15.

THE STRICKEN COUPLE

“I saw the strong man bowed down and his knees to fail.”

CHARLES LAMB

WILLIAM FREE pushed away his plate with most of its contents untouched, walked to the window and, thrusting aside the lace curtains, stared at the road without seeing anything.

It was as though he were expecting Ronald to come home.

His wife, making a show of eating something, watched him out of the corner of her eye. Then she, too, left her food and sat with her hands in her lap, saying nothing.

Thus Littlejohn found them. The bottom knocked out of their lives and everything in ruins.

They did their best to make him welcome and invited him to a cup of tea from the pot on the hob.

Littlejohn hardly knew how to begin. He looked at the unfinished meal, the haggard, hopeless faces of the stricken Frees and felt his gorge rise. If only he could lay his hands on the swine who …

There was a good fire burning, casting a mellow light on the old-fashioned mahogany sideboard, dining-table and chairs. The brasses and pot dogs shone on the mantelpiece. On the hearthrug a little tabby cat industriously licked her paws and washed behind her ears. Littlejohn watched her. Her busy, detached air gave relief to the tension of the rest of the place. She rose, arched her back, purred and pranced round the Inspector’s trousers, rubbing herself against them with great satisfaction.

Old Free’s eyes were bloodshot and dark-ringed from lack of sleep. He had nothing at all to say for himself. His only comfort was in work. He excused himself.

“I’ve to finish a job for to-night,” he said. “I’ll be gettin’ on … Nothin’ I can tell you …”

He stumbled out of the room and soon could be heard rummaging among his stock of timber and using a saw.

Littlejohn felt embarrassed. It was like rubbing salt into a raw wound. But it had to be done.

Relief arrived from an unexpected quarter. There was a tap on the door and a tall, straight-backed, scraggy woman entered without waiting to be admitted. Her eyelids were inflamed and she kept blinking and twitching her face as though they annoyed her.

“I called to see if I could get you anythin’, Anne. I’m on my way to Melchester …”

She looked Littlejohn up and down searchingly and boldly, as though challenging his right to be there at all. She wore a long, shabby brown coat and a hat like a pancake fixed on a skullcap. In her large, bony hands she gripped a shopping basket tightly, as though expecting it to be snatched.

“My cousin Sarah … This is Mr. Littlejohn from the police.”

Sarah drew up a chair and joined the conference without waiting for an invitation. She seemed used to doing as she liked about the place. There was a lull in the conversation. Everyone seemed to be waiting for somebody else to start the ball rolling.

Littlejohn slowly filled his pipe, lit it, crossed his legs and stared gloomily into the fire. An atmosphere of dejection filled the room. Mrs. Free sat motionless, her hands in her lap, waiting for the Inspector to talk about his business.

There was an old-fashioned, small case-clock on the mantelpiece, with a painted dial and a steel pendulum showing beneath it through the glass door.

Ti-tock, ti-tock, ti-tock … As though some part of the works were out of balance and ready to stop at any moment.

“I seem to have interrupted the conversation … If I’m in the way I’ll be off …”

Sarah was getting peevish. Unable to tear herself away out of sheer curiosity, yet getting jumpy because things were hanging fire.

“No, don’t go. Sarah’s all right, Mr. Littlejohn. You can talk in front of her. She’s one of the family.”

Sarah nodded her head vigorously and tightened her lips, defying anybody to prove it otherwise.

“I just wondered, Mrs. Free, if you’d any idea as to why anyone should want to kill your son.”

Tears filled the woman’s eyes again and she shook her head helplessly, unable to speak.

“Why should anybody want to murder Ronnie?” said Sarah. “He was a good boy. Everybody liked him.”

“But someone must have hated him or what he had done so much, that …”

“I can’t see a single person hating Ronald.”

“Was he all right, Mrs. Free, when he left home to meet Miss Cruft?”

“Yes. He seemed very happy. Things were going well between him and Laura.”

“Hadn’t they always gone well?”

Mrs. Free hesitated.

Ti-tock. Ti-tock. Ti-tock.

Sarah bent closer across the table, intent on not missing a word.

“His father and me didn’t like it. We thought she wasn’t the girl for him.”

“Why?”

“Well … She’d had a few before and thrown them over. Never seemed to be able to make up her mind proper. We didn’t want Ronnie always like a cat on hot bricks wondering … wondering if he was going to be the next to be thrown over. He’d his career and needed all his wits to make his way. Besides …”

“Yes?”

“Besides … I suppose all parents are alike. No girl’s good enough. But she seemed to us to be the sort who’d be fonder of a good time than a husband and home and children.”

“I see.”

“Yes,” said Sarah. Littlejohn didn’t quite know what she was affirming, but she seemed quite settled in her own mind in approving some point or other.

“So he didn’t seem to have any worries the last time you saw him?”

