IT KEPT ON RAINING.
Whatever went on during the interview with Jacob Wait behind closed doors of the front drawing room, there was no clue to it in Beatrice’s face or bearing when at last she emerged. Wait vanished abruptly.
Shortly before lunch, and while Beatrice and Wait were still talking, two men came again to the house and spent some time in the library. The policemen were about, too; not the two who had been there during the night, but different ones. So that when Marcia attempted to go to the Copleys’ again, they stopped her. She was asked to remain in the house, they said, respectfully but with a remarkably efficient air, and although she could have gone into the garden, it was raining.
She was obliged to accept it. To insist would have revealed the urgency of her errand. She turned to the telephone before she realized that the telephone, in all likelihood, was also being watched, and it was only a small, prompt click, as of another connection being made secretly somewhere along the line, that warned her of that. She put down the receiver in something like panic. It had been rather a close escape. Another moment and central would have asked for the number and she would have given it and—probably— talked openly and without evasion to Rob.
She sat there at the telephone for a moment. Policemen in the house watching every move, searchers all over it respecting no barriers and no household dignity and reserve.
Telephone lines tapped. Every move and every breath under surveillance.
That was what they did when murder entered a house.
And Beatrice had the letter.
Ancill was sounding the lunch gong when she came into the hall, and the long, mellow notes were hollow and resonant and filled the hall and reached up the well of the stairs. Gally came downstairs through the eerie bands of light there at the landing, and Beatrice followed him. Gally looked a little embarrassed and aware of his desertion as he met Marcia’s eyes, and Beatrice was altogether cold and calm and enigmatic. She sat, as if by right now that he was dead, in Ivan’s place at the table, and lunch was one of the most unpleasant social amenities Marcia had ever been called upon to endure. Ancill walked on cat feet around the table, Beatrice sat in stony silence with rigidly erect shoulders, and Gally wriggled, essayed one or two conversational attempts which withered under Beatrice’s blank regard, and jumped nervously when Ancill materialized at his elbow with celery.
“It’s got to be a game,” he told Marcia later. He took his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. “I try to catch Ancill. He eases in the pantry door, and if I see him before he appears at the table, I win. I only did it once at lunch, but I was upset. My batting average was low. I’ll do better at dinner. Oh, God,” said Gally miserably. “Dinner! And I can’t stay away. I’ve got such a good appetite. See here, Marcia,”—he turned to her with a glint of desperation—“I don’t like the way Beatrice looks at me. There’s something cold and—and calculative about her. Something sort of predatory. You don’t suppose she’s planning to polish me off, do you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Marcia absently. They were in the front drawing room. Beatrice had disappeared, and Gally had got hold of some of the morning papers. “Murder!” they shouted in headlines, but on the whole stuck to the facts, which were few. Jacob Wait, probably, had seen to that, thought Marcia. Preparing for his case, his big denouement, his grand-jury indictment.
“Don’t think so!” echoed Gally in injured tones. “I wish you’d stop reading the papers and pay some attention to me, Marcia. There’s not much there, anyway. They say Wait won’t let his cases be tried in advance in the papers. I dunno—that’s what they say. And I don’t like the gleam in Beatrice’s eyes.”
Marcia looked at him. Could Gally, she wondered, go to see Rob and tell him about the letter? He would do it in an instant if she asked him to; he would reach Rob with the message over policemen’s dead bodies if she told him how important it was.
“And I don’t see why she brought me here,” went on Gally. “I asked her, you know. Said I didn’t want to come. She said she wanted me—so I came. And what can she do with me? What am I here for? She hates me.”
“Perhaps it’s to have—oh, a man in the house. Protection,” hazarded Marcia.
It was not a good guess. Gally looked at her and snorted.
“Protection!” he said. “I’m the one that needs it.” He looked worriedly out the window, jingled things in his pockets, glanced over his shoulder toward the door and said suddenly, “Look here, Marcia, do you suppose she murdered him?”
