It was still early in the day when Elsie’s mother came to her at the
police-station. Her fat face was white, stained and mottled with tears.
“It seems too bad to be true,” she kept on repeating again and again.
“That’s what I said when I heard about poor Horace: too bad to be true.
And you in this dreadful place, Elsie, and such a state as you’re
in--and no wonder. The whole thing seems too bad to be true.”
“Have they--found anything? Shall I be able to go home soon?” asked
Elsie.
“I don’t know, dearie. They’ve got to find out who killed poor Horace,
you know. Elsie, you’ve always been a sensible girl. You must tell them
all you know, however dreadful to you it is to speak of such things. Or
I’ll tell them for you, if you’d rather just have it out with mother.
Didn’t you see anyone?”
“Someone flew past, and as I turned to speak to Horace, I saw the blood
coming out of his mouth.”
“Who was it flew past?” said Mrs. Palmer.
“I don’t know. It all happened in a flash, like,” said Elsie.
“You and Horace were happy together, weren’t you?”
“Yes, always,” said Elsie stolidly. She had made up her mind not to say
anything else.
“You didn’t quarrel?”
“No, never.”
“You’ll tell them that, won’t you, dearie? The police, I mean.”
“It’s nothing to do with them,” said Elsie childishly.
“Now don’t talk that way. That’s silly. You don’t seem to realise, my
lady, the sort of mess you’re in.”
Mrs. Palmer’s voice rose to stridency as she let her fear and her
temper get the mastery of her attempt at caution.
“My God, Elsie, can’t you see what it means? They may try you for
murder. Murder--the same as the horrid common people in the newspapers.
Who’s to know what happened--you and Horace in that empty street at
one o’clock in the morning, and he gets done in, and whatever you may
say--and mind you, I’ll back you up in it-they’ll get hold of the fact
that you and poor Horace didn’t hit it off together.”
“We were quite happy together.”
“That’s right,” said Mrs. Palmer approvingly. “You stick to that.”
Then she began to cry. “To think it should have come to this! I that
have always held my head high--I don’t know what your aunts will say!
It’ll be an awful shock for them.”
Elsie hardly heard what her mother was saying. Waves of physical
nausea kept on passing over her, and she was conscious of nothing but
thankfulness when an elderly woman in uniform came to her with a cup of
tea, and suggested that she should lie down and get some sleep.
Elsie followed her, scarcely replying to Mrs. Palmer’s voluble farewell
and assurances of her own speedy return.
She could not afterwards have told where it was that she was taken,
but a small, narrow bed awaited her, and she flung herself on to it
and fell almost at once into the trance-like sleep of utter bodily and
mental exhaustion.
The same uniformed woman was waiting for her when she woke, after
several hours, and the sight of her brought back in a sick rush the
horrors of the morning.
“Oh, I must go home!” cried Elsie.
The woman took very little notice of her words, but she conducted her
to a lavatory and helped her to make her toilette.
Cold water and the effects of sleep combined slightly to steady the
wretched Elsie. “I should like to go home at once, please,” she said,
in a voice that she tried in vain to render firm.
“Yes. Well, I daresay your mother will take you away as soon as you’ve
answered a few questions,” said the woman indifferently and quietly.
“They want you downstairs first for a few minutes now.”
“Is Mother there?”
“She’s in the waiting-room. You’ll be able to see her afterwards.”
“_Afterwards?_”
Elsie’s agonised perceptions fastened upon that one word. She sought
with frantic and irrational intensity to pierce the veiled threat that
she felt it to convey.
A man whom she knew to be a police-inspector appeared at an open door,
and the uniformed woman went away.
“Now, Mrs. Williams, I’m afraid we must trouble you for a short
statement,” said the man pleasantly. “Will you follow me, if you
please?”
He moved forward, and Elsie saw into the room that he had just left.
Leslie Morrison was within it.
As their eyes met, it seemed to Elsie that the last shreds of
self-control deserted her, and she screamed on a high and hideous note
words that came incoherently and frenziedly from some power outside
herself.
