The Case of the Abominable Snowman

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘Who am I supposed to arrest?’

  Nigel spoke a name. Blount’s smooth features were violently agitated. His pince-nez wobbled.

  ‘Why, man, what are you talking about? That’s impossible. We’ve already –’

  Perched on the corner of Blount’s desk, Nigel began to talk.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ‘If I can catch him once upon the hip,

  I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.’

  SHAKESPEARE

  AS NIGEL WALKED up to the Manor next morning, with Will Dykes and Miss Cavendish, they could hear the sound of the piano mingled with the slurred water music of melting snow. A phrase was played over, rather laboriously, twice, then a pause. Then the phrase rippled forth perfectly.

  ‘Hereward is giving Priscilla her music lesson,’ said Clarissa.

  ‘He plays very nicely, doesn’t he?’ Will Dykes said. ‘Funny he should, when you come to think of it.’

  ‘You would allow us no accomplishments?’

  Dykes did not answer. Gazing at the façade of the Manor, the high-pitched roof from which the snow had peeled away in long strips, he said:

  ‘I never thought I’d come back to this house. And I hope I never see it again. There’s a curse on it.’

  A few minutes later the party from the Dower House were sitting in the drawing-room, together with the Restoricks and Miss Ainsley. Priscilla’s music lesson had been cut short.

  Nigel gazed round at the company. Hereward’s fingers were still unconsciously playing a phrase on the arm of his chair. Charlotte had forgotten to take off her Wellingtons when she came in from the garden – snow was melting off them on to the carpet. Eunice stared back at Nigel rather defiantly. Will Dykes was fidgeting with a waistcoat button. Only Clarissa Cavendish, her delicate, brilliant head looking small as a cameo above the bulky clothing in which she had swathed herself, seemed perfectly composed.

  Nigel went to stand with his back against the french windows that opened on the terrace.

  ‘One way or another,’ he said, ‘you’re all interested in what’s been happening at the Manor. So I thought it’d be only fair to let you all hear the explanation. It’s difficult to know where to begin.’

  He paused. There was a painful constraint all round him, reflected in his own expression.

  ‘I’d better tell you first how I hit on the truth. John told me.’

  Charlotte’s hand made a movement towards her lips, instantly checked.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Nigel. ‘He didn’t know the meaning of it, and he never need know. I had a talk with him yesterday morning. For reasons I’ll come to, I believed he might be able to tell me something of vital importance. He did. He said that, on the night Elizabeth died, her ghost came into his room.’

  ‘Ghosts?’ said Miss Cavendish testily. ‘Surely we are not to fiddle with the supernatural at this juncture?’

  ‘No. He assumed it was her ghost because next morning he heard she was dead, and because – mark this well – “her face was white as death”. Those are his own words. I want you to get this clear in your minds. At the time, it never occurred to John that his visitor wasn’t the flesh-and-blood Elizabeth. He wasn’t frightened. She just came into his room, looking very sad, bent over his bed – he was pretending to be asleep – and then went out again. Now the normal thing for a boy to have done under the circumstances would have been to speak to her. I asked him why he hadn’t done so. He couldn’t explain it properly, but I got the impression that her appearance overawed him – you know how children react to a violent emotional conflict in an adult: they draw in their horns and go still as mice. That’s why he pretended to be asleep.’

  ‘But why didn’t the boy tell the police about this. I simply can’t understand,’ said Hereward.

  ‘They asked him had he heard anyone passing his door that night. You know what literal minds children have. He hadn’t heard anyone passing the door. Besides, as I say, that midnight visitation was something he’d naturally close up about. I’d never have dreamt of it myself, but for something my wife said. The children were talking about ghosts to her. Priscilla had somehow got to hear of the Bishop’s room and the Scribbles episode. But Georgia got the impression that John, who was edgy on the subject, knew nothing about this – that he had some other “ghost” on his mind. So, after something Miss Cavendish told me the other night, I managed to draw it out of him.’

  ‘Something I told you?’ Clarissa’s black eyes looked startled.

