She stepped back and away from him. “Killed her?”
“Colette. I’ve killed her. She went on and on. She said horrible things about — about you, Rosa. She thinks you — she always said that you — Rosa, I know you’ve liked me—”
“I love you,” she said simply; but she took a deep, deep breath while the future spread out before her — as earlier his own had opened out to him. His wife was dead and he was free.
He pretended amazement at her answer — amazement and gratit-ude; but he was too clever to claim immediately a return of her feeling. He came at last to the point. “Then, even more, Rosa, may I dare to ask you what I was going to. I am throwing myself on your mercy, just praying that out of friendship you will help me. And now, if you really mean that you—”
And he went with her to the sofa and sat there gripping her hands and poured it all out to her. “She was being so vile. She had — well, she’s dead, but Colette had a filthy mind, Rosa. She’d been going on like this for weeks and suddenly I couldn’t stand it any more. I saw red. I–I picked up the poker. I didn’t mean to harm her — honestly, I swear it — just to frighten her. But when I came to myself again—” And he prayed, “Oh, my God, please try to understand!”
“You did this because she was saying foul things about me?”
“You’ve always been so nice to us, Rosa; it just made me sick, her talking like that, sneering and jeering.” And he poured it all out again, living through the scene, only substituting her name for Trudi’s. Her big plain face went first white, then scarlet, then white again. She held tightly to his hand. “What do you want me to do?”
“Rosa, I thought very quickly — I do think quickly when I’m in a spot. It seems awful now, her lying there dead and me just thinking of myself, trying to fight my way out of it. But that’s what I did. And then I knelt down and — well, there are two brass knobs on the fender exactly like the one on the poker and I–I moved her head so that it looked as though she’d hit it against one of the fender knobs, and then I cleaned all the — the blood and stuff off the poker—”
She was a clever woman — quick and clever. The body might have slowed down, the body that once had been so strong and under control, but the mind was still clever and quick. “An accident,” she said.
“Yes, but — people knew we were always quarreling. Trudi must have known it, of course. They could say I’d pushed her, given-her a shove.” He gave her a sick look that was not too difficult to assume.
“At the least — manslaughter,” he said.
Clever and quick. “You want me to say that I saw what happened?
That you didn’t hit her?”
“My God,” he said, “you’re marvelous! Yes. You could say you saw it all through the window, saw me standing there talking to her, say frankly that we seemed to be arguing, make it look as though you’re not too much on my side, just a casual neighbor. And then — there’s a rug there, you know it, very silky and slippery — you skidded on it once yourself, remember? Perfectly possible for her to have taken a backward step, slipped and fallen backward; and of course that would be all you’d know — you can’t see down to the floor of our room, even from your balcony.”
“But I’d have to say I was out on the balcony. I can’t see your window from in here.”
He had thought that out too. “Your balcony’s only overlooked by two flats, and all those people will have been out; I know them.
No one could say that you weren’t there.”
“All right,” she said.
“You’ll do it for me?”
“Of course. But what about that girl, that little trollop, whatever her name is — the au pair?”
He could hardly keep the stiffness from his voice but he controled himself. “Out shopping, thank God!” And thank God, also, that Rosa couldn’t in fact have been on the balcony, looking in, seeing Trudi there in the room with him. He knew all about the allergy, and one glance at her face confirmed it — Rosa hadn’t been out.
“Well, go back now. You must call a doctor quick. And say nothing about me. Just tell your story, don’t seem even to think of bringing me into it. They’ll be round here soon enough, asking if I saw anything. Now, time’s passing, you really must go.”
He started for the door but suddenly he paused. “Rosa!” He had assumed a look of shame but over the shame a flush of exultancy.
“Rosa, it’s awful to have even thought of it, but suddenly it’s come to me. A trial for murder! You know how things are in the theatrical business, you know how things have been with me lately. But if I were suddenly in the news! Accused of murder — standing there at the Old Bailey, headlines in all the papers, a cause célèbre! And then — the dramatic intervention, the witness who’d seen it all, the last-minute evidence.” He stood before her, half shame-faced, half pleading. “Rosa?”
“Why didn’t I give evidence before? They’d never even have charged you if I’d spoken at once.”
“Well, that’s the point. I must get myself arrested and tried. You’d have to say you hadn’t realized, you didn’t want to get mixed up in it. But then of course the moment you heard I was accused—”
“Even so you wouldn’t get further than the first hearing, whatever it’s called. No publicity in that.”
“You couldn’t — just be abroad for a little while, out of touch?”
She opened her mouth to say that none of it mattered, he’d never need to work again. But she held her peace. He was an actor, actors needed to work, they had to express themselves. “Leave it all to me.
I’ll handle it,” she said.
The earlier headlines were not too bad though hardly sensational and then came the long dull period before the trial opened. However, at last — the day. Himself in the dock, very pale, very handsome. The police in the witness box. “Accused stated—” A flipped-over page in a notebook. “Accused stated, ‘Oh, my God, this is awful, I must have hit out at her, I must have had a blackout, she was nag nag nag at me the whole bloody time because I wasn’t getting work, but I never meant to harm her, I swear I did not.’”
And the forensic evidence. “On the head of the poker I found a small smear of blood.” The smear had been consistent with the blood of the dead woman, with having come there at the time of her death.
Tests showed that the accused had handled the poker after the blood came there. Yes, consistent with his having attempted to remove marks of blood with the palm of his hand, missing the one small smear. The blade of the poker appeared to have been wiped — it showed no fingerprints.
In reply to defense counseclass="underline" yes, it was true that the blade of a poker would not be much handled in the ordinary way and the wiping might well have been simply the previous routine cleaning.
The doctor testified that the woman had been dead between half an hour and an hour when he saw her.
Trudi in the box for the defense: shrewd and cool. Had arrived back from the shoppings to find Mr. Gray on his knees beside the body; had had almost to lift him to his feet. Yes, he might very well have touched the poker with his hand, made bloody by his examination of the wound; his arms were all over the place as she hauled him up. She had tried to get him calm; wanted to call a doctor but did not know the number of him, and Mr. Gray seemed so dazed she could get no sense from him. And anyway, what was the hurry, said Trudi with one of her shrugs. Anybody could see that Madame was dead.
And so at last to Rosa Fox. She had with extraordinary dedication deliberately shed all aids to such doubtful charms as she possessed — stripped off the jewelry, dressed herself drably, sacrificed the cosmetics which ordinarily, to some extent at least, disguised the ravages of her age. Not for one moment could anyone suspect that here stood a woman with whom the prisoner could ever have had the slightest rapport.