And Death Came Too

by Hull, Richard

  “And which had treated him so well.”

  “And which had treated him so well.” Kinderson repeated the phrase apparently unconscious of any irony lurking in Flaxman’s mind. “At any rate, the house was transferred to the school, nominally for the sum of—I really forget what. Then we went to an insurance company and said to them: ‘Supposing we hand you this sum to buy an annuity for Mr Yeldham, what would you pay him a year?’ He was quite a healthy man, and they apparently took a favourable view of his life. Insurance companies, too, are not very generous—or at least, so it seemed to me, but then I hold that they should be nationalised. However, who am I that I should argue with an insurance company? Or, for that matter, as I pointed out to him, who was Yeldham? At any rate, he agreed to accept an annuity of the sum which they had mentioned in return for his house. I think that, in some ways, he was glad to go.”

  “Then the college is the gainer by his death?” Flaxman asked.

  “Oh, no! Oh, dear, no! The college was not paying the annuity. I think I explained to you that all the money that it had was required for improvements. The annuity was to be a first charge on the profits of Salter’s house—in fact, would come out of what would normally go to him. It meant, of course, that for a while he would not get much, but then he was getting a very considerable promotion, and even after deducting the annuity, I expect that he would have been better off than he was, but I believe that Salter always took the view that Yeldham would not live as long as the insurance company thought. Yeldham drank, you know,” he added casually.

  “So Salter is better off as the result of Yeldham’s death.”

  “Oh, very distinctly! Surely I made that quite clear? Yes, it was always a sound arrangement from the point of view of the college—indeed the governing body had to admit that, despite their sentimental feelings—and now it has proved advantageous to Salter, too. An excellent fellow, Salter, in many ways, if a trifle obstinate at times, but—Well, anyhow, I thought it my duty to tell you all about it. A very unpleasant task in many ways, but one which I thought it my duty to discharge. Of course, if I can help you any further—” Kinderson got up to go. It was noticeable that, apart from a few trivial questions, including finding out where the headmaster could be found if he were wanted immediately, Flaxman made no attempt to detain him.

  8

  The Sunken Road

  Sergeant Evans moved ponderously up Trevenant Hill, and occasionally shook his head disparagingly. He had never reconciled himself to the idea of there being a detective branch to the police force of Treve; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, to anyone but Sergeant Evans being in charge of it. To bring in a man like Scoresby who was not wholly a Treve man was really monstrous! It all came from this new chief constable having ideas of his own.

  To Evans’s mind the murder of Yeldham, though regrettable in itself, was at any rate an opportunity to show up Scoresby’s incompetence. He had little idea of what line Scoresby was taking, and that fact in itself constituted a grievance, but he was fully prepared to disagree with him in advance. So far as he could make out not enough effort was being made to find out about Yeldham’s past, and having one possible line of doing so, which he believed was not known to his colleagues, he determined to pursue it. Hence his progress towards the cottage in which lived the lad who collected car numbers.

  Not that he was interested in the boy himself. He was concerned rather with his father, a ne’er-do-well poacher now, but once a private soldier under the command of Marcus Hands, Martin’s father, and in the same machine gun company in which Yeldham had once been.

  It took a little persuasion to induce ex-Private Davies to believe that a visit from the police was in no way connected with any misdeeds of his own, but once he was induced to talk he was very hard to stop, and very detailed in his recollections. It appeared that a party of them who had joined the local Infantry Battalion had volunteered to be attached to the Brigade Machine Gun Company, which was being raised in France in the beginning of 1916. Later on, and rather to their surprise, they found that they had been transferred to the Machine Gun Corps to which Hands, their officer, had been also seconded and, in consequence, the drafts which reached them were not Treve men necessarily, but came from anywhere else. Actually, no one who arrived subsequently had any connection at all with the district except Yeldham, and he had never been there. In fact, Davies believed that he had called Mr Hands’ attention to the name and so caused it to be ascertained that he was the cousin of the lady then living at Y Bryn.

  By the spring of 1917, when they went to Bullecourt, Hands and Davies were practically the only survivors of the original company, and on the whole it looked as if they would not long be left. They were, according to Davies, in a very nasty place. “Our infantry had been attacking at dawn a place they called the Crucifix, on the corner of where the village had been, and they hadn’t got it. Our subsection—two machine guns in those days—had been sent up to help them, though we were precious little good. Yeldham, he had two guns on the right of us doing the same thing.

  “Well, it got light when the infantry stopped attacking, and we couldn’t get back to our own lines because that meant going back a long way and getting over a high railway embankment, and we should have been seen. So we, and the handful of infantry there was with us, had to find what shelter we could. Yeldham, we heard afterwards, got into a bit of an old trench which wasn’t so bad, but Mr Hands, he put us in a sunken road.”

