THE THIRD PART

WILL THODAY GOES IN QUICK AND COMES OUT SLOW

For while I held my tongue, my bones consumed away through my daily complaining.

PSALM xxxii. 3.

Wimsey thought he had never seen such utter despondency on any face as on William Thoday’s. It was the face of a man pushed to the last extremity, haggard and grey, and pinched about the nostrils like a dead man’s. On Mary’s face there was anxiety and distress, but something combative and alert as well. She was still fighting, but Will was obviously beaten.

“Now then, you two,” said Superintendent Blundell, “let’s hear what you have to say for yourselves.”

“We’ve done nothing we need be ashamed of,” said Mary.

“Leave it to me, Mary,” said Will. He turned wearily to the Superintendent. “Well,” he said, “you’ve found out about Deacon, I suppose. You know that he done us and ours a wrong that can’t be put right. We been trying, Mary and me, to put right as much as we can, but you’ve stepped in. Reckon we might have known we couldn’t keep it quiet, but what else could we do? There’s been talk enough about poor Mary down in the village, and we thought the best thing was to slip away, hoping to make an honest woman of her without asking the leaves of all they folk with long tongues as ’ud only be too glad to know something against us. And why shouldn’t we? It weren’t no fault of ours. What call have you got to stop us?”

“See here. Will,” said Mr. Blundell, “it’s rough luck on you, and I’m not saying as ’tisn’t, but the law’s the law. Deacon was a bad lot, as we all know, but the fact remains somebody put him away, and it’s our job to find out who did it.”

“I ain’t got nothing to say about that,” said Will Thoday, slowly. “But it’s cruel hard if Mary and me—”

“Just a moment,” said Wimsey. “I don’t think you quite realise the position, Thoday. Mr. Blundell doesn’t want to stand in the way of your marriage, but, as he says, somebody did murder Deacon, and the ugly fact remains that you were the man with the best cause to do it. And that means, supposing a charge were laid against you, and brought into court—well, they might want this lady to give evidence.”

“And if they did?” said Will.

“Just this,” said Wimsey. “The law does not allow a wife to give evidence against her husband.” He waited while this sank in. “Have a cigarette, Thoday. Think it out.”

“I see,” said Thoday, bitterly. “I see. It comes to this—there ain’t no end to the wrong that devil done us. He ruined my poor Mary and brought her into the dock once, and he robbed her of her good name and made bastards of our little girls, and now he can come between us again at the altar rails and drive her into the witness-box to put my neck in the rope. If ever a man deserved killing, he’s the one, and I hope he’s burning in hell for it now.”

“Very likely he is,” said Wimsey, “but you see the point. If you don’t tell us the truth now—”

“I’ve nothing to tell you but this,” broke out Thoday in a kind of desperation. “My wife—and she is my wife in God’s sight and mine—she never knew nothing about it. Not one word. And she knows nothing now, nothing but the name of the man rotting in that grave. And that’s the truth as God sees us.”

“Well,” said Mr. Blundell, “you’ll have to prove that.”

“That’s not quite true, Blundell,” said Wimsey, “but I dare say it could be proved. Mrs. Thoday—”

The woman looked quickly and gratefully at him.

“When did you first realise that your first husband had been alive till the beginning of this year, and that you were, therefore, not legally married to Will Thoday here?”

“Only when you came to see me, my lord, last week.”

“When I showed you that piece of writing in Deacon’s hand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“But how did that—?” began the Superintendent. Wimsey went on, drowning his voice.

“You realised then that the man buried in Lady Thorpe’s grave must be Deacon.”

“It came over me, my lord, that that must be the way of it. I seemed to see a lot of things clear that I hadn’t understood before.”

“Yes. You’d never doubted till that moment that Deacon had died in 1918?”

“Not for a moment, my lord. I’d never have married Will else.”

“You have always been a regular communicant?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“But last Sunday you stayed away.”

“Yes, I did, my lord. I couldn’t come there, knowing as me and Will wasn’t properly married. It didn’t seem right, like.”

“Of course not,” said Wimsey. “I beg your pardon, Superintendent. I’m afraid I interrupted you,” he added, blandly.

“That’s all very well,” said Mr. Blundell. “You said you didn’t recognise that writing when his lordship showed it to you.”

“I’m afraid I did. It wasn’t true—but I had to make up my mind quick—and I was afraid—”

“I’ll bet you were. Afraid of getting Will into trouble, hey? Now, see here, Mary, how did you know that paper wasn’t written donkey’s years ago? What made you jump so quick to the idea Deacon was the corpse in the Thorpe grave? Just you answer me that, my girl, will you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, faintly. “It came over me all of a sudden.”

“Yes, it did,” thundered the Superintendent. “And why? Because Will had told you about it already, and you knew the game was up. Because you’d seen that there paper before—”

“No, no!”

“I say, Yes. If you hadn’t have known something, you’d have had no cause to deny the writing. You knew when it was written—now, didn’t you?”

“That’s a lie!” said Thoday.

“I really don’t think you’re right about that, Blundell,” said Wimsey, mildly, “because, if Mrs. Thoday had known about it all along, why shouldn’t she have gone to Church last Sunday morning? I mean, don’t you see, if she’d brazened it out all those months, why shouldn’t she do it again?”

“Well,” retorted the Superintendent, “and how about Will? He’s been going to church all right, ain’t he? You aren’t going to tell me he knew nothing about it either.”

“Did he, Mrs. Thoday?” inquired Wimsey, gently. Mary Thoday hesitated.

“I can’t tell you about that,” she said at last.

“Can’t you, by God?” snapped Mr. Blundell. “Well, now, will you tell me—?”

“It’s no good, Mary,” said Will. “Don’t answer him. Don’t say nothing. They’ll only twist your words round into what you don’t mean. We’ve got nothing to say and if I got to go through it, I got to go through it and that’s all about it.”

“Not quite,” said Wimsey. “Don’t you see that if you tell us what you know, and we’re satisfied that your wife knows nothing—then there’s nothing to prevent your marriage from going through straight away? That’s right, isn’t it, Super?”

“Can’t hold out any inducement, my lord,” said the Superintendent, stolidly.

“Of course not, but one can point out an obvious fact. You see,” went on Wimsey, “somebody must have known something, for your wife to have jumped so quickly to the conclusion that the dead man was Deacon. If she hadn’t already been suspicious about you—if you were perfectly ignorant and innocent the whole time—then she had the guilty knowledge. It would work all right that way, of course. Yes, I see now that it would. If she knew, and told you about it—then you would be the one with the sensitive conscience. You would have told her that you couldn’t kneel at the altar with a guilty woman—”

“Stop that!” said Thoday. “You say another word and I’ll—Oh, my God! it wasn’t that, my lord. She never knew. I did know. I’ll say that much, I won’t say no more, only that. As I hope to be saved, she never knew a word about it.”

“As you hope to be saved?” said Wimsey. “Well. Well. And you did know, and that’s all you’ve got to tell us?”

“Now, look here,” said the Superintendent, “you’ll have to go a bit further than that, my lad. When did you know?”

“When the body was found,” replied Thoday, “I knew then.” He spoke slowly, as though every word were being wrenched out of him. He went on more briskly: “That’s when I knew who it was.”

“Then why didn’t you say so?” demanded Blundell.

“What, and have everybody know me and Mary wasn’t married? Likely, ain’t it?”

“Ah!” said Wimsey. “But why didn’t you get married then?”

Thoday shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Well, you see, my lord—I hoped as Mary needn’t ever know. It was a bitter hard thing for her, wasn’t it? And the children. We couldn’t ever put that right, you see. So I made up my mind to say nothing about it and take the sin—if it was a sin—on my shoulders. I didn’t want to make no more trouble for her. Can’t you understand that? Well, then—when she found it out, through seeing that there paper—” He broke off and started again. “You see, ever since the body was found I’d been worried and upset in my mind, like, and I daresay I was a bit queer in my ways and she’d noticed it—when she asked me if the dead man was Deacon after all, why, then I told her as it was, and that’s how it all came about.”

“And how did you know who the dead man was?”

There was a long silence. “He was terribly disfigured, you know,” went on Wimsey.

“You said you thought he was—that he’d been in prison,” stammered Thoday, “and I said to myself—”

“Half a mo’,” broke in the Superintendent, “when did you ever hear his lordship say that? It wasn’t brought out at the inquest, nor yet at the adjournment, because we were most particularly careful to say nothing about it. Now then!”

“I heard something about it from Rector’s Emily,” said Thoday, slowly. “She happened to hear something his lordship said to Mr. Bunter.”

“Oh, did she?” snapped Mr. Blundell. “And how much more did Rector’s Emily overhear, I’d like to know. That beer-bottle, now! Who told her to dust the fingerprints off it—come, now!”

“She didn’t mean no harm about that,” said Will. “It was nothing but girl’s curiosity. You know how they are. She came over next day and told Mary all about it. In a rare taking, she was.”

“Indeed!” said the Superintendent, unbelievingly. “So you say. Never mind. Let’s go back to Deacon. You heard that Emily heard something his lordship said to Mr. Bunter about the dead man having been in prison. Was that it? And what did you think of that?”

“I said to myself, it must be Deacon. I said, here’s that devil come out of his grave to trouble us again, that’s what I said. Mind you, I didn’t exactly know, but that’s what I said to myself.”

“And what did you imagine he had come for?”

“How was I to know? I thought he’d come, that’s all.”

“You thought he’d come after the emeralds, didn’t you?” said the Superintendent.

For the first time a look of genuine surprise and eagerness came into the haunted eyes. “The emeralds? Was that what he was after? Do you mean he had them after all? Why, we always thought the other fellow—Cranton—had got them.”

“You didn’t know that they had been hidden in the church?”

“In the church?”

“We found them there on Monday,” explained his lordship, placidly, “tucked away in the roof.”

“In the roof of the church? Why, then, that was what he—The emeralds found? Thank God for that! They’ll not be able to say now as Mary had any hand in it.”

