The Second Shot (20 page)

‘Well, Tapers, I congratulate you.’

‘On what?’ I asked, startled.

‘On that pretty little theory of yours. You say you haven’t tested it?’

‘What theory? Oh, about someone concealed by the path. No, certainly, I haven’t.’

‘Well, it was a smart piece of work, my boy. You were perfectly right.’

I stared at him. ‘I was –
right
? How?’ I had not had the faintest hope of there being anything in my idea at all. It seemed impossible that there could have been.

‘Somebody
had
been standing at that very twist in the path.’ Seeing the astonishment in my face, he amplified. ‘You remember when I called out to that chap not to move because I wanted to see if he was visible from the other clearing? That, my dear Tapers, was a ruse. What I wanted to do was to have a look at that very turn in the path, to see if there was anything in the notion of yours or not; it occurred to me that the police might not have bothered to examine the ground a yard or two off the path. But I didn’t want him to know what I was going to do, or he’d have wanted to come and do it too; and at present, in view of what we agreed last night, I’m rather keeping any discoveries I may make to myself.’

‘Well?’ I asked in excitement.

‘Well, as I say, you were perfectly right. Someone had been standing there, and, judging from the number of marks, for more than a short time. And then, judging from two marks in particular, more deeply indented than the others, for quite a few minutes in one particular spot – during which, I think we might infer, not a muscle was moved. (It’s not easy to keep the feet absolutely still for more than half a minute, unless one’s standing absolutely rigid, you know.) And I think we might also infer that those few minutes were the particular ones that elapsed between your leaving the glade and the second shot. Now then: what do you think of that, young Tapers?’

For once in my life, I did not even notice the distasteful appellation. ‘But are you sure of this? How can you be? I thought the ground was too hard to take marks. That fellow said so.’

‘So the paths were. This particular place, however, was quite damp – well-shaded, lush grass, in winter probably boggy. Anyhow, it certainly wasn’t too hard to take impressions, because the impressions are there.’

‘Well, I can’t understand it,’ I could only mutter feebly.

‘And what is more, Tapers,’ Sheringham continued, in a voice more significant still, ‘it may interest you to know that whoever stood there wore high-heeled shoes.’

I looked at him sharply. ‘A woman!’

‘You draw the deduction,’ Sheringham said ironically, ‘just as swiftly as I did.’

I can only say that I was genuinely thunderstruck at the news. It was the last thing in the world that I could have expected.

After breakfast Sheringham told me that he was going out to see the superintendent, if he had arrived. Did I wish him to say anything about the footprints he had discovered, or not?

‘No,’ I said firmly, for I had already made up my mind on that point. ‘Not yet, at any rate.’

‘But if I get the impression that he’s out for your blood at the inquest?’

‘In any case,’ I told him, ‘we must find out more about them, and particularly who made them, before we divulge the information to the police.’

‘Very well,’ he agreed. ‘After all, it’s your pigeon.’

We were in the hall, speaking of course in low tones.

‘I shall wait for you in the study,’ I said. ‘John will certainly let us have the use of it when we want it during the next few days.’

Sheringham nodded and went out. I sauntered into the garden to ponder further over those mysterious footprints. Who could possibly have made them?

I was leaning against one of the trees which border the banked edge of the front of the garden, looking absently out over the view across the valley, when my name spoken in a low voice just behind me caused me to turn round hastily. It was Elsa Verity, the first time I had seen her since her fiancé’s death.

The embarrassment at once seized me which always seems to attach to the presence of the recently bereaved, but in this case it was intensified by the thought which instantly flashed through my mind: did she too think me responsible for Eric’s death?

If she did, I was relieved to notice that she did not show it. She was pale, naturally, and there was fear as well as grief in her eyes, but this I put down to the impending inquest, which hung heavy over all of us. In any case there was certainly no shrinking from my person, as otherwise could hardly have failed to be the case.

‘Mr Pinkerton,’ she said quietly, ‘may I speak to you a minute?’

‘Of course,’ I said gently. ‘Let me bring you out a chair.’

‘No, thank you. I only want to ask you one thing. No, two things.’ She glanced back towards the house, as if to make sure that no one was within earshot. ‘Mr Pinkerton, is it true that Eric had been having an affair with Mrs de Ravel?’

