‘Don’t forget that I’m going to hold your coat for you, lady.’
Dido’s chin came forward. ‘Looks like you may have to,’ she said. ‘But the more I think of it the more I scent organised opposition. You don’t know me very well—in fact you don’t know me at all—but I just won’t be bullied. I come of a large family, all males, and I know something about getting my own way.’
Morty chuckled with delight. ‘That’s the spirit, my girl. There’s a saying in these parts—I picked it up in The Demon—“I won’t be knocked out of my Know”. We’ll defy the foul fiend together. And to hell with the Forty Angels and Hector Askew, too, now I come to think of it.’
‘Poor man,’ said Dido. ‘He hates being kept waiting. I ought to have been there nearly an hour ago. At least I’ve got a good excuse.’
The roar of a motor cycle exhaust announced that its owner was departing for Saltey at speed and in a moment P.C. Simmonds appeared round the van, notebook in hand.
‘I’d best take your name, just in case,’ he said. ‘Though I think I know you, sir. You’re the American gentleman, aren’t you, from The Demon, And you’re a doctor, miss? You wouldn’t be the lady who’s come into Miss Kytie’s house, by any chance?’
There was a half smile on his face as he spoke which suggested that he was going to add ‘and much good will it do you’ but he clearly suppressed the thought.
‘The van has a tyre that’s been cut and he doesn’t carry a spare. He will move the vehicle away to the side in a minute which will just give you room to get past.’ He cocked a speculative eye at the pair. ‘You do want to go to Saltey, I suppose?’
‘We’re both going to live there,’ said Morty firmly, ‘so spread the good news around.’
The afternoon was fading as the procession finally moved off. The road swept round in a long erratic curve between low cut butchered hedges separating heavy fields where the saltings, on which nothing but sour grass will grow, had been held at bay by deep drainage. A straggling line of bungalows and villas announced the village itself which was dominated by the squat Norman tower of St Michael’s mantled in elms. It was remote, disinterested and apparently deserted, a huddle of mixed dwellings ranging from Tudor to Edwardian, each sited without consideration for its neighbours. Chapel brick and corrugated iron rubbed shoulders with white weatherboard and oak beams which had escaped the restorer’s art.
The heart of the hamlet was marked by a patch of grass not large enough to be dignified by the title of Green, flanked on one side by cottages and on the other by The Angel, a sad hostelry which clearly found little favour with its intended public. It stood back from the road and the space in front of it provided a parking area now occupied by a single small station wagon.
‘Hector’s here,’ said Dido sombrely. ‘He won’t be pleased with us. That’s his car. He’ll be up at the Hollies, that’s the official name of the house. It’s a difficult drive to get into.’
The late Miss Kytie’s property lay some fifty yards ahead on their left. It was a solid double fronted late Georgian residence faced with stucco, to which two ill-proportioned bow windows had been added. Dark hollies flanked it and at the far side was a brick wall concealing a lady garden with trees beyond. A white five-barred gate stood open at a rakish angle and gave on to a circular drive in the centre of which was a group of unpruned rose trees guarded by a miniature box hedge. Weeds sprouted from the pebbled pathway and on the ground floor the blinds were drawn.
Morty negotiated the difficult approach with skill and brought the Lotus to a halt directly in front of the pillared porch. He ran up the two steps which led to the door and tried the handle. It did not respond.
‘Try ringing,’ said Dido. ‘He’s bound to be here.’
A tug at a wrought iron bell pull which creaked at the unaccustomed insult brought a faint tinkling jangle from somewhere far inside, but the echoes died away without producing any other result. The light was now beginning to wane and the air was soft and melancholy after the downpour of the morning.
Morty had raised his hand for a second attempt when Dido caught his arm.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There must be someone at home. I can hear music.’
They stood immobile with ears strained. From the depths of the house, faint but unmistakable, came the adenoidal moan of the Mersey beat:
‘I wanna be your rave . . .’
