Vintage Crime Page 7

  “When?”

  “Yesterday. When I saw her wearing my mother’s watch.”

  She looked at the fire, over which the silver cups glimmered.

  “Maybe I said more than I should have,” she went on. “But I got no support from my father or Harry. I don’t blame Dad: he’s so worried about business, and that bad arm of his troubles him so much sometimes that all he wants is peace and quiet. As for Harry, he doesn’t really like her; but she took rather a fancy to him, and that flatters him. He’s a kind of male counterpart of Aunt Renée. Out of a job? – well, depend on somebody else. And I’m in the middle of all this. It’s ‘Dolly, do this,’ and ‘Dolly, do that,’ and ‘Good old Dolly; she won’t mind.’ But I do mind. When I saw that woman standing there wearing my mother’s watch, and saying commiserating things about the fact that we couldn’t afford a servant, I felt that something ought to be done about it. So I suppose I must have done something about it.”

  Jameson reached out and took her hands. “All right,” he said. “What will you do?”

  “I don’t know! That’s just the trouble.”

  “But surely—”

  “No. That was one of the things Mrs. Topham always had such sport with. You don’t know much about anything when you walk in your sleep.”

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” she went on, after another pause. “Utterly ludicrous. But not to me! Not a bit. Ever since I was a child, when I’ve been overtired or nervously exhausted, it’s happened. Once I came downstairs and built and lit a fire in the dining room, and set the table for a meal. I admit it doesn’t happen often, and never before with results like this.” She tried to laugh. “But why do you think my father and Harry looked at me like that? That’s the worst of it. I really don’t know whether I’m a near – murderer or not.”

  This was bad.

  Jameson admitted that to himself, even as his reason argued against it. He got up to prowl round the room, and her brown eyes never left him. He could not look away; he saw the tensity of her face in every corner.

  “Look here,” he said quietly, “this is nonsense.”

  “Oh, please. Don’t you say that. It’s not very original.”

  “But do you seriously think you went for that woman and still don’t know anything about it now?”

  “Would it be more difficult than building a fire?”

  “I didn’t ask you that. Do you think you did it?”

  “No,” said Dorothy.

  That question did it. She trusted him now. There was understanding and sympathy between them, a mental force and communication that could be felt as palpably as the body gives out heat.

  “Deep down inside me, no. I don’t believe it. I think I should have woken up. And there was no – well, no blood on me, you know. But how are you going to get round the evidence?”

  The evidence. Always the evidence.

  “I did go across there. I can’t deny that. I remember half waking up as I was coming back. I was standing in the middle of the lawn in the snow. I had on my fur coat over my pyjamas; I remember feeling snow on my face and my wet slippers under me. I was shivering. And I remember running back. That’s all. If I didn’t do it, how could anybody else have done it?”

  “I beg your pardon,” interposed a new voice. “Do you mind if, both figuratively and literally, I turn on the light?”

  Dennis Jameson knew the owner of that voice. There was the noise of someone fumbling after an electric switch; then, in homely light, Colonel March beamed and basked. Colonel March’s seventeen stone was swathed round in a waterproof as big as a tent. He wore a large tweed cap. Under this his speckled face glowed in the cold; and he was smoking, with gurgling relish, the large-bowled pipe which threatened to singe his sandy moustache.

  “Ah, Jameson!” he said. He took the pipe out of his mouth and made a gesture with it. “So it was you. I thought I saw you come in. I don’t want to intrude; but I think there are at least two things that Miss Brant ought to know.”

  Dorothy turned round quickly.

  “First,” pursued Colonel March, “that Mrs. Topham is out of danger. She is at least able, like an after-dinner speaker, to say a few words; though with about as much coherence. Second, that out on your lawn there is one of the queerest objects I ever saw in my life.”

  Jameson whistled. “You’ve met this fellow?” he said to Dorothy. “He is the head of the Department of Queer Complaints. When they come across something outlandish, which may be a hoax or a joke but, on the other hand, may be a serious crime, they shout for him. His mind is so obvious that he hits it every time. To my certain knowledge he has investigated a disappearing room, chased a walking corpse, and found an invisible piece of furniture. If he goes so far as to admit that a thing is a bit unusual, you can look out for squalls.”

