“I shan’t take any disciplinary action, other than what I’ve done,” I told him, “because if you get hold of anything, I can use it as a lever to make him talk. It may be some common little intrigue when he does own up, and on the other hand it mayn’t.”
George told me guardedly that he’d had no luck at all in Penelope’s room, so after a spot of lunch which Ledd was finding for him, he was going out for a breather. He was calling at the doctor’s place for one thing, to hear what had happened at the P.M. Then he’d probably be at the City to take a call from the Yard about the carpet analysis.
“What about your key man?” I said. “Had any more conversation with him?”
Wharton gave a little chuckle, which seemed to me to indicate that much of that mysterious hinting about Newton was mere blether.
“Oh, him,” he said. “He’s peevish. Says he’s got his own job to get on with, and Colonel B. wasn’t the only one who might be on to something big.”
“Serve you damn well right,” I said. “I expect you’ve been asking for a snub. Why don’t you bully someone as big as yourself?”
He seemed delighted at that, and promised off his own bat to let me know about the P.M., and the Yard expert’s opinion on that wet piece of carpet.
Our Mess library was a ramshackle collection, but I remembered after lunch that I’d seen in it an old copy of Who’s Who—that lovely garner of self-written epitaphs. Newton was in it right enough, and when I had read his staggering list of achievements and honours, I was more than ever certain that Wharton had been blethering for some deep reason of his own. Wharton hates Hitler worse than the Devil hates incense, but when it comes to the use of the lie, he has Hitler beaten to the wide.
One of his tricks, for instance, is this. He will suggest something which has some foundation of fact, and then proceed to embroider. When he has finished, you feel that there is still something vital which he has missed. But you have seen it, and you tell yourself that you will follow it up and surprise him. When you try to do so, you discover the fraud, and you go to him indignantly and ask if it is necessary to mystify or even double-cross those who are supposed to be his helpers. Then he guilelessly explains that in what you have just told him was the very something he had been looking for. He also repudiates scornfully the charge of misrepresentation. All he did, he says, was to put in your mind a certain view-point towards the suspect. When you try to pin him down, he asks triumphantly if the means haven’t justified the end.
Does that read a bit woolly? I hope it does, provided you’ve got the main idea, because you may feel how woolly and even pained I’ve felt in my time when I’ve been a victim of George’s circumlocutions. But to get to the question of Newton. The suggestion was that Newton knew the truth about everything, and that I was the man to extract it. Now I was quite prepared to see Newton. I had my own interests in him, and I was certainly not going to the Hall to treat him as a suspect. I wanted to hear his views on those photostats, and—that overmastering curiosity again!—to get from him some definite hint of the lines on which he and his assistants were working, and the hopes they had of success. After all, I did have a wife working in a London hospital, and there would have been a personal ease of mind, if nothing else, to have a hint that the night bomber was on the way to being badly mauled if not mastered.
The trouble was to find a good excuse for seeing Newton, and it was not till the middle of the afternoon that I found one. Off I went at once to the Hall. I had a short wait before Newton could see me, and while I was in the empty office, Riddle came in. He was in slacks and pullover, and came bursting in without seeing me at first.
“We’ve busted the last ping-pong ball,” he said grinningly. “I think there should be some here.”
“Who’s winning?”
“Oh, Wissler,” he said. “He gives me five start and then beats me three times out of four. Were you waiting to see Professor Newton?”
I said I was, and he explained. Life at the Hall was erratic in the extreme. Sometimes one slept all day and worked all night, and sometimes it was a kind of half and half. Riddle said he and Wissler could do with very little sleep, but Newton liked more. As a matter of fact he was just getting up after snatching a few hours.
Off Riddle went with a couple of balls that he found, and I told myself that there was a young man who was much easier in his mind than when I had last seen him. So boyish and absolutely natural had he been that even Wharton could never have suspected him of subterfuge, let alone crime. What he had told me about Newton was useful too, for when the Professor did come in, I was all apologies about disturbing him, and he all protestations that he hadn’t really been disturbed, and so we were on loquacious terms at once.
“Can I get you some tea?” he said, “or is it too early?”
“Just a bit too early for me,” I said. “Besides, I don’t want to take up your valuable time. What I really came about was Ledd. Strictly speaking, he isn’t performing duties while Colonel Brende isn’t here, so I ought to have him back. On the other hand, if you say you’d still like him here, that’s good enough for me.”
He seemed most grateful for what he called my consideration. He had got used to Ledd, and Ledd was used to the Hall, and so he’d esteem it a favour if he might remain. I said he could consider it as settled.
Then I decided to employ my own un-Whartonian technique. The room suggested mention of work; that suggested the admiration of the layman for the experts like himself and Hush; and then to my surprise he was volunteering information.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “Hush should have been coming down here on the very day he did come.”
“Periodical stock-taking?” I said.
He smiled. “You might call it that. He’s an exceedingly able man and it’s a pleasure to talk things over with him. He’s one of the few who know.”
“Not like myself.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I know your civil life reputation, and I wouldn’t put you among the badly informed.”
“All the same,” I said, “this work you’re doing here is far in advance of most of what I could grasp.”
