He leaned back in the seat, fumbled in his pocket for his cigarettes, and lighted one. There was nothing he could do now until they reached Victoria.
Presently the cab swung into the front of the station and stopped. Harry got out, taking his time to search for his fare, paid the driver, and strolled into the busy station. In a mirror that was fastened to a wall, he saw the man who had been outside Monelli’s walking slowly along in his rear.
Harry went over to the Surburban Line ticket office and bought a ticket for Battersea Park. As he moved over to the platform from which the train went he saw his tailer at the ticket office window. Harry sauntered onto the platform. The train wasn’t in yet and he waited patiently, walking up and down humming a tune.
After a few minutes the train drew in and Harry was almost the first to board it. He chose an empty compartment, slipped quickly to the opposite door, opened it and dropped onto the line. A few seconds later, unseen by anyone, he had pulled himself up onto the other platform, hurried out of the station by the News Theatre entrance, and, hailing the first taxi was driven to Waterloo.
There was no sign of anyone on his tail this time and he congratulated himself that he had succeeded in fobbing off the watcher.
Having made doubly certain at Waterloo that the tailer was no longer in evidence, he took a ticket to Marbury. . . .
*
Miss Titmarsh finished her frugal supper, washed up the dishes in her neat little sink, and made herself a cup of tea. Carrying this into the sitting-room, she fetched a thick bundle of exercise books from a table, put them on her desk and began to mark them.
This was her usual nightly occupation and it took her until it was time for her to go to bed.
She still felt far from well. The headache which had been so troublesome recently was still hovering in the background, ready to leap out in full fettle at the slightest provocation. Miss Titmarsh had kept it at bay during the past few days with aspirin until she dreaded to think of the number she must have taken.
Half way through the pile of books, she paused and rubbed her eyes. It was a monotonous job, checking and marking. She leaned back in her hard chair to rest her back.
She was just going on with her task when there came a knock on the front door. She looked at the little clock on the mantelpiece. It was half-past nine. Who could it be at this hour?
The knock was repeated a little louder. Miss Titmarsh got up. Perhaps it was someone from the village about one of the children. . . . She put on the dim light in the tiny hall and cautiously opened the front door.
A man stood on the step—a man in a heavy overcoat. A complete stranger to Miss Titmarsh.
“Miss Titmarsh?” he inquired in a voice that had a twang in it—not at all an educated voice.
“Yes,” answered Miss Titmarsh. “What is it? What do you want?”
“I should like to have a talk to you, Miss,” said the stranger. His manner was quite pleasant but Miss Titmarsh felt vaguely uneasy.
“Are you—are you from the police?” she asked doubtfully.
Harry Bates laughed.
“Well, not exactly,” he answered. “The police an’ me couldn’t be called pals, not by a long chalk.”
“Then what do you want with me?” she asked. “I don’t know you. . . .”
“You knew a friend of mine,” he retorted. “You knew him quite well. Sam . . . Sam Sprigot.”
Miss Titmarsh put out her hand quickly and gripped the door post to steady herself. She felt the blood receding from her brain and the resultant dizziness.
“I—I don’t know what you mean,” she whispered faintly. “That was the name of the man who—who was killed here. . . .”
“That’s right,” said Harry Bates.
“I knew nothing about him,” said Miss Titmarsh, gripping the door frame tighter. “I—I never knew him. . . .”
“Don’t try an’ pull that stuff on me,” said Harry. “Sam talked to me about you—not so very long before he was murdered. I know all about you, see?”
“You—you’d better come in,” said Miss Titmarsh breathlessly. “You’d better come in. . . .”
“That’s fine,” agreed Harry. “You an’ me have got a lot to talk about.”
Miss Titmarsh said nothing. She was incapable of saying anything. Her throat was dry and the pain in her head had suddenly come on again with agonizing stabs that seemed to cut through to the centre of her brain.
It had come. The thing she had dreaded had come at last. . . .
