“I see,” said George, remembering how in the night Bunty had reorientated him with much the same phrases and sent him off after the same quarry, though by slower and more orthodox methods. “So you thought of one woman at least who was older, who was well known to her, and who’d been on the scene with her that evening.”
“Yes. And I thought what Kitty could have said to her that might make her suddenly want to kill Mr. Armiger, and you see, it was there as soon as I began looking for it.” Yes, it was there to be found, though he shouldn’t have known enough to go looking for it. There isn’t much boys miss; even the gossip they disdain their knowing senses record accurately. “I wouldn’t mind betting,” said Dominic, “that Kitty’s the one person who didn’t even know what they said about him and Miss Hamilton. She’s so apart from those things. Even if you told her something like that it would go in one ear and out the other. She doesn’t hear what doesn’t interest her.”
George wasn’t prepared to follow him into the shadowy sweet hinterland of Kitty’s mind; there was no permanent place for either of them there.
“So you decided as we couldn’t find the gloves to try a gigantic bluff and pretend that you had. How did you set about it?”
Dominic told the whole story, glad to unburden himself; it was difficult to recapture the fear now, in this familiar and secure place, but there were times when he trembled.
“I went there after I knew old Shelley’d left, and pretended I wanted to talk to him, and that it was something about the case. As soon as she bit like that and suggested I should tell her instead I felt sure I was right about her. And when I told her I’d found the gloves, and they were a woman’s, letting on I thought they must be Kitty’s, and wanted to suppress the evidence, well, then it began to look even more promising, because right away she said I could give them to her and she’d deal with them. Meaning me to understand, she’d destroy them. Well, I mean people just don’t stick their necks out like that, not to a chap they’ve hardly set eyes on before, and don’t know at all. Do they? Not without a pretty urgent reason of their own. She tried to make me tell where I’d found them, and what they were like and all that, so she could make sure whether she really had anything to fear or not, but I laid on a sort of hysterical act, and she couldn’t get any sense out of me. And you know, she couldn’t afford to take even the least risk of my tale being true. Even if the odds were a thousand to one against my having anything that mattered to her, she couldn’t afford to let even that one chance slip by. So she said give them to her. And if I’d done it then and there I don’t know what she’d have done, because long before that I could feel her thinking that I was just as dangerous to her as the gloves themselves, and she had to get rid of both of us. I was acting pretty emotional, I bet she was thinking to herself, this little ass will never be able to keep his mouth shut, some day he’ll blab to his father. I think she’d have seen to it that something happened to me right there in the office, because everyone else had gone, and with the car she’d have been able to take me somewhere miles away to dump me. But I said I hadn’t got them on me, on account of the chaps at school being naturally a bit casual with one another’s things, and I’d bring them to her when I came in for my music lesson at night. You should have seen her jump at it! Nobody’d ever know we were going to meet, and if I vanished nobody’d ever think of her. She suggested she’d wait for me at the end of the road when she came from the club. And she impressed on me that I wasn’t to say a word to a soul. So then I was absolutely sure. She had got rid of some bloodstained gloves somewhere close to the barn that night, and she had killed Mr. Armiger. Why else should she prepare a set-up like that?”
“And why,” asked George gently, “didn’t you come to me then and tell me everything? Why did you have to go through with a thing like that all by yourself? Couldn’t you have trusted me?”
The note of reproach, however restrained, had been a mistake. “All right, I know, I know!” said George hastily. “It wasn’t proof, and you felt you had to provide the proof. But did it have to be by using yourself as live bait?”
“Well, having gone so far I sort of couldn’t stop. And if I’d told you you’d have stopped me from going on with it. You’d have had to. I could do a thing like that, but you couldn’t let me do it. You don’t blame me, do you?”
“I don’t blame you, I blame myself. I ought to have made it possible for you to rely on me more.” That wasn’t the way, either; self-reproach seemed to have a worse effect still on Dominic. “Never mind,” said George gently. “You did what you felt you ought to do, let’s leave it at that for now. How did you know what sort of gloves to provide? That must have been a headache. If they were wrong, one glance and she’d know you were lying.”
“But then she’d also know I suspected her and was trying to trap her, wouldn’t she? And that would have come to the same thing, she’d still think it essential to get rid of me while she had this chance. So it didn’t matter. But I did try to do the best I could. I saw she hadn’t got gloves on when we left the office, so I went along to see her to the car, and sure enough she had them there in the locker, and they were plain short black kid and quite new, hardly creased at the joints yet. So I thought the safest bet was that she bought a pair as like the ones she threw away as possible, and I rode back into town and got some like them. I ran the tap on them and crumpled and soiled them and tried to age them a bit, and even then I wrapped them up so she should only get a glimpse of them.
“And you know all the rest,” said Dominic, lying back in his pillows with a huge sigh. “I couldn’t know my note to Leslie Armiger would be held up like that, or I’d have said eight o’clock instead of half past.”
“I should think so,” said George warmly. “Turned nine when they located me at the garage near her place, and no sign of you or the Riley by the time we got to Brook Street. If it hadn’t been for young Leslie, , , ” He dropped that sentence quickly, for his own sake as much as for Dominic’s.
“Suppose she goes back on her confession? Will you still be able to get a conviction without the real gloves?”
“Oh, there’ll be no trouble there. Her car’s full of traces of blood, all the seams of the driving-seat show it. The leather’s been washed, but she made the usual mistake of using hot water, and in any case you can never get it out of the threads. And we’ve recovered the zip fastener of the black skirt she wore that night, and two ornamental buttons from the front pleat, all metal, out of the furnace ashes from the flats where she lives. The jacket she must have thought wasn’t marked, she sent it to a church rummage sale, but we’ve traced it. The right sleeve is slightly splashed with blood, too. Oh, yes, we’ve got a case. She must have knelt on the floor beside him, I should think, anyhow she found it necessary to burn the skirt. No wonder the hem of Kitty’s dress was stained where it brushed hers.”
Looking fixedly at the edge of the sheet which he was folding between his fingers, Dominic asked abruptly: “Did you see her to-day?”
“Who, Ruth Hamilton?”
“No,” said Dominic, stiffening. “Kitty. When they, when she was released.”
“Yes, I saw her.”
“To speak to? How did she look? Did she say anything?”
“She looked a bit dazed as yet,” said George carefully, remembering the stunned purple eyes that had stared bewildered at freedom even when it was put into her hands. “Give her a day or two, and she’ll be her own girl again. At first the truth was just one more shock to her, but she was coming round nicely the last I saw of her. She
