The Riddle of the River Page 23

  But it was not merely a question of stairs. Stairs to the street, entering the bookshop…murder…and then mounting the stairs back to the room, all in a time so short as to make his absence go unnoticed?

  Well, Simpson may well have been away in his own bedroom or in the kitchen, and as for Julian, if he noticed, Philip may have said he would explain later – and have done it. Only Mr Trevelyan must be supposed to have noticed nothing…it was odd, but couldn’t it be?

  My feet stopped automatically, and I realised with startled amazement that they had carried me back to Petty Cury. I stood facing the bookshop, not knowing why I was there. The door to the upper rooms was in front of me, hermetically closed. And behind it sat a murderer, like a hunchbacked, long-armed spider in the centre of his web. I could not tear myself away, nor ring the bell. I stood there for many minutes, confused, reluctant to leave, incapable of acting.

  People walked past me along the street, and some glanced at me. I searched around for some place to be less conspicuous, and noticed that the two buildings just across from Heffers were separated by a tiny, narrow alley; an odd thing, since all the other buildings on that side of Petty Cury are joined as one. But it suited my purposes, and I withdrew into it and stood watching the door, not knowing exactly what I was doing it for, wondering, hoping, for some reason, that Philip Archer would emerge.

  Instead, someone entered.

  With a quick, sharp step, a woman walked up to the door, stopped in front of it, and rang the bell with a violent gesture.

  She was tall and black-haired, her lips were pressed together, and she held a crumpled paper in a gloved hand which shook with tension. The other hand was hidden under her cloak. Her mass of hair was disarrayed underneath a hat set askew, whether by art or by haste I could not tell. Her forehead was burning, her cheeks flushed. Simpson opened the door, and she pushed past him into the hall; I glimpsed her storming upstairs.

  I did not hesitate now, but crossed the street and rang again. Apparently unruffled by the unexpected sequence of female visitors, Simpson admitted me and preceded me up the stairs, informing me courteously of the presence of another visitor. The woman had been there for less than a minute. He opened the sitting room door, smoothly announced my return and left, closing it behind me. Philip Archer was sitting in his chair, at his desk, exactly as he had been when I first saw him. The woman was staring at him with a mixture of amazement and contempt; she barely vouchsafed me a glance.

  ‘Why, you mangy dwarf,’ she said to him, her voice low and vicious. ‘So you’re the ‘‘young” Mr Archer? Now I understand everything. Now I understand why you never showed yourself, you sick, deformed little monster.’

  He stared at her for a moment without replying; a shadow passed over his face, nothing more. Then he reached for his crutches, which leant against the wall in the corner behind him, and, awkwardly struggling to his feet, he approached her. Because of the withered legs and hunched back, he was significantly smaller than she; yet he looked up at her with a certain authority.

  ‘May I ask who you are,’ he said quietly, ‘and what you want from me?’

  ‘I’ve come here to kill you,’ she said, and suddenly her hand came out of the cloak, and it was grasping a large kitchen knife. ‘I’ll do it – I don’t care if they hang me!’

  Mr Archer’s eyes fixed on the knife, and an expression of utter bewilderment painted itself on his features. He looked as though he had not the faintest glimmerings of an idea why this dark-haired Valkyrie wished to do away with him.

  The sight of the blade pinched me with a cold fear. She looked like a madwoman. I kept my eyes fixed on her, ready to pounce if she pounced.

  ‘But why?’ said Mr Archer after a moment.

  She took a step towards him, and I tensed. But her next words were startlingly unexpected.

  ‘Because you’re a filthy pimp,’ she said between clenched teeth. ‘Why, you evil scum – a pimp and a sick little hunchback murderer, disguised as a Cambridge gentleman. I know your secrets! Just look at you – an angel face on a devil’s body – pretending you don’t even know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘But I don’t,’ he protested, still seemingly unable to muster anything more urgent than a tone of courteous though disbelieving politeness. His body, however, began to shake violently on the shrivelled legs which refused their support, and, yielding to necessity, he collapsed onto the sofa and stared up at the woman who towered over him.

