The Crime and the Crystal

by E. X. Ferrars

Tony struck out again for the shore. Andrew lingered for some minutes where he was, seeing the bobs of two wet heads still farther out, and, assuming that they belonged to Denis and Bob, thought that there could be no reason to hurry if his host was still in the water.

  But presently Denis came swimming in, with Bob close behind him, and the three of them made for the shore. David and Clare had already come out of the water and were sitting with Sara under the umbrella, though this was hardly needed any more. The sun was low and a tinge of faint coral pink had appeared in the sky in a line just above the horizon. The beach was emptying. When the party had first come down to it, it had been crowded with holiday-makers, some with umbrellas or tents, and a good many with the forbidden dogs. Children had been playing the inevitable cricket and from time to time the lonely jogger had slogged his way by. Now there were very few people left and the tide was slowly creeping over the sand.

  “Where are Kay and Jan?” Denis was asking Sara as Andrew joined them.

  “I don’t know, I haven’t seen them,” she replied.

  “Been asleep, have you?” Denis asked.

  “Not so far as I know. Perhaps I dozed off, but I don’t think so. I don’t think they’ve been down.”

  “But there’s Jan’s towel over there,” Tony said, pointing.

  A bright green towel was lying on the sand about twenty yards or so away from where the party had gathered around the umbrella.

  “How do you know it’s hers?” Denis asked. “It could be anyone’s.”

  “Then it’s exactly the same as some we’ve got,” Tony said. “I noticed she brought one like it with her today.”

  “But why drop it over there?” David asked. “She’d have come here and joined Sara, wouldn’t she? And what about Kay? Hasn’t she a towel for herself?”

  Something about the vivid green of the towel was familiar to Andrew, though at first he could not think why it was. Then the memory came to him of Dudley Blair slouching through the Gardiners’ kitchen with a bright green bundle under his arm. But probably all this meant, he thought, if the towel was not Jan’s, was that towels of that pattern happened to be popular in the shops of Betty Hill.

  Tony had strolled over to where the towel lay and picked it up.

  “I’m sure it’s ours,” he said, returning.

  “Then I suppose Sara did doze off,” Denis said, “and Kay and Jan saw she was asleep and didn’t want to disturb her, so they went in from over there.”

  “But why did Jan leave her towel behind?” Tony persisted. “Kay must have taken hers in and Jan left hers here. Isn’t that peculiar?”

  “Carelessness,” Bob suggested. “She just forgot it.”

  “Seems to me a funny thing to be careless about.” Tony seemed more disturbed by the incident than Andrew thought was warranted. “It isn’t like her.”

  “Then let’s go inside and see what’s happened.” Denis began to struggle with the umbrella, trying to close it. At first it twisted in his grasp, then suddenly yielded, nearly trapping his head between its spokes. “Time for a drink,” he said, emerging. “Coming, everybody?”

  Andrew felt that he had drunk enough for one day, but he would have to do whatever the Gardiners wanted, so he joined the group that trailed slowly up to the bungalow. Tony took the green towel with him, then as if he had suddenly become uncertain that it was actually Jan’s, took it back to the spot where he had found it and dropped it there. Rejoining the party, he walked up the steps to the road beside Andrew.

  Reaching the bungalow with Denis leading the group, they found the front door standing open.

  Denis paused in the doorway and called out, “Kay!”

  There was no answer. Inside the house there was only silence.

  Stepping inside the door, Denis called out again, but again there was no answer.

  Looking round at the knot of people behind him, he said, “They were probably caught by our neighbours. Probably they had to go in and say Merry Christmas to the kids. They’ve got a gang of them there. Not bad kids, actually, and Kay’s fond of them. She’d go in any time if they asked her. Get out of your bathers now, then come along to the lounge for that drink.”

  He walked towards his bedroom.

  Andrew went to the room where he had left his clothes and stripped off the swimming trunks that he was wearing. It was a bedroom and the clothes in which he had arrived were in a heap on the bed. Bob Wilding had shared the room with him. His clothes were on the floor.

