‘It is very kind of you, but I am afraid there isn’t anything you can do.’
It wasn’t Ella’s way to beat about the bush. She never had and she never would. She came right out into the open with a frank,
‘I can say you got back here by eleven o’clock, and that you couldn’t have gone out again because you were with me. Come along, Nicky, isn’t that worth being nice to me for? Or isn’t it? But you can’t expect me to do it if you keep on looking at me as if I could go to hell and be damned to me!’
He restrained himself. When he had fetched half a dozen shirts and packed them, he was able to achieve a conversational tone.
‘It’s a kind thought, but I’m afraid I’ve already told the police that I went for quite a long walk and didn’t get in until fairly late.’
‘That, darling, was only because of your being Jack’s cousin and a perfect gentleman and not wanting to give me away. Quite good reasons for saying you took that walk. Nobody will believe in it anyhow. It’s just a question of whether you would rather they believed you were waiting in Winifred Graham’s garden to lure her out and murder her, or that you were here having fun and games with me. People always like to believe the worst, you know, and there’s quite a good chance they could be got to believe it about you and me.’
‘And what are Jack and Althea supposed to think about it?’
She shrugged her shoulders.
‘I don’t give a damn!’
‘Perhaps I do.’
She sat down on the end of the bed. Her voice dropped.
‘I meant that, you know – all of it! I suppose you haven’t been here all this week without tumbling to it that Jack bores me stiff? Well, you don’t. We could have a good time together, you know. I like travelling – going places. We’d get on like a house on fire if you’d only let yourself go. And you needn’t bother about Jack – all he really wants is what he calls a quiet life. But I haven’t got any use for being poor. If I swear you were with me on Tuesday night it’ll clear you, but Jack will probably divorce me – and I should have to reckon on that. If I don’t do it, you’ll probably hang, and it would be up to you to see I didn’t suffer for saving your neck, wouldn’t it? We could go abroad till it all blew over – travel and have a good time.’
Oh, they could travel, could they? He found his thought straying to some of the places to which he might conduct Ella Harrison and dump her. There was an Asian desert scourged by Polar winds. There were leech-infested swamps. There was a tribe of head-hunters. He said in a perfectly civilized voice,
‘I’m afraid there’s nothing doing, Ella. You see, if it hadn’t been for Mrs Graham’s death Althea and I would be married by now.’
TWENTY-TWO
AS HAS ALREADY been said, the Miss Pimms were in the habit of spreading their net as widely as possible. Even if they caught the same bus down into the High Street and took the same bus back, they would after alighting each take her separate way, dividing the errands between them and neglecting no chance of conversation. Lily, who was the middle Miss Pimm, was as a rule the least enterprising and successful of the three. She had neither Miss Mabel’s keen nose for a scandal nor Nettie’s passionate and persistent attention to detail. Her only gift was, in fact, one which seldom survives the impact of education. She could reproduce word for word a conversation which she had overheard, or a communication which had been made to her. It is to this faculty that we owe the great traditional tales and ballads which have been handed down by word of mouth through countless generations. Most literates have lost it, most children possess it. Miss Lily Pimm, distressingly impervious to the efforts of the excellent Miss Sanders, their one-time governess, had retained it. She entered a greengrocer’s shop, where she bought apples and a cauliflower. She met the youngest Miss Ashington and inquired solicitously after her mother, to which Louisa replied that she was very well, thank you. She seemed in a hurry to get away, so Miss Lily let her go, a thing which neither of her sisters would have done. Mabel’s louder voice and dominant manner would have compelled a more satisfying answer, Nettie’s bright darting questions would have extracted one, but Lily Pimm, though quite as well aware that Mrs Ashington was now practically off her head, could manage nothing better in the way of delaying tactics than a word and a smile which had no effect at all.
She bought soap in a packet at a grocery store, and toilet soap from the old-fashioned chemist’s shop at which her parents had always dealt. She met Mrs William Thorpe who wanted to find homes for three female kittens of uncertain looks and ancestry, Miss Brazier who was earnestly trying to collect enough money to provide somebody’s eleventh child with a school outfit, and old Mr Crawley who was telling everyone he met what his newspaper had that morning told him about foreign affairs. Since this was not the sort of gossip which interested the Pimm family, she got away from him as soon as she could and went to stand in the fish queue, where she was overtaken by a horrid uncertainty as to whether Mabel had told her to get fresh haddock or finnan. If she had been listening at the time she would have remembered, but that was the trouble – she had allowed her thoughts to wander, and if she bought the wrong sort Mabel wouldn’t be pleased.
And then, there in the fish queue, a bare-headed woman in a shabby coat said to the woman in front of her, ‘I don’t rightly know what to do about it, and that’s a fact.’ The other woman had on slacks and a headscarf and she was smoking a cigarette. She said, ‘Fancy that, Mrs Traill!’
Lily Pimm’s memory began to record what they were saying. By the time she had reached the head of the queue and bought fresh haddock and got half way to the bus stop and then remembered that Mabel really had said finnan and gone back and changed it, Mabel and Nettie were waiting for her and not too pleased about it. Each had already asked the other more than once how on earth Lily managed to take so much longer over her shopping than they did. Her arrival almost at a run and with flushed cheeks did nothing to placate them. If they had missed the bus it would have meant another half hour’s wait.
Fortunately they had not missed the bus. All the way up the hill Lily Pimm sat hugging herself with pleasure. What she had got to tell her sisters as soon as they got home really was news, and the woman in the fish shop had been able to give her Mrs Traill’s address. She hoped Mabel would realize how clever it was of her to have thought of getting it. Mabel and Nettie always treated her as if they didn’t think she was clever at all. Everyone always treated her like that, but this time she had been very clever indeed, and they would have to admit it.
She didn’t say anything as long as they were on the bus, just sat there and hugged herself. They got off at the end of Warren Crescent as they always did, but she hadn’t a chance of beginning about the fish queue then, because Nettie was telling Mabel about seeing Mrs Stock at the butcher’s. ‘And do you know, the meat she was getting was the very cheapest they had – and if she meant to make it do the four of them for even one day, no wonder they always looked half starved!’
Lily offered the suggestion that there might have been something left over from the Sunday joint, to which Nettie replied, ‘Rubbish!’ but without any rancour, and went on talking about the Stocks. Lily had to wait until they were inside their own hall door before she got a chance to say,
‘I heard the most dreadful thing in the fish queue.’
‘About Mr Browning breaking his leg? I always did say he would have an accident if he went on climbing up ladders at his age!’
Lily shook her head.
‘Oh, no, it was something much worse than that – something about Mrs Graham being murdered – something dreadful!’