The Murder of My Aunt

by Richard Hull

  2

  Really the credit for the fact that I am still alive must go mainly to dear Dr Spencer. I say ‘mainly’ not ‘entirely’ only because it was pure good luck that I was not killed straight away when Edward cut through the brakes of my car. That was a very well-engineered accident; indeed, Edward always did have an excellent mechanical knowledge, which I always wanted him to put to some useful purpose, but in other respects it was not so clever. You see, Edward fondly thought he had left no traces of any kind, and in point of fact there were a great many.

  To begin with, as he himself knew, it was essential there should be no suspicion, simply because he was certain to be a bad witness. But, in fact, he attracted attention to himself straight away by the oddness of his manner at the time. His whole appearance was funny; so funny that Dr Spencer, who is a singularly shrewd man beneath a benign appearance, thought it peculiar even when his attention was almost wholly occupied in looking after me. Edward was so anxious on the one hand to speak of his great anxiety, and on the other to do absolutely nothing to help, his face was so very white and strained, his movements so jerky, and his conviction that I was dead so very fixed, that in all, it seemed curious.

  Accordingly, after he had made me as comfortable as he could, the Doctor began to make a few inquiries. To begin with, he rather wanted to know what had happened and how it had happened, and whether anyone had seen it. On the way down from my bedroom he found my beloved old Cook, the most loyal person in the world, in a terrible state of grief, and set to work to calm her nerves.

  ‘Now, Cook,’ ‘he said, ‘we must all do what we can to help Miss Powell, and so we must all keep our heads and be calm and helpful. I think she’ll pull through probably’ (and I understand at that the dear old thing positively sobbed), ‘so I want you to be quite cheerful and normal. Now just help me a bit. Did any of you see the accident?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir; I was in the kitchen, and the first thing I heard was a crash; at least, I thought I did, and I went to the front hall and I couldn’t see anything, so after a bit I went back to the kitchen, but I couldn’t settle down to anything somehow. You know, sir, how you do get a feeling when anything’s wrong, don’t you? And then some minutes later I heard Master Edward come in and go to the telephone, and I’m afraid I listened, sir.’

  The doctor smiled gently at that. As a matter of fact it was fairly well known that Cook generally did listen!

  ‘Well, never mind that, Cook. But do you happen to know if Mr Edward saw anything?’

  ‘I really couldn’t say, sir, but he might, because his little dog seems to have been the cause of the disaster, sir (the little dog’s killed, sir), and Master Edward said then that her car was at the bottom of the dingle, but he thought she’d been thrown out, and so she had been, poor lady.’

  ‘It’s as well she was, Cook; she’d have had a poor chance in the car. I suppose the crash you heard was only just before Mr Edward came back?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir, at least five minutes before – possibly ten.’

  ‘I see. Then Mr Edward must have investigated a bit before he telephoned to me. Stupid of him. He ought to have got me at once.’

  Cook looked at him rather hard at that. ‘It’s my belief,’ she snapped, ‘that he was more concerned about that dog.

  ‘He’d wrapped him up carefully in a duster and put him on a table, and a shocking mess it’ll be in too.’

  Dr Spencer closed the conversation and gave her something to do by commiserating with her on the work she would have in cleaning up. He had suddenly remembered that Edward had shown most emotion when he had said I was not dead! His agonized ‘Oh, my God!’ had sounded really genuine then. Just as he reached the foot of the stairs, Cook called him back.

  ‘But I never really answered your question just now, sir, about seeing the accident. I’ve just been giving Master Edward a nice cup of tea, him being so upset, and I said to him, “And you seeing it all,” and he said, “No, not quite, Cook,” but I don’t quite know what he meant by that.’

  With that in his mind Dr Spencer went down to talk to Edward, and that conversation has been reasonably faithfully recorded in Edward’s diary. But there were several points which emerged from it which Edward certainly did not realize although, to do him justice, he did think of some of them. Dr Spencer, a most methodical man, gave me afterwards the notes he put down at the time for investigation later.

  1. E. told Cook he didn’t quite see the accident. He told me he saw the car going over the edge and then it went out of sight. Note. Look at spot and see if from inside meadow you could see car go over edge and if it would go out of sight.

  2. E. says he saw car crash into bottom of dingle. Note. Can you see and how quickly could he get across fence. Any signs of break through?

