Ladies’ Bane

CHAPTER 35

During the rest of the day everyone in the village was asked where he or she had been between half past nine and half past ten on the night of Flaxman’s murder. There was apparently a collective alibi for the men who remained in the Falcon after Tom Humphreys had gone out. They had left together at ten o’clock, and since, as it happened, all lived on the side of Bleake nearest to Wraydon and farthest from the waste piece of ground where the body had lain, they went home in a bunch, calling out cheerful good-nights as each disappeared into his own dwelling. And all their wives were prepared not only to say but to swear that they had not gone out again. This left a number of people whom there was no reason for suspecting, and who were for the most part asleep in bed. And the women-wives, mothers, sisters, and grandmothers of Bleake-who had no possible reason for setting foot outside at such an hour.

Grayson had worked solidly through the lot, when he encountered Miss Silver coming out of the village shop. She bowed, and was about to pass on, when he fell into step beside her.

“Abbott tells me it was you who put him up to the idea that Mrs. Larkin might have seen someone coming from the direction of the village. Well, I’ve been through the place with a toothcomb, and there isn’t anyone who will so much as admit to having been out at the time.”

Miss Silver did not consider this at all surprising. Inspector Grayson was doubtless an excellent officer, but not perhaps endowed with the finer shades of tact. Put as he had just put it, his questioning of the local inhabitants could only have sounded like an invitation to confess. With a slight preliminary cough she enquired,

“Did you, perhaps, make it sufficiently clear that you were seeking for the co-operation of a witness, and not preparing the way for an arrest?”

He stared.

“They had got the wind up, the whole lot of them. If anyone was out, he wasn’t going to admit it-you could see that.”

Miss Silver smiled in the dusk.

“Did you have any conversation with old Mrs. Pease?”

She was aware of his jerk of surprise.

“Granny Pease? Why, no! She was in bed with the rheumatics, and as to going out in the dark, why she wouldn’t think of such a thing. She must be well up in her eighties anyhow.”

“Nevertheless I think you will find that she did go out on the night of the murder.”

“What makes you think so, madam?”

His tone expressed an obstinate disbelief. Miss Silver ignored it.

“Her daughter, Mrs. Bowyer, works for Miss Falconer. She arrived as usual on the morning after the murder, and before it had become public property. In the course of a casual conversation with Miss Falconer she deplored the fact that Granny, as she called her, was so venturesome-‘Slipping out last night when everyone’s back was turned, and not a word where she was going. Said she’d remembered a very particular cough mixture from her great-grandmother’s recipe, and finding she’d got a bottle of it by her, she’d gone down the street with it to Mrs. Miller’s where they hadn’t been able to sleep for nights on account of Stanley’s cough. And after ten before she came home.’ ”

“You heard this yourself?”

“No, Inspector, it was said to Miss Falconer, who only spoke of it to me about half an hour ago. She had heard that you were anxious to find anyone who might have seen the murderer, and her conscience would not allow her to keep silence. If I had not met you just now I would have rung up the police station at Wraydon.”

He was frowning in the darkness, a fact which Miss Silver was very well able to deduce from the tone of his voice.

“It is most unlikely that she saw anything at all, but anyhow she can’t very well be suspected of the murder, so perhaps she’ll be willing to talk. I’ll say good-night, Miss Silver.”

He went striding on past Miss Falconer’s cottage. He would have to see the old woman, but he told himself that he expected nothing from the interview. On the other hand she had been out until after ten, and Mrs. Miller’s house was the last in the village. Coming and going she would pass the entrance to the Ladies’ House. There were possibilities, but of course no use to build on them. He stood knocking on the cottage door, and wondered who would come to it. It was not the least of his surprises that it was Granny Pease herself, in a large black shawl and slippers of crimson wool. There was nothing on her head but its own sparse white hair, and she immediately complained of the draught and told him to come in and be quick about it. By virtue of some attenuated relationship to his wife she addressed him as Johnny.

“Come to have a nice little chat with me, have you? Time was when young men would come visiting me evenings-and never too late to start again! Sit you down by the fire. I’ve a nice strong cup of tea in the pot.”

The tea was stewed and bitter, but he took it, repressed a shudder over his first sip, and said in a good-humoured bantering tone,

“Well, Granny, I’m glad to see you up and about. Aggie told me this afternoon that you couldn’t move out of your bed with the rheumatics.”

Her cup looked blacker and must have tasted worse than his own, but she seemed to be enjoying it. Her face twisted in a malicious smile.

