Ordeal by Innocence

Chapter 7
Dr. MacMaster was an old man with bushy eyebrows, shrewd grey eyes and a pugnacious chin. He leaned back in his shabby arm-chair and studied his visitor carefully. He found that he liked what he saw.

On Calgary's side also there was a feeling of liking. For the first time almost, since he had come back to England, he felt that he was talking to someone who appreciated his own feelings and point of view.

"It's very good of you to see me, Dr. MacMaster," he said.

"Not at all," said the doctor. "I'm bored to death since I retired from practice. Young men of my own profession tell me I must sit here like a dummy taking care of my groggy heart, but don't think it comes natural to me. It doesn't. I listen to the wireless, blah - blah - blah - and occasionally my housekeeper persuades me to look at television, flick, flick, flick. I've been a busy man, run off my feet all my life. I don't take kindly to sitting still. Reading tires my eyes. So don't apologise for taking up my time."

"The first thing I've got to make you understand," said Calgary, "is why I'm still concerning myself over all this. Logically speaking, I suppose, I've done what I came to do - told the unpalatable fact of my concussion and loss of memory, vindicated the boy's character. After that, the only sane and logical thing to do would be to go away and try to forget about it all. Eh? Isn't that right?"

"Depends," said Dr. MacMaster. "Something worrying you?" he asked in the ensuing pause.

"Yes," said Calgary. "Everything worries me. You see, my news was not received as I thought it would be."

"Oh well," said Dr. MacMaster, "nothing odd in that. Happens every day. We rehearse a thing before-hand in our own minds, it doesn't matter what it is, consultation with another practitioner, proposal of marriage to a young lady, talk with your boy before going back to school - when the thing comes off, it never goes as you thought it would. You've thought it out, you see; all the things that you are going to say and you've usually made up your mind what the answers are going to be. And, of course, that's what throws you off every time. The answers never are what you think they will be. That's what's upset you, I suppose?"

"Yes," said Calgary.

"What did you expect? Expected them to be all over you?"

"I expected -" he considered a moment - "blame? Perhaps. Resentment? Very likely. But also thankfulness."

MacMaster grunted. "And there's no thankfulness, and not as much resentment as you think there ought to be?"

"Something like that," Calgary confessed.

"That's because you didn't know the circumstances until you got there. Why have you come to me, exactly?"

Calgary said slowly: "Because I want to understand more about the family. I only know the acknowledged facts. A very fine and unselfish woman doing her best for her adopted children, a public-spirited woman, a fine character. Set against that, what's called, I believe, a problem child - a child that goes wrong. The young delinquent. That's all I know. I don't know anything else. I don't know anything about Mrs. Argyle herself."

"You're quite right," said MacMaster. "You're putting your finger on the thing that matters. If you think it over, you know, that's always the interesting part of any murder. What the person was like who was murdered. Everybody's always so busy enquiring into the mind of the murderer. You've been thinking, probably, that Mrs. Argyle was the sort of woman who shouldn't have been murdered."

"I should imagine that everyone felt that."

"Ethically," said MacMaster, "you're quite right. But you know -" he rubbed his nose - "isn't it the Chinese who held that beneficence is to be accounted a sin rather than a virtue? They've got something there, you know. Beneficence does things to people. Ties 'em up in knots. We all know what human nature's like. Do a chap a good turn and you feel kindly towards him. You like him. But the chap who's had the good turn done to him, does he feel so kindly to you? Does he really like you? He ought to, of course, but does he?

"Well," said the doctor, after a moment's pause. "There you are. Mrs. Argyle was what you might call a wonderful mother. But she overdid the beneficence. No doubt of that. Or wanted to. Or definitely tried to do so."

"They weren't her own children," Calgary pointed out.

"No," said MacMaster. "That's just where the trouble came in, I imagine. You've only got to look at any normal mother cat. She has her kittens, she's passionately protective of them, she'll scratch anyone who goes near them. And then, in a week or so, she starts resuming her own life. She goes out, hunts a bit, takes a rest from her young. She'll still protect them if anyone attacks them, but she is no longer obsessed by them, all the time. She'll play with them a bit; then when they're a bit too rough, she'll turn on them and give them a spank and tell them she wants to be let alone for a bit. She's reverting, you see, to nature. And as they grow up she cares less and less about them, and her thoughts go more and more to the attractive Toms in the neighbourhood. That's what you might call the normal pattern of female life. I've seen many girls and women, with strong maternal instincts, keen on getting married but mainly, though they mayn't quite know it themselves - because of their urge to motherhood. And the babies come; they're happy and satisfied. Life goes back into proportion for them. They can take an interest in their husbands and in the local affairs and in the gossip that's going round, and of course in their children. But it's all in proportion. The maternal instinct, in a purely physical sense, is satisfied, you see.

