He went silently, on the turf edge, and presently he found himself by the glade of beehives. The large one in the middle was clearly the place. He could have wished that he knew more about bees.
Putting down his torch and stick he grasped the roof very gently with both hands. It came up, in one piece, together with the top section of the hive. Underneath was nothing more alarming than a folded blanket.
He listened very carefully, and in the stillness he sensed rather than saw the legion of sleeping bees. Very gently he raised the blanket and, sure enough, there was the dictaphone, a box-like affair above the first comb-section, with its receiver immediately behind the ventilation grille in front of the hive. Carefully he lifted it, carefully replaced the blanket and hive-top. Then he tiptoed away with his spoil into the thickest part of the shrubbery.
A quarter of an hour later he was back in the bee glade. He lifted the top and replaced the dictaphone exactly where he had found it. He stood for a moment as if undecided. Then, with a quick, almost abrupt gesture, he pulled a pencil and notebook from his pocket and, using his torch guardedly, scribbled a note. When he had finished it, he tore out the page, folded it in four, and wrote a name on the outside. Then, with the paper in his hand, he made his way up the drive, towards the sleeping front of Humble Bee House.
It was eleven o’clock on the following morning when Bohun reached Humble Bee House once again, and rang the front door bell. The door was opened by Placket, who had no word to say to him. The Inspector was behind her in the hall.
“It’s all over,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better come up.”
Norman and Rachel Mallet were sitting, upright, in chairs on either side of the empty hearth in their father’s room. It was difficult, in the shadows, to realise that they were dead, so quietly and calmly they sat. Almost as if they had been carefully preserved, thought Bohun, and put under glass. The words formed an echo in his head.
“They took the same stuff as they gave the old man,” said Franks. “Norman left a note – just to say that he was responsible for both his father and Morgan. Not much explanation. He says it was him, not his sister, but she knew about it – afterwards. I don’t suppose we shall ever understand the whole of it now.”
“On the contrary,” said Bohun. “If you’ll come out in the garden I’ll do my level best to explain it to you.”
“I wouldn’t try to open it now, not unless you happen to be a skilled apiarist,” said Bohun. “But inside that large central hive you’ll find the dictaphone Mallet and Morgan bought for the consummation of their final stupendous joke.”
“Joke?”
“So elaborate. So funny. So much in character. What’s the best-known and oldest superstition about bees? That if there’s a death in the house, they must be the first to be told about it. Can’t you imagine it? After a week or ten days of preparation and preliminary fun, getting everyone in the mood for it, Morgan suddenly comes down last thing at night with the news that the master has had a second stroke and passed away. Chaos and confusion and the doctor to be sent for, and the lawyers to be telephoned. And in the middle of it all, Norman creeps down to the hive and whispers the news to the bees.”
“I see,” said Franks. “And the message is picked up on the dictaphone.”
“That’s right. To be preserved, forever and ever as the joke of a lifetime. I think it must have been due to take place that very evening. You can imagine Morgan’s feelings when he went along to arrange for the culmination of the jest – and found his master really dead.”
Franks thought this out. He brushed off a bee which had settled on his coat.
“Later,” said Bohun, “I don’t suppose he thought of it at once, but later. Perhaps in the early hours of next morning, when things had settled down, it did just occur to him to wonder. So he went off to the hive. The dictaphone had run down by that time, but he wound it back and listened in – and heard what I venture to think was one of the plainest and most singular confessions of murder which has ever been made – a confession unmistakably identified by a slight stutter.”
“You mean to say,” said Franks, “that after he’d done the job Norman went off and told the bees all about it.”
“Certainly,” said Bohun. “You must never keep anything from the bees.”
Another bee came past, and settled on Franks’ sleeve. The Inspector looked at it in silence. The bee looked back, for a moment, impassively, then flew off.
“After that,” went on Bohun, “Morgan re-hid the dictaphone in the safest place – back in the hive. The bees must have been a bit more active by then. I think that’s when he got stung.”
