“Good-night,” replied Vereker, laughing, and on Heather’s departure, closed his volume of Emerson, thrust it into his pocket, and produced an ordnance survey map of the Yarham district.
“Now let’s have a look at the geography of the place!” he said to himself, as he spread out the map on the table and began to study it with concentration. “Lovely things, maps! They’ll completely oust fiction in the near future.”
Chapter Seven
Next morning, Vereker breakfasted alone. Before going to bed on the previous night, he had made a close study of the map of the district and noted carefully all the roads, lanes, and field-paths in any way connected with the thoroughfare that swept round and enclosed Cobbler’s Corner. After that survey, he had decided to revisit the scene where the bodies had been discovered, and explore the surrounding district on foot.
The morning was fine, with an almost cloudless sky and a gentle breeze that promised to temper the sultriness of a perfect summer day. Vereker ate his breakfast with gusto. There was an alertness and excitement in his manner, and a brightness in his eye which declared he was in that cheerfully aggressive mood that an intricate problem always roused in him. There was something in the very air which seemed to promise good fortune.
Lighting a cigarette, and picking up a stout ash stick, he set off, and, after half an hour’s walk, arrived at the small stretch of waste grass land, which for some reason unknown to any of the inhabitants of the parish, was called Cobbler’s Corner. Not a soul was in sight when he arrived, and the hard, drought-baked ground, with its covering of coarse, sere grass bore no impression of the tread of the numerous villagers who had crossed and recrossed it on the previous day after the police had finally left the scene. Measuring the distance from the road as he paced, he proceeded rapidly to the spot where the bodies of John Thurlow and Clarry Martin had lain. Coming to a standstill, he glanced about him, his eye roving from one point to another in casual observation. Then drawing his map from his pocket, he took his bearings with reference to the village and to Old Hall Farm. They lay almost in a direct line to the south. He noted a field-path that left the road, crossed the meadow opposite the angle of Cobbler’s Corner, and made its way to the outskirts of the village, effecting a very appreciable short cut. That field-path was reached by climbing over the gate on which Ephraim Noy had sat when Vereker first came on the scene, the day before.
The sudden recollection of Ephraim Noy at once made him turn round and look up the road running north. That road presented a fairly stiff gradient from Cobbler’s Corner, and just above the summit, through surrounding foliage, could be seen the red asbestos tiled roof and the upper portion of a window in the gable of Noy’s bungalow. It was barely a hundred yards in a direct line from the point at which Vereker stood.
The sight of Ephraim Noy’s bungalow immediately filled Vereker with a lively curiosity to see the place and its owner. After another careful scrutiny of the ground around him, he passed through a gap in the hedge into the adjoining meadow and made a straight line for the bungalow. As he paced up the steep, grassy slope, he was smiling to himself, for he was carrying out a rapid mental adjustment which always secretly amused him. He was putting on the armour of the journalist, assuming the “hide of brass” which is essential to a successful interviewer. With some, it is a natural shield against the onslaught of a hostile personality; the arrows of insolence glide off it without inflicting any hurt. With Vereker, naturally sensitive, that impervious defence had to be forcibly created by cold reasoning and vigorous self-exhortation. By the time he had reached the fence and recently planted hedge which divided Noy’s demesne from the meadow, Vereker had prepared himself to meet the most frigid rudeness with unshakable imperturbability.
