Gwen must have been unconscious for a full minute.
I pushed a pillow under her head and straightened her legs. I loosened the neck of her white blouse and slid off those enormous black-rimmed spectacles. Then I ran to the bathroom and came back with a dripping handkerchief and a toothglass of water.
At last she roused. She blinked, grimaced, and immediately began groping blindly on the floor.
“Here are your glasses, Gwen.”
They pulled her slack face into shape like a corset on a bulging figure. She gave me a feeble smile. Then, remembering, she went paper-white. I thought she was going to faint again.
I offered her the mug of water. “Drink some of this.”
She took a few sips, then shook her head.
“I’m all right now, Kim. Sorry about all that.”
I helped her get up. She stood shakily, and I held on tight to stop her falling again.
“I think I’d better go to my own bedroom for a bit.”
“No, sit here.”
I reached out a foot and hooked a basket chair closer. I eased her down as gently as I could.
Very slowly color returned to her cheeks. I watched her without speaking. When she began to show signs of restlessness I decided she was well enough to start talking.
“You’ve got a lot to explain, Gwen.”
“What do you mean?”
She said it faintly, and held out a hand for more water. Certain this was just a cover-up, I kept up the pressure as I reached for the glass and gave it to her again.
“You said something that needs explaining, Gwen.”
Slow sips of water, long pauses in between. She was playing for time. Time to think. I wasn’t going to let her concoct a fake story.
“You said Brian had a jacket on. What did you mean by that, exactly?”
She laughed. I doubt if I’d ever before heard such an utterly phony attempt at hilarity,
“My dear girl, what do you think I meant?”
“I’m asking you.”
Her eyes swiveled sideways, patently insincere. “I just meant that on the evening he died, Brian had been wearing a jacket.”
“You were here at Mildenhall that night?”
“Why yes, it was a Friday, you see.”
However hard I tried, I seemed to get nowhere. I decided to make a sudden switch. Maybe that would shake the truth out of her.
“Bill Wayne said Brian must have been drunk, and that’s why he fell in the pool.”
“Yes, that’s absolutely right,” she agreed, leaping at the suggestion much too eagerly. “He was disgustingly drunk.”
“Nobody seems to have mentioned that fact to the coroner.”
“Would it have done any good?”
“I’d have thought it was extremely relevant.”
Again deadlock. But I was determined to break her down. To leave the subject now would give Gwen time to renew her battered defenses. The way she was eyeing me, I knew her one thought was to escape from my resolute inquisition.
Perhaps unfairly, because I was not at all sure that I’d have the nerve to go through with it, I threatened her.
“Look here, Gwen, if you don’t come clean with me I shall go straight to Drew and tell him what you’ve just said. It’s perfectly obvious you’re concealing something important.”
“Don’t do that, Kim. You mustn’t go to Drew”
She came bounding out of her chair so that for one crazy moment I thought she was going to attack me, aid I put my arms up. She caught at my wrists, but it was only a beseeching gesture.
“Don’t stir up the mud, my dear; it’s settled now. All forgotten,”
That made me see raw red. “Settled? How can you say it’s all forgotten? Look at your sister; look at your nephew and his wife; look at that poor child of theirs. The Mildenhall air is poisoned, Gwen, as you perfectly well know.”
She let go of me then. Her weakly falling hands sketched the shape of helplessness.
“What I’ve been concealing wouldn’t make things better. And now it’s even ...” She bit her lip in misery. “Poor, poor Tansy. She must never know.”
“Tell me, Gwen.”
I took her hand and led her towards the bed. She followed me meekly.
We sat side by side, and I urged her again. “Tell me.”
She said very simply, and with a touching dignity: “I want to tell you, Kim. For two years now I’ve been holding this thing inside myself. It has not been easy, my dear.”
For a third time I said, “Tell me.”
“I think I can trust you ...”
At that moment all thought of my problem with Jane was drained from my mind. I was enclosed within a bubble of time, coaxing a desolate woman to shed some of her agony. A woman I wanted to help.
“Tell me ...”
She squared her drooping shoulders and carefully lifted my hand from hers, as if she couldn’t presume to keep it there. I waited, and at last she spoke.
“I pushed Brian into the water.”