"Well, with Mrs. Argyle the maternal instinct was very strong, but the physical satisfaction of bearing a child or children, never came. And so her maternal obsession never really slackened. She wanted children, lots of children. She couldn't have enough of them. Her whole mind, night and day, was on those children. Her husband didn't count any more. He was just a pleasant abstraction in the background. No, everything was the children. Their feeding, their clothing, their playing, everything to do with them. Far too much was done for them. The thing she didn't give them and that they needed, was a little plain, honest-to-goodness neglect. They weren't just turned out into the garden to play like ordinary children in the country. No, they had to have every kind of gadget, artificial climbing things and stepping stones, a house built in the trees, sand brought and a little beach made on the river. Their food wasn't plain, ordinary food. Why, those kids even had their vegetables sieved, up to nearly five years old, and their milk sterilised the water tested and their calories weighed and the vitamins computed! Mind you, I'm not being professional in talking to you like this. Mrs. Argyle was never my patient. If she needed a doctor she went to one in Harley Street. Not that she often went. She was very robust and healthy woman.

"But I was the local doctor who was called in to the children, though she was inclined to think I was a bit casual over them. I told her to let

'em eat a few blueberries from the hedges. I told her it wouldn't hurt them to get their feet wet and have an occasional cold in the head, and that there's nothing much wrong with a child who's got a temperature of 99. No need to fuss till over 100. Those children were pampered and spoon-fed and fussed over and loved and in many ways it didn't do them any good."

"You mean," said Calgary, "it didn't do Jacko good?"

"Well, I wasn't really only thinking of Jacko. Jacko to my mind was a liability from the start. The modern label for him is 'a crazy mixed-up kid.' It's just as good as any other label. The Argyles did their best for him, they did everything that could have been done. I've seen a good many Jackos in my lifetime. Later in life, when the boy has gone hopelessly wrong, the parents say, 'If only I'd been stricter with him when he was young,' or else they say, 'I was too harsh, if only I'd been kinder.' I don't think myself it amounts to a penn'orth of difference. There are those who go wrong because they've had an unhappy home

and essentially feel unloved. And again there are those who go wrong because at the least stress they're going to go wrong anyway. I put Jacko down as one of the latter."

"So you weren't surprised," said Calgary, "when he was arrested for murder?"

"Frankly, yes, I was surprised. Not because the idea of murder would have been particularly repugnant to Jacko. He was the sort of young man who is conscienceless. But the kind of murder he'd done did surprise me. Oh, I know he had a violent temper and all that. As a child he often hurled himself on another child or hit him with some heavy toy or bit of wood. But it was usually a child smaller than himself, and it was usually not so much blind rage as the wish to hurt or get hold of something that he himself wanted. The kind of murder I'd have expected Jacko to do, if he did one, was the type where a couple of boys go out on a raid; then, when the police come after them, the Jackos say 'Biff him on the head, bud. Let him have it. Shoot him down.' They're willing for murder, ready to incite to murder, but they've not got the nerve to do murder themselves with their own hands. That's what I should have said. Now it seems," added the doctor, "I would have been right."

Calgary stared down at the carpet, a worn carpet with hardly any of its pattern remaining.

"I didn't know," he said, "what I was up against. I didn't realise what it was going to mean to the others. I didn't see that it might - that it must -

"

The doctor was nodding gently.

"Yes," he said. "It looks that way, doesn't it? It looks as though you've got to put it right there amongst them."

"I think," said Calgary, "that that's really what I came to talk to you about. There doesn't seem, on the face of it, any real motive for any of them to have killed her."

"Not on the face of it," agreed the doctor. "But if you go a little behind the face of it - oh, yes, I think there's plenty of reason why someone might have wanted to kill her."

"Why?" asked Calgary.

"You feel it's really your business, do you?"

"I think so. I can't help feeling so."

"Perhaps I should feel the same in your place... I don't know. Well, what I'd say is that none of them really belonged to themselves. Not so long as their mother -I'll call her that for convenience - was alive. She had a good hold of them still, you know, all of them."

"In what way?"

"Financially she'd provided for them. Provided for them handsomely. There was a large income. It was divided between them in such proportions as the Trustees thought fit. But although Mrs. Argyle herself was not one of the Trustees, nevertheless her wishes, so long as she was alive, were operative." He paused a minute and then went on.

