Ordeal by Innocence

  "Killed?"

  "It is quite true," said Kirsten.

  "Has Mr. Argyle rung up the police?" "I do not know."

  "Any chance that he's just wounded?" said Don. He turned to take his medical bag out of the car.

  "No," said Kirsten. Her voice was flat and tired. "He is dead. I am quite sure of that. He has been stabbed - here."

  She put her hand to the back of her own head.

  Micky came out into the hall.

  "Hallo, Don, you had better have a look at Tina," he said. "She's fainted."

  "Tina? Oh yes, that's the - the one from Redmyn, isn't it? Where is she?"

  "She is in there."

  "I'll just have a look at her before I go upstairs." As he went into the room he spoke over his shoulder to Kirsten. "Keep her warm," he said, "get some hot tea or coffee for her as soon as she comes round. But you know the drill -"

  Kirsten nodded.

  "Kirsten!" Mary Durrant came slowly along the hall from the kitchen - Kirsten went to her - Micky stared at her helplessly.

  "It's not true." Mary spoke in a loud harsh voice. It's not true! It's a lie you've made up. He was all right when I left him just now. He was quite all right. He was writing. I told him not to write. I told him not to. What made him do it? Why should he be so pig-headed. Why wouldn't he leave this house when I wanted him to?"

  Coaxing her, soothing her, Kirsten did her best to make her relax. Donald Craig strode out of the sitting-room. "Who said that girl had fainted?" he demanded. Micky stared at him.

  "But she did faint," he said. "Where was she when she fainted?'"

  "She was with me... She came out of the house and walked to meet me. Then -she just collapsed."

  "Collapsed, did she? Yes, she collapsed all right," said Donald Craig grimly. He moved quickly towards the telephone.

  "I must get hold of an ambulance," he said "at once."

  "An ambulance?" Both Kirsten and Micky stared at him. Mary did not seem to have heard.

  "Yes." Donald was dialling angrily. "That girl didn't faint," he said. "She was stabbed. Do you hear? Stabbed in the back. We've got to get her to hospital at once."

  Chapter 23

  In his hotel room, Arthur Calgary went over and over the notes he had made. From time to time, he nodded his head.

  Yes... he was on the right track now. To begin with, he had made the mistake of concentrating on Mrs. Argyle. In nine cases out often that would have been the right procedure. But this was the tenth case.

  All along he had felt the presence of an unknown factor. If he could once isolate and identify that factor, the case would be solved. In seeking it he had been obsessed by the dead woman. But the dead woman, he saw now, was not really important. Any victim, in a sense, would have done.

  He had shifted his viewpoint - shifted it back to the moment when all this had begun. He had shifted it back to Jacko.

  Not just Jacko as a young man unjustly sentenced for a crime he did not commit - but Jacko, the intrinsic human being. Was Jacko, in the words of the old Calvinistic doctrine, "a vessel appointed to destruction"?

  He'd been given every chance in life, hadn't he? Dr. MacMaster's opinion, at any rate, was that he was one of those who are born to go wrong. No environment could have helped him or saved him. Was that true?

  Leo Argyle had spoken of him with indulgence, with pity. How had he put it? "One of Nature's misfits." He had accepted the modern psychological approach. An invalid, not a criminal. What had Hester said? Bluntly, that Jacko was always awful!

  A plain, childish statement. And what was it Kirsten Lindstrom had said? That Jacko was wicked! Yes, she had put it as strongly as that. Wicked! Tina had said: "I never liked him or trusted him." So they all agreed, didn't they, in general terms? It was only in the case of his widow that they'd come down from the general to the particular. Maureen Clegg had thought of Jacko entirely from her own point of view. She had wasted herself on Jacko. She had been carried away by his charm and she was resentful of the fact. Now, securely remarried, she echoed her husband's views. She had given Calgary a forthright account of some of Jacko's dubious dealings, and the methods by which he had obtained money. Money...

  In Arthur Calgary's fatigued brain the word seemed to dance on the wall in gigantic letters. Money! Money! Money! Like a motif in an opera, he thought. Mrs. Argyle's money! Money put into trust! Money put into an annuity! Residual estate left to her husband! Money got from the bank! Money in the bureau drawer! Hester rushing out to her car with no money in her purse, getting two pounds from Kirsten Lindstrom. Money found on Jacko, money that he swore his mother had given him.

  The whole thing made a pattern - a pattern woven out of irrelevant details about money.

  And surely, in that pattern, the unknown factor was becoming clear.

  He looked at his watch. He had promised to ring up Hester at an agreed time. He drew the telephone towards him and asked for the number.

  Presently her voice came to him, clear, rather childish. "Hester. Are you all right?" "Oh, yes, I'm all right."

  It took him a moment or two to grasp the implication of that accented word. Then he said sharply: "What has happened?"

  "Philip has been killed."

  "Philip? Philip Durrant?"

  Calgary sounded incredulous.

  "Yes. And Tina, too - at least she isn't dead yet. She's in hospital."

  "Tell me," he ordered.

  She told him. He questioned and re-questioned her narrowly until he got all the facts.

