What Happened at Hazelwood?

by Michael Innes

  It was at this moment that I found a question of my own to address to Mr Deamer. I had happened to walk over to the window and notice, leaning against a bench outside, an old bicycle with a decidedly rusty chain. I turned back and glanced at Mr Deamer. He was a shabby little man, plainly disregardful of both comfort and appearance. ‘I think, sir,’ I said, ‘that you are fond of gardening?’ He stared in surprise, as he well might do at so inconsequent a question. And then I risked my long shot. ‘Perhaps you will tell us how you came to leave a pair of boots at the Hall on the very night that Sir George Simney was killed?’

  If the Devil himself had at that moment appeared in the coffee-room of the Simney Arms and beckoned to Mr Deamer with a sinister ‘Hither to me’ I doubt whether the reverend gentleman would have been more upset.

  ‘Boots?’ he stammered. ‘A pair of boots?’

  ‘Certainly – and fairly new ones too. As a result of losing them you have had to put on a thoroughly well-worn pair today.’

  Mr Deamer looked down at his feet, and then with his wildest glance round the room. He was engaged, I thought, in some rapid calculation something to which persons unfortunate enough to become involved in criminal investigation are not infrequently reduced. But I had an obscure feeling that these particular calculations were something out of the way. Perhaps Mr Deamer was estimating just how much of the Hither-to-me business people so profane as ourselves would accept. It was as if, in terms of the supernatural, he had a thoroughly tall story to tell, but was rather daunted by the prospect of our blank incredulity. Perhaps he was subject to hallucinations, and really believed that the powers of darkness had robbed him of his boots as a preparatory step to providing him with cloven hooves. Be this as it may, Mr Deamer abruptly descended to a sublunary view of the matter.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘My boots. I left them at Hazelwood.’

  The chief scratched his chin, thereby indicating that it was still my ball.

  ‘Quite so,’ I pursued. ‘But will you tell me how you came to leave them in Sir George’s study upon the very night upon which he was killed?’

  ‘I was tricked!’ The vicar of Hazelwood was vehement. ‘I was tricked by–’ He hesitated and peered uncertainly into his coffee cup.

  ‘Perhaps by the Devil?’

  ‘Well – yes.’ Mr Deamer was almost apologetic. ‘I see that I had better not obtrude upon you a point of view which you are unlikely to accept. But I am afraid it was the Devil. At the time, I understood it to be Miss Grace Simney.’

  ‘You thought Miss Simney had taken your boots?’

  ‘Dear me, no. How confusing this is! I thought it was Miss Simney who spoke to me on the telephone. She is a most devout lady and one of my truly valued parishioners. Again and again she has given information invaluable to me in my ceaseless struggles to curb the terrible immoralities and depravities which here surround us.’

  ‘You mean that she is a great hand at smelling things out?’

  ‘It might be put in that way. For example, she was the first to discover that both Sir George and his nephew Willoughby were intent upon seducing the blacksmith’s daughter.’

  ‘You are sure that Mr Willoughby was not intent merely upon painting her?’

  Mr Deamer frowned. ‘It is virtually the same thing, is it not? And, again, there is the shocking liaison between Lady Simney and the young man from Australia – Gerard. It was Miss Grace who immediately brought me word of that. I am very well aware that there are maiden ladies who imagine such things. But Miss Grace has always been most reliable. So when on Tuesday evening she rang up and told me of this assignation which Sir George had made with Jane Fairey–’

  ‘Jane Fairey?’

  ‘The blacksmith’s daughter, of course! She was to climb the trellis to Sir George’s study just after eleven o’clock.’

  ‘Eleven o’clock?’ Inspector Cadover broke in. ‘The voice on the telephone said that?’

  ‘Yes. I was greatly shocked. And I fell in with the suggestion which the D –, which the voice made, that I should keep watch and surprise the wretched girl in her intention.’

  I looked at Mr Deamer with some compassion. Despite his cycling and his gardening he was a miserable wisp of a man, tormented by heaven knows what obscure fires within. ‘Rather a chilly job,’ I said.

