Let Him Lie (6 page)

“You see, we have two independent witnesses, Miss Tamsin Wills and Sir Henry Blundell, who say they were aware of the time when they heard the shot and that it was then twenty-five minutes to four.”

“That is so,” agreed Sir Henry.

Agnes said tremulously:

“Yes, well—it might have been. I talked to Bates. I didn't hurry.”

“Oh, it's of no great importance,” Finister assured her soothingly. “But naturally we have to fix the time of the—shot, and your evidence seems to make it earlier than three thirty-five.”

“No, I don't say that! I don't know! I left my bedroom at a quarter-past three, that's all I know!”

“Could you possibly cast your mind back and remember
exactly
what you did between then and coming to the orchard gate?”

“I—I suppose I can!”

Agnes paused so long that Sir Henry Blundell turned his head inquiringly from his contemplation of the last autumn leaves.

“I—I went downstairs.”

“Immediately?”

“Yes. Yes, immediately. And Bates was in the hall. And he said that the Field Club had arrived. And I said: ‘Where are they?' And he said: ‘In the old kitchen, looking at the devil's oven.' And I said: ‘We'll have tea at four; I expect that'll give them plenty of time.' And he said—oh, I expect he said ‘Very good,' or something, and I—”

There was another pause.

“Well—I just looked at the flowers to see if they were fresh, and they were, and then I went out at the Tower door. I thought, shall I take a mackintosh? but it wasn't raining, so I just put on some galoshes—”

“Where were the galoshes?”

“In the lowest Tower room. It's used as a cloakroom. That's why I went that way. And I went across the lawn—not quickly, you know, quite slowly, thinking about planting some new shrubs. And—and—”

“And as you came to the orchard gate you heard a shot?”

“Yes. I should think it could easily have been three thirty-five by then, couldn't it?”

Superintendent Finister shook his head.

“No, what you've told us couldn't have taken twenty minutes. Seven at the outside, I should say. Are you quite sure, Mrs. Molyneux, you didn't do anything else? Speak to anybody else in the house, for instance?”

“Of course I'm sure!” Suddenly Agnes's pale rain- washed face flushed with uneven colour. She looked from Finister to Jeanie. Her eyes were both frightened and angry. “Why do you ask that?” she demanded shrilly.

Jeanie saw the surprise on Superintendent Finister's face give way to a grave, thoughtful look. He looked very seriously at Agnes. He only said, however, quietly: “It's important to fix the time, you see, of the shot, and I thought possibly you had had a talk with one of the staff or somebody and had forgotten it.”

Agnes bent her head. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, her whole slight figure tense. “I see. I'm sorry. No, I don't think I did. No, I didn't, I'm sure. May I go now? I've had about as much as I can bear.”

“Certainly. We're very sorry to have had to trouble you at all.”

“So sorry,
so
sorry,” murmured Sir Henry, turning from the window and holding out his hand. He smiled in melancholy fashion, squeezing Agnes's little fingers. Her tears brimmed over.

“Thank you, Sir Henry. No, I won't go through the hall. I can't face all those people! No, Jeanie! It's all right! I'd rather be by myself!”

She went slowly through the door to the Tower. Jeanie heard her steps dragging along the stone passage, up the wooden uncarpeted stairs, slowly, slowly, then suddenly accelerating, pattering quickly up the stairs with heels quickly clicking along the wooden passage overhead. Jeanie, listening to that sudden astonishing acceleration, saw her own surprise reflected in Superintendent Finister's look. And once again she saw his look of surprise melt into a glance thoughtful, grave, even severe.

Jeanie gave her own evidence quickly. She produced an effect, she saw, by her account of Myfanwy Peel and her antics with the revolver. Finister, Sir Henry and even the sergeant all became alert, gazing at her with a sudden bright surmise. She could not but see, herself, that around Myfanwy Peel the motive and the weapon and the opportunity all most opportunely grouped themselves. Yet she could not bring herself to believe that Myfanwy Peel was a murderess, and did her best to damp any such belief that might be taking shape in Superintendent Finister's mind. She stressed the fact that the revolver was unloaded.

“Easy enough to reload it,” remarked Sir Henry.

