“Yes, I see. Thank you very much. This will materially help my report. I hope I have not taken up too much of your time?”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’m glad the Board of Governors is waking up and taking a bit of interest. I can easy make the time up in the classrooms. As long as I gets the wastepaper baskets emptied and the chairs stood down (which the boys is supposed to stand them up on the desks to make the sweeping more easy), the rest can go.”
Dame Beatrice drove to the Town Hall and asked the caretaker at what time the early meetings of Mr Perse’s subcommittee took place. His answer checked with Julian’s own account and the caretaker, because of what he had read about Spey’s death, was able to recall that Julian had been present at the meeting on the Friday under review, that he had been in good time for it, and that it had gone on until half-past nine. If the caretaker felt any curiosity about being questioned thus, he did not betray it. He remembered Dame Beatrice perfectly well from her previous visit to the Town Hall, had decided that she was eccentric but harmless, and he answered her questions civilly and with good humour.
The public house opposite the Town Hall—Dame Beatrice arrived there so soon after opening time that there were only two customers in the saloon lounge—was able, with the help of a blonde who wore an enormous white chrysanthemum as a buttonhole, to confirm that after Council meetings some of the members reckoned to drop in for a snack and a drink. Yes, Councillor Perse was a regular. No, she could not speak to any particular day. Oh, wait a minute, though. Yes, that would be right. Quarter to ten it was, because Councillor Perse, always quite a one, had told her the Council ought to be able to get the licensing hours extended when they were kept so long at the meetings. Would she care to take a little of something? No, ta. No offence, but she did not reckon to take something so early on. Yes, it was terrible, all the things you read in the papers. Everybody was talking about that man what hanged himself out of remorse. The barmaid reckoned as how he must have been listening to Billy Graham, or something of that, and had his crimes brought home to him good and proper. A schoolmaster, too! You hardly knew who was what nowadays, did you? And to think of all them poor little kids being taught by a dirty murderer.
“Of course,” said Laura, “even if Julian stayed in the pub until closing time, which is what you think the barmaid indicated, I suppose it doesn’t really let him out, but you think it’s enough to go on, and Gavin agrees.”
“Oh, yes,” said her husband, from the depths of a long armchair. “We’ve never really worried about young Perse. We’ve tackled his landlady, of course, as he’d run this second pageant during which Gordon was killed, but his habits appear to be regular and he has never given any trouble or kept late hours or come back unpleasantly boozed, and he always pays his rent on the dot and “eats normal”—her expression, not mine.”
“He sounds too good to be true,” said Laura critically.
“Oh, I don’t think so. Typically respectable young schoolmaster and Borough Councillor, wouldn’t you say? Well, Squire’s Acre is next on the list. We must make Giles Faudrey confess that he did see the man who came to borrow the sword after the Town Hall dress rehearsal that night. I think I’d better tackle the Batty-Faudrey angle, Dame B.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Batty-Faudrey Angle
“The narrow avenues…were barricadoed, and little breast works were thrown up at convenient places. Furthermore the barricadoes were well defended, but the defenders were unprepared for a surprise attack at that time…”
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If it hadn’t been for the fact that two swords from the Squire’s Acre collection must have been used, should we ever have thought Giles Faudrey might be the murderer?” asked Laura. “I mean, the head having been thrown into the river at the end of the Colonel’s grounds wouldn’t really implicate one person more than another. Anybody could have gone along that path and got rid of it there, as you pointed out to me earlier.”
“So he could,” Dame Beatrice agreed. “By the way, does anything strike you about the way in which the three bodies were treated after death?”
“How do you mean?”
“Falstaff? Cast your mind back to poor Mr Luton.”
“Stabbed cleanly through the heart—must have died instantaneously—body dumped in Thames, but not otherwise ill-used—is that what you mean?”
“Splendid. What do we deduce from that?”
“Goodness knows!”
“Compare it with the treatment meted out to Henry VIII, in the person of Mr Spey.”
“Well, yes, I begin to see what you mean. Probably beheaded before Spey was quite dead—the head put in a weighted covering and chucked into the river—the body left almost contemptuously in a private road where anybody might have come upon it…”
“We make progress.”
“I do, you mean. What exactly are you getting at?”
“You said that you saw what I meant. Continue to express your very valuable thoughts.”
“Don’t be unkind. It’s indelicate to make academic rings round morons.”
“Recount what happened to Edward III, and show, in your answer, in what respects, if any, the treatment meted out to Mr Gordon after death differed from that of the bodies previously under review.”
“Well, it was nastier and more spiteful than that meted out to Falstaff, but, I would say, not as vicious and horrid as in the case of Henry VIII. Of course, we can’t take the head in the river as having any real significance.”
“Can we not?”
“Well, the body was decapitated and the head disposed of in order to disguise the method of murder.”
“That does not make sense, you know. Why should the murderer go to all that trouble in the case of one of his victims when he did not attempt it in the case of the other two?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Neither had I, at first, but, when one comes to think of the matter, it does seem sufficiently interesting to merit closer attention.”
