Death in the Stocks: Merely Murder

by Georgette Heyer

  Giles handed him his glass without comment. A slight flush had crept up under his tan, and the Superintendent, repenting, said with superb inappropriateness: ‘And why – perhaps the most important question of all – was the body placed in the stocks?’

  Twelve

  Giles Carrington, in the act of raising his glass to his lips, lowered it again, and looked down at the Superintendent with a startled frown. ‘Yes, of course, that’s an important point,’ he said. ‘Stupid of me, but I really don’t think I’ve considered it. Does it mean anything, I wonder?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Hannasyde. ‘Without going to the length of searching for some obscure incident in Vereker’s past which had a bearing on stocks, I imagine that there must have been some reason for putting the body there.’

  ‘Unless it was the murderer’s idea of humour,’ said Giles, before he had time to stop himself.

  The two pairs of eyes met, Giles Carrington’s quite limpid and expressionless, the Superintendent’s full of a kind of amused comprehension.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Hannasyde. ‘I’d already thought of that. And now I’m going to be really frank. It’s the kind of humour I can easily imagine young Vereker indulging in.’

  Giles smoked for a moment in silence. Then he said: ‘No. I’m speaking now merely as one who – to a certain extent – knows Kenneth Vereker. It may be helpful to you. Kenneth would not place his half-brother’s body in the stocks as a senseless practical joke. If he did it, it would be for some very good, and probably rather subtle reason. That is my honest opinion.’

  The Superintendent nodded. ‘All right. But you’ll admit you can visualise circumstances under which he might have done it.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll admit that. But you’re assuming that the body was placed there after death.’

  ‘At the moment I am, because it seems the most likely hypothesis.’

  ‘No blood on the grass around the stocks,’ Giles reminded him.

  ‘There was very little external bleeding – and no signs of any struggle,’ replied Hannasyde. ‘So that if you incline to the theory that Vereker was stabbed after his feet were put in the stocks, you must work on the assumption that he sat there quite willingly. Now the time was somewhere between eleven at night, or thereabouts, and two o’clock in the morning. We know from the medical evidence that Vereker can’t have been drunk. Does it seem to you credible that he should choose that hour of night to try what sitting in the stocks felt like – when he could have done it any day he happened to be in the village?’

  ‘No, I can’t say it does,’ admitted Giles. ‘Though I can conceive of situations where it might be entirely credible.’

  ‘So can I,’ agreed Hannasyde. ‘If he was motoring down with a gay party after the theatre, and they were all in a light-hearted mood. Or even if he was with one person alone, whom we’ll assume to have been a woman. We know he had a puncture on the way down; suppose he picked it up at Ashleigh Green; and after changing the tyre sat down on the bench to admire the moonlight, or cool off, or anything else you like. I can picture him being induced to put his feet in the stocks, but what I can’t picture is the woman then stabbing him. It can’t have been Miss Vereker, for whatever I disbelieve about her I entirely believe that she was on the worst possible terms with her half-brother. Very well, then, was it some lady of easy virtue motoring down to spend the week-end with him at his cottage?’

  ‘Quite likely,’ Giles said. ‘I see what’s coming, though, and I confess I can’t offer a solution.’

  ‘Of course you see it. What should induce any such woman to murder him? You’ve seen the knife. It’s a curious sort of dagger – might have come from Spain, or South America. Not the sort of thing you carry about with you in the normal course of events. That proves the murder was premeditated.’

  ‘Some woman who had a grudge against him,’ suggested Giles.

  ‘Must have been a pretty large size in grudges,’ said Hannasyde. ‘And one, moreover, that Vereker didn’t set much store by. If he’d done any woman an injury big enough to give her a motive for cold-blooded murder, do you suppose he would quite unsuspectingly have put himself into a helpless position at her instigation?’

  ‘No. On the whole he had rather a suspicious nature,’ replied Giles. ‘And in justice to a somewhat maligned man I’m bound to say that I don’t think he would have done a woman any serious injury. He was amorous, but not ungenerous to his fancies, and not unkindly.’