“But of course we don't know yet,” said Superintendent Finister, “that the weapon that killed Mr. Molyneux
was
a revolver. We'll know more about that after the autopsy.”

Jeanie lay awake long in her raftered bedroom at Yew Tree Cottage that night, and woke at last from an exhausted sleep to find the pale November sunlight streaming through the window opposite her bed, outlining, as a nimbus a saint, the small angular figure of old Mrs. Barchard, holding a broom as a saint his symbol.

“I knocked and knocked, Miss,” said Mrs. Barchard reproachfully.

“I was asleep. What's the time?”

“Going on for ten.”

“Good Heavens!”

“When I didn't get no answer to my knocking, you see, Miss, I judged it best to enter.”

“And I haven't died in my sleep or anything after all,” said Jeanie, and with the words came back to the dreadful realities of yesterday. Mrs. Barchard gave an embarrassed snigger and then very suddenly became grave. She had in her time swept, scrubbed and drunk tea in nearly all the houses round Handleston, a little dark woman with the sallow skin of impaired digestion and the bright prominent eyes of volubility.

“Dreadful thing happened at Cleedons, Miss,” she now brought forth lugubriously.

“Yes, indeed.”

“Poor Mr. Molyneux. Poor
Mrs.
Molyneux, I should say, because it's the ones that's left behind feels it most. Poor Mr. Molyneux, he's gone to his rest. But them that's left behind don't get no rest.”

Jeanie took up the cup of strong tea Mrs. Barchard had placed beside her.

“Fancy, to fall out of a tree like that. I had an uncle died in a stroke. Me uncle on me mother's side, he was.”

Jeanie let her run on. The village would know soon enough that Robert Molyneux had been murdered, without her information. She could not face the avid rapturous glee with which, she foresaw, Mrs. Barchard would receive enlightenment. She held her tongue, savouring on it the dark chill brew.

“To be took like that! Like being struck by lightning.” A queer, half-shocked, half-amused expression came over Mrs. Barchard's thin lively face. She jabbed absently with her broom at the skirting board. “There's some people says it was a kind of lightning. They says it was old Grim.”

“Who?”

“It's silly talk, really, Miss, of course. Only Mr. Molyneux he
had
planned to open old Grim's Grave to look for treasure. So they say. They say he was going to get a gentleman down from London to open it.”

It was plain from the way Mrs. Barchard's voice sank that she herself was somewhat awed.

“Well, we don't know, do we, Miss? I wouldn't open old Grim's Grave, not for a million thousand pounds' worth of treasure, and plenty of people in Handleston thinks the same. Well, I mean, Miss, opening anybody's grave isn't very nice. And when it's one of these old kings, I mean to say, one doesn't know what misfortunes might happen.” 

“Oh, Mrs. Barchard, lots of these burial-mounds
have
been opened, you know!”

“Yes, and lots of misfortunes has happened,” replied Mrs. Barchard pertinently. “Not that I believes in it meself, exactly... Still, we don't
know
, do we?”

“Yes,” said Jeanie with youthful dogmatism. “I think we do know that no harm comes of knowledge. It's ignorant superstitions that do harm.”

Mrs. Barchard was instantly on the defensive. Her sallow cheeks grew pink. She said in a voice that held an indignant quiver:

“It isn't only ignorant people thinks so, Miss! Mr. Fone was dead against it. He'd've done anything to stop it!”

Jeanie smiled and stretched.

“Oh, well, Mr. Fone's a poet.”

“He's the best, cleverest gentleman that ever lived!” cried Mrs. Barchard vehemently. “And the kindest, too!
He
wouldn't squeeze a poor man to pay him back money he'd lent, when he'd got more than he knew what to do with!
He
wouldn't go poking his nose in a man's private affairs!”

Mrs. Barchard stopped abruptly, trembling a little.

Jeanie looked thoughtfully at the little indignant woman, remembering gossip she had heard about Hugh Barchard and his ill-starred chicken farm and ill-starred love adventure.

“Do you mean,” she asked directly, “that Mr. Molyneux
did
do these things?”

The little woman was plainly disconcerted at this directness. A half-ashamed, half-sullen look came over her expressive face.