“True,” said Wimsey. “But you were about to say something else, I rather fancy. ‘That was what he—?’ What? ‘That was what he was after when I found him in the church.’ Was that it?”

“No, my lord. I was going to say—I was just going to say, that was what he did with them.” A fresh wave of anger seemed to sweep over him. “The dirty villain! He did double-cross that other fellow after all.”

“Yes,” agreed his lordship. “I’m afraid there’s not much to be said in favour of the late Mr. Deacon. I’m sorry, Mrs. Thoday, but he was really rather an unsatisfactory person. And you’re not the only one to suffer. He married another woman over in France, and she’s left with three small children too.”

“Poor soul!” said Mary.

“The damned scoundrel!” exclaimed Will, “if I’d have known that, I’d—”

“Yes?”

“Never mind,” growled the farmer. “How did he come to be in France? How did he—?”

“That’s a long story,” said Wimsey, “and rather far from the point at issue. Now, let’s get your story clear. You heard that the body of a man who might have been a convict had been found in the churchyard, and though the face was quite unrecognisable, you were—shall we say inspired?—to identify him with Geoffrey Deacon, whom you had supposed to have died in 1918. You said nothing about it till your wife, the other day, saw a bit of Deacon’s handwriting, which might have been written at any time, and was—shall we again say inspired?—with the same idea. Without waiting for any further verification, you both rushed away to town to get remarried, and that’s the only explanation you can give. Is that it?”

“That’s all I can say, my lord.”

“And a damned thin story too,” observed Mr. Blundell, truculently. “Now, get this. Will Thoday. You know where you stand as well as I do. You know you’re not bound to answer any questions now unless you like. But there’s the inquest on the body; we can have that re-opened, and you can tell your story to the coroner. Or you can be charged with the murder and tell it to a judge and jury. Or you can come clean now. Whichever you like. See?”

“I’ve nothing more to say, Mr. Blundell.”

“I tell thee all, I can no more,” observed Wimsey thoughtfully. “That’s a pity, because the public prosecutor may get quite a different sort of story fixed in his mind. He may think, for instance, that you knew Deacon was alive because you had met him in the church on the night of December 30th.”

He waited to see the effect of this, and resumed:

“There’s Potty Peake, you know. I don’t suppose he’s too potty to give evidence about what he saw and heard that night from behind Abbot Thomas’ tomb. The black-bearded man and the voices in the vestry and Will Thoday fetching the rope from the cope-chest. What took you into the church, by the way? You saw a light, perhaps. And went along and found the door open, was that it? And in the vestry, you found a man doing something that looked suspicious. So you challenged him and when he spoke you knew who it was. It was lucky that the fellow didn’t shoot you, but probably you took him unawares. Anyway, you threatened to give him up to justice and then he pointed out that that would put your wife and children in an unpleasant position. So you indulged in a little friendly chat—did you speak?—In the end, you compromised. You said you would keep quiet about it and get him out of the country with £200 in pocket, but you hadn’t got it at the moment and in the meantime you would put him in a place of safety. Then you fetched a rope and tied him up. I don’t know how you kept him quiet while you went to fetch it. Did you give him a straight left to the jaw, or what?... You won’t help me?... Well, never mind. You tied him up and left him in the vestry while you went round to steal Mr. Venables’ keys. It’s a miracle you found them in the right place, by the way. They seldom are. Then you took him up into the belfry, because the bell-chamber was nice and handy and had several locks to it, and it was easier than escorting him out through the village. After that you brought him some food—perhaps Mrs. Thoday could throw some light on that. Did you miss a quart bottle of beer or so about that time, Mrs. Thoday? Some of those you got in for Jim? By the way, Jim is coming home and we’ll have to have a word with him.”

Watching Mary’s face, the Superintendent saw it contract suddenly with alarm, but she said nothing. Wimsey went on remorselessly.

“The next day you went over to Walbeach to get the money. But you weren’t feeling well, and on the way home you broke down completely and couldn’t get back to let Deacon out. That was damned awkward for you, wasn’t it? You didn’t want to confide in your wife. Of course, there was Jim.”

Thoday raised his head.

“I’m not saying anything one way or other, my lord, except this. I’ve never said one word to Jim about Deacon—not one word. Nor he to me. And that’s the truth.”

“Very well,” said Wimsey. “Whatever else happened, in between December 30th and January 4th, somebody killed Deacon. And on the night of the 4th, somebody buried the body. Somebody who knew him and took care to mutilate his face and hands beyond recognition. And what everybody will want to know is, at what moment did Deacon cease to be Deacon and become the body? Because that’s rather the point, isn’t it? We know that you couldn’t very well have buried him yourself, because you were ill, but the killing is a different matter. You see, Thoday, he didn’t starve to death. He died with a full tummy. You couldn’t have fed him after the morning of December 31st. If you didn’t kill him then, who took him his rations in the interval? And who, having fed him and killed him, rolled him down the belfry ladder on the night of the 4th, with a witness sitting in the roof of the tower—a witness who had seen him and recognised him? A witness who—”

“Hold on, my lord,” said the Superintendent. “The woman’s fainted.”