The Dreadful Hollow

by Nicholas Blake

  Charles was torn between the two women—that was certain. And a man so divided, whose conscience is perpetually working overtime, is liable to crack. Psychologically, thought Nigel, the Charles who drove himself so mercilessly was more likely to have done the binoculars job than the erratic, self-indulgent Stanford. The binoculars could easily be a symbol of his unconscious revolt against the woman who obsessed him. He might have already become a split personality, deadly dangerous to himself and those around him. Did he suspect this himself? Was that why he had implored Nigel to “look after” the Chantmerles?

  Yet, at the back of Nigel’s mind, there was a nagging conviction that something had been said just now at the Hall which provided a clue to the binoculars episode. He strained to put his finger on it, but it eluded him like quicksilver.

  Celandine was sitting in her drawing room, with Mark Raynham beside her. She seemed untouched by her experience, unless it had given her eyes a brighter sparkle, her whole personality an air of vibrant excitement.

  “I’m just telling Mark he really mustn’t fuss about me. I’m perfectly all right,” she said, resting her hand lightly for a moment on the vicar’s.

  “She’s hopeless,” Mark said. “She ought to be in bed. I’ve seen too many cases of delayed shock in the war.”

  “Well, I’m not going to bed, till my bedtime.” The exquisite Botticelli face turned to Nigel. “We’ve not had a proper talk yet, Mr. Strangeways. I can’t wait to hear about these anonymous letters. Didn’t you say at lunch you knew who’d written them?”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  “Celandine, ought you really to—?”

  “Oh, Mark, don’t be so maddening. I’m not a Sèvres shepherdess. Are the police going to make an arrest soon?”

  “No. There are several points to clear up. And we’ve no real proof yet. By the way, Vicar, you can help—I’d like a word with you presently.”

  “How mysterious we are,” laughed Celandine. “All this male freemasonry. Protecting the little woman from life’s harsh realities.”

  “You’ve always been protected, and so you should be,” said the vicar, with that rough forthrightness of his which Nigel found extremely sympathetic. “If I could lay my hands on the man who sent you those—”

  Celandine’s laughter bubbled up like a crystal spring. “Mark, you’re straight out of the Idylls of the King. Sans peur et sans reproche. But you must stop breathing fire about a silly little trick—”

  “Celandine will talk as if she’d been sent a jolly practical joke, calculated to set the whole table in a roar.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it at all. It’s Bay I’m worried about, Mr. Strangeways. I wish you’d have a talk with her and find out what’s the matter. She’s closed up like a clam, and whenever she comes into the room—well, she stares at me so oddly.”

  “Nonsense, my dear. You’re imagining things. And after all, she had quite a turn too, you must remember.”

  “It’s not nonsense,” Celandine replied patiently. “Bay being like this, and Charles not coming to see me—it makes me feel as if I was in an isolation hospital. What’s wrong with them?”

  Mark Raynham gave Nigel a quick, appealing glance, which Celandine intercepted with the ease of a bird snapping up a fly.

  “Don’t be absurd, Mark,” she said gently. “I’ve known them both all my life. I’m very fond of them both. Do you really think I don’t use my eyes?”

  Nigel opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. If Celandine, knowing about Charles and Rosebay, took this attitude, there was nothing more to be said. Mark Raynham’s reaction was very different. His craggy face transfigured by a dawning hope, he said ingenuously: “So you don’t mind, Celandine? I’d always thought you—I mean—”

  “Charles and I were engaged once. I broke it off after my father’s death. Et ça c’est tout.” Celandine looked meditatively at the vicar. “The real problem is my sister, Mr. Strangeways. She’s looked after me for so long, and it ought to have been the other way round. Invalids are very selfish. I’m afraid it’s not been good for her, feeling tied to me like this.”

  “Oh, Bay’s all right. You needn’t worry about her,” said the vicar.

