The Major said nothing, but little beads of sweat were collecting on his forehead. Accusations of cowardice, Minchip realized, touched a raw nerve.
“I don’t imagine the plan envisaged the gun falling into police hands anyway. I expect you thought that when the Hallams had driven home, got the full impact of the insult to Dennis Hallam, they would retreat into the house, either to phone down here to the Sergeant, or else to talk things over, in the way these intellectuals have. Then the thing would be retrieved. Because they were to be watched. That was always part of the fun, seeing the effect. One of the earlier japes had been watched by the perpetrator and by Barry Noaks. So Chris Keene was to stick around. But because you couldn’t be sure this was how things would work out, you borrowed the gun.”
Minchip paused.
“The gun was loaded, because you always sent the boys out on these expeditions armed. They weren’t pranks, they were forays into enemy territory, limited engagements. Part of a military training. I hope you warned him to be careful, carrying the skeleton and the gun. I do hope you impressed that on him. Anyway, the night of the expedition came. You went off to Beecham Park, thus effectively distancing yourself from the operation. Chris Keene set out from home, collected the skeleton and the gun from your cottage—no doubt you have a hiding place for the key—and set out along the river path to Hallam. Not the road, because there was a real danger that he might be seen. Meanwhile you, up at Beecham, were not greatly enjoying yourself.”
“I made no secret,” Coffey said sourly, “that I felt out of place, watching all those childish games.”
“Different sort of childishness, I suppose,” said Minchip maliciously. “So you, bored and out of place, decided to go and watch Keene executing your plan—watch him from the other bank of the river. It’s only about a half a mile. You wouldn’t be able to see the entrance to Hallam, where he was to place the skeleton, but you would be able to observe him on his way there. The General observing troop manœuvres. You watched, I suspect, but did not speak or reveal your presence.”
The Major did not speak now. He sat there, a lean, military presence, with sweat on his forehead.
“You watched Keene leave the path, go up on to the lawns, and then decide to take a rest. You saw him lay out the skeleton in the way he intended doing outside the front of the house.” Minchip paused significantly. “What happened next I’m not going to speculate on at this point. There are too many possibilities. But when it had happened, and Chris Keene was lying in a heap over the skeleton, you panicked.”
“I never panic,” said Coffey.
Minchip, who had seen The Chocolate Soldier, thought him faintly absurd. A parody soldier.
“Well, if you prefer it, you decided there was a need for prompt action. You crossed the bridge and retrieved the rifle. I think you might have taken the skeleton too, and dropped it in the river, only I suspect you were surprised by something, possibly by the dog being let out at the Hall, and barking at the intruders it sensed. Or perhaps you just decided that the skeleton couldn’t be traced back to you. Anyway, you took the gun, and hot-footed it back to Beecham. There you waited for a suitable opportunity, probably when the guests were beginning to leave, and then you returned the rifle to the conservatory, wiping it clean of fingerprints first. Only you were a bit hurried over that. There wasn’t the opportunity to do a thorough job. One of your fingerprints remained. I’ve checked it against your prints on the guns I took from your cottage.”
There was a silence. It was not the silence of repose, but of intellectual activity.
“That proves nothing,” said the Major at last. “I’ve admitted that I borrowed the gun. Whoever wiped it could have left one of my prints on it.”
“Major, I am an experienced police officer,” said Minchip wearily. “Don’t try to teach me my job . . . Well, perhaps it is time now for you to fill me in on the bit I left blank. Tell me, please, precisely what you saw that night.”
An expression of infinite contempt settled on the Major’s face.
“Inspector, you have regaled me with a long farrago of conjecture and circumstantial evidence. You surely are not expecting me to admit for one moment that any of it is true.”
“I think you’d be wise if you did, Major . . . Because I have one piece of evidence I haven’t mentioned.”
“Oh?” The interrogative sounded hollow.
