Cover Her Face Read online

  "She seemed stunned and kept repeating that Sally must have killed herself. I pointed out that that was anatomically impossible and that seemed to upset her more. She gave me one curious look… and burst into loud sobbing."

  Dalgleish looked up at his audience. ‹I think we can take it," he said, "that Mrs. Bultitaft's emotion was the reaction of relief. I suspect, too, that before Miss Bowers arrived to feed the child Mr. Hearne had coached Mrs. Bultitaft for the inevitable police questioning. Mrs. Bultitaft tells me that she didn't admit to him or to any of you that she was responsible for drugging Sally. That may be true. It doesn't mean that Mr. Hearne didn't guess. He was quite ready, as he has been throughout the case, to leave well alone if it were likely to mislead the police. Towards the end of this investigation, with the faked attack on Mrs. Riscoe, he took a more positive line in attempting to deceive."

  "That was my idea," said Deborah quietly. "I asked him. I made him do it."

  Heane ignored the interruption and merely said: ‹I may have guessed about Martha. But she was perfectly truthful. She didn't tell me and I didn't ask. It wasn't my affair."

  "No," said Dalgleish bitterly. "It wasn't your affair." His voice had lost its controlled neutrality and they looked up at him startled by his sudden vehemence.

  "That has been your attitude throughout, hasn't it? Don't let's pry into each other's affairs. Don't let's be vulgarly interested. If we must have a murder let it be handled with taste. Even your efforts to hamper the police would have been more effective if you had bothered to find out a little more from each other. Mrs. Riscoe need not have persuaded Mr. Hearne to stage an attack on her while her brother was safely in London if that brother had confided in her that he had an alibi for the time of Sally Jupp's death. Derek Pullen need not have tortured himself wondering whether he ought to shield a murderer if Mr. Stephen Maxie had bothered to explain what he was doing with a ladder in the garden on Saturday night. We finally got the truth from Pullen, but it wasn't easy.

  "Pullen wasn't interested in shielding me," said Stephen indifferently. "He just couldn't bear not to behave like a little gent! You should have heard him telephoning to explain just how oldschool-tie he was going to be. Your secret is safe with me, Maxie, but why not do the decent thing? Damn his insolence!"

  "I suppose there's no objection to us knowing what you were doing with a ladder," inquired Deborah.

  "Why should there be? I was bringing it back from outside Bocock's cottage. We used it during the afternoon to retrieve one of the balloons which got caught up in his elm. You know what Bocock is. He would have dragged it up first thing in the morning and it's too heavy for him. I suppose I was in the mood for a little masochism so I slung it over my shoulder.

  I wasn't to know that I'd find Pullen lurking about in the old stables.

  Apparently he made a habit of it. I wasn't to know, either, that Sally would be murdered and that Pullen would use his great mind to put two and two together and assume that I'd used the ladder to climb into her room and kill her. Why climb in anyway? I could have got through the door. And I wasn't even carrying the ladder from the right direction."

  "He probably thought that you were trying to cast suspicion on an outside person," suggested Deborah. "Himself, for instance."

  Felix's lazy voice broke in:

  "It didn't occur to you, Maxie, that the boy might be in genuine distress and indecision?"

  Stephen moved uneasily in his chair.

  "I didn't lose any sleep over him. He had no right on our property and I told him so. I don't know how long he'd been waiting there but he must have watched me while I put down the ladder. Then he stepped out of the shadows like an avenging fury and accused me of deceiving Sally. He seems to have curious ideas about class distinctions. Anyone would think I had been exercising droit de seigneur. I told him to mind his own business, only less politely, and he lunged out at me. Pd had about as much as I could stand by then so I struck out and caught him on the eye, knocking off his spectacles. It was all pretty vulgar and stupid. We were too near the house to be safe so we daren't make much noise. We stood there hissing insults at each other in whispers and grovelling around in the dust to find his glasses. He's pretty blind without them so I thought I'd better see him as far as the corner of Nessingford Road. He took it that I was escorting him off the premises, but his pride would have been hurt either way so it didn't matter much. By the time we came to say good night he had obviously persuaded himself into what he imagined was an appropriate frame of mind. He even wanted to shake hands! I didn't know whether to burst out laughing or to knock him down again. I'm sorry, Deb, but he's that sort of person."

