I couldn’t see it that way. Owdon’s testimony, I had firmly decided, was true so far as it went, though certainly it might have gone further. His account of Tuesday night had given us virtually our whole physical framework for the affair, and to say the least it would be tiresome to have to scrap it. But, quite apart from this, I was obstinately convinced that its essence was true. To Alfred Owdon – or Denzell Simney if one preferred to think of him that way – Sir George’s death had been both unexpected and inexplicable, a mysterious catastrophe in what he knew to have been an empty room. The wretched Deamer, watched by the sombre Hoodless, had come up that trellis. But who had descended it from above? The death of Owdon brought us no nearer a solution of that.
We rounded a sweep of the drive and the great manor house lay before us. A groom was leading a couple of horses across a paddock and near at hand a gardener placidly performed some indistinguishable task beside a lily pond. The life of the place went on, and would presumably continue to do so until impersonal economic forces strangled it. Until then the Simneys would continue their ways here. There would always be a Sir Somebody adding his portrait to that unengaging gallery in the study. Only the interspersed ladies a change of taste or humour might banish from that sinister room…
Sergeant Laffer received us in the hall, a good deal awed by this second stroke of violence. He was a simple fellow and likeable; and his one tenet of faith in the affair hitherto had been that Sir George’s death was to be laid to the charge of some casual marauder. He said nothing of this now but led us through green baize doors to a small apartment assigned to the butler’s professional offices. Owdon lay sprawled across a table much as his master, and brother, had done. A writing-pad and fountain-pen had been pushed to one side; on the other side was a revolver which might well have fallen from his own hand. The shot had certainly been at short range and the bullet had gone in at the temple. He must have died at once.
Timmy Owdon and Mervyn Cockayne were standing silent in a corner of the room. Both were dressed in Mervyn’s clothes, so that more than ever they looked like twins. But whereas Mervyn’s expression displayed both shock and decent sorrow Timmy’s showed tragic and stark. Years had fallen upon him like a burden; he was as one still mastering a complex and overwhelming experience. Dark circles had drawn themselves round his eyes – but his shoulders were square and his chin had tilted upwards.
We made what examination was worth making. The two lads watched us, quite silent. And then, suddenly, Timmy turned and left the room. I was prompted to follow him. He walked to the baize doors which marked the boundary of the servants’ quarters, and for a moment regarded them fixedly. He passed out into the hall and looked deliberately round. He moved to the fireplace and passed his hand over the arms of the Simneys carved above it. He crossed to a table and paused, frowning at a small bronze nymph which was its sole ornament – a vulgar little thing, and no doubt prized by Sir George on that account: Timmy took it up and pitched it into a wastepaper-basket. ‘Mervyn,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘let’s get some air.’
And he passed out into the bleak afternoon sunlight.
14
Here, then, was a second unnatural death on our hands – and of a sort that every CID man learns to detest. The revolver was Sir George’s; it had been kept ready loaded in a bedroom drawer which anyone could rob; it showed the dead butler’s finger-prints after a fashion which might mean nothing at all. Moreover anyone might have come in upon Owdon unobserved, and the thing had taken place at an hour when the household was dispersed and movements were difficult to check. I had an uncomfortable sense that the whole mystery was gaining on us; for example, there had been gathered for us a good deal of information about people’s whereabouts at the time of the first fatality, but we had as yet made little progress in analysing this – and now here was another set of circumstances in which it looked as if similar labour would have to be undertaken. Unless something turned up almost out of hand to prove that the butler had simply taken his own life (as I, for one, was pretty sure that he had) we were faced with a tolerably formidable task.
Perhaps it is odd that, confronted by this, I should have chiefly felt the need to find out about Cuvier and his feather. But so it was, and I took myself to the library to investigate: fifteen minutes got me the facts for what they signified. It was Cuvier, it seems, who started the business of reconstructing whole prehistoric monsters from such fragments of them as archaeologists turned up. The feather told him about the wing, the wing about the thorax, and so on; presently he could describe the whole bird. And then years later somebody would dig out a skeleton of the creature in its entirety and Cuvier would be proved exactly right. No doubt it is an admirable pattern for detective investigation. But at least, I reflected rather gloomily, one has to be sure of one’s feather. And where was the feather in the Hazelwood affair? Perhaps the chief knew. I was pretty sure that I did not.
