Джозефина Тэй - To Love and Be Wise

‘Dora–? Who is she?’

‘She left her shoes on the seat of my car. Tied up in a neat parcel. At the time they were just Dora Siggins’s shoes tied up in a parcel. But at 12:45 last Monday, right in the path of a taxi, they became a parcel of the required dimensions.’

‘What dimensions?’

‘The dimensions of that empty space in your photographic box. I did try a pair of Searle’s shoes in that space – you must allow me so much – but you’ll admit that no run-of-the-mill hard-working one-of-a-bundle detective would think up anything so outré as a parcel containing one pair of women’s shoes and a coloured silk headsquare. By the way, my sergeant’s recorded description of the woman who joined the bus at that crossroads where the fair is, says: Loose gabardine raincoat.’

‘Yes. My Burberry is a reversible one.’

‘Was that part of the preparation too?’

‘No; I got it years ago, so that I could travel light. I could camp out in it, and go to afternoon tea with the inside out.’

‘It is a little galling to think that it was I who paved the way for this practical joke of yours by my anxiety to be helpful to the stranger within the gates. I’ll let strangers stand after this.’

‘Is that how it seems to you?’ she said slowly. ‘A practical joke?’

‘Let us not quibble about terms. I don’t know what you call it to yourself. What it actually is, is a practical joke of particular brutality. I take it that your plan was either to make a fool of Walter Whitmore or to leave him in the soup.’

‘Oh, no,’ she said simply. ‘I was going to kill him.’

Her sincerity was so patent that this brought Grant up all standing.

‘Kill him?’ he said, all attention and his flippancy gone.

‘It seemed to me that he shouldn’t be allowed to go on living,’ she said. She took her coffee cup off her lap to put it on the table, but her hand was shaking so much that she could not lift it.

Grant moved over and took it from her, gently, and set it down.

‘You hated him because of what you imagined he had done to Marguerite Merriam,’ he said, and she nodded. Her hands were clasped in her lap in a vain effort to keep them steady.

He was silent for a moment or two, trying to get used to the idea that all the ingenuity that he had taken to be her slick exit from a masquerade had been in reality a planned get-out to murder.

‘And what made you change your mind?’

‘Well – oddly enough, the first small thing was something Walter said. It was one evening after Serge Ratoff had made a scene in the pub.’

‘Yes?’

‘Walter said that when one was as devoted as Serge was to anyone one ceased to be quite sane about it. That made me think a bit.’ She paused. ‘And then, I liked Liz. She wasn’t at all what I had pictured. You see, I had pictured her as the girl who had stolen Walter from Marguerite. And the real Liz wasn’t like that at all. That sort of bewildered me a little. But the real thing that stopped me was – was that – that–’

‘You found out that the person you loved had never existed,’ Grant said quietly.

She caught her breath and said: ‘I don’t know how you could have guessed that.’

‘But that is what happened, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. Yes, I found out – people didn’t know that I had any connection with her, you see, and they talked quite unguardedly. Marta, especially. Marta Hallard. I went back with her one night after dinner. She told me things that – shocked me. I had always known that she was wild and – and headstrong – Marguerite, I mean – but one expects that of genius, and she seemed so – so vulnerable that one forgave–’

‘Yes, I understand.’

‘But the Marguerite that Marta and those other people knew was someone I didn’t know at all. Someone I wouldn’t even have liked if – I remember when I said that at least she lived , Marta said: “The trouble was that she didn’t allow anyone else to. The suction she created,” Marta said, “was so great that her neighbours were left in a vacuum. They either expired from suffocation or they were dashed to death against the nearest large object.” So you see, I didn’t feel like killing Walter any more. But I still hated him for leaving her. I couldn’t forget that. That he had walked out on her and she had killed herself because of it. Oh, I know, I know!’ she added, as she saw his interruption coming. ‘It was not that she loved him so much. I know that now. But if he had stayed with her she would be alive today, alive, with her genius and her beauty and her gay loveliness. He might have waited–’

‘Till she tired?’ Grant supplied, more dryly than he had intended, and she winced.

‘It wouldn’t have been long,’ she said, with sad honesty.

‘May I change my mind and have some of that coffee after all?’ Grant said.

She looked at her uncontrolled hands and said: ‘Will you pour it out?’

She watched him as he poured, and said: ‘You are a very strange policeman.’

‘As I said to Liz Garrowby when she made the same remark: It may be your idea of policemen that’s strange.’

‘If I had had a sister like Liz how different my life would have been. I had no one but Marguerite. And when I heard that she had killed herself I suppose I just went a little crazy for a spell. How did you find out about Marguerite and me?’

‘The police in San Francisco sent us an account of you, and in it your mother’s name was given as Mattson. After much too long an interval I remembered that in Who’s Who in the Theatre , which I had been using one night to pass the time while I waited for a telephone call, Marguerite Merriam’s mother was also given as a Mattson. And since I had been looking for some connection between you and Walter, it seemed that I might have found it if you and Marguerite were cousins.’

‘Yes. We were more. We were both only children. Our mothers were Norwegian, but one married in Britain and one in America. And then, when I was fifteen, my mother took me to England, and I met Marguerite for the first time. She was nearly a year older than me, but she seemed younger. Even then she was brilliant. Everything she did had a – a shining quality. We wrote to each other every week from then on, and every year until my parents died we came to England in the summer, and I saw her.’

‘How old were you when your parents died?’

‘They died in a flu epidemic when I was seventeen. I sold the pharmacy but kept the photographic side, because I liked it and was good at it. But I wanted to travel. To photograph the world and everything that was beautiful in it. So I took the car and went west. I wore pants in those days just because they were comfortable and cheap, and because when you are five feet ten you don’t look your best in girlish things. I hadn’t thought of using them as – as camouflage until one day when I was leaning over the engine of the car a man stopped and said: “Got a match, bud?” and I gave him a light; and he looked at me and nodded and said: “Thanks, bud,” and went away without a second glance. That made me think. A girl alone is always having trouble – at least in the States she is – even a girl of five feet ten. And a girl has a more difficult time getting an “in” in a racket. So I tried it out for a little. And it worked. It worked like a dream. I began to make money on the coast. First photographing people who wanted to be movie actors, and then photographing actors themselves. But every year I came to England for a little. As me. My name actually is Leslie, but mostly they called me Lee. She always called me Lee.’

‘So your passport is a woman’s one.’

‘Oh, yes. It is only in the States that I am Leslie Searle. And not all the time there.’