“You have, eh?” cried Gale. “Who was she?”
“She was a young woman named Christine Hunks. She lived with her family—Mum and Dad and a younger brother—at Hounslow, and was a waitress in a local restaurant.” Hatchard paused to take another pull at his beer.
“Go on,” said Gale impatiently.
“That’s about all, sir. About two years ago, at the beginning of August, she left her home to go on a cycling holiday and that was the last they ever saw of her. They had one postcard.”
Alan suddenly saw a vivid picture of the girl wandering into the ruined garden of Sorcerer’s House, on that hot afternoon, with her milk and her packet of sandwiches. She had gone in search of peace and rest, and she had found—what? A crazy woman with a murder-bug gnawing at her brain?
“It doesn’t help much, does it, sir?” remarked Hatchard. He rubbed at the bald spot on the crown of his head. “There doesn’t seem to be any possible connection between this young woman Hunks and anyone in Ferncross.”
“Was she in the habit of taking cycling holidays?” asked Gale, tugging at his beard.
“No, this was the first,” replied Hatchard. “She’d only just bought a bicycle. It’s a funny thing,” he added thoughtfully. “Just shows what little things make big differences. She had a friend, a girl who worked in the same place, who was going with her. At the last moment this friend had an accident—fell down an’ broke her ankle. If she hadn’t done that, Christine wouldn’t have been alone.” He emptied the mug and set it down. “You know sir,” he said, “I’m beginning to think we’ve got a lunatic to deal with in this business.”
“Who kills two people in rapid succession and then waits nearly two years for his next victim,” snapped Gale. “Nonsense!”
“Nothing else seems to make sense,” said the inspector. “What sensible motive could there be for anyone wanting to kill a girl like Christine Hunks?”
“She might have seen something she wasn’t supposed to have seen,” said Gale. “Have you thought’ve that?”
“And the tramp?” said Hatchard. “Did he see something he wasn’t supposed to have seen, too?”
“I don’t know,” answered Gale. “You asked for a sensible motive an’ I’m giving you one, d’you see? Nobody ’ud want: kill a girl like that for gain. She could scarcely have stirred up sufficient hatred in anyone, during the short time she must have been here. They’re the chief motives for murder, eh? Gain—hatred—” He stopped abruptly. “By all the heads of the Lernian Hydra…!”
“What is it, Mr. Gale?” asked Hatchard.
“I don’t know… I’ve got to think...” Simon Gale flung himself down in a chair and clutched his head between his hands. “Look here, leave me alone, will you? I’ve just caught a glimpse of the whole pattern…the appalling, hideously cold-blooded design that was the motive for those three murders...”
*
The rain persisted throughout the following morning and the atmosphere in Bryony Cottage was a little depressing. Henry Onslow-White disappeared immediately after breakfast into his study with a muttered excuse that he had some work to attend to, and Flake joined her mother in the kitchen to help with the household chores, leaving Alan to his own devices.
She was quite obviously annoyed with him for absenting himself during the whole of the previous afternoon and evening without any very satisfactory explanation, and her attitude, in consequence, was verging on the frigid. He felt a little uncomfortable about it, but it was impossible to tell her where he had been. He spent most of the morning sitting on the bed in his room, smoking cigarettes, and trying to puzzle out what Gale had suddenly hit on last night, before he had unceremoniously thrown them both out. An ‘appalling, hideously cold-blooded design’ he had described it. It might, of course, be merely his flamboyant and exaggerated way of talking, but Alan had an idea that he had meant it literally. There had been an expression on his face as though he had suddenly been confronted with a nightmare.
Through rain-blurred the window of his room, Alan could see the jutting gable of Sorcerer’s House with the ivy-draped window of the Long Room. Three people had died there—violently.
And all three had died in exactly the same way...
What, in Heaven’s name, was the connection? What was the appalling design that Simon Gale had glimpsed? He was no nearer finding a solution by the time lunch was ready than he had been when he started.
