The Riddle of the River Read online

  ‘And yet?’

  ‘There is something,’ he said. ‘I believe now – I am sure – that he had found out about the marriage. Once I found Ivy’s letters to me disarranged on my desk, and wondered about him. But I didn’t ask, and he never said a word. Still, the more I think about it, the more I am certain that he did know. I know him so well!’

  ‘And you think that would constitute a motive?’ I asked gently. ‘I mean, a stronger motive than what Miss Wolcombe surmised, that Ivy might tell others about his – his, ah, activities?’

  ‘That wouldn’t be a motive at all,’ he replied. ‘Ivy would never have spoken of all that again once she had got right away from it. She was not vindictive.’

  ‘You may be right,’ I said. ‘But why would your brother kill her rather than let her marry you?’

  ‘Rather than let me marry her,’ he said bitterly. ‘Don’t you see? Ivy was expecting a child, who would have become my child. A son, perhaps. She was sure it was a little boy.’

  ‘A son?’ I repeated slowly, wonderingly. ‘A son? To inherit? Do you mean that your son would inherit the Archer fortune if Julian did not have a son?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘My son would inherit the Archer fortune in any case. I am the older brother, not Julian.’

  I was stunned. Why had I never even thought of this?

  ‘You?’ I said. ‘But – but Julian talked about the fortune at table…I understood that he was the heir…and I saw his portrait in your father’s study at Chippendale House! I thought that only the Archer heirs were painted there.’

  ‘My portrait is there as well,’ he replied. ‘My father had us both sit for the American, Sargent. He had Julian painted because the doctors told him I might die at any age; according to some, I was not likely to live past the age of twenty-five.’

  ‘Of course!’ The portrait I had noticed in Mr Archer’s study leapt suddenly out of my memory, as clearly as if it stood again in front of my very eyes. Now I knew why Philip had seemed familiar to me when I first saw him, although so different from his father and brother. I remembered what I had thought of his portrait when I first noticed it. I had thought it the face of a burdened man – burdened by the Archer evil…

  ‘She was desperate when she found out about the child,’ he said suddenly. ‘She told my father, she told Julian, she begged them for help. She didn’t know what to do; she had no money, no one who could help her; she was going to lose the work as an actress that she cherished. She came here to the flat to see Julian – to beg him yet again! I knew her already, of course; I’d seen her often with my father. She was so beautiful…But we had never really spoken together. She had such eyes…She came to see Julian, and he wasn’t here, and she talked to me instead; she talked to me for hours; she laid her head on my knees and cried; she told me everything about herself, and I think…I think I told her everything also, about myself…words that I had never before spoken aloud. And I asked her to marry me then, at the end of that afternoon. When I think it was barely more than a month ago. It seems forever.’

  He stopped, drew a deep breath and continued.

  ‘We were to be married the very day she died; did you know that? It was all planned. She was to come upstairs in the night, after leaving my father’s party. She didn’t have any things with her, she didn’t want anyone to suspect what she meant to do. She had chosen her Ophelia costume from the theatre for a wedding dress; she didn’t possess anything else remotely suitable, and she wouldn’t hear of my offering her anything before the wedding – I had enough ado persuading her to accept just a little, simple pearl engagement ring. I would have kept her here for the rest of the night, and first thing in the morning after Julian went down to work, I would have sent Simpson out for something, and she would have helped me get to the church. But she never came. She was killed on her way here, and I only found out about it weeks later, when the police came to tell me. For all that time, I knew nothing of what had become of her; nothing, not one word. I thought that she had just changed her mind, and couldn’t bear to tell me. God knows I wasn’t even surprised. I thought that she couldn’t go through with it – that she couldn’t face marrying a – a thing like me. After all…no woman could.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘She could have, and she would have. She loved you. Didn’t you hear what Jenny said? Haven’t you read her letters? She was going to marry you, and she was killed for it.’

