I suspect Colonel Primrose was as surprised as I was to see Jim Gould and Sergeant Buck sitting on the front steps of my house so deep in conversation that they didn’t even see us coming until we were almost up to them. When they did Buck jumped to his feet, giving the Colonel a sharp probing glance—unless I was mistaken—no doubt to see whether I’d proposed to him. Then he came to an abrupt attention.
“Mr. Gould’s got an idea, sir,” he said stiffly.
“Really?” said Colonel Primrose. “What is it?”
“It’s about the foreigner, sir.”
“Yes?”
Colonel Primrose gave me a glance.
“Yes, sir. It’s his idea that the foreigner knew the missus in Georgia.”
He looked over at Jim out of one eye.
Jim grinned. There was something decidedly grim, just the same, about his lean set jaw and steady eyes, fastened, squinting a little against the sun, on the Colonel.
“It sounds cockeyed, Colonel Primrose, I admit,” he said easily, shifting his long sinewy frame from one leg to the other. “I didn’t pry into my wife’s affairs. But I guess anybody’d have been blind if he didn’t see she knew him when he first came into the clubhouse.”
“I noticed she did,” Colonel Primrose said.
“You did? Well, then, I guess I’m not telling you anything.”
“That depends, of course.”
“She called him up when we were at dinner and talked to him. She was pretty sore when she came back to the table.”
“You didn’t hear what she said?” Colonel Primrose asked bluntly.
“I heard it, all right, but I don’t speak the language.”
Colonel Primrose nodded. “Georgian, of course.—You didn’t happen to see him, when you were with Miss Bishop, Saturday night?”
Jim shook his head. “No.”
“Nobody but Santa Claus,” Jim said cheerfully.
“Did you see Santa Claus this noon too? When Mrs. Potter was killed?”
The smile left Jim’s face.
“No. I didn’t see anybody. Except Miss Bishop. I saw her, here. I went directly home by the side door. I didn’t know Mrs. Potter was in the house.”
Colonel Primrose nodded politely. “And Saturday night—where did you meet Miss Bishop, at one o’clock?”
Jim hesitated. Then he nodded down towards the group of white chairs by the tree.
“Down there. I was going for a walk before I went home. We walked down to the lane and back up through their garden. I cut straight across here and home.”
“When would that be?”
“Two-fifteen, perhaps, I don’t know.”
“You’re sure you didn’t see anybody, except Santa Claus?”
The fraction of an instant that Jim hesitated was imperceptible unless you knew him very well, or so I thought.
“Quite sure.”
“Just what was your mother doing, Gould?” Colonel Primrose asked—suavely.
Jim flushed a little. “I didn’t see my mother, Colonel Primrose,” he said evenly. The two of them looked directly at each other for a long time. I couldn’t have said whether it was challenge or merely appraisal.
“That’s straight, Colonel,” Jim added steadily.
Colonel Primrose nodded again. Jim took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket. His brown hands were perfectly steady as he held his lighter to his cigarette and snapped it shut.
“I didn’t come over for a cross-examination, anyway,” he said curtly. “I just came over to tell you I don’t think much of the method of hounding women and children, and tell you I’m in on this myself from now on.”
“That’s fine,” said Colonel Primrose cheerfully. He hesitated an instant, looking questioningly at Jim. “Have you . . . learned something?”
Jim hesitated also, a barely perceptible fraction of a moment. He shook his head grimly.
“Well,” Colonel Primrose remarked, “you’ll find it a little difficult to take much of a part in this if you’ve just made up your mind about things. And a little dangerous.”
“You can leave that to me, Colonel.”
We watched his long figure move swiftly across the lawn towards the Bishops’. I looked at Colonel Primrose. He was staring after him thoughtfully. He looked at me, shaking his head a little.
“That young man’s headed for trouble,” he said. “He’s found out something, or thinks he has, that’s changed the setup for him. What was it, Buck?”
The iron-faced Sergeant shook his head.
“He’s had a heart-to-heart talk with his brother-in-law, sir, is all I can get.”
Sergeant Buck looked at Jim’s disappearing form with some approval. “He’s a good boy, sir,” he added.
I brightened up considerably at that, for some reason, but I learned later that that was a mistake. It seemed that in all the businesses of this sort that the two of them had been in, the people Sergeant Buck took a fancy to invariably turned out to be monsters of villainy. At least, so Colonel Primrose maintained. I learned later, also, that Sergeant Buck was a man of considerable means, having invested his army pay and army poker winnings in houses on the Coast near naval stations, and actually, what with his retired pay and his rents, doing rather better than his colonel with his retired pay and his nonproductive stocks. There was never any confusion about their relationship, however. The Colonel was still the Colonel and the Sergeant still the Sergeant—though he did often seem a pretty severe manager.
