A thick, squat man of between fifty and sixty, Sydney Handy, the brother-in-law of Joss Varran, an officious farmer from Narradale, with a broad expressionless face and a tight seam of a mouth, was laying down the law about something and as he spoke he made little pecking jerks with his predatory nose like the beak of a buzzard. Although he never saw Isabel Varran or the dead man from one year to the next, he now felt himself of some importance in the case. He had a black eye and was walking with a limp, features which gave rise to plenty of humorous enquiries, which seemed to annoy him. He said he’d trodden on a hay-rake and the shaft had leapt up and hit him.
Wandering here and there, with a camera hanging round his neck, a lank newspaper man with pale, myopic eyes. He made straight for Knell with a curious sidling walk.
‘Any developments, Reg?’
‘You still here, Quick? Nothing more to report.’
‘Is that the Scotland Yard detective who’s a friend of yours . . .?’
There was no time for a reply. Mrs. Candell, who might have been waiting in ambush for Knell and his party to arrive, emerged from the house, crossed the yard and made straight for the Archdeacon, ignoring anyone else there. A strong, dumpy, full-bosomed woman who seemed to be seething with indignation at the disturbance of the usual morning peace of the place.
‘I want a word with you, reverend, if you don’t mind, indoors, out of the way of these busybodies . . .’
And she turned and began to return to the house as though there was no question of a refusal.
‘Wait a moment, Mrs. Candell . . .’
She halted in her course, looking back over her shoulder.
‘I shan’t speak to anybody else but you and in private.’
She continued on her way without more ado.
‘Do you mind, Tom?’
Littlejohn smiled and shook his head.
The Archdeacon followed the woman.
Littlejohn lit his pipe and looked around the place.
Nobody seemed to be taking much notice of the police. The aggressive brother-in-law was holding the field and arguing fiercely with the rest of the men of the family. Now and then he swept his arm in the direction of a tall tower constructed at one end of the house, one storey higher than the main building. It was plastered and white-washed in keeping with the rest of the place and a large tall window overlooked the farmyard. At this window an incongruous pair, an old man and a young woman, one sitting and the other standing, were watching all that was going on. Her hand was on the old man’s shoulder. This scene seemed to be agitating the brother-in-law, Sydney Handy.
The old man, when he retired, had had this watch-tower constructed and moved in there. Thence he could watch all that went on in the farm and neighbourhood and he slept and ate there. Admission was forbidden without his consent and he had emphasised this by having a notice placed on the door of the ground floor which gave access to it. Trespassers forbidden, with all the s’s reversed.
Junius Candell had started life as a sailor and then spent a spell as a fisherman before turning to farming with the money he had saved in his travels, for he was an avaricious man. In his young days he had visited strange faraway lands and, in cold weather, when he grew light-headed and delirious and took to his bed, he often thought himself in the antipodes, or in Kinsale, where the Manx herring fleet had once frequently put-in, and he called out the names of shipmates and girls who had taken his fancy during his wanderings.
Mr. Handy had arrived, full of his own importance, to represent the Varran family and to ask why Isabel had taken up quarters with the Candells instead of with her own sister at Narradale. Sydney was a great talker and had once been a local preacher. Words usually rolled out of him non-stop. But now he felt restricted and inhibited by the pair watching him from the tower window, like a couple of immortals in their heaven. Now and then, the girl made a remark to her companion and they both laughed.
‘What are those two doin’ spyin’ on all that goes on? And I find nothing for them to be ribald about. This is a murder, I’ll have you know, not a pantomime . . .’
The girl was of unusual beauty and it might have been that which was upsetting Mr. Handy, whose philandering in the course of his milk round was talked about and exaggerated and embroidered by the local gossips. Beulah Candell had dark hair framing an oval face and peculiar oriental slant eyes. She had a good ripe figure to match her good looks, too, and there was a strange magnetism about her which attracted men like bees to a honey-pot. She was watching Knell, the youngest of the men there outside her own family.
‘That’s old Junius Candell and his grand-daughter up there. Her name’s Beulah.’
Knell said it following Littlejohn’s gaze and lowering his own eyes nervously as he caught the bold glance of the girl above.
‘Beulah’s the apple of the old man’s eye, they say. He won’t let her work on the farm, so she just plays the lady.’
He didn’t get any farther, as Joseph Candell, seeking an excuse for getting away from Mr. Handy, pretended with exaggerated gestures that he’d only just noticed the police and hurried to them.
‘Any more news?’ he said.
‘How could there be?’
Knell said it impatiently. It was strange that, in the course of a crime investigation, people thought the case developed like a growing cabbage or a disease running its certain course, or a birth after gestation. A sort of scientific development, instead of a hotch-potch of information being painfully sorted out and sometimes a stroke of luck which led to a solution.
‘I hear you’ve got some help from London . . .’
Candell looked hard at Littlejohn. Knell introduced them.
‘I was the first to find Joss Varran. That is, after his sister found him, or says she did . . .’
And Candell put the same question to Littlejohn that he’d put to everyone he’d spoken to since the crime.
‘. . . If he was dead when she saw him there in the ditch, how did he get in the house? That’s where I found him dead.’