“You ... ?” The questions piled on to my tongue too fast to be voiced. “What do you mean?”
Gwen’s human need to share a burden took control. Now she was anxious to talk.
“I didn’t mean to do it, Kim. He made me so angry, you see, and I grabbed at him. But he was drunk, like I said, and he stumbled and fell into the water.”
“But ... but how could he have drowned?”
“That’s what I can’t understand. I imagined a cold dowsing like that would sober him up, so I walked off and left him there. I wanted to teach him a lesson. But something must have happened—I don’t know what...”
She was sobbing without lowering her eyes from mine, and somehow that made it all the more tragic.
“Bill Wayne found the body in the morning,” she went on. “It was a terrible shock when I heard. I didn’t for a moment imagine Brian wouldn’t get out all right. You do believe me, don’t you, Kim?”
What else could I do but nod and reassure her? She looked older than her sister now, more lost than Tansy ever seemed.
“I’d better know the whole story, Gwen.”
“Yes.”
But she didn’t go on, I got a feeling that her hesitation was due to some new sense-of shame. And I was right.
“I must have a drink first, Kim,” she muttered with furtive determination. “I simply must.”
“No, not now, Gwen.”
“Yes, now.”
She was staring down at her joined hands, at the fingers nervously flexing. Suddenly she looked me straight in the eye.
“I know I drink too much, Kim. I didn’t before ...”
I softened. “I’ll go down and get you something. Wait here for me.”
The house seemed empty as I ran down the stairs. But then, coming faintly from the music room at the far end of the hall, I heard Corinne’s voice. She was singing.
Quietly, I closed the door of the drawing room behind me. I guessed it didn’t matter much to Gwen what particular form of alcohol she swallowed. The first bottle to hand was gin. I poured an unmeasured dose and tossed in a splash of tonic. I hustled back across the room, slid into the hall and made for the stairs.
A quiet voice, silk-smooth with sarcasm, floated at me from behind.
“That’s right, Miss Bennett. We want you to feel quite free to help yourself.”
I jumped, nearly spilling the outsize portion of gin. Corinne was watching me with a wicked smile of triumph.
“There’s always a selection of drinks put out—but of course you know that already.”
“But this isn’t ...” What could I say? That Gwen was upstairs, so badly shaken that she needed a stiff drink to pull her round?
The best I could manage on the spur of the moment was to pretend to take Corinne at the value of her deceitful face. So I smiled warmly, thanked her, and went on upstairs.
Gwen grabbed at the glass and swigged half the gin in a couple of gulps. She paused, and looked at me apologetically. “I’m sorry but I needed a lift.”
I didn’t explain just how much her lift had cost me in reputation.
Fascinated, I watched the remainder of the gin follow the first half. Gwen put down the drained glass regretfully. She was beginning to look faintly better.
“Brian was a louse,” she announced abruptly. “Everyone knew that. Even Tansy.”
“Then why does she get so upset whenever his name is mentioned?”
“Poor Tansy feels guilty. Guilty because she couldn’t love her son. There was just nothing lovable about him. Even as a small child he was a nasty deceitful little brute.”
I said, a bit pompously, “Whatever he may have been, he couldn’t have deserved to die so young.”
Gwen took me up on that.
“I tell you, it was an accident. We’d had an awful row earlier, and I ran into him again when I went out for some air. We met down there on the road between the ponds. He was coming back from the pub, and immediately started on me again.”
Behind those great goggle spectacles, slow tears were filling her eyes. She left them to trickle away as though entirely unaware.
“Brian had a vicious tongue, Kim. An evil tongue.”
“Just tell me what happened, Gwen. I’m not asking what he said.”
‘“You might as well know it all. I think I’ve no shame left now. Perhaps I strike everybody the way he described me.”
She stood up and began wandering around the room, fingering ornaments. Then she suddenly stopped this nervous prowling and stood still, her back to me.
“He called me a frustrated old virgin. He said if I could persuade a man to go to bed with me, which he took leave to doubt, it might make a human being of me.”
She bent her head and pulled off her glasses to free the flood of tears,
I went over to her quickly and put my arm round her shoulders. “It was a wickedly cruel thing to say.”
She sobbed for a minute, and then I witnessed a display of iron self-control. Her voice was defiant.
