The Ivory Dagger

CHAPTER XXV

When the two Inspectors had left Lila Dryden’s room Ray Fortescue waited long enough to let them get well away and then ran down into the hall. She wanted to telephone to Bill, and she wanted to find out how she could do it. There was a telephone in the study, but that wasn’t any good, because the policemen were there interviewing people. A house organized and improved by Herbert Whitall would probably be stiff with extensions, but she didn’t know where she should look for them. There would be one in Sir Herbert’s bedroom, but the idea of using it made her feel as if someone had dropped an icicle down her back.

She rang a bell, and Frederick came to answer it. She had seen him vaguely when she arrived, but she hadn’t really noticed what a tall, pale slip of a boy he was. He really was very pale indeed. Not so nice being in a house where there has been a murder and the police keep coming in and out as if the place belonged to them. She produced a friendly smile, and said that she wanted to telephone.

Frederick looked sideways like a startled colt. His lip twitched as he opined that the police would be in the study. Ray liked boys. She thought this one wouldn’t be more than seventeen. Her heart warmed to him. A year or two earlier he could have had a good cry, but you don’t cry if you can help it when you are six foot one. She thought he was having pretty hard work to help it.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I expect there’s an extension, isn’t there?’

‘Oh, yes-in the Blue Room. I don’t think there’s anyone there.’

He showed her the way and displayed a tendency to linger.

Ray said, ‘Thank you very much. I’m afraid I don’t know your name.’

‘ Frederick, Miss.’

‘Well, Frederick, do you think you could wait in the hall while I put through my call? Because I may have to go out for a little, and if I do, perhaps you would find Mary Good for me and ask her to come up and stay with Miss Lila.’

‘Oh, yes, Miss.’ He got as far as the open door, took hold of the handle, twisted it nervously, and said all in a rush, ‘she didn’t have anything to do with it, Miss-not Miss Lila, did she? I mean, there’s things you can believe and things you can’t, and that’s what I couldn’t believe, not if it was ever so.’

Ray gave him one of her best smiles.

‘Thank you, Frederick -that’s very nice of you.’

Frederick clung to the handle.

‘They won’t go and make out she did it, will they? Nor yet Mr. Waring. Ever such a nice gentleman, I thought he was. And a cruel shame not letting him see Miss Lila when he come all that way.’

What Marsham would have thought of this conversation, Ray did not care to speculate. She had a feeling herself that perhaps it had better stop. She said,

‘Thank you, Frederick. Now if you’ll just shut the door, I’ll get on with my call.’

She had never fully realized the beneficence of the telephone until just in a moment with a brief click it gave her Bill’s voice, speaking from the Boar.

‘Hullo!’

She said, ‘It’s Ray,’ and heard his tone warm as he answered her.

‘Ray! I wondered how I was going to get on to you. I thought it wouldn’t be considered exactly tactful if I rang up, but I was getting to the point where I was going to crash in and chance it.’

She thought, ‘He wants to know about Lila. I’m only a kind of extension of the telephone.’ Out loud she said,

‘Lila is quite all right. She had a good sleep this afternoon, and then she got up on the sofa and we had a tea-party in her room-Adrian Grey, and Miss Silver, and me.’

He didn’t seem tremendously interested in the tea-party.

‘Ray, I want to see you. Could you come out to the gate? We could sit and talk in the car. I don’t suppose I’d better come up to the house.’

‘No.’

‘Do you mean no, you can’t come, or no I’d better not come up to the house?’

‘I mean no, you’d better not come up to the house. I’ll come and meet you.’

‘All right-I’ll stop just this side of the gate.’

She left Mary Good with Lila and went down the drive in the dusk. When she turned out of the gate Bill was there, walking up and down on the grass verge of the country road. He put an arm round her shoulders.

‘Good girl! Punctual to the minute.’

‘Do we get into the car, or do we walk up and down?’

After being shut up in a warm house all the afternoon she thought it would feel good to walk with Bill in this cool, soft air.