  “But I do, Mark. She had a bad nervous breakdown a few years ago, before you came to the parish. And I couldn’t help feeling responsible. She’s so good-hearted, underneath. I tried to persuade her to take a holiday afterward, but she wouldn’t leave me. So you see, Mr. Strangeways, this is where you could help.” Celandine made a charming gesture of appeal; her eyes were a darker, cornflower blue in the evening light that washed the room. “Someone from outside might do more than any of us.” She stretched her hand to Nigel in a gesture queenly yet intimate. “I know we can all rely on you.” As Nigel rose to go, she added: “And don’t forget to tell me when the anonymous-letter business is going to blow up. You’d better go along with Mr. Strangeways, Mark—he wants to talk to you.”

  “Wonderful woman, isn’t she?” said the vicar, limping along beside Nigel down the hill.

  “Very remarkable, yes.”

  “You know, it’s a great load off my mind, what she said about Charles. I’d thought she was still a bit taken up with him.” The vicar began to whistle cheerfully.

  When they reached the vicarage, Nigel asked him if he could get in touch immediately with the friend to whom he had written about his wife. Mark Raynham put through a long-distance call to London. The friend confirmed that he had never breathed a word to anyone on the subject of Mark’s letter.

  The next morning, having made an appointment with Inspector Randall, Nigel took a hired car in to Moreford. The Inspector had news for him. The Special Branch had turned up information that John Smart had been involved in a serious case of sabotage in 1940. Though nothing could be proved against him, the Security Officer of the factory where he was working had had every reason to suspect him of complicity, as an undercover activist, with the two men who were arrested for the crime. John Smart was sacked, and kept under observation. But shortly afterward, when Russia came into the war, he joined up, and his army record had been excellent. Futhermore, the Nottinghamshire police had interviewed Smart’s old mother again, and persuaded her to admit that, soon after coming to Prior’s Umborne, her son had written her a letter saying, in effect, that he believed he had now lived down the 1940 episode, had changed his political opinions and would be able to make a fresh start.

  “That just about clinches it,” said Nigel.

  “I reckon so. But which of them? They’re a pretty pair. D’you think they might both be in it?”

  “No. The poison pen always works alone, surely. Going to be damned difficult to prove, though.”

  “I’d say the woman was the weak spot. Might break her down. She struck me as nervy as a cat. If she’s not in it herself, she’s scared that her nearest and dearest has been up to mischief.”

  “Yes, I got that impression, too. But I’m glad I don’t have the job of softening her up.”

  Inspector Randall gave Nigel his slow, crafty, countryman’s smile. “You’d best earn Sir Archibald’s money. Tell me how you got onto it. Up-to-date psychological theories, eh?”

  “Psychological grandmothers! It was all plain as pie, as soon as it was established that two of the poison-pen letters were based on information that no one else in the village could possibly possess.”

  “Ah.” The Inspector nodded sapiently.

  “No one we’re concerned with, except for the vicar and his friend, and Smart and his mother, knew the secrets. But these secrets had been referred to in letters from Raynham and Smart to their confidantes—letters sent from Prior’s Umborne. Letters go through a post office. Therefore, the only person who could have discovered the secret was somebody in the post office. Somebody who had an obscene, or malevolent, or dotty curiosity about the affairs of newcomers to the village, and steamed open their letters. I told Daniel Durdle that anyone living in a post office has special facilities f
or the writing of anonymous letters. I hope it shook him. They’ve stopped, anyway.”

  “You’d say it was him, not Mother Durdle?”

  “Yes. The letters had an artistic touch which I don’t believe she’d be capable of. Daniel gets it from his father, I imagine—from the late essayist, Edric Chantmerle.”

  “Eh? What’s that?”

  “Yes. He’s a by-blow. It accounts for his hatred of the Chantmerle sisters—jealousy that they’ve got the things which his Chantmerle blood entitled him to. It’s also what he was blackmailing Rosebay over; but we’ll come to that in a minute. It accounts for a great deal of his warped personality. The proof of how bitterly he feels about it is in the letter he wrote to himself, of course. Why accuse yourself of alcoholism when you could write a nice juicy letter about bastardy? Only possible answer: because the latter is still too sore a subject. And conversely, if anyone else had written the letters, he’d have brought up against Daniel the old village rumor about his illegitimacy, not a feeble accusation of imbibing strong liquors. Daniel isn’t clever enough by half.”

