Death in Desolation (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)
Page 17
Mrs. Quill looked at him over the tops of the glasses she had put on.
‘… Especially after the way I’d blackmailed you about the cheque and the letter you signed. You fool! I destroyed both years ago. After Nunn had informed me you had put right the books. When your defalcations were discovered, Nunn told me. It was I who persuaded him to keep you on his staff even then. Nunn was going to have you gaoled. Perhaps it slipped your attention that about that time a cashier was taken on who relieved you of all contacts with money of any kind and your skill was confined to the law alone.’
‘You didn’t tell me …’
‘Of course I didn’t. I wanted to be sure you’d behave yourself in future. You were saying, Superintendent …?’
‘I was going to remark that, having stopped Harry Quill from receiving the money, Bilbow didn’t seem to have a motive for killing him. Then I thought about Rose Coggins. Perhaps Bilbow and Quill were rivals. Had Quill gone too far in offering Rose all that money? Apparently he had in Bilbow’s opinion. He killed him for it …’
‘You can’t prove that. It’s as I said, Clara Quill did it and I got her out of the mess she’d made.’
Littlejohn went on as though Bilbow hadn’t interrupted.
‘And all to no purpose. She and Harry were just friends, Rose told me, and she never loved him. He gave her things and helped her along. He was going to give her all he had; and she told me Harry was just a joke. It may have been all lies. She’s a natural liar. She’ll even send Bilbow to gaol for life if it suits her.’
‘She loves me. We’d be married …’
‘Rubbish. She’s just anybody’s woman. Anybody with money to give her. She’d actually have taken all Harry had and then thrown him aside, just as she will do to you, Bilbow, when you go to gaol.’
Cromwell had seized the little lawyer’s arm when he showed signs of rushing at Littlejohn, and held him fast. Bilbow was frothing at the mouth.
‘Lies! You’re making it all up to incriminate me …’
‘Let me quote her again, when I asked her about her feelings about you. She said “I’ve no intention of not knowing where my next meal’s coming from … I’ve learned to know what men are when they say they love you.” Ask her if she comes to see you in prison, which I’m afraid she won’t. Or better still, I’ll arrange for you to see her tonight. Will that do?’
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘You, Bilbow, Tim Quill, Harry Quill and who else besides? She said Harry was a joke. She’ll tell the next man you all were a joke. And he’ll believe her, like you did, Bilbow.’
Bilbow made for the nearest chair and sat down heavily. He looked at Mrs. Quill, engaged in a new game of patience as though no cloud hung over her at all.
‘So you destroyed the letter and the cheque. Is that true?’
‘I’m not a liar, Bilbow. You can ask Nunn. He’ll tell you of the pressure I successfully exerted to get you another chance. That woman seems to have ruined it all.’
‘Leave that out of it. Why did you do it?’
‘Nunn liked you and admired your brains. I liked you, and strange to say, I admired your lack of bitterness and your fortitude in the face of the raw deal life gave you. I found out all about you. Your wife was no good. She ran away with your partner, but you didn’t divorce her because you thought she’d come back. You knew your partner’s predatory nature. You took the blame. She died, didn’t she, instead, and you turned to whisky and finally to a trollop like Rose for consolation. I didn’t know about Rose. That was the last straw.’
Bilbow, who had hitherto resisted the brandy bottle, seized it.
‘Do you mind?’
‘Take some if it will help you.’
He took a good half tumblerful. He paused and then spoke quietly.
