The Watersplash (20 page)

Susan always looked back upon the really quite short time during which she and Arnold Random waited for Edward in the library as one of the most uncomfortable she had ever spent. As if it wasn’t enough to have her mind in a black turmoil about Edward being arrested and wondering whether the finding of this will was going to make things better for him or worse, but there was Arnold looking as if he had every crime in the Decalogue on his conscience and walking up and down the room like a panther in a cage! The state of her mind may be indicated by the fact that she was definitely conscious of being thankful that they were on the ground floor. If Arnold chose to plunge out of the end window, there would not be more than a matter of six inches between him and some nice soft garden mould. There didn’t seem to be anything else of a lethal nature he could do before Edward got here, but she found herself counting the lengthening minutes.

Edward walked in unheralded. He gave her a quick surprised glance as he came up to the table and said,

“Well?”

Arnold’s last prowl had taken him over to the hearth. He straightened himself now and said,

“Thank you for coming. I asked you to do so because something has happened. I could not talk about it on the telephone. James made a later will than the one that has been proved. Susan has just found it.”

He was doing it well. After all, there is something in breeding. The nerve-ridden creature of a few minutes ago was gone. This was Arnold Random as both Edward and Susan had always known him—rather dry, rather formal, not very interesting, but a member of an old and honourable family, well bolstered up by tradition and a certain code of behaviour. As Edward looked at him in silence, he added,

“She will tell you.”

Susan said her piece. It could hardly have been briefer.

“His prayer-book was pushed in behind some books. The will was inside it. I brought it to Mr. Random, and he rang you up.”

Edward too had reverted to the family mould. There was not a trace of expression in either face or voice as he said,

“What books? On what shelf?”

Susan found it difficult to come by any words at all. She felt as if she was digging up stones with her bare hands as she said,

“Nathaniel Spragge. Three volumes. On the top shelf.”

His eyebrows rose slightly.

“An odd place for Uncle James to keep his will. May I ask the date?”

Arnold Random said,

“A week before he died.”

“Curiouser and curiouser, my dear Arnold. However… Am I to understand that I have an interest in this will?”

“It leaves you everything.”

Edward sat down on the corner of the writing-table. He could not have seemed more casual or completely at home, yet Susan found herself wincing. It was as if at that moment the Hall and all that it stood for had changed hands.

Sitting there at his ease, Edward said,

“Well, I think this is where we ask Susan to leave us. It’s going to flutter the legal dovecotes a bit, isn’t it?”

“I would rather she stayed.”

Edward shook his head.

“Oh, no, I don’t think so. She can go back to her sorting, but she had better not find any more wills.” Then, when she had most thankfully escaped, “That’s better! Now it’s between you and me. Was there a letter with the will—anything to show why he did it?”

Arnold came over to the table. The envelope with its enclosure lay there across the blotting-pad. He took it up and gave it to Edward. The envelope dropped back upon the pad. The will dropped.

It was James Random’s letter that Edward took over to the window to read. A short letter to take up so much time.

“I am altering my will, because I am quite sure that my boy is alive. I saw him in a dream last night, and he told me that he was coming home. So I have altered my will.”

There was a shaky signature—a very shaky signature. Edward stared at it until it disappeared in a momentary clouding of his sight. With the outer vision darkened, he had an astonishingly vivid picture in his mind—an old man sitting there writing at that table behind him—a very tired old man— writing in the faith and hope of a dream. And it touched him to the depths. It was a little time before he could turn round and say,

“Well, he took a chance.”

Arnold had moved to watch him.

“You haven’t read the will,” he said in a kind of dull surprise.

Edward came up to the table again and stood there reading it. Simple, comprehensive. “Everything to my nephew, Edward Random.” He looked over his shoulder at Arnold and said,

“I see both the witnesses are dead.”

“Yes.”

“In fact there would have been no questions asked if the will had never turned up.”

“I suppose not.”