“He said it to annoy me, out of sheer spite. It hurt me so very much because it’s probably true.”
“‘But you mustn’t let it hurt you, Gwen,” I pleaded helplessly. “I mean….”
“I gave him such a little push,” she went on. “I couldn’t believe it when he fell back into the pond. He wasn’t by any means a small man. He must have tripped, or slipped on some mud or something. I don’t know.”
“But, Gwen, why didn’t you tell all this to the police? Or the coroner?”
“How could I?” She reached behind her for the support of the mantelpiece. “I would have been charged with ... heaven knows what. Manslaughter, I suppose.”
“But it was an accident.”
“And I walked off and left Brian there to die!”
“But you couldn’t possibly have known he would drown. You wouldn’t have been blamed,”
Gwen was shaking her head, sweeping aside my protest. “What difference does it make? I hadn’t the courage to confess.”
My mind zoomed away in another direction. “About the jacket, Gwen. Are you saying that Brain was wearing one when ... when he fell into the water?”
She looked at me vaguely, slow to switch her mind to my tack.
“Yes ... yes, that’s right. He was.”
“Yet when Bill Wayne found him in the water next morning, he was minus that jacket. How come? Are you quite certain about it?”
“How could I be mistaken about a thing like that? Do you think I’ll ever be able to forget a single detail of that awful night?”
“Then it looks as if somebody must have taken it off him, after he was dead.”
She nodded, screwing up her face in a misery of pain,
“Yes. I suppose that’s what made me pass out just now. The idea seems so ... so horrible.”
“But who would do a thing like that?” I asked her. “And what for? Money?”
“Brian never had any money. He always spent it the minute he got his hands on any.”
Unwillingly, inevitably, my thoughts flashed to Bill Wayne. Incredulously I considered the possibility. But I rejected it. I had to reject it.
There was still another question that had to be asked.
“What was the row about, Gwen? The quarrel between you and Brian earlier in the evening.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she said shortly, “He was a thief. A nasty little thief.”
She paused again, and then went on, “Brian used to get hold of stuff for my shop. Bits and pieces of Victorian jewelry and bric-a-brac—you know the kind of thing.”
“That’s what you specialize in, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “We had a sort of arrangement. He was supposed to call at likely houses and pick up whatever he could on the cheap. There’s no end to the oddments tucked away in drawers and cupboards—family relics, things like that. The owners think of it just as so much junk, and are glad enough to be offered a pound or two in hard cash. Usually they haven’t the faintest idea what it’s really worth.”
“And that’s what Brian was doing for you?”
“That’s what he said he was doing. And whatever he claimed to have paid for a thing, I’d give him double or more. I was still able to make a good profit.”
It sounded like pretty sharp practice to me. Underhand.
Gwen must have read my frown correctly. “It’s done all the time, Kim. In my sort of business you buy cheap and sell dear if you can. Anyway, it’s a darn sight more honest than what Brian was actually doing.”
“You mean the things he sold you were stolen?”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I only found out that evening.”
“And you had a row about it?”
“He was showing me a little mother-of-pearl snuffbox he said he’d bought at a farmhouse over Petersfield way. But I recognized it. I’d sold the thing myself a few years before to a big collector of Victoriana. I realized, then, why it was that some of the other things from Brian had seemed vaguely familiar.”
“You mean he had stolen a whole lot from the one collection?”
“Yes. It was dead easy for him. The man’s widow was an invalid, and Brian was nicely dug in with her nurse. Of course, I was absolutely furious about it. But Brian just laughed. He said that if I wanted to make trouble for him, he could make plenty for me. I was a receiver of stolen goods, and who would ever believe I hadn’t known what was going on all the time?”
So now I knew the truth about Brian Hearne’s accident.
Gwen was still talking, floundering in an ooze of guilt and shame and fear. But I’d stopped listening to her. I was listening now to the questions erupting in my own mind. Gwen had told me a great deal, but her story only thickened the mystery.
Nothing she had said explained why the whole family were hypersensitive about Brian’s death. Nothing explained the climate of explosive discord. I still couldn’t understand why the happiness of a small child was being heedlessly sacrificed.
And what about the missing jacket?
The answers to these questions were woven somehow into the shroud of silence that lay over Mildenhall.