The Case of the Abominable Snowman

by Nicholas Blake

  Blount gave Nigel a significant glance as he turned to the telephone.

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily follow,’ said Nigel, more out of mere obstinacy than conviction. ‘Andrew might have got out at another station. He might not have taken a train at all, for that matter. If they were accomplices, the last thing they’d do would be to turn up at London together.’

  ‘No. It won’t wash. The obvious interpretation is the right one. Bogan killed Andrew Restorick. And he’ll not get away with it – not this time.’

  Dialling New Scotland Yard, Blount gave his orders. The search for Dr Dennis Bogan was to be intensified. Every port and landing-ground would be watched. It was only a matter of time now …

  But day after day passed, a week went by, and still no sign was found of the live Bogan or the dead Andrew Restorick. They had both disappeared as thoroughly as if they had melted into the snow which masked the whole countryside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Our hearts, my love were form’d to be

  The genuine twins of Sympathy,

  They live with one sensation.’

  THOMAS MOORE

  NIGEL WAS EXTREMELY susceptible to weather. Afterwards, he pleaded that the palsying cold of those two winter months had prevented his brain from functioning properly. Even when large segments of the truth had been hurled in his face, they made no impression upon his numbed intelligence. Whatever credence one may give to this, there is no doubt that his solution of the Restorick case began on an evening ten days after the disappearance of Andrew and Bogan, when Superintendent Phillips had remarked, with the countryman’s slight, ritual upturning of the eyes to the sky, ‘We’re going to have a change in the weather soon, Mr Strangeways.’

  A series of images flashed across Nigel’s mind. Their first arrival at Easterham. The Dower House delicately befurred with snow. Clarissa Cavendish’s snowy hair piled above her brilliantly painted face. Will Dykes and himself strolling in the little birch copse. Andrew building the snowman, while Eunice Ainsley tried to be playful. John Restorick prowling round the garden with his air-gun. Hereward staring out of the window at the level, dreary white landscape, and turning round to protest mildly at a wrong note Priscilla had played upon the piano. Charlotte, in Wellingtons, a basket on her arm, setting off down the drive to play Lady Bountiful in the village, as to the manner born. Dr Bogan brushing the snow off his collar as he entered the hall on his last visit.

  ‘Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow.’ It had veiled the whole case, drifted into every corner of it. And not only snow, but ‘snow’. During the last week, if they had done nothing else, Blount’s investigations had revealed the full depravity of Dennis Bogan’s character. There was no doubt now that Bogan had been for years, and with a criminal subtlety and opportunism that amounted to genius, using his professional position as a cover for cocaine-distribution and blackmail. The C.I.D. drug squad had at last tracked down his distributors and the source of their supplies. Blount, interviewing one after another of Bogan’s long list of patients, had discovered in detail the methods by which he worked. Perhaps the most formidable thing about Bogan was his flair for choosing the right victims. A high proportion of his cures were genuine – so high a proportion that no suspicion had ever touched him on this score. But even with these, the intimate knowledge revealed to him in the course of treatment was frequently used as a means for blackmail. The woman whom Eunice’s friend had interviewed was only one of several agents whom Bogan had working at this branch of the racket. His drug victims – the ‘unsuccessful’ cures – were chosen with equal skill. They were always people who would particularly fear the exposure of their addiction – young women generally, daughters of rich parents.

  But the most sinister aspect of Bogan’s activities was their apparently wanton malice. His ordinary fees for professional treatment were high enough to make him a rich man without any need for illegal side-lines. Blount’s investigation made it abundantly evident that Bogan really did answer to Andrew’s description of a person who revelled in evil, for its own sake. It was not wealth or position, but the horrible satisfaction of destroying people body and soul, which appealed to him. Behind that opaque personality, that distinguished, self-contained manner, there lay a dreadful relish for power, a genius so perverted that it could feel this relish only in corruption.