  ‘It was very cold. I stood for a long time on the terrace and nothing happened. Sometimes’ – Mr Deamer hesitated – ‘I felt rather ridiculous. Various images kept coming into my mind. Mr Pickwick, for instance, when he was tricked into keeping a not dissimilar vigil in the garden of a girls’ school.’

  The chief chuckled – but not unkindly. This, indeed, was the first human gleam we had had from our reverend visitor.

  ‘But then there were other images too. I became convinced that I had arrived too late, and that if I wished to tax the unhappy Jane with her abominable fornication I must wait until – until–’

  ‘Quite so,’ said the chief.

  ‘And at that a very strange urge came upon me. I must know the worst.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the chief.

  ‘It was very dark all around. And in my mind were vivid and shocking fantasies. I determined to climb to the study and – and investigate.’

  ‘Your impulse,’ said the chief gravely, ‘was not altogether out of the way.’

  ‘But I was apprehensive of making a noise, and I distrusted myself on that trellis. I therefore removed my boots and knotted them round my neck. Doubtless it would have been more sensible to leave them on the terrace. But I was obscurely distrustful.’

  ‘The distrustfulness,’ said the chief, ‘I discerned. But it was my colleague who discerned the gardening.’

  Mr Deamer looked at us helplessly. ‘The trellis turned out to offer no difficulty and within a minute I found myself in a window-embrasure, heavily curtained. I peered into the room. There was low light, sufficient to show me that the place was deserted.’ Mr Deamer made a long pause. ‘And at that,’ he said in a strangled voice, ‘the horror of what I was doing came upon me.’

  ‘Horror?’ asked Inspector Cadover mildly.

  ‘I searched my heart. And it was impure. I believed that I had come to combat sin. But I had a horrible feeling that I had really come to – to peer at it.’

  The chief nodded. ‘It was a situation,’ he said soothingly, ‘in which your judgement would naturally be strained, Mr Deamer.’

  For some moments the vicar was silent. I would have said, at a guess, that he was wrestling with his conscience. But whether retroactively, so to speak, and in the matter of the peering, or whether because at this point he felt it necessary to tell us something rather less or other than the truth, it was impossible to say.

  ‘I was horrified. My one impulse was to get down again and away. I turned and groped for the window, and as I did so the boots must have slipped from my neck. As I climbed down I was trembling all over, and when I reached the terrace I believe I went into some sort of faint or coma. When I recovered myself – and it may have been considerably later – I was still feeling very weak. And it was then, and as I was beginning to slip away from the terrace, that somebody jumped on me from behind. I found myself engaged in something like a bout of fisticuffs.’

  ‘Had you any idea, Mr Deamer, who your assailant was?’

  ‘None whatever. It was a mere confused scuffle in the dark. And presently I broke away and made my escape across the park.’

  So here, I thought, was the antagonist a drawn fight with whom had so raised the confidence of Mervyn Cockayne! But then a more important reflection struck me. If the vicar’s story was true – and I was pretty sure that a good part of it was – we were more badly off then ever for footprints in the snow. What, for instance, of Jane Fairey, the blacksmith’s daughter? Either she had been transported to Sir George’s study by demons through
the middle air (and this, it seemed, was not a view that Mr Deamer himself would find it hard to swallow) or the whole story of the assignation was no more than a hoax. The latter was almost certainly the true explanation. It was possible, of course, that Miss Grace Simney had really telephoned and that her information had been at fault. But if this were so why had she not already come forward with facts so obviously relevant to her brother’s end? It was far more likely that somebody had played a trick – a Pickwickian trick – on Mr Dearner, whose zeal in the pursuit of sexual irregularities must be very generally known. Jane Fairey’s footprints, then, we had no need to sigh for.

  But with some others we could certainly do. Deamer had come across the park, and his tracks had been clearly visible. He had climbed the trellis, peered, impinged in no other way upon the Hazelwood affair, climbed down, fainted or lurked, scuffled with young Cockayne and made off again – the tracks of what must have been his stockinged feet obscurely visible for a little way. And to this there were only Cockayne’s own footprints to add. What, then, of the person who had impinged upon Hazelwood – and most fatally for its owner? On him – or her – there seemed to be only one possible conclusion. He had reached the study not by climbing up the trellis but by climbing down.

