When Last I Died Page 8

  "Oh, dear me! What a very dreadful thing!" said Mrs. Bradley. "How did she do it? I suppose she drowned herself?"

  "Yes, that was what she did, madam; she was found in a pond on the common, I believe."

  "Dear, dear!" said Mrs. Bradley." Not far from her house, I presume?"

  "I couldn't say how far, madam. Probably not very far. She was never much of a walker. But I don't know the district at all. I didn't even go to the funeral, not knowing how I was to get there and back the same night, her living all alone as she did, and me hardly one of the family to go poking myself in if not invited; although, really, who could have invited me I don't quite see, I'm sure."

  "Did Miss Tessa go to the funeral?"

  "There, again, I couldn't say, madam. I've not had a word from Miss Tessa since poor Mr. Tom's sad death. In her last letter she mentioned she was going to move. I kept the letter. I expect I've got it somewhere, if you'd like to see it. It's nice for me to talk to somebody who takes such an interest in it all."

  Mrs. Bradley, who still wondered whether her apparently insatiable curiosity about the whole affair would not, at some point, strike Eliza as unnecessary and impertinent, was relieved to hear this last statement. She said immediately that she would be very glad to see it, and, upon its being produced, she noticed that, as Eliza had indicated already, it was written in a far more careless and dashing hand than the neatly written diary which she had already seen. In fact, it bore most of the indications of a singularly ill-balanced personality. Had it been the writer who had committed suicide, it would have been most comprehensible, thought Mrs. Bradley. "The sisters must have been women of widely different temperament," she remarked.

  "Temper, too," responded Eliza. "Miss Tessa would fly off the handle, as they say, over anything. But I never knew Miss Bella to be angry. She was sort of sharp and abrupt, but never lost control like Miss Tessa. I liked Miss Tessa the better for it. Give me somebody that speaks their mind, and perhaps has to apologize afterwards for being over-hasty. Still, that isn't everybody's taste, and I dare say Miss Bella might have been a lot easier to live with in the long run."

  Mrs. Bradley consulted the diary again that evening. The wish-fulfilment dream and the self-pity so frankly expressed seemed ingenuous enough, but there were other passages over which, comparing them with Eliza's version of the facts, she frowned in concentration for minutes at a time.

  How, for instance, could Bella so have misinterpreted the old servant's feeling for her mistress as to suggest that Eliza considered the fall a "judgment" on Aunt Flora for being contrary? Nothing in Mrs. Bradley's conversations with Eliza. had led her to believe that such a remark could possibly have been made, least of all to Bella, whom, it had become very clear, she did not like very much.

  Then the beginning of the entry for January the twenty-eighth was puzzling. It did not seem at all likely that the doctor had diagnosed Aunt Flora's recovery from the fall as "the end," and Mrs. Bradley had made up her mind that the rest of the entry, referring to the arrival of Tom and Muriel after "they had travelled all night "was pure fiction.

  Again, there was the ridiculous entry about the lobster and Eliza's delight when she was given it. This, however, could be dismissed as more cloud-cuckoo-land on the part of the diarist, and was not more important than it appeared on the surface to be. But the entry about the grated carrot was very interesting. There was, first, the discrepancy in the time. According to the diarist, it was not until seven o'clock in the evening that there had been any mention of grated carrot. Then, again upon the authority of the diary, it had been Aunt Flora herself who asked for it. Eliza's story, on the other hand, contradicted both these assertions. Aunt Flora had had the carrot during the afternoon, and yet, it seemed, knew nothing of grated carrot and certainly would not have suggested partaking of it. It was interesting, too, to note the awkward sentence in which Cousin Tom's name appeared. 'Tom said that he realized it could be nothing but the return of all her normal faculties and he thought she must be humoured.' Further, 'we (Mrs. Bradley added the italics) went to the kitchen, therefore, Eliza being at the Chapel for her week-night meeting ...'

  This was more than interesting, as Eliza, upon her own showing, was not a chapel-goer, and certainly was not likely to have attended, of all things, a weeknight meeting at a town some distance inland.

  Then, (extremely suspicious this), there was the careful suggestion of what had happened when the old lady had been left with the saucerful of grated carrot and the spoon. 'The effort of eating,' the diarist had pronounced on what seemed almost a judicial and was certainly a remarkably detached and objective note,' must have been too much....' The careful dissociation of the narrator herself from the dreadful event she was describing was obviously intended to indicate that poor Aunt Flora had been alone when she died. But, unless there were guilty knowledge of the means which had encompassed her death, and unless the diary had not been written for the usual personal reasons, but was intended for a wider circle of readers than is usually the case, why this elaborate and stiffly-phrased disclaimer of all knowledge about the choking fit which had caused Aunt Flora's demise ?

