“Was Murphy in the house at the time the call came through from San Francisco?”
“I think she was downstairs.”
“There’s another telephone down there?”
“Yes.”
“Then I think we can assume that Murphy was listening in.”
“I... yes. If you say so.”
“Is something troubling you, Mr. Goodfield?”
“I... it’s this damned smell. It’s making me ill.”
“We can leave in a minute. First, I want to know if your mother ever used that desk in the corner.”
The desk was very small, almost child-sized. On it was a bowl of faded iris dripping purple, a fountain pen with its top off, and a piece of paper that had been crumpled and smoothed out again. The paper bore the words, written in a shaky, hesitant hand: “I’m getting scared. I have a premonition.” The letters were crudely formed as if the person who’d written them had forgotten how to write correctly or had never learned.
“She used the desk,” Willett said. “Sometimes she wrote letters, not often.”
“Is this her handwriting? Please don’t touch the paper.”
“I can’t tell. Her handwriting changed a lot during her illness. I... I suppose she wrote this, though I can’t understand why.”
“Did she go in for premonitions?”
“Premonitions, astrology, fad diets, anything to pass the time. She got bored lying in bed day after day.”
“What would she have to be scared about?”
“N-nothing.”
“Were you and your wife and Murphy her sole contacts with the outside world?”
“I don’t like the way you put that. You’re implying that Ethel and I are culpable. We’re not. But I know who is. I know whose fault it will be if my mother is never brought back alive. Your fault, Captain Greer. Yours alone.”
“I don’t agree.”
“You think Ethel and I were wrong to pay the money,” Willett said passionately. “Well, I think you were wrong to interfere like this, to spoil our chances.”
“Cooperating with criminals is always wrong. I hope you don’t learn that the hard way, Mr. Goodfield.”
Greer locked the bedroom. Then they went down the wide staircase together, walking in step but as far apart as possible, as if to emphasize their unity of purpose and their separateness of minds.
“You paid the ransom,” Greer said, “at the time and place specified?”
“Yes. Our instructions were very definite. We put the money in a paper bag, drove down to the breakwater and walked out about a third of the way. There’s a big rock there on the channel side covered with mussels. At exactly a quarter to eight I put the paper bag on the rock. The tide was coming in.”
“The timing was very close.”
“Very. We almost didn’t make it. No more than forty-five minutes elapsed from the time of the phone call till the time we left the money on the rock.” Willett leaned against the banister as if he found his body suddenly and intolerably heavy. “Even if we had wanted to... well, think it over a bit, we didn’t have time. Everything moved too fast, don’t you see?”
Greer saw. Speed and moderation were the elements that made the kidnapping unusual and, possibly, successful. There had been none of the delays common to such cases: Willett and Ethel were not forced to wait for a ransom note, raise a large amount of cash and then wait again for instructions about the payoff. Such delays would have given Willett a chance to think the matter over in a reasonable way. As it was, the ransom was already paid before he emerged from a state of shock, and the tide had covered the tracks and tracings of the kidnapper before anybody started to search for them.
A neat and simple payoff. At seven-forty-five in the morning the breakwater was usually well-filled with people, mostly fishermen, men, women and children carrying their bait or their lunches in paper bags. One more paper bag, one more fisherman, would hardly attract attention. Was that fisherman Murphy? Everything pointed to her — her disappearance, the amount of money demanded, the voice on the phone, the knowledge of Willett’s psychology and the advantage taken of his weakness, the fact that the old lady had made no outcry — everything pointed, almost too clearly, to Murphy. Murphy was, Greer thought, too shrewd a woman to leave such a blazing trail, and besides, she was not strong enough to have handled the actual kidnapping by herself. There were two possibilities: either someone had helped her, or someone sufficiently intimate with her to share her knowledge of the Goodfields was using her as a dupe. But Murphy would never willingly be used as a dupe, she was more likely to use someone else; so Greer was left with the disturbing thought that Murphy, as well as the old lady, had been kidnapped. Yet this picture of Murphy as a victim was distorted in his mind because it did not coincide with his own impression of her.
“Everything moved too fast,” Willett said again in an aggrieved tone as if speed was always being used unfairly against him in one way or another.
He followed Greer into the dining room. The room was long and narrow with windows on three sides. The drapes were still drawn closely over two of the windows. The third was open and in front of it stood Ethel staring out at the people on the lawn, her face white with strain and anger. It was as if all her resentments — against the Goodfields, the doll factory, the police, the kidnappers, and, inevitably, Willett — had been fused together and were now directed against the curiosity-seekers in the yard.
She spoke in a harsh voice, one hand pressing her throat. “Look at them. Look at them, ruining everything, not even knowing, not even caring. What do they expect, a floor show? — a hanging?”
“I’ll send them away,” Greer said.
“They won’t go.”
“They might. I’ll give them a story. I only wish,” he added dryly, “that I could give them a story as good as some of the ones I get.”
When he had gone Ethel looked at Willett. “What did he mean by that?”
“How should I know?”
“It sounded as if he thought we were lying.”
“Well, weren’t we?”
“I lied very little.” She watched Greer cross the lawn, and then she slanted the slats of the blind so that Greer and the people were shut out and only the sun came in. “What do you think will happen if he finds out everything?”
“You know what will happen. We’ll be ruined.”
“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you—”
“Don’t kid yourself, Ethel.”
“Well, all right then, we’ll be ruined. If we’re going to be ruined anyway, let’s at least be cheerful about it. I can always go out “and take a job.” After a time she added wistfully, “Wouldn’t it be kind of fun, Willett, to start all over again, without the factory and your mother and Jack — just you and me — wouldn’t it be kind of fun?”
Willett didn’t answer and Ethel interpreted his silence as acquiescence.
“You’re not old, Willett. Why, you could even go out and learn a trade, be something real, like a carpenter, maybe. Your mother told me you always enjoyed hammering nails into things so maybe carpentry would be just—” She looked at his face and added hastily, “Well, of course you don’t have to be a carpenter, dear. There are lots of other things, a mechanic, or a bricklayer— Your mother said you were very neat about piling up your blocks when you were a boy, and piling bricks is practically the same thing, isn’t it, except for the glue in between?”
“It’s not glue.”
“Or a farmer, Willett. That’s it, we could have a dairy farm. You’ve always been very good with dogs and you could probably handle cows quite— You don’t like that idea, either?”
“Don’t be silly.”