A Penknife in My Heart Page 9

  He dreaded it, though he knew that Helena would not be found till 10 A.M., when their daily woman came in. No, he thought, it’s not dread, it’s impatience, I want to get it over with—that’s why I’ve had a telephone bell on my brain all night. I want to know for certain, to end this aching suspense.

  There was a bang at his bedroom door, which at once flew wide open, crashing against the wall behind. A grubby small girl, six or seven years old, entered with a cup of tea, most of which had slopped into the saucer, and favored him with a long, inimical stare.

  “Hallo,” he said.

  “Frankie told me to bring you this.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  This child would be Francesca Lane’s daughter. The Lanes, his hosts, were a progressive couple; and the children of progressive hosts were, as Ned knew well, one of the chief occupational hazards of lecturing.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, sipping the lukewarm, stewed tea.

  “Queenie.”

  “That’s a nice name.”

  “It isn’t. It stinks. I would like to be called Doris.”

  “Well, Doris, what time’s breakfast?”

  “As soon as Frankie can be bothered to get up, fella. Can I come into your bed?”

  “No.”

  “Are you married to a wife?” pursued the small girl, her beady eyes still fastened on Ned.

  “Yes, I’m married.”

  “Is she nice? What’s her name?”

  “Some people think so,” Ned articulated carefully. “Helena.”

  “Oh. How long have you been married?”

  “Years and years.”

  “Isn’t it time you got divorced then?”

  “Buzz off, Queenie, I want to get up.”

  “Don’t be phony. I know what men look like. Do you think I’d be good at being a television announcer?”

  “You’d be terrible.”

  Undiscouraged, the child padded over to the dressing table and started examining Ned’s belongings.

  “Why have you only one key on your ring? Peter has hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.”

  “Your father has more drawers to unlock, I expect.”

  “Drawers, dirty-drawers, droopy-drawers, dopey-drawers,” the child began to chant, executing a pas seul in the middle of the room.

  “Beat it! Get out, you little horror!” Ned suddenly shouted at her.

  “All right, you fool.”

  “See you at breakfast, Doris.”

  “You won’t. You’ll be dead. I put poison in your tea.”

  Arrived in London, Ned took a taxi to his club, intending to lunch there. But the hall porter gave him a message, asking him to ring Marksfield 230 at once. So this is it, he thought: but why Marksfield?

  “Edwin Stowe speaking. I was asked to ring you. Who am I speaking to?”

  “Oh yes, sir. If you will hold the line a moment, I will fetch Inspector Bartley.”

  There was a slight pause before Ned heard the sound of footsteps receding. He should have filled in that pause with an inquiry as to why the police wanted him. He felt danger closing in on him, and it cleared his head.

  “This is Detective Inspector Bartley, Hampshire C.I.D.,” came a comfortable, solicitous voice. “I am speaking to Mr. Edwin Stowe of the Old Farm, Crump End?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “We have been trying to find you, sir, for several hours. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, sir. Very bad news. I must ask you to prepare yourself for a—”

  “Yes, yes. What is it?” Ned had no difficulty in sounding agitated.

  “I deeply regret, Mr. Stowe, to have to tell you that it concerns your wife.”

  “My wife? Is she—has something happened to her? For God’s sake, man!—”

  “Mrs. Stowe,” the voice bumbled on, “died last night. The circumstances—”

  “Died? But—but she was quite well when I left her. I simply can’t grasp this.” Ned’s voice shook. “Did she have an accident?”

  “If you will make it convenient to call in at this station on your way home, sir, I will give you such information as we have.”

  “I’ll drive down straight away. Detective Inspector Bartley, did you say?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  Speeding out of London, Ned irritably contemplated another mistake he had made. Should he not have asked this Inspector Bartley why it was the police who had notified him of Helena’s death? Yet he felt braced, clearheaded, stripped for action. No more uncertainty. The thing was done, and he felt curiously free, as if an enormous weight had been lifted off his heart. He began to think about Laura. A new life was opening to him—a real life, not that death-in-life he had been living all these years. He enjoyed this strange euphoria for quite a time before it entered his consciousness that his own part of the pact had yet to be fulfilled.

  Inspector Bartley received him in a room which seemed to be all wooden chairs, dark green paint and filing cabinets. A large man, with mild, steady, disillusioned eyes, he gave Ned Stowe a firm handshake and a neutral look.

  “This is a very sad business, sir. I hope you will allow me to offer my sympathy.”

  “Thank you. But I can’t understand—how do the police come into this?”

  “You must prepare yourself for a grave shock, Mr. Stowe. Your wife was murdered.”

  “Murdered!” Ned hid his face in his hands, to conceal its lack of any genuine expression of surprise or horror.

  “I’m afraid this is a great ordeal for you, sir. If you would rather I deferred my questions till tomorrow, say—”

  “No, carry on. I’d rather get it over with.” Ned’s voice was harsh with complicated emotion. “Where is she?”

  “The body has been removed for an autopsy. At present all we know is that the deceased met her death by suffocation at some time during the night or early morning. The body was discovered by a Mrs. Marle when she came in at 10 A.M.”

