What Happened at Hazelwood?

by Michael Innes

  ‘Can you imagine her playing rather a cruel trick on Mr Deamer?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! Deamer dislikes her in rather an open way. But that only makes her act the perfect lady.’

  ‘Happen I can!’

  We swung round, startled. It was Jane Fairey who had uttered this vehement affirmation.

  ‘After Tuesday morning I can! Didn’t even treat her like dirt, he didn’t. You’d notice dirt, and give yourself a shake to be rid of it. But he just looked through her when she called good morning to him.’

  Inspector Cadover regarded the girl gravely. ‘You mean that Mr Deamer cut Lady Simney dead?’

  ‘Yes, did ’e – the little beast. I were standing at smithy door there and saw it myself. Mr Deamer ’e be talking to Miss Simney – Miss Grace, that is – by lich gate. And Lady Simney she passed by and called good morning to him. And Mr Deamer did flout but put his lips together and look straight through her.’ Miss Fairey tossed her head. ‘I’d play any cruel trick on man who did that to me.’ She hesitated and looked sly. ‘Though I won’t say as her ladyship was up to any good that morning, either.’

  ‘Jane,’ said Willoughby, ‘shut your dirty little mouth, my dear.’ He picked out another brush. ‘I’m not making a talkie, praise heaven.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said the chief, ‘that Miss Fairey must continue to talk. If she doesn’t do it now she must do it later.’

  Jane stood up, grabbed at her shift just in time, and sat down on the table. ‘Her ladyship’s a good sort,’ she said. ‘But terrible hard, I’ll say. Were she not an actress before she caught squire?’

  Willoughby flung down his palette. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Let’s wallow.’

  ‘Playing hide-and-seek in the park, she be, with two men at once. And then squire slapped her face for it.’

  The chief nodded. ‘We know he did that,’ he said quietly.

  ‘But am I to understand that you spent the morning following Lady Simney and spying on her?’

  Jane Fairey nodded emphatically. ‘Happen I often do,’ she said. ‘I do think she be a lovely lady.’

  ‘I see.’

  I rather think I saw too. Jane’s mental age was round about eight, and a fascinated shadowing and watching was quite in the rural picture. I wondered if Lady Simney herself was at all aware of what rustic curiosity might achieve.

  ‘The way she looked, when Mr Deamer did that to her frightened me. I thought she were going to cry. I wanted to see her cry. So I followed without her a-knowing of it. And for a time she went dodging about as if she didn’t know or care where she be going to. It be then that I saw there were a gentleman after her – the young Australian gentleman from Hall. He were a-prowling and not knowing whether to come up on her.’

  Inspector Cadover frowned. ‘And was Lady Simney aware of this?’

  Jane Fairey paused to think. Once launched as a witness, she seemed likely to prove a fairly reliable one. ‘I be sure she was. But she seemed just not to attend. Leading him on, she would be. As to whether she was really aware of the other gentleman I wouldn’t like to say. Tall he was, and he just stood behind an oak tree on a rise and watched her.’

  ‘Have you ever seen this tall gentleman before?’

  Jane shook her head. ‘Never!’ she said. ‘But I got close to him once and happen I should know him again. He were a lovely gentleman.’

  Willoughby Simney uttered an exclamation of impatience and disgust, ‘A lovely gentleman,’ he said, ‘peering at a lovely lady through a shrubbery. And my lovely but imbecile Jane peering at both of them. Good lord!’

  ‘And then he did go off – the tall stranger. And I didn’t see him again until he came from behind Sir Basil’s Folly when it be all over.’

  The chief looked absently at Willoughby’s canvas. ‘When what was all over, my good girl?’

  Jane Fairey gathered her garments about her, evidently for good. ‘What did happen there,’ she said.

  ‘Um. So you know about that too.’

  ‘I can put two and two together like.’

  Willoughby gave a sort of disgusted guffaw. ‘Wallow, wallow, wallow,’ he said.

  ‘Now, don’t you know you were talking nonsense’ – the chief was severe – ‘when you spoke of Lady Simney as playing hide-and-seek?’

