In At The Death

by Francis Duncan

  ‘I daresay you’re busy, Chief Inspector. I know Parkin is. I’ll arrange to see you when I’ve checked my engagements and we’ll discuss the final details. Come along, Lin.’

  He ushered his wife into the car and slipped into the driving seat. He nodded and the car moved off. The three of them watched it until a left-hand bend in the road took it from their sight. Boyce pursed his lips.

  ‘Not the most friendly of meetings. Your boss seems off colour again this afternoon.’

  He was addressing himself to Parkin. The inspector was looking worried.

  ‘Yes,’ he said uncomfortably, ‘he does.’

  Boyce glanced at Tremaine.

  ‘You knew he was in the restaurant,’ he said. ‘That why you dashed off in such a hurry?’

  ‘Yes, I saw his car outside. I thought we might be in time to meet him if we went out straight away.’

  ‘What was the idea? I didn’t notice that you got very far with him.’

  Tremaine did not make a direct reply. Instead he looked at Parkin.

  ‘I noticed that the Chief Constable called his wife Lin. I take it that was a shortened form of her name, a sort of intimate abbreviation?’

  ‘Yes, I imagine so,’ Parkin said.

  He was looking very unhappy now. His glance had wavered away and he was staring out across the downs.

  ‘What is her name?’ Tremaine probed. ‘You do know it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Parkin admitted, unwillingly. ‘Yes, I do. It’s—Elaine.’

  There was a sudden silence.

  ‘Oh,’ Tremaine said. ‘Oh. I see.’

  Memories were pressing upon him. A memory of the Chief Constable spending many hours on the scene of the murder and receiving them with a manner that had been both preoccupied and on the alert; a memory of the shadow on his face and the bitterness in his voice when he had spoken of a man being master in his own house.

  He recollected Sir Robert Dennell’s anxiety to avoid scandal; his eagerness to be informed at once of any development.

  And he remembered, too, the hesitancy that had sometimes crept into Parkin’s manner when they had first met; the guardedness his intuition had told him had been due to the fact that the inspector had something to conceal.

  This was it. This was the thing he had tried to recall. This was what had been on Parkin’s mind.

  21

  EPILOGUE TO MURDER

  MORDECAI TREMAINE CLIMBED pantingly up the path towards the seat where Martin Slade was resting. It was an ideal vantage point on the very edge of the cliff where it was possible to sit at ease and gaze out over the panorama of the gorge and the river.

  Slade heard the sound of his approach and glanced round.

  ‘Good morning!’ he called. ‘I see you’re indulging in your morning exercise!’

  Tremaine covered the remaining few yards and Slade moved one of his sticks to allow him to sit down.

  ‘My goodness,’ he observed, ‘you certainly have been going at it!’

  Tremaine pushed back his pince-nez, breathing hard.

  ‘I was hoping I’d see you. I noticed your car down on the road and your chauffeur told me you might be up this way.’

  ‘You mean you’ve been looking for me?’

  ‘Yes. I’m in something of a difficulty and I thought maybe you could help me.’

  ‘Naturally I’ll do anything I can. What’s the trouble?’

  ‘You saw last night’s Courier?’

  Slade raised an eyebrow.

  ‘You mean the news about that fellow Fenn? Yes, I saw it. But surely that isn’t your difficulty? It looked to me as though your troubles were over.’

  ‘They aren’t exactly over,’ Tremaine said. ‘Although, of course, a lot of things have been cleared up.’

  Slade settled himself more comfortably.

  ‘I must say last night’s report was something of a shock. Nobody dreamed what Hardene had been up to—certainly I didn’t or he wouldn’t have been my doctor for so long. Reading between the lines it seemed to me that the police are pretty certain he was responsible for those two murders. I suppose there’s no doubt about it? The report was genuine? But it must have been. The Courier wouldn’t have printed it otherwise.’

  ‘The report was true enough.’

  Tremaine leaned back. Jonathan Boyce had kept his word to Rex Linton and had given him the full story. The Courier had done it justice and its later editions on the previous day must have caused many Bridgton eyebrows to be raised.

