Under Suspicion

By noon on Thursday all of Marlow Cross knew.

No one said it to Edwin's face. That is not how it is done in small towns. In small towns it is done differently: conversation in the bakery stops the moment the bell above the door rings, and Jenkins the baker, who for thirty years has set aside the brownest loaf for Edwin, suddenly spends a very long time looking for change in the till. The women by the post office turn their backs, as if studying the notice about the church bazaar. And Mrs Turner, Maureen's neighbour, stands on her step with her arms folded and watches him go by the way people watch a dog that is said to have bitten a child.

Edwin knew what they were saying. He caught scraps — "was there at nine", "his tool", "who else could it be", "and always so quiet, so respectable". And each of those words landed on him like wet sand on a shovel, and the shovel grew heavier and heavier.

He was not angry with them. He had lived among these people for forty years and he knew: they were not wicked. They were frightened. Two dead in a week, in a town where the last killing had been before the war, when Farmer Goddard shot his horse and then himself. People need a name. A name is a key with which to lock away fear. And the key to this fear, as luck would have it, fitted Edwin perfectly.

He went home, bolted the door — for the first time in his life by daylight — and sat down at the kitchen table.

In front of him lay a sheet of paper. He meant to write to his daughter in Canada. He had not written for nearly a year — not since the last quarrel, when she had once again begged him to come and live with her in Toronto, with the grandchildren he had seen twice in his life, and he had once again refused, because Mary's grave was here, and the shed, and Marlow Cross, where he knew every door.

"Dear Annie," he wrote. "If you should hear any rumours…"

He crossed it out. Started again. Crossed it out.

What could he write? "Your father is suspected of two murders, but don't worry, he didn't do it"? Had anyone ever said otherwise?

He folded the sheet, tucked it under the salt cellar and sat for a long time looking at his hands — big, knotted, with white scars from forty years of metal burrs. Hands that had never shaken. Now they were shaking.

* * *

There was a knock at the door at three. Not three short, two long — an ordinary, decisive, slightly impatient knock.

On the step stood Gwendolyn Renwick. She carried a basket covered with an embroidered cloth.

"Mrs Hobbs baked a rhubarb pie," she said. "I told her I was bringing it to you. She said I'd gone mad. I said I probably had. May I come in?"

Edwin stood aside to let her in. She put the basket on the table, noticed the folded sheet under the salt cellar, but asked nothing. She sat down opposite him, the way she had sat that night in the shop, upright, hands folded.

"Why have you come, Miss Renwick?" he asked. "Do you realise what people will think? The heiress paying calls on the man the whole town believes murdered her uncle."

"They think things about me already." She shrugged. "Came down from London two months before a rich relative died. Got everything. Has no alibi. Do you suppose Jenkins the baker keeps loaves back for me?"

He smiled in spite of himself. For the first time that day.

"I came," said Gwendolyn seriously, "because I lay awake all night thinking. And this is what I've worked out. If you'd killed Maureen, you would never have given Doyle her note. You'd have burned it that same night. No one but Tommy knew she'd written to you. And Tommy's a child; his word against yours would count for nothing. You'd have said you were at home, and that would have been that." She shook her head. "You gave him the note because you couldn't do anything else. Because Maureen trusted you with a secret and you didn't manage to keep it safe, and the only thing left to you was to tell the truth. Even if the truth drowns you."

Edwin was silent for a long time.

"You're very like your uncle," he said at last.

"I hope not." Something bitter crossed her voice. "I still don't know who he was, Mr Hale. An honest man who was cheated? Or a swindler whose conscience finally caught up with him? But I know exactly who you are. And I have no intention of sitting in a boarding house waiting for an inspector from Bristol to arrest you. We've got one day. Let's use it."

* * *

Doyle arrived an hour later — alone, uninvited, in plain clothes, with a small case under his arm. He stood on the step, red and embarrassed, like a schoolboy bringing an apple for the teacher.

"I was never here," he said, stepping over the threshold. "Understood? I didn't bring you the keys to Maureen Cobb's room, and we're not going there together, and you're not touching anything."

"Understood, Percy."

"It's just…" He hesitated. "Last night I read through everything I've written down this week. Everything. And I realised there's one person in my notebook who hasn't told me a single lie. And that's you." He turned away, as if ashamed of the words. "Grimshaw will never forgive me. But Grimshaw didn't know Oscar Renwick. And he didn't know Maureen Cobb either."

