“I’m Mrs. Claybourne. You wanted to see me?”
“My name is Felse. If you can spare me a quarter of an hour or so of your time, I should be very grateful. It’s important.”
She studied him in silence for a moment, her fine dark eyes narrowed. Then, without any questions, she opened the house door wide, and said: “Come in!”
He had not expected so prompt an entry, but even less was he expecting the first remark she addressed to him, without preamble, as soon as they were safely shut into her neat front room, among the polished brass and the pot plants insidiously creeping round the walls:
“You’re police, aren’t you?” Not ashamed, not bitter, just bluntly practical. “Not that you’re all that typical, I suppose, but who else could you be? What’s he wanted for now?”
“I take it you’re referring to your son.” There was not much doubt of it; the startled face in the passport photograph bore a certain resemblance to hers, the eyes specially were her signature. “Thomas J. Claybourne.”
“Thomas Jeremiah,” she said flatly, and sat down in one of the glossily polished chairs. “Tom after his dad, Jeremiah after mine. He was a good man, my dad, church-warden for thirty years, and honest as the day. Many a time I’ve been right glad he died the year after I got married. Better that than live to know what we were coming down to. But I’ve got nothing to hide, and never have had. Them that will go to the devil must go alone, I’ll abide the same as I always have, in my dad’s way. So don’t think I’m ever likely to be hiding him here from your kind. What is it he’s done this time?”
George sat down opposite her, and drew out the passport from his wallet, and handed it to her, open at the photograph. “Is this a picture of your son? And these details, are they correct?”
She took the little book curiously in her hands, turning it to look at the cover. She had never seen a passport before, much less owned one; she would never in her life have any use for such a flighty thing. “That’s him, all right. Well, I never did! I never thought he meant it when he talked about emigrating.”
“He never got as far as that,” said George, and felt in his pocket for the one object he had taken from the body itself, a deplorable remnant which had once been a clean, folded handkerchief. The fact of being so neatly and tightly folded inside the lined breast pocket had preserved at least its inner portions, and these had been turned outwards now to conceal the worst, and expose the small initials in Indian ink on the hem, TC. “Can you also identify this as his property? No, don’t take it out of the plastic envelope, just look at it.”
“Doesn’t need much looking,” she said firmly. “I marked six of these for him, the last time he was here.” She looked up at George. Her eyes were shrewd, and the lines of her face hard as nails; perhaps she had had to be hard to survive. “I always did my duty by him when he chose to remember he was my son. Whether he ever paid his way or not, whether he ever gave a damn for me or not, and whether or not I stopped caring about him, either, when he came I fed him and housed him and mended his clothes. Not for love! Only for duty. He always walked out again as soon as it suited him—as soon as your people quit looking for him and his mates, I shouldn’t wonder, but I never asked him anything. When he went, he went. Like his dad before him, who cleared off without a word two years after we were married, and never showed his face here again. I’m not bothered, they’re neither of them much loss. I get along best alone. Men who walk out on me I don’t follow. This is my place, and here I stay, where I’m independent and respected.” She looked down again, narrowly, at the small plastic packet in her steely fingers, and asked in the same uncompromising voice:
“What happened to him? He’s dead, isn’t he?”
George told her the bare facts. No one was going to be embarrassed by this woman’s tears, or feel obliged to try and comfort her. The mention of Midshire and Mottisham clearly meant nothing to her; but she knew her responsibilities.
“You’ll be wanting me to identity the body, I suppose. Tomorrow’s closing day, I could come down then. And I suppose there’ll have to be an inquest before I can get to bury him?” She knew her duty. There was even something admirable in her acceptance of it, after all affection had been drained away out of her blood.
‘’I don’t think it will be necessary for you to see the body. If you can tell us who his doctor was, and in particular his dentist, the medical evidence will take care of that. But your help would be invaluable in identifying his belongings. And there’s money which will probably be reclaimable, and which must be yours unless he had a wife.”
She shrugged, but rather resignedly than coldly. She was not in the least interested in his money. “No, he never married. Too restless, always on the move, job to job and place to place ever since he was eighteen. I gave him money when he needed it. He never came unless he did.”
“Tell me about him. It might help us to find out what he was doing in our part of the country, and who could have killed him.”
“What is there to tell you? I brought him up alone, and I brought him up good, and let me tell you, that isn’t easy on your own. But he took after his dad, not after me. Come the time he was seventeen, I never knew where he was, and he’d had three jobs and wrecked the lot. And at eighteen he went off with some smart-aleck friend of his, and I didn’t see him for three years. Three or four times your folks came here asking after him, but always when he wasn’t here. Whether he did all the things they think he did, I don’t know. Far as I know, he only went to gaol once, and that was for some sort of fraud, not a big thing—he got six months. I don’t make any secret of it, I’m responsible for my record, not his, and there isn’t the man born that can say I’ve done him out of a farthing. I tend my own garden. He let his run wild. Twice he took money from me, besides what I gave him. I knew that. I never said nothing that was between him and me, and what never touched a soul besides I forgave him. He wasn’t cruel or vicious. He wasn’t even bad. Only feeble and shiftless and wanting it to come easy.”
As an epitaph, in her passionless voice, it was not so harsh as it might have been; and now her eyes, so dark and full and meant to be sensuous, had a curious measured softness in the unchanged marble hardness of her face. And George thought, if only somebody could have got her out of here, and stirred her deeply enough to make her forget the narrow, cold springs of her own righteousness, what a woman this could have been!
“And when was the last time you saw him?”
“Oh, about five years ago. It was round about the thaw, as I remember, February or March it would be. He came on the quiet, without a word beforehand, like he always did, and after dark, the way I thought he must have been mixed up in something shady and wanting to lie low. But he never told me anything about his affairs. Still, that was the only time he talked about emigrating. Tried to borrow some more money off me, but I hadn’t got it to give him, and a gift it would have been, loans to him always were. I don’t know, he may just have felt like getting out and starting fresh somewhere else, I can’t say it wasn’t so. But what I thought was that the police were after him for something, and he needed pretty bad to get out. If I’d had more, I’d have given it. But now you tell me he had money.”
“If he meant to go abroad, he needed all he could get. And he never said anything to you about a place called Mottisham? Or a family named Macsen-Martel? Nothing to indicate why he should go to Midshire at all?”