“Don’t you believe it,” he said. “Of course I can’t give you any hint of what we’re actually doing here, but I can tell you of one idea. Highly confidential, by the way.”
I was most interested, though I couldn’t for the life of me have told if what he was telling me was something on which he was really working. The idea was to make use of the sensitivity of certain metals like selenium, and he instanced television. Suppose, for example, that an enemy plane is in a pitch dark sky at an unknown height. Its vibrations affect an extremely sensitive instrument on the ground, and this instrument is co-ordinated, shall we call it, with a special gun. Then no matter how the aircraft twists, climbs or dives, the selenium records it and automatically transmits it to the gun.
I had to admit that the idea had tremendous possibilities, but that to transmit them into results was an even bigger business.
“By the way,” I said, “Wharton told me he’d given you some rather interesting photostats. Was he pulling my leg as usual, or were they interesting?”
Never in my life did I meet a man who so closed down as Newton did at that question. Instead of being genial and chatty, he froze completely up. He did say the photostats were interesting only as examples of how modern science could read what would once have been called the irretrievably lost, and then he was changing the subject most pointedly. I even got the idea he was trying as gracefully as he could to get rid of me, so I said I wouldn’t keep him any longer. A word with Ledd and I’d have to get back to the Camp.
He pushed a bell and another batman came. I said I’d see Ledd in the hall, and I shook hands with Newton and thanked him, and he thanked me, and that was that. Ledd came along to the hall at the double, and he was still buttoning his tunic when he appeared. I told him what had been decided, and he seemed very relieved. I liked Ledd, I don’t quite know why
, unless it was that grin of his and the perky snub nose.
“While I’m here,” I said, “I’d rather like to have a look at the cellar. The wine-cellar, to be exact.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, and at once was leading the way. In a corridor just short of what various odours told me was the kitchen, he went through a door and into a small empty room which had a flight of stairs going down from one of its corners. There was a light which he switched on, and it was necessary, for the steps were none too wide. The cellar itself was stone-floored, and not as large as I’d expected, and very few bottles were in the racks.
Ledd said that Mrs. Brende had sent most of the wine to the local hospitals. I asked why the door had been unlocked, and he said that Wharton had been down there and had probably forgotten to lock it after him. There were only two keys, he thought, and Wharton now had one and Mrs. Brende the other.
“What the devil is that bumping noise?” I said. It had been going on ever since we had been down there. Ledd pulled a face. There was another cellar through that door, he said, and coal was just being chuted down from the back yard. Tons and tons of it, he said.
“But what’s worrying you?” I asked him. Ledd had one of those faces that reveal pretty closely its owner’s mood.
“I’m not worried, sir,” he said, and his grin was sheepish. “The only thing is, sir, we had the coal outside up to now, and it was easy to bring in the house.”
“I see,” I said. “And now you’ve got to come down here and carry it up the stairs.”
“Well yes, sir,” he admitted.
We were on such friendly terms that I thought I’d talk to him like a Dutch uncle.
“Ledd,” I said, “I’ve been wanting a quiet word with you for some time.” I caught his quick, worried look. “Where were you exactly on that Saturday night when Colonel Brende disappeared?”
“Where, sir?” He coloured up to his scalp. “Out for a walk, sir.”
“A pretty long one, wasn’t it? You didn’t get back till early morning.”
“Well, there was the air-raid, sir.”
“Oh, no,” I said, “the real air-raid didn’t develop till after you were in.”
That was a slip on my part and he took quick advantage of it.
“It was that other one, sir. I hung about looking for the parachutists that dropped.”
“Very thoughtful of you;” I said dryly. “You see, Ledd, I want to help you if I can. If you’ve got anything on your chest which you’d like to get off, now’s your chance.”
“I’ve got nothing, sir.”
“You certainly had on Sunday morning,” I told him. “Still it’s up to you. Mrs. Brende in, do you know?”
He said he didn’t know, and I was wondering if I ought to force myself on her after all. As I looked back from the door, Ledd was still staring after me, and I knew more than ever that that young fellow had something on his mind.
It was a sunny afternoon and the wind had shifted a point more east so that it was less cold. As I stood for a minute admiring the young green of the trees and the flaunting colours of the rockery, I caught a movement by the summer-house, and I was just in time to identify Mrs. Brende. Just as quickly she disappeared, and I suddenly remembered again that Saturday evening when I had seen someone whom I had erroneously taken for Colonel Brende.
In a moment I was stepping off the gravel and making my way across the lawn.
CHAPTER XIV
Uneasy Interim
THAT was the first time I had walked towards the summer-house in what might be called broad open daylight, and I was noticing something of which I had previously been unaware. The lawn fell away much more steeply than I had imagined. That was natural, since the tennis-court, or part of it, had once been a bathing-pool, and would therefore lie in some sort of hollow. That tennis-court broke the line of descent, but beyond it the land still fell away, so that you might have said that it and the summer-house lay on the side of a hill, of which the Hall itself was the summit. It was not a real hill, of course, for the actual difference in altitude between the end of the slope and the base of the house could not have been more than fifty feet. As for the summer-house itself that overlooked the tennis-court, it stood on an artificial mound, the back of which was terraced away till it lost itself artistically in the level lawns beyond.