“As I say I’ve talked with all the other boys in your troop. Naturally they’re not at all happy with the way things turned out. I have a signed statement from Jim Fallow—one of your prize recruits, I gather, and your favourite—that the day after the killing you told him that ‘the gun was taken care of.’ You wouldn’t say anything more, just that. So if I can’t get you for murder, I’ll have you on a charge of suppressing evidence, or conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Think about that, Major!”
The Major thought. He seemed to be agonizingly considering his position. As he thought, his face began to glisten, and at times contorted itself briefly with rage or frustration. After a time he said:
“I should welcome refreshment.”
“I’m sure Sergeant South could rustle up a cup of tea,” said Minchip, gesturing to him, still in position beside the door. While they waited Minchip sat, his inquisitorial eye fixed on the Major. When the tea came the Major drank half of it, then put cup and saucer down on the table.
“The idea that I might be charged with the boy’s murder is a nonsense,” he said, in steely tones, with the snakelike lisp once again very pronounced. “There is no motive.”
“None that I have discovered,” admitted Minchip. “If there is one, I don’t despair of finding it out.”
“On the other hand, I have no more relish than the next man for being arraigned in court. And a charge of that kind would be particularly damaging to my reputation and influence.”
“Certainly it would,” agreed Minchip, mentally adding: “such as it is.”
“I will tell you what I saw.” The Major relaxed his ramrod stance, but there was no illusion of ease. He was as tense as he had been throughout the interview, so that Minchip wondered whether what was coming would be the whole truth, or even truth at all. “Much of what you said is tolerably close to the truth. I set off from Beecham shortly after nine-thirty. There was some moonlight, and I’d made it my business to know the terrain.”
“Ah—you expected to go along.”
“Shall we say I did not expect to enjoy a party at the Wadhams’? I thought I might enjoy watching Keene’s efforts. I got to the bank at about a quarter to ten, and by then Keene was coming along the path on the other side of the river. He was coming slowly and carefully, pointing the gun away from himself, as I had instructed him to. When he came to the end of the lawn things were more open, so I could see better. He paused, and then started up the bank. Then he stopped by a willow tree—not to rest, but to reconnoitre, as he had been trained to do on such an exercise. There was no light on on that side of the house, but you could just hear a dog barking. Keene rightly delayed going on. Instead he laid out the skeleton as he intended doing when he got to the house. Then he took up the gun, and was about to place it in position, pointing at the foot—”
“Yes?”
“When he was set upon—by a man who must have been standing in the cover of the willow.”
“I take it you could not see who it was?”
“Naturally not. If I hadn’t known it was Keene I could not have recognized him. In the moonlight they were merely shapes.”
“But you are sure it was a man?”
“I assumed it was. The shape was right for a man. The fight was brief but fierce.”
“Women wear trousers these days.”
“Very few women in this part of the world do, I’m glad to say.”
“And in the course of the struggle the gun went off?”
“Yes. It went off and Chris fell immediately. The other figure knelt by the body and examined it. Then it ran away as fas
t as it could in the dark.”
“Which way?”
“Towards the house and the proper road into Chowton.”
“I see . . .” Minchip considered. Thus far, he thought, the Major had probably been telling the truth. “And then you went over the bridge and got the gun?”
“Yes. And made sure that Keene really was dead. There was no doubt about that at all. While I was taking the gun from his hand, a dog was let out up at the house, and I made my way quickly back across the river.”
Minchip narrowly avoided saying “Panic.” But there was something, he felt sure, that the Major was holding back on. Was it a fact, or something he conjectured?
“And you really had no idea who the attacker was?” he asked.
“Naturally not,” said the Major, shrugging. “In the moonlight one would have had to have been very close to recognize anybody. I assumed it was one of the Hallams.”
“O-oh! Why?”
“It’s their house. It was their miserable cowardice that was being exposed.”
“But they were all at the party.”
