Here Lies Gloria Mundy

11

A Conference with the Accused

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The next question was put to me personally. Dame Beatrice asked me whether I wrote shorthand, adding that as, among my other activities, I was a newspaper reporter (or so William Underedge had told her), no doubt I numbered shorthand among my accomplishments. Wondering what this was leading up to, I admitted that this was so.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘You shall accompany me upon my mission.’

‘And we hope,’ said Laura Gavin, ‘that shades of the prison-house will not begin to close upon the growing boy.’

‘You mean you want me to sit in on your interview with Coberley?’ I said. ‘He won’t like that very much.’

‘Did you not get on well with him when you met?’

‘Oh, I saw very little of him, but he did show me over the old house one morning.’

‘Well, he can refuse to talk to me in front of you, but I think he would prefer you to Laura. He may even feel he has a friend at court when he sees you with me.’

So off we went. Apparently she had made all the arrangements beforehand, for we were taken straightaway to the governor’s office, where Dame Beatrice was received with deference.

‘You had better see Coberley in here,’ said the governor and he sent off the prison officer who had brought us into his presence to conduct Coberley to the sanctum. ‘I told him that we were expecting a visit from you and that he could have his lawyer present at the interview if he so wished, but he said that he had met you and needed no other help.’

Coberley looked better than I had expected. He was well-shaven and was wearing a good suit. His demeanour was cheerful. In fact, he looked fresher and more alive than he had appeared at Beeches Lawn. I think he had shed the image of the headmaster and had reverted to that of the business tycoon who, no doubt, had been in tight places before and had come out of them unscathed. He greeted us with an impartial, ‘Very good of you both to come,’ shook hands with us and the governor, and then the prison officer left us and we, so to speak, settled down, myself at the desk ready to take notes, the other two in chairs adjacent to one another.

‘I take it that you know the magistrates have decided I must stand trial,’ said Coberley. ‘It means the end of the school, so far as I am concerned, of course, but my first assistant will carry on and if the boys stay he will buy me out and take over completely. That is all arranged. Whatever the result of the trial, I can hardly go back there myself. I shall miss the boys, of course, but Marigold will enjoy living in our villa in the south of France. I am pretty sure I shall be able to join her there. I don’t see how this charge can possibly stick. There isn’t enough evidence against me to hang a dog.’

‘A pity the magistrates did not share that view,’ said Dame Beatrice drily.

‘Oh, the Bench always believe the yarns the police cook up,’ said Coberley, appearing less and less like my previous picture of him. ‘The Chief Constable brought pressure to bear on that rather obtuse detective-inspector, I think, so an arrest had to be made and I drew the short straw.’

‘Why was that, do you suppose?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’m an old lag, you know. I’ve done time for assault and battery. I was an obvious choice, since a choice had to be made.’

‘Who, in your opinion, were the other candidates for incarceration?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘Well, I don’t want to sound unchivalrous, but, speaking quite objectively, I see this as a woman’s crime. There were a number of guns in the house — ’

I looked up and said, ‘I never saw any. Wotton prided himself on not being one of the hunting, shooting and fishing crowd.’

‘His father was one of them, though,’ said Coberley, ‘and he left a little armoury in that room Wotton uses as a den. I don’t suppose you have ever seen inside the big cupboard in there. My point is that a man would have shot the girl, not stabbed her in the back.’

I apologised for the interruption, but Dame Beatrice waved a benedictory yellow claw at me and remarked that it was a good thing to get these matters clear. Then she turned again to Coberley and said: ‘So you think that a man would have shot Miss Mundy.’

‘At least a man would not have needed to stab her in the back, as I said. She was a slight, waif-like little thing whom a man could have strangled with one hand. That would have settled the thing if he thought a shot would be heard.’

‘Before we continue this interesting discussion,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘apart from your record of violence, what other evidence do you suppose the police have against you? I have my own theories, of course, but what are yours?’

‘Oh, that’s an easy one,’ said this new and, to me, astonishing Coberley. ‘It boils down, as I see it, to a question of alibis. Before I was arrested we heard a load of codswallop about gangs of town hooligans. They are supposed to have buttered the steps of my house, mugged Gloria Mundy, set fire to the old house and all the rest of it.’

‘You mentioned a question of alibis.’

