What Happened at Hazelwood?

by Michael Innes

  ‘I see. But by this time it must be getting pretty late. Why have you time to fill in?’

  ‘It is about eleven-fifty. Very punctually at this hour Sir George comes – I ought to say was in the habit of coming – up to the study. He would enter, close the door behind him, and spend some ten minutes glancing at magazines and drinking his toddy. Then he would come out, turning off the lights behind him, and enter his bedroom. I would follow him a few minutes later – perhaps just on midnight – and collect his dress-clothes. These I would put in order in one of the wardrobes before finally retiring to bed myself.’

  I think I looked at Owdon with a mixture of compassion and respect. That sort of upper-servant business, and shuffling round with other men’s drinks and pants while having to keep one’s own dignified end up, seems pretty awful to me. And I suspect the world is about through with it. But if Owdon thought it pretty well sub-human he concealed the fact effortlessly enough. He was as respectful as one’s silliest self could wish. At the same time he might have been a cabinet-minister giving an account of the organization of his Ministry to the PM.

  And it occurred to me that there was more to Owdon than there was supposed to be. But then hadn’t he once struck one of the Simney ladies that way? Plainly, he was a man to keep an eye on.

  The Inspector was doing that. And it was a narrowing eye. ‘All this is very good,’ he said. ‘It is very clear – this exposition of your routine. And I am particularly impressed by your stepping behind the curtains.’

  ‘Is that so, sir?’ If Owdon was perturbed he didn’t – save for that now chronic slight trembling of the hand – at all show it.

  ‘Of course it was simply to close the window in your regular fashion…’ The Inspector paused. ‘I suppose you didn’t happen to glance out of the window?’

  ‘No, sir. I simply pushed down the sash.’

  ‘You didn’t happen to make some sign or signal to somebody waiting outside?’

  He can be pretty effective in these transitions to the really nasty questions. But Owdon declined to be shaken. ‘I did not,’ he said.

  I must say I believed him – just as I was going to believe him presently on other vital matters. There was something in his voice that convinced me. At the same time I was puzzled, and I looked at the Inspector. He was making jottings in a notebook – never a very significant process with him, I’m bound to say. And then he looked up and went evenly on. ‘Very well. And now we’d better come to last night, and to your discovery of the murder. For the moment, you may as well again begin at eleven-thirty.’

  ‘Very well.’ The words were almost snapped out – but decisively rather than defiantly. I realized that Owdon was a man who had received a tremendous shock and still showed it – but that the signs of this shock would be misleading if they inclined one to suppose that he was not fully in possession of himself now. ‘Very well, officer.’ And Owdon looked quickly about the room. ‘I came in here as usual about eleven forty-five, and everything was much as it is now. But just before that, I remember, there was one incident. Her ladyship sent me for The Times.’

  ‘You would call that an incident?’

  There was no more in this, I suppose, than the more or less routine police trick of giving a witness the impression that his statements are being closely scrutinized. But Owdon appeared struck by the question. ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘There was something a little arresting in the way it happened. I had been working in the corridor there since about half past eleven, and Lady Simney was already in her boudoir. It must have been about ten minutes later that she opened her door and asked me to fetch her The Times of the day before. She had already dismissed her maid, Martin, for the night, and, of course, I was very ready to do her bidding.’

  ‘I see. And what was arresting about this?’

  Owdon hesitated. ‘Perhaps I used too strong a word. But in the first place there was the fact that she was already undressed and in what is called, I suppose, a bathrobe. Commonly her ladyship did not appear like that. I have the impression that she resented the comparative lack of privacy resulting from the study’s being set at the end of a corridor upon which her own apartments gave. It is unusual.’

  ‘Ah. You have been in service in other great houses?’

  This time Owdon did jump. But at once he controlled himself. ‘You would wish me,’ he asked, ‘to turn aside to some account of my own history?’