The first object that interested him and brought a sharp exclamation of surprise to his lips, as he stood surveying the bungalow and its surroundings, was a large heap of greyish white earth, some seven feet high, that lay a few yards from the back entrance. Just visible over the piled-up earth, could be seen the top of a heavy wooden tripod, to which was attached a pulley and rope. Working his way round, Vereker came to a point from which he could see that this tripod stood directly over a shaft which descended into the earth. He at once knew that these were the outward signs of the operation called “sinking a well.” Without further hesitation, he calmly stepped over the young privet hedge, barely three feet nigh, and crossed over the still undisturbed meadow grass which formed the bungalow’s back lawn, to the mouth of the shaft. The shaft was from five to six feet in diameter, and he could clearly see its bottom some forty feet below. He glanced at the section of earth through which the shaft had been sunk, and noticed the heavy surface loam, under which lay a bed of clay superimposed over the basic chalk. This was the first chalk he had seen in the district, for in this part of the county the long westerly chalk slopes pass well beneath the London clay and crag. At once there flashed across his memory the fact that John Thurlow, just prior to his murder, must have trodden on chalk, and he carefully examined the chalky earth that had been excavated from the well and flung up in an unsightly heap near its mouth. Vereker’s close inspection of that chalk debris yielded no information, and approaching the well, he was just considering a descent by the rope attached to the pulley, when he heard a footstep on the gravel path behind him. Swinging round on his heel, he came face to face with Mr. Ephraim Noy, who, with his hands behind his back and an ugly frown knitting his brow, eyed him up and down with marked displeasure. At this close view of him, Vereker was immediately struck by the remarkable resemblance of Ephraim Noy to “Uncle Sam,” Punch’s pictorial personification of the United States of America. The likeness was so close that Vereker was obliged to smile, and he was wondering who had given the original artist the idea for that caricature, when its counterpart spoke.
“Well, young man, may I ask how you got in here?” he said with ironical politeness.
“Just stepped over your hedge at the back,” replied Vereker bluntly.
“Would you mind just stepping back over the hedge to oblige me?” asked Mr. Noy.
“Certainly,” said Vereker with a rapid investment of himself in his journalist’s hide. “I’m sorry if I happen to have annoyed you.” He was about to say, “Mr. Noy,” but the sound sequence reminded him of a music hall song in which a certain Mrs. Moore is urged to desist from drinking any more, and he deftly substituted, “Sir.” After a pause he continued: “But I’m rather interested in the geology of the district and couldn’t resist having a look at your well shaft.”
“I don’t see anything very interesting in a well shaft,” remarked Mr. Noy with an air of being mollified much against his will.
“To the owner, I suppose the sole interest is water,” commented Vereker, “but I was wondering at what depth the chalk passed under the London clay.”
“You mean Suffolk clay. London’s seventy miles away from here,” remarked Mr. Noy, looking at Vereker with an alienist’s glance in his eye.
“Of course it’s Suffolk clay, but the bed is known to geologists as London clay.”
“Very interesting, I’m sure. He must have been a Cockney who called it so,” commented Mr. Noy, and then with a swift change of tone asked, “Were you the gentleman who took charge for Constable Godbold at Cobbler’s Corner while he ran into the village to telephone, yesterday morning?”
“Yes, and I believe you’re Mr. Ephraim Noy, who discovered the bodies of Mr. Thurlow and Mr. Martin. You were sitting on the gate leading into the meadow when I came on the scene.”
“You’re right; my name’s Ephraim Noy. And yours?”
“I’m an artist by profession,” replied Vereker guardedly, “though on this murder case I’m acting as a special correspondent of the Daily Report.”
“Oh, a newspaper man! I see, I see,” remarked Mr. Noy with undisguised relief. “You weren’t long in getting on the spot. Talk about a vulture’s eyes for a carcase!”
“Where there’s a carcase, there
’s a news story, Mr. Noy,” said Vereker, with a supreme effort at amiability.
“Naturally. But you mentioned the word murder. Have they decided that this is a case of murder?”
“I believe the police think it’s a case of one murder, perhaps two.”
“They love to get the Press screaming about mystery, so as to make the subsequent solution redound to their credit as investigators. I see nothing very complicated about it. Two men, ostensibly rivals in love, meet and fight to the death. Seems simple enough to me, almost as simple as they were to scrap over a pretty face.”
“I don’t think it’s as simple as all that,” remarked Vereker, scrutinizing Mr. Noy’s face.
For a moment Mr. Noy’s hawk-like glance met Vereker’s gaze, hovered uncertainly, and then fell to admiring his own boots.
“You pressmen are nearly always hand in glove with the police,” he commented with a cynical air. “They flatter you by letting you partly into the know, and then you gratefully pat them on the back for helping you to write up your news story. I suppose it’s the way of the world; a variation of the crocodile and the crocodile bird. But as far as policemen are concerned, give me old Godbold as in the running for the post of village idiot.”
“You were rather rude to him, yesterday,” said Vereker in defence of his friend. “Godbold’s not a bad fellow.”
