She didn’t glance in Torrant’s direction. She said, “That’s right, Sergeant. Sarah was going to start a new job in Lynnfield, and I asked her to spend a few days with me first.”
Behind her the grandfather clock resumed its dull ticking, as though nothing at all had happened in the room.
CHAPTER 11
TORRANT DEVOTED his stare to the pattern of the parlor rug, and Sergeant Hilary left. Mrs. Watts went out into the hall with him; Torrant caught a few apologetic phrases about routine and an autopsy. When Mrs. Watts re-entered the parlor he stood up expectantly—and felt his own face tightening.
The mask she had worn under the sergeant’s inquiries was still in place. She didn’t look at Torrant, he might not have been in the room. For a silent few moments he watched her plump the pillow where the policeman had sat, move the chair a fraction of an inch, give a microscopic turn to the beaded lampshade above it. Then he said almost casually, “Why didn’t you tell the sergeant about me, Mrs. Watts?”
She plucked at a faultless antimacassar. “Sarah was coming anyway.”
“You didn’t mention that yesterday.”
“If you wanted to telephone her yourself,” said Mrs. Watts with the same stony indifference, “that was none of my business.”
It was a lie, of course, and a peculiarly unassailable lie, cold, careless, open. Why? Something had steeled her to it, so thoroughly that she met Torrant’s gaze without blinking. She had been bought, or threatened, because in spite of her stubbornness and her steady hands there was something almost palpable in this grim little parlor.
It wasn’t grief in any recognizable form, or even shock; that had clearly been wiped out by something stronger. Fear? Greed? Or the unbeatable combination of both?
A door closed somewhere and then the house was silent again. Torrant said gently, “Mrs. Watts, you don’t really believe your sister slipped and fell, do you? No matter what someone has told you—”
“I’m busy,” said Mrs. Watts jerkily, standing motionless behind a wing chair, “so you’ll have to pardon me now.” Torrant looked at her a moment longer and then walked to the doorway. He was sharply aware of not liking Mrs. Watts; that might have been because of the wary undersized eyes in the tallowy face or because of his own sense of involvement. The dislike added to his burden instead of lightening it, and he said out of a sudden bitterness, “Someone came to see you this morning, or was it as early as last night, Mrs. Watts? Miss Blair, wasn’t it?”
The soundless impact of that took up a moment in which nothing stirred. Then Mrs. Watts said flatly, “You’ll leave this house or I’ll call my nephew.”
The weedy youth with the forelock. “I’ll go while I’m still in one piece,” said Torrant wearily, and walked out.
He knew he hadn’t the price of buying Mrs. Watts back again, because while greed was calculable, fear was not. Halfway down the short path to the street he paused, listening to a sharp echo on the cold air. It came again, drawn raspingly in and out: the sound of a saw on wood. Torrant turned and went rapidly around the house to his left.
The boy saw him approaching under a frozen twist of grapevine. He straightened, dropping the saw and leaving the log on the wooden horse half-severed. His vague pallid face under its forelock went hostile; he said before Torrant had a chance to speak, “I got to go in now,” and walked away and up a flight of wooden back steps. The door closed firmly behind him.
So that was that. Mrs. Watts had spoken to him—but somebody had spoken to Mrs. Watts first. Somebody had put into crisp close outline the vague and lifelong fears implicit in the watchful eyes, the grudging mouth—because there was no other possible explanation of this stoniness in the face of a sister’s sudden death.
Fear invited brutality in some natures. In animals, in young children, in vicious adults.
In Annabelle Blair.
Two minutes away from the Watts house, Torrant stopped the Renault at Willet’s Pond. It was deserted now after the morning’s drama, but it had a cold patient look under the gray sky. Broken ice moved lazily about in the wide dark mouth of water toward the lower end. Torrant, about to flip his cigarette end into it, paused for no reason and stepped on it instead.
His first thought was of how close Mrs. Partridge had been to her sister’s house and safety—but logic told him that she hadn’t been safe since she stepped off the train; that she had been played, like a fish. She had been allowed to leave the lighted houses near the station and walk unmolested up the hill and into this silent danger area. If she struggled then or had time to scream, the thin woods, the old cemetery on the far side of the pond, the chimneys of the houses at the foot of the hill wouldn’t tell.
She had reached Chauncy, according to Sergeant Hilary, on the 6:35 train instead of the taxi Torrant had told her to take at South Station. There had been no specific warning in his mind at the time, only an idea that if her coming was worth while at all it ought to be as private as possible. But years of economy must have conditioned her against taxis, because she had saved the fare and spent her life instead.
And she had telephoned her change in trains. Torrant’s mind veered away from the eagerness of that, the hurry she had been in to come and be killed. If she had taken the train agreed upon—
But she hadn’t, and Mrs. Judd had written down her name and message and left the note on the hall table for Simeon to see, or Mrs. Kirby in the course of
