a temperature of 99. No need to fuss till over 100. Those children were pampered and spoon-fed and fussed over and loved and in many ways it didn't do them any good.'
'You mean,' said Calgary , 'it didn't do Jacko good?'
'Well, I wasn't really only thinking of Jacko. Jacko to my mind was a liability from the start. The modern label for him is 'a crazy mixed-up kid.' It's just as good as any other label. The Argyles did their best for him, they did everything that could have been done. I've seen a good many Jackos in my lifetime. Later in life, when the boy has gone hopelessly wrong, the parents say, 'If only I'd been stricter with him when he was young,' or else they say, 'I was too harsh, if only I'd been kinder.' I don't think myself it amounts to a penn'orth of difference. There are those who go wrong because they've had an unhappy home and essentially feel unloved. And again there are those who go wrong because at the least stress they're going to go wrong anyway. I put Jacko down as one of the latter.'
'So you weren't surprised,' said Calgary , 'when he was arrested for murder?'
'Frankly, yes, I was surprised. Not because the idea of murder would have been particularly repugnant to Jacko. He was the sort of young man who is conscienceless. But the kind of murder he'd done did surprise me. Oh, I know he had a violent temper and all that. As a child he often hurled himself on another child or hit him with some heavy toy or bit of wood. But it was usually a child smaller than himself, and it was usually not so much blind rage as the wish to hurt or get hold of something that he himself wanted. The kind of murder I'd have expected Jacko to do, if he did one, was the type where a couple of boys go out on a raid; then, when the police come after them, the Jackos say 'Biff him on the head, bud. Let him have it. Shoot him down.' They're willing for murder, ready to incite to murder, but they've not got the nerve to do murder themselves with their own hands. That's what I should have said. Now it seems,' added the doctor, 'I would have been right.'
Calgary stared down at the carpet, a worn carpet with hardly any of its pattern remaining.
'I didn't know,' he said, 'what I was up against. I didn't realise what it was going to mean to the others. I didn't see that it might — that it must –'
The doctor was nodding gently.
'Yes,' he said. 'It looks that way, doesn't it? It looks as though you've got to put it right there amongst them.'
'I think,' said Calgary , 'that that's really what I came to talk to you about. There doesn't seem, on the face of it, any real motive for any of them to have killed her.'
'Not on the face of it,' agreed the doctor. 'But if you go a little behind the face of it — oh, yes, I think there's plenty of reason why someone might have wanted to kill her.'
'Why?' asked Calgary .
'You feel it's really your business, do you?'
'I think so. I can't help feeling so.'
'Perhaps I should feel the same in your place… I don't know. Well, what I'd say is that none of them really belonged to themselves. Not so long as their mother –I'll call her that for convenience — was alive. She had a good hold of them still, you know, all of them.'
'In what way?'
'Financially she'd provided for them. Provided for them handsomely. There was a large income. It was divided between them in such proportions as the Trustees thought fit. But although Mrs. Argyle herself was not one of the Trustees, nevertheless her wishes, so long as she was alive, were operative.' He paused a minute and then went on.
'It's interesting in a way, how they all tried to escape. How they fought not to conform to the pattern that she'd arranged for them. Because she did arrange a pattern, and a very good pattern. She wanted to give them a good home, a good education, a good allowance and a good start in the professions that she chose for them. She wanted to treat them exactly as though they were hers and Leo Argyle's own children. Only of course they weren't hers and Leo Argyle's own children. They had entirely different instincts, feelings, aptitudes and demands. Young Micky now works as a car salesman. Hester more or less ran away from home to go on the stage. She fell in love with a very undesirable type and was absolutely no good as an actress. She had to come home. She had to admit — and she didn't like admitting — that her mother had been right. Mary Durrant insisted on marrying a man during the war whom her mother warned her not to marry. He was a brave and intelligent young man but an absolute fool when it came to business matters. Then he got polio. He was brought as a convalescent to Sunny Point. Mrs. Argyle was putting pressure on them to live there permanently. The husband was quite willing. Mary Durrant was holding out desperately against it. She wanted her home and her husband to herself. But she'd have given in, no doubt, if her mother hadn't died.
'Micky, the other boy, has always been a young man with a chip on his shoulder; he resented bitterly being abandoned by his own mother. He resented it as a child and he never got over it. I think, at heart, he always hated his adopted mother.
'Then there's the Swedish masseuse woman. She didn't like Mrs. Argyle. She was fond of the children and she's fond of Leo. She accepted many benefits from Mrs. Argyle and probably tried to be grateful but couldn't manage it. Still, I hardly think that her feelings of dislike could cause her to hit her benefactor on the head with a poker. After all, she could leave at any moment she liked. As for Leo Argyle –'
'Yes. What about him?'
'He's going to marry again,' said Dr. MacMaster, 'and good luck to him. A very nice young woman. Warm- hearted, kind, good company and very much in love with him. Has been for a long time. What did she feel about Mrs. Argyle? You can probably guess just as well as I can. Naturally, Mrs. Argyle's death simplified things a good deal. Leo Argyle's not the type of man to have an affair with his secretary with his wife in the same house. I don't really think he'd have left his wife, either.'
Calgary said slowly: 'I saw them both; I talked to them. I can't really believe that either of them –'
'I know,' said MacMaster. 'One can't believe, can one? And yet — one of that household did it, you know.'
'You really think so?'
'I don't see what else there is to think. The police are fairly sure that it wasn't the work of an outsider, and the police are probably right.'
'But which of them?' said Calgary .
MacMaster shrugged his shoulders. 'One simply doesn't know.'
'You've no idea yourself from your knowledge of them all?'
'Shouldn't tell you if I had,' said MacMaster. 'After all, what have I got to go on? Unless there's some factor that I've missed none of them seems a likely murderer to me. And yet –1 can't rule any one of them out as a possibility. No,' he added slowly, 'my view is that we shall never know. The police will make inquiries and all that sort of thing. They'll do their best, but to get evidence after this time and with so little to go upon –'
He shook his head. 'No, I don't think that the truth will ever be known. There are cases like that, you know. One reads about them. Fifty — a hundred years ago, cases where one of three or four or five people must have done it but there wasn't enough evidence and no one's ever been able to say.'
'Do you think it's going to be like that here?' 'Well,' said Dr. MacMaster, 'yes, I do…'
Again he cast a shrewd look at Calgary . 'And that's what's so terrible, isn't it?' he said.
'Terrible,' said Calgary , 'because of the innocent. That's what she said to me.' 'Who? Who said what to you?'
'The girl — Hester. She said I didn't understand that it was the innocent who mattered. It's what you've just been saying to me. That we shall never know –'
'— who is innocent?' The doctor finished for him. 'Yes, if we could only know the truth. Even if it doesn't come to an arrest or trial or conviction. Just to know. Because otherwise –'
He paused.
'Yes?' said Calgary .
'Work it out for yourself,' said Dr. MacMaster. 'No –1 don't need to say that –you already have.'
He went on: 'It reminds me, you know, of the Bravo Case — nearly a hundred years ago now, I suppose, but books are still being written about it; making out a perfectly good case for his wife having done it, or Mrs. Cox having done it, or Dr. Gully — or even for Charles Bravo having taken the poison in spite of the Coroner's verdict. All quite plausible theories — but no one now can ever know the truth. And so Florence Bravo, abandoned by her
