Ordeal by Innocence

‘What the hell!’ said Micky’s voice. ‘After all this time? The missing witness! Well, well, Jacko’s luck was out that night.’

Leo spoke again. Micky listened.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I agree with you. We’d better get together as quickly as possible, and get Marshall to advise us, too.’ He gave a sudden quick laugh, the laugh that Leo remembered so well from the small boy who had played in the garden outside the window. ‘What’s the betting?’ he said. ‘Which of us did it?’

Leo dropped the receiver down and left the telephone abruptly.

‘What did he say?’ Gwenda asked.

Leo told her.

‘It seems to me a silly sort of joke to make,’ said Gwenda.

Leo shot a quick glance at her. ‘Perhaps,’ he said gently, ‘it wasn’t altogether a joke.’

II

Mary Durrant crossed the room and picked up some fallen petals from a vase of chrysanthemums. She put them carefully into the waste-paper basket. She was a tall, serene-looking young woman of twenty-seven who, although her face was unlined, yet looked older than her years, probably from a sedate maturity that seemed part of her make-up. She had good looks, without a trace of glamour. Regular features, a good skin, eyes of a vivid blue, and fair hair combed off her face and arranged in a large bun at the back of her neck; a style which at the moment happened to be fashionable although that was not her reason for wearing it so. She was a woman who always kept to her own style. Her appearance was like her house; neat, well kept. Any kind of dust or disorder worried her.

The man in the invalid chair watching her as she put the fallen petals carefully away, smiled a slightly twisted smile.

‘Same tidy creature,’ he said. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ He laughed, with a faint malicious note in the laugh. But Mary Durrant was quite undisturbed.

‘I do like things to be tidy,’ she agreed. ‘You know, Phil, you wouldn’t like it yourself if the house was like a shambles.’

Her husband said with a faint trace of bitterness:

‘Well, at any rate I haven’t got the chance of making it into one.’

Soon after their marriage, Philip Durrant had fallen a victim to polio of the paralytic type. To Mary, who adored him, he had become her child as well as her husband. He himself felt at times slightly embarrassed by her possessive love. His wife had not got the imagination to understand that her pleasure in his dependence upon her sometimes irked him.

He went on now rather quickly, as though fearing some word of commiseration or sympathy from her.

‘I must say your father’s news beggars description! After all this time! How can you be so calm about it?’

‘I suppose I can hardly take it in…It’s so extraordinary. At first I simply couldn’t believe what father was saying. If it had been Hester, now, I should have thought she’d imagined the whole thing. You know what Hester’s like.’

Philip Durrant’s face lost a little of its bitterness. He said softly:

‘A vehement passionate creature, setting out in life to look for trouble and certain to find it.’

Mary waved away the analysis. Other people’s characters did not interest her.

She said doubtfully: ‘I suppose it’s true? You don’t think this man may have imagined it all?’

‘The absent-minded scientist? It would be nice to think so,’ said Philip, ‘but it seems that Andrew Marshall has taken the matter seriously. And Marshall, Marshall & Marshall are a very hard-headed legal proposition, let me tell you.’

Mary Durrant said, frowning: ‘What will it actually mean, Phil?’

Philip said: ‘It means that Jacko will be completely exonerated. That is, if the authorities are satisfied–and I gather that there is going to be no question of anything else.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Mary, with a slight sigh, ‘I suppose it’s all very nice.’

Philip Durrant laughed again, the same twisted, rather bitter laughter.

‘Polly!’ he said, ‘you’ll be the death of me.’

Only her husband had ever called Mary Durrant Polly. It was a name ludicrously inappropriate to her statuesque appearance. She looked at Philip in faint surprise.

‘I don’t see what I’ve said to amuse you so much.’

‘You were so gracious about it!’ said Philip. ‘Like Lady Somebody at the Sale of Work praising the Village Institute’s handiwork.’

Mary said, puzzled: ‘But it is very nice! You can’t pretend it’s been satisfactory to have had a murderer in the family.’

‘Not really in the family.’

‘Well, it’s practically the same thing. I mean, it was all very worrying, and made one most uncomfortable. Everybody was so agog and curious. I hated it all.’

‘You took it very well,’ said Philip. ‘Froze them with that icy blue gaze of yours. Made them pipe down and look ashamed of themselves. It’s wonderful the way you manage never to show emotion.’

‘I disliked it all very much. It was all most unpleasant,’ said Mary Durrant, ‘but at any rate he died and it was over. And now–now, I suppose, it will all be raked up again. So tiresome.’

‘Yes,’ said Philip Durrant thoughtfully. He shifted his shoulders slightly, a faint expression of pain on his face. His wife came to him quickly.

‘Are you cramped? Wait. Let me just move this cushion. There. That better?’

‘You ought to have been a hospital nurse,’ said Philip.

‘I’ve not the least wish to nurse a lot of people. Only you.’

It was said very simply but there was a depth of feeling behind the bare words.

The telephone rang and Mary went to it.

‘Hallo…yes…speaking…Oh, it’s you…’

She said aside to Philip: ‘It’s Micky.’

‘Yes…yes, we have heard. Father telephoned…Well, of course…Yes…Yes…Philip says if the lawyers are satisfied it must be all right…Really, Micky, I don’t see why you’re so upset…I’m not aware of being particularly dense…Really, Micky, I do think you–Hallo?…Hallo?…’ She frowned angrily. ‘He’s rung off.’ She replaced the receiver. ‘Really, Philip, I can’t understand Micky.’

‘What did he say exactly?’

‘Well, he seems in such a state. He said that I was dense, that I didn’t realize the–the repercussions. Hell to pay! That’s the way he put it. But why? I don’t understand.’

‘Got the wind up, has he?’ said Philip thoughtfully.

‘But why?’