It was a question that, all that long, dark afternoon, repeated itself endlessly in Marcia’s thoughts. That and those words of Beatrice’s—“You are both in my hands”—she and Rob; it was simple, direct. Terribly true.
“I don’t know,” she said, then, slowly.
“Look here, Marcia,” Gally said suddenly, “you’re not grieving over Ivan, are you? He was such a—” He checked himself abruptly and said, “Nothing to grieve over. I’m glad he’s dead. Told the police so. Told Wait. No use to pretend I liked him. No use to pretend I’m not damn glad you are free.”
No, it would be a mistake to tell Gally. Marcia said wearily, “Do be careful, Gally. Don’t say too much.”
“Why?” He stared at her and suddenly comprehended. “You don’t mean they might suspect me! Oh, come, Marcia! I didn’t kill him.”
“Can you prove you didn’t?”
“It’s up to them to prove I did, isn’t it?” He said it, after a moment, blithely enough. But he looked very sober.
A note, thought Marcia, suddenly. Gally could carry a note to Rob and need not be asked to share and guard that secret. But she decided against it in the same breath. It was a note that was likely to convict Rob now … No, no, she cried silently and looked at her watch. Three. And what could Rob do when he knew?
Gally was craning his neck at the window.
“Here’s another police car,” he said. “I’m going to duck. You’d better come along.”
“I’ve had my turn today,” said Marcia wearily, but her heart jumped as the front door opened. Was it something else—some new thing? Or had Beatrice told Jacob Wait what she had threatened to tell?
Gally was fidgeting, listening at the door. He looked relieved.
“They’re going into the dining room. I’m leaving.”
“Gally,”—a sudden irrelevant thought struck Marcia—“how about work? Did they let you off for today?”
He ran his fingers through his hair.
“Well,” he said, “no. Not exactly. That is—”
“That is what?”
“Well—I was fired. Six weeks ago,” said Gally and went rather hurriedly away.
More men came, and the doors to the dining room were closed, and they were again interviewing the servants. What were they saying?
They left finally after another long interview with Beatrice in her study.
Ancill, letting them out, again avoided Marcia’s gaze, but then he always did that. Delia had red eyes when she brought in the evening paper an hour or so later. Emma Beek, summoned to Beatrice’s study before the police had gone, had an air of veiled knowledge and impudence when Marcia encountered her in the hall. Marcia did not address her, and the woman did not speak but looked at Marcia with small, piglike eyes.
It was growing dark with the approach of early, rainy twilight when Gally paused in the door of the library where Marcia, despairing of reaching Rob, was standing at the french doors staring into the rain and dusk.
He looked harassed and said he’d been practising billiard shots in the basement game room all afternoon.
“It’s damn cold down there,” he said. “And sort of dark and lonesome. Awful lot of cellars all around. What’d they do with them all? Where’s Beatrice?”
“In her study, I think. Writing.”
He glanced over his shoulder, closed the door rather cautiously and approached her.
“I’ve been thinking about this will of Ivan’s,” he said. “It’s all wrong, you know. Unfair to you.”
“I know, Gally. But there’s nothing I can do.”
He hesitated.
“Do you mean—aren’t you even going to try to do anything?”
“What?”
“Well—fight it,” said Gally, looking at her anxiously.
Fight it—all the secrets of that house bared. Beatrice saying, “My brother believed his wife incompetent to handle her affairs.” “My brother warned me … hysteria … temper … attacked him …”
“No.”
“You mean, you’ll just let it ride? Let Beatrice have everything? Nothing for—for yourself? That you can do as you please with?”
“I suppose so. There’s nothing else to do. Let’s not talk of it now, Gally. It can wait. There’s so much else—”
Gally said suddenly, “If anything happens to Beatrice, you inherit from her, don’t you? Funny Ivan left it that way.”
“I don’t think he meant the will to stand, really,” said Marcia wearily. “I think he meant to change it later.”
