All Fall Down

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Next morning Ellis announced his intention of going to church. Gilkison, sensitive to a notoriety in which he could not help sharing, refused to accompany him, and called him an exhibitionist.

Ellis rebutted the charge with characteristic offensiveness, and went off in high spirits to sit at the feet of Mr. Rawlings.

If the churchgoers did not react to his arrival as markedly as the Plume of Feathers’ customers the night before, it was only because their surroundings forbade it. The sensation caused was, if anything, greater. Between those who frankly stared, and those who resolutely looked in front of them, Ellis achieved as much attention from pew and choir-stall as if he were a gorilla.

Several of Ellis’s new friends of the pub were there, making violents efforts not to seem aware of him. One, the verger who handed him a prayer-book, was scarlet with embarrassment. Martha Attwill was in the front of the choir, looking happy and unconcerned. Rattray wheeled his wife in at the side door just before the service began. Stiff and resolute, he took care not to look in Ellis’s direction.

The constraint lasted even after the service had begun, since Ellis joined heartily in the opening hymn, his confident tenor being heard all over the little church. The congregation and choir rallied and sang their loudest, stimulated perhaps, or else determined to put the intruder in his place. To do Ellis justice, he did not sing in order to draw attention to himself, but unself-consciously and from good will. One of the puzzles of Gilkison’s life was to know when Ellis was showing off and when he was naively unaware of the effect he was producing. Even Kathleen, Ellis’s wife, did not always know.

The West Nattering choir sang simply and pleasantly, and the organist, Ellis decided, was really good. He found himself enjoying the service. A village church or a school chapel—those were the places where he liked best to attend service. His ideal, for communal worship, was to make a cheerful noise unto the God of Jacob, and the genuinely devout strain in his nature found its most natural expression in a straightforward and simple ritual.

Happy, the worries of the case forgotten, he sat upright, twiddling his thumbs, and noted with approval the advent of an elderly and most respectable looking man to read the first lesson. The elderly man did not hurry himself. He took out a spectacle case, opened it, put the spectacles carefully on his nose, announced the lesson, and then looked over the top of his spectacles until the congregation had found the place in their Bibles or settled themselves into an attitude of attention. He then repeated the chapter and verse, and delivered, in tones of respectful fervour, a passage from one of the lesser prophets, which, to Ellis, meant nothing at all, and could hardly have meant more to the congregation.

It sounded well, though, Ellis decided: and none of the congregation would like it any the less for not knowing what it was about. The woes prophesied to some city long since dust had for them the one great quality of bearing no possible relationship to their own fives. They could listen disinterestedly, and, when a year had passed, they could hear the same words again, part of the seasons’ rhythm, a brief, recurrent experience in the cycle of the turning globe.

The vicar read the second lesson, a miracle and a parable from St. Matthew, and its immediate simplicity was in perfect contrast to the remoter resonance that had come first. He read it with a note of childlike wonder, as if he had never seen it before, and Ellis wished that he had gone to see the vicar himself, instead of handing that duty over to Bradstreet.

When, presently, Mr. Rawlings made allusion to the recent fatality, and solicited the congregation’s prayers for the bereaved, Ellis’s mood of admiration received a jolt. The immediate reaction of the hearers was patent too. A soundless stiffening, a withdrawal of the mind. No one there but knew that Matt Baildon’s death was a mercy and a relief to the wife and daughter he left behind him.

Then, within three or four seconds, they yielded themselves once more to the exhortation of the single voice. The vicar was neither cynical nor foolish. He was doing the conventional thing, the thing he would always do, because the Church prescribed it: and, even if the sense of it went a little awry, was it not fitting to pray for those two souls, who had suffered a great deal, and were by no means clear of their troubles yet, and needed all the goodwill that might come to them from earth or from heaven? So the congregation acquiesced, and Ellis found himself relaxing with them into the warmth of a better wisdom and a higher common sense.