‘That’s right, so I did. Well, upon thinking things over and also consulting with my lawyer, it seems likely that the men who were at Beeches Lawn can more or less account for one another. I’m the odd man out because, of course, I was over at the school a good deal of the time and, when I hang a notice on the headmaster’s door asking not to be disturbed — which, in effect, means I don’t want naughty boys brought to me by incompetent masters who can’t keep order and on whose behalf I am expected to cane their boys, an operation I dislike intensely and resort to as few times as possible — nobody, not even my wife or my head assistant, can account for my movements. The fact that on such occasions I merely put my feet up, have a quiet drink and a smoke and study the stock market, in which I still have an interest, is neither here nor there. For the space of, say, a couple of hours, I do not exist, so far as is known, and, thus disembodied, could be up to anything, including murder and arson.’

‘Excellent,’ said Dame Beatrice in an absentminded way which made me think that she had spotted something in all this which might be a help to her. ‘To resume our previous topic at the point where I digressed from it, granted that you are right and that the murder of Gloria Mundy was a woman’s crime, which woman have you picked for the rôle of villainess?’

‘I believe you are laughing at me,’ said Coberley, ‘but I will answer the question in all seriousness because the fact is that I simply do not know. It could be any single one of them, or even two in collusion.’

‘You said that, with the exception of yourself, the men could alibi one another. Could not the women, with the possible exception of your wife, do the same?’

‘They could, but I don’t think they would. Men will lie themselves black in the face in support of the old school tie. Women have no such mistaken loyalties. A woman will tell little fibs on behalf of a girl friend, such as claiming that the friend was staying the weekend with her when actually the damsel was sharing an illicit bed quite elsewhere, or telling the friend’s husband that she was with his wife when she bought a new dress “in the sales for a knockdown price” and then tell the wife to keep her fingers crossed and hope that he won’t notice the big hole in their joint account when he goes over the books at the end of the quarter or whenever it is; but, when it comes to the real crunch, women get cold feet and tell the truth willy-nilly.’

‘Not all women,’ I said.

‘There are exceptions to every rule, Stratford.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Just the chivalrous knight speaking up for a maligned and unjustly treated sex.’

‘I gather, Mr Coberley, that you do not share a bank account with your wife,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘I might, if most of the money was hers and not mine. As it is, I’m not such a fool. You asked me to pick out the woman who murdered Gloria Mundy. I can’t do it. All I know is that, in a serious matter of this kind, women wouldn’t connive to give each other alibis.’

‘May we have chapter and verse?’

‘I imagine, even from the little I saw of her, that Gloria was a red rag to a bull to other women. She had no beauty, either of face or figure, yet, from what I have gathered, men were her cornfield and her vineyard.’

‘There was her remarkable hair,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Perhaps that was the attraction. What say you, Mr Stratford?’

‘When I buy a horse it will be a strawberry roan,’ I said. ‘I don’t go for piebalds and skewbalds.’

‘I gather that both of you were immune to Gloria’s charms,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Now, Mr Coberley, line up your suspects.’

‘I repeat,’ said this new and astonishing man, ‘it could have been any one of them. I am perfectly certain that any normal, sex-orientated woman would have declared war on Gloria Mundy at sight. Let us (as you seem to wish this) take the ladies in question one by one, leaving out my wife, who had no fear of female rivalry.’

‘I should think not,’ I said warmly.

Dame Beatrice cackled and Coberley said in his best headmaster’s voice, ‘Attend to your work, boy.’

Instead of doing so immediately, I asked a direct and, to my mind, a pertinent question. ‘Aren’t you taking this being brought to trial seriously?’

‘I might, if I were guilty, but I’m not, you see,’ he said. ‘Sir Ferdinand got me a very light sentence when last I appeared before a jury, and this time I expect to escape without a stain on my character.’

‘Sir Ferdinand?’ I said blankly.

‘My son,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘a clever and unscrupulous boy, but it is more fitting that the guilty should escape man’s vengeance rather than that the innocent should suffer. I must place it on record, however, that I had no hand in Mr Coberley’s choice of a lawyer. Now, client, back to business, if you please. Name your dames and let us have your opinion of each in turn and, if you can manage it, your reason for bringing her under suspicion.’

