Sophia gave a yell when she saw the dead man. Kinsman bade her pull herself together, and in a minute or so she flew away down the stairs, saying she would find a policeman. By this time the whole square was roused. There were lights at most of the windows, sashes were flung up, men ran out in their slippers and with their pipes still stuck in the corner of their mouths, asking what was up. Kinsman and I ran down too. Piety didn’t move. He might have got away easily, but he stood dazed, staring at the heavy body of the dead Irishman; stood and stared sluggishly, with the splashed blood drying on his face and hands, just where it had spurted, and dropping heavily from his limp red cuff, the corner of which was soaked. Of course, everybody said that he had murdered Murphy in a fit of temper, because he couldn’t get his twenty pounds back. I knew they had been rowing, heard their angry voices across the passage when I went to my door to admit a visitor. It looked bad for Bob. Yet I didn’t believe that he had done it. All the other fellows pooh-poohed his lame explanation, and some said that Murphy, who was a thorough bad lot, was well out of the way, and others, who had known Mrs. Bob as Miss Martin, were full of sympathy for the poor little woman.
It was a wet night. Warm rain fell straight from the sky to the square. The light of each lamp above the hooded doors was reflected on the pavements. The stair leading to the second floor at 7 was crowded—with men in slippers and girls without any hats. One of the girls went into hysterics. Another one propped her up against the wall and undid her collar and called out shrilly for cold water and smelling salts. And then, after what seemed an interminable time, Sophia brought a policeman—he had been off the beat, of course—and Bob was arrested.
I went with him to the station, and after that I went down to Norwood and broke the news to Barbara.
I never believe in those women who, when trouble comes, sit at home and weep and wait and pray. They are fools, or callous. Your true woman must be doing something. Barbara never shed a single tear. She didn’t wring her hands or scream or faint. She only kept saying, with pitiful monotony, that it was her wicked vanity and extravagance which had got Bob in a mess, and that she meant to get him out of it.
She seemed to rise all at once out of villadom—that smug, narrow life which ruins so many people. Villadom! It promulgates the hateful, stultifying creed of “paying your way.” Barbara told me once that a lady at Norwood refused to visit another lady because she hadn’t paid her butcher’s bill. She threw off her shackles—the shackles of that spick-and-span house, with the stiff white curtains at the windows, the demure maidservants, and the noisy overflow of babies. She sent for Mrs. Martin to keep house, then packed a little black box, kissed her children with the air of a Spartan, and came away to the Inn with me.
With me! Why not? She had my set. I went and turned in with Hawkins. He had a little den leading out of his bedroom, which he used as a carpenter’s shop, and his laundress as a kitchen! It was very good of me to do that for a comparative stranger! But she wasn’t. You see—hadn’t I mentioned it?—Barbara was an old flame of mine. It was a close running between me and Bob at one time. But I backed out. He had four hundred pounds a year and I hadn’t a penny—that could be called certain. Sometimes I make a haul and sometimes I starve. That would have killed Barbara. She had always been educated to the necessity of a certain income.
She came and settled in my rooms, so as to be near Bob. At Norwood she might as well have been in Alaska—these suburbs are so beautifully isolated. And then, as she confessed to me, she hoped to pick up evidence. Of course she believed in her husband’s innocence. She went farther than that; she was convinced that the murder was committed by someone in the Inn—in the house—at 7.
I gave her a list of all the tenants. I tried to show her how impossible it was. On the ground floor was Kinsman, who had been shut up with Sophia. The set opposite was empty. The sets on the first floor were rented as offices, and both principals and clerks had been gone for hours at the time Murphy was stabbed. On the second floor, Murphy had one set and I the other. On the third floor, one set was empty and the other—the fatal set, although she knew nothing about that—belonged to Stapley.
Stapley was a quiet young fellow. He was engaged to his cousin, spent his Sundays with his widowed mother at Dulwich, and was reading hard for a Civil Service appointment. As I pointed out to Barbara, Murphy was murdered on Saturday night, and Stapley always left for Dulwich on Saturday afternoon. I saw him come back myself at the usual time on Monday morning. But she wouldn’t be convinced. She was certain that the murderer was in the Inn, in the very house.
The Inn bore with her. Laundresses stared after her sympathetically as she went up and down the old stairs, and called her to each other, “Pore young thing.” The fellows, many of whom had met her as Miss Martin, didn’t know how to show their sympathy. They brought her flowers and new-laid eggs—anything. One brought a stray white kitten that he’d found in a doorway. Arnold offered a pure-bred bull pup, and was hurt when she refused it. Arnold was a great fancier. His book of devotion was a bulky volume, “Druid on Dogs.”