Patricia Wentworth - Ladies’ Bane

“You heard this yourself?”

“No, Inspector, it was said to Miss Falconer, who only spoke of it to me about half an hour ago. She had heard that you were anxious to find anyone who might have seen the murderer, and her conscience would not allow her to keep silence. If I had not met you just now I would have rung up the police station at Wraydon.”

He was frowning in the darkness, a fact which Miss Silver was very well able to deduce from the tone of his voice.

“It is most unlikely that she saw anything at all, but anyhow she can’t very well be suspected of the murder, so perhaps she’ll be willing to talk. I’ll say good-night, Miss Silver.”

He went striding on past Miss Falconer’s cottage. He would have to see the old woman, but he told himself that he expected nothing from the interview. On the other hand she had been out until after ten, and Mrs. Miller’s house was the last in the village. Coming and going she would pass the entrance to the Ladies’ House. There were possibilities, but of course no use to build on them. He stood knocking on the cottage door, and wondered who would come to it. It was not the least of his surprises that it was Granny Pease herself, in a large black shawl and slippers of crimson wool. There was nothing on her head but its own sparse white hair, and she immediately complained of the draught and told him to come in and be quick about it. By virtue of some attenuated relationship to his wife she addressed him as Johnny.

“Come to have a nice little chat with me, have you? Time was when young men would come visiting me evenings-and never too late to start again! Sit you down by the fire. I’ve a nice strong cup of tea in the pot.”

The tea was stewed and bitter, but he took it, repressed a shudder over his first sip, and said in a good-humoured bantering tone,

“Well, Granny, I’m glad to see you up and about. Aggie told me this afternoon that you couldn’t move out of your bed with the rheumatics.”

Her cup looked blacker and must have tasted worse than his own, but she seemed to be enjoying it. Her face twisted in a malicious smile.

“Didn’t want me to see you-didn’t want you to see me! Keeping of us apart, that’s what Aggie was a-doing! Jealous of my new young man, I shouldn’t wonder, and thinking I wouldn’t know nothing about your coming because of me having my forty winks! But her Ernie let it out. ‘What’s that Johnny Grayson want, coming here?’ he says. And I give it to Aggie proper! And now that you’re here, I’ll arst the same as what he did. What do you want, Johnny Grayson? You’d better look lively, or Aggie will be home, and maybe she’ll pack you off.”

As he told her, she began to laugh, shaking and rocking herself backwards and forwards till her tea spilled over and she had to set down her cup on the top of the stove.

“Well, I never!” she gasped. “Think I went after that Flaxman and got him with Mr. Humphreys’ pruning-knife? I daresay there’s been women might have had cause to do him in. A bad lot, that’s what he was, and that Nellie Humphreys not much better! But I didn’t take a knife to either of ’em.”

He laughed too.

“I didn’t think you did, Granny.” He allowed a pause to lengthen. “I thought you might have seen something.”

“And if I did?” Her tone had sharpened. There was no laughter in it now.

“Then I hope you will tell me.”

She considered. Her tea must have been cold now as well as bitter, but she finished it before she said,

“Will I have to come into court and swear to what I seen?”

“That depends on what it was.”

“Well then, it wasn’t much. I come along to Mrs. Miller’s with the cough mixture for her Stanley -”

“What time would that be?”

“Half past nine when I slipped out the back door. Listening to the wireless they was, and I went quiet.”

“Did you see anything then?”

She shook her head.

“I went along on, and I got to Millers’ and I give her the mixture.”

“How long were you there?”

She screwed up her face.

“I don’t rightly know. She was talking about Stanley ’s cough and how they couldn’t none of ’em sleep nights for it. And I was telling her about my old great-gran. Better than all your doctors and chemists and National Health she was! Made up stuff for man and beast, and what she couldn’t cure nobody could, and no use trying!”

Grayson could see that this kind of conversation might have lasted quite a long time. He gave up trying to measure it and said,

“It was past ten when you got home.”

“Who says it was?”

“Aggie does.”

She made a grimace.

“Well, I daresay.”

“And now, Granny, you saw something when you were going home. What did you see?”

“ ’Tweren’t nothing to make a song and dance about.”

“What was it?”

“I’d got my shawl over my head and my slippers on my feet. The streets were as dry as a bone. I’d got outside of Millers’, and I’d gone a little way, when I stubbed my toe on a stone, right through the wool of my slippers. It hurt something cruel, and I took and stood still under the big holly right over the way from the Ladies’ House. I didn’t feel like walking on that foot till I’d got it eased off a bit. So there I stood, leaning up against Bessie Turner’s front gate and thinking whether I’d be able to get home alone. No one couldn’t see me on account of that big holly what she won’t never have clipped.”

“Well?”

“Now, Johnny Grayson, don’t you go trying to hustle me! Cruel bad, my toe was, and if I could ha’ stood on one leg I’d ha’ done it.” She screwed up her face reminiscently and then opened a winking eye. “Time was I could! Egg race, hop-skip-and-jump-I’d win ’em all!”

He laughed.

“Some time ago, Granny!”

She nodded vigorously.

“Not but what I can’t do a thing or two when I’ve got to! You’d be surprised!” Her eyes sparkled with malice. “Well, I was just seeing if I could get my foot off of the ground by leaning on Bessie’s gate, when someone come out atween the gate-posts of the Ladies’ House.”

“Who was it?”

She gave an odd cackle of laughter.

“And wouldn’t you like to know that!”

“Yes, I should.”

“Then want must be your master, Johnny, my boy.”

“You couldn’t see?”

She tossed her head.

“Nobody could ha’ seen! There’s the trees hanging over, and a shadow as black as you please. All I could see was there was someone moving out atween the gate-posts and along under the trees.”

“Which way?” said Grayson quickly.

She wagged her head at him.

“Just the way you would like it to be, Johnny-round to the left and along on the road to Tom Humphreys’. And if you want to know what I thought at the time, well, I thought it was that Flaxman going after Nellie.”

He could get no more from her than that. She had taken it to be Flaxman at the time, but she couldn’t swear to any distinguishing mark of man or woman. What she had seen was someone moving in the shadows, and she would swear to that. But it certainly wasn’t Flaxman, because the time would be somewhere round about ten, when, according to Mrs. Larkin, he had had his peppering and was making his painful and interrupted way towards the waste piece of ground where he was to be stabbed. Grayson could have no doubt in his own mind that she had seen the person who had stabbed him, but as to who that person might be his guess was as good as another’s. It went no farther than that.

They were having coffee that evening in the drawing-room of the Ladies’ House, when Ione said,

“I’m going up to town tomorrow, Geoffrey. I may stay a night or two-I’m not sure.”