“Well, this certainly explains an awful lot, but what is it you want me to do?”
“I would like you to find out what Miss Daffy can tell you. Just allow her to talk. There is no need to question her directly. In fact, it will be as well not to do so. I do not wish you to arouse her suspicions in any way.”
“What do you expect her to tell me? I must have some sort of guide.”
“I want her impressions and recollections of the night the girl is supposed to have been brought to the inn by Gorinsky and Scouse, and I want to know all that she can tell you about the happenings on the following morning. In particular, I must find out whether she went to buy eggs in Heathcote Fitzprior from a certain Mrs. Purse. Do you know Mrs. Purse, by the way?”
“Yes. I buy my own eggs from her. She’s a vinegary old party, and the eggs are a bit hit-and-miss because her hens sometimes stray and lay away, and she doesn’t know how long the eggs have been in the hedges. However, if you tell her the number that have turned out dud, she always replaces them without question, although she grumbles that somebody must have let the hens out. Apart from that, she’s a mine of information on the Heathcote family, so that’s how I really made her acquaintance.”
“I hoped for something of the kind, so I want you to talk to her after (not before) you have gossiped with Miss Daffy.”
“To check on Daffy’s reminiscences?”
“And to gain any further information which may help us.”
“And how will this help Dave?”
“That I cannot tell. I am dependent upon what you are able to glean. At the least I hope we can clear away some dead wood, and at the most we may obtain a clue to the identity of the murderer.”
“I suppose you have your suspicions? I know I have mine.”
“Indeed?”
“Oh, yes—a straight choice between Maverick and Gracechurchstreet, or the two in collusion. Poor old Harry is no murderer, Scouse wouldn’t have had a motive—quite the reverse, since he was hand-in-glove with Gorinsky—and Dave, I’m positive, didn’t do it.”
“I wish I could be equally positive, but my bump of caution suggests that I preserve an open mind.”
“You mean that you think Dave might have done it under provocation?”
“And with reason. The boy can fly into a rage, knock people down, kick them on the head . . .”
“He was only wearing boxing boots . . .”
“Fortunately for himself.”
“I see. All the same, he just flew off the handle . . .”
“Yes, it seems so, does it not?—and he himself does not deny it.”
“But he certainly didn’t crown Gorinsky with a bottle. All the evidence is that Scouse and Harry bundled him away upstairs and locked him in as soon as they pulled him off Gorinsky.”
“Yes. Have you ever been to that attic room?”
“No. I’ve never been higher than that big room they used as a gym.”
“Could you sufficiently sink your prejudices as to find out, and tell me, whether an active lad could climb out of the window and gain the ground from that attic?”
Toby stared at her, and then agreed that he supposed he could.
“That’s if the Smettons will allow me to go up there,” he added.
“They will,” said Dame Beatrice, “unless they have something more to hide.”
“Anything else I can do?”
“You can ask Smetton whether either Maverick or Gracechurchstreet ever bought a full bottle of whisky from him.”
“Don’t you mean Dubonnet?”
“No, I mean whisky. I suppose he has a licence to sell liquor both on and off the premises.”
“You mean Gorinsky was slugged with a bottle of Canadian rye, and that there never was a bottle of Dubonnet involved?”
“I do not mean anything. If you relish a little exercise when you have left Mrs. Purse, you might care to scramble down into some of the stone quarries and see whether you can locate the bottle—or the fragments of it—which was handled by Holley while he was incarcerated in the attic.”
“That’s definitely an idea! I’d like to do that. I have a theory (nebulous as yet) that the bottle may have been removed from Dave’s attic after he was released and taken down to the car and placed beside the body in the smaller car.”
“And was thrown into the quarry by Mrs. Spreadapple’s son?”
“I think it possible.”
“But why should he want to get rid of the bottle?”
“Because it had blood on it, one might conjecture. But, of course, if Gorinsky was hit with a whisky bottle . . . I mean, they wouldn’t have given Dave whisky in the state he was in.”