It was apparent now that whatever Jim had said or done while we were away, he had quite definitely sold himself to Sergeant Buck. Personally I suspected it was because the Colonel had left Buck and taken me. Also, of course, here was Jim obviously a fine young fellow done in by a woman, and a foreign woman at that.
I left the two of them a few minutes after Jim had gone and went around the house to get my car. I hadn’t been to the village all day, and the family larder was definitely low. I got the car and set out for Church Street with utterly no idea of what an important development in the business of Sandra Gould and Maggie Potter I was about to run into, or how—just as in Mrs. Potter’s case—a hitherto quite trivial figure in the whole affair was to take on new proportions. It was, I suppose, nothing short of Fate that when I walked into the tea store Elsie Carter should be there, pressing the cantaloupes and turning the berry boxes upside down.
She abandoned the whole business the instant she spotted me and came across to where I was.
“My dear Grace, this must be simply terrible for you, you poor child!”
She fixed me with a bright predatory eye.
“I’m bearing up wonderfully, Elsie,” I said.
“Oh but my dear! What could you expect? I told poor Maggie just last week that I didn’t see how she stood it.”
I stared at her a horrified instant.
“You did?” I said, and no doubt very bitterly. “Then you can thank yourself for Maggie Potter’s death.”
Elsie turned a livid green.
“And what’s more,” I went on furiously, “if you could bring yourself to stop all this nonsense about Rosemary and Jim, we’d all be better off.”
I don’t really know why I said that, except that I was dreadfully angry all of a sudden at her carrying her wretched gossip to poor Maggie Potter. Certainly I hadn’t the faintest notion that it would affect Elsie as it did. She went from green to a dead-white. Her sharp beady eyes fairly burned holes into me.
“You’re not the one to talk, Grace Latham!”
She almost spat the words at me.
“Don’t think I haven’t got eyes in my head. What’s Rodman Bishop doing around your house all the time?”
I gaped stupidly at her. She’d got started and under way, and when Elsie once gets that far nobody has ever been known to stop her.
“And what’s more, if Rosemary Bishop comes back here, and hasn’t the decency to leave Jim alone, you can’t blame Sandra for fighting for her happiness—and you can’t expect me to perjure myself when Colonel Primrose asks me about it! Heaven knows I’m merely doing my duty as I see it!”
“Oh dear!” I thought. I could have known that very astute little man with the sparkling black eyes had no doubt been doing lots of things he hadn’t told me about. And I thought again that Rodman Bishop was quite right. The trouble with the world is that too many people are barging about doing their duty as they see it. George Barrol wasn’t the only one.
“I didn’t know Rosemary and Sandra had taken to fighting, or at any rate not in the public streets,” I said, as casually as I could manage.
“Then the crowd’s wrong in thinking Colonel Primrose takes you into his confidence,” Elsie snapped spitefully. “He came to me yesterday afternoon. Obviously realizing that the whole lot of you couldn’t be relied on to tell the truth.—Even if you knew it,” she added with sharp malice.
I don’t know why I felt I had to defend my position as confidante of the Colonel—especially when what she was saying about our unreliability was only too true. But there’s something about Elsie’s predatory nose and thin lips and prying eyes that would make a cat defend a mouse.
“Colonel Primrose hasn’t pretended to take me into his confidence,” I said stiffly—and truthfully. I realized also that it was more truthful than I’d thought. And actually it was really more truthful than I realized even then.
Just then somebody reached past her and started to take the largest and crispest head of iceberg lettuce. Elsie turned and grasped it firmly out of her hand. I fled, feeling just as if I’d eaten a large cold pancake.
What must Colonel Primrose have heard from Elsie Carter—or rather, what couldn’t he have heard from her? I dreaded to think of it, but I couldn’t keep the series of crazy notions Elsie had had for years from rushing like wild horses through my head. Rodman Bishop and Alice Gould had been “carrying on.” Dr. Potter was slowly doing poor Maggie to death. Little Andy Thorp was deaf and dumb, because he didn’t talk till late. Sandra’s baby had been born Chinese, or Malay, or green, or yellow, or something pretty ghastly. As it was also born dead, no one ever knew but the hospital people. The manager of the club had sold the original paneling to the Metropolitan one winter and replaced it with beaverboard and pocketed the money. Rosemary’s dull gold hair was peroxide, my auburn hair was henna. Sandra was really from Hoboken, New Jersey; she was really an escaped Georgian aristocrat, misunderstood and nagged to death by Alice Gould. Chapin Bishop’s head had been forcibly held in the pool until he’d drowned. The Catholics were building a tunnel to the White House, President Roosevelt was a Jew.