  ‘Well, what’s on your mind,’ Slade said, glancing at him. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can sort out what’s troubling you.’

  ‘Would you be surprised to hear that Mrs. Colver had been blackmailing Hardene?’

  ‘Mrs. Colver? You mean the housekeeper?’ Slade’s expression was incredulous. ‘You certainly do surprise me. She doesn’t look the type.’

  ‘She found out what Hardene had done. He was making regular withdrawals of fifty pounds a month when he died. I don’t suppose he paid over the entire fifty but there’s no doubt that a large part of it went to her each time.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as though she was pressing him all that hard. Not considering there was murder involved.’

  ‘No, but as you said just now she doesn’t seem the blackmailing type. You see, her son’s a patient in a sanatorium—incurable. The money helps her to keep things going, and I daresay she’s tried all kinds of specialists in the hope of finding one who might be able to do something for him. That sort of thing is expensive.’

  ‘Yes, I know all about that,’ Slade remarked grimly. ‘But if she was blackmailing Hardene it doesn’t seem likely that she had anything to do with killing him. She was cutting off her own source of income by putting him out of the way.’

  ‘I don’t think she killed Hardene, but at the same time we haven’t got the whole story out of her. You see, she hasn’t given up.’

  Slade stared at him for a moment or two, and then shook his head with a smile.

  ‘Sorry. You’ve lost me.’

  ‘All right,’ Tremaine said, and pushed back his pince-nez, ‘I’ll go on. You don’t mind listening to me?’

  ‘I’m enjoying it. Being on the inside of a murder investigation is a new sensation, as I mentioned the other day.’

  ‘As long as I’m not boring you. By talking things over like this, I mean. Doctor Hardene was having an affaire with a woman called Elaine. It had been going on for a long time.’

  ‘Yes, I remember your asking me if I knew anything about her. Have you found out anything fresh?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve found out quite a lot. At first we didn’t know any more than her name. She rang up the house on the morning after the murder but she was too quick for the detective who answered the ’phone to put a patrol car on to her. It wasn’t until yesterday that we discovered that she’s the wife of a—of a prominent person in Bridgton.’

  Tremaine deliberately held back the Chief Constable’s name. He did not think that at this stage at least it would be a sound policy to reveal that particular item of information.

  ‘I’m seeing daylight,’ Slade remarked. ‘The husband had found out and was going to start something. Right?’

  ‘More or less. Hardene seems to have known it because he made a note in his diary about trouble that obviously referred to Elaine.’

  ‘And you think the husband actually was doing something about it.’

  ‘Yes. Not long before the murder he was prowling about around Hardene’s house. Mrs. Colver saw him, although she didn’t know who he was or what he was after.’

  Tremaine was sure that his theory was sound. Sir Robert Dennell had known all about his wife and Hardene; that was the reason for the jumpiness of his attitude. And he had kept watch on them. One slip he had made had confirmed that. He had not officially paid a visit to Hardene’s house and yet he had mentioned the lane at the rear—a fact he could not possibly have known unless he had been there in person, for its existence had not been discus
sed at any of their conferences or set down in any report Tremaine had seen.

  It was clear now why he hadn’t gone to the house in his official capacity, although he had spent so much time at the scene of the murder. He had known that the housekeeper had seen him that night in the garden and he had been afraid of being recognized.

  Martin Slade was studying him with an ill-concealed air of impatience, clearly waiting for him to continue.

  ‘Do you think it was a case of the eternal triangle, after all? That it was Elaine’s husband who killed him and not Fenn?’

  ‘It was certainly a case of the eternal triangle, but it wasn’t the husband who murdered Graham Hardene.’

  ‘It wasn’t? You mean,’ Slade ejaculated, ‘that it was the wife?’

  His tone was eager. Tremaine looked at him thoughtfully. He thought that the time was ripe. He said, quietly:

  ‘What are you going to do about Mrs. Colver?’

  Slade’s brows drew together in a quick frown.

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I said just now,’ Tremaine went on, still in that quiet, steady voice, ‘that she hadn’t given up. She knows that we’ve a good idea what’s been going on. But she doesn’t believe that we know all of it. She thinks that if she can keep her head there’s still a chance that she can go on drawing a second income. It’s a little—frightening—what a woman will do for someone she loves. Especially what a mother will do for her son.’

  ‘Get to the point, man. What about her?’

  ‘Graham Hardene and two companions were involved in a series of robberies in Canada,’ Tremaine said. ‘One of them—the man we’ve known as Fenn—was caught and sent to prison. It looks as though Hardene double-crossed him, and Fenn quite naturally wanted his revenge.’

  ‘That much was in the Courier report.’

  Tremaine’s hand strayed to his pince-nez. He glanced up the path.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But this wasn’t in the Courier. That it was you Doctor Hardene arranged to meet in that empty house near the downs. That it was you who killed him.’

  For a long interval of time Martin Slade stared at him. And then:

  ‘Would you mind repeating that?’ His voice was harshly unnatural. ‘I don’t think I heard you correctly.’

  ‘It was unexpected when Marton turned up,’ Tremaine went on. ‘It hadn’t occurred to you that Fenn might talk to someone else. You were caught off-balance. That was why you paid Marton to keep him quiet—until you’d had time to plan how best to get rid of him. But you knew more or less when Fenn was likely to arrive, and you had time to get ready for him.’

  ‘I presume,’ Slade observed sardonically, ‘you mean that Hardene had time.’

  Tremaine paid no attention to the interruption.

  ‘There were three members of the original gang. Hardene, Fenn, and Number Three—you. Hardene didn’t settle down here in Bridgton alone. The third person seems to have been rather overlooked, but my view is that he was the leader. That’s why it was left to Hardene to do the—unpleasant—things. Like killing Marton and that poor devil of a pawnbroker. That’s why he kept the appointment in that empty house at your orders. I imagine he thought that you were going to talk over what was to be done about Fenn. The real situation was that you’d made up your mind that Hardene was a menace to you and that it was time to get rid of him.’

  Slade made an angry movement.

  ‘You’re talking nonsense! I’m not surprised you’ve been finding difficulties if this is the crazy way your mind’s been working! If I’d wanted to meet Hardene for the reason you say, d’you think I’d have needed to go to all that trouble when I could have seen him at his surgery at any time!’

  ‘There were two reasons why the surgery wouldn’t have done. In the first place, there was too great a risk that what you had to say to each other might be overheard. And in the second place, you knew that you could never get away with murder under those conditions. By persuading Hardene to meet you in that empty house, after saying that he’d been called out to see a patient, you thought it would look as though he’d made a mistake in the dark and been killed in an accidental scuffle with a tramp. But you made one elementary slip that showed that the murder must have been premeditated.’

  Slade’s head went up.

  ‘What slip?’

  ‘Your choice of a weapon was made to give the idea that it had been lying close by and your mythical tramp had snatched it up in a rage. But Hardene’s body was found inside the house. It was unlikely that there would have been a piece of rock that size in the hall, even though the place was empty. Perhaps you’d planned to drag the body out to the drive and were disturbed by that patrolling policeman. I’m not certain of that any more than I’m certain of your precise motive for killing Hardene. My theory is that you did it because although Fenn knew where to find Hardene he didn’t know just where to find you or what name you were using. Maybe you thought that with Hardene out of the way you’d be safe. There was even the chance, of course, that Fenn might be connected with the murder and arrested. As a matter of fact, it very nearly did happen.’

  Slade was clearly making a great effort to keep his voice level.

  ‘You’re forgetting something.’ His hand went out to one of his sticks. ‘This. It would need a healthy and active man to do what you’ve just accused me of doing.’

  Tremaine nodded.

  ‘Yes, I know. But you see, you aren’t a cripple at all.’

  Martin Slade’s grasp tightened upon the stick at his right side but he sat very still.