  And now suppose that Mr Deamer was indeed what he professed to be: a side-show as far as the death of Sir George Simney was concerned. Suppose the bringing him to intercept Jane Fairey was a hoax. Could it be a pure hoax in the sense of being wholly unconnected with the fatal business of that night? Already the Hazelwood affair was pretty heavily burdened with coincidence; was it conceivable that this of Mr Deamer’s vigil had nothing to do with the case? It was difficult to believe that it could be so. In what way then could the unfortunate man’s fool’s errand have formed part of some other person’s plan? He had been persuaded to come to the terrace and lurk beneath the study window something under an hour before Sir George died – before it was planned that Sir George should die. And – since the errand was indeed a fool’s one – there would be a fair expectation that after some twenty minutes or half-an-hour of fruitless waiting he would withdraw.

  Had he been brought to the terrace to seal, as it were, that particular approach, even as the butler, working in the corridor, sealed the approach from the house? It was a conceivable notion but scarcely a satisfactory one, since the probability was that after so chilly a vigil the vicar would have taken himself off again somewhat before the vital hour.

  What other explanation, then, could there be? Suddenly, and as I stared at Mr Deamer’s old boots, the answer came. The unfortunate man had been coaxed or conjured to Hazelwood and to that very spot on the terrace simply for the sake of the footprints he would leave in the snow. Sir George’s assailant was to come from within the house, and from above. The coming and going of Mr Deamer was to suggest that the murderer had come from without, and from below.

  But who put Mr Deamer’s boots in Sir George Simney’s safe? And why?

  I doubt whether I should at all quickly have found any answer to this. But now my speculations were interrupted by the chief. He had no doubt got quite as far as I had, and his next question to our visitor was a cast back to earlier matters.

  ‘Mr Dearner,’ he said, ‘I suppose it has occurred to you that Jane Fairey may really have been before her hour, and that by the time you looked into the study she and Sir George had – um – withdrawn to another apartment?’

  The vicar received this warily, and I had a strong feeling that he suspected a trap.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at length. ‘It is a reflection which I was bound to make.’

  ‘Jane Fairey is a personable girl?’

  ‘Most certainly. Her figure–’ Mr Deamer checked himself. ‘A good-looking girl, no doubt.’

  ‘Such a girl would have followers, admirers, in the village? Yes? Very well. Might not one of these have detected her keeping this assignation with the squire, followed her up the trellis and concealed himself somewhere in the house?’

  ‘It seems likely enough.’

  ‘And then killed Sir George?’

  The vicar shifted uneasily in his chair. He was without all the information which we possessed, and he was without the habit of putting such information together. He could therefore not know the difficulties this view presented. ‘Yes,’ he said reluctantly. ‘There seems much in what you say.’

  ‘Then, Mr Deamer, why drag in the Devil? Sir George, you declared, was carried off by the Devil when about to achieve some illicit sexual enjoyment conjured up for him by black magic. Is that sort of thing merely a fixed idea in your mind, or have you some particular ground for alleging it in this instance?’

  Mr Deamer licked his lips – which were bloodless, thin and chapped. He looked round the coffee-room and fixed his eye on a steel engraving which represented (I think) Oliver Cromwell dictating a dispatch to John Milton. Then, as if there were no inspiration in this, he transferred his glance first to one and then to another more than indifferent sporting print. ‘It is a fixed idea,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Nothing more than that. My struggles against vice in this parish have been very terrible. And perhaps I am now more than a little mad. More than once I have suspected myself of being subject to hallucinations. And yet–’

  ‘Yes, Mr Deamer?’

  But the vicar of Hazelwood was soundlessly weeping. Police work has its abominable moments, without a doubt.