By the time they had sung another hymn, and Mr. Rawlings had slowly climbed into the pulpit, Ellis’s faith in him was fully restored, and he sat back expectantly. The sermon did not disappoint him. It was short, obvious, and applicable to the life of everyone present, from the gnarled ancient who bent over a stick in the front row to the little vacant-eyed children who looked around, open-mouthed, beside their elders, and made no attempt to take it in. For that matter, no one seemed to listen. Perhaps for them the discourse was only a part of the ritual, a recognised part of the occasion’s furniture, so to speak, like the pulpit, the voluntary, and the taking round of the plate. But, if they did listen, they would get nothing but good: a good that depended less on the thing said, sound and homely though it was, than on the quality that radiated steadfastly from the man who said it.

Ellis’s acquaintance of the night before, who had given him his prayer book, had to encounter him once more with the plate. Ellis, singing lustily, dropped half a crown in it, suddenly caught sight of the man’s crimson protruding ears, and all but burst out laughing.

The organist played them out of church with Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” and Ellis, delighted, made his way round to offer his congratulations. She proved to be a girl of about twenty-three or four. Shy at first, she thawed out in the warmth of his approval. They talked music hard, and the girl only became self-conscious again when they came outside and walked slowly towards the lych gate, a target for the eyes of those who, by the immemorial custom of all villagers, stood outside the church to talk and stare.

Suddenly aware of the change in the girl’s manner, and her anxiety to get away, Ellis saw the onlookers. He bade her good-bye, once more loudly congratulating her on her playing, turned on the onlookers a stare with which their own could not compete, and set off up the road. Damn the fools, he thought. Why couldn’t they forget his trade and look on him as a human being, for one day in the week at least?

Then his brow cleared, and the effect of the service was reinstated in his mind. It had done him good: real good. Ellis drew a deep breath, hit himself upon the chest, looked round upon the morning, and decided that it was fair. He realised, too, where his feet were taking him. He would go to the Baildons’, ostensibly to see how Gilk was getting on, but really in the hope of a word with Joan.

He found Gilkison busy in the front room, and looking as if he had never stopped since the evening before.

“Where are the women?” Ellis asked, after contemplating him for a moment.

“I’ve no idea.”

“Fat lot of help you are.”

“About as helpful to you as you are to me.”

“It’s twenty past twelve. At ten to one I’ll come and fetch you back to your Sunday dinner.”

“Run away till then.”

It was useless to retort at him. Ellis sniffed, and went out into the passage. He stood, and cocked an ear. Culinary sounds indicated that someone was in the kitchen. Probably Mrs. Baildon. In that case, Joan might be in the garden. He could have looked over the hedge, but, if he had seen her, she might equally well have seen him, and retreated: and he wanted, if possible, to take her off her guard.

The back door was open. Ellis went noiselessly past the kitchen window. He need not have bothered: the occupant turned on a tap, and could not have heard anything short of a fall over the dustpan and brush that stood against the wall.

He went out boldly, knowing that, till he reached the currant bushes and the raspberry canes, he was in full view of the window. With any luck, her back would be turned.

A path twisted through the bushes. He followed it, and came suddenly upon Joan. The girl was lying in a deck chair, her long bare legs up on a stool.

Seeing him, she started, took down her feet, and sat up. She flushed, and for a couple of seconds he thought she was going to harden against him.

“Don’t disturb yourself. I’ll sit on this.”

He took the stool, and smiled at her with such obvious friendliness that she smiled back, and half relaxed.

Ellis nodded towards her book.

“Reading? Or working?”

“Working.”

“You looked as if you were enjoying it.”

“It is interesting,” she said defensively.

He held out his hand, and she gave him the book. It was on Drama, and she had it open at the Restoration. Ellis flipped over the pages.

“Etheredge—Vanbrugh—Sedley. Don’t expect they let you read them in the original, do they?”

She blushed again, and her eyes answered the twinkle in his. “Father has some of them.”

