What Happened at Hazelwood?

by Michael Innes

  ‘Dead?’ And Willoughby raised his eyebrows. ‘Why, that’s very bad indeed.’ He looked at me seriously as I stood there with my wet wrap clinging to me. It was an appraising look but with nothing remotely indecent to it. At this unlikely moment this most unlikely of the Simneys was rather taken up with me as a possible work of art. And in this there was an element somehow so macabre that I shivered as if the cold air in that corridor was piercing me to the bone.

  ‘No point in talking,’ I said. ‘Come with me, Willoughby. And you, Owdon, get the doctor at once.’

  ‘Your ladyship, I am afraid I had better call the police too.’

  ‘As you think best. And then rouse Mr Bevis. Willoughby, come.’

  Willoughby appeared to wake up. ‘Nicolette,’ he said, ‘won’t you let me go in and see first? It may be a bit horrid. Go and sit down in your room.’

  I looked at him queerly – perhaps because he spoke with unexpected authority. And suddenly I realized that Hazelwood now held a Sir Bevis Simney, and that here before me stood the next in succession to a baronetcy. Well, all that was no business of mine. ‘We’ll go in together,’ I said.

  Owdon had gone away to telephone, but his voice could be heard raised in question or explanation somewhere behind us. A moment later there was a patter of footsteps and Mervyn Cockayne came running down the corridor. He too was in pyjamas – an old pair of schoolboy’s pyjamas still – and these and his slippers were both splashed with melting snow. ‘I nearly caught him,’ he said quietly. ‘But is what Owdon says true?’

  Willoughby halted. ‘Caught him?’

  ‘The burglar or whoever he was – out on the west terrace.’

  ‘Rubbish. You couldn’t come within a mile of catching a henwife. And now you’d better cut off to bed.’

  I could see Mervyn flush unexpectedly – and in that moment he was extraordinarily like Timmy. He turned to me. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we had better go in?’

  Willoughby was at that moment disagreeable to me, and Mervyn I had certainly never had cause to care for. Moreover they were scarcely more than boys, and at what was in front of me I would have preferred the company of a grown man. But it was no good standing there and risking the start of an indecent quarrel. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Come along.’

  George’s study was a bare, bleak place in which the comparatively crowded pictures set off the almost empty room. The long refectory table was the only substantial piece of furniture. And George’s body was sprawled on it, face downwards. There was a chair behind him, and it was as if he had been sitting there at the end of the table, reading. And that, indeed, was his habit. And the impression one received was obscurely this: that some preternaturally powerful force from behind had picked him up and flung him across the table. Only his toes touched the floor.

  George’s end was ugly. Even if the back of his skull was not as I now saw it to be, there would have been something peculiarly horrible about that sprawl across the table – the posture of a man hopelessly drunk, or of a schoolboy about to be caned. His left hand was violently splayed out, as if desperately spanning the octave of a gigantic piano; his right hand had closed upon a tumbler with such force that it was no more than shivered glass within his fist. There was nothing on the long table but writing things and a litter of magazines – stupid magazines full of horses and dogs and stupid, arrogant faces, for George’s brains he had kept for the prosecution of his own peculiar affairs. Now, his brains were rather widely scattered about the room.

  I turned towards the window behind him – this because I felt sick and there was coming from it a blessed breath of cold night air. The boys – they were no more than that, after all, and so far the world’s violence had passed them by – turned towards it too. And I could see them stiffen as its significance struck them.

  The room’s single window stood in a shallow embrasure across which thick curtains were now drawn, and these were stirring in a way that showed the window behind them to be wide open. This was, of course, unusual on a winter night, and the moving curtains held their own powerful suggestion at once.

  But there was more than that. Here was the room’s only possible lurking-place. And it is only in books that, when murder has been committed, it is at once taken for granted that the murderer will have fled from the scene of his crime. I looked at the curtains and felt no assurance that George’s assailant was not still behind them; I looked at Willoughby and Mervyn and guessed that the same thought was in their minds.

