“Now don’t disturb yourself, Vicar,” said Miss Bligh, suddenly appearing at his elbow. “Mrs. Beresford knows, I’m sure, that it was nothing to do with you. It was indeed extremely kind of her to offer to help, but it’s all over now, and she’s quite well again. Aren’t you, Mrs. Beresford?”
“Certainly,” said Tuppence, faintly annoyed, however, that Miss Bligh should answer for her health so confidently.
“Come and sit down here and have a cushion behind your back,” said Miss Bligh.
“I don’t need a cushion,” said Tuppence, refusing to accept the chair that Miss Bligh was officiously pulling forward. Instead, she sat down in an upright and exceedingly uncomfortable chair on the other side of the fireplace.
There was a sharp rap on the front door and everyone in the room jumped. Miss Bligh hurried out.
“Don’t worry, Vicar,” she said. “I’ll go.”
“Please, if you will be so kind.”
There were low voices outside in the hall, then Miss Bligh came back shepherding a big woman in a brocade shift, and behind her a very tall thin man, a man of cadaverous appearance. Tuppence stared at him. A black cloak was round his shoulders, and his thin gaunt face was like the face from another century. He might have come, Tuppence thought, straight out of an El Greco canvas.
“I’m very pleased to see you,” said the vicar, and turned. “May I introduce Sir Philip Starke, Mr. and Mrs. Beresford. Mr. Ivor Smith. Ah! Mrs. Boscowan. I’ve not seen you for many, many years—Mr. and Mrs. Beresford.”
“I’ve met Mr. Beresford,” said Mrs. Boscowan. She looked at Tuppence. “How do you do,” she said. “I’m glad to meet you. I heard you’d had an accident.”
“Yes. I’m all right again now.”
The introductions completed, Tuppence sat back in her chair. Tiredness swept over her as it seemed to do rather more frequently than formerly, which she said to herself was possibly a result of concussion. Sitting quietly, her eyes half closed, she was nevertheless scrutinizing everyone in the room with close attention. She was not listening to the conversation, she was only looking. She had a feeling that a few of the characters in the drama—the drama in which she had unwittingly involved herself—were assembled here as they might be in a dramatic scene. Things were drawing together, forming themselves into a compact nucleus. With the coming of Sir Philip Starke and Mrs. Boscowan it was as though two hitherto unrevealed characters were suddenly presenting themselves. They had been there all along, as it were, outside the circle, but now they had come inside. They were somehow concerned, implicated. They had come here this evening—why, she wondered? Had someone summoned them? Ivor Smith? Had he commanded their presence, or only gently demanded it? Or were they perhaps as strange to him as they were to her? She thought to herself: “It all began in Sunny Ridge, but Sunny Ridge isn’t the real heart of the matter. That was, had always been, here, in Sutton Chancellor. Things had happened here. Not very lately, almost certainly not lately. Long ago. Things which had nothing to do with Mrs. Lancaster—but Mrs. Lancaster had become unknowingly involved. So where was Mrs. Lancaster now?”
A little cold shiver passed over Tuppence.
“I think,” thought Tuppence, “I think perhaps she’s dead. . . .”
If so, Tuppence felt, she herself had failed. She had set out on her quest worried about Mrs. Lancaster, feeling that Mrs. Lancaster was threatened with some danger and she had resolved to find Mrs. Lancaster, protect her.
“And if she isn’t dead,” thought Tuppence, “I’ll still do it!”
Sutton Chancellor . . . That was where the beginning of something meaningful and dangerous had happened. The house with the canal was part of it. Perhaps it was the centre of it all, or was it Sutton Chancellor itself? A place where people had lived, had come to, had left, had run away, had vanished, had disappeared and reappeared. Like Sir Philip Starke.
