The Skeleton in the Grass

by Robert Barnard

  “Oh Lord, where are they, Josie?” He led the way uncertainly into the family rooms at Beecham, which resembled nothing so much as a junk-shop with a particularly careless proprietor. Nothing the Wadhams had ever bought or been given seemed to have been discarded, and around the various sticks of furniture and ornaments were draped pullovers and scarves, even a pair of trousers. Glasses and plates probably left over from the party were still to be espied in odd crannies. Picking their way through all this detritus of gracious living, they came eventually to the conservatory, and Waddy threw open the door.

  “Here we are. Most of them will be here . . . Here’s the only one that’s been used recently. Simon did a bit of shooting in August. See if he liked it. Don’t think the birds had much to worry about.”

  Minchip’s sharp eyes discarded that gun at once, as well as two guns suspended on the wall by the door. He walked over to an old wooden chest under the glass that looked out on to the kitchen garden and looked down without nostalgia on a Lee-Enfield .303. He could see at once it had recently been polished.

  “I’ll take that when I go. Nobody’s to touch it, please.”

  “Gad. My old grandfather’s poacher’s gun. Claimed another village lad, eh?”

  Minchip had had enough of Waddy. He led the way briskly back through the family rooms and up the stairs. At the top he let Waddy point out his son’s room, then waited for him to go down again. Then he marched up to the door, knocked, and walked straight in.

  “I didn’t say come in,” protested Simon Killingbeck.

  “When I knock it means I’m coming in,” said Minchip.

  Simon had been lying on the bed, and had stood up to adopt a more aggressive posture. His face had an expression of youthful arrogance that would before he was much older become thoroughly unpleasant. Minchip did not suffer from the delusion that all bullies are cowards. He had fought the Kaiser’s army. But he rather suspected that this was the case here. And a degree of uncertainty in Simon Killingbeck’s warlike stance suggested that he had some feeling of being caught at a disadvantage. Since he obviously knew who Minchip was, this was promising.

  “Sit down,” Minchip said, gesturing to the bed. He hooked his hand round the top of a little chair by a desk, and swung it round so he could sit facing the bed. He set it down a little too close to the boy for the latter’s comfort and sat facing him. “Well, you have got yourself into a pickle, haven’t you?” he said to the next Lord Wadham.

  “What do you mean? What pickle? I’m not in any pickle.”

  “Oh, but you are, young man. Associating with a man like Major Coffey? Getting involved in a killing? I’d call that a right pickle.”

  “I’m not involved—I don’t associate—”

  “You don’t associate with Major Coffey? How did you come to invite him to the party here, then?”

  “Oh, that . . . Well . . . He doesn’t know many people round here, and he is a gentleman, and . . .”

  “And he is a friend of yours.”

  “I’ve talked to him a bit. That’s all.”

  “Been involved in those training sessions and exercises of his, have you?”

  “No,” Simon said, with lofty contempt. “That’s for the village yobs.”

  “Ah—you’re above that. So what did you do at these meetings? Talk of higher things? The destiny of the nation?”

  “I forget what we talked about,” said Simon sulkily. Then he unwisely blurted out: “At least Major Coffey is a patriot.”

  “As opposed to who? The Hallams, presumably?”

  Simon Killingbeck sat there, saying nothing.

  “So you’ve been involved in this series of childish practical jokes against them, have you?”

  “Of course not,” said Simon disdainfully. “That’s village boys’ stuff.”

  “The yobs again, eh? They did the spadework while you and the Major took care of the grand strategy, is that it? Very nice for you. Though unfortunately it does mean that the greater blame falls on the strategists, rather than the menials. What have you got against the Hallams?”

  “Nothing . . . I haven’t got anything against them . . .” Under Minchip’s straight and surprisingly powerful gaze Simon looked down at his hands. “The Major says they’re sapping the nation’s morale.”

  Minchip gave a brief smile of satisfaction. The boy was hard, untrustworthy and sly, but he was still a boy, and he was still unsure of himself. He could not stand up for long to anyone with authority.

