At this point Scoresby shook his head. It was not a solution which seemed to cover all the points; the text-book on law for instance, nor the visit of the fair woman. Above all, Salter had far too obvious a chance to have risked doing it then, and he must have known that the motive, if it was the motive, was almost certain to be disclosed. But despite all that, Scoresby still thought that he was right to go to Salter. For one thing, it was a matter which could hardly be left without being cleared up, especially if Kinderson broadcast a few hints, and to Scoresby’s mind the headmaster was not very reliably discreet. For another, for the moment at least, it was almost the only line of further inquiry that presented itself in at all an obvious manner.
As to how he was going to pursue the interview, he had a general idea, but to rehearse the type of conversation with a man of Salter’s eccentric and indirect type of mind was a pure waste of time, and Scoresby abandoned the effort and concentrated instead on the country through which he was passing.
It happened after a certain distance that it was all new to him, and it certainly seemed amazingly attractive. Why, he wondered, had the English hardly discovered the beauties of Montgomeryshire and Merioneth at all? Except in some few places, mostly by the sea, hardly any tourists ever came. Perhaps there was not a great deal of organised entertainment in the way of such things as big hotels and golf courses, but for those who liked a quiet holiday and walks over some of the most beautiful, hilly, and occasionally mountainous country in existence, there could have been few more charming parts of the world.
Frequently he passed by great woods of oak and elm, with firs at the top. The rhododendron must have been magnificent earlier in the year, and everywhere there were wild flowers in profusion and little brooks and small rivers that raced swift and shallow over brown stones. In one place there were mushrooms in the meadows, so that he felt tempted to stop the car and get out and pick them, being accustomed to finding with difficulty only the few that were overlooked by the early riser.
As they went on, the road rose to some extent and the meadows gave way to heather, and here and there the rocks stood out, grey but friendly in the sunshine, and in front of him the unmistakable bulk of Cader Idris loomed clearly with one little cloud resting on the westernmost peak.
Scoresby sighed. He wished that when he was younger he had come to this part of the world and climbed Cader. It looked so much more interesting and friendly than the better-known, the almost too well-known, charms of Snowdon. But now he supposed he was too old and fat even to go up the Breiddens that stood “where England dips to the purple gates of Wales”, and instead of such pleasant recreation he must do his duty and ask awkward and possibly impertinent questions of a man who would be very good indeed at answering them.
But, at least, the man was there and prepared to talk.
“I wonder, sir,” Scoresby began, “if you would care to make any statement as to your financial relations with the late Mr Yeldham?”
Salter cocked an eye at him and replied almost laughingly.
“Without the presence of my solicitor, sergeant? Oughtn’t we to have him as a chaperon?”
“You are perfectly entitled to have him, sir, if there is any reason why you should. Or in any case,” he added nastily.
“Thank you for the last admission. Otherwise, you know, I should have had to have made the suggestion that your answer contained a peculiarly naughty insinuation.”
“I’m perfectly prepared to postpone the interview till he comes, if you like.”
“I don’t think that you are,” Salter grimaced. “Like many other people my solicitor is at the moment taking his holiday—it consists of a statutory fortnight.”
“Statutory?”
“Yes. A fortnight the other end. His own invention, I believe. I don’t know where he has gone this year but it has gradually extended itself. It is quite possible that he is walking to Lhasa. At least, I wouldn’t put it beyond him.”
“I see, sir. Then perhaps one of his partners?”
“You know, sergeant, it’s a very interesting way of measuring the length of a holiday, but you must preserve a sense of proportion and I am inclined to think that he is inclined to go beyond it.”
“Quite, sir. One of his partners would remain though?”
“How insistent you are, sergeant, and how impatient! Now, as a schoolmaster my own holidays are fixed by powers quite beyond my control, and they are very long; so I suppose that I ought to be content. But you know, I am not. There are times when the only thing in the world that I want to do is to take a walking tour in the Cotswolds or in the Pyrenees, but anyhow in May or June, and of course I am never free then. Nor am I ever allowed to see, save in hurried snatches, the leaves of the trees turning from gold to brown and scarlet.”
“But Finchingfield isn’t in a town, is it, sir?”
“No. But although it is in a much more attractive part of the country than many people think, it cannot be called a beauty spot by any chance. By the way, it was about Finchingfield that you wanted to talk to me, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.” Scoresby fully realised that inexhaustible patience had to be shown quite openly. “About your financial affairs there.”
“What a very unpleasant subject to intrude upon one on one’s holiday and on one of the very few days that it does not rain. I intend soon to take quite a long walk, so perhaps it would be best that we should get on with the question at once without waiting for my solicitor. As, no doubt you have guessed, that is the question that I have really been deciding whilst I have been listening to your conversation. It’s very interesting though, that you should appreciate so accurately the drawbacks of the scholastic profession.”