  Colonel March nodded quite seriously. “Yes,” he said. “That is why I am here, you see. They thought we might be interested in that footprint.”

  “That footprint?” cried Dorothy. “You mean—?”

  “No, no; not your footprint, Miss Brant. Another one. Let me explain. I want you, both of you, to look out of the window; I want you to take a look at the laurel hedge between this cottage and the other. The light is almost gone, but study it.”

  Jameson went to the window and peered out.

  “Well?” he demanded. “What about it? It’s a hedge.”

  “As you so shrewdly note, it is a hedge. Now let me ask you a question. Do you think a person could walk along the top of that hedge?”

  “Good lord, no!”

  “No? Why not?”

  “I don’t see the joke,” said Jameson, “but I’ll make the proper replies. Because the hedge is only an inch or two thick. It wouldn’t support a cat. If you tried to stand on it, you’d come through like a ton of bricks.”

  “Quite true. Then what would you say if I told you that someone weighing at least twelve stone must have climbed up the inside of it?”

  Nobody answered him; the thing was so obviously unreasonable that nobody could answer.

  Dorothy Brant and Dennis Jameson looked at each other.

  “For,” said Colonel March, “it would seem that somebody at least climbed up there. Look at the hedge again. You see the arch cut in for a gate? Just above that, in the snow along the side of the hedge, there are traces of a footprint. It is a large footprint. I think it can be identified by the heel, though most of it is blurred and sketchy.”

  Walking quickly and heavily, Dorothy’s father came into the room. He started to speak, but seemed to change his mind at the sight of Colonel March. He went over to Dorothy, who took his arm.

  “Then,” insisted Jameson, “somebody did climb up on the hedge?”

  “I doubt it,” said Colonel March. “How could he?”

  Jameson pulled himself together. “Look here, sir,” he said quietly. “‘How could he?’ is correct. I never knew you to go on like this without good reason. I know it must have some bearing on the case. But I don’t care if somebody climbed up on the hedge. I don’t care if he danced the tango on it. The hedge leads nowhere. It doesn’t lead to Mrs. Topham’s; it only divides the two properties. The point is, how did somebody manage to get from here to that other cottage – across sixty feet of unbroken snow – without leaving a trace on it? I ask you that because I’m certain you don’t think Miss Brant is guilty.”

  Colonel March looked apologetic. “I know she isn’t,” he answered.

  In Dorothy Brant’s mind was again that vision of the heavy paperweight inside which, as you shook it, a miniature snowstorm arose. She felt that her own wits were being shaken and clouded in the same way.

  “I knew Dolly didn’t do it,” said John Brant, suddenly putting his arm around his daughter’s shoulders. “I knew that. I told them so. But—”

  Colonel March silenced him. “The real thief, M
iss Brant, did not want your mother’s watch and brooch and chain and rings. It may interest you to know what he did want. He wanted about fifteen hundred pounds in notes and gold sovereigns, tucked away in that same shabby desk. You seem to have wondered what Mrs. Topham did with her money. That is what she did with it. Mrs. Topham, by the first words she could get out in semi-consciousness, was merely a common or garden variety of miser. That dull-looking desk in her parlour was the last place any burglar would look for a hoard. Any burglar, that is, except one.”

  “Except one?” repeated John Brant, and his eyes seemed to turn inward.

  A sudden ugly suspicion came to Jameson.

  “Except one who knew, yes. You, Miss Brant, had the blame deliberately put on you. There was no malice in it. It was simply the easiest way to avoid pain and trouble to the gentleman who did it.”

  “Now hear what you really did, Miss Brant,” said Colonel March, his face darkening. “You did go out into the snow last night. But you did not go over to Mrs. Topham’s; and you did not make those two artistic sets of footprints in the snow. When you tell us in your own story that you felt snow sting on your face as well as underfoot, it requires no vast concentration, surely, to realise that the snow was still falling. You went out into it, like many sleepwalkers; you were shocked into semi-consciousness by the snow and the cold air; and you returned long before the end of the snowfall, which covered any real prints you may have made.

