suddenly — stillness.
He knew she was dead.
Trudi stood in the doorway, then moved forward to him slowly.
She said, “Is all right. I saw. You did not touch her.” And she fumbled for the English word. “Was — accident?” She came close beside him, staring down. “But she is dead,” she said.
She was dead. He had not touched her, it had been an accident.
But she was dead — and he was free.
It took him a little while to accept that Trudi was not going to tie up her life with an out-of-work, has-been actor, free or not free. “But, darrleeng, you know that your money is all gone, soon I must anyway leave. Mrs. Gray she has told me so.” And since Mrs. Gray was lying there dead on the floor and could not contradict, she impro- vised a hurried tally of the debts already owing to her. “And this I must have, Raymond, soon I go home if I have no more a job here.”
To be free — to be free to marry her and now to lose her! He pleaded, “Don’t you love me at all?”
“But of course! Only how can we marry, darrleeng, if you have no money to live? So this money I must have, to go home.”
“You can’t go yet, anyway. You’ll have to stand by me about — her.” He had almost forgotten the poor dead thing lying there, ungainly, at their feet. “You’ll have to give evidence for me.”
She shrugged. “Of course. Was accident. But then I go home.”
“Leaving me here like this? Trudi, I have no wife now, no money—”
The little shrug again, so endearing to his infatuated heart, half comic, half rueful; the wag of the pretty little head toward the window across the corner. “As to wife, as to money — over there, plenty both.”
He said quickly, “Then I should be rich. So you and I—?”
But she said, as a few minutes earlier Colette had said, “I don’t think Mrs. Rosa Fox puts up with nonsense. I think she suddenly pulls the moneybags — tight.”
Did the idea come to him all in a flash as it seemed at the time? — or was there an interval while he thought? — while he stood over his wife’s dead body and carefully, deliberately, thought it all through to the end? All he knew afterward was that suddenly he had Trudi by the arm, was talking to her urgently, pulling her to kneel down beside as, very delicately, he scraped from the round brass knob of the fender a fleck of the blood so rapidly congealing there, smearing it over the round brass knob of the poker, the knob identical in size, covering the smears with his own hand. And finally he threw the poker back into the fireplace.
“Now, Trudi, slip out, don’t let anyone see you. Buy something somewhere. Come back right away and this time let the porter see you.”
He did not look back, as he scrambled to his feet, at the still sprawled body — he had not even that moment to spend on the past.
The future was now ahead of him. Only, he prayed, as he furtively slid out into the corridor, let Rosa be in! And let her be alone!
She was in and alone. She was always in and alone these days, flopped in an armchair, dreaming like an adolescent girl of her hopeless, her helpless, love. “A woman of my age,” she thought,
“sitting here mooning over another woman’s husband.” But she’d been quite a gal in her day and widowed a long, long time. Now she said, “Raymond — how lovely!” And at once, “But what’s the matter, my dear? Are you ill?”
“Rosa,” he said, “You must help me!” And he fell on his knees before her, grabbing at her skirt with shuddering hands — really, with all that talent it was quite extraordinary that he couldn’t get more work! He threw a hoarse quaver into his voice. “I’ve killed her,” he said.
She stepped back and away from him. “Killed her?”
“Colette. I’ve killed her. She went on and on. She said horrible things about — about you, Rosa. She thinks you — she always said that you — Rosa, I know you’ve liked me—”
“I love you,” she said simply; but she took a deep, deep breath while the future spread out before her — as earlier his own had opened out to him. His wife was dead and he was free.
He pretended amazement at her answer — amazement and gratit-ude; but he was too clever to claim immediately a return of her feeling. He came at last to the point. “Then, even more, Rosa, may I dare to ask you what I was going to. I am throwing myself on your mercy, just praying that out of friendship you will help me. And now, if you really mean that you—”
And he went with her to the sofa and sat there gripping her hands and poured it all out to her. “She was being so vile. She had — well, she’s dead, but Colette had a filthy mind, Rosa. She’d been going on like this for weeks and suddenly I couldn’t stand it any more. I saw red. I–I picked up the poker. I didn’t mean to harm her — honestly, I swear it — just to frighten her. But when I came to myself again—” And he prayed, “Oh, my God, please try to understand!”
“You did this because she was saying foul things about
“You’ve always been so nice to us, Rosa; it just made me sick, her talking like that, sneering and jeering.” And he poured it all out again, living through the scene, only substituting her name for Trudi’s. Her big plain face went first white, then scarlet, then white again. She held tightly to his hand. “What do you want me to do?”
“Rosa, I thought very quickly — I do think quickly when I’m in a spot. It seems awful now, her lying there dead and me just thinking of myself, trying to fight my way out of it. But that’s what I did. And then I knelt down and — well, there are two brass knobs on the fender exactly like the one on the poker and I–I moved her head so that it looked as though she’d hit it against one of the fender knobs, and then I cleaned all the — the blood and stuff off the poker—”
She was a clever woman — quick and clever. The body might have slowed down, the body that once had been so strong and under control, but the mind was still clever and quick. “An accident,” she said.
“Yes, but — people knew we were always quarreling. Trudi must have known it, of course. They could say I’d pushed her, given-her a shove.” He gave her a sick look that was not too difficult to assume.
“At the least — manslaughter,” he said.
Clever and quick. “You want me to say that I
That you didn’t hit her?”
“My God,” he said, “you’re marvelous! Yes. You could say you saw it all through the window, saw me standing there talking to her, say frankly that we seemed to be arguing, make it look as though you’re not too much on my side, just a casual neighbor. And then — there’s a rug there, you know it, very silky and slippery — you skidded on it once yourself, remember? Perfectly possible for her to have taken a backward step, slipped and fallen backward; and of course that would be all you’d know — you can’t see down to the floor of our room, even from your balcony.”
“But I’d have to say I was out
He had thought that out too. “Your balcony’s only overlooked by two flats, and all those people will have been out; I know them.
No one could say that you
“All right,” she said.
“You’ll do it for me?”
“Of course. But what about that girl, that little trollop, whatever her name is — the au pair?”
He could hardly keep the stiffness from his voice but he controled himself. “Out shopping, thank God!” And thank God, also, that Rosa couldn’t in fact have been on the balcony, looking in, seeing Trudi there in the room with him. He knew all about the allergy, and one glance at her face confirmed it — Rosa hadn’t been out.
“Well, go back now. You must call a doctor quick. And say nothing about me. Just tell your story, don’t seem even to think of bringing me into it. They’ll be round here soon enough, asking if I saw anything. Now, time’s passing, you really must go.”
He started for the door but suddenly he paused. “Rosa!” He had assumed a look of shame but over the shame a flush of exultancy.
“Rosa, it’s awful to have even thought of it, but suddenly it’s come to me. A trial for murder! You know how things are in the theatrical business, you know how things have been with me lately. But if I were suddenly in the news! Accused of murder — standing there at the Old Bailey, headlines in all the papers, a