  Nigel paused to light another cigarette. “Then there’s the clue of the other post box.”

  “But the other post box was never used. Yes, and there lies the clue,” said the Inspector, poker-faced.

  “Have you country bobbies nothing better to do than recline, with your feet on the table, reading Sherlock Holmes?”

  “Oh, we’re master minds down this way. As you were going to say, it’s significant that all the anonymous letters had Prior’s Umborne postmarks. If any had been posted in the other village box, they’d have gone straight into Moreford and been stamped there. Why weren’t any of them posted in that other box? Because it’s just opposite the New Inn and even at night there’d be a risk of being observed posting letters there—a risk, that’s to say, if you were Daniel Durdle, or Mrs. D. It’d look very peculiar—someone who lives at the post office putting letters into a box at the other end of the village.”

  Nigel and the Inspector eyed each other with some gratification. “We’re a couple of pretty clever chaps, I suspect,” said the former.

  “It was elementary. If Durdle had only stuck to information he got through gossip or snooping, like he used in all the other letters, it’d have been just another case of ‘the police are baffled.’”

  “Well, there’s no use your crying over his spilt milk. What do we do next?”

  “Can I rope him in over this alleged blackmail? I’d like to know more about that,” said Randall.

  Nigel told him everything Rosebay had said. Evidently, unless she had received and kept some letters from Daniel demanding money, or was prepared to co-operate with the police into trapping him over a further demand, no immediate steps could be taken against Durdle.

  “And I doubt if she would co-operate. It would be difficult for her to do so without the substance of the blackmail coming out in public, and that’s just what she doesn’t want—her sister to learn about their father’s disgrace.” Nigel took from his wallet the anonymous letter to Celandine Chantmerle which her sister had intercepted, and passed it to the Inspector.

  “I wonder could this link up with the attempt on Miss Chantmerle’s life,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “Rosebay had been paying Daniel to keep quiet about Edric Chantmerle. In this letter, however, he blows the gaff. Therefore, Rosebay must have already told him she was not going to pay any more. Therefore, when he walked up to the Little Manor the night before last—”

  “If he did.”

  “If he did, it could not have been to receive another payment. Therefore, it might have been to deposit the field glasses.”

  “Yes, that’s a point. And why should he lie about his walk if he hadn’t been up to something shady?”

  “On the other hand,” said Nigel, “when I was talking to Rosebay after lunch yesterday, she did rather draw my attention to Durdle; and also, she said that, last time she’d paid him, which was some little time ago, she’d told him she wasn’t going to pay any more; but I was quite convinced she was lying about this. Which rather confuses the issue. And why should she lie, anyway?”

  Inspector Randall’s eyes, fixed upon Nigel, had become almost dreamy. “Oh, well, if we’re just having a knock-up with theories, I could give you one for that. Rosebay is behind the binoculars business. She makes an appointment with Durdle for that night, promising him another installment of hush money. He goes up to the Little Manor, or wherever the rendezvous was, nearby, but finds nobody there. Rosebay has maneuvered him under the suspicion of having gone up to deposit the binoculars. And very neat too. He can’t tell us what he went there for, without admitting to his blackmail racket.”

  “Yes. It sounds plausible enough,” said Nigel. “And it gets us round the difficulty of Durdle having done the field glasses job. Why should he want Celandine killed when it paid him, via Rosebay, for her to be alive? But I can’t see Rosebay being all that clever.”

  “She must have had an accomplice, anyway, to doctor the glasses. And I reckon it must have been one of the Blicks.”

  “Any luck with them yet—the glasses, I mean?”

