Was It Murder? (22 page)

“I don’t think I understand at all,” she said, in a slow, chilled voice.  “Tell me the whole truth, Colin, however terrible it is.”

But that, of course, was just what he could not do; he could not tell her how he suspected her husband.  So he told her merely that in his opinion the murderer had not been Lambourne.  She was astonished, bewildered—the revelation disturbed, he could see, the whole foundations of her recent life.  “Not Mr. Lambourne?” she echoed.  “But, Colin, he confessed to me!”

“I know he did, but it wasn’t true.”

“Then why—why should he confess?”

“He might have wanted to save someone else.”

She was bewildered for a long time.  He could not be too explicit with her lest he made it clear who, in his opinion, HAD committed the murders.  In fact, his whole story was far less convincing than it ought to have been, by reason of the large suppressions he had perforce to make.  Yet, in the end, she seemed dubiously persuaded.  Woman-like, she went straight to the crux of the matter.  “But, Colin, if Mr. Lambourne didn’t do it, then who did?”

“Yes, of course.  And that’s just what I don’t know for certain, though I’ve got suspicions.”

“Won’t you tell me?”

“It wouldn’t be fair.  They may be quite unfounded.  Far better not talk about it till the suspicions become certainties.”

“But supposing they never do?”

“They probably will.  Criminals always give themselves away if you watch them long enough.”

“Do you really think that?”

“I’m sure of it.”

“But—how horrible it all is—it may be somebody we all know—

somebody we meet every day—“

“Quite possibly.”  He nodded gravely.  He felt that years hence, when he came to write his reminiscences as a crime-investigator, he would begin a chapter with the sentence:  “Of all the mysteries that it has fallen to my lot to unravel, that of the Oakington murders was undoubtedly the most horrible. . . .”

She clung to his arm with a timid gesture that made him feel superbly protective.  “Colin, let’s go in now—I think I’m a little scared after all this.  It’s getting late, too—Tom will soon be back.”

From the way she spoke her husband’s name he knew that he had avoided giving her the slightest inkling as to where his suspicions lay.

On the way back to the School they talked in a new mood of seriousness.  “So you see,” he explained, “what it all means.  There were only three people in the world who knew that Lambourne had confessed to you—Detective Guthrie, me, and yourself.  But there are only two—yourself and me—who know that Lambourne’s confession was false.”

“And there is only ONE who knows—or has an idea—who really is the murderer.”

He half-smiled.  “Perhaps.”

“Mr. Guthrie believed that Mr. Lambourne had done it?”

“Oh yes.  As he was so often careful to tell me, it was facts HE was bothered about, not theories.  The fact that Lambourne had confessed to you was enough for him.  Perhaps it ought to have been enough for me, too, but—well, it wasn’t.”

“So you’re doing this altogether on your own?”

“Altogether.”  He felt a strong pride rising in him.  “I believe that somewhere on these premises there is a person who has committed the most devilish crimes, and if the police are satisfied to give the matter up as a bad job, then I am not.”

“You’re brave, Colin.”

“No, it isn’t that.  It’s more, to be quite frank, a sort of damnable conceit that I’ve got.”

“You think you’ll get the murderer, then, in the end?”

“Yes, I do.  I’ve certain evidence already, and I hope to get more very soon.”

She shuddered.  “It all sounds so terribly ruthless.  Oh, let’s hurry—I seem to see people hiding behind every tree.”

He left her at the door of her house and climbed to his own room in a state of strange excitement.  He had kissed her, and she was the first married woman he had ever kissed.  He perceived that he had passed a definite milestone in life.

But the incident was not repeated.  Indeed, there came no suitable opportunity.  When first they met again after the night of the concert, she warned him that they must be more discreet.  “Because I have an idea Tom guesses how I feel towards you,” she explained, and the confession helped to soften the restrictions it foreshadowed.  Revell, too, now that the Kreutzer Sonata mood had worn off, was less inclined to be reckless; he saw at any rate that to have Ellington jealous of him would only complicate the final and more important issue.

The matter, however, led to a short but rather revealing conversation.  He agreed that the very last thing he desired was to make things more difficult for her than they were.

“It isn’t that,” she answered.  “I’m not thinking of myself at all— so far as I’m concerned I wouldn’t much care what happened.  I’m thinking of you.”

“ME?”

“Yes.”

“But
I
don’t care, either—not personally.  A writer isn’t supposed to have much of a reputation, you know.”

She smiled.  “I wasn’t thinking of your reputation.  It’s more a matter of your personal safety.  Oh, I know you’ll think that’s absurd and melodramatic, but it isn’t.  You don’t know Tom as I do.”

The obvious corollary that neither did she know Tom as he did, struck at him with sinister intensity.  “But surely you don’t mean to say that I should be in actual physical danger from him?”

“You might be,” she answered.  “It’s a frightful thing to have to confess about one’s husband, but it’s true.  He’d do nearly anything in a fit of jealousy.  And I think—already—he’s a little jealous of you.  That’s why we must be careful.”

So they saw far less of each other during that final fortnight of the Term.  It was just as well, Revell admitted to himself, for there had been more than a whisper of talk among the masters, and even the Head had come to know that his secretary and the wife of one of his housemasters had struck up a rather close friendship.  As end of Term approached, however, the scandal-mongers were baffled, for Revell and Mrs. Ellington entirely ceased their habit of openly chatting for half an hour on the edge of the quadrangle within sight of all Oakington.  Once or twice she called on him in his room in the evening, but stayed only for a moment or so, finding him busy on what he had already come to think of as “the case”.  He had never, in fact, been so intent upon anything in his life.  So much, he knew, depended on whether, during the few days that still intervened before the departure of the Ellingtons, he could manage to discover some last fragment of conclusive evidence.  It was maddening to be so morally certain of Ellington’s guilt and to have collected such a mass of suspicious probabilities against him, yet to lack just the one single thread of hard fact that would knit the whole into a presentable indictment.  As each day passed and still that fact eluded his most strenuous search, Revell became fidgety to the point of panic.  Hour after hour in his room in School House he sat at his desk before the window pondering over the pencilled entries in his notebook in the hope that somehow or other an avenue of swift investigation might suggest itself.  He even sent to his Islington lodgings for his portable typewriter and laboriously typed out the contents of his notebook on quarto sheets; he thought that their added clarity in such a form might well reward him for his trouble.

End of Term came; Oakington dispersed to its homes; the School itself took on that air of dreary desolation that always hangs about deserted buildings.  On the last evening before the break-up, Ellington, in the presence of the whole school assembled in the Hall, had been presented with a large and opulent-looking cowhide valise.  Dr. Roseveare’s speech had naturally been a perfect model for such occasions.  He had mentioned Ellington’s years of faithful service, had hinted vaguely at recent ill-health and at a decision to assist recovery by living the freer, more invigorating life of the Colonies.  “And so, remembering what a lot of good wishes he will have to take with him, we thought we would give him this bag to carry them in!”  Oh, very pretty—VERY pretty, Revell had murmured to himself.

Revell’s position at the School, now that Term was over, was becoming somewhat anomalous, but Roseveare eased it considerably by suggesting that he should stay on a few days if it convenienced him at all.  Revell accepted the offer with relief, and in his own room that night addressed himself to a last, frenzied attempt at solving the Oakington problem.  First of all he typed out, in concise form, the sum-total of his reasons for suspecting Ellington.  They were as follows:

(1) He had strong motive for both crimes.

(2) He has no alibi for the time when the second murder was committed, and probably none for the time of the first, either.

(3) The revolver with which the second murder was committed belonged to him.

(4) He is, according to his wife, a violent man.

(5) He plans to leave England almost immediately.

Fairly impressive, Revell thought, as he looked it over.  And then, rather suddenly, he thought of something else that should, he upbraided himself, have struck him long before.  It was a chilly evening for the time of the year, and he had donned a dressing-gown for warmth while he sat at his writing-desk.  That reminded him of the dressing-gown that Wilbraham Marshall had worn on the night of the murder.  Thus, with amazing swiftness, the sequence of argument developed.  The boy, Revell assumed, had been shot whilst standing on the edge of the bath.  He would, therefore, since the bath was empty, have been wearing his dressing-gown.  Almost certainly it would have been stained with blood; ergo, the murderer, if he wished to leave an impression of an accidental dive, would have had to remove the soiled dressing-gown and leave another, unsoiled, on the side of the bath.  Doubtless the former had been destroyed, but the latter, included presumably amongst the boy’s other possessions, might well yield valuable clues.  Whose was it, for example, and how had it been obtained?

The idea seemed so promising, and the urgency of the whole matter had lately been driving Revell into such agonies of fretfulness, that he allowed himself the relief of feeling that he had now really and definitely scored.  The dressing-gown ought, somehow or other, to implicate Ellington.  How, of course, had yet to be discovered, and there was distinctly no time to waste.  He did not even at first know where the dressing-gown was; but a seemingly casual chat with Brownley drew the information that it had been taken charge of by Detective Guthrie along with other belongings of the dead boy.

Revell was slightly chagrined by that, for Guthrie was perhaps the last person he wished to drag back into the affair.  Guthrie, in his opinion, had bungled the case altogether and thrown it up far too readily; he had also, Revell considered, treated a youthful amateur with a patronage and condescension quite unjustified by their respective degrees of success.  Yet there was nothing else for it; the clue of the dressing-gown must not be overlooked.  So Revell, after much cogitation, there and then composed the following:

MY DEAR GUTHRIE,

I am still interesting myself somewhat in various aspects of recent unhappy events here.  A point has occurred to me in connexion with the dressing-gown left in the swimming-bath on the night of the tragedy.  I believe you took charge of it, and if it is still in your possession, would it be permissible for me to see it, at some time and place to suit your convenience, but preferably as soon as possible?

Yours faithfully,

COLIN REVELL.

He was rather proud of that letter; it seemed to conceal the significance of the matter and to suggest rather a painstaking research student busily gathering material for a thesis.  Guthrie would probably laugh at the amateur who continued to bother with a case long after it was finished, but that could not be helped.

Revell had just signed the letter and sealed it in an addressed envelope when Mrs. Ellington chanced to call with a few books that he had lent her from time to time.  (They were Brett Young’s Tragic Bride; Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome; and the play edition of Young Woodley—all of which he had had to send for specially from his rooms in Islington.  But it had been part of her education, of course, and therefore worth the trouble.)  “We’ve already begun to pack some of our things,” she explained, “and I didn’t want these of yours to get mixed up with the rest.”

He invited her to sit down, but she declined.  “Really, no, I mustn’t stay—it’s too late.  And besides, you’re busy.”  She approached his desk and looked over his shoulder.  “What—a letter to Mr. Guthrie?”  Her exclamation of astonishment gratified him, though, as a matter of fact, he would rather she had not known about the letter.  “Colin—do you mean—does this mean—that at last—at last—you’ve discovered who did it?”

He swung round and faced her startled eyes.  “Not perhaps all that, Rosamund,” he answered, but with a triumph he could not disguise.  “All the same, things are coming to a bit of a climax.  My letter to Guthrie may—if I’m lucky—round off the whole thing.”

“You mean that it will prove who did it?”

“It may LEAD to a final proof.”

“But the School is broken up—everybody’s away.”

He answered cautiously:  “Yes, I know—it’s a pity it couldn’t have happened earlier.”  He had to go very carefully over this extremely slippery ground, or she would assuredly begin to suspect the truth.  “Still, it’s an advantage that everything’s been kept so secret.  Guthrie’s method of filling the School with policemen isn’t perhaps the best, after all.”

She nodded.  “It’s terrible, though.”  He saw with deep pity the strain that was put upon her; he smiled and, changing the subject, asked how she felt about going away so soon.

“I’m trying my best to be thrilled,” she answered, valiantly.  “It seems almost impossible to believe that I shall soon be seeing Paris, Marseilles, Suez, the Red Sea, and so many other places.  I hate the thought of the life at the end of it all, but I daresay I shall manage to enjoy the journey.”

“Unfortunately the journey will only last three weeks, whereas the

life after it—“

“Oh yes, but please don’t remind me of it.”