  “Our household help.”

  “Mrs. Marle summoned a doctor and the police by telephone. She told us that you were away in Bristol last night, and gave us the telephone number of your London club in case you might be calling in there on your way home.” Inspector Bartley’s voice droned on. Tact, or strategy, caused him to lead up to things by easy stages.

  “Suffocation, you said? Do you mean smoke or something?”

  “There was a pillow over the dead woman’s face. And signs of a struggle.”

  A struggle—oh God, he said he would be quick, would do it mercifully, thought Ned.

  “I do not think she could have suffered long, sir.” The inspector’s low-pitched, respectfully sympathetic tone set up a revulsion in Ned’s mind: he was nauseated by the unreality, the hypocrisy of all this.

  “Look, Inspector,” he jerked out. “I’m grateful to you for trying to break it gently. But I’d better tell you at once that Helena—my wife and I were not a devoted couple. We had become gradually estranged. She was difficult to live with, and I expect I was too. Oh, we rubbed along fairly well most of the time: but I can’t pretend that my deepest feelings are involved.”

  “I understand, sir.” The inspector gave Ned a long, measuring look. If he was shocked or puzzled, he showed no signs of it. “Then we’ll get down to business.”

  A stenographer was sent for, and Bartley began asking his routine questions. Mr. Stowe had been in Bristol last night. What time did he arrive there? Where had he stayed? Name, address and telephone number of his hosts? He had gone there to lecture? Was it a longstanding engagement? Which of his friends and neighbors would have known about it?

  Under the steady stream of questions, which seemed so formal and irrelevant, Ned grew restive. Had Mrs. Stowe any enemies? Had she an income of her own? Who would inherit? Had she—at this point Inspector Bartley’s voice became just perceptibly more weighted— had she any special men friends? Had Mr. Stowe ever suspected his wife of taking lovers?

  “Oh no, she wasn’t that sort of woman at
all. It’s quite out of the question.”

  “I’m afraid, sir, that my information doesn’t bear out that view.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “There were indications,” the inspector proceeded, with elephantine delicacy, “that intimacy had taken place. And there were marks of violence on the deceased’s body.”

  “Good God!—” Ned was genuinely startled now— “you mean the burglar raped her before he—?”

  “Burglar, sir? What makes you say that?”

  Ned felt as if the floor had given way beneath him. “Well, I assumed it had been done by—by someone who broke into the house. Damn it all, who else could have done it?” His heart was pounding so hard he thought the inspector must hear it. But Bartley seemed unsuspicious.

  “Ah, yes. A very natural assumption, Mr. Stowe. But the facts do not support it. We found the ground-floor windows fastened shut when we began our investigations. The front door has a special anti-burglar lock, which shows no signs of having been tampered with. Mrs. Marle, who has her own key to the back door, told us it was locked when she arrived—”

  “But there are the upstairs windows,” Ned interrupted in bewilderment.

  “We examined them carefully, and the ground beneath them. I can assure you there are no indications whatsoever of illegal entry. Mrs. Stowe’s bedroom window was open; but it had not been forced open.”

  “Well, I simply can’t understand it,” muttered Ned after a pause. And he could not. The plan had been that Stuart Hammer should leave marks of breaking in and leave the ladder against the wall. What could have gone wrong?

  “And nothing has been taken?” he dully asked.

  “Mrs. Marle found no objects missing. But you’ll be able to confirm that, sir. How many keys are there to the front door?”

  The sudden change of direction very nearly caught Ned on the wrong foot. “Let me see. My wife had one.”

  “Yes, we found it in her purse.”

  “And I’ve got one.” Ned took out the key ring from his pocket.

  “Just the two of them, sir?” prompted Bartley. Something in his voice put Ned on guard. Stuart Hammer had arranged to leave Ned’s spare key in the handkerchief drawer. He’d apparently departed so far from the agreed plan that he might well have failed to do this too. But Ned’s whole safety seemed to depend now on the third key being proved innocent.

  “There’s a spare,” he said.

  “And where would that be?”

  “Well, unless my wife moved it for some reason, it should be in a drawer in our bedroom, under my handkerchiefs.”

  “Just so, sir. We did find a key there. Would this be the one?” said the inspector, opening a desk drawer.

  “Yes, that’s it, I think.” Ned was irritable with sheer relief. “But surely you tried it in the front-door lock to see?” he added, rather petulantly. The large man behind the desk let this pass.

  “You are sure there are only three keys, sir?” he asked.

  “Quite sure.”

  “And all three are accounted for. You see where that leads us? Mrs. Stowe must have admitted the man herself.”

  “I just don’t believe it, Inspector.”

  Bartley shifted his bulk in the chair, and ran a finger round the inside of his collar—a habit surviving from his years in the uniformed branch. “Now, here’s another interesting thing.” He held up a rumpled white handkerchief in front of Ned’s eyes, like a conjuror. “We found this at the bottom of the bed, near the feet of the deceased. The laundry mark is the same as that on some of the handkerchiefs in your drawer—in fact we found this spare key while verifying that point. Can you account for a handkerchief of yours being in your wife’s bed last night?”

