"I don't know that she'll agree to have you visit her," replied Ferdinand.
"I know what you mean," said Mrs. Bradley, with her harsh cackle. "I did my best to get her hanged, you think. Well, let me know as soon as I can get permission to visit her."
She had few questions to ask Bella Foxley when they met. The prisoner was as uncommunicative as when they had conversed at her toll-house in Devon, so perhaps it was well that Mrs. Bradley was prepared to be brief.
"Don't worry. They'll probably get me next time," Bella announced, as soon as she was seated opposite the visitor. "What do you want?"
"Answers to a question or so," Mrs. Bradley replied, "and I will guarantee not to use what you tell me in a manner detrimental to your interests."
"Perhaps you think the gallows might serve my interests best?" said Bella with an ugly look and an even uglier laugh. Mrs. Bradley shrugged, and then, fixing her bright black eyes on the prisoner, looked at her expectantly.
"For my own satisfaction, if for no other reason, I should like to establish the truth," she said. "Now, Miss Foxley: suppose, instead of being charged with the murder of those two boys, you were charged with the murder of your sister, Miss Tessa Foxiey?"
Bella half-smiled. Mrs. Bradley waited. Her clients knew that expression of patient benevolence. It seemed to have hypnotic powers. She exercised them now upon Bella, and, to her relief, although not altogether to her surprise, the prisoner spoke almost good-humouredly.
"Poor Tessa! Of course, as you've guessed, she was mental. That's why she was taken advantage of. That's one of the reasons why I hate men. I had her to live with me after the other trial because I had nobody else, and I thought I ought to keep an eye on her as I was letting her have half the money, and—I suppose I might as well confess it and get it off my conscience—I was hoping something would happen, and it did. She was the suicide kind, I suppose. My aim was to assume her identity if anything happened to her. I suggested to her we should call each other by nicknames, and I always told people—not that we got to know many; I saw to that all right—that she was Bella and I was Tessa Foxley.
"People didn't seem to suspect anything; I suppose they thought she was what people were like when they'd been acquitted of murder.
"Anyway, one afternoon I got to her in time to pull her head out of the rainwater butt. Silly of me, because it would have done the trick all right, but, somehow, you can't watch people die. Anyway, next time she did it in the village pond, and it was all up with her by the time she was discovered."
"And you had an alibi, I believe, for the time of her death?" said Mrs. Bradley in very friendly tones.
"Yes. Good enough for the coroner. I thought I told you. I had been let in for giving a talk to the Mothers' Meeting. Nice fellow, the vicar. Very good to both of us. Glad to oblige him."
"What made you so anxious to assume your sister's identity?" asked Mrs. Bradley. Bella gave her a curious look, and then replied off-handedly:
"Oh, I don't know, you know. I'suppose I wanted a chance to forget all about the trial and all the unpleasantness. Still, I don't seem to have got far with it, do I?"
"It couldn't do any harm to tell me the truth, you know." Mrs. Bradley suggested. "If you wanted to begin life afresh, as they say, after the trial, why couldn't you have adopted an entirely new name? After all, the names Tessa Foxley and Bella Foxley are not so extremely unlike that you would have been able to hide yourself much behind your sister's name—except to people who knew you! Come, Miss Foxley, be reasonable."
But Bella shook her head, and her heavy face set obstinately.
"It's neither here nor there," she answered. "I reckon I've had this coming to me all my life. I haven't had a happy life, you know."
"But I suggest to you that you had a better reason than the one you've given me for assuming your sister's name," Mrs. Bradley persisted. "You knew those boys were dead."
"Forget it," said Bella tersely; and as Mrs. Bradley had no more questions to put she took her leave.
"Come again," said the prisoner in tones more genuine and less sardonic than Mrs. Bradley had expected. "It's something to talk to somebody a bit intelligent."
"Thank you," said Mrs. Bradley. "I have two or three more questions I want to put to you, and I shall be glad of an opportunity."
"Pleasure!" responded the prisoner, but more in good-humour than contempt.
Mrs. Bradley returned to the Stone House at Wandles Parva full of cheerfulness, and remained there for five days. At the end of that time she had given up the idea of her proposed stay in the village where Tessa Foxley had been drowned, but had paid three visits there. There was no doubt, it seemed, that Bella Foxley's alibi for the time of the murder was, although slightly shaky theoretically, almost fool-proof from a practical standpoint. The tremendous risks attendant upon transporting her sister's dead body in daylight from the rain-water butt outside the back door of the cottage to the village pond were a deterrent to any but a maniac, Mrs. Bradley decided.
Bella Foxley, whatever her peculiarities, was no lunatic, and Mrs. Bradley abandoned, without regret, the theory that the idiot boy had been a witness of the murder of Tessa Foxley. The more likely explanation, it seemed, was that he had been a witness that Bella had indeed saved her sister from a suicidal drowning.
The next task, that of tracing the man who had bigamously married Tessa, proved less difficult and complicated than she had feared. The man, who had served a prison sentence, was working in a Salvation Army shelter. He responded readily to Mrs. Bradley's advertisement, established his identity by appeal to the Court missionary and admitted that Tessa had been 'kind of weak in the head.' He also stated that it was not for her 'or the likes of her' he had 'done his stretch,' that he believed she had had money, but that this proved 'the biggest washout of the lot,' and that he was 'going straight' and didn't 'need to be afraid of no-one.'
Painstakingly, Mrs. Bradley sifted fact from opinion, and opinion from lies, and convinced herself that she was left, at the end, with a residue of truth which, if not particularly valuable in itself, had its point as contributory evidence. Tessa had been weak. vacillating and of suicidal tendencies.
"In fact, I wouldn't help to hang Bella Foxley or anybody else...."
"Even the rice-pudding Muriel ..." interpolated Ferdinand, with a grin ...
"... upon such evidence as we have in connection with Tessa Foxley's death," said Mrs. Bradley.
"So what?" her son not unnaturally enquired.
"So—another interview with the prisoner so that I can explore fresh avenues," said Mrs. Bradley, with a cackle of pure pleasure.
"'So we sought and we found, and we bayed on his track,'" quoted Ferdinand unkindly. But his mother's only response was another cackle.
"Something up her sleeve," thought Ferdinand uneasily. "Now where have we all slipped up?"
This second interview was not, in some ways, either more or less satisfactory than the first one had been. The prisoner, puffy under the eyes and with skin as unsavoury as ever, raised sardonic eyebrows and greeted Mrs. Bradley ironically.
"What, you again?" she said. Mrs. Bradley agreed, cheerfully, that it was.
"And when do we go through the performance again?" enquired Bella Foxley.
"I don't know exactly. But, tell me, Miss Foxley—that diary of yours. Your own unaided work—as they say in competitions for children—or not?"
"Diary? Oh, diary. I suppose Eliza Hodge handed it over?"