyed. Why don’t they kill me, why don’t they save her from me? And then, triumphant, ringing like a clarion through the wreckage of the splendid brain: “I must save Fran. I must save her. I must save her from myself!”

He dragged his hands from her throat and, hugging the revolver to him, pulled the trigger.

“I couldn’t hold him, sir,” said Johnson to Cockrill in a frightened and penitent voice. “I caught him as he fell, but I thought it was just a faint. I wasn’t prepared for him to struggle, and he tore himself away from me and went for the girl. If that dog hadn’t attacked him, sir—but each time it went for his legs, he seemed to slacken his hold on her throat a bit; I do believe it saved her life, sir. She couldn’t have held out otherwise…”

Fran was on the floor beside Pendock’s body, holding her aching throat. “Oh, he’s dead, he’s dead. Pen darling—Pen, I’m so sorry. He couldn’t help it; he didn’t know what he was doing. He must have been mad all the time; poor Pen. Oh, Granny, he was mad!”

“Yes, darling,” said Lady Hart, and took her by the arm and pulled her to her feet. “Come away now; you can’t do Pen any good. He’s dead, and it’s better that way: isn’t it, darling? Isn’t it better that way?”

“He killed himself because he couldn’t save me any other way,” cried Fran, and leant her head against James’s breast and sobbed. “Oh, James, I’m so frightened, and it’s all so dreadful and my throat aches most terribly! Pen! Pen! Who could have believed that he was mad? Dear Pen… he loved me and he was so sweet. …”

“Take her somewhere else,” said Cockie to James: He bent down and closed the eyelids over the beautiful blue-green eyes. “God rest his soul! Who could have known he was mad?”

“We ought to have recognised the signs,” said Lady Hart sadly, sitting down in a chair and covering her face with her hands. “He never knew, of course. But he got these headaches… And yet—there’s nothing in the family.”

“His mother died young,” said Cockrill thoughtfully, “and she died abroad. We never knew quite what happened.”

“But he always seemed such a normal, steady person: what could have suddenly turned his brain like that?”

“I wonder if it was the death of that girl in the wood,” said Venetia, looking up swiftly. “He was so terribly upset by it; perhaps it shook him worse than we realised. We mentioned it here, in the drawing-room, that afternoon when Grace Morland came to tea—don’t you remember, Granny? He went so white, and he shuddered all over, and later in the evening he said he had a headache. He had one the night Pippi died, too: I remember thinking how white he looked, but I supposed he hadn’t got over the fright when Fran disappeared. You do think he—forgot all about it? He never knew what he’d done?”

“Oh, I’m sure he didn’t: if he’d guessed for a moment that he was a danger to other people, he’d have given himself up. In certain types there’s a sort of automatism, at least I think I’m right in saying so: they act abnormally, and don’t know what they’re doing at all; then there’s a period while they act perfectly naturally, but still automatically, and when they come to, they just think they’ve been asleep; and of course poor Pen believed he’d been in bed all night.”

They stood round, staring with pitiful eyes as two constables lifted the body and carried it up-stairs. Henry said diffidently: “Forgive me, Lady Hart.”

She could not smile, but she put out her hand to him and said, as she had said earlier in the evening: “You did quite right, Henry; you were only doing what seemed right”; and to Venetia, sitting shivering alone on the sofa, she added gently: “He protected me while he thought nobody else would suffer through it, Venetia; he said it was not for him to judge me. He did quite right to speak, when he thought the wrong person was being accused. If
I
can understand that, you must,” and watched them as he humbly took Venetia’s hand and kept it in his own.

Cockie had steadied his shaking fingers sufficiently to roll himself a cigarette. He said abruptly: “What do you think happened? Why Grace Morland?”

“It was because of Fran, I suppose,” said Lady Hart. “He was a little excited already that afternoon; then Miss Morland abused her on the way down to the cottage. But how did he get her out into the garden that night?”

“Don’t you think she may have come of her own accord?” suggested Henry. “She looked out of her bedroom window and saw Fran kissing James in the orchard; and in her hate and jealousy she slipped out of the cottage while Trotty was talking in Pippi’s room, and came up to the house; perhaps she threw stones at Pendock’s window like Bunsen did, and she poured out to Pendock some filthy story about Fran…”

“He was very much in love with Fran,” said Cockie, looking at the tip of his cigarette.

“Yes, he was. Too much in love with her. She wasn’t—big enough for it,” said Lady Hart frankly. “I don’t mean to say that Fran’s shallow, because I don’t think she is; but she’s young and gay and light-hearted and often silly; she’s not cut out for the
grande passion,
and Pen just loved her too much.” She added thoughtfully: “I, was glad to see how, in her bad moment, she turned to James.”

“James loves her too,” said Venetia, with a soft little sigh, and she turned upon Henry adoring eyes, and was his slave again.

