Unnatural death
waiting to let her out. As she went, she glanced up at the High Altar,
unlit and lonely, with the tall candles like faint ghosts in the
twilight of the apse. It had a grim and awful look she thought,
suddenly.
“Good night, Mr. Stanniforth,” she said, quickly.
“Good night, Miss Climpson, good night.”
She was glad to come out of the shadowy porch into the green glow of the
June evening. She had felt a menace. Was it the thought of the stern
Baptist, with his call to repentance? the prayer for grace to speak the
truth and boldly rebuke vice? Miss Climpson decided that she would hurry
home and read the Epistle and Gospel—curiously tender and comfortable
for the festival of that harsh and uncompromising Saint. “And I can tidy
up these cards at the same time,” she thought.
Mrs. Budge’s first-floor front seemed stuffy after the scented
loveliness of the walk home. Miss Climpson flung the window open and sat
down by it to rearrange her sanctified oddments. The card of the Last
Supper went in at the Prayer of Consecration; the Fra Angelico
Annunciation had strayed out of the office for March 25th and was
wandering among the Sundays after Trinity; the Sacred Heart with its
French text belonged to Corpus Christi; the. . . “Dear me!” said Miss
Climpson, “I must have picked this up in church.”
Certainly the little sheet of paper was not in her writing. Somebody
must have dropped it. It was natural to look and see whether it was
anything of importance.
Miss Climpson was one of those people who say: “I am not the kind of
person who reads other people’s postcards.” This is clear notice to all
and sundry that they are, precisely, that kind of person. They are not
untruthful; the delusion is real to them. It is merely that Providence
has provided them with a warning rattle, like that of the rattlesnake.
After that, if you are so foolish as to leave your correspondence in
their way, it is your own affair.
Miss Climpson perused the paper.
In the manuals for self-examination issued to the Catholic-minded, there
is often included an unwise little paragraph which speaks volumes for
the innocent unworldliness of the compilers. You are advised, when
preparing for confession, to make a little list of your misdeeds, lest
one or two peccadilloes should slip your mind. It is true that you are
cautioned against writing down the names of other people or showing your
list to your friends, or leaving it about. But accidents may happen—and
it may be that this recording of sins is contrary to the mind of the
church, who bids you whisper them with fleeting breath into the ear of a
priest and bids him, in the same moment that he absolves, forget them as
though they had never been spoken.
At any rate, somebody had been recently shriven of the sins set forth
upon the paper—probably the previous Saturday—and the document had
fluttered down unnoticed between the confession-box and the hassock,
escaping the eye of the cleaner. And here it was—the tale that should
have been told to none but God—lying open upon Mrs. Budge’s round
mahogany table under the eye of a fellow-mortal.
To do Miss Climpson justice, she would probably have destroyed it
instantly unread, if one sentence had not caught her eye:
“The lies I told for M. W.’s sake.”
At the same moment she realised that this was Vera Findlater’s
handwriting, and it “came over her like a flash”—as she explained
afterwards, exactly what the implication of the words was.
For a full half-hour Miss Climpson sat alone, struggling with her
conscience. Her natural inquisitiveness said “Read”; her religious
training said, “You must not read”; her sense of duty to Wimsey, who
employed her, said, “Find out”; her own sense of decency said, “Do no
such thing”; a dreadful, harsh voice muttered gratingly, “Murder is the
question. Are you going to be the accomplice of Murder?” She felt like
Lancelot Gobbo between conscience and the fiend—but which was the fiend
and which was conscience?
“To speak the truth and boldly rebuke vice.”
Murder.
There was a real possibility now.
But _was_ it a possibility? Perhaps she had read into the sentence more
than it would bear.
In that case, was it not—almost—a duty to read further and free her mind
from this horrible suspicion?
She would have liked to go to Mr. Tredgold and ask his advice. Probably
he would, tell her to burn the paper promptly and drive suspicion out of
her mind with prayer and fasting.
She got up and began searching for the match-box. It would be better to
get rid of the thing quickly.
What, exactly, was she about to do?—To destroy the clue to the discovery
of a Murder?
Whenever she thought of the word, it wrote itself upon her brain in
large capitals, heavily underlined. MURDER—like a police-bill.
Then she had an idea. Parker was a policeman—and probably also he had no
particular feelings about the sacred secrecy of the Confessional. He had
a Protestant appearance—or possibly he thought nothing of religion one
way or the other. In any case, he would put his professional duty before
everything. Why not send him the paper, without reading it, briefly
explaining how she had come upon it? Then the responsibility would be
his.
On consideration, however, Miss Climpson’s innate honesty scouted this
scheme as jesuitical. Secrecy was violated by this open publication as
much as if she had read the thing—or more so. The old Adam, too, raised
his head at this point, suggesting that if anybody was going to see the
confession, she might just as well satisfy her own reasonable curiosity.
Besides—suppose she was quite mistaken. After all, the “lies” might have
nothing whatever to do with Mary Whittaker’s alibi. In that case, she
would have betrayed another person’s secret wantonly, and to no purpose.
If she _did_ decide to show it, she was bound to read it first—in
justice to all parties concerned.