“Ever read Sedley’s Mulberry Gardens? Some fine talk in that. Chap talking about his girl to another chap, who’s throwing cold water on the affair. Second chap asks how old she is. Lover says, seventeen. T’other chap says, ‘I have drunk excellent Hockamore of that age.’ Grand answer: ‘Damn thy dull Hockamore, and thy base jaded Pallatt, that affects it.’ They knew how to talk in those days. Little bit further down, they’re talking about fate and their stars, and one says, ‘The stars are pretty twinkling rogues, that light us home sometimes when we are drunk, but they care not for you or me.’ Always stuck in my mind, that scene did. You ought to read it.”

“I’ll look out for it. There is an edition of Sedley, upstairs.”

“When d’you go up to Oxford? October?”

“I hope so. That is——”

“I hope so too.”

He looked at her. Shyly still, but steadily, she met his gaze. Her manner was so different from the last time that he decided Miss Attwill had been talking to her, and blessed the instinct that had led him to interview the aunt first.

“I had a great time with your aunt,” he said. “I think she’s a darling.”

Joan smiled. “She said you were a cheeky toad.”

“I know. But I fancy she’d rather have cheeky toads than respectful ones.”

“Yes.”

“You know,” Ellis said, “ours is a rotten job, in some ways. Everyone looks on us as a natural enemy—yes, even the innocent. It’s astonishing, the way people draw together when they see a policeman. I’m not sure they’re not even more frightened of us in plain clothes than in uniform. But none of ’em will ever treat us as human beings. That’s one reason why I fell in love with auntie. She didn’t take me for an enemy. Not even when I asked her the most embarrassing questions.”

He could see she was trying to picture the scene.

“What did she do?”

“The worst question of all—the one really embarrassing one—she answered right away, and told the truth, when she needn’t have at all. The others she either didn’t answer, or warned me that, if she did answer, the answers would be lies.”

“That’s just like auntie,” Joan said, her eyes alight behind the big lenses.

“Yes. She treated me as if I were human: and she believed me when I said I hoped it would all clear up properly. For you and your mother, I mean.”

The ground was very delicate now. Ellis wondered if he had brought the subject up too soon. Joan looked down at her hands. She seemed to be hesitating whether to speak or not. He kept quiet, making himself receptive, creating as it were a vacuum into which her words could come.

“All the same,” she said at last, “if we’d done it, you’d want to catch us and to hang us.”

“I never want to hang anybody,” Ellis said. “What’s the sense of it?”

“Well, then, why——?”

“I didn’t make the law. What the law does to the people I catch isn’t my affair. I only want to catch them if they’re a danger to society, or in order to protect innocent people who may fall under suspicion. As in this case.”

“Yes.” She wriggled in the chair. “But you can’t get out of it as easily as that. After all, you don’t need to be a detective.”

“A policeman is like a soldier. The state decides this, that, and t’other. He has to obey. He mayn’t always like it, but he has no choice. I’ve a certain talent for this kind of thing—at least, my superiors seem to think so—and I earn my daily bread at it. However—to-day you can look on me as off duty; we won’t talk about this business at all. Then you needn’t be afraid what you say to me.”

“You might lay a trap for me,” she smiled at him.

“I won’t. You’ll see I won’t.”

“If you aren’t going to talk about what’s happened, or to lay traps for me, why have you come?”

“I wanted to see you, and get to know you, just as I wanted to see auntie and get to know her. The way I work—since for the moment you make me talk about it—the way I work isn’t so much to burrow about with a magnifying glass looking for clues and finger-prints. I do that, of course, or whoever’s with me does it, because I’m not particularly good at it. The way I work, and the part of the job I have most talent for, is to get to know the people concerned in a case, and get the feel and the character of it all. I’ve often been able to say, quite positively, that someone didn’t do a thing, in spite of all the evidence against him, simply because it didn’t fit in with his character and the feel of the whole situation. Being the man he was, he couldn’t have done it. There are two really first-class ways of clearing a person from suspicion. One is to prove that he wasn’t there, and couldn’t have been there. The other is to prove that the crime wasn’t in his character. Unfortunately, in the present backward state of the world, only the first one is accepted. But the second is very valuable, because it does save one, privately, from following up the wrong scent.”