“To change it later,” echoed Gally. He stared out into the wet gray dusk. “Funny, too, that he was killed just when Beatrice would come into his money.”
“Beatrice isn’t fond of money. Not inordinately, I mean,” said Marcia as much to herself as Gally.
“She’s fond of power,” said Gally with unexpected discernment. “Have you any money at all, Marcia?”
The abruptness of the question startled her.
“Why—why, no, Gally. Nothing.” She searched his thin, freckled face. Had there been something troubled, something anxious and urgent in that question? “You know I would give you anything you need if I had it,” she said gently. “Is anything wrong, Gally?”
After a moment he said no. Beatrice’s study door opened, and he sighed.
“Guess I’ll go back downstairs,” he said and vanished unhappily again.
What were the police doing now?
There was one sitting in the front hall reading the newspaper when no one came through the hall. She could hear it rustle as he turned it.
What were the others doing? Where had they gone and why? What had they learned? What was to be the result of the whole vast machinery which had been set going by one dreadful, mysterious moment the night before? In that room. Over there where the chalked outline on the carpet still showed. She hated the room and everything in it. Hated and in that slow, silent dusk feared it. But because of the french doors and the view of the Copley house she remained there, watching—hoping for a chance to get to Rob.
Had Beatrice murdered him?
Beatrice had had opportunity. She had just gone from the house when Marcia came down and found Ivan dead. And she had heard no one else in the house. And the front door had closed twice.
Beatrice could have opened and closed it loudly once to make Marcia think she had gone. And then, really leaving after she had done that awful thing, had forgotten (or had been shaken and unsteady) and had let the door close more loudly than she’d intended.
Or someone else could have been there. Someone who did not know or remember that loud, dull jar the door made when it closed.
Or that sound could mean nothing at all. The murderer could have come and gone by the french doors.
And if Rob had killed Ivan—and he hadn’t—who had?
And who had been in the room during the night? There was that, too. Marcia turned suddenly and went to the closet. But the blue flannel jacket was not there. Was not anywhere in the room.
If she could only get to Rob. And yet, when he knew, what could he do? Take it from Beatrice by force? Absurd. Threaten her? Equally absurd.
Where was the letter? Where had Beatrice hidden it?
Was there any possibility of finding it, retrieving it— destroying it? Marcia considered it for some time. She came at last to the conclusion that in all that roomy old house, crowded with furniture and hiding places, there was not much chance of her finding the letter. Not if Beatrice, who knew the house so well, had determined, as of course she had done, that Marcia was not to find it. Perhaps, even, she hadn’t hidden it but carried it about with her. Or had locked it away in her desk.
It would do no harm to try to find it, of course. Although Beatrice would be watching. Beatrice with her strong, beautiful hands, her tall, strong body, her arms which would be like steel. She had, certainly, thought Marcia in queer, sudden horror, the strength to kill Ivan if she had so desired. The physical strength to plunge that knife in his heart.
It was not possible that Ivan was dead. That he was no longer in that room watching her every move; in that house, ordering its every breath.
Ivan was dead. The thought stabbed across her consciousness again as it had done many times. But it was not yet comprehensible in all its meaning and significance. She knew there would be, sometime, recognition of it; she knew that now in her inmost being there was a deep awareness of it. Of the removal of those dark, cruel fetters that had bound her.
But now there were other things. For Ivan was dead and he had been murdered. That was the thing that obsessed them all; that took every energy and every thought and every anxiety.
Ivan had been murdered, and Rob was already suspected of that murder.
So they must guard themselves, live somehow through those days of utter horror, meet somehow this incredible emergency.
Yet, standing there at the french doors, surrounded by that room which was so strongly Ivan’s, the room where only twenty-four hours ago he had been murdered, it seemed as if he were still there. As if, when she turned, he would be sitting in the big leather chair—watching her, smiling secretly. As if at any moment she would hear his voice: “Marcia … Marcia, come to me.”
She turned, shuddering, from the window.
