We had all kept our topcoats on, and all sank into them; and the room was quite silent now, save for the crackling of the fire. I could hear no stream rushing by, but only the baaing of sheep, which were at very close quarters.
Why were they all here? My thoughts raced in a circus. They'd fled Yorkshire after the disappearance of Falconer and the murder of their Club confederate George Lee, but why had either been killed in the first place? Not for the few silver candlesticks that had been taken from Lee's house. I looked again through the tiny window, where I saw that the lawyer Marriott had joined Small David; they were holding a conference in the falling snow, which seemed to muffle up their words, but I heard my own name mentioned twice by Marriott.
He came into the room a moment later and stood before the stove for a warm. He had removed his topcoat, and he managed to cut a handsome figure even in that old black guernsey. He then moved over to one of the two vacant beds. This, I saw, was better ordered than the others, with the blankets properly folded, and the papers over there were in better order than in the other parts of the room. As far as I could see, they were mostly shipping-line brochures. He caught up one of these, and read it for a few minutes before impatiently leaving the room once more.
I turned to the son, Richie, and repeated my earlier question.
'What's the programme?'
He just gave a shrug, and went back to his reading matter. The arrangements of the mean lamps meant that the shadow of the page he read covered the whole wall behind him.
I glimpsed Bowman, who now stood in the doorway, watching me with bottle in hand. I glanced that way, and he turned on his heel and disappeared. He could not bear to be in my company, now that he had betrayed me. I looked down at the crumpled papers under my boots. They seemed to have come from a holiday agent: 'Winter in the Cornish Riviera'; 'Railway Map of the British Isles'; 'Bournemouth, the Land of Pines and Sunshine.'
'Can you see us in Bournemouth, Detective Stringer, taking tea in an hotel?'
It was Marriott, standing by me and looking down at my reading matter. The householders would keep coming and going, but much as they wanted to keep clear of one another, they were all drawn back to the fire before long. The lawyer held a small glass in his hands - quite dainty by the standards of the cottage. I imagined it might be valuable to him; an object saved from his earlier life. From the kitchen came the smell of food, and I wondered how many more meals would be left to me.
'I cannot bear to see the daylight lost as early as it is here,' Bowman said, moving towards the fireplace, 'and so a flight to the south is contemplated - but a good deal further south than Bournemouth.'
'A flight?' I said.
'The trip has been in prospect for some time, Detective Stringer, but I would not have called it a flight until I heard about you.'
Small David entered the room, saying, 'Where's yon bottle, man?' Receiving no answer, he called out, 'Hey, Bowman!' at which Marriott turned on him.
'Don't shout so, you fucking Scottish hooligan!'
I had never heard swearing in such refined tones.
'You see,' said Marriott, turning towards me again, 'I must get out of this quagmire . . . And I must make a satisfactory arrangement about you before I do so. I brought you here to save you, don't you see that?'
'Strikes me this is a good place to bring a fellow if you wanted to do him in.'
'Now Small David would disagree with you there, Detective Stringer,' Marriott said. 'He holds that the best place for that business is the Cleveland Hills.'
'You pitched Theodore Falconer down an old iron shaft,' I said.
But then another, and better, thought hit me like a thunderclap.
'No, you put him into a blast furnace. His body was never found, and that's because it was melted away to nothing.'
Small David was watching me from the doorway. Marriott kept silence. He stood before me with his arms folded - a good-looking man with too much on his mind.
'Richard's a good fellow,' he said suddenly, nodding towards his son.
The boy looked up at him. 'Stow it, father.'
'But he has a poor physique - a defect on his mother's side, I suppose, for she died young herself. Small David, now -'
Marriott indicated the Scotsman, who had sat down on the last remaining free bed.
'Small David is a practical man, if not a very great hand at conversation.'
The Scotsman muttered something, and Marriott made a show of cocking an ear.
'Did you get that, Detective Stringer?'
I shook my head.
'I didn't either. He's not a great one for talk, as I say.'
'Wi'oot me,' muttered Small David, picking up a newspaper, 'ye'd be deed - and ye stull could be.'
Marriott rolled his eyes at me, saying, 'I just can't help wishing that fellow was a little more - just ever so slightly English.'
Small David put down his paper, and closed on Marriott, saying, 'Haud yer tongue or I'll gie ye somethin' for yersel'—'
Marriott turned once more to me, saying, 'He is not a university man, you know.'
I had a quick impression of Marriott in the position of an old- fashioned boxer, with fists high and chin lifted for Queensberry Rules, but the scrap itself was a wild affair lasting not more than a few seconds.
And it was Marriott who was bloodied - and almost knocked on to the stove. Steadying himself against the wall, he again turned to me, saying, 'Small David was not on the Classics side, Detective Stringer, but then again he was not on the Modern side either. On the face of it a black mystery, until you remember this: Small David was not at the University.'
