Head of a Traveller

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘Was Oswald Seaton carrying any luggage?’

  ‘Apparently not. Why?’

  Nigel was frowning in concentration. ‘I wish you’d find out from the Left Luggage Office at Chillingham Junction if they’d any unclaimed articles left over from that night. A cheap suitcase possibly. Though why should he deposit it at the station? You see, if they haven’t, it means that Oswald turned up here with nothing but what he could carry in his pockets—shaving tackle, toothbrush, etc.’

  ‘Just so. But—’

  ‘Don’t you see? That means he was expected. It means he knew somebody here would look after him, rig him out. And how could he know that, if this somebody hadn’t been in communication with him? Judging by past history, he’d have had every reason, otherwise, to expect to be chucked out on his ear.’

  ‘You may be right,’ said the Superintendent, cautiously. ‘But why should any one at Plash Meadow want Oswald back? I don’t know the legal ins-and-outs of it; but when the original owner of a property, presumed dead, is found to be living, it’ll likely make things vairy awkward for the present owners, to say the least of it.’

  ‘Even if they’ve still got the same hold over him which compelled him to disappear originally?’

  ‘Aye, there’s that, to be sure. But it was your own idea that something had happened—maybe his seeing that picture in the old society periodical—which gave Oswald the all-clear to come back to this country.’

  Nigel’s eyes were fastened upon a spider hauling itself up its own thread in a slant of sunlight at the summerhouse door. ‘What it boils down to, Blount, is this,’ he said slowly. ‘Find someone here to who’s advantage it would be for Oswald to return from the dead, when he did, which implies someone who knew he was alive, which probably means someone who was instrumental in Oswald’s disappearance ten years ago, in the fake suicide, and—’

  ‘And you’ve found the murderer?’ asked Blount, with a quizzical glance at his friend.

  ‘Oh, dear me, no. You’ve eliminated one suspect. But you’ve also begun to crack the case open.’

  They talked for a few minutes longer. Then the Superintendent rose to go. Nigel walked pensively towards the garden-close of the old barn, where Rennell Torrance was asleep with a newspaper over his face. Mara had just gone indoors, Nigel noticed, presumably to prepare lunch. It seemed a good opportunity for a private talk with the painter.

  Nigel shook him unceremoniously by the shoulder. Torrance grunted, heaved up in his chair; the paper slid off his face.

  ‘Eh? What’s that? Oh, it’s you.’

  ‘Sorry to wake you up. But I’ve an urgent message for you from the Superintendent. He wants to see you when he comes back this afternoon. About two-thirty.’

  A flicker of apprehension came and went in the man’s eyes.

  ‘Wants to see me? What the devil for? I’ve told him everything I know about—’

  ‘I doubt if you have,’ said Nigel cheerfully.

  ‘Are you suggesting—?’

  ‘You misunderstand me. In a police investigation, as new facts crop up, fresh questions arise. So the witnesses have to be interrogated again. Over and over again, sometimes.’ Nigel gazed placidly at a feathery white cloud in the sky above Torrance’s head. ‘Absolute terror, old Blount is, once he gets his teeth into a case. Probes away, you know, like a dentist with a drill.’

  ‘The metaphors are rather mixed,’ said Torrance, laughing wheezily, ‘but I see what you mean. Have a drink, old man.’

  Nigel took the gin and lime which Torrance handed him and resumed his scrutiny of the cloud. A silence fell between them, which Nigel had no intention of breaking first. A bee hummed a light tenor against the distant bass of the weir.

  ‘What’s he after now?’ said the painter at last. Nigel lowered his eyes, taking in the man’s shabby, dissolute face, the pudgy hand which trembled as it raised the glass, the unconvincing air of impersonal interest.

  ‘Blount? Oh, Oswald Seaton’s past, of course. His supposed death. Who profited by it. Who stood to lose by his return. That sort of thing.’

  ‘He can’t need me to tell him the answers.’

  Nigel spread out another silence, like bait. Torrance could not refrain from taking it, after a little.

  ‘Well, I mean to say, of course nobody who knows Robert and Janet could imagine for a moment that they’d—but, as a purely academic point, it was they who profited by it. Robert did come in for the property. And he needed it.’

  ‘And they’d be highly embarrassed by Oswald’s resurrection? It isn’t really so academic, is it? And then there’s yourself.’

