She Died a Lady (26 page)

‘Then she did feel sick and martyred; and he stood by in agony, watching her grow more and more infatuated with Sullivan, while there wasn’t anything he could do about it. As a climax to the whole thing at the end of May, while he was tearin’ his heart out, Rita came to Tom and threw herself on his mercy and said she wanted a passport-recommendation to go away with Sullivan.

‘That tore it.

‘It wouldn’t have been hard for him to get the whole story out of her. Don’t you see that a flighty, romantic, star-gazin’ female like Rita Wainright would be very easy to gull in one particular way? If Tom said to her something like this: “Yes little gal, I renounce you to a better man and God bless you,” that would be exactly the sort of thing Rita would
expect
him to say.’

Molly compressed her lips.

‘Yes,’ Molly said shortly.

‘It was the way her husband always treated her,’ H.M. continued. ‘The way he treated her to the end. She’d have tears of gratitude in her eyes, and she’d kiss Tom in a chaste way and say how noble he was. But he wasn’t noble. Oh, my eye, no. He was only human, and just a little crazy.

‘He learned all about their scheme with the garden-roller, just when and where and at what time they were goin’ to do it. Why not? He was their self-sacrificing friend. And it would arouse no suspicion in the district if Dr Tom happened to be out late at night: a country G.P. is the one person who usually is.

‘At some time on Saturday night – we can’t say just when, but it must have been before one in the morning – he drove out to the Baker’s Bridge road and parked his car there. He walked across to the tunnel entrance to the Pirates’ Den, and down the tunnel holdin’ a stolen gun behind his back. He was comin’ to say good-bye.

‘He found those two just finished dressin’ after their swim. They’d had no reason to be suspicious. They were all eager and breathless for a new life. He had a glove on against the back-fire of the gun. Maybe he was a bit white round the gills, but in candlelight they wouldn’t notice that. He walked straight up to Rita and shot her through the heart at body-range. Sullivan, who must have been too paralysed to move, felt the gun jab into his own chest too.’

H.M. paused.

In imagination, I heard the shots echo.

‘Tom rolled the bodies out into the sea. The suitcases went after them, all contents except diamonds and passports. Unmarked clothes didn’t matter, but passports were too dangerous. He took those with him. But he forgot the bathing-suits, which they had stuffed out of sight in a crevice of the walls; and he couldn’t find one of the spent cartridge-cases. Then he put the gun in his pocket and went back to his car.’

I intervened here.

‘But why take the gun with him? Why not drop it after them?’

H.M. eyed me over his spectacles.

‘Oh, my son! They were supposed to have shot themselves –
if
the bodies were ever found – on the edge of Lovers’ Leap. Hey?’

‘That’s right.’

‘But a steel automatic pistol has a nasty habit of not floatin’. If he chucked it in at all, he had to chuck it in somewhere near Lovers’ Leap and not half a mile away. That’s where he had a very bad bit of luck, a crusher, the thing that did for him. That same night, probably while he was gettin’ into his car, the gun slipped through his pocket. And he was so shaky and upset he never noticed it.’

H.M. took out a cigar, turning it over in his fingers.

‘Well … now. The next thing he had to do was get rid of Sullivan’s own car. But he didn’t dare to do it that night, because shortly the roads would be hummin’ with coppers and he couldn’t stay away from home
too
long.

‘He never knew Rita and Sullivan had left those studio doors standin’ wide open, with the car exposed to the public eyes. Then, the next afternoon, Belle Sullivan came stormin’ past and stopped. When Tom came out that night to get the car, by this time so full of remorse he ruddy near did lose his reason, we had the quicksand business.

‘Undoubtedly, he’d already left his own car near the patch of quicksand he intended to use, and walked back for the other one. He must ’a’ been petrified when he saw a little gal pop up screamin’ out of the dickey-seat.

‘You’d all been spoutin’, by the way, about who knew Exmoor and where to dispose of a car. Craft was down on Dr Luke; and Dr Luke, young feller, was down on you. It didn’t seem to occur to anybody that, if the father had to be acquainted with Exmoor in the course of his work, so had the son.

‘Well, Belle Sullivan jumped and fainted. Tom didn’t know what to do. His conscience was all over him like delirium tremens. He wasn’t goin’ to risk more trouble. He’d done everything in darkness, and she couldn’t have recognized him if she’d seen him again.