  And so, thought Nigel, we come back to Elizabeth Restorick – to that body hanging naked in the sandalwood-scented room, dazzling the eye, the body of a woman who had been lustful, erratic, vain, shameless, but never ungenerous and never a coward. The long talks he had been having with Miss Cavendish made that quite plain. They had assured him too that, whatever else there had been between Elizabeth and Bogan, there could not have been blackmail; he couldn’t blackmail a woman who no longer had a shred of reputation to lose and who had never run away from anything in life.

  ‘We shan’t be long finding him once the thaw sets in,’ said the superintendent.

  ‘No. But it’s queer. Your chaps have been going over the ground for days. Bogan must have found out some extraordinarily ingenious place to hide the body. I suppose it’s definitely established that he couldn’t have buried it miles away and then ditched the car near Easterham to throw us off the track.’

  ‘Oh yes, sir. No doubt of that. He hadn’t time for it. The constable was knocked out just after one o’clock. The cook, you remember, testified to having heard a car being driven out of the garage at a quarter to two. It’d be at least 1–50 before he reached the corner where the car went into the drift. Chelmsford, the nearest railway station to that point, is seven miles away, which’d take him two hours walking at least in the deep snow. Three-fifty. And the train he arrived by in London left Chelmsford at four-five. That gives him a maximum of fifteen minutes for burying the body. He couldn’t even have taken it far off the direct route between Easterham and the station.’

  ‘It does leave a long gap of time between knocking out the constable and driving off in Andrew’s car.’

  ‘We’ve been into all that, sir. He had to kill Mr Restorick in the interval and search his room – and you saw yourself how thoroughly it had been searched.’

  ‘Yes. That’s true.’

  Another long silence fell between them. They were drinking in the pub at Easterham. It was barely half past six, and the little private bar was still empty but for themselves.

  Yes, that’s all very reasonable, Nigel began to argue with himself. But why should Bogan skip at all? Presumably because he failed to find the evidence against himself in Andrew’s room. Andrew, no doubt, had told him that such written evidence existed, and he would now assume that Andrew had put it in safe keeping somewhere else, to be produced if anything happened to himself. But it never had been produced. Neither Andrew’s bank nor his solicitors nor his London flat had revealed anything of the sort.

  The police theory was that Bogan had found and removed this evidence from Andrew’s room. O.K. But, if so, why should he confess to the murder of Andrew by running away and taking the body with him? He had several hours to fake it up into another apparent suicide. The police said it was because he lost his nerve. Bogan was a vile creature: he did not lose his nerve, though. Even at his luncheon with Nigel in the London restaurant, even when he must have realized from Nigel’s remarks that the police were investigating his professional life and might any day discover the iniquitous things that were going on behind it – even then, he had shown no signs of discomposure.

  No doubt, like other criminals on the grand scale, he had a crazy belief in his own infallibility. But that did not weaken Nigel’s argument. Bogan was not a man who lost his nerve. He had not run away after killing Elizabeth Restorick, far from it, his composure had been almost flawless.

  Well then, why had he killed Andrew at all? Not, surely, because Andrew had evidence of his drug and blackmail activities; the police would almost certainly turn that up sooner or later. No, it must have been because Andrew could convict him
of Elizabeth’s murder. Why had Andrew held back from doing it, though, for so long? Was it just a kind of cat-and-mouse game? A revenge?

  Revenge! Now he was getting warmer. Had Bogan killed Andrew just to suppress his knowledge about Elizabeth’s murder, in the belief that Andrew’s knowledge would die with him, he would not have run away. But, if he knew the game was up anyway and believed that it was Andrew who had defeated him, he would disappear after killing him. This theory would fit in with Bogan’s having waited till the invitation to Easterham gave him an opportunity both to commit the murder and escape afterwards. In London, with all the suspects being closely watched, the chance of escaping would be far smaller.