‘Damn him,’ said Morty. ‘He’s got a blasted transistor going and he can’t hear anything else. One more try here and if that fails we’ll take him from the rear.’
He wrenched violently at the handle as he spoke and put his shoulder to the panelling. To his surprise the effort was successful. The door groaned, hesitated mutinously and finally swung back in surrender. The interior was dim with twilight, a cluttered curtained gloom which offered no welcome.
‘Hector!’ shouted Dido. ‘Hector, where are you?’
Distant and elusive Mersey voices wailed but there was no other response. Morty began to move purposefully through the house, flinging back curtains and shutters, raising protesting dust in his wake. He returned without success and they paused together to listen.
‘It’s down this way,’ said Dido at last. ‘It must lead to the greenhouse—a sort of garden room built on the side. I saw it when I walked round without the keys.’
A narrow passage led them to a half glass door and beyond it they found a green overgrown arbour full of ferns and smelling of eucalyptus. The place was furnished with dilapidated cane chairs and a low table filled the centre space. On it stood the tell-tale transistor still bleating out a history of woe. The largest chair in the room was a vast fan-backed affair with wide curling arms containing pockets for magazines and a tumbler, a relic of colonial glory designed for chota-pegs and gracious tropical verandahs. In it sat a man, his head bent forward on his chest and his arms gripping the sides.
Morty, who had snatched up the transistor in some anger, switched it off and they stood looking at the stranger. There was about him a frightening ageless loneliness as if he had been carved out of stone.
Dido took a step forward and caught at her breath, aware that the hairs at the back of her neck were rising. She shook herself involuntarily and became professional with a disciplined effort.
Very gently she took hold of Hector Askew’s shoulders and leant his body back against the cushions. His eyes were wide open and his head lolled awkwardly to one side. It did not need expert knowledge to tell either of them that he was dead, but it was some minutes before Dr Jones straightened her back and looked her companion in the face.
‘I thought he must have had a seizure of some sort,’ she said. ‘But he hasn’t. I think he’s been shot. Very silly of me not to spot it straight away.’
Suddenly her composure broke and Morty held out his arms to her. The fact that she was human enough to weep and be afraid was the one comfort he found in an ugly world.
5
The Company at The Demon
THE INVESTIGATION OF homicide in England is subject to the same considerations which control most other enterprises in contemporary life. This means that laws of economics and the shortage of manpower put a limit on the time and staff which can be devoted to any one problem.
The chain of enquiries into the death of Hector Askew began with P.C. Simmonds, who was just starting an evening meal in his cottage when the news reached him, and ran from him to his superior at Nine Ash, thence to Chelmsford and finally to Scotland Yard. The possible connection between the murder and the poison pen outbreak was remarked with commendable speed and Sergeant Throstle found himself seconded to a murder squad to which he did not properly belong, under the leadership of Superintendent Gravesend, an officer who delighted in being called dynamic when his activities were noticed by the Press. By midnight there were five official cars parked outside the Angel and the inn itself did unexpectedly good business until it closed its doors to the general public with stop watch precision.
Dido s
pent an uncomfortable night in an attic bedroom at The Demon and slept fitfully. The Superintendent and his team did not sleep at all, nor did they expect to. The modern intensive system of enquiry, which is to work with unremitting pressure until a case is broken, had found a high priest in Gravesend. He guarded his reputation with the care of a gardener watching over a rare plant, for it was his intention to retire early and to move on to better paid appointments.
Throstle disliked him dispassionately but the situation was out of his control.
By Sunday evening The Hollies had been searched from junk room to tool shed and before nightfall every inch of the overgrown garden and the copse beyond it had been trampled, beaten, prodded and given the appearance of an area recently tenanted by a battalion of cantankerous livestock. Nothing of any consequence was discovered.