  ‘It was part of the new character you were playing,’ Tremaine went on. ‘I began to suspect it that day when I first met you on the downs. You made it clear that you didn’t want to stay in my company and you covered the distance to your car at a rate that was a little too fast for a man in your supposed condition. I had a shock when I looked round and saw that you’d gone and that your car was moving off. Incidentally, just after seeing you I met Fenn, and I imagine that the coincidence made me link the two of you together. He was going to meet you, wasn’t he? That’s why you were waiting on that seat. He did know about you, after all. Tell me, did he go over the cliff accidentally? Or was it your doing?’

  Slade sat up. He looked carefully all about him and then relaxed with a sigh that was almost one of contentment.

  ‘It was my doing,’ he said calmly. ‘The fool thought he was going to blackmail me and the chance was too good to miss. No one about and the cliff right behind him. He didn’t deserve to get away with such carelessness. It was easy. Just like it was with Hardene. Neither of them suspected what was going to happen to them until it was too late.’

  He settled himself against the back of the seat. He seemed quite self-possessed. There was, indeed, an amused smile on his face.

  ‘You’ve worked it all out, haven’t you? Go on, tell me the rest. I find it instructive to have the record played back to me.’

  ‘In your role as a cripple you built up the belief that you couldn’t go out unless your hired chauffeur took you when you sent for him, but on the night you killed Hardene your housekeeper and her husband went to the village hall at Seabury and didn’t return until late and during their absence you were able to carry out your plan. You were back again by the time they returned from Seabury and of course they had no suspicion that you’d left the house. It’s a lonely spot and there wasn’t much danger of anyone seeing you.’

  ‘That’s why I chose it in the first place,’ Slade said. ‘I wanted a quiet corner where I wasn’t likely to be disturbed and where there wouldn’t be too many sympathetic people asking questions about my not being able to walk. With Hardene as my doctor it meant that I could keep in touch with him without anybody realizing there was anything between us.’ He nodded in satisfaction. ‘It was a perfect set-up. I was a bit removed from Hardene’s main practice, of course, but I covered that by saying that he was the only chap who’d ever been able to do anything for me.’

>   ‘Naturally, the appointments with the specialists were all non-existent?’

  ‘Oh, naturally. I daren’t go near a specialist or I’d have been found out. Hardene used to pretend he’d made the appointments himself and he’d tell that girl of his to note them down as if they were genuine.’

  ‘I can well understand,’ Tremaine said, ‘how irritated you must have felt when Hardene started to go into politics. He was doing the last thing you wanted by putting himself in the limelight and drawing attention upon himself. When you argued with him about its being dangerous he told you that the more prominent he became the less chance there’d be of being found out; people wouldn’t be able to see the wood for the trees.’

  ‘So you know that, do you?’ Slade looked at him searchingly, and then nodded. ‘Of course. The girl told you. She came back too early—Hardene had got rid of her for a few moments—and heard us talking. I thought I’d managed to carry it off, though.’

  ‘You did. She didn’t suspect anything. She isn’t a Mrs. Colver. You were the mysterious visitor on the night after the murder, weren’t you? It was a big risk to take, but I suppose you thought it might be worth it.’

  ‘I intended to kill her,’ Slade said calmly, ‘before she got scared and began to talk. I realized after I’d killed Hardene that when she’d had time to think she’d suspect that I’d done it and might go to the police to save herself. She knew that Hardene and I were more than doctor and patient although she didn’t know the whole story. She was holding Marton and Wallins over Hardene but she didn’t find out why he’d done it.’

  ‘Nevertheless, she was too clever for you that night,’ Tremaine observed. ‘She was expecting something and stayed awake. When she heard you at the window she gave the alarm—quickly enough to save herself but not so that you’d be caught. She wanted you to get away. She knew that if she was right about you there was a chance of switching her blackmailing tactics on to you. She rang you up the next morning. I don’t suppose she dared say much on the ’phone. Did she arrange to meet you somewhere?’