Henry still held tightly to her hand, but he did not even notice that she had spoken. He said, with a return to his old bouncing eagerness: “So Pippi did come up to the house that night and telephone! She must have noticed something in Pendock’s manner as they went down to the Cottage; you remember how headachy and nervy he was…”

Lady Hart looked up suddenly: “Do you know what it was… he said to Pippi as they went through the hall that… I forget quite what, but something to the effect that it had been terrible running out into the garden, expecting to find Fran with her head cut off—he said it several times to all of us, and none of us ever spotted that of course he couldn’t have known that Grace Morland had been decapitated, unless he had done it himself. I suppose it was a sort of half-memory… But Pippi was such a smart, clever little creature;
she
realised. And brave too, if you think what she did then… she came right back to this house to try and warn us: I do believe that’s what she did! She made an excuse about the glasses; but when that failed she just simply followed him back and came into the hall. She heard him talking to us in the drawing-room…”

“And I’ll tell you what,” said Henry excitedly, as the pieces of the puzzle began at last to fall into place. “She heard Fran ask him to stay and play Vingt-et-un. Don’t you remember, Venetia, that you heard something out in the hall, just about the same time… you thought it must have been Aziz. Pippi must have decided that Pen would be harmlessly playing cards with us for a good time to come, so she decided to ring up the police… and Pendock found her at it and silenced her. All that part that I worked out for—Lady Hart—was right. Pippi saw that he had heard her asking for Cockrill: she lost her head and said frantically that she was the murderess, and tried to hurry them up by adding that Fran was ‘next’; he waited till she had finished and then he killed her. He cut the lines of the telephone…”

“They get a sort of heightened—cunning,” said Lady Hart, shuddering away from the ugly word.

“And then he took her down to the railway line, collecting the scarf as he went…”

“No. He came back for the scarf,” said Cockrill. “He always insisted that the murderer ‘came back to the house for the scarf.’ Another half-memory.”

They fell into a reverie again; Lady Hart said sadly: “Sometimes there are dreams—a recurrent dream, not necessarily anything bad or terrible, but always the same one. I wonder if Pen had a dream…”

The two constables had carried Pendock’s body upstairs and laid it on his own bed. The shot had gone through the heart, and they thrust a towel between his hand and his breast to dry up the pool of blood. A photograph fell out of his breast pocket and on to the floor.

“It’s Fran,” said Cockie, and wiped off the blood and put it back gently into the lifeless hand.

A
N OLDER AND QUIETER
Fran stood, six months later, in her bridal dress, having her veil arranged. Aziz barked ecstatically round her feet. “He knows we don’t often get married,” said Venetia, seizing him in her arms and kissing his soft brown face.

“Venetia darling,
don’t
let him lick you!”

“Oh, Granny, it can’t possibly do any harm, except to my war-paint. Fran darling, honestly, you look divine.”

“You don’t look so bad yourself,” said Fran, smiling at her sister’s reflection beside her in the glass. “Henry, what are you doing here? Why aren’t you in the church, looking after James?”

“James is in the front pew, darling, completely oblivious to his surroundings, reading the ‘Sonnets to a Dark Lady,’ disguised as Hymns A. and M. I just slipped over to wish you… well, you know all that I can possibly wish you, Fran. I hope James will always love you as truly and deeply as I love Venetia; and if you give him even a part of what Venetia has given me…

“Don’t
get all Jewish and sentimental, darling, or I shall start howling. Aziz, my heavenly one, come and kiss your mother before she gets her face on.”

“Fran, don’t let him lick your face…”

The sun shone, the fortifying champagne whispered in their shallow glasses, Fran’s flowers were perfect, Venetia had split her glove, Lady Hart was convinced that her grey frock made her look like an elephant. “But, darling, some elephants are
sweet…
”

They all hung out of the window, waving to the guests going into the church next door. “There’s that awful Miss Whatsaname—Granny, you are a traitor, I
told
you not to ask her! There’s Mrs. Pountney, what a nice hat!—and, look, there’s Aunt Aggie, and she’s got her handkerchief out all ready to weep when I say, ‘I will.’ Is it ‘I will’ that I say?”

“If you can bring yourself to be so obliging for once,” said Venetia. She waved violently to a black beetle on the pavement outside the church. “It’s Cockie! Fancy him coming all the way up from Torrington; bless his heart!”

“So it is,” said Francesca. She waved her bouquet frantically out of the window. “Cockie! Oi, Cockie! this is me, Fran, all dressed up like a Christmas tree. I’m getting married to-day.”

Cockie waved back at them and replaced his hat at its Napoleonic angle upon his head. “Thank goodness he can’t keep it on in church,” said Lady Hart, leaning out of the other window, no less excited than they. “Isn’t that Trotty? He must have brought her up in his car.”

“And Bunsen; dear old Bunsen! Hallo, Bunsen, how very grand you look!”

“Miss Fran,” cried Bunsen, shocked to his respectable core. “You shouldn’t be showing yourself. I beg your pardon, my lady, but the bride shouldn’t be seen, you know…”

Fran drew in her head and readjusted her veil. “I wish they hadn’t come; and yet I don’t.” She dabbed at her face with a powder puff, leaning forward and peering into the mirror. “Well, come on; what about it? Shouldn’t we start?”

The bridesmaids were huddled in a giggling group at the foot of the stairs. Lady Hart pulled a sash straight, adjured two young flappers to hold their stomachs in, and shaking her head anxiously over the vision of a charming grey elephant that met her from a passing mirror, swept out of the hotel and into the church next door. The bridesmaids formed themselves into something like a procession and an elderly uncle offered Fran his arm. Venetia went ahead of them, Aziz clasped to her bosom.