“Come, sir, have your little joke at my expense by all means, but when it comes to talking—”
“I suppose you found our mutual friend Kinderson even more boring?”
“I won’t disguise from you, sir, that it is after he talked to us that I came along to see you, if that is what you mean.”
“I thought as much. And no doubt he told you everything that he could, and somehow none of it was really to the credit of either Yeldham or myself, although no doubt he explained that he didn’t wish to say a word against either of us, and nothing but a painful sense of duty made him talk at all.”
“Well, sir—”
“Oh! I know my Kinderson—now. There was a time when I didn’t, but now I think that I understand him quite well. ‘A little more than kin and less than kind’ perhaps you might say.”
“Is he a relation of yours, then?”
“‘Oh! My prophetic soul! My uncle!’ No, good Horatio, no. In fact I am afraid,” Salter’s queer smile broke over his lips and even reached his eyes, “that my pedantic and pedagogic tongue is leading you astray with inapposite quotations from Hamlet, in which connection I know the phraseology better than I know that of English law, into whose verbal intricacies I have unfortunately fallen.”
At the mention of the word “law”, Scoresby pricked up his ears, but no sign of special interest was visible in the grey eyes under the bushy eyebrows, although in his mind he quickly ran over the points in one of which Yeldham had been apparently interested—marriage when under age, bankruptcy, contracts for sale of real property, foreign domicile, and ancient lights. The second sounded quite possible and perhaps the last, although probably the houses at Finchingfield were well away from other buildings, but of them all the question of the sale of real property leapt to the eye as a very possible subject that had required the use of a text-book.
But aloud Scoresby was naturally guarded.
“Some legal point, sir?” he prompted.
“Yes. Perhaps, after all, we ought to wait for my solicitor. But on the whole I think that we will not. Although the whole trouble is that I was too lazy to do so before, and like many another fool signed a contract without fully knowing what it was.”
“What sort of a contract?”
“In commercial circles, whi
ch are not those in which I usually move, I believe it is called ‘a service agreement’. I take it that the obliging Kinderson has explained to you that I took over Yeldham’s house and that he parted with it on the understanding that he received an annuity. Kinderson, by the way, has always maintained that Yeldham got most generous terms, but Yeldham always referred to it as ‘giving’ his house to the school. It is not a subject on which I should like to express a very confident opinion but there was certainly no generosity by the school, so far, at any rate, as Kinderson was concerned, and I know very well that it was not a present by Yeldham—or was not intended to be. Of course, now he has died—”
“The annuity paid by you stops.”
“Precisely. Only it never began because in fact I have never paid any of it, and in my opinion never should. My solicitor, on the other hand, seems to think that it is a question of what a document says. I thought it was of what it meant, even of what it was meant to mean, which is not necessarily the same thing. In fact, it was about that that I came to consult Yeldham. Indeed it was on that very point that I was consulting the cards. You know, I got it quite fixed in my head that the matter would be decided in practice in the same way as the cards decided it by lot. Absurd, I know, but one gets these superstitions occasionally.”
“One does. But what was the point which was not decided?”
“Didn’t Kinderson explain that?” Salter seemed genuinely surprised.
“No, sir.”
“Didn’t he tell you that there was a considerable discussion about the whole thing, and that I had refused to pay the annuity on the ground that I had been induced to sign the agreement on a misunderstanding so important to the whole question that in my opinion it vitiated the whole thing?”
“What was the point?” Scoresby asked, instead of a direct answer to the question.
“I was induced to leave a minor but comfortable position with a view to taking over a very much more important one. I was not surprised because I had worked very hard under Kinderson, and it happened that he had got all the credit, and so I thought that he was only doing the proper thing—I did not then know my Kinderson as I told you—when he offered me this very considerable promotion. Right at the start I was told that the house belonged to Yeldham and, of course, I could only answer that it was quite impossible for me to buy it, but next came the suggestion that it should be bought by the school by means of paying Yeldham an annuity. There was, it is true, some talk from the beginning of the annuity being in some way connected with the profits of the house, but I understood that it was to be charged on them, and I understood that to mean that if the school could not pay, then I should have to, but only if the school could not pay. In other words that a mortgage, if that is the right term, which it probably is not, was created, and that the profits of the house were an additional security for Yeldham. I remember thinking at the time that it would have been simpler if he had retained an actual mortgage on the house, but whether I said so or not is one of the points in dispute.”
“‘Charged on’,” Scoresby murmured. “I should have thought that that would have meant just as a security.”
“You mustn’t take me too literally, sergeant. I rather doubt if that is the wording actually used in the document which was drawn up by Kinderson’s solicitors.”
“Surely by the solicitors to the school?”
