“Maybe. Yes. And, finally, Miss Cruft and the professor.”
Mr. Habakkuk poured out the coffee and Buffet brought out the cigars.
Littlejohn wondered if these two epicures regaled themselves in this fashion every night. He also wondered where the excellent leg of mutton had come from. Certainly not from the butcher’s on the ration. In these country places maybe there were secret sources of supply.
They took their coffee and drew up to the fire again. It was getting on for nine. Time seemed to pass slowly in this quiet retreat. Even the pendulum of the fine grandfather’s clock in the corner seemed to hang fire between the ticks.
“So much for the love angle,” said Littlejohn at length.
The two old men looked at him surprised, as though suddenly torn from thoughts of other and better things back to the unpleasant realities of the present.
“Yes, I think so,” replied Mr. Buffet.
The ash on his cigar broke and scattered itself down his waistcoat. Mr. Habakkuk had been taking snuff and sat like one petrified enjoying the sensation and wondering whether or not he would sneeze.
“There’s another aspect, too, I believe,” added Littlejohn, dusting ash from his own pants. “When Laura marries I believe she comes into the money her father left in trust. I wonder if that might embarrass the Sprys.”
Buffet rubbed his nose nervously. He and his friend looked ready for a nap, and Littlejohn wasn’t far off snoozing himself. The photographs of cricketers over the fireplace began to grow uncertain in outline and the hypnotic ticking of the big clock was soothing.
“I’ve heard about that … Ronnie mentioned it once. Didn’t want anybody to think he was after Laura’s money. But surely the Sprys, or Spry himself, wouldn’t go so far.…”
“You never know. I’ve had one or two cases. You’d be surprised.”
Mr. Habakkuk suddenly roused himself.
“Tell us something about your cases. You know, a tale round the fire.”
Littlejohn was seeking an excuse in his own mind, but he saw he wouldn’t need any. Stall for a minute or two, and the old chap would be sound asleep.
Outside, cars and footsteps passed the door now and then. There didn’t seem to be many people about. Here in this quiet spot murder seemed very far away. Yet, somewhere in the village was a killer.
Heavy footsteps came pounding along the macadam and halted at the door. There was a thunder of knocking.
“Come in! Come in!” shouted Mr. Buffet, rousing himself, his grey hair disordered and his eyes wide.
The three men by the fire put their heads round the wings of the armchairs they were occupying.
It was P.C. Costain, red in the face, eyes popping, and breathing laboriously from running.
“Inspector! I’m glad I’ve found you. Somebody’s bin at it agen on Gallows Hill. This time it’s Butt … P.C. Butt. If the vicar ’adn’t ’appened to be passing he’d ’ave bin a gonner. Binder twine again, sir. He’s unconscious at Dr. Gell’s. Can you come?”
Littlejohn had the greatest difficulty in preventing his two new cronies from joining him, but finally dissuaded them. He left them both on the mat, wide-eyed like startled children, and hurried out with the constable.
“I never was fond o’ Bill Butt, sir. But this is the bloody limit,” panted Costain on the way. And, having thus relieved himself of his feelings, he seemed more like his placid self again.
6.
CONFESSIONS
“Very singular things occur in our profession, I can assure you, sir.”
CHARLES DICKENS (Pickwick Papers)
IN normal times P.C. Butt was a figure of fun and scorn in Ravelstone, but the cowardly attempt on his life altered local opinion considerably. The fact that he had almost met his death whilst guarding the village from violence softened the hearts of most of his former detractors. He assumed an air of importance, almost heroic, during his spell in hospital. That was probably because absence makes the heart grow fonder and emotion tends to overdo things a bit. When Butt, restored to health and later to be seen back on his alien beat, reappeared in the flesh his popularity began to wane again and he was soon where he started.
The attempted murder of a policeman had peculiar repercussions in the Costain household, however. Soon after the crime the news spread like wildfire round the village and Mrs. Costain was informed that the constable had been strangled in the course of duty. Which constable was not specified, as the woman who bore the news had been too impatient to be off and spreading it to listen properly to the account.
