A Letter of Mary - Laurie R. King [98]
TWENTY-ONE
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At 5:20, my week's pay in my handbag, I stood outside the building where Miss Sarah Chessman lived. Seven minutes later, I saw a woman matching her description alight from a crowded omnibus and clack purposefully down the street towards me, a small woman with glossy shingled hair, wearing clothes that had been carefully tailored for a woman who weighed a few pounds more than she did just now. The deliberate set to her jaw and shoulders made me wonder how long she could stretch her reserves, and as she drew near, I could see the pallor of her skin and the tautness next to her eyes and the slightly haunted look I had often, in the past, seen in my own mirror. She took out her key, and as she moved past me to the door, I held out a meaningless but official-looking card which Lestrade had prepared for me.
"Miss Chessman?" I asked politely.
She jumped as if I had screamed at her, and when she looked up from the card, she had on her face a look of pure loathing.
"Oh, bloody hell, not again!"
She jammed her key into the lock, slammed the door violently open, and stalked into the building.
"Miss Chessman?" I called after her.
"Come in, for Christ's sake. Let's get it over with. But it's the last time, do you hear? Absolutely the last time."
I followed her up to her tiny flat and closed the door behind me. The room was painfully neat, and the way in which she went automatically to the wardrobe to brush her coat and hang it up and to place her hat on the shelf told me that it was not a temporary tidiness, but a permanent state. Like its occupant, the room was glossy, smooth, and designed to allow no one entrance without permission. Both room and woman were very different from the teary, newly affianced flosshead I had expected to find. This was going to prove even more difficult than I had anticipated.
She was, however, nervous and could not quite hide the fact. She went to a cupboard and poured herself a drink, straight gin, without offering me anything. She took a large swallow, went to a table near one of the two windows, took a cigarette from a japanned tin box, and made a great show of inserting it into a holder and lighting it. She stood and puffed and drank and looked down at the passing cars, and I waited motionless, hands in pockets, for her to gain control of herself. Finally, she stubbed the cigarette out in a spotless ashtray and went back to the drinks cupboard. She spoke over her shoulder.
"I've already told you people everything I can remember. Three nights last week and once on the weekend, one bloody set of police after another. You'd think I'd run her down, the way the questions come."
"I'm not from the police, Miss Chessman." The mildness of my reply turned her around, and she ran her eyes over me as I stood there patiently. "The card was given me so you would know I was here with their permission."
"Then who are you? The newspapers?"
"No." I had to smile at the thought.
"Who, then?"
"A friend."
"No friend of mine. Oh, you mean a friend of hers, that woman?"
"Of that woman, yes."
I thought for a minute she would tell me to go, but abruptly she threw up one hand in a lost little gesture, and seemed even smaller.
"Oh, all right. Sit down. Can I give you something?"
"A small glass of the gin would be nice." I did not intend to drink it, but it established the community of the table. She brought it and her own refilled glass and sat opposite me. I thanked her.
"Really," she said, subdued, "I cannot help you. I've told everyone everything I can remember. You're wasting your time."
"She was my friend," I said simply. "You were the last person, aside from her murderers, to see her alive. Do you mind awfully, going through it again? I know it must be very painful for you, and I'll understand if you can't bring yourself to do it."
Her face softened, and I caught a glimpse of the person her friends saw, when her formidable defenses were down. She would have few friends, I thought,