  The Inspector frowned. ‘Go ahead,’ he said abruptly. ‘About The Times.’

  ‘I think it must be said that her ladyship burst from her room. And she was holding that day’s Times – yesterday’s, that is to say – as she appeared. I saw that something she had just read made her uncommonly anxious to consult the issue of the day before. There was nothing more arresting about the incident than that.’

  ‘It has its interest.’ The Inspector looked up sharply. ‘Has it occurred to you that Lady Simney may simply have been contriving to get you out of the way?’

  ‘That wasn’t the way of it at all. She very much wanted that Times.’

  ‘But I think I am right in believing that she is by profession an actress? If she wanted to get rid of you she could think up and execute this little business of the newspaper without effort?’

  Owdon hesitated for a moment at this ingenuity. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It sounds likely enough, but I don’t think so. I found the paper in the breakfast-room, and I remember that the clock at the end of the corridor here was chiming eleven forty-five as I passed it. Her ladyship had gone into her bathroom – I could hear the water running – and so I left the paper on a table in the boudoir. As I came out I found that my electric kettle was boiling, and I therefore proceeded straight to the study. The room was, of course, empty. I stirred the fire, closed the window from the bottom, and withdrew. In the corridor I met Sir George; he said nothing, but entered the study and closed the door behind him as usual. You must realize that during the next few minutes that door was steadily within my observation. I was not, of course, watching it idly, and I began, indeed, the inspection of some bills which had come in that morning. Nevertheless it was impossible that anyone should pass me unnoticed, or even slip out of one of the other rooms on the corridor and enter the study. Lady Simney, for example, could not have done so.’

  Inspector Cadover stirred in his chair. ‘And you are positive that this room had, in fact, been empty when you visited it?’

  ‘I am quite positive. It is, as you see, sparely furnished – and to its one possible hiding-place behind the curtains I had, of course, to penetrate in closing the window.’

  ‘Very well. Sir George is closeted here alone; the curtains are drawn across the window-recess with the window still open at the top; and you yourself are only a few yards off down the corridor. What then?’

  ‘Whatever happened, sir, must have happened within a couple of minutes of Sir George’s entering. I heard–’ And Owdon hesitated.

  ‘Yes, Mr Owdon?’

  ‘I heard a scream of rage and terror.’

  ‘Dear me! And was this from Sir George?’

  Owdon shook his head. ‘It was a man’s voice, sir – but definitely not Sir George’s.’

  At this I was prompted to chip in. ‘Come, come,’ I said. ‘Sir George cannot have been in the habit of uttering screams of rage and terror in your hearing. So how can you rule him out so certainly?’

  ‘It was not Sir George.’

  This was no sort of answer – but again it was convincing. That he had seen his employer go into an empty room, and that within a couple of minutes he had heard a strange man scream with terror and rage: these, I was tolerably sure, were true reports on Owdon’s part.

  The Inspector had twisted round to look at the curtains behind him. ‘Well, Mr Owdon,’ he said without turning back, ‘–what then?’

  ‘The scream was followed immediat
ely by a crash, and a sound as of a heavy body being flung forward. I hesitated for a moment and then ran up the corridor.’

  ‘Mr Owdon, please attend to this. It has been my duty to listen to a good many narratives such as yours, in which an unsuspecting man is suddenly embraced within some context of violence. And over and over again I have heard the words, “I hesitated for a moment”. Sometimes that moment proves to have been no more than a second or two; sometimes it has been a minute or more. And now, as commonly, the exact truth is very important. Let us have it, please.’

  I could see Owdon suddenly lick his lips. ‘I was frightened,’ he said.

  The Inspector looked at him curiously – struck, I think, by some importance that the man seemed to attach to his confession. ‘Likely enough,’ he snapped. ‘But with just what result?’

  ‘I believe I ran up the corridor almost at once. Only when just outside the room was I seized with a horrible dread.’ Again Owdon licked his lips. ‘My feet would not move. It was as if they were tied together. Nothing of the sort has ever happened to me before.’