But the chief, meantime, had disappeared, and inquiry revealed that he had asked his way to the music-room. I set out to find this apartment myself and was presently guided to it by strains of melody. I entered. Inspector Cadover was regaling himself with a programme of light opera on the gramophone.
Well, a quarter of an hour off to track down Cuvier was one thing; this was quite another. I suppose I gaped at him as if he were demented. And then I saw that I was not alone in this activity. No less than three ladies, sitting in a row on a window-seat, were similarly employed, The Three Feathers, I thought idiotically, and watched the chief irritably lift the tone-arm and remove a record.
The youngest of the ladies – it was, of course, Joyleen Simney – giggled hysterically; the chief glowered at her and turned on something from The Yeomen of the Guard. After a minute he removed this in turn and rummaged irresolutely in a record album. ‘And where have you been?’ he demanded disagreeably.
‘Looking up Cuvier’s feather, sir.’ It always pleases me to be particularly polite when he is like this. ‘I’m very sorry to have gone off duty without permission. May I help you to find a really nice piece? I believe Mrs Gerard would enjoy something from The Bohemian Girl.’
Joyleen giggled again. Another of the ladies – it was Mr Deamer’s friend, Miss Grace – was making noises like a coffee percolator, and I couldn’t decide whether she was having a quiet cry over Owdon or merely designing to express indignation at the irregular conduct of the higher constabulary. The third lady was looking rather helplessly about her. ‘If my dear Mervyn were here,’ she murmured vaguely, ‘he would be delighted to help. He knows such a lot about music – but mostly on the heavier classical side.’
This seemed to rouse the chief momentarily from his extraordinary vagary. ‘Music?’ he growled at Mrs Cockayne. ‘Your concern with music is facing it. And you’d better face it now, all three of you.’
I was more startled than ever. This was not a manner which any assistant-commissioner would recommend, particularly when dealing with the propertied classes. Indeed, it is specifically condemned in the lectures, which are very strong on the dangers of Americanization.
‘A short time before Sir George was killed,’ said the chief, ‘Mr Deamer received a telephone call from someone he believed to be Miss Grace. It had the effect of bringing him beneath the study window between eleven o’clock and midnight. Assuming that the call did, in fact, come from Hazelwood – and it will be possible to check up on that – it was almost certainly made by one of a small number of women – and by a woman with a naturally cultivated voice. Servants, it appears to me, are ruled out. Moreover this call, I am sorry to say, can scarcely have been made with other than a criminal intent. Just think it over, will you, while I try another tune.’
And, sure enough, Inspector Cadover again started up the gramophone. It almost seemed to me as if he were more genuinely concerned with his musical entertainment than with the inquiry he was sandwiching into it. This time he played, among other thin
gs, Three Little Maids from School. I doubt whether the three Hazelwood ladies heard it. No sooner had the music stopped than Mrs Cockayne spoke. ‘It’s quite absurd,’ she said. ‘I know nothing about it whatever. I don’t like the telephone. And I don’t like Mr Deamer either.’
The chief appeared to weigh this and docket it for reference. ‘Mrs Simney?’ he said.
Joyleen Simney tossed her head. ‘Give it a go!’ she said scornfully. ‘Why should I telephone to some little dill I’ve never seen? And how could I imitate the funny way that Grace talks?’ Suddenly she turned from petulance to tears. ‘I don’t even know,’ she sobbed, ‘where they keep their stupid telephone in this horrid house.’
The chief nodded gravely, as if acknowledging that there was some force in all this. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘The simplest explanation, after all, remains. Miss Grace sent the spurious message herself.’