Without turning her head Tuppence’s eyes went to Sir Philip Starke. She knew nothing about him except what Mrs. Copleigh had poured out in the course of her monologue on the general inhabitants. A quiet man, a learned man, a botanist, an industrialist, or at least one who owned a big stake in industry. Therefore a rich man—and a man who loved children. There she was, back at it. Children again. The house by the canal and the bird in the chimney, and out of the chimney had fallen a child’s doll, shoved up there by someone. A child’s doll that held within its skin a handful of diamonds—the proceeds of crime. This was one of the headquarters of a big criminal undertaking. But there had been crimes more sinister than robberies. Mrs. Copleigh had said “I always fancied myself as he might have done it.”
Sir Philip Starke. A murderer? Behind her half-closed eyelids, Tuppence studied him with the knowledge clearly in her mind that she was studying him to find out if he fitted in any way with her conception of a murderer—and a child murderer at that.
How old was he, she wondered. Seventy at least, perhaps older. A worn ascetic face. Yes, definitely ascetic. Very definitely a tortured face. Those large dark eyes. El Greco eyes. The emaciated body.
He had come here this evening, why, she wondered? Her eyes went on to Miss Bligh. Sitting a little restlessly in her chair, occasionally moving to push a table nearer someone, to offer a cushion, to move the position of the cigarette box or matches. Restless, ill at ease. She was looking at Philip Starke. Every time she relaxed, her eyes went to him.
“Doglike devotion,” thought Tuppence. “I think she must have been in love with him once. I think in a way perhaps she still is. You don’t stop being in love with anyone because you get old. People like Derek and Deborah think you do. They can’t imagine anyone who isn’t young being in love. But I think she—I think she is still in love with him, hopelessly, devotedly in love. Didn’t someone say—was it Mrs. Copleigh or the vicar who had said, that Miss Bligh had been his secretary as a young woman, that she still looked after his affairs here?
“Well,” thought Tuppence, “it’s natural enough. Secretaries often fall in love with their bosses. So say Gertrude Bligh had loved Philip Starke. Was that a useful fact at all? Had Miss Bligh known or suspected that behind Philip Starke’s calm ascetic personality there ran a horrifying thread of madness? So fond of children always.”
“Too fond of children, I thought,” Mrs. Copleigh had said.
Things did take you like that. Perhaps that was a reason for his looking so tortured.
“Unless one is a pathologist or a psychiatrist or something, one doesn’t know anything about mad murderers,” thought Tuppence. “Why do they want to kill children? What gives them that urge? Are they sorry about it afterwards? Are they disgusted, are they desperately unhappy, are they terrified?”
At that moment she noticed that his gaze had fallen on her. His eyes met hers and seemed to leave some message.
“You are thinking about me,” those eyes said. “Yes, it’s true what you are thinking. I am a haunted man.”
Yes, that described him exactly—He was a haunted man.
She wrenched her eyes away. Her gaze went to the vicar. She liked the vicar. He was a dear. Did he know anything? He might, Tuppence thought, or he might be living in the middle of some evil tangle that he never even suspected. Things happened all round him, perhaps, but he wouldn’t know about them, because he had that rather disturbing quality of innocence.
Mrs. Boscowan? But Mrs. Boscowan was difficult to know anything about. A middle-aged woman, a personality, as Tommy had said, but that didn’t express enough. As though Tuppence had summoned her, Mrs. Boscowan rose suddenly to her feet.
“Do you mind if I go upstairs and have a wash?” she said.
“Oh! of course.” Miss Bligh jumped to her feet. “I’ll take you up, shall I, Vicar?”
“I know my way perfectly,” said Mrs. Boscowan. “Don’t bother—Mrs. Beresford?”
Tuppence jumped slightly.
“I’ll show you,” said Mrs. Boscowan, “where things are. Come with me.”
Tuppence got up a
s obediently as a child. She did not describe it so to herself. But she knew that she had been summoned and when Mrs. Boscowan summoned, you obeyed.
By then Mrs. Boscowan was through the door to the hall and Tuppence had followed her. Mrs. Boscowan started up the stairs—Tuppence came up behind her.
“The spare room is at the top of the stairs,” said Mrs. Boscowan. “It’s always kept ready. It has a bathroom leading out of it.”
She opened the door at the top of the stairs, went through, switched on the light and Tuppence followed her in.