I only hesitated a moment. One look into her eyes told me that the time for subterfuges had gone by; she wanted the truth, and she had a right to the truth. ‘Yes, Elsa. Quite true.’

‘She had been his mistress? You know for certain?’ The poor child spoke quite collectedly. It was evident that the question was dreadfully familiar to her mind.

‘For certain,’ I replied.

‘Thank you. That’s one thing I wanted to ask you. The other was this: was he wanting to marry me only for my money?’

That came as a greater shock, and I did not feel myself competent to answer it directly. ‘Have you any reason to think so?’ I temporized.

‘Yes, Ethel told me so. She thought I’d better know. I want to ask you if you thought so too – if everyone thought so.’ Her voice did break there for an instant, but only on a single word.

‘Yes, I did. And I think everyone did.’ With Ethel taking the responsibility of the knowledge, I could only feel it my duty to confirm it.

She did not answer for a moment but gazed, as I had been doing a minute ago, out over the wooded slopes beyond us. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured. ‘That does make it – easier.’

Without another word she turned and went into the house again.

I followed her with my eyes, and saw her meet and pass Ethel in the doorway, and caught Ethel’s eye. Something in it seemed to summon me, and I walked towards her. At the same moment she came out to me.

Before I could speak she had caught my hand in hers and grasped it tightly. ‘Whatever happens this morning, dear, dear Cyril,’ she whispered, ‘you’ll know that we…that we…’ Her voice broke more than Elsa’s had done.

My embarrassment, too, was greater than Elsa had caused me, very much greater. Anyone might have seen us from the house.

I succeeded in withdrawing my hand. ‘Thank you, Ethel,’ I said, more lightly than I felt. ‘But it won’t happen, you know. By the way,’ I hurried on, alarmed by the growing intensity of her expression, ‘I’ve just confirmed what you’d told Elsa about Eric being after her money. She asked me point-blank, and I thought you would wish me to do so.’

Ethel was quite evidently surprised. ‘What I’d told her? I never told her anything of the sort, Cyril.’

I was surprised in my turn. ‘She said you had. Quite definitely. She said you said it would be better for her to know.’

‘I dare say it is, but I certainly never told her. I was quite sure she wouldn’t believe it. I intended to later, when she had got over the first shock, to make her forget him more easily. But how very strange.’

‘She must have suspected it somehow, and thought you wouldn’t give her a straight answer,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘So she used an innocent subterfuge to obtain the truth. It was plucky of her.’

‘Yes,’ Ethel agreed, no less thoughtfully. ‘She is plucky. She’s taken the whole thing wonderfully well. I must admit that there’s more stamina in her than I imagined. She may be as ignorant of the world as ever I thought, but she’s certainly not so milk-and-watery as – well, as Sylvia fancied. In fact, in a stand-up fight between the two of them, I’m not nearly so sure as I was that Sylvia would have won. Well, thank goodness it didn’t come to that.’

‘Amen,’ I replied earnestly.

‘And thank
you
, dear friend,’ Ethel said, with a return of her intense look.

‘I expect Sheringham back any minute now,’ I said hastily. ‘He’ll do wonders, you’ll see. I think I’ll stroll along and meet him.’

The only successful way, I have learned, of coping with feminine emotion is firmly to avoid it.

I went down the six stone steps from the garden, crossed the open lane, and sat down on the edge of the steeply sloping field beyond which I could see Sheringham from whatever direction he came.

But even there I was not to remain long alone. I had
The Times
with me and was making a pretence of reading it, but happening to glance back towards the house I saw Armorel moodily slouching down the steps. She advanced across the lane in my direction. I would much rather have remained alone.

She plumped down beside me, drew her knees up under her chin, clasped them with her bare brown arms, and stared gloomily ahead of her in silence.

‘Well, Armorel?’ I said.

‘Damn this inquest,’ she muttered. ‘Damn and damn it. I’m dreading it.’

‘You?’ I queried in surprise.

‘Yes,
me,’
she returned, quite fiercely.

I hesitated for a moment. ‘If you’re afraid of it coming out that you said to me – what you said to me in Bluebell Wood that morning, I really don’t see how they can possibly manage to – ’

‘Oh,
that,’
she muttered contemptuously.

