Burden interrupted him. “I want to hear about Swan’s alibi.”
“Swan drove Stella to Equita at two-thirty. Silly sort of name, isn’t it? Whether it’s supposed to mean all the pupils are equal or the only thing they teach is horse-riding, I wouldn’t know.”
Burden was always impatient with these digressions. “What kind of a car does he drive?”
“Not a red Jag. An oldish Ford shooting brake. He left Stella at the gates, believing, he said, that friends would bring her home, and went back home himself. At three-thirty he also got on a horse, that Sherry thing, and rode to Myfleet to see, believe it or not, a man about a dog.”
“You’re joking.”
“Would I, about a thing like this? There’s a fellow in Myfleet called Blain who breeds pointers. Swan went to look at some .puppies with an eye to buying one for Stella. Of course, he didn’t buy one, any more than he ever got her the pony he promised or got her name changed. Swan’s always ‘just going to do something.’ One of the Four Just Men, he is.”
“But he did call on this man?”
“Blain told us Swan was with him from ten to four until four-fifteen, but he didn’t get back to Hall Farm until five-thirty.”
“Where did he say he had been in that hour and a quarter?”
“Just riding round. The horse, he said, needed exercise. Maybe it also needed a wash, for both rider and mount must have been wet through when Swan got home. But odd though this sounds, it is the kind of thing Swan would do. He would moon about on horse back in the rain. His ride, he said, took him through Cheriton Forest, but be couldn’t produce a single person to corroborate this. On the other hand, he could have got to Mill Lane in the time and killed Stella. But if he did, why did he? And what did he do with her body? His wife hasn’t an alibi either. She says she was at Hall Farm and she can’t drive. At any rate, she hasn’t a driving licence.”
Burden digested all this carefully. Then, he decided, he wanted to know more about Stella’s departure from Equita. He wanted the details Wexford hadn’t had time to give him when they had sat together in the car in Fontaine Road.
“The children,” said Wexford, “had an hour’s riding lesson and a further hour they spent messing about with the horses. Miss Williams, the owner of Equita, who lives in that house adjoining the stables, saw Stella that afternoon but says she didn’t speak to her and we have no reason to doubt her word. It was Mrs. Margaret Fenn who took the children out for their ride. She’s a widow of about forty and she lives in what used to be the lodge to Saltram House. Know it?”
Burden knew it. Ruined Saltram House and its grounds, now turned to wilderness, had been a favourite resort of his and Jean’s. For them it had been a place of romance, a lost domain, where they had gone for evening walks in the early days of their marriage and where they had later returned many times to bring their children on picnics.
All that day he had hardly thought about Jean and his happy past with her. His misery had been suspended by the present tumultuous events. But now again he saw her face before him and heard her call his name as they explored the gardens that time had laid waste and, hand in hand, entered the dark cold shell of the house. He shivered.
“You all right, Mike?” Wexford gave him a brief anxious glance and then he went on. “Stella said good bye to Mrs. Fenn and said that as her step-father - incidentally, she always referred to him as her father - hadn’t yet arrived, she would walk along Mill Lane to meet him. Mrs. Fenn didn’t much like letting the girl go alone, but it was still light and she couldn’t go with her as she still had another hour and a half at Equita in which to clear up. She watched Stella go through the gates of Equita, thus becoming the last person but one to see her before she disappeared.”
“The last but one?”
“Don’t forget the man who offered her a lift. Now for the houses in Mill Lane. There are only three between Equita and Stowerton, all widely separated, Saltram Lodge and two cottages. Before Hill offered her the lift she had passed one of these cottages, the one that is occupied only at weekends, and, this being a Thursday, it was empty. We know no more of what happened to her after she was seen by Hill, but if she walked on unmolested she would next have come to the second cottage which has a tenant, not an owner occupier. This tenant, a single man, was out at work and didn’t return until six. Again this was carefully checked because both this cottage and Saltram Lodge have telephones and one of the possibilities which occurred to me was that Stella might have called at a house and asked to phone Hall Farm. The third and last house, Saltram Lodge, was also empty until Mrs. Fenn got home at six. She had had some relatives staying with her, but they had left for London by the three-forty-five train from Stowerton. A taxi-driver confirmed that he had picked them up at the lodge at twenty past three.”
“And was that all?” Burden said. “No more leads?” Wexford shook his head. “Not what you’d call leads. The usual flock of people came forward with unhelpful evidence. A woman had picked up a child’s glove outside one of the cottages but it wasn’t Stella’s. There was another of those free-lift merchants who said he had picked up an elderly man near Saltram Lodge at five-thirty and driven him into Stowerton, but this driver was a shifty sort of fellow and he impressed me as a sensation-monger rather than someone whose word you could rely on.”
“A van-driver claimed to have seen a boy come out of the back door of the rented cottage and perhaps he did. They all leave their back doors unlocked in this part of the world. They think there’s no crime in the country. But the van-driver also said he heard screams coming from behind the hedge just outside Equita, and we know Stella was alive and unharmed until she had refused Hill’s offer. I doubt if we shall ever find out any more.”
Wexford looked tired, his jowly face heavier, and more drooping than usual. “I shall take a couple of hours off tomorrow morning, Mike, and I advise you to do the same. We’re both dead-beat. Have a lie-in.”
Burden nodded abstractedly. He didn’t say that there is no point in lying-in when there is no one to lie in with, but he thought it. Wearily he found himself recalling as he went out to his car those rare but delightful Sunday mornings when Jean, usually an early riser, consented to remain in bed with him until nine. Lying in each other’s arms, they had listened to the sound of Pat making tea for them in the kitchen, and had sat bolt upright, jerking away from each other when she came in with the tray. Those had been the days, but he hadn’t known it at the time, hadn’t appreciated and treasured each moment as he should have done. And now he would have given ten years of his life for one of those mornings back again.
His memories brought him a dull misery, his only consolation that soon he would be in the company of someone as wretched as himself, but when he walked up to the always open door he heard her call out to him gaily and as intimately as if they were old friends, “I’m on the phone, Mike. Go in and sit down. Make yourself at home.”
The telephone must be in the dining room, he thought. He sat down in the other room, feeling uncomfortable because untidiness always made him ill-at-ease. He wondered how anyone as beautiful and as charming as she could bear to live in such disorder and wondered more when she came in, for she was a changed woman, brilliantly smiling, almost elegant.
“You needn’t have run off on my account,” he said, trying not to stare too hard at the short kingfisher-blue dress she wore, the long silver chains, the silver comb in her high-piled hair.
“That was Matthew,” she said. “They brought him a phone and he phoned me from his bed. He’s terribly worried about John, but I told him it was all right. I told him everything would be all right on Monday. He has so many worries, poor boy. He’s ill and his wife’s expecting a baby and he’s out of work and now this.”