‘Well, I don’t know. They may have put someone on to shadow me. I think we’d better sit in the car. I want to talk.’

When they were shut in together he came back to Lila, as of course she knew he would. But it wasn’t quite what she expected. He had turned round to face her, his back in the angle between the door and the driving-seat. From his voice she knew just the kind of frowning look he had.

‘What has Lila got to say about it now she has come round?’

She told him.

‘Do you mean to say she doesn’t remember anything at all?’

‘Nothing between going to sleep on the sofa in her room and waking up with Sir Herbert lying dead on the study floor.’

‘Do you think she is telling the truth?’

‘I’m quite sure of it.’

‘Then she really was walking in her sleep?’

‘Oh, yes. She does, you know, when she is worried or upset. She used to do it at school. Miriam St. Clair woke up with a cold hand on her face one night and screamed the place down.’

He said in a dogged voice,

‘Then she did it in her sleep.’

‘Bill! She didn’t do it at all!’

‘I don’t see how you can get away from it. She wasn’t responsible of course. But she had been holding that dagger-her hand was all red.’

‘Bill, you’re mad! Lila couldn’t kill anyone if she tried. And she wouldn’t try.’

‘You didn’t see her standing there like I did.’

‘I don’t care what you saw. If the police thought she had done it they would have arrested her. They came up and saw her after tea-the Scotland Yard man and the local one. I could see they didn’t think she had done it-not by the time they went away anyhow.’

Bill said gloomily, ‘I can’t think why.’

She let some real anger into her voice.

‘Because they’ve got eyes in their heads and some sense in their brains! And because Adrian Grey swears that he was just behind her all the way from her room, and there simply wasn’t time for her to kill Herbert Whitall. I mean, there would have been a scuffle and a pretty heavy fall. Adrian would have been bound to have heard it.’

‘My dear child, Adrian Grey would swear the moon was made of green cheese if he thought it would get Lila out of a mess.’

‘Oh!’

Bill went on in tones which reached a new depth of gloom.

‘I suppose you know what happened when she woke up?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I came in from the terrace, and he came in from the passage. And Lila woke up. Just like that. She saw Whitall lying there, and the dagger-and her hand. And then she saw me. Get a good hold on that, will you-she saw me first, before she saw Adrian, and I wasn’t any good to her. She kind of shuddered away, if you know what I mean. But as soon as she saw Adrian she fairly chuckled herself into his arms. Well, there’s only one thing you can make of that, isn’t there?’

‘She had just had the most awful shock. She didn’t know what she was doing.’

‘She knew which of us she wanted all right,’ said Bill. ‘When you have had a shock like that you don’t reason, you act on instinct. Lila’s instinct didn’t take her to me, it took her to Adrian.’

‘Oh, Bill!’

‘Don’t sit there saying, “Oh, Bill! ” Do you suppose I want to marry a girl who shudders when she looks at me and flings herself into somebody else’s arms? Because if you do, you had better start thinking again.’

Ray was silent, because she didn’t know what to say. She had too many insurgent feelings, and they wouldn’t go into words. What she really wanted to do was to put her arms round Bill and kiss the hurt away. She clamped her hands together and sat as far back in her corner as she could get. Anyhow it was a good thing that he could talk about it.

He went on talking.

‘If they don’t think Lila did it they are absolutely bound to think it was me. I can’t imagine why they haven’t arrested me already. They found my note to Lila, so they know I had asked her to come down and meet me. Only I didn’t say the study-I said that room just inside the hall door. I told her if she wanted to marry Whitall she could, but if she didn’t want to, I would take her away to you. I can’t imagine why she went down to the study instead.’

Ray found words.

‘Darling, you don’t listen. She-did-not-know-what- she-was-doing.’

‘That’s what you say. I want to know how she got that blood on her hand.’

Ray felt cold through and through.

‘She must have touched him-or-or the dagger.’

‘Ray, can you believe that Lila would touch a dead body? Or that dagger in cold blood?’

