Just hysteria. What they called love was just a barn-yard exercise; they thought anything else “sentimental.” No discipline. No putting up with things. Every time something got difficult, they ran away. Not slapped enough in their youth. All this modern idea about giving children their own way. Look what it led to. Howling on the beach one minute and as cool as a cucumber the next.
And then the sergeant noticed the trembling of the too fine hands on the wheel. No, whatever else Robert Tisdall was he wasn’t cool.
“This is the place?” the sergeant asked, as they slowed down by a hedged garden.
“This is the place.”
It was a half-timbered cottage of about five rooms; shut in from the road by a seven-foot hedge of briar and honeysuckle, and dripping with roses. A godsend for Americans, week-enders, and photographers. The little windows yawned in the quiet, and the bright blue door stood hospitably open, disclosing in the shadow the gleam of a brass warming pan on the wall. The cottage had been “discovered.”
As they walked up the brick path, a thin small woman appeared on the doorstep, brilliant in a white apron; her scanty hair drawn to a knob at the back of her head, and a round bird’s-nest affair of black satin set insecurely at the very top of her arched, shining poll.
Tisdall lagged as he caught sight of her, so that the sergeant’s large official elevation should announce trouble to her with the clarity of a sandwich board.
But Mrs. Pitts was a policeman’s widow, and no apprehension showed on her tight little face. Buttons coming up the path meant for her a meal in demand; her mind acted accordingly.
“I’ve been making some griddle cakes for breakfast. It’s going to be hot later on. Best to let the stove out. Tell Miss Robinson when she comes in, will you, sir?” Then, realising that buttons were a badge of office, “Don’t tell me you’ve been driving without a license, sir!”
“Miss—Robinson, is it? Has met with an accident,” the sergeant said.
“The car! Oh, dear! She was always that reckless with it. Is she bad?”
“It wasn’t the car. An accident in the water.”
“Oh,” she said slowly. “That bad!”
“How do you mean: that bad?”
“Accidents in the water only mean one thing.”
“Yes,” agreed the sergeant.
“Well, well,” she said, sadly contemplative. Then, her manner changing abruptly, “And where were you?” she snapped, eyeing the drooping Tisdall as she eyed Saturday-night fish on a Westover fishmonger’s slab. Her superficial deference to “gentry” had vanished in the presence of catastrophe. Tisdall appeared as the “bundle of uselessness” she had privately considered him.
The sergeant was interested but snubbing. “The gentleman wasn’t there.”
“He ought to have been there. He left just after her.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw him. I live in the cottage down the road.”
“Do you know Miss Robinson’s other address? I take it for granted this isn’t her permanent home.”
“No, of course it isn’t. She only has this place for a month. It belongs to Owen Hughes.” She paused, impressively, to let the importance of the name sink in. “But he’s doing a film in Hollywood. About a Spanish count, it was to be, so he told me. He said he’s done Italian counts and French counts and he thought it would be a new experience for him to be a Spanish count. Very nice, Mr. Hughes is. Not a bit spoilt in spite of all the fuss they make of him. You wouldn’t believe it, but a girl came to me once and offered me five pounds if I’d give her the sheets he had slept in. What I gave her was a piece of my mind. But she wasn’t a bit ashamed. Offered me twenty-five shillings for a pillow-slip. I don’t know what the world is coming to, that I don’t, what with—”
“What other address had Miss Robinson?”
“I don’t know any of her addresses but this one.”
“Didn’t she write and tell you when she was coming?”
“Write! No! She sent telegrams. I suppose she could write, but I’ll take my alfred davy she never did. About six telegrams a day used to go to the post office in Liddlestone. My Albert used to take them, mostly; between school. Some of them used three or four forms, they were that long.”
“Do you know any of the people she had down here, then?”
“She didn’t have any folks here. ’Cept Mr. Stannaway, that is.”
“No one!”
“Not a one. Once—it was when I was showing her the trick of flushing the W.C.; you have to pull hard and then let go smart-like—once she said: ‘Do you ever, Mrs. Pitts,’ she said, ‘get sick of the sight of people’s faces?’ I said I got a bit tired of some. She said: ‘Not some, Mrs. Pitts. All of them. Just sick of people.’ I said when I felt like that I took a dose of castor oil. She laughed and said it wasn’t a bad idea. Only everyone should have one and what a good new world it would be in two days. ‘Mussolini never thought of that one,’ she said.”
“Was it London she came from?”
“Yes. She went up just once or twice in the three weeks she’s been here. Last time was last week-end, when she brought Mr. Stannaway back.” Again her glance dismissed Tisdall as something less than human. “Doesn’t he know her address?” she asked.
“No one does,” the sergeant said. “I’ll look through her papers and see what I can find.”
Mrs. Pitts led the way into the living-room; cool, low-beamed, and smelling of sweetpeas.
“What have you done with her—with the body, I mean?” she asked.
“At the mortuary.”
This seemed to bring home tragedy for the first time.
“Oh, deary me.” She moved the end of her apron over a polished table, slowly. “And me making griddle cakes.”
This was not a lament for wasted griddle cakes, but her salute to the strangeness of life.
“I expect you’ll need breakfast,” she said to Tisdall, softened by her unconscious recognition of the fact that the best are but puppets.
But Tisdall wanted no breakfast. He shook his head and turned away to the window, while the sergeant searched in the desk.
“I wouldn’t mind one of those griddle cakes,” the sergeant said, turning over papers.
“You won’t get better in Kent, though it’s me that’s saying it. And perhaps Mr. Stannaway will swallow some tea.”
She went away to the kitchen.
“So you didn’t know her name was Robinson?” said the sergeant, glancing up.
“Mrs.
