Grave Mistake

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘You’d better,’ said Schramm. ‘This is the hell-knows-no-fury bit, Superintendent, and you may as well recognize it. Oh, yes. She actually said when she heard about Sybil and me that she bloody well wished Syb was dead and she meant it. Fact, I assure you. And I don’t mind telling you she felt the same about me. Still does. Look at her.’

  Sister Jackson was hardly a classical figure of panic but she certainly presented a strange picture. The velvet beret had flopped forward over her left eye so that she was obliged to tilt her head back at an extravagant angle in order to see from under it. Oddly enough, and deeply unpleasant as the situation undoubtedly was, she reminded Alleyn momentarily of a grotesque lady on a comic postcard.

  They began to exchange charge and countercharge, often speaking simultaneously. It was the kind of row that is welcome as manna from Heaven to an investigating officer. Alleyn noted it all down, almost under their noses, and was conscious, as often before, of a strong feeling of distaste for the job.

  They repeated themselves ad nauseam. She used the stock phrases of the discarded mistress. He, as he became articulate, also grew reckless and made more specific his accusations about her having threatened to do harm to Sybil Foster and even hinted that on her visit to Room 20 she might well have abetted Sybil in taking an overdose.

  At that point they stopped dead, stared aghast at each other and then, for the first time since the slanging match had set in, at Alleyn.

  He finished his notes and shut the book.

  ‘I could,’ he said, ‘and perhaps I should, ask you both to come to the police station and make statements. You would then refuse to utter or to write another word until you had seen your respective solicitors. A great deal of time would be wasted. Later on you would both state that you had been dead drunk and that I had brought about this pitiable condition and made false reports about your statements and taken them down in writing. All this would be very boring and unproductive. Instead, I propose that you go back to Greengages, think things over and then concoct your statements. You’ve been too preoccupied to notice, I fancy, but I’ve made pretty extensive notes and I shall make a report of the conversation and, in due course, invite you to sign it. And now, I expect you will like to go. If, that is, you are in a fit state to drive. If not, you’d better go to the lavatories and put your fingers down your throats. I’ll be in touch. Good evening.’

  He left them gaping and went out to his car where he waited about five minutes before they appeared severally, walking with unnatural precision. They entered their cars and drove, very slowly, away.

  II

  Fox had not gone to bed at their pub. He and Alleyn took a nightcap together in Alleyn’s room.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Fox, rubbing his hands on his knees. ‘That was a turn-up for the books, wasn’t it? I’d’ve liked to be there. How do you read it, then, Mr Alleyn? As regards the lady, now? Dropped in on the deceased round about nine p.m. and was watched by crêpe-soles from the alcove and is being blackmailed by him. Which gives us one more reason, if we’d needed it, for saying crêpe-soles is Claude?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘But,’ said Fox opening his eyes wide, ‘but when the doctor (which is what he isn’t, properly speaking, but never mind), when the doctor rings through an hour, or thereabouts, later and tells her to come to Room 20 and she does come and the lady’s passed away, does she say –’ and here Mr Fox gave a sketchy impersonation of a female voice – ‘“Oh, Doctor, I looked in at nine and she was as right as Christmas”? No. She does not. She keeps her tongue behind her teeth and gets cracking with the stomach pump. Now why? Why not mention it?’

  ‘Schramm seemed to suggest that at some earlier stage, in a fit of jealous rage, that Jackson had threatened she’d do some mischief to Mrs Foster. And was now afraid he’d think that on this unmentioned visit she’d taken a hand in overdosing her with barbiturates.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Fox. ‘But the catch in that is, Mrs Foster, according to our reading of the evidence, was first drugged and then smothered. So it looks as if he didn’t realize she was smothered, which, if true, puts him in the clear. Any good?’

  ‘I think so, Br’er Fox. I think it’s quite a lot of good.’

  ‘Would you say, now, that Sister J would be capable of doing the job herself – pillow and all?’

  ‘Ah, there you have me. I think she’s a jealous, slighted woman with a ferocious temper. Jealous, slighted women have murdered their supplanters before now but generally speaking they’re more inclined to take to the man. And by George, judging by the way she shaped up to Schramm tonight I wouldn’t put it past her.’