“I’m very glad to have found you here,” said Mrs. Boscowan. “I hoped I should. I was worried about you. Did your husband tell you?”
“I gathered you’d said something,” said Tuppence.
“Yes, I was worried.” She closed the door behind them, shutting them, as it were, into a private place of private consultation. “Have you felt at all,” said Emma Boscowan, “that Sutton Chancellor is a dangerous place?”
“It’s been dangerous for me,” said Tuppence.
“Yes, I know. It’s lucky it wasn’t worse, but then—yes, I think I can understand that.”
“You know something,” said Tuppence. “You know something about all this, don’t you?”
“In a way,” said Emma Boscowan, “in a way I do, and in a way I don’t. One has instincts, feelings, you know. When they turn out to be right, it’s worrying. This whole criminal gang business, it seems so extraordinary. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with—” She stopped abruptly.
“I mean, it’s just one of those things that are going on—that have always gone on really. But they’re very well organized now, like businesses. There’s nothing really dangerous, you know, not about the criminal part of it. It’s the other. It’s knowing just where the danger is and how to guard against it. You must be careful, Mrs. Beresford, you really must. You’re one of those people who rush into things and it wouldn’t be safe to do that. Not here.”
Tuppence said slowly, “My old aunt—or rather Tommy’s old aunt, she wasn’t mine—someone told her in the nursing home where she died—that there was a killer.”
Emma nodded her head slowly.
“There were two deaths in that nursing home,” said Tuppence, “and the doctor isn’t satisfied about them.”
“Is that what started you off?”
“No,” said Tuppence, “it was before that.”
“If you have time,” said Emma Boscowan, “will you tell me very quickly—as quickly as you can because someone may interrupt us—just what happened at that nursing home or old ladies’ home or whatever it was, to start you off?”
“Yes, I can tell you very quickly,” said Tuppence. She proceeded to do so.
“I see,” said Emma Boscowan. “And you don’t know where this old lady, this Mrs. Lancaster, is now?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Do you think she’s dead?”
“I think she—might be.”
“Because she knew something?”
“Yes. She knew about something. Some murder. Some child perhaps who was killed.”
“I think you’ve gone wrong there,” said Mrs. Boscowan. “I think the child got mixed up in it and perhaps she got it mixed up. Your old lady, I mean. She got the child mixed up with something else, some other kind of killing.”
“I suppose it’s possible. Old people do get mixed up. But there was a child murderer loose here, wasn’t there? Or so the woman I lodged with here said.”
“There were several child murders in this part of the country, yes. But that was a good long time ago, you know. I’m not sure. The vicar wouldn’t know. He wasn’t there then. But Miss Bligh was. Yes, yes, she must have been here. She must have been a fairly young girl then.”
“I suppose so.”
Tuppence said, “Has she always been in love with Sir Philip Starke?”
“You saw that, did you? Yes, I think so. Completely devoted beyond idolatry. We noticed it when we first came here, William and I.”
“What made you come here? Did you live in the Canal House?”
“No, we never lived there. He liked to paint it. He painted it several times. What’s happened to the picture your husband showed me?”
“He brought it home again,” said Tuppence. “He told me what you said about the boat—that your husband didn’t paint it—the boat called Waterlily—”
“Yes. It wasn’t painted by my husband. When I last saw the picture there was no boat there. Somebody painted it in.”
“And called it Waterlily—And a man who didn’t exist, Major Waters—wrote about a child’s grave—a child called Lilian—but there was no child buried in that grave, only a child’s coffin, full of the proceeds of a big robbery. The painting of the boat must have been a message—a message to say where the loot was hidden—It all seems to tie up with crime. . . .”
“It seems to, yes—But one can’t be sure what—”
Emma Boscowan broke off abruptly. She said quickly, “She’s coming up to find us. Go into the bathroom—”
“Who?”
“Nellie Bligh. Pop into the bathroom—bolt the door.”
“She’s just a busybody,” said Tuppence, disappearing into the bathroom.
“Something a little more than that,” said Mrs. Boscowan.
Miss Bligh opened the door and came in, brisk and helpful.
