Hilary came away quite bright and brisk. Mrs. Smith would be able to give her Mrs. Ashley’s address, and she might be able to find out something that would help Geoff. She hadn’t expected anything of Mrs. Thompson who must have been pumped completely dry between the inquest and the trial. If you don’t expect anything you don’t let yourself feel disappointed. Mrs. Thompson thought Geoffrey had done it, but then of course she didn’t know Geoff. She could only repeat what she had said at the inquest and finish up with ‘I saw him with the pistol in his hand.’ Hilary wasn’t going to let herself be damped and daunted by that.

She found the greengrocer’s shop without difficulty, and was given Mrs. Ashley’s address by the buxom fair-haired Mrs. Smith, who obviously thought that she was looking for daily help – ‘And I’m sure, madam, you’ll find Mrs. Ashley very nice about the house – very nice indeed. Ladies I’ve recommended her to have always been very well satisfied- 10 Pinman’s Lane, and if you go round the corner and take the second on the left and the third on the right you can’t miss it. And you’ll find her in. She was here not half an hour ago, and she was going home then. The lady she’s been working for is away, and all she’s got to do is keep the house aired.’

Hilary thought Pinman’s Lane a most depressing place. The houses were old and tottery, with tiny windows. She knocked at the door of No. 10. Nothing happened. She knocked again. Then someone began to come down the stairs, and the minute Hilary heard that footstep she knew why Mrs. Thompson had wanted to snort. It was one of those trailing footsteps, a hesitating, slow dreep of a footstep. James Everton must have had some fatal attraction for dreeps, because Mrs. Mercer had been one too. Or – a window opened brightly in Hilary’s mind – was Mercer the kind of man who liked to lord it over a batch of spineless, subservient women? She was wondering about that when the door opened and Mrs. Ashley stood there putting back the faded hair from her faded eyes and peering at Hilary in a vaguely questioning manner. She had once been a very pretty girl. The faded hair had been a pale ash-blonde, and the faded eyes a very soft pale blue. Her features were regular and good, but the apple-blossom tints which had coloured them had long since departed, leaving her lined and sallow. She might have been thirty-five, she might have been fifty-five. There was no knowing.

Hilary said, ‘May I come in?’ and walked firmly past her and into the room on the right. She felt quite sure that it was no use waiting to be asked in, and she wasn’t going to stand on the doorstep and talk about the Everton Case in the hearing of the neighbours.

The room was most dreadfully pathetic – very old linoleum on the floor with the pattern worn away and the edges frayed, a rug that looked as if it had been picked off a rubbish heap, and a sofa with broken springs and bulges of horsehair coming through the burst American cloth. There was a wooden chair and a sagging wicker one, and a table with a woollen table-cloth which had once been red.

Hilary stood by the table and waited for Mrs. Ashley to come in and shut the door.

CHAPTER NINE

Mrs. Ashley looked frightened to death. Hilary thought she had never seen anyone so ridiculously frightened in her life. Ridiculously because – well, really, there wasn’t anything for her to be frightened about. You don’t need to look like a rabbit in a trap just because you once worked in a house where there was a murder and someone comes to ask you a few quite harmless questions about it. All the same, there was Mrs. Ashley with her mouth open in a pale O and her eyes staring with terror.

‘I’m Mrs Grey’s cousin,’ repeated Hilary firmly.

Some kind of a sound came out of the pale O, but it didn’t make any sense.

Hilary tapped with her foot. She really could have shaken the creature.

‘Mrs. Geoffrey Grey – Geoffrey Grey’s wife. I’m her cousin. I only wanted to ask you one or two questions – Mrs. Ashley, why are you so frightened?’

Mrs. Ashley caught her breath. Her chin trembled. She put up a hand to cover her mouth.

‘I don’t know anything – I can’t say anything.’

Hilary restrained herself. If she lost her temper, it would be all up. She said in the careful, gentle voice which she would have used to someone who was not quite right in the head:

‘There’s nothing to be frightened about. I really only wanted to ask you something about Mrs. Mercer.’

This seemed to have a soothing effect. Mrs. Ashley took her hand away from her mouth, moistened her lips with a pale tongue, and said in a faint, gasping voice:

‘Mrs. Mercer?’

‘Yes. You were helping her at Solway Lodge, weren’t you? Did she tell you she had a toothache the day Mr. Everton was shot?’

‘Oh no, miss, she didn’t.’

It was obvious that the question was a relief, and the answer an easy one.

‘Did you know that she’d been having toothache?’

‘Oh no, miss, I didn’t.’

‘You didn’t know she’d had trouble with her teeth?’

‘Oh no, Miss.’

‘But I suppose she used to talk to you a good bit?’

‘Sometimes she would and sometimes she wouldn’t,’ said Mrs. Ashley – ‘not if Mr. Mercer was anywhere about. But if we were by ourselves in the bedrooms as it might be, she’d tell me how she’d lived down by the sea when she was a girl the first time she was in service. She thought a lot about that place Mrs. Mercer did. There was a lady and a little boy, and the gentleman a lot away from home. There was a baby too, but it was the little boy she thought the world of.’ Mrs. Ashley paused for breath. The topic seemed to have reassured her, and she had stopped looking like something in a trap.

Hilary brought her firmly back from Mrs. Mercer’s reminiscences to Mrs. Mercer herself.

‘Then you didn’t know she had a toothache?’

‘Oh no, miss.’

Hilary let the toothache go.

‘What time did you leave – on the 16th, I mean?’

The frightened look came back into Mrs. Ashley’s face. She showed the whites of her eyes like a nervous horse as she said:

‘I had my tea and went same as usual.’

Now what was the matter with her?

‘And what time was that?’ said Hilary.

Mrs. Ashley’s mouth opened and shut. She looked dreadfully like a fish on a hook.

‘Six o’clock,’ she said on an almost inaudible gasp.

‘And you didn’t sec anything out of the way?’

Mrs. Ashley shook her head.

‘Or hear anything?’

Mrs. Ashley turned the colour of a tallow candle and her eyes bolted, but she shook her head again.

Hilary, exasperated, took a step towards her and said with all the severity of her twenty-two years:

‘Mrs. Ashley, you did hear something. It’s no good your saying you didn’t, because I can see that you did, and if you won’t tell me what it is, I shall just have to think about going to the police.’

It wasn’t possible to look more frightened, but it was possible to shiver. Mrs. Ashley shivered, and clutched at the table for support.

‘I went away at six o’clock – gospel truth I did.’

Hilary came darting at her with, ‘But did you come back again, Mrs. Ashley -did you come back?’ And then and there the woman collapsed, going down on her knees by the table, sobbing and weeping, her hands pressed over her eyes and her tongue stumbling and failing under a landslide of words.

‘I told her I wouldn’t tell, and I never. I promised her sure and certain I wouldn’t tell. I told the police I went away at six like I always done and no reason why I shouldn’t and take my gospel oath on it for true’s true and I went away like I said and no one never arst me nothing more except that pore lady and I promised her faithful I wouldn’t tell and I never.’

Hilary felt a little cold and bewildered. The sound of Mrs. Ashley’s sobs filled the room. She had let go of the table and was crouched in a sort of heap against one of the rickety legs, rbcking herself to and fro and crying.