When Last I Died

"Did you ever have speech with Miss Bella when Miss Tessa wasn't there?"

"Never. But I several times spoke to Miss Tessa by herself. She told me how extremely good her sister had been to her. It seems that a wealthy aunt left all her money to Miss Bella, and that she shared everything with Miss Tessa. Then, of course, upon Miss Bella's death, it all came to Miss Tessa, and she moved away. She moved very soon after the funeral. She said she would have wished to stay on in the village, and mentioned our kindness—although I'm afraid I cannot claim that we ever did very much except to keep their little secrets—the trial, you know, and the Christian names, and so forth—and, of course, my dear wife and I used to visit them occasionally, but really a good deal of the kindness was on the other side. We never asked for a subscription in vain, for instance, at that house, and Miss Tessa was an excellent stand-by if we wanted a talk in the village hall or at a Mothers' Meeting. She was also a most excellent cook. Poor Miss Bella couldn't cook at all."

"Really?" said Mrs. Bradley. "Wasn't Miss Tessa at a Mothers' Meeting when her sister ...?"

"Very distressing," said the vicar. "Very distressing indeed. I know that she blamed herself very much. Had she been with her sister, she said, it would never have happened. The meeting was at a quarter-past two, you see, and she came back here to tea. She was here when the news was brought to her. Terribly distressing."

"Have you the same doctor now?" asked Mrs. Bradley; and when the vicar replied that they had, and that his name was Sandys, she told him that he had been more than helpful. "All the same, I'm not at all sure you haven't laid yourself open to a charge of having been accessory before the fact," she added.

"Before the fact?" said the vicar, puzzled.

"Of murder," said Mrs. Bradley. She cackled to see the expression upon his round and amiable face, accepted an invitation to return and take tea at the vicarage, and went off to find the doctor's house. Characteristically, she had not asked where it was, and, characteristically, she found it within five minutes.

"You seem to have been enjoying yourself, mother," said Ferdinand, somewhat austerely. "What the devil have you been up to?"

"Looking at Item one pond, Item one cottage, Item one toll house, Item one murderess, mark of interrogation, as our friend Stainless Stephen would say. Not to speak of interviewing a clam of a doctor, an expansive and genial vicar, and the murderess, question-mark, aforesaid," replied his mother, looking very pleased with herself. Ferdinand, who had been looming over her, sat down on the arm of a chair.

"Not there, dear child. You're too heavy for my furniture," suggested his mother. Ferdinand removed his thirteen stone to the seat of the chair without comment and looked across at her. His expression had altered considerably.

"Are you pulling my leg, Mother?"

"No, child. I've found Bella Foxley."

"Then who was it committed suicide?"

"Well, not Bella."

"The sister ...?"

"Murdered, possibly. If so, she was held head-downward in the rain-water butt outside the woodshed of their cottage in the village of Pond, transported to the pond at Pond, left there to be found by any who would, and the rest abandoned to Fate and the crass stupidity of a coroner who wouldn't believe that what the village idiot said was evidence."

"What did the village idiot say?"

"He said that it was the rain-water washed her cheeks so white."

"I seem to have heard that before."

"Yes, I have transposed his rude rustic remark into the key of the poetic."

"You couldn't take that statement as evidence, coming from such a source."

"You could investigate it, though," said Mrs. Bradley. "Instead of that, the boy was told not to waste the time of the court."

"When is all this supposed to have happened?"

"Well, the doctor put the time of death at between noon and three o'clock. She wasn't found until almost dusk. It was winter, too, which gives the idiot boy's evidence all the more importance. Whenever you would choose to wash yourself in the rain-water butt, you would hardly do so in November, I imagine. Bella must have drowned Tessa, gone straight to the Mothers' Meeting, and then had tea at the vicarage."

"But why should she kill her sister?"

"That remains to be seen. Why should she kill Cousin Tom? We know why she may have killed the old aunt."

"You'll never prove a word of it, Mother."

"Probably not," said Mrs. Bradley, in such tones of self-satisfaction that her son lifted his black brows and grinned.

"Something up your sleeve," he announced.

Mrs. Bradley by this time had the enlargements of the snapshots.

"Ask your friend Pratt to dinner," she observed. "You see this woman?"

"Who is she?"

"That," said Mrs. Bradley, "is for Mr. Pratt to say."

Mr. Pratt, confronted with both snapshot and enlargement, did not hesitate.

"If it was ten years younger—well, say, five ..."