The Case of the Abominable Snowman

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Absolutely certain,’ replied the man, in a tone of austere rebuke like that of a cathedral verger defending the authenticity of his medieval glass.

  Blount took up the bottle gingerly in a handkerchief, removed the cork, and sniffed very cautiously.

  ‘Yes. This is it. Seen it before?’

  The butler, after some humming and hawing, admitted that he had seen a bottle of similar appearance in a cupboard in the master’s study.

  Half an hour later, Nigel was summoned to the writing-room. Blount had interviewed the house-party in the meanwhile, with the following results. Between four and four-fifteen, Mr and Mrs Restorick had been in the study with Nigel, Dykes and Eunice in the drawing-room; at about five past four Andrew Restorick entered the drawing-room, and was there till the tea-things were brought in. Dr Bogan was the only member of the party whose movements during this period were uncorroborated. He claimed to have been upstairs in his room till about 4.10, when he had come downstairs, washed his hands in the hall lavatory, and entered the drawing-room just before the maid brought in the tea-tray. Blount summed it up.

  ‘If the butler is correct in stating that the poison bottle was not in the pantry just after four o’clock – and chaps like that instinctively notice anything that’s out of place – the only people who could have poisoned the milk are Andrew Restorick and Dr Bogan. I can imagine no reason why Andrew should poison his own milk and then give it to the cat. So –’

  ‘Q.E.D.? I wonder. It sounds almost too easy. If Bogan did it, he’d surely have given himself some sort of alibi. And why leave the bottle in such a conspicuous place? It looked as if we were meant to find it.’

  ‘He’d not have much time to hide it anywhere. And I don’t expect to find fingerprints on it, no doubt he held it in a handkerchief.’

  ‘I believe you’re making a mistake in concentrating on the four to four-fifteen period. The butler may be wrong, which’d give us 3.50 to four to play about in. Or the criminal might have doped the milk earlier and planted the bottle after 4.15, to throw suspicion on Bogan.’

  ‘No, that won’t do. They were all under somebody’s eye then. Dykes, Bogan, Andrew, and Miss Ainsley in the drawing-room, Mr and Mrs Restorick with you.’

  ‘Not quite accurate. There were a few minutes between the time I left the Restoricks in the study and the time they entered the drawing-room. They–’

  ‘Oh, come now! You’re not suggesting –?’ Blount looked really shocked.

  ‘I didn’t go to the study for my talk with them till four o’clock. One of them could have poisoned the milk before that, then popped into the pantry after the interview was over, on the way to the drawing-room, and planted the bottle. They knew better than anyone else here the household routine. They’d know that the butler always went to inspect the tea-tray ten or fifteen minutes before it was brought in. They could rely on us believing his evidence that the bottle was not there at four o’clock, thus providing themselves with a good but not too perfect alibi.’

  ‘But why on earth should they want to poison Andrew?’

  Nigel related the substance of his interviews with Eunice Ainsley and the Restoricks.

  ‘You see how it is?’ he concluded. ‘If the Restoricks really are hard up, they’ve got a remarkably solid motive for murdering both Elizabeth and Andrew. Elizabeth’s money would be divided equally between Andrew and themselves. Now suppose Andrew dies intestate, or has made a will in their favour, all his money plus his share of Elizabeth’s would come to them also. It’d make a tidy sum. You’ll have to ask Andrew about his will.’

  ‘Restorick’s no poisoner,’ said Blount irritably. ‘A man with a temper like that is the wrong type.’

  ‘Macbeth, I fancy, had a temper, too.’

  Blount scrutinized him keenly. ‘H’m. So that’s your line. Will you tell me, then, how Mr and Mrs Restorick managed to put some of the milk from Andrew’s glass into the milk jug when they weren’t in the drawing-room at all?’

  ‘Oh, they didn’t do that, of course. That was Bogan’s work, I imagine. He’s getting a bit rattled, I expect you’ve noticed. If those burnt papers really were planted in his grate, he’d act quickly to diffuse any further suspicions that might be coming his way.’