“That’s true, but my mind’s a blank. However much closer my attention, I still wouldn’t get any nearer an explanation.”
“Oh, but, surely! Think of the three personages involved.”
“Well, we did agree that they were all involved with women in a way which society still deprecates.”
“With one substantial and one minor difference.”
Laura made a face at her employer and then grinned.
“Aren’t you really going to tell me?” she asked. “You might just as well, and stop taking the mickey, you know. I’m all befogged.”
“But that is just what you are not!” said Dame Beatrice. “What was the substantial difference, in literature and history, between Falstaff and Henry VIII, going back to your last argument?”
“Women…women… Oh, I see what you’re getting at! In The Merry Wives, Falstaff is anything but a success with Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, except as a figure of fun, whereas Henry VIII—well, I don’t know how successful he was, from one point of view.”
“By that you suggest…?”
“Well, I don’t suppose any of the six wives married him for love. It was a case of not having been able to refuse, if he asked them, I gather. All the same, he did have the six, and got rid of four of them exactly when and how he chose. He certainly couldn’t be called a figure of fun.”
“He was a great and powerful king; one who, in spite of his excesses, appears to have won the approbation of the majority of his subjects.”
“Well, people do tend to admire those who are larger than life, and Henry was certainly that. What about Edward III?”
“So we exchange roles and I become the examinee. The body of Mr Gordon was not maltreated more than the murderer deemed necessary in order to maintain the fiction that the crimes were the work of a madman.”
“But isn’t the murderer a madman?”
“According to psychiatry, yes, I think he is, but, under the McNaughton Rules by which the l
aw still holds, undoubtedly he is not. He is perfectly aware of what he has done, and he knows that what he has done was anti-social and wrong. He knew this, too, at the time when the acts were committed.”
“We know the motive, too. Luton had threatened to expose him to his uncle and aunt because of his hobby of getting girls into trouble. If that happened, he felt he might be disinherited, and as he has no prospects other than to be kept by his uncle and aunt and to inherit Squire’s Acre later on, naturally he felt he couldn’t let Luton blow the gaff on him. We’ve already agreed that the other two men were killed because, somehow or other, they knew who Luton’s murderer was.”
“Even about that I have had a slight change of mind. I agree that we have hit on the right motives for the murders of Luton and Spey, but the killing of Gordon seems to me to stem from a different source. Does nothing strike you about the murder of Gordon?”
“Well,” said Laura, dubiously, “there are two things, I suppose, when one thinks it over. Spey was killed pretty soon after Luton, but it was months before the murderer got around to the idea that Gordon might also be a danger.”
“And your second point?”
“Oh, ah, yes. All three murders were somehow mixed up with pageantry. The first two were connected in some way with old Kitty’s do, and the third was done when Julian Perse put on another silly show.”
“Do you detect any special significance in these facts?”
“Special significance? No, I don’t think so, unless the murderer was allergic to pageants.”
“Was there any good, valid or sufficient reason for staging a second pageant, do you suppose?”
“To my mind, it was a wrongheaded gesture and completely unnecessary.”
“So the murderer thought, in a sense. I believe he saw it as a carefully rehearsed trap.”
“I believe that idiot Julian did have some such notion, but, of course, it didn’t come off.”
“I think it has come off now, you know,” said Dame Beatrice. “I wonder what our dear Robert will have to tell us?”
Laura looked up and met the keen black eyes and a saurian, mirthless smile.
“You briefed him!” she said accusingly.
“He asked me to do so,” Dame Beatrice meekly replied. Laura snorted indignantly.
“You might have put me wise at the same time,” she said. Dame Beatrice cackled.
“Robert cannot afford to make mistakes,” she said. “And you are making only one mistake at the moment.”
“Oh? Well, you might at least tell me what it is.”
“Do you really believe that a doting, although outwardly censorious, aunt, and an uncle subservient (if I mistake not) to that aunt, would disinherit Giles Faudrey because of his amorous adventures and their consequences?”
“I still think he’d be out on his ear in two flicks of a horse’s tail if his behaviour came to the notice of Mrs Batty-Faudrey, this in spite of what you said.”
“There, I think, you are wrong. Remember that, so far as we know, neither the girls nor their parents have complained. It was Mr Luton’s heroic role to confront Squire’s Acre with its sinfulness.”
“And he ran into Giles (although Giles says he didn’t) and taxed him with getting the Sunday School teacher into trouble? Yes, we settled all that, I thought. What’s new?”
“What I have already said. I do not believe that Giles would have been disinherited.”
“He might have had some other motive, then, for murdering Falstaff.”
“Yes, he might. I must keep that in mind. Giles Faudrey was successful with women, don’t you think?”
“I suppose he was. Are you going off at a tangent?”
“No, indeed I am not.”
“Prove it, then, because I don’t follow you at all.”
“The Sunday School teacher had been a domestic servant at Squire’s Acre Hall.”
“Well, it used to be a common or garden practice to seduce the servants.”
“Used to be? You would not suppose it to be a common practice nowadays?”
“Well, I shouldn’t think so, but, if it did happen, I should say the boot would be on the other foot.”