  ‘Yes. We were talking about the sympathy that existed between Andrew and Betty. As if they were twins. You told me how, as children, when Betty had a nightmare, it used to awake Andrew and he would come into her room to comfort her.’

  A sudden exclamation broke from Charlotte.

  ‘Yes?’ asked Nigel encouragingly.

  ‘What you’re suggesting is that Betty’s agony, when she was murdered, communicated itself to Andrew. He went in and found her – like that.’

  ‘But, damn it, the door was locked,’ said Hereward obstinately.

  ‘Yes, the door was locked. At 11–30, at any rate. But Andrew admitted to us, rather incautiously, that he was good at opening locks. Go on, Mrs Restorick.’

  Her shrewd eyes held Nigel’s. ‘It’s been worrying me ever since. When we found Betty that morning, Andrew was so cool and competent. He took charge of everything. I wondered then how he managed to do it, when he was so devoted to Betty. You’d have thought the shock – but, of course, if he’d already been into her room during the night and seen – I was afraid,’ she went on, unsteadily, ‘afraid it was he who had – but now you’ve explained it differently, why he went to her room.’

  ‘You’ve hit on a great part of the truth. But not all of it. I should have seen, much earlier, that odd point about Andrew’s having been in control of the situation, but –’

  ‘Not all the truth?’ exclaimed Charlotte, her eyes pleading with him. ‘Surely you don’t still mean that Andrew –?’

  Nigel had opened his mouth to reply, when they were all startled by a cry from overhead and feet tumbling down the stairs.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ John was yelling. ‘Come quick! There’s someone inside the snowman.’

  ‘Damn!’ exclaimed Nigel loudly. ‘So that’s where he was put. What a fool I am! Under our noses.’

  Hereward was outside the door, ordering the children not to leave the house. Eunice Ainsley, her lips quivering, whispered:

  ‘Oh God! Poor Andrew! And I was there when he built it. I can’t bear any more of this.’

  Nigel, at the door, turned back to her. ‘It’s not Andrew in the snowman. It’s Dr Bogan’ …

  After lunch they collected in the drawing-room again. The police had come and gone, the body had been taken away. The face of the iniquitous doctor staring blankly out of the snowman, the draggled beard hiding the rope round its neck, haunted Nigel unpleasantly.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Andrew killed Bogan. I might have known where he’d hidden him too. The murder was planned, and the receptacle decided on. That’s why Andrew brought John an air-gun from London. The snowman stood below the nursery window. John would take potshots at the birds from that window. The birds were very hungry during the great frost – Andrew wanted them chivvied away from what was inside the snowman.’

  Charlotte Restorick shuddered. Her heavy, handsome face was darkened with horror.

  ‘Andrew,’ she whispered. ‘But why –?’

  ‘Andrew put Bogan in the snowman simply to gain time. He wanted to get out of the country, and he cleverly arranged things so that we should think it was he himself who had been murdered, and would concentrate the search upon Bogan.’

  ‘How long have you known this?’ asked Will Dykes.

  ‘It forced itself upon me gradually. So many things were wrong with the idea of Bogan’s having killed Andrew. How could Bogan have doped the Ovaltine? Why was Andrew’s room so disordered? Andrew did it himself, of course, to throw mo
re suspicion on Bogan. How could Bogan have known about the third garage key? The one that’s hung up by the back door? You, Mr Restorick, told me he was a bad driver, always got somebody else to put his car into your garage and take it out, because manoeuvring’s tricky there. I asked the servants yesterday morning. They and the chauffeur were quite definite Bogan had never made any inquiries about this key. How could he have unlocked the garage door, then, since the other two keys were in the possession of yourself and your chauffeur? Another point. Why should Bogan have delayed so long between the time the constable was knocked out and the car driven away –?’

  ‘But Robins told us Bogan was the man who knocked him out,’ objected Hereward.

  ‘No, he didn’t. He said he felt his assailant’s beard. That beard, which – by the way – is missing from your acting cupboard, is the one Andrew wore as the Wicked Uncle when you did that charade. A thick, formidable black beard, which could easily be trimmed to resemble Bogan’s.’

