‘Oh, yes, it was all right when we were at the Reckitts’. We were playing at the same table for part of the time. It’s a beautiful ring, and I noticed it particularly. The stones came from Golconda. A great-uncle of mine brought them home and had them cut. They are well matched. They were certainly all there on Tuesday.’
Ella Harrison had been going back step by step.
It was a purely instinctive movement. In a moment she would think of something to say, to do. The moment wasn’t yet. She would have to wait for it. She went back until the fireplace brought her up short. There was a Sèvres jar in the middle of the mantelpiece with a delicate china figure on either side of it. Eighteenth-century figures – a lady in a hooped skirt with powdered hair, a gentleman in a brocaded coat with red heels to his shoes. She picked up the lady by her slender neck and slung her at Jack Harrison.
THIRTY
MR HARRISON DUCKED. The china lady in her applegreen gown and flowered petticoat smashed against the door which he had closed behind him and fell in splinters on the parquet floor. The head rolled under a small gold gimcrack chair. Ella Harrison stood against the mantelpiece, heavily flushed and breathing deep. Nobody spoke until Frank Abbott said, his voice very cool and detached.
‘Perhaps it would be better to defer the rest of this interview until Mrs Harrison is calmer.’
Jack Harrison spoke.
‘I think it would be better. If you want me, I shall be in the study.’ He turned and went out of the room.
Ella Harrison left the hearth and came forward.
‘And now we can get on with it!’ Her voice was loud and dominant.
She was furiously angry, but she had got past smashing china. There were other things that could be broken, and she was out to break them. She came up to one of the easy chairs and stood there, resting her hands on the back.
‘You…’ she said, addressing Frank Abbott, ‘you’ve been free enough with your questions. Now you’re going to listen to me! I’ve got something to say!’
‘You wish to make a statement?’
‘If that’s what you like to call it! I’ve got something to say, and if you want to write it down you can!’
Inspector Sharp found himself a chair. He got out a notebook and propped it on the edge of the table where the diamond had lain.
Frank said, ‘Perhaps you would like to sit down, Mrs Harrison.’
She stared angrily.
‘I’d just as soon stand! It won’t take long! Quite a nice change it’ll be me talking and you listening, instead of your popping off questions at me for all the world as if you were a cross-talk comedian and I was your stooge! Now, you get this, Mr La-di-da policeman – I’m nobody’s stooge! And if you think you can pin anything on me, you can just set to work and think again, because I’ve got an alibi! And you, Mr What’s-his-name Sharp, you can write that down and be damned to you!’
The veneer was clean stripped off. This was the woman who had grown up in a drunken home and learned her language from hearing her father and mother swear at one another in their not infrequent rows, who had played as a child in the gutter, who had fought and clawed her way into a children’s act in pantomime, and from there with the help of good legs and a resonant voice into a variety turn. She hadn’t taken anything from anyone then, and she wasn’t taking anything from these policemen now. She said so at the top of her voice.
‘I don’t know what you think you’re getting at with your was I down at the Grahams’ on Tuesday night! Well then, I wasn’t, so you can put that in your pipe and smoke it! And why wasn’t I? You see, I’m asking the questions this time, and here’s the answer to that one! I wasn’t down at the Grahams’ because I’d got other fish to fry! And if you want to know who I was frying them with, it was Nicholas Carey! He came to this house as the clock struck eleven, and he didn’t go out of it again – I can answer for that. Here he was, and here he stayed, and neither of us wanted it any different. Jack was off to bed at ten o’clock, and the servants sleep out, so there wasn’t anyone to interfere with us, and that’s how we wanted it to be. So now you know!’
Frank Abbott’s cool detached gaze rested upon her. He was wondering how much of this was to Jack Harrison’s address. Just another and more effective way of hitting him where it hurt? Some of it no doubt, and the rest the alibi foreshadowed by Miss Silver. He said,
‘When you were questioned before, you stated that you were in bed by eleven, and that you had no idea when Mr Carey came in. Now you say he was in by eleven, and that you remained together.’
She had gone back to tapping with her foot.
‘Yes, you don’t put everything in the shop-window right away, do you?’
‘Meaning that you don’t always tell the truth unless it suits you?’
‘Don’t you go trying to make out I’ve said what I haven’t!’
‘By your own account you have said first one thing and then another with regard to your movements on Tuesday night.’
‘I didn’t see it was anyone’s business – not then. But if you’re trying to pin something on me, then it’s my business to see you don’t get any wrong ideas! Nicky was here with me from eleven o’clock and for the best part of the night. It didn’t suit either of us for it to come out – not then. But that’s how it was, and you can’t get from it!’
Her flush was one of triumph now. She had flung her stone and killed two birds with it. If she had an alibi, they couldn’t make out she’d been down at the Grahams’ on Tuesday night, and if the alibi was going to hit Jack where it hurt, well, he’d asked for it – chipping in to say he’d seen the ring on Tuesday evening and none of the stones missing! Anyone else would have had the sense to hold his tongue, with the police in the house and a murder charge flying round. But not Jack Harrison, not her poor boob of a husband – oh dear, no! He must come chipping in with having seen the ring and noticed that all the stones were there! Well, if he liked to divorce her he could, and a good riddance to him!
The local Inspector wrote down what she had said and read it over to her. When she had signed it they both went out of the room. She heard them go across the hall to the front door. She heard it open and shut again behind them.
The warm satisfied anger in her began to die down.
THIRTY-ONE
NICHOLAS CAREY SAT at the dressing-table of his room at the George, but he was not engaged with the affairs of the toilet. The old-fashioned dressing-mirror with its five drawers, two on each side and one in the middle to take rings, trinkets, and what have you, had been pushed on one side to make way for the typewriter upon which he was rapidly tapping out his latest article. The room was furnished in a heavy mid-Victorian style, the only change which it had suffered since the days when the George was a posting inn being the substitution of up-to-date spring beds for the gloomy four-poster of a hundred years ago. If the carpet had been renewed, Mr Pickwick himself would not have been able to swear to it, and the general air of gloomy respectability remained intact.
When the telephone bell rang Nicholas stopped tapping, crossed to the space between the beds, and took up the receiver. A voice informed him that there was a gentleman to see him, ‘Name of Abbott – Mr Abbott.’ He said, ‘Send him up,’ and went back to the dressing-table, where he stood gathering up a couple of sheets already typed. He was frowning at the one still in the typewriter, wondering whether he would be allowed to finish it if they arrested him, and whether the Janitor would want it if they did.
There was a knock at the door before he could make up his mind. Frank Abbott came in and shut it behind him. He was alone, and the official manner was in abeyance.
Nicholas raised his eyebrows, laid down his sheets of typescript, and said,