Ray was up against the one thing she could really not believe. She had to fall back on,

‘She didn’t know what she was doing.’

‘Then why did she do it?’

They sat facing one another. Feature and expression were hidden by the darkness, yet each knew the other so well that this darkness was only a black screen upon which memory could throw its pictures. Bill holding doggedly to what he had said and saying it all over again, as if battering repetition was an argument in itself. Ray on the defensive-quick thrust and parry to meet his bludgeon blows, eyes wide and the colour in her cheeks like flame. How many times had they fought each other to a standstill over something that wasn’t worth a tenth part of all that force and fire? Things that didn’t matter. And this thing that mattered more than all the world because it was a matter of truth and honesty between them. It wasn’t Lila’s guilt or innocence which was in question, it was their own integrity.

Bill said roughly,

‘You won’t face facts. Women never will.’

‘I’m not women-I’m myself. I’m facing the fact that Lila didn’t do it. I don’t care how much evidence there is-she didn’t do it. If you cared for her you’d know that.’

There was a long and rather horrid silence. Ray had the same feeling which had overwhelmed her when in a fit of rage she had thrown a stone through the drawing-room window. She was seven years old again, with that dreadful sense of irrevocability. When you break something, it’s broken, and you can’t put it together again.

In the end Bill said in rather a surprised voice,

‘I suppose I don’t. I suppose I never did.’

Ray couldn’t get her words steady.

‘What-do-you-mean?’

‘You know perfectly well what I mean. If we’re talking, let’s talk. Lila was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen, and I went in off the deep end. I didn’t know a thing about her-I didn’t care if there was anything to know. If I’d married her, we’d have been damned unhappy. I’ve been realizing that bit by bit ever since I got home.’

Ray said with shaking lips,

‘Then why did you come down here and start all this?’

‘How do you mean, start all this? I wasn’t going to have her pushed into marrying Whitall if she didn’t want to, and I wasn’t going to be dropped in Lady Dryden’s tactful accidental sort of way as if I was something that hadn’t really happened, or if it had it wasn’t the kind of thing you would talk about in a drawing-room.’

A gust of silent laughter swept Ray’s anger away. She went on shaking, but it was the laughter that was shaking her now.

‘Bill-darling!’

‘Well, that’s how I felt. I was going to bring her to you if she wanted to get away. And if she didn’t want to get away she had got to break off our engagement properly.’

‘And is that what you want her to do now?’

A movement in the darkness, told her that he was shaking his head.

‘No-there’s no need. It’s broken off all right. She doesn’t want me any more than I want her now. She made that quite plain when she turned back on me and flung herself into Adrian ’s arms. He’s a good chap, and he’ll look after her. I should say it was going to be a whole-time job!’ He gave, an odd half-angry laugh. ‘Marian Hardy told me it would be, months ago. I don’t think I’m cut out for being a nursemaid.’

Ray was struggling with the feeling that everything was going to be all right now. It was completely irrational. It was like having balloons under your feet and being floated up into the clouds. Presently the balloons would go off with a bang and let you down. Just at the moment she couldn’t make herself care. She did manage to say that she thought she ought to go in.

Bill acquiesced.

‘My police spy will be getting bored. He might even come along and arrest me just to relieve the monotony.’

‘Bill-you don’t really think-’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, I can’t imagine why they haven’t arrested me already. If Adrian is such a good liar that they really believe it wasn’t Lila who did it because she wasn’t long enough out of his sight, then I don’t see how they could help believing it was me. In any case I don’t see why they haven’t arrested one of us. It looks as if they had got their eye on someone else. Let’s hope they have.’

Ray got out of the car, and they walked up the drive together. Just short of the gravel sweep he put an arm round her and said out of the blue,

‘It makes a lot of difference having you here.’

‘Does it?’

‘Yes. Why are you shaking?’

‘I’m not.’

He said, ‘Liar!’, kissed her somewhere between her cheekbone and her ear, and went off down the drive at a run.

Ray went into the house with stars in her eyes.