  In that moment it required positive courage to move. And it was the youngest of us who moved first. Mervyn strode towards the window – the very window from which he had been so ignominiously dropped by Gerard the night before. I could see his spirits rise as the discovery of his own sufficient courage came to him. Of course if he had really tackled somebody outside, and that somebody had fled, there could scarcely be any actual danger now. But I doubted if he remembered this – for those slightly swaying curtains were simply sinister in themselves. During this first brief period of tension, in fact, they represented a sort of magical or tabu locality against approaching which the blood rebelled. Murdered baronets sprawled across tables at midnight are sophisticated enough. But, confronted with them, the mind works in uncommonly primitive ways. I didn’t want my own mind to do this, and I was fighting to be calm. But here was the little toad Mervyn striding across the room. His voice rose – shrill, affected, but confident – in the first words uttered since we had entered the study. ‘Nicolette,’ he said, ‘I will just have a look round while you get poor Willoughby a glass of brandy.’ And he disappeared behind the curtains.

  I remembered that, if not brandy, there ought at least to have been whiskey, sugar and hot water on the table, since it was one of Owdon’s routine duties at this hour to provide these for the making of George’s final and solitary toddy. And then I saw that these were lying spilt and smashed on the floor, having apparently been pushed over, tray and all, when George’s body pitched across the table. And I remember – so strange a contraption is the human mind – feeling a kind of automatic annoyance that here was more cut glass gone. If involuntary, this was none the less indecent. And then I became aware of something not less indecent. Willoughby and Mervyn were quarrelling fiercely behind the window curtains.

  I was tiptoeing about the room now – rather, I suppose, as if George were a light sleeper whom it would be inconsiderate to waken. The Simneys – the other dead Simneys – and those ladies whom George had associated with them looked down at me impassively; the lads quarrelled and were seemingly jostling each other; I could hear Owdon’s footsteps returning heavily up the corridor. There was something peculiarly horrible about this moment; a tall flame suddenly leapt up in the great fireplace, and amid the resulting flickering shadows everything seemed to be moving, so that I had a wild feeling of that splayed-out hand of George’s as something in the act of making a last desperate clutch – perhaps at the leaping flame, perhaps at my throat… And then Willoughby and Mervyn appeared again, decorously enough. I believe that there, and in the very presence of the dead man, they had fallen out over some coveted possession that might now come to one or the other of them: a shot-gun, perhaps, or some little secret collection of smutty books. And now this made them (sincerely enough, I think) all the more gentlemanlike and solicitous for the unhappy widow. And the unhappy widow was calculating in just how many days she would at last be able to leave Hazelwood for good… There is nothing pretty in this chronicle of Sir George Simney’s end. It is all ugly from start to finish. But then if one marries out of some bitter negation of decency – well, what has one to expect?

  At least not perhaps murder. But what, other than murder, could this be? I believe that George Simney must be called satanic – I have ample reason to believe it. Had he resolved to commit suicide it was only too likely that his last hours would have been spent in contriving to bequeath posterity the appear
ance of a murder-mystery. But no man could contrive to stave his own head in like that.

  Or could he? By some extreme of ingenuity could he manage just that? Was the expression of inordinate surprise which was to be revealed when the body was turned over occasioned by his pleased knowledge that he had brought off some peculiarly difficult technical feat?

  Gentle Readers – you who are skilled in conning chronicles of violence – these questions are yours!

  Part Two

  Harold

  1

  …Speculations, he says, are useless until you have all the facts. But I’ve noticed often enough that it isn’t like that with him, really. He begins speculating straight away, if you ask me, and his speculations suggest what facts to hunt for next. You know I always do a bit of serious reading at bedtime, as auntie Flo advised? Well, the other night I was reading a book about Darwin, and it said how Darwin’s great strength was in his extraordinary fertility in hypotheses. This just means that he was always guessing. Give him a few facts and he would start guessing at once. He couldn’t peer into a cage at the Zoo without forming a hypothesis, and then he would go hurrying round the other cages trying it out. Most likely there would be nothing in it, and he would discover this before he had got from the lemurs to the spider monkeys. But by then he would have another hypothesis – or guess, that is – and quite soon one of these would look sufficiently promising to be called a theory… Well, you know, it’s very much that way with him.

