Into the agreed routine. The casual acquaintance, the occasional drink together. The question of the police directly after the — accident.
Agreed she had previously insisted she had seen nothing. She had been unwell, under great private tensions, wanted only to get abroad to a health spa where she had been ever since. She hadn’t wished to become involved. Never dreamed, of course, that there could possibly be any charge against Mr. Gray, knowing as she did with absolute certainly that the thing had been entirely an accident. Because in fact she had actually seen it happen.
“From my balcony you can look straight into their room. I glanced over and saw them standing there. They seemed to be having an argument. He said something angry, she jerked away from him as though he had raised his hand against her—”
“Mrs. Fox, had he anything in his hand?”
“In his hand? Oh, the poker you mean? No, nothing, no poker or anything. And anyway, he never raised his hand.”
“He never raised his hand? You can swear to that?”
The Judge from the Bench said solemnly, “Mr. Tree, she is swearing to that. She is swearing to everything she says. She is under oath.”
“Well, I could see it all quite clearly and I certainly can swear — well, I mean I am absolutely sure he never raised his hand at all. He said something. She stepped back and then she seemed to trip and topple over backwards. I thought to myself. “Oh, she’s skidded on that rug of theirs!” I know that rug — very treacherous it is on the parquet floor. I nearly slipped on it once myself.
Well, and then I went back into my room and thought no more about it.”
“It didn’t occur to you that she might have injured herself?”
“I thought she might have banged her head or something but of course no more than that. As I say, I’d slipped there myself and been none the worse for it.” And she made a little face and admitted that if the lady had collected a couple of bruises it would have been no more than she deserved. “I think she nagged him. But of course I didn’t know them well.”
Headlines, yes. But not much really and often not even on the center pages, let alone the front page. But there was a big picture of him planned for Sunday, with an interview — celebrating, a glass of champagne raised to the neighbor whose testimony had confirmed his innocence. Not perhaps in the best of taste, the picture taken right there in front of the fireplace where his wife had died. But it wasn’t a best-of-taste newspaper and one settled for what one could get.
And the reporters withdrew; and at last they were alone in his apartment.
She held out her hands to him. “Well, Raymond?”
She looked about a hundred years old standing there before him, the sagging face devoid of its makeup, the ugly dull dress, the droopy hairdo, the mottled hands without their customary diamond flash.
She revolted him.
“Well, Rosa, you did a beautiful job.”
She did not hear the chill in his voice, or did not believe it. She said softly, “And one day soon — shall I collect my reward?”
“Reward?” he said.
“After all, my darling, I have perjured myself for you.”
“Yes, so you have, haven’t you?” he said.
Now the unpowdered skin took on a strange ashen color, and her eyes grew frightened and sick. “Raymond, what do you mean?”
“I mean that you perjured yourself, as you say; and you know, perhaps, what happens to perjurers?”
A clever woman, quick and clever. But still she insisted, “I don’t understand.”
“I need money, Rosa,” he said.
“Money? But if we were married—”
He moved aside so that she looked over his shoulder and into the mirror above the fireplace.
He said, “You? And I? Married?”
She looked long, long at her pitiful reflection. She said at last, “Is this blackmail?”
“Wasn’t it blackmail when you thought that by saving me from prison you could force me to marry you?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think perhaps it was.” And she thought to herself that now she was beaten at her own game. “If you give me away,” she said, “you’ll have to admit you murdered her.”
“In fact I didn’t murder her. I can say it happened almost exactly as you said in court.”
“Very well then,” she said swiftly, “I can change my story. Who can prove that I didn’t see you murder her?”
“I can prove that you didn’t see it. You couldn’t have been out on your balcony. The plane trees were pollinating and anyone will confirm to the police what happens if you so much as open a window when the pollen’s flying about. But when they first saw you, you showed no traces of any allergic reaction. I know, because I’d just seen you myself.
“Besides, they couldn’t touch me. I’ve been ‘put in peril,’ as they say— autre fois acquit is the legal name for it. Once acquitted I can’t be tried again for the same crime. I could shout from the housetops that I’d killed her and still be safe.”
“And live with that reputation?”
“Well, of course I wouldn’t say I’d been guilty — which anyway, as I keep telling you, I wasn’t. I’d still claim it had been an accident.
But you would be in the soup.”
“I see.” She pondered it long and carefully, still staring, but unseeingly now, at her sad reflection in the glass. “You thought all this out from the very first, didn’t you? In detail, from the very first?”
“Quite a nice little bit of opportunism,” he suggested, proud of it.
“All that about the publicity? The blood deliberately smeared on the poker? Yes, I see. You had to give them something, you had to get yourself accused and charged, you had to be tried and acquitted before it was safe to accuse me. Two purposes to my perjury: first to supply the evidence that would set you free and second to make me vulnerable to blackmail.” She said almost curiously, almost as though she were humbled for him rather than for herself, “Did you never even like me?”
“I didn’t mind you,” he said indifferently. “But as for marrying you — I think I’m a trifle more particular than that.” And he picked up her handbag, helped himself to the thick wad of banknotes there, stuffed them loosely into his wallet, tucked the wallet away. “Just a very, very small beginning, my dear,” he said.
“I won’t even ask how much you’re demanding. You’ll be back again and again and again of course, won’t you? But by way of a start—?”
“Make it ten thousand,” he said. “You can get that much quickly.”
He smiled at her with cruel and ugly triumph. “And I need it quickly — for my honeymoon,” he said.
Clever and quick. Clever not even to have to ask the name, to have summed it all up in one bright intuitive flash. And quick. The poker with its round brass knob lay there on the fender. She snatched it up — and struck.
Trudi burst open the door, darted forward from her listening post, slowed, then came smoothly the rest of the way and knelt beside him. For what seemed a long, long time they both stared down as only a few short months ago Raymond Gray himself had looked down at the dead body of his wife. It was his turn now.
Rosa’s fat white arms retained something, it seemed, of their once splendid muscle; long-ago anatomical training had suggested the most susceptible spot. The heavy ball of the poker had smashed to a cobweb of fractures Raymond’s delicate temple bone.
Trudi moved. With a small sick grimace she shifted Raymond’s head a little way, so that the wound lay crushed against the round brass knob of the fender.