  ‘That’s rather the impression I gathered,’ said Hannasyde. ‘I don’t rule out the possibility of an unknown woman in the case – but my department hasn’t been idle, you know, and so far we can’t discover any woman who had the least reason for wanting to murder Vereker. I don’t mind telling you that we checked up on several, too. That shabby stranger the butler described to us made me think there might be some woman who’d been got into trouble, because there’s a smell of blackmail about that odd visit. But I haven’t discovered anything of the kind. On the contrary, Vereker seems to have been pretty decent, and his women were the sort who can look after themselves.’

  Giles sat on the arm of his chair. ‘Yes, I should think they were. Arnold was no fool. And I’m ready to admit that you’ve made it seem highly improbable that the murder was done after Arnold was in the stocks. But do you mind looking at the other side of the picture? Does it seem to you probable that having stabbed a man to death the murderer conveyed his body to the stocks – the most conspicuous place he could well think of – and arrange it most carefully in a natural position there, which I imagine must have been not only a gruesome, but also a somewhat difficult task? Impossible for Miss Vereker to have done it; too macabre for Mesurier; too senseless for Kenneth.’

  ‘It may not have been senseless,’ said Hannasyde. He glanced at his wrist-watch, and got up. ‘That’s what I’ve got to try and find out – amongst other things. By the way, we’ve been trying to trace those notes Vereker had on him the day he was killed. You remember we found the counterfoil of a cheque for a hundred pounds drawn to self, and only thirty pounds in his pocket? Well, only one of these has come in, to date, and that one is a ten-pound note which a man in a blue suit handed to a waiter at the Trocadero Grill in payment of his bill for dinner on Saturday evening. The suit might have been a dark grey, I may mention, and the waiter really couldn’t call the gentleman’s face to mind, because there were a lot of people dining that night. You can’t say we policemen get much help! Look here, I must be going! Many thanks for by far the most pleasant hours I’ve spent on this case yet.’

  Giles laughed. ‘Well, I hope they’ll prove to have been profitable ones.’

  ‘You never know,’ said Hannasyde. ‘It’s always good to get another point of view.’

  Mr Charles Carrington, hearing something of the visit next day from his son, paused in his search for the pencil he distinctly remembered placing on his desk not five minutes earlier, and said: ‘Absurd! You can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, or if you can you shouldn’t. An Eversharp pencil – you must have seen me use it hundreds of times! Use your eyes, Giles! Use your eyes! So Superintendent Hannasyde doesn’t know what to make of those Vereker brats! Now I come to think of it the boy baffled me too. More in him than I thought. God bless my soul, a pencil can’t walk away!’

  Kenneth, getting wind of Hannasyde’s visit, loudly endorsed his uncle’s verdict, adding a rider to the effect that if there was any double-crossing going on he should immediately change his solicitor. When Giles gave every evidence of regarding such a happening in the light of a Utopian dream, he forgot his original complaint in pointing out his own virtues as a client. He was in one of his more incalculable moods at the time, and his cousin’s somewhat unwise rejoinder that the vaunted virtues had escaped his notice provoked him to give a trenchant résumé of his own case. He walked up and down the studio, with his eyes very bright, and with what Antonia called his elf-smile on his lips, and held his cousin partly in dismay, partly i
n admiration, of the ingenuity with which he postulated various fantastic ways in which he might, had he been feeling like it at the time, have murdered his half-brother.

  With the Superintendent’s remarks in mind, Giles demanded a reason for putting Arnold Vereker’s body in the stocks. The result of this, though entertaining, was not helpful, for Kenneth threw himself into what he conceived to be the spirit of the inquiry with huge zest, and, abandoning the dramatisation of himself as the murderer, advanced a quantity of the most astonishing theories, not the least brilliant of which involved the reputation of the Vicar of Ashleigh Green, a gentleman entirely unknown to him.

  Giles gave it up. There was nothing to be made of Kenneth, who, if he were indeed playing a dangerous game, obviously preferred (and Giles could only applaud his wisdom) to play it alone.