“No … If we’d known about all this, we’d have let him alone. Better Laura than …”

The stricken woman was weeping again. Sarah rose and comforted her, glaring at Littlejohn in reproach.

Mrs. Free sniffed back her tears and dried her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “Was there anythin’ else, sir?”

“I’m sorry, too, Mrs. Free. It’s all very distressing to me to have to keep asking these trying questions, but I’ve got my duty …”

“Of course you have.”

“Of course you ’ave,” echoed Sarah like a chairman giving a casting vote, finally and defiantly.

“And Ronald hadn’t mentioned anybody quarrelling with him … about his love-affair, shall we say?”

“No. Johnny Hunter was wild about it at first. He was keen on Laura, I’m told. They quarrelled, but soon made it up agen. Johnny’s a nice boy. The sort who wouldn’t hold anythin’ against anybody for long.”

“That’s right,” affirmed Sarah, blinking her eyes ferociously and then contorting her face as though having difficulty in drawing the lids apart.

Outside, the road was very busy. Drovers bringing cattle from the morning’s stock auctions in Melchester, and cars and turnouts on their ways to town for the afternoon’s produce markets. A large, red bus thundered past.

“That’s my bus … I’ll ’ave another half-hour to wait now,” asserted Sarah, settling down more cosily in her chair, determined to be comfortable while she waited. “I see Mrs. Fairfield was on it. Promised to meet ’er, I did. Owe her two and six. Spent all me money last week and had to borrer from ’er. I’d better call and pay me debts to-night.”

The name had a familiar ring to Littlejohn.

“Let me see, isn’t that the mother of the girl Johnny Hunter’s courting?”

“Yes. Funny sort o’ courtin’ too, if you ask me. Mrs. Fairfield’s proper bothered about it. Told me so last week. In confidence, of course. I can speak my mind here, I know. Neether of you’ll say a word outside … So I’ll not be breakin’ me word.”

Littlejohn smiled. That’s the way it was. Secrets whispered under solemn oath of not telling a soul soon all over the shop!

Sarah was going it full steam ahead.

“… Mrs. Fairfield’s that worried about their Jessie. The girl’s mad about Johnny and sometimes you’d think he was the same about ’er, Mrs. Fairfield tells me. And then, suddenly, he’ll change. Speak cynical to her, kiss ’er and turn nasty, and all that …”

Mrs. Free, her mind taken from her own troubles, showed sudden interest.

“Surely Jessie’s not been tellin’ all that sort o’ stuff?”

Sarah shot out her neck like a hen drinking.

“Oh yes, she ’as. Mrs. F. says she can’t sleep o’ nights for worry and she’s been up a time or two in the small hours comfortin’ her. You tell things in the small hours you wouldn’t in the day.”

Littlejohn could well imagine a sort of third-degree on affairs of heart in the middle of the night!

“In case you don’t know it, Inspector, Mrs. Fairfield’s the late schoolmaster’s widow. Her and her two daughters live in the old schoolhouse, the present schoolmistress living in a flat in the village. They take in a lodger, you see, an’ only having three bedrooms, Jessie and her mother use the same room. That’s how it is her mother knows she can’t sleep.”

Mrs. Free explained it all pat. Littlejohn wondered if any secrets at all were hid from the matriarchal council of Ravelstone! Perhaps they even knew who’d killed Free! And wouldn’t tell a foreigner!!

Sarah wasn’t going to be stopped in the middle of a juicy narrative. She raised her voice, which mingled with and finally routed that of Mrs. Free.

“… I sez to ’er, ‘Mrs. Fairfield,’ I sez, ‘Mrs. Fairfield, there’s on’y one explanation for that. Johnny’s took her on the rebound from Laura Cruft. It often happens that way. When a man can’t get the girl he wants, he turns to another and pretends to himself she’s the girl he couldn’t have, and then when he sees she isn’t, he turns nasty’.”

This profound piece of sex psychology was delivered with great gravity and a final toss of the head which defied argument. Sarah began to rock herself to and fro in the rocking-chair, her hands and arms embracing her abdomen like a sufferer from colic.

Ti-tock. Ti-tock. Ti-tock.

Next door Free could be heard hammering. You could follow his every movement. Selecting a nail, holding it in position and then giving it a heavy clout and a series of minor ones.

“Mrs. Fairfield wouldn’t have it of course, but I know.”

Sarah was unmarried and, therefore, as an onlooker, saw most of the game!

“I know, I say. Known all along. If I was Jessie, I’d show him a thing or two. Keepin’ wake o’ nights for a chap like Hunter! And her could have half the single men hereabouts if she lifted ’er little finger. Silly thing!”