  But, of course, he says little, and you just can’t tell what the hypothesis of the moment is – or even the theory when one develops into that. Still, I really believe that he is guessing all the time, and that this is what makes him so good a Detective Inspector – far the best at the Yard, as I’ve often said. It’s a bit of luck, isn’t it, to work with a man like that? Tell auntie Flo about Darwin. Anything of that sort always interests her.

  If you ask me, he’s wasted no time in beginning a few speculations about this Lady Simney – Nicolette, as she seems to be called by the men folk here. I must say, my dear Dad, that I would like to have seen her when she came out of that bathroom in a towel – a regular Venus, she must have been. But then she’s an actress and famous on the London stage, and no doubt the dead man married her for what the queer kid Mervyn calls her charms. What she married him for nobody knows; he seems to have been quite as nasty as most of the people who get murdered. Don’t tell auntie Flo that about wanting to see Lady Simney like I said. I told him and he was down on me like a ton of bricks. Only ’tecs in American shockers, he said, can afford to have those sort of feelings when on duty. Keep them for the cinema, he said, or for Jane; it’s safer. Well, that’s just like him.

  And it must have been just a guess (or a hypothesis) that those clothes were not Sir George’s. For if you find a suitcase in a married lady’s room with a complete outfit of men’s garments you would naturally take them to be her husband’s, wouldn’t you? But no sooner had I opened the thing than his eyes narrowed on them the way they do. ‘Harold,’ he said, ‘take them across the passage and measure them against some of Sir George’s. And I did, and they were nowhere near the same. Then he made me snoop all over the house (and a huge great place it is – I think the most aristocratic I’ve been in yet) and measure the things against everybody’s – all the men, I mean, who live here. And they were nowhere near a match anywhere. It was like going round with Cinderella’s slipper in a pantomime with four times as many ugly sisters as usual. ‘So what do you think of that?’ he asked. And I said it looked suspicious. ‘Suspicious?’ he said; ‘well, it may be a straw in the wind – or a feather.’ ‘A feather?’ I asked. ‘Just that,’ he said; ‘Cuvier’s feather.’ ‘Cuvier?’ I asked. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I see you haven’t got to the chapter on Cuvier.’ I think this was some sort of joke – his sort of joke – on my reading a book about Darwin. I’ll find out one day soon. That’s one thing about him. He always explains his little mystifications later on.

  But now I had better go back. I’m afraid my first notes were a bit disjointed. The truth is, I haven’t been brought out before on so big an affair, and I was a bit worked up. Besides, there was Lady Simney; it did seem a shame that such a woman should be mixed up in a dirty affair like this – blacksmith’s daughters, and that sort of thing. I felt I would like to take her right away – to New Zealand, or somewhere like that. When I first saw her I said to myself: ‘There’s a woman who has had enough’ – and for a time I couldn’t get anything else into my head. But I wouldn’t like to tell him that – or auntie Flo.

  We got here just before luncheon, which means about twelve hours after the commission of the crime: an attack a tergo with a blunt instrument upon a well-nourished middle-aged man (upper class). That’s how it goes in my notebook. It’s difficult to get rid sometimes of the awful bosh they taught us in the lectures. And practical work is miles better, I must say. Lady Simney –

  But that’s wandering. We got here at lunchtime, and I could tell by the pace at which he let me push the Bentley along (the yellow one, you know, that poor Inspector Appleby had before his marriage) that he felt there was something out of the common in front of us. We were met by local men and shown in on somebody called Sir Bevis – who talked as if he was a chief constable or even a lord lieutenant. He let him talk until he had talked himself thoroughly uneasy, and then we could see that this Sir Bevis was hiding something. But then they all are, and we can’t even be sure that it is the same thing. It looks as if the investigation might be quite a long affair. However, I rather look forward to settling in. This CID business, you know, has turned out almost as peripatetic (just ask auntie that one) as being on the beat. So here’s a change, anyway.

