Shroud of Darkness

by E. C. R. Lorac

  “It must be worrying for you to be so cut off,” said Macdonald. “I take it the farm men sleep in the house?”

  “Yes, they sleep here—and eat here. I cook for them,” she said bitterly. “Old Thomas and young Jim: both as dumb as sheep. No newspaper, no wireless—the old battery set’s run down again. Oh, you don’t want to hear about my troubles, I know that, and I’ve nought to tell you about Dick because I know nought.”

  “Well, perhaps you can tell me which road I take to get back to Yelverton,” said Macdonald dryly, and she laughed.

  “Not the one you came by. I suppose the old signpost’s down again—it’s always coming down. You go on past the house and through the gate and you’ll get out at the front. It’s not much of a road, but ’tis better than the way you came up.”

  “Can I leave any message, or do any errand for you?” he asked, and she shook her head.

  “No. I’ll manage. Now ’tis clear again, the van from the stores will come up. ’Tis the one excitement in the week, that van is.”

  2

  Macdonald drove back by a less precipitous route. He looked out to discover how he had taken the wrong track coming up and saw the old signpost lying in a ditch, well concealed. He got out to look at it and found the wood at the base pretty well rotted. It might have fallen down of its own accord—or it could easily have been pulled down. He was wondering quite a lot. He knew that very few cars would have taken the gradient he had driven up, and the fact suggested a variety of ideas.

  It was one o’clock when he found the entrance to Brian Salcombe’s farm, Long Barrow, and he met the young farmer just scrambling down from his tractor. Brian was a big, fair fellow, Saxon in type, blue-eyed and ruddy, and he stared at Macdonald and his good car in some surprise.

  “Is it about the rates?” he enquired.

  Macdonald laughed. “No. It’s about Richard Greville. I’ve just been up to Moorcock and seen Mrs. Greville. The boy’s had an accident in London.”

  “Oh Lord . . . is he bad?”

  “Bad enough. Can I come inside?”

  “Yes. Of course. Do you know him—Dick Greville?”

  “No. I’m a C.I.D. man. We’re a bit puzzled about his accident.”

  In a few moments Macdonald was in another farmhouse kitchen, warm, dark, smelling pleasantly of baking.

  “Come and sit by the fire. Would you like some dinner?” asked Brian. “An old Biddy comes and cooks for me and there’s generally plenty. Now what’s this about Dick?”

  It didn’t take Macdonald long to get Brian into the picture. He and Dick Greville had been at the grammar school together: they had done their National Service together, both in the same section of the Royal Armoured Corps, and they had been demobbed together. Brian, with the help of his father, had bought the small farm he was now working, and later the two lads hoped to get more land and work it together, building up a herd of pedigree milking cattle and improving meadows and pastures up to the highest level of production.

  Macdonald elicited all this over a dish of excellent Irish stew. He found Brian an alert, intelligent fellow: his background of sturdy self-reliance and farming skill had been invigorated not marred (as was sometimes the case) by his grammar-school education, and the latter had given him the ability to express himself in words, vigorously and without self-consciousness.

  “Well, now I want you to tell me all that you can about Dick Greville,” said Macdonald. “I’ve told you, in confidence, that someone tried to murder him as soon as he got to London and that his pockets were emptied, presumably to delay, or prevent, identification. Can you suggest any explanation?”

  Brian pushed his plate away, put his elbows on the table and his chin on his big fists, and thought for a while before he answered. Then he said:

  “I might suggest several, but I think it’d be fairer if I told you a bit more about Dick. Mrs. Greville told you how he was found that night of the Plymouth blitz?”

  “Yes. She also told me that when he came back from Germany he was troubled in mind, and she had an idea his memory was coming back, vaguely and fitfully. Do you think that’s true?”

  “I know it is,” replied Brian. “It happened in Germany. I found him in a frightful state one day, soon after we were stationed in Berlin. He suddenly burst out that he must have been a German. He remembered the language—not altogether, of course: at first just odd words, then phrases, and names of things, and how to pronounce the words he saw on shops, and notices in busses and trains.”

