A shudder went over her. Mrs Graham was devoted to Ovaltine. She had it in the middle of the morning, and she had it the last thing at night in bed. She was very particular indeed about the way it was made. Althea had had to make it twice a day for years. She would never have to make it again.
This train of thought was broken in upon by Nicholas. He said in what seemed to be an entirely irrelevant manner,
‘I had better clear out of the Harrisons ’.’
Althea’s hand jerked under his.
‘Why?’
He had several reasons, but he only gave her one of them.
‘Well, it’s involving them in what isn’t any affair of theirs. I expect the police will want me to be somewhere handy whilst they are clearing things up, and I can get a room at the George.’
An hour or two later Ella Harrison looked round an open bedroom door and found him packing. She came in and said ‘Hullo, what’s all this?’ A suitcase was open on the bed, right on one of the new covers. Really, men were the limit! He pushed a pair of socks into a corner and turned round.
‘Oh, I was coming down to see you… I thought I had better clear out.’
Eye-shadow, mascara, powder, lipstick, she had them all on. The reinforced eyebrows rose.
‘What on earth for?’
‘Well, I’m a bit conspicuous, don’t you think? I don’t think it’s quite fair to you and Jack.’
‘My dear Nicky – what nonsense! We won’t hear of your going! Besides the police will expect you to hang around until after the inquest.’
‘I could get a room at the George.’
‘We wouldn’t hear of it! Jack would be furious. Besides it would look so bad – as if we had turned you out. It might do you quite a lot of harm – as if we believed the kind of talk that’s going round. That’s what I really came up to see you about.’ She went back a step, pushed the door so that it shut and latched, and came back again. ‘You see, Nicky, you could be in a bit of a spot, couldn’t you?’
She was being kind, and the trouble was that he couldn’t take it. He disliked her too much – the brassy hair and all that make-up, her laugh, the way she picked on Allie, the way she treated poor old Jack. She was a handsome woman. The eyes that were smiling at him were undeniably fine. He didn’t dislike people as a rule, but he disliked Ella Harrison.
She was saying in a voice as brassy as the hair,
‘Lucky for you and for Thea that Nurse Cotton should have been passing after you’d had that dust-up in – what do you call the place – the gazebo. A bit of nonsense giving it an outlandish name like that, but that was just Winifred Graham all over!’
He shook his head.
‘The name is much older than Mrs Graham – eighteenth – nineteenth century – at least a hundred years before her time.’
She laughed.
‘Well, that’s not what we were talking about anyhow. I said it was lucky Nurse Cotton could swear that Thea took her mother into the house and left you there in the garden. What the police are going to want to know is why did she come out again.’ He said,
‘You seem to know a lot about it all.’
She made an impatient movement.
‘Do you suppose that people don’t talk? Nurse Cotton made a statement to the police, didn’t she? She’s friendly with a Miss Sanders who teaches at that little preparatory school in Down Road. Miss Sanders has an aunt who used to be governess to the Miss Pimms. I met Lily Pimm this morning, and she told me all about it. And all about what Miss Cotton said to the police. And as I said, it’s a good thing for you that Nurse Cotton says Thea went into the house with her mother and left you there in the garden. She says she came back the same way about half an hour or three quarters of an hour later, which is about the time the murder must have been done, and she says she didn’t see anything or hear anyone then. It gives one a creep to think poor Winifred Graham may have been lying there dead just the other side of the hedge in that – what did you call it – gazebo, when Nurse Cotton went by. Of course what puzzles everyone is, why should Winifred have gone into the house with Thea and then come out again as I suppose she must have done.’
She had come up close to him. He could smell the heavy scent she used. He loathed women who scented themselves. He made an excuse to go over to the washstand and collect toothbrush, nailbrush, a tube of toothpaste, and a face-cloth. He was rolling them up in paper, when Ella Harrison exclaimed,
‘You ought to have a case for those! You can’t pack them like that! I’ll get you one next time I’m in the High Street! Men really do want looking after!’ Then, breaking off, ‘Of course what the police will want to know is, what did you do after Thea took her mother away.’
He was irritated every time she said Thea. For one thing it reminded him of Mrs Graham, and for another it wasn’t for her to play tricks with Allie’s name. The thought went through his mind and stiffened it against her as he said,
‘I told the police what I did. I went for a walk.’
He tossed his parcel into the suitcase from the other side of the bed, but she was edging round it towards him again.
‘Nicky, that is no good. You went for a walk! At that hour? It’s too thin! What you want is someone to say what time you got back here! It would probably take Thea half an hour to get her mother back to bed and settled down after the upset she had had – at least she can always say it did. Nurse Cotton is supposed to have left her cottage at half past ten, and it would take her until about a quarter to eleven to get to the top of Hill Rise and start listening in to the row that was going on in the gazebo. Well, it wouldn’t be a lot short of eleven by the time Thea got her mother indoors and up into her room, and it would be a good deal after that before she got her to bed and was able to leave her. So if someone could say that you were back in this house by eleven – well, that would let you out, wouldn’t it?’
‘And who is supposed to be going to say that?’
She had been moving along past the foot of the bed. Now she turned the corner and was on the same side as he was. She said,
‘Suppose I was to say it…’
She looked at him between the long mascaraed lashes. It made her angry too. The pleasure and the anger were stimulating.
He said,
‘You certainly couldn’t do anything of the sort! I didn’t look at the time, but it must have been all of twelve o’clock before I came back here.’
She laughed.
‘Well, I shouldn’t tell that to the police, darling!’ Then, with a change of manner, ‘Nicky, you know you might be in quite a tight place over this. There’s Nurse Cotton to say you had a row with Winifred Graham, and that she said things like you wanting to kill her. And then later on she’s found dead in that damned gazebo – well, there you are! There wasn’t anyone else who had quarrelled with her. There wasn’t anyone else who had a motive for killing her, unless it was Thea – and that doesn’t let you out, because if Thea was in it you would be bound to be in it too.’
‘We weren’t either of us in it.’
She stood there smiling.
‘Well, that’s what you say, but no one is going to believe it – unless you can prove that you just weren’t there. It all turns on that. And when you say there isn’t anything I could do about it, that’s just where you’re wrong, because I could. Look here, Nicky, why won’t you be friends with me? I could help you a lot, you know – and I would if you’d stop glaring at me and looking as if you’d like to murder me too.’
He was so angry that he couldn’t trust himself to speak. Instead he went over to the walnut chest on the other side of the room, opened the top long drawer, and came back with a pile of underclothes, which he dumped in the suitcase on the bed. By this time he was able to manage a tone of deadly politeness.