  Eleanor Maxie spoke for the first time:

  "It is a pity that you didn't tell us about this earlier. That poor boy should certainly have been spared a great deal of worry."

  They seemed to have forgotten the presence of Dalgleish, but now he spoke:

  "Mr. Maxie had a reason for his silence. He realized that it was important for you all that the police should think that a ladder had been available within easy reach of Sally's window. He knew the approximate time of death and he wasn't anxious for the police to know that the ladder hadn't been returned to the old stable before twenty past twelve. With luck we should assume that it had been there all night. For much the same reason he was vague about the time he left Bocock's cottage and lied about the time he got to bed. If Sally was killed at midnight by someone under this roof he was anxious that there should be no lack of suspects. He realized that most crimes are solved by a process of elimination. On the other hand I think he was telling the truth about the time he locked the south door. That was at about twelve thirtythree and we know now that at twelve thirty-three Sally Jupp had been dead for over half an hour. She died before Mr. Maxie left Bocock's cottage and about the same time as Mr. Wilson of the village store got out of bed to shut a creaking window and saw Derek Pullen walking quickly past, head bent, towards Martingale. Pullen was hoping, perhaps, to see Sally and to hear her explanation.

  But he only reached the cover of the old stables before Mr. Maxie arrived, carrying the ladder. And by then Sally Jupp was dead.

  "So it wasn't Pullen?" said Catherine.

  "How could it have been," said

  Stephen roughly. "He certainly hadn't killed her when he spoke to me and he was in no condition to turn back and kill her after I had left him. He could hardly see his way to his own front gate."

  "And if Sally was dead before Stephen got back from visiting Bocock, it couldn't have been him either," pointed out TO Catherine. It was, Dalgleish noticed, the first time that any of them had specifically referred to the possible guilt or innocence of a member of the family.

  Stephen Maxie said:

  "How do you know that she was dead then? She was alive at ten-thirty p.m. and dead by the morning. That's as much as anyone knows."

  "Not really," replied Dalgleish. "Two people can put the time of death closer than that. One is the murderer, but there is someone else who can help too."

  There was a knock on the door and Martha stood there, capped and aproned, stolid as always. Her hair was strained back beneath her curiously high oldfashioned cap, her ankles bulged above the barred black shoes. If the Maxies were seeing in their mind's eye a desperate woman, clutching to herself that incriminating bottle and homing to her familiar kitchen like a frightened animal. She looked as she had always looked and if she had become a stranger she was less alien than they now were to each other. She gave no explanation of her presence except to announce "Mr. Proctor for the Inspector." Then she was gone again and the shadowy figure behind her stepped forward into the light. Proctor was too angry to be disconcerted at being shown thus summarily into a roomful of people obviously occupied with their private concerns. He seemed to notice no one but Dalgleish and advanced towards him belligerently.

  "Look here, Inspector, I've got to have protection. It isn't good enough. I've been trying to get you at the station. They wouldn't
tell me where you were, if you please, but I wasn't going to be fobbed off with that station sergeant. I thought I'd find you here. Something's got to be done about it."

  Dalgleish considered him in silence for a minute.

  "What isn't good enough, Mr. Proctor?" he inquired.

  "That young fellow. Sally's husband.

  He's been round home threatening me. He was drunk if you ask me. It's not my fault if she got herself murdered and I told him so. I won't have him upsetting my wife.

  And there are the neighbours. You could hear him shouting his insults right down the avenue. My daughter was there, too.

  It's not nice in front of a child. I'm innocent of this murder as you very well know, and I want protection."

  He looked indeed as if he could have done with protection against more than James Ritchie. He was a scrawny redfaced little man with the look of an angry hen and a trick of jerking his head as he talked. He was neatly but cheaply dressed.