“Leslie, Leslie! Oh, God, what shall I do? Why did you do it? I didn’t
ever mean you to do it.... I must tell the truth....”
The inspector swung sharply round and gripped her by the arm. “Do you
realise what you’re saying? It is my duty to caution you that anything
you say now may be used in evidence against you.”
Elsie burst into hysterical sobs and tears.
The man pushed her gently into another room where another official and
a young man in plain clothes sat at a table with papers and pens in
front of them.
The interrogatory that followed was conducted with grave suavity by the
senior official, but Elsie was conscious only of a horror of committing
herself.
She said again and again that she and her husband had always been happy
together.
It was a faint relief when at last they came to actual questions of
fact, and she could reply with direct statements to the enquiries as to
her movements on the previous evening.
(O God, was it only last night that she and Horace had gone to the
theatre--only _this morning_ that they had started to walk home from
the Tube station?)
“Mrs. Williams, I want you to tell me in your own words exactly what
happened in the alleyway just before your husband was struck.”
Elsie realised with despair that she must say something.
She was not imaginative, but almost without her own knowledge she had
evolved a sort of account by which, it seemed to her, confusedly, that
she might safeguard herself.
“We were walking along,” she said in a trembling, almost inaudible
voice, “and there wasn’t anybody in sight, and suddenly someone rushed
up from behind and pushed me away from my husband. I was sort of dazed
for a moment--I think I must have been pushed against the wall--and
when I recovered I saw Horace--my husband--struggling with a man. Then
the man ran away.”
“Did you see the man’s face?”
“No,” said Elsie, with ashen lips.
“But you know who it was?”
“It was Leslie Morrison.”
The room reeled before her eyes, and she made an ineffectual clutch at
a chair.
Through a sort of thick fog she heard the official repeating in a low
tone: “It was the man known as Leslie Morrison.”
Then she felt herself fall.
Her mother was with her when she recovered consciousness, and the woman
who had attended to her before, and whom Mrs. Palmer now repeatedly and
volubly addressed as “Matron.”
Elsie looked round her, but the officials were gone. With a groan she
let her head drop backwards again on to the rail of the chair in which
she found herself.
“Come along now, don’t give way. You’re better now,” said the matron
briskly. “Don’t let yourself go, Mrs. Williams.”
“Oh, Elsie, Elsie,” wailed Mrs. Palmer, “whatever will become of us?
Didn’t I always tell you----”
“Give her an arm, Mrs. Palmer, and I’ll take her on the other side, and
we’ll get her into the other room. There’s a nice couch there, and she
can lie down a bit.”
They half led, half dragged Elsie away, the matron exhorting her all
the time with impersonal, professional brightness to pull herself
together.
She was conscious of thankfulness when the woman left her alone with
her mother, although leaving the door open behind her.
Mrs. Palmer instantly bent forward and asked with avidity: “What did
you say to them, Elsie?”
“Let me alone, Mother, for pity’s sake!”
“How can I let you alone, as you call it, you unnatural girl? What a
way to speak to your own mother, on whom you’re bringing sorrow and
shame, and may bring worse yet, if you’re not careful! Now you tell me
this, Elsie Williams, directly this minute: Did you or did you not tell
them that you and Horace were on bad terms together?”
“I said we were quite happy together----”
“Stick to that,” said Mrs. Palmer significantly. “Did anyone know--any
neighbour or anybody--that you quarrelled? He never made a row, or
knocked you about, did he?”
“Only the once,” Elsie said automatically.
She pushed up her sleeve, then shuddered violently as she recalled
that she had last made use of that same gesture in the tea-shop with
Morrison.
“My goodness, did Horace do that? You must have tried him pretty high,
_I_ know. How are you going to account for that bruise, young Elsie?”
“Who’s to know about it?”
“Oh, they’ll find out fast enough! They get to know about everything.
Look here, did you say that you’d been pushed against the wall by
whoever it was who did in poor Horace?”
Elsie nodded, too much stunned even to wonder how her mother had become
possessed of this information.