She was terribly tired. She would go to her room and try to rest—try not to think of that adjoining room with the locked door between.
“Dr. Blakie,” said Ancill from the doorway.
She turned with almost a sob of relief. She hadn’t heard the faraway bell. She hadn’t heard the door being opened.
She held out both her hands, and Dr. Blakie took them quickly.
“How are you, Marcia? I tried to get here sooner but couldn’t make it.” He spoke quietly and with an effect, not of lightness, but of matter-of-factness which fell gratefully upon Marcia’s ears.
He went on scrutinizing her.
“You look a little pale. Why don’t you put on some lights? It’s not a good thing to sit here in the dark and—think.”
He released her hands and went to the light and pulled the cord and closed the door into the hall.
“Now then. How goes everything?”
“I don’t know. That’s the thing—I don’t know. We don’t know what they’re doing—what they’re after.”
“There, there now. None of you have been arrested; that’s something. Oh, it’s a bad thing, Marcia. But don’t break down over it. How late did they keep you last night?”
She told him.
“But you didn’t—incriminate yourself in any way?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Look here, my dear. We may not have very many minutes alone together, and I want to talk to you. Think you can—manage it?”
“Yes—yes.”
“All right. Sit down. Over here so we can’t be heard. That’s right. Now then—who killed Ivan?”
“I don’t know. I—”
“I mean, who do you think killed him?” She looked at him, and he shook his head kindly.
“Don’t be afraid to talk,” he said. He came nearer her, put a hand under her chin, lifted her face a little toward him and said gently, “You do have friends, you know.”
“I know,” she said, trying to smile.
“And I’m afraid,” he said in the remote small voice any of the surgical nurses at St. Thomas’s would have recognized —“I’m afraid, my child, that you’re going to need them. Now, then, tell me what you think—who killed him?”
“I don’t know. First I thought it was Rob—”
“Rob!”
“Yes. I—” She could feel a warm little wave coming. over her face. “He—he thought Ivan was not good to me. He—”
Dr. Blakie was watching her, seeing too much. He stepped back toward the desk and leaned lightly against it.
“Rob’s in love with you,” he said finally, very quietly. Marcia did not answer; she met his steady, searching gray gaze for a long moment but did not speak.
“I see,” he said at last, smiling a little. “Well—after all, it’s happened before this. You needn’t look so—upset about it, my dear. Remember, doctors see a lot of humanity—too much sometimes. However, you are a beautiful young woman, obviously mismated, it’s not surprising that Rob would constitute himself a sort of knight-errant. So you thought at first it was Rob?”
“But it wasn’t,” said Marcia quickly. “I know it wasn’t. It was only because Rob had—chanced to see something, and he thought I was in danger.”
“So Rob was the man in the garden?”
“He wasn’t in the house. He wasn’t the man Ancill heard here in the library.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. He told me. And Rob—you know Rob.”
He nodded shortly.
“Rob’s honest. And while I suppose he could go off on a tangent—most men could under sufficient provocation— still I can’t see Rob as a murderer. No. I agree with you there. But who was the man in the library? Isn’t there any clue to him?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps the police know by this time. It would be so much easier if we only knew what they are doing—what they’ve discovered—it’s the terrible uncertainty …” She was twisting her hands together, her voice rising unevenly.
“I know. I know. Hang on, my dear. Don’t worry about Rob, if that’s what you’re doing. He’ll take care of himself. The only evidence they have is the raincoat.”
If it were only the raincoat!
He walked over to the french windows, glanced out into the rain, and came back.
