That this should happen now!”
The expression in Eve Clare’s light blue eyes as she faced Vanner across the narrow dining table was one of angry depression rather than of grief. She could almost be seen asking herself the question—and longing, too, to put the question to Vanner himself, being restrained from it only by a reluctant and rather unexercised sense of propriety: “How long will all this last?”
Upstairs in Lou Capell’s bedroom a photographer was busy. An ambulance had been sent for. Policemen overflowed the house and garden.
Seated on her chair of leather and steel, with one bare elbow pressing hard on the top of the table, Eve was possessed with a restlessness that would not allow her long, thin hands, her shoulders or her feet in their bizarre sandals to be still for more than a moment. She was distraught, too, and inattentive.
Vanner had to repeat the question he had just asked her.
Jerkily she replied: “Oh, her name? Louise Dorothy Capell.”
“She lived with you?”
Eve shook her head emphatically. “She lived in London. If you want to know more about that you’d better ask her friend, Druna Merton; she’s down here for the weekend. They shared a flat off the Gray’s Inn Road. Lou used to come down to Larking to visit a brother; he lived here till recently, but they’ve gone to America now, he and his wife.”
“You know their address?”
“No,” she answered with a shrug, “I scarcely knew them.”
“It was through them, I suppose, that you met Miss Capell?”
“Actually, no. I met her at my aunt’s. My aunt and uncle, Mr and Mrs Fry, live at Belling Lodge, that white house just this side of Larking. You can question them, too, if you want to; they’re here for the weekend. Everyone’s here.” This last remark was followed by a curious laugh.
Vanner raised his eyes from his notebook to study her face. He asked: “Was Miss Capell a friend of yours?”
“Just what do you mean by a friend?”
He altered his question. “You were intimate with her?”
“There were about twelve years between our ages, Inspector. Lou was a very simple, irritatingly ignorant young woman…” Then she changed her tone slightly. “I don’t mean I didn’t like her—I did; she was good natured, frank and rather brave. But she was much more attached to both my husband and my daughter than she was to me.”
“Your husband, I understand, is away.”
“My husband and I are divorced.”
Giving one of his heavy nods, Vanner jotted something down.
“And your daughter, Mrs Clare, does she live with you?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Eve, “she’s living with Mr and Mrs Fry at the moment. That’s to say… it was to do with that that Lou was here this weekend.” She looked down thoughtfully at her pointed, reddened nails. In a flat tone she said: “I’m not actually callous. I’m not. But I’ve had so many things to think about lately.” She drew her lower lip under her teeth and bit into it hard. The gloomy inattentiveness was back on her face.
“I was asking about your daughter.”
“Ah yes, Vanessa. She’s here, too, this weekend.” This thought produced the same odd laugh as before. “You see, Vanessa’s been living with my aunt and uncle for some time. It happened to be convenient—I mean because of the divorce and all.”
“Quite so.”
“Well… You see, it’s not very exciting for the child there. Old people, I mean, and so on. She doesn’t meet many children. Well, Lou’s got some relations in Devon, people who’ve got a farm and a family of five or six. Somehow the idea came up—I’m not sure exactly how; I think it was with my husband she first discussed it—that Vanessa might go down there for a holiday. Lou was going down herself for some weeks. So we arranged that she should take Vanessa. It seemed an awfully good idea. It’d give my aunt and uncle a rest too. Children are frightfully tiring, aren’t they?”
“To elderly people, no doubt,” said Vanner coldly.
She gave him a hard stare. “Well,” she said, “that was what Lou was here for, to collect Vanessa.”
“When was she taking her down?”
“She was to have taken her down there today. She arrived here in the morning. But I’d got a bit of a party on and I didn’t see why Lou shouldn’t stay for it and take Vanessa away tomorrow, or on Monday even. Besides, she’d still got that awful cold; my aunt got worried because she said she’d give it to Vanessa.”
“You say she’d still got it. You saw her then a few days ago?”
“No,” she said, “but she rang up last Thursday and said she’d got one. She said she hoped it wouldn’t get bad and stop her travelling.”
“And so,” said Vanner slowly, “it was you who persuaded her to stay here?”
