Ruth had the sensation that her body had taken control of her mind. She heard her own voice from outside herself and thought it sounded scrawny and venomous.
“Is it fair to Herbert — to rob your marriage of all meaning?”
“Oh, be your age, Ruth! That belongs in a tuppenny novelette. And I find it a rather disgusting topic, if you don’t mind.”
One may say that the twentieth-century Ruth Watlington looked on while that part of her that was a thousand ages older than history obeyed a law of its own. Without her conscious volition, her muscles stiffened and she stood up. In her arms and thighs was an odd vibration, as if the corpuscles of her blood were colliding.
She heard the iron bracket whistle through the air — then heard a thud, and another. After a timeless period she felt herself going back into her body, understanding that an iris shutter in her brain had contracted until she had been able to see only one thing — that babies were a rather disgusting topic.
The iris was expanding a little. In the reflected moonlight she could see that the bench was glistening with blood. Rita had fallen from the bench and was lying, still.
“I seem to have killed Rita!” She giggled vacuously. “I wonder what Herbert will say!” her iris expanded a little more. She became vaguely aware of an urgency of time. She looked at her wrist watch, but had to try again and again before she could concentrate enough to read that it was half-past eight. Then it was easy to remember that Herbert would be there at nine.
“I’d better put Rita in the pool. When Herbert comes to the cottage I can break it to him gently. But dead bodies float, don’t they? Oh well, we’ll manage something just for an hour or so!” The iron bracket was ready to her hand.
There was blood at the angle of the bracket. She shuddered with a purely physical revulsion, wiped the bracket on the grass. She worked the short end of the bracket under the suede belt, then rolled the body into the pool near the waterfall. In spite of her care, there was a smear of blood on her left hand. Struggling against nausea she washed it off. The moonlight did not reveal that there was also a smear of blood on the sleeve of her yellow jumper.
In the walk back to the cottage something approaching normality returned, and she realized what she had done. She had no thought of concealment, once she had told Herbert. She would then tell the police that she had killed Rita, but she would not tell them why, and they could not make her.
As she crossed the scrub to the cottage she heard the church clock chiming nine. Perhaps Herbert had finished his work. She hurried into the cottage and rang the school. A kitchenmaid answered. “Will you please go to Mr. Cudden’s classroom, and tell him that Miss Steevens is sorry that she cannot keep her appointment.”
She turned on the reading lamp. Again came nausea as she saw a smear of blood on the sleeve of her yellow jumper — a smear half the size of the palm of her hand. She whipped off the jumper. She took it to her room, dropped it in the laundry basket, and put it out of her mind.
She had no moral shrinking from what she had done. She even felt a certain exultation, tinged with an unease which had nothing to do with fear of the hangman. She took it for granted that her own life was, in effect, at an end, and this gave her an immense freedom.
She went into Rita’s room. It held a faint fragrance of unknown flowers. Spread on the bed was the light green dress and the yellow bodice.
“Oh, I wish I had been Rita!”
She took off all her clothes, put on Rita’s. Last, the yellow bodice and the light green dress. Then a spot of Rita’s scent on her hair and the merest dab behind the ears.
“I do look nice! What a pity! It’s only waste. I wonder what was wrong with me?”
Downstairs and into the air. Her life’s history floated before her. Rita’s clothes helped her to review her past from the angle of a young woman who had no fear that men would lure her on with flattery and then laugh at her. She was actually thinking of the classical master when Herbert’s arms closed round her. For a moment she let her head rest on his shoulder, then realized that he had mistaken her for Rita.
The need for personal explanation shattered the mood in which she had wanted to break the news to him. Besides, she saw now that it would save him so little that she was entitled to think of herself. Tomorrow, when they found the body, life for her would end. Tonight she would enjoy an hour of his soothing friendliness for the last time.
When she had made him believe the hallucination theory, she indulged in the child’s game of make-believe — “Let’s pretend” — that things were as yesterday, and that she had not murdered Rita. She nearly told him about her gift of the cottage, but it would have meant discussion, and she wanted to ask him a question. As the minutes passed the question became more and more important to her. The answer, if it were the right one, would help her to face the gallows with a calm mind.
“Have another brandy.”
“Just a little one, and then I must hop off. Another thing Rita wants to do when we’re married—”
She shirked putting the question to him directly. She produced her scrapbook to help her approach. The whole of the first page was taken by one ebullient baby who had advertized a milk food. Herbert grinned and turned the pages. “Ah, I used to know one just like that — same expression and everything! And when they look like that, they grab your nose if you get too close. This is a jolly book. Why have you never shown it to me before?”
“Herbert, are you and Rita going to have babies?”
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t. I’ve got a bit in the stocking, and so has she.”
“Oh, I am glad!” There was a turbulence in her that he must have sensed.
“And I’m glad you’re glad. Ruth, dear, you can scream for the village policeman if you like, but I’m going to kiss you.”
When he kissed her, Ruth knew what it was that had been wrong with her. She also knew that to talk of robbing a man of fatherhood did not belong in a tuppenny novelette.
“I’m only thirty-seven; there’s still time,” she told herself when he had gone. Murder could never be justified, and she would never so deceive herself. But a form of atonement for having taken life seemed to be open to her.
On the following morning, at about seven-fifteen, Herbert Cudden’s landlady took his shoes out of doors with a view to cleaning them. It was, in a sense, unfortunate for Scotland Yard that Police-Sergeant Tottle happened to amble by on his bicycle.
“Good morning, Mr. Tottle. Your George’s garden is a credit to the family. Oo! You don’t ’appen to have had a nice murder, I suppose? Look at these!”
She held up the shoes. The rim of the sole and the back of one heel was caked with dried blood.
“Don’t you touch ’em until I’ve seen ’em,” barked the sergeant.
“Don’t be silly! I was only joking — it can’t be human blood. They’re Mr. Cudden’s. As if—”
The sergeant took the shoes and examined them.
“Take me up to his room,” he ordered.
When he had succeeded in waking Herbert Cudden, the latter’s reactions were, from the police point of view, ideal.
“Oh, my God!” It was almost like a woman’s scream. “I shall go mad.” He leaped out of bed, thrust Wellingtons over his pyjamas. “You’d better come with me, Sergeant. Give me those shoes.”
“Here, what’s it all about, Mr. Cudden?”
“Oh, shut up, please! I must see Miss Watlington at once, or I tell you I shall go mad. Hang on to the shoes if you like, but come with me.”
Ruth was startled into wakefulness by hearing her name called while Herbert and the sergeant were still fifty yards from the cottage. She was in her dressing gown and at the doorway almost as soon as they were.