“He simply asked for it. Strutting about with the importance of a Lord Chief Justice, and then spoiling the part by wetting his pencil point with spittle before jotting down his notes. When the inspector arrived, I thought we’d get a bit of a hustle on in the grey matter, but he ran Godbold a dead heat. They simply wouldn’t let me tell my story in my own way. Treated me as if I was bughouse—that is cracked. So I shut up, and they got no information out of me at all in the finish.”
“Was there anything vital that you withheld?” asked Vereker, with as casual an air as he could assume.
“Who’s to say what’s vital and what isn’t in a case like this? If the affair was, say, a double murder and not a fight, the most ordinary information might prove just the goods.”
“I think you must dismiss the theory of a fight as a solution, Mr. Noy. If Thurlow had shot Martin, it’s difficult to see how the latter could have brained his opponent with that iron bar. If Martin got his blow in first, then Thurlow certainly couldn’t have fired his revolver at Martin.”
“That’s the ordinary way of looking at it, but in such cases you never can tell how things just happened. The blow may have been delivered and the shot fired almost simultaneously.”
“True, but most unlikely. Again, it’s clear that Martin, prior to his death, was bound hand and foot, and the doctor’s of the opinion that the bullet wound was inflicted after death.”
“Ah, so that’s what they’ve discovered!” exclaimed Ephraim Noy with considerable surprise. “Amazing! Amazing!” Thrusting his hands into his pockets and looking steadily at Vereker, he added gravely, “I wouldn’t say but what they’re right. It seems to bear out a little theory of my own.”
Vereker, at this juncture, glanced at his watch, as if to convey to Mr. Noy that his time was limited and extremely valuable. If Mr. Noy were eager to tell his tale, this manoeuvre would immediately put him in the inferior position of a man to whom a favour was being granted. If he were merely wasting time by flinging out intriguing hints, without any intention of being communicative, it would show him the futility of his conduct.
“Perhaps you’re in a hurry to get away?” asked Mr. Noy, with the first sign of any deference to his unexpected visitor.
“Well, not exactly in a hurry,” fenced Vereker.
“Because, if you can spare the time, I’d like to tell you something bearing on the case, something that’s really important. If you’re a pressman, you’ll be able to make use of it. After you’ve squeezed the juice out of it, you can pass it along to the police. They’ll come to me to corroborate the story, and I’ll see that Inspector Winter treats me with more respect than he did yesterday. But I’m tired of standing here in the sun. Let’s go into the bungalow and sit in the cool.”
With these words, Ephraim Noy led the way into the very simply but elegantly furnished sitting-room of his bungalow, pushed a cane chair over to his guest, and handed him a box of cigars.
“Like cigars?” he asked. “Believe they’re good, but I don’t smoke ’em myself.”
Vereker helped himself to a cigar and lit it while his host charged an out-size in briar pipes.
“Now, Mr. Vereker,” said Ephraim Noy at length, “when I came upon the bodies of Mr. Thurlow and Mr. Martin at seven o’clock yesterday morning, there was one thing that immediately struck me as peculiar.”
“Excuse the interruption, but were you making your way to the village?” asked Vereker.
“Yes. I was going to catch the eight o’clock coach that runs through Yarham to Sudbury. I’d run out of baccy, and the brand I smoke isn’t sold in Yarham. I can get it in Sudbury, and that was my destination. I left myself plenty of time, because I hate to waste time hustling. I strolled down the hill and was cutting across Cobbler’s Corner, when I came upon the bodies.”
Mr. Noy paused dramatically.
“And you observed something that struck you as important,” remarked Vereker, eager to eliminate any play of his host’s sense of the histrionic.
“Yes, and it was simply the way the bodies were lying. They looked as if they had been carefully placed there. When I observed their wounds, it at once struck me that, if there had been a fight, the combatants would have looked crumpled up, so to speak.”
“Exactly what I noticed myself, Mr. Noy. But this statement of yours doesn’t tally with your first idea that there had been a fight to the death between two rivals,” observed Vereker pertinently.
The comment evidently took Mr. Noy by surprise, but he countered it after a moment’s hesitation with the remark: “I was simply testing your intelligence, Mr. Vereker.”