Armorel has always been an insoluble enigma to me. At one moment I am convinced that I really do know her at last, the next I am in despair of ever knowing the first thing about her. Certainly I could not understand her that morning, or the reason for her strange mood, which caused her apparently to seek my company and then snap at me when she had got it. Anyone might have thought that it was she who was suspected of having killed her cousin.

‘I’ve just been having a few words with Elsa,’ I said, determined to shift the topic of conversation from our two selves. ‘Really, I was surprised to find how very well she has taken it. I expected to see her on the point of collapse, or just recovering from one.’

‘Yes,’ Armorel nodded. ‘Eric may have taken her in, but she always took you in, Pinkie, didn’t she?’

‘Took me in? With what?’

‘Her style. The blue-eyed-doll pose.“Oh, Mr Pinkerton, do tell me some more about your wonderful stamp collection. How
marvellous
it must be to collect stamps as well as you do!”’ Armorel’s caricature of Miss Verity’s pretty way of drawing me out on our walks together was ridiculous, of course, but there was enough reminiscence of truth in it to make me glance at her uneasily.

‘What do you mean, Armorel?’

‘And then she’d come back and imitate what you’d said to her to Eric and me, till we nearly died of laughter,’ Armorel continued, returning my glance with positive malice.

‘She – she did?’ I exclaimed, much shocked. I remembered Eric’s words to the same effect that evening he had – that unfortunate evening; could it be possible that he had not been drawing on a crude invention after all, as I had imagined?

‘She certainly did,’ Armorel mocked. ‘Oh, yes, my poor Pinkie, you were properly taken in. No wonder you thought yourself in love with her.’

‘Certainly I never imagined anything of the sort,’ I retorted, grieved and hurt by this revelation of Miss Verity’s astonishing and unkind duplicity, and yet with a fleeting moment to spare for wonder too at the way in which Armorel seemed to be positively delighting in rubbing salt into the wounds of my gullibility. ‘Far from it.’

Really, I do not think I shall ever understand Armorel. She simply rounded on me. ‘You were!’ she blazed. ‘Can’t you speak the truth for once? You know perfectly well you were. Just because your damned conceit’s hurt, you pretend you weren’t what you know perfectly well you were. Of course you were in love with her. Good God, Pinkie, you make me sick. What the hell do you think you’ve got to be so damned conceited about? You’re taken in up to the eyebrows by any girl who comes along, and then you pretend – Oh, shut up, for God’s sake.’

I was so amazed at this attack that I could not even be annoyed with its perversions, its lack of truth, and its incredible lack of logic. To cap all, I had not even attempted to speak when I was ordered so peremptorily to be silent.

I think I may claim credit for saying only, and in the mildest manner: ‘One would think you really wished me to be in love with Miss Verity, Armorel.’ Though how it could affect her in any way whether I was in love with Miss Verity or not I could not imagine, to say nothing of the chit’s impertinence in referring at all to my purely private feelings. But no doubt (I reflected charitably) her mind was still harping on the ridiculous idea of being responsible for her cousin’s death by indirectly inciting me to murder. That at any rate was the kindest explanation.

‘Of course I don’t wish you to be in love with her,’ she snapped at me now. ‘What the blazes do you think it matters to me whether you are or not? Of course I want you to be. Didn’t I say so the night before last? Anyhow, I don’t care a hang if you are or not. So now you know.’

That, however, was certainly not the case. So far from enlightening me, Armorel had succeeded, almost incredibly, in contradicting herself no less than four times in half a dozen sentences. I contented myself with saying merely: ‘I don’t think you’re quite yourself this morning, Armorel, are you?’

‘Well, who would be, sitting next to you?’ was her quite gratuitously insulting retort.

I could not refrain from pointing out that at least I had not forced my company on her. I had not even invited her to sit next to me.

‘Well, if you don’t want me so much, why didn’t you say so?’ she replied angrily. ‘I’d better go.’

Fortunately at that moment Sheringham came in sight, and I hailed him. ‘You’ll excuse me, Armorel,’ I was beginning, when she cut me short by calling Sheringham to come down to us.

Really, her effrontery was outrageous. As soon as Sheringham had approached us she said: ‘Come on, Mr Sheringham. We’ve been waiting for you. Tell us all about it.’ And she actually smiled at him. To hear her two minutes ago, one would have said that she would never smile at anyone again.