  But there remained a few very awkward obstacles. How had Bogan introduced the sleeping-powders into the Ovaltine or the bowl of sugar? Why, if the murder was purely for revenge and there had been no necessity to search Andrew’s room for incriminating evidence against himself, did Bogan delay so long before leaving the house? Why, indeed, was Andrew’s room left in disorder at all? There could not have been a struggle, for Andrew had presumably been doped like the others. And if Bogan had somehow failed to dope Andrew and there was a struggle, why didn’t the maid hear it?

  Nigel groaned aloud. The superintendent glanced at him sympathetically over the top of his beer-mug.

  ‘Feeling poorly, sir?’

  ‘I’m feeling like Laocoon. I’m feeling like a professional contortionist who’s tied himself into seventy knots and forgotten how to undo them.’

  They rose to go. Out in the village street, Phillips again remarked that the weather was going to change. Nigel could not honestly say he noticed any alteration in the prevailing and seemingly eternal bleakness, but a faint sensation of excitement stirred in the pit of his stomach, a feeling of anticipation, like that of a poet in whom a poem is beginning to move.

  Taking his leave of the superintendent, he walked across to the Dower House, where he had gone to stay after the disappearance of Andrew Restorick. When dinner was over, he encouraged Clarissa Cavendish to talk once again about Elizabeth and Andrew. They had become firm friends during this last week. The long talks in Clarissa’s exquisite drawing-room had bound them together, for Miss Cavendish revealed to him the full extent of her love for the young Restoricks. Through their lives, warped and shattered as they had been, the tragedy of her own was sublimated. She had never infringed their privacy or taken advantage of their intimacy. They had remained her ‘dream children’, quite unaware of Clarissa’s love for their father. But throughout their childhood, and during their visits to Easterham after they had grown up, she had studied them with the passionate absorption of a mother and the detachment of a keen intelligence.

  Now, sitting upright in the straight-backed chair, her hands resting on the ivory stick, she returned once again to her favourite subject.

  ‘Poor Betty. She was born two hundred years too late. In my day’ – she raised a deprecating finger and smiled ruefully – ‘in the days I like to call mine, her vitality would have been recognized. The history books say that we found enthusiasm odious. But, at least, we were not ashamed of our feelings. Love made us swoon away. We gave sorrow its full measure of tears, and death an elegant epitaph. When we drank, we finished under the table, not in the confessional or the chemist’s shop. Betty might have been a king’s mistress. You recall, no doubt, the anecdote about the Duchess of Marlborough’ – her bright black eyes shot a naughty glance at Nigel – ‘how she told a friend, “To-day the Duke returned from the wars and pleasured me twice in his top-boots.” I find such behaviour vastly agreeable – and, I suspect, far beyond the capacity of the public figures of our own time. We may say, I think, without impropriety, that such heroic impulsiveness is a thing of the past. Men, in the cant phrase, are no longer men.’

  ‘Which is why Betty turned to Will Dykes?’

  ‘A sagacious observation, my dear Nigel. Mr Dykes’ breeding leaves much to be desired, but at least he retains the virility of the class from which he has risen. He would treat a woman, I fancy, neither as an angel, a dictator, nor a sow. The more I see of Hereward and Charlotte, the more I am led to think that calling in the New World has upset the balance of the old. A female may wish her husband to be a mere sleeping partner in a business conducted by herself, but ’tis unnatural and soon enough she will find it so. Will Dykes would have taken a stick to Betty – and she’d have vastly preferred that to all those young men of hers who behaved like carpets. I protest this modern kowtowing to womanhood is hideous immoral. A man of firm character was what Betty needed – one who would both support and direct her own exuberance.’

  ‘And do you think Andrew was an anachronism too?’

  Clarissa gazed sadly into the flickering fire. Tears came to her eyes.

  ‘Andrew’s is the real tragedy. Betty had, at least, lived some kind of life, even if it was a fruitless flowering. Andrew’s never began. You may say he had everything – charm, money, leisure, wit; but with all that, he was sterile, utterly sterile. I am not in the way of exaggerating. Ever since that thing happened to Betty in America, he has been driven by the Furies.’