‘And now, I’ll tell you what really happened. After all the noise and confused accounts you’ll probably not believe me. She … Mrs. Quill had nothing to do with it. Harry Quill was quite conscious and well when I arrived. He’d recovered from the blow Mrs. Quill gave him, but he was drunk. I did drive the tractor with Harry Quill as a passenger. He was quite incapable of doing it himself. A drunken teetotaller! I’d got to take him by the roads where I wouldn’t meet the police. I was drunk in my car last New Year’s Eve and my licence was suspended for a year. On the way, Harry began to talk. He seemed quite cheerful. I expect it was the brandy. He thanked me for helping him with Mrs. Quill. Yes, he did. And he said he was sure that next time they met he’d be able to persuade her to grant him the loan. “I’ll offer to give up Rose and get on with the farming and when I’ve set Rose up in her business, somewhere far enough away from here, I’ll be able to go and see her just the same.” And he came out with a lot of silly drunken talk about Rose and about their relationship. I couldn’t stand it any more. I stopped the tractor and hit him. He was still unsteady and fell backwards and hit his head against the steel chassis. He just lay there, unconscious.’
Bilbow took another good drink and nobody tried to prevent him.
‘I didn’t know what to do. It was still daylight. I tried to bring him round, but couldn’t.’
‘Where was that?’
‘Near the Jolly Tinker crossroads, on the back road to Marcroft. There were a few cars about, so I took Harry and the tractor through a gateway and hid them behind the hedge of a field until it was dark enough to move on again. I did all I could for him, in the circumstances. I was in a real mess. I ought to have taken him to Marcroft Hospital, but I couldn’t muster the courage. Instead, I went in the inn there and got a drink. When I returned a few minutes later, Harry had died. You know the rest. All that stupid and nightmare journey to Great Lands …’
He looked across at Mrs. Quill who was no longer playing cards, and nodded at her.
‘One good turn deserves another. You had nothing to do with Harry’s death. You know how to put the fear of God in people, waving that stick, but you haven’t the strength to swat a fly with it. You’d marked his head a bit with the blow, but the rubber ferrule prevented it being a bad one. He was quite fit and well until I hit him and he caught his head on the tractor …’
Bilbow got away with manslaughter and a five year sentence. Nunn and Clara Quill visit him in prison and will probably see him right in some way when he’s free again. Rose Coggins married a bookmaker not long after the trial. He gives her the things that help her along and, now and then, gives her a good hiding to show who’s master.
Following Bilbow’s arrest, Mr. Nunn had a quiet talk with Littlejohn.
‘Mrs. Quill has asked me to apologise to you for the wrong information she gave you when you first met at the hotel. You will doubtless recollect that she told you that Harry Quill had already received the cash for the £2,000 loan she had arranged to make him, when all the time, he hadn’t yet had it …’
‘I do remember, Mr. Nunn, and, although I guessed the reason for the lies she told me … I can describe them as nothing else … I was going to call on her for an explanation.’
‘She has asked me to tender it, and apologise sincerely on her behalf. She is an old woman and had taken too much brandy when you interviewed her. She asks if you will overlook it.’
‘Of course. I’ll forget it in the circumstances.’
Nunn gave him a slow smile.
‘Between you and me, Littlejohn, and now that it’s all over, she’s a fine business woman. Harry Quill, at the time of his death, hadn’t taken his loan. The mortgage, although already signed and in my hands, was void, and Clara wouldn’t get Great Lands as she’d planned. It was a good investment at the price she was paying and she greatly coveted it. She thought that if she said she’d paid the money over to Harry before his death, she’d still get Great Lands and that I would help her to do it. Nobody but herself, Bilbow and I knew he hadn’t had the loan. There are limits to what I will do for Mrs. Quill. My apologies, too, for not interfering with her statement at the time she made it to you. I did interfere later …’
When it came time to remove the remains of the burned-out haystack, used by Mrs. Quill to give the alarm of Harry’s death, the workmen who did it came upon a small locked deed-box, externally undamaged except that the enamel had all peeled off among the ashes. They handed it to Mr. Nunn. When it was forced open, it revealed that Harry Quill must still have had some money tucked away in a hiding place nobody had thought of, the heart of a haystack. When the scorched contents, which consisted of a pile of thoroughly toasted, ghostly looking banknotes, encountered the open air, they crumbled away to dust. There was what appeared to be one other document with them. To Mr. Nunn, it looked very much like Harry Quill’s will, but, to his relief, it also disintegrated into grey unrecognisable powder before it could be identified.
