Take My Life by Winston Graham
‘If it’s not a rude question, Mrs Talbot, how long have you been married?’
‘Twelve months.’
‘Have you been in England much of that time?’
‘No, we arrived only three weeks ago.’
Archer smiled suddenly, turning it on with the facial muscles to be reassuring. ‘I know you’ll forgive me if these questions seem impertinent. As a police officer, you know, one gets so used …’ He turned off the smile. ‘Are you happy in your married life?’
Philippa made a little moue of embarrassment. ‘Well, I … of course. Completely. Very happy indeed.’
‘Did you quarrel with your husband last night?’
There was a fractional hesitation while her mind weighed up the question. What did they want?
‘No,’ she said, old instinct carrying the day. ‘Why do you ask?’
The inspector’s eyes moved round the room.
‘You’re a singer, aren’t you, Mrs Talbot? Opera, I believe? What time did you get home last night? Can you remember?’
‘A little before ten, I think.’
‘Did your husband come home with you?’
She got to her feet. ‘What’s the matter? Tell me what’s the matter!’
‘I don’t want you to be alarmed,’ Archer said. ‘But we think Elizabeth Rusman was murdered. Certain facts link your husband with the matter and we think he may be able to help us. He’s been detained at Bow Street for questioning.’
Chapter Six
Mr Frobisher carefully looked at his clerk.
‘Mrs Talbot? Do I know her? Was she the lady waiting when I came in? Ask Mr Forbes if he’ll see Mr Smith when he comes.’
Philippa was shown in.
‘Why, Miss Shelley,’ said Mr Frobisher, rising. ‘ I didn’t recognize you. Of course, it must be six years. You’re Mrs Talbot now?’
Philippa shook hands with him. ‘I came to you, Mr Frobisher; I happened to remember your address and you were the only solicitor I knew. You see, I thought I’d prefer to talk this over with someone.’
‘Do sit down. Some trouble? Don’t hurry yourself. Have you been married long?’
It took some minutes for Philippa to tell Mr Frobisher all he wanted to know about her career; he had known her as a girl of eighteen struggling to make enough money to pay for music lessons abroad. Urgency prompted her to cut him short and to tell him of last night, of Nick’s meeting with Elizabeth Rusman. Shame made her try to minimize the quarrel, to make it seem half horse-play; her face flushed up as she spoke of throwing the bottle of lotion, of Nick’s walking out, of the visit from the police this morning.
‘They seem to imagine Nick may know something about it! The janitor of the lodgings where Elizabeth Rusman was staying described a man he had seen coming out just before she – she was discovered, and they telephoned this description round to hospitals. He’d hurt his face or was holding a handkerchief to it or something. Well, Nick must have gone into a hospital to have his head dressed, and with this description before them they telephoned the police, and the police arrested him just as he was leaving. It’s completely fantastic! I – I haven’t known what to do for the best. It’s seemed like half a day waiting for you to come …’
Mr Frobisher carefully smoothed back his stiff grey hair. His scholarly cautious legal mind went all round the situation, like a cat round a piece of fish, before picking it up.
‘I can understand that. Well understand it. Possibly it is just an unfortunate coincidence. The fact of his being in the neighbourhood at the time; the misfortune of his knowing the dead woman. If so, there’s no doubt we shall soon be able to straighten it out. Where is your husband?’
‘Bow Street.’
‘Well, I think we should go there at once. When we get all the facts we shall be in a better position to act.’
Archer looked at Talbot across the table. He gazed at him without animosity but without favour. Not at all the usual type to be brought in here: the trickster, the petty burglar, the drunk, the disorderly, the pickpocket or the pimp. (The small crimes were so much more numerous than the big, and even the big were usually committed by the small man getting above himself.) Educated men there were in here, but usually they were down-at-heel, suavely apologetic, or arrogant, overfed, uneasy, blustering. Public schoolboys were not a type Archer really approved of. Having worked his way up from nothing with laborious, intelligent application, he did not appreciate the man who started half-way up the ladder for other reasons than pure merit. He found himself at a disadvantage with them in his own profession, and although twenty years of varied experience had given him all the confidence he could need in dealing with a lawbreaker of any class, he was conscious deep down inside him that he was ever so slightly at a disadvantage with this cool self-contained man who was neither shabby nor suave, nor in any degree apologetic.
For this reason he was conscious of a faint antagonism towards Talbot. And because of this feeling it was necessary that he should treat him with more than ordinary consideration.
‘Look, Captain Talbot. This statement you made last night. Here it is; read it over again; I don’t wish to take any unfair advantage of you. You’d had a trying evening, to say the least. Now you’re rested, no doubt you’d like to add to it, or to amend it.’
‘I’ve no wish to do anything of the sort,’ Talbot said, his voice sounding unlike his own in the tiny high room with its cheap magazines and its smell of Jeyes.
‘Well, help us to straighten out these contradictory stories then. When you went to the hospital you told them you’d had an accident in a taxi and had been cut by the breaking glass. When we came along you stuck to that story, gave us all sorts of circumstantial details. It was only when we pressed you further that you completely changed your story, said you’d cut your head in a quarrel with your wife. Well, you obviously can’t expect us to believe both stories. Which one do you prefer this morning?’