  There followed, then, the information about the sister. According to Eliza. Tessa had had no children, but had married a bigamist. According to Bella, her sister had not been married at all and had had an illegitimate baby. There were discrepancies, too, between what Mrs. Bradley had heard from the Warden of the Institution and what Bella Foxley had written.

  Strangest of all, perhaps, was the extremely odd entry referring to Aunt Flora's dirty hair and head. She re-read that several times, trying to connect it with Eliza's statement that her mistress had had her hair dyed dark red and had kept it this unbecoming tint until the end.

  There were other mistakes, notably the one which referred to Eliza's term of service. Between the twenty years mentioned by the old servant herself and the years between the age of sixteen and almost seventy referred to by the diarist, there was a substantial difference.

  Then there was the reference to the Aunt's house having been put in the hands of the agents. The house had been willed to Eliza, and it did not seem as though the diarist knew this; yet Bella, as the chief inheriter, must have known it.

  On a par with this small yet significant error, was the one about the files. According to the diarist it seemed as though the files used in the escape of Piggy and Alec had not been traced. According to the Warden, they must have been; otherwise the make could not have been compared with that of the files in use at the Institutional manual centre. Yet surely Bella would have known that the 'escape' files had never left the building ?

  Then came the incredible entry which referred to the inspector of police who investigated Cousin Tom's first fall from the window of the haunted house. It was inconceivable to Mrs. Bradley that he should have made any mention of the old lady and the grated carrot. There was no reason for his doing such a thing, for the old lady's death certificate was in order, and, except for the reference to a remark in the Daily Pennon, there had been no official suggestion that the old lady had died from anything but natural causes.

  (Mrs. Bradley, incidentally, was so much interested in this point that she took the trouble to go up to London specially to consult the files of the newspaper in question. To her great interest, there was not a single reference to Aunt Flora's death in any of its columns for the whole year in which that death had occurred, for she went carefully through the lot.)

  Then there was the slip in describing the pre-Institution activities of Alec. Either the diarist or the Warden was wrong, and, in view of the exhaustive records of each boy which were kept in the archives of the Institution, Mrs. Bradley did not, somehow, think it could be the Warden who was at fault. Of course, Bella Foxley might have been misinformed ... but, added to the rest of the evidence that the writer of the diary had made mistakes which the ex-housekeeper of the Institution ought not to have made, and, in most cases, Mrs. Bradley decided, would not have made, it was cur
ious and very interesting.

  She locked and bolted all the doors and fastened the down-stair windows—actions which, in that innocent countryside, she rarely troubled to perform—that night before she went to bed.

  Chapter Three

  COUNSEL'S OPINION

  How in my thoughts shall I contrive The image I am framing, Which is so far superlative As 'tis beyond all naming?

  · · · · · ·

  It must be builded in the air, And 'tis my thoughts must do it, And only they must be the stair From earth to mount me to it."

  DRAYTON.

  FERDINAND'S friend stretched his legs and smiled at his hostess.

  "I've been longing to meet you," he said.

  "Flattering," said Mrs. Bradley. "I hope Ferdinand told you why you've come?"

  "Oh, yes." He nodded his handsome head. "Bella Foxley. Interesting case. Curious that she committed suicide. Still, quite the type, of course."

  "I should be interested to know exactly what you mean by that."

  "I can't explain—exactly. But we see a lot of suicides, unfortunately, in our job. When I was a cub I had a regular Embankment beat for a fairly lurid sort of rag—the old Gimlet. You wouldn't remember it. Anyway, you can divide humanity into suicides and non-suicides. You ought to know more about it than I do! There is the person who would commit suicide no matter how life seemed to turn out, and there is the person who wouldn't, whatever sort of hell on earth he suffered. Bella Foxley, to my mind, belonged to the first group."

  "Thank you," said Mrs. Bradley. "But why did she choose to commit suicide at that particular time?"

  "Well, some unkind people suggested that it was remorse, because, although she was acquitted, she was guilty. Most people thought she was guilty, you know."

  "Why did they think that?"

  "She made an unfortunate impression in court, I think."

  "Yes. Reason enough. People will jump to conclusions, and the awkward part is that, as often as not, they are justified. It makes the scientific mind appear cumbersome and rather unnecessarily slow. Did you think it was remorse, as well as that she was guilty?"

  "I thought she was guilty, but I don't think it was remorse that caused her to drown herself. I think she received anonymous letters."

  "Yes, she would do, of course. There are always lunatics at large, and they have brought about the suicide of an innocent person before now. But we seem to have begun at the end. It was the trial I wanted to hear about."