  ‘I can’t see how pouring poisoned milk from a glass to a jug could distract suspicion from him. It’d merely make it look as if he’d intended to poison the whole company and not Andrew alone.’

  ‘I said, “diffuse” suspicion, not “distract”. We know – and he must realize it – that there’s some sort of private duel going on between him and Andrew. Whether it has anything to do with the murder isn’t established yet. But it’s imperative now for him to cover up anything which might suggest that he’s out for Andrew’s blood in particular.’

  ‘All this is very fanciful, Strangeways. And it doesn’t help you to pin anything on the Restoricks.’

  ‘I don’t want to pin anything on them. But I’m worried about that locked door.’

  ‘Locked door?’

  ‘Yes. As I told you, Hereward states that, when he went to Betty’s room at about 11.30 on the night she died, he found the door locked. Don’t you see the contradiction? We have been assuming that she was expecting a visit that night – from a lover or someone else. If she was expecting a visitor, she would not leave the door locked. If the door was locked, she wasn’t expecting a visitor and no one could get in without a pass-key. Hereward has a pass-key. On the other hand, if the door wasn’t locked, Hereward for some reason is lying.’

  ‘You do get tangled up in your logic,’ said Blount, beaming at him mildly. ‘Why shouldn’t her lover be already in the room when Hereward came along? That’d account for the locked door.’

  ‘Yes. I hadn’t thought of that,’ replied Nigel disconsolately. ‘But I still feel in my bones there’s something odd about that door being locked.’

  In which he was later to be proved, if illogical, highly correct.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘She who, wise as she was fair,

  For subtle doubts had simple clues’

  COVENTRY PATMORE

  NOW THAT THE Macbeth motif had entered his head, Nigel’s position as a sort of unofficial investigator for the Restoricks had become impossible. Not liking to declare this openly to them, for it would put them on their guard if they were guilty, he pleaded business in London. Some loose ends, too, might be tidied up if he went there, he told the Restoricks.

  Loose ends, he was thinking as the train took Georgia and himself through the snow-bound landscape, was an understatement. The whole case had become a tangle of loose ends; it was almost impossible to find the real thread in the midst of them all. For Blount, of course, it was worse still. His job was to make an arrest, and it seemed as though, whenever he was ready to pounce on one player in this grim game, another player jumped up and attracted his notice. Besides, as Blount remarked just before Nigel left, you can’t make bricks without straw. He couldn’t arrest Will Dykes on the strength of one cord out of a dressing-gown tassel and a broken engagement. He couldn’t arrest Bogan just for being a sinister character who might or might not have supplied Elizabeth with marijuana fifteen years before, and who might or might not have burned papers in his grate on the morning after the murder. Nor, again, could he have arrested Hereward because of a locked door, or Eunice Ainsley because she had as good as blackmailed Hereward, or Andrew because he had talked about people who revel in evil.

  No motives had come to light which, unsupported by really damaging material evidence, a defending counsel couldn’t tear to shreds; and not enough material evidence even to make shreds of. The inquest had been adjourned, and Blount could not keep his suspects at Easterham any longer. Indeed, he did not want to. He knew that time was always the police’s long suit: sooner or later something would come to light, someone would grow impatient or careless and give himself away. He had hopes of the unobtrusive watch which had been set on Eli
zabeth’s flat in town: nothing material to the case had been discovered there, but there was still a chance that the criminal, who seemed to have a penchant for planting false clues, might try something on at the flat.

  Seated in front of their own fire that evening, the sound of London’s traffic beating like a distant surf into the Bloomsbury square below them, Nigel and Georgia were both thinking of the events into which Miss Cavendish’s invitation had plunged them. Easterham Manor and its occupants seemed remote already, and Nigel felt he might at last be able to get things into perspective.

  ‘It’s the loose ends that bother me,’ he said after a long silence, absently watching the flames gesticulate in the hearth. ‘The loose ends. The cross currents. How many plots are there in the story?’

  ‘Ignore them,’ replied Georgia crisply.

  ‘It’s all very well to say, “ignore them”. They’re like a scaffolding in this case, which looks as if it ought to contain a finished building, but take it away and there’s nothing there at all.’