I could not see how this catalogue was going to help the enquiry, but I trusted that Dame Beatrice had something constructive in mind and that she anticipated that Coberley’s opinions would shed some ray of light upon what still seemed to be the impenetrable darkness and mystery which surrounded Gloria Mundy’s death.

‘Well, my first choice would be Mrs Wotton,’ said Coberley. ‘It was easy to see that she detested the girl. Wotton and I had a couple of drinks too many when I was at his place one night. This was some time ago, before any of this murder and arson business. I have no doubt I unburdened myself in a way I would not do normally, but so did he, by Jove! I heard the full story of Gloria Mundy’s conquest of him and he finished up by begging me to forgive him for bandying a woman’s name and saying that he had made a clean breast of the whole affair to his wife before they married.’

‘It was Celia Wotton who asked the wretched girl to stay to lunch that day,’ I pointed out.

‘Yes, because she knew it was the last thing Wotton wanted. It was a mean little way of getting a bit of her own back,’ said Coberley.

‘Oh, come, now!’ I protested. ‘Any hostess would have felt bound to do the same.’

‘To an uninvited and obviously unwelcome guest? Still, you may be right.’

‘After the soup-splashing incident, everybody took it for granted that Miss Mundy had slung her hook. Nobody expected her to be seen at the old house,’ I said.

‘Nevertheless, that’s where she was,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Can you produce any evidence, apart from a somewhat weak motive, for your suspicions of Mrs Wotton?’

‘No, I can’t. I have no evidence against any of the ladies. The only two I don’t suspect at all are my wife and the elderly aunt. I have reasons for excepting these two. Apart from the fact that she later broke her leg, the old lady had scored a signal triumph with her quite disgraceful behaviour at table and was far too pleased with herself to plan any further assault on that young serpent, and my wife, having committed one murder, had the fright of her life when she was brought to trial and is utterly inhibited from murdering anybody else.’

I looked at Dame Beatrice and asked, ‘Is that good psychology, Domina?’

‘Oh, it could be,’ she responded. She turned again to Coberley.

‘So you knew your wife killed her first husband?’

‘I thought everybody knew it,’ he said. ‘I was the chief witness for the prosecution, you know. The deed was done in my office. Marigold was my secretary. Her husband had come to kick up a fuss about what he had made up his mind was our relationship with one another. I need hardly tell you that there was nothing in the least improper about it. I treated her like a daughter, but that is all. I am twenty-five years older than she is and, beyond admiring her beauty and finding her knowledge of Spanish, her native language, very useful in my business — for I had large interests in South America, particularly with the Argentine — I was (and still am, if it comes to that) merely a father figure in her life.’

‘So her hot Spanish blood got the better of her when her husband came to your office,’ I said.

‘I suppose so. I heard the shot and burst in to find her with the gun in her hand and the fellow lying on the carpet. Of course I wasn’t going to admit to anybody what I had seen. I said, “You silly girl! Now look at what you’ve done! Drop the gun beside him.” ’

‘Did she always carry a gun?’ I asked. He took no notice.

‘Of course there were voices outside and soon a knock on the door,’ he said. ‘I did not invite anybody in, but, of course, it opened and a scared typist asked whether everything was all right. I replied that a man had just shot himself and that she was to telephone for the police. That’s the whole story. When Marigold was acquitted I married her and bought the school after I had changed my name.’

‘You were not alarmed at becoming the husband of such a volatile young creature?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘Oh, no. Things came out, you know. He was an absolute waster, an undischarged bankrupt and a chap who had bought the gun and threatened suicide with it more than once. There were witnesses who supported Marigold’s statement about that. Of course there were her prints on the gun superimposed on his, so the defence relied mainly on a story of a struggle for the gun which then went off and killed the fellow. Of course I was called for the prosecution, but they didn’t get much joy out of me. You can’t run a business as successful as mine was without being able to tell a good big thumping lie or two when the need arises, but I really think it was Marigold’s outstanding beauty and a sort of defencelessness about her which really swayed the jury; neither could the prosecution find anybody who could produce evidence of previous quarrels between the husband and wife, although I’m pretty sure they led a cat and dog life. In fact, they both lived on Marigold’s salary, which I bumped up from time to time because, in a fatherly or avuncular way, I was very fond of her. I used to take her out to meals quite a lot. I got the impression that she often went hungry.’

