The Merciless Ladies (37 page)

With a great effort the court came singing back, back out of a distant dome of time …

So Mr Rosse had been too clever …

… when a gentleman drove up in a taxi.

‘Can you describe this man?' asked the coroner.

‘Yes, sir. He was above average height, about five feet ten or eleven, about thirty years of age, and rather thin, with a tendency to a slight stoop. Grey eyes, good teeth, and wearing a dinner jacket evening dress, no hat, fair hair, silk scarf …'

With a black monogram.

Mr Rosse had been too clever. Wise Mr Rosse.

I had been too clever.

‘… And what happened after they left the Savoy?'

‘They drove back to Mrs Stafford's flat, sir; at which they arrived at ten thirty-five. They went into the flat laughing and talking, and presently a light came on in the window which I had previously ascertained was the sitting-room.'

Mr Sparks had a thrice damned habit of closing his eyes while he spoke and then opening them very suddenly to stare at his notebook as if he expected his notes to have changed their significance. But they had not. Nothing now would ever change their significance.

‘This light remained on for about fifteen minutes, and then a light came on in the window which I had previously ascertained was the bedroom. Both lights remained on, sir. At eleven-fifteen exact I went round to the back of the flat, where there is a bedroom window looking upon Carlton Mews, hoping that I might be able to see something more, but the curtains of the bedroom were drawn. I then returned and took up my position in Clarendon Gardens again.

‘At midnight thirty the light in the living-room went out, but the bedroom light remained on. I continued observation until midnight forty when the man I had seen entering the flat with Mrs Stafford came out and walked rapidly into Curzon Street.'

Mr Sparks closed his eyes again and coughed into his fist to show he had finished.

The coroner said: ‘ Did you not follow the man?'

‘I did, sir. But as he came to the corner a taxi happened to be passing and he hailed it and drove away. I tried to follow, but couldn't get a taxi for myself in time.'

‘What was your exact purpose in keeping this watch on Mrs Stafford's movements?'

‘I had been instructed to make a report on her moral character.'

‘Did this man when he left the flat show any signs of emotion or distress?'

‘As I've said, he walked very quick, sir. In coming out of the doorway he looked both ways to make sure no one was about. But he didn't see me, sir.'

‘During the time you were watching, did you hear any explosion which might have been a shot fired?'

‘I did not, sir. But, then, a pocket Colt don't make a big noise and I was on the other side of the street.'

‘Did you know the identity of this man you saw with Mrs Stafford?'

‘No, sir; but I'd know him again anywhere.'

‘How long had you been keeping a watch on Mrs Stafford's movements?'

‘Fourteen days, sir.'

‘Had you seen her in company with this man before?'

‘No, sir.'

‘Very well, Mr Sparks. Don't leave the court. You may be needed again.'

I watched him leave the box and take a seat at the end of the third bench from the front. A harmless little man.

‘Call Miss Mary Oakley.'

A tall, thin, pleasant-faced spinster took the stand.

She lived by herself, she said, and occupied the flat below Mrs Stafford's. She had been in bed for several days with bronchitis. On the night of the thirteenth she had been in bed reading and listening to the wireless when she heard what she took to be a car backfire. She had not looked at the time and had only recollected the noise when interrogated by the police. But one thing she did remember: she had been listening to the third act of
Aida
, and had switched off at eleven-fifty, immediately it was over. ‘And the noise I heard was soon after I switched off.'

‘You heard nothing else unusual?'

‘Nothing.'

When she was gone it was observed that Inspector Priestley was again standing up in the well of the court.

‘In view of the evidence which has been given this afternoon I wish to apply for an adjournment of this inquest for one week.'

The coroner consulted with the clerk of the court, but I knew his answer was a foregone conclusion. I rose, slid across the man beside me and pushed past the policeman at the door. I had no wish at all to encounter Mr Sparks on his way out.

Beasley must have noticed my movement and had also slipped out, just as quickly aware that proceedings were over until the police chose to have them resumed.

‘Developments, what?' he said. ‘This is a question of
cherchez l'homme
. It'll make a story. Are you going east, old boy?'

I tried to think of an excuse, but he talked on until we reached my Hornet. I made a motion towards it, and he got in. We drove off in silence. I wanted to think.

‘You don't look well, Grant. Feeling all right?'

‘I've had flu.'

‘Ah. It's no good getting up too soon.'

There was silence again.

‘Tell me what you think happened', I said suddenly.

‘What, in this case?'

‘In this case.'

‘Well, that's a tall order, isn't it? Still … OK. I think … I think X, this unknown man, had a crush on Mrs Stafford – they say she was a good looker – and they made a date to spend the evening together. Off they went and had a good evening, and back they came to the flat full of drink and high spirits. They fall for each other in a big way, but afterwards, ah, afterwards, they come back to earth with a bump and they quarrel over something. Maybe he asks for money. Anyway, she takes the revolver from the drawer and threatens to shoot him. Or maybe she merely gets histrionic and threatens to shoot herself. Anyway, he grabs the revolver, they struggle and off goes the gun.'

‘I notice', I said, ‘that you give this man credit for not doing the job deliberately.'

‘Well, obviously this wasn't a premeditated act or he'd not have taken her to a fashionable restaurant beforehand to advertise himself, would he? Then he'd probably have brought his own weapon; it's hardly likely he'd know she had one handy.' Beasley grunted and filled his pipe. ‘Of course, if it was a long-standing liaison and he was tiring of her, that puts another complexion on the matter. But I don't feel that that was it.'

‘Why not?'

‘Wouldn't the inquiry agent have seen him before? And wouldn't the Brade woman have dropped some hint? She'd no reason to love her mistress.'

We drove for some minutes.

‘Anyway', he said, ‘she didn't take out the revolver in the first place to protect herself.'

‘Why not?' I said again.

He looked at me. ‘Well, women don't discard their underwear to defend their virtue.'

We came to a stop. ‘This is as far as I go. I suppose', I said, ‘there's just a chance they may still find the man had nothing to do with it.'

Beasley got out of the car. ‘ The evidence was pretty conclusive, wasn't it? Miss What's-it heard the shot about midnight, and the inquiry agent saw the man leave at twelve-forty. Do you know what I'd be inclined to do if I were the man?'

‘No.'

He waved his pipe. ‘Come forward and give my version. He might get away with accidental death. After all, there can't have been witnesses to what happened.
She
can't deny what he says. Verdict at a trial might hinge on the strength of his motive, on how much the man stood to gain. It's a moot point. Don't you agree?'

I said: ‘ But men who do that sort of thing don't usually have the guts to come forward until they're found by the police.'

‘Quite', he said. ‘So long. And thanks for the lift.

I watched him lope swiftly away.

I drove to my flat, threw pyjamas and a few accessories into an attaché case and took it out to the car. At a nearby garage I filled up with oil and petrol.

As I left London a few lights were already winking through the early dusk of the late October afternoon. Rain-clouds blew across the smoky sky. Buses roared and grated down the narrow, busy streets, swinging in and out like galleons on an asphalt sea. Milestones in every suburb, the white granite pillars of ‘The Tailor of Taste' and the scarlet and gold façade of the sixpenny stores; or the monstrous shape of some local super-cinema thrust itself out, electric lights already glinting a spurious smile of welcome. The pavements were crowded. The world was full of anonymous little egos each jostling with the others, each talkative but secretive, self-assertive but self-afraid, free to go as it wished but a prisoner within its own ivory tower until death brought release, death coming unobtrusively and gently with old age or striking swiftly and unnaturally as it had done with Olive Stafford.

The afternoon advanced and one town succeeded another, each with the same scene to print on the memory so that there was no memory; lights flickered and multiplied; the few but increasing stretches of unlighted road were a rest to aching eyes. I stopped again for petrol, but not for food, being conscious only of the hunger to get on. I drove clumsily, without consideration for the car.