‘But what could he do with her? He couldn’t claim to “find” her there without sayin’ how he came to be there himself, away off the road, and perhaps causin’ considerable curiosity as to why he was there at all. So he bundled her into his own car. He took her back to the studio. He put her into the upper room – he had a key to that from previous experience – where she’d at least have a bed to lie on. He locked her in, fully expectin’ she’d have the sense to push the key through and fish it under the sill when she woke up.

‘She didn’t. She lost
her
head, too.

‘It must have given him still another jolt when he found the same little gal appearin’ next day as a guest in his own home.

‘Dr Luke’s got an interestingly blind account of it. “Tom,” he says, “liked her. He was even more furiously didactic and insufferable than usual.” Didactic? Insufferable? He was scared. Listen to the tone of his voice! See how he shies back, this chap who’ll tell you all the details of a post-mortem while eatin’ bread and butter, yet feels his throat go dry when Belle starts talking about the injuries to Rita Wainright.

‘All that remained for Tom, now, was another visit to the Pirates’ Den to make sure of what had happened to that missing cartridge-case. By this time (let me repeat) he’d gone through the phase of mere remorse and was now good and scared for his own skin.

‘One: they’d found the bodies. Two: they’d found the gun. Three: the coppers suspected hocus-pocus. If there happened to be any other little thing he’d left behind in that cave, he might be for it.

‘But he couldn’t go on Monday night. Because why? Because they had a guest – Belle Sullivan – who kept ‘em up late. Even when she’d been put to sleep with dope, the old man himself was restless and stayed awake most of the night. Tom couldn’t go. So it had to be Tuesday night, the night before the inquest.

‘Where Tom got a second gun I can’t tell you. I’d hazard a flyin’ guess he got several to choose from for his great effort; and, as Molly’s father said, they’re floatin’ about as common as gooseberries nowadays. When he went to the Pirates’ Den that night, he had blood in his eye and he meant business.’

Molly pulled her skirt over her knees and cried out in protest.

‘Surely,’ she said, ‘Tom Croxley wouldn’t have shot his own father?’

‘Ho ho,’ said H.M., with a chuckle of such ghoulish mirth that little children would have fled from him. ‘But he had no idea on this good green earth it
was
his own father.

‘If the parent misunderstood the son, just see how the son misunderstood the father. It happens in the best families, they say. To Dr Tom, Dr Luke was an old dodderer fit only to lie gaspin’ in the sun and get lectured to when he wouldn’t eat his porridge.’ H.M.’s face grew murderous. ‘Of all the people Tom
didn’t
expect to run into anywhere, especially in a cave at one o’clock in the morning, his old man led the list.

‘What he saw at a distance, in dim candlelight, was the bent back of a man holdin’ a bathing-suit in each hand. He’d guessed somebody was there, right enough. Because he’d seen a car parked in the road, even if he didn’t get close enough to identify the number-plate.

‘And then?’

‘Tom completely lost his head. He fired a couple of blind shots, not hitting anything. But the man keeled over just the same, against the moonlight streamin’ in from the sea entrance.

‘We will now,’ H.M. added, with emphasis and dignity, ‘return to
me
.’

For some time he had been twisting the cigar in his fingers. At this point he condescended to put it into his mouth, indicating that he wished it lighted. I then took a – perhaps fairly large – burning brand out of the fire, and extended it politely in the general direction of his face.

This may have been unwise, since it provoked an outburst in which he inquired whether I thought I was a goddam lion-tamer, and intimated that I must be in the habit of lighting the kitchen fire with incendiary bombs. It was Molly who got him soothed down presently.

‘When we found the diamonds back in their box on Tuesday afternoon,’ he was persuaded to continue, ‘that tore it. Tom Croxley was the feller we wanted. No doubt about it now.

‘Up to then I hadn’t been absolutely certain. And I still didn’t see how Rita’s and Sullivan’s levitation trick had been worked. But when we went in early in the evening to pay Willie Johnson’s fine in advance – after all, could we blame the poor fellow if the majesty of my appearance made him think I was Nero? – I heard about the garden-roller. That finished up everything.

‘I’m not joking, son. I
was
scared.

‘Here was the blinkin’ awful cussedness of things in general, back on my neck again. Here was the father, as fine and honest an old boy in his way as I’ve ever come across. He was dead set on solving this problem. And the murderer, if he did solve it, would turn out to be the son he was so proud of that you can hear Dr Luke’s chest-buttons burstin’ every time he mentions Tom.

