“Upstairs to her room, and bawling all the way.”
“And Tom Humphreys?”
“How do I know? I reckon he’d get himself a drink. Beating’s thirsty work, and getting in the sort of temper he was in is worse.”
“Then he didn’t come out of the house again.”
She gave him a look of sharp resentment.
“That’s putting words in my mouth! I tell you I don’t know nothing about what Tom Humphreys did!”
He nodded.
“My dear Mrs. Larkin, I wouldn’t try and put words in your mouth for anything in the world. You are much too clear and careful a witness. As I told you before, you have an uncommon gift of observation, and what I want from you is just what you saw and heard. Come now, you were at your open window-what about it?”
She had drawn back, but she was not insensible to the fact that she was being treated with appreciation. If Inspector Abbott on his side could salve his conscience with the reflection that he flattered her with nothing but the truth, Mrs. Larkin for her part accepted what he had said with the same conviction. She was a keen and accurate observer with the kind of memory which can reproduce a narrative without varying a single detail. It is the kind of memory which is commoner in the country than in the town, and which used to be commoner still.
Appreciation was therefore only her right. But it had to struggle with a grudge. She could speak, or she could be silent. They couldn’t get it from her unless she chose. All this was in the air as the Inspector said,
“Well now, Mrs. Larkin, just cast your mind back. The beating is over. Nellie has gone to her room crying. Don’t tell me you were there at your window and never looked to see what was happening to Flaxman.”
She said in a stubborn voice,
“He went off up the road. Cursing like I told you.”
“You could hear him whilst the beating was going on?”
“Every now and again.”
“And after the beating was over-where was he then?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?” He used a light tone with a laugh in it. “You see, I don’t believe you could miss anything if you tried-and you can take that for a compliment. Come along now, I don’t mind betting you had your eye on Flaxman all the time you were listening to the row between Nellie and her father.”
Her lips tightened.
“That’s just what you say.”
He changed his tone.
“Look here, this is a thing you can tell me. If you could hear all that banging and screaming from the Humphreys’ cottage, Flaxman must have been able to hear it too. Do you mean to say he just walked away and left Nellie to it? Didn’t he make the slightest attempt to protect her?”
She gave a scornful laugh.
“What-him! He’d got enough to do on his own account, I reckon! That shot was worrying him above a bit. He’d took the most of it about the back and shoulders. He’d go a little way and turn around and claw at himself, and go on a little more and stop dead and stand there cursing.” She gave that scornful laugh again. “He’d got enough to worry about without Nellie!”
“And how far had he got by the time the beating was over?”
Mrs. Larkin capitulated. She would be a star witness and have her picture in all the papers. She said,
“Just about half way to that waste piece of ground.”
They looked together from the window. The road was plainly in sight.
“You went on watching him?”
She nodded.
“For a bit. Enough to make a cat laugh the way he’d keep clapping a hand first one place and then another and cursing all the time!”
“You could hear him?”
“Enough to know he was at it. And a good thing he’d got too far away for me to hear the language!” She rounded this off with a virtuous sniff.
“Did you see him get as far as the waste piece of ground?”
“Just about the beginning of it.”
“And there was no one on the road behind him?”
“Well, no, there wasn’t.”
“You’ll swear to that? You may have to, you know.”
The tip of the sharp ferrety nose went an angry pink.
“Anything I’ve said is all the same as if I was on my oath! I haven’t said nothing that isn’t true! Nor nothing but what I’m willing to stand up in court and take my Bible oath on!”
“So there was no one on the road behind him-” Frank used a meditative tone. Then, with an abrupt change of manner, “Or in front of him, Mrs. Larkin? On the road from the village?”
She didn’t answer. He said insistently,
“Was there anyone on the road in front of him, coming from the village?”
She backed away.
“Well then, there was.”
“Man, or woman?”
She shook her head.
“I couldn’t see-nobody couldn’t have seen. It was gone ten o’clock and more.”
“There was a moon.”
“It never come through the cloud. All I could tell was there was someone coming along the road. So I reckoned whoever it was would give Flaxman a hand. And I shut my window.”
“Sure about that?”
“Of course I’m sure! Nellie, she’d stopped crying-leastways she’d stopped bawling out loud. And it was too dark and too far to bother any longer with that Flaxman, so I gave up. I was as cold as a stone. I made myself a good hot cup of tea and went to my bed. And that’s the gospel truth.”
Frank came away with the strong conviction that it was.
“And if it is,” he observed to Grayson a little later, “it lets Tom Humphreys out.”
Inspector Grayson said he thought so too.
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?”