  ‘By and large, then, these two are a bit of nuisance. We’d got things more or less settled – well, I had,’ said Mr Fox with a hard look at Alleyn, ‘and it was just a matter of running Claude to earth. And now this silly lot crops up.’

  ‘Very inconsiderate.’

  ‘Yerse. And there’s no joy from the Claude front, by the way. The Yard rang through. The search is what the Press likes to call nationwide but not a squeak.’

  ‘Southampton?’

  ‘They sent a copper they don’t reckon looks like it into “The Good Read”, in Port Lane. It’s an accommodation address-shop all right but there was nothing for “Morris”. Very cagey the chap was – sussy for drugs but they’ve never collected enough to knock him off. The DI I talked to thinks it’s possible Claude Carter off-loaded the stuff he brought ashore there. If he’s thinking of slipping out by Southampton he could have fixed it to collect Sister J’s blackmail delivery on the way.’

  ‘Suppose she’d posted it today, first-class mail, it wouldn’t arrive at the earliest until tomorrow,’ said Alleyn.

  ‘They’ve got the shop under the obbo non-stop. If he shows, they’ll feel his collar, all right,’ said Fox.

  ‘If. It’s an odd development, isn’t it?’ Alleyn said. ‘There he is, large as life, mousing about up at Quintern Place and in and around the district until (according to Daft Artie) twelve o’clock or (according to Bruce) nine, last night. He comes down the lane with his pack on his back. He opens the squeaky lych-gate and leaves his prints there. And vanishes.’

  ‘Now you see him, now you don’t. Lost his nerve, d’you reckon?’

  ‘We mustn’t forget he left that note for Mrs Jim.’

  ‘P’raps that’s all there is to it. P’raps,’ said Fox bitterly, ‘he’ll come waltzing back with a silly grin on his face having been to stay with his auntie. P’raps it was somebody else blackmailing Sister J, and we’ll get egg all over our faces.’

  ‘It’s an occupational hazard,’ Alleyn said vaguely and then to himself, ‘“into thin air” and but for the footprints at the lych-gate, leaving “not a wrack behind”. Why? And then – where to, for pity’s sake?’

  ‘Not by the late train to London,’ said Fox. ‘They said at the station, nobody entered or left it at Great Quintern.’

  ‘Hitched a lift?’

  ‘Nice job for our boys, that’ll be. Ads in the papers and what a hope.’

  ‘You’re in a despondent mood, my poor Foxkin.’

  Mr Fox, who, although an occasional grumbler, was never known to succumb to the mildest hint of depression, placidly ignored this observation.

  ‘I shall cheer you up,’ Alleyn continued. ‘You need a change of scene. What do you say to a moonlight picnic?’

  ‘Now then!’ said Fox guardedly.

  ‘Well, not perhaps a picnic but a stroll in a graveyard? Bruce Gardener would call it a Gothic stroll, no doubt.’

  ‘You don’t mean this, I suppose, Mr Alleyn?’

  ‘I do, though. I can not get Daft Artie’s story out of my head, Fox. It isn’t all moonshine, presumably, because there are those prints. Carter has disappeared and there is the layby in the hedge. I suggest we return to the scene and step it out. What’s the time?’

  ‘Eleven-ten.’

  ‘The village ought to be asleep.’

  ‘So ought we,’ sighed Fox
.

  ‘We’d better give the “factory” a shout and ask if they can raise an acetylene lamp or its equivalent.’

  ‘A reconstruction, then?’

  ‘You find it a fanciful notion? A trifle vieux-jeu, perhaps?’

  ‘I dare say it makes sense,’ said Fox resignedly and went off to telephone.

  Sergeant McGuiness on night duty at the station did produce an acetylene lamp, kept in reserve against power failures. He had it ready for them and handed it over rather wistfully, ‘I’d’ve liked to be in on this,’ he confided to Fox. ‘It sounds interesting.’

  Alleyn overheard him. ‘Can you raise a copper to hold the desk for an hour?’ he asked. ‘We could do with a third man.’

  Sergeant McGuiness brightened. He said, ‘Our PC Dance was competing in the darts semi-finals at the local tonight. He’ll be on his way home but if he’s won he’ll be looking in to tell me. I dare say if it’s agreeable to you, sir –’

  ‘I’ll condone it,’ said Alleyn.