  Jane nodded sulkily. ‘Happen I was.’

  ‘The facts, were they not, were these. Lady Simney was simply taking a walk in the park; the Australian gentleman wanted to join her but was shy about doing so; and there was a stranger watching her unobserved who presently went away and – well – investigated the Folly?’

  ‘That would be it.’

  ‘And later the stranger emerged from behind the building in time to see Sir George strike his wife and ride away with a lady? Now please be very careful about this. Did Lady Simney see the stranger?’

  ‘I be sure she did not. She did know there be somebody there, I think. But she did nout but walk fast away towards the Hall. And the stranger did start to follow her and then turned and went off in other direction. That be whole thing.’

  Inspector Cadover nodded grimly. ‘For one morning,’ he said, ‘I would call it quite enough. Did you see what the stranger looked like after that blow?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jane. ‘’E did look like death. Somebody’s death.’

  12

  We left the smithy – and Willoughby endeavouring to persuade Jane to undress again and made our way past the Simney Arms and on to the only other inn in the village, the Green Cow. I had a fair idea of what Inspector Cadover was looking for. But my own mind wasn’t running ahead. I was continuing to puzzle over the telephone call that decoyed Mr Deamer – and no doubt I was doing this because I wanted an explanation that would let Lady Simney out.

  It wasn’t easy to find. That the call had been made without any genuine belief that Jane proposed to visit the Hall I was now convinced. That it had been an ingenious trick to produce the appearance of a malefactor coming and going in the snow was pretty well a certainty too. And from this there followed the inescapable inference that Sir George Simney’s death had been plotted by an inmate of the Hall who proposed to descend the trellis to the study from an upper storey.

  But who could feign Miss Grace Simney’s voice? Almost certainly not a man – unless (it suddenly occurred to me) conceivably Mervyn Cockayne. For this queer kid talks more often than not in an affected falsetto over which he has considerable control. It may well be that one of his private amusements has been mimicking his female relations, and that this accomplishment he exploited on Tuesday evening to a thoroughly sinister end. There was a loophole for Nicolette there. And then another loophole occurred to me. Timmy Owdon (if he was properly to be called that) is also in some ways a mimic – Mervyn’s mimic. He speaks like a gentleman, and I imagine it is Mervyn he has copied. So he may have copied this particular ability too… Even as I worked this out I saw that it was pretty feeble. The evidence, I acknowledge to myself, points back at Lady Simney every time.

  We walked through slush, and all the eves were dripping. The chief paused to observe the behaviour of a robin, rather as if he were a Conservative statesman taking the air in St James’s Park. Then he led the way into the Green Cow. A melancholy woman was polishing – or rather smearing – glasses in the bar. The chief nodded to her curtly. ‘Is Mr Hoodless in the inn?’ he asked.

  ‘I am Mr Hoodless.’

  We turned round to see a tall and uncommonly handsome man sitting on a settle near the door. There was a walking-stick in his hand. He had been idly tracing queer barbaric patterns on the sanded floor.

  He bent down again, completed some intricate design, and added a spear-like flourish directed towards Inspector Cadover. ‘You wouldn’t recover from that one,’ he said quietly.

  The chief peered. ‘It looks harmless enough,
Mr Hoodless.’

  ‘No doubt. But the power of such things over the human mind can be irresistible. If you stepped out one morning and found this pointing at your hut you would be dead before sunset.’

  ‘Dear me! It must simplify homicide immensely.’

  ‘But then among the people from whom I have come all deaths are homicide. The concept of natural death is unknown, or ignored. No man dies except by another’s malevolence. Suppose that I go hunting, slip on a riverbank and am eaten by a crocodile. My friends will at once meet to decide whose magic has prompted the brute to make a snack of me. They are like’ – and Christopher Hoodless smiled wearily – ‘a conference of detectives. But it is only after they have decided on the guilty party that they begin to look for the clues.’

  The chief frowned. ‘Preposterous,’ he said briefly.