They were now embarked on a right good gossip. Littlejohn refilled and lit his pipe, stretched his legs and made himself comfortable. It wouldn’t do any harm to listen-in even if it did no good. The little cat, with a sudden impulse, leapt on his knees and settled down.

“Push ’er off, sir,” said Mrs. Free. “She’s always doin’ that. Come down now, Edna.”

“Edna?”

“Yes. Ronnie called her that. Said she’d a face like the barmaid at The Bird in Hand.”

The cat stuck its claws through the Inspector’s trousers right into his skin in its ecstacies.

Sarah was still in full spate.

“… Mrs. Fairfield was proper put-out when I told ’er that. ‘The girl’s missing one good catch as I know of,’ I sez. ‘That writer chap on Gallows Hill’s crazy about ’er, an’ well you know it.’”

“Who?” asked Littlejohn, now up to the neck in gossip and enjoying it like any old woman.

“Chap that has a bungalow on Gallows Hill. Long … no, Shortt … Shortt, that’s it. George Shortt. Well-known writer, they tell me. I never read books, so I can’t say, but they tell me he’s famous and makes thousands out of his novels every year.”

“Never heard of him!”

“You wouldn’t, not as George Shortt. Writes under a nomdiploom. Maude Temple, or something. A woman’s name! Doesn’t sound right, does it? Like a man dressin’ in woman’s clothes. But it earns him a fortune, so what’s the odds.”

Littlejohn remembered the books. Circulating libraries full of them, and customers clamouring for more. Strong romances where the hero didn’t ask for the woman, he took her …!

“Yes. George Shortt’s mad on Jessie. Followin’ her about with sheep’s eyes and bowin’ and smilin’ and lookin’ love-lorn whenever he sees her in the village. ‘She doesn’t know which side her bread’s buttered,’ I sez to Mrs. Fairfield. “Losin’ a chance like that for the sake of Johnny Hunter, who can’t make up his mind who he does want’.”

“But if she doesn’t love Mr. Shortt,” pleaded Mrs. Free.

The sex psychologist had an answer to that.

“Better take one who loves you than one who doesn’t. You know where you are then. She’d come to love ’im later. I told Mrs. Fairfield that straight. I’ve seen that ’appen more than once’t. Wasn’t born yesterday …”

Sarah rocked furiously and screwed her eyes violently.

“I wish I knew that Shortt to speak to. I’d give ’im a piece of my mind.”

She leaned forward confidentially and made her points strongly prodding her left palm with a stiff bony forefinger.

“… They tell me in his books the men know what they want and take it. No arguin’ for his women. Just swept off their feet by force of passion.”

She threw out her arms in enthusiasm and flicked her eyelids furiously.

“Not that I read ’em. But them that do tell me it’s true. Pity ’e can’t take a dose of his own medicine and show Miss Jessie Fairfield wot’s wot.”

“So you don’t think Hunter’s in love with Jessie, then?” Littlejohn put it casually. He didn’t quite know why he asked the question, but somehow, at the time, it seemed important.

“Not a bit of it … Just showin’ Laura Cruft that there’s as good fish in the sea … And mark my words, mark my words, now that Laura’s free again, Jessie’s heart’s goin’ to be broke more than ever. She’d better take that Shortt chap while the going’s good … Johnny’ll be round Apple Tree Farm agen as sure as eggs is eggs …”

Free had finished his hammering and appeared in the house again. He looked as dazed and listless as ever.

“Hello, Sarah,” he muttered.

“Hello, Will. How are things? Nicely, I hope.”

The old man made no reply. He seemed to be looking for something and to have forgotten what it was.

“Could I have a cup o’ tea, mother? I feel that a good cup o’ tea might …”

“Certainly, Will. I’ll make one right away. Sit down, dad, do. Don’t keep on …”

The wretched couple looked helplessly at each other.

“Will you have a cup of tea, Inspector?… Sarah?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Free. I must be going.”

“Is that clock right, Anne? I must be goin’ too! My bus is due. Mustn’t miss that or else …”

Sarah gathered her belongings and hurried off with hardly another word, pausing at the door only for a final warning.

“You’ll not tell a soul wot I said about Jessie Fairfield.”

Free, who had been wandering about with his hat on, removed it, revealing a livid weal where the brim had bitten into his forehead. He sat at the table dumbly waiting for his drink.

“Sure you won’t have a cup, Mr. Littlejohn?”

“Quite sure, thanks, Mrs. Free. I’ve spent enough time already and must be off.”

He shook hands with the pair of them.

As he gripped Littlejohn’s hand, Old Free suddenly flamed into life.

“I hope you soon find who done it. I wish to thank you … If only I could lay these hands on …”

The veins in his forehead stood out like cords and his face grew livid.

“There, there, dad. Don’t take on so. It’s over and done with past mendin’ now, dear. Revenge and bitterness won’t bring him back.”

Littlejohn left them comforting each other.