In fact, I couldn’t think of any notion that Elsie Carter hadn’t had. I shuddered to think of the tale she must have told Colonel Primrose. Especially if, as she’d virtually said, she’d actually seen Rosemary and Sandra quarreling . . .
I opened the door of my car and waited for the boy to put my groceries on the back seat.
“Hello, Grace,” somebody said. “How’s the charnel house doing?”
I turned around. Bill Chetwynd was coming down Mr. Toplady’s steps, carrying a can of kerosene with a potato stuck on the spout.
“It’s just dandy,” I said.
Then I thought of something.
“When did you leave the clubhouse the other night, by the way, Bill?”
“I wouldn’t know, Grace.” He grinned. “My friends can probably tell you.”
“Would you happen to remember when the Carters left?”
Bill Chetwynd wrinkled his forehead and squinted his eyes, trying to think, which is rather hard for him.
“Yeah, now, lessee. You mean the lady that’s a cross between an elephant and a hawk, married to the little guy that looks like the stuff they used to give us in the nursery instead of tea.”
“That’s the people,” I said patiently.
“Lord, Grace, you don’t think she did Sandra in—”
“Shut up,” I said quickly. Elsie was coming stalwartly out of the tea store, her lips compressed, not missing anything that was going on, from Bill and me to the Reverend Arrowsmith’s daughter in shorts smoking a cigarette with some boy at the popcorn stand.
“Hello, Mrs. Carter!” Bill said. “Lovely day, isn’t it? Too hot, though.”
He grinned at me as Elsie went on.
“Now, lessee. I can tell you, if it’s important. What I mean is, I’m not going to all the trouble to think about the Carters unless it’s damn important. I’d rather think about anteaters, or a nice cool drink of vitriol.”
“Please, Bill, don’t be an idiot,” I pleaded. “I really want to know.”
“O.K. Then I was in the bar having a drink.”
“I know, darling. It’s the Carters—you know, the Carters.”
“Sure. I was in the bar. Ferney Carter was in the bar too.”
“Be serious, Bill—please!”
“ ’Struth. Ferney Carter was there having a lemon coke. It was—lessee—it was just when they dragged the foreign gal and Georgie out of the water. I said—”
“No, Bill. The Carters!”
“I’m getting to ’em. Elsie came to the door and said, ‘Ferney dear, we ought to be going home, it’s late.’ Need I say more? Next thing I knew there was a gap, and then Andy Thorp was filling it by saying a double whisky neat.”
“Oh,” I said. “Then the Carters left before Andy and Sandra.”
“Not so fast, girl. Not so fast. When I went upstairs, Ferney dear was sitting in the hall, hat on his knees. Dame Elsie was gassing with some old girl about whether the men wouldn’t prefer creamed chicken and peas at the auxiliary picnic to peas and creamed chicken.”
“Bill, please!” I said. “This is serious, really!”
“But that’s a fact, Grace. I know, because I’d had just enough to make my heart bleed for poor old Ferney. I said, ‘Elsie, can’t Ferney go have another coke, just one more?’ She said, ‘Bill, you’re a man, which would you rather have, creamed chicken and peas—’ and I said ‘Yes’ and tottered off. I waited to dance with Rose, but she’d gone too. Then I went and fetched Ferney a lemon coke, but I had to water the rubber plant with it. He’d gone.”
“You wouldn’t know what time that was?”
“It was before one,” Bill said earnestly. “Because I don’t remember anything after one.”
“Well, that’s a help,” I said. “I wanted to know, because Elsie’s going to be an eyewitness to Rosemary slogging Sandra over the head with the monkey wrench, or something, before another day’s gone, and I just wondered whether she could possibly have been anywhere in the district.”
Bill shook his head. “Couldn’t tell you,” he said cheerfully. “I can tell you this—I’d like to slog her.”
“Wouldn’t we all.”
I answered rather absently, because it was a sort of academic point anyway. Chiefly, however, because I was just then remembering the crack she’d taken at me about Rodman Bishop, and trying to figure out what she’d meant by it. I should probably have thought about it seriously enough to see its importance if I hadn’t had to go on to a Red Cross Board Meeting, and after that out to Mrs. Rowe’s to get two country hams she’d been saving for me. As it was I dismissed it—much too lightly. Even Elsie Carter has to be right once in a while.