  “I certainly can’t, Inspector.”

  “You must pardon my next question, sir. You told me you and your wife were not on the best of terms. There are two beds in the room. Have you, er, occupied hers recently? The night before you went to Bristol?”

  “No.”

  “Was the deceased in the habit of borrowing your handkerchiefs?”

  “Only when she had a bad cold.”

  “Which she did not have when you left her yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “So the obvious explanation for the presence of this handkerchief in her bed is that Mrs. Stowe had lent it to a visitor last night—a visitor who was her lover, and who did her to death.”

  “It’s not in the least obvious—not if you knew Helena. I tell you, she wasn’t the kind of woman who takes lovers. The idea’s preposterous. Anyway, if she had a man in there, surely you’d find fingerprints?”

  “We have found them, sir. Four sets. Mrs. Marle’s and Mrs. Stowe’s have already been identified. One of the other two sets will be yours—you’d have no objection to my taking your prints presently, for elimination?”

  “None at all.”

  “So that leaves the fourth set. They will be the murderer’s.”

  “What proof have you of that? The murderer might have been wearing gloves.”

  “I see you’re harking back to your notion about a burglar breaking in. We found clear examples of the fourth set on three surfaces which Mrs. Marle swears she dusted and polished yesterday afternoon. This proves that the deceased had a visitor in her bedroom after four P.M.”

  “Yes, but I don’t see that it proves anything else.”

  “Not proves, perhaps; but it’s an indication. Your wife would not be in the habit of taking ordinary visitors, particularly men, up to her bedroom?”

  “Well, no.”

  “And if a stranger arrived at the door, when she was alone in the house, she’d not be likely to admit him?”

  “I agree.”

  “You see what I’m driving at, Mr. Stowe? Medical evidence shows that the deceased entertained a lover last night, and that she was murdered by suffocation. All the evidence we have so far shows that the murderer could not have been either a criminal who intended robbery or a chance stranger. So we have good reason to believe that the murder was done by this lover, and to look for him among the circle of your friends and acquaintances at Crump End.”

  Laborious though the inspector’s reasoning was, and stilted his language, Ned Stowe was impressed against his will by these arguments. That he and Bartley should be discussing Helena’s death so dispassionately seemed just another part of the vivid hallucination in which he had been living for many days now.

  His line with Bartley must be to remain incredulous that Helena should have voluntarily received a lover last night, or that this man could be one of their friends. It was not a difficult line to take, for Ned felt convinced now that Stuart Hammer had raped Helena before killing her. It was Stuart who must have left those fingerprints, after he had finished with her, while looking round for some valuables to steal, in accordance with their plan. But why had he not gone through with it? Did his nerve suddenly break, alone in that room with the dead woman? What other explanation could there be? Yet Stuart Hammer had not appeared to be a man whose nerve was breakable.

  These thoughts raced through Ned’s mind while the inspector, who had been called out of the room, was away. He returned now, solid and reassuring.

  “That was a call to Bristol, sir. We have full corroboration of your statement about your movements last night.”

  “One suspect eliminated, eh?” Ned could have bitten off his tongue for saying this. Cheap, false and unfeeling. He despised the thing in himself that was always playing up to people. Inspector Bartley’s expression did not change.

  “Was it generally known in the village that you would be at Bristol last night, Mr. Stowe?”

  “I don’t know how much I’m gossiped about. Mrs. Marle knew, of course. And some neighbors who came in for drinks a few days ago—the Avenings, Colonel Gracely, Mrs. Holmes and her son, Josephine Weare. A harmless lot.”

  “Your work entails being in London a good deal, sir?”

  “Off and on. But look here, Inspector, you
know what villages are like. If my wife had a lover coming to the house while I was away, it’d be all over the village in a week.”

  “Just so, sir.” Inspector Bartley looked noncommittal. But he had, in fact, had a talk with P. C. Rainbird, who like all good village policemen was a filing cabinet of local gossip, and discovered that no breath of scandal had touched the late Helena Stowe. She was considered standoffish by some, “a real lady” by others, while a third faction felt her as a romantic mystery.

  It worried the inspector a good deal that Mrs. Stowe’s reputation should be so untarnished. Apart from gossip, a preliminary search at the Old Farm had turned up no incriminating documents whatsoever. Either she and her lover had been remarkably skillful in covering their tracks, or the liaison had only just started.

  “One last question, sir, for the time being. And I hope you won’t take offense at it. What was your wife’s demeanor before you went away this time? Did you notice any alteration? What you might call secretiveness? or suppressed excitement? or guilt?”

  “Well, we had a blinding row on Sunday night—she was terribly neurotic, poor woman. But why do you ask?”

  “It is possible that she was about to take a lover for the first time.”

  “Well, I suppose anything is possible. But you don’t kill a woman the first time you go to bed with her. You do it when you’re sick to death of her, or when she’s driven you crazy with jealousy—something like that.”

  Inspector Bartley made no reply to this argument, which indeed nonplussed him. “You haven’t answered my question, sir,” he stated mildly.

  “The answer is, no. She seemed quite normal, for her, when I left.”