All Fall Down

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The amount of paper brought in an hour later was not as great as Ellis had expected—and this in spite of the fact that the collectors had interpreted their instructions very generously, and brought in toffee papers and a cigarette carton or two. It did not take long to sort the damp basketful: and the result, although it brought to light two or three interesting love letters, and one that was quite startlingly obscene, was completely negative. No fragment belonging to or at all resembling the two small pieces was in the collection.

The question of handwriting had naturally not been overlooked: but in practice it is not easy to identify a hand by three letters, especially when these three letters show every sign of having been scrawled in haste. Ellis and Bradstreet pored over their precious clue, with the uneasy feeling that at each fresh scrutiny its value was decreasing. Finally Bradstreet got up, and announced that he was going to the dead girl’s place to have a look round.

The words touched off a spring in Ellis. He swore, and started to his feet.

“Here am I, ferreting about in all this rubbish instead of doing my job. I told you I was no good at this sort of thing.”

“What is your job, if this isn’t?”

“People. People are my job. Human beings. I should have been up at the Baildons’, seeing that this thing doesn’t get to that poor child with too violent a shock. It’s bound to be bad for her: but it needn’t reach her in the crudest way, from errand boys and such. I ought to have gone there right away.”

“I don’t think so. If we’d got something here, we might have had to act right away.”

“You could have done that for me, Bradder. No. I’ve fallen down on my job. I’ll go right along.”

He plodded off, and, reaching the Baildons’, found his fears confirmed. Seeking out Mrs. Baildon in the kitchen, he learned, with renewed self-accusation, that Joan had heard the news from the gleeful lips of Jane Exworthy, and received a severe shock. She was now lying down in her room and could see nobody. Ellis sighed.

“That’s my fault, Mrs. Baildon, I’m afraid. I should have come here at once, and broken the news to her quietly.”

Mrs. Baildon looked at him. Her expression was the most difficult to read that he had ever encountered. One could read almost anything into it—irony, blame, disapproval, deep reserve: but the big eyes, that at first gave a vaguely mournful look to the face, were so blank and so queerly lit that they made the face into a mask, whether for comedy or tragedy Ellis could not determine.

He set himself to penetrate beneath it, to exact from this silent woman one recognisable, definite human note. The look and tone with which she told him of Joan’s retirement conveyed nothing at all. She might have been an uninterested shop assistant telling a customer the price of some article not in stock.

“Your daughter is going through a very trying time, Mrs. Baildon. I hope it will soon be over.”

“Yes.”

“A good girl. She must have been a great comfort to you.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t think I don’t appreciate what you’ve been through, too. We policemen have to do unpleasant things from time to time; but they don’t rob us of the power to sympathise with our fellow-creatures in misfortune.”

Evidently Mrs. Baildon did not feel that this deserved a reply. Privately, Ellis agreed with her. He tried another tack.

“This poor girl that’s been murdered. Can you tell us anything that would help us, do you think?”

She shook her head.

“Did you know her well?”

“Not to say well.”

“She came here a good deal, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Did she never talk to you? Tell you about herself?”

Mrs. Baildon shook her head.

“It would be only natural for a girl, living by herself, to expand a little in the company of friends.”

“I didn’t see her much. She and Joan were together working.”

“She never talked to you about herself.”

“No more than to say she had a cold, or what someone had given her for Christmas.”

Ellis looked at her steadily, with a gaze which nineteen people out of twenty found disconcerting. She met it with her own, not the resolute blank of the poker player, but a relaxed nothingness; steady, but void of interest or enquiry; expressionless, but not at all mad. Ellis was well used to the faces of criminals and others who have much to hide, but this was wholly baffling.

He held it a full half minute, during which time it neither wavered nor concentrated. She could have stared at him silently for an hour without embarrassment.

“Then you can tell me nothing? Nothing to help us catch the man who killed her?”

She shook her head slowly, as if in wonder; and stood waiting for him.

“That’s a pity,” Ellis said. “Maybe Miss Attwill may be able to help. She seems very observant.”

A faint flicker came over the smooth face.

“It wouldn’t do to take too much notice of everything Martha says.”

“No?” said Ellis encouragingly.

“What she doesn’t know she makes up.”

Spoken in a level tone, the remark seemed to hold no touch of malice. Mrs. Baildon sounded as objective as if she were talking about something in a greenhouse.

“She’s very kindhearted, I know,” said Ellis, with a smile. “I dare say she wouldn’t want to disappoint me.”

To his surprise she smiled briefly back.

“You’ve hit her,” she said. “That’s Martha. Mind you, she’s a very sensible woman. Her mind’s very active.”

“And she hasn’t enough to occupy it. I see.”

The ghost of life had left her face. She regarded the subject as exhausted.