Nick said: ‘Are you married yourself, Inspector?’
‘Yes.’ Archer spoke reluctantly, a little irritated by a question which brought his own personality into it.
‘Then surely you must realize the sort of instinct that exists in us all to – to keep our dirty linen for private washing. My wife threw something at me, not really meaning to hit me, but it did. It’s only natural I shouldn’t want to brag about a thing like that.’
‘When we called on your wife this morning she denied ever having had such a quarrel.’
‘Well, I’m glad the same instinct was working in her. But when you told her –’
‘Nor,’ said Archer patiently, ‘ were there any signs of a quarrel in your flat.’
‘What did she say?’
‘When we went into further details she then changed her story, supporting your statement and saying that she had cleared everything up. There was no trace of any broken glass and she claimed that during the night she had brushed up this glass and carried it down to the incinerator in the kitchens. There can of course be no proof of this, but naturally every effort will be made to check up on her statement.’
Archer paused and blew out his cheeks.
‘And in the meantime?’ said Nick.
‘In the meantime I’m afraid we shall have to detain you a little longer. Now, you know, we had to go through the formality of examining your pockets when you came here. This programme was among the effects. ‘‘A performance of Madame Butterfly on Monday the –’’ ’
‘Yes. That’s mine.’
Archer turned it over. ‘On the back we find written ‘‘Elizabeth, 46, Loften Street, W. 1.’’ Is that your writing?’
Nick shifted on his hard chair. ‘No. Miss Rusman wrote that when we happened to meet at the opera last night.’
‘I see. And I suppose she wrote the rest, did she?’
The younger man looked up in surprise. ‘ What do you mean?’
‘This.’ Archer pointed. ‘ ‘‘Don’t fail to come. Alas, the love of women!’’ ’
?
Archer pursed his lips. ‘You mean you didn’t know it was there?’
Nick was lost for a moment in his own memories. ‘ Poor little beggar … No, I merely stuffed the programme in my pocket. I didn’t know she’d written anything else.’
Archer grunted. He was very tired, and for a moment his mind wandered to his own home in Streatham; a new patch of grass where the vegetables had been, and yesterday morning the first green sprouting.
‘Then there are these two letters,’ he said, frowning his re-concentration at the deal table. ‘Written to the dead woman five years ago and found in the lining of her violin case. Finally, there’s this pencil, which you admit to having in your possession as late as yesterday. Yet it was lying on the floor of the room where this young woman was murdered.’
Nick shrugged his shoulders rather hopelessly. ‘ It’s all very unfortunate, I agree. Why she should have kept the letters all this time I can’t think. But surely the explanation of the pencil suggests itself? Have you never loaned a pencil for someone to scribble something down and then forgotten to get it back?’
‘I’m afraid it’s not for us to supply the explanations, Mr Talbot. If that’s the truth, then I am just as anxious to establish it as you are. Now I hope you’ll not object to taking part in an identity parade? Just nine or ten of you dressed exactly alike in mackintoshes and felt hats.’
‘What about this?’ Nick fingered the neat bandage on his forehead.’
‘Oh, all the others will be bandaged just the same. There’ll be nothing to fear on that account.’
The other shrugged again. ‘When do we start?’
Archer got up. ‘I’ll get Sergeant Standish.’
Five minutes later, Nick was standing with nine other strange men, all wearing mackintoshes and all bandaged over the left temple. Yet there was something distinctive about him which seemed to set him apart from the rest. He’d got the stamp of command and the stamp of culture. At a word from the sergeant they all put on dark grey hats and he then went round adjusting them to the same angle. Then they filed out into a big bare room like a polling booth and stood against one wall under the lights.
Three men came in through another door.
There was silence. After a few moments a voice, hoarse with years of beer-drinking, said: ‘Can I get a bit nearer, guv’nor?’
One of the men at the other end came half-way down the room, stood there uncertainly, feeling his neck-band, sucking at his moustache.
‘Will you all turn round, please,’ Archer said.
When they faced the room again the man with the big moustache had come quite close to them and after some moments his eyes fastened on Nick Talbot, Talbot stared back at him bleakly.
‘Blimey, I think that’s ’im,’ Grieve said, pointing. Conviction hardened, hesitation fled. ‘Yes, that’s ’im. That tall one, guv’nor. That one there. I reckon that’s ’im.’
‘Are you sure?’ Archer was behind him, his tired features tightened up at this moment of decision.
‘Yus,’ said Grieve. ‘That’s ’im, I reckon.’
It was all smaller and more shabby than she had expected of the most famous police station in London. The dreary, bare office place with policemen behind the counter, the smell of disinfectant; the little, ragged, dirty man waiting with a smouldering cigarette in his mouth directly under the ‘SMOKING PROHIBITED’ notice; the noise one’s feet made on the tiled floor. It might have been a converted nineteenth-century council school.
