Henry was not listening to all this. His mind was completely occupied with the Mercers. He said,
‘She couldn’t be made to give evidence against him – he was in a blazing hurry to shut her mouth – ’
Miss Silver nodded again.
‘It certainly has that appearance. I should be glad if you would resume your seat, Captain Cunningham – it is difficult to talk to someone who is, so to speak, towering.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Henry, and sat down.
‘I have a nephew who is six-foot-one,’ said Miss Silver, knitting busily. ‘Very much your own height, I should say – and I have constantly to remind him that it is very tiring to converse with someone who, so to speak, towers. But we must return to the Mercers. There might, of course, be other explanations of this sudden marriage, but at first sight it certainly does suggest a desire on Alfred Mercer’s part to make sure that his associate could not be compelled to give evidence against him. But if you accept this suggestion, you will find yourself forced to a most sinister conclusion.’ She laid down her knitting and looked directly at Henry. ‘Consider the date of the marriage.’
‘The day after the murder.’
‘Yes. But consider, Captain Cunningham. You cannot just walk into a register office and get married – notice has to be given.’
‘I know that, but I don’t know how much notice.’
‘One clear week-day must elapse between the giving of the notice and the actual marriage. The Mercers were married on Wednesday the seventeenth of July. They must have given notice to the registrar not later than Monday the fifteenth, and Mr. Everton was not murdered until eight o’clock on the evening of Tuesday the sixteenth. If the marriage was designed in some way to shelter the criminal, then the crime must have been coldly planned at least thirty-six hours ahead – it was no affair of a sudden quarrel, a sudden violent impulse of anger or resentment. The words “malice aforethought” will occur to you, as they did to me.’ She coughed a little. ‘You see, Captain Cunningham?’
Henry saw. He put his head in his hands, and saw a number of things which did not come into Miss Silver’s view. He saw the Everton case being re-opened and a flood of unpleasantness let loose. He saw Hilary plunging into the flood and getting splashed, and mired, and stained all over. He saw her openly triumphant because she had been right and he had been wrong all along. He found himself quite unable to believe that Geoffrey Grey was innocent. He didn’t see how he could possibly be innocent. If the Mercers were in it, too, if Alfred Mercer had married his wife to stop her mouth, it merely made matters worse for Geoffrey Grey, since it proved that the murder was premeditated and not, as he had believed after reading the case, the outcome of Geoffrey’s ungovernable fury on learning that he had been disinherited. That was what he had believed, what the jury had believed, and what practically everybody who read the case had believed. But if the murder had been planned… He recoiled in horror from the thought of the added suffering and discredit which might be brought upon Marion and Hilary should this be established.
Miss Silver watched him without speaking for a time. At last she said,
‘Well, Captain Cunningham? Do you wish me to go on? It is for you to say.’
Henry lifted his head and looked at her. He never knew quite how he came to a decision, or what impelled this decision. He said,
‘I want you to go on.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Marion Grey went back to work after five days of Hilary’s nursing. It was about this time that Jacques Dupré wrote to his sister in Provence:
I saw Marion in the street today. It breaks one’s heart – she looks like a shadow carved in stone…
But then Jacques was a poet, and he had loved her vainly for years – one of those endless, hopeless loves.
Hilary urged a longer rest, but was silent when Marion said,
‘Don’t stop me, Hilary. If I stop I shall die. And if I die, Geoff won’t have anyone.’
It was this speech more than anything else which took Hilary down to Ledlington again just a week after her last fruitless visit. She wasn’t going to be caught in the dark this time, se she took the 9.30, and found her way out of the station yard and into Market Street with a good fat slice of the morning still before her, to say nothing of the afternoon – only she hoped she would have found Mrs. Mercer long before it came to that. She had duly pawned Aunt Arabella’s ring, and was comfortably conscious of being a capitalist with four pounds ten and sixpence in her purse. She had brought it all with her, because you never know, and bicycle shops have a way of asking for a deposit before they will hire a machine to a stranger. Even a deposit does not always incline them to what they regard as a chancy transaction.
Hilary tried three bicycle shops before she encountered a very pleasant and impressionable young man who not only produced a bicycle but gave her floods of information about all the cottages between Ledlington and Ledstow. He had a most surprising crop of fair hair which stood up a sheer four inches from his freckled forehead, and he was one of the most friendly creatures Hilary had ever met. He hadn’t heard of any strangers taking any cottages -‘But then you never know, miss – I’ll just pump that back tyre up a bit. It might be Mr. Greenhow’s cottage, best part of a mile and a half along the Ledstow road and turn to the left down the the lane – there isn’t more than one thereabouts. I did hear he’d gone to stay with his married daughter in London, but Fred Barker told me he’d come back again. Or it might be the new house Mr. Carter was building for his daughter, only she never got married at all and it was up to be let. I don’t know that you’d hardly call it a cottage, but you might try there. And there’s the Miss Soameses. They always let in the summer, but you wouldn’t hardly call it summer now, and they’re a good half-mile off the main road.’
‘I shouldn’t think that would be it.’
The young man stopped pumping and stood up.
‘There’s Humpy Dick’s place,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Nasty old tumble-down shack though. I shouldn’t think anyone ’ud take it, though you never can tell – can you?’
It didn’t sound attractive, but Hilary wasn’t looking for attractions. A broken-down woman might very well be hidden away in a broken-down shack.
She said, ‘How do I get to it?’ and was rewarded with another flood of information.
‘Third bridge you come to there’s a lane going off to the right – well, ’tisn’t hardly a lane, but you might call it one. Well, you don’t take any notice of that, you go straight on, and then there’s a bit of a wood, and then there’s a pond, but you don’t go as far as the pond. There’s a footpath all along by the side of the wood, and you keep right on till you come to Humpy Dick’s. Only I don’t suppose there’ll be anyone there, because it’s stood empty ever since Humpy fell over the quarry in the dark last January and his brother fetched him away. I did hear a London gentleman had bought it – some kind of an artist – but he wouldn’t hardly move in this time of year, I shouldn’t think. Anyhow, it was empty a fortnight ago, because I was up that way myself and seen it.’ He went on telling her about cottages, until she received a comforting impression that the Ledstow road had fallen a prey to ribbon building, and that cottages fairly jostled one another over the whole seven miles.
She thanked the young man, left a deposit of two pounds, and tore herself away. She would much rather have continued to listen to his friendly discourse than go the round of the house-agents and then start looking for Mrs. Mercer.
The house-agents were a complete wash-out. They were neither chatty nor helpful. The name, of Mercer evoked no response. They knew nothing of any cottage being taken. The Miss Soames never left in winter. Mr. Greenhow’s cottage had not been in their hands. Mr. Carter was going to live in his new house himself. The late Mr. Humphrey Richard’s cottage had been sold about a month ago. They were not at liberty to give any information about the purchaser. Thus three agents with admirable discretion. But at the fourth a very young clerk told Hilary that the place had been bought for a song by a Mr. Williams, a gentleman from London, who wanted it for a weekend cottage in summer.