  ‘So Andrew spent that time dismantling the snowman and building it up again round – round the man he’d murdered,’ said Eunice. ‘Oh, I can’t believe it! I don’t know how he could force himself to do it.’

  ‘Andrew was extraordinarily sensitive and skilful with his hands. It would not be so difficult for him. It had already begun to snow again when Bogan arrived, and this would with luck obliterate the tracks he made round the snowman. Whether he’d planned out beforehand to use the snowman, I can’t say, John’s air-gun suggests that he did. Even if a fresh fall of snow hadn’t come to help him, the snow all over that bit of lawn was covered with tracks.’

  ‘I can’t think why we didn’t notice the new snowman was bigger than the old,’ said Charlotte. ‘It’d be bound to be bigger, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘The snowman had been there so long, it was a familiar figure. Even the children had stopped playing with it. And the fresh fall of snow would account for its looking bulkier and more shapeless. So we can reconstruct Andrew’s movements that night. He has already doped the Ovaltine or the sugar, so that no one on the first floor would awake, and disordered his bedroom. He puts on the beard, neatly puts the constable out and tucks him away in the boiler-room, enters Bogan’s room, strangles him in his sleep, packs Bogan’s things up in his suitcase, builds the body into the snowman, and departs.’

  ‘Why did he drive his car into that drift?’ interrupted Hereward. ‘Good driver, Andrew. Can’t see him doing that.’

  ‘It was another subtle touch to build up a picture of Bogan as the fugitive – Bogan who was a bad driver. Well, the next we hear of this fugitive is at the London terminus. He buys a ticket. Well, I ask you, if it had been Bogan, can we imagine him calling attention to himself in such a flagrant manner? But Andrew would. And, with his beard, his bronze complexion which, in a dimly-lighted station, would look sallow, and an assumed stoop, he could easily answer the description of Bogan which the police gave the ticket-collector. It was this business that first made me wonder whether somebody hadn’t been impersonating Bogan.’

  Will Dykes’ forehead was creased in a frown. ‘Is your theory that the pretended arrest of myself forced Andrew to take action? But why? I can’t connect it up. Why should it make him have to get rid of Bogan?’

  ‘That is a highly significant point. You see, Andrew must have known before he killed Bogan that your “arrest” was not genuine.’

  ‘But I thought the whole thing depended –’

  ‘If the police had really arrested you, it’d have been in the papers the next morning. The Restorick case has had plenty of publicity, in spite of the war. Andrew read the papers, presumably?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘It wasn’t in the papers. Therefore, Dykes hadn’t been arrested. But Andrew went through with his plan for killing Bogan. His motive, therefore, could have had nothing to do with the saving of an innocent man from trial. You see, what misled us all along was our assumption that Andrew had evidence against Bogan for Elizabeth’s murder. In fact –’

  Charlotte Restorick’s voice broke in, hoarse and unsteady, she was making a desperate effort to control it, to control her hands and features. Now she voiced what they were all thinking.

  ‘Please, Mr Strangeways. I beg of you, don’t keep us in this suspense any longer. What you are trying to tell us is that it was the other way round. Isn’t it? – that it was Bogan who had evidence against Andrew and therefore had to die? That it was Andrew who killed Betty?’

  The whole room went still. They stared at him with the most painful anxiety, as if he had come to tell them the result of a major operation upon someone dear to them. Nigel gazed long and seriously at Charlotte Restorick.

  ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘No, Mrs Restorick, Andrew didn’t kill Elizabeth.’

  Will Dykes broke the bewildered silence. ‘But this is fantastic. Are you telling us there’s no connexion between Bogan’s death and Betty’s?’

  ‘No. There is a connexion. Let me remind you of what John told me – about Elizabeth coming into his room that night. About her pallor and her sadness. She was pale as death, in the moonlight, he said. I questioned him very closely, and he stuck to that. But when we found her, her face was made up. Don’t you see it?’

  They glanced at each other, shaking their heads.