“Didn’t want me to see you-didn’t want you to see me! Keeping of us apart, that’s what Aggie was a-doing! Jealous of my new young man, I shouldn’t wonder, and thinking I wouldn’t know nothing about your coming because of me having my forty winks! But her Ernie let it out. ‘What’s that Johnny Grayson want, coming here?’ he says. And I give it to Aggie proper! And now that you’re here, I’ll arst the same as what he did. What do you want, Johnny Grayson? You’d better look lively, or Aggie will be home, and maybe she’ll pack you off.”

As he told her, she began to laugh, shaking and rocking herself backwards and forwards till her tea spilled over and she had to set down her cup on the top of the stove.

“Well, I never!” she gasped. “Think I went after that Flaxman and got him with Mr. Humphreys’ pruning-knife? I daresay there’s been women might have had cause to do him in. A bad lot, that’s what he was, and that Nellie Humphreys not much better! But I didn’t take a knife to either of ’em.”

He laughed too.

“I didn’t think you did, Granny.” He allowed a pause to lengthen. “I thought you might have seen something.”

“And if I did?” Her tone had sharpened. There was no laughter in it now.

“Then I hope you will tell me.”

She considered. Her tea must have been cold now as well as bitter, but she finished it before she said,

“Will I have to come into court and swear to what I seen?”

“That depends on what it was.”

“Well then, it wasn’t much. I come along to Mrs. Miller’s with the cough mixture for her Stanley -”

“What time would that be?”

“Half past nine when I slipped out the back door. Listening to the wireless they was, and I went quiet.”

“Did you see anything then?”

She shook her head.

“I went along on, and I got to Millers’ and I give her the mixture.”

“How long were you there?”

She screwed up her face.

“I don’t rightly know. She was talking about Stanley ’s cough and how they couldn’t none of ’em sleep nights for it. And I was telling her about my old great-gran. Better than all your doctors and chemists and National Health she was! Made up stuff for man and beast, and what she couldn’t cure nobody could, and no use trying!”

Grayson could see that this kind of conversation might have lasted quite a long time. He gave up trying to measure it and said,

“It was past ten when you got home.”

“Who says it was?”

“Aggie does.”

She made a grimace.

“Well, I daresay.”

“And now, Granny, you saw something when you were going home. What did you see?”

“ ’Tweren’t nothing to make a song and dance about.”

“What was it?”

“I’d got my shawl over my head and my slippers on my feet. The streets were as dry as a bone. I’d got outside of Millers’, and I’d gone a little way, when I stubbed my toe on a stone, right through the wool of my slippers. It hurt something cruel, and I took and stood still under the big holly right over the way from the Ladies’ House. I didn’t feel like walking on that foot till I’d got it eased off a bit. So there I stood, leaning up against Bessie Turner’s front gate and thinking whether I’d be able to get home alone. No one couldn’t see me on account of that big holly what she won’t never have clipped.”

“Well?”

“Now, Johnny Grayson, don’t you go trying to hustle me! Cruel bad, my toe was, and if I could ha’ stood on one leg I’d ha’ done it.” She screwed up her face reminiscently and then opened a winking eye. “Time was I could! Egg race, hop-skip-and-jump-I’d win ’em all!”

He laughed.

“Some time ago, Granny!”

She nodded vigorously.

“Not but what I can’t do a thing or two when I’ve got to! You’d be surprised!” Her eyes sparkled with malice. “Well, I was just seeing if I could get my foot off of the ground by leaning on Bessie’s gate, when someone come out atween the gate-posts of the Ladies’ House.”

“Who was it?”

She gave an odd cackle of laughter.

“And wouldn’t you like to know that!”

“Yes, I should.”

“Then want must be your master, Johnny, my boy.”

“You couldn’t see?”

She tossed her head.

“Nobody could ha’ seen! There’s the trees hanging over, and a shadow as black as you please. All I could see was there was someone moving out atween the gate-posts and along under the trees.”

“Which way?” said Grayson quickly.

She wagged her head at him.

“Just the way you would like it to be, Johnny-round to the left and along on the road to Tom Humphreys’. And if you want to know what I thought at the time, well, I thought it was that Flaxman going after Nellie.”

He could get no more from her than that. She had taken it to be Flaxman at the time, but she couldn’t swear to any distinguishing mark of man or woman. What she had seen was someone moving in the shadows, and she would swear to that. But it certainly wasn’t Flaxman, because the time would be somewhere round about ten, when, according to Mrs. Larkin, he had had his peppering and was making his painful and interrupted way towards the waste piece of ground where he was to be stabbed. Grayson could have no doubt in his own mind that she had seen the person who had stabbed him, but as to who that person might be his guess was as good as another’s. It went no farther than that.