  A more immediately pressing anxiety than the question of whether or not he was guilty of murder was, in the estimation of his entourage, the problem of how to induce him to attend Arnold Vereker’s funeral. Exhaustive, and at times heated, discussions, into which Giles was dragged, raged throughout the evening, Murgatroyd, Violet, Leslie and Giles being banded upon the side of respectability, against Kenneth, who was supported by his sister, and his own quite irrefutably logical arguments. The contest was won eventually by Violet, who, though lacking Murgatroyd’s stern piety, was quite as insistent that Kenneth must at least appear to accord a proper respect to the dead. Finding that he was unmoved by argument or entreaty, she got up in a cold anger that was only partly feigned, and signified her intention of departing without permitting him to kiss her, or even touch her hand. Some spark of wrath kindled in his eyes, but was quenched by the closing of the door behind her. He hurried after her; what passed between them in the hall the others had no means of knowing; but in a few moments they came back together, Kenneth meekly bound by his word to attend the funeral, and Violet as charming and as sweet-tempered as she had been angry before.

  ‘If Kenneth marries that young woman he won’t be able to call his soul his own,’ Giles remarked later to Antonia at the door of the flat.

  ‘I know; it’s sickening,’ she agreed. ‘He isn’t really in love with her, either. He’s in love with what she looks like.’

  ‘Which reminds me,’ said Giles. ‘What has become of your intended?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’m beginning to be afraid he’s going to jilt me,’ replied Antonia, with undiminished cheerfulness.

  This theory, however, proved to be incorrect, for Mesurier attended the funeral the following afternoon, and returned with Kenneth to the flat afterwards. He had recovered his poise, and nothing could have been more graceful than his apology for having left Antonia in anger when they had last met. He apparently considered that his action in seeking out Superintendent Hannasyde at Scotland Yard with the revised version of his story exempted him from any future inquiry, but Kenneth did what he could to disillusion him on this point, and succeeded so well that within two days of being reconciled to his fiancée, Rudolph’s nerves began to show signs of fraying, and he exclaimed, in exasperation at the Verekers’ absorption in other and more everyday matters: ‘I don’t know how you two can go on as though nothing had happened, or was likely to happen!’

  ‘What is likely to happen?’ inquired Antonia, looking up from a collection of guide-books and railway timetables. ‘We could quite well go to Sweden, Ken. I’ve worked it all out.’

  ‘What’s the use of talking about trips abroad when you may be in prison?’ said Rudolph, with an attempt at a laugh.

  ‘Oh, that!’ she said dismissing it. ‘Of course we shan’t be in prison. Anyway, I’m getting sick of the murder.’

  ‘I wish we knew what the police were doing!’

  ‘They’re working like a pack of bloodhounds on our trails,’ said Kenneth, leaning over the back of Antonia’s chair to look at Baedeker. ‘And talking of bloodhounds, why’s all my bedroom furniture in the hall?’

  ‘Murgatroyd. She says she’s going to turn the whole flat out.’

  ‘What, not this room too?’ cried Kenneth, in such tones of dismay as not the gloomiest of Rudolph’s forebodings could wring from him.

  ‘Yes, but not till to-morrow. Leslie said she’d come and help, so I daresay she’ll take care of your pictures,’ said his sister, omitting, however, to add the information that Murgatroyd’s bitterly expressed object was to keep the place free from that Violet Williams for one day, even though she had to make the studio floor wringing wet to do it.

  It was as well for Murgatroyd’s temper that this was not really her main object, for when Violet walked into the flat after luncheon on the following day (a habit which she had lately acquired) and found the studio in a state of glorious disorder, with one dishevelled damsel polishing the handles of a bow-fronted chest, the other turning out the contents of an over-loaded bureau, and Kenneth, sitting on the window seat, reading aloud to them snatches from the Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse, she displayed an unexpectedly domesticated trait to her character, demanded an overall from Murgatroyd, and within ten minutes of entering the studio had taken complete charge of the operations. By the time she had shown Leslie a better way to polish brass, convinced Antonia that what she wanted was a large box to put all the waste paper in, and rehung all the pictures which had been taken down to be washed, one only of the original four in the studio remained unruffled. This was, of course, Kenneth, who paid not the least attention either to requests that he should move, or that he should shut up for a moment, but continued to delve into the pages of the Oxford Book, emerging always with a fresh extract which he read aloud, heedless of the fact that no one was listening to him. The only time he vouchsafed any answer to the various things that were said to him was when Violet in the voice of one at the limit of her patience, said: ‘Will you stop reading Milton aloud?’ To this he replied: ‘No,’ in a perfectly calm way, as soon as he got to the end of a line.