There was a pause. I didn’t, for my own part, expect other than a flat, and perhaps vehement, denial in this quarter also. But Miss Grace, for some reason, was struck all of a heap. She lay back on her window-seat, apparently fighting for breath, and her lips were as pale as blotting paper. And at this the chief very seriously played another record. I began to think he was really mad. But presently he frowned, shook his head, and switched off again. ‘Well?’ he said.
I didn’t know much about Miss Grace Simney, but had rather gathered that she was an unbalanced woman who had suffered from a morbid preoccupation with her dead brother and his morals. Was it possible, I wondered, that she was in fact some sort of maniac, and that the whole mystery would have some horrid explanation in this? She looked uncommonly queer now. And, when she spoke, what she said was uncommonly queer as well.
‘George died with his sins about him,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘He died in vileness and in plotting vileness. And would you have me not have called Mr Deamer, who, although despised and reviled by him, was his only hope?’
Inspector Cadover was standing very still. ‘Do I understand,’ he said, ‘that you believed – or affected to believe – in a plot to bring Jane Fairey to the study that night, and that you rang up Mr Deamer and told him so?’
Miss Grace had gone paler still; there was something in the manner of this that frightened her. ‘That night?’ she faltered. ‘I didn’t know anything about that night. I knew only that he hoped soon to – to accomplish his vile purpose on the girl. I wanted Mr Deamer’s advice – his support. But I – I didn’t get through.’
‘You mean that you tried to telephone him, and failed?’
‘Yes. Nicolette’s maid, Martin, was helping me to dress. There is a house telephone in my room and I asked her to put the call through that way. She did so and then left the room. But when I picked up the receiver I found there had been some hitch and the engaged signal was sounding. I felt very tired, and so I didn’t try again.’
Miss Grace’s voice faded out on a sigh. The chief said nothing, but put another record on the gramophone. Jaunty music filled the room. There was nothing impossible in the story Miss Grace Simney had told. But if she felt she had to lie it was obviously the best she could do, since a telephone call initiated by the maid Martin could not well be denied outright.
This was a moment at which I felt extraordinarily depressed. The chief was proceeding to badger these three women as to their whereabouts on Tuesday night, and his growing irritability suggested his sense that it was a perfectly futile task. Sir George had been killed at midnight, and some time before midnight most of the household had gone to bed. This held of the three witnesses now present. Mrs Cockayne had retired to her widowed couch shortly after eleven, and Miss Grace Simney to her virgin one some half an hour earlier. Naturally there had been no one to keep an eye on them in bed. And even if their movements had been other than they professed their stories were peculiarly easy to hold to, so that even a severe interrogation was unlikely to achieve anything. It was true that Miss Grace had told us a queer story and might fairly expect a little sharp questioning. But I certainly didn’t believe that she would prove to have bashed in her brother’s head from behind, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that with her the chief was doing no more than fill in time while waiting for some line to come to him.
These two women, although naturally rattled, were not bad witnesses, and I knew that in a court what they said would carry a good deal of conviction. But it was otherwise with Joyleen Simney.
Hers was the same story, for apparently at Hazelwood she had been given a room to herself at some remove from her husband’s, and here she had retired and gone to sleep about eleven o’clock. Again it was an account easy to stick to. Nevertheless under the chief’s questioning Joyleen was uneasy from the first. Was it simply that certain other of her Hazelwood adventures had given her a bad conscience, and that she feared lest at any moment the spotlight might be switched to Sir Basil’s Folly? Or had she really been up to some mischief, relevant or otherwise, at this crucial hour?