An extract from George Bellairs’
The Night They Killed Joss Varran
CROUCHED IN a dead hamlet in the harshest part of the Ballaugh marshes, locally known as the Curraghs, Close Dhoo cottage was a sad little place which none of the changing seasons seemed to cheer. Always the same in all weathers, with its desolate front garden, its barren trees and its tightly closed door, with the paint peeling off it. The small windows with their shabby curtains hid all that went on inside. The roof, once thatched, was now covered in tarred corrugated iron through which the rust of decay was beginning to show.
The place, once a croft, occupied a small patch of poor ground of under an acre parallel with a shabby, unmetalled road leading farther into the marshes, with a barren garden behind littered with rubbish – ashes, tin cans, old iron and shards of pottery, and a long alley down the middle receding into the wilderness. Its boundaries were marked by old struggling hawthorn bushes leaning at an angle from the prevailing wind. The garden was completely neglected but, in Spring, the daffodils, planted by occupants long gone, bloomed in profusion and the fuchsias, as old as the house itself, blossomed unseen.
The locality was hushed and seemed to be listening for something. Once, the inhabitants of the now deserted hamlet had, as evening fell, been able to set their clocks by the whistle of the last train to Ramsey leaving the station two miles away. Now they had all gone, railway and people, except the solitary occupant of the lonely house. She was sitting in a plain wooden armchair beside the dying fire of wood in the primitive hearth, waiting. A small, prematurely aged woman, with a resigned weatherworn face in a frame of straight, grey close-cut hair. The fading light of the late autumn day dimly lit up her face and revealed the tight skin showing the bones of the skull beneath, the small thin mouth and the broad snub nose.
The interior of the house consisted of one large room, with a smaller one leading off it and a lean-to kitchen. In the background, a plank ladder led to a trap-door in the loft. The place with its simple old furniture had a dreary look. Full of memories of a departed family. Isabel Varran, the occupant, was one of a family of ten, all scattered except herself and the brother, Josiah, for whom she was now waiting. The walls of the room were decorated with old fly-blown photographs of children, wedding groups posed among absurd Victorian cardboard scenery, or of individual men and women staring with almost frightened looks at the camera behind which the photographer had counted out the interminable seconds to secure the likeness.
A ramshackle green van drew up at the gate and a hefty fat woman in an old coat and with her hair covered by a soiled gaudy scarf, emerged, wobbled up the path and entered the room without knocking at the door. The wind, the muffled drumming of which was rising, entered with her and blew the low fire into flame and drew puffs of aromatic smoke from the smouldering gorse wood into the room.
The newcomer was too inquisitive even to greet the waiting woman.
‘Has Joss come yet?’
She wore old trousers and gumboots and was panting heavily from her efforts. She placed her hands flat on the table and rested her great lumbering body on her powerful arms.
The other slowly raised her head and gave her sister a weary, baffled look.
‘No. I don’t know what . . .’
The other cut her off quickly.
‘Of course, you know as well as I do. The boat arrived in Douglas from Liverpool hours since. He’s stopping at all the pubs on his way here. It’s just like him. You’d think after more than twelve months in gaol for drunken violence, he’d have had enough. But our Joss was always too clever to learn . . .’
She paused to gulp in air.
‘I suppose he’ll be here after the pubs close. Well, I haven’t time to wait. I’m going now. Sydney’s been out all day. He says there’s a farmers’ meeting of some sort in Ramsey, but I don’t know what he’s up to. I’ve had all the milking to do. The doctor told me to take things easy. I expect that one day I’ll drop down dead and that’ll be the end of it.’
And with that depressing prognosis, she left as she had come, without a word of farewell. The rattle of the old van died away in the distance and silence descended again, punctuated by the steady tick-tack of the cheap alarum clock on the dresser.