  ‘Well then,’ she said, doing something in her rage which might almost be described as gnashing her teeth, and taking yet another step towards him, ‘I’ll tell you. And I’ll tell her,’ she added, gesturing towards me with her chin, ‘though I don’t know who she is. Because I’ll be happy to have a witness. I want a witness. I want the whole world to know that a dirty little rat from Cambridge who couldn’t ever have had a woman no matter how much he might have wanted one, enjoyed himself working women to the bone, forcing them to sell themselves on the street to pay him. Oh, you’re no ordinary pimp – you wouldn’t know how to strike a girl or force her to satisfy your depraved imaginings – when she’s already exhausted from night after night of work, if you can call it work, and sick of the very sight of a man. You never showed your face and I’ve often wondered why. But now I know. Who could set eyes on you without laughing themselves sick, you deformed little midget? What girl would work for you if she once set eyes on you? If a man’s going to live on a girl’s work, crush her, take everything from her, wring her dry, then he’d better not be a contemptible laughing-stock in her eyes. Who could feel fear – who could feel anything but loathing for a thing like you, that can’t even be called a man?’ Her eyes narrowed, and her look of manic hatred increased as she stood nearly on top of him, fingering her knife. But it was obvious that she still had a great deal to say.

  ‘Oh, you must have felt wonderful, squeezing us dry, taking everything we had, while you sat here in your nice chair, in your pretty rooms. It must be all so easy, when you don’t see anything of the filth and hardship, mustn’t it? You’re a new kind of pimp, aren’t you? A dirty little rat like you – you taking money from us for sleeping with other men! It doesn’t bear thinking about!’

  And she let out a horrible, hysterical peal of deranged laughter.

  ‘No, no – this is all an awful mistake,’ stammered Mr Archer, glancing at me awkwardly. But she didn’t even listen to him. The flood of words continued to pour forth.

  ‘We were getting out of it, that’s what we were doing,’ she said. ‘We were getting out of it – you knew you couldn’t hold us any longer. You knew it, you knew it, you knew she was going to be free from you, and you were afraid she would reveal everything! That’s why you killed her, isn’t it? Don’t think I don’t know – I know it now! I have the proof!’ And she agitated the crumpled paper she held in her left hand. ‘That’s why Ivy had to die, isn’t it?’ she said again in a kind of raucous whisper, leaning towards him, brandishing both the paper and the knife in his face.

  ‘Why Ivy had to die?’ This time Mr Archer reacted; the words emerged like a raucous croak, and he half struggled out of his seat again. ‘What are you talking about? What does all this mean? What do you know about Ivy’s death?’

  For the first time, a shade of doubt crossed the woman’s face, and she withdrew a step.

  ‘You killed her,’ she said, but her voice wavered a little.

  ‘Mr Archer,’ I said, stepping forward and speaking firmly and gently, ‘please allow me to intervene. I am a detective, and I am investigating Miss Elliott’s murder.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the woman, paying attention to me for the first time, and understanding swept over her features. ‘Are you – are you Mrs Weatherburn?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and you must be Jenny Wolcombe.’

  ‘Yes, I’m Jenny Wolcombe, who’s lost the one thing that made her life bearable. Jenny, who’s lost her best friend, her only friend. And you’re here – so you’ve understood as I have, th
en?’ Unconsciously, she lowered the knife which she had been brandishing crazily.

  ‘Ivy was your best friend,’ I said, gently trying to draw her attention, to distract her from Mr Archer, whose chest was no more than a few inches from the blade, which she still gripped firmly, although no longer pointing it at him. ‘Tell me about her, tell me everything you know about what happened. I need to know – I need to know about Ivy, how you came to know her, what your lives were like.’ I moved closer to her, holding her eyes with mine, concentrating, soliciting her attention. She reacted slowly, turning towards me, and her words came in a rush. Her hand raised the knife again, as though to convince herself that she would not lose her advantage, but her attention was diverted to me, and she began to speak in a rush. It was, perhaps, the only tribute her dead friend would ever receive, and the only chance she would ever have to speak about her.

  ‘Ivy and I worked together for years,’ she began. ‘We made friends back when she first started. I helped her then. She came up from the country, and I saw her just wandering the streets – wandering the streets. I saw tears on her face, she was just lost, didn’t know where to go, what to do. She saw me watching her, and begged me for help. She was only fifteen, I was already eighteen, I’d been on the street for years, there was nothing about it I didn’t know. She’d been in trouble out where she came from. Got a little too fond of some slick gentleman or other and her family threw her out, wouldn’t have anything more to do with her. And neither would he, of course. What could she do? She came up to London and just wandered all over town crying until she talked to me.

