When they had gone Tyler stalked across to the office on the other side of the passage where his devil, Arthur McNeill, was poring over some papers. McNeill looked up as a bundle of fresh papers was dropped on the table before him. Tyler did not speak but went and stood with his back to the fire, his brilliant eyes fixed on his colleague.
There was silence.
‘A fortnight’s work for you, Arthur. Drop that other stuff and put your mind to this. This Talbot fellow, who’s accused of strangling his mistress. It’s all before you.’
‘You’re leading?’ McNeill said, screwing up his face as he stared at the top page. ‘What’s the odds?’
‘Heavy against him, but it’s all circumstantial. We can shake that. There are things in his favour, obvious things: his education, his army career, his good reputation –’
‘I shouldn’t bank too much on that, Stephen.’
Tyler flung up his arm. ‘Rot. We can get an acquittal. There’s one definite line. But I want your opinion. Go through it piece by piece. If you have any idea come and tell me. The man’s innocent I feel, and it will be a good life to save.’
On Good Friday Philippa paid one of her usual visits to Nick, who had been moved to Brixton Remand Prison.
It took quite a lot to frighten Philippa, but this place did. From the outside it might have been a medieval castle built by some gloomy baron whose rule rested on terror and brute power. But inside it was much, much worse. As far as she could see it consisted – apart from the endless disinfected stone corridors and the blank lime-washed reception-rooms – of a number of great chambers with the cells in tiers, looking across at each other from among barred balustrades and iron ladders. Such things she had seen in American prison films but had never before quite believed in. Nick called them the Mappin Terraces.
But privately his sense of humour was wearing a little thin. While he was in Bow Street he had not quite been able to take the charge seriously; although he had hated it all he had not in his heart believed the police meant to bring him up on a capital charge. It was his move to Brixton, far more than the magistrates’ committal, which had brought it home to the very last detail. The English law said he was innocent until proved guilty; but in the interim police law inevitably had to ensure that he was maintained, guarded, fed, regimented and preserved until such time as he came up for trial. He was treated kindly enough, allowed to keep his own clothes, to smoke and to read in off times and was allowed to see Philippa once a day. But he had been stripped, searched, medically examined, deprived of all articles which might tempt him to suicide and locked away in a cell. Each day he was exercised with other prisoners awaiting trial; each day the prison ate away his good spirits: the high draughty glooms of the place, the noises of clanking buckets and nailed boots, the hygienic but unsavoury smells. If he had been guilty he felt he would long since have lost all hope. It seemed even to implant a sense of guilt where none existed. Sometimes he woke in the night and began to swear at his thoughts.
To Philippa he was always bright enough, but she knew him well enough to see beneath the surface. Perhaps she even read into his mind some of her own feelings. At Bow Street he had said he didn’t suffer from claustrophobia, but she felt that no one could fail to suffer from it in this place. Her own imprisonment in Italy had been in fairly pleasant surroundings and with plenty of latitude inside the camp, but even there the endless years had weighed so heavy on her that at times she had felt herself inside a tiny contracting cage against which she must beat her fists and cry out. How much worse must Nick feel inside what was in fact a tiny cage, knowing what was before him and knowing that all the time the law was working to get him more securely in its grip.
Sometimes, to deflect her obvious distress, he joined in her attempt at amateur detection, though he hadn’t the slightest faith in them. He could see that her activity was useful to her if not to him. On only one point did he argue angrily with her, and that was on the breaking of her operatic career. He felt that her withdrawing at this stage would do him no good and herself untold harm. He was set on her becoming the leading European soprano of the day, and confident that nothing much stood in her way. He could fend for himself. In any case, irrespective of his own future, they must think of hers.
After two weeks of freedom Philippa was tired but not discouraged, and she was anxious to tell him her movements and her plans. She had been making inquiries, treading uselessly in the footsteps of the police. Wherever she went they had been first; but there was a consolation in this active response to Nick’s imprisonment. Not only did it help to salve her conscience over that night, it also occupied her mind and body in the only way it was at present willing to work.
She had been to Elizabeth Rusman’s lodgings, but had been turned away, she had met Mike Grieve and talked with him, but his response had been surly. Some of the lodgers were more agreeable, but their information hadn’t helped, since they were out at the time of the murder. Later she had called on Mr Till, who had found Elizabeth Rusman her new engagement, and he had been very helpful in giving her the history of Elizabeth Rusman’s pre-war employments. This had given her something to work on, and she had been all over the south of England.
Yet every alley was blind after a few turns, and every contact she made was curiously lacking in another respect. Nowhere could she find a friend of Elizabeth Rusman. Acquaintances enough, and one or two people who had known her pretty well, but none would agree to the description as applied to themselves. ‘Well,’ they would say, ‘I knew her quite well and for a time we went about a bit together, but I wouldn’t say we were exactly friends.’ It seemed that when she came back to England after her long absence she had looked up none of these acquaintances she had made before. Philippa wondered why.
Of course there was much to be done yet – especially in America. But as she went about her quest this week she realized that through a mistaken sense of not wanting to re-open a subject which had been the cause of their quarrel she was neglecting a source which might supply the answer to that question and a number of others as well. There was one person who could not deny he had known Elizabeth intimately, and that was …
‘Nick,’ she said, breaking in at the end of something he was saying, ‘I want you to tell me more about Elizabeth Rusman.’
He frowned, changing the direction of his thoughts; looked at her over the glass partition that was between them and lifted one eyebrow in quizzical concern.
‘Haven’t we had enough of her?’
‘No. Not nearly enough, Nick. Since that awful night we’ve avoided her like the plague –’
‘I thought we’d done nothing else but talk of her.’
‘Oh, yes, of the murder. But not of what happened five years ago. I want to know all about that. It may give me some idea of why she acted as she did, going off to America –’
‘I’ve told the police all the facts.’
‘All they’ve asked. But not the whole history of it, where you met, what happened … Forget I was ever jealous, Nick. This is – above pettiness. Remember that she’s dead and you’re accused of killing her. You’re in danger, terrible danger. No sort of false shyness must stand in our way over this. I want to know –’
‘What good will knowing it do you?’
‘I can’t tell. I don’t know till I hear. But I want to hear.’
He shrugged. ‘ Some time perhaps –’
‘No. Now.’
He was silent. ‘ Oh, it’s nonsense.’
‘Tell me, please,’ she said. ‘Tell me how you first met.’
He lit a cigarette, glanced at his watch.
‘It was after I came back from Nigeria – you know, I’d been prospecting for the government out there. I’d come back to join up and met her at a house party. We – more or less teamed up at once. I got very fond of her and in fact toyed with the idea of marriage; it was then that I wrote those letters the police found, but somehow it didn’t really get round to marriage. We quarrelled and separ
ated and came together again, and quite suddenly, without any special cause except the war, decided to go off together. We spent three weeks in Wales. Then we quarrelled again and that was the end of it. I was drafted abroad almost at once and never saw her again until the night at Covent Garden.’
He met his wife’s gaze. His eyes were embarrassed but a little relieved, as if he was thankful that much was over.
‘But why did you quarrel?’ she asked.
He looked at his cigarette. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You must know.’
‘Damn it!’ He knocked the ash off into a tray. ‘What does one quarrel about? The simplest, absurdest things. We should know.’
‘But you weren’t going to leave me, were you?’
‘Of course not. You silly. That was quite different. Very soon after we went away I realized I didn’t really love her. It made the last part of our three weeks a dismal failure. When –’
‘But what made you decide you didn’t love her?’
He shook his head as if trying to shake away the question. ‘ I don’t know, Philippa. She was pretty, she was fun; but it was one of those things. Intimacy is a sort of crucible, I think: either it refines one’s love or the feeling disintegrates and proves to be fake. My feeling was fake. That was why I had rather a guilty conscience about her when we met again back stage.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, I had been fond of her, and I did leave her. And the interval of years had rather glossed over her fault and made me feel a heel about it.’
There was silence. Time was nearly up.
Philippa said: ‘Do you think she went with other men?’
‘I wasnt the first. But she was not the sort who would go off with anybody for the sake of a good time. She would have married me if it had got that far.’
‘Did she never speak to you of her friends?’
‘I dont think so.’
‘Or her plans?’
‘I can’t remember that, she did. Anyway, it’s surely so long ago that it can hardly have any bearing.’
‘You can never be sure, Nick. Think. Try to think. Anything. Your life may depend on it.’
‘Don’t you think I’d help you if I possibly could?’
‘Tomorrow I’m going to Holland to see her only living aunt. She may have visited her there since the liberation. While I’m away think hard of everything you did together, any names she may have mentioned, anything which could help me.’
‘I’d far rather think of the time I’ve spent with you.’
‘I’ve also been trying to get an air passage to America,’ she said. ‘They say they’re all booked, but perhaps I can get some sort of priority. It seems almost certain now that the clue lies in New York.’
The prison officer sitting at the end of their table gave a discreet cough. It was borne in upon Nick that because of her going to Holland he would not see her for two or three days. The shadow of this knowledge crossed his eyes. Her visit was the only thing in the day.
‘Dont worry,’ he said. ‘I like the looks of Tyler: I’m sure it will be all right.’
‘Between us we’ll make it sure,’ she said, and turned to go.
Chapter Eleven
Philippa thought of her promise several times during the Easter week-end she spent at The Hague. Tyler, like herself, would do his best; but she hoped his efforts would be surer than hers. In a little scrupulously tidy kitchen she saw the old aunt, while a cat rubbed against her legs and fitful sun lit up the patterns of the faded rugs.
Through an interpreter it was almost impossible to get at the surviving Miss Rusman. She was worse than deaf, being inattentive with the mental deafness of old age. Once her mind had been edged into the right groove it went clicking over into the well-worn ridges of opinion formed twenty years ago. Even Philippa, who knew no word of the language, could pick out the repetitions. Elizabeth had always been a wilful child; no care for her parents. No, she had not seen her for many years. She was not the sort of girl to come visiting her old relatives. No, she had no photograph, except one at the age of five with her father, which the police had taken. What? Oh, yes, the police had been. She was not surprised, for Elizabeth had always been a wilful child, no care for her parents. Other relatives? Yes, there was one; Peter Schuyleman, who lived at Utrecht. A cousin. Age? About the same age as Elizabeth, who had always been a wilful child …
On Sunday Philippa went to Utrecht and found that Peter Schuyleman had died during the occupation. On the Monday she returned to England and the following morning early she called again on Inspector Archer and told him she had decided to go to America – could he furnish her with the necessary addresses.
Archer looked at her with a certain degree of discomfort. He noted the signs of fatigue on the girl’s face.
‘It’s less than ten days to the trial, Mrs Talbot,’ he said. ‘You could do nothing in the time. All this side has been covered, I assure you.’
‘It’s better than – just sitting waiting. I might find out something. I’d rather go.’
He said: ‘You’ve been tiring yourself out enough, Mrs Talbot.’
‘Oh, it isn’t what I’ve been doing,’ she said, ‘so much as knowing that my husband’s innocent – it’s the knowing that you’re making a terrible mistake and not being able to do anything to stop it.’
He had been watching her very closely. He was not a mean judge of character.
She said: ‘Can you give me permission to see the room where the murder took place? They wouldn’t let me in.’
‘We can do that. But the room has been cleared up and everything taken out.’
‘And Elizabeth Rusman’s belongings?’
‘Some of them are exhibits at the trial.’
‘But not all. Not everything she wore and …’
‘I can show you some of the things. Isn’t it rather a forlorn hope?’
‘It’s almost a last hope. But sometimes a woman notices things …’
He picked up a telephone and spoke into it. After a few minutes a constable brought in a suitcase and a violin case. He put them on a table, unlocked them and then withdrew. Slowly Philippa rose and went over to the table. She lifted the lid of the suitcase and stared down at the clothes within, some of them charred and almost ready to crumble. As she touched them there rose to her nostrils a faint feminine scent. It was the only remaining trace of the personality of their owner. Philippa shivered.
Archer had come to stand beside her. She forced herself to go on lifting them out.
‘Is there nothing in these things to give you any clue at all?’ she asked.
‘The suit is from Paris Modes, who have shops all over the country. The shoes are from multiple shops. The nightdress is Celanese. The evening dress was bought in Bournemouth five years ago.’
‘They’ve all been bought in England, then?’
‘The handbag is American. Otherwise she must have restocked herself when she returned.’
She frowned, half sensing some illogicality here. ‘Had she no personal papers?’
‘Your – the murderer destroyed them.’
‘But he didn’t destroy Nick’s two letters.’
‘They were hidden in the lining of the violin case.’
Philippa turned and opened the case, lifted out the violin and stared at the torn lining. It was a good violin though rather small, a Grancino, and probably worth a couple of hundred pounds.
‘Did she have any money on her? Had she no banking account?’
‘None under her own name at any rate.’
Philippa put the violin back and turned over the pieces of music at the bottom of the suitcase. Two or three Mozart and Beethoven sonatas. A series of exercises and the Bach Chaconne. After a moment her fingers stopped and she slipped out a single sheet of manuscript music.
‘Was this in with the others?’
‘Yes.’
It was a simple tune, scored in ink on home-ruled paper. Either Elizabeth had copied it somewhere o
r she had experimented in composing for herself.
Philippa hummed the tune under her breath. She did not know it.
‘Could I have this?’ she asked.
‘I’m afraid not until after the trial.’
She half put the sheet back, then changed her mind and jotted down the first bars on the back of an envelope. It might be worth trying some music shop.
She felt that Archer was getting impatient, and in fact she knew she had taken up enough of his time. The last thing she wanted to do was to become a nuisance to him so that he would avoid seeing her.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very kind. You’ll try to help me about a visit to New York?’
‘I’ll let you know tomorrow,’ he promised.
‘This Elena Rusman,’ said the Assistant Commissioner, frowning. ‘You’re quite sure she is not now the same person? That’s been confirmed?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Archer, flipping through the papers he had brought. ‘Final word came just before I phoned you. Elena Rusman left this country in 1942 with the Dutch children of M. van Ruysdael. She stayed in New York with them until last year, when she left them and they lost trace of her. It all seemed to fit in perfectly. But she’s now been definitely identified as married and living in Montana. A photograph is being radioed and we should get it tomorrow.’
‘It’s most confoundly awkward there should have been this slip up,’ said the Director of Public Prosecutions. ‘It may give the impression that we have been over-precipitate in bringing this man to trial. I dont like that. I shall be seriously inclined to recommend a postponement of the trial for three weeks.’