The Silent Pool

Chapter Thirty-nine

Superintendent Martin looked at Miss Silver with that mixture of exasperation and respect which it was not unknown for her to arouse in the official breast. There had been quite a neat case against Mr Geoffrey Ford. In addition to his own admissions, the butler Simmons had heard raised voices proceeding from the study when he passed through the hall at half past eight. It had been his intention to make up the study fire, but on hearing those angry voices he thought better of it and went back to the housekeeper’s room. He had had no difficulty in identifying the voices as those of Mr Geoffrey and Miss Meriel, and he had attributed no importance to the fact that they were quarrelling, since Miss Meriel was always in a way about something. Taxed with this evidence, Geoffrey Ford admitted that Meriel had found him in the study, and that they had quarrelled there, but he continued to deny that she had accompanied him to the Lodge, or so far as he knew, that she had followed him there. On the top of this Miss Silver produced Ellie Page with her story of having overheard Meriel Ford accuse Geoffrey and Mrs Trent of having pushed Mabel Preston into the pool. According to this statement she had accused them and threatened them with the police, after which she left the Lodge and Geoffrey followed her. Evidence that would hang Geoffrey Ford if she stuck to it in the box. Ellie Page had stuck to it with him all right, and at this second time of telling there had been very little of the agitation reported by Miss Silver. She had been anxious to tell her story and careful in telling it, and again, according to Miss Silver, the narrative though more coherent and rather more ample in no way differed from its original form. All very satisfactory up to a point. But if that point was to be accepted, the whole case against Geoffrey Ford broke down, because Miss Ellie Page deposed, and stuck to it, that Geoffrey Ford had entered the house by the study window, and that it was a woman coming up from behind her who had followed Meriel across the lawn and through the gate into the enclosed garden beyond. Miss Ellie Page could be lying to protect a man with whom she had been carrying on, but her evidence did not strike him that way. She was so set on this point and so sure of it, it really didn’t seem to occur to her that the earlier part of her evidence would bring him under suspicion. It was just something to be got out of the way before coming to the real point. And the real point was that she had seen a woman following Meriel Ford with a golfclub in her hand. She had seen this woman come back alone from the pool, and some considerable time later she had found Meriel lying there dead with her head and shoulders under the water. If that was to be accepted, bang went the case against Geoffrey Ford. A difficult business, taking part of a girl’s evidence to build your case on and rejecting the climax to which it led. A jury either believes a witness or it doesn’t. He thought the odds were that it would believe Ellie Page. Well, that left you with the good old three-card-trick and ‘Spot the lady’! If a woman followed Meriel Ford, what woman was it? Again an easy answer, if it were not that Ellie Page’s evidence didn’t lend itself to easy answers. A woman coming up from behind and following Meriel carried the overwhelming suggestion that it would be Esmé Trent. Quite in character that she should distrust Geoffrey Ford’s capacity to silence Meriel with fair words and make sure of it by some more drastic action. She could have taken up a golfclub and followed them, seen Geoffrey go into the house, and pursued her purpose. A nice easy theory ruined by the evidence of Miss Ellie Page to the effect that she had afterwards seen the woman enter Ford House by the study door.

He had gone so far in a frowning silence. He broke in now upon his own train of thought.

‘Miss Page says she saw this woman go into the house. You say you believe her evidence. Do you believe that?’

Miss Silver said composedly,

‘I think she was speaking the truth.’

‘Your reasons?’

‘She was in such a state of shock and agitation as to preclude any design in what she said. And when she repeated it to you she did not vary it. I feel sure that if it had not been securely based on fact there would have been discrepancies.’

‘She wants to help Geoffrey Ford.’

‘She believes him to be innocent. If she did not, she would recoil from him in horror.’

He said,

‘Well, well – about this woman. She ought to be Mrs Trent, but if you believe that she went into Ford House, why in heaven’s name should Mrs Trent do that? If she had just killed Meriel she would have every incentive to get back to the Lodge and make out that she had never left it. She could have had no possible motive for going into Ford House.’

‘I think as you do, Superintendent. The woman who entered Ford House was returning to it.’

‘Then it wasn’t Mrs Trent. And that leaves us with the six women who are known to have been in the house that night – Adriana Ford, Meeson, Mrs Geoffrey Ford, Miss Johnstone, Mrs Simmons, and yourself. I think perhaps we may exclude the last three.’

He smiled slightly, but Miss Silver remained grave.

‘Yes, I think so.’

They were in the study at the Vicarage where he had interviewed Ellie Page, now handed over to Mary Lenton’s care. He sat a little drawn back from the table at which John Lenton was in the habit of writing his sermons. On the right of the blotter lay a Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Since to Miss Silver all law and justice drew its authority from these two books, the association did not seem incongruous. That the police force was upheld by what she called Providence in exactly the same way as the ministry of the Church she regarded as axiomatic.

Martin was frowning.

‘Well, to start at the beginning, there’s Adriana Ford herself. There doesn’t seem to be any motive for her to kill her old friend – but there are old grudges as well as old friendships. Granting the first crime, she would have the same motive as anyone else for the second. She knew Meriel Ford had been down at the pool, and she was afraid of what she might have seen.’

Miss Silver shook her head.

‘She is a very tall woman, and she has a limp. It becomes especially noticeable by the end of the day. The woman seen by Ellie Page was not tall, and there was no mention of a limp.’

The Superintendent said, ‘Meeson-’ in a meditative voice. ‘Now what would Meeson’s motive have been? As regards the first crime, some provision under Miss Ford’s will, I suppose. Do you happen to know if it was considerable?’

‘I believe that she is handsomely provided for.’

‘And she doesn’t like living in the country. Somebody told me that – I believe it was Meriel Ford. Anyhow she’s a regular Londoner – it sticks out all over her.’

‘She has been forty years with Miss Ford. She is devoted to her.’

He nodded.

‘Sometimes people have been too long together, they get on one another’s nerves – you’d be surprised. Well, the other possible is Mrs Geoffrey Ford. Either she or Meeson would do as far as height is concerned, and so would Mrs Trent if one could think of any reason for her going in through that study window. You don’t think it was a put-up thing between her and Geoffrey Ford? Say it was like the Macbeth business – “Infirm of purpose, give me the daggers!” He hadn’t the nerve to pull it off, and she had.’

Miss Silver observed him with interest.

‘You are a student of Shakespeare?’

‘Well, I am. He knows a lot about the way people go on, doesn’t he? You don’t think Mrs Trent might have come into the house to tell him she’d done the job? I don’t mind saying she is the one I would pick out for it. Not many scruples, I should think.’

Miss Silver gave her slight cough.

‘No, Superintendent,’ she said. ‘But not one to rely upon another, or to risk anything for Geoffrey Ford. If she had committed the crime she would, I feel sure, have returned at once to the Lodge as you yourself opined.’

Sitting at an angle to the writing-table, she looked down the study to where Mary Lenton’s dahlias bloomed brightly in the sun. She saw Edna Ford walk up to the front door.