“Well,” Ellis told her, “bearing what you’ve said in mind, I’ll go and see Miss Attwill, and see what she has to say. Good-bye. And tell Joan not to worry. Not much good, I’m afraid, poor child.”

“She’s the worrying age,” replied Mrs. Baildon: and Ellis took his leave of her and departed, feeling that he had been completely and effortlessly outwitted. A poised and determined antagonist was one thing, but this woman, who did not exert herself, whose whole attitude had not a trace of tension—he had never met her like.

As he passed the door of the front room, Gilkison popped out and called after him in a sibilant whisper.

“Good God, Gilk! Have you been taking elocution lessons from a cobra?”

Gilkison made his usual offended pause.

“I thought you might like to know something that happened,” he said. “That’s all.”

“Happened when? While I’ve been talking to Mrs. B.?”

“No. Before.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when I came in?”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“Good Lord. Well—go on. What is it?”

“Only that this morning, before the news came about the schoolmistress, I found those two had been upstairs, dusting the books. In here, too. They were both very friendly, and said they ought to have done it before, and did I get very dirty, and so on.”

“Yes?”

“Nothing more. Only I got the idea they were doing it to cover up traces that might show in the dust. Traces of other substitutions, or plain thefts.”

“Might be,” Ellis said.

“I had an idea, too. What about finger-prints on the substituted books?”

“No good.”

“You mean, there aren’t any?”

“It doesn’t matter how many there are. Matt had to ask ’em to fetch any book he wanted. Their prints have a right to be on any and every book in the place. Thanks for suggesting it, all the same.”

Gilkison looked hard at him, and flushed.

“Are you laughing at me?”

“I laugh at you often and regularly, my dear Gilkie. You are one of the joys of my drab existence. But I am not laughing at you now. For the matter of that, I’m not laughing at anything. Well—thanks again for telling me.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see Martha Attwill. I’ve an idea she’ll be helpful about this business. So long.”

“You haven’t time. It’s close on one o’clock.”

“Lord. So it is. We must have been longer over that waste-paper basket than I thought.”

“That what?”

Ellis explained. “Look here,” he added. “I must go to see the old hen. Tell ’em I’ll be late.”

Whether Ellis’s idea was well founded he did not discover. Miss Attwill’s door was shut. Milk stood on the step, and a parcel was half hidden near the door. A note held under the knocker announced in bold scrawly characters: “Gone away for the day. Please leave as usual. M. A.”

Disappointed, Ellis turned and went slowly back to the inn. This second murder had deeply depressed him. He kept seeing the misused, tumbled body, the swollen face. Avid for sensation, she had had her will, poor girl, shortly and finally. And there was nothing of the murderee about her. She had seemed strong, self-centred, capable. You couldn’t tell, though, how love would take a girl, making her exigeant, clinging, reproachful, a creator of scenes. Or were Bradder and Co. right, and was Eunice Caunter victim of a common rape? A girl so strongly built might have fought so hard there was no other way to quiet her?

Ellis shook himself. This was no accidental crime, he felt in his bones. It was the outcome of a relationship. But had it anything to do with what had already happened? If so, what? Where was the connection?

He was in a thoroughly bad temper by the time he reached the hotel. Gilkison had only just started his meal. To Ellis, his appearance seemed smug: but, as he said nothing, and asked no question, he gave no outlet for ill temper.

Ellis prodded viciously with his fork.

“Potatoes aren’t cooked,” he growled.

Gilkison raised his eyebrows. “Mine are all right,” he observed, with an expression that implied polite disbelief.

“Call me a liar, and have done with it.”

“By all means. If it will give you any pleasure.” He took a little more mustard. “Wasn’t Miss Attwill helpful?”

“She wasn’t anything, blast her. She was out.”

“Going to try again after lunch?”

“May be something else to do by then. Sorry, Gilk. I’m all on edge. I hate these gaps in a case, when one’s waiting for something to happen.”

“What do you expect to happen?”

“Any of about five things. Or all at once.”

“Sounds very dramatic.”

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it.”

Ellis’s antagonism rose again. Gilkison had a knack, quite unintentional, of flicking his nerves. He looked at the neat, careful scholar, eating his food so discreetly, so self-containedly, and thought, he ought to have been born a governess; then proceeded to imagine such a series of adventures for this feminine incarnation of Gilkie that he began to grin, and his humour restored, attacked his food with ferocious relish.

He read for twenty minutes when the meal was over, to aid digestion—an unnecessary precaution, since he had the digestion of a horse—then went up to his room, pulled the furniture about, sat down, and wrote another letter to his wife, giving her a fresh report on the case, and adding his solution.

“If I’m right,” he concluded, “we shan’t be long. It’s true there are gaps, and I’ve had to advance more than one motive, which I never like. But what other explanation fits the facts?”