“He got stung a lot harder when he tried to blackmail Norman next morning,” said Franks thoughtfully.
“Yes. Bad tactics to blackmail a desperate man.”
“That’s not entirely guesswork, I take it.” Franks nodded towards the hive.
“I’m afraid not. I thought it all out last night. I’ve listened to the confession. You won’t find my fingerprints on the dictaphone, because I wore gloves. But I’m prepared to bet you’ll find Morgan’s—”
“I see.” The Inspector sat, swinging his legs. He seemed to be in difficulties over something. At last he said, without looking up, “I take it you told him. Sent him a note or something.”
“Without prejudice to my having to deny it later,” said Bohun, “and since you haven’t found it, I gather he must have destroyed it – yes, I did.”
“I see,” said Franks. “Best way out, really. I don’t see much of this coming to light now. What exactly did you say to him?”
Bohun got to his feet, and started down the drive with Inspector Franks beside him. They had reached the gate before he spoke.
“It is a couple of lines of verse. I’ve known them all my life – though I couldn’t tell you, even now, who wrote them. They go like this:
‘Money is honey, my little sonny
And a rich man’s joke is always funny.’”
Behind them, Humble Bee House dozed in the morning sun.
Butcher’s Dozen, 1956.
THE CRAVEN CASE
“SPEAKING AS YOUR SOLICITOR,” said Bohun, “it sounds an impossible assignment. But speaking as a man, it needs no argument to get me down to Vambrill Court for Christmas. Sir Hubert’s reputation as a host has reached even my ears. Wasn’t he the man who said, ‘Turkeys are old-fashioned, but there’s nothing wrong with a well-boiled peacock?”
“That’s just newspaper talk,” said John Craven. “But why do you call it an impossible assignment?” He leant forward to say, through the communicating panel, “Better stick to the Great North Road, Peters. The A.A. say there’s snow north of Hitchin.” Then he shut the panel carefully.
“Well,” said Bohun, “admitted that Captain Miller will be a member of the Christmas party. And therefore, in a sense, under our observation. I shouldn’t have thought that a social weekend was the time or place to investigate financial dishonesty. Alleged financial dishonesty,” he added, carefully, being himself a solicitor.
“Maybe not.” Craven sat back and pulled the rug over both of them. “I’d like you to meet him, all the same. He’s an odd mixture. When I took up this politics game, I thought it was a fairly straightforward sort of business. Once you were lucky enough to get elected. You sat up at Westminster, and spoke when you could, and voted the right way—”
Bohun grinned. “It’s no use your coming the simple soldier man with me, John,” he said. “I’ve checked up on you. If you don’t look out you’re going to get a job when they have their semi-annual stocktaking in the new year.”
“A Parliamentary Secretaryship, maybe,” said Craven. But he couldn’t quite conceal his satisfaction. For a man who had been in Parliament only five years he had undoubtedly done well.
A first-class war record had helped. Perhaps an inherited income had helped even more. But undoubtedly there was ability under that thatch of smooth light hair. The ability to plan and to persev
ere. Possibly even to accomplish. Time would show.
“What I hadn’t visualised,” he said, “is the constituency end of it. Hamboro West is a good constituency, I think. For me, certainly. It’s full of ex-Army types ruining themselves on farms and that sort of thing and I get on with ’em. But you can’t let up. You’ve got to think about them the whole time. Every time you open your blessed mouth there are all those thousands of householders sitting in judgment and all of ’em ready to take offence.”
“I quite see why it’s important to have a good agent,” said Bohun, thoughtfully.
“He’s not just got to be good. He’s got to be a miracle of tact and ability and organisation and probity. And the Constituency Association pay him – what? £500 a year, if he’s lucky. A bit more in the big constituencies. But not much. You can’t buy miracles today for £500 a year.”
