Who Wins?
JOANAPPEARED, escorted by the constable, and behind them came Mr Wallace, who had been requested by Bony not to leave the poor girl alone to brood.
She looked cool and confident in a lilac dress and sling-back sandals. Her hair was gloriously, vividly alive and her makeup was, as usual, lightly applied. She gave Bony a tender smile and then concentrated on SergeantMansell, who had sent word that he wished to ask questions. It was when Bony was presented as Inspector Bonaparte that she froze.
“You, a detective-inspector!”
“When I am not breaking-in horses, yes. Now be easy, Miss Fowler. I just want you to tell us about the fire so that this matter of your mother’s unfortunate end may be cleared up. Would you tell SergeantMansell just what happened?”
“What, again?”Joan tossed her hair, settled herself on the hard tea-chest, and related her experience as previously given to Bony and others.
“Thank you,” murmured Bony. “Let us be quite clear. Your mother was lying down on her bed. She occupied a room other than yours?”
“Yes. When I ran to her she was lying on her bed and I tried to wake her up and couldn’t. So I pulled her off the bed and tried to drag her from the room, but the fire and smoke was too much for me, and I just got out myself. As I told you.”
“When you first noticed the fire, you were lying down on your own bed?”
“Yes.”
“Fully dressed, of course?”
“Oh, yes. I had had a shower and dressed for the afternoon. I was reading a book when I saw smoke pouring into my room and then I heard the crackle of the flames.”
“It was, if memory serves, a very hot afternoon, Miss Fowler. You would have found the shade cast by the garden trees much cooler. During the morning you swept out the office, I understand.”
“No. I didn’t. Mother did, I think.”
“Supposing you tell us about the money in the unlocked safe.”
“Money in the safe!” echoed Joan. “What are you talking about?”
“This money,” replied Bony, and brought up the parcel to place it on the desk.“Gillen’s money. It was in the safe before the house caught fire. It was not in the safe when the house was burning. After the house burned to ash, it was in Lester’s room… under his bed and pushed as far back as possible. Can you tell us anything concerning this strange angle?”
“I still don’t know what you are talking about!”persisted the girl, her eyes indignant, but voice controlled.
“You knew, of course, that Gillen possessed a great deal of money, and that everyone thought he had stolen it?”
“It’s the first I’ve heard of it. And if you believe tales told you by Harry and Mr Martyr about me, you’re a fool. They’re spiteful liars. They’ve always been sore because I wouldn’t give in to them. This has never been a safe place for a decent girl, but Mother and I had to live, and we could save something from our wages.”
“These tales about you have to be checked, you know,” Bony said soothingly. “It’s my job. Let’s return to the fire. Of course, you know there will have to be an inquest, and it’s better to have it all straightened out for the coroner. Would you prefer to sign a statement covering your actions from the time you realized the house was on fire?”
“Yes, I would.”
Bony wrote down the details.
“There you are. Please read it carefully before you sign it. Then we’ll witness your signature, and make it hard and fast.”
The girl read the document. She picked up the pen provided byMansell. She looked at Bony, who was rolling a cigarette. She glared at Martyr and Carney, who had drawn close at Bony’s beckoning.
“That is what happened,” she said.“Every word of it. I don’t tell lies about people.”
With angry deliberation she wrote her name, and sat back while Carney and Martyr and Lester witnessed her signature.
“You might confirm the document, Mr Wallace,” suggested Bony, and Wallace signed as a Justice of the Peace. The men were waved away, and Bony continued. “Now that subject is covered, Miss Fowler, let us make clear the subject of your mother’s jewellery.”
Bony thought to make the girl betray shock, and when he saw no evidence of it he could not but wonder at the manifestation of a one-track mind, unable to anticipate a trap. Here was a woman so sure of her power, made so vain by her victories, that even the subject of her mother’s jewellery did not, at this moment, disturb her, as she deftly renewed her make-up.
“Well, what about Mum’s bits and pieces?” she demanded, slipping the gold compact into the pocket of her skirt. Bony smiled ruefully, saying:
“I find this as irritating as you must do, Miss Fowler. Do you remember Lester giving your mother a gold brooch set with opals?”