He sealed the letter and posted it, resisting the temptation to keep it open for the medical evidence and any possible discovery which Bradstreet might make among the dead girl’s belongings. Ellis inclined always to the school of thought which looks to character and motive for a solution, and regards circumstantial evidence as confirmation rather than as proof. His sense of character and his intuitions were so strong that in most cases this arrogant method brought success. Every now and then, however, it came a cropper: and the feeling deepened that this was to be a case in the latter class. He wished that he could get back his letter. “Why volunteer a solution before all the evidence was in? A bundle of love-letters in the girl’s rooms, the discovery of the rest of the paper from which those grisly little plugs were torn, the arrest of a soldier—anything might knock his theory cock-eyed and expose him once more as a self-confident fathead to the one person in the world who had best reason to know he was one, and whom, therefore, he had best reason not to furnish with additional and quite gratuitous evidence on the point.

Returning from the post, Ellis looked at the hotel clock. It said ten to four. He pondered whether to go to the station before tea, decided against it, and went into the garden. He tried to read, but found that he couldn’t concentrate. Finally, in an angry fever of impatience, he decided that he couldn’t wait till half-past four for his tea, went inside, and rang the bell.

When the little waitress appeared, he put his head on one side at her.

“Do you think I could have tea early? I have to go off and work.”

She smiled at him. “I’ll see, sir.”

In a minute she reappeared. “Yes, sir. It’ll be ready in about ten minutes.”

“Good. Thank you so much.”

But it was a long ten minutes; and Ellis, as he ate his tea, was all the time listening for the telephone, and so did not enjoy his meal.

“You fool,” he apostrophised himself. “What’s come to you? Steady. Steady the Buffs.”

But no nursery phrases, no self-exhortation would still that little crawling toad of apprehension inside him: and, as he realised its insistence, Ellis felt real alarm, for he knew it of old, the extra sense that, reacting almost physically as to a coming change in the weather, presaged always something ugly, violent, unforeseen, something which took the conscious planning brain by surprise; though the unconscious mind, perceiving it all too well, tried with these frantic signals to warn its crass colleague before the happening was precipitated upon them.

Gilkison came in just as Ellis was standing up and wiping his mouth.

“I didn’t wait for you. Sorry. I’m off to the station. Anything new?”

“Not so far.”

“Joan about yet?”

“I heard her mother go up to her and ask if she’d like some tea.”

“M’m. I’ll give her a miss, I think.”

The weather was hot, no longer with the serene steady heat which had met them when they came down, but an uneasy heat, the sun flaming through a clear, thin air. Walking and the tea he had drunk brought Ellis out in a sweat. He pulled out a handkerchief, and mopped his high, crimson forehead.

“Hallo,” Bradstreet said. “I’ve just been ringing you, but they said you’d started.”

“Got anything?”

“Yes and no. First, Wilbraham’s report.”

He passed Ellis the typewritten sheet with the medical findings. Ellis scanned it.

“Cause of death, strangulation. Bruises on throat and upper arm inflicted before death. H’m. He doesn’t think it was rape.”

“No.” Bradstreet was looking at something on his desk.

“On the other hand. . . . Recently, but not so recently as all that. Ye—es. What d’you make of it?”

“It doesn’t seem to help us very much.”

“Neither your theory nor mine. Unless——”

“Yes?” Bradstreet enquired, after a pause.

“Nothing. Get anything else? Among her effects? Any letters?”

“Nothing to signify. There was a batch of eleven letters from one Maurice, from an address at South Shields, but no more than friendly, and they tailed off. There was eight months between the last two.”

“Nothing local?”

“None from anyone we’ve an eye on. Excepting a few from Joan Baildon. All full of admiration and gratitude. The letters a child would write.”

“Not recent, I take it, then.”

“They aren’t dated. There’s one a bit different from the rest, asking if the girl was offended with her, and what had she done. It had a pencil mark in the margin, and the what-had-she-done part was underlined, with an exclamation mark after it.”

“Typical,” Ellis said. “Got it here?”

Bradstreet smiled, opened a drawer, and passed over the bundle of letters. Ellis flipped them through.

“Notice how the writing has matured? This little one, about the book she’d borrowed—I’ll bet you that’s later than the rest. I’ll bet you, too, that there were more in between it and the what-have-I-done one, and that this beauty tore ’em up because she didn’t like ’em. I know her sort. The sort that cuts her own photo out of a group if she doesn’t like it.”

He passed the letters back.

“There’s been some hellish stuff here, Bradder. Playing up that poor child’s feelings.”

“Over what?”

“Over Rattray. ‘You don’t love me any more’ when Rattray comes to give the Latin lessons.”

“I don’t see you’ve a right to say that. It’s conjecture.”

“Well, if I’m wronging the dead, I apologise.”

“They continued good friends. Miss Caunter was always ready to do what she could to help.”