“They could have made their way back as well as I. They could have expected that advantage would be taken of their well-advertised absence from the house to take further action against them. I knew that Oliver Hallam had been walking in the garden at Beecham at some point in the evening. I learnt later that Hallam himself had disappeared for a long period.”
“But why would they have waited there?”
Minchip caught himself suddenly up. It would have been natural for a Hallam to wait near the house, but there were people who would have known that Keene would be coming by the river path.
“Ah—now I understand! You didn’t think the attacker was a Hallam. You thought it was one of your boys!”
CHAPTER 16
The Austin Seven had been giving hints for some time that she was going to have one of her fits of temperament. Why are motor-cars always “she,” Dennis wondered, as she spluttered again? And ships too. Were aeroplanes also female? The Austin choked, as she had been doing almost since Dennis left Banbury, where he had been buying records of the Razumovsky Quartets for Helen’s birthday. She’s going to fail me, Dennis thought, referring to Bumps rather than Helen. I should have brought the Wolseley.
Bumps finally gave up trying just before he got to Chowton. Dennis got out and raised the bonnet. He didn’t know much about the insides of cars—got confused by talk of carburettors, and even of batteries—but he had been taught by Pinner that if one screwed this or reconnected that, the car would sometimes start. He looked intelligently at the collection of grimy innards, and worked through his repertory of cures.
After twenty minutes’ fiddling, and rather dirty fiddling at that, Bumps still refused to start. Dennis realized that five minutes back on the road there was a country pub called the Lamb and Fleece. He could at least telephone from there to his garage in Wilbury. But when he got there and knocked at the back door—it still being the afternoon closing time—the landlord, when he opened it, shook his head.
“Oh no. No telephone here. You could ‘a seen that if you’d used your eyes. Little country pub like this be can’t afford things like telephones.”
He stood there, fat and unobliging. Dennis was forced to mutter “Sorry,” and go away. He told himself as he walked back to Bumps that he had never patronized the Lamb and Fleece, so there was no reason for its landlord to put himself out on his account. He bent over the engine once more, noting that there was someone coming along the road from the village, so at least he could get a push if he wanted one.
So absorbed was he in his screwing and tightening that the man had passed him before he realized it, and was twenty yards away before Dennis decided that he might represent his last chance of a push.
“I say,” he shouted. “I’m having a bit of trouble here. Could you give me a shove so I can try and get it started?”
The man turned. It was one of the farm labourers from Wilton Farm, Dennis thought. The man stood there, looking at him, deliberately creating an awkwardness.
“No,” he shouted at last, brutally loud. “Push your own bloody car. I don’t have no truck with murderers.”
• • •
Inspector Minchip loved Oxford. To be sure there were the undergraduates, and lately an unpleasant amount of motorized traffic, but these were the inescapable crosses, and he bore them as the lover of Manchester would bear the grime or the lover of Brighton day-trippers. It was his county town, and he felt it had associations and reverberations that no other county town could match.
He walked from the station to Balliol College slowly and with relish, drinking in the sights and sounds. He would like to have been an Oxford man himself, but in his young days boys of his class—unless they were quite exceptionally brilliant—did not go to Oxford. Not that many did today, he thought, his observant eye and ear tabulating the traces of class in the dress and accents of the undergraduates he passed. Though he recalled South mentioning that one of the boys from Chowton had in fact become an undergraduate here.
The Martyrs’ Memorial brought back memories of more than one historical novel in which saintly and heroic Protestants suffered under the zealot Mary for their faith, and he walked along the façade of Balliol, viewing it with approval. He had heard the joke about “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la gare,” and he had had enough history, and just enough French, to appreciate it. It was a good joke, but it lacked in his eyes aptness. Balliol College was not like any railway station he had seen. It was, he thought, an imposing building, and eminently suitable for a college, in its blend of palace and jail.
