'Yes,' said Calgary . 'It was I.'
'I really can't get over it,' said Maureen. 'Talked about it half the night, Joe and I did. Really, I said, it might be something on the pictures. Two years ago, isn't it, or nearly?'
'About that, yes.'
'Just the sort of thing you do see on the pictures, and of course you say to yourself that sort of thing's all nonsense, it wouldn't happen in real life. And now there it is! It does happen! It's really quite exciting in a way, isn't it?'
'I suppose,' said Calgary , 'that it might be thought of like that.' He was watching her with a vague kind of pain.
She chattered on quite happily.
'There's poor old Jackie dead and not able to know about it. He got pneumonia, you know, in prison. I expect it was the damp or something, don't you?'
She had, Calgary realised, a definite romantic image of prison in her mind's eye. Damp underground cells with rats gnawing one's toes.
'At the time, I must say,' she went on, 'him dying seemed all for the best.' 'Yes, I suppose so. Yes, I suppose it must have done.'
'Well, I mean, there he was, shut up for years and years and years. Joe said I'd better get a divorce and I was just setting about it.'
'You wanted to divorce him?'
'Well, it's no good being tied to a man who's going to be in prison for years, is it? Besides, you know, although I was fond of Jackie and all that, he wasn't what you call the steady type. I never did think really that our marriage would last.'
'Had you actually started proceedings for divorce when he died?'
'Well, I had in a kind of way. I mean, I'd been to a lawyer. Joe got me to go. Of course, Joe never could stand Jackie.'
'Joe is your husband?'
'Yes. He works in the electricity. Got a very good job and they think a lot of him. He always told me Jackie was no good, but of course I was just a kid and silly then. Jackie had a great way with him, you know.'
'So it seems from all I've heard about him.'
'He was wonderful at getting round women –1 don't know why, really. He wasn't good-looking or anything like that. Monkey-face, I used to call him. But all the same, he'd got a way with him. You'd find you were doing anything he wanted you to do. Mind you, it came in useful once or twice. Just after we were married he got into trouble at the garage where he was working over some work done on a customer's car. I never understood the rights of it. Anyway, the boss was ever so angry. But Jackie got round the boss's wife. Quite old, she was. Must have been near on fifty, but Jackie flattered her up, played her off this way and that until she didn't know whether she was on her head or her heels. She'd have done anything for him in the end. Got round her husband, she did, and got him to say as he wouldn't prosecute if Jackie paid the money back. But he never knew where the money came from! It was his own wife what provided it. That reely gave us a laugh, Jackie and me!'
Calgary looked at her with faint repulsion. 'Was it so very funny?'
'Oh, I think so, don't you? Reely, it was a scream. An old woman like that crazy about Jackie and raking out her savings for him.'
Calgary sighed. Things were never, he thought, the way you imagined them to be. Every day he found himself less attracted to the man whose name he had taken such trouble to vindicate. He was almost coming to understand and share the point of view which had so astounded him at Sunny Point.
'I only came here, Mrs. Clegg,' he said, 'to see if there was anything I could, well, do for you to make up for what had happened.'
Maureen Clegg looked faintly puzzled.
'Very nice of you, I'm sure,' she said. 'But why should you? We're all right. Joe is making good money and I've got my own job. I'm an usherette, you know, at the Picturedrome.'
'Yes, I know.'
'We're going to get a telly next month,' the girl went on proudly.
'I'm very glad,' said Arthur Calgary, 'more glad than I can say that this — this unfortunate business hasn't left any — well, permanent shadow.'
He was finding it more and more difficult to choose the right words when talking to this girl who had been married to Jacko. Everything he said sounded pompous, artificial. Why couldn't he talk naturally to her?
'I was afraid it might have been a terrible grief to you.'
She stared at him, her wide, blue eyes not understanding in the least what he meant.
'It was horrid at the time,' she said. 'All the neighbours talking and the worry of it all, though I must say the police were very kind, all things considered. Talked to me very politely and spoke very nice about everything.'
He wondered if she had had any feeling for the dead man. He asked her a question abruptly.
'Did you think he'd done it?' he said.
'Do you mean, do I think he'd done his mother in?'
'Yes. Just that.'
'Well, of course — well — well — yes, I suppose I did in a way. Of course, he said he hadn't, but I mean you never could believe anything Jackie said, and it did seem as though he must have done. You see, he could get very nasty, Jackie could, if you stood up against him. I knew he was in a hole of some kind. He wouldn't say much to me, just swore at me when I asked him about it. But he went off that way and he said that it was going to be all right. His mother, he said, would stump up. She'd have to. So of course I believed him.'
'He had never told his family about your marriage, I understand. You hadn't met them?'
'No. You see, they were classy people, had a big house and all that. I wouldn't have gone down very well. Jackie thought it best to keep me dark. Besides, he said if he took me along his mother'd want to run my life as well as his. She couldn't help running people, he said, and he'd had enough of it — we did very well as we were, he said.'
She appeared to display no resentment, but to think, indeed, that her husband's behaviour had been perfectly natural.
'I suppose it was a great shock to you when he was arrested?'
'Well, naturally. 'However could he do such a thing?' I said to myself, but then, you can't get away from things. He always had a very nasty temper when anything upset him.'
Calgary leaned forward.
'Let's put it like this. It really seemed to you not at all a surprising thing that your husband should have hit his mother on the head with a poker and stolen a large quantity of money from her?'
'Well, Mr — er — Calgary , if you'll excuse me, that's putting it in rather a nasty way. I don't suppose he meant to hit her so hard. Don't suppose he meant to do her in. She just refused to give him some money, he caught up the poker and he threatened her, and when she stuck it out he lost control of himself and gave her a swipe. I don't suppose he meant to kill her. That was just his bad luck. You see, he needed the money very badly. He'd have gone to prison if he hadn't got it.'
'So — you don't blame him?'
'Well, of course I blamed him… I don't like all that nasty violent behaviour. And your own mother, too! No, I don't think it was a nice thing to do at all. I began to think as Joe was right in telling me I oughtn't to have had anything to do with Jackie. But, you know how it is. It's ever so difficult for a girl to make up her mind. Joe, you see, was always the steady kind. I've known him a long time. Jackie was different. He'd got education and all that. He seemed very well off, too, always splashing his money about. And of course he had a way with him, as I've been telling you. He could get round anybody. He got round me all right. 'You'll regret it, my girl,' that's what Joe said. I thought that was just sour grapes and the green-eyed monster, if you understand what I mean. But Joe turned out to be quite right in the end.'
Calgary looked at her. He wondered if she still failed to understand the full implications of his story.
'Right in exactly what way?' he asked.
'Well, landing me up in the proper mess he did. I mean, we've always been respectable. Mother brought us up very careful. We've always had things nice and no talk. And there was the police arresting my husband! And all