“I never thought of Rob doing it; I thought of—” He shot a gray, clear look at the door and said, “Listen to me carefully, Marcia. There’s something I want you to understand. I told you just now that a doctor saw a lot of humanity. I do. So much that I think I might understand things. That I might see things that other people would be less likely to see. I mean—impulses, reasons—justice as it actually is.” He paused to look down into her face in a kind remote way that was as disarming as a priest’s may be. She felt obscurely that there was something she ought to understand in what he had said and that he expected her to reply. But she had nothing to say, and he continued, “What I’m trying clumsily to say is that I deal, all the time, with life and death. I know their intimate secrets. And I know that there are matters beyond the usual course of law and legality. I know that—that there are things that are as necessary as fighting cholera. As burning a malignant growth. As—”
“Murder is never justifiable,” said Marcia with stiff lips.
“Oh, my dear, my dear! I only want you to know I am your friend. I knew Ivan. I know you. What’s more important,” he said dryly, “I know the nervous system.”
Tears were not far from Marcia’s eyes. She leaned forward.
“You’re trying to say that even if I murdered him you’ll still—help me.”
“You didn’t murder him,” he said abruptly.
“No. I didn’t.”
“Well, then, that’s all right,” he said briskly. “Forget all this. Forget it—but tell me just one thing. Mind, I’m not questioning you. I only want to help you—for God knows you need it. Why did you come back from Verity’s last night?”
“Come back! But I didn’t. I hadn’t gone. I—”
He looked at her slowly. His face was tired and all at once old.
“Your silver evening wrap was there. I saw it on the bed in Verity’s room when I arrived.”
“So that’s why—oh, Dr. Blakie, that’s why you thought I might have murdered him. But I didn’t. Beatrice had borrowed my silver wrap.”
“Beatrice—Forgive me. Why did she borrow it?”
“It was too warm for a winter wrap, and she hadn’t got the summer things out from the cedar closet yet.”
“Oh—so she borrowed your wrap. Wore it to Verity’s. Left it there when she went downstairs. H’m. I thought you were already there because I saw your wrap. So did Rob.”
She stood there looking perplexedly at him. It had been so natural, that request. In all that terribly crowded twenty-four hours there had been nothing more natural or ordinary.
“I don’t like it. You see, I did a little detective work today. It’s not exactly in my line. But you—there’s no use in denying the fact that you’re in rather a spot, my dear. Any little thing that can help … Well, it occurred to me that since, summing it up, the last month of Ivan’s life was spent in the hospital there might be some clue there, so I got hold of his nurses—there were five altogether. More nurses than information. However, I did get hold of two things. One wasn’t important. Only that Galway Trench had been to see Ivan.”
“Gally! But I didn’t know—”
“No. He made a very short call, and not a very pleasant one, according to the nurse. That is, she didn’t hear the conversation. But Ivan was in a rage when the boy left and told the nurse that—don’t mind this, my dear; we knew Ivan—that his wife’s relatives seemed to think he was made of money. So I take it Gally tried to borrow some money and was refused.”
“Oh.” It did hurt. But it was like Gally. And he’d been, she suddenly remembered, out of a job for six weeks. Since a fortnight before Ivan was injured. And she remembered, too, swiftly, that feeling of anxiety and urgency when he asked her, only a few moments ago, if she had any money.
“The other,” Dr. Blakie went on, “is more important. And that was that Beatrice and Ivan quarreled. Quarreled bitterly and terribly just a week before he came home. This time the nurse heard part of it, but she doesn’t know what the quarrel was about.”
Beatrice. Marcia heard herself saying stiffly, “Beatrice has the letter.”
“What letter?”
She would tell him, she decided swiftly. He would see Rob.
She told it briefly, honestly. He listened, trying, she thought, not to show in his expression the increasing anxiety he felt, and asking a few terse questions.
“And no one but Beatrice and the cook knew of the will?”
“So Beatrice says. And I suppose Emma Beek knew only of its existence, not the contents.”
“And it lets you out entirely. Ivan would have changed it again sometime, probably. Odd he was killed just then. Are there any other substantial bequests? Anyone else, I mean, who would benefit largely by his death while this will is in existence?”
“I don’t think so. That seemed to be the main provision.”
“And Beatrice has Rob’s letter? Why on earth did the young fool write it! Well, never mind. They do. When did she get hold of it?”