The college porter, like all such, was a genius. He rather thought, which meant he knew, that Mr. Hallam was at a special tutorial with a Fellow of Oriel. No doubt he’d be back soon after five. It was Mr. Oliver Hallam he was wanting to see, was it? He’d understood that a Mr. William Hallam was to have come up this term, but he gathered he’d gone off to fight in Spain. Quite a number of young gentlemen seemed to have taken it into their heads to fight in Spain. No doubt the decision did them credit. But somebody of their generation knew a deal too much about fighting on foreign soil, wasn’t that right? and would wait until they were sent to war, rather than rush into it.
The two men settled down to a mellow gossip.
“ . . . and though as far as official consumption is concerned they’re all nice young gentlemen, between you and me there’s a number of ’em that the word excrement would be a compliment for, if you get my meaning. But your Mr Hillam is a nice young gentleman and no mistake—ah, there he is now.”
Oliver Hallam had come through the big gates leading to the Broad, and was looking into his pigeon-hole. With a brief wave to the porter Minchip went out and accosted him.
“I wonder if I could have a few words, sir.”
“Oh, Inspector . . . of course. Come up to my rooms. I’ll get the scout to fetch us some tea and sandwiches.”
“No call for that, sir.”
“No trouble,” said Oliver as they walked into the small quadrangle. “You’ve come a fair way to talk to me.”
“Oh, as to that, the Force isn’t letting me spend all my time any longer on the Chowton business. I’m here about a drug addict from Banbury who we think has come into Oxford to get money by peddling the stuff.”
“A dope fiend?”
“That’s what the newspapers call them, sir, though in my experience they’re more pathetic than fiendish. We have to step down hard on that sort of thing in a community of young people like Oxford . . .”
They had come up to Oliver’s room, a turreted affair at the top of one of the front quadrangle’s staircases. Oliver ordered tea, and they made conversation about Oxford until it arrived. The ham and cucumber sandwiches were rather heftier than Minchip had expected—man-sized sandwiches, he thought approvingly, and he ate them with relish.
“I did have some purpose in dropping in on you like this,” he said at last, wipin
g his mouth. He looked at the young man sitting on the other side of the coal fire—slightly overweight, kindly of feature, not yet fully defined or decided in character.
“Anything I can do to help,” murmured Oliver, occupying himself with his last sandwich.
“You see, we know—or think we know, because people don’t always tell us the truth—that Major Coffey left Beecham Park on the night of the party, and took the lane down to the river. He was bored with the games, and wanted to watch Chris Keene on his unpleasant expedition—which, as you all suspected, he had masterminded. Now, what he says happened next was this: he says Chris laid down the skeleton carefully where we found it, and was about to place the rifle in its hand—”
“—pointing at its foot,” said Oliver.
“Ah—you’d got that far, had you, sir? Yes, indeed: I’m afraid so. Well, what Coffey says happened next is that a shape—he says a man, but I’m keeping an open mind—came from the willow tree, from behind or from within the cover of the overhanging branches, and that there was then a brief struggle in which Chris Keene was killed.”
“I see,” said Oliver neutrally.
“Now, so far as I’m concerned that puts a rather different gloss on the whole thing. For a start, there seems to be a strong element of accident there, certainly of unpremeditation. It was the victim who had the gun, too, not the aggressor. To my mind a murder charge would be quite inappropriate, and even if manslaughter is in question there would be mitigating circumstances . . . You get my drift, sir?”
“Yes,” said Oliver, after a pause.
“Now, Major Coffey, I’m convinced, thinks it was one of the village lads in his troop who did it. Maybe a jape that went wrong. A bit of horseplay, to frighten the life out of him—if that’s not an unfeeling turn of phrase. He knows that the standing he has in the village would scarcely survive if that turned out to be the case. Well, I’ve talked to these boys, and I didn’t notice that they were concealing anything like that. Not that I necessarily would. These are not bumpkins—they’re bright lads, the pick of the bunch. So I’m keeping an open mind on that too. Because there are other possibilities . . .”
The Skeleton in the Grass Page 15