In the brief seconds during which Mrs. Costain sought her hat and coat with which decently to garb herself for a visit to the doctor’s, she saw herself alone, with no Joe to nag and find odd jobs for. At the same time, his longings to return to Ballaugh acquired an almost holy significance now that she thought him dead. She sat on the stairs, a broken woman for a minute or two, and sobbed her eyes out. Then she dried her tears, blew her nose, and ran all the way to the Gells’ place.
“Oh, Joe!” cried Mrs. Costain when she saw Butt instead of her husband stretched on the surgery couch. She flung herself sobbing on Costain’s navy blue breast.
Costain was quite bowled over. He wasn’t used to the least exhibition of emotion from Liza. It brought tears to his own eyes. After quite a struggle he disentangled himself and persuaded his wife to go home and wait for him. On the way she called at the back doors of the butcher and the fruiterer for supplies of steak and cowheel. These were gladly produced by their respective purveyors in exchange for up-to-date information. In fact, the greengrocer gave Mrs. Costain his part of the mixture free of charge. At the time, overcome by events, he felt deep gratitude to the police effervescing in his bosom. The next morning, however, he regretted his impulsiveness on remembering that he paid rates for police protection, and he evolved a plan for getting his money back with interest over a series of transactions for fish and sprouts at a penny a time more than usual.
It was long past midnight when P.C. Costain sat down to his favourite dish of steak and cowheel opposite his chastened and solicitous wife. As he entered she had instinctively greeted him in the usual way. “Wipe …” And then the words froze on her tongue. “Hullo, Joe! Draw up to the fire, Joe.”
Joe talked about Ballaugh all through his supper and Liverpool was never mentioned. The constable was fluent on this occasion, for on the way home he had fortified himself with a medicinal dose of whisky at The Bird in Hand, and this had been supplemented by another double on the house by the grateful landlord.
The following day the village was in a turmoil from morning till night.
First, there was the inquest on young Free at eleven in the morning. Then, the funeral at mid-day. Butt’s escapade of the night before was bandied from group to group and from queue to queue. And, in the midst of it all, oranges arrived for distribution. It wasn’t fair of the Ministry of Food to choose such a day, but it was just like them.
At the height of all this commotion a large lorry, loaded with building materials and six men with grim faces, passed through Ravelstone on its way to Ditchling Episcopi to repair the ruined roof of the police station.
The inquest on Ronald Free was held in the Village Hall, and there was a large queue waiting for admission when Mr. Sylvanus Groan, the County Coroner, arrived. This annoyed Mr. Groan, for he was a native of Ditchling, and an inborn antipathy towards all Ravelstonians caused him to resent providing entertainment for them. He was more annoyed when the audience assembled before him. All the women had oranges in their shopping baskets and some of their children had even pounced on the rare fruit and were noisily sucking them and pitching the peel and pips all over the shop. Two old men on the front row were smoking pipes of twist.
Mr. Groan was a small, dapper man, dressed in black for the occasion, and wearing spats. He had a large, bald head, large ears, a large mouth and an enormous purple-tinted nose. It was rumoured that presiding over so many suicide enquiries had made him a mel
ancholy secret drinker. He looked hungrily at the oranges leaking from the shopping bags, glared malevolently at the children burying their mouths and noses in them, and angrily beat the desk with his gavel.
“Clear the court!” he yelled to his officer. “This isn’t a harvest festival!”
After this operation there remained only a residue of determined spectators, who had insisted on their rights as citizens and democrats. It took ten minutes for P.C. Costain to tell his tale, for the doctors to give their reports and for Laura Cruft to testify, and then Mr. Groan adjourned the inquest sine die. As he climbed into his car the ejected audience, now queuing for cakes at the pastrycook’s, hooted him.
Meanwhile, Sam Stopford, Funerals Reverently Conducted, Cremations a Speciality, was hurrying to and fro about the place. Sam was usually very cheerful when pursuing his usual trade of carpentry and joinery, but now he had assumed his funeral expression and uniform of top hat, frock coat and corrugated black trousers. Wherever he went he carried such a blast of death and corruption that men felt like baring their heads when he passed by, as to a corpse in a coffin. He was deaf on one side and when addressed from the wrong quarter either failed to respond or, as a rule, said “Wot?” and swivelled his large, square head round to bring his good ear into operation. This day, however, importance had made him totally deaf.