  ‘To our way of thinking, yes. But what is a clue? A cigarette-end or a couple of hairs left behind by the criminal. To the savage mind such things are instruments of power. Secure them, and you can work some counter-magic against their owner.’

  ‘Like making a wax image,’ I suggested, ‘and sticking pins in it.’

  ‘Precisely so. Absurd, is it not? And yet you will find that such queer culture-constructs often continue to exist disguised in our own society. Do you happen to know any detectives?’ And Hoodless glanced with good-humoured irony from one to the other of us. But he was not really entertained, though apparently resolved to be entertaining. He struck me as a tired man.

  ‘As you know,’ said the chief, ‘we are both detective officers from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘Witch-doctors indeed!’ With a swirling motion of the ferrule of his stick Hoodless obliterated the pattern he had been tracing. ‘Well now, the theory of criminology is this: you don’t know your man, you hunt for clues, find them, and they lead to the guilty person. But as often as not you do know your man, and then you look for clues to get power over him.’

  ‘Or her,’ said the chief.

  Hoodless knitted his brows and stared at the floor. Then he continued, apparently unheeding. ‘With you, that power passes by the name of evidence, or proof. But the magical basis of your behaviour persists. Material traces of your enemy – a hair, a scrap of clothing – are essential to you. And what follows from this? An absurd over-estimate of the importance of such bits of rubbish for scientific criminal investigation.’

  ‘Appleby used to say that,’ I said.

  ‘Bother Appleby.’ But the chief was looking interested. ‘There may be something in it, all the same. And would you say the business of believing all deaths to be homicide has left traces too?’

  ‘I daresay it has. When we don’t find sufficient colourable murdering in real life we turn to fiction and feed our instinct that way. And, no doubt, the police are constantly seeing deaths by misadventure as more sinister than they naturally are.’

  ‘Um. And would you be inclined to say that we see Sir George Simney’s death in too sinister a light?’

  Christopher Hoodless rose and glanced round the bar. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we might go for a bit of a tramp?’

  We tramped the park. The thaw continued. Every bough dripped and on the ground patches of grass and bare earth showed through.

  ‘Snow,’ said Hoodless. ‘If I were going to kill myself and convince the police that a murder had occurred I should regard as one of my first essentials snow – with footprints suitably disposed. Footprints approaching me and footprints leaving me: what could be more irresistible to the professional mind?’

  Inspector Cadover breathed heavily. ‘You may not know,’ he said, ‘that Sir George’s skull was crushed by a violent blow from behind. That such an injury should be self-inflicted is sheerly impossible.’

  ‘From behind?’ Hoodless lengthened his stride. ‘Look at the kestrel.’

  I caught something queer in his voice – it might have been both mockery and relief – and glanced at him. His shoulders had squared and the tired look was gone. And something prompted me to speak – though I didn’t at all know how the chief would take it.

  ‘I think you wanted information, Mr Hoodless? You wanted to know just how Sir George had been killed, and you put up quite a rigmarole to get hold of it. What Inspector Cadover has told you relieves your mind. Lady Simney had great reason to detest her husband, and you have feared that she was perhaps driven to some act of desperation. But you are convinced that she would never attack an unsuspecting man from behind and smash his skull in.’

  ‘Either what my colleague says is true,’ said the chief, ‘or you have designed that we should attribute to you such processes of mind as he has distinguished. One who has felt uneasy lest another may have committed a crime must necessarily be innocent of it himself.’ He paused. ‘We know that an attachment at one time existed between Lady Simney and yourself. We know that her marriage was unhappy and that her husband’s conduct was such as any wife might consider intolerable. During this period you have been absent abroad. Your return has coincided with Sir George’s violent death – which took place, as you know, in his study on Tuesday night. Would you be good enough to give us some account of your movements since you returned to England, of the time of your arrival, and of such meetings or correspondence as you may have had with Lady Simney since that arrival?’

  We had breasted a rise in the park, and the great house lay before us in the middle distance, three long lines of windows looking blankly out over the melting snow. Hoodless gazed at it sombrely. ‘You are nothing if not precise,’ he said. ‘But why treat me in this rather hostile way? It is true that when I heard of this poor devil’s being killed I feared that Nicolette might have done something fatal in the heat of a quarrel. But of course she wouldn’t creep up and bash in the man’s head from behind! She had stood at an altar with him, after all.’