‘I don’t want you to think, curse you, that I was actin’ from any motives of human sympathy. I’ve got no human sympathy. G
RR
!’ said H.M., leaning forward and looking us both in the eye. ‘But it did seem a good idea to bribe the crew of a fishing-boat to (a) get that roller to blazes away from the foot of the cliff; and (b) to keep their mouths shut afterwards. I expect I’ll be payin’ blackmail for the rest of my life.

‘I hoped the doctor wouldn’t tumble to it: to the mechanics of it, I mean. But he did. I knew that when he rang me up in the middle of the night.

‘The worst of it was that you two were out canoodlin’ in the car until three o’clock in the morning …’

Molly smiled placidly.

‘Maestro,’ I said, ‘for many mortal months I had been trying to persuade that girl to give up her so-and-so father and her so-and-so principles. I wanted her to throw in her lot with a reckless Bohemian like me, who stays up almost until midnight every night. And do you know what finally did the trick?’

‘Bah,’ said Molly.

‘Belle Sullivan, and Belle Sullivan’s philosophy. For the first time, that girl looked at her home and said what the hell? I hear Belle has a boy-friend nowadays, and I wish her very much luck. She did the trick.’

Again Molly smiled placidly.

‘Nonsense,’ she declared. ‘I asked Dr Luke if it would be all right, and he said yes, so I went ahead. Father was dreadfully annoyed. But,’ added Molly, ‘what the hell? If it weren’t for poor old Dr Luke …’

H.M. spoke quietly.

‘I told you it was tragedy, my wench. It couldn’t have been anything else. But it might have been a much worse tragedy if Tom Croxley had hit his father when he fired those blind shots into the cave.

‘You’d left
me
stranded out here, curse you. I couldn’t get in to head the doctor off when he started investigatin’. Naturally, I had a most excellent idea of where he was going. As I told you and Craft and the doctor, you’d been goin’ on about caves ever since I’d been here. The Pirates’ Den seemed to fill the bill.

‘My wheel-chair wasn’t any good since you fellers tried to push me over the cliff in it and busted the motor. So I walked. Toe and all, I walked. When I got there …

‘You see what had happened, don’t you? Tom slipped out of the house before his father. Croxley Senior, speedin’ like a maniac to get to the Pirates’ Den before that drug overcame him, passed his son without recognizin’ him any more than Tom saw the old man.

‘When Tom fired those shots, that shape ahead of him, that “somebody”, fell. Dr Luke managed to get out an electric torch. Its beam wobbled round, and up over his own face, before he flopped down again with the drug in him.

‘And when I got there, a pretty long time afterwards, I found Tom sittin’ at the outer mouth of the tunnel in just about a demented state. The moon was shining down on him and he had his head in his hands. Y’see, he thought he’d killed his father.’

H.M. took several puffs at his cigar, yet he did not appear to enjoy them. He cleared his throat.

‘I went back into the cave with him. Dr Luke wasn’t even scratched; he was only full of secconal. Tom and I didn’t talk much. I didn’t
say
I knew, but he knew I knew. I told him to help me get his father back up to Dr Luke’s car. Then to hare off for home himself, and sneak in, and never let on to anybody he’d been out of the house that night.’

‘But Tom,’ Molly suggested, ‘took care to dispose of the spent cartridge-case and the two bathing-suits?’

H.M. sniffed.

‘Well, no,’ he admitted. ‘
I disposed
of ’em. I slung the bathing-suits into the sea – Devon morality must ’a’ got an awful shock if they were washed up anywhere – and I found the cartridge-case in his waistcoat-pocket, so I kept it.

‘I took him home, and you know the rest. He never got a real glimpse of the figure with the gun; he was too far gone. And he never could prove afterwards, thank God, that those two had been murdered.’

There was a long and uncomfortable silence, while we all thought round one subject without daring to approach it.

‘Of course you heard …’ Molly began.

‘All about Dr Luke’s death …’ I said.

‘In Bristol …’

‘Uh-huh,’ said H.M. He glowered at the floor, and seemed to be wriggling his toes inside his shoes. ‘Y’know, I think I’m a little bit sorry.’

‘He was only there for the day,’ Molly said clearly. ‘Visiting a friend of his. He didn’t have to stay. He was under no obligation to stay.’