“I take it,” said Bohun, “that that’s why you so often get a man who’s retired from some other job with a pension. Like Miller.”
“Miller seemed all right. A nice little man. Obviously as tough as nails. The M.C. he got in Holland wasn’t something that came up with the rations. I took the trouble to read the citation. And that was the piece of the war I was in – hard, cold, dirty, damp fighting.”
He seemed to be looking out again across the steel grey dykes, their surface whipped alternately by hail and bullets.
“You were saying,” said Bohun, “that he seemed all right.”
John Craven gave an involuntary shiver, and pulled himself back into the comfortable warmth of the car. “You can imagine,” he said, “that I was prepared to give a man like that every latitude. Anyway, I was in the constituency so little that I wasn’t in a position to notice things. But a week ago Priday – Alan Priday, he’s Chairman of the Constituency Association – came to see me. Alan’s a very able man. If he says something, you listen to it. And when he said he wasn’t quite happy about the finances of our organisation, I sat up.”
Bohun said, “Priday? What is he besides being your Chairman?”
“He was an accountant of some sort. Now he gives his whole time to politics. You’ll meet him tonight. He’s a bachelor, like me. And Sir Hubert always asks us both down for Christmas. It gives us a real opportunity to talk. Also I think he hopes one of us will marry his daughter, Vanessa.”
“Miller,” said Bohun, firmly.
“Yes,” said Craven. “Well, Priday told me that he’d been looking into the Association accounts – we’re not a business, you understand that. But we handle quite a lot of money and have to keep things pretty straight. The first thing that struck Priday was that Miller seemed to pay almost all his bills in cash. Even things you’d always expect to pay by cheque, like the rent of the headquarters office.”
“I know people like that,” said Bohun.
“It’s a form of phobia.”
“All right. Suppose it was just a habit he’d got into. It meant that he was constantly drawing large cheques to ‘Self or ‘Cash.’ Nothing actually wrong with that. But he seemed a bit vague when Priday questioned him about where it had all gone.”
“Did he like Priday questioning him?”
“Not a bit. He’s got a temper like a Mills bomb.”
“Then his evasiveness might have been annoyance more than guilt.”
“It could have been. Yes.” Craven was obviously trying hard to be fair. “There was one other thing. It was Sir Hubert who pointed it out to me last time I was down there – quite innocently. He said, ‘Miller seems to be smartening up a bit. Got himself a nice new car, and stopped dressing like a tramp.’ It was true, too. During the last two years he’s been showing distinct signs of prosperity.”
“Which wouldn’t be accounted for by an agent’s salary.”
“We pay him as well as most. But I don’t think he could do it on his salary. Might have come into money, but I never heard of it. These things usually get out.”
“Yes,” said Bohun. “I think you’ve made out a prima facie case. The real proof will be in Miller’s bank account. If that has got a lot of fairly large, fairly regular unexplained payments in of cash, I’d say that would clinch it.”
“Can one look at his bank account?”
“With a judge’s order,” said Bohun. “Which you won’t get without something a lot more definite than what you’ve told me. However, I’ll keep my eyes open.”
Sir Hubert Vambrill was an excellent host. A very tall, very thin, outwardly serious man, who had started life as an office boy in Liverpool and made a fortune in cotton before he was forty. He had, for the past twenty-five years, been living the life of a country gentleman and fighting to preserve what he had won.
The success of his fight was evidenced by the fact that he was still able to maintain a large house and an adequate staff of servants.
Clare, Lady Vambrill, a square, leathery woman, had hunted until she was fifty and then relapsed into almost complete insensibility. The daughter of this curious couple, Vanessa, was a strikingly pretty girl with characteristics derived, in unexpected proportions, from both sides of the family.
“What does it mean,” she said confidingly to John Craven, at dinner that Christmas Eve, “when it says that outside calling was normal, but the clearing banks were active as buyers of bills?”
“Well, it’s a bit difficult to explain.”