She led the way into her little sitting-room unsteadily.
“Will you sit down, please?” she said.
Mr. Bates carefully removed his coat, folded it over the back of a chair, and sat down. Taking a packet of cigarettes from his pocket he lit one and blew the smoke gently up to the ceiling.
Miss Titmarsh also sat down, in the extreme centre of her small settee.
“What have you come here for?” she asked after a pause.
“I want to talk to you about Sam,” answered Harry Bates. “I don’t know quite how to address you, you know. Shall I call you Miss Titmarsh or—Mrs. Sprigot?”
She caught her breath with a sharp sound—a curious rattle as though her throat was full of dried leaves. Her hands, folded in her lap, twisted convulsively.
“I have been known by the name of Titmarsh for many years,” she said at last. “It was my maiden name. Everybody knows me as Miss Titmarsh. . . .”
“You can remain Miss Titmarsh, so far as I’m concerned. I’m not fussy,” said Harry. “What’s in a name, after all? The whole question is that Sam came to see you a month or so before he was murdered, didn’t he?”
She nodded. She would never forget the night she had gone to the door and found her husband on the step. . . . Those headaches had dated from the moment. . . .
“What did he come for?” asked Harry. “He didn’t come just to say ‘hello’, did he? You an’ he hadn’t met for years—not since you left him an’ came to live here.”
Miss Titmarsh passed the tip of her tongue over dry lips and swallowed with difficulty.
“What did he tell you?” repeated Harry Bates. “He was on to somethin’ big an’ he wanted you to help him. What was it?”
She looked at him with troubled eyes. The pain in her head was getting worse, and she put up a thin hand and pressed her temple to try and ease it. But still she said nothing.
“You’d better tell me, you know,” persisted Harry. His voice was quite gentle but behind the gentleness there lurked a threat. “You don’t want your connection with Sam to get around, do you? It wouldn’t do you any good in this place, you know. You’d lose your job. They wouldn’t like the widow of a crook like Sam to teach their children, would they?”
“You—you wouldn’t . . .?” Miss Titmarsh’s voice trailed away.
“I don’t want to do anything—unpleasant,” said Mr. Bates. “But I’m going to know just what Sam had in his mind. All you’ve got to do is to tell me. Then you needn’t worry any more. . . .”
Miss Titmarsh made up her mind.
“Very well,” she said.
Chapter Fourteen
Mr. Budd was notified that the tailer had lost track of Harry Bates at Victoria Station, and said a great deal that was not fit for publication. The recipient of these caustic observations was reduced to inarticulate apologies that only produced a further stream of invective from the stout superintendent. But the fact remained. Harry Bates had succeeded in reaching his unknown destination without anybody but himself being the wiser.
After the trouble he had taken to insure that Harry should be kept under observation, it was not surprising that the big man should feel annoyed.
He sat in the dining-room at Kenwiddy’s farm, chewing on one of his unlighted cigars, and in a mood that was only describable as foul. Leek, after trying to soothe him down, and getting the overflow of his temper, fled to his own room and sought solace in the grubby exercise book containing the notes for his au
tobiography.
The post, which was intermittent in Marbury, arrived just before mid-day and there was a bulky envelope for Mr. Budd which did a little to cheer him up. It contained the dossier of Sam Sprigot, and everything that was discoverable concerning the Conyers.
After the enormous lunch provided by Mrs. Kenwiddy, Mr. Budd carried these documents up to his room, locked the door, lay down comfortably on his bed, and began systematically to peruse them.
He began with the record of Sam Sprigot. The early part of the little crook’s life was rather sketchy. His father had, apparently, been a respectable motor mechanic and his mother had worked in a shop. Sam had left school at the age of fourteen and had had a succession of different jobs, none of which he had remained at very long. He had got in with a lot of undesirable companions and had, before he was sixteen, twice been in Court for stealing from shops. His first serious conviction was for breaking and entering a tobacconists shop and stealing cigarettes. After he had served his sentence for this offence, he had gone straight for a period of nearly twelve months during which time it was believed that he had married a woman who was a teacher in a Council School at Hither Green. . . .