“Dave’s fingerprints on a bottle which was not the murder weapon might give the police something to think about, I imagine.”
“So you think the intention was to frame young Dave? Well, it seems to have come off to a certain extent, doesn’t it?”
“Ah, but only to a certain extent.”
“I must go along to the quarries and search for that bottle, anyway. Is there anything else I can do?”
“Not unless something transpires which we do not and cannot foresee.”
“Such as?”
“If I could tell you that, it would mean that I was able to foresee it. Do not trouble about scrambling down quarries. The bottle whether of Dubonnet or whisky, will not help us now.”
“Why not?”
“If it is in one of the quarries it will have the soldier’s fingerprints on it, and we do not want to pile Pelion on Ossa, do we? Besides, the police would have found it if it was there.”
Taking his assignments in the order in which he had been given them, Toby, once again master and sole occupier of the station house, went over to the Swan Revived and asked for Daffy. He had gone to the side door, for the inn was closed until eleven in the morning. Mrs. Smetton opened the door to him and, instead of her usual kindly smile, a stare of deep suspicion, with (he thought) fear behind it, greeted him.
“I can’t oblige, Mr. Sparowe,” she said flatly, “and I’m surprised you should sir.”
“Oh, I haven’t come for a drink out of hours,” said Toby. “I only wanted to ask Miss Daffy if she can recommend anybody for new-laid eggs. I’ve been getting mine from Mrs. Purse in the village, but Dame Beatrice tried her and found that hers weren’t always very fresh.”
“Which I could have told her if she’d asked me,” said Mrs. Smetton. “Daffy shops ours in Morchester.”
“I wonder whether I could have a word with her?”
“There’s no occasion. She’s helping Mr. Smetton clear out the garage. I can tell you where she gets the eggs. It’s Bond’s, a little shop in Queen Street.”
“Oh, is it? Thanks very much.” There seemed no reasonable excuse for lingering and, if he followed his instructions, he was not to go to Mrs. Purse until he had heard what Daffy had to tell. He returned home feeling slightly downhearted, but rallied when, from his sitting-room window, he spotted Smetton leaving the garage and walking towards the side door of the inn. This indicated that Daffy was left on her own. It seemed a good chance to talk to her, and he took it. He waited until Smetton had disappeared and then he slipped out by the door into the station yard and crossed the road out of sight of the windows of the bar.
“Hullo,” he said. “How’s tricks, Miss Daffy?”
“Lord!” she exclaimed. “How you startled me, Mr. Sparowe!” A gleam of amusement lit up the intelligent little grey eyes in her dough-cake face. “It isn’t no use you thinking you can edge in for a drink by the side door, you know.”
“I don’t want to,” said Toby. “It’s you I’ve come to see. It’s about this tiresome business of young Dave Holley. I’m worried about the kid. What sort of chance does he stand with all those rozzers breathing down his neck?”
“Well, I can’t help him, can I? I don’t know nothing about it.”
“I rather hoped you did. You see, what we need is an intelligent witne
ss who’ll swear that the murder was committed that morning while Dave was locked in his room.”
“That witness couldn’t be me, Mr. Sparowe. I wasn’t on the premises at the time.”
“Oh, really? How was that, then?”
“Out shopping, as usual. The meat and cheese and veg. and eggs as that lot got through each day, well, you never would believe it! And, of course, neether Tom nor Dora, let alone me meself, us hadn’t no idea as they was a’going to take themselves off so sudden-like, so I went out to shop for them as usual.”
“So you heard nothing of the row between Dave and Gorinsky?”
“Only by hearsay, after I got back with the shopping.”
“Oh, yes, that reminds me. Mrs. Smetton told me that you’ve given up going to Mrs. Purse in the village for eggs. Why is that?”
“I have not give up going to Mrs. Purse, sir. It’s the only chance of a really good gossip I get in this dead and alive hole in the winter. Martha Purse is a good friend of mine and I likes her company.”
“Mrs. Smetton says her eggs aren’t fresh.”