  “That’s about the last thing I expected to hear,” said Macdonald, and Brian nodded.

  “Same here. At first I was simply stumped. You see we’d never done any German at school. I wondered if he’d learnt any at an earlier school, but he was only about eight when they found him on Roborough, and kids of eight don’t learn much German at school. Dick was in an awful state about it. The thought of being a Jerry made him feel sick. And then I suddenly said, ‘Don’t be such a bloody fool. You couldn’t have been German, because if you were, you’d have used German words when you began to talk again. You used English words—yes and no and please and thank you.’ I know that’s true,” added Brian, “because I went and played with him as soon as he was well enough to play and the words he spoke were English.”

  “Do you think he used English words he’d picked up from Mrs. Greville?” asked Macdonald.

  “No. It wasn’t that, because he didn’t pronounce them as she does. I don’t mean he had a foreign accent, it was just different from Devon. You see we’d had a lot of evacuated kids in the village school, some from London and some from the north, and we noticed the different ways they talked. I thought Dick was a Londoner—but he soon picked up our way of talking and I never thought about it again—not until he told me this nightmare he’d got about being German.”

  “Did you do anything about it, or get any further towards an explanation?” asked Macdonald.

  “Not so far as the language business was concerned,” replied Brian. “You see, he made me promise not to tell anyone. He wanted to think things out for himself, and I knew he felt rotten over it. I tried to make him discuss it, I thought he’d feel better if we talked it out, but he went cagey and just shut up and I had to leave it alone. The next thing that happened was when we went to Cologne.”

  Brian had lifted his chin from his hands and he was fiddling with the knives and forks on the table, unconsciously arranging them in patterns and groups, like a boy playing with soldiers.

  “He knew he’d been there before,” he said slowly. “He recognised the cathedral: then, one day when we were on the outskirts of the town, where there hadn’t been so much bombing, he said, ‘There’s an old house round the next corner with a lot of painted gables and timbering and a big copper beech in the garden, with a cedar tree near it.’ And when we went to look, this house was there and the trees, just as he said.”

  “Did you do anything about that?” asked Macdonald patiently.

  “Yes. I went there myself. They were Germans living there, and they talked quite a bit of English. I asked them if they knew who lived there before the war. They said it was a German pastor and his family—very good people. The Gestapo got the pastor for being anti-Hitler, and then the house was taken for an army officer’s family. But they were all dead, the pastor and his family, and the army people, so I didn’t really get any further.”

  Brian sighed, and rumpled up his fair hair. “I’d got frightfully worried about all this,” he said. “I could see Dick was getting more and more het up over it. It wasn’t only worrying about being a German, though he did get rather a thing about that, he had an awful sense of being frustrated, because he couldn’t get any further. Things wouldn’t link up. And if he thought too much about it, he’d suddenly go off to sleep, like he did when he was a kid.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘a defence mechanism’?” asked Macdonald.

  “I suppose so—read it in the papers, or heard it on the ra
dio,” said Brian, “but it never meant anything: just somebody else’s jargon. Though now you’ve reminded me of it, I can see it does apply to Dick. You see, he even shut down on me, and he’d never done that before.”

  “Do you mean that you think he may remember more than he’s admitted?”

  “Yes. Something like that: probably not anything consecutive, because he promised he’d tell me if things ever really came back. Anyway, I had the sense to see he was getting broody and that he couldn’t go on like that. They do have psychologists attached to the Army Medical Corps, you know, and I suggested he should go and talk things over with the M.O. But Dick wouldn’t hear of it: he wouldn’t see anybody connected with the Army. Then I asked if he’d go and see somebody after demob—somebody who didn’t know anything about him. And he agreed. That’s what he was going up to London for.”