The Scotsman stood for a moment, as though deciding whether to give this latest provocation the go-by, and he evidently decided not to, for he clouted the lawyer a second time, sending him sprawling amid the newspapers and journals on the floor.
'Look, I know this is all fun, but can we drop it?' said Bowman, who'd had his hands over his glasses as the blows had been struck. Marriott was finding a shaky pair of legs, blood running freely from his nose. He did not look strong, being so thin, but there again he was not the sort of man you expected to see felled.
'I'm not a university man either, if it comes to that,' Bowman was saying. 'Not by a long chalk.'
The lawyer was now standing in silence before the stove, occasionally giving a flick of his head so as to send the blood from his nose away from his mouth. He would not raise his hand to it, for that would show weakness. He was all ablaze inside, but still no colour showed in his face, and he paid no heed as his son stood and walked out of the room, preferring, as I supposed, to sit in the poorly warmed scullery rather than hear more of his old man's ravings.
'The boy is not vigorous like me,' Marriott said, 'and he cannot scrap, as I can. I learnt to take a punch in the boxing club, Detective Stringer ... it was at the University.''
He shot another quick glance at Small David, who did not rise to the bait this third time, but sat back down on his bed. Marriott then removed the photograph from his coat pocket and looked it over, nodding the while.
'It proves you were all on the train that morning,' I said. 'The newspaper in your son's hand proves it.'
The lawyer turned and opened the stove door with the fire tool, placing the photograph carefully on top of the burning wood within.
'I have another print,' I said,'... and the negatives, of course.'
The lawyer looked at me and sighed, brushing his hair back once again. And now at last he raised a handkerchief to his bleeding nose.
'You are not helping the case I am trying to make for keeping you above ground, Detective Stringer.'
At which the Scotsman, who had his head buried in one of the newspapers, muttered something like: 'Aye, that's right enough.'
'You killed Falconer,' I said to Marriott, 'but why?'
The lawyer looked at me fixedly as he dabbed at the blood - almost with real curiosity.
'You killed Lee as well,' I added, 'though I daresa
y not with your own hands.'
I turned towards Small David, who was still reading, and making such a great show of coolness that I almost believed he wasn't listening.
'Or did you pay him to do it?'
The Scotsman read on.
'You are of a questioning humour,' Marriott said, rocking on his feet before the fireplace, quite composed again. 'It is the mark of a good pleader. Have you considered the Bar? There's a good deal of reading to put in, much burning of the midnight oil with your Stephens's Commentaries, your Hunter's Roman Law, but it's quite a democracy, you know. There's no 'mister' at the Bar, still less any 'sir'. In fact, it's not at all such a toff's profession as you might suppose, Stringer ...'
I was plain Stringer to him now, which meant I had riled him, about which I was glad.
'Any man with brains might aspire even to the silk gown of the King's Counsel - army officer, actor, schoolmaster. A university training usually precedes the call, but not necessarily. Fluency of speech is the chief requirement, you see, thinking on one's leg - although of course you must also become fashionable, and in that, I confess, I never succeeded . . .'
'Now I winder why not?' put in Small David, looking up from his paper.
Marriott ignored him, saying, 'I did well enough for a time, mark you. Three or four cases a day was nothing to me - not all of them jury cases, of course, but still: seven guineas for a thirty-minute consultation . . . Five shillings to the clerk, yes, but even so . . . Unfortunately, I did not put in the hours flattering the important men of my acquaintance. Rather than dine with the benchers in my evening at the Temple, I would go off to the German gymnasium at King's Cross, Stringer.'
He kept saying my name. The man was speaking only for my benefit.
'I worked at my boxing night and day at that gymnasium,' he went on, at which Small David, turning the page of his paper, muttered, 'And much guid it did ye.'
I thought that the lawyer might fly at Small David for a second time, but instead he touched the handkerchief to his nose again, saying, 'Unfortunately, I did not generally like the judges. I knew many of them, Stringer, and I knew many that were inclined to hanging.'
At which he fell silent for a space, during which time I watched Small David turn two further pages of newspaper.
It was the Sutherland Gazette that Small David was looking over. Bowman, as far as I could make out, was now asleep, the bottle at his feet, but he righted himself a moment later when the boy Richie walked in with two bowls of steaming broth. He gave the first to his father, who began sipping from the bowl directly, and somehow doing so in a mannerly sort of way. The other bowl went to Small David - so that the two governors had been fed first.
The boy returned a moment later with a bowl for Bowman, who, after staring at the concoction for a while, said, '. . . Looks almost good enough to eat.'
The last bowl was given to me. A spoon rolled in the brownish stuff; a hunk of bread floated on it. I nodded thanks, and the boy nodded back - which was the first communication between us. I tasted the soup, which was like slow Oxo - Oxo slowed by flour and something that might have been potatoes. But I hadn't tasted food for hours, so it was nectar to me.
