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malevolent.'
96
Mr Bedford smiled and shook his head. 'Can you really imagine Jane doing
anything cruel, or hurtful?'
'Not the Jane I knew when she was alive, but - '
'Jane would never hurt anybody, alive or dead. She was an angel, you know,
John. An angel when she was living; and now she's gone, an angel still. I'm
going to have to tell her mother, you know.'
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'Walter, I hate to come back to brass tacks,' I told him. 'But I still don't
see how you're going to get me off this homicide charge. Not if ghosts are my
only alibi.'
Mr Bedford paused in silence for a long time. Then he looked up at me with
reddened eyes, and said, 'Mrs Simons was killed in a most remarkable way,
wasn't she?'
'Not just remarkable. Impossible. At least for me to have done it. Or anybody
human.'
'Well,' said Mr Bedford, 'I think I'll go talk to the district attorney. I'm
sure it's going to be possible to come to some arrangement. He's an old friend
of mine, you know. We both belong to the same golf club.'
'You really think you can swing something?'
'I can but try.'
He stood up, and put away his pad. He couldn't stop himself from smiling. 'I
can't wait to tell Constance,' he said. 'She'll be delighted.'
'I don't really see what you've got to be delighted about.'
'John, my dear boy, we have everything to be delighted about. Well, almost
everything. Once you're released, and back at the cottage, we can visit you,
can't we, and see Jane again for ourselves?'
I couldn't think what to say. I shook his hand, uncertainly, and then sat down
on my chair as abruptly as if somebody had hit me with a sockful of wet sand.
Mr Bedford left and I heard his rubber-soled shoes squeaking up the polished
police station corridor.
The police sergeant poked his head around the door again.
'What are you sitting there for?' he wanted to know. 'It's back in the slammer
for you.'
97
ELEVEN
I was released late in the afternoon on $75,000 bail, put up by an Essex
County real-estate corporation of which Mrs Constance Bedford was a major
stockholder. Outside, it was bright, dry and windy, and I was picked up by Tom
Watkins, one of Walter Bedford's clerks, and driven back to Quaker Lane
Cottage.
Tom Watkins was young and flush-faced, with a fluffy little mustache. He had
never been involved with a homicide case before, and I think I quite scared
him.
'I read the police report on Mrs Edgar Simons' death,' he told me, as he
drove. 'That was some way to die.'
I nodded. It was impossible to explain to anybody what I felt about the
gruesome events of the previous evening. I was still suffering from residual
shock, and a kind of persistent nausea. I could actually imagine what that
chandelier chain must have felt like, passing right through Mrs Simons'
insides, cold and uncompromising and beyond any human capability to remove.
Worst of all, though, I still felt dread. If Mrs Simons' dearly beloved Edgar
had been powerful and cruel enough in his spirit state to impale his widow
like that, what would Neil try to do to Charlie Manzi, or Jane try to do to
me? And from what Walter Bedford had told me, Charlie and Mrs Edgar Simons and
I weren't the only people in Granitehead who had been visited by flickering
visions of their dead relatives.
For some unknown reason, it seemed as if this year the influence of these
manifestations was stronger than usual, although I hadn't really been living
in Granitehead long enough to know what 'usual' might be. Mrs Simons had said
something about the manifestations being seasonal,
98
more frequent and more obvious in the summer months than they were in the
winter. Only God knew why that could be: maybe there was more static
electricity in the air in the summer, feeding the apparitions with natural
power.
Tom Watkins said, 'Mr Bedford will get you off of this rap. You just wait and
see. He talked to the district attorney already, and tomorrow he's going to
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have a meeting with the chief of police. Actually, the police don't really [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]