They caught up with me at Chagford, near the edge of Dartmoor. I was having tea, of course, the parlor boarder at a small farmhouse, a writer down from London for a bit of a rest. Nice manners, but no talker. Fond of cats.
They had two fat ones, a black and a white, who liked Devonshire cream as much as I did. The cats and I had our tea together. It was a dismal afternoon, as gray as a prison yard. A hangman’s day. Mists would be hanging in low clumps on the hard yellow gorse of the moor.
There were two of them, a Constable Tressider, local man, though with a Cornish name, and the Scotland Yard man. This one was the enemy. The local man merely sat in the corner and smelled of his uniform.
The other was fiftyish, beautifully built, as they are over there when they are, red-faced, a warrant officer of the Guards without the ruthless, deadly detached voice. He was soft and quiet and friendly. He put his hat on the far end of the long dinner table and picked up the black cat.
“Glad to find you in, sir. Inspector Knight from the Yard. You’ve given us a very nice run for our money.”
“Have tea,” I said. I went over to pull the bell and leaned against the wall. “Have tea—with a murderer.”
He laughed. Constable Tressider did not laugh. His face expressed nothing but the bitter wind on the moor.
“Gladly—but we won’t talk of that other now, if you please. But just to ease your mind—nobody’s in any real trouble over the affair.”
I must have turned pretty white. He jumped for a bottle of Dewar’s on the mantel and shook some of it into a glass faster than I would have thought such a big man could have moved. He had it against my mouth. I gulped.
A hand felt me over, a hand as neat and questing as a hummingbird’s bill, as sharp, as thorough.
I grinned at him. “You’ll have it,” I said. “I just don’t wear it to tea.”
The constable had his tea in the corner, and the Scotland Yard man at the table, with the black cat in his lap. Rank, after all, is rank.
I went back to London with him that same evening.
And there was nothing to it—absolutely nothing.
They had been foxed and they knew it, and as the English always do, they lost as if they were winning. Outwardly, it was, why had I taken the gun? Because she had foolishly handled it, and that frightened me. Oh yes, I see. But it would really have been much better—you see, the Crown—and the inquest being adjourned at the request of the police makes a hint of something wrong, don’t you think? I thought so, contritely.
That was outwardly. Inwardly, I saw it behind the cold gray stone walls of their eyes. The idea had come to them just too late and it was my fault. Just too late had arrived in their bleak, keen minds the possibility of his being just drunk enough and just silly enough to let somebody put a gun in his hand and point it (where he couldn’t see it) and say “Bang!” and make him pull the trigger, with a finger over his lax finger, and then let him fall back—not laughing.
I saw Millicent Crandall at the adjourned inquest, a woman in black I had met somewhere, long ago. We did not speak to each other. I never saw her again. She must have looked ravishing in black chiffon nightgowns. She could wear one now, any day or any year.
I saw Lady Lakenham once, in Piccadilly, by the Green Park, strolling with a man and a dog. She sent them on and stopped. I think the dog was some sort of bob-tailed sheepdog type, but much smaller. We shook hands. She looked marvelous.
We stood in the middle of the pavement, and the English moved around us meticulously, as the English do.
Her eyes were black marble, opaque, calm, at peace.
“You were swell to go to bat for me,” I said.
“Why, darling, I had the grandest time with the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard. The whole place simply swam with Scotch and soda.”
“Without you,” I said, “they might have tried to pin it on me.”
“Tonight,” she said, very quickly, very busily, “I’m terribly afraid I’m all booked up. But tomorrow—I’m staying at Claridge’s. You’ll call?”
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Oh, definitely.” (I was leaving England tomorrow) “So you rode him down on Romeo. I’m being impertinent. Why?”
This on Piccadilly, by the Green Park, while the careful pedestrians eddied.
“Did I? Why, how utterly abominable of me. Don’t you know why?” A thrush, as calm as the Green Park itself.
“Of course,” I said. “Men of his type make that mistake. They think they own every woman who smiles at them.” The wild perfume of her skin came to me a little, as if a desert wind brought it a thousand miles to me.
“Tomorrow,” she said. “About four. You needn’t even telephone, really.”
“Tomorrow,” I lied.
I stared at her until she was quite out of sight. Motionless, utterly motionless. They moved around me politely, those English, as though I were a monument, or a Chinese sage, or a life-sized doll in Dresden china.
Quite motionless. A chill wind blew leaves and bits of paper across the now lusterless grass of Green Park, across the trim walks, almost over the high curbing into Piccadilly itself.
I stood there for what seemed a long, long time, looking after nothing. There was nothing to look after.
Created with Writer2ePub
by Luca Calcinai
Raymond Chandler, Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)
(Series: # )
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