“And a wicked libel that is, Mr. Sparowe, because she always changes the bad ‘uns. What I do, you see—only you mustn’t let on to Dora—I drives into Morchester for the most of the shopping and then, on the way back, I takes a little by-road that loops back into the village, has a cuppa tea and maybe a half-hour’s natter with Martha, and comes back to the Swan the same way, like as I’m coming straight back from Morchester. Dora may suspicion me, but she don’t say nothing ’cos she don’t want words and she don’t want to lose me, neether, and it suits both of our book as I stays.”
“When did she tell you you had to stop buying eggs from Mrs. Purse?”
“Oh, long enough ago.”
“Before this lot came to stay at the Swan?”
“Oh, ah, long before that.”
“So, on the morning of Gorinsky’s death, you were in the village with Mrs. Purse?”
“Happen I wasn’t. I had to call on the brewers in Morchester that day and it took up so much of my time that I didn’t have the chance to get to Martha’s. I got the eggs at Bond’s.”
“So what was the first you knew about Gorinsky?—about the party leaving the inn, I mean,”
“When I got back with the shopping the lot of them had gone. Then, of course, a day or two after, there was all this hullabaloo about finding the body and Tom being called upon to go and speak to it.”
“Yes, I see. Do you know Mrs. Spreadapple?”
“That lying bitch?—excusing the word, sir. That I do. I reckon everybody round about knows her. You don’t want to take no notice of anything she tells you. Out to make trouble, that’s all she’s out for.”
“So I’ve heard. Oh, well, what do you make the time?”
“The church clock just struck eleven. You’ll be all right now for your drink.”
“Good Lord! Your ears must be pretty sharp! I didn’t hear a thing.”
“Then you couldn’t have wanted your drink all that bad, sir. The strike was loud and clear.”
Toby slipped back to his house by the way he had come, got into his car, and drove to the village to speak to Mrs. Purse. She lived in a thatched, white-washed cottage where the village street made its U-turn to rejoin the main road. She was a wisp of a woman with iron-grey hair, an inquisitive nose and a shrewish mouth, but she had a smile, albeit a sour one, for a customer and, without a word, she packed a partitioned cardboard box with a dozen eggs. Then she said,
“I asked you particular always to bring the box back when you wanted eggs. I’m not made of boxes, am I?”
“I hope not,” said Toby, giving her a young man’s grin. “And, as a matter of fact, I didn’t come for eggs, although I’ll take them now you’ve boxed them up. I came to have a word with you.”
“I don’t reduce ’til after Pancake Day.”
“No, no, of course not. It’s really about something quite different. I believe you’re friends with Miss Daffy up at the Swan Revived.”
“What of it?”
“Well, would you be prepared to go into court and swear that she was here with you on the morning that chap was murdered?”
“How could I? I don’t even charge my mind with remembering which morning that was. Do you mean the no-good fellow they found in the stone quarries?”
“That’s the man. Now, look, this may be very important. You wouldn’t want to see a boy get a life-sentence for something he didn’t do, would you?”
“All the same to me. These young ’uns nowadays, you can take it for granted if they haven’t done one thing they’ve done summat else. No time for none of them, I haven’t.”
“Oh, they’re not all bad, you know—any more than your eggs,” retorted Toby, with calculated rashness. Mrs. Purse drew herself to her full height of five feet two and in awful silence removed Toby’s twelve eggs from their box and replaced them in the large wicker basket from which she had taken them. Then she pointed magisterially to the front door by which he had entered.
“I’m sorry,” said Toby, standing his ground. “It was just my joke.”
“Very funny, I’m sure! Well, you needn’t come to me no more for bad eggs. The idea! I’ve never been so insulted in my life!”
“Oh, come off it, Mrs. Purse! You don’t want to get rid of a good customer just because of a silly crack! Where’s your sense of humour?” He realized that he had overplayed his hand.
“Never had none. Nor would you, if you’d been married to Purse as long as I was. So now be off with you, if you please. There’s some as their room is preferred to their company, I’ll inform you,” said Mrs. Purse implacably.