  Then he said grimly: "Hold on, Hester, I'm coming. I'll be with you -" he looked at his watch - "in an hour's time. I've got to see Superintendent Huish first."

  II

  "What exactly do you want to know, Dr. Calgary?" asked Superintendent Huish, but before Calgary could speak the telephone rang on Huish's desk and the superintendent picked it up. "Yes. Yes, speaking. Just a moment." He drew a piece of paper towards him, picked up a pen and prepared to write. "Yes. Go ahead. Yes."

  He wrote. "What? How do you spell that last word? Oh, I see. Yes, doesn't seem to make much sense yet, does it? Right. Nothing else? Right. Thanks." He replaced the receiver. "That was the hospital," he said.

  "Tina?" asked Calgary.

  The superintendent nodded.

  "She regained consciousness for a few minutes."

  "Did she say anything?" asked Calgary.

  "I don't really know why I should tell you that, Dr. Calgary."

  "I ask you to tell me," said Calgary, "because I think that I can help you over this business."

  Huish looked at him consideringly.

  "You've taken all this very much to heart, haven't you, Dr. Calgary?" he said.

  "Yes, I have. You see, I felt responsible for reopening the case. I even feel responsible for these two tragedies. Will the girl live?"

  "They think so," said Huish. "The blade of the knife missed the heart, but it may be touch and go." He shook his head.

  "That's always the trouble," he said. "People will not believe that a murderer is unsafe. Sounds a queer thing to say, but there it is. They all knew there was a murderer in their midst. They ought to have told what they knew. The only safe thing if a murderer is about is to tell the police anything you know at once. Well, they didn't. They held out on me. Philip Durrant was a nice fellow - an intelligent fellow; but he regarded this as a kind of game. He went poking about laying traps for people. And he got somewhere, or he thought he got somewhere. And somebody else thought he was getting somewhere. Result: I get a call to say he's dead, stabbed through the back of the neck. That's what comes of messing about with murder and not realising its danger."

  He stopped and cleared his throat. "And the girl?" asked Calgary.

  "The girl knew something," said Huish. "Something she didn't want to tell. It's my opinion," he said, "she was in love with the fellow."

  "You're talking about - Micky?"

  Huish nodded. "Yes. I'd say, too, that Micky was fond of her, in a way. But bein
g fond of anyone isn't enough if you're mad with fear. Whatever she knew was probably more deadly than she herself realised. That's why, after she found Durrant dead and she came rushing out straight into his arms, he took his chance and stabbed her."

  "That's merely conjecture on your part, isn't it, Superintendent Huish?" "Not entirely conjecture, Dr. Calgary. The knife was in his pocket." "The actual knife?"

  "Yes. It had blood on it. We're going to test it, but it'll be her blood all right. Her blood and the blood of Philip Durrant!"

  "But - it couldn't have been."

  "Who says it couldn't have been?"

  "Hester. I rang her up and she told me all about it."

  "She did, did she? Well, the facts are very simple. Mary Durrant went down to the kitchen, leaving her husband alive, at ten minutes to four, at that time there were in the house Leo Argyle and Gwenda Vaughan in the library, Hester Argyle in her bedroom on the first floor, and Kirsten Lindstrom in the kitchen. Just after four o'clock, Micky and Tina drove up. Micky went into the garden and Tina went upstairs, following close on Kirsten's footsteps, who had just gone up with coffee and biscuits for Philip. Tina stopped to speak to Hester, then went on to join Miss Lindstrom and together they found Philip dead."

  "And all this time Micky was in the garden. Surely that's a perfect alibi?"

  "What you don't know, Dr. Calgary, is that there's a big magnolia tree growing up by the side of the house. The kids used to climb it. Micky in particular. It was one of his ways in and out of the house. He could have shinned up that tree, gone into Durrant's room, stabbed him, back and out again. Oh, it needed split-second timing, but it's astonishing what audacity will do sometimes. And he was desperate. At all costs he had to prevent Tina and Durrant meeting. To be safe, he had to kill them both."

  Calgary thought for a moment or two.

  "You said just now, Superintendent, that Tina has recovered consciousness. Wasn't she able to say definitely who stabbed her?"

  "She wasn't very coherent," said Huish slowly. "In fact I doubt if she was conscious in the proper sense of the term."

  He gave a tired smile.

  "All right, Dr. Calgary, I'll tell you exactly what she said. First of all she said a name. Micky..."

  "She has accused him, then," said Calgary.

  "That's what it looks like," said Huish, nodding his head. "The rest of what she said didn't make sense. It's a bit fantastic."

  "What did she say?"

  Huish looked down at the pad in front of him.

  "'Micky.' Then a pause. Then, 'The cup was empty...' then another pause, and then, 'The Dove on the mast.'" He looked at Calgary. "Can you make any sense of that?"

  "No," said Calgary. He shook his head and said wonderingly: "The Dove on the mast... That seems a very extraordinary thing to say."

  "No masts and no doves as far as we know," said Huish. "But it meant something to her, something in her own mind. But it mayn't, you know, have been anything to do with the murder. Goodness knows what realms of fancy she's floating in."

  Calgary was silent for some moments. He sat thinking things over. He said: "You've arrested Micky?"