Hector Askew, it was established, had arrived at Saltey at about four o’clock on the afternoon of Friday, some two and a half hours before his appointment with Dido. He had left his car outside the Angel and gone directly to the house, where he had apparently unlocked all three outer doors and opened two windows at the back. But he had not been seen alive since he had walked up the drive. The transistor was his property and he was in the habit of using it to obtain racing results.
No one had heard an identifiable shot and this was not remarkable since two young men admitted spending their afternoon shooting at rooks and three motor cyclists had rushed through the village headed for Mob’s Bowl without benefit of silencer.
By Tuesday evening three hundred and twelve grudging statements had been taken, signed, co-ordinated, corroborated and their makers temporarily eliminated. Askew had died at some time between five and six as a result of a shot from a 3.8 pistol which had not been discovered.
On Thursday in the early evening the Superintendent sat in P.C. Simmonds’ office parlour and looked morosely from his official report to his private notes. He had drawn a complete blank and no amount of detail or of word spinning could change the fact. Saltey had treated him and his squad with what amounted, in his opinion, to dumb insolence but he could find no loophole in the facade, nothing to suggest conspiracy or even simple concealment by omission.
The population, in the local Inspector’s phrase, was pig ignorant and was enjoying the fact.
The odd incident of the broken glass at the corner of the main road puzzled him but he found no enlightenment. The murderer could conceivably have left the village before it occurred or even have placed the barrier there to delay discovery, but he was tolerably certain that in fact no one had left the village during the vital hour. He put the affair down to the viciousness of modern youth, which was the accepted opinion, but left a query beside it in his notes.
Wider researchers had uncovered a scandalous affair between the dead man and an ex-secretary of the family firm, but the lady had been married and divorced since that period and was now much engaged as a receptionist and managerial friend in a hotel on the Isle of Wight. Apart from an occasional expensive winter cruise to the Mediterranean and the Near East with cultural overtones, Hector’s life for the past five years made remarkably dull reading. Nevertheless the Superintendent wrote the word ‘womaniser’ in his notes and as an afterthought underlined it, adding a query. He stared gloomily at his handiwork for some time, but found no enlightenment. Finally he drew a line across the sheet of paper and inscribed the initials N.U.P.S.H. beneath it in block capitals.
Throstle was sitting on the far side of the table opposite his superior and from long training had the habit of reading upside down. He raised his eyebrows.
‘That’s a new one on me.’
‘It dates from the war, my lad. Same like T.A.B.U. and C.U.M.F.U. A favourite of my old boss in the S.I.B. in the days when preventing Arabs from sneaking motor tyres was the most important job on earth. Damn near impossible too. If you must know, it stands for “No Useful Purpose Served Here” and that’s the long and the short of it as far as I’m concerned at the moment. I’m sorry but this was agreed at the morning conference.’
He folded the sheet of notes precisely and tucked them into a wallet.
‘You’ll stay on here until you can get a lever into some little crevice. Run over the depositions, see who you can shift—you know the form. The answer is either here in the shape of someone who thinks the house is rightly theirs or at Nine Ash, in which case you want an angry husband or a young woman in the pudding club. Quarter the ground every which way, and keep all concerned on the hop. Report in the usual way and if anything breaks ring me at once. Understood?’
He stood up and straightened his back wearily. ‘And another thing . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘The mattress of Simmonds’ spare bed is made of broken bricks. If you must sleep, stay on at the Angel. I’ll give you a week. Liaise with the County. You’ll find the man at Nine Ash is the best bet. He’s an old timer called Branch who’ll tell you all the local dirt, if you can understand what he’s saying. If no one cracks, then we’re just wasting our time on what ought to be a local job.’
At precisely the same time, which coincided in Fleet Street with the evening conferences, four London news editors were reaching the same conclusion. The adjourned inquest had revealed nothing and the significant phrase ‘The investigations are continuing’ was on the lips of the official P.R.O. at the Yard. Good reporters are scarce and there was better game afoot. The invasion of Saltey was over and the cash tills at The Angel and The Demon returned overnight to their normal rhythm.