The rain stopped in the early part of the afternoon and the sun came out. He asked Flake to come for a walk but she received the suggestion with a polite but firm refusal, and he gathered that he was not yet forgiven.
Alan went out on his own.
It was very warm, indicating that the hot spell was returning. Almost unconsciously he turned in the direction of Simon Gale’s house. He had no intention of calling. Gale had very clearly indicated that he wanted to be left severely alone until he had fully worked out the idea which had come to him. But it was a pleasant walk with the added attraction of passing Mr. Veezey’s beautiful garden.
There was another mystery, thought Alan, as he strolled slowly along the hedge-lined road leading up to the Dark Water. Or was it part of the same one? There was certainly something queer about the little man. By no means normal, and abnormality took strange twists sometimes. There had never been any satisfactory explanation for the threat which Miss Flappit had heard him utter. It was true he had denied it, but, although Miss Flappit had probably embroidered on what she had heard, it was distinctly unlikely that she had made the whole thing up.
Alan came to the bridge over the Dark Water. He stopped, lit a cigarette, and leaning on the old stone parapet of the little humpback bridge, stared down at the wide pool of green-scummed, brackish water.
‘If you do that, I’ll kill you!’
That’s what he had said—standing on this very spot. And Paul Meriton had laughed. What had he threatened to do to Veezey that had upset him so much? Upset him to such an extent that he had cried.
Was this part of the ‘appalling, hideous and cold-blooded design’?
Alan finished his cigarette and resumed his walk. The sun shone down hotly, drawing from the wet earth that wonderful scent which has no counterpart unless it be the tang of burning leaves on a frosty, autumn afternoon. This green and pleasant land which lay in peaceful beauty on either side, stretching away to the distant hills, seemed the very antithesis of violence. But violence had happened here before and probably would again. He remembered the scorched earth and the blasted, tortured trees of the villages of France which he had seen just after the war.
‘Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile’. Man had decidedly made a mess of his green and pleasant inheritance, and was spending vast sums of money and brainpower in an endeavour to wipe it out altogether.
Mr. Veezey was working in his garden when Alan came in sight of the gate. He looked up as he heard somebody approaching with his habitual nervous, half-scared expression. To Alan’s surprise, he smiled rather hesitantly when he saw who it was.
“Nice now, isn’t it?” said Alan cheerfully, pausing by the gate.
Mr. Veezey swallowed with difficulty. A little uncertainly he moved nearer to the gate. He said, in his tremulous voice:
“I—er—I owe you an apology. I’m—er—afraid I was—er—rude the other day.” He gulped again and his fingers strayed to his small chin. “I’m rather—er—shy, you know. People frighten me...”
This candid admission so embarrassed Alan that he could think of nothing to say. Fortunately Mr. Veezey continued without waiting for a reply:
“You—er—seemed interested in—er—my garden,” he said diffidently. “Would you...care to come in and—er—look at it?”
“I should, very much,” said Alan, and Mr. Veezey opened the white gate for his guest to enter.
“I—er—think gardening is the most pleasant and most rewarding of—er—all hobbies,” said Mr. Veezey, as he conducted his visitor round his small domain. “
There is always something—er—fresh and fascinating about it.”
Alan quickly realized that he was an expert on his subject, and, as he waxed enthusiastic over his flowers, it was noticeable that his nervousness became less in evidence. At the back of the house was a small but perfect lawn, a velvety oblong of emerald green set in a profusion of carefully blended colour; and beyond this, screened by a mass of climbing roses, was a little kitchen garden and a tiny greenhouse, in which Mr. Veezey reared the seedlings and cuttings that formed the basis of his garden.
“Did you do all this yourself?” asked Alan.
“Oh yes, everything,” answered Mr. Veezey, with a note of pride in his voice. “There was nothing here when I came. Nothing. Only rank grass, and a great many weeds and nettles. That is the pleasure, you know...”
“It must have taken you a long time,” said Alan.