  ‘Me? Don’t be absurd, old man. I’d nothing to lose.’ The phrase touched a spring of self-pity in the painter. ‘I’ve not got a reputation, like Robert: or Janet’s insane amour propre. I’m a failure, by the world’s standards.’ He gave a creditable imitation of what novelists call a hollow laugh. ‘Not that I’d choose to be anything else. I’ve no use for these cheap successes. In the arts, success always corrupts. What matters is integrity. By that standard, my work is bound to survive—oh, yes, in fifty years’ time, when I’m safely underground, the dealers will be putting their fancy prices on it. And—’

  ‘And, in the meantime, you starve in your attic,’ said Nigel, gazing into his gin and lime.

  The painter gave him a sulky look. ‘That’s rather uncalled-for. One can be starving for other things than food: for a bit of recognition, for instance. And no one likes living on another man’s charity.’

  ‘Well, there’s something you had to lose by Oswald’s return. Or would he have allowed you to stay on in the old barn?’ asked Nigel, bringing Torrance firmly back to the point. Equally firmly the painter grasped it. Raising his voice, he exclaimed:

  ‘My good Lord! One doesn’t do murder to maintain one’s tenure of a charming piece of old-world brick and mortar. At least,’ he added, with a singular glint of malice in his eyes, ‘at least I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Don’t you be so sure, Rennell,’ came a gentle voice from behind him. Robert Seaton had approached unobtrusively: raising his pipe-stem in salutation to Nigel, he sat down cross-legged on the grass beside them.

  ‘But I am. Quite sure. I’ve lived hard before, and I could again.’

  ‘Same here,’ murmured the poet. ‘Though I’d rather not.’ There was an appeased, detached, floating-in-air look about him, a look of delightful exhaustion which Nigel had noticed often enough before during this last week: the poem was still going well.

  ‘What are you two talking about?’ he asked.

  Nigel said, ‘Artistic integrity.’

  ‘Oh, that. Dear me.’ The poet waved it away with the stem of his pipe. The effect on Rennell Torrance was positively embarrassing. His slack, heavy body stiffened with the rage of some long-suppressed emotion (was it pure jealousy? Nigel wondered: or was it fear, finding a safe outlet here?)

  ‘That’s absolutely typical of you, Bob,’ he said. ‘You’ve made a name. You can afford to lie back on your bed of laurels and be amused at the idea of integrity. Or you think you can. But by God! at least I do produce some work. I may be living on charity, but I’ve not been corrupted by luxury, not been atrophied. The artist lives the life of a bourgeois rentier at his peril, and you damn’ well know it. One of these fine days you’ll be asked to account for your talent. And you’ll have to answer, “I buried it, Master—buried it under a heap of roses.”’

  The tirade continued bitterly for some time. When it was ended, Robert Seaton said:

  ‘How you do go on, Rennell! I don’t believe in all this fussing about integrity and the proper life for the creative artist. It just uses up energy that ought to go into one’s work. There’s only one thing people like you and me need to pray for’—the little figure on the grass was oddly impressive—‘patience. Patience. And an act of God. We can do something about the former: the latter—that’s His worry.’

  ‘Oh, phooey! And He moves in a mysterious way, you’ll say next. H
e’s certainly taken a long time to—’

  ‘He does indeed,’ remarked the poet, a queer little ripple of humour passing over his face. ‘A very mysterious way indeed. However, we must take Him as we find Him.’

  Nigel could feel, like an emanation, the poet’s authority. No, it was not exactly authority: it was a supreme inward confidence, which made him, for the present at any rate, intact and inviolable. No wonder he exasperated Rennell Torrance beyond measure. There was no getting at Robert Seaton just now. Nigel said:

  ‘This is all very interesting. But I came here about a different kind of mystery.’

  ‘The bloody old murder,’ said Rennell Torrance, who had been refreshing himself once again from the bottle. ‘Very sordid. Not at all the sort of thing we Laceys are accustomed to.’

  ‘What the police will ask you,’ pursued Nigel, using his convenient formula, ‘is why you were so extraordinarily disturbed by the head.’

  ‘The police are damn’ fools then. Who wouldn’t be disturbed when a head falls out of a tree right at his feet?’

