Josephine Tey - The Collected Works

Three telephones kept ringing like demented things, and by post, telegram, wireless, and personal appearance the information poured in. Nine-tenths of it quite useless, but all of it requiring a hearing: some of it requiring much investigation before its uselessness became apparent. Grant looked at the massed pile of reports, and his self-control deserted him for a little.

“It’s a big price to pay for a moment’s lack of wit,” he said.

“Cheer up, sir,” said Williams. “It might be worse.”

“Might be worse! Would you tell me what occurrence would, in your opinion, augment the horror of the situation?”

“Oh, well, so far no nut has come to confess to the crime, and waste our time that way.”

But the nut arrived next morning.

Grant looked up from inspecting a dew-drenched coat which had just been brought in, to see Williams closing the door mysteriously and mysteriously advancing on him.

“What is it, Williams?” he asked, his voice sharp with anticipation.

“The nut,” Williams said.

“The what?”

“The person to make a confession, sir.” Williams’s tone held a shade of guilt now, as if he felt that by mentioning the thing yesterday he had brought the evil to pass.

Grant groaned.

“Not a bit the usual kind, sir. Quite interesting. Very smart.”

“Outside or inside?”

“Oh, her clothes, I meant, sir.”

“Her! Is it a woman?”

“Yes. A lady, sir.”

“Bring her in.” Rage ran over him in little prickles. How dare some sensation-mad female waste his time in order to satisfy her perverted and depraved appetite.

Williams swung the door back and ushered in a bright fashionable figure.

It was Judy Sellers.

She said nothing, but came into the room with a sulky deliberation. Even in his surprise at seeing her, Grant thought how Borstal she was in spite of her soigné exterior. That air of resentment against the world in general and her own fate in particular was very familiar to him.

He pulled out a chair in silence. Grant could be very intimidating.

“All right, Sergeant,” he said, “there won’t be any need for you to stay.” And then, to Judy as Williams went: “Don’t you think this is a little unfair, Miss Sellers?”

“Unfair?”

“I am working twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, on dreadfully important work, and you see fit to waste my time by treating us to a bogus confession.”

“There’s nothing bogus about it.”

“It’s so bogus that I have a good mind to dismiss you now, without another word.”

She stayed his half-movement to the door. “You can’t do that. I’ll just go to another police station and confess and they’ll send me on to you. I did it, you see!”

“Oh, no, you didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, you weren’t near the place.”

“How do you know where I was?”

“You forget that in the course of conversation on Saturday night it was apparent that on Wednesday night you were at Miss Keats’ house in Chelsea.”

“I was only there for cocktails. I left early because Lydia was going to a party up the river.”

“Even so, that makes it rather unlikely that you should be on a beach near Westover shortly after dawn next morning.”

“It wouldn’t be at all surprising if I were in the north of England next morning. I motored down if you want to know. You can enquire at my flat. The girl I live with will tell you that I didn’t come home till lunch-time on Thursday.”

“That hardly proves that your activities were murderous.”

“They were, though. I drove to the Gap, hid in the wood, and waited till she came to swim.”

“You were, of course, wearing a man’s coat?”

“Yes, though I don’t know how you knew. It was cold driving, and I wore one of my brother’s that was lying in the car.”

“Did you wear the coat to go down to the beach?”

“Yes. It was dithering cold. I don’t like bathing in the dawn.”

“You went bathing!”

“Of course I did. I couldn’t drown her from the shore, could I?”

“And you left the coat on the beach?”

“Oh, no,” she said with elaborate sarcasm. “I went swimming in it!”

And Grant breathed again. For a moment he had had a fright.

“So you changed into swimming things, walked down to the beach with your brother’s coat over you, and—then what?”

“She was a fair way out. I went in, swam up to her and drowned her.”

“How?”

“She said, ‘Hello, Judy.’ I said, ‘Hello.’ I gave her a light tap on the chin. My brother taught me where to hit a person’s chin, so as to addle them. Then I dived under her and pulled her through the water by the heels until she was drowned.”

“Very neat,” Grant said. “You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you? Have you invented a motive for yourself, too?”

“Oh, I just didn’t like her. I hated her, if you want to know. Her success and her looks and her self-sufficiency. She got in my hair until I couldn’t bear it another day.”

“I see. And will you explain why, having achieved the practically perfect murder, you should calmly come here and put a noose round your neck?”

“Because you’ve got someone for it.”

“You mean because we’ve got Robert Tisdall. And that explains everything. And now having wasted some precious minutes of my time, you might recompense me and rehabilitate yourself at the same time, by telling me what you know of Tisdall.”

“I don’t know anything. Except that he would be the very last person in the world to commit a murder. For any reason.”

“You knew him fairly well, then?”

“No. I hardly knew him at all.”

“You weren’t—friends?”

“No, nor lovers, if that’s what you’re trying to say. Bobby Tisdall didn’t know I was alive, except to hand me a cocktail.”

Grant’s tone changed. “And yet you’d go even to this length to get him out of a jam?” he said, quite kindly.

She braced into resentment at the kindness. “If you’d committed a murder wouldn’t you confess to save an innocent person?”

“Depends on how innocent I thought the police were. You underrate us, Miss Sellers.”

“I think you’re a lot of idiots. You’ve got a man who is innocent. You’re busy hounding him to death. And you won’t listen to a perfectly good confession when you get one.”

“Well, you see, Miss Sellers, there are always things about a case that are known only to the police and are not to be learned from newspapers. The mistake you made was to get up your story from the newspaper accounts. There was one thing you didn’t know. And one thing you forgot.”

“What did I forget?”

“That no one knew where Christine Clay was staying.”

“The murderer did.”

“Yes. That is my point. And now—I’m very busy.”

“So you don’t believe a word I say.”

“Oh, yes. Quite a lot of it. You were out all night on Wednesday, you probably went swimming, and you arrived back at lunch-time on Thursday. But none of that makes you guilty of murder.”

She got up, in her reluctant, indolent way, and produced her lipstick. “Well,” she drawled between applications, “having failed in my little bid for publicity, I suppose I must go on playing blonde nit-wits for the rest of my life. It’s good I bought a day-return.”

“You don’t fool me,” Grant said, with a not too grim smile as he opened the door for her.

“All right, then, maybe you’re right about that, and blast you anyhow,” she burst out. “But you’re wrong about his doing it. So wrong that your name will stink before this case is over.”

And she brushed past an astonished Williams and two clerks, and disappeared.