“You were wasting your time,” observed Vereker with a suspicion of tartness. “I’m simply lit up with intelligence.”
“Then what I’m going to tell you will interest you,” continued Mr. Noy with smug serenity. “On the previous night, that was Tuesday night, between ten and eleven, I was sitting reading. The night was perfectly still, and I was interested in my book, when I heard a motor car down below at Cobbler’s Corner. I read on, expecting the car to come up the hill and pass this shack. It didn’t, so I glanced out of the window there and saw its lights in the hollow. It turned and went back up the hill to Yarham. At the moment, I thought the driver had discovered he was on the wrong tack and had decided to correct his mistake. Next morning, in the light of my discovery, the incident struck me as most important. Do you get me?”
“It may be of the utmost importance, Mr. Noy, and, of course, it may have nothing to do with the tragedy,” remarked Vereker judicially. “Did you tell the police about this?”
“No. We began to insult one another before I reached the climax of my story. I lost my temper and shut up. A couple of years ago, I came here to Yarham to pass my days in peace and quietness, and now by some rotten luck I’m dragged into the thick of this miserable police investigation. I was quite willing to give any information I could on a subject that interested me no more than the exploits of Jack the Ripper. I began to tell them what I knew, and I was cross questioned by a set of mutts, as if I was a big noise in the outrage. Damn it all, there’s a limit to a man’s patience!”
“The police are very trying at times,” agreed Vereker, and remarked, “I bet you got a dreadful shock when you discovered that one of the dead bodies was that of Mr. Thurlow, didn’t you?”
The question asked casually, but with intention, at once arrested Mr. Noy. He nearly dropped the briar pipe that he held lightly in his hand, but managed to recover it and his composure with commendable adroitness.
“To stumble over a couple of corpses on a fine summer morning isn’t what you’d call having
a lucky break, but why do you ask?”
“Because I thought you were an old friend of Mr. Thurlow,” commented Vereker, looking straight at his host.
“No, I knew no more about Mr. Thurlow than I did about Mr. Martin,” replied Noy with a shifty look in his eyes. “I knew them both by sight, if that’s what you mean.”
“I was under the impression that you and Thurlow had known one another long before you came to Yarham.”
“Then you’re up the wrong street,” replied Mr. Noy, and rose to signify that he wished the interview to be considered at an end. “What put you on this line?” he asked as if the question was an afterthought.
“I don’t know what gave me the idea,” replied Vereker with studied carelessness. “I must have misconstrued some remark I’d heard in the village. In any case, it’s of no importance.”
“None whatever,” agreed Mr. Noy readily, and added: “Well, I must get on with my work outside instead of shooting hot air. I’m expecting the men who are sinking my well to arrive at any moment. We’re down forty feet already and not a goddam sign of water. I had a simp’s faith in water diviners when we commenced the job, but I’m on the verge of thinking it’s merely a profitable form of spoofing fools.”
“You must give it a fair trial, Mr. Noy. Water divination is practised throughout the county professionally, and the average East Anglian doesn’t part with his hard won cash for mere superstition,” said Vereker.
“Your faith is most encouraging, Mr. Vereker,” said Mr. Noy complacently, and as he showed his visitor to the door, added: “Next time you pay me a call, please come in by the front gate. It’ll save my temper and give my privet hedge a chance of establishing itself.”
Vereker bade him good-day and, lost in thought, made his way slowly back to Yarham. There was something about Mr. Ephraim Noy that he found forbidding. His manner was unpleasantly aggressive, and what in a more genial man might be called bluffness, in him verged dangerously on churlishness. Vereker had met his type before; lonely, secretive, ill-natured, with a passion for stripping life of any pleasant illusions. His attitude to his fellows, too, was tinged with an arrogance which made him intolerable. Perhaps some past experience, some grave injustice, or deep disappointment had embittered him and distorted his outlook on life. There was one thing, however, about the short interview which roused all Vereker’s suspicion and impressed him with a sense of its importance in the circumstances. Ephraim Noy was a liar. He had certainly lied when he disclaimed any past knowledge of John Thurlow. This was a significant pointer, and Vereker decided that he must probe discreetly into the past history of Mr. Ephraim Noy. It was a subject that might prove highly informative.
The Spirit Murder Mystery Page 9