“Yes. She showed it to me when Lester gave it to her.”
“Did you see the emerald ring given your mother byMacLennon?”
“Yes.”
“And the pendant?”
“Yes. Why all this?”
“Where did your mother usually keep her jewellery?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Never interested that much.”
“Do you think she would keep her jewellery in an old handbag behind the door of the ladies’tante?”
“Tante! What’stante?”
“Aunt.”The girl laughed, and Bony said suavely:
“Constable, take Mr Wallace and Mr Lester to the room now occupied by Miss Fowler, and bring here any jewellery you may find.”
The girl jumped to her feet andstormed, her voice harsh, her words raw. The sergeant stood and towered over her. The constable and Lester departed, the mystified Mr Wallace following after them. Bony glanced across at the two men again seated by the wall. Martyr was leaning back and resting his head against a wall support. His eyes were closed, and he was smiling. Carney sat tensely, his eyes wide, as horror strangled an ideal which had striven to live.
“Sit down, Miss, and keep calm,” urgedMansell. “The Inspector’s only getting things straightened out.” She looked up at him searchingly, her hands clenched. Abruptly she turned to Bony. Bony was writing a memo, and she sat again and from the cigarette section of the gold compact she extracted a smoke. The sergeant struck a match for her. She inhaled clumsily, and as she spurted smoke through pursed lips, Bony looked up and the light in his eyes caused her to flinch.
“You don’t know where Gillen planted his money, do you?” he asked, softly. “I do. I know how his money came to be in Lester’s room, and who conveyed it thereto. I know why it was hidden under Lester’s bed. And I know who took your mother’s jewellery to thetante, before the fire, and who removed it from thetante just before we all left for Johnson’sWell. Greed is a loathsome vice, Miss Fowler. Beauty is a wonderful gift which should make the recipient deeply humble. When beauty is allied with greed and a lust for power, beauty is as nothing. You, with your possession of beauty, with the addition of a little intelligence, might have created a world of happiness.”
“Clever, aren’t you!”
Sadly, Bony looked into her green eyes, mocking, cold, empty. Wallace came into the shed. The constable entered with Lester. The constable put on the desk gold and gems which caught the hot light from without.
“Lester! Is that the brooch you gave to Mrs Fowler?”
“Yair, it is. And that’s the ring that Mac gave her. And here’s the necklet Harry gave her, too. Isn’t it, Harry?”
Carney made no move from his seat against the wall, and Bony said:
“Would you like to make a statement telling how your mother died?”
“I signed it.”
“That one isn’t quite accurate.”
“I’m signing no other statement,” the girl said, contemptuously tossing her cigarette butt on to Bony’s papers.
“Very well, I’ll tell you how she died, and what you did afterwards. The case is so simple and so clear that the best lawyers in the country would fail in your defence. There is only one point which eludes me, and it is not important, and that is whether you or your mother found the office safe with the key in its lock.
“For years there has rested on the top of the safe a brass figurine, and this morning it was found where the passage door of the office originally swung.
“The doctor is sure that your mother was killed by a blow from that figurine. He is confident that the Government pathologist will support his opinion, and further will agree with him that the body was dragged on its back for some distance to the bedroom where the fire partially consumed it. The fact that a dustpan has been found on the place where the office stood indicates that one of you went there to sweep out the office. And there murder took place over the parcelled money taken from the safe.
“You dragged your mother’s body from the office, along the passage and so to her room. That was before lunch, and Lester would be expecting to hear the gong struck. You called him to lunch at the right hour, and afterwards you collectedall your mother’s jewellery, your own bank-book and what loose money there was, as well as your toilet aids, and hid them in the handbag behind the door of the ladies’tante, dropping a ring on the path as you went there or returned.
“You foresaw that after setting fire to the house you would escape with nothing save what you were wearing. You could wear your own jewellery but not that belonging to your mother, and what place more secure against men than that you selected?
“Doubtless you were a trifle upset by the body in the house. What to do with the brown-paper parcel containing some twelve thousand pounds? The jewellery you could eventually hide down inside your blouse and in your skirt pocket. But not the parcel. That was too large. You would have put it in thetante, but you could not be sure what Mr Martyr would decide about your immediate future. So you looked across to the quarters and saw Lester dozing with his back to the steps, and you stole over with the parcel, silently gained the veranda and slipped into Lester’s room because it was the first room you came to.