“Leading to Discovery Number Two. Out with it, Bradder. I think I can guess.”

Bradstreet looked at him. Ellis grinned into the wide, expressionless face.

“Miss Caunter was the muffled lady who handed Nelder the books,” he said.

Bradstreet took something else out of the drawer.

“The anonymous letter was done on her typewriter. So she may have been.”

“Understand me, Bradder. I don’t mean for a second that the girl turned against Joan, because of Rattray. All I mean is that she belonged to a type that can’t help making emotional capital out of everything that occurs. She had to play the girl up. She’d play anyone up; at any time, however happy she was. And, since she was probably quite unhappy, and her life lacked drama, she’d be bound to make the most of every chance she got.”

“I still don’t see—Well, never mind. It doesn’t bear on the matter in hand.”

“Like half the things I say, Bradder. Only it never does to disregard me entirely, because sometimes I talk sense by accident.”

Bradstreet was in no mood for persiflage. He put the letters away in the drawer, and took out a further bundle of papers, and Ellis’s small flat tin.

“I’ve been over a number of samples of her handwriting, and I think you’ll agree with me that the most we can say is that she might have written the three letters on that little piece of paper.”

He passed the papers over to Ellis, who scrutinised them through a magnifying glass, comparing them with the small crumpled piece.

“The ‘s’ is the most like. But it’s such a scrawl.”

“Her writing varies a lot,” Bradstreet commented.

“Typical, again. It was very marked in the letters to Joan that I read. Well, Bradder. Where do we go from here?”

“I’ve put my men on to all the usual routine. We’re checking up on all the men from the camp and aerodrome who had leave last night.”

“And the movements of everyone hereabouts.”

“Naturally.” Bradstreet looked hurt.

“Bless your heart, Bradder. I was afraid you’d tell me it couldn’t be any of the local race of Galahads. Now, now. I’m only pulling your leg, and you know it.”

Bradstreet’s expression suggested that the time and place were unsuitable.

“Who’s going to interview some of our more prominent citizens, Bradder? You or I?”

“Which of them have you got in mind?”

“Well—Rattray, for one. It was one of his evenings out. He finishes at nine, he’s home by ten. What does he do between nine and ten? What did he do the night before, when he came in so late? Lucky for him she wasn’t killed that night. He’d have had something to explain away. He has, as it is: but not her death.”

“Seeing she did a full day’s work in the school, no,” Bradstreet agreed. “I think you’d better tackle him, don’t you?”

They looked at each other.

“Perhaps I had. But not yet. I’ve a half notion in my head . . .”

He told Bradstreet what it was. Bradstreet looked concerned, but nodded slowly.

“Worth trying, I dare say. But I shouldn’t play around too long.”

“Bradder! What a low view you take of my professional activities.”

“Well,” said the Devonian doggedly, “you work on rather fancy lines, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Fancy, that is, compared to the likes of me. I just go along my own way.”

“And a damned good way too. I admire it. I’d do it, if I could. But I can only go my own.”

Bradstreet nodded. “While you’re doing your thing, I’ll do t’other.”

“Choosing a time——”

“Yes. I’ll find a tale to satisfy her.”

“I think it’s as well that the two operations should be independent.”

“There may be nothing in it,” Bradstreet said. “But, if there is——” He shrugged his heavy shoulders.

“It boils down to two questions, Bradder. Why was she killed? Was it because she knew something? In other words, is her death connected with Matt’s, or is it quite irrelevant? My notion can work in either event.”

“It’s a bit much to ask me to believe, in a little place like this, which I know like the back of my hand, and which has been quiet for years, that two independent murders can take place in four days.”

“That’s a sound point, Bradder. Even I, who am handicapped by no local knowledge, can allow it some force.”

“Local knowledge isn’t always a handicap.”

“Of course it isn’t. But, when it comes to an estimate of possibilities, the outsider and the local man will judge differently. I maintain there’s only been one unexpected murder—Eunice’s. Half a dozen people, yourself included, have told me they wondered nobody had polished Matt off sooner.”

“We might have said it, but we didn’t mean it literally.”

“Didn’t you though. Personally, I always attach great importance to the things people say without meaning them. That is, without knowing they mean them. No, Bradder: the form of words is very important. You not only said you wondered Matt hadn’t been killed: you said you wondered his wife or Joan hadn’t done it.”

“That was only a manner of speaking. I never——”

“Out of the heart the mouth speaketh. On top of all that, you can’t claim that Matt’s murder was unexpected or outside probability. That leaves you with only one murder to explain: whether it’s related to the other or not. Personally, I’m betting that it’s not.”

“God help us,” Bradstreet said, “if we’ve two murderers to watch out for in this little place.”

“God help us indeed. And God helps those that help themselves. Let’s get on with it, Bradder.