  "I remember it very well indeed," said the ex-journalist. "The case was most interesting to me. She was quite a tall woman, you know—five feet eight, I should think—and a bit bloated, with a bad skin—greasy and blackheads—rather repulsive, really. Besides which, she looked every inch a spinster, if you know what I mean. She was not at all nervous, either, and that was what impressed people most unfavourably, I think. Everybody still seems to think that the bold ones are guilty and the furtive ones innocent, although I don't pretend to know why. People don't change their nature or their general mental attitude because they've been accused of a crime."

  "Of what did the accusation consist? How did they state it?"

  "Well, the story told by the prosecution was that this woman had been blackmailed by her cousin, a man named Turney, and that she went to the house that night, and, pretending that she had come to pay up, took the opportunity of pushing him out of the window."

  "How did they get hold of the blackmailing theory?" Mrs. Bradley inquired.

  "That came from the wife, who was the chief witness for the prosecution. Her story was that she did not know why the prisoner had been paying certain sums of money to her husband, but that he had told her that the rent of the house and some money for psychical research had been provided by Bella, and that 'Bella would have to cough up a lot more before he was through with her.'"

  Mrs. Bradley thought of the admission in the diary that Bella had become a lodger with Cousin Tom and his wife Muriel, but she said nothing.

  "The defence pressed Mrs. Muriel Turney hard, of course, to declare how much money had changed hands between the prisoner and her husband, and scored quite well when they forced her to admit that her husband had once shown her five pounds, on another occasion three pounds ten, and lastly a further five. If the prisoner were interested in the experiments he was making in connection with the so-called haunted house, these sums, the defence suggested, were not excessive subscriptions from a woman with an income of a thousand a year.

  "They also dug up the prisoner's sister and got evidence from her of the prisoner's generosity. Weak-looking, faded sort of woman. You'd never have connected her with Bella. It appeared that the prisoner thought her sister had been treated badly by being cut out of the aunt's will, and had made over half her income to her. In the light of this really rather magnificent gesture, the small sums paid over to the cousin seemed almost negligible, especially as the defence found witnesses to prove that the prisoner was paying for board and lodging whilst she was staying with the cousin and his wife, and that the sums mentioned might have been nothing more than these payments."

  "They seem to have been made on rather a generous scale," Mrs. Bradley suggested. "She was only with Cousin Tom and his wife a week or two, I believe."

  "Still, it seemed absurd to talk of blackmail when the sums were so trifling. If they weren't actual payments they were probably small loans. The defence tried to establish the financial position of the cousin at the time of his death, but didn't get much change there, because the prosecution were able to show that the fellow had no outstanding debts, and was, in fact, rather better off than he had been for some time, so they dropped that pretty quickly, for, without the blackmail theory, they couldn't find a motive."

  "How did the prisoner herself account for her actions that night?" Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  "Oh, well, of course, she was asked that by the prosecution. She went into the box all right. No trouble about that. She said that she and the wife had become very nervous in the haunted house and were unwilling to remain there, and so had gone to the inn. There the cousin came to see them several times, and had dinner, and then, after he had returned to the haunted house to continue his researches, which Mrs. Muriel was no longer willing to go on with, Mrs. M. became agitated, said that she knew something dreadful was going to happen, and that she felt she ought to go to the house and see whether all was well. Apparently she said this several nights."

  "But she didn't go?"

  "No. What is more, her story and the story told by the prisoner did not agree. The wife said that on one occasion the prisoner refused to let her go, flung her back on her bed, darted out and locked the door behind her. The next morning the husband was found hurt, but not seriously. The prisoner, on the other hand, stated that the wife said she was too nervous to go to the house alone and yet was in 'such a state'—the prisoner's words—that she offered to go with her. The wife then said, 'What good would any of us be against those awful things?' Therefore the prisoner, much against her inclinations, but to pacify the wife who was 'in a terrible state of nerves ' went alone to the house, and, throwing gravel up at the bedroom window, attracted the attention of the cousin and conversed with him. She declared upon oath that she did not enter the house, but that, 'finding he was all right and had got over his drinks,' she returned to the inn and reported to the wife that all was well.

  "Well, that was where, I imagine, all the fun and most of the lying began. Next morning the boy who delivered the milk found Tom Turney lying on the gravel path outside the front windows of the house, and the man said that he had fallen from the bedroom. Apparently he soon recovered, but the curious thing is that he was lying on almost the same spot and was found by the same boy not so many days later. The only difference was that the second time he was dead.

  "The wife's story here was about the blackmail. She declared that the prisoner had insisted upon going to the house after dark; she asserted that this was to pay over some money for which she was be
ing blackmailed by the husband, and she gave it as her view that Bella Foxley, to rid herself of a nuisance and a drain upon her income, had pushed the chap out of the window and that in this second fall he had struck his head and had died.