  Brian stopped fiddling with his forks and knives and drummed with his fists on the table. “You started by asking me if I’d got any explanation of what might have happened to him at Paddington,” he said slowly, “and I’ve told you all this yam about Germany, and his remembering disconnected things. I feel pretty bad about it. . . . Could it have preyed on his mind so that he—well, went round the bend . . . I mean . . . he got imagining things and attacked somebody . . . ?”

  “No. That won’t wash,” said Macdonald. “The damage to Dick Greville wasn’t done by anybody in self-defence. It was a savage attempt at murder, followed by an effort to conceal his identity.” He paused, and then added: “Now I think it’s time I asked a few questions. Mrs. Greville told me he was going to Reading University. Had he been to Reading, for an interview, or anything like that?”

  “Yes, but that was over two years ago, before he did his army service. Our head at school sent him, to see if they’d take him, and it was all fixed up then. He hasn’t been since.”

  “What sort of chap is Greville?” asked Macdonald. “Is he quiet or tough? What’s he interested in?”

  “He’s quiet,” rejoined the other. “As for tough—well, he’s not the sort to get bullied. He doesn’t give a damn for the things that amuse most chaps—skirts or dance halls or cinemas or comic strips. You see—well living up on the moor as we both did, we weren’t good at social events: we’re both dead keen on farming. But we could both hit anybody who needed hitting. Some of the chaps thought we were flats—and if they got too funny we showed ’em where they got off. That went for both of us.”

  “What about sport—racing, dogs, and all the rest?”

  Brian laughed. “Not he—nor me neither. We both play soccer: we know all about farm horses and sheep dogs, but not fancy ones. We’ve seen an occasional point to point and the usual local horse shows, but Dick’s no gambler—no more than me. We saved all we could—and we knew what we were saving for.” He stared at Macdonald. “I don’t quite see where you’re leading. Bad company? Gambling debts—bookies—all that rot? No. Nothing like that.”

  He pushed back his chair and burst out: “This is going all haywire, like one of those radio quiz programmes when the team gets bogged down. You can’t think how crazy it seems to me to hear you asking questions about racing and dogs and gambling in connection with Dick. You’re right off the beam.”

  “All right,” said Macdonald, “but you might get it into your head that I don’t ask questions without a reason for asking them. I’ve told you that somebody tried to murder Dick Greville. He travelled on a train that stopped at Reading. At Reading the station authorities had had some trouble with a gang of rowdies who were believed to be connected with the bookies who work the dog-racing business, and one of these rowdies got into the same compartment that Greville was travelling in, and, according to two witnesses, Greville not only spoke to this chap, but went up the platform with him at Paddington. Five minutes later Greville was bashed over the head with an iron bar.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” cried Brian.

  “I’ve got to make sense of it, and you’ve got to try to help,” said Macdonald. “In my experience, there’s always an explanation if you sort facts into their places. Now here’s another question. Do you remember any deserters from your unit while you were in the Army?”

  Brian sat and cogitated, and Macdonald knew that in his careful, conscientious mind the young farmer was working out the implications of the question. Suddenly his face lightened: “I think I get the idea behind that one,” he said. “I believe there were some chaps who packed up and beat it: not from our hut and nobody I remember personally. I expect battalion H.Q. could tell you—and the police know, don’t they?”

  Macdonald laughed—he couldn’t help it—and Brian flushed red. “Sorry,” he said. “That was a fool thing to say.”

  “I dare say I can get the information from our own records when you have told me the details of Greville’s number, unit, and the rest,” Macdonald replied.

  Brian began to rummage in his pockets, and Macdonald produced pencil and notebook and handed them over. The young man wrote slowly and carefully, and when he had finished he added:

  “I realise I must seem a fool to you, but all this has got me muddled. I don’t even know how you traced Dick home—you said he’d got nothing on him to show who he was, didn’t you?”

  “I did. The process by which I traced him is what we call ‘routine.’ Doubtless you have your own routines, rotation of crops, breeding, and the like. I respect your skill, and all I ask is that you should realise that we know our job too. If I ask seemingly futile questions, there’s probably a reason behind them.”