Maureen's room above the cobbler's was small, clean and painfully lonely. A narrow bed under a crocheted coverlet. A photograph of a young man in uniform on the chest of drawers — the husband she had lost in 'forty-two, after whom, the neighbours said, she had never so much as looked at anyone else. A bottle of ink and a pen on the kitchen table. A pot of geraniums on the windowsill.

And all of it slightly, almost imperceptibly, out of place.

Edwin saw it at once. A drawer in the chest not quite pushed home — only by a finger's width. The pillow on the bed laid with its corner the wrong way. A bundle of letters on the shelf, tied with a ribbon — the ribbon knotted not in a bow, as a woman would have tied it, but in a plain double knot. A man's knot.

"Someone's searched this room," he said quietly. "Carefully. Very carefully. Someone used to putting things back so that no one would notice they'd been touched."

"Mrs Turner," Doyle glanced at his notebook, "says that about ten o'clock last night she heard footsteps on the stairs. Quiet ones. Thought Miss Cobb had come back. Then, half an hour later, footsteps again, going down. And she says," he looked away, "that before that, at half past nine, a man was knocking here. Loudly, for a long time. She looked out and saw. It was you, Mr Hale."

"It was me."

"And at ten?"

"At ten I was sitting at home in my armchair. And no one saw me but Mary's photograph."

Doyle sighed as if he were carrying a sack of cement on his shoulders.

"The key to Miss Cobb's room," he said, "was in her handbag. The handbag was found in the shop, next to the body. The lock on the door's intact. So whoever came at ten either had a spare key, or…"

"Or took her key from her handbag," said Gwendolyn, "came here, searched the room, went back to the shop and put the key back. While she… while she was lying there."

At that thought the room went cold, as if someone had opened a window on a November night.

They searched for half an hour. They were looking for the notebook — brown, in a worn binding, with a metal clasp — which Edwin knew of only from Maureen's note and from the way, on Monday, she had been hiding something from him behind her eyes. It was not there. Not in the drawers, not under the mattress, not in the kitchen cupboards, not behind the photograph of the husband in uniform.

"It's been taken," said Edwin. "That's what they came for at ten. Not money, not jewellery. Oscar's notebook. The murderer knew it existed. Knew Maureen had it."

"How?" asked Doyle.

"The same way he knew she'd be at the shop at nine."

They looked at one another. And all three thought of the same thing — the ginger-haired boy with the canvas bag who had taken an hour and three quarters to walk three streets.

* * *

They found Tommy Beckett by the church, under the old yew where he usually counted his takings. At the sight of Doyle the boy went white, grabbed his bag and ran — across the churchyard, past the graves, over the low stone wall and into the lane, his ginger head flashing round the corner like a fox's brush.

"He's frightened," said Gwendolyn, watching him go.

"Boys are always frightened of the police," Doyle grunted, out of breath.

"No," Edwin said quietly. "Boys are frightened of being told off. They run like that when they know something they shouldn't. And when some grown-up has promised them what will happen if they tell."

They went back to Edwin's house as dusk was gathering over Marlow Cross. Doyle went on to the station — he had papers to prepare for Grimshaw, "though I can hardly bring myself to". Gwendolyn lingered on the step.

"We have one night," she said. "And a card with a cross on it. And a key we know nothing about, because we don't even know whether it exists."

"We have something else," Edwin replied. "We have a man who has killed twice in a week to keep a secret, and twice failed to find what he was looking for. People who kill, Miss Renwick, don't usually stop at two. They stop when they've got what they want." He gave her a long, heavy look. "Or when someone stops them."

Gwendolyn walked back to the boarding house through the dusk, clutching in her coat pocket the price ticket with its sharp, slanting hand. Marlow Street was empty. The shop window was dark. And only as she was turning the corner did it seem to her — only seem — that behind the glass, in the depths, by the tall Dutch clock, a shadow moved.

She stopped and stared. Nothing. Only the moon on old Jan's dial, winking at the sun.

She stood on the corner for a long time. And then walked on, quickening her step, and for the first time in her life felt on the back of her neck a stranger's gaze that made her skin go cold.