“I’ve never noticed particularly. There’s a cupboard downstairs in the entrance hall, and of course the one—”
“Yes, I’ve looked for it up here. I wonder whether you’d care to tell me what happened—what you did, I mean, and what you remember of Mr. Endicott’s movements from the time, say, of his reaching home this afternoon.”
Mrs. Endicott’s face sought refuge in the very pith of candour. “Why, nothing much—nothing unusual.”
Lieutenant Valcour laughed pleasantly. “That is where I fail in my background,” he said. “The things done were usual to both of you and therefore of no importance. To me, however, they would prove interesting because of their unfamiliarity. Did you talk at all?”
“Elaborately.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said elaborately. Herbert makes a point of talking elaborately whenever he’s lying.”
“I see—he was lying, then, about Marge Myles.”
“And unoriginally. But Herbert never was original, much, in his emotions. He told me he was going to an impromptu reunion of some men in his class at the Yale Club. These reunions have occurred with astonishing regularity once a week for the past month, in spite of their impromptu character. I detest having my intelligence insulted,” she ended, not unfiercely, “more than anything else in the world.”
“You will forgive me for becoming personal, but I doubt whether Mr. Endicott understood you very well.”
“He didn’t understand me at all.”
“And you, him?”
Mrs. Endicott momentarily disarranged the perfect arch of her eyebrows. “I could see through him perfectly,” she said. “A child could see through him. But understand him? I don’t think anyone could understand Herbert. He made a fetish of reticence. He was,” she concluded, “half animal.”
“And the other half rather cloudily complex?”
“A fog.”
“And when he came home this afternoon at five?”
“Five-thirty—nearer six, even.”
“Toward six, he joined you in the living room and gave you the weekly excuse.”
“I didn’t say the living room. It was the top floor—you may have noticed that this house has a peaked roof—in what would correspond in the country to an attic—” She stopped sharply, and her defensive veneer cracked for an instant, long enough to show that she was definitely startled. “I—”
“You feel that you shouldn’t have told me that. Perhaps you shouldn’t. If the fact of your having met Mr. Endicott in the attic has nothing to do with the case at all, it will cause us to snoop around among your personal affairs unnecessarily.”
“He didn’t ‘meet’ me there, as you say. He—I don’t know why he came up there. I never will know why.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
Mrs. Endicott forced Lieutenant Valcour’s full attention by the almost startling intentness of her eyes. “There has never been a direct question put or answered between Herbert and me during the whole period of our married or unmarried life,” she said. “My hold on him was the static perfection of my features and a running, superficial smartness in attitude and mind that passed for intellect. His hold on me was that I loved him.”
“Even when you wished to kill him?”
“I suppose even then. Mind you, I never wished him dead—there’s a difference.”
“Oh, quite.” Lieutenant Valcour smiled engagingly. “You often felt like killing him, but you wanted it to stop right there.”
“You know, I wish you’d come to tea sometime—” Mrs. Endicott’s eyes contracted sharply. Her voice became a definite apology, not to Lieutenant Valcour, but as though its message were being sent along obscure and private channels to some port where it would find her husband. “There are moments,” she said, “when you make me forget.”
“Forgetting isn’t a sin. That’s natural. It’s not loving—being mentally hurtful—that’s a sin. There isn’t any word exactly for what I mean. Did you both stay in the attic and go through the trunk together, or whatever it was you were going through?”
Mrs. Endicott smiled as if at some secret knowledge. “I wasn’t going through a trunk,” she said.
“No? I just mentioned it, as nine times out of ten that’s what people do in attics.”
“And the tenth customary thing,” said Mrs. Endicott, reaching for a cigarette, “is suicide.”
V
10:17 p.m.—Living or Dead?
Lieutenant Valcour’s eyes narrowed slightly. He had a habit of dividing suicides into two classes—those who talked about killing themselves, and those who did so. He knew that the two rarely overlapped. He felt a shocking conviction that in Mrs. Endicott’s case she might well have been the exception which proved the rule. “I suppose an attic is the conventional place for suicide,” he said. “Or at least to think about it.”
Mrs. Endicott’s laugh was without humour. “One doesn’t need an attic in order to think about it.”
“That’s true. And so you went downstairs with him, then?”
“He followed me in here. That is,” she corrected herself with noticeable carelessness, “we went into the living room and he wondered, while he kissed me, whether I’d mind very much being alone for dinner. I doubt whether you’ve ever experienced, Lieutenant, the rather perfect torture of a, well, an abstract kiss. Men don’t.”
“We’re too self-centred, I’m afraid, or conceited or something, or else our sensibilities aren’t refined enough to be hurt by it.”
“But you could understand—if you could vision the background?”
“Everybody knows what love is, Mrs. Endicott.”
“That’s just it—it’s the comparison of what is with what has been. It’s an indescribably vulgar subject—kissing—but it’s either very wonderful or very painful. People who claim it can be a combination talk nonsense. We can eliminate, of course—”
“Of course—‘petting’ they call it, or did. You never know from one minute to the next just what a thing is being called. And then he went to his room to dress?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Certainly.”
“Has he a valet?”
“Herbert? Heavens, no.”
“And you dressed?”
“Yes.”
“Roberts helped you?”
“Of course.”
“Then when Mr. Endicott said goodbye?”
“He called it through the closed door.”
Lieutenant Valcour almost visibly showed his surprise. “He did say goodbye?”
“Herbert insists upon saying goodbye. He rapped on the door and called in. If it would interest you to know his exact words,” she said bitterly,