  It had not, apparently, been a very good position, since the left end of the road ran into the German lines and, consequently, snipers occasionally shot straight down it, and Hands and his party had had to flatten themselves against the bank and dig in a little bit. Fortunately, a tree had been cut down, and had fallen across the road, and this gave them some protection from view at any rate. But to add to the insecurity of the post, there was no wire in front of the position and the German line was no distance off, and also was out of sight as the ground sloped steeply up a few feet above the top of the bank of the sunken road. It was, in fact, a thoroughly bad place to be in and could only be excused by the fact that Hands had had to choose it in a hurry before the smoke of the attack had drifted away leaving him exposed to fire and view. Also, it was more or less a case of Hobson’s choice, as there were not many shell holes.

  During all the morning and early afternoon they had done their best to improve the position. They had, with difficulty, and with many narrow shaves, begun to prepare some sort of gun positions and shelters for themselves, but the guns were not even mounted in a position where they could fire at anything when, at two o’clock, they had been heavily shelled. “That was a nasty time,” was Davies’s comment, “because it looked as if we all must get killed, and if we didn’t, Jerry would come over, and pick us up like rabbits out of a newly made burrow, which were just about what we were in.”

  However, their very closeness to the German line, though they had not realised it at the time, must have been their temporary salvation, since the shells all dropped behind them, and by good luck they had no casualties, whereas Yeldham and his party, who were a little farther back, had two men killed.

  “About half-past two the shelling stopped. By then we’d got the guns up, and for that we had to thank the officer. He worked with his own hands all the time things were at their worst, whereas the sergeant gave way properly, and whenever he thought no one was looking, got back into the funk-hole in the side of the road. The funny thing was that when it did stop, the sergeant pulled himself together and went on doing what was necessary, although it wasn’t nice in that road, the sniping having begun again, and Mr Hands, he collapsed and just couldn’t do any more. Used himself all up, he had.

  “Well, the rest of that day wasn’t so bad, though when it got dark we were all properly windy, especially when we found that Hands wasn’t going to take us back. The sergeant did say something to him but he said ‘No.’ His orders had been to hold on as close to the Crucifix as he could, so t
hat the attack could be renewed and we could go over and consolidate, and until he got fresh orders he was going to stay. When it began to get near dawn he did send me with a message to Mr Yeldham—he was junior to Yeldham—to ask if there were any orders, and pretty lucky for me I was sent. I didn’t find Yeldham—he’d been relieved, and the people who had taken over said that our orders were to go back, both we and what were left of the infantry in the sunken road. Well, of course, that cheered me up, but just then Jerry started shelling again. When they did stop—and it wasn’t for some time—I hurried to where Mr Hands and the fellows had been, but there was only the sergeant and three men left, and one of them was wounded. We five only just got back before it got light.”

  “If Yeldham had passed on the orders then, none of them would have been killed?”

  “Not Mr Hands nor any of the others. I don’t know but the sergeant always said that Yeldham was to blame but the captain, when he heard of it, said he wasn’t. It seems that Yeldham, so he said, had made one or two rather half-hearted attempts to find us, but he hadn’t gone as far forward as the road. For one thing, he said, it was a silly place where no one was likely to be. For another, he didn’t think what with the sniping and the shelling that anyone there could be alive. They all told us afterwards—including those who were right back on the railway embankment but could see us—that it looked as if we were having a proper dusting, so perhaps there was something to be said for what Yeldham thought. All the same, I don’t think he tried very hard, and the sergeant was wild about it, and kept on talking about ‘cowards’ which, considering the way he had been squashing himself as flat as a fly against the side of the road when he ought to have been using his entrenching tool, was nothing but impertinence. But you know what those sergeants were. Oh, sorry, sir. In the army, I mean.” Davies recollected Evans’s rank a little late.

  “Never mind about sergeants. What did people think of Yeldham in the end?”

  “It all quietened down pretty quick. For one thing, Yeldham wasn’t windy. We found that out soon afterwards, and it was a silly place for Hands to have put us—don’t go and say that to his kids, though.”

  “I’m not likely to do that. Do you think they ever heard all this?”

  “I should think they did because the sergeant, he was still properly wild about it, and before he went on leave he asked me, knowing that I knew something about Mr Hands, if he was married and what his address was. From what I recollect of him, he being a vindictive brute who held things up against you, he probably did write when he was in England, but I don’t know because he’d hardly come back from leave before he got killed and, to tell you the truth, I wasn’t sorry. I couldn’t forget the way he went on in that road and he hinting that I ought to have come back to him through that shelling so that they could have got away, which they couldn’t have done anyway, there being a lot of those nasty coal-boxes flying about.”

  “I see.” After a few more questions Evans went away, completely satisfied with the use that he had made of his time.

  Normally he was quite a loyal man but his loyalty did not extend as far as Detective Sergeant Scoresby. Besides, he really felt that the discovery that he had just made was entirely his and that he alone was entitled to the credit of it. Accordingly, he insisted on passing it on direct to the chief constable, and he was delighted to find that Scoresby was away for some reason which Major Flaxman did not tell him, and that therefore he could repeat his story without the presence of the obtrusive detective branch.

  “Bullecourt?” Flaxman said, half to himself. “Yes, I know. I wasn’t there myself at the time but it proved a very tough nut. Not unnaturally, as the Germans had just fallen back on it and had been preparing the defences for months before that. Very tough. In fact, if my recollection is right, we didn’t get it that time or only a little bit of it.”

