Margot Bennett - The Man Who Didn't Fly

“I don’t want to hear what he said,” Inspector Lewis interrupted.

“Well, Hester said at breakfast, ‘You’re still wearing your roses, Jackie, were you up all night?”’

“I don’t want to hear that either. Your sister may make a separate statement about his appearance.”

“All right. Then I was in here cutting out a frock. I wanted to ask him if he could tango, but I expect that’s another thing you don’t want to hear again. I must say, I do think you’re trying to have it both ways,” she added candidly. “You’ve heard all this already, and now officially you’re not hearing it.”

“Confine yourself to what you saw,” Inspector Lewis said. “Then that’s practically nothing. No, wait, I saw him take off the roses and throw them in the wastepaper basket. They are probably still there, because I haven’t emptied it. And I saw him go away. He was wearing his pullover then, and carrying a paper shopping bag. I thought he was going to the village, but of course he must have been going away with his things.”

“But he didn’t have any things,” Sergeant Young pointed out quickly. He looked down again at his notebook. “Shall I go back to the station and get this transcribed, sir?”

“No, copy it now.”

While Sergeant Young wrote the statement, Lewis went to the wastepaper basket and shook out its contents. The two withered roses lay among the old papers and empty cigarette packets. He picked them up and put them away carefully, and then waited until the sergeant had handed over the statement and Prudence had signed it. He took the statement and folded it slowly, almost lovingly, as a hunter might unconsciously caress his gun.

“Then?” Hester asked.

He turned on her, smiling almost indulgently. He was a human being again. “Miss Wade, you look tired,” he said in solicitous tones, that, after what had gone before, failed to convince. “We needn’t trouble you any more today.”

“You can’t go like this. You have no right to. We are the people most concerned. Perhaps we are the only people who care at all about him. You can’t leave us like this, not knowing.”

“We police must be allowed our little secrets, you know,” he said, beaming at her.

“You said it wasn’t Morgan, because he wasn’t wearing a rose. You said it couldn’t be Jackie, because he still had those roses in the morning. You’re leaving us to suppose that Uncle Joe or Maurice must have – have done what was done. If that’s not true, then you must tell us, and not leave us to think evil thoughts of the dead.” She spoke with a conviction that made her seem sadly ingenuous.

Inspector Lewis allowed his expression to slip almost to the edge of compassion, to the slopes that are too dangerous for officialdom to tread.

“I’m issuing a warrant for Jackie’s arrest,” he said. “I wish I could be sure about his other name being Daw.”

The rose petals that Hester still held floated softly to the ground and settled there before she spoke.

“But he – we’ve sworn that he still had his roses in the morning.”

“That’s almost the whole point, Miss Wade. He had his roses in the morning, although we think he left them, or most of them, in that vault. We shan’t know exactly what happened there, until we get him. There may have been a struggle. Enough of a struggle, anyway, to make someone’s button-hole, or the petals from it, fall off. He wouldn’t have noticed at the time that they’d gone, but he certainly noticed it afterwards. He wouldn’t want to go back there, searching for rose petals.”

“But how do you know it was Jackie?” Prudence said in exasperation. “He wasn’t the only one with a button-hole.”

“The others were wearing only one rose. And, you see, you have the evidence in this room that it was Jackie. There are only sixteen roses in that vase, as Sergeant Young noticed earlier,” he said in a voice which contained only a careful measure of approval.

The sergeant moved forward eagerly. “There were twenty, Miss Wade. You – he – I mean you watched them being picked, one for every year of your life, he said. And you noticed when he gave Jackie two of them. Eighteen left. No one else touched them, so far as you know. In the morning Jackie stayed long enough to flaunt the fact that he still had two roses. He was shrewd enough, in his way, but quite blinded by his own shrewdness, or he’d have taken his substitute roses from the garden, and not left the vase here with only sixteen.”

Inspector Lewis sat still, looking as though he would like to bite his fingernails. “That’s enough,” he said impatiently. “There are no more facts we can give you. Only theories. It’s possible that Harry found the place where Morgan Price was hiding those jewels he may have stolen. It’s possible he went there late at night with the idea of getting these jewels and delivering them up to the insurance company. It’s possible that this Jackie, quite independently spying on Morgan Price, also discovered the hiding-place. The brooch he produced earlier in the evening certainly suggests this. It’s possible that when Jackie had made his plans he went back to this vault and found Harry there already. All that will have to wait till we get him. It won’t take long. We get a lot of co-operation when we need it. The first of the Sackford diamonds that comes on that market will be the end of your Jackie.”

He began to make ponderous preparations for departure. Sergeant Young looked wistfully at the two silent girls, as though they represented something he had given up, like the piano, but, whatever he felt, he attached himself hastily to his superior, like a railway carriage being impelled towards its engine.

Inspector Lewis stopped at the door.

“There’s a point about a letter, the letter Maurice Reid gave Ferguson to post. He must have forgotten it. He gave it to the – to Harry Walters to post, or so it seems, for it was still in his pocket. There’s no danger now that the cheque will ever be presented.”

He gave them a bureaucratic nod that included in its scope a contempt for the fallible men who forget to post letters. Then he lumbered from the room. Sergeant Young followed, smiling anxious messages over his shoulder.

The two sisters were left alone to survey the empty wastes of misery. Prudence made an effort to approach Hester, then retreated, frightened by the silence.

They were sitting nervously apart when the door opened and Marryatt came in with two cups in his hands.

“Tea’s up,” he said. “It’s strong, the way we like it in Australia. You’ll get used to it.”

MARRYATT and Hester climbed the long slopes of Furlong Hill with the rain drifting in their faces.

“I know it’s the finest view in England,” Marryatt said. “But it’s like every other view in England: fifty yards of sodden grass, then wet invisibility.”

“Doesn’t it ever rain in Australia?”

“When it rains it’s real rain, not this filtered drizzle. I’m going back, Hester. Did I tell you? Next week. The firm’s getting jumpy. They think I’m staying here for the fun of it.”

Hester walked on quickly through the wet grass.

“Don’t accuse me with your back,” he said. “I know the kind of time you’ve been having. Do you suppose I couldn’t understand what you felt at the trial?”

Hester looked resolutely ahead. “We’re nearly at the top. They made it as easy for me as they could.”

“You’re always trying to give people credit where none is due. They made it as easy for themselves as they could. He’d kept the gun: he had the diamonds. Naturally they made their case out of that. They couldn’t have got a conviction out of two rosebuds in a button-hole.”