“Can you ever be so sure of a person’s character—to know they haven’t done a thing?”

“I believe so,” Ellis replied, looking straight into her eyes.

“Haven’t you ever been wrong? Not once?”

“Oh yes. I’ve been wrong. But only because I didn’t really know the person. Didn’t know enough about him.”

He leaned forward, elbows on knees.

“It’s not always easy to know a person through and through, so as to be ready to stake your life that he or she didn’t do a thing. In a way, it’s harder when it’s someone you’ve known for a long time. One gets to take one’s near friends for granted. If you were to ask me, suddenly, if Gilk would do a thing—well, I’d know he wouldn’t do some things. He couldn’t. But others, things that just might conceivably be in his character, if something went wrong, if life pushed him or got him in a corner; I’d have to think a long time to be sure. It’s easier if you come in from outside. You’ve no emotions about it. If Gilk were in trouble, my feelings would be aroused. That makes it hard to be sure. When all the people are strangers, it’s far easier.”

She was listening with all her attention. Her lip was quivering.

“So, you see,” Ellis said very softly, “you needn’t blame yourself so much.”

Instantly she was on the defensive. Her eyes blazed at him.

“What do you mean?” she began: but he held up his hand, smiling.

“Now, now. I know what’s been your trouble. Why not admit it? You’ve let yourself wonder whether one of your friends may not just possibly have done this thing: and then you’ve been blaming yourself and calling yourself every sort of a skunk for having such a terrible thought of them.”

She hung her head, and did not look at him.

“Well. Cheer up. You couldn’t help wondering. How could you?”

“Why have you started all this again?” she said passionately. “I’d managed to forget it for a bit. Now you’ve brought it all back.”

“Stop blaming yourself. Cheer up.”

“Don’t be such an idiot,” she cried. “Do you—— How can I cheer up? Someone——”

She broke off, and turned her face away from him, biting her lip.

“Someone must have done it. I know. Well: your mother’s got an alibi. Even if she hadn’t, why should she wait till now, when she could have done it at any time of the day or night since he was ill? You might—I say you might—have worried about her if it had happened in the middle of the night, when she was alone with him: but not as things are. You don’t need to worry about what you were doing, because you know. If anyone’s got to worry about that, the police have. Anyway, you haven’t. The American—whether he did it or not, you’re not going to lose any sleep over him. If it was a tradesman, or a stranger, you aren’t worried about him. There are only two people for you to be worried about, and you’re cursing yourself sick for having a doubt about either of them. Well—cheer up. I don’t believe that either of them did it.”

She looked at him, silent, breathing fast.

“I don’t,” he repeated. “Cross my heart. Cut my throat. It’s not in their characters.”

She let out a deep, slow breath, and leaned back once more.

“I won’t pretend that either of them might not conceivably take a life, in certain circumstances,” Ellis said. “I believe she could: and I believe that he could. But only under intense provocation, and in circumstances very, very different from these. So, you see, you’re not so much to blame for thinking that, perhaps——”

She was looking oddly at him. He persevered.

“When people talk a lot, and say it’d be a mercy if something was done, it’s hard not to remember it later on. You had a worse fear, too. One you haven’t said anything about. If either of them had done it, he or she might be found out.”

She stared.

“Of course. What else would I worry about?”

“Blaming yourself for thinking either of them capable of killing a helpless old man.”

Her lips twisted scornfully.

“That wouldn’t worry me.”

Ellis was disconcerted. His mouth fell open foolishly, and be blinked.

“Surely,” he said, “you wouldn’t like to think——”

“Don’t be sentimental. Calling father helpless. He trampled on mother for twenty-five years, and me too, ever since I was tiny. Helpless! he was a powerful, cruel old devil. I’d have killed him gladly, a hundred times, if I’d had the guts. Oh, don’t look shocked! You’d have felt the same, if you’d been me, and seen how he treated mother. Everyone knows it’s true.”