  ‘I loved her,’ he said, ‘loved her and was in love with her. Strange, isn’t it? That can happen even to a man like me. The body is ill, but the heart is just like anyone’s heart. After those hours we spent together, I was like a madman. I told her so; she stared at me; I’ll never forget her look full of amazement and tears. I didn’t want to force her or blackmail her into marrying me out of despair, if she didn’t want to of her own free will. I told her I would give her money; I have an allowance of my own, I could have kept her decently. I would have had her child brought up at my expense and never asked anything of her. But I took her hand in mine and told her that if she could accept it, I would marry her. I would adopt her child and make it legitimate. I knew what she felt about men and the love of men, the physical, bodily love; I knew she felt nothing but revulsion. I swore to her that our marriage would be exactly as she wanted; nothing, or everything – or anything. And she told me I was the first man in the whole of her life who had spoken such words to her. I remember what she said – many of those she had taken home with her for money had spoken of love, but not one had ever spoken to her with generosity. I’ll treasure every one of her words until I die. I had so few of them! I wanted her – I wanted her child. Can you understand that? I wanted her child, to hold and cherish; I, who will never have a child of my own. That’s why we chose not to tell Julian until the thing was done. He’s always known that I cannot live long; he had but to wait, and the family fortune would be his. He’s known that all his life; he wouldn’t have accepted this.’

  Julian – his name, inevitably, had reappeared.

  ‘Did the police tell you where she was killed, and what we believe she was doing when she was killed?’ I asked him suddenly.

  ‘No,’ he said, glancing up at me, surprised. ‘I know she was found in the Cam, in the Lammas Land. I didn’t know they knew anything about what she was doing when she died.’

  ‘You should know,’ I said. ‘It concerns you closely. It seems virtually certain now that she was killed in the bookshop just downstairs. I don’t know why she went in there or how she had a key, but I believe that she was there, writing a letter to you, which she meant to slip into your hand as she came upstairs a few minutes later, so as not to let your brother hear any special words pass between you. I found her letter to you; she thrust it down into the armchair. I gave it to the police, so I don’t have it here, but I can tell you what it said.’ And as closely as I could remember, I quoted the words of Ivy’s last little note. He bent forwards to catch my words.

  ‘Can I have the letter back?’ he asked softly.

  ‘I will get it for you,’ I promised him. ‘But – now we must talk about your brother – I have to ask you the most difficult question of all. Given that Ivy was in the bookshop, do you not think that your brother could have slipped down and killed her there during one of the times that he briefly left the room?’

  There was an awful silence. When he spoke, his voice was no more than a low croak.

  ‘It is horrible to say…Julian – my brother! Is it possible? No – it’s too horrible.’

  It was not enough. I waited, but as he did not speak again, I urged him gently.

  ‘No one knows Julian like you do,’ I said. ‘No one but you can answer this question: would he have been capable of it?’

  ‘I thought he would go to any lengths to prevent my marrying Ivy. I thought it, and feared it, and did everything to hide it,’ he admitted. ‘He could have done it, perhaps – yet no! I told you, he spent the whole evening with me.’

  ‘Except for a
few minutes now and then,’ I reminded him. ‘And she was just downstairs. It would have taken no more.’

  ‘But he couldn’t have known she was there!’ he said, as though with a last surge of energy in the defence of his brother. ‘Even I had no idea she meant to stop down there before coming up here.’

  ‘Couldn’t they have planned it between them?’ I persisted gently. ‘Could he not have asked her to meet him for some reason?’

  ‘Impossible,’ he replied. ‘Ivy would never have agreed to meet him anywhere, day or night. She hated him; her one desire was never to see him again. I didn’t know why, I thought she had some inkling of the difficulties he might put in the way of our marriage; she never told me about my brother’s role in her life; I believe she kept silent about it to protect my feelings. But she told me she hated seeing him. And besides, if she had meant to meet him down there secretly, she wouldn’t have written to me while waiting for him.’

  ‘I know, I’ve thought of that,’ I admitted. ‘Listen, perhaps he did not find out that she was going to the bookshop from Ivy herself. Might it not have been your father who sent her there, and told Julian?’

