The Applegreen Cat, page 12
They were deserted. There was no one in sight outside.
I sat down on the enameled bath-chair and heard Yates say, “What were you doing last night at the time the girl was murdered, Mr. Heyward?”
“My God!” Heyward said angrily. He calmed down. “Depends on when she was murdered,” he conceded.
“It’s been tentatively established that her murder occurred between 10:30 and 10:50 last evening. I hope you’ve got an alibi. So far only the two young ladies are so fortunate as to be able to swear they weren’t out of each other’s sight during that time.” Yates wasn’t being smooth at all. “Well?” he said irritably, when Mr. Heyward didn’t answer at once.
“As it happens,” Heyward said coldly, “I wasn’t doing anything very suspicious at that time. I left the playroom a minute or two before 10:30 and proceeded to my study, which is just along the hall. I sat down at my desk and read and signed letters until twelve minutes before eleven, when I noticed the time and jumped up and hurried into the hall, where my wife and Todd Erickson were waiting to go to meet Lieutenant Abbott’s train. Mrs. Abbott hadn’t come down from her room. Then Miss Wells called to me over the banisters and I ran upstairs and unlocked Mrs. Abbott’s door. Does that cover it, Inspector?”
“Rather elaborate system of locks in this house,” Yates said.
“They were here when we bought the place,” Mr. Heyward replied.
“Anybody see you in the study?” Yates asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“Did the maid Bevans drink?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“Try to be specific, please.”
“How should I know? They usually do, don’t they? And why wouldn’t they?”
Yates said, “There’s no sense in losing your temper, Mr. Heyward.”
“Then ask me something I can answer. If you want information about the servants, go to my wife or Miss Wells.”
“I have done so,” Yates said. “What about the other one? Elsie? Surely you noticed her enough to know who she was, Mr. Heyward? She was uncommonly well-dressed, for a girl of her class. She wore a very fine pair of stockings. Oddly enough.”
“Perhaps they were an old pair of my wife’s.”
“They were not an old pair, Mr. Heyward. They were brand new, and a kind not obtainable now in England. But they will be easily traced. Our English customs are very thorough. If the stockings were sent from the States, we shall have no trouble finding out when and how, and by whom, and who received them here. Now—ah—this fellow Erickson, what is your opinion of him, Mr. Heyward?”
“He is my best friend. As well as my partner in business.”
“I see. You knew your wife had morphine in her possession?”
“I didn’t know. It’s the sort of thing I never know anything about.”
“But it was in her medicine cabinet—”
“Why should I look there? I’ve got my own bath. My own medicine cabinet. For God’s sake—”
Yates interrupted him. “Where was your son last night? After he left the playroom?”
“You’ll have to ask him,” Mr. Heyward said.
A constable rapped on the door and announced that the doctor had arrived. Yates left the room.
At once Mr. Heyward seemed almost to collapse. I came out of the bathroom as he sank into a chair and Patrick, offering him a drink, reached for the Scotch. Mr. Heyward refused the whiskey, so Patrick set the bottle back on the tray.
“Who has a master key, besides yourself?” he asked.
“My wife.”
“Does she carry it about with her?”
“Don’t ask me. Come to think of it, I believe she keeps it in her desk.”
“In her bedroom?”
“In the little room she calls her office, off her bedroom. Why are you asking me this?”
Patrick said, “How many people know where she keeps that key?”
Mr. Heyward looked angry again. “See here, Abbott, I don’t know anything about anything. I don’t want to even hear about it. See.”
“Okay,” Patrick said. “Sure you don’t want a drink? I haven’t thanked you for this, by the way.”
“That’s all right,” Mr. Heyward managed. “No, I don’t want a drink. Sorry.”
He looked about the room and frowned as though everything in it displeased him. “Come down to my study. That room is soundproof, so that nobody can hear what I’ve got to tell you,” he said.
Soundproof? That explained why he had not heard us in the hall this morning, in time to cradle the telephone receiver.