Mr. Budd paused when he reached this. A schoolteacher? His mind conjured up a picture of Miss Titmarsh. She had known the identity of Sam Sprigot before it had become public property. She was definitely afraid of something. . . . Could it be that she was the person Sam had married? Remembering her, it seemed unlikely but people changed. Maybe at that time she was quite a goodlooking girl. But why should she now call herself “Miss” Titmarsh? That was easy. If she had discovered what Sam was, and disapproved, she had probably left him. . . .
It would be simple to make sure. The marriage certificate would contain her maiden name which was the most likely one she would have gone back to. Mr. Budd made a mental note to have this looked up. If she had been Sam Sprigot’s wife it would account for a lot.
Perhaps she might know where he had spent that three months that were unaccounted for and be able to give some clue as to why he had gone, that night when somebody had struck him down, to the old, ruined house?
It was definitely an idea. Of course, the schoolteacher might just be a coincidence. There must be thousands of schoolteachers who could have been the one who had married Sprigot, but it was worth following up.
There was nothing much more of interest in “Stackpipe” Sam’s record. Mr. Budd read through the list of his various operations without discovering anything that was likely to help in the present case, and turned his attention to the history of the Conyers.
Sir Thomas Conyers, the father of Basil and Francis, had married twice. His first marriage had been to Millicent Harrington who had presented him with two children—the two already named. After her death—she had apparently been killed in a train accident—Sir Thomas had married a Mrs. Harriet Levington, a widow with one daughter, Isobel, the present Mrs. Mortlock. She had married James Mortlock at the age of twenty-six. It had proved an unhappy marriage. Apparently her husband drank heavily, left her after four years of unhappiness and misery, and departed abroad with another woman, where he died shortly afterwards in extreme poverty.
This, thought Mr. Budd, would account for Mrs. Mortlock’s rather warped outlook on the world in general.
The two brothers, Basil and Francis, had both been educated at the same preparatory school and gone to Oxford. There was only a matter of eighteen months difference in their ages, but a great deal of difference in their temperament. Francis had always been rather wild and had neither distinguished himself at school, or later at the university. Basil, never a very bright scholar had, however, managed to scrape through with a certain amount of reputation, if not for brilliance at least for diligence.
A few years before old Sir Thomas died from a stroke, Francis had got into hot water over money. Heavily in debt, and with his creditors pressing him on all sides, he had forged a cheque in his father’s name and cleared out of the country. That was the last that had ever been seen or heard of him. Where he had gone nobody knew, but he had taken three thousand pounds with him, leaving the creditors high and dry and screaming for his blood. Old Sir Thomas, for the sake of the family name, had settled his debts. It was a fit of temper due to his discovery of what Francis had done that had contributed to the stroke from which he subsequently died.
Basil was on holiday in Switzerland when the news of his father’s death reached him and he came back to claim the estate. A year later, he had met and married Sybil Marsden, an attractive woman in her early thirties, with a large fortune left her by her uncle, whom he had met at a cocktail party in London. They had settled in Marbury, and Sir Basil had proceeded to get rid of his fortune as quickly as possible on racing and women. At the time of his death there was very little left of his own money, although, since his wife had predeceased him, if only by a very short period, he had died a rich man, her fortune having passed to him as next of kin.
Mr. Budd frowned.
Was there anything in this history that helped to shed a light on the reason for the murders? In the case of Lady Conyers the person who benefited by her death was obviously her husband. But he had himself been killed shortly after. Was his death connected with the murder of Sam Sprigot but not with the murder of Lady Conyers? The method in her case was different. Poison.
The stout superintendent reached for one of his cigars, lit it, and blew a cloud of acrid smoke toward the ceiling.