“Yesterday. Stella brought it just after Ivan had returned.”
“And she found it in the cupboard over there? When?”
“While I was at the bank in the afternoon.”
“Queer she didn’t just hand it over to Ivan.”
“Yes.”
“She didn’t tell you why?”
“No. That’s all she said.”
“Well, you’ll have to go along with her for a while. Do as she says. There’s something more behind it than a fear lest they think she knew of the new will. It may be linked up somehow with this quarrel at the hospital. I don’t know.” He paused, frowning at the desk, thinking. “I’ll try to find out. What are you going to do about Rob? Marry him?”
“I can’t. Not when people will say—”
“ ‘ There goes Ivan Godden’s murderer,’ ” he finished.
“You see it, too.”
“I’m afraid so,” he said reluctantly. “But things may break right—look here, I’ll go over and tell Rob about this. I’ll go right away. Now don’t worry too much. And promise me something.” He was suddenly very grave.
“Yes.”
“You know my telephone number. Promise me, if any thing at all happens that seems—oh, unusual in any way, or that frightens you, to telephone to me at once. Will you?”
“Yes.”
He went away then. Marcia with her heart lighter watched from the french windows and could barely see, beyond the iron fence and the dripping green shrubs, the dark figure going along the street through the rain toward the Copley house. A light flashed on in the lower hall; he’d rung and been admitted. Rob would know now.
It was just then that she remembered that she hadn’t told him Gally was there. That at Beatrice’s mysterious request Gally had come to stay in the house.
But it didn’t matter. There’d been so many other more important things.
Rain stopped with darkness, and it grew warmer, so that the earth steamed and halos of mist obscured street lights. Dinner was worse than lunch, for the house was, with the cessation of the rain, suddenly and unaccountably still, and the air heavy and lifeless. Gally looked white and nervous in the wavering light of candles, and lingered to give a longing look at the buffet. Beatrice saw the look and herded him firmly into the drawing room. She poured coffee and over it told them, all at once, that there was some question over the manner of Ivan’s death.
“There’s been a post-mortem,” she said, abruptly. “Jacob Wait told me. It seems—his skull was fractured before he was stabbed. Sugar, Gally?”
He started violently, said no and then said yes. She gave him a glance of disapproval.
“One lump?”
“Two,” said Gally, who never took sugar, and took the cup from her hand. “You were saying?”
“They are inclined to think that his skull was fractured—before he was stabbed,” said Beatrice coolly.
“B-but—” said Gally.
“Well?”
Gally was very white; the freckles stood out on his thin face.
“But they—they said the fracture occurred as he fell.”
“They thought it possible. If this later theory is correct, it rather reverses things. If he were already unconscious or stunned by the blow, it would be very much easier for—whoever did it—to approach Ivan and stab him. It would argue less physical strength necessary on the part of the murderer.” She did not look at Marcia but might as well have done so.
“You mean—anybody might have done it? A—a woman, for instance?” said Gally.
“A woman,” said Beatrice. “For instance.”
Gally made an incoherent sound in his throat. Marcia stared into the small black pool of coffee in her cup. Gally said, “I’ll have more coffee, please,” and stood beside Beatrice watching the clear brown stream pouring into his cup as if his life depended upon it.
Beatrice said suddenly, “The police are bunglers. I could have solved this murder long ago if I chose to do so.”
Marcia’s head jerked toward the two there at the coffee table as if it had been on a wire. Beatrice’s black eyebrows were level, her hand steady at its task, the stream of coffee unwavering.
“You see,” said Beatrice, “I saw the dandelion knife. It was hidden in the cupboard. The cupboard,” said Beatrice, glancing at Marcia, “at the east of the french doors in the library. It was there the afternoon of the murder. It and— some other things. I’ve not told the police—not yet.”
“She means the letter,” thought Marcia, staring back helplessly at Beatrice.
And Gally’s cup crashed out of his hand and down upon the floor.