“But Susan found it. Very inconvenient of her—from your point of view. I feel that I ought to apologize. Only it wasn’t I who brought her down here to rummage in the library, which has done very well without being catalogued for all these years. It looks almost as if you thought she might find something. It even looks as if you wanted her to find it.”

Arnold had gone back to staring down upon the blazing logs. He said stiffly,

“You cannot imagine—” and heard Edward laugh.

“My dear Arnold, I can imagine anything—I’ve always been quite good at it. I can imagine, for instance, that a will like this turning up when you were perfectly sure that I was dead must have presented you with a horrid vista of legal obstacles and delays. It might be years before my death could be presumed, and meanwhile a minor state of chaos! I can imagine its appearing in an extremely unattractive light. What I can not imagine, and what I hope you are not going to ask me to believe, is that Uncle James climbed to the top of the library ladder in the last week of his life and hid the will he had been at so much trouble to make behind old Nathaniel Spragge’s ditchwater sermons. After all, why should he?”

Arnold said nothing. The firelight showed that there was sweat on his face.

Edward stood now with his back to the table, leaning against it. It came to him that it was his table, and that the room was his room. And a lot of good it would do him if he lay in Embank jail on a charge of murder. But the production of the will—how was that going to affect the prospect? Not very greatly, he thought. The police already knew from Miss Silver’s account of her conversation with Clarice that William Jackson had witnessed a will and was proposing to blackmail Arnold on the strength of it. They knew that James Random had told Clarice about the will, and about the dream which had induced him to make it. All that the actual production of the will could do would be to provide strong corroboration of what Clarice had told Miss Silver. It left him no motive at all for the murder of William Jackson, and the merest thread of a motive for the murder of Clarice Dean. After all, you don’t bump girls off because they drop hints that they know something to your advantage, or even because they throw themselves rather assiduously at your head. On the whole, then, his position would be improved. But Arnold’s wouldn’t. If the police got the idea that he had been suppressing the will, they might begin to think very seriously indeed about the possibility that William Jackson had actually made some blackmailing attempt, and that Clarice was following it up. And if Arnold showed the police the same sweating mask that he was now turning to the fire, they would probably arrest him at sight.

He said in a voice which had lost its ironic edge, “It seems to me that we have got to be extremely careful what we do next. The family wash strictly in private, and a convincingly united front. I think the best thing will be for you to take the initiative. Drive over to Embank this afternoon and show this will to the solicitors there. You can take Susan along if you like. But no, on the whole better not. You don’t want to appear to need any backing up. You’ve been having the library catalogued, and this will has turned up behind some old books. I shouldn’t mention the top shelf or anything like that. Just say it was behind some early nineteenth-century sermons. And of course nobody is better pleased about it than you are.” He smiled, and the ironic flavour returned for a moment as he added, “Do you know, curiously enough, I’ve really got a feeling that’s the truth.”

I simply will not hear of it,” said Frank Abbott. Miss Silver gazed at him across the last of the pink vests. “My dear Frank!”

“My dear ma’am, it’s no use—I simply will not lend myself to any such thing. And you know very well that you ought not to ask me to take such a responsibility.”

The mildness of her aspect remained quite unchanged.

“Then perhaps you will tell me what you propose to do about it.”

The time was just after lunch, and they were in Ruth Ball’s comfortable morning-room. Two empty coffee-cups testified to the fact that her hospitality had not been lacking. Outside, a November murk had begun to gather between the hedgerows and along the course of the stream. It would be early dark tonight, and there would be no moon. But within all was cosy and bright. The standard lamp behind the sofa had been switched on and shed a warm glow over Miss Silver and her knitting. A fire burned cheerfully upon the hearth, and in front of it stood Detective Inspector Abbott, extremely polished and elegant, in the immemorial attitude of the man who is laying down the law to his womenfolk. He said,