  “Ah, so they’re the woodworm eating away at the British oak, are they? And of course Dennis Hallam is a coward.”

  Here Simon smiled with unutterable contempt.

  “He shot himself in the foot to get out of the war. Everyone knows that. Even my father, who’s a half-wit, knows it.”

  Sergeant South had informed Minchip of this piece of received village folklore, and he had also confided at the same time his suspicions about the purpose of the rifle. Minchip felt it was hardly his place to defend Dennis Hallam, but he did say:

  “Village wisdom is not fact.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Simon Killingbeck. “He didn’t join up when war broke out. His brother Edward did, but he didn’t. Not till months afterwards. His family wangled that he went to Egypt rather than the front, but even that wasn’t peaceful enough for him. He shot himself in the foot and was invalided home. He was back by the beginning of 1916. Lucky, wasn’t he?”

  “Any man of his age who survived the war is lucky,” agreed Minchip. “That doesn’t mean things necessarily happened as the village believes them to have done. But that’s not the point. The point is, you’ve just confirmed as far as I’m concerned what the purpose of the rifle was.”

  “What rifle?”

  “The rifle that killed Chris Keene.”

  “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “I think you do. The rifle was part of the set-up, wasn’t it? When the Hallams returned from the party here, they were meant to find the skeleton laid out before their front door. And the rifle was apparently to be in the skeleton’s hands, and pointing at its foot. Memento Morí. Or rather, not ‘Remember you must die,’ but ‘Remember how you got out of the war.’ ”

  An unpleasant smile crossed Simon’s face.

  “I expect something like that was what Chris Keene was getting at.”

  “You know. Because the rifle that Chris Keene was going to use came from this house.”

  That did floor Simon Killingbeck completely.

  “You—you can’t know that. You haven’t found the rifle.”

  “On the contrary. I just have. I found it downstairs. I’m taking it with me when I go.”

  It was a shot if not in the dark, at any rate in the half-light. But it went home.

  “I didn’t give it to Chris Keene to play the trick. I didn’t know anything about that. I only lent it to the Major for exercises. That’s all it was!”

  Inspector Minchip looked at him closely.

  “Ah—now we’re getting a bit nearer the truth. Five minutes ago you barely knew the Major, now you’re lending him guns. Let’s try and get this straight. How well did you know him?”

  “We’ve met a few times . . .” This very sullenly.

  “You visit him at his cottage?”

  “I may have been there once or twice.”

  “Now you’re talking like a village yob, or a petty criminal. May have been? You know perfectly well whether you’ve been there or not. How often have you visited him?”

  “Well . . . Probably once or twice a week. Since just after I left school.”

  “Right. Stick to the truth in future, won’t you? Because I will get it out of you in the end. You visited him regularly. What did you do, apart from talk?”

  “Well . . . he taught me to shoot. You could probably get that from the neighbours, so it’s no secret. There’s a target in his back garden. He taught me to use a pistol and . . . military weapons. And we did a bit of strategic studies as well.”
<
br />   “I see. Did you learn to use firearms with the village boys?”

  “No. On my own. Major Coffey said the usual distinctions should be observed. I did sometimes drop round on the nights they came, but I didn’t talk much to any of them.”

  “Now, when did the Major ask to borrow the gun?”

  “I don’t remember exactly—”

  “You remember. You’ve thought of little else since the killing.”

  “Well . . . it was about a week before the party.”

  “Had you asked him to the party then?”

  “Oh yes. Yes, I had.”

  “And had he asked who else would be there?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And what did he say he wanted the gun for?”

  “Well, for the normal exercises he went in for with the village boys. He said there were so many coming along these days that he was finding it difficult to equip them.”

  “And you said there were guns lying all over the place here at Beecham Park and nobody would miss them.”

  “Well, apart from me nobody shoots here. My father doesn’t. He doesn’t do anything. So I thought I could just take the Lee-Enfield. And nobody would miss it.”

