“I left a little before nine. Then Rita never went near Drunkard’s Leap!” He laughed at his own fear, though it wasn’t a wholesome laugh. “Yet — it was horrible! I can’t believe it wasn’t real.”
“Well, come in first and tell me all about it. I’ve got a bottle of brandy for emergencies. I think you have been overworking on that syllabus... Oh, you’ve cut your hand — it’s bleeding. I’ll try and bind it up for you, though I’m very bad at anything to do with blood.”
“It’s nothing. Must have cut it when I fell down.”
He followed her into the sitting-room of the cottage, stopping in the hall to hang up his mackintosh.
As is known, he stayed there for about an hour, leaving before eleven, slightly fuddled with brandy. Ruth’s purpose was to delay investigation. No police system, however scientific, could be expected to solve the riddle of why she should want to create the delay. The pool was obviously useless as a permanent hiding place. Once she had made her getaway, as she had, it would not have mattered to her if the police had found the body a few minutes later.
Nor did anybody attribute any special importance to Herbert Cudden’s assertion that, in mistaking Ruth for Rita, he was misled not only by Rita’s dress, but also by Rita’s perfume. Yet Ruth Watlington was convicted — thanks to Detective Inspector Rason of the Department of Dead Ends — for no other reason than that she had put on the dead girl’s dress and worn her perfume.
After a stiff brandy, Herbert gave Ruth details of the now supposed hallucination.
“But the pool is forty feet deep!” objected Ruth. “If there had been a body under the surface it would have been at the bottom, and you couldn’t have seen it without a strong searchlight.”
“I know. But one does not think of things like that at the time.”
He told her about it all over again, and then, his fear banished, they talked about Rita in general, an absorbing topic to both. This conversation has been grossly misunderstood by the commentators, who said that it revealed Ruth as an hysteric titillating her own terror by talking about the woman she had just murdered. Her showing him her scrapbook of babies’ photographs was stigmatized as the height of hypocrisy — alternatively as indicating a depth of morbid cruelty which would almost justify a plea of insanity.
Whereas the truth is that if Ruth had been a hypocrite she would never have committed the murder. “The schoolmarm who beat Scotland Yard” would have had, short shrift if the police had been able to grasp that, though she was capable of murder, she was not capable of insincerity, cruelty, or greed.
At the time of the murder, Ruth was thirty-seven; would have been physically mistakable for thirty if she had not affected a certain dowdiness of dress. She was trim and springy, athletic without a touch of thickness. A truth about herself that she did not know was that the right touch here and there would have converted her into a more than ordinarily attractive woman. When she was sixteen, a boy of her own age had kissed her at a party, to her own satisfaction. Three days later she overheard the boy laughing about it to another boy. There was a loutish reference to her own over-estimation of her charms.
The incident distressed her sufficiently for her to confide in her young stepmother, for whom, in defiance of tradition, she entertained a warm affection. It did not occur to her that Corinne Watlington, who was only seven years older, might be sexually jealous.
“Men are rather beastly, you know,” explained Corinne Watlington. “They lure you on with flattery and then laugh at you. It’s as well to be on guard, or you may find yourself humiliated where you least expect it.”
Ruth did not want to be humiliated, so she went on guard — so effectively that the young men of her generation dubbed her a prude and a cod fish, and left her out — which made her manner more brusque than ever.
Following Corinne’s advice, Ruth concentrated on a career. She won a scholarship to Oxford, generously resigning the bursary, as her mother had left her some two hundred pounds a year. She represented the University in lacrosse, tennis, and fencing. She took honors in history and literature, doing so well that she was invited to read for a Fellowship, but declined, as she wished to teach the young. She was appointed to Mardean, which was then considered the leading school for girls.
When she was twenty-seven she found herself thinking too intensively about one of the classical masters. In her emotion there was no echo of the boys at the parties. Indeed, she hardly thought directly of the man himself. She thought of herself in a house, just large enough, with a very green lawn on which very young children — hers — were playing. Somewhere in the background, giving substance and security to the dream, was the classical master.
Ruth resigned her appointment. She went to Paris; not being analytical, she did not know why she spent six months as a volunteer worker in a creche. But the babies here were vaguely unsatisfactory, and she started the new school year at Hemel Abbey, a praiseworthy but indistinguished replica of Mardean on a less ambitious scale.
Here began that rare association with Herbert Cudden which baffled the romantically minded commentators. From the first she was able to talk to Herbert without any artificial coldness. From a different angle he found something of the same restfulness in her, for he had always been self-conscious with other women. Ruth, obviously, would never expect him to make love to her. There sprang up, hardly a deep friendship — rather an intimate palliness utterly intouched by romance.
In her first year she bought Wood Cottage. A few weeks after she had settled in she cut the first of the baby pictures from a magazine. In six months, when she had cut another dozen, she began to paste them into a scrapbook. During the years that followed the number of pictures grew. There was nothing secret about it. She would snap village babies with her Kodak, explaining that she was fond of pictures of babies, though they were so difficult to take. All the same, she never showed the scrapbook to anybody until she showed it to Herbert on the night of the murder.
Herbert used the cottage almost as a club. He came at routine times, always to lunch on Wednesdays and Sundays. She allowed him to pay half the cost of the food and a few pence over in part payment of the village woman who prepared it. Thus nearly nine years slipped by before Rita Steevens came and changed Ruth’s perspective.
One evening, when the pupils were away for the halfterm weekend, Ruth met Herbert and Rita together, and was astonished by the look she surprised in Herbert’s eyes. For a second she had seen him young, vigorous, commanding — definitely among “the men” — in Corinne’s sense of the word. An hour later he came to the cottage and told her, as a great secret, that he had fallen in love with Rita. Ruth expressed sincere delight. A new, inner life was opened to her. At first Rita was cold, almost suspicious. She accepted Ruth’s offer to share the cottage with indifference, bargaining shrewdly over her share of the expenses.
By the end of the term she had fielded and was accepting Ruth as mentor and general benefactor.
Ruth was determined — one might say fiercely determined — that life should give to Rita what it had denied to Ruth. She positively groomed those two for each other, and without a single black thought of malice. In her dream life, Ruth had already elected herself an honorary auntie.
A little before six on the night of the murder, while Rita was visiting in the village, Calder had rung to ask Rita to catch the eight-fifty bus — the last — and spend the night at Lynmouth. As the bungalow had no telephone, Calder would meet the bus on the chance of Rita coming. Ruth said she would deliver the message if Rita returned in time.