  “All right,” said Brian. “Go ahead.”

  3

  “I want to know about Dick Greville’s home life,” said Macdonald. “I didn’t bother Mrs. Greville with questions, but I saw Mrs. Burrow for a moment or two. Are there any other members of the family?”

  “No. There was a baby boy who died, and Margery. Mr. Greville’s folks lived on Exmoor, and his brothers are sheep farming in Wales now. Mrs. Greville had married sisters, but one’s in Canada and the other’s dead, so apart from a few cousins there aren’t any relatives of theirs about.”

  “Mrs. Burrow seemed very bitter about Dick, and she made no bones about saying so,” said Macdonald.

  “I know. I suppose you can’t blame her,” said Brian. “It was such a queer setup. When Dick first came and Mrs. Greville nursed him back to life and got him to talk, well, she got absolutely absorbed in him, and Margie was jealous. She was a queer-tempered girl, and she just wouldn’t take it. I think she hated Dick. Anyway, she got a job as soon as she left school: she went to help Mrs. Yeo over at Brent Moor, and she got married before she was twenty, so they didn’t really know much about each other—she and Dick, I mean.”

  “When Mr. Greville died, do you know how he left his property?”

  Brian stared, and his face lengthened: he evidently didn’t feel very happy over this question. “Not to Dick,” he said quickly. “Everything was left to Mrs. Greville. There wasn’t much money. On a farm your capital’s all invested in the land and gear and stock. Moorcock’s a good sheep farm, though you mightn’t think it, and sheep mean money these days. Mrs. Greville’s been used to sheep farming all her life, and she knows as much about it as her husband did.”

  There was silence for a while: Macdonald was pretty sure that Brian had followed the trend of the last questions and was troubled in consequence, but he made no further comment. At length Macdonald said:

  “Mrs. Burrow complained that Dick had had everything—schooling, pocket money, indulgence—and she added: ‘He’ll get the farm, too, likely as not.’ ”

  “She’d damn well no right to say a thing like that,” cried Brian indignantly. “Mrs. Greville will do what’s right by both of them. It’s not true Dick had everything and Margie nothing. Margie had her rake-off when she got married. Damn the woman, she’s a proper mischief maker. I know what she’s after——” He broke off, his face flushed, his eyes angry. Then he said: “Look here. I’ve got t
o say it. I don’t like Margie: I admit she’s got a grievance, but she can’t be fair. All the same, she hasn’t had anything to do with . . . all this. I’m certain she hasn’t. I just don’t believe it.”

  “All right. Let’s leave it at that,” replied Macdonald. “Now do you know where Dick was going to stay in London?”

  “No. Not for certain. I don’t think he knew either. Before we went into the Army he and I went up to London for a two days’ beano, and we stayed at a small hotel near Paddington Station. There are a lot of them, bed and breakfast places, pretty mouldy, but all we could afford. I expect Dick would have gone there again, or somewhere nearby.”

  “Right. Now can you tell me the name of the psychologist he was going to see?”

  “Yes. I can. I got the name for him from the M.O. I’ve got it written down in my pocketbook. Wait a jiffy and I’ll find it.” Brian went and rummaged in a table drawer, muttering: “I know I’ve got it somewhere. The M.O. said this chap was one of the sanest men in that job. I wanted to make sure he was good, because one hears some rum stories. . . . Here it is. I knew I’d kept it.”

  He handed a slip of paper over to Macdonald: the name and address were written carefully and legibly:

  Dr. David Garstang. 500 Wimpole St., London, W.1.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MACDONALD drove on to Branscombe when he left Brian Salcombe. Branscombe was the Burrows’ farm and it was a very different proposition from the grey harshness of Moorcock, away up on the moor. Margie Burrow’s home approximated more to the popular idea of a farm in Devon: set in a wide, well-watered valley, its pastures and meadows green even in December, the farmhouse whitewashed and thatched. It was a comfortable-looking building, sturdy and squat, with deep eaves and fine stone chimneys.