"It seems strange that Sally didn't leave her child at Martingale if she wanted to go up to London. Mrs. Bultitaft would probably have been willing to look after him occasionally. All this secrecy was surely rather unnecessary."
"Sally liked it that way. She liked things to be secret. I think that was half the attraction of sneaking out at night. I had a feeling sometimes that she wasn't really enjoying it. She was worried about the baby or just plain sleepy. But she had to come. It made her pleased to know next day that she had done it and got away with it."
"Didn't you point out that it would make trouble for both of you if it were discovered?"
"I don't see how it could affect me," said Pullen sulkily. (‹I think you're pretending to be a great deal more simple than you are, surely. I'm ready to believe that you and Miss Jupp weren't lovers because I like to think I know when people are telling the truth and because it fits in with what I know so far of both of you. But you can't honestly believe that other people would be so accommodating. The facts bear one obvious interpretation and that is the most people would put on them, especially in the circumstances."
"That's right. Just because the kid had an illegitimate child then she must be a nymphomaniac." The boy used this last word self-consciously as if it were one he had only recently known and had not used before.
"You know, I doubt whether they'd understand what that word means.
Perhaps people have rather nasty minds, but then it's surprising how often the nastiness is justified. I don't think Sally Jupp was being very fair to you when she used these stables as a retreat from Martingale. Surely you must have thought that, too?"
"Yes, I suppose so," The boy looked away unhappily and Dalgleish waited. He felt that there was still something to be explained but that Pullen was enmeshed in his own inarticulateness and frustrated with the difficulty of explaining the girl he had known, alive, gay and foolhardy, to two officers of police who had never even met her. The difficulty was easily understood. He had no doubt how Pullen's story would look to a jury and was glad that it would never be his job to convince twelve good men and true that Sally Jupp, young, pretty and already lapsed from grace, had been sneaking out of her bedroom at night and leaving her baby alone, however briefly, for the sole '100 pleasure of intellectual discussion with Derek Pullen.
"Did Miss Jupp ever suggest to you that she was afraid of anyone or had an enemy?" he asked.
"No. She wasn't important enough to have enemies."
"Not until Saturday night, perhaps," thought Dalgleish.
"She never confided in you about her child, who the father was, for example?"
"No." The boy had mastered some of his terror and his voice was sullen.
"Did she tell you why she wanted to go to London last Thursday afternoon?"
"No. She asked me to look after Jimmy because she was sick of carting him around the forest and wanted to get away from the village. We arranged where she was to hand him over at Liverpool Street Station. She brought the folding pram and I took him to St. James's Park. In the evening I handed him back and we travelled home separately. We weren't going to give the village tabbies anything else to gossip about."
"You never thought she might be falling in love with you?"
"I knew damn well she wasn't." He gave Dalgleish one quick direct glance and then said, as if the confidence surprised him:
"She wouldn't even let me touch her."
Dalgleish waited for a moment and then said quietly,
"Those aren't your normal spectacles, are they? What happened to the ones you usually wear?"
The boy almost snatched them from his nose and closed his hands over the lenses in a gesture which was pathetic in its futility. Then, realizing the significance of that instinctive gesture, he dug in his pocket for a handkerchief and made a show of cleaning the lenses.
His hands shook as he pushed the spectacles back on his nose where they rested lopsidedly, his voice croaked with fright:
"I lost them. That is, I broke them. I'm having them mended."
"Did you break them at the same time as you got that bruise over your eye?"
"Yes. I knocked into a tree."
"Indeed. The trees around here seem curiously hazardous. Dr. Maxie grazed his knuckle on the bark of one, I'm told.
Could it have been the same tree?"
"Dr. Maxie's troubles are nothing to do with me. I don't know what you mean."
"I think you do," said Dalgleish gently.
"I'm going to ask you to think over what we've said and later I shall want you to make a statement and sign it. There isn't any tremendous hurry. We know where to find you if we want you. Talk it over with your father when he comes in. If either of you want to see me let me know. And remember this: someone killed Sally. If it wasn't you, then you've got nothing to fear. Either way, I hope you'll find the courage to tell us what you know." He waited for a moment but his eyes met only the glazed stare of fear and resolution.
After a minute he turned away and beckoned Martin to follow.
Half an hour later the telephone rang at Martingale. Deborah, carrying her father's tray through the hall, paused, balanced it on her hip, and lifted the receiver. A minute later she put her head round the drawing-room door.
"It's for you, Stephen. The 'phone.
Derek Pullen of all people."
Stephen, home unexpectedly for a few hours only, did not look up from his book but Deborah could see the sudden arrest of movement and the slight tensing of his back.
"0 Lord, what does he want?"
"He wants you. He sounds pretty worried."
"Tell him I'm busy, Deb."
Deborah translated this message into the semblance of civility. The voice at the end of the line rose into incoherence.
Holding the receiver away from her ear Deborah made soothing noises and felt the well of hysterical laughter which nowadays was never far submerged. She went back to the drawing-room.
"You'd better come, Stephen. He really is in a bad way. What on earth have you been up to? He says the police have been with him."
"Is that all? He's not the only one. Tell him they've been with me for about six hours all told. And they haven't finished yet. Tell him to keep his mouth shut and stop flapping."
"Hadn't you better tell him yourself?" suggested Deborah sweetly. "I'm not in your confidence and I'm certainly not in his."
Stephen swore softly and went to the telephone. Pausing in the hall to balance her tray, Deborah could hear his quick impatient expostulations.
"All right. All right. Tell them if you want to. I'm not stopping you. They're probably listening in to this conversation anyway… No, as a matter of fact I didn't, but don't let that influence you… Quite the little gentleman, aren't you… My dear man, I don't care a damn what you tell them, or when or how, only for God's sake don't be such a bore about it. Goodbye."
Moving out of earshot along the gallery, Deborah thought sadly, "Stephen and I have grown so far apart that I could ask him outright whether he killed Sally without being certain what answer I'd get."
Dalgleish and Martin sat in the small parlour of The Moonraker's Arms in that state of repletion without satisfaction which commonly follows a poor meal.
They had been assured that Mrs. Piggott who, with her husband, kept the inn, was noted for her good plain cooking and plenty of it. The expression had struck ominously on the ears of men whose travels had inured them to most of the vagaries of good plain English fare. It is probable that Martin suffered most. His war service in France and Italy had given him a taste for continental food which he had been indulging ever since on holidays abroad. Most of his spare time and all of his spare money was spent in this way. He and his cheerful, enterprising wife were enthusiastic and unsophisticated travellers, confident of their ability to be understood, tolerated and well fed in almost any corner of Europe. So far, strangely enough, they had never been disappointed.