  ‘He has never forgiven himself for failing his sister then, you mean?’

  ‘That, and more. Consider, I beg you, the shock poor Betty’s scandal must have given to a youth who had never before been confronted by real evil. Andrew – I must allow even my favourite some failings – was a thought priggish. By which I mean that his ideals – and they were very high – had been inherited, not quarried out of experience. But even that signified less than the fact of their extraordinary identity. As I have told you, they were like twins. I recollect how, in their childhood, when Betty had a nightmare, Andrew used to come into her room to comfort her. He told me once that he often knew when she was having a nightmare. It would awake him, with all the sensations of having woken from a nightmare himself. So, you see, when Betty went through that dreadful agony of experience out there, Andrew, I am convinced, felt it far more deeply – more physically and directly, shall I say? – than would the normal devoted brother.’

  ‘Would you say his sanity, in the broadest sense, had been affected by it?’

  ‘Sanity?’ A touch of the old crispness came into her tone. ‘That is an excessively vague word. Sanity, like some other qualities, lies in the eye – and the prejudices – of the beholder. You yourself, for instance, when you first came down here, thought that I was mentally deranged. Did you not?’

  Nigel grinned at her. ‘Like Justice with her scales,’ he replied, ‘I suspended my judgement.’

  ‘La! You are a sad prevaricator!’ said the old lady, keenly delighted. ‘No. I am not speaking of sanity. Let us say that what happened to Betty was, for him, the rape of his own innocence. It is a wound from which the heart never recovers. Nor had he the powers of resistance which would have fortified a coarser nature. His whole life since that day’ – Clarissa’s voice fell to a brittle whisper – ‘has been a penance for the sin which, through Betty, was committed against him. He was like a man who goes through life impotent.’

  Nigel felt strangely stirred, a little frightened almost, by the intensity of meaning which Clarissa’s fragile voice gave to her words. Her eyes shone, in the gleams of firelight, like blackberries. The hands, folded over her ivory stick, were as placid as cream.

  ‘I remember once, when Betty was ten years old …’ she began again.

  Lying in bed an hour later, Nigel lit another cigarette and made a deliberate effort to empty his mind of all the theories and perplexities which had grown up round the death of Elizabeth Restorick, like the thorn thickets round the Sleeping Beauty. Gradually they lapsed away. A confusion of images took their place, and amongst them, moving forward with the assurance of a conductor, something Clarissa Cavendish had told him this evening came to the front of the stage. As if of its own volition, while he lay back and quietly looked on, it called for silence, beckoned the instruments and began. Everything fell into place: each
image struck its true note in the symphony, answered its lead, contributed to the inevitable theme that was being built up. The burning cigarette scorched his lips. Absently he ground it out and took another. It might have been a cigarette of marijuana, for all he knew and tasted of it …

  Next morning he was awoken by the sound of water. Water was chuckling in the gutters, dripping from the eaves, singing everywhere. Superintendent Phillips was right. The weather had changed.

  Immediately after breakfast, Nigel sloshed his way through the melting snow up to the Manor. There he talked with Hereward Restorick, interviewed the servants, had a word with John and Priscilla, and inspected the acting cupboard. In the early afternoon he reached London and went to see Chief-Inspector Blount.

  ‘You’re looking horribly satisfied with yourself. Solved the case, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes. As a matter of fact I have, up to a point. I don’t take any credit, though. It just came to me. Last night.’

  ‘I’m extremely busy just now, Strangeways –’

  ‘It’s all right. Honestly. No joking. I had a talk with the Restorick kid this morning – the boy. He had the key to the problem all along, without knowing it.’

  Very deliberately, Chief-Inspector Blount pushed aside the papers on his desk, polished his pince-nez as if to get a clearer view of Nigel, and remarked sardonically: