The Grass Widow's Tale

“She did herself well. Doesn’t it seem to you that a lot of this is brand-new?”

“I told you, she took the car shopping on Thursday. I said she’d have time to shop in London, but she couldn’t wait. She loved clothes,” he said helplessly, watching delicate feminine colours lifted one by one from Pippa’s treasury.

“I see she did. Too well,” said Bunty sharply, “to have let this pass when she was packing.”

He had noticed nothing wrong, and indeed there was little to notice, just a corner of a folded skirt in its plastic envelope crumpled together like a buckled wing after a collision, stubbed into creases. And directly below that, the lace edge of a slip folded back on itself. Bunty slid her hand into the corner and felt down past layer after layer, turning them back to examine each as she came to it. Then she readjusted them, a glint of excitement in her eye, and treated all the other corners in the same way.

“You see?”

He didn’t see; his own packing would have looked so different that this still appeared perfection, but it is on perfection that tiny blemishes show most clearly.

“He was very neat, he hardly disturbed anything, but he left his traces, all the same. She’d never have left those corners crumpled like that, not even by one fold. Even if she had to disturb her case again to put in something else, she’d do the job properly. Somebody has been through this case, hunting for something. Something big enough to be easily found, because he didn’t lift out the things, he just ran his hands down in the corners and here, at the front, and felt for it. And what’s more,” she said with certainty, “he didn’t find it!”

“Oh, now, hold it! How can you possibly know that?”

“Because if he had, something big enough to be located that way, he would have to lift things out to get at it, or else pull it out by force from under, and in either case we’d be able to tell. If anything sizable had been yanked from under these pretties, not only would they have been disarranged a good deal more, but also the hole where the thing had been would be there to be seen and felt. You try it, some time. And even if he’d lifted things out, I think I’d be able to tell the difference. Besides, I doubt if he had time.”

“He certainly didn’t have too much, but…” He was afraid to believe too readily in her conclusions. She might consider this as proof positive that some third person had been present in the cottage that night, but he was still waiting for the unmistakable sign, something that didn’t depend on opinion, something as positive as a fingerprint.

“I wonder,” said Bunty, “what he was looking for?” She closed the lid again over the delicate remains of Pippa’s human vanity, and turned to their last card, the large handbag of cream-coloured glove-leather, soft as velvet and almost as expensive as mink. “This is new, too? She was really intending to start afresh, wasn’t she?”

He said sombrely: “Yes ”; thinking, but not with me.

Bunty unclasped the opulent bag, and turned it upside-down over the table, letting its contents slide out gently through her fingers to be spread out on the polished surface and examined almost in one glance. She moved the items aside one by one, innocuous things like comb, handkerchief, purse-cum-wallet, stamp-case, compact, lipstick, tissues in a clear plastic holder, Quickies…

“… ball-pen, manicure, Kwells… Was she a bad traveller in a car?”

“Not that I know of. But we hadn’t made any long trips together before. Maybe she was. When you come down to it, I didn’t really know much about her.”

“… a folder about what’s on in London, a small wallet of hair-grips. That’s all. Well?”

“Well?” he repeated, without understanding. “Yes, that’s all. Nothing remarkable there.” His voice was discouraged, though he tried to keep it level and reasonable. What, after all, had he been expecting? “Nothing there to tell us anything new.”

“Oh, no?” said Bunty. “Then where are her keys?”

“Keys?” he echoed, shaken, blinded, transfigured with realisation. “Keys!”

He began to shake uncontrollably, and she put her arm round him and held him strongly, watching his face. In similar circumstances she might even have ventured to put her arms round Dominic, yes, even at his ripe, daunting age of twenty, rising twenty-one, though with Dominic she would have had to go very much more carefully, simply because he was her son, and still a little in love with her, and terribly in love with someone else, and jealous of his own manhood. Luke was an easier case, their relationship, complex as it might be, had not that ultimate complexity.

“Yes, her keys. Didn’t you think of them? Her suitcase wasn’t locked, was it? Would Pippa go anywhere with her suitcase unlocked? Of course she locked it! Of course she had her keys with her, here, in this handbag. She was locking up her flat, wasn’t she? She was locking her luggage. He—whoever he was—he took her keys to look through her case, and he didn’t find what he was looking for, so he kept the keys. Why? To look for it in her flat… don’t you think so?”

She led him in her arm to the nearest of the white wicker chairs and persuaded him into it, and sat on the arm and held him against her shoulder, talking to him in a soft, reasonable, detached voice, coaxing and reassuring without directly doing either.

“He wanted something she had, or something he believed she had. He thought it would be in her case, but it wasn’t. So he went to her flat to hunt for it there. Now you know,” she said, and had no need, and felt none, to explain what it was that he knew.

“There was someone there,” he said, suddenly laughing, shaking with laughter like a lunatic. “I didn’t…” And he put his head down in her lap and laughed and wept, with relief, with rapture, because he wasn’t a murderer.

“She always carried them,” he said, clearly, almost gaily, staring out over a sea now deep-blue and shadow- green in the late afternoon light. His face was warm, human, mobile, with fluctuating colour and live, ardent eyes. His age, which went up and down on the yo-yo of circumstances, had steadied at twenty-seven, and now he was well able to hold it there. “She was a person who took care to lock things. She had a little leather case shaped like a climbing boot, she’d bought it somewhere in the Tyrol, one holiday. A little kid climbing boot with a keyring. You fitted your keys on the ring, and it went inside the boot, and the boot zipped up. She wouldn’t go away without that! And it isn’t here. And I didn’t take it. So somebody else did. So I believe—I believe now! —that I didn’t kill her. Someone did come in on us. I was set up