But just after I'd taken my second spoonful, something made me glance up towards Small David, who was eyeing me narrowly.
'Ye ken ye're gaun to dee, don't ye?'
Well, I could not believe it; I seemed to be living in a dream, as we all ate in the dimly lit room on the hillside, while the blizzard wind made a repeated low note, like the sound of a ship coming into harbour, as it blew across the chimney top. Presently, Richie went around the room again, this time collecting up the bowls. The lawyer drained whatever was left in his small glass, and put it on the mantelshelf. He did not seem in need of another dram. He watched after his son as the boy left the room, and turned towards me again. He seemed minded to talk, and I had the powerful notion that he wanted to tell me as much as I wanted to know.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-six
'As I say, the boy and I are not constructed at all on the same lines,' Marriott began. 'For example, I do not take a constitutional, Detective Stringer ...'
(Perhaps the supper had put him in better humour. At any event, I had regained my title.)
'I do not take a constitutional,' he repeated, 'and never let it be said that I take a stroll. I walk, Detective Stringer, and I would walk with Theodore Falconer for quite hours - right over the tops and all about Whitby. Do you know Whitby at all, Detective Stringer? A very fine old seaport, beautiful ships ... Do you know about ships? The parish church at the top of the steps is quite exceptional, and Falconer and I would make a wide circuit from there on Sunday mornings in all weathers. I was in fact a member of his rambling club for a spell, and a very strange grouping they proved to be. They met in the woods, you know - an almost pagan confederacy.'
'I had met Falconer at the University,' he continued, again looking keenly at Small David, hoping to reopen the quarrel, but the Scotsman read on, so Marriott continued addressing me. 'We were not of equivalent rank, socially speaking, but fell in with each other while tramping on Christ Church Meadow. Almost every Sunday for two years, we'd tuck into our mackintoshes and have a blow. He'd enjoy that, and the rougher the weather, the better he liked it. We continued in the same way when I removed, with Richard, to the Middlesbrough district - to the village just south of Saltburn, which was Falconer's home territory. We rode into town in the Club car, and on Sundays we tramped. High up on the tops—he would never keep to the paths but would battle his way through the heather singing Methodist hymns and booming on about the wonders of nature.'
And he nearly smiled, adding, 'Quite the fresh air fiend was Falconer.'
Small David was looking up from the Sutherland Gazette.
'We've come to' t now!' he said in a strange, fluting tone.
'The virtues of fresh air are well attested,' Marriott went on, 'and the cramped, stifling rooms of the suburban house are to be deprecated . . .'
He spoke with agitation, fairly shaking now, and not from the cold. I knew that the truth was approached as Small David, leaning further forward on the edge of his truckle bed, said, 'Spit it oot, man, spit it oot!'
The lawyer seemed in a daze now, gazing at vacancy and shaking his head. In an under-breath that I had to crane forwards to hear, he spoke the words:
'But to open the window on a day of heavy snowfall -'
'There y'are, it's oot!' cried Small David, rolling backwards on his bed, as the lawyer continued to shake his head, speaking a Latin phrase whose meaning I did not take at the time, for I am not well up in the language:
'—that was the reductio ad absurdum.'
The Scotsman was falling back on his bed, cackling, saying over and over, 'It's oot, it's oot!'
What was out?
Bowman was looking directly at me, red face at boiling point.
'Don't you see? Falconer opened the window in the saloon, and caught his death as a result.'
The lawyer went on, in the same head-shaking, sorrowful way. 'It was against the rules of the Club.'
Richie, the son, was standing in the doorway now; he gave a cough.
The truth was coming to me by degrees.
'Falconer opened the window in the Club carriage -' I said, eyeing Marriott, 'and you murdered him for it?'
'Yon dunderheed's got there in the eend!' came the cry from the
Scotsman's bed, and it was followed by a long bar of silence. Then Marriott spoke up again.
'He drew down the window, Detective Stringer. I put it up again; he drew it down a second time; and I struck out - one blow of the cane, Detective Stringer. I did not mean to kill. The word on the indictment would have been "manslaughter".'
The Scotsman snorted.
'But others have gone the same way,' I said. 'He was not the only one killed.'
The boy Richie was in the doorway.
'The kitbags are packed and stowed on the cart, father,' he sai
d. 'All ready for the morning . . . but we must leave your books behind.'
Small David was drawing the bed that the boy had sat on closer to the stove; he then did the same with his own. He opened the door of the stove, and began putting on logs. There seemed to be a deepening of the darkness beyond the window.
'You're pushing off tomorrow?' I said to the room in general.
'Aye,' said Small David at the stove, 'and so are ye.'
'Planning on taking me with you, are you?'
The Scotsman paused about his work.
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