Джозефина Тэй - A Shilling for Candles

“Don’t let looks influence your judgment, Miss Burgoyne.”

“I don’t. Not the way you mean. Anyhow, he isn’t at all my type. But it’s quite right to judge on looks if you know enough. You wouldn’t buy a washy chestnut narrow across the eyes, would you?”

This, thought Grant, is quite the most amazing conversation.

She was standing up now, her hands pushed into her jacket pockets so much the much-tried garment sagged to two bulging points. The tweed she wore was rubbed at the cuffs and covered all over with “pulled” ends of thread where briars had caught. Her skirt was too short and one stocking was violently twisted on its stick of leg. Only her shoes – scarred like her hands, but thick, well-shaped, and expensive – betrayed the fact that she was not a charity child.

And then Grant’s eyes went back to her face. Except her face. The calm sureness of that sallow little triangular visage was not bred in any charity school.

“There!” she said encouragingly, as Grant helped Tisdall to his feet and guided him into a chair. “You’ll be all right. Have a little more of Father’s brandy. It’s a much better end for it than Father’s arteries. I’m going now. Where is Father, do you know?” This to Grant.

“He has gone to lunch at The Ship.”

“Thank you.” Turning to the still dazed Tisdall, she said, “That shirt collar of yours is far too tight.” As Grant moved to open the door for her, she said, “You haven’t told me your name?”

“Grant. At your service.” He gave her a little bow.

“I don’t need anything just now, but I might some day.” She considered him. Grant found himself hoping with a fervor which surprised him that he was not being placed in the same category as “washy chestnuts.”

“You’re much more my type. I like people broad across the cheekbones. Goodbye, Mr. Grant.”

“Who was that?” Tisdall asked, in the indifferent tones of the newly conscious.

“Colonel Burgoyne’s daughter.”

“She was right about my shirt.”

“One of the reach-me-downs?”

“Yes. Am I being arrested?”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that.”

“It mightn’t be a bad idea.”

“Oh? Why?”

“It would settle my immediate future. I left the cottage this morning and now I’m on the road.”

“You mean you’re serious about tramping?”

“As soon as I have got suitable clothes.”

“I’d rather you stayed where I could get information from you if I wanted.”

“I see the point. But how?”

“What about that architect’s office? Why not try for a job?”

“I’m never going back to an office. Not an architect’s anyhow. I was shoved there only because I could draw.”

“Do I understand that you consider yourself permanently incapacitated from earning your bread?”

“Phew! That’s nasty. No, of course not. I’ll have to work. But what kind of job am I fit for?”

“Two years of hitting the high spots must have educated you to something. Even if it is only driving a car.”

There came a tentative tap at the door, and the sergeant put his head in.

“I’m very sorry indeed to disturb you, Inspector, but I’d like something from the chief’s files. It’s rather urgent.”

Permission given, he came in.

“This coast’s lively in the season, sir,” he said, as he ran through the files. “Positively continental. Here’s the chef at the Marine – it’s just outside the town, so it’s our affair – the chef at the Marine’s stabbed a waiter because he had dandruff, it seems. The waiter, I mean, sir. Chef on the way to prison and waiter on the way to hospital. They think maybe his lung’s touched. Well, thank you, sir. Sorry to disturb you.”

Grant eyed Tisdall, who was achieving the knot in his tie with a melancholy abstraction. Tisdall caught the look, appeared puzzled by it, and then, comprehension dawning, leaped into action.

“I say, Sergeant, have they a fellow to take the waiter’s place, do you know?”

“That they haven’t. Mr. Toselli – he’s the manager – he’s tearing his hair.”

“Have you finished with me?” he asked Grant.

“For today,” Grant said. “Good luck.”

“No. No arrest,” said Grant to Superintendent Barker over the telephone in the early evening. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt about its being murder. The surgeon’s sure of it. The button in her hair might be an accident – although if you saw it you’d be convinced it wasn’t – but her fingernails were broken with clawing at something. What was under the nails has gone to the analyst, but there wasn’t much after an hour’s immersion in salt water… ’M?… Well, indications point one way certainly, but they cancel each other out, somehow. Going to be difficult, I think. I’m leaving Williams here on routine inquiry, and coming back to town tonight. I want to see her lawyer – Erskine. He arrived just in time for the inquest, and afterward I had Tisdall on my hands so I missed him. Would you find out for me when I can talk to him tonight. They’ve fixed the funeral for Monday. Golders Green. Yes, cremation. I’d like to be there, I think. I’d like to look over the intimates. Yes, I may look in for a drink, but it depends how late I am. Thanks.”

Grant hung up and went to join Williams for a high tea, it being too early for dinner and Williams having a passion for bacon and eggs garnished with large pieces of fried bread.

“Tomorrow being Sunday may hold up the button inquiries,” Grant said as they sat down. “Well, what did Mrs. Pitts say?”

“She says she couldn’t say whether he was wearing a coat or not. All she saw was the top of his head over her hedge as he went past. But whether he wore it or not doesn’t much matter, because she says the coat habitually lay in the back of the car along with that coat that Miss Clay wore. She doesn’t remember when she saw Tisdall’s dark coat last. He wore it a fair amount, it seems. Mornings and evenings. He was a ‘chilly mortal,’ she said. Owing to his having come back from foreign parts, she thought. She hasn’t much of an opinion of him.”

“You mean she thinks he’s a wrong ’un?”

“No. Just no account. You know, sir, has it occurred to you that it was a clever man who did this job?”

“Why?”

“Well, but for that button coming off no one would ever have suspected anything. She’d have been found drowned after going to bathe in the early morning – all quite natural. No footsteps, no weapon, no signs of violence. Very neat.”

“Yes. It’s neat.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic about it.”

“It’s the coat. If you were going to drown a woman in the sea, would you wear an overcoat to do it?”

“I don’t know. ’Pends how I meant to drown her.”

“How would you drown her?”

“Go swimming with her and keep her head under.”

“You’d have scratches that way, ten to one. Evidence.”

“Not me. I’d catch her by the heels in shallow water and upend her. Just stand there and hold her till she drowned.”

“Williams! What resource. And what ferocity.”

“Well, how would you do it, sir?”

“I hadn’t thought of aquatic methods. I mightn’t be able to swim, or I mightn’t like early-morning dips, or I might want to make a quick getaway from a stretch of water containing a body. No, I think I’d stand on a rock in deep water, wait till she came to talk to me, grip her head and keep it under. The only part of me that she could scratch that way would be my hands. And I’d wear leather gloves. It takes only a few seconds before she is unconscious.”

“Very nice, sir. But you couldn’t use that method anywhere within miles of the Gap.”