Plain Murder

  Morris, with his hand on the rope, stood and hesitated. Someone in the house must have heard that noise; it was penetrating enough. Even if it made no impression now it would be vividly recalled when Oldroyd was found hanging to those hooks. Even the little rumble made when the bed was jerked across the floor might have been heard. That would lead to Morris’s death by hanging as well as Oldroyd’s, and Morris’s life was a thing infinitely more precious than Oldroyd’s. Morris was sane enough still to retain the instinct for safety and retreat. The moment after he had pulled the noose tight again he released it once more. More air flooded into Oldroyd’s lungs and his frantic writhings ceased. Morris lowered him to the floor and bent over him.

  Oldroyd put both hands to the rope and pulled it loose. Morris had left it amply loose enough for him to breathe, but Oldroyd pulled it looser still. He did not cease until the loop was at least a yard in diameter, the while he breathed deeper and deeper yet, staring up the while at Morris’s grim face bent over him. In a new spasm of terror he tried to writhe away from him.

  ‘It’s all right now, you fool,’ said Morris. ‘I’m not going to kill you after all.’

  Oldroyd was too busy gulping down air and rubbing his aching throat to make any reply beyond a gasp and a grunt.

  Morris regarded him with a complexity of emotions. Disappointment may have been the main one, but he felt very weary and stupid, too. But he felt no sense of defeat. Morris’s mentality did not admit that sort of feeling now. He explained the recent failure to himself as a test of circumstances. He had made a trial, and the trial had proved that what he wished to do could not be done; if it could not be done by Morris it was an impossible thing to do. The trial, then, was almost as satisfactory as the success which Morris was sure would come sooner or later. At the same time he thought of an explanation which would maintain his standing in Oldroyd’s eyes as a dangerous man, a man to be feared.

  ‘Let that be a lesson to you,’ he said. ‘If I’d wanted to, you’d be dangling from those hooks now, as dead as a doornail. That’ll teach you to meddle with me. Another time I won’t let you off.’

  Oldroyd goggled up at him from his seat on the floor.

  ‘Behave yourself another time,’ said Morris, and he wheeled about and strode from the room.

  The sensations experienced in his descent of the stairs were not what he had anticipated earlier in the evening. He had looked forward to leaving a dead man behind him, hanging in that dark corner of the room. It would have been so simple. Braithwaite and the others would have been so ready to bear testimony both to Oldroyd’s abstracted behaviour and his recent bad work at the office. He himself would have given evidence that he had called to give Oldroyd very serious warning that dismissal was imminent. The conclusion which any coroner’s jury would have reached would be that as soon as Morris had departed Oldroyd had hanged himself in despair. No one at all would have suspected Morris, especially (as Morris guessed) because murder by hanging is the rarest form of homicide known.

  It was a pity that the trial had been unsuccessful. It would have been so convenient had it succeeded. Oh, well, another scheme would present itself shortly. Morris did not attempt to think one out as he directed his dragging footsteps homeward. He was feeling very tired.

  20

  Mr Charles Morris, nevertheless, had the right sort of welcome accorded him when he reached home; the kind of welcome a tired man should receive. When his key was heard in the door his wife emerged speedily from the sitting-room and ran to the front door to open it. As he came in she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed his mouth (that heavy, cruel mouth) tenderly. She hung up his hat and helped him off with his coat. Then she led him into the sitting-room. In a twinkling his supper was ready and on the table for him, and she sat beside him and made a pretence of eating with him. Yet at frequent intervals during his meal she put out a thin hand and allowed it to rest on one of his thick ones; then their eyes would meet. There was a world of tenderness in her eyes.

  The glance that Morris would give her in return showed no sign of pure or tender passion. It was a sensual bold glare which one would expect of Morris, with all the force of his coarse passion behind it, but it was very pleasant to Mrs Morris. It was long since Morris had looked at her with any passion at all. And after supper Morris rose from the table and, disregarding his wife’s pleased expostulations, he carried the dirty crockery out into the scullery and washed it up. It was a very amateurish washing-up; the condition in which he left the saucepans would have brought tears to the eyes of a housewife who was not in love with him, but the whole operation was evidently pleasing to his wife. Then, when the washing-up was finished, he came back to the fireside, and Mrs Morris, instead of taking up her customary seat opposite him, pulled her chair round beside him and sat close to him.

  They even talked. They even exchanged light gossip. Morris even told Mary a few interesting things about the office – that office which had been a sacred mystery to Mary ever since the days of their honeymoon years before. She listened enraptured. The world was a very pleasant and delectable place to her now that her husband showed in so many ways that he loved her.

  That, of course, was exactly the impression which Morris wanted to convey to her. He had been doing this sort of thing for some weeks now, because he wanted his wife to come to believe that he liked nothing so well as her society, that he could never be satiated with it, that hours spent in her company passed as quickly as minutes spent away from her. Morris was clumsy at it. He had no subtlety or delicacy in his actions, but he was successful. He could hardly help but be successful with a lonely woman like Mrs Morris, especially as there was nothing in the world which she wanted so much as the certainty that Charlie loved her – partly because she loved him, and partly because she was possessed of a certain amount of egoism which made attentions to her especially pleasant. It was that egoism which had made a nagging wife of her when Morris neglected her, just as it made a tender, thoughtful wife of her now that he paid her attention.