As she came in she had seen the bills of the coming night’s opera outside the scene of last night’s triumph. The two things faced each other in her mind. The patient respectable queue waiting to book seats; the middle-aged tart deliberately getting out of a taxi at the police station and flouncing off down the street under the eyes of the constable at the door. The majesty of success and the majesty of the law.
But last night’s was true, worked for through years; this was false, undeserved, would be quickly cast off by common sense. As soon as she saw him she would know it was going to be all right …
As the warder unlocked the door, she tightened her grip on her gloves and wondered what word she should say. But when she went in, and Nick stood up and came towards her, she knew that no word was necessary.
For a few moments they clung to each other, and despite the happiness of the reconciliation she felt at once that this thing was not going to be blown away. She was surprised at the curious strained look in his eyes, the tight little lines about his mouth. She saw the ordeal he had been through, the humiliation and anger and impotence, the first fine threads of fear trying to weave themselves about his mind. He had knocked about the world a good bit, but this was something outside his experience. Like most normal men he had a considerable respect for the law – though he might not betray it to a questioning police officer. He felt this as if he had been brought up on some fake charge for court martial.
‘Phil,’ he said after a moment.
‘Oh, Nick, I … It’s been like a nightmare. What is it all about? Last night –’
‘It’s just a damned silly mistake,’ he said, ‘but I don’t pretend to be amused.’
‘Your head,’ she said, glancing up, and the colour coming to her face again.
‘Oh, that’s all right.’ He made a grimace. ‘Two stitches at the Fitzroy Street Hospital by a surgeon hardly out of his teens who might have been sewing up his brother’s shirt …’
‘What happened after you left?’
‘I walked, and walked, trying to get rid of the spleen that had somehow come between us. For a time the cut stopped bleeding, but then it began again and I went to have it seen to. The surgeon phoned the police, and just, as I was leaving this man Archer turned up and began asking questions. It’s a complete mystery to me.’
His bitter dejected manner alarmed her.
‘Well, it can only be a misunderstanding for a short time. The English police don’t make silly mistakes for long. It’s unpleasant, but there’s no reason to be really alarmed.’
‘That’s what I’ve been telling myself until a few minutes ago,’ he said.
‘What d’you mean?’
He shrugged. ‘They’ve had an identity parade. Ten of us up against a wall. Some man from this boarding house where Elizabeth Rusman died thinks he’s identified me as a man he saw coming out of her room last night.’
She felt as if something had laid cold fingers on her heart.
‘Nick … How could that be …? You didn’t go?’
‘At that time of night? Of course not. I never wanted to see her again.’
‘There must have been someone there like you. A superficial likeness, anyway.’
‘You see, it all fits in; the cut forehead and everything.’
‘But I can confirm your story of what really happened.’
‘Having denied it first, as I did.’ Talbot sighed. ‘Never in my life, Philippa, have I felt so much like a liar as I did last night when I started telling them the truth about our quarrel. They just stood there with dead-pan faces writing it all down. I believe they’d have respected me more if I’d kept to my accident story.’
‘But surely they can’t keep you here!’ Philippa said. ‘ What right have they to put you in a cell!’
‘It isn’t a cell. This is the room where people are detained for questioning. Fortunately I don’t get claustrophobia.’
‘Won’t they release you on bail?’
‘Not yet. The thing for us to do now is get a solicitor.’
She smiled briefly. ‘I’d forgotten. I have one outside.’
He smiled back at her a moment. ‘I shall be in good hands with you to look after my interests. Why had this to happen, Philippa? Have you see your notices? There are two here – they couldn’t be better.’
She stared at the paper he was holding out to her. ‘After you left last night, Nick, I was so ashamed.’
‘I meant to ask you to try to forget what had happened,’ she said. ‘But it’s impossible now, for all this has grown out of it. I must have been mad.’
‘We both acted like spoilt children,’ he said. ‘Which I suppose we are: spoiled by fate. I’m really much the most to blame; I was insufferably irritable and stuffy and pompous. With a dozen words I could have stopped it all.’
‘I wasn’t really ever seriously jealous of that girl,’ she said. ‘That’s the silly part of it. And I knew very well that you had some good reason for leaving the box which had nothing to do with her.’
‘Lou Friedman was on the telephone from New York,’ he told her. ‘He’d forgotten our operas started so early. He can arrange an American contract for you if this season is a success.’
There was silence for several seconds.
‘That makes me feel very small,’ she said in a low voice.
‘Don’t you see? And me also. I had only to tell you, to kill the quarrel stone dead.’
‘I never gave you a chance.’
He took her face in his hands and kissed her.
‘Last night was yesterday, and no good comes of crying over it. It can’t be helped. Today we’ve got to face this boring interlude. Your success is the stable, important thing. This can only put us out for a few days. Somewhere there’s another man. They already know he’s a bit like me and has a bandaged head. They’re bound to trace him pretty quickly. Now let’s have this lawyer in and see what he has to suggest.’
As she went to the door she was thinking: a man with an injured head and murder on his conscience will lie low, desperately low, fox in hole, hiding his hurt at any cost, while another man takes the suspicion and the consequences.