“Yes.” Suddenly her eyes opened wide. With a dart of her small head forward in a snakelike movement, she hissed: “What’s that got to do with it?”
Making another note, Vanner said evenly: “Were your husband and Miss Capell well acquainted?”
“Oh yes,” she said.
“And your husband approved of the arrangement that she should take the child to her relations?”
“I told you, it was with him she first discussed it.”
Vanner nodded, leaning back and looking down at the notes he had made.
“Mrs Clare,” he said, “Miss Capell was treating her cold with some stuff called Breathynne.”
“I believe so.”
“You saw her use it? Now there are instructions on that bottle that it should not be used more than once in three hours. Can you tell me whether Miss Capell stuck to those instructions?”
A definite nod was his answer.
“You’re sure?” he said.
“She was almost comic about it,” said Eve. “She’d stand waiting in front of a clock for the last five minutes of the three hours to go.”
“In that case,” said Vanner, “it becomes a matter of some importance when she was last seen to use it. Perhaps you can tell me.”
Eve asked abruptly: “It was the Breathynne then that killed her?”
“Not the Breathynne, but whatever was in the bottle that usually contained Breathynne.”
“I see. Well, I know I saw her use it. I’ve a sort of picture in my mind of her sitting there and squirting the stuff up her nose. It was in the afternoon sometime, out in the garden. I should guess it was about four o’clock. But you’d better ask someone else, Inspector.”
“You’re sure you can’t remember just when——?”
“No,” she said sharply, “if you want accurate information ask someone else.”
“Thank you, Mrs Clare. Now I want you to take a look at this letter which Miss Capell appears to have been in the middle of writing to you when she met her death. I want you to tell me——”
But at that moment there occurred an interruption.
It was an interruption that upset the whole of Vanner’s relations with the case, helped to increase the dominant strain of brooding in his temperament, and unsettled him nervously for a considerable period.
The actual interruption was the opening of the door. What the opening of the door revealed was a man. He was a tall man with dark hair and a narrow, dark face, a high-bridged nose and darkly dramatic, deep-set eyes. Had it been New Year’s Eve instead of sometime in the region of midsummer he would doubtless, as a dark stranger, have been regarded as a bringer of luck. Inspector Vanner did not regard him as a bringer of luck. He regarded him as one of the worst things that could have happened to him.
Behind the tall, dark man there were three others. One was a flustered constable. One was a short man with a pink, plump face. The third was a man of about forty-three, well built, well dressed and with that look of having had his personality smoothly rounded off in a lathe that often comes to successful men of business. It was the third man whom Eve Clare, with startled eyes but a voice that was lightly artificial, greeted: “Good heavens, Roger!”
The man came forward. He spoke to Vanner. “I am Roger Clare.”
But Vanner scarcely paid attention to him.
“What are you doing here?” he said to the dark-haired man in the doorway. He said it with a wooden slowness that revealed what might have been a lifelong storing up of antagonism.
Toby Dyke said: “Where’s the parcel, George?”
George held out a roughly constructed brown paper parcel tied with string. Toby Dyke stepped forward and put it down on the table in front of Vanner.
“Actually,” he said, “George and I—this is George, Vanner, old man—George and I came down to return this to Miss Capell. She left it behind last night. And now we’ve just heard this terrible news.”
Vanner was wrenching at the string. “What’s this?”
The parcel came asunder. Inside was a knitted cardigan. A frowsy purple in colour, it had an odour as if it had generally been worn in an atmosphere of frying onions.
“Is this Miss Capell’s?”
“I believe so,” said Toby.
“I’m sure it isn’t,” said Eve Clare.
“Well, she left it behind last night,” said Toby.
“Where?” said Vanner. “Where did you see her last night?”
“But it’s much too big,” said Eve. “It can’t be hers. Call Druna. She’d know. I’m certain it isn’t hers, Inspector. Who is this man?”
The inspector replied heavily: “This man’s name is Dyke, madam, Toby Dyke.”
She turned swiftly to her husband. “The man you’ve talked about?”
Vanner also turned swiftly on Roger Clare. His voice was suddenly charged with brutality. “Oh, you know this man, do you? You brought him, did you?”
Roger Clare gave a slight shake of his head. All his gestures were slight and quiet. There was a controlled underemphasis about him that was faintly repellent, it seemed to speak such certainty of himself.