Littlejohn was in Melchester, talking things over with the Chief Constable. Greatly to the Inspector’s relief, Stanley had himself been smitten by the influenza which had so decimated the force. Fortunately, Superintendent Glaisher had recovered from his bout of the epidemic and had returned to collaborate on the case. Littlejohn found this efficient and modest old-stager a much better and less exasperating colleague.
Glaisher was lanky and thin with a furrowed face and a tired manner. Only his black, sparkling eyes were animated. For the rest, he looked like a dissipated French savant of the last century. The cut of his clothes was even out-of-date. Perhaps it was living a semi-fossilised life in Melchester made him such a relic.
The Chief Constable, thin, aquiline and radiating intense physical fitness, was torn between concentrating all the energies of his force on the murder and attending to the routine of the district with a staff cut down to half by the prevailing epidemic.
Littlejohn offered to carry on himself until more men returned to duty. He would send for Cromwell, his sergeant, if necessary.
They left it at that and went on to discuss the state of the case so far.
Littlejohn told them what he had already done. The visit to Apple Tree farm. The chatter of the two old gentlemen, Buffet and Habakkuk, on the previous evening, and the love and money aspects of the affair as far as he had been able to ascertain.
Then, the final curtain of the day’s work: Butt almost killed in the same way as Free.
“Quite obvious that the murder of Free wasn’t a casual affair, then,” said Glaisher. He had a tired, monotonous voice, and his long legs and sprawling attitude, feet on the coal scuttle and body slumped in a wooden armchair, reminded Littlejohn of that of a famous philosopher-politician in the House of Commons before he was elevated to the Lords. “It couldn’t have been a tramp, I mean.”
“Why?”
In spite of his alert manner, Sir Guy wasn’t as quick on the uptake as his lackadaisical subordinate.
“It looks to me as if Butt had some information that endangered the murderer,” droned Glaisher. “So whoever it was tried to wipe him out.”
“Has Butt been questioned yet?”
“No, sir. They gave him a sleeping draught early this morning and he wasn’t awake when I called. It seems his father met with an accident yesterday, too, and the pair of them are side by side in the same ward. They started quarrelling in the middle of the night and the nurse gave them both a shot of something to stop them.”
“Well, it’s high time Butt was wakened and his tale got out of him, dope or no dope.”
It was quite true that in the night there had been a battle royal between old Butt and his son. When the night nurse’s back was turned, the ancient of days had rudely awakened his son and demanded an immediate explanation of his skulking in bed in hospital when he ought to have been laying a murderer by the heels.
“Did you denounce Costain?”
“No. An’ I ain’t goin’ to. Saved my life, did Joe, and whoever does Will Butt a good turn never regrets it.”
P.C. Butt thereupon told his parent what had happened and how near to death he had been.
Old Nehemiah was furious. He reviled his son for proclaiming his business to all and sundry. He called him an incompetent ne’er-do-well. He taunted him about his wrestling, saying that after all his parent had taught him he couldn’t wrestle a rice pudding.
“’Ow the bee haitch I ever begot yew, I don’t know. If I ’adn’t explicit trust in yore pore dead mother I’d have said you was somebody else’s son.”
Whereupon P.C. Butt, his head aching from his rough handling on Gallows Hill and almost bursting from his father’s abuse, rose from his bed, seized the old man by the throat and told him what he’d do to him if he didn’t shut up. He also squeezed the old chap’s windpipe until Nehemiah promised not to breathe a word about Costain’s crime to a soul.
By this time the ward, which held ten other sufferers, was in a state of pandemonium. Four of the inmates were drugged and slept through it, but the rest raised the roof. Two men, who on the previous day had lost their appendices, writhed from their beds and tried to get at the constable and his father with a view to murdering them. A chap with a broken thigh struggled to release himself from the blocks and tackle in which he was imprisoned and do the same. And a fellow of fifty who that day had had half his thyroid taken away started shouting for his mother.