“Right,” Patrick said. Mr. Heyward left the room and Patrick bent and kissed my hair. “You be careful.”
“But it’s you who should be careful.”
“I am.”
“I’m afraid,” I said, nodding my head towards the door which Mr. Heyward had left open. “He wouldn’t take any of the Scotch. Why not?”
“Coming?” Mr. Heyward called, from the hall.
“Were you testing him?” I asked Patrick.
Patrick waved a hand and followed Mr. Heyward.
I went into the bath and scrubbed my hands and fixed up my face and went down to help set the table.
Joyce Wells was in the dining-room, not Mrs. Heyward. She was wearing a beige jersey dress. She moved efficiently as she laid the mats on the Chippendale table.
She accepted my offer of assistance gladly.
“You’re very kind,” she said. “I couldn’t find either of the girls, and Mrs. Heyward is lying down. Mrs. Heyward was fond of Bevans, and of course, she had been with them so long, sixteen years, you know, so it is like losing someone in the family. Her death will be hard for Mrs. Heyward to bear. My usual sources of temporary help have failed this time, aside from a charwoman, who couldn’t set a table properly, I’m afraid. And Lorna—Mrs. Erickson—is never much good doing anything. I mean she’s no good at any sort of housework. It’s nothing against her, of course. Some women aren’t.”
“Well, tell me what to do,” I said. “I can do about anything, I guess. Wash the dishes. Carve the roast—”
Joyce took me seriously.
“The char will wash the dishes when the time comes, and I shall carve the roast. I’ll serve, from the sideboard. I’ll have to, anyway. Cook won’t let anyone but me go between the kitchen and the dining-room. Nobody from the family, I mean. And of course she’d throw a fit if one of the guests tried doing it. This being Sunday she’s fit to be tied.” Joyce handed me a tray of flat silver and let me take one side of the table while she took the other. “She stints our rations all week in order to have a real joint of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Sunday—when we have a one-o’clock dinner, of course—and everybody in the place could be murdered before Cook would let that dinner be interfered with. And I’ve got to carve the roast and serve it properly or she wouldn’t let it come into the dining-room.”
“She sounds dictatorish,” I said.
Joyce smiled. Alone, she seemed natural enough. Maybe she’s only shy in groups, I thought.
“You don’t know half,” she said. “Well, Mrs. Murdock has to be humored. We can get along in spite of a shortage of housemaids but we’ve got to have the cook.”
Joyce finished her side of the table first and started arranging the sideboard.
“All this trouble is too bad,” she said over one shoulder. “This is the first week-end in ages with only the family here, and their guests. And now these murders. It may even be the Heywards’ very last week-end to themselves in their own house.” I lifted my eyebrows. Joyce explained, gloomily, “After the war, places like this will have to go. There won’t be any real servant class after the war, and you can’t run them without. I feel sorry for Mr. and Mrs. Heyward. It’s their home.”
She put the glasses round.
“Are you out here a lot?” I asked.
“I? But I live here.”
“Oh. I knew you were Mr. Heyward’s secretary, but I thought perhaps you had come for the week-end.”
“I was Mrs. Heyward’s secretary first. I went into the office when Mr. Heyward couldn’t get anyone that suited him. The English girls had to get into the war effort, and he found the older ones too set in their ways to adapt to an American firm.”
“You are an American, aren’t you?”
“Of course. I was born in New York. But I haven’t any people of my own any more, so I call this home. I expect to stay here forever, or as long as they do. I came to England to play tennis. With a team, you know.”
“Oh. At Wimbledon, you mean?”
Her face clouded.
“I didn’t get to play at Wimbledon, but I did play at the Queen’s Club, and I’m sure I would have played at Wimbledon another year. I’m mad about tennis in England. Everybody loves it, you know. I mean, the public, and that makes it wonderful for the players. Mrs. Heyward saw me play and looked me up, and when she found out that I had to earn my living, she asked me to be her secretary. I jumped at it. Back home I had worked in an office, and it was almost impossible to get in enough tennis, in fact, I couldn’t’ve gone on playing if she hadn’t made a job for me. She invented the job. But I didn’t know it then. She really didn’t need a secretary, then, so I had only a few hours’ work each day and all the rest of the time I could play tennis. Hours and hours. In winter I played indoors, that is till after Christmas, then Mrs. Heyward took me to Cannes. On the Riviera, you know.” Joyce’s light blue eyes were shining now. “The ideal thing, of course, is to play in England in May and June, then go to America, then come back to southern France in winter, and back to Paris in the spring, then to England again. Cannes, Nice and Monte Carlo are marvelous. They have wonderful tennis there. The courts are a reddish clay, simply marvelous, awfully fast and terribly good to play on. The French champions were there that year for winter practice. It was so exciting. Quite often I was invited to play against one of them. And the King of Sweden was there—he’s crazy about tennis—oh, it was all so gay, so much fun, and everything was so beautiful. We visited people in the lovely villas and went to the casinos. Kip stayed with us six weeks, for his midwinter holidays, and we all went on to Rome, and I also played a lot of tennis there, mostly with Kip. The Italians had a nice club, but they haven’t gone in much for tennis yet—hadn’t, I should say. Their girls don’t play yet at all—didn’t.” Joyce smiled. “When I start talking tennis I forget there’s a war.”
She paused to take breath. “It was the very finest time I ever had in all my life. I was really Mrs. Heyward’s protegee, you know. There wasn’t any work at all during that time, though she invented things for me to do because I’m sort of dependent and it bothered me not to earn my salary. Kip’s a fine player, by the way, though he pretends not to take it seriously.”
“Kip doesn’t take things too seriously, does he?”
Joyce herself looked serious. “Kip’s very serious. He only pretends to frivol. Inside, he is all seriousness. Oh, Mrs. Abbott, you’ve set the table American style—well, never mind. Cook won’t see it, I guess. We went to Milan that winter, too. While Kip was still with us. They’ve got a fine club in Milan. Had. Then Kip came back to Oxford, and we returned to Cannes. I was playing awfully good form. They said my overhead smash was the best of any woman player. That was why Mrs. Heyward stayed on, though I didn’t know it at the time. She’s like that. She never lets on when she’s doing something nice for you. And I was having such a good time that I didn’t realize what a sacrifice it was for her to stay down there and keep pretending that she was loving the winter sunshine, which is somewhat thin, by the way, for American taste. Of course, later on, I realized she had done it for me. She loves her home and she adores Mr. Heyward and worships Kip, and it was really hard for her to stay away like that. She did it entirely for me, to give me my chance to play at Wimbledon. And then, in the very first match, I played after coming home to England, what did I do, but sprain an ankle and I had to wear it taped for six months whenever I played—meanwhile the war began and that ruined international tennis, of course.”
Joyce stood idle, her mind numbed by the disaster that had befallen tennis, her hands working.
“Well be having it again soon,” I said, optimistically.
“I’ll be too old,” Joyce said.
“Oh, go on!” I said.
She looked tragic. “I’m thirty. That’s old, for tennis. If you’re championship stuff you’re getting to the top at eighteen or nineteen or twenty at the most. I was past twenty-five before I even had a look-in. You can’t take the grilling in the big matches after you’re thirty—oh, I might play in doubles or something, but who wants that? The war spoiled things for me, and not getting started early enough.” She added bitterly, “Having made the fatal error to start with of being born poor, and then having to support myself as a stenographer at a time when I should have been playing tennis and nothing else.”
She opened a door in the sideboard and handed me a stack of napkins. Her voice and manner softened. “It might have been worse, Mrs. Abbott. I might not have come to England at all. I might not have met Mrs. Heyward and had that beautiful winter in France and Italy. At least that was something. By the way, I saw some time ago that Baron Gottfried von Cramm was taken prisoner in Africa—he was the most beautiful player I ever watched.” Joyce said then, “If all the German children were required to play tennis, there would never be any wars.”
“Why so?” I asked.
“Because tennis teaches fair play. There were no better losers at Wimbledon than the Germans. If Hitler had given them tennis, instead of war games—well, don’t let me get started on that! I’ll be back in a moment,” she said then, and went off through the butler’s pantry towards the kitchen.
She came back almost at once with a great stack of plates which she settled upon the proper heater, or warmer perhaps it is called, on the sideboard.
I asked, “What made you let Mrs. Erickson beat you this morning?”
Joyce answered sharply, “I didn’t let her beat me, Mrs. Abbott.”
“Oh, you must have. You can play rings around that gal. Even I can see that.”
She said, “In a series, no doubt. But she outplayed me in two sets this morning, and won fairly enough.”
“Maybe. Though I don’t like her kind of tennis.”
“Neither do I. I prefer hard tennis, fast services, hard hitting from the back of the courts, with an occasional trick near the net, but that doesn’t mean that Lorna didn’t win fairly. She did. She confused me by talking a lot and she lobbed little balls over that for some reason I smashed into the net one after another. But that’s all in the game. Lorna won, and since our schedule was arranged so that no two players would meet twice, her winning our match stands.” She continued, “We’ll get to play some tennis this afternoon, I hope—after what’s happened has been—taken care of—and the police gone and all, or whatever it is they will do. Mrs. Heyward said we should go on with the tournament. She urges it, in fact.”
Joyce went out and fetched ice water. I filled the glasses, listening to the pleasant clink of the ice, cherishing it as the luxury it is in England.
“Well, when the tournament’s over, challenge Lorna and lick the daylights out of her,” I said. “Just for fun.”
Joyce’s eyes bulged. “Oh, no. She won fairly.”
“But you’re the best.”
She said stubbornly, “I lost the match to Lorna.”
I thought suddenly I would question her about Lorna. I dallied with the idea while she was kept busy doing this and that, going and coming to and from the kitchen, setting the stage for the meal. But I let it go.
“Lorna is a very remarkable person,” she volunteered, presently. “I think there is nothing she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do, if she made up her mind.”
That rang a bell. Mrs. Heyward had said the same thing. Possibly she had given Joyce the idea.
“You mean, she made up her mind in advance to beat you? And did? Well, why can’t you make up your mind to beat her back?”
“Because we won’t have another match,” Joyce said doggedly. “Not this week, anyway. What’s more, she wouldn’t play if I suggested it. She would refuse, and laugh at me.”
“She’s not a very good sport, is she?”
Joyce moved her shoulders. “Perhaps if Lorna had learned tennis as a child her whole attitude toward life would be different. Maybe she would be loyal, then. To her husband and to her friends and all.” She clasped her hands. “Oh, I shouldn’t’ve said that! You see, they’re in Mr. Heyward’s business, and I see Todd—Mr. Erickson—every day, and what with this or that—oh, dear, I’ve talked too much.”
“Never mind. I forget easily, Joyce.”
“Oh. Thank you,” she said, with a touch of that humility which troubled me, in an American, and off she went towards the kitchen, looking back suddenly to thank me for helping and to add that there wasn’t anything more to do now.
I went to our room. Patrick hadn’t come back. I washed my hands and rearranged my green bow.
The gong sounded. I didn’t know if that meant dinner would be ready at once, or what, so I came downstairs and started looking for Patrick. He wasn’t in the Big Room. No one was there, and it was even more beautiful in the midday light than at any time. I went on and looked in the drawing-room. Sally O’Neill and Dicey were there, sitting on the sofa. They said it would be ten minutes, maybe more, before the second gong sounded for dinner.
I went upstairs again.
Patrick had come in, and was washing, in the bathroom. The door stood partially open.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello.”
Patrick started brushing his teeth.
“What did Mr. Heyward want, darling?”
Patrick didn’t answer. I asked it again.
“Bshineeth,” he explained.
“Brushing your teeth?”
“Um-m.”
“Oh. I helped Joyce set the table.”
“Um-m?”
“She certainly is devoted to the family. It all connects with her tennis.”
