Читать книгу Moss Rose - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 21

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"I am glad," thought Belle, "that I didn't have to identify the body. I don't suppose poor Daisy looks very pretty by now."

She had been maliciously pleased to see how downcast and sick the members of the jury looked when they filed back to their places, after having returned through the brown varnished door that concealed the room where Daisy Arrow lay—"smug, respectable, selfish people, all of them," thought Belle. "It will do them good to hear of this kind of thing—it will do them good to see this kind of thing—indeed, it will."

Mrs. Bulke's evil eyes, hard and sullen, had identified Daisy Arrow; a cockney young man, awkward and ashamed in a tight blue coat with brass buttons, who kept twisting his cap round and round in his hands, a much younger brother, who had not seen his sister for ten years or more, but who knew her story as he had heard it often enough from her father who had died last year, had also looked on the body and had said that it was that of Martha Owen, his sister.

John Owen, of Welsh origin, had been a baker in Clerkenwell. His son, awkward and nervous in the witness-box, had insisted that they were all respectable people, and his other sisters were married to decent men; one of them had bought the bakery. He—Roger Owen—was a button-maker himself, and did well he had his own little business and lodged with his sister.

But Martha had always gone on her own. She had been in service as quite a young girl and had run away—some trouble with a footman. Her parents had found her, though with great difficulty, another place. Again she had been disgraced, and this time dismissed. Then, they had lost sight of the light pretty creature.

She had come home once—too gaily dressed, too much money in her purse. Her tale was plausible. She had found a post as companion to a lady. She seemed, indeed, in the eyes of her simple kinsfolk, to have an air of gentility. She had picked up, it seemed to her relations, some airs and graces of society, and they thought her clothes tasteful.

She had then disappeared. She had written to them from abroad—France, the young man thought it was. He had lost the letter. He remembered that his mother had given it to him to write to that address, but he had not had the heart or the courage to do so. His parents had died soon after; he had washed his hands of Martha; probably if his mother had lived she herself would have written. It was a good many years ago and he was sure that the letter was lost.

The police were a little vexed about this. There seemed some possible connection between Daisy Arrow's visit abroad and the foreigner whom she had brought home with her on the last night of her life. But, as the letter could not be found and the young man's memory was not reliable, this small clue could not be followed up.