  ‘My father?’ He stopped, stunned, and stared at me. ‘Why would my father do that?’

  ‘Why would he send her to Heffers? I don’t know, but he could easily have found a pretext. He gave her quite a lot of money before she left his house, a whole roll of bank notes, according to a lady who saw him do it. He admits it, and says it was a gift, but it seems like too much money…’

  ‘She wouldn’t have accepted a gift from him, not on that day,’ he said. ‘She no longer needed it! When she begged him for help the week before, he gave her just ten shillings – and she was in desperate need!’ He covered his eyes with his hand.

  ‘Well,’ I said, pursuing an idea that had been vaguely in my mind, ‘do you think it is possible that he asked her, as a favour, to bring that money to Heffers? Could he have borrowed it and meant to return it, or told her some such story, and lent her the key to get in and put the money there?’

  ‘My father doesn’t have the key to the bookshop,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Julian could have given it to him,’ I said.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘To save his son from losing the family fortune to a bastard child…’ I said wearily. I hated saying the words, but he must know. He stared at me.

  ‘Are you saying that my father would have sent Ivy there on purpose to be killed?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, unable to speak my honest thought: yes!

  ‘It can’t be,’ he said, echoing the logical objections that hovered in my mind, contradicting my own intuitive conviction. ‘Even if Julian gave him the key and knew he meant to send her there during the night, how could he have known exactly when she would be there? He didn’t spend his time listening or looking out for her, I swear it. He sat at the piano and played waltzes and…comic songs…’ His voice trailed away, trying to reconcile the memory of that cheerful moment with the murder.

  I was struck by a sudden revelation. ‘The telephone!’ I shouted suddenly, springing to my feet! ‘I’ve been wondering how your father could have let Julian know exactly when Ivy left his house – just that one detail would make it easy for him to predict her arrival at the bookshop and slip down within a few minutes of the right time! I’ve been so stupid, thinking about telepathy. Mr Archer – do you have the telephone installed?’

  He looked at me blankly, and shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘The shop downstairs has one, but we don’t, up here.’

  My face fell utterly. ‘Is there any other way your father could have communicated with your brother on that evening, without leaving his house, without your knowing anything about it?’ I said.

  He did not answer. He looked utterly wretched.

  1898

  ‘They’ve offered us to cover the Kingstown Regatta in a boat,’ he said, showing the letter to Kemp, his eyes dancing. ‘Let’s do it. It will be the best publicity we’ve ever had, by far!’

  Wednesday, July 20th, 1898

  The darkness was agitated around me, its peace shattered by the incessant rumble and chug of the train, the rolling movement imparted to the whole of the sleeping car, the sensation of proximity of a world of living humanity enclosed together in a series of wagons, all engaged in the communal business of trying to get some rest, not many, probably, succeeding. The train was the Irish Mail to Holyhead, which after stopping innumerable times to pick up the mail bags suspended for collection alongside the track, disgorged a group of dishevelled and exhausted passengers at the landing stage at the unholy hour of two-thirty in the morning.

  I was on my way to the Kingstown Regatta. Mr Archer, who meant to return home in his own yacht, sailed by his friends, had naturally invited me to join him for the trip, but I had pleaded the necessities of my daily life and refused. Spending a festive day in town together was one thing; spending a night enclosed on a boat with no possibility of escape an entirely different one.

  The decision to make the trip at all had not been taken lightly. I had thought long and hard, and I continued to do so, interrogating myself pitilessly as I lay, eyes open against the darkness, broken by flashes of light, bumps and shouts, as the train stopped at Harrow, at Hempstead, Bletchley, Nuneaton, Tamworth, Stafford, Rhyl, Bangor.

  Logic, reason and Inspector Doherty told me that my entire investigation of the Archers must be a mistake; the alibis were too solid, the instantaneous message that would have solved the mystery remained inconceivable, Sir Oliver’s experiments in telepathy had done no more than convince me that the thing was impossible – and the Archers did not possess the telephone. Yet at the very moment when I was wavering, almost convinced by all these objections, Philip had revealed to me an overwhelmingly strong motive for the murder, of which I had suspected nothing. And Ivy had been killed in Heffers, or at least I was convinced that it was so. Then how could the Archers be unconnected with her killing?

