Агата Кристи: Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 53, No. 12, December 2008

“Anna had a young man courting her?” I asked.

“Indeed she did,” John said. “They were working their way toward an understanding.”

“Garrick would never have stood for it,” Aiken said.

“He hated that young scamp,” Brand added.

This development took me by surprise. Rather than help prove the women innocent, it seemed to offer further motive to confirm their guilt. I couldn’t quite mask the puzzlement from my face.

John saw it and smiled. “They really are guilty, you know.”

I decided it would be wise to prove to him that it was not my task to push the blame for the crime on other shoulders. I wanted to keep him helping me. “It certainly looks that way,” I agreed. “And if I can prove it to my lord’s satisfaction, then they will surely swing.”

“So are we finished here?” he asked.

“Not quite,” I replied, before turning back to the brothers of the dead man. “If everyone was working in the fields, why had your brother gone home?”

“He liked to check on his women,” Aiken said.

“Women get into all sorts of trouble if you don’t keep a close eye on them,” Brand added.

I glanced back to John to see if I had understood them correctly. His embarrassed shrug told me that I had.

“So your brother liked to leave the fields during the day to go beat his wife and daughter.”

Aiken laughed. “That wife of his was a wild one — even before Garrick married her. And the daughter was looking to be just like her mother. Hell’s fire, the village still talks about the way Peta went walking with that Norman knight when she was already betrothed to Garrick. It would make him so mad. He swore he’d never give her the chance to embarrass him again.”

I thought about that for a moment, moving the various pieces of the murder about in my mind. I had a question now for John, but I didn’t want these brothers to hear it. “That’s all I want to know,” I told John. “We can go now.”

He turned to leave with me, but I couldn’t help lingering at the door. “You know, murdering your brother was a crime and someone will hang for it, but I can’t help but think this village is far better off now that he’s gone.”

“Garrick was the worst of them,” John confided. “Aiken and Brand have been far easier to control without him.”

“Tell me more about Garrick,” I suggested. “I don’t even know what he looked like. Was he dark and hairy like his brothers, or fair like his daughter?”

John missed the implication in my words. “Oh he was dark enough. The whole family is.”

I now thought I understood my lord’s concern, but I didn’t know if I could find him a scapegoat acceptable to Sir Gerald and these villagers.

To record it briefly, we talked to just about everyone in the village and learned nothing further of substantial use to me. The men, almost without fail, were in the fields when Garrick left and no one remembered anyone following after him. Oswin, the young man interested in Anna, was there in the fields with the rest of them. What was worse, he was a likable young fellow. I might be able to twist things around to fit him for the noose like Lord William wanted, but it would not sit well with the villagers, or with my own conscience, for that matter.

No strangers had been seen that day so we could not push the crimes on foreign shoulders. In truth, I firmly believed the women had committed the deed, and while I might sympathize with them and my lord William, I could not see any way to save both of them.

Yet therein was the answer to my problem. I could not see a way to save both of them, but might it not be possible to save one? But which woman would my lord prefer to live? The fancy of his youth or the daughter he had never dreamt he had? And even if I guessed correctly, would John help or hinder what I was about to try?

We approached the criminals’ house.

Garrick’s brothers wouldn’t like this. They stood to inherit their brother’s land if both women hung for killing him. But the rest of the village? Would they be satisfied with a single death?

Hodge, the foreman of the jury, stood outside Garrick’s house, keeping the women inside. I didn’t want him listening to my conversation with the women, nor John either, for that matter.

“Bailiff,” I said, turning to him, carefully in earshot of the foreman. “I’m convinced the jury was correct in its conclusion, but I don’t yet have the evidence to satisfy Lord William.”

Both men visibly relaxed at my words. “There’s just no one else who could have done it,” John said.

The juror was shifting uncertainly from foot to foot, wondering if it was proper for him to enter the conversation. I waved him over. I would need his help in this as well if I were to be successful.

“This is very good news,” Hodge told me. “I’m pleased we could convince you.”

“I am convinced,” I repeated for their benefit, “but I’m not certain my lord will be.”

Both men frowned, considering this problem.

I helped them along with their thinking. “What I’d like to bring Lord William is a confession.”

“A confession?” both men exclaimed.

“Yes, it would be difficult, to say the least, for my lord to deny these wo-men’s guilt if we could get them to confess it to him.”

The juror nodded solemnly, but the bailiff’s thoughts were already grappling with the practical problems in obtaining said confession. “I doubt,” he said, “that Lord William would find it overly convincing if the women were beaten into confessing.”

“I think you are correct,” I agreed.

“Then what should we do?”

“I’d like to talk to them again,” I said, “but this time I’d like it to be just them and me.”

John the Bailiff shook his head. “Sir Gerald’s instructions to me were quite clear.”

“Just hear me out and tell me what you think. Lord William is the only man who has ever questioned that these women killed Garrick. I am his man, charged in effect, with proving them innocent. They may talk to me.”

“Then they can talk with me beside you.”

“I think that lessens our chances,” I said. I dug my heels in on this point because I had no other argument. If John was as mulish as I, then both women would likely die.

Hodge, the juror, came unexpectedly to my assistance. “What harm can it do, Bailiff? He’s already said he agrees with us. We can go and stand by that tree stump over there and let him convince the women that this is their last chance at eternal salvation. If they die unshriven...” Hodge cringed and left the sentence unfinished.

The bailiff faltered in his conviction. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you everything that happens,” I lied.

“It will only be for a little bit,” the juror said. He began to lead the bailiff to the tree stump.

I went up to the door, unbarred it, and stepped inside.

The two women, Peta and Anna, sat despondently around a small table as they had when I first visited them. The daughter glanced up in fear as I entered, but the mother was either less anxious or more resigned to her fate.

I crossed the room and joined them at the table, sitting on a low stool that had probably once been Garrick’s seat. Neither spoke, which surprised me. Most prisoners who expected to be condemned babbled forth prayers and pleas and promises. These women’s silence was unnatural and must have been driven, nay, beaten into them over the years.

I cleared my throat. “I have spent the day trying to find a man to take this murder conviction for you.”

“But you did not succeed,” Peta said quietly.

“There are a couple of prospects: Garrick’s brothers, your daughter’s friend, Oswin.”

This suggestion stirred Anna to speech. “No!”