“Mr Dyke and I know each other slightly. He edited a True Crime Story collection for me last year. But when we met tonight it was a complete surprise to us both.”
“Where did you meet him?” said Vanner.
Toby replied: “At the garden gate.”
His remark pointedly addressed to Clare, Vanner repeated: “Where did you meet him?”
But Roger Clare had suddenly started across the room to straighten a picture that was hanging faintly crooked. He did not attempt to reply until he was certain that it was hanging correctly. Then he repeated Toby’s words: “At the garden gate.”
Vanner turned back to the cardigan. “Where did she leave this with you, Dyke? Where did you see her?”
Toby’s face became solemn. “You’ve got to get this right, Vanner. You’re not to go reading into what I tell you a lot of things that weren’t there. I’ve got George here as a witness to corroborate what I say. The story may not strike you, with your evil mind, as a particularly likely one, but——”
“Your stories always strike me the same way, Dyke,” said Vanner. “Get on with this one.”
“Well, what happened last night was this. Lou Capell turned up at my flat at about a quarter to twelve. She came because she wanted to borrow fifteen pounds.”
“Fifteen pounds?” Vanner shot the words at him sharply; there was a sudden brightening in his face.
Toby nodded. “Fifteen pounds,” he said, and Vanner relaxed in his chair with a keener look of attentiveness.
“She wouldn’t tell me what she wanted it for,” said Toby. “She got me a bit worried, she was so obviously frightened and worked up. I tried to make her tell me, but she stuck to it that she’d promised not to tell anyone, and I couldn’t get a word out of her. Then she asked if she could stay there the night. For some reason she didn’t want to meet the girl, Druna Merton, she shares a flat with——”
Eve interrupted: “But Druna wasn’t there last night—she was here. Still, perhaps Lou didn’t know that; I only rang Druna up in the morning and she got down here about seven in the evening. But why didn’t Lou want to meet Druna?”
“Yes,” said a new voice from the doorway, “why didn’t Lou want to meet Druna? I should like to be told that.”
Heads turned. Vanner muttered to himself while the girl in the doorway came a few steps into the room. She said to Vanner: “I think I might be allowed to hear why Lou didn’t want to meet me.”
There was a momentary silence. With a shrug of his shoulders, Vanner looked at Toby. Toby looked thoughtfully at Druna Merton. Certainly, as Lou had told him, the girl possessed beauty. She was one of those rare people whose whole person is an exceptional achievement in composition. It was not only her face that held the eye, though her face, small and pale, with straight features of delicate severity yet with sensuousness and subtlety in the curves of nostrils and mouth, would have been enough to merit attention. But her slim, long legs, her narrow yet rounded hips, her high breasts, her supple shoulders, were moulded with such fineness and completeness that one might think the deity for once had had the enthusiasm to finish this job of work himself instead of leaving the final polish to be added by environment and chance. She was not very tall; her hair was black—thick, heavy hair which she wore in elaborate curls.
She said, lifting a cigarette she held in her hand with a gesture demanding a light from someone: “Well, why, please?”
Toby took out a matchbox. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Oh, please. You were just going to tell the inspector.”
“No,” said Toby. “I was just telling the inspector that for some reason Lou didn’t want to meet you. For some reason. She wouldn’t tell me what the reason was.”
She smiled at him. If there was a fault in her appearance it was that when she smiled it made little difference to her face.
“You tried to make her tell you the reason, of course?”
“Yes, I tried to make her tell me.”
“And she was just hysterical, evasive and muddled up?”
Vanner broke in: “Then you know yourself, Miss Merton, why she didn’t want to go back to your flat?”
“No,” she answered composedly, “Lou was always getting into states of mind I didn’t understand at all.”
“Well,” said Toby to Vanner, “shall I go on?”
Vanner grunted.
Toby continued: “She wouldn’t go back to her flat and she was very anxious not to go to a hotel.”
“Why?” said Vanner. “Hadn’t she the money?”