  ‘Quite so. It is nothing out of the way, I assure you. And it lasted?’

  ‘No more than half a minute, I should say. It passed, and I felt intensely ashamed. I flung open the door and ran into the room. Sir George’s body was lying across the table, and behind him the curtains had been disarranged. I bent over him and – and saw the back of his head. It was impossible to doubt that he must be dead – nevertheless I knew that medical aid ought to be summoned at once. I turned and hurried from the room. As I reached the corridor Lady Simney appeared from her bathroom, much alarmed. She had heard some involuntary cry of my own.’

  ‘Quite so. We are all liable to bellow at times, Mr Owdon. And I judge that we have reached a point at which your testimony may end for the moment. I think it fair to say that it will be scrutinized, and that we may require some inquiry into your personal affairs… I take it that in the interval between Lady Simney’s asking for The Times and her subsequent reappearance from the bathroom there was no one who caught a glimpse of you and could in part substantiate your story?’

  ‘There was Sir George; he passed me in the corridor.’

  ‘But it is Sir George, unfortunately, who has been killed.’ And suddenly Owdon looked at us stupidly – as if the fact were one which he had only confusedly realized before. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It was Sir George.’ His knees crumpled beneath him and he slithered to the floor.

  4

  Had Owdon expected to find somebody else dead in the study? Why otherwise should he display this sort of delayed shock over the dead man’s identity? Was he lying, after all, when he said that his employer had entered an empty room? Or had he known of some tryst that Sir George was to keep there, and would it have been more in accord with expectation if it had been the visitor who was killed? Again – and to take the matter another way – had the butler really given some sort of signal through the window, as the chief had hinted? Standing out there in the corridor like a sentry, had he really lured his master into a trap? We knew obscurely that those two men had shared rough and mysterious days long ago. Might Owdon have been living here at Hazelwood simply on the strength of blackmail? Might some element of the sort be connected, too, with what was known of the parentage of the boy Timmy? And had the arrival of the Australians in some way turned the tables on Owdon, who had hastily arranged with some confederate that Sir George should be silenced? Was it simply some stroke of remorse that made his mind veer away from the simple fact that in the resulting encounter it was indeed the man plotted against who had died?

  You see, my dear Dad, that I am doing my best to follow in Darwin’s footsteps. I have entered the Zoo, taken one look at the baboon – the effect of looking at Owdon, I must say, is not altogether different, poor chap – and hurried off round the cages being as fertile in hypotheses as you could wish. The difficulty, of course, is to know how to test these out rapidly and scrap them if they are no good. Perhaps the chief was already doing so. After we got Owdon on his pins again and away, he sat in a muse, staring at the dark grain of the table before him. I could hear my watch ticking in my pocket.

  And what, I wonder, would auntie Flo think at this point? Her eye, if you ask me, would be decidedly on Lady Simney. A really beautiful actress, who had good reason to hate her husband. Where could you have a better point than that?

  Inspector Cadover, I think, was turning his mind the same way, but for a different reason. Lady Simney looked like having quite an obtrusive alibi, and no CID man likes that. Perhaps this is just the influence of fiction. Certainly we spend a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that in regard to this or that person the laws of space and time just don’t apply.

  We went down to the terrace. If the late Sir George had wanted to provide a convenient back-staircase for murderers he couldn’t well have done better than put up the trellis that here arose from ground-level to his study window. And he had put it up. This the chief, with his queer faculty for asking questions that bring all sorts of unexpected information, had discovered when we had first inspected the thing. Were there to have been roses? Yes, it was believed that such was the idea. Had anything, in fact, been done about them? Nothing at all. Sir George’s interest in gardening was nil, and it was an activity from which his young bride had very quickly withdrawn… We stared at the trellis once more – and then looked at each other doubtfully. It seemed difficult to escape this conclusion: that the trellis was a back-staircase and nothing else. Sir George, presumably, had used it as a quiet means of playing truant. But it was a queer way for even a bad baronet to behave.