  The conversation went back and forth around unimportant subjects for a time. Then:

  ‘I met Mrs Herbert this morning while I was shopping,’ said Mrs Morris.

  ‘Yes? And what did she have to say?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much. But didn’t she look at me though! She wanted me to say something about it, but I wouldn’t. Does it show very much, then, Charlie? I didn’t think it did.’

  ‘Yes, it does a bit,’ said Charlie. ‘But not a terrific lot as yet.’

  It was rather an understatement. Three pregnancies in quick succession, and none of them properly managed, had made even Mrs Morris’s slight figure ungainly and awkward. Her condition was obvious at a glance.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Mrs Morris. Despite (or perhaps because of) her husband’s cautious reply, Mrs Morris guessed at the truth. ‘I didn’t want it to show so early. The tradespeople do look at one so.’

  ‘Well,’ said Morris – this was an opening he had been waiting for for several days – ‘well, you’ve still got time to – you remember what Mrs Whatshername did.’

  ‘Oh, Charlie,’ said Mrs Morris, with a world of disappointed reproach in her tone, ‘you don’t want me to do that; I know you don’t. Why, it was only last week you told me – how glad you were.’

  She scanned Morris’s face anxiously. In his expression there appeared just enough of Morris’s actual feelings to make her feel hurt and dejected. She stiffened and broke into rapid speech again.

  ‘No, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to, Charlie. I don’t want to. I told you before I didn’t want to. And I’m not going to.’

  There were even tears in her eyes, tears of disappointment that this loving husband of hers should be so ignorant of her own wishes.

  She was condemning herself to death by those words, but that she did not know. Morris changed his tactics instantly. He had given his wife a fair chance. Up to that moment his new
plan of campaign had permitted two possible developments. One – and that the one which, to give him his due, he would have preferred – had come to naught in consequence of his wife’s obstinacy. It only remained, therefore, to work on towards the other end – the end being the death of his wife. As consolation, his wife’s death, as contrasted with her miscarrying, had the further advantage of permitting him to marry Doris Campbell. At the thought of that a little warm thrill ran through him, and he hastened to erase the bad impression his tentative suggestion had made.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do. Do just as you like, and that’s what I shall like.’

  Three weeks ago, before Charlie had begun to woo her again, such a charming speech from her husband might have roused her suspicion. Even as it was she looked at him sharply. But the animal glare of devotion with which he met her eyes suppressed any lurking wonder she may have felt. Even if Charlie, in his heart of hearts, she thought, did not want the child to be born, he was suppressing such a wish in deference to her own desires, and that was more pleasing than ever. She smiled at him and leaned over to him so that her head was on his shoulder. That gave Morris a chance to caress her and quite eradicate any lingering suspicion on her part. When Morris went a-wooing his actions were much more eloquent than his words.

  ‘What about the pictures tomorrow evening?’ asked Morris later.

  ‘That would be nice. I was going to ask you, but I was afraid you’d be too tired. There’s a talkie at the Hippodrome that I’d like to see. It’s called – it’s called – I’ve forgotten what it’s called, but I know I wanted to see it. I’ll ask Mrs Richmond tomorrow morning if Nellie can come in for the evening.’

  Of late, now that Morris had more money to spend, they had begun to pay a girl to sit in the house with the children during evenings when they wished to go out. As a result they had been to the pictures two or three times a week, so that life to Mary Morris, who had hardly been once to a public entertainment since the birth of her first child, was now one long dream of delight. More housekeeping money, a loving husband, and the pictures three times a week – what more could any woman possibly desire? She almost cooed with happiness as she snuggled up to her husband’s shoulder.

  ‘Now that the summer’s coming in we’ll have to get that girl in for the day sometimes on a Sunday, so that we can have the whole day out together,’ said Morris. That was the first definite step towards objective number two.

  ‘Ooh!’ said Mary. ‘Goodness! Where shall we go?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Morris, ‘out in the country somewhere. We can go on the river. It’s years since I’ve been on the river.’

  That was bare truth. Once in his life had Morris gone rowing on the Thames. He had never before to his wife expressed the least yearning for a day in the country with her whether on the river or not. She said as much.

  ‘I didn’t know you liked the river, Charlie,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, I do,’ said Charlie. ‘Love it.’

  ‘Where? Kew? Hampton Court?’

  Charlie smiled at her pityingly.

  ‘You don’t know the river like I do,’ he said. ‘Why, Kew and Hampton Court’s nothing to what it is higher up: Maidenhead, where the nobs go. There’s Cliveden Reach there, just lovely. And there’s Marlow and Windsor and all sorts of places.’

