The murderer had a motive so strong and of such duration that he could wait for his victim at six of a morning and deliberately drown her.
Champneis had a possible motive.
Jason Harmer had a possible motive if they had been lovers, but there was no proof of that.
Herbert Gotobed had no known motive but had almost certainly hated her.
On points Gotobed won. He knew where his sister was; he had the kind of record that was “headed for murder”; and he had been on bad terms with the victim.
Oh, well! By tomorrow Gotobed might have declared himself. Meanwhile he would drug himself with black coffee and try to keep his mind off the Press.
As he raised the cup to his lips, his eyes lighted on a man in the opposite corner. The man’s cup was half empty, and he was watching Grant with amused and friendly eyes.
Grant smiled, and hit first. “Hiding that famous profile from the public gaze? Why don’t you give your fans a break?”
“It’s all break for them. A fan can’t be wrong. You’re being given a hell of a time, aren’t you? What do they think the police are? Clairvoyants?”
Grant rolled the honey on his tongue and swallowed it.
“Some day,” Owen Hughes said, “someone is going to screw Jammy Hopkins’s head off his blasted shoulders. If my face wasn’t insured for the sum total of the world’s gold, I’d do it myself. He once said I was ‘every girl’s dream’!”
“And aren’t you?”
“Have you seen my cottage lately?”
“No. I saw the photograph of the wreck in the paper one day.”
“I don’t mind telling you I wept when I got out of the car and saw it. I’d like to broadcast that photograph to the ends of the earth as a sample of what publicity can do. Fifty years ago a few people might have come a few miles to look at the place, and then gone home satisfied. They came in charabanc loads to see Briars. My lawyer tried to stop the running of the “trips,” but there was nothing he could do. The County Police refused to keep a man there after the first few days. About ten thousand people have come in the last fortnight, and every one of the ten thousand has peered through the windows, stood on the plants and taken away a souvenir. There is hardly a scrap of hedge left—it used to be twelve feet high, a mass of roses—and the garden is a wilderness of trampled mud. I was rather attached to that garden. I didn’t croon to the pansies, exactly, but I got a lot of kick out of planting things people gave me, and seeing them come up. Not a vestige left.”
“Rotten luck! And no redress. Maddening for you. Perhaps by next year the plants will have taken heart again.”
“Oh, I’m selling the place. It’s haunted. Had you ever met Clay? No? She was grand. They don’t make that kind in pairs.”
“Do you know of anyone who would be likely to want to murder her, by any chance?”
Hughes smiled one of the smiles which made his fans grip the arms of their cinema seats. “I know lots who would gladly have murdered her on the spot. But only on the spot. The minute you cooled off, you’d cheerfully die for her. It’s most unlikely death for Chris—the one that happened to her. Did you know that Lydia Keats prophesied it from her horoscope? She’s a marvel, Lydia. She should have been drowned when she was a pup, but she really is a marvel. I sent her Marie Dacre’s year, day, and minute of birth from Hollywood. Marie made me swear an oath before she divulged the awful truth of the year. Lydia hadn’t the faintest notion whose horoscope she was doing, and it was marvellously accurate. She’d be a wow in Hollywood.”
“She seems to be heading that way,” Grant said dryly. “Do you like the place?”
“Oh, yes. It’s restful.” As Grant raised his eyebrows: “There are so many pebbles on the beach that you’re practically anonymous.”
“I thought they ran rubbernecking tours for Midwest fans.”
“Oh, yes, they run motor-coaches down your street, but they don’t tramp your flowers into the ground.”
“If you were murdered they might.”
“Not they. Murders are ten cents the dozen. Well, I must get along. Good luck. And God bless you. You’ve done me a power of good, so help me you have.”
“I?”
“You’ve brought to my notice one profession that is worse than my own.” He dropped some money on the table and picked up his hat. “They pray for judges on Sundays, but never a word for the police!”
He adjusted the hat at the angle which after much testing had been found by camera-men to be the most becoming, and strolled out, leaving Grant vaguely comforted.
19
The person who wasn’t comforted was Jammy. The buoyant, the resilient, the hard-boiled but bouncing Jammy. He had eaten at his favourite pub (black coffee might be all very well for worried police officials and actors who had to think of their figure, but Jammy dealt only in other people’s worries and remembered his figure only when his tailor measured him) and nothing during lunch had been right. The beef had been a shade too “done,” the beer had been a shade too warm, the waiter had had hiccoughs, the potatoes were soapy, the cabinet pudding had tasted of baking soda, and they were out of his usual cigarettes. And so his feeling of being ill-used and misunderstood, instead of being charmed away by food and drink, had grown into an exasperation with the world in general. He looked sourly over his glass at his colleagues and contemporaries, laughing and talking over the coarse white cloths, and they, unused to a glower on his brow, paused in their traffic to tease him.
“What is it, Jammy? Pyorrhœa?”
“No. He’s practising to be a dictator. You begin with the expression.”
“No you don’t,” said a third. “You begin with the hair.”
“And an arm movement. Arms are very important. Look at Napoleon. Never been more than a corporal if he hadn’t thought up that arm-on-chest business. Pregnant, you know.”
“If it’s pregnant Jammy is, he’d better have the idea in the office, not here. I don’t think the child’s going to be a pleasant sight.”
Jammy consigned them all to perdition, and went out to find a tobacconist who kept his brand of cigarettes. What did the Yard want to take it like that for? Everyone knew that what you wrote in a paper was just eye-wash. When it wasn’t bilge-water. If you stopped being dramatic over little tuppenny no-account things, people might begin to suspect that they were no-account, and then they’d stop buying papers. And where would the Press barons, and Jammy, and a lot of innocent shareholders be then? You’d got to provide emotions for all those moribund wage-earners who were too tired or too dumb to feel anything on their own behalf. If you couldn’t freeze their blood, then you could sell them a good sob or two. That story about Clay’s early days in the factory had been pure jam—even if that horse-faced dame had led him up the garden about knowing Chris, blast her. But you couldn’t always rise to thrills or sobs, and if there was one emotion that the British public loved to wallow in it was being righteously indignant. So he, Jammy, had provided a wallow for them. The Yard knew quite well that tomorrow all these indignant people wouldn’t remember a thing about it, so what the hell! What was there to get sore about? That “hounding innocents to death” was just a phrase. Practically a cliché, it was. Nothing in that to make a sensible person touchy. The Yard were feeling a bit thin in the skin, that was what. They knew quite well that this shouldn’t have been allowed to happen. Far be it from him to crab another fellow’s work, but some of that article had been practically true, now he came to think of it.