  ‘I don’t mean that head. I mean the clay head your daughter did. Before she altered it. While it still bore the expression of a fiend. Of Oswald Seaton.’

  ‘Ah, yes. It certainly did give me a turn. The expression on it, I mean. Queer girl, Mara,’ said her father.

  ‘But a clever bit of modelling doesn’t give one a heart attack. Unless —’

  ‘Unless?’ interrupted Torrance pugnaciously.

  ‘Well—I’m only telling you what the police will think—if you’d killed Oswald Seaton the week before, and removed his head, and then were confronted by the living image of it in your studio, that would account for—’

  ‘What utter bunk! I—we all had Oswald on our minds just then, quite naturally, and—’

  ‘Oh, no. There was no reason, at that time, for any one to dream that the murdered man was Oswald Seaton. Any one but the murderer, that is,’ Nigel cut in swiftly.

  ‘Lock here, this is outrageous! Who the devil are you to come pestering us like this? A bloody nosey parker, setting your piddling little verbal traps!’

  Rennell Torrance clawed himself out of his chair and loomed unsteadily above Nigel. He was almost beside himself with anger: but it was the anger of a frightened man; and well it might be, thought Nigel, after such a slip.

  ‘Don’t get so fussed, Rennell. Strangeways is only telling us what our behaviour looks like from the police point of view. We should be grateful to him,’ said Robert Seaton, who had been listening to the previous exchanges with the bird-like, intent attitude which was becoming familiar to Nigel. ‘The most trying thing about a business like this is that the innocent and the guilty are equally in the dark. The police pop in and out, asking every one the most prosaic, drab questions—it’s like a bad play, really; you’ve no idea what goes on in the characters’ minds when they’re off the stage.’

  If Robert Seaton had been talking to gain time for Torrance to recover his composure, he was successful enough.

  ‘Trying, you call it? It certainly is. Though you don’t seem to turn a hair,’ grumbled the painter. He sat down again, poured himself another drink and turned to Nigel. ‘I’ll tell you why Mara’s head upset me. The last time I saw Oswald, he did look just like that. Quite literally, his head was the last I saw of him.’

  Robert Seaton unexpectedly chuckled. ‘Rennell has a great turn for the macabre,’ he remarked, with childlike appreciation.

  ‘Oswald was walking away over the dune,’ Torrance continued. ‘Scrambling down the far side of one of them, he turned round. I saw his head over the top, looking back. His body was cut off by the line of the dunes. Quite prophetic.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ asked Nigel. ‘You don’t mean—?’

  ‘Yes. It was ten years ago. The evening he—er—disappeared. I was probably the last person to see him.’

  ‘We were all there,’ said Robert Seaton. ‘In the neighbourhood, I mean. Oswald had asked—’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Nigel interrupted. ‘This never came out at the inquiry, did it?’

  Rennell Torrance replied, ‘My seeing him? No, it didn’t.’

  Nigel had found himself extraordinarily disconcerted by this revelation. He had an odd impression, too, that Seaton and Torrance were not just stone-walling; that they were stealing quick runs; and for the moment at any rate there was a close understanding between them. Or could it be that, to change the metaphor, they were shortening their front? Was one important position being surrendered, the better to defend some key-point?

  ‘Why not?’ he asked, rather feebly.

  ‘Why didn’t it come out? Because I wasn’t asked about it, I suppose,’ said the painter.

  Robert Seaton knocked out his pipe on the leg of Nigel’s chair. ‘I think you should be a bit more forthcoming, Rennell,’ he said.

  ‘Well, then. All the evidence pointed to Oswald’s having committed suicide. There was a farewell letter and so on. If I’d said I was on the dunes, too, and had seen him—well, it might have been misunderstood, produced unnecessary complications.’

  ‘You mean, you might have been suspected of doing away with him?’

  The painter nodded curtly.

  ‘The police would have discovered you had a motive for killing him?’

  ‘Every one who knew Oswald had a motive for killing him,’ said Torrance, rather theatrically. ‘He was a running sore on the face of humanity, if you don’t mind me saying so, Bob.’

  ‘So your motive would have been one of pure social hygiene?’ Nigel commented. ‘Oh, well, if you’re determined to be evasive—’

  ‘I’m sorry, but—oh, damn it all, it’s not my secret only! It affects other people.’