“Very well, then. Those bruises on your arm are where you fell against
that wall. Don’t forget. I shall say you showed them to me, and told me
about it.”
“Say what--when?” Elsie asked stupidly. “I suppose all this’ll be over
before I’m quite mad, and they’ll let me go home to-day.”
Her mother’s fat face puckered up suddenly, and she began to cry with
loud, gulping sobs. “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I don’t know.”
“But what--what--for Heaven’s sake, Mother, stop that noise, and tell
me what they’re going to do. _What is it?_” almost shrieked Elsie,
striving to fight down the panic that threatened to overwhelm her.
“Don’t you understand, you little fool? (God forgive me for speaking
like that!) Oh, Elsie, I’m afraid--I’m afraid they’ll--they’ll arrest
you--for murder!”
“Don’t use that word!” almost screamed Elsie.
“How can I help it? Murder’s what’s been done, and it lies between
you and that fellow Morrison. Elsie, how far have things gone between
you and him? But there, I needn’t ask. I know you.” Mrs. Palmer wept
convulsively.
She remained with her daughter until late in the afternoon, and twice
during that time Elsie was summoned to a further interrogatory. She
learnt that Morrison’s knife had been found close to the alley, and
that he had been fetched from his office early in the day and taken
away by the police.
It was after her mother had gone away, as the dusk was gathering, that
Elsie Williams and Leslie Morrison were charged together with the
wilful murder of Horace Williams.
* * * * *
“For God’s sake, Mrs. Williams, tell me the whole truth!”
Elsie looked dumbly at Mr. Cleaver, too sick with fright to speak.
“Do you understand that you’re in the most frightful danger?”
A sound that just amounted to an interrogation forced its way between
her dry lips.
“You know what the sentence is for anyone found guilty of wilful
murder?”
Elsie screamed and shrank.
Cleaver bent forward, deep dents coming and going at the corners of his
nostrils, his white face working with earnestness. She could see the
sweat shining upon his forehead.
“Try and understand. You will be committed for trial for the murder of
your husband.”
“But Leslie Morrison....”
“He’s in the same boat. His one idea, it seems, is to shield you--to
pay the whole of the penalty himself.”
“It was him who--who....” Elsie’s voice trailed away.
“I know. But who inspired him to do it, Mrs. Williams? I tell you that
nothing but absolute frankness can give you a chance.”
“Shall I be in the witness-box?”
A bewildered idea that she could still make use of her charm to serve
her present cause made Elsie ask the question.
“You will be in the dock,” said Cleaver grimly. “Understand that
everything--your life itself--depends upon your being absolutely
straightforward with me. Don’t conceal anything--don’t attempt to. I
tell you, it’s your one hope.”
Elsie stared and stared at Mr. Cleaver. “I never meant Leslie to do
it!” she cried suddenly and wildly.
“But you knew he was going to?”
“No, no, no!”
“Mrs. Williams, tell me the truth. You and Morrison were madly in love
with one another, and had been for over a year?”
She nodded.
“You knew that your husband would never, in any circumstances, set you
free?”
“Yes. We asked him, begged him to. He--he was very cruel, Mr. Cleaver.”
“You and Morrison would not face open scandal by going away together?”
“It wasn’t that.”
“What was it, then?”
She hesitated, twisting her handkerchief round and round in her fingers.
The solicitor moistened his lips with his tongue. “Your only hope, your
one and only hope in this world, Mrs. Williams, is to speak the truth.
I’m powerless to help you if you won’t be open. Don’t be afraid that
everything you say now will come out in the police-court; it won’t
necessarily be so at all--far from it. But I can judge of nothing
unless I know every single thing.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Elsie, white to the lips.
“Why would you and Morrison not have gone away together? Were you
afraid?”
“We had no money.”
“I see. Morrison’s pay was very small, and you had nothing but what
your husband gave you?”
“Yes.”
“Whereas if you were a widow, you had reason to suppose that Williams
would leave you comfortably provided for?”
“Yes.”
“Did it not occur to you, then, that his death would be a very
convenient solution of the whole problem?”
“Oh yes! How could I help thinking that?”
“You not only thought it, Mrs. Williams, you said it, and you wrote it.”
“I never----” The denial sprang from her quite instinctively.
Mr. Cleaver put up his hand authoritatively. “Wait! Do you remember
a conversation with a friend of yours, Miss Irene Tidmarsh, on the
eighteenth of last October, when you made use of the words, ‘I wish to
the Lord that Horace would do the decent thing or go West, and let me
have a chance of happiness’?”
Elsie was terrified at the precision with which her very words were
quoted and the occasion known. “I can’t remember,” she gasped.
“Mrs. Williams, you _must_ speak the truth. Remember that a great
deal is known already, and banish any idea of false shame from your
mind. This is a question of life and death to you: neither more nor
less. If I know the truth from you, I can advise you as to the line
you must take under cross-examination. Remember that it will be a
terrible ordeal for you, and it’s essential that you should be properly
prepared for it. And weight will be attached, without a doubt, to that
conversation of yours with Miss Tidmarsh.”
“But how will they know about it?” she sobbed, forgetting her previous
denial.
“Miss Tidmarsh will be called as a witness against you,” said Mr.
Cleaver gravely. “We’ve got to account for those words of yours
somehow, and what is more serious still--if anything could be more
serious--we’ve got to keep out of sight, if we can, those damning
letters of yours.”
“What letters?” screamed Elsie, a new and unbearable horror clutching
at her.
“The letters, Mrs. Williams, that you have repeatedly written to Leslie
Morrison during the past months.”
“They’re burnt, they’re burnt!” shrieked Elsie. “He swore he’d burn
them!”
“I wish to God he had, but he never did, Mrs. Williams. Those letters
may form the bulk of the evidence against you. You repeat in them,
again and again, that Williams ill-treated you, made you miserable, and
that you wish he was dead. In one of them occurs the words: ‘He’s ill
now, and taking sleeping draughts. One little mistake in pouring out
the mixture, Leslie, and you and I might be free! I’d do more than that
for our love’s sake, darling.’ Do you understand the awful weight that
those expressions and many, many similar ones would carry with a jury,
Mrs. Williams? We’ve got to put some construction on them other than
the obvious one, if we can’t get a ruling that they’re inadmissible as
evidence, which is what we shall try for. I want to make it very, very
clear to you. Everything depends on your co-operation. Are you fit to
listen to me?”
Elsie was sobbing and writhing.
“Have you any letters whatever from Morrison?” pursued the relentless
voice of the solicitor.
“No.”
“What have you done with them?”
“I burnt them all.”
He looked at her as though doubting her words. “Very few women burn
their love-letters, Mrs. Williams.”
“I was afraid to keep them.”
“For fear of your husband seeing them?”
She hesitated. “Partly.”
In Elsie’s mind was a piercing recollection of the haunting fear that
had obsessed her ever since the scene at the house of Madame Clara, the
medium.
“_Beware of the written word...._”
But she would not give that reason for having destroyed Morrison’s
letters to the solicitor. The strange, undying remnant of vanity that
finds a lurking-place upon the most apparently trivial and unlikely
ground held her back from the truth.
Elsie Williams realised that Mr. Cleaver was in grimmest earnest when
he told her that only the absolute truth could possibly save her; she
was prepared to tell him the truth in spite of her deadly terror and
shame, but she could not bring herself to say that the reason why she
had destroyed the letters of Leslie Morrison was because she could
never forget the words spoken by the clairvoyante whom she had visited.
“I burnt the letters because I had nowhere to keep them, and I was
afraid they might be found,” she repeated, her young face grey and
ravaged.
It was the only particular in which she lied to Mr. Cleaver, and she
did so with blind and irrational persistence.
After the hours that he spent with her, Elsie, physically exhausted,
and psychically strung to a pitch of tension that she had never known
in her life before, was left alone in her cell, face to face with her
own soul.
At first, fragmentary recollections of the past forty-eight hours
obsessed her. She went over and over her conversations with the police
officials, her own replies to Mr. Cleaver, her mother’s hysterical
ejaculations. Then she thought of Leslie Morrison, who had backed
up her statements to the police, and who, when both were arrested
together, had only asked through white lips: “Why her? She was not
aware of my movements.”
But since her own half-unconscious betrayal of him, Elsie’s feeling for
Morrison had undergone an extraordinary revulsion.
It had all turned out so utterly unlike anything that they had ever
planned. It still seemed to Elsie that catastrophe had fallen, a bolt
from the blue, into the midst of their lives without warning. She
still felt that none of it could be true, that she must wake as from a
hideous dream.
When had she had a hideous dream--something about Horace--something
like this?
Dim associations of horror and bewilderment awoke slowly within her,
and brought to her the remembrance of her visit with Irene Tidmarsh
to the woman who had called herself “clairvoyante.” She had talked
in a deep, rather artificial voice about love and intrigue; she had
bade Elsie beware of the written word. And then all of a sudden the
atmosphere had altered, Madame Clara’s voice itself had altered,
horribly, and she had screamed out terrifying words and phrases.
“Blood, and worse than blood ... you’re all over blood! O, my God,
what’s this? It’s all over England--_you_--they’re talking about you.”
Elsie understood. In a flash of searing, anguished intuition she
understood what would happen.
With the appalling rapidity of a vision, there came to her the
realisation of all that would come to pass in the near future.
She knew already that the police-court trial was the almost certain
preliminary to her committal and Morrison’s for trial at the Old
Bailey. _They would be tried for murder._
She and the man who had been her lover would stand in the dock together
as prisoners; lawyers would fight out questions concerning their past
relations; people would give evidence against them--evidence in their
favour; Elsie would in all probability hear her own letters to Leslie
Morrison read aloud in court....
It would be a sensational trial, such as she had often followed with
avidity in the newspapers.
“_It’s all over England--they’re talking about you...._”
But why ... why?...
Elsie Williams’ instant of vision fled from her as suddenly as it had
come, and left her agonisedly and wildly rebellious, bewildered at the
vortex of terror and shame and misery into which it seemed to her that
she had suddenly, without volition of her own, been flung.
She could not trace the imperceptibly-graduated stages that had brought
her to the pass where catastrophe became inevitable. To her, it seemed
that she had swiftly been hurled from security into deadly peril by
some agency as irresistible as it was malignant.
Every now and then realisation came to her, when certain frightful
words sprang into frightful meaning, as they had never done before.
“Murder....”
“Conspiracy ... and incitement to murder....”
“Principal in the second degree....” The police officials had made use
of that expression--so had Mr. Cleaver.
Elsie’s mother had fetched Mr. Cleaver, and had wildly repeated, in
front of Elsie and the lawyer, that she would grudge no expense, not if
it cost her her last penny.
“And the aunties will help, Elsie, they’ve been ever so good--anything
we can get together, says your Aunt Gertie, and her face the colour of
the tablecloth. Mr. Cleaver here will tell us the best man, if it--if
it comes to--to....”
“You could scarcely do better than Sir Cambourne Trevor, Mrs. Palmer,
but his fee, I ought to warn you, is a thousand guineas.”
“A thousand guineas!” Elsie and Mrs. Palmer had screamed together.
And Mr. Cleaver, gaunt and haggard and grey-faced, had made answer:
“It’s her life that will be at stake.”
From time to time, Elsie understood. She knew, at those moments, what
it all meant. There would be no more concealments, everything would be
dragged out into a publicity that could only bring with it dishonour
and shameful notoriety, and hatred, and execration.
And she would have to live through it--to suffer through an ordeal
of vast, incredible magnitude, of which the climax--she knew it in a
prescience that mercifully could not endure--would come in the ghastly
dawn of a prison-yard, beneath the shadow of the scaffold....
Inexorable results would be suffered by herself, and she would never
know how it was that these things had become inevitable--had happened.
_Dawlish_, 1923.