  ‘Not nothing. The body of Elizabeth. Why not start again from that – start at the beginning?’

  ‘Very well. But –’

  ‘Why did Elizabeth die?’

  ‘Sex. Money. Drugs. Take your choice.’

  ‘All right. Sex. That means jealousy, a brainstorm by someone.’

  ‘Dykes or Bogan. More likely, Dykes.’

  ‘Or Andrew. You mustn’t leave him out.’

  ‘In some respects, Andrew qualifies better than any of them. His room is nearest to Elizabeth’s, and I still think it odd that he shouldn’t have heard Hereward knocking at her door, or the actual murderer turning up a little later – after all, he didn’t go to bed himself till eleven. The morning the burnt papers were found in Bogan’s grate, Andrew came down to breakfast a few minutes after him, so he could have planted them there. But what could have been his motive for killing Elizabeth? And where did his motive-power come from? – that’s even more important – we know he was exceedingly fond of her.’

  ‘Motive-power? Oh, that’s not so difficult. Just think of his past. An intelligent, charming, versatile young man, with good traditions behind him and a bright future before him, falls right away. When did it happen? In America, after his sister was disgraced. He ran away and got work in a lumber camp, he told us. Ever since, he’s been knocking round the world at a loose end. He admitted he behaved like a prig and a prude on that occasion. He must have been wrapped up in sexual idealism, to have treated his beloved sister so harshly. Well, then –’

  ‘I see what you mean. That tragedy perverted his idealism, left him with a hatred for sex? The idealism, having nothing positive to build on, has turned bad. He found out his sister was having a liaison with Bogan, killed her, and tried to pin the crime on her lover. It’s possible. But she’s had so many lovers. Surely Andrew hasn’t disposed of them all. Why pick on Bogan?’

  ‘Because, I suggest, he recognized Bogan as Engelman, the original cause of her downfall. For him, Bogan would represent not only that, but also the agency which killed his youthful idealism, his faith in humanity, and made him throw up a potential career of success.’

  ‘I must say, that sounds very plausible.’

  ‘Here’s another point. If we assume it was a sex crime, and line up Andrew, Bogan, and Will Dykes as suspects, Andrew is the only one who really fits such a crime. If Bogan was her lover, he’d have no reason to kill her; if he wasn’t, he surely wouldn’t dare to do it, because even to be touched with a breath of the ensuing scandal would damage his professional reputation. He knows which side his bread is buttered on, all right: he’d never lose his head through jealousy of a successful lover.’

  ‘Yes. I agree to that. What about Dykes?’

  ‘Dykes is a realist. His upbringing made him one. Now a man like him might do murder in the heat of the moment. But this was a premeditated crime. Sane, realistic people don’t commit premeditated sex crimes. His reactions after the event prove he’s that sort of person. He was terribly distressed. But it was not the end of the world for him – he admitted that to you himself. He’s a well-balanced type psychologically, don’t you see? He has his creative work to compensate for anything the world can do to him. He’s not all for love. If he’d found Betty playing about with another man, he’d have taken a stick to her, not staged a melodramatic, Othello sort of murder.’

  ‘You’re very good, Georgia. I find all this quite convincing. But what about the cord from his dressing-gown tassel?’

  ‘During the five minutes it could have been done – let’s see,’ Nigel flipped through some scraps of paper he took from his pocket. ‘Andrew and Eunice were playing picquet, Hereward, Charlotte, and Bogan have no alibis, Dykes was with me in the garden. It was Hereward who invited the constable to a snack downstairs, and took him away from the door of the room.’

  ‘My money’s on Bogan, then.’

  ‘Why Bogan, rather than the Restoricks?’

  ‘Because at that point the Restoricks had not yet come under suspicion, whereas Bogan had – the papers had been found in his grate. Where does he claim to have been during the five minutes in question?’

  ‘In the lavatory. Just to the right of the stairhead on the first floor.’

  ‘Did Hereward bring the constable downstairs that way?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So Bogan could have heard them talking, and known the coast was clear for a little. Did Dykes leave his door unlocked?’

  ‘He says so.’