  ‘I took her home, I taught her everything. We worked in a lodging house then, and paid the landlady practically everything we earned; the rest had to go on clothes and food. Ivy used to keep telling me we had to get out of it. ‘‘I want a future,” she used to say. ‘‘I’ll get us out of this, I swear it.” She wanted to become an actress. She took to going out and trying for all the parts advertised in the papers; she went to all the theatres in London asking for parts. She was so pretty, and there was something about her. She could act. Don’t ask me how; I couldn’t do it if my life depended on it. But she had something in there that came out when she stepped onto the stage. Like another person inside her; maybe the person she was before she met the slick one. She got a few little parts, and then, a year ago she was hired by a real company.

  ‘Oh, she was excited. They didn’t pay her much; a girl couldn’t live on it, let alone two. But she told me it was the beginning. ‘‘We’re going to get out of here now, Jenny,” she told me. ‘‘We’re going to become decent girls.” “You are,” I said to her. ‘‘You’re the actress. What can I do? Kill myself in a factory for fifteen hours a day and fall deathly ill for my pains?” ‘‘No,” she said. ‘‘We’ll do it little by little. Let’s move out of this place first. We’ll get a room in a real lodging house, a decent one. We’ll get a nice room, Jenny, and no one will know about us. That will be the beginning.” ‘‘You’re crazy,” I said to her. ‘‘What are we going to live on? Your two shillings a week?” ‘‘No,” she said, ‘‘we’ll have to go on working. But not in our room! I know a gentleman that has a flat in London he almost never uses. I think I could get him to lend me a key, and we could go there for work. We’ll just pay ordinary rent, Jenny, we won’t have to pay the extra – we won’t have to work as much. We’ll be free agents. And we’ll get better from there, you’ll see. I’ll become a star. And you’ll go to the Working Women’s College and get an education.” That’s what she used to say.’ She turned back to Mr Archer, and her lip curled. ‘Girls like us can dream, too, can’t we? And it could have been as she said, except for you.’

  ‘No,’ he said, sketching an indefinite gesture with his hand.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Because Ivy’s old Mr Archer didn’t want to give her the key to his London flat, did he, even though she used all of her sweet wiles on him. She was going to give up and look for something else, until his son, that she called young Mr Archer, learnt of the story. ‘‘Oh, you want the key,” said young Mr Archer, ‘‘well, I’ll give it to you on some conditions, and here they are: you never go into any room except the servant’s quarters next to the kitchen; you never say a word to Father about this; I’ll wire you whenever Father’s coming to London, and you clear out of the place at once till he’s gone; and you pay me rent.” What kind of money do you think we could make that way? Well, I’ll tell you. Nothing, or next to it. Young Mr Archer needed our money. And young Mr Archer’s rent was more than what we made. People like you don’t even think we girls are human beings, do you? You look at us, but you don’t see us. You see flesh, naked flesh to lust after and to spit on. We don’t even have souls to people like you. We’re invisible; our profession is a screen that hides us. A person can’t look at us and see what we are – nothing, ever, except what we do. How could you ever know what that feels like?’

  ‘How could I know?’ he interrupted, with a sudden flash. ‘Do you really think people ever look at me and see anything of the man that I am? Don’t you see that if anyone in this world can understand what you mean, I am that person?’

  She hesitated, struck by his words, but they seemed only to inflame her more.

