When Last I Died

other mistakes, notably the one which referred to Eliza's term of service. Between the twenty years mentioned by the old servant herself and the years between the age of sixteen and almost seventy referred to by the diarist, there was a substantial difference.

Then there was the reference to the Aunt's house having been put in the hands of the agents. The house had been willed to Eliza, and it did not seem as though the diarist knew this; yet Bella, as the chief inheriter, must have known it.

On a par with this small yet significant error, was the one about the files. According to the diarist it seemed as though the files used in the escape of Piggy and Alec had not been traced. According to the Warden, they must have been; otherwise the make could not have been compared with that of the files in use at the Institutional manual centre. Yet surely Bella would have known that the 'escape' files had never left the building ?

Then came the incredible entry which referred to the inspector of police who investigated Cousin Tom's first fall from the window of the haunted house. It was inconceivable to Mrs. Bradley that he should have made any mention of the old lady and the grated carrot. There was no reason for his doing such a thing, for the old lady's death certificate was in order, and, except for the reference to a remark in the Daily Pennon, there had been no official suggestion that the old lady had died from anything but natural causes.

(Mrs. Bradley, incidentally, was so much interested in this point that she took the trouble to go up to London specially to consult the files of the newspaper in question. To her great interest, there was not a single reference to Aunt Flora's death in any of its columns for the whole year in which that death had occurred, for she went carefully through the lot.)

Then there was the slip in describing the pre-Institution activities of Alec. Either the diarist or the Warden was wrong, and, in view of the exhaustive records of each boy which were kept in the archives of the Institution, Mrs. Bradley did not, somehow, think it could be the Warden who was at fault. Of course, Bella Foxley might have been misinformed ... but, added to the rest of the evidence that the writer of the diary had made mistakes which the ex-housekeeper of the Institution ought not to have made, and, in most cases, Mrs. Bradley decided, would not have made, it was curious and very interesting.

She locked and bolted all the doors and fastened the down-stair windows— actions which, in that innocent countryside, she rarely troubled to perform—that night before she went to bed.

Chapter Three

COUNSEL'S OPINION

How in my thoughts shall I contrive The image I am framing, Which is so far superlative As 'tis beyond all naming?

· · · · · ·

It must be builded in the air, And 'tis my thoughts must do it, And only they must be the stair From earth to mount me to it.'

DRAYTON.

FERDINAND'S friend stretched his legs and smiled at his hostess.

'I've been longing to meet you,' he said.

'Flattering,' said Mrs. Bradley. 'I hope Ferdinand told you why you've come?'

'Oh, yes.' He nodded his handsome head. 'Bella Foxley. Interesting case. Curious that she committed suicide. Still, quite the type, of course.'

'I should be interested to know exactly what you mean by that.'

'I can't explain—exactly. But we see a lot of suicides, unfortunately, in our job. When I was a cub I had a regular Embankment beat for a fairly lurid sort of rag—the old Gimlet. You wouldn't remember it. Anyway, you can divide humanity into suicides and non-suicides. You ought to know more about it than I do! There is the person who would commit suicide no matter how life seemed to turn out, and there is the person who wouldn't, whatever sort of hell on earth he suffered. Bella Foxley, to my mind, belonged to the first group.'

'Thank you,' said Mrs. Bradley. 'But why did she choose to commit suicide at that particular time?'

'Well, some unkind people suggested that it was remorse, because, although she was acquitted, she was guilty. Most people thought she was guilty, you know.'

'Why did they think that?'

'She made an unfortunate impression in court, I think.'

'Yes. Reason enough. People will jump to conclusions, and the awkward part is that, as often as not, they are justified. It makes the scientific mind appear cumbersome and rather unnecessarily slow. Did you think it was remorse, as well as that she was guilty?'

'I thought she was guilty, but I don't think it was remorse that caused her to drown herself. I think she received anonymous letters.'

'Yes, she would do, of course. There are always lunatics at large, and they have brought about the suicide of an innocent person before now. But we seem to have begun at the end. It was the trial I wanted to hear about.'