“I don’t think so. Besides, wouldn’t they be the same?” Salter became extremely vague and unworldly in his appearance, and his long neck seemed to put his brain above the clouds despite the fact that he was dealing with a question of pure cash. “Anyhow, I understand that the wording of this service agreement which I signed is against me, which is what I started by saying, and as I went on to say, the only hope was that I should prove that its legal meaning was quite different to what was in the minds of the party when we started to make the arrangement. That really was what I had come to see Yeldham about. We did talk about school news, and so on, but not all the time.”
“I see, sir. Now, just before eleven you rather fell out, if I understood you aright; about the characters of boys in the house, you told us. Are you sure, sir, that it was not because Mr Yeldham’s recollection of what was to be put in the agreement did not coincide with what you hoped that he would say?”
“Quite certain. His attitude was that he really knew nothing about it. We had that out much earlier in the day and at that I had left it. You see, I was only bound to pay the annuity while I kept the house. No,” he corrected himself, “I believe that that agreement says that I had to do the work for a number of years, but still, some other arrangement would have had to be made since otherwise I should have been working for nothing at all, and that could never have been what was intended. Oh, no, sergeant, it was very stupid of me to have signed, I agree, but I could have got out of it somehow. Kinderson is just beginning to realise that his position is by no means as gilt-edged as he thinks it is, and he would never have faced my resignation coupled with the full publication of the facts.”
“That’s all very well, but what would you have done with yourself if you gave up the house?”
“Found another job somehow, I suppose. Difficult at my age but not impossible, especially as, besides some quite definite qualifications, I think that there would have been a good deal of sympathy with me.”
Scoresby gave a non-committal grunt. As he had feared, it was an explanation of a sort. There was nothing in it that was palpably untrue upon which he could fasten. Still less was there any sort of admission. Nevertheless, it was not wholly convincing, and in some ways it rather strengthened the desirability from Salter’s point of view of Yeldham dying. Unless he had, it really rather looked as if Salter might have been without any income at all, and with arrears of the annuity to pay.
“Well,” the voice of the alleged victim of legal terminology broke in on his meditations, “what are you going to do? Arrest me on suspicion?”
“No, sir, but it is only fair to say that I am watching you, and I think you have put yourself in a very awkward position. You should have told us of this at once.”
“That would have made my position almost equally awkward, and you might have stopped me going on my holiday, and as, in fact, this question of the annuity has nothing to do with Yeldham’s death, that would have been extremely annoying. As it is, I wonder if you would mind going back to Trevenant and leaving me in peace? I shan’t run away, I promise you.”
“Well that,” thought Scoresby, “is something, anyhow, and possibly true. All the same, I wonder.”
10
A Question of Appearance
“Miss Westbury?”
“Yes.” A fair-haired woman looked up from the deck-chair in which she was sitting and petulantly rearranged the cushions. In front of her was standing the rather large policeman whom she had noticed before in the village. As if to shield her face more effectively from the rays of the sun, she adjusted the angle of the broad, brightly coloured umbrella that stood behind her chair so that her face was entirely in the shadow. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m very sorry to trouble you, miss, but do you own car number ZGQG10?”
“For the present, yes. I’ve hired it for the month—and paid in advance. They said it was fully licensed and all that sort of thing.”
“Oh, yes, miss, it is.”
“Then—?”
“Well, really, miss, I don’t quite know but it seems as though a car with a Number 10 was doing something that it shouldn’t on the night of—” The simple-minded man looked down at the instructions which he had copied into his note-book and read out the date which Maud Westbury had hoped not to have heard. It was, she was only too well aware, the night on which Yeldham had been murdered. In her narrow, selfish mind was one intention and one only—that if she could possibly avoid it, she would be concerned no further in the matter. As soon as possible it was her intention to find out the answer to the legal problem which had, in part, brought her to England, a
nd then to return as quickly as she could to the south of France. Once there her future actions would depend to some extent on the legal answer which she got, but at any rate they would never include a return to England.
That her car could be traced had never occurred to her, and for the fact that it had, she blamed the melodramatic propensities of the unfortunate Yeldham. After all it had been his fault that the matter had been so foolishly arranged. True, when she had written to him, as the only person in England who had known her past story, she had told him to burn her letter, and perhaps that had started the notion of melodrama in his mind. But there was no need for him to have gone on in the same way. No doubt she had hinted, in view of certain possible eventualities of her own position, that she did not wish to see him too obviously, but there was a considerable difference between doing things unostentatiously and a night-time visit by stealth. And how extravagant were the instructions that she should leave her car in a deserted lane—and she believed she had gone to the wrong one—and enter by a back door that was left ajar, when apparently the front door was equally open.
“Silly old man!” she thought, ignoring the fact that he had been kind to her in the past and had apparently been trying to help once more. “Why, if he had to leave Finchingfield, must he bury himself in an inaccessible spot like Trevenant and tell me to go to such a horrible hole as this? And if he was there, why didn’t he realise that caution was no longer quite so necessary? Or wasn’t it? And in any case, why must he make me have a car which can apparently be traced so easily?”
And Death Came Too Page 8