Free The Case Is Closed by Patricia Wentworth Page A

the glass, sickly with fog, sodden with moisture. She turned back and saw Hilary putting away the file. The Everton Case was closed. Geoff was in prison. Here was the new day that she had to meet. She said not unkindly,
    ‘Run along and dress. I’ll get breakfast.’
    But Hilary hesitated in the doorway.
    ‘If — if you didn’t hate to talk about it so much, darling — ’
    ‘I won’t talk about it!’ said Marion, the edge on her voice again. She was dressed for the street and cleverly made up. She looked like an ultra-modern poster — incredibly thin, amazingly artificial, but graceful, always graceful.
    Hilary said quickly. ‘There are things — I wish you would — there are things I want to ask about.’
    ‘I won’t talk about it!’ said Marion again.
    Hilary had stopped looking like a ghost. She was brightly flushed and her eyes were wet. She saw Marion’s queer poster colouring all blurred as if it was drowned in tears. But they were her tears, not Marion’s — Marion wouldn’t cry. She turned and ran into her own room and shut the door.
    When Marion had gone to work Hilary washed up the breakfast things, made beds, and ran over the floors with a carpet-sweeper where there was a carpet and with a mop where there wasn’t. The flat was very small, and it didn’t take long. They had a woman once a week to do the heavy cleaning.
    When she had finished Hilary sat down to think. She took a pencil and paper and wrote the things that came into her mind.
    Mrs. Mercer — why did she cry such a lot? She cried at the inquest, and she cried at the trial, and she cried in the train. But it didn’t stop her saying she heard Geoffrey quarrelling with his uncle. She needn’t have said it. She cried, but she went on saying it.
    That was the first thing that struck her.
    Then — the daily help hadn’t been called as a witness. She would like to ask her some questions. About that toothache of Mrs. Mercer’s —it seemed funny that she should have had it that night. So convenient if you were all to bits with a bad conscience and felt you simply had to put your head in your hands and groan. You could with a toothache, and nobody would think anything about it.
    Then Mrs. Thompson. Terribly respectable, terribly deaf. How convenient to have a deaf visitor if someone was going to be shot and you knew it. If you didn’t know it, why have a deaf visitor?
    There was of course no logic in this, but Hilary had not a very logical mind. She wasn’t bothering about being logical, she was just putting down what came into her head. The deafness of the Mercers’ visitor was one of these things. Another thing that struck her was what a lot of alibis everyone had. Looking back on what she had read last night, it seemed to her that all those people couldn’t have had better alibis if they had sat down and thought them out beforehand. And bright as lightning there zigzagged through her mind the thought, ‘Suppose they had.’
    Mercer — Bertie Everton — Mrs. Mercer — Frank Everton…
    Mrs. Thompson to supper on just that one night. Mrs. Thompson so deaf that she couldn’t hear a shot, but able to testify that Mercer hadn’t left the kitchen and that Mrs. Mercer hadn’t been gone long enough to shoot James Everton and get back into the house. Not that she thought that Mrs. Mercer had shot James Everton. She was a dithery dreep of a woman, and she wouldn’t have the nerve to shoot a guinea-pig. Hilary simply couldn’t believe in her firing a pistol at her employer. A dreep is and remains a dreep. It doesn’t suddenly become a cool plotting assassin. Mrs. Mercer’s weepy evidence might be, and probably was, a tissue of lies, but it wasn’t she who had shot James Everton.
    Well, that looked as if the Mercers were a wash-out. But the Evertons, Bertie and Frank, one in Edinburgh and the other in Glasgow —what about them? The answer to that was discouraging in the extreme. You could put it into one word — nothing.