  “The real thief – who was very much awake – heard you come back and tumble into bed. He saw a heaven-sent opportunity to blame you for a crime you might even think you had committed. He slipped in and took the slippers out of your room. And, when the snow had stopped, he went across to Mrs. Topham’s. He did not mean to attack her. But she was awake and surprised him; and so, of course, Harry Ventnor struck her down.”

  “Harry—” The word, which Dorothy had said almost at a scream, was checked. She looked round quickly at her father; then she stared straight ahead; then she began to laugh.

  “Of course,” said Colonel March. “As usual, he was letting his – what is it? – his ‘good old Dolly’ take the blame.”

  A great cloud seemed to have left John Brant; but the fussed and worried look had not left him. He blinked at Colonel March.

  “Sir,” he said, “I would give my good arm to prove what you say. That boy has caused me half the trouble I ever had. But are you raving mad?”

  “No.”

  “I tell you he couldn’t have done it! He’s Emily’s son, my sister’s son. He may be a bad lot; but he’s not a magician.”

  “You are forgetting,” said Colonel March, “a certain size ten footprint. You are forgetting that interesting sight, a smeared and blurred size ten footprint on the side of a hedge which would not have held up a cat. A remarkable footprint. A disembodied footprint.”

  “But that’s the whole trouble,” roared the other. “The two lines of tracks in the snow were made by a size four shoe! Harry couldn’t have made them, any more than I could. It’s a physical impossibility. Harry wears size ten. You don’t say he could get his feet into flat leather moccasins which would fit my daughter?”

  “No,” said Colonel March. “But he could get his hands into them.”

  There was a silence. The Colonel wore a dreamy look, almost a pleased look.

  “And in his unusual but highly practical pair of gloves,” the Colonel went on, “Harry Ventnor simply walked across to the other cottage on his hands. No more than that. For a trained gymnast – as those silver cups will indicate – it was nothing. For a rattle-brained gentleman who needed money it was ideal. He crossed in a thin coating of snow, which would show no difference in weight. Doorsteps, cleared of snow by the overhanging roof, protected him at either end when he stood upright. He had endless opportunities to get a key to the side door. Unfortunately, there was that rather low archway in the hedge. Carrying himself on his hands, his feet were curved up and back over the arch of his body to balance him; he blundered, and smeared that disembodied footprint on the side of the hedge. To be quite frank, I am delighted with the device. It is crime upside down; it is leaving a footprint in the sky; it is—”

  “A fair cop, sir,” concluded Superintendent Mason, sticking his head in at the door. “They got him on the other side of Guildford. He must have smelled something wrong when he saw us taking photographs. But he had the stuff on him.”

  Dorothy Brant stood looking for a long time at the large, untidy blimp of a man who was still chuckling with pleasure.

  Then she joined in.

  “I trust,” observed Dennis Jameson politely, “that everybody is having a good time. For myself, I’ve had a couple of unpleasant shocks today; and just for a moment I was afraid I should have another one. For a moment I honestly thought you were going to pitch on Mr. Brant.”

  “So did I,” agreed Dorothy, and beamed at her father. “That’s why it’s so funny now.”

  John Brant looked startled – but not half so startled as Colonel March.

  “Now there,” the Colonel said, “I honestly do not understand you. I am the Department of Queer Complaints. If you have a ghost in your attic or a footprint on top of your hedge, ring me up. But a certain success has blessed us because, as Mr. Jameson says, I look for the obvious. And Lord love us! – if you have decided that a crime was committed by a gentleman who could walk on his hands, I will hold under torture that you are not likely to succeed by suspecting the one person in the house who has a crippled arm.”

  The Woman Who Had Everything

  Celia Fremlin

  The effort of opening her eyes was enormous, and no sooner had Maggie achieved it than the light pounced like knives, and she closed them again.

  She thought at first that it was the sun, that she was sunbathing, sunbathing for too long, on a scorching Mediterranean beach, on holiday somewhere or other. This must be heat-stroke she’d got, she felt so weak and numbed, almost paralysed. Even her jaw would not move, her teeth were clenched in some sort of tension whose cause she could not at the moment recall; so that when she tried to speak, the words would not come.

  “I think I’m getting heat-stroke, darling,” she wanted to say, reproachfully, in a feeble effort to arouse Rodney’s sympathy and concern. “I’ve been lying here too long, why didn’t you wake me…?”

  But it was no good, something seemed to be blocking the sounds, choking them back into her throat; and anyway, Rodney wasn’t listening.

  Well, of course he wasn’t. He never listened to her, these days. Maybe he wasn’t even there; maybe he’d wandered off by now, bored and restless, eyeing desultorily the other female figures spread-eagled on the sand, and thinking about his work.

  He never thought about anything else any more, at home or away; a far cry indeed from those golden holidays in the first years of their marriage, when he’d sit or lie beside her hour after hour, rubbing oil on her brown body, murmuring into her ear nonsense to make her laugh or endearments to make her glow – face down on the hot sand – with secret joy.

  Maybe he was still sitting there after all, right beside her? Reading, of course, and making notes. Going over those eternal papers and documents which he lugged with him everywhere, even on holiday; the dry, convoluted paragraphs curling under the Mediterranean heat, the sand seeping into the interstices of his bulging, important briefcase.

  To hell with Rodney’s importance, his rocketing success! Success had come suddenly, attacking her marriage like a fast-growing cancer, with metastases spreading into every corner of their relationship.

  “Rodney…?” She tried to put appeal, reproach and pathos into the syllables; but once again, no sound came from her throat.

  And now a memory…a suspicion…an unease lurched inside her, and she forced herself once more to open her eyes, to peer through the dazzle with narrowed, burning lids.

  * * *

&nb
sp; No beach. No blazing Mediterranean sun. Only a reading-lamp – and a shaded one at that – casting its mild sixty watts across the littered desk; and straight in front of her, propped carefully at eye-level, just where she had left it, was her suicide note.

  So she was still alive. The thought was a neutral one to Maggie at first – neither surprising nor unsurprising. Nor did she feel either relieved or dismayed at this miscarriage of her plans.

  Her plans? What, actually, were her plans? What had the whole thing been about? Letting her lids fall closed again against the baffling light of Reality (Reality? Oh, not again…!), Maggie set herself to fumbling through the cotton wool that right now was her brain, seeking the relevant connections, trying to recall, through the confusion of her thoughts and the singing in her ears, the sequence of events that had landed her here, in her husband’s own special wing-chair, in his own well-ordered study, with an empty bottle of sleeping-pills at her elbow.

  No, not empty. Half the pills were still there – no, more than half – the blur of blueness reached way up the glass sides, two-thirds up at least.

  So what had gone wrong? She’d intended to take the lot, of that she was certain. What had prevented her? Had she been overcome by unconsciousness before she’d had time to swallow more than a dozen or so of the things? Or had she, on the very verge of oblivion, somehow lost her nerve…?

  This, of course, would explain why she was still alive, she reflected, with slow, laborious logic; and still she could feel neither pleased nor sorry at the outcome. She could, though, feel a weak stir of anger about it all. It was so unfair! Why was everything, for her, always so difficult? Other people commit suicide in their hundreds of thousands, all over the world, why should she be the one who never managed to bring it off?

  Because this wasn’t the first time she had tried – oh, by no means. In these past two or three years – the years since Rodney’s spectacular promotion at the Foreign Office had changed him from a shy, pleasant young man into a dynamo of ruthless energy – during these years, Maggie had made two other suicide attempts – three, if you counted that first one of all, which (as she now admitted to herself) hadn’t really been an attempt at all, but merely a ruse for getting attention – forcing attention, indeed, at pistol-point – from her increasingly remote and preoccupied husband.