“Eight years. I have enjoyed every minute of it. There was a time when I thought all my labour had been for nothing…” His face clouded at the unpleasant memory, but he did not pursue the subject. Alan would have liked to ask what had happened, but he was afraid that it might jeopardize Mr. Veezey’s friendly attitude and refrained.
It was over an hour before he left, and he found that he had thoroughly enjoyed the interlude. There was something very refreshing in the little man’s simple and unaffected outlook.
As he walked slowly back to Bryony Cottage, he wondered what had originally induced that almost painful shyness. ‘People frighten me...” There was something definitely psychological in that. Something, perhaps, that had occurred in childhood to an over-sensitive nature...
An outsize inferiority complex, thought Alan. That’s what he’s suffering from.
And an outsized inferiority complex, coupled to a sensitive and highly intelligent mind, could produce the most unexpected results—sometimes very dangerous ones.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Onslow-Whites had almost finished tea by the time he got back to Bryony Cottage. Because the grass was still wet after the rain, the table had been set on the tiny veranda, and, in spite of Alan’s protests, Mrs. Onslow-White insisted that a fresh pot would be made for him. Flake, who, although still far from her natural self, seemed a little less frigid than she had been earlier, went off to make it, and Alan settled himself in a vacant chair.
He was telling them, between mouthfuls of cucumber sandwich, about his afternoon with Mr. Veezey when Flake returned with the fresh tea.
“So that’s where you’ve been,” she remarked, setting the pot down in front of her mother. “We rather wondered what had happened to you.”
“You mean you did,” grunted Henry Onslow-White, brushing cake crumbs from his trousers. “You know, Boyce, you must be about the only person in Ferncross whom Veezey has been the least friendly with.”
“I thought, when you didn’t come back in time for tea,” said Flake, “that you’d gone off somewhere again with Simon.”
“Poor Mr. Veezey,” said Mrs. Onslow-White, shaking her head. “It really must be dreadful to suffer such acute shyness. Such a drawback.” She handed Alan a cup of tea. “I’m quite sure that he’s a very nice man, but he must be terribly lonely.”
“I guess it doesn’t worry him much,” said Alan. “He seems to be happy enough with his garden.”
“Lovely place he’s made of it,” said Henry Onslow-White. “When he first came here it was nothing but a wilderness.”
“So he told me,” said Alan, stirring his tea. “He said something else which I couldn’t understand.” He repeated the little man’s remark about all his labours being for nothing.
“Did he say that?” asked Flake quickly. “I wonder if it could have had anything to do with Paul?”
“Why should it have?” inquired Alan.
“He owned the land,” answered Flake. “Mr. Veezey wanted to buy it, but Paul wouldn’t sell.”
“Paul didn’t like Mr. Veezey,” remarked Mrs. Onslow-White. “He couldn’t understand him, of course. That meek manner irritated Paul. Meekness does some people, you know. I’ve always thought how wrong it is—that saying that the ‘meek shall inherit the earth’.”
“Paul hated selling land,” put in her husband. His chair creaked as he reached over and helped himself to a cake. “Perhaps Veezey ’ull be able to get it, now, from the solicitors.”
Here was something, thought Alan, that might explain the threat on the bridge over the Dark Water, which Miss Flappi had overheard. Supposing Meriton was trying to get his land back. Perhaps it was on a very short lease and he had refused to renew. To what lengths would Veezey have gone to keep his garden?
“I suppose all the property goes to Fay?” said Mrs. Onslow White.
“They’ve got to find her first,” mumbled her husband through a mouth full of cake. “That wild idea of Simon’s—that Paul had killed her and hidden the body—proved to be a wash-out. I knew it would.”
“They did find a body, dear,” said his wife gently.
“Yes, I know,” grunted Henry Onslow-White. “That was the most extraordinary thing.” He leaned back in his chair, pulled out a handkerchief and mopped his face. “The whole thing’s extraordinary. I wonder if they’ll ever find out the truth about it?”