Can love turn to hate while the minute-hand of the clock moves an inch on the clock's face? But love had never entered into it: attraction and aversion had been different sides of the same coin. And all in a way actuated by the feelings I had for the couple I was now going to visit.

Yet one could not unload the final responsibility on them. Certainly they had provided – their problems had provided – the seed bed from which had sprouted this abnormal, divergent relationship between Olive and me. The crisis of Tuesday night could not be called a catharsis for there had been nothing vicarious about it. But it had been a purging, a resolution, the climax of a conflict that had been deep-rooted in my nature and in Olive's too.

It was one of those intense, cloudy, English nights when there is no wind and no light, when there is nothing but an abyss of darkness between the great nebulae of the towns and the small star clusters of each succeeding village. You journey through spaces of night between steep walls of trees, and the approach of another car is like the moon rising below the horizon.

As hours went by the villages began to wink out and the towns to become less garish. A thin freckle of rain set the screen-wipers to work. The car was running well despite its treatment. I was conscious for the first time of a sense of discomfort which suggested hunger. A snack-bar was still open in a town whose name I never knew and some sandwiches were available. The bright light of the bar was distasteful, as also was the sleepy barman talking and yawning with the solitary customer in the far corner. Keep away from other human beings; keep away while I think what is to happen next.

Strange that Mr Rosse had ruined everything by putting the idea of the
dum casta
clause in my head, and then acting on it himself. Yet but for the revolver all would still have worked out. Mr Sparks's testimony would have confirmed Maud's. If Maud had refused to tell on her mistress his alone might have sufficed. Olive in any case was likely to have been powerless – as she had seen in a flash. The one in-calculable – the imponderable of
this
situation – had been her possession of a revolver. Would she have used it on me? I thought so.

The night turned more chill as I began to thread a way through the Lancashire mill towns. Here again lights winked afresh. Here again big multiple shops and super-cinemas and rows of poor houses, and the occasional clanging tram.

In Lancaster I stopped to fill up again, and waited long enough to drink three cups of strong black coffee. As I climbed back into the car the first streaks of dawn were splitting the night clouds of the east. Light came slowly, and when I ran over the border into Westmorland there was just sufficient daylight to see the landscape sprinkled with snow. To have gone round and into Crichton Beck by way of the road Holly had once described would have been a sensible precaution; but impatience insisted on the direct route over the Long Neck Pass.

Past the Langdales the snow showed signs of thickening, but at the beginning of the climb over the shoulder of the mountain it disappeared. The wind had been blowing from the north, and if further snow was to be found it would be on the other face.

The car was already hot with its long, hard drive. As we climbed the clouds began to clear and a desolate sun stared over the top of the mountains. Boiling, the car reached the top. I stopped and lifted the bonnet; steam simmered from every joint of the cooling system. I walked ahead a few yards, and peered down into a valley of deathly stillness and virgin snow. When the water had stopped boiling I filled the radiator with some scrapings of snow from the ditch and went on. Some guiding providence – whose help I should have appreciated more often during the previous week – avoided a skid, and the valley was reached.

There had been quietness on my visits before, an all-embracing, all-powerful silence which incidental noise could no more penetrate than a fish breaking the surface can disturb the deeper quietness of a lake. But all previous silences were fussy and commonplace before the supreme quiet of this autumn morning. Even the sputtering of the engine was at once absorbed. A phrase came into my mind and kept recurring: ‘The peace that passeth all understanding.' Well, you couldn't get more inapt than that, so far as I was concerned.

Slipping and sliding, I came to the floor of the valley. Low cloud had drifted across again to obscure the sun. I drew up before the cottage and switched off the engine. Now the true weight of the silence fell on me like darkness on a snuffed candle. There was no movement about the cottage. The gaunt branches of the trees showed black against the snowy hillside. Into numbed ears crept the faint whisper of the stream.