  They all have something to hide – and they all have something to gain. This Sir Bevis has got a title and a fair-sized estate. His son, Mr Willoughby Simney, has got one step nearer to the same. Lady Simney has got rid of an awful beast of a husband. Young Mr Mervyn Cockayne is believed to have come into a considerable legacy, and this may also benefit his mother. As for the relations from Australia, it appears that the deceased and Mr Hippias had quarrelled, that Mrs Gerard – the girl called Joyleen – had let the dead man seduce her and may have been terrified of being given away, and that therefore her husband (if he knew) had a very sufficient motive himself. Finally, of course, there are the servants – as he says there always are. Well, when I say that the butler, Owdon, once had an illegitimate son by one of the ladies of the family, and that the son is here on the spot as a sort of footman, you will see that the menservants, at least, can’t quite be counted out. In fact, the only person who seems to have no interest from a police point of view is Miss Grace Simney, the unmarried sister of the dead man. But he says he’s not so sure. It isn’t often he says so much. He says that it’s very classical – and looking out of the window at the yellow Bentley he murmured something about What would Appleby have done? From what I’ve heard of him I’d say the answer is Talked Greek and swopped tags out of Shakespeare. Whereas I bet he will get straight on with the job. We’ve got to find out what happened at Hazelwood. And the thing may have been done by any of them, I should say – I mean just reckoning by the sort of people they appear to be. I can’t be sure that Nicolette even – Lady Simney, that is – is nice. I’m sure she’s been nice. But there’s something rather hard about her, and perhaps a woman can go a bit bad when she’s had enough and she’s through… And now to throw in the clutch.

  ‘Sir Bevis,’ he said after he’d bided his time, ‘I understand that on Monday night there was a family quarrel in this room?’

  The new baronet didn’t like it. ‘I don’t think it should be called that,’ he said. ‘No doubt there was a little heat.’

  ‘And the heat resulted in the throwing of a bottle and the smashing of that picture?’ He pointed to the portrait of the late Sir George in his hunting-coat. ‘In fact there was attempted violence?’

 
Sir Bevis frowned. ‘Mr Hippias undoubtedly – ah – tossed the bottle. Sportfully, no doubt. Colonial manners are a little bluff.’

  ‘Sir Bevis, are you disposed to a little bluff yourself?’

  That got him. He went as red as a turkey-cock and made much the same gobbling sort of noise. ‘Perfectly scandalous!’ he said. ‘And I may mention that a particular friend of mine at the Home Office–’

  ‘Quite so, sir. That is what everybody says – when caught speeding, for instance, or anything of that sort. But in thirty years’ experience of police work I’ve never known it to cut any ice yet. So we’ll spare your influential connexions, if you don’t mind. But my question should have been more precise. Have you not, so far, concealed information which it is your duty to divulge?’

  Well, that’s the straight way to talk to a baronet. And perhaps in a year or two I shall have picked it up. And this one wilted a little. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you. That, in my opinion, is one of the most significant replies a police officer can receive. It invariably indicates deception.’ And he turned to me. ‘Harold,’ he said, ‘write it down. The words were I don’t know what you mean.’

  In America they’re said to use wearing-down tactics – which must take a lot of time considering the hurry folk are in there. He uses sudden little unnerving bits like this. And – sure enough – our grand Sir Bevis begins to babble, and has a lot to say about some unpleasantness over a place called Dismal Swamp.

  He listened to this for a while. And when he spoke again it was with a sort of relaxed tension as if the air had been cleared a good bit. Well, I’ve got to know a number of his tricks in the last few months, and I knew this one.