AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Too heavy." Ada looked thoughtful. "But the wardrobe in my room is not so weighty."
Carla nodded. A maid was assumed not to have many clothes, nor to need mahogany furniture, she realized with a touch of embarrassment, so Ada's room had a narrow hanging cupboard made of flimsy deal wood. "Let's get it," she said.
Ada had originally lived in the basement, but that was now an air raid shelter, and her room was upstairs. Carla and Ada went up. Ada opened her cupboard and pulled all the clothes off the rail. There were not many: two sets of uniforms, a few dresses, one winter coat, all old. She laid them neatly on the single bed.
Carla tilted the wardrobe and took its weight, then Ada picked up the other end. It was not heavy, but it was awkward, and it took them some time to manhandle it out of the door and down the stairs.
At last they laid it on its back in the hall. Carla opened the door. Now it looked like a coffin with a hinged lid.
Carla went back into the kitchen and bent over the body. She took the camera and films from Joachim's pocket, and replaced them in the kitchen drawer.
Carla took his arms, Ada took his legs, and they lifted the body. They carried it out of the kitchen into the hall and lowered it into the wardrobe. Ada rearranged the towel about the head, though the bleeding had stopped.
Should they take off his uniform? Carla wondered. It would make the body harder to identify--but it would give her two problems of disposal instead of one. She decided against.
She picked up the canvas bag and dropped it into the wardrobe with the corpse.
She closed the wardrobe door and turned the key, to make sure it did not fall open by accident. She put the key in the pocket of her dress.
She went into the dining room and looked out through the window. "It's getting dark," she said. "That's good."
Maud said: "What will people think?"
"That we're moving a piece of furniture--selling it, perhaps, to get money for food."
"Two women, moving a wardrobe?"
"Women do this sort of thing all the time, now that so many men are in the army or dead. It's not as if we could get a removal van--they can't buy petrol."
"Why would you be doing it in the half dark?"
Carla let her frustration show. "I don't know, Mother. If we're asked, I'll have to make something up. But the body can't stay here."
"They'll know he's been murdered, when they find the body. They'll examine the injuries."
Carla, too, was worried about that. "Nothing we can do."
"They may try to investigate where he went today."
"He said he had not told anyone about his piano lessons. He wanted to astonish his friends with his skill. With luck, no one knows he came here." And without luck, Carla thought, we're all dead.
"What will they guess to be the motive for the murder?"
"Will they find traces of semen in his underwear?"
Maud looked away, embarrassed. "Yes."
"Then they will imagine a sexual encounter, perhaps with another man, that ended in a quarrel."
"I hope you're right."
Carla was not at all sure, but she could not think of anything they could do about it. "The canal," she said. The body would float, and be found sooner or later, and there would be a murder investigation. They would just have to hope it did not lead to them.
Carla opened the front door.
She stood at the front of the wardrobe on its left, and Ada positioned herself at the back on the right. They bent down.
Ada, who undoubtedly had more experience of heavy lifting than her employers, said: "Tilt it sideways and get your hands under it."