“By which you imply…?”
“That servants are like gold-dust nowadays, and a girl who was doing a Daphne would merely have to give in her notice. It was different when servants were two a penny and jobs were hard to get, especially if you left without getting a reference.”
“You mean that, nowadays, if an untoward incident took place, it would be because the servant was as willing as her employer that this should be so.”
“That’s it, but where does it get us?”
“It gets us to the important fact, my dear Laura, that Giles Faudrey is not an employer.”
“No, but he’s got this fatal fascination we’ve mentioned, and it was often the son of the house who seduced the servants.”
“You would do well to take the car and go for a drive and, in tranquillity, recollect the main items of this conversation. As the schoolmaster said to the insolent boy, I fear we do not see you at your best.”
“The trouble is, I’m hungry,” said Laura, “and tea-time is in the dim distance. Suppose I nip down to the kitchen and see what I can rustle up in the way of bodily sustenance? Then I’ll do as you say. As a matter of fact, I do dimly see what you’re getting at. I can’t believe it, that’s all.”
She took herself off and, twenty minutes later, Dame Beatrice heard the front door being closed. The time was a quarter to three. At half-past three Detective Chief-Superintendent Robert Gavin was shown in.
“You were right, Dame B., but my blokes still have to prove it,” he said. “They know how to keep their traps shut, up at Squire’s Acre, and the Colonel and his nephew are standing shoulder to shoulder.”
“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, dear Robert, and the weakest link at Squire’s Acre, from one point of view, is Mrs Batty-Faudrey. But have you had any lunch?”
“Yes, thanks. I briefed the Inspector and the C.I.D. sergeant and pushed them off to the Hall, and then I lunched at The Hat With Feather, having told them to report to me there. That excellent pub kept back some lunch for them in a private room, so, when they’d had it, we got down to brass tacks.”
He took out some papers and looked them through. Dame Beatrice bestowed upon his dark and close-cropped head the benign smile of a well-fed python.
“The report,” he said, looking up at her, “is roughly this: on the night of the dress rehearsal of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the Batty-Faudreys dined with the Mayor, leaving Giles at home. This, of course, is at first-hand from the Mayor and Mayoress. While the Batty-Faudreys were out of the house, a man turned up and wanted to borrow a sword. The girl who opened the door to him confirms this and, having been shown a not-very-recent photograph of Luton—taken, unfortunately for us, completely surrounded by Sunday School teachers and scholars—says it might be the man who called, but she couldn’t be sure. The only thing she remembers is that he was short and thin and said he was sorry to call so late, but that his business was important.”
“Upon that, the girl went to consult Giles Faudrey, who was in the downstairs library.”
“Yes. Interviewed separately, Giles and the girl both state that she was sent back to the door to ask what his business was, was told about the sword, returned to Giles and was ordered to show the visitor up to the long gallery.”
“And, after that, Giles’ previous story breaks down, I venture to think.”
“How right you are! He confesses that he did go up to the long gallery, and that he not only spoke very cordially to the visitor, but that he invited him to take two swords so that, in the stage production, they matched.”
“What a pity that they did not match, then! If Laura says that one sword was a theatrical property and the other a genuine weapon, I am prepared to back her judgment.”
“Yes, so am I, but, apart from that, the Inspector got on to Page and Ford—Co
llis and Carson, you know—and they’re ready to take their oath that there was only the one real sword among their stage properties, and that they tossed up to see which one should wear it.”
“What had Giles to say to that?”
“He bluffed it out. He stuck to it that two swords were borrowed. He also declared that Luton did not give his name to the girl who answered the door, and the girl confirms that. Both say, most emphatically, that they had never set eyes on Luton before—and that, of course, may be the truth, in the case of the girl.”
“I think very likely it is. I wonder just how great a villain young Mr Faudrey is?”
“By which you mean that he may be blackmailing his uncle? Oh, I’m perfectly certain he is doing that, and that’s why it’s paying him not to give the old man away. My chaps did their utmost to break him down, but he fended them off. He stressed that he had nothing to do with the murders, insisted that they had another go at the members of the drama club, and told them that the criminal had hanged himself and that was that. They couldn’t shake him.”
“What had the Colonel to say?”
“He blustered, as you’d expect. Said that Giles had been sowing wild oats since he was sixteen and had been expelled from two schools for so doing. The inspector asked for the names of the schools, and the Colonel rather weakly said he couldn’t remember them. Then he was asked for the name of Giles’ college, and that he gave readily enough. I can find out whether Giles was sent down and, if so, for what, but it won’t really help us. Then my chaps sounded the Colonel about his movements on the Friday when Spey was killed. He said he had no idea what he’d done or where he’d been, and damned them to perdition for daring to question him. He asked them what the hell they thought they were playing at, and threatened to report them—he didn’t say to whom. Upon this, they apologised for troubling him and told him that, as it was now established (which it isn’t, of course) that Gordon did not commit suicide, but was murdered, the police had no option but to turn the borough upside down and question everybody who might have the slightest bit of information to give.”
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