'I wish you hadn't reminded me. This woman had the audacity to say that people were talking about Marjorie long before she was killed, and that she was asking for trouble, walking down by the river at night on her own. She made her sound like a common tart, looking for custom. It was there, in the tone of voice she used.'
'What sort of talk was there?'
'That she was avoiding her friends, insinuating that she must be in some sort of trouble. Well, someone in London knows where she was that evening. Why won't he or she tell us the truth?' Her voice was rising again, and she fidgeted with her gloves as if they had offended her, not the woman. 'I blame Helen Calder. She ought to have noticed something. Marjorie would have listened to Helen if she'd spoken up. In the beginning, before it had got too far. But she shut her eyes, didn't she? The sort of woman who wasn't willing to put herself out for anyone, safe in her own rectitude.'
It was a harsh indictment, not really warranted, but I'd seen Helen Calder's willing detachment even when she suspected that Marjorie was growing too fond of the man she'd been seeing. I didn't believe that she could have changed the situation, but I could understand Serena Melton's feeling that she might have made a difference.
'There must be a reason why she-' I began.
But she interrupted me for a second time. 'We're speaking of behavior that led to murder. I would have said something, if I'd had any inkling that Marjorie was being talked about. I'd have confronted her and told her what I thought of such selfish conduct.'
'Are you saying that her-that an affair had something to do with her death?'
She cast a withering glance in my direction. 'When you flout the rules of society, you leave yourself open to the consequences of your actions. If she'd been at home, if she'd been with respectable friends, she would still be alive and Merry would still be alive.'
All pretense that Marjorie had been killed in the course of a robbery had been dropped. I don't think Serena was aware of it, the volatile mixture of distress and anger, grief and frustration blinding her to everything else.
We drove in silence for a time, and then she said, 'I might as well go home. I don't feel like facing any more blank faces and lies. The people who could really help me are Marjorie's closest friends, but they're fiercely loyal. Or else Victoria has told them not to talk to me. I wouldn't put it past her.' She flicked a glance in my direction. 'Marjorie's sister. I can't abide her, and neither could Marjorie.'
The pent-up feeling of helplessness driving her must be exhausting, I thought, for there were new lines around her mouth, and circles beneath her eyes.
I said, 'Would your brother want you to go through this anguish, trying to get at the truth?'
'I don't know whether he would or not. But if the shoe were on the other foot, he'd have moved heaven and earth to find out who had killed me. I can do no less. Just because I'm a woman, I'm not going to walk away from this.'
I couldn't have said whether Lieutenant Evanson would have felt that way. But then he hadn't lost his sister while I was caring for him. I couldn't have guessed how angry he would have been, or if he'd have left matters to the police.
'Would you mind dropping me at the station? I'm sorry to ask you to turn around. But it would be a kindness.'
I did as she asked, and when she had left the motorcar, she turned back to me and said, 'If you hear anything about Marjorie, anything at all, you would let me know, wouldn't you?'
Now there was a conundrum. I hadn't told her what I knew. And I couldn't in good conscience promise to keep her informed. And I wasn't sure I trusted her to act wisely if she did learn the truth.
'Serena-' I began.
But she said bitterly, 'You're just like the rest, aren't you?'
'No,' I said sharply. 'I will go to the police if I hear anything that's helpful in finding her murderer. That's what everyone should do.'
'Liar,' she answered, turning her back.
And she was gone, marching toward the station as if she were marching to war.
In a way she probably thought she was.
I took Michael, still protesting, back to Little Sefton.
'I've made a promise to your doctors,' I told him over his protests when I finally ran him to earth at the Marlborough. 'After I keep it, you're free to do as you like.'
He was not in a good mood. As we threaded our way through London's traffic-mostly bicycles, military convoys or vehicles, omnibuses, and the occasional lorry trying to make deliveries to the next shop-I let him sulk.
He did it beautifully. But I was immune to his blandishments.
When we were in the clear and running through the countryside beyond London, I said, 'I came looking for you earlier. Where were you?'
At first I was sure he wasn't going to tell me. Finally, he said, 'I went to Scotland Yard.'
Surprised, I asked, 'And did they have news for you?'
'They would tell me nothing.' There was suppressed anger in his confession. 'Apparently I'm a suspect in Marjorie's death.'
'But-you said you were in France.'
Yet Jack Melton had told me he was not.
He turned to look at the passing scene, as if he hadn't heard me. Then, grudgingly, he went on. 'I haven't said anything about it. I was given forty-eight hours' leave. A foreign object in my eye. I was sent to a specialist in London. My men were in rotation, I could be spared. He removed the particle, gave me drops and a patch, and I went straight back to the line. I didn't actually lie. Everyone thought I was in France. I let them go on thinking it. But the Yard stumbled on the truth.'
'I don't understand.'
'I hadn't heard from Marjorie for three months. Just-silence. I wrote to Victoria, but she wouldn't answer. That worried me more. I tried to get word to Meriwether, to ask him if everything was all right. But it didn't get through. When my eye was inflamed, they thought I might lose it, and I was given the choice of seeing someone in Paris or in London. Luckily, I knew a chap in school whose father was an eye surgeon in Harley Street, and the doctors at the Front approved.'
'And did you see Marjorie?'
'No. I sent her a telegram the day before, telling her where I would be, begging her to come and sit with me for a bit. Either she didn't get the message or she had something else on her mind. She never came.'
He was staring at a field where cows grazed, and so I couldn't read his face.
'And you didn't go to the house? Why not?'
'I was told not to leave the surgery. Not to move for twenty-four hours. I waited all that day and the next for her, and she didn't come.'
'You went back to France, not knowing she'd been killed?'
He didn't answer.
'Michael-?'
He turned to me, his face twisted with grief and anger. 'Do you know how many times I've wondered if she was on her way to Dr. McKinley's surgery when she was killed? How many times I've wondered if she might have lived if she'd been with me instead of out on the street somewhere and vulnerable?'
And Marjorie's housekeeper had said she went out earlier in the day and never returned. From the train station, could she have been on her way to see Michael? Was the timing right?
Catching sight of the next turning, I asked as I slowed for it, 'You couldn't leave the surgery?'
'Dr. McKinley told me not to jar the eye in any way. He left me in a darkened room and his wife brought me my dinner and my breakfast the next morning.'
'So you weren't supervised?'
'I was there whenever they looked in on me,' he said, which wasn't necessarily the same thing.
I let a little time pass.
'Was it your child she was carrying?'
