The Oxford Book of American Det (53 page)

Everything was all right. She was at the country cottage, where she and Dad and Harry had come down for the skating on the frozen lake; possibly even a little mild skiing, if the snow came on according to the weather forecast. And the snow had fallen. She should have been glad of that, though for some reason the sight of it on the window-sill struck her with a kind of terror.

Shivering in the warm bed, the clothes pulled up about her chin, she looked at the little clock on her bedside. Twenty minutes past nine. She had overslept; Dad and Harry would be wanting their breakfast. Again she told herself (that everything was all right: though now, fully awake, she knew it was not. The unpleasantness of yesterday returned. Mrs. Topham next door—that old shrew and thief as well...

It was the only thing which could have marred this weekend. They had looked forward to the skating: the crisp blades thudding and ringing on the ice, the flight, the long scratching drag as you turned, the elm-trees black against a clear cold sky. But there was Mrs. Topham with her stolen watch and her malicious good manners, huddled up in the cottage next door and spoiling everything.

Put it out of your mind! No good brooding over it: put it out of your mind!

Dorothy Brant braced herself and got out of bed, reaching for her dressing-gown and slippers. But it was not her dressing-gown she found draped across the chair; it was her heavy fur coat. And there were a pair of soft-leather slippers. They were a pair of soft-leather moccasins, ornamented with bead-work, which Harry had brought her back from the States; but now the undersides were cold, damp, and stiff, almost frozen. That was when a subconscious fear struck at her, took possession, and would not leave.

Closing the window, she padded out to the bathroom. The small cottage, with its crisp white curtains and smell of old wood, was so quiet that she could hear voices talking downstairs. It was a mumble in which no words were distinguishable: Harry’s quick tenor, her father’s slower and heavier voice, and another she could not identify, but which was slowest and heaviest of all.

What was wrong? She hurried through her bath and through her dressing. Not only were they up but they must be getting their own breakfast, for she could smell coffee boiling. And she was very slow; in spite of nine hours’ sleep she felt as edgy and washed-out as though she had been up all night.

Giving a last jerk of the comb through her brown bobbed hair, putting on no powder or lipstick, she ran downstairs. At the door of the living-room she stopped abruptly.

Inside were her father, her cousin Harry, and the local Superintendent of Police.

“Good morning, miss,” said the Superintendent.

She never forgot the look of that little room or the look on the faces of those in it.

Sunlight poured into it, touching the bright-coloured rough-woven rugs, the rough stone fireplace. Through side windows she could see out across the snow-covered lawn to where—twenty yards away and separated from them only by a tall laurel hedge, with a gateway—was Mrs. Topham’s white weather-boarded cottage.

But what struck her with a shock of alarm as she came into the room was the sense of a conversation suddenly cut off; the look she surprised on their faces when they glanced round, quick and sallow, as a camera might have surprised it.

“Good morning, miss,” repeated Superintendent Mason, saluting.

Harry Ventnor intervened, in a kind of agony. His naturally high colour was higher still; even his large feet and bulky shoulders, his small sinewy hands, looked agitated.

“Don’t say anything, Dolly!” he urged. “Don’t say anything! They can’t make you say anything. Wait until—“

“I certainly think—“ began her father slowly. He looked down his nose, and then along the side of his pipe, everywhere except at Dorothy. “I certainly think,” he went on, clearing his throat, “that it would be as well not to speak hastily until—“

“If
you please, sir,” said Superintendent Mason, clearing his throat. “Now, miss, I’m afraid I must ask you some questions. But it is my duty to tell you that you need not answer my questions until you have seen your solicitor.”

“Solicitor? But I don’t want a solicitor. What on earth should I want with a solicitor?” Superintendent Mason looked meaningly at her father and Harry Ventnor, as though bidding them to mark that.

“It’s about Mrs. Topham, miss.”

“Oh!”

“Why do you say ‘Oh’?”

“Go on, please. What is it?”

“I understand, miss, that you and Mrs. Topham had ‘words’ yesterday? A bit of a dust-up, like?”

“Yes, you could certainly call it that.”

“May I ask what about?”

“I’m sorry,” said Dorothy; “I can’t tell you that. It would only give the old cat an opportunity to say I had been slandering her. So that’s it! What has she been telling you?”