‘I was the first to find him.’
He said it again, as though there were some merit in it or a reward waiting somewhere for him.
‘Did you know Joss Varran well, Mr. Candell?’
‘I hardly knew him at all. The less I had to do with him, the better. A contentious man and violent when the drink was in him.’
Candell seemed flustered and kept blinking his red-rimmed eyes as though nervous about what was coming next.
‘When did you last see him alive?’
‘I must have been one of the last to see him before he shipped off on the trip that ended in him being sent to gaol.’
‘Where did you see him?’
‘In Ramsey. At the time he was working as a deck hand on the container ship that comes in from Preston. She was just leaving the quay and he was leaning over the rail.’
‘Do you remember the date?’
Candell looked indignant.
‘It was more than twelve months ago. I can’t remember so far back.’
‘Think again. You might recollect it . . .’
‘I think it was a Friday. I was taking a stroll along the quay waiting for the wife, who I take to do her shopping in Ramsey every Friday.’
‘So, it was a Friday then?’
‘That’s right. Yes; and it was, March, too, because I remember I’d run out of hay and our own wasn’t ready. I bought some and I remember I’d just got my milk cheque and was going to pay it in at the bank along with some cash, and I used the cash to pay the merchant for the hay instead. The milk cheque comes in the last week in the month. It must have been the last week in March last year when I saw Joss Varran.’
All very tortuous, but useful.
‘Did he say anything to you?’
‘He shouted at me, otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed him. He’d been drinking even then and was a bit cheeky.’
‘What exactly did he say?’
Candell hesitated and looked sheepish.
‘He shouted “What ho, Alfonso!” I ignored him.’
‘Alfonso?’ asked Knell. ‘I’ve got you down here as Joseph.’
Candell kicked the paving-stones of the yard nervously.
‘It’s a nickname I had when I was younger. Varran had a cheek to use it. As though I was a pal of his.’
Joseph Candell had, in his youth, although to look at him now you wouldn’t think it, been somewhat of a masher. Names like Alfonso and The Count were endowed on such fancy men by their contemporaries.
‘And that was the last you saw of Joss Varran?’
‘Till I found him dead at Close Dhoo.’
‘You’ve no idea, then, who might have killed him?’
Joseph Candell felt he’d said quite enough already. In Celtic fashion, his mind ran well ahead of current events and he saw himself lost in the ramifications of a case in which he might become involved, ruined, disgraced, destroyed. Besides, his father from his lofty perch in the tower was making gestures which suggested that old Junius thought he’d done quite enough talking and that he and his family had better get on with their farming. Alfonso sheered off.
‘I don’t know anything else. I’ve told you all I know.’
‘Alfonso, you don’t happen to have a bottle of beer handy . . .?’
Candell leapt as though he’d been stung.
‘What the hell!’
And he stopped. Alcohol and foul language were strictly forbidden at Close-e-Cass by Junius Candell, who’d once owned a private chapel of his own in the curraghs and preached in it, too, until the small congregation got tired of Junius behaving as though he were God himself and stopped attending.
‘What are you doing here, you old loafer, and what do you want?’
He spoke to a small, wizened man with little cunning eyes glinting behind beetling grey brows, who had gradually sidled up to the group and had been listening quietly to all that was being said. He reminded Littlejohn of one of those Irish characters created by Barry Fitzgerald, of happy memory.
E. D. Cojeen was the local rag-and-bone man who, in exchange for the cast-offs of the neighbourhood, old clothes and anything else from a rare coin to a mowing machine or a mangle, gave coloured balloons, packets of detergent and tinned goods. Naturally, his wardrobe was extensive and almost every day he wore a different set of clothes, the best he had collected the day before. Now, he was togged up in a strange black coat with clawhammer tails and on his feet were a pair of splendid football boots.
‘I seem to have asked for the wrong thing. I forgot that in this place wine is a mocker and strong drink is raging. I only wanted a drink for Bessie.’
And he indicated a little donkey, hitched to an empty cart, for, in his haste to reach the scene of the crime and obtain information to scatter in the course of his rounds, he had hitherto done no business. In his wanderings, E. D. Cojeen stopped at every pub and Bessie was as big a soak as he was himself.
‘What do you want? You know very well we don’t take kindly to the likes of you hanging around here.’
‘I want to see the police. To be precise, Inspector Knell. It’s about poor Joss Varran, of whom, we must now speak in the past tense. He was, and now is not.’
In the course of his wanderings and gatherings, E. D. Cojeen accumulated a lot of old books. These he read feverishly in his spare time. He often read them aloud to Bessie, who shared his home in a disused R.A.F. hut near Kirk Andreas. He boasted a good literary knowledge and style of speech, although nobody else agreed, for it was a sort of Irish stew of words and phrases he’d accumulated and which he trimmed and gabbled to suit the occasion.
‘I have some information for the police. If I don’t impart it, they will find out I have it and let the sun go down upon their wrath. Only a fool tries to outsmart smart people.’
Knell, who had met Cojeen before, was impatient.
‘Tell us what it is without any embroidery, then. First, give me your name.’