  For the rest, he listened in silence, until Evans had finished.

  “It sound probable enough,” he said at the end, “and it is certainly too circumstantial to have been invented, though I wonder exactly whether Davies hasn’t put his own part in it in a more favourable light than it was seen in at the time. Still, that’s quite unimportant. I also wonder why, if anyone was going to blame Yeldham for not finding Hands, they might also think that some of the responsibility to find Yeldham lay on Hands.”

  “If I may say so, sir, no—because Yeldham had fresh orders to pass on to Hands, whereas Hands had only been told to stay there.”

  “That’s true. All the same, as you have told it to me, it sounds quite possible that really Yeldham was in no way to blame. We haven’t heard his version, and now we never shall. You notice that the company commander was satisfied in the end, and that even Davies admits that Yeldham wasn’t ‘windy’. However, that is not the question. The point which I suppose you want to make is that Mrs Hands was told?”

  “Exactly, sir, and the case wouldn’t have been put fairly to her. The sergeant, Davies kept on saying, was wild with Yeldham, and it seems very probable that, as he took the trouble to get the address, he did write, and a pretty biased statement it would have been.”

  “That’s all guesswork. We don’t even know that he did write. But assume for the moment that he did. Even then, Martin was only about seven when this happened. He wouldn’t understand it and Patricia was still quite a baby.”

  “Yes, sir, but their mother might have said something and children pick things up very fast. If young Mr Hands got a prejudice when he was a boy, it might get sort of rooted. Then Mrs Hands didn’t die for some few years after that, and she may have kept the letter or told him later. There are plenty of ways in which the young gentleman might have learnt of it.”

  “There are certainly possibilities but there isn’t anything definite. All the same—” Flaxman stopped, having remembered what, for the moment, he had forgotten, namely Martin Hands’ reluctance to go to Y Bryn and his refusal to eat or drink anything while he was there. It really seemed just possible that there was some connection between that and the manner of his father’s death. Still, it was a far cry from resenting Yeldham’s action—or rather inaction—at Bullecourt, and actually murdering him. It was not half so good a motive as had been discovered for Salter. Nevertheless, there was some sort of a motive and he decided that the whole story must not be forgotten, and he instructed Evans to put it down briefly on paper. Recognising that this would largely be for the benefit of Scoresby, Evans showed little enthusiasm, although he had no alternative but to obey orders.

  “You take my word for it, sir,” he said, as he got up to go, “there’s no doubt about it. Sorry though I am to say it, it’s young Mr Hands who did it, and I shouldn’t be surprised if some of his other friends were in it, too.”

  “You’re jumping to conclusions, Evans,” Flaxman answered firmly. “The motive is not substantiated, and even if your conclusion is right, we have not started to prove it. Moreover, for Hands to do it, does not explain a great many other facts. For that matter when did he do it, what was the weapon, and how did he get rid of it?”

  “That I don’t know, sir, though if you would like me to try to find out—”

  “No. You really should not have acted at all without consulting me first as to whether I wished you to do anything. Young Reeves has been doing exactly the same thing and in his case I put it down to inexperience, but you are a person of considerable seniority and should know that. I admit that with the opening in your knowledge, which was not in mine, it was a temptation, and I am quite sure that you acted with the best possible intentions, but in future let me know before you take any action. It might happen to clash with the plans that I am arranging. Is that quite clear?”

  “Yes, sir.” Evans had sufficient discipline and self-control to keep his face quite rigid, but inwardly he was cursing deeply. So that was all the thanks that he was going to get for discovering the murderer! To be bracketed with Reeves! And “the plans that I am arranging”. “The plans that that ugly devil Scoresby is a
rranging,” he said to himself as he reached the door.

  Seeing something of what was going on in the sergeant’s mind and hoping that the lesson was well learnt, Flaxman called him back.

  “All the same, Evans,” he added more kindly, “I have no doubt that your information will be useful—most useful, and I gather that the time you spent to get it was really time when you would have been off duty. I shall not forget both sides of the question. Only, if you have any more good ideas, work with me, not independently.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Evans went off down the drive leading to Flaxman’s house considerably relieved. “Not a bad sort, the chief constable, really,” he thought, “and perhaps there is something in what he says. On the whole, I shall take his last tip.”

  9

  A Charge Against?

  Scoresby, being driven along as rapidly as the twisting road would allow, deliberately allowed his thoughts to wander. That the course on which he was embarking was of doubtful wisdom, he was quite prepared to admit was possibly true, and that was all the more reason why it was desirable that he should have as fresh a mind as possible when he reached the hotel to which Salter had said on the previous day that he was going.

  Of course, if he was not there, if he had deliberately given misleading information as to his destination, then Scoresby’s intention to interview him was justified at once. But if he was—and to the detective’s mind it was highly probable that he was—then one or two things were likely to happen. In the first place, either guilty or innocent, he would produce an answer of some sort which might or might not be convincing, but which, in any case, it was unlikely would be demonstrably untrue. Or alternatively, the disclosure of how much the police knew might frighten him into a confession.