I came up the side steps and there was no sign of Mrs. Brende. As I came round to the back, there she was, just in the act of locking the back door. Then she turned and saw me.
Over her face came a most extraordinary expression. Let me describe it like this. Suppose you have told a young nephew not to touch the fruit on a certain tree, and then you come on him suddenly and catch him in the act of eating a stolen pear. That happened to me with a nephew of mine, and over his face came an expression which said: “You’ve caught me, then, uncle. I’m not going to attempt to argue. Here I am and I’ll take my medicine.” In his look and attitude were admission of guilt and, with never a sign of brazenness, a free acceptance of the consequences.
Mind you, that’s what I knew later. At the moment two ideas flashed into my mind to explain that extraordinary look in quite other ways. I thought the first quick confusion was at seeing me, and so suddenly, after having tried to avoid me. Then I wondered if I were on private or sacrosanct ground, and if I had not taken a liberty by wandering about the grounds.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Perhaps I oughtn’t to be here, but I thought I’d caught sight of you, so I came over to speak.”
She gave a little smile, but it was one of relief.
“I was just taking advantage of the sun. Those cold winds kept one so much to the house.”
“Yes,” I said, still standing there awkwardly and feeling rather stupid. “And how are you?”
“Very well,” she said. “Thank you enormously for everything you did for me.”
“That was nothing,” I told her. “I’m awfully sorry, by the way, about this last dreadful business.”
She caught me up at once.
“She didn’t die naturally?”
“Why should you ask that?” I said gravely.
Her eyes turned away. For a moment or two she was thinking hard, brows puckered, then she shook her head, and her eyes met mine again.
“She was very young to die. Only this time yesterday she was with me, and I thought how robust she was. She never ailed a thing in her life.”
“One can never tell,” I said. “These things happen, you know.”
All the time we had been standing there, neither of us stirring an inch. I knew my presence was some sort of restraint so I decided to depart gracefully.
“Well, I must get back to the Camp,” I said. “I just called here on business, that was all. Don’t forget I’m to have tea with you soon. Or why shouldn’t you have tea with me?”
She smiled. “I so rarely go out. You must come here. In a day or two, I hope. Perhaps you will let me telephone.”
I left her there and puzzledly began making my way back to the drive. Then I had an idea, and it arose out of those last words of hers about telephoning. Then it got mixed up with what she had said about rarely going out, when I recalled that she had made an exception in favour of Passenden. And Passenden had been at Sowdale, her old home.
That was how the thoughts began to crowd in, and on the last heels of them was the remembering how Passenden, when he rang me up from what he hoped I should imagine was Scotland, had asked me if anything had happened at the Hall. So I turned back to the house, and luckily it was Ledd who opened the door. I went a few yards along the bare corridor.
“This is in strict confidence, Ledd,” I told him. “What are the telephone arrangements here now? Has Mrs. Brende asked for an extension to be put through to her room, for instance?” I saw I had scored a bull. Ledd said he had fixed that simple extension himself.
“Is it much used?” I said.
“Not a great deal, I don’t think, sir. It was this morning, though. Mr. Newton wa
nted to make an urgent call and we were held up because they had a trunk call.”
“They” in Ledd’s vernacular would mean Mrs. Brende, which was all I wanted to know, so I cautioned him again and then made my way out by the back, and so through the shrubbery path to the drive again and the front gate. What had happened seemed to me to be reasonably clear. Mrs. Brende and Passenden were in telephonic communication and she had rung him up that morning to tell him of Penelope Craye’s death. If so, she had doubtless told him that in her view that death had not been natural.
As I drove slowly back to the Camp I saw something else. When Ledd caught sight of Mrs. Brende that morning, she had been coming from Penelope’s room. Perhaps something there— something she had removed in that dust-pan—had told her beyond all doubt that Penelope had been murdered.
But how was I to clinch that argument? I saw no possible way of proving a single suspicion, and it was no business of mine to cross-examine and question. Then I did think of some small proof that might present itself, even if negatively. I was expecting Passenden to ring again, and again to ask me if anything had happened. If he did not ring, then it might be proof that he had other sources of information.
It was not till almost dinner-time when Wharton rang me up that evening. He said he’d just had a call from the Yard to say that the champagne had a strong solution of veronal.
“Then it was murder,” I said.
“I knew that in any case,” he told me.
That was a surprise for me. George never made foolish boasts like that without reason.
“You knew! Good Lord, how?”
“Knowing and proving are two different things,” he said, and obviously to put me off. “As a matter of fact I’m trying to make a start on the proof to-night.”
“And what about the P.M.?”
“Confirms everything, and by the by, she was not a virgin.”
I merely grunted at that. After all, what was there to say? Neither old scandals nor new seemed to matter much just then.
“Still, as I was saying,” Wharton was going on, “I have to be away for a few hours. It may be a day or two. I happen to have been lucky enough to have overheard a certain telephone conversation.”
The Case of the Kidnapped Colonel: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 18