Perhaps—if she just glanced at another word or two, she would see that
it had nothing to do with—MURDER—and then she could destroy it and
forget it. She knew that if she destroyed it unread she never would
forget it, to the end of her life. She would always carry with her that
grim suspicion. She would think of Mary Whittaker as—perhaps—a
Murderess. When she looked into those hard blue eyes, she would be
wondering what sort of expression they had when the soul behind them was
plotting—MURDER. Of course, the suspicions had been there before,
planted by Wimsey, but now they were her own suspicions. They
crystallised—became real to her.
“What shall I do?”
She gave a quick, shamefaced glance at the paper again. This time she
saw the word “London.”
Miss Climpson gave a kind of little gasp, like a person stepping under a
cold shower-bath.
“Well,” said Miss Climpson, “if this is a sin I am going to do it, and
may I be forgiven.”
With a red flush creeping over her cheeks as though she were stripping
something naked, she turned her attention to the paper.
The jottings were brief and ambiguous. Parker might not have made much
of them, but to Miss Climpson, trained in this kind of devotional
shorthand, the story was clear as print.
“Jealousy”—the word was written large and underlined. Then there was a
reference to a quarrel, to wicked accusations and angry words and to a
pre-occupation coming between the penitent’s soul and God. “Idol”—and a
long dash.
From these few fossil bones, Miss Climpson had little difficulty in
reconstructing one of those hateful and passionate “scenes” of slighted
jealousy with which a woman-ridden life had made her only too familiar.
“I do everything for you—you don’t care a bit for me—you treat me
cruelly—you’re simply sick of me, that’s what it is!” And “Don’t be so
ridiculous. Really, I can’t stand this. Oh, stop it, Vera! I hate being
slobbered over.” Humiliating, degrading, exhausting, beastly scenes.
Girls’ school, boarding-house, Bloomsbury-flat scenes. Damnable
selfishness wearying of its victim. Silly _schwärmerei_ swamping all
decent self-respect. Barren quarrels ending in shame and hatred.
“Beastly, blood-sucking woman,” said Miss Climpson, viciously. “It’s too
bad. She’s only making use of the girl.”
But the self-examiner was now troubled with a more difficult problem.
Piecing the hints together, Miss Climpson sorted it out with practised
ease. Lies had been told—that was wrong, even though done to help a
friend. Bad confessions had been made, suppressing those lies. This
ought to be confessed and put right. But (the girl asked herself) had
she come to this conclusion out of hatred of the lies or out of spite
against the friend? Difficult, this searching of the heart. And ought
she, not content with confessing the lies to the priest, also to tell
the truth to the world?
Miss Climpson had here no doubt what the priest’s ruling would be. “You
need not go out of your way to betray your friend’s confidence. Keep
silent if you can, but if you speak you must speak the truth. You must
tell your friend that she is not to expect any more lying from you. She
is entitled to ask for secrecy—no more.”
So far, so good. But there was a further problem.
“Ought I to connive at her doing what is wrong?”—and then a sort of
explanatory aside—“the man in South Audley Street.”
This was a little mysterious. . . No!—on the contrary, it explained the
whole mystery, jealousy, quarrel and all.
In those weeks of April and May, when Mary Whittaker had been supposed
to be all the time in Kent with Vera Findlater, she had been going up to
London. And Vera had promised to say that Mary was with her the whole
time. And the visits to London had to do with a man in South Audley
Street, and there was something sinful about it. That probably meant a
love-affair. Miss Climpson pursed her lips virtuously, but she was more
surprised than shocked. Mary Whittaker! she would never have suspected
it of her, somehow. But it so explained the jealousy and the quarrel—the
sense of desertion. But how had Vera found out? Had Mary Whittaker
confided in her?—No; that sentence again, under the heading
“Jealousy”—what was it—“following M. W to London.” She had followed
then, and seen. And then, at some moment, she had burst out with her
knowledge—reproached her friend. Yet this expedition to London must have
happened before her own conversation with Vera Findlater, and the girl
had then seemed so sure of Mary’s affection. Or had it been that she was
trying to persuade herself, with determined self-deception, that there
was “nothing in” this business about the man? Probably. And probably
some brutality of Mary’s had brought all the miserable suspicions
boiling to the surface, vocal, reproachful and furious. And so they had
gone on to the row and the break.
“Queer,” thought Miss Climpson, “that Vera has never come and told me
about her trouble. But perhaps she is ashamed, poor child. I haven’t
seen her for nearly a week. I think I’ll call and see her and perhaps
she’ll tell me all about it. In which case”—cried Miss Climpson’s
conscience, suddenly emerging with a bright and beaming smile from under
the buffets of the enemy—“in which case I shall know the whole history
of it legitimately and can _quite honourably_ tell Lord Peter about it.”
The next day—which was the Friday—she woke, however, with an unpleasant
ache in the conscience. The paper—still tucked into the
office-book—worried her. She went round early to Vera Findlater’s house,
only to hear that she was staying with Miss Whittaker. “Then I suppose
they’ve made it up,” she said. She did not want to see Mary Whittaker,
whether her secret was murder or mere immorality; but she was tormented
by the desire to clear up the matter of the alibi for Lord Peter.
In Wellington Avenue she was told that the two girls had gone away on