  11

  For what it was worth, we interviewed Jane Fairey. She was very composedly posed for Willoughby Simney in a room behind her father’s smithy. Her figure might be described as nubile (ask auntie Flo that one) and Willoughby had persuaded her to expose rather more of it than was altogether proper in one who was not a model by profession. But I don’t think that this young man dabbles in paints to any fleshly end. Whether he has real promise as a painter I have, of course, no idea. But he was genuinely absorbed in the job he was about. The sky was leaden – perhaps with a promise of fresh snow – and a dull diffused light came from the window. Through an open door flickered a red glow from Mr Fairey’s forge; it played on Jane’s shoulders; and I don’t doubt that the result was sufficiently complex to tax whatever technique Willoughby had.

  This interview, or double interview, was entirely the chief’s. And it taxed his technique too.

  ‘It must be a great adventure to you, Mr Simney,’ he said smoothly, ‘to have so fine a collection of Old Masters at the Hall. There must be any amount of inspiration in that.’

  Willoughby was gazing intently at what I took to be the lobe of Jane’s left ear. ‘Would you mind,’ he asked civilly, ‘going to hell out of here?’

  This might be described as a straight drive to the off. But the chief fielded it smartly. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is how your vicar regards the death of your uncle. Sir George went to hell out of here – and in the most literal way. Mr Deamer is reluctant to believe there was a body. He supposes that the only appropriate end for Sir George was to be hoisted on the back of the Devil himself and disappear through a trap. But then I suppose Mr Deamer is a little mad.’

  ‘Mad? Nothing of the sort.’ Willoughby held out a brush and appeared to measure Miss Fairey’s nose. ‘Wretched little man is as sane as you are.’

  ‘Is that so, now?’ The chief looked uncommonly thoughtful.

  ‘Deamer seldom sees smoke where there’s no fire. But of course this parish is pretty well fire all over. Ask Jane.’

  Miss Fairey, whose fine eyes had rounded as the chief delivered himself of Mr Deamer’s opinion, hitched her shift a little higher, thought better of this and let it drop again, giggled, and assumed an expression of inscrutable charm.

  ‘Jane is very close.’ Willoughby was scraping at his palette. ‘To you she looks like an advertisement for soap. To me she is a girl the curve of whose chin is oddly repeated in the curve of her breast. That’s why she’s undressed,
more or less. But it is the advertisements and the movies, and not life, that have taught her to look wanton. Jane is a good girl, and easily repelled the advances of the bad baronet. Just badger her a little, Inspector, would you? I want her sulky and not smeared with soap-box glamour.’

  Miss Fairey understood enough of this to look sulky without further urging.

  ‘All manner of lads have been after Jane,’ Willoughby pursued. ‘My late uncle wasn’t even leading the field. Was he, Jane?’

  ‘That ’e were not.’

  These were the first words that Miss Fairey had spoken. There was no mistaking their conviction, and they settled the trellis-business for good and all. This girl had never climbed, nor thought to climb, to Sir George Simney’s room. From that particular satyr the nymph had fled – nor had ever stumbled or cast a look behind. And this was enough for us. Whether Jane was indeed a good girl concerned us not at all. I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt.

  Mr Deamer’s telephone message, then, had been assuredly either mistaken or bogus – and ten to one it was the latter. But who, it occurred to me to ask myself, could sufficiently simulate Miss Grace Simney’s familiar warning voice to carry conviction over the wire? With a shock I realized how strong was the pointer here. Lady Simney, a professional actress, was by far the likeliest suspect. No doubt her sister-in-law, Mrs Cockayne, was a possibility, as were Mrs Gerard Simney and various maidservants at present unknown. But none of these could have been so sure of success as the appealing Nicolette.

  But the chief, as usual, was before me here. He had sat down, noticed that he cast a shadow on Jane’s shoulders, thoughtfully shifted his position, and was now easily filling a pipe. ‘Lady Simney, now,’ he said. ‘I wonder if she could be called a mischievous woman?’ He turned to Willoughby. ‘For instance, when young Cockayne was dropped through the window – would that appeal to her sense of fun?’

  Willoughby hesitated. ‘I’m damned,’ he said, ‘if I see why we should sit chattering about Nicolette. But she was certainly not amused. She loathes anything in the nature of a practical joke. And quite right too.’