  Minchip certainly didn’t believe that was all there was to it, but he merely nodded.

  “Well, that’s all very satisfactory. It clears up several things that have been bothering me. Oh—how did the rifle get back here?”

  “What?” Simon had jumped.

  “How did the rifle get back to Beecham? It’s here now.”

  “Well, it sort of appeared . . . I mean, I noticed that it’d been returned.”

  “Oh, and when was that?”

  “The day after—no, maybe two days after the party.”

  “And what conclusion did you draw from this?”

  “I thought Major Coffey had returned it at the party.”

  “Did you welcome your guest when he arrived?”

  “Well, yes—”

  “And you didn’t happen to notice whether he was carrying a rifle or not?”

  “He could have returned it the next day. They leave this house open all the time. They’ve no sense of security.”

  “And why did you think it had been returned?”

  “Well, maybe he found it wasn’t needed . . .”

  “And you weren’t messing yourself with funk because it might be the gun that killed Chris Keene?” Minchip got up. “You’re a rotten liar, young man. One day you may be a good one, when you’ve grown up the way I think you will, but at the moment you’re a rotten one. You’ve had a week to think up a story, and you can’t think up a better one than that. Your father would have done a more convincing job. Not that I think it’s a matter of much importance. You were nothing but the stooge.”

  “I was not!”

  “Well, that’s what I think. But I’ll be checking up in any case. I won’t ask you if you made a note of anybody’s movements on the night in question, because I don’t think for a moment you’d tell me the truth. I shall certainly be checking up on your movements, though.”

  “I was with people the whole time,” said Simon hurriedly. “First playing croquet, then in the table-tennis room.”

  “Yes,” said Minchip. “I rather thought you would have been with people the whole time. I think you made very sure of that.”

  CHAPTER 15

  This time, Minchip decided, he would not interview Major Coffey in his charmless cottage. This time he would take him on at the Police Station. What was more, he would send Sergeant South to get him. They could walk together down the main street of Chowton, skewered by the watching eyes.

  In the event the Major carried it off rather well—better, at any rate, than Minchip had hoped. There could be no comparison with the way South might march a village boy along to inquisition at the Station. Coffey bent down from his great height to make conversation with South’s imposing bulk, and set his own pace for the walk which nothing that South might do could speed up. They might have been two pillars of the community discussing the problems of law and order, with Coffey very much the more important pillar of the two. Inspector Minchip shook his head. He had underestimated his opponent, and he had forgotten that his brushes with the law, during his years in London, had been frequent. Nevertheless, the whole of Chowton would now be aware that the Major was being interviewed at the Police Station, and would register how long he was kept there. That was something. Minchip did not like the influence of Coffey on the village of Chowton.

  “Good morning, good morning,” were the Major’s first words as he was ushered into the Souths’ sitting-room. “I gather I can be of further assistance.”

  Minchip did not look up from his notes, but gestured towards the chair on the other side of the table. The Major’s lisp, he noted, was rather more pronounced today. A sign of nerves, perhaps? He wondered what communication the Major had had with Simon Killingbeck. He let the clock tick on, while he made a series of meaningless squiggles in his notebook.

  “We’ve investigated—or the Metropolitan Police have—the gun you sent to your gunsmith,” he said finally, looking up coldly at the Major. “It was indeed sent there well before the death of young Keene.”

  The Major twisted his mouth into a grimace.

  “You surely haven’t brought me here to tell me what I already know.”

  “They say they do a lot of business with you.”

  “Indeed they do.”

  Minchip sat back easily in his chair.

  “Tell me, Major, how many boys come along to you regularly to play at military exercises?”

  The Major’s voice acquired a slight bark.

  “You will not call it play, Inspector, when this country is at war.”

  “How many?”

  The Major threw himself back in his chair with something like petulance.

  “Let me see. There’s a very faithful nucleus of five or six. And two or three more who come somewhat irregularly.”

