She had come up close to him. He could smell the heavy scent she used. He loathed women who scented themselves. He made an excuse to go over to the washstand and collect toothbrush, nailbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a face-cloth. He was rolling them up in paper, when Ella Harrison exclaimed,
‘You ought to have a case for those! You can’t pack them like that! I’ll get you one next time I’m in the High Street! Men really do want looking after!’ Then, breaking off, ‘Of course what the police will want to know is, what did you do after Thea took her mother away.’
He was irritated every time she said Thea. For one thing it reminded him of Mrs Graham, and for another it wasn’t for her to play tricks with Allie’s name. The thought went through his mind and stiffened it against her as he said,
‘I told the police what I did. I went for a walk.’
He tossed his parcel into the suitcase from the other side of the bed, but she was edging round it towards him again.
‘Nicky, that is no good. You went for a walk! At that hour? It’s too thin! What you want is someone to say what time you got back here! It would probably take Thea half an hour to get her mother back to bed and settled down after the upset she had had – at least she can always say it did. Nurse Cotton is supposed to have left her cottage at half past ten, and it would take her until about a quarter to eleven to get to the top of Hill Rise and start listening in to the row that was going on in the gazebo. Well, it wouldn’t be a lot short of eleven by the time Thea got her mother indoors and up into her room, and it would be a good deal after that before she got her to bed and was able to leave her. So if someone could say that you were back in this house by eleven – well, that would let you out, wouldn’t it?’
‘And who is supposed to be going to say that?’
She had been moving along past the foot of the bed. Now she turned the corner and was on the same side as he was. She said,
‘Suppose I was to say it…’
She looked at him between the long mascaraed lashes. It made her angry too. The pleasure and the anger were stimulating.
He said,
‘You certainly couldn’t do anything of the sort! I didn’t look at the time, but it must have been all of twelve o’clock before I came back here.’
She laughed.
‘Well, I shouldn’t tell that to the police, darling!’ Then, with a change of manner, ‘Nicky, you know you might be in quite a tight place over this. There’s Nurse Cotton to say you had a row with Winifred Graham, and that she said things like you wanting to kill her. And then later on she’s found dead in that damned gazebo – well, there you are! There wasn’t anyone else who had quarrelled with her. There wasn’t anyone else who had a motive for killing her, unless it was Thea – and that doesn’t let you out, because if Thea was in it you would be bound to be in it too.’
‘We weren’t either of us in it.’
She stood there smiling.
‘Well, that’s what you say, but no one is going to believe it – unless you can prove that you just weren’t there. It all turns on that. And when you say there isn’t anything I could do about it, that’s just where you’re wrong, because I could. Look here, Nicky, why won’t you be friends with me? I could help you a lot, you know – and I would if you’d stop glaring at me and looking as if you’d like to murder me too.’
He was so angry that he couldn’t trust himself to speak. Instead he went over to the walnut chest on the other side of the room, opened the top long drawer, and came back with a pile of underclothes, which he dumped in the suitcase on the bed. By this time he was able to manage a tone of deadly politeness.
‘It is very kind of you, but I am afraid there isn’t anything you can do.’
It wasn’t Ella’s way to beat about the bush. She never had and she never would. She came right out into the open with a frank,
‘I can say you got back here by eleven o’clock, and that you couldn’t have gone out again because you were with me. Come along, Nicky, isn’t that worth being nice to me for? Or isn’t it? But you can’t expect me to do it if you keep on looking at me as if I could go to hell and be damned to me!’
He restrained himself. When he had fetched half a dozen shirts and packed them, he was able to achieve a conversational tone.
‘It’s a kind thought, but I’m afraid I’ve already told the police that I went for quite a long walk and didn’t get in until fairly late.’
‘That, darling, was only because of your being Jack’s cousin and a perfect gentleman and not wanting to give me away. Quite good reasons for saying you took that walk. Nobody will believe in it anyhow. It’s just a question of whether you would rather they believed you were waiting in Winifred Graham’s garden to lure her out and murder her, or that you were here having fun and games with me. People always like to believe the worst, you know, and there’s quite a good chance they could be got to believe it about you and me.’
‘And what are Jack and Althea supposed to think about it?’
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘I don’t give a damn!’
‘Perhaps I do.’
She sat down on the end of the bed. Her voice dropped.
‘I meant that, you know – all of it! I suppose you haven’t been here all this week without tumbling to it that Jack bores me stiff? Well, you don’t. We could have a good time together, you know. I like travelling – going places. We’d get on like a house on fire if you’d only let yourself go. And you needn’t bother about Jack – all he really wants is what he calls a quiet life. But I haven’t got any use for being poor. If I swear you were with me on Tuesday night it’ll clear you, but Jack will probably divorce me – and I should have to reckon on that. If I don’t do it, you’ll probably hang, and it would be up to you to see I didn’t suffer for saving your neck, wouldn’t it? We could go abroad till it all blew over – travel and have a good time.’
Oh, they could travel, could they? He found his thought straying to some of the places to which he might conduct Ella Harrison and dump her. There was an Asian desert scourged by Polar winds. There were leech-infested swamps. There was a tribe of head-hunters. He said in a perfectly civilized voice,
‘I’m afraid there’s nothing doing, Ella. You see, if it hadn’t been for Mrs Graham’s death Althea and I would be married by now.’
TWENTY-TWO
AS HAS ALREADY been said, the Miss Pimms were in the habit of spreading their net as widely as possible. Even if they caught the same bus down into the High Street and took the same bus back, they would after alighting each take her separate way, dividing the errands between them and neglecting no chance of conversation. Lily, who was the middle Miss Pimm, was as a rule the least enterprising and successful of the three. She had neither Miss Mabel’s keen nose for a scandal nor Nettie’s passionate and persistent attention to detail. Her only gift was, in fact, one which seldom survives the impact of education. She could reproduce word for word a conversation which she had overheard, or a communication which had been made to her. It is to this faculty that we owe the great traditional tales and ballads which have been handed down by word of mouth through countless generations. Most literates have lost it, most children possess it. Miss Lily Pimm, distressingly impervious to the efforts of the excellent Miss Sanders, their one-time governess, had retained it. She entered a greengrocer’s shop, where she bought apples and a cauliflower. She met the youngest Miss Ashington and inquired solicitously after her mother, to which Louisa replied that she was very well, thank you. She seemed in a hurry to get away, so Miss Lily let her go, a thing which neither of her sisters would have done. Mabel’s louder voice and dominant manner would have compelled a more satisfying answer, Nettie’s bright darting questions would have extracted one, but Lily Pimm, though quite as well aware that Mrs Ashington was now practically off her head, could manage nothing better in the way of delaying tactics than a word and a smile which had no effect at all.