Now with the gramophone, and now with these wretched women, the chief continued to beguile the afternoon. In desperation I took out the notes we had been given and ran over this whole alibi business as it affected everybody we could at present believe concerned. With what might be thought of as the outside people – Deamer and Hoodless – we had recently dealt; both told odd stories which there was no positive controverting nevertheless. And of those domiciled or visiting at Hazelwood the facts were colourless and few. The butler’s routine and Lady Simney’s bath had already been prominently in the picture. Bevis Simney – Sir Bevis, as it appears he must now be called – and his son Willoughby, claimed to have been together in the latter’s bedroom, smoking and talking over the day’s shooting, until Willoughby emerged to investigate what proved to be the tragedy. This, I suppose, is an alibi of a sort, but as Sir George’s death has put both father and son in the way of a baronetcy it cannot be called impressive. And no more can the only other pairing off that investigating reveals. Here again it is a matter of father and son, for Hippias and Gerard Simney declare themselves to have been playing billiards in a somewhat remote part of the house until disturbed by the general turmoil of discovery. This left Timmy Owdon, who declares himself to have been asleep throughout in his room over the stables, and Mervyn Cockayne. Mervyn has the room immediately above Sir George’s bedroom. He maintains that he was restless on Tuesday night; that he looked out of his window and discerned movement on the terrace; and that he then ran downstairs and outside to engage in his notable encounter with Mr Deamer.
These, then, were the facts which I briefly chewed over to the accompaniment of the chief’s inexplicable gramophone. Nobody had shaken any of them; nobody’s testimony contradicted that of anyone else; no one member of the household had spotted any other on the prowl. Nor did the fact that the study might be reached by a climb from above appear at all to limit or define the issue. For the room above the study was a large untenanted bedroom; any member of the household might, as far as I could see, have reached it unobserved, climbed down and up again, and returned to base without meeting anyone. This meant that Nicolette Simney alone was positively out of it. She possessed no means of ascending to the upper storey without first emerging upon Owdon in the corridor. And, even if she had, it was just not possible for her to take such a route to the study and thence back to her bathroom in the time available to her. But anybody else might have achieved the exploit that way, and it appeared to me essential to believe that somebody had. And the telephone call designed to elicit the appearance of an attack from without must be an integral part of the plot.
I had got as far as this – and saw small prospect of getting further – when I noticed that the gramophone had abruptly stopped and that the chief was striding from the room. With no more ceremony towards the ladies than he himself had shown, I followed him into the corridor. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘what is all this, sir? Is it a variant of Sherlock Holmes’ violin?’
For a moment he stared at me unheeding, and with a look in his eye that I have certainly not seen before. ‘Holmes?’ he echoed. ‘Certainly not. Cuvier, my lad – nothing but Cuvier.’
‘Cuvier?’
‘That feather of his brushed against my cheek right at the beginning, and I just couldn’t grasp it. But I knew’ – and he grinned at me with sudden disconcerting cheerfulness – ‘that I might snare it with song. Did you notice what that last record was?’
‘No, I didn’t.’ This mystery-mongering made me feel at once excited and aggrieved. ‘I was trying to get some line on the whole beastly case.’
‘And were you, indeed? Now, Harold, that’s very commendable. But I’m afraid you must wait till next time. The case is–’
Inspector Cadover broke off as he noticed Sergeant Laffer approach. And I saw at once that from the local officer’s point of view something had gone terribly wrong. He came up to us with a face as long as a fiddle – Sherlock Holmes’ or another. ‘Timmy Owdon,’ he said sorrowfully and in a low voice. ‘He’s the only one we’ve managed to catch tripping, after all.’
‘He is?’ The chief was already exultant, but this news appeared to fill him with actual glee. ‘You’ve caught the little blighter out?’
‘Yes, sir. It’s the head groom’s story – a most reliable man, and uncommon upset about it. Apparently on Tuesday night he woke up a little short of midnight and imagined there was a smell of burning somewhere in the stables. So he went right through them at once. And Timmy Owdon was not, as he has claimed to be, in his room. His bed had not yet been lain in.’
‘Capital!’ And the chief bustled me towards the hall. ‘I think it gives us just what we require.’
We passed out of the house in silence. I was not only puzzled. I was more depressed than before. Timmy Owdon ought to have been nothing to me, yet I rather liked the lad. ‘You were saying,’ I prompted, ‘that the case–’
What Happened at Hazelwood? Page 21