“I shall do what I should have done this morning if Bury hadn’t taken me off on a wild goose chase. It seems the girl William Jackson was running after at Embank has a husband, and when it was suggested that we had better find out what he was doing on the night that William was drowned, I naturally had to agree. He is said to be a man of violent temper, and there is some evidence of his having been heard to utter threats—the quite commonplace sort—like breaking every bone in William’s body if he ever found him speaking to his wife. He works for a contractor over at Hanmere, and Bury couldn’t get hold of him till he came off the job for his dinner. Well, he said he and his wife were visiting her parents at Littleton on both those Friday nights. He says it’s a regular thing— they bicycle over, have supper, and get back about eleven. Bury has gone to check up on it. The chap says half a dozen people can speak to their having been there. Well, according as that pans out, we either go on and arrest Edward Random—or we don’t. As for your plan, it is absolutely out of the question, and it is no use your asking me to have any hand in it.”

He received an indulgent smile.

“Then, my dear Frank, I must make other arrangements.”

“And just what do you mean by that?”

She reached for her knitting-bag and loosened some strands of the pale pink wool. Her smile persisted, and so did her silence.

Frank Abbott said with an edge on his voice,

“You cannot intend to carry out this impracticable scheme by yourself!”

Miss Silver coughed.

“I should naturally prefer not to be obliged to do so.”

“Miss Silver!”

“Yes, Frank?”

“You are the most obstinate woman that ever breathed!”

“Men always say that, I believe, when they cannot succeed in inducing a woman to change her mind.”

He looked at her in an exasperated manner.

“What do you intend to do?”

“I shall carry out the plan of which I gave you an outline just now.”

“Alone?”

“If you leave me under that necessity.”

“You know very well I can’t allow any such thing!”

“Well, what will you do, my dear Frank? You cannot very well arrest me, and I assure you that unless I am put under physical restraint I do most certainly intend to carry out my plan. It is simple, and I believe that it will prove effective. If nothing comes of it, you are in no worse a position than you are at present.”

His tone changed.

“You really believe that something will come of it?”

“I think there is a reasonable chance. The ground has been carefully prepared. I shall be much surprised if by this evening there is anyone in Greenings who is not aware of Annie’s distressing state of mind and the morbid attraction which the splash seems to exert upon her.”

“And you expect that to produce results?”

“I think so. You must consider the murderer’s frame of mind. Two people have already been killed because of something they knew. Annie has made it patent to everyone that she knows more than she has told. I made three useful contacts this morning. Then the old cook here is an intimate friend of the housekeeper at the Hall—they see each other nearly every day. I think we may conclude that Annie’s behaviour would not go unmentioned.”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

“I should say that would be an understatement.”

She inclined her head.

“Look here,” he said—“as man to man, or words to that effect, just how sure are you about all this?”

She laid her knitting down upon her lap and looked at him very seriously indeed.

“I cannot tell you that I am sure, because I do not think that this is a case in which anyone could be sure. When I mentioned a name to Annie she burst into hysterical tears and repeatedly denied that she had ever said anything at all. She would not even admit that she believed her husband to have been murdered. She was, in fact, in a state of panic, and very much afraid that she had already said too much for her own safety. Do you really believe that a murderer who has killed twice will wait for this fear to subside and take the risk of what Annie may be persuaded to disclose?”

He frowned.

“I suppose not. But if you are going to talk about risks—an attack upon Annie wouldn’t be exactly safe.”

“Was there no risk in the case of William Jackson and of Clarice Dean? Yet it was taken. And each success will have heightened the murderer’s sense of immunity. The criminal becomes persuaded of his own power to override the law and evade it. In the end he arrives at a stage where he believes that he can do anything.”

He nodded.

“You are right of course—you always are.”

She shook her head.

“That is a dangerous attitude of mind, Frank, and one which would greatly shock Chief Inspector Lamb.”

He threw up a hand in protest.

“If this plan of yours comes off, I shall get his longest homily about Wind in the Head, its Deleterious Effect on the Morale of the Junior Police Officer. And if it doesn’t come off—” He paused, gave her a really brilliant smile, and continued, “he won’t be told anything about it. And, as you were doubtless about to remark, what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over.”