Suppose you looked at it this way. Suppose, for the sake of argument, you took Lady Conyers’s death as a separate thing—as quite apart from the other murders? What did you get then?
Mr. Budd shook his head.
There was the writing on the door against that theory. Another bit out of the same nursery rhyme that had been used on the paper pinned to the door of Jackson’s Folly. And both written in blue pencil. That seemed to prove that the same person was responsible for both. . . .
Hold on, though. Did it?
Supposing somebody had wanted it thought that the same person was responsible for both murders? What then? Well, what then? The poison had been put in Lady Conyers’s glass of water before Sam had even reached Marbury much less been killed. So that was a washout. . . .
Or was it? Could the murderer have already planned Sam’s death when he, or she, had put the poison in Lady Conyers’s glass?
That was possible but it meant that the murderer of Sam Sprigot and the murderer of Lady Conyers was one and the same person. That was all right—if the murderer was Sir Basil. How did that fit?
Mr. Budd frowned.
It fitted quite well—except that Sir Basil himself had been a victim. And that upset the apple cart.
The big man raised a ponderous hand and scratched his chin. It really was the toughest case he’d ever had anything to do with. You just couldn’t get your teeth into it anywhere. If you thought you’d found a soft bit it turned hard on you before you could take a good bite. And yet there must be a solution if only you could get the right end of it—a solution in which all the disconnected parts would drop into place and fit neatly. . . .
Perhaps he was looking at the whole problem from the wrong angle. Was there any other way of tackling it? Supposing, instead of starting from Sam Sprigot’s murder, you started from Lady Conyers death? What happened then?
Mr. Budd closed his eyes and drew his brows together in a concentrated frown.
And suddenly something did happen. Something remarkable happened. An idea that was startling in its simplicity suddenly came out of nowhere as such ideas do. The various bits of the puzzle settled neatly into place—that is with the exception of one. That one was quite a large one but it might be persuaded to fall into position when the whole thing was reviewed carefully.
The stout superintendent opened his eyes, took a deep pull at his cigar and slowly exhaled the smoke.
There was a lot of thinking still to be done—a lot of marshalling of facts already in his possession and several facts
to be found—but the main outline of the idea was sound.
At first glance it seemed fantastic but when you came to examining it it was quite reasonable. It made sense. . . .
The big man got heavily off the bed.
At last he had discovered what he had been looking for—a jumping off point. . . .
*
Roger Marsden looked at Mr. Titer and Mr. Titer looked up at the ceiling.
They were in the big drawing-room at Marbury Court Roger perched on the arm of an easy chair, the solicitor standing in front of the fireplace.
“So Sybil’s money goes with the estate?” said Roger.
Mr. Titer, who had just informed him of this fact, nodded.
Roger got up and walked over to the french window. Resting his hand on the edge of the frame he looked out at the deserted terrace.
“Who inherits?” he asked without turning his head.
Mr. Titer, who strongly objected to answering a direct question, coughed.
“At the—er—present juncture,” he answered reluctantly, “it would seem that—er—that the late Sir Basil’s step-sister will inherit. Unless, of course, we can establish that Francis Conyers is still alive. . . .”
“That’s going to take some time,” said Roger. He came back and resumed his position on the arm of the chair.
“Yes,” agreed Mr. Titer. “There are difficulties—a number of difficulties.” He sighed.
“There wasn’t much of Basil’s money left, was there?” inquired Roger.
Mr. Titer frowned. He disliked these questions. He disliked any question that could be plainly answered.
“I’m afraid Sir Basil’s fortune was sadly depleted,” he replied after a pause. “Sadly depleted.”
“How much was there left?” said Roger.
The lawyer shifted uneasily.
“That will have to be gone into,” he answered evasively. “Not a great deal, but I am not prepared to state exactly how much.”
“If Basil hadn’t been murdered,” remarked Roger, “he would have been a rich man. . . .”
Mr. Titer inclined his head.
The Nursery Rhyme Murders Page 10