“I’m quite sure Alan and Simon will.” There was a slightly malicious note in Flake’s voice. “If they don’t, it won’t be for want of trying, will it, Alan?”
So she still resented the fact that he hadn’t taken her into his confidence concerning his excursions with Simon Gale. Alan wondered what the result would be if he suddenly exploded his bombshell, there and then. If he told them that Fay Meriton was in a mental home because her husband had believed that she was responsible for the murder of the girl whose body had been found in the ruined house, and also for the murder of the tramp.
“Much better if Simon ’ud leave it to the police,” commented Henry Onslow-White. “It’s their job, and they should be left alone to get on with it.”
Alan decided that it was more diplomatic to say nothing.
After tea, Flake asked him if he would like a game of tennis.
“There are some pretty good hard courts just off the Green,” she said. “We ought to be able to find one vacant if we go soon.”
Now Alan rather fancied himself at tennis. He played regularly at home and, in the hope that he might get a game or two during his holiday, had brought his rackets with him. In the excitement of Paul Meriton’s death, and all that had followed from it, any thought of tennis had been driven completely from his mind, but, at Flake’s suggestion, he decided that a really strenuous set or two was just what he needed.
It would be a relief from ‘ghosts and goblins’ and designs that were ‘appalling, hideous and cold-blooded’.
He changed quickly, and expected that he would have to wait for Flake, but when he came down she was waiting for him. And very attractive she looked in her crisp white shorts and sleeveless white blouse.
He helped her drape a light dust coat round her bare shoulders, and they set off for the Green.
Only two of the four courts were in use when they arrived, apparently by friends of Flake, for they exchanged greetings, and, dismissing all thoughts of murder and mayhem from his mind, Alan settled down to concentrate on the game.
Rather to his surprise, though why it should have been he couldn’t have explained, Flake proved to be extremely good. She was fast and she could place a ball with unerring judgment. But it was her service that he found the most deadly. The ball came whistling over the net, within a few inches of the top, and with the speed of a bullet.
They played three sets and although Alan won two of them, it was only by exerting himself to his fullest capacity.
“I guess I didn’t know you could play like that,” he said, pulling on his sweater. “We must do this more often.”
She smiled, her face slightly flushed, and she was still a little breathless. The last remnant of her bad temper was gone.
�
�Paul taught me to play,” she said. “When I was a schoolgirl. He was first-class.”
A stentorian hail shattered the peace of the evening and startled the birds in the trees. Alan looked round. At the entrance to the courts stood Simon Gale, waving furiously, and grinning like a malignant gargoyle.
“It’s Simon,” said Flake unnecessarily. Even the people on the other side of the Green must have been aware of the fact. She looked a little annoyed.
“Hello, young feller,” cried Gale. “I’ve been looking for you. Henry told me I’d find you here.”
They collected their rackets, and the box of tennis balls, and went over to him.
“It’s really too bad of you, Simon,” greeted Flake.
“What is?” he demanded, raising his bushy eyebrows.
“Well, I suppose this means that you’re going to commandeer Alan again for something or other.”
“Now, listen to me, my good wench,” said Gale, “you can’t expect to tie him to your apron-strings all the time.”
“All the time!” echoed Flake. “I haven’t seen very much of him, lately.”
“And you don’t like it, eh?” remarked Gale, hugely amused. “Well, you won’t have to put up with it much longer. But tonight’s important, d’you see? I’ve got a little job that I want him to help me with.”
“Oh, well...” She spoke lightly, but the flush had deepened under her eyes, “I suppose I can walk home by myself.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Alan.
“Of course she won’t,” agreed Gale. “Come along, we’ll go and call on Jellyberry.”
Without waiting for a reply, he seized each of them by an arm and propelled them at a furious pace across the Green towards the Three Witches. The bar was not very full, and Mr. Jellyberry welcomed them with a beaming smile.
“Now,” said Simon Gale, cocking an inquiring eyebrow at Flake. “What would you like?” For a moment she looked mutinous, and then her face cleared and she laughed.
Sorcerer's House Page 15