CHAPTER 42
Mrs. Willard had plugged in her electric iron and was slipping a damp dress over the ironing-board when the bell rang. She looked surprised to see the Chief Inspector and Sergeant Abbott, but not at all disconcerted. She liked doing her ironing in the sitting-room because two of the chairs there were of just the right height to take the board. Well, she supposed that both the men had seen a woman ironing before now, and it wasn’t as if it was underclothes. She led the way into the room and went over to turn the iron off. So easy to forget, and she didn’t want a hole in her board and the flat smelling like a fire. When she straightened up, there they were, both of them, looking down at the damp dress. For the first time something touched her like a cold finger.
The large man who was the Chief Inspector looked up from the dress and said,
“There are just a few questions we should like to ask you, Mrs. Willard.”
She managed a hesitating smile and said,
“Yes?”
“I think you told Sergeant Curtis that your husband left you soon after seven o’clock last night and did not return until this morning.”
Mrs. Willard said, “That’s right.”
She was standing behind one of the big chairs. She put out a hand now and rested it upon the back.
“I’m sorry to put a personal question, but I’m afraid I must ask you if this was in consequence of a quarrel between you.”
She took a moment before she said,
“Well, it was-but it’s all made up now.”
“Was the quarrel about Miss Roland?” Lamb’s tone was very direct.
Mrs. Willard flushed all over her face and made no reply. She stood quite still behind the chair and looked down at her hand.
Lamb said in an authoritative voice,
“Then I take it that you did quarrel about Miss Roland. You can correct me if I’m wrong.”
Mrs. Willard said nothing. She stood there looking down. Her hand had closed on the back of the chair and was gripping hard.
“Mrs. Willard, I can’t force you to answer-I can only invite you to do so. If you have nothing to conceal on your own account, you know that it is your duty to assist the police. Did you leave your flat at any time last night and go up to No. 8? Did you wash this dress because it became stained whilst you were in Miss Roland’s flat?”
Frank Abbott had lifted the right-hand sleeve and turned it over. The stuff was only faintly damp. A red and green pattern straggled over a cream-coloured ground. The colours were fast and had not run at the edges, but on the outside of the sleeve from wrist to elbow the cream was clouded by a stain of brownish red. Frank Abbott exclaimed,
“Look here, sir!”
Mrs. Willard looked up, and the Chief Inspector down. There was a pause before Lamb said,
“A laboratory experiment will prove whether that stain is blood or not. Is there anything you would like to say, Mrs. Willard?”
She took her hand off the chair and came up to the ironing-board.
“It ran up my sleeve when I was washing the little statue,” she said in a meditative tone. “A stain does spread so on silk. I suppose it was the shock, but I forgot all about it till I saw Alfred looking at it this morning. I don’t know what he thought, because I was too tired to talk-I’d been up all night. I just put the dress in to soak and went and lay down-”
Lamb broke in.
“I have to warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence against you.”
They were both looking at her. Abbott had his notebook out.
Mrs. Willard looked down at the stained sleeve and went on.
“Alfred must have just wrung it out and put it in the cupboard to dry. I never thought of his doing that. The stain hasn’t really come out at all-has it?”
Lamb said, “No,” and suddenly she looked up at him with a ghost of her pleasant smile.
“You want me to tell you about it, don’t you? Shall we sit down?”
They sat, the two men on the sofa, Mrs. Willard in her own chair facing them, her manner quite easy and unembarrassed now.
“I suppose I ought to have told you this morning, but I was feeling so dreadfully tired. Of course you must be thinking it strange, my dress being stained like that, but it’s quite simple really. You see, we’ve been married for twenty years, and there’s never been anyone else with either of us. And then Miss Roland took the flat upstairs, and I couldn’t help seeing that Alfred admired her. I don’t want to say anything hard about her now she’s dead, but she was the sort of girl who lays herself out to catch a gentleman’s eye. There wasn’t anything in it, but last night-it’s no good pretending, is it?-we did have words about her, and Alfred went off to his brother’s and stayed away all night.”
Mrs. Willard sat there in a dark blue dress with the collar pinned crooked, her grey hair rumpled and her eyes fixed on the Inspector’s face with the candid gaze of a child. Her hands lay in her lap, and as she talked she fingered her wedding ring. It was impossible for anyone to look less like a murderess. She went on speaking simply and directly, with the least trace of a country accent cropping up here and there.
“He went off, and I didn’t know where he had gone. He’d never done such a thing before, and I got fancying things the way you do when anything’s happened and you’re sitting alone and thinking about it. I kept going to the door and looking out to see if he was coming back. It was stupid of me, but I didn’t think about his brother. It kept coming over me that we’d had words, and that perhaps he had gone upstairs to her.”
Frank Abbott wrote, his fair sleek hair catching the light as he bent over his notebook. Lamb said,
“Did you know that he did in fact go up to Miss Roland’s flat soon after seven o’clock?”
She nodded.
“Yes-he told me. She laughed at him and sent him away. She didn’t take him seriously, you know. He was very much hurt about it.”
“She had her sister with her-that’s why she sent him away. Well, you didn’t know all this at the time, I take it. He told you afterwards?”
“Yes-when he came back this morning.”
“Well, let’s get back to last night. You were wondering where your husband had gone-”
“Yes, I was dreadfully unhappy, and it kept on getting worse. When it came to eleven o’clock and Alfred not back, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I’d got to know whether he was up there with Miss Roland or not, so I went up.”
“Yes, Mrs. Willard?”
“I meant to ring the bell. I didn’t care whether she was in bed and asleep or not. But when I got up there I didn’t have to ring- the door was ajar.”
“What!”
She nodded.
“I didn’t think anything but that someone had shut it carelessly and it hadn’t latched. And I thought that wouldn’t be like Alfred, because he’s always so particular, but it might have been Miss Roland. And I thought here was my chance of catching them if he was there, so I pushed the door and went in.”
“Just a moment, Mrs. Willard. How did you push it-with your hand?”
She shook her head.
“No-I don’t think so. I wouldn’t if it was like that. I’d just give it a push with my shoulder.”
“All right-go on.”
“Well, the lights were on, so I thought she hadn’t gone to bed.”
“What lights?”
“Oh, the hall, and the sitting-room. The door was half open and I could see in. I stood in the hall and called, ‘Miss Roland!’ and no one answered, so I went in.”
“Did you touch the sitting-room door?”
Mrs. Willard looked faintly surprised.
“Oh, no-the door was half open. I just walked in and saw her. It was a most dreadful shock.”
“You mean that she was dead?”
The surprise was in her voice as she responded.