Morty found himself disconsolate and the depth of his feelings surprised and worried him. Dido had returned to London and he was in a mood of bored malaise. He had spent most of the day prodding at the marsh turf covering the site of the pre-Norman fort, a desolate piece of comparatively high ground by the sea wall which offered a commanding view of Mob’s Bowl and the huddle of the Forty Angels a quarter of a mile distant on the inland side. Through his glass he surveyed the nearer hamlet which was dominated by the church of St Polycarp, a decaying late Norman shell without a tower, reputed to be dangerous and only used on token occasions. Near it stood a cluster of cottages in brick and weatherboard whose slate roofs uncompromisingly prevented them from being picturesque. Some modern caravans and a small green tent completed the group. The Bowl itself was empty at this hour, an expanse of greasy mud which sucked in sluggish resentment at the ebbing tide. In better days there had been a boatyard, still marked by sheds and a railed slipway running to the water’s edge and a group of four sail lofts in lichen grey weatherboard one of which was surmounted by a weathercock above a wooden lantern. Three small rowboats were pulled up on to the hard and several skeleton hulks lay inert in the grey slime.
The Demon itself was an L-shaped building, part weatherboard and part plaster over brick. It had a mansard roof in which there were dormer windows but despite its three floors it appeared squat and sturdy, having the painted and tarred patina which coastal buildings acquire over the years. Only the touches of white and green, the trimmings of geranium tubs and benches, gave it a rakish air, that of a middle-aged man who dons an unlikely hat for a children’s party. It stood squarely beside the Bowl separated from the waterside by a broad frontage of pebbled earth which was edged by baulks of timber sunk into the mud. Bollards proclaimed that this had once been a working quay. Seagulls circled perpetually around a white flagstaff and only the incongruous new sign offended the young man’s eye.
From where he stood Morty surveyed the back yards and the outhouses, noting the arrival of an elderly Morris Minor from whose interior there emerged a figure of such ponderous bulk that the performance took on something of the quality of a conjuring trick. Magersfontein Lugg, Mr Campion’s other emissary in Saltey, had arrived at the inn for vesper refreshment and there was something about the self-importance of his movements which suggested that the old man was bringing news. The idea afforded Morty some pleasure. Dido, with luck, would be banished from his thoughts. After all, he had more import
ant things to worry about.
The saloon bar of The Demon was much as it had been for a hundred years. It was dark, warm, heavily varnished and smelled pleasantly of beer, baking and scrubbing soap. On the shelves behind the long counter there were concessions to modernity in the shape of miniature bottles, a coyly indecent calendar, bureaucratic edicts concerning drinking hours and a large handwritten card which announced:
* * *
DEMON CAKES
Made from the original recipe
1/- each
Box of 6 packed to take away
5/-
‘The History of the Saltey Demon’
by H.O. Wishart
On sale here: 2/6d
* * *
When Morty entered there were already two customers, an old man sitting in the gloom of the ingle corner at the end of the bar, whose red rimmed eyes were the only living thing in a face which otherwise appeared to be moulded in suet, and the portentous figure of Mr Lugg outlined against the light from a door behind the bar. He was a large man, a thought melancholy, with a bald head and a dipped greying moustache which suggested that it was the relic of a darker and more luxuriant growth. He had discarded his flat cap and overcoat to reveal a white expanse of sweater and now leaned against the bar, a tankard in his hand. His accent was thick as a London fog.
‘Wotcher, cock.’
Morty responded conventionally to the greeting.
‘Good evening. Good evening, all.’
‘Still grubbing around in the ’istoric past, I see from the muck on your boots.’ Mr Lugg was disposed to be conversational. ‘Not my period, reely, the Roman caper, togas and all that gear. If I ’ad to make a choice it would be Restoration, what you might term the Dawn of Gracious Livin’. I could fancy meself in a wig, leather sports coat and a touch of lace at the wrists but not in a purple cotton mini-skirt and a laurel wreath.’
‘I take your point.’
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