  Following Andrew into the room, he stood still in the doorway, saying, “D’you know, I’ve never cared for Christmas? There’s always a sort of disappointment about it, once you’ve grown up.”

  “That’s true,” Andrew agreed. “It doesn’t seem to mean much unless you’ve got children. It’s just a time for drinking and overeating.”

  Bob closed the door behind him and picked up a shirt from the floor.

  “Not that I’ve anything against overeating if it’s good enough,” he said, “and Kay’s a splendid cook. I wonder if Sara can cook. It’s something I’ve never thought about. I can’t imagine her standing at a kitchen stove. Look here, I didn’t mean to tell you as much about her and me as I did, it’s just that I was too excited to keep it to myself. You don’t mind saying nothing about it to the others, do you?”

  Andrew wondered if Bob was having second thoughts about the marriage, or if he had become less sure than he had been at first that Sara’s acceptance of him had been serious. On the other hand, Andrew remembered that when he had first become engaged to Nell, all of forty years ago, he had had a feeling that no one must be let into the secret of it, that it was something too precious to be shared with anyone, that they must wait in silent enjoyment of one another before the right time came for making the matter public to their friends.

  He and Bob were halfway into their clothing when they heard a wild shout from the passage.

  If it had been a woman’s voice it would have been a scream. But it was a man’s voice and sounded more like the roar of an animal in pain.

  Doors on to the passage were opening. The noise had come from the living room. Bob Wilding reached it first, then recoiled violently in the doorway, treading on the feet of Tony, who was just behind him. Clare and David Nicholl were close behind Tony, with Andrew joining the group which was trying to surge into the living room, only to become motionless at what they saw before them. Sara Massingham had not appeared, as if roars of anguish did not mean much to her.

  It had been Denis who had shouted. He was on his knees, beside Kay’s prostrate body. There was blood on his hands and some smeared on his face, though he did not appear to have been injured. It seemed that he must have taken his head in his hands, after staining them in the blood that had gushed from Kay’s battered head. Her face had been smashed in, though one sightless eye had been left peering out through the ruins of it with a dreadful, bright knowingness. Her fair hair had been stained red and there were thickening splashes of red on her black-and-white dress.

  Lying on the floor beside her, with blood giving it a sickening pinkish colour, was the lump of quartz crystal that Andrew had noticed earlier on the coffee table.

  Denis gave another yell, looking at the group in the doorway as if he hated all of them. His cry sounded as if he were trying to enunciate words, but could only produce this strange animal bellow. Then all at once he sat back on his heels and with a calmness that sounded a little mad after the noise that he had just been making, observed, “I went to our room and changed. I came in here and found her. I found her just like this. I haven’t touched her. I swear to God I haven’t touched her. I didn’t do it.”

  David Nicholl went forward and put a hand on Denis’s shoulder, trying to raise him to his feet. Denis only shrugged him off. David’s face, always grave, was harrowed now by anxious sympathy.

  “No one thinks you did it, Denis,” he said. “You couldn’t have, that’s for sure. Her blood’s already beginning to clot. Someone else got in and�
�”

  “Where’s Jan?” Tony interrupted suddenly.

  They all looked at one another, as if the answer were to be found in one of their faces.

  Turning swiftly, Tony went rushing from room to room, calling out, “Jan! Jan, where are you?”

  There was no answer. After a minute Tony returned.

  “She isn’t here,” he said. “Her clothes are there in the room where we changed, but she’s gone.”

  “What about her bathers?” Clare Nicholl asked. She and her husband seemed to be keeping their heads better than anyone else on the horror of the situation.

  “I don’t know, I didn’t think about them,” Tony answered.

  “Go and see if they’re there,” Clare said.

  Turning once more, Tony darted into the bedroom where he had just changed. When he returned he looked extremely pale and bewildered.

  “Gone,” he said.

  “What about her towel?” David asked.

  “Gone too. And that sort of beach robe she had.”

  “So that towel you found on the beach could have been hers,” Bob said.

  “But where is she?” Tony demanded as if he thought that someone there could tell him. “If she went down to the beach, what’s happened to her?”

  “If she swam out to sea…” Bob began, then stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry, Tony. I’m sure Jan’s all right. She’s a strong swimmer. Even if she did swim out, she’ll be all right. But Kay—oh God, I don’t know what to say about it or what we ought to do. Get the police, I suppose.”

  “I’m going to see if our car’s still here,” Tony cried. “I don’t believe Jan went in swimming. If she had, she’d be back by now.”

  He made for the front door and for the drive where the cars were parked in which the Lightfoots’ guests had arrived.

  As he went Sara Massingham thrust her way through the group who were still clustered just inside the doorway. Her face was paler than usual, but she had not lost her look of quiet self-control.

  “We’d better ring the Triple 0,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

  Chapter Four

  She picked up the telephone and dialled.

  Andrew saw that what she dialled were three noughts, consecutively.

  David, who was standing near him, said, “You’d dial 999, wouldn’t you?”

  “It’s the same thing, is it?” Andrew said.

  “Yes, I think so. I believe the call will go through to the communications centre and they’ll send a patrol. After that—well, I’ve never been involved in anything like this. I don’t know what happens.”

  Sara had spoken incisively into the telephone, summoning whoever it was whose job it was to deal with murder, then put the instrument down.

  Andrew, to his own irritation, found himself reciting in his head:

  Pibroch of Donuil Dhu,

  Pibroch of Donuil,

  Wake thy wild voice anew,

  Summon Clan Conuil…

  How much easier for Donuil Dhu it would have been, he reflected, if he could have relied on the telephone to summon his clansmen, instead of on the skirl of the bagpipes. They would have arrived in half the time that it must have taken them to reach the place from which they were to set off to capture someone else’s cattle, or whatever it was that their chief expected of them.

  On this occasion Clan Conuil, that was to say two uniformed constables in a white car with a blue light on top, arrived in what seemed to be only a few minutes after Sara had telephoned the Triple 0.

  But before they came Clare and David had led Denis into the dining room, had made him sit down there, had found brandy in a cupboard of the sideboard and had made him drink it. He had started to tremble violently and when he drank the brandy it looked at first as if it might make him vomit, but then it seemed to help him to achieve some control of himself. When the two constables arrived he insisted on going to the door to meet them and led them into the living room, instead of leaving this to Bob Wilding, who appeared prepared to do the job. The men stood side by side, looking down at Kay’s battered head, then looked at each other questioningly and then both nodded. One of them spoke into a radio which was hanging on his chest and the radio clucked back at him.

  “That’s the supervising sergeant I was speaking to,” he said to Denis. “It won’t take him long to get here. Meanwhile, if you don’t mind, you’d all better go to that other room. We don’t want anything touched here.”

  The two men herded everyone into the dining room, then placed themselves as sentinels in the passage.

  Tony spoke in a low voice to Andrew. “Jan didn’t take our car. It’s there still. If I’d stopped to think, I’d have known it would be, because I’ve got the key. It’s in my pocket. So God knows what’s happened to her.”

  “Perhaps she saw what happened here, got frightened and made a bolt for it,” Andrew suggested.

  “In that case, why didn’t she just run down to the beach and tell us about it?” Tony asked.

  “Yes, that’s what you’d have expected.”

  “But there’s that towel on the beach, as if she did run down…” Tony gave a shuddering sigh, then shook his head. “No, she can’t have gone into the sea, because her beach wrap is missing. It’s a sort of jacket, made of towelling, and she’d probably have put it on over her bathers to go down to the beach, but if she’d gone in swimming she’d have left it with her towel. Anyway, why should she have gone dashing into the sea after seeing Kay killed, or on coming on her body after it had been done? She’d never have done that, would she?”

  “It doesn’t seem likely,” Andrew agreed. “But just suppose she went down to the beach before Kay was killed, she might have left the towel and the wrap there together, mightn’t she, then come out, put on the wrap, forgotten about the towel, come up here—”

  “Yes, and then?” Tony interrupted. “Then she found Kay’s body and went rushing frantically away instead of coming down to us. That would be madness.”

  Andrew looked thoughtfully at Tony’s white face. “What do you think happened, Tony? You’ve some idea about it, haven’t you?”

  “I can’t think where she could have gone, except home,” Tony answered. “But why should she have done that? I suppose it’s just possible that something frightened her so that she completely lost her head and didn’t know what she was doing. If she felt it was that other murder repeating itself, because she’s never really got over it, you know… Anyway, I’m going to tell these men about it and see if they’ll let me go home to see if she’s there.”

  He went out of the room to speak to the two constables in the passage.

  Andrew, who had never felt such a stranger in the country as he did just then, with no justification for his presence in this house except through his connection with Tony, followed him out and heard him trying to explain himself lucidly to the policemen.

  “Don’t you understand, my wife’s disappeared?” he said. “She’s Mrs. Lightfoot’s sister and when the rest of us went down to the beach to swim in the afternoon she stayed behind to help her sister clear up. And now she’s missing. But her clothes are here, she’s in her bathers, and her towel’s on the beach, but I don’t believe she went into the sea. I think she may have lost her head and gone home and I’d like to go there myself and see if that’s what’s happened. I can take the car and get there and back in a few minutes.”

  “She didn’t take your car herself?” one of the men asked.

  “No,” Tony said. “I had the key.”

  “How far away is your home?”

  “On foot? Perhaps ten minutes.”

  “Have you any reason for thinking she might have gone there?”

  “Only that she may have lost her head completely at seeing what had happened and felt home was the best place to be.”

  The two men looked at each other and seemed to consult silently, then the one who had spoken before said, “Ten minutes is quite a while for your head to stay lost, even if you’ve had a bad sh
ock. Don’t you think she’d be back here by now even if she started off for home? Why not telephone first to see if she’s got there?”

  Tony plainly welcomed the suggestion, picked up the telephone and dialled while the two men stood close to him, ready to listen if there should be an answer. But there was none. After the ringing tone had gone on for some time, Tony put the telephone down.

  “She might not be answering,” he said. “She may be there. If I go, I can be sure. She’s got to be somewhere. She can’t just have vanished into thin air.”

  “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” the constable said. “We’ll wait till the sergeant gets here and tell him what’s happened, then he can send one of us with you to see if she’s at home. I don’t think any of you should leave here till he’s agreed to it. What’s the address?”

  Tony told him and the man wrote it down in a notebook.

  However, when the superintending sergeant arrived a few minutes later, he did not give Tony permission to go home in search of Jan, but sent one of the constables to look for her. The sergeant, who was in uniform, was a big, burly man with sandy hair and small, shrewd eyes in a very large face. He remained stooping over Kay without touching her for some time, then nodded as if in answer to some question that no one had asked him, straightened up and on his radio asked the communications centre to contact the divisional detective inspector on duty, the major crime squad and the C.I.B.

  After that he went into the dining room, where David Nicholl had persuaded Denis to drink more brandy and had poured out some for everyone else. Andrew was not sure that it was the best treatment for Denis. A flush had replaced his pallor and his eyes had an unfocussed look, while his body was shaken every little while by starts and tremors. But Andrew was glad enough of the brandy himself. It was only as it was given to him and he looked round to see if Tony also had a glass of it that he discovered that he was not in the room.

  So perhaps he had made off for his home without permission. The thought that he might have done this worried Andrew. Tony’s intense anxiety about Jan was understandable, but it was not going to help matters to antagonize the police at the very beginning of their inquiry. The sergeant seemed to be a level-headed man, and his greeting of Denis was sympathetic, but the way he glanced round the room looked as if he was aware already that someone was missing.