“After the fire, you gained your way with Martyr, or thought you did, to let you stay at the out-station, but when compelled to accompany the men to Johnson’sWell for a space, you retrieved the loot you had put in the handbag and stuffed it down your blouse. The parcel, however, you could do nothing with because one of us at least would see it. So I found the parcel under Lester’s bed within two hours after we left inBarby’s utility, and Mr Wallace with the constable and Lester found your mother’s jewellery in the room given you since yesterday.”
“In the suitcase my wife packed and I brought here for her,” supplemented Mr Wallace.
“Damn clever, eh?” commented Joan, calmly.
“Heavens, no, one hasn’t to be clever with you,” replied Bony, pleasantly. “You know, actually, you are extremely dumb. Just listen to this. This is what you said and what you signed before witnesses: ‘I found Mother unconscious from the smoke and I dragged her off the bed. I couldn’t lift her. The smoke was getting my breath, and the room was full of flames. I dragged Mother by her feet to the doorway, then I had to leave her and rush out because the house was all on fire.’ That is what you stated, and signed as the truth.”
“Well, so what, cocky?”
“Come, come, Miss Fowler! You cannot really be as dumb as that. If you dragged your mother off the bed and then by the feet to the doorway, her body would have been found by police and doctor with its feet to the doorway. She was found with her head to the doorway, proving that you had dragged her body by the feet to that place from the passage. From the passage, Miss Fowler, not from the bed. That’ll be all, Sergeant.”
“Just a little conference before I depart with the Boss,” Bony told Lester and Carney and Martyr, he having drawn them to the edge of the bluff overlooking the dreary depression.
“Much will depend on the Crown Prosecutor,” he went on, “but I fancy he won’t take action againsteither you, Martyr, or you, Carney. Martyr, don’t let this episode in your life spoil it. There was no action you could have taken to rescue Gillen that night, for had there been a boat he couldn’t have been reached in time. As for the money… well… with no one to claim it and a mother desperately ill, I believe I would have… thought about it.
“As for you, Harry, cling to your dreams and remember that what one woman kills another can resurrect. Tell me, who did trounce Bob when he climbed out of that tank?”
“MacLennon,” sighed Carney, and Lester sniffled twice.
“The fourth man there that night? Was it you. Martyr?”
“Yes. I was keeping watch from the creek bank.”
“Who prepared Gillen’s bike for a get-away?”
“I did,” Carney said. “I was fed up with the place and all. Then I thought how silly I’d be.”
“You would have been, and it would not have been like you. And had you attempted to ride away after I came here, you would have found that the carburettor had been removed. We won’t say anything more about Gillen’s motor-cycle and, unless the matter crops up, we’ll say nothing of the accidental discharge of the shot-gun, Mr Martyr. What did happen that night?”
“The women had been nagging each other for days, and I ought to have anticipated a showdown,” Martyr replied. “The gun was kept on the wall in the hall, and cartridges are about anywhere. I was in my room, and I heard them arguing. A moment or two later, I heard the gun-breech snapped shut. It was a sound I couldn’t mistake, and I raced to Joan’s room and was just in time to push up the barrel of the gun as the mother pulled the trigger. I didn’t make a song and dance about it, Inspector, as it would have spoiled my star act.”
“Yes, it would have been an anticlimax,” agreed Bony. He gripped Lester’s forearm. “Now, Bob, you cannot gossip without stones crashing through your windows. Remember, you have lived in a glass house. Imagine giving a woman a brooch worth?120 merely on a promise. Imagine what people would say. It made the gamble frightfully expensive, didn’t it?”
“Yair, I suppose it did.” Lester forgot to sniffle, but he did chuckle. “Still, if a bloke never gambles, he can’t ever win, can he?”
“That’s quite true, Bob,” agreed Bony, smiling. “Yet when it comes to gambling on a woman, no man can win… ever. Now I must go. Aurevoir, and grand luck for you all. Should you be here at the time, let me know when Lake Otway is born again.”