  "We've detained him. He will be charged within twenty-four hours."

  Huish looked curiously at Calgary.

  "I gather that this lad, Micky, wasn't your answer to the problem?"

  "No," said Calgary. "No, Micky wasn't my answer. Even now -1 don't know." He got up. "I still think I'm right," he said, "but I quite see that I've not got enough to go on for you to believe me. I must go out there again. I must see them all."

  "Well," said Huish, "be careful of yourself, Dr. Calgary. What is your idea, by the way?"

  "Would it mean anything to you," said Calgary, "if I told you that it is my belief that this was a crime of passion?"

  Huish's eyebrows rose.

  "There are a lot of passions, Dr. Calgary," he said. "Hate, avarice, greed, fear, they're all passions."

  "When I said a crime of passion," said Calgary, "I meant exactly what one usually means by that term."

  "If you mean Gwenda Vaughan and Leo Argyle," said Huish, "that's what we've thought all along, you know, but it doesn't seem to fit."

  "It's more complicated than that," said Arthur Calgary.

  Chapter 24

  It was again dusk when Arthur Calgary came to Sunny Point on an evening very like the evening when he had first come there. Viper's Point, he thought to himself as he rang the bell.

  Once again events seemed to repeat themselves. It was Hester who opened it. There was the same defiance in her face, the same air of desperate tragedy. Behind her in the hall he saw, as he had seen before, the watchful, suspicious figure of Kirsten Lindstrom. It was history repeating itself.

  Then the pattern wavered and changed. The suspicion and the desperation went out of Hester's face. It broke up into a lovely, welcoming smile.

  "You," she said. "Oh, I'm so glad you've come!"

  He took her hands in his.

  "I want to see your father, Hester. Is he upstairs in the library?"

  "Yes. Yes, he's there with Gwenda."

  Kirsten Lindstrom came forward towards them.

  "Why do you come here again?" she said accusingly. "Look at the trouble you brought last time! See what has happened to us all. Hester's life ruined, Mr. Argyle's life ruined - and two deaths. Two! Philip Durrant and little Tina. And it is your doing - all your doing!"

  "Tina is not dead yet," said Calgary, "and I have something here to do that I cannot leave undone."

  "What have you got to do?" Kirsten still stood barring his way to the staircase. "I've got to finish what I began," said Calgary.

  Very gently he put a hand on her shoulder and moved her slightly aside. He walked up the stairs and Hester followed him. He turned back over his shoulder and said to Kirsten: "Come, too, Miss Lindstrom, I would like you all to be here."

  In the library, Leo Argyle was sitting in a chair by the desk. Gwenda Vaughan was kneeling in front of the fire, staring into its embers. They looked up with some surprise.

  "I'm sorry to burst in upon you," said Calgary, "but as I've just been saying to these two, I've come to finish what I began." He looked round. "Is Mrs. Durrant in the house still? I should like her to be here also."

  "She's lying down, I think," said Leo. "She - she's taken things terribly hard."

  "I should like her to be here all the same." He looked at Kirsten. "Perhaps you would go and fetch her."

  "She may not want to come," said Kirsten sullenly.

  "Tell her," said Calgary, "that there are things she may want to hear about her husband's death."

  "Oh, go on, Kirsty," said Hester. "Don't be so suspicious and so protective of us all. I don't know what Dr. Calgary's going to say, but we ought all to be here."

  "As you please," said Kirsten. She went out of the room.

  "Sit down," said Leo. He indicated a chair on the other side of the fireplace, and Calgary sat there.

  "You must forgive me," said Leo, "if I say at this moment that I wish you'd never come here in the first place, Dr. Calgary."

  "That's unfair," said Hester fiercely. "That's a terribly unfair thing to say."

  "I know what you must feel," said Calgary, "I think in your place I should feel much the same. Perhaps I even shared your view for a short period, but on reflection I still cannot see that there was anything else that I could have done."

  Kirsten re-entered the room. "Mary is coming," she said.

  They sat in silence waiting and presently Mary Durrant entered the room. Calgary looked at her with interest, since it was the first time he had seen her. She looked calm and composed, neatly dressed, every hair in place. But her face was mask-like in its lack of expression and there was an air about her as of a woman who walks in her sleep.

  Leo made an introduction. She bowed her head slightly.

  "It is good of you to come, Mrs. Durrant," said Calgary. "I thought you ought to hear what I have to say."

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p; "As you please," said Mary. "But nothing that you can say or anyone can say will bring Philip back again."

  She went a little way away from them and sat down in a chair by the window. Calgary looked round him.

  "Let me first say this: When I came here the first time, when I told you that I was able to clear Jacko's name, your reception of my news puzzled me. I understand it now. But the thing that made the greatest impression upon me was what this child here -" he looked at Hester - "said to me as I left. She said that it was not justice that mattered, it was what happened to the innocent. There is a phrase in the latest translation of the Book of Job that describes it. The calamity of the innocent. As a result of my news that is what you have all been suffering. The innocent should not suffer, and must not suffer, and it is to end the suffering of the innocent that I am here now to say what I have to say."