“Why, miss,” said Superintendent Mason, taking out a pencil and scratching the side of his jaw with it, “I’m afraid she’s not exactly in a condition to tell us anything. She’s in a nursing-home at Guildford, rather badly smashed up round the head. Just between ourselves, it’s touch and go whether she’ll recover.” First Dorothy could not feel her heart beating at all, and then it seemed to pound with enormous rhythm. The Superintendent was looking at her steadily. She forced herself to say:

“You mean she’s had an accident?”

“Not exactly, miss. The doctor says she was hit three or four times with that big glass paper-weight you may have seen on the table at her cottage. Eh?”

“You don’t mean—you don’t mean somebody
did
it? Deliberately? But who did it?”

“Well, miss,” said Superintendent Mason, looking at her still harder until he became a huge Puritan face with a small mole beside his nose. “I’m bound to tell you that by everything we can see so far, it looks as though you did it.” This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be. She afterwards remembered, in a detached kind of way, studying all of them: the little lines round Harry’s eyes in the sunlight, the hastily brushed light hair, the loose leather wind-jacket whose zip fastener was half undone. She remembered thinking that despite his athletic prowess he looked ineffectual and a little foolish. But then her own father was not of much use now.

She heard her own voice.

“But that’s absurd!”

“I hope so, miss. I honestly hope so. Now tell me: were you out of this house last night?”

“When?”

“At any time.”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Yes, I think I was.”

“For God’s sake, Dolly,” said her father, “don’t say anything more until we’ve got a lawyer here. I’ve telephoned to town; I didn’t want to alarm you; I didn’t even wake you: there’s some explanation of this. There must be!” It was not her own emotion; it was the wretchedness of his face which held her. Bulky, semi-bald, worried about business, worried about everything else in this world, that was John Brant. His crippled left arm and black glove were pressed against his side.

He stood in the bright pool of sunlight, a face of misery.

“I’ve—seen her,” he explained. “It wasn’t pretty, that wasn’t. Not that I haven’t seen worse. In the war.” He touched his arm. “But you’re a little girl, Dolly; you’re only a little girl. You couldn’t have done that.”

His plaintive tone asked for confirmation.

“Just one moment, sir,” interposed Superintendent Mason. “Now, miss! You tell me you were outside the house last night?”

“Yes.”

“In the snow?”

“Yes, yes, yes!”

“Do you remember the time?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Tell me, miss: what size shoes do you wear?”

“Four.”

“That’s a rather small size, isn’t it?” When she nodded dumbly, Superintendent Mason shut up his notebook. “Now, if you’ll just come with me?” The cottage had a side door. Without putting his fingers on the knob, Mason twisted the spindle round and opened it. The overhang of the eaves had kept clear the two steps leading down; but beyond a thin coating of snow lay like a plaster over the world between here and the shuttered cottage across the way.

There were two strings of footprints in that snow. Dorothy knew whose they were.

Hardened and sharp-printed, one set of prints moved out snakily from the steps, passed under the arch of the powdered laurel-hedge, and stopped at the steps to the side door of Mrs. Topham’s house. Another set of the same tracks—a little blurred, spaced at longer intervals where the person had evidently been running desperately—came back from the cottage to these steps.

That mute sign of panic stirred Dorothy’s memory. It wasn’t a dream. She had done it.

Subconsciously she had known it all the time. She could remember other things: the fur coat clasped round her pyjamas, the sting of the snow to wet slippers, the blind rush in the dark.

“Yours, miss?” inquired Superintendent Mason.

“Yes. Oh, yes, they’re mine.”

“Easy, miss,” muttered the Superintendent. “You’re looking a bit white round the gills.

Come in here and sit down; I won’t hurt you.” Then his own tone grew petulant. Or perhaps something in the heavy simplicity of the girl’s manner penetrated his official bearing. “But why did you do it, miss? Lord, why did you do it? That’s to say, breaking open that desk of hers to get a handful of trinkets not worth ten quid for the lot? And then not even taking the trouble to mess up your footprints afterwards!” He coughed, checking himself abruptly.

John Brant’s voice was acid. “Good, my friend. Very good. The first sign of intelligence so far. I presume you don’t suggest my daughter is insane?”

“No, sir. But they were her mother’s trinkets, I hear.”

“Where did you hear that? You, I suppose, Harry?”

Harry Ventnor pulled up the zip fastener of his wind-jacket as though girding himself.

He seemed to suggest that he was the good fellow whom everybody was persecuting; that he wanted to be friends with the world, if they would only let him. Yet such sincerity blazed in his small features that it was difficult to doubt his good intentions.

“Now look here, Dad, old boy. I had to tell them, didn’t I? It’s no good trying to hide things like that. I know that, just from reading those stories—“

“Stories!”

“All right: say what you like. They always find out, and then they make it worse than it really was.” He let this sink in. “I tell you, you’re going about it in the wrong way.

Suppose Dolly did have a row with the Topham about that jewellery? Suppose she did go over there last night? Suppose those are her footprints? Does that prove she bashed the Topham? Not that a public service wasn’t done; but why couldn’t it have been a burglar just as well?”

Superintendent Mason shook his head.

“Because it couldn’t, sir.”

“But why? I’m asking you, why?”

“There’s no harm in telling you that, sir, if you’ll just listen. You probably remember that it began to snow last night at a little past eleven o’clock.”

“No, I don’t. We were all in bed by then.”

“Well, you can take my word for it,” Mason told him patiently. “I was up half the night at the police station; and it did. It stopped snowing about midnight. You’ll have to take my word for that too, but we can easily prove it. You see, sir, Mrs. Topham was alive and in very good health at well after midnight. I know that too, because she rang up the police station and said she was awake and nervous and thought there were burglars in the neighbourhood. Since the lady does that same thing,” he explained with a certain grimness, “on the average of about three times a month, I don’t stress that. What I am telling you is that her call came in at 12.10, at least ten minutes after the snow had stopped.”

Harry hesitated, and the Superintendent went on with the same patient air:

“Don’t you see it, sir? Mrs. Topham wasn’t attacked until after the snow stopped.

Round her cottage now there’s twenty yards of clean, clear, unmarked snow in every direction. The only marks in that snow, the only marks of any kind at all, are the footprints Miss Brant admits she made herself.”

Then he rose at them in exasperation.

“ ‘Tisn’t as though anybody else could have made the tracks. Even if Miss Brant didn’t admit it herself, I’m absolutely certain nobody else did. You, Mr. Ventnor, wear size ten shoes. Mr. Brant wears size nine. Walk in size four tracks? Ayagh! And yet somebody did get into the cottage with a key, bashed the old lady pretty murderously, robbed her desk, and got away again. If there are no other tracks or marks of any kind in the snow, who did it? Who must have done it?”

Dorothy could consider it, now, in almost a detached way. She remembered the paper-weight with which Mrs. Topham had been struck. It lay on the table in Mrs. Topham’s stuffy parlour, a heavy glass globe with a tiny landscape inside. When you shook the glass globe, a miniature snowstorm rose within—which seemed to make the attack more horrible.

She wondered if she had left any fingerprints on it. But over everything rose Renee Topham’s face, Renee Topham, her mother’s bosom friend.

“I hated her,” said Dorothy; and, unexpectedly, she began to cry.

Dennis Jameson, of the law-firm of Morris, Farnsworth & Jameson, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, shut up his brief-case with a snap. He was putting on his hat and coat when Billy Farnsworth looked into the office.

“Hullo!” said Farnsworth. “You off to Surrey over that Brant business?”

“Yes.”

“H’m. Believe in miracles, do you?”

“No.”

“That girl’s guilty, my lad. You ought to know that.”

“It’s our business,” said Jameson, “to do what we can for our clients.” Farnsworth looked at him shrewdly. “I see it in your ruddy cheek. Quixotry is alive again. Young idealist storms to relief of good-looker in distress, swearing to—“

“I’ve met her twice,” said Jameson. “I like her, yes. But, merely using a small amount of intelligence on this, I can’t see that they’ve got such a thundering good case against her.”

“Oh, my lad!”

“Well, look at it. What do they say the girl did? This Mrs. Topham was struck several times with a glass paper-weight. There are no fingerprints on the paper-weight, which shows signs of having been wiped. But, after having the forethought to wipe her fingerprints carefully off the paper-weight, Dorothy Brant then walks back to her cottage and leaves behind two sets of footprints which could be seen by aerial observation a mile up. Is that reasonable?”