“Well,” said Ellis dryly—he had recovered himself—“it seems I’ve been wasting my pity on you.”

To his amazement, she put out a hand and caught his arm.

“Don’t think me horrid. No, no, don’t. You’re not to. Oh, it isn’t fair!” She burst into tears. “If I’d had a decent life like any other girl, you wouldn’t have. I’m not hard a bit, really, to other people. Truly I’m not. It’s father made me like it, father, father, father! Everything that’s wrong with me is father. Oh—it isn’t fair!”

“My dear,” Ellis said. He took her hand, but she snatched it away, and held a handkerchief to her mouth. “I made a fool of myself a minute ago, but I’m not a total fool. I know you’re not hard. I know what you’ve been through. I know all about it. That’s why I sympathise with you, that’s why I’m your friend, that’s why I want to clear this whole damned business up, so that you can go to Oxford and put it all behind you for good.”

She kept the handkerchief to her mouth. Her face was turned away. A sob shook her thin shoulders.

“I hate myself,” she said. “I wish I was dead.”

“That wouldn’t help,” said Ellis cheerfully. “Not in such a hurry to follow your father, are you? Very well, then. Stop alive, and cheer up. And let’s talk about someone else, for a change.”

“Yes, do let’s.”

She dried her eyes, and put the handkerchief away.

“Tell me about this tutor of yours,” Ellis suggested.

“David?”

“Yes. What’s his history? How did he come to be tied up with that poor soul?”

“He’s terribly fond of her,” she said quickly.

“He’d need to be. Was she always ill? Or did she get ill after they were married?”

“She was always delicate, I believe,” the girl said, frowning. “But she usen’t to be as bad as she is now. I don’t know. David’s very kind—and very sensitive. You see, his mother was ill for years before she died, when David was quite young, and he used to nurse her quite a lot. He felt it most terribly, when she died.”

Ellis nodded.

“So much, that he had to find another person to nurse?”

She looked at him, startled.

“I never thought of that. Yes. I suppose so.” Her eyes were wide as she considered this. “Anyway,” she went on, after a moment, “he was most terribly upset when she did die. Although he’d known, for ages, really, that she must. And that it was the best thing for her. Yet, when it happened, he nearly went mad.”

“I know. Much the same sort of thing happened to me. One knows, in one’s mind, what’s the best; but when the thing happens, one finds there’s a whole lot, deep down, that one didn’t know anything about.”

“Yes.” She was looking away past Ellis. “You know, it did him good, as well as being—well——”

“Bad for him?”

She frowned, not liking to hear it put so bluntly.

“I was going to say, as well as upsetting him so terribly. It’s made him most wonderfully kind. When I’ve been stupid about my work, and sulky and horrid, he was never cross, never even for one second. He understood me better than I understood myself.”

“Dangerous.” Ellis smiled at her. “People who do that aren’t always so good for one.”

“You mean because one comes to rely on them too much?”

“One day they tell one something one knows isn’t true, and then it’s terribly hard, because they’ve always been right before. Mind you”—he smiled again—“it’s not hard, every now and then, to understand you better than you understand yourself.”

She looked at him challengingly, but with a half-smile.

“Meaning, I suppose, that you do?”

“M’m. Example? You said just now that you hated yourself.”

“So I do.”

“So do we all, for that matter, unless we’re clods. Or unconscious hypocrites. But you hate yourself exaggeratedly. It’s proper—how old are you? Eighteen? It’s proper to your age. You’ll never hate yourself so much again, or feel that life’s so grim. But—what I was going to say is—you don’t know yourself. You give yourself a worse character than you’ve got.”

“You say so.”

“I’ll prove it. You told me you’d have nothing but praise for anyone that killed your father. Right. Now—be honest. Look into yourself: take a deep breath: put your hand on your heart, and tell me if you’d really feel quite the same to Eunice or to David if you knew they had crept treacherously into a house to which they had right of entry, tiptoed up to the chair of an old helpless man, and pulled his muffler tight around his neck.