“Oh, I hope you found everything you wanted?” she said. “There were fresh towels and soap, I hope? Mrs. Copleigh comes in to look after the vicar, but I really have to see she does things properly.”
Mrs. Boscowan and Miss Bligh went downstairs together. Tuppence joined them just as they reached the drawing room door. Sir Philip Starke rose as she came into the room, rearranged her chair and sat down beside her.
“Is that the way you like it, Mrs. Beresford?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Tuppence. “It’s very comfortable.”
“I’m sorry to hear—” his voice had a vague charm to it, though it had some elements of a ghostlike voice, far away, lacking in resonance, yet with a curious depth—“about your accident,” he said. “It’s so sad nowadays—all the accidents there are.”
His eyes were wandering over her face and she thought to herself, “He’s making just as much a study of me as I made of him.” She gave a sharp half-glance at Tommy, but Tommy was talking to Emma Boscowan.
“What made you come to Sutton Chancellor in the first place, Mrs. Beresford?”
“Oh, we’re looking for a house in the country in a vague sort of way,” said Tuppence. “My husband was away from home attending some congress or other and I thought I’d have a tour round a likely part of the countryside—just to see what there was going, and the kind of price one would have to pay, you know.”
“I hear you went and looked at the house by the canal bridge?”
“Yes, I did. I believe I’d once noticed it from the train. It’s a very attractive-looking house—from the outside.”
“Yes. I should imagine, though, that even the outside needs a great deal doing to it, to the roof and things like that. Not so attractive on the wrong side, is it?”
“No, it seems to me a curious way to divide up a house.”
“Oh well,” said Philip Starke, “people have different ideas, don’t they?”
“You never lived in it, did you?” asked Tuppence.
“No, no, indeed. My house was burnt down many years ago. There’s part of it left still. I expect you’ve seen it or had it pointed out to you. It’s above this vicarage, you know, a bit up the hill. At least what they call a hill in this part of the world. It was never much to boast of. My father built it way back in 1890 or so. A proud mansion. Gothic overlays, a touch of Balmoral. Our architects nowadays rather admire that kind of thing again, though actually forty years ago it was shuddered at. It had everything a so-called gentleman’s house ought to have.” His voice was gently ironic. “A billiard room, a morning room, ladies’ parlour, colossal dining
room, a ballroom, about fourteen bedrooms, and once had—or so I should imagine—a staff of fourteen servants to look after it.”
“You sound as though you never liked it much yourself.”
“I never did. I was a disappointment to my father. He was a very successful industrialist. He hoped I would follow in his footsteps. I didn’t. He treated me very well. He gave me a large income, or allowance—as it used to be called—and let me go my own way.”
“I heard you were a botanist.”
“Well, that was one of my great relaxations. I used to go looking for wild flowers, especially in the Balkans. Have you ever been to the Balkans looking for wild flowers? It’s a wonderful place for them.”
“It sounds very attractive. Then you used to come back and live here?”
“I haven’t lived here for a great many years now. In fact, I’ve never been back to live here since my wife died.”
“Oh,” said Tuppence, slightly embarrassed. “Oh, I’m—I’m sorry.”
“It’s quite a long time ago now. She died before the war. In 1938. She was a very beautiful woman,” he said.
“Do you have pictures of her in your house here still?”
“Oh no, the house is empty. All the furniture, pictures and things were sent away to be stored. There’s just a bedroom and an office and a sitting room where my agent comes, or I come if I have to come down here and see to any estate business.”
“It’s never been sold?”
“No. There’s some talk of having a development of the land there. I don’t know. Not that I have any feeling for it. My father hoped that he was starting a kind of feudal domain. I was to succeed him and my children were to succeed me and so on and so on and so on.” He paused a minute and said then, “But Julia and I never had any children.”
“Oh,” said Tuppence softly, “I see.”
“So there’s nothing to come here for. In fact I hardly ever do. Anything that needs to be done here Nellie Bligh does for me.” He smiled over at her. “She’s been the most wonderful secretary. She still attends to my business affairs or anything of that kind.”
The Complete Tommy & Tuppence Collection Page 87