  ‘I’ll give you another hint, then. When the maid left her that night, Betty was removing her make-up, and she seemed “excited”. This, and subsequent events, led us to believe that she was expecting a lover in her room; that she began removing her make-up in order to hoodwink the maid. But – don’t you see? – if she was expecting a lover, the last thing she’d do would be to go into the children’s room in the middle of the night, looking so sad, looking as if –’

  ‘As if –’ Will Dykes’ words seemed to be dragged, against his will, out of the depth of his heart – ‘as if she was saying good-bye to them.’

  ‘Saying good-bye to them,’ echoed Nigel. ‘Yes. That is what she was doing. It was the last thing she did before she hung herself.’

  They sat in a stunned silence. At last Hereward found his voice. ‘Hung herself? But you told us – everyone said that – that it was murder rigged to look like suicide?’

  ‘Yes, it was very cleverly done. But the truth is just the opposite. Suicide rigged to look like murder. Even Bogan told the truth sometimes. You remember he informed us how Elizabeth had hinted at suicide to him – “I expect you’ll be glad to have one hysterical woman off your hands”?’

  ‘I am not to believe,’ remarked Clarissa crisply, ‘that Betty would take her own life. She was not a coward.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have done it for herself. I agree. But there was more at stake. The children. That’s why she went in to say good-bye to them. That’s why she seemed to the maid “excited”. It was more than excitement. It was the exaltation of a person who is about to perform a purely altruistic act.’

  ‘Eh? Altruistic? I don’t follow,’ said Hereward. ‘You mean she sacrificed herself for the children?’

  ‘Just that. Mind you, she was probably at the end of her tether in other ways too. I doubt if we shall ever know for certain now, but the likelihood is that she believed Bogan had her in his power; partly through the hypnosis treatment, partly through his control of her drug addiction. What Bogan was after, we may never know either. Maybe he wanted her as his lover, maybe it was just his vicious lust for torturing people’s souls. At any rate, I’ve no doubt in my own mind that the crucial moment for her came when he threatened to deprave John and Priscilla. The marijuana business makes it pretty clear what he was up to.’

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ said Charlotte. ‘Why couldn’t she have broken off her association with him, told us what he’d threatened to do to the children?’

  ‘First, because she may really have believed that the hypnosis treatment had put her in his power. Second, because no one but her own family – perhaps not even they – would have taken the word of a neurotic, unstable
drug-addict against that of an eminent doctor. She had no material evidence against him, you see. He would have said it was a case of morbid delusions, if she had attempted to expose him. And, above all, she was deadly afraid of Bogan. She knew that, even if she managed to discredit him with her family, he would sooner or later get his own back.’

  ‘I understand now,’ said Dykes. ‘She had to get rid of Bogan thoroughly, for good and all. So she killed herself in such a way as to throw the suspicion of murder on him.’

  ‘Oh no. It wasn’t that. You’re leaving out too much of the material evidence. No, she hung herself and left a suicide note fastening the responsibility on Bogan. Bogan’s reputation would have sustained any attacks a neurotic patient made upon it, but it would not sustain the police inquiry which would inevitably result from a patient’s suicide.’

  ‘Hold on,’ said Hereward. ‘That won’t do, y’know. There wasn’t a suicide note. We never found one.’

  ‘No. Andrew destroyed it – or at any rate, removed it.’

  Hereward goggled at him.

  ‘Ah, now I understand what you meant about the sympathy between those two poor children,’ said Clarissa.

  ‘Yes. The physical agony, the extreme emotional disturbance which Betty experienced when she killed herself was communicated to Andrew, like her nightmares when they were children. He woke up, went to her room, found the door locked and no answer when he called to her. He picked the lock and went in. There was her body hanging, and the suicide note. Reading it, he knew that all his suspicions about Bogan had been justified. Now Miss Cavendish and I have had some long talks about Andrew’s character. I won’t go over them with you, except to say that her account of him confirmed my own belief that what happened to Betty in America maimed and permanently distorted his mind. My point is this: when he found his sister dead and read the suicide note, it merely set a keener edge on a deadly enmity against Bogan that had existed for years.’

  ‘You mean, Bogan really was Engelman – the man who had ruined Betty?’ asked Charlotte.