  ‘Right. Then it was possible for Bogan to have planted that clue. He was already rattled by the burnt paper episode, and he’d be looking out for an opportunity to distribute the suspicion a bit. Dykes would be his choice, because the thing looked like a sex crime and Dykes’ secret engagement to Betty had already come out.’

  ‘D’you think the potassium cyanide business was another attempt to throw suspicion, then?’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘Andrew staged it himself, you mean?’

  ‘Why not? It fits in with the theory that he hates Bogan inveterately and wants him incriminated.’

  ‘That’s true. And Andrew was unduly startled, and rather bad-tempered, when he returned to find that the milk-jug was poisoned as well as his own glass.’

  Nigel rose and walked over to the mantelpiece, where he absent-mindedly patted the head of an Etruscan dog. He glanced at Georgia, curled up in an armchair, looking as wise as Baviaan.

  ‘Things are sorting themselves out,’ he said. ‘You ought to be running this case, not me. It looks as if we could leave Bogan out of it, if it’s a sex crime.’

  ‘I think so. After all, Bogan’s a doctor. Surely he’d have thought of some neater, more professional way of killing Betty than that rope trick. An overdose of cocaine would have been the obvious thing, under the circumstances. And given himself some sort of alibi for the poisoning of Andrew’s milk.’

  ‘Yes. He seems to spend all the crucial times in lavatories. Not very adroit. Well then, if it was a sex crime, Andrew is our man. And if Bogan is Engelman, it would answer the question why Andrew has been making such a dead set at him. Now, what about the money motive?’

  ‘I give it a poor third. We can’t tell till we know the exact state of the Restorick finances. By the way, did you find out about Andrew’s will?’

  ‘M’m. Left two thousand pounds a year by his parents, like Elizabeth. His will leaves this to Hereward in trust for John and Priscilla.’

  ‘So, if the Restoricks killed Betty and tried to poison Andrew, they were doing it on the strength of Betty’s capital and the interest on Andrew’s. Well, let’s suppose they were nearly broke, which I somehow doubt. Can you see them contemplating a couple of murders?’

  ‘Charlotte, perhaps. She’s an able woman, and one always wonders what’s going on behind imposing façades like hers. I mean, when a façade is so elaborate, has grown so much part of the personality, its upkeep may become the most important t
hing in life for that person. If she lost the means of preserving it, to all intents and purposes she’d cease to exist. The very fear of poverty – comparative poverty – will often terrify the rich so much that the whole world turns unreal for them, if they’ve been accustomed to wealth all their life, that is to say. And when the future becomes unreal, it infects the present. And that nightmare sense of unreality can be the starting point of crime.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ said Georgia. ‘But the few thousands a year she’d get out of the deaths of Elizabeth and Andrew wouldn’t seem much better than poverty to a woman of that sort. And what about Hereward? All the facts go to suggest that there must have been collusion between them if either of them is concerned in the crimes at all. Now can you see Hereward in the part of second murderer? I can’t.’

  ‘Superficially, no. But we don’t know enough about the relations between them to dogmatize. How far could ancestor-worship carry an inoffensive, conventional English country-gentleman? Easterham Manor has been in the family for centuries. He might weigh those two not very creditable Restoricks in the balance against it, and find them wanting. Moreover, Clarissa told us the family is badly inbred. How do we know Hereward hasn’t got the bug too, as well as Betty and Andrew? And d’you suppose he doesn’t feel the way his wife overshadows him? I fancy Lady Macbeth had put in a good deal of quiet work before the play opens, telling her husband what a worm he was.’

  ‘Grooming him for evil stardom?’ Georgia laughed. ‘No. It won’t do. Charlotte isn’t like that. You might as well say Eunice Ainsley did it.’

  ‘Eunice? If Betty hadn’t just disclosed to them all that she’d not yet made a will, Eunice would have to come in on the money motive. But she’d hardly kill Betty on the strength of a hope that Hereward would honour Betty’s promise to her.’

  ‘All right. That brings us to drugs. Did Betty die because of drugs?’

  Nigel stretched his long legs, and regarded the frayed toes of his carpet slippers.