  The grey raincoat was clean and the trilby hat, held stiffly in his gloved hands, had recently acquired a new band. Catherine said suddenly, "You were in this house on the day of the murder, weren't you? We saw you on the stairs. You must have been coming from Sally's room."

  Stephen glanced at his mother and said:

  "You'd better come in and join the prayer meeting, Mr. Proctor. Public confessions are said to be good for the soul. Actually you've timed your entrance rather well. You are, I assume, interested in hearing who killed your niece?"

  "No!" said Hearne suddenly and violently. "Don't be a fool, Maxie. Keep him out of it."

  His voice recalled Proctor to a sense of his surroundings. He focused his attention on Felix and seemed to dislike what he saw. "So I'm not to stay! Suppose I choose to stay. I've a right to know what's going on." He glared round at the watchful, unwelcoming faces. "You'd like it to be me, wouldn't you? All of you.

  Don't think I don't know. You'd like to pin it on me all right if you could. I'd have been in queer street if she'd been poisoned or knocked on the head. Pity one of you couldn't keep your hands off her, wasn't it? But there's one thing you can't pin on me and that's a strangling.

  And why? That's why!"

  He gave a sudden convulsive movement, there was a click and a moment of sheer unbelievable comedy as his artificial right hand fell with a thud on the desk in front of Dalgleish. They gazed at it fascinated f0f while it lay like some obscene relic, its rubber fingers curved in impotent supplication. Breathing heavily, Proctor hitched a chair beneath himself with a deft twist of his left hand and sat there triumphantly, while Catherine turned her pale eyes on him reproachfully as if he were a difficult patient who had behaved with more than customary petulance.

  Dalgleish picked up the hand.

  "We knew about this, of course, although I'm glad to say that my own attention was first brought to it less spectacularly. Mr. Proctor lost his right hand in a bombing incident. This ingenious substitute is made of moulded linen and glue. It's light and strong and has three articulated fingers with knuckle joints like a real hand. By flexing his left shoulder and slightly moving his arm away from his body, the wearer can tighten a control cord which runs from the shoulder to the thumb. This opens the thumb against the pressure of a spring. Once the tension on the shoulder is released the spring automatically closes the thumb against the firm fixed index finger. It is, as you can see, a clever contraption, and Mr. Proctor can do a great deal with it.

  He can get through his work, ride a bicycle and present an almost normal appearance to the world. But there's one thing he can't do, and that is to kill by manual strangulation.' ' "He could be left-handed."

  "He could be, Miss Bowers, but he isn't, and the evidence shows that, Sally was killed by a strong righthanded grip." He turned the hand over and pushed it across the table to Proctor.

  "This of course, was the hand which a certain small boy saw opening the trapdoor of Bocock's stables. There could only be one person connected with this case who would be wearing leather gloves on a hot summer day and at a garden fete.

  This was one clue to his identity and there were others. Miss Bowers is quite right.

  Mr. Proctor was in Martingale that afternoon."

  "What if I was? Sally asked me to come. She was my niece, wasn't she?"

  "Oh, come now, Proctor," said Felix. "You aren't going to tell us that this zoi was a dutiful social call, that you were just dropping in to inquire after the baby's health! How much was she asking?"

  "Thirty pounds," said Proctor. "Thirty pounds she was after and much good they would do her now."

  "And being in need of thirty pounds," went on Felix remorselessly, "she naturally turned to her next of kin who might be expected to help. It's a touching story."

  Before Proctor could answer Dalgleish broke in:

  "She was asking for thirty pounds because she wanted to have some money ready for the return of her husband. It had been arranged that she should go on working and save what she could. Sally meant to keep that bargain to the last pound, baby or no baby. She intended to get this money from her uncle by a not uncommon method. She told him that she was shortly to get married, she didn't say to whom, and that she and her husband would make his treatment of her public unless he bought her silence. She threatened to expose him to his employers and the respectable neighbours of Canningbury. She talked about being done out of her rights. On the other hand, if he chose to pay up, neither she nor her husband would ever see or worry the Proctors again."