  ‘Um,’ said Inspector Cadover.

  ‘I don’t know that I much care who did in fact kill Simney. He was a horrible man. But I realize that the truth must be found. Until that is done there will be no rest for Nicolette or anyone else.’ Hoodless uttered these short sentences absently; he was still gazing fixedly at Hazelwood – as fixedly, I thought, as an abstracted eye may gaze at destiny. ‘So let me tell you the whole story – or almost the whole of it – so far as it is any concern of mine. It will be more than you need know, or gather into your notebooks. Perhaps it will convince you, or be a sort of earnest of faith. I don’t want you to waste time on my alibi. Not that I have one, likely enough.’

  ‘We are very ready,’ said the chief formally, ‘to hear anything that you may think proper to communicate to us.’

  Hoodless nodded, turned away from the prospect of the great house, and appeared to orientate himself anew in the park. ‘This way,’ he said, and set off with an oddly purposeful stride. His legs were long. We had hard work of it keeping up with him.

  ‘I met Nicolette shortly after I took Greats and when I was just getting a first grip on my anthropology. I never went to school; my father had eccentric ideas on such things; and of that fact there were, I think, two consequences. My private tutors had been competent, but I had lacked the stimulus of competition, and for my First in Mods and Greats I had to work harder than most. I never had time to think about myself or inquire into my own nature. And the second consequence is really the same: being educated at home among my sisters, there was a lot I simply didn’t know. In the way of experience and observation, that is to say. I had read all the books, I don’t doubt.

  ‘Nicolette fascinated me from the moment our eyes first met across a room. It sounds simple, does it not? And the queer thing is she found it so.’

  Hoodless paused and we walked for some moments in silence. It was an odd sort of police investigation, this colloquy in the park of Hazelwood Hall. And I doubt if the chief liked it.

  ‘Nicolette, and Nicolette alone, was perfe
ctly real to me – unless you except one or two savage peoples whom I had not yet seen. She is very intelligent. We tired the sun with talking, and everybody came to suppose that it was quite the usual thing. There are men, you know, for whom it is as lucky and as simple as that. They find and gain, when still mere lads, the woman who is going to travel with them all the way. But with Nicolette and myself it wasn’t lucky and wasn’t simple. I took her in my arms in a punt, and the action seemed to plant a tiny seed of terror in my soul. The seed grew. And I ran away.’

  There was another silence. We were walking towards a grove of oaks. ‘Mr Hoodless,’ said the chief kindly, ‘I don’t know that you need–’

  ‘But I came back again. I came back from across the world and I was maturer in many ways. I had published papers and a book. And when a young man has done that’ – Hoodless smiled wryly – ‘he believes himself to hold the Fates fast bound in iron chains. If I wanted something I was entitled to it. And I wanted Nicolette still. To this day I torment myself hourly over the great wrong I did her in not stopping – in just not stopping to inquire.

  ‘She was playing in Shakespeare. And in a sense I did stop. Without declaring my presence in London I saw and heard her every night. She was beautiful – I was very aware of that – and enchantingly intelligent in every line she spoke. I presented myself and we became engaged. That tree of terror had withered and I could not believe that it might germinate again at the root. But, of course, it did. A man such as I didn’t, I concluded, marry, or have any issue of his natural body. He went out into the desert and rode with Arabs; he sought distant people and found his task and his solace in the mere contemplation and record of their abundant life. So I was forced to think. It was a frightful mess.

  ‘She was divinely good. She made me believe that my work was important, and that it would always, in a way, be for her. She sent me back to it, and there was nothing but love in the goodbyes we said. When I heard that she was married I think I found it in my heart to be glad. But that was before I knew what manner of man this George Simney was.’ Hoodless paused and regarded us sideways and with irony as he walked. ‘Do I bore you, gentlemen, with this somewhat intimate chronicle?’