Left alone, the woman remained in her chair, lost in her own thoughts, her hands together in her lap as if in prayer, except that she monotonously rotated her thumbs round one another, a habit which had been her mother’s, too, when she was anxious about anything. As the last of the sad daylight faded from the room, she rose and switched on the solitary electric light which hung over the table, a single lamp in a cheap pink shade. The lamp illuminated the room more starkly than the struggling daylight and revealed the well-polished Welsh dresser, the oak corner cupboard and the worn rush-bottomed chairs.
She went again to the door, looked out and then shone a torch into the darkness. A damp smell of trees and earth from the garden entered the room. She closed the door again with an anxious forlorn gesture and went to the kitchen and filled an electric kettle and made some tea. Then she cut thick slices of bread and butter, produced some cold cooked sausages from the pantry and set out her meal on one corner of the table under the light in the living-room. She ate her meal, slowly masticating it and washing it down with draughts of tea from a large mug. She seemed lost in thought and took no interest in what she was doing. Only once did she show any sign of where her thoughts were wandering. Half-way through her feeding, she rose, paused and then went to the sideboard and took out a purse, from which she counted twenty one pound notes. She replaced three of these and with the rest in one hand, groped up the chimney of the wide hearth and with the other brought down an old metal teapot. She stuffed the money in it and replaced it. Just in case her brother indulged in his old habit of helping himself to her savings. Then she finished her tea. Twice more in the course of tidying and washing-up she went to the door and looked out into the night. There was nobody about. In the distance a dog barked and far away the headlamps of a passing car shone across the marshes, from which a thin mist was rising, and faded away. She put on a pair of spectacles and sat again in the chair by the fire, which she revived with wood from a box on the hearth, and began to read a book she had borrowed from the country library. Soon she had fallen asleep.
She moved and the book falling from her lap awakened her. She sat up with a start and looked at the clock. Five minutes past ten. She rose in a flurry and hurried to the door, gathering up the torch on her way. Outside it was pitch dark. The wind had dropped and now hissed quietly in the bushes along the road. The woman stood at the door, the light from her torch illuminating the path and the ramshackle wooden gate. She remained there for a minute, lost in thought, wondering when her brother would finally turn up. Then, almost mechanically, she moved into the dark and walked to the gate, struggled briefly with the broken catch and stepped out into the road. She shone her torch here and there and suddenly brought the beam to rest on a huddled bundle under the hedge opposite the house. She hurried across and stooped over it.
For
one incredulous minute she examined what she had found and then uttered a shrill wail. It was the body of a man.
The corpse lay face downwards with arms spread above its head. All around the earth was disturbed, as though there had been a struggle or the murderer had tried to drag him further into the bushes. There was no doubt about the cause of death. There was a gaping wound in the back of the head and a streak of congealed blood running from the skull and round one side of the neck.
The woman stood for a moment panting and whimpering. The flashlight, which was almost played-out and now gave forth a faint red glimmer, fell from her hands. She did not trouble to rescue it, but first ran along the path to the house, illuminated by the light shining through the doorway, and then back to the road and vanished in the darkness.
Even in the dark, the woman knew her way about. As soon as she stepped off the rambling highway of two barely discernible tracks almost obliterated by grass and weeds, a labyrinth of corkscrew paths overhung by marsh shrubs and trees spread in every direction. Without hesitating, she made her way through the wilderness, running and then reducing her speed to a walk as she recovered her breath. Finally, she emerged on a narrow macadamed road. Almost at the junction stood a whitewashed farmstead in a large yard. Before she reached it a dog emerged boiling from his kennel, came to the end of his tether, and hurled himself savagely on his hind legs struggling to get free. As the woman entered the farmyard, a window in the house opened and a man’s voice cursed the dog and yelled at him to be quiet.
Above the noise of the man and dog, the woman tried to make herself heard.
‘Joss is dead. Somebody’s killed him.’
The man at the window leaned out farther, peering into the dark. Suddenly wakened from his first sleep, he was bemused and he half wondered if in the confusion of its furious barking, the dog had started to articulate as well. He shouted back into the blackness.
‘What do you say?’