  "But that was blackmail," cried Catherine. "He should have told her to go ahead and say what she liked. No one would have believed her. She wouldn't have got a penny out of me!" Proctor sat silent. The others seemed to have forgotten his presence. Dalgleish continued. ‹I think Mr. Proctor would have been very willing to take your advice, Miss Bowers, if his niece hadn't made use of one particular phrase. She talked about being done out of her rights. She probably meant no more than that a difference was made in the treatment of herself and her cousin, although Mrs. Proctor would deny that this was so. She may have known more than we realize. But for reasons which we needn't discuss here that phrase struck uncomfortably on her uncle's ear. His reaction must have been interesting and Sally was intelligent enough to take the clue. Mr. Proctor is no actor. He tried to find out how much his niece knew and the more he probed the more he gave away. By the time they parted Sally knew that those thirty pounds, and perhaps more, were well within her grasp."

  Proctor's grating voice broke in: ‹I said I'd want a receipt from her, mind you. I knew what she was up to. I said I was willing to help her this once as she was getting married and there was bound to be expense. But that would be the end. If she tried it on again I'd go to the police, and I'd have the receipt to prove it."

  "She wouldn't have tried it on again," said Deborah quietly. The men's eyes swung round to her. "Not Sally. She was only playing with you, pulling the strings for the fun of watching you dance. If she could get thirty pounds as well as her fun so much the better, but the real attraction was seeing you sweat. But she wouldn't have bothered to go on with it.

  The entertainment palled after a time. Sally liked to eat her victims fresh."

  "Oh no, no." Eleanor Maxie opened her hands in a little gesture of protest.

  "She wasn't really like that. We never really knew her." Proctor ignored her and suddenly and surprisingly smiled across at Deborah as if accepting an ally.

  'That's true enough. You knew what she was like. I was on a string all right.

  She had it all worked out. I was to get the thirty pounds that night and bring it to her.

  She made me follow her into the house and up to her room. That was bad enough, the sneaking in and out. That's when I met you on the stairs. She showed me the back door and said that she would open it for me at midnight. I was to stay in the trees at the back of the lawn until she switched her bedroom light on and off. That was to be the signal."

  Felix gave a shout of laughter.


  "Poor Sally. What an exhibitionist! She had to have drama if it killed her."

  "In the end it did," said Dalgleish. "If she hadn't played with people Sally would be alive today."

  "She was in a funny mood that day," remembered Deborah. "There was a kind of madness about her. I don't only mean copying my dress or pretending to accept Stephen. She was as full of mischief as a child. I suppose it could have been her kind of happiness."

  "She went to bed happy," said Stephen.

  And suddenly they were all quiet, remembering. Somewhere a clock struck sweetly and clearly but there was no other sound except the thin rasp of paper as Dalgleish turned over a page. Outside, rising into coolness and silence, was the staircase up which Sally had carried that last bedtime drink. As they listened it was almost possible to imagine the sound of a soft footfall, the brush of wool against the stairs, the echo of a laugh. Outside in the darkness the edge of the lawn was a faint blur and the desk light reflected above it like a row of Chinese lanterns hung in the scented night. Was there the suspicion of a white dress floating between them, a swirl of hair? Somewhere above them was the nursery, empty now, white and aseptic as a morgue. Could any of them face that staircase and open that nursery door without the fear that the bed might not be empty? Deborah shivered and spoke for them all. "Please," she said. "Please tell us what happened!"

  Dalgleish lifted his eyes and looked at her. Then the deep level voice went on.

  "I think the killer went to Miss Jupp's room driven by an uncontrollable impulse to find out exactly what the girl felt, what she intended, the extent of the danger from her. Perhaps there was some idea of pleading with her - although I don't think that is very likely. It is more probable that the intention was to try to arrange some kind of a bargain. The visitor went to Sally's room and either walked in or knocked and was let in. It was a person, you see, from whom nothing was feared.