Druna explained: “She’d been brought up to believe that if she stayed a night alone in a hotel she’d be abducted. Besides”—and she gave her unexpressive smile—“she was rather fond of putting herself in compromising situations and then behaving platonically. She got some sort of thrill from it. Poor Lou, she was terribly undeveloped. I think I know what Mr Dyke is leading up to telling you: it’s that although he allowed Lou to spend the night at his flat it was all perfectly innocent. You can believe him; it almost certainly was.”
A smothered sound came from Roger Clare. Toby glanced at him. Clare was looking at Druna with intense dislike on his face.
Vanner addressed Druna: “Miss Merton, have you ever seen this cardigan here?”
Druna looked at it distastefully. “No,” she said.
“Didn’t it belong to Miss Capell?”
“It did not.”
Vanner looked at Toby. “Well?” he said.
Toby shrugged. “She’d a very bad cold; perhaps she’d borrowed it from someone to keep her warm. All I know is she left it behind. She was gone in the morning by the time we got up, and there the thing was, over the end of the bed where she’d slept.”
“So you thought you’d return it to her, eh?” said Vanner. “How nice. Thought you’d return it to her just the same evening as she goes and gets herself murdered—very nice, very nice indeed.”
“Yes,” said Toby woodenly, “I thought I’d return it to her. George and I had nothing special to do, and it was a lovely summer evening, so we thought we’d combine a run in the country on George’s motorcycle with returning the cardigan. We came down here and then we heard this news——”
“Heard it how?” barked Vanner.
Toby’s face showed a bland sort of surprise. “Mr Clare here told us all about it.”
“Oh, Mr Clare told you, did he? At the garden gate, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said Toby, “at the garden gate.”
“And how” said Vanner fiercely, swinging round on Roger Clare, “did you know anything about it?”
A slight catch of the breath sounded close to Toby. It was Eve Clare, who, since her first exclamation when her husband came into the room, had not addressed a single word to him; only, from time to time, she had let her eyes dwell upon him, their expression lifeless. But that lifelessness was so inappropriate to her vivid face that it had revealed how deliberately she found she had to school herself to regard him.
Clare’s face still had on it the look of contemptuous dislike that had appeared there while Druna was speaking. There was the weariness too of a deeply felt horror.
“I knew that Lou was dead,” he said, “because about an hour ago I telephoned. Someone told me she was dead.”
“Where did you telephone from?” Vanner asked.
“My flat in town.”
“Why did you telephone?”
“I wanted to ask Lou—I mean I wanted to ask about Lou——” He stopped. Taking a hold of himself, he started again. “I wanted to ask whether Lou and Vanessa—that’s my daughter—whether they’d got away all right. Miss Capell was taking Vanessa down to Devonshire to some relatives of hers.”
“I’ve been telling the inspector about that,” said Eve.
“Ah yes,” said Roger, without looking at her.
“Whom did you speak to on the telephone here?” asked Vanner. “Mrs Clare?”
Eve shook her head.
“I don’t know who it was,” said Roger.
“It was I,” said Druna.
The very quiet voice she used managed to turn the simple statement into something of threatening significance.
“And,” she went on when she had had her effect, “there’s a question I should like to ask you, Mr Clare. When you telephoned why did you begin by speaking in an assumed voice?”
A flush spread over his face. “What d’you mean?”
“When I picked up the telephone,” said Druna, “you began by saying: ‘Can I speak to Miss Capell?’ with such a violent cockney accent it just screamed amateur theatricals.”
“Hey,” said Vanner quickly, “you asked for Miss Capell, did you? You asked for Miss Capell although you thought she’d taken your daughter off to Devon this morning?”
Roger Clare began to tremble. It was a curious sight, the trembling of this self-assured, solidly built man; it revealed a tension of nervous fury directed against the girl Druna.
“I did nothing of the kind, and the voice I used was my own!” His face was still dark red. “She’s telling lies—I don’t know why, but she’s telling lies. It’s spite of some sort, or she’s unbalanced. I don’t know why she should, but she’s telling lies.” His voice was rising, beginning to lose control.
Druna suddenly leant on the table behind which Vanner was seated. “Lou Capell was my friend!” she said dramatically.
“When you answered the telephone,” Vanner said to her, “what did you say?”
“I said——”
But at that moment, ringing through the house, cutting across question, answer, truth or lie, ripping at the nerves with almost unendurable shrillness, came a scream of mortal terror.