The night nurse arrived hot and bothered and plunged a hypodermic into what she thought was an arm apiece of the combatants. She thus gave Nehemiah, whose struggling anatomy was mixed up with that of the patricidal William, two doses and P.C. Butt none. The old chap passed out at once and was still fast asleep when Littlejohn called. His son, seeing Nehemiah fall unconscious, thought he had done for him and fainted with emotion. So they gave him a light sedative and he was able to talk with the Inspector in due course.
“What information had you got hold of that might have been dangerous to the murderer, Butt?” asked Littlejohn.
“Nothin”, sir,” replied the constable, but his powers of dissimulation were poor and he looked like the murderer himself.
“Come, come, Butt. Why should anyone attack you otherwise? You were just on patrol, I suppose. People don’t attack policemen for nothing.”
“I dunno. Perhaps it was because I boasted I’d soon catch the chap. I dunno.”
“Boasted? What do you mean?”
“I was goin’ through Ravelstone in the afternoon and some women in a queue started shoutin’ h’abuse. They’re that way in Ravelstone. Can see no good in anybody as doesn’t belong to their village. They started runnin’ down what I was doin’.”
“Well?”
“So I up an’ told ’em as I’d soon have the criminal by the ears. I boasted I’d got some information, and I hadn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
There were violent movements from the adjacent bed.
“Tell ’im about Joe Costain and the partridges,” yelled old man Butt, recovering from his double hypodermic and full of beans.
The nurse, fearing a renewal of hostilities, thereupon made a signal to a male orderly, who at once wheeled the shouting Nehemiah into another ward.
It happened that Costain was sitting in an anteroom waiting to enquire about P.C. Butt’s condition. Littlejohn at once brought him to the bedside and dragged out a confession from both men concerning the partridges, their slaughter and ultimate disposal.
“I’m not here investigating poaching offences, and as far as I’m concerned the matter’s finished with,” said the Inspector when the sorry tale had been finished.
&n
bsp; Both police constables looked relieved, shook hands and parted the best of friends.
“Always was a lucky one, Joe,” Butt was heard to mutter to himself as he fell asleep again.
“So it looks as if the murderer was somewhere within hearing when Butt started boasting to the women in the street,” said Littlejohn to Costain on the way home. “He must have thought Butt was going to expose him instead of you.”
Costain blushed and eased the collar of his tunic convulsively.
“I’m very much obliged to you, sir, for overlooking …”
“Say no more about it. Now, we’ve got to find out who was in the queue and in the vicinity when Butt made his outburst.”
“If I may say so, sir, without presumption, I could take on that part. I knows most of the villagers and could set about finding out …”
“Very well, Costain. Go to it. I’ll see young Free’s parents and one or two other parties whose names have cropped up lately.”
The strife between the rival constables was not to Littlejohn’s liking at all, and lest there should be a further outbreak of hostilities he had a word with the house surgeon at the hospital, which ensured the detention of P.C. Butt for a week or more. Old Butt, too, whose personality, under existing stress, alternated between his own and that of Noah, was kept to his bed, whence, unable to meet and denounce his son face to face, he sent him abusive notes couched in horrible handwriting and full of Latin tags and bad spelling.
Thus the two knockabout comedians were eliminated from the case and Littlejohn and Costain could get on without further interruption.
7.
COSTAIN AT WORK
“.… Monstrous Regiment of Women.”
JOHN KNOX
IN offering to find out who might have been within earshot when Butt made his vainglorious boast, Costain, on later consideration, realised, to use his own words, that he “had bitten off more than he could chew.”
The worthy constable was nothing of a lady’s man. Any instinctive leanings he might have had in that direction had been stifled long ago by his vigilant wife, and a streak of natural shyness combined with his exclusive idolatry of Mrs. Gell did the rest. When Littlejohn left him to get on with the job alone, Costain felt like a swimmer out of his depth and fast being carried to destruction.
Outrage on Gallows Hill Page 6