  “Yes. That’s what I thought. Because I have talked to some of your little group, as you’ve probably heard. Now, Major, you borrowed a gun from Beecham Park.”

  “Well—I—yes. The young chap there, Simon Killingbeck, volunteered a gun from the family collection, and one doesn’t want to discourage that sort of enthusiasm . . .”

  “As I understood it, you borrowed it.”

  “And it was becoming difficult to equip all the boys who came along.”

  “Nonsense, Major. I’ve seen your collection. You could have equipped eight or nine quite easily.”

  “Valuable guns, Inspector. Not the thing for village lads to play around with.”

  “Don’t treat me as a fool, Major,” said Minchip, with an expression of weariness. “I do know something about guns, both as an ex-army man, and as a policeman. That is a perfectly workaday collection.”

  “I’m not a rich man—”

  Minchip leant forward and rapped out.

  “You borrowed that gun. You didn’t borrow it for military training. You borrowed it for the prank that Chris Keene was carrying out on the night he died.”

  “No! I—”

  “You’re fond of accusing other people of cowardice, Major. And yet you borrowed that gun from Beecham so as to be sure it couldn’t be traced back to you.”

  The Major rose from his chair. His voice had become a parade-ground bellow, and his lisp had disappeared.

  “How dare you accuse me of—”

  The Inspector rang a little handbell on the table, and Sergeant South came in and stood, massive and impassive, by the door. The Major subsided into his chair.

  “I’m accusing you of sheltering behind one of your subordinates. I’m accusing you of being directly involved in the planning of these nasty japes. I’m accusing you of organizing them.”

  “I deny it.”

  Minchip relaxed again, back into the desk chair.

  “It must have seemed like a good idea. Here was a sitting butt, the Hallam famil
y, famous throughout the country for their zeal for peace. Opposition to their pacifist views was just the thing to unite a group such as you were setting up. And the nature of the pranks? Well, you had a group of lads poised between being boys and being men. The pranks were cleverly adapted to their situation.”

  “Anything that was done was done on their initiative,” said the Major, with an air of intending to repeat that line indefinitely.

  “I have talked to these chaps, Major, and I know. Because though you may have planned this last insult to Dennis Hallam with Chris Keene alone, he talked to the other boys. As you probably realized he would. These are country boys, not part of a military machine, in spite of your efforts. Chris was a bright, outgoing boy, who went along with all this because it was a bit of daredevil fun. He was the sort of boy—you chose him well—who would probably have flown planes, if it does come to another war. The danger involved would have been an attraction.”

  “He was a great loss.”

  “You lost him.”

  The Major’s voice rose again in volume.

  “I had nothing to do with his killing!”

  “I’m not accusing you of killing him. I keep an open mind about that. I’m accusing you of organizing the foolish and dangerous escapade that led to his death. Let me tell you how I reconstruct what happened.”

  The Major assumed a posture expressive of lofty disinterest while the Inspector settled into his story.

  “This was the culmination of a series of antics aimed at the Hallams, and the nastiest. It took up the rumour in the village that Dennis Hallam got out of fighting in the war by shooting himself in the foot. Those rumours were all the more persistent and bitter because I gather Mr. Hallam’s elder brother, who was a more down-to-earth and popular figure, was in fact fighting in the trenches in France for three years before he was killed. The idea was to procure a joke skeleton—it being close to Hallowe’en—and paint out its backbone. Very subtle. Very amusing.” He leant forward. “I believe you procured the skeleton.”

  “I did not.”

  “I don’t think Chris Keene could have afforded such an object on a farm labourer’s pay. And I can’t find that he’s been into Oxford, or any other town where it might have been bought. I shall find out. Anyway, the skeleton was bought, and the backbone painted out. The date was fixed for the night of the Wadhams’ party, when you knew all the Hallams would be out. For the final, vivid touch you needed a gun, and that you heroically borrowed, so that there would be no unpleasant consequences for you.”