‘I intend to do that. I see the patriarch watching us from his tower in company with his chatelaine living there a life of queenly luxury. Before he descends and pursues Bessie and me with his avenging rod, I will tell you that I think I was the last man to see Joss Varran alive. You want my full name? Emanuel Dalrymple Cojeen.’
And he leaned back on the studs of his football boots and looked from one to another of them to observe the impact. Knell was astonished as he wrote it in his book. This was a revelation! The little man was generally known as Cojeen the Rags, and nobody ever bothered about his E. D.
‘Well, goon.’
It was like opening a sluice-gate and releasing E. D. Cojeen’s Irish stew of verbiage. Knell did his best to pick out the meat from the rest and put it in his book. It could hardly be described as an interview. It was a monologue. Knell couldn’t get a question in edgeways.
It seemed that Cojeen and Bessie, after a good day’s exchanges, had stopped several times for drinks at their favourite inns. In the last of their round, on the quay at Ramsey, they had found Joss Varran, standing at one end of the counter, sullenly drinking. He didn’t recognise Cojeen and E. D., knowing him to be an awkward man in his cups, avoided him. As the bar clock struck nine, Varran drank up and left in a hurry.
Cojeen wondered how Joss was going to get home at that hour. There were no buses running and few people about to give him a lift. The rag-and-bone man hitched up Bessie in the inn yard and they started along the quay for home. Their cart was empty, as Cojeen rented a shabby little warehouse in Ramsey where he stored and sorted out his rummage. As soon as they reached the country road to Andreas, he would hoist himself on the cart and Bessie would tow him leisurely to their lodging and there, if he was asleep, which was usually the case, vigorously shake the shafts to remind him that she was hungry.
As they approached the swing-bridge, Cojeen made out Varran, leaning against the first stanchion. Cojeen hurried the donkey past, in case Joss stopped him and asked for a lift, which, in Mr. Cojeen’s own words was a plausible and unconvincing impossibility. However, man and beast had only moved a few yards beyond him when a car arrived, picked up Joss and moved off noisily and at high speed.
‘Did you see the car plainly or who was driving it?’
‘I saw the silhouette of a man and also that of the car. I didn’t recognise either and that is the truth.’
‘And that is all?’
‘Except a deduction, which as you know, might be proved fallacious. In the course of my profession, I have had some experience with cars, old cars principally. This was of very ancient vintage, but still in excellent running order. The acceleration . . . the clarity of the ignition . . .’
They were in the stew again.
‘Briefly, what was the deduction?’
‘An old Bentley, my friend, and in excellent condition. Old friends are best, aren’t they? I must go. The patriarch is waving his stick at me.’
4
Family Secrets
AFTER THE pandemonium going on in the farmyard, the interior of Close-e-Cass was quiet and peaceful. The Archdeacon was not surprised when Mrs. Candell pursued an independent line and removed herself from the public confusion created by the murder. He knew she came of better stock than her husband and he had, among many others, been surprised when she married into the Candell family at the very time when Junius was engaged in a furious quarrel with the Milk Board and had barricaded himself in his farm against its representatives and even fired shots at them. Whether she had found the blandishments of ‘Alfonso’ too much for her and had yielded to them, or whether she married him to rid herself of the grip of her own tyrannical father nobody seemed to know.
Mrs. Candell took the Archdeacon in the drawing-room and closed the door. It was a dark place, never used except when there was company, obscured by old trees blown at an angle by the prevailing high winds of winter. There was a smell of damp and mould about it. But it held the best furniture, including a set of Chippendale dining-chairs around a matching ta
ble, which Myra Candell had inherited from her own family and which she tended and polished herself in a sort of proud memorial ritual. There was a large mahogany dresser on one side, with a stuffed owl in the middle of it.
‘Will you have a cup of tea, Archdeacon, or a glass of my ginger wine?’
‘Ginger wine, if you please, Myra . . .’
He called her by her Christian name because he’d known her family well in the past.
‘. . . I didn’t know such sinful beverages were allowed in this house.’
‘Grandfather thinks it’s non-alcoholic. I see no reason for letting him know that it isn’t. What a man doesn’t know, he doesn’t grieve over. I give him some for his chest in the cold weather and he doesn’t suspect a thing and asks for more. It all goes to show that these rabid teetotallers don’t know what they’re talking about.’
She took two ruby glasses and a bottle from the sideboard and poured out a drink apiece.
‘I’d better say what I have to say quickly, Mr. Kinrade, or else there’ll be questions asked. It’s about this murder of Joss Varran. You know Joss was a rascal, especially where women were concerned. And for some reason, women were attracted to him. Not always those of his own kind either. Some quite decent ones have found him fascinating.’
‘I heard something of the kind . . .’
‘Oh, I know when he was dressed in his working clothes and unwashed or drunk, he was a sorry, unattractive sight, but get him in his Sunday best, washed and shaved, at a show or a fair, you’d have looked twice at him. There was the Irish in him and he had dark good looks and the blarney. He seemed to appeal to younger women, too . . .’
The Night They Killed Joss Varran (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery) Page 4