  Nigel got the impression that the painter, though he studiously avoided looking at Robert Seaton, was really addressing him—whether in appeal or in challenge, Nigel could not be sure. He heard Seaton gently murmuring:

  ‘“He had done most bitter wrong

  To some who are near my heart.”’

  ‘I think we’d better stop talking in rhymed riddles,’ said Nigel irritably. ‘But first, may I have all the facts about your brother’s fake suicide? There seems to be quite a lot that didn’t come out at the inquiry, or didn’t get into the papers anyway. What were you doing there, for instance?’ Nigel asked Torrance.

  There was a marked silence. So the run-stealers are a bit rattled, thought Nigel; they’d like to have a few private words with each other between the wickets; but they won’t, if I can prevent it.

  At last Rennell Torrance took up the parable. The story as he told it, calling on Seaton for corroboration from time to time, or led on by a question from Nigel, and as Nigel himself wrote it down shortly afterwards for Blount to have checked by Inspector Slingsby, the officer working on that end of the case, ran as follows:

  The Torrances had first met Oswald while on a caravan holiday in 1937. He had allowed them to camp in the Plash Meadow fields and supplied them with milk and water. The following summer he invited Rennell and Mara to stay at his holiday cottage in the Quantocks, half a mile from the sea. The other members of the party were Robert Seaton, Janet Lacey and her mother.

  It was in the second week of this holiday, the last week of August, that the ‘suicide’ occurred. Two days before, Mara, then aged fifteen, had been taken seriously ill with what seemed to be a kind of nervous breakdown. She had been nursed by Janet Lacey: but, according to Rennell, it was chiefly Robert Seaton’s care and solicitude for the girl which had finally restored her to health. Janet Lacey, who was going through a Christian Scientist phase at the time, had persuaded Rennell not to call in a doctor.

  Oswald Seaton himself had been very much on edge the previous week. It was his first holiday from the business since the death of his father, two years before; but he seemed unable to keep his mind off it, was continually ringing up the Redcote factory, complaining to Robert about the strain of the work, the severity of foreign competitio
n, etc., and was subject to alternations of irritability and extreme depression. These were aggravated by Mara’s illness—he had taken quite a fancy to the girl and used to spoil her with presents; indeed she was the only member of his house-party who had seemed able to raise his spirits. When Mara fell ill, Janet Lacey had her hands full: for, as well as looking after the girl, she had also to minister to her host, Oswald having got it into his head that he was responsible for Mara’s illness, through having kept her out too long in the fierce heat of the previous day and allowed her to get sunstroke. However that might be, he had turned to Janet in his new trouble, and when she was not at the girl’s bedside, she was usually with him.

  After dinner on the evening of his disappearance, Oswald had seemed half distraught. He said to his brother, ‘I can’t stand this bloody house another minute. I’m going for a walk. Don’t let any one wait up for me.’ Robert went upstairs and read to Mara for an hour or so, then went to bed. Old Mrs Lacey had already retired. Janet, who was sleeping in Mara’s room, went to bed soon after Robert left the girl. Rennell Torrance had gone out for a walk when dinner was over. No doubt he had dined heavily. He fell asleep in a pocket of the dunes, a hundred yards or so away from the sea. Awakened by the sound of feet scrunching the sand, he had seen in the last of the daylight Oswald Seaton walking seaward, away to his left. Oswald turned round once, before disappearing behind the last ridge of dunes: whether he had noticed Rennell Torrance, the latter could not be sure. A sea-mist, which had been hovering over the Channel, was now beginning to drift inshore. Rennell heard the scrape of a boat being launched from the secluded cove beyond. He assumed Oswald to have gone fishing, as he occasionally did late in the evening.

  The next day, fishermen had found Oswald’s dinghy anchored in the Channel, a mile from shore. It was empty, but for his clothes and, pinned to the coat, a letter for Robert. Oswald was known to be a very poor swimmer. Tracks of footprints offered by the dunes and the muddy foreshore proved that nobody had accompanied Oswald in the boat. The police had no doubt made exhaustive inquiries as to the possibility of Oswald having transhipped from his own boat to another. Four factors had weighed heavily in their final decision to accept the disappearance as a suicide, and in that of the Court of Probate when later it gave leave to presume Oswald Seaton’s death: