Free Heads You Lose by Christianna Brand

than ever, just because of it… to try and shut out the idea of her… poor Miss Morland…”
    “I keep thinking of her too,” said Venetia, who knew the innermost workings of Fran’s heart. “It’s so impossible to believe that here, in Pen’s garden, she should have died, and died like—that. But it doesn’t do her any good to brood over it; and it’s only worse for us.” She added: “I’m so sorry, Pippi… we shouldn’t be talking about it in front of you.”
    Pippi looked blank. “Oh, good heavens, don’t mind about me. I mean, it’s rotten about poor old Grace, but there’s no use moaning over it, is there?”
    Pendock looked at her with increasing dislike. Odd how people could say almost the same things and have such different meanings. Fran and Venetia, he knew, were haunted by their own imaginary reconstructions of the scene in the moonlight, down by the drive; he himself could not blot it from his mind—though, strangely enough, the first death, that of the girl in the wood, remained more clearly with him; but Pippi seemed genuinely not to care at all, to be able to continue her own heedless way, cocky, impregnable, tough. He finished his drink at a gulp and said abruptly: “Let’s go in to dinner.”
    The Inspector burst in upon them as they sat round the table. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Pendock, but I’m off for the night. They’ve taken a man into custody at Torrington, and I’ll have to go and see him. I’ll leave someone here in case you need them, but I don’t think you will.” He was about to rush off when the news that had been oozing out of him suddenly emerged with a plop: “This man has confessed to the murder of that girl last summer,” he said, and was gone.
    A load seemed to lift from about their hearts and Pendock expressed the feelings of everybody at the table when he said over his shoulder to Bunsen: “I think we’ll have some champagne.”
    Pippi was used to cocktails but not to champagne. It warmed the cockles of her heart and went straight to her henna’ed head. “I know you all thought it was me,” she said cheerfully, waving her golden glass. “But you see you were wrong. It was this nasty ole tramp.”
    “We didn’t think it was you at all,” said Fran, who was, indeed, innocent of any such charge. “It couldn’t have been you, because you couldn’t have known about the hat.”
    “Ah, but thasswhere you were wrong,” said Pippi, giggling joyously.
    “Trotty definitely told us that she was with you and Miss Morland all the evening,” said Pendock, staring at her. “And that Miss Morland said nothing to either of you about the hat.”
    “Quirright,” said Pippi. She was only just drunk enough to make her enjoy a pretence of being more drunk than she actually was.
    “Then you couldn’t have known. No one could have known.”
    “Anyone could have known,” corrected Pippi. She nodded her head at them artfully. “I could have known; tramp could have known; anybody could have known.”
    “I don’t see what you mean, Pippi,” said Venetia, leaning across the big table with the candlelight on her hair. “The story didn’t go out of this house; and if Miss Morland didn’t tell anyone…”
    “How do you know she didn’t tell anyone?”
    “But who could she have told?” said Venetia, bewildered by her air of jaunty triumph; and Fran, from the other end of the table, chimed in impatiently: “When could she have told them?”
    “She could have told them just before she died,” said Pippi, and drained her glass and set it down with a thump. “She could have told her murderer.”
    She could have told her murderer. This man, this creature who had confessed to killing the kitchen-maid; he had somehow lured Grace out of her house and she, for some reason they would probably never know, had told him about the hat. And after he had killed her he had got the hat and thrust it upon her head; how he could have got it, why she should have told