“I'm not saying so. Only, it wasn't my Hugh's fault that he couldn't make chicken-farming pay when he came back from Canada. He always paid the interest regular on what was lent him. And as for a man's private affairs, what business are they of other folk?”

It was obvious from Mrs. Barchard's unhappy rancorous tone that her son's sinful living had caused her a good deal of suffering. She had the gossip's fear of gossip.

“Was Mr. Molyneux pressing your son to repay a loan?”

Mrs. Barchard looked uneasy.

“I'm not saying so,” she muttered. “I didn't say
he
did. I only said Mr. Fone didn't.”

“But it
was
Mr. Molyneux who lent your son money to start his chicken-farm, wasn't it?”

“I'm not saying so.”

Mrs. Barchard was evidently not saying anything at all about Robert Molyneux, now that Robert Molyneux had joined old Grim among the awful, unknown, propitiated shades.

“Still,” she added resentfully, “it wasn't my Hugh's fault the bottom dropped out of chicken-farming, was it? And when everything went wrong at once like that—chickens doing no good, I mean, and that Val treating him so bad and then to be hard on the poor lad about a loan he'd never asked for—”

She glanced defensively at Jeanie, and Jeanie saw that she wanted to defend her boy against the imagined gossips who might already, with their calumnies, have assailed Jeanie's virtuous ears.

“Val?” murmured Jeanie encouragingly.

“That Valentine Frazer that treated him so bad Coming here and spending his money and making all sorts of nasty talk about the place with her silly painted face and red gloves and then to go and break his heart like that!”

“Oh dear!”

“Yes, I told him the sort she was! Often. But he wouldn't listen to me! Oh no! Red gloves, indeed!”

“Oh dear!”

“One thing I do thank Heaven for!” said Mrs. Barchard. “One thing on my knees I thank God for! He never married her.”

“Oh dear.”

“No. So when she went off with her painter he was well shut of her. He didn't think so, of course. Two years ago last July it was. He come to my house early in the morning, white as a sheet, poor lad.
Val's gone!
he says.
What?
I said.
Val's gone,
he said,
she's sick of me,
he said,
and she's gone up to London to be an artist's model,
he said.
An artist's model!
I said.
That's what you call it, is it? I told you what she was!
I said.
Oh, Mother, it isn't what you think!
he says, poor boy, believing the best of her even then, or pretending to. But everybody in the village knew what she was, Miss. A bad lot, that's what she was. Her and her artist! An actress she'd been and you could see it all over her!”

“An artist?”

“Yes, staying down here at the ‘White Lion' he was that summer. A chap with a beard, more like a nanny-goat than a human being.”

“
Not
Hubert Southey!”

“Some such name.”

“Well, I'm blowed!”

Jeanie reflected how little one knew of the characters and strange private lives of those from whom one learns painting in art schools. Who would have suspected Hubert Southey, that dry and circumspect man, of an entanglement with an ex-actress in red gloves?

“Painted her picture, he did, sitting among the buttercups. And then off he goes, and off she goes. Buttercups!” said Mrs. Barchard, in a tone of extraordinary satire. “And she said her father was a clergyman.”

Jeanie smiled.

“Why not? Well, I must get up, Mrs. Barchard.”

Startlingly assuming a falsetto drawl as she prepared to leave the room, Mrs. Barchard remarked languidly:

“When mai fawther werz rector of Hunsley!”

Jeanie started.

“Rector of
where
?”

“Hunsley, or some such place, Miss. She was always on about it. Couldn't have gone on more about it if her father'd been a duke. Showed what a guilty conscience she'd got!”

“Not Hunsley in Yorkshire?”

“Yes, it was. On the beeyootiful moors.”

“But how
extraordinary
!”

Agnes's father had been Rector of Hunsley, in Yorkshire, on the beautiful moors. Jeanie wondered if the two so very different daughters of two Hunsley rectors had ever become aware of the link between them—the only link, Jeanie imagined, from what she knew of Agnes and had heard of Miss Valentine Frazer!

It was nearly noon when she arrived at Cleedons, and Tamsin Wills met her on the stairs. Agnes, it seemed, was in her bath. She would soon be up and dressed. Meanwhile, if Jeanie cared to come to the Tower room where Miss Wills was arranging some flowers, Miss Wills would do her poor best to entertain her.