‘Which of them had brought the gun to your office?’ I could not help asking.

This time he answered me. ‘She said that she had. Her story was that he had been in a deeply depressed mood when she left for work that morning and she had not dared to leave him in the house with it.’

‘And which of them do you think had toted it along?’

‘Oh, he had, of course. He had come to the office to shoot me. She had asked him for a divorce, you see. She told me exactly what had happened as soon as we were married. She saw him produce the gun and simply held out her hand for it, took it and shot him.’

‘Just like that?’ I said.

‘Just like that.’

‘But why?’

‘Because he had threatened that one day he would turn up at the office and shoot me. When she was acquitted I took her straight off to the south of France for a year and we were married as soon as we came back to England.’

At a signal from Dame Beatrice I had written down none of this story. I was astonished, in fact, that he had told it. I resumed my task, however, when Dame Beatrice said, ‘Well, we have mentioned some of the women who were at Beeches Lawn. What about the others?’

‘I don’t see any way of choosing between them,’ said Coberley. ‘The two unmarried girls are less likely murderers than Mrs Wotton, perhaps, simply because they were not only younger than she, but, because of that very fact, possibly had their fiancés under firm control. A fiancée is always stronger in most respects than a wife. No, on the whole I plump for Celia Wotton.’

‘What Coberley does not know,’ I said to Dame Beatrice when we got outside, ‘is that Kate McMaster had exactly the same motive as Celia Wotton for detesting Gloria Mundy. Before his marriage McMaster had a caper with her. One of the husbands-to-be picked her up at a night-club, the other on board a cruise liner, but that seems to have been the only difference. Kate McMaster would have known the address of Beeches Lawn because McMaster came to see me there.’

‘Yes, but she could not have known that Miss Mundy was to go there.’

‘Did you get anything helpful from Coberley?’ I asked.

‘I found the whole interview very interesting,’ she replied, ‘particularly the importance he attaches to the eleventh Commandment.’

‘Oh, about telling lies? In time of trouble thou shalt tell a lie, a good lie, and stick to it. Yes, indeed. Incidentally, I had to exercise a lot of self-control to avoid telling him what I thought of him for accusing Celia Wotton. I respect and admire her and it was hurtful to think that anybody should accuse her of stabbing another woman in the back.’

‘Some women do it metaphorically, of course. He was very frank in confessing that he could not furnish himself with any kind of an alibi, but, as I think we are agreed, no alibi is of use, either to the police or the person under suspicion, until we know when the murder actually took place. Being a shrewd man, he has worked that out for himself. Have you your luggage with you?’

‘Yes. I’m not going back to my hotel — or, rather, to one of McMaster’s hotels. I have finished the job I was doing for him and shall send him the last bit of my work tomorrow when I’ve gone through it and done any necessary typing at home. I will also type out today’s shorthand and send it to you.’

‘If you can spare the time, why not bring it to me and stay for a couple of days? We can find plenty of material for conversation and Laura will like to hear our combined account of today’s visit. I am interested in Mr Coberley’s assertion that the murder was committed by a woman.’

‘What is your own opinion about that? You said that women were capable metaphorically of stabbing one another in the back, but it might be much more difficult for them to bring themselves to do it physically, don’t you think?’

‘It might depend upon the sharpness of the weapon, the physical energy of the murderess and her knowledge of anatomy,’ said Dame Beatrice, pretending to misunderstand me.

‘I recoil from the idea of a woman plunging cold steel into another woman,’ I said.

‘A typical masculine reaction, but the squeamishness becomes you. Shall I look forward to seeing you tomorrow, then, at lunch? Can you get your work finished by then?’

‘Oh, yes, easily, and I can post it to McMaster on my way to you.’

‘Before we meet again, I should be glad if you would turn over in your mind everything which happened between Gloria Mundy’s invasion — I use the word advisedly, for that is what it seems to have been — and the discovery of the charred body. Will you do that and prepare yourself to answer any questions which it may occur to me to put to you?’

‘Certainly, and thank you for the invitation. Has Coberley convinced you of his own innocence?’

‘By no means. The evidence against him may be slight, but it must be taken into account.’