  “Sent them up to the scientific chummies at the Yard, together with assorted sweepings from Mr. Stanford’s workshop and the experimental room at the factory here. I like other folk doing the work for me. Then I can just sit and think.”

  “Very proper. Been having any nice thoughts lately?”

  “I’ll tell you one thing I’ve been thinking. This business of the field glasses—it doesn’t make sense. Can you imagine any dafter way of trying to kill a person?”

  “It’s certainly far-fetched.”

  “But not original, in this case. The Yard rang me just now to say they’d got a pair of binoculars in the Black Museum. Sent to a girl who’d been demobbed from one of the Services—quiet girl who’d never had any enemies, as far as they could discover. Sender was never traced. Whole thing a senseless mystery. These field glasses were doctored in a much more rudimentary way than ours, but they had needles all right. So, of course, I asked if any of our suspects had visited the Black Museum.” The Inspector paused aggravatingly.

  “Well?”

  “The answer was in the negative. But, by a funny coincidence your employer was taken round a year or two ago.”

  “My employer?”

  “Yes. The great Sir Archibald Blick.”

  Nigel was trying to digest this bit of information as he strolled round Moreford. It was the kind of country town which goes into a coma between its weekly markets. In the market square a few rural characters hung about by the cattle pens, exchanging desultory conversation, and at long intervals shifting their weight momentously from one leg to the other. An exanimate group of village housewives stood at the bus stop, in the patient attitudes of the dead awaiting Charon’s ferry. A policeman on point duty looked unhopefully for some traffic to direct. The streets smelt of dung, faintly laced with petrol fumes. Nigel walked downhill toward the station, by which his car was parked.

  On his right was the raw, red-bricked factory building. Beyond the railway line, the town shredded off into green fields. The sun, stepping out from behind billowy April clouds, struck a glint from the railway metals. Like quicksilver. And instantly Nigel’s mind fastened upon the thing that had been eluding him: a phrase of Stanford Blick’s: “Somebody hated her enough to try and puncture those bright eyes of hers.” The note that came with the binoculars had said: “Read this now, Bright Eyes, if you can.” No, thought Nigel, that could too easily be a coincidence. He made an impatient gesture, as if flinging an undersized fish back into the water, which drew some loudly and frankly expressed doubts as to his sanity from a group of children sitting on the railings. Nigel rat-tat-tatted an imaginary tommy-gun at them, with such versimilitude that one startled boy fell backward off the railings, while the rest followed his progress dumbly, eyes and mouths wide opened.

  There was something Stanford had
said, though. Nigel groped his way back through their last conversation at the Hall, till he came to it. Yes, that was really an extremely odd thing to say, even allowing for Stanford’s oddity. He fished his driver out of the Railway Arms Bar. The glimmering of an idea, bizarre yet rational, had come to him.

  Nigel directed the driver to take him to the Hall. By force of habit he walked round to the workshop at the back. The usual demoniac shindy from the compound of dogs greeted his arrival. He put his head in at the workshop door, but the place was empty.

  As he closed the door again, he became aware of a shadow, elongating itself with a chilling swiftness over the courtyard and running along the wall in front of him. Turning, he found himself face to face with Daniel Durdle.

  “I would like a word with you, Mr. Strangeways.”

  “By all means. In here?”

  The man shook his head, and led the way through the plantation into a paddock to the north of the house. They were not far from the hedge gap where Nigel had seen him hurrying past two nights ago.

  “We shan’t be overheard here,” said Daniel. He was wearing a black suit and hat—the garments, no doubt, in which he walked to the Gospel Hall on Sundays. They emphasized the dead whiteness of his face and hands. Standing there, in the lush April grass under the April sky, he looked like something out of another world—out of no human world—a figure summoned up from the vasty deep where nightmares breed. Nigel did not find it difficult to imagine why Rosebay Chantmerle was terrified of her half-brother.

  “You made an accusation against me yesterday,” said Daniel, “in front of a witness. A slanderous accusation.”

  “Yes.”

  “‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil.’”

  “Yes, and so is the pen,” said Nigel equably.