  With objective number two in mind, Morris had lately been reading a guide-book to the Thames. That was how he knew more about the river than his wife did. Cliveden Reach and Quarry Woods and Bell Weir were no more than names to him either.

  ‘What are they like?’ asked his wife.

  ‘Oh, lovely. Big cliffs covered with trees standing up beside the river. Birds singing. And lonely.’

  If Mrs Morris had had any cause to suspect him, if she had known as much about Morris as Oldroyd did, for instance, she might have noticed a little change of tone as Morris uttered that last word.

  ‘Lonely,’ repeated Morris. He was conscious of that change of tone, and corrected it at the repetition.

  ‘It sounds nice,’ said Mary. ‘Although we don’t have to go and look for lonely places nowadays, do we?’

  She laughed happily as she pressed her face against her husband’s shoulder. His arm tightened round her instinctively and he kissed her, brutally, as usual. He had no particular desire to kiss her, but he had to maintain appearances, and that was an obvious moment for a kiss. As their lips met together he thought of Doris Campbell and pressed her closer to him. She was perfectly, exquisitely happy. Perhaps these weeks of happiness with a husband who was deliberately plotting her murder would have been considered worth the subsequent tragedy by Mary; certainly it was the happiest time of her life. It was a pity that Morris had not considered it worth while to win the domestic peace and happiness which now were his for the asking without having objective number two solely in his mind. But it never occurred to him to try wooing his wife in this tender fashion save in accordance with a plan; and once Morris had begun to put a plan into practice it never occurred to him that he could leave off. He had to carry it through to the bitter end; that was his nature. It was a dogged characteristic which, however praiseworthy, had very decided disadvantages.

  What Morris had suggested came to pass in a few weeks’ time, as, of course, was only to be expected. One Sunday morning Mr and Mrs Morris rose early and scanned with anxiety the promise of the heavens. Nellie Richmond arrived to take charge of the children, and Mr and Mrs Morris, after a hurried breakfast, started off, she all a-bubble with excitement, and he, as ever, looking anxiously at his watch and hastening their steps to catch the train.

  It was a long, tiring day, and Mrs Morris, if the truth must be told, found it rather exhausting although wholly delightful. They took the train to Charing Cross, and then the tube to Paddington, and at Paddington they just caught the fast train to Maidenhead. From Maidenhead Station it was a long walk to the river, but Mrs Morris did not mind that, for she was too busy looking about her for all the actresses – and worse – who are notoriously accustomed to living in Maidenhead. At the bridge they hired a skiff; a punt was offered to them and refused. Mrs Morris thought that was because her husband had doubts about his punting ability (and loved him for it), but it may have been because punts are so much more stable than skiffs.

  Then they started off upstream, with Morris rowing in lusty windmill fashion and Mrs Morris, in the stern sheets, admiring his prowess and bare forearms, and very pleased that her husband had put on his purple shirt, which showed to such advantage on the river. Boulter’s Lock swarmed with craft – skiffs, punts and motor-launches – and the Morrises’ skiff crashed into several of them under Morris’s unskilful handling. Black looks were cast at the pair of them by the occupants of the other boats, Jews and Gentiles, but Mrs Morris merely drew herself up and looked down her nose at them. With her husband present she was not going to be put upon by any la-di-da lot of actresses and their boys.

  At last the lock gates opened, and the swarm of boats pressed forward towards Cliveden Reach. Morris’s energetic tugs at his sculls took their skiff along well ahead of the punts, and even ahead of most of the skiffs, despite the zigzag course laid down for their boat by Mrs Morris’s inexperienced steering. They went on past the weir, and soon the whole vista of the beautiful reach, in broad sunshine, dotted with boats with flannelled crews, was opened up to Mrs Morris’s delighted gaze. At her delighted exclamations Morris rested on his sculls and looked over his shoulder; even he was moved by the prospect, although he had to conceal the fact, because he was supposed to have seen Cliveden Reach long before, in the dark, mysterious days before he was married. There are few sights more beautiful than Cliveden Reach on a sunny morning in early summer, with the larks singing overhead and the towering cliffs clothed in their freshest green.

  They rowed up to the top of the reach before they stopped for lun
ch, although by that time it was nearly two o’clock. They moored to the bank, and there Mrs Morris took out their sandwiches from the paper bags, and the cold sausages, and the bananas, and, sitting side by side in the stern seat, they had a delightful picnic lunch, while Morris displayed his purple shirt for the benefit of humanity. Having eaten hugely, they rowed across the river and moored again and, leaving the boat, they landed hurriedly to find beer for Morris. Mrs Morris at the same time drank stout, because she was not very strong just now. Then back again to the shady trees. Morris lay flat on his back in the cushioned seat at the bow, while his wife sat on in the stern and admired the view.

  Very few boats had crews energetic enough to row up as far as here; a few went by, and several motor-launches. There were not many people passing to admire Morris’s purple shirt. They had this part of the river very much to themselves, despite the fact that it was a fine Sunday. Morris took note of that.