  There was no doubt that somebody had climbed the thing the night before: Dr Watson himself could have read the signs unmistakably. There was no doubt that somebody had approached the terrace from the direction of the drive, and one could just distinguish that he had later retreated as he came. There was no doubt that a little way along the terrace somebody else had emerged from the house and made his way to a spot just beneath the study window – and this, of course, must have been the courageous Mervyn Cockayne. There was every sign of some sort of dust-up or flurry, in the snow, so that nothing contradicted his story of a struggle with the intruder. All this could still be read in the snow, and it pointed as plainly as could be to the crime being the work of an intruder. Except, of course, that any member of the household, granted the necessary time, could have left the house unobserved by one of several swept paths on which no tracks would be visible, could have made a detour and approached again through the snow from the drive, could – after breaking away from Cockayne – have regained the house by reversing the manoeuvre.

  We went over these facts and appearances carefully enough. Nevertheless I could see that Inspector Cadover’s mind was elsewhere. There was one stretch of territory which irresistibly attracted him. It was that which rounded that whole wing of the house with which we were immediately concerned. In other words, it started under the window of Sir George’s study and ended under the window of Lady Simney’s bathroom. We covered this route hugging the terrace and the wall. We covered it making a wider cast. Snow, of course, had been falling at the time of the crime; and there had been some wind since. I could imagine that every track and trace would by no means remain – and indeed there were here and there appearances in the snow for which I could only account by supposing a stiff wind blowing it into drifts and ridges. But it was and had always been virgin of footprints. There could be no doubt of that.

  ‘Nothing could cross this,’ the Inspector said disconsolately. ‘And no trellis here, either.’

  ‘Something like an eighteen-foot drop.’

  He shook his head. ‘We’ve a good long way to go yet. Almost a dozen folk who are unknown quantities still. I think we’ll go back inside.’

  But where he took me was Lady Simney’s room. I didn’t like it, for I had no reason to suppose that she mightn
’t turn up at any time: after all, nobody had clapped her in a police cell yet. Of course, he didn’t mind that. We started with the bathroom, which smelt of something pretty special in the way of soap. There was something, it seemed to me, downright indelicate in this. And I know that auntie Flo would agree with me.

  Not that it was really a bathroom at all. There was nothing but an elaborate shower in it – all chromium-plated sprays and nozzles and taps, surrounded by yards and yards of oil-silk. I am sorry to say that I found this shower bath a little haunting (if you understand me); more so than if there had been just an ordinary bath. I couldn’t quite get the lady out of my head.

  Inspector Cadover didn’t waste much time here, and we went poking into the bedroom and the boudoir. The bedroom was very handsome and curiously neutral, so that here the lady just didn’t come into my head at all. We might have been in a shop. I mean a furniture shop of a tremendously expensive sort, with a whole room faithfully got up for living in. But here nobody really lived.

  The boudoir, on the other hand, was quite different; in fact it had a very definite personality stamped on it, and I felt at once that it shouldn’t go by so stupid a name. Into this room Lady Simney had brought her past life with her, and although it didn’t come together in any clear picture the effect was pleasant enough. There were old theatrical prints and hockey sticks and skis; there was a shelf of delicate Chinese pottery and on top of that a shelf of pretty stiff-looking books on drama; on the walls there were half a dozen magnificent photographs of Papuan children caught in the several stages of some intricate game. It was an excellent room for living in. It was also an excellent room for spying and snooping round – and this was our business now. The Inspector prowled about looking sombre – it was just as if he had already spotted something that depressed him and I did the work. It’s commonly like that. He says that my generation has been taught the technique, and that he isn’t going to compete with it. But sometimes 1 suspect that he has preserved from a well-brought up childhood a distaste for poking about in other people’s drawers.