"It's interesting in a way, how they all tried to escape. How they fought not to conform to the pattern that she'd arranged for them. Because she did arrange a pattern, and a very good pattern. She wanted to give them a good home, a good education, a good allowance and a good start in the professions that she chose for them. She wanted to treat them exactly as though they were hers and Leo Argyle's own children. Only of course they weren't hers and Leo Argyle's own children. They had entirely different instincts, feelings, aptitudes and demands. Young Micky now works as a car salesman. Hester more or less ran away from home to go on the stage. She fell in love with a very undesirable type and was absolutely no good as an actress. She had to come home. She had to admit - and she didn't like admitting - that her mother had been right. Mary Durrant insisted on marrying a man during the war whom her mother warned her not to marry. He was a brave and intelligent young man but an absolute fool when it came to business matters. Then he got polio. He was brought as a

convalescent to Sunny Point. Mrs. Argyle was putting pressure on them to live there permanently. The husband was quite willing. Mary Durrant was holding out desperately against it. She wanted her home and her husband to herself. But she'd have given in, no doubt, if her mother hadn't died.

"Micky, the other boy, has always been a young man with a chip on his shoulder; he resented bitterly being abandoned by his own mother. He resented it as a child and he never got over it. I think, at heart, he always hated his adopted mother.

"Then there's the Swedish masseuse woman. She didn't like Mrs. Argyle. She was fond of the children and she's fond of Leo. She accepted many benefits from Mrs. Argyle and probably tried to be grateful but couldn't manage it. Still, I hardly think that her feelings of dislike could cause her to hit her benefactor on the head with a poker. After all, she could leave at any moment she liked. As for Leo Argyle -"

"Yes. What about him?"

"He's going to marry again," said Dr. MacMaster, "and good luck to him. A very nice young woman. Warm-hearted, kind, good company and very much in love with him. Has been for a long time. What did she feel about Mrs. Argyle? You can probably guess just as well as I can. Naturally, Mrs. Argyle's death simplified things a good deal. Leo Argyle's not the type of man to have an affair with his secretary with his wife in the same house. I don't really think he'd have left his wife, either."

Calgary said slowly: "I saw them both; I talked to them. I can't really believe that either of them -"

"I know," said MacMaster. "One can't believe, can one? And yet - one of that household did it, you know."

"You really think so?"

"I don't see what else there is to think. The police are fairly sure that it wasn't the work of an outsider, and the police are probably right."

"But which of them?" said Calgary.

MacMaster shrugged his shoulders. "One simply doesn't know."

"You've no idea yourself from your knowledge of them all?"

"Shouldn't tell you if I had," said MacMaster. "After all, what have I got to go on? Unless there's some factor that I've missed none of them seems a likely murderer to me. And yet -1 can't rule any one of them out as a possibility. No," he added slowly, "my view is that we shall never know. The police will make inquiries and all that sort of thing. They'll do their best, but to get evidence after this time and with so little to go upon -"

He shook his head. "No, I don't think that the truth will ever be known. There are cases like that, you know. One reads about them. Fifty - a hundred years ago, cases where one of three or four or five people must have done it but there wasn't enough evidence and no one's ever been able to say."

"Do you think it's going to be like that here?" "Well," said Dr. MacMaster, "yes, I do..."

Again he cast a shrewd look at Calgary. "And that's what's so terrible, isn't it?" he said.

"Terrible," said Calgary, "because of the innocent. That's what she said to me." "Who? Who said what to you?"

"The girl - Hester. She said I didn't understand that it was the innocent who mattered. It's what you've just been saying to me. That we shall never know -"

"-who is innocent?" The doctor finished for him. "Yes, if we could only know the truth. Even if it doesn't come to an arrest or trial or conviction. Just to know. Because otherwise -"

He paused.

"Yes?" said Calgary.

"Work it out for yourself," said Dr. MacMaster. "No -1 don't need to say that -you already have."

He went on: "It reminds me, you know, of the Bravo Case - nearly a hundred years ago now, I suppose, but books are still being written about it; making out a perfectly good case for his wife having done it, or Mrs. Cox having done it, or Dr. Gully - or even for Charles Bravo having taken the poison in spite of the Coroner's verdict. All quite plausible theories - but no one now can ever know the truth. And so Florence Bravo, abandoned by her family, died alone of drink, and Mrs. Cox, ostracised, and with three little boys, lived to be an old woman with most of the people she knew believing her to be a murderess, and Dr. Gully was ruined professionally and socially.

"Someone was guilty - and got away with it. But the others were innocent - and didn't get away with anything."

"That mustn't happen here," said Calgary. It mustn't!"