The sound of the stertorous breathing reached them again and she and Ricky made their way up to bed. She sent him on ahead, and made a pretence of going into the room to see that all was well. ‘She’s quite quiet now; only snoring a bit,’ she said rejoining him. ‘I dare say she was pretty worn out, silly girl,’ he said. ‘She’ll be better in the morning.’ And he added, humbly and gratefully, ‘Thank you, darling. You were splendid,’ and kissed her. She turned away her head.
And in the morning, the girl was dead. Ann Kelly would smile her sweet, sneering, malicious little smile no more; and Stella Harrison was a murderer.
Suddenly the house was full of policemen, large, slow, kindly-spoken men, led by a small, quick, snapping little man called, apparently, Chief Inspector Cockrill. ‘Sorry about this, Mrs. Harrison. Very distressing for you. And you say the girl was hardly known to you, to you or Dr. Harrison either…?’
Up at the hospital Matron told her story: evidently they had all underestimated the lengths to which the girl would go in her neurotic desire for attention—or the girl herself had overestimated the dose which it would be safe to play with… At the house, they went through the anticipated routine. The coffee cup proved all that it had promised: the Chief Inspector dipped in a tentative little-finger tip and sucked it—‘No, nothing there—just black coffee,’—and gave instruction for a few drops to be poured off and the rest sent to the laboratories. ‘We’ll get a quick analysis done here, Sergeant: I dare say the doctor has some reagents about the place. We shan’t find anything but it’ll be nice to know for certain. Can’t be too careful, Mrs. Harrison, for your sake and the doctor’s. She might just possibly have smuggled something into it.’
‘Just as well I didn’t wash it up,’ said Stella. ‘But with all the fuss….’
It was a Sunday. Ricky and Frederick sat wretchedly side by side on the sofa. ‘I’d have sworn she’d taken nothing.’
‘So would I,’ said Frederick.
‘You examined her carefully?’
‘Well—we were both prepared, you see, to believe she’d taken nothing. I know the type,’ said Ricky, ‘and they never have taken anything; and Stella had seen her pulling up her stocking when she was pretending to be half unconscious. And if she had taken the stuff—well, it must have been getting on for an hour before we saw her, and she’d have been showing symptoms long before that.’
‘I quite agree,’ said Frederick. He added slowly: ‘Of course, Ricky, we were basing the whole thing on the assumption that if she’d taken anything it would have been before she left the hospital—which is what she said. But—suppose she’d taken it just before she walked in here? She’d have been at such an early stage that we’d have been justified in doing nothing?’
‘I’d have thought there’d be something, even so,’ said Ricky. (Silly blind fool! thought Stella—can’t he ever leave well alone…?)
‘I must confess,’ said Frederick, looking back, ‘that when she went up to bed I did think she seemed over-excited. I said so to you, Stella, didn’t I?—and flushed and not flopping about as she had been. But… Well, I suppose it was the stocking episode—I was so convinced that it was all an act….’ He broke off wretchedly, conscious of a failure and of the dire consequence of that failure to a human life.
When Ricky was uncertain and floundering, Stella could feel only irritation and a sort of contempt. Now, with Frederick so unwontedly at a loss, she was filled with a sense of protectiveness. She pointed out: ‘I’d just given her strong black coffee for that very purpose—to wake her up.’
‘You let her put herself to bed, Mrs. Harrison?’
‘She wouldn’t let me help her; we just left her to it.’
‘She said she was—exhausted was the word,’ said Frederick, thoughtfully. ‘And that she’d been through a strain. So—once again, you see: one accepted it as natural. But I suppose it was in fact symptomatic—flushed, excited….’
‘And she was breathing very heavily,’ said Ricky. ‘I ought to have gone in….’ These men! They seemed bent upon making themselves look inept fools and worse. ‘I went in,’ said Stella. ‘She was snoring, yes; she just seemed heavily asleep.’
And so on, and so on—question and answer, but quiet, amicable, just talking it over….Times, places, words said, words unspoken. The story of the call to Matron, a passing reference to the ‘crush’ of the young lady on the doctor. ‘No doubt you get lots of that kind of thing?’