  ‘So that’s why!’ she cried. ‘It’s always a comfort to find worse than yourself, isn’t it? Oh, I begged Ivy to get out of it all. I told her it was even worse than the old lodging house. The days when old Mr Archer came to London, sometimes he asked Ivy to stay with him and gave her a few shillings. He was all right, that old man; I met him, he liked Ivy well enough. Thank God he did, because we couldn’t work on those days. Sometimes he didn’t need Ivy because he had guests or went out. Then we starved. I had to work more than I ever had. Ivy’s earnings with the theatre were less than what she could have made by working, and her rehearsals took up hours of the day. I was struggling to pay the two rents by myself. I couldn’t take it any more! I begged Ivy to give it up. But she swore that she’d find a solution, that she’d earn more money in the theatre, that we’d find a way. She didn’t want to go back to the old house, where the clients came up to our rooms. She wanted to separate her life in two, cut the bad side off from the good side, and make it smaller and smaller until it was gone. And you know, I kept on with it, even though it was harder than it ever had been. I kept on with it because I loved Ivy, and I loved our secret life, that pretty room we shared, with all those nice, ordinary people who had no idea about anything, and the time we spent there, brushing each other’s hair, just like two nice girls. And Ivy kept promising me it would get better. She’d make Mr Archer see reason. She’d ask him to lower the rent. She did ask, and you know what he said?’ Her demented voice imitated a kind of mincing cruelty as she quoted, ‘‘‘Oh no, I’m sorry. I can’t make it any less. In fact, you haven’t been too punctual lately. I might just have to take that key back from you if this goes on.”’

  ‘And then Ivy got pregnant,’ she went on, without the slightest pretence of obscuring this brutal fact under the euphemisms that we habitually use for it. ‘We thought everything was up with us. A few more months and she’d lose both her jobs, plus the baby to keep. She was sick about it. We spent the whole night crying in each other’s arms. It was the loss of everything we had gained; back to the mud for me, even worse for her, the loss of her work as an actress. I never saw her so desperate. She went up to Cambridge to see the old gentleman, with some idea of telling him what was happening and begging him for help. He was never a very generous old fellow; he never gave her more than a few shillings, but he was fond of her, and very rich. It seemed like her last chance.

  ‘She stayed away three days and came back radiant. She threw herself in my arms and told me everything was going to be all right. It was better than she could have dreamt of. The old gentleman had given her nothing but a pat on the back and a few coins – but something much, much better had happened. In those three days, Ivy had fallen in love, and someone had fallen in love with her
. She’d left desperate, she came back wildly happy. ‘‘I love him, Jenny,” she told me. ‘‘I can’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe it. Maybe even you wouldn’t understand.” ‘‘Of course I would,” I told her. ‘‘Except it sounds too good to be true.” ‘‘It’s true,” she promised me. ‘‘Only we can’t tell anyone. It has to be a secret till we’re actually married. He’s getting a licence – we can marry in a week or two, and then everything will be all right. It will be all right, Jenny! He has some money – not too much, but it’ll do. We’ll leave all this right behind us and move away.” She wouldn’t tell me anything more; wouldn’t tell me his name, anything about him. But it was like she was walking on air. He wrote to her twice in the next week, telling her the marriage was fixed. I started to believe in this unbelievable piece of luck. Ivy was so beautiful, anything was possible. She’d even told him about the baby. He wanted to adopt it, bring it up as his own. He must have been wild about her. A week later, the old gentleman asked her to come up to Cambridge to host some party of his. ‘‘I’ll go,” she told me, ‘‘it’s for the day before my wedding, Jenny! It’ll be like a goodbye to him. He’s been good to me.” She never came back. She didn’t write or wire. I didn’t know anything; I just thought she’d got married, and perhaps the new husband had whisked her off on a honeymoon somewhere. Only I couldn’t believe she didn’t write to me. I wanted to find her so much that I looked through her letters and read the ones he’d sent her, trying to figure out who he was. But I couldn’t tell, I couldn’t make out his name and there wasn’t an address.

  ‘Then the police came to see me and told me Ivy had been murdered in Cambridge, the very night she went up there. She’d been dead for days and I hadn’t known it! Oh, I was sick, there aren’t any words for what you feel when you find out that your best, your only friend is dead, and you had no idea. She was on the threshold of her life and she was killed. I tried to think who could have killed her, and why. Then I knew that it must have been the young Mr Archer – him, there, that I had never seen, that I didn’t know where he lived. Who else could it have been? Once she didn’t need him and his bloody key any more, she could have told everyone about what he’d been doing. She could have told his father, and got him cut off without a shilling. I made sure he’d done it; I swore I would kill him myself. I saved up every penny to buy myself a train ticket; I vowed I’d find out where he lived and kill him with my own hands. It was easy to find out where he lived. I looked in a Directory.’