'I remember it very well indeed,' said the ex-journalist. 'The case was most interesting to me. She was quite a tall woman, you know—five feet eight, I should think—and a bit bloated, with a bad skin—greasy and blackheads— rather repulsive, really. Besides which, she looked every inch a spinster, if you know what I mean. She was not at all nervous, either, and that was what impressed people most unfavourably, I think. Everybody still seems to think that the bold ones are guilty and the furtive ones innocent, although I don't pretend to know why. People don't change their nature or their general mental attitude because they've been accused of a crime.'

'Of what did the accusation consist? How did they state it?'

'Well, the story told by the prosecution was that this woman had been blackmailed by her cousin, a man named Turney, and that she went to the house that night, and, pretending that she had come to pay up, took the opportunity of pushing him out of the window.'

'How did they get hold of the blackmailing theory?' Mrs. Bradley inquired.

'That came from the wife, who was the chief witness for the prosecution. Her story was that she did not know why the prisoner had been paying certain sums of money to her husband, but that he had told her that the rent of the house and some money for psychical research had been provided by Bella, and that 'Bella would have to cough up a lot more before he was through with her.''

Mrs. Bradley thought of the admission in the diary that Bella had become a lodger with Cousin Tom and his wife Muriel, but she said nothing.

'The defence pressed Mrs. Muriel Turney hard, of course, to declare how much money had changed hands between the prisoner and her husband, and scored quite well when they forced her to admit that her husband had once shown her five pounds, on another occasion three pounds ten, and lastly a further five. If the prisoner were interested in the experiments he was making in connection with the so- called haunted house, these sums, the defence suggested, were not excessive subscriptions from a woman with an income of a thousand a year.

'They also dug up the prisoner's sister and got evidence from her of the prisoner's generosity. Weak-looking, faded sort of woman. You'd never have connected her with Bella. It appeared that the prisoner thought her sister had been treated badly by being cut out of the aunt's will, and had made over half her income to her. In the light of this really rather magnificent gesture, the small sums paid over to the cousin seemed almost negligible, especially as the defence found witnesses to prove that the prisoner was paying for board and lodging whilst she was staying with the cousin and his wife, and that the sums mentioned might have been nothing more than these payments.'

'They seem to have been made on rather a generous scale,' Mrs. Bradley suggested. 'She was only with Cousin Tom and his wife a week or two, I believe.'

'Still, it seemed absurd to talk of blackmail when the sums were so trifling. If they weren't actual payments they were probably small loans. The defence tried to establish the financial position of the cousin at the time of his death, but didn't get much change there, because the prosecution were able to show that the fellow had no outstanding debts, and was, in fact, rather better off than he had been for some time, so they dropped that pretty quickly, for, without the blackmail theory, they couldn't find a motive.'

'How did the prisoner herself account for her actions that night?' Mrs. Bradley enquired.

'Oh, well, of course, she was asked that by the prosecution. She went into the box all right. No trouble about that. She said that she and the wife had become very nervous in the haunted house and were unwilling to remain there, and so had gone to the inn. There the cousin came to see them several times, and had dinner, and then, after he had returned to the haunted house to continue his researches, which Mrs. Muriel was no longer willing to go on with, Mrs. M. became agitated, said that she knew something dreadful was going to happen, and that she felt she ought to go to the house and see whether all was well. Apparently she said this several nights.'

'But she didn't go?'

'No. What is more, her story and the story told by the prisoner did not agree. The wife said that on one occasion the prisoner refused to let her go, flung her back on her bed, darted out and locked the door behind her. The next morning the husband was found hurt, but not seriously. The prisoner, on the other hand, stated that the wife said she was too nervous to go to the house alone and yet was in 'such a state'—the prisoner's words—that she offered to go with her. The wife then said, 'What good would any of us be against those awful things?' Therefore the prisoner, much against her inclinations, but to pacify the wife who was 'in a terrible state of nerves ' went alone to the house, and, throwing gravel up at the bedroom window, attracted the attention of the cousin and conversed with him. She declared upon oath that she did not