  A scraping sound and a bobbing light on the window-blind announced the arrival of a bicycle. The sergeant excused himself and hurried to the door. A voice outside shouted, ‘Done it, Sarge.’

  ‘You never!’

  ‘Out on the double seven.’

  ‘That’s the stuff.’

  ‘Very near thing, though. Wait till I tell you.’

  ‘Hold on.’ The sergeant’s voice dropped to a mumble. There was a brief inaudible exchange. He returned followed by a ginger-headed simpering colossus.

  ‘PC Dance, sir,’ said Sergeant McGuiness.

  Alleyn congratulated PC Dance on his prowess and said he would be obliged if they could ‘borrow’ him. ‘Borrow’ is a synonym for ‘arrest’ in the Force and the disreputable pun, if pun it was, had an undeserved success. They left Dance telephoning his triumph to his wife.

  On their way to the village Alleyn outlined the object of the exercise for the gratified McGuiness. ‘We’re trying to make sense of an apparently senseless situation,’ he said. ‘Item: could a walker coming down Stile Lane into Long Lane see much or anything of the light from Bruce Gardener’s lamp? Item: can someone hidden in the hedge see the walker? Item: can the walker, supposing he climbs the steps to the church and goes into the church –’

  ‘Which,’ said the sergeant, ‘excuse me, he can’t. The church is locked at night, sir. By our advice. Possibility of vandals.’

  ‘See how right we were to bring you in. Who locks it? The vicar?’

  ‘That’s correct, Mr Alleyn. And once the deceased lady was brought in that’s what he’d do. Lock up the premises for the night.’

  ‘Leaving the church in darkness?’ Fox asked.

  ‘I think not, Fox. I think he’d leave the sanctuary light on. We can ask.’

  ‘So it’s after the arrival of the deceased that Artie’s story begins?’

  ‘And our performance too for what it’s worth. Do they keep early hours in the village, Sergeant?’

  ‘Half an hour after the local closes they’re all in bed.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Suppose,’ Fox said, on a note of consternation, ‘Daft Artie’s sleeping out?’

  ‘It’ll be a bloody nuisance,’ Alleyn grunted. ‘If he is we’ll have to play it by ear. I don’t know, though. We might pull him in to demonstrate.’

  ‘Would he co-operate?’

  ‘God knows. Here we are. We make as little noise as possible. Don’t bang the doors. Keep your voices down.’

  They turned a sharp corner through a stand of beech trees and entered the village; a double row of some dozen cottages on either side of Long Lane, all fast asleep: the church, high above, its towers silhouetted against the stars, the rest almost disappearing into its background of trees. The moon had not yet risen so that Long Lane and the bank and hedge above it and the hillside beyond were all in deep shadow.

  Alleyn drove the car on to the green near the steps and they got out.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘There’s somebody still awake up Stile Lane.’

  ‘That’s the widow Black’s cottage,’ said the sergeant. ‘There’ll be someone looking after her – the brother, no doubt.’

  ‘Looking after her? Why?’

  ‘Did you not hear? She was knocked over by a truck on the way back from the funeral this afternoon. The blind corner up the lane. I’ve been saying for years it’d happen. The chap was driving dead slow for the turning and she fell clear. He helped her in and reported it to us.’

  ‘Would that be Bruce Gardener’s sister?’ asked Fox.

  ‘That’s right, Mr Fox. We’re not likely to disturb them.’

  ‘I don’t know so much about that,’ Alleyn murmured. ‘If it’s Bruce up there and he looks out of the window and sees light coming from where he dug the grave and had his own lamp last night, he may come down to investigate. Damn!’ He thought for a moment. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘we tell him. Why not? Let’s get moving. I’d like you, Sergeant, to act as the boy says he did. Get into the layby in the hedge when the time comes. Not yet. We’ll set you up. I’ll do the Carter bit. Mr Fox is Bruce. All you have to do is to keep your eyes and ears open and report exactly what you see. Got the lamp? And the shovel? Come on, and quietly does it.’

  He opened the lych-gate very cautiously, checking it at the first sign of the squeak. They slid through, one by one and moved quietly up the steps.

  ‘Don’t use your torches unless you have to,’ Alleyn said and as their eyes adjusted to the dark it thinned and gravestones stood about them. They reached the top. Alleyn led the way round the church: the nave, the north transept, the chancel, until they came to the Passcoigne plot and Sybil Foster’s grave. The flowers on the mound smelt heavy in the night air and the plastic covers glinted in the starlight as if phosphorescent.