“I read that in the Financial Times this morning. Daddy couldn’t explain it either.”
“I dare say I understood it once,” said Sir Hubert. “Curious girl. Only papers she ever reads are the Financial Times and Horse and Hounds”
“The other papers are so impossible,” said Vanessa. “The Times is so stodgy you can’t even light the fire with it – or that’s what Jane says. The others are just impertinent. Why should they always be trying to run people’s lives for them?”
Craven thought rapidly of those organs of the Press which his calling forced him to read every morning, and was inclined to agree with her. He was not certain whether he disliked more the papers which normally supported his party or those which openly attacked it.
“Did you have a good run today?”
“Not bad,” said Vanessa. “Two-mile point. The ground’s still a bit soggy.”
“It’s freezing now,” said Priday.
“It’s going to be a real old-fashioned Christmas Eve,” said Sir Hubert. “At least, I hope it is, because I’ve got a surprise for you all.”
“Daddy. Not carols.”
“Wait and see,” said Sir Hubert.
“At the fourth tee,” said Captain Miller to Lady Vambrill, “I hit a humdinger. Right down the middle.”
“I hope you didn’t hurt him,” said Lady Vambrill.
Bohun on her right, choked on a walnut, and said, “Do you play golf, Lady Vambrill?”
“Waste of time,” said her ladyship, briefly. “Come Vanessa.”
The departure of the only two ladies left the five men to their devices. Sir Hubert tipped the remains of the port into his own glass, fetched a full decanter from the sideboard and circulated it to Captain Miller, who filled his glass gratefully. His chances of drinking a 1924 vintage port were few and far between, and the fact that he was adding it to the Burgundy drunk at dinner and the gin drunk before dinner seemed to cause his seasoned stomach no qualms. In fact, however, he was getting very slightly drunk.
Craven filled his own glass. Priday said “no.” Bohun topped his own up.
“Another Christmas,” said Craven. “A barbaric and outdated ceremony, but useful as a sort of milestone.”
“That’s the trouble with milestones,” said Sir Hubert. “At the start of your journey they show you how far you have gone. After a certain point they get turned round and only show you how far you have to go.”
“In my opinion,” said Priday precisely, “the traditions of Christmas are mainly kept up by shopkeepers for the good of their profit and loss accounts. It carries them nicely over the dead season at the end of autumn,
and anything that’s over can be ‘marked down’ for the January sales.”
“Thank God we’re not all accountants,” said Miller.
Priday said acidly, “A little accountancy isn’t out of place sometimes.” And Bohun looked at him sharply.
Captain Miller seemed to be debating whether to accept the challenge. His face was normally the colour of a south wall, so it was difficult to see whether he was flushing. Before he could reply—
“I sincerely hope,” said Sir Hubert mildly, “that none of you are actively opposed to a little entertainment at Christmas.”
“You mustn’t take any notice of them,” said Craven, “they’re just trying to shock you.”
“I must admit,” said Bohun, “that I rarely let Christmas go past without casting my eye back to other Christmasses. Last year I spent it in Germany. Never again. The Germans may have invented Christmas, but they’ve forgotten the secret.”
“Past Christmasses,” said Sir Hubert, with a sigh.
He walked across to the window and pulled back the heavy, swinging curtain. Outside the moon was riding in glory. The snow had stopped falling and the frost had laid its iron fingers on the world.
“When I was a boy,” he said, “I could remember each Christmas on its own. Each one was distinct and separate and each had its own glories. Now, I’m afraid they seem to blur and run together. I wonder if I shall remember this one.”
Three of the others had joined him at the window as he was speaking and stood, looking out at the glittering snowscape. The silence was broken by an almost hysterical laugh. It came from Captain Miller, seated alone at the table. He had recharged his glass and was gazing into the red heart of the thirty-two-year-old wine.
“There’s one Christmas,” he said, “that I’m not going to forget in a hurry.”
The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries Page 11