“Just as you say,” said Toby, “but I really am very contrite. I hadn’t the slightest intention of upsetting you. Please let me have my eggs, and I’ll tell young Holley’s lawyer that Miss Daffy didn’t come into the village that morning. There’ve been funny doings up at the Swan, you know, and the Smettons may find themselves in Queer Street before they’re through. I wouldn’t like to see Miss Daffy implicated, but there it is! If she didn’t come into the village, she must have been elsewhere, and it’s up to the police to find out where.”
“She’d have been doing the shopping in Morchester. Used to go in every day while that party was there. Anyway, if you want to know, she was in the village that day. She didn’t know I seen her, but I did.”
“Have you told her so?” The boat which he felt he had rocked too violently seemed to be on an even keel again.
“No, I ain’t. If she chooses to come to the village and park other folks’ cars on that Mrs. Spreadapple’s bit of green, it’s no concern of mine, although I think she might have mentioned it.”
“When was this, then?” He managed to keep the excitement out of his voice.
“Why, the day you was talking about, I reckon. I told her next-door about it, us being on speaking terms again, and we worked out that’s when it must have been. ‘Though what she could want upsetting that nasty old Tantrums I can’t make out,’ I said. ‘She knows what that Mrs. Spreadapple’s like, as well as I do,’ I said. All right, Mr. Sparowe, you can have your eggs if you want ’em, but you see you tell that lawyer the truth. Daffy was in the village that day, although not with me, and though I’ll not see her in trouble if I can help it, I do think she might have mentioned it, I really do. After all, what are friends for, eh?”
Feeling a worm and a heel, but trying to take comfort from the fact that he was acting on Dave’s behalf and that the end, he hoped, would justify the means, Toby humbly accepted his dozen eggs (feeling more ashamed of himself than ever when he noted that Mrs. Purse had picked him out the brown ones), paid for them, promised to return the box, and drove back to the church lych-gate opposite Mrs. Spreadapple’s sacred roadside grass.
Suddenly he thought better of his self-abasement. Mrs. Purse’s evidence coincided nearly enough with Dame Beatrice’s theories. Added to that, it was unlikely that Mrs. Spreadapple would recog
nize his description of Daffy, as he had no idea of how she had been dressed, and she had been seen by the irate London woman walking away from her. It was unlikely that Mrs. Purse was lying on Daffy’s behalf. If she had been doing so, Toby thought, she would have said, “Yes, Daffy was in the village buying eggs from me as usual” She would never have fabricated the story of the strange car left by Daffy on Mrs. Spreadapple’s verge.
He drove back to the station house, left his car and walked across the road to the inn.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Prisoner’s Release
“When you hear the trumpet blast,
Then you know you’re home at last—
Open up them pearly gates for me!”
Anon.—Negro Spiritual
From behind the bar Smetton eyed Toby with sorrowful suspicion.
“You didn’t ought to have tried to trip poor Daffy up, Mr. Sparowe,” he said. “It wasn’t kind or gentlemanly, and I must say I was rather surprised when she told me.”
Toby, nettled by this speech and knowing what he felt he knew about the landlord, decided to take the bull by the horns.
“Now look here, Mr. Smetton,” he said, “that’s all very well, but it isn’t up to you to chuck stones at other people’s glasshouses.”
“Meaning exactly what, sir?”
“Well, we know a good bit about your doings, you know, on the morning that Gorinsky was murdered. The party, without him, piled into his car and drove to London. How come that you didn’t realize he wasn’t with them?”
“Simple. They told me he’d drove off in Maverick’s little bus to get to London ahead of them.”
“The little bus which you afterwards found had been left in your garage with Gorinsky’s body inside it.”
“That’s a lie!”
“Oh, no, it isn’t. We’ve got witnesses, you know. You and Daffy drove that car away and parked it on Mrs. Spreadapple’s green verge and then walked into the churchyard at Heathcote Fitzprior, Mrs. Spreadapple saw you, so you needn’t bother to deny it.”
Gory Dew (Mrs. Bradley) Page 19