“Can you see David doing it?” he pressed her. “David, who is kind, who has spent most of his life nursing the sick?”

“I never said I could see him doing it!” she cried. “He wouldn’t! he couldn’t!”

“Aha! and why? Why should you be so quick to say that, if it were a good thing to do? And, if it weren’t a good thing—if he wouldn’t, he couldn’t—how could you feel the same to him, supposing he had done it?”

“That’s a trap,” she said at last. “It isn’t fair.”

“Because it makes you admit you would feel differently?”

“Because it takes a thing I said to you, and uses it as if I felt it about myself.”

“Then you shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.”

“Heads you win, tails I lose. Are you always right? I’m sorry for your wife.”

“That’s what auntie said. However: she can take very good care of herself, bless her.”

“Who, auntie?”

“Both of ’em. But I meant my wife.”

She was looking past him again.

“Was that how father was killed? With his muffler?”

“Looks like it.”

“How can you tell? How d’you know it wasn’t an accident?”

He told her about the position of the chair, and the medical evidence.

“I don’t see how you can be sure,” she persisted. “You can’t prove it.”

“No.”

“Will they have to decide at the inquest?”

“They will.”

“You’re not to go badgering mother,” she flung at him. “Trying to trip her up, and worrying her. She isn’t fit for it. Dr. Carter will tell you so.”

“Why should I want to trip her up?” Ellis asked.

“You want to make out that someone did it.”

“As I told you, your mother has an alibi. She can bring witnesses to say she wasn’t there.”

“Will I be asked a lot of horrid questions?”

“You’ll be asked what you were doing, and presumably you’ll give the same answers you gave before.”

“It’s hateful. I don’t see why we should be stood up there, for everyone to stare at.”

“I assure you, there’s no court in the country where you’d have so much in your favour.”

“How do you mean?”

“My dear girl, every man, woman and child in the village is on your side, yours and your mother’s. One hundred per cent. If you’d been seen pulling both ends of the muffler, they’d find that you were tying it for him, or pulling him out of the draught. No: you’re all right. Don’t go sulky, that’s all. Just stand up straight, and answer what they ask you. Don’t do your fury act, either.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Don’t tell the coroner you think it’s a good thing Matt’s no more.”

“I’m not going to be a hypocrite, for anyone. If he asks me what I think, I shall tell him.”

“Well, if you take my advice, you won’t volunteer it.”

“I thought I had to swear to tell the truth.”

“In reply to questions, yes. He won’t ask you that one. Don’t bristle at me, girl. The court will want to make everything easy for you. Don’t hinder them out of pure cussedness. The only effect it would have would be to make them think you knew more than you should, and were trying to shield someone else.”

“Who?”

“David. Eunice. Anyone. Don’t take my advice: take auntie’s. She’s as wise as a vanload of chimpanzees.”

Joan smiled in spite of herself. “Are chimpanzees wise?”

“They look it. She’ll give you good advice, anyway. This inquest is going to be all right for you, if you let it alone. Nobody but you can make it go wrong.”

“Don’t frighten me.” Her eyes were wide again. “It’s beastly of you.”

“I’ll do more than frighten you in a minute. I’ll smack you, damned hard.”

“You dare!”

“Talk sense, then. All I tell you is, if you have the wit to keep quiet and answer the questions they will ask you, and not go blurting out a whole lot they won’t, you’ll be all right.”

“How do you know they won’t ask me?”

“ ’Cos they won’t want to know. All they care about is to make out it was an accident and save the fair name of West Nattering.”

“Why shouldn’t they?”

“From their point of view, it’s most natural.”

“Well then. Why must you try to upset it?”

“Because, my dear,” said Ellis, “murder’s murder. It’s a dirty business, whoever the victim was, and as long as we think there’s been a murder, it’s our duty to say so, and find out who did it.”