Charles Todd - An Impartial Witness

"Do you perhaps know of a Lieutenant Fordham?" I asked.

Mrs. Calder frowned. "Ought I to know him? Do you think he was the man Marjorie was seeing?"

"I have no real reason to believe it. His name came up in a different connection. But I'd like to ask, if Marjorie were in trouble-of any kind-would she have turned to you for help? And if not to you, where would she go?"

"She didn't come here. My housekeeper would have told me if she had called. I wish she had." She shook her head. "There's really no one else she was close to. Except for Michael Hart. But of course he was in France."

"If you could ask among her friends? It could lead somewhere."

"Yes, by all means. I'm ashamed now that I didn't do something. You're very brave to take on this search. It should have been me."

But she hadn't wanted to know.

I told her how she could contact me, and thanked her.

Sadly, we were still no closer to finding Marjorie's killer.

I was outside on the pavement, preparing to crank the motorcar, when I realized that she hadn't asked me if Marjorie was pregnant.

Did she know already? Or was this something else she didn't want to hear?

As I was about to pull over at the Marlborough Hotel, I saw a face in a cab window that caught my attention. Serena Melton. She appeared to be very upset.

I swerved back into heavy traffic, ignoring a horn blown in disgust, and fell in behind her cab, wondering where she might be going, although it was more likely that she was coming from somewhere instead.

But I was right. She was going. I trailed her back to the house where her brother and his wife had lived. She asked the cabbie to wait and went up the steps to knock at the door.

There was no answer. She waited for a moment and tried again. And again no one came to answer the summons.

She was coming back down the steps, when I turned in behind the cab and called to her.

"Serena? Imagine running into you in London. Could I take you somewhere?"

She looked at me, and after a moment paid off the cabbie and came to join me in my motorcar.

"What brings you to London?" she asked. "I thought you were in France again. "

"How are you?" I asked her instead of answering. Then, "Is anything wrong?"

"I've just had a most unpleasant conversation with someone who knew my brother's wife. It was very upsetting."

"In that house? The one you were just coming out of?"

"No, no. That's my brother's house. I was hoping to have some tea and a lie down, before taking the train home."

"Are you any closer to finding out who killed your brother's wife?" It was baldly put but there was no other way to ask.

"How did you-oh. The weekend at Melton Hall." She sighed, pulling off her gloves and then after a moment putting them on again. "It's been the most hopeless task. But the police are still sitting on their hands, doing nothing. I spoke to the inspector in charge this morning. He tried to assure me that everything possible was being done. But it isn't. I know it isn't."

"It's likely-" I began, but she interrupted me, turning toward me with anger in her eyes.

"His latest theory has to do with someone from Oxford. I don't know that Marjorie even knew anyone there. He's grasping at straws."

I couldn't explain what I'd been told about the reason the police were searching for that person. It wasn't my place to pass on such information if the police had not. And so I said, "Do you have any idea what your sister-in-law did that day?"

"The police have told me that she went out in the early afternoon and never came back. She knew Merry would be arriving that day, and I'd assumed she would go at once to see him. I was intending to visit him the following day, when he was a little more rested from his journey. But of course the police were at our door before I could go. And it was left to me to tell him what had happened. I couldn't understand how she'd come to die in London. I thought there must be some mistake. They'd had some difficulty in identifying her-her purse was taken-and if her housekeeper hadn't spoken to the constable on their street, the police wouldn't have known who she was as soon as they did."

It was, for the most part, what Michael had learned from Marjorie's housekeeper.

We were nearing Kensington Palace. I said, "You remarked earlier that you'd just had an unpleasant conversation-" I left it there.

"I wish you hadn't reminded me. This woman had the audacity to say that people were talking about Marjorie long before she was killed, and that she was asking for trouble, walking down by the river at night on her own. She made her sound like a common tart, looking for custom. It was there, in the tone of voice she used."

"What sort of talk was there?"

"That she was avoiding her friends, insinuating that she must be in some sort of trouble. Well, someone in London knows where she was that evening. Why won't he or she tell us the truth?" Her voice was rising again, and she fidgeted with her gloves as if they had offended her, not the woman. "I blame Helen Calder. She ought to have noticed something. Marjorie would have listened to Helen if she'd spoken up. In the beginning, before it had got too far. But she shut her eyes, didn't she? The sort of woman who wasn't willing to put herself out for anyone, safe in her own rectitude."

It was a harsh indictment, not really warranted, but I'd seen Helen Calder's willing detachment even when she suspected that Marjorie was growing too fond of the man she'd been seeing. I didn't believe that she could have changed the situation, but I could understand Serena Melton's feeling that she might have made a difference.

"There must be a reason why she-" I began.

But she interrupted me for a second time. "We're speaking of behavior that led to murder. I would have said something, if I'd had any inkling that Marjorie was being talked about. I'd have confronted her and told her what I thought of such selfish conduct."

"Are you saying that her-that an affair had something to do with her death?"

She cast a withering glance in my direction. "When you flout the rules of society, you leave yourself open to the consequences of your actions. If she'd been at home, if she'd been with respectable friends, she would still be alive and Merry would still be alive."

All pretense that Marjorie had been killed in the course of a robbery had been dropped. I don't think Serena was aware of it, the volatile mixture of distress and anger, grief and frustration blinding her to everything else.

We drove in silence for a time, and then she said, "I might as well go home. I don't feel like facing any more blank faces and lies. The people who could really help me are Marjorie's closest friends, but they're fiercely loyal. Or else Victoria has told them not to talk to me. I wouldn't put it past her." She flicked a glance in my direction. "Marjorie's sister. I can't abide her, and neither could Marjorie."

The pent-up feeling of helplessness driving her must be exhausting, I thought, for there were new lines around her mouth, and circles beneath her eyes.

I said, "Would your brother want you to go through this anguish, trying to get at the truth?"

"I don't know whether he would or not. But if the shoe were on the other foot, he'd have moved heaven and earth to find out who had killed me. I can do no less. Just because I'm a woman, I'm not going to walk away from this."

I couldn't have said whether Lieutenant Evanson would have felt that way. But then he hadn't lost his sister while I was caring for him. I couldn't have guessed how angry he would have been, or if he'd have left matters to the police.

"Would you mind dropping me at the station? I'm sorry to ask you to turn around. But it would be a kindness."