  I promised myself that this trip to Dublin represented my very last, final attempt at finding out the truth. If the Archers were guilty, I must discover it now, and if I failed, I must accept their innocence and either search for the murderer elsewhere against all my intuition, or give up the search altogether. Coming here at all seemed tremendously dangerous. If Mr Archer were guilty, then by questioning him too closely, I risked making myself suspicious to him. If he were innocent, then it was a frightening risk to go away leaving Jenny behind; Jenny, in the same town as Julian Archer, aware now of his role in her past life, filled with hatred and violent fury. Whatever I undertook seemed fraught with danger.

  The sky was dark and cloudy when the train pulled into Holyhead. My eyes, which had firmly refused to shut for the entire duration of the journey, now protested vigorously at the necessity of remaining open. The other passengers and I trudged across the landing stage and embarked on the Royal Mail Steamer. For several hours, I lay in a berth in the ladies’ cabin, snatches of dreams mingling in my mind with moments of waking during which I perceived the slowly lightening sky through the porthole. Towards seven o’clock I gave up all pretence of sleeping and went above onto the deck.

  The sight of the sea, infinite and twinkling, reflecting even the meagrest morsels of sunlight accorded to its purling surface, moved and awakened me to the sense of the largeness of the world. My own task gained in sharpness and perspective. I suddenly realised that outside the necessary contact with Mr Archer, the regatta might turn out to be one of the unforgettable travelling experiences of my life. I know nothing about boating, but who cannot be struck with admiration at the sight of a splendid yacht, manned by expert sailors exhibiting the kind of rapid, precise motion that one usually expects from horses or acrobats? I found myself looking forward with eager purpose to the coming day, and my sense of purpose began to share space in my breast with a sense of impending beauty and excitement.

  The little train from Dublin to Kingstown, the first r
ailway constructed on Irish soil, revealed to me a landscape whose dominant colour was a vivid green, produced, I thought sadly, by an enormous quantity of rainfall, which we were not absolutely certain to avoid that very day, since the sky overhead was becoming increasingly grey as the train progressed through the countryside. The ride was short; no more than six or seven miles later all passengers were invited to alight, and I found myself in Kingstown.

  It was unmistakably a festival day, reminiscent of Ascot. The crowd that milled in the streets surrounding the port were dressed in clothes so elegant and fashionable that my own carefully chosen muslin gown and bonnet appeared countrified and even, in spite of my best efforts, slightly wrinkled. I smoothed out my skirts as well as I could, adjusted my shawl and proceeded to the Anchor Hotel.

  It took some courage before I could persuade myself to enter, but when I did, I saw that the dark, quiet interior contained almost no clients, and my awkward shyness diminished. Mr Archer was nowhere to be seen, as it was still long before midday, but a kind gentleman pointed the way to the port, and told me that everyone had already gone there, as the race was about to begin.

  The scene on the docks was impressive. A throng of passionate spectators crowded together so solidly that the sea was invisible behind them; their hats and umbrellas formed a screen impenetrable even to the tallest viewer. The jostling was indescribable, and only the masts of the boats could be perceived. The tall lamp posts surrounding the area in front of the dock were all covered with clinging and climbing boys, and these served as the only useful source of information about what was happening on the water.

  ‘They’re off for the Queen’s Cup!’ a voice cried; a general shout went up, and the boats sailed away – but only, as I soon understood, to take up their starting positions for the first race. This placing in position took up what seemed an immense amount of time, which was relieved by the boys on the lamp posts shouting out descriptions of the boats as they manoeuvred. Finally, when I had tired of moving around the edge of the crowd, waiting and trying unsuccessfully to find a loophole through which I could perceive the water, I heard the report of a gun, and knew the race had begun. I gave up on the waterfront altogether and moved to the outskirts of the crowd, hoping to hear something interesting, at least. But no.