  Fox and McGuiness crouched over the lamp. Presently it flared. The area became explicit in a white glare. The sergeant spent some time regulating the flame. Fox stood up and his gigantic shadow rose against the trees. The lamp hissed. Fox lifted it and put it by the grave. They waited to make sure it was in good order.

  ‘Right,’ said Alleyn at last. ‘Give us eight minutes to get down, Fox, and then start. Don’t look into the light, Sergeant, it’ll blind you. Come on.’

  The shadow of the church was intensified by the light beyond it and the steps took longer to descend than to climb. When they were back at the car Alleyn murmured, ‘Now, I’ll show you the layby. It’s in the hedge across the lane and a little to our right. About four yards further on there’s a gap at the top of the bank with a hurdle gate. You can ease round the post, go through into the field and turn back to the layby. If by any chance somebody comes down the lane and gets nosey we’re looking for a missing child thought to be asleep near the hedge. Here we are. Make sure you’ll recognize it from the other side. There’s that hazel plant sticking up above the level of the hedge.’

  They moved along the hedge until they came to the gap.

  ‘Through you go,’ Alleyn whispered, ‘turn left and then back six paces. You’ll have to crawl in, helmet and all. Give one low whistle when you’re set and I’ll go on into Stile Lane. That’s when your obbo begins.’

  He watched the shadowy sergeant climb the bank and edge his bulk between the gate-post and the hedge. Then he turned about and looked up at the church. It was transformed. A nimbus of light rose behind it. Tree-tops beyond the Passcoigne plot started up, uncannily defined, like stage scenery, and as he watched, a gargantuan shadow rose, moved enormously over the trees, threw up arms, and the sweeping image of a shovel sank and rose again. Mr Fox had embarked on his pantomime.

  The sergeant was taking his time. No whistle. The silence, which is never really silence, of a countryside, breathed out its nocturnal preoccupations: stirrings in the hedgerow, far-distant traffic, the movements of small creatures going about their business in the night.

  ‘Ssst!’

  It was the sergeant, back in the gap up the hill. His he
lmet showed against Mrs Black’s lighted window in Stile Lane. Alleyn climbed the bank and leant over the hurdle.

  ‘Artie is there,’ breathed Sergeant McGuiness. ‘In his hidey-hole. Curled up. My Gawd, I nearly crawled in on top of him.’

  ‘Asleep?’

  ‘Sound.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Come back into the lane and lean into the hollow in the bank below the layby. Your head will be pretty much on a level with his. I simply want to check that he could have seen what he said he saw and heard what he said he heard. Back you come.’

  The sergeant had gone. Alleyn slipped into the lane and walked a little way up it. He was now quite close to Mrs Black’s cottage. The light behind the window was out. He waited for a moment or two and then retraced his steps, walking, now, in the middle of the road. He wondered if Claude Carter had worn his crêpe-soled shoes last night. He wondered, supposing Daft Artie woke and saw him, if he would repeat his eldritch shriek.

  Now he was almost opposite the layby. Not a hint of the sergeant, in blackest shadow under the hedge.

  Alleyn paused.

  It was as if an ironclad fist struck him on the jaw.

  III

  He lay in the lane and felt grit against his face and pain and he heard a confusion of sounds. Disembodied voices shouted angrily.

  ‘Mr Fox! Come down here, Mr Fox.’

  He had been lifted and rested against a massive thigh. ‘I’m all right,’ somebody said. He said it. ‘Where’s Fox? What happened?’

  ‘The bloody kid. He chucked a brick at you. Over my head. Gawd, I thought he’d done you, Mr Alleyn,’ said Sergeant McGuiness.

  ‘Where’s Fox?’

  ‘Here,’ said Fox. His large concerned face blotted out the stars. He was breathing hard. ‘Here I am,’ he said. ‘You’ll be all right.’

  A furious voice was roaring somewhere out on the hillside beyond the hedge. ‘Come back. You damned, bloody young murderer. Come back, till I have the hide off of you.’ Footsteps thudded and retreated.

  ‘That’s Bruce,’ said Alleyn, feeling his jaw. ‘Where did he spring from? The cottage?’