Cold Blood

by Leo Bruce

  Beef nodded solemnly but said nothing. Mrs. Ducrow seemed puzzled and put out by his silence.

  “You realize what this means?” she said. “It explains what he was doing in the park that morning. He had left me to walk home.”

  “That is so. But it also provides an additional motive for murder.”

  She grew a little hysterical now.

  “Why do you say that?” she almost shouted. “He didn’t murder Cosmo. He would never have done such a thing. Why should he?”

  “Take it easy now,” said Beef, trying to sound comforting in his rough way. “It won’t help if you lose your head. And you must see why it was an additional motive. He is in love with you, Mrs. Ducrow.”

  “What of it?”

  “A man in love makes plans. What he wanted was to marry you.”

  “But his wife . . .”

  “With the money he would inherit from his uncle he could soon arrange a settlement and divorce from her. Now I’m not saying he did it. I’m only saying that what you have told me cuts both ways.”

  “If anything happens to him I shall kill myself.”

  Beef looked very grave.

  “That’s one thing you must not say. Ever.”

  “I shall! You’ll see! If anything happens to Rudy I shall kill myself.”

  Beef was at a loss. His experience had failed to teach him what to do in such a case.

  “I want a little more information,” he said uneasily.

  Freda Ducrow at once seemed to pull herself together and to look at Beef suspiciously.

  “Well?”

  “His wife must have known about this. How did she take it?”

  “You will meet her presently and perhaps understand. She is a strange woman. She seems to care for nothing but dogs and horses. She never loved Rudy though I think she loved the prospect of money. As long as she could have that, and freedom to ride and breed dogs and so on, she did not seem to care. Of course she knew he came here at night.”

  “And your husband?”

  I think her expression softened.

  “He had no inkling,” she said. “He was a good man and trusted everyone. If he had guessed anything of the sort we should all have known instantly. He could not keep things to himself. No, he never had any idea, unless . . .”

  “Unless?”

  “Well, something rather strange did happen that evening. Rudy used to come in by the back door and up the back staircase past the Gabriels’ bedroom. They . . . I’m afraid they knew he used to come to me and left the back door open for him. But that night as Rudy came into the kitchen he noticed that the door leading from the kitchen to the main hall was ajar. This was unusual but he would not have taken any more notice if he had not turned round just as he was about to go up the back stairs. When he looked the door was shut. It was as though someone was watching him.

  “He supposed that it was Gabriel. But as he passed the Gabriels’ bedroom he heard them talking together. He did not go down again but told me about it. I did not take it very seriously. It seemed unthinkable that it should be Cosmo.”

  “I see. Now from the time you said good night to him and Mr. Gray at ten o’clock that evening you never saw your husband alive again?”

  “No.”

  “At what time did Rudolf Ducrow come to your room?”

  “At about midnight, I think.”

  “And remained till?”

  “Till we heard the clock strike four.”

  “You heard no sound from outside during that time?”

  “No. But some minutes after he had left me I heard Theo Gray pass my door. I waited for his return and he told me that he had heard shouts in the grounds and had phoned to Dunton to be on the look-out.”

  “So it was possible, in point of time I mean, for Rudolf to have caused those shouts?”

  “I suppose so. I’m glad I’ve managed to tell you all this, Sergeant. I feel I can trust you. Of course, both Theo and Gulley have been very kind but they’re so worried themselves. I have thought of going to see my old family solicitor down at Folkover. But I’m sure you can clear Rudy of this terrible thing.”

  “If he’s not guilty he will be cleared,” said Beef solemnly. “One more thing. What was he wearing that night?”

  “I can’t be sure. He very rarely wore an overcoat, though. Probably a sports coat of some kind and flannel trousers. Why? Is it important?”

  “It may be very important,” said Beef. “Now you take my advice and go and have forty winks. Do you good when you’re upset like that. I’m going to see Rudolf Ducrow this afternoon, then maybe I’ll have better news for you.”

  It was strange to see that big masterful woman look like an admonished child.

  “But . . . I haven’t told you the most important thing of all,” she said. “At least I think it is. It happened at about eleven o’clock, soon after I had heard Theo go up to bed for the first time. My room faces east, as you know, and looks out over the terrace. My window was open a little at the top. I heard a whistle.”

  “A whistle? But Mrs. Ducrow it was a gusty night. How could you have heard a whistle from up in your room?”

  “I don’t mean a low, secret sort of whistle. It was a special shrill whistle repeated in a certain way.”

  “You had heard it before?”

  “Oh yes, often. I knew it quite well. It was the whistle used by Zena Ducrow to call those dogs of hers. Rudolf’s wife, I mean.”

  “And where do you suppose she was when she whistled?”

  “Not far away. It sounded almost as though she was on the terrace.”

  “Did she often come up to the house?”

  “Not very often. She and Cosmo did not get on very well.”

  The crude attempts at gentleness seemed to have gone out of Beef’s manner now. He did not again suggest that Mrs. Ducrow should go and lie down but said brusquely that he was going to see Rudolf, and left the room.

  “Is he really clever?” Mrs. Ducrow asked me. “Will he find out the truth?”

  “He always has done,” I said confidently.

  “I couldn’t go on living without Rudy. I couldn’t!”

  I showed my tactfulness and resource.

  “The clouds will soon go by,” I said, and with a reassuring smile to her I hurried after Beef.

  As we were pulling on our coats Theo Gray came up.

  “There’s something I should like you to do, Beef, if you would. Not a piece of investigation but something practical and helpful.”

  “If it conforms . . .” began Beef, but Gray spoke rather urgently.

  “Rudolf has a gun in his house,” he said. “A twelve-bore. I think that in the circumstances it would be much wiser if just now he was relieved of it.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a lethal weapon, you know. However much Rudolf seems to be bearing up under all this it must be a terrible strain.”

  “You mean he might . . .”

  “I don’t know. I just think it would be better if he had not got it down there.”

  “You may be right. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thank you. I may be exaggerating the danger, of course. But Rudolf is not quite the carefree young man he appears.”

  “Where does he keep it?”

  “I don’t know, I’m afraid. But you can soon find out.”

  We started walking down the drive, and as I guessed he would, Beef began to reflect aloud on the results of his investigations so far.

  “You ought to be pleased,” he said. “Just the job for you. Suspect under every stone. There wasn’t one of them who doesn’t seem to have been around the house that night.”

  “Except Major Gulley,” I pointed out.

  Beef let out a roar of laughter but made no other answer.

  “I thought it wouldn’t be long before someone brought in Rudolf’s wife.”

  We had reached the point where the drive ran nearest to the little fenced-off area kept for tennis and croquet, and Beef stopped and
looked towards the pavilion. With a curt command to me to follow he walked across and opened the door, then stood looking down at the mallets and balls.

  “Come on,” he said presently. “You’n me are going to have a basinful of this.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “Game of croquet, of course. Get hold of those hoops.”

  I pointed out to Beef that we were visible from the house and that it would be in the worst possible taste to do anything of the sort.

  “Taste?” he said. “You forget that there’s been a murder here. That wasn’t in such wonderful taste, was it? Now show us where these hoops go.”

  Nothing would satisfy him till we had set out the appurtenances of the game. He commented caustically on it, maintaining that it was not a patch on darts, then tried to wield his mallet. I have no particular skill at croquet but I found it easy to do better than Beef, whose game was clumsy in the extreme. He kept swinging his mallet as though he were playing golf and using a driver. But something was on his mind as he did so, and when I asked him sarcastically whether this was a necessary part of his investigation he replied with a rather distasteful Americanism: “What do you think?” he asked.

  Then, keeping on the side of the pavilion farthest from the house so that he was invisible from its windows, he began to swing the mallet in the air in the most extraordinary way, chopping it downward on an imaginary mark. I could guess the object of this manoeuvre and asked him whether a woman could have wielded the mallet which had killed Cosmo Ducrow.

  He looked at me in his bland innocent way then said, “A woman was just as capable of it as a man.”

  Finally he helped me replace all the articles in the pavilion and began to walk on towards the two lodges.

  “Now I am getting somewhere,” he said. “Now I am beginning to see daylight.”

  I am accustomed to these cryptic statements of his and knowing that if I asked any questions he would only grow more obscure, I said nothing.

  8

  Rudolf came to the door of the lodge in which he lived and invited us in, explaining that his wife was out.

  “Pity,” said Beef, “I’d like a few words with her.”

  “With Zena? Oh, I suppose Mrs. Ducrow has told you that story of hers about hearing Zena whistling the dogs. Imagination, if you ask me.”

  “Where was your wife that night, Mr. Ducrow?”

  “She went to the pictures. Took the car. It really won’t help you to try to involve her, I assure you.”

  “Everyone is involved,” said Beef. “And now we’ve got to do some very plain talking. I may as well tell you at once that Mrs. Ducrow has told me where you were that night. And other nights.”

  Rudolf stood up. I thought at first that he was going to be violently angry, but after a few moments’ silence he spoke in a tense but well-controlled voice.

  “She shouldn’t have done that.”

  “It had to come out. I shall be surprised if the police don’t know. And at least it explains what you were doing in the park at four o’clock in the morning.”

  He remained thoughtful.

  “Tell me about that evening.”

  As he told his story I for one believed that Rudolf was speaking the truth. He told of the open door in the kitchen which had mysteriously and silently closed when he started going up the back stairs; he confirmed Freda Ducrow’s estimate of the time of his leaving her; he said that during his walk home he had neither seen nor heard anything unusual. He had left the house by the back door as usual, come round to the front and followed the drive. It had taken him perhaps six or seven minutes because he had to go very quietly out of the house and silently shut the door after him. He had passed near the pavilion, as he always did on his way down the drive, but had noticed nothing. He had been very surprised to see Dunton waiting about near the lodges. When he got in he went straight up to bed. His wife always slept with her door open, and as he passed her room he heard her snoring. He knew nothing more. It was true that the bloodstained croquet mallet found by the body was his favourite and was used by no one else. He knew that he and Freda Ducrow and Theo Gray were equal beneficiaries under Cosmo’s will. He agreed that the case looked black against him, but he was innocent.

  “There were no lights showing in the lower windows of the house that night when you left?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t hear a car pass through the lodge gates after you got to bed?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve nothing else to tell me about that night?”

  “Nothing. So far as I knew till the morning it was a night like any other. There was just that half-open door. Oh, and one other thing, though it obviously has nothing to do with Cosmo’s death.”

  “Well?”

  “I was alone in this house all the evening until I went up to Hokestones about midnight. Some time after ten one of my wife’s dogs started barking and I went out to see what was disturbing the creature. She breeds Boxers, you know, and she trains them not to make a racket unless they’re disturbed. This one barked for about two minutes. I took a torch and went to the kennels. Just as I was returning I saw what had disturbed the dog. Someone was standing outside Dunton’s front door.”

  “His wife, I suppose?”

  “Yes. But she had not been near the place for weeks and had left Dunton because he stayed with Cosmo. She saw me and asked if I knew whether Dunton was in. I said that as far as I knew he was, and just then the door was opened by Dunton and they went in together.”

  “It only needed that,” said Beef. “That means there were at least a dozen people round the place at one time or another that night.”

  “Good Lord, you surely don’t suppose that Mrs. Dunton could have had anything to do with it?”

  “But who could? That’s what I want to know. No one can believe that anyone else would do such a thing. But he didn’t crack his own head open with a croquet mallet. Now suppose it was Cosmo Ducrow at the kitchen door. Suppose he saw you going upstairs to his wife’s bedroom. What would he have done?”

  “I don’t know, but something pretty desperate. He wouldn’t have let it pass.”

  “What anyone might suppose he did was to wait till you came down, follow you across the park to the pavilion and there attack you in some way which would make you strike in self-defence . . .”

  “No,” said Rudolf, “that wouldn’t work. You can’t smash the back of a man’s skull in with a croquet mallet in self-defence. Besides, as I’ve told you, I never saw him that evening at all.”

  “All right,” said Beef wearily. “Let’s leave it at that, shall we? I was going to ask you whether you’ve by any chance got an old gun you could lend me? If there’s one thing I enjoy it’s a bit of rabbit-shooting, and there should be plenty round the park.”

  Rudolf smiled.

  “I’ll lend you my gun,” he said, “but you needn’t be afraid I’m going to do myself in. Or anyone else, for that matter.”

  “Still with all this going on you’d be better with it out of the way,” said Beef. “Where is it?”

  Rudolf rose and led the way to a little cloakroom. It was not more than ten feet square and was part of the house which had been built on, I surmised. Besides the W.C. there was a hand-basin, a row of coat pegs with overcoats hanging from them, and an old table on which were a dog’s comb and brush, while under it were three dog-baskets. The whole room smelt of dogs.

  Rudolf explained that some of his wife’s Boxers slept here and added that they were all over the place. Then he pointed to his gun, which was leaning against the wall by the laden coat pegs. Beef went across to pick it up, but before doing so he stopped and stood staring at the coats. Then he turned to Rudolf.

  “Is this your jacket?” he asked casually.

  Rudolf did not seem interested.

  “Yes; an old one,” he said.

  “Why do you keep it down here with the overcoats?”

  “I didn’t know it was here.”
>
  “Where is it usually kept?”

  “Upstairs, I suppose. I haven’t worn it for some time.”

  “Mr. Ducrow, I would ask you to try to remember everything you can about this jacket. I regard it as important. When did you wear it last?”

  “I can’t say, really. Back in the summer, I think.”

  “You were not wearing it on the night of the murder?”

  “No . . . well, I don’t think so. I can’t remember when I wore it.”

  “You have another light-coloured sports coat?”

  “Yes. Two. This is the oldest.”

  “Have you ever hung this up in the house—at Hokestones, I mean?”

  Light broke on Rudolf’s face.

  “Why, yes. Now you mention it. I remember leaving it up there in the summer. I was going to do a job on the car with Mills and went out in my shirt sleeves. Then I drove straight here, forgetting it altogether.”

  “Did you never go and fetch it?”

  “No. Clean forgot.”

  “How did it get here then?”

  “Blowed if I know.”

  “Come now, Mr. Ducrow. There must be some explanation.”

  “I don’t know. I may have brought it down, but I can’t remember doing so.”

  “How long has it been here?”

  “Don’t know that either, I’m afraid. Never noticed it before.”

  “Do you mind if I take it away with me?”

  Rudolf smiled.

  “To wear for rabbit-shooting? All right.”

  Beef picked up the gun and jacket, and laden with these we were making for the front door when there was a fury of barking outside and we heard a woman’s deep voice, shouting, “Down, Stalin! Come here, Molotov! Lenin, will you behave yourself?” Then a loud shrill whistle repeated four times on one note: Whee, WHEE, whee, WHEEEE. The front door opened and a pack of Boxers hurtled in followed by a hefty young woman in jodhpurs. The dogs barked and sniffed round us, but without animosity. There was a scene of much confusion till their names had been shouted again and the whole of the Supreme Soviet had been incarcerated in the cloakroom.