  Any failure on Kenneth’s part to treat her with that adoring respect which she demanded from him always impaired the smoothness of Violet’s temper, so neither Antonia nor Leslie was surprised when she seized on the opportunity afforded by the discovery of an automatic pistol in the bureau to say with a sting behind her sweetness: ‘Yours, Tony, dear? Perhaps it’s as well the police know nothing about that.’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ replied Antonia. ‘It’s fully loaded, and hasn’t been fired for months.’

  ‘Why so touchy, darling?’ said Violet, raising her delicate brow. ‘Of course, now I daren’t ask why you keep such a very odd weapon.’

  ‘That’s a good thing,’ said Antonia.

  Conversation waned after that, but Violet’s capable assistance so soon reduced the studio to order that Antonia repented of her momentary ill-temper, took the Oxford Book away from Kenneth, and told Murgatroyd to go and make tea.

  They were in the middle of this repast when the door was opened and a man who might have been any age between thirty-five and forty-five looked in. He had a good-humoured, if somewhat weak countenance, from which a pair of rather bloodshot grey eyes looked out with a certain amiable vagueness.

  The party gathered round the table stared at him blankly and unhelpfully.

  He smiled deprecatingly. ‘Hullo!’ he said, in the slightly husky tones of one in the habit of indulging his penchant for spirits too often. ‘Door was on the latch, so I thought I’d walk in. How’s everybody?’

  Antonia glanced inquiringly at her brother, and was startled to see his face suddenly whiten. A look of mingled incredulity, horror, and anger came into his eyes. ‘My God in Heaven!’ he said chokingly. ‘Roger!’

  Thirteen

  A slice of bread and butter dropped from Violet’s fingers on to the floor. Leslie, seated beside her, heard her say numbly: ‘But he’s dead. They said he was dead!’

  Antonia looked the visitor over frowningly. ‘Is it really? Yes, now I come to think of it, that’s whom you reminded me of. We thought you were dead.’ />
  ‘Thought!’ Kenneth cried. ‘We knew he was dead! He’s been dead for years!’

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I never was dead,’ said Roger Vereker, with the air of one making a confidence. ‘Just at the time it seemed a good thing on the whole to be dead, because there was a bit of trouble over some money. I forget the rights of it now, but people were very unpleasant, very.’

  ‘But why on earth did you go on being dead all this time?’ demanded Antonia.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ replied Roger, with the vagueness which characterised him. ‘There wasn’t much point in coming to life again, really. It would have meant a lot of bother one way and another. I did think of it, but I was getting on quite well as I was. Fancy you being Tony! I shouldn’t have known you. Kenneth’s altered too. Wants his hair cutting.’

  ‘Leave my hair alone!’ said Kenneth angrily. ‘If you –’

  ‘It’s all right. I wasn’t going to touch it. You know, it seems very funny to me to find you two grown up. Tony had a pigtail when I saw her last – at least, I may be confusing her with someone else, but I think it was she. Long one, with a bow on the end. You were a horrid little beast. You haven’t changed as much as Tony, now I come to look at you. I remember you messing about with a lot of smelly paints.’

  ‘Well, he still does that. He’s an artist,’ said Antonia.

  Roger heard this with a faint show of surprise, as fleeting as it was mild. ‘No, is he really? Well, I’m sorry I spoke about his hair, then. One gets out of touch, that’s how it is. I’m going to settle down at home now. After all, why not? You get sick of roaming about, and the man they mistook me for in that Cuban dust-up was called Harry Fisher. The man who was killed, I mean. I didn’t mind at first; one name seemed as good as another. But you’ve no idea how tired you can get of being called Fisher. I’ve had seven years of it, and it’s very irritating. I thought I’d come home.’