  3. E. thought he saw aunt in bush. What would he have seen?

  4. What was E. doing in that field? Not his shortest way home. There never were any mushrooms in it.

  5. Look at apple and damson crop.

  6. Why this long pause?

  You will see that within an hour or two Dr Spencer had put his finger on several weak points in the story, and this was the man whom Edward presumed to consider a fool!

  Well, naturally Dr Spencer didn’t leave it at that. He tells me he made a thorough examination of the ground straight away. So far as the apples and damsons were concerned, Edward was quite right. So he certainly had been past the orchard recently, and, moreover, past it, not in it, because while there were no damsons on the trees you could see from the meadow there were some on a tree right inside the orchard, which was not visible from the outside. But there was absolutely nothing that Dr Spencer could see which Edward could possibly, for a second, have mistaken for a mushroom. However, a piece of paper might have blown away, or there might have been the sun glistening on a leaf then, whereas by the time the doctor had finished the shadow of Yr Allt was beginning to creep across the grass.

  Now, as to what he would have seen, Edward had been pretty careful. Standing by the fence he could see the car start to go over, and then it would disappear. But in that case, why hadn’t I seen him? And subsequently when Dr Spencer asked me, I had no recollection of seeing Edward. I thought it over afterwards with great care, and I was almost certain I hadn’t. Of course the concussion might have made me forget, and at the time we put it down to that, but we were never quite happy about the point, and as we now know we were on the right track, for I should have seen Edward if he hadn’t been crouching down.

  The next point was how he got over the fence quickly enough to see the car crash at the bottom of the dingle. This had quite an easy explanation, Dr Spencer found. There was a convenient bit of timber, put in clearly to mend the fence and stop Williams’ cattle from straying, which in course of time had slipped over sideways and made almost a stile. The only thing was, it was almost too convenient!

  There was still the long pause to account for. The crash Cook heard must have been when the car either hit a tree or reached the bottom, probably the latter, but in any case, within a few seconds of it Edward would, by his own account, have been standing in the road. It would not have taken him two minutes to have reached the telephone. Even allowing for examining and picking up his Pekingese, well under four would be ample, and really fond though he was of the dog, he oughtn’t to have spent long looking after him when he knew his aunt was at least hurt, and every minute might be vital. Yet it was five or ten minutes before he actually telephoned, according to Cook. It seemed curious to Dr Spencer. He may have seemed ‘an inquisitive old fool’ to Edward, but they were pretty pertinent questions.

  The next thing he did was to check up about the time. It was all very well for Cook to say, ‘at least five, possibly ten minutes’, but she might be wrong, but curiously enough it was possible to check it up much more accurately than that.

  In the first place Edward had commented on the speed at which my old friend had arrived (by the way, what a dangerous drive that must have been!)
and that had fixed in his mind the fact that he had been rung up by Edward at five minutes past four. At least, that was the time he had put down the receiver. Say three or four minutes past when Edward had rung up. Now he imagined, when he was talking to Edward, that the accident was only three or four minutes before – that, at least, was the impression Edward was giving – and that was why he made the comment that I should have been late for my hospital meeting at four o’clock. Only a minute or two late, and there would have been nothing remarkable in that if I had not been rather notoriously a punctual person. In fact, I believe I am rather a nuisance about it.

  Of course Edward gave a very rational explanation of it. I had had a rush owing to the pea-sticks (and the absence of Edward to help me – an absence which generally occurred when there was a job of work to be done), but when Dr Spencer suggested to me that I was going to be late, I was so indignant that he maintains my temperature went up and I nearly had a relapse!

  As a result of that he went down to see Herbertson. Now Herbertson is a very typical Welshman. Not only in his appearance and manner (and he is, in fact, the typical dark, reserved, shortish kind of man with his knees slightly bent from a youth spent walking up hills) but in his character; once convince him that you are friendly to him and always going to act straight by him, and he will take an infinity of trouble for you; but get the wrong side of him once and you’re on the wrong side forever. And Edward was definitely and always (and on the whole deservedly) on the wrong side. No one had enjoyed the little comedy of the petrol more than Herbertson.

  But there was no doubt that when Dr Spencer asked to see the remains of my car which, with great difficulty, Herbertson had extracted from the dingle and taken to his garage, there was a great deal of relief on his face.

  ‘Yes, indeed, sir, I shall be glad, only too glad to show you what remains of Miss Powell’s car. I would like you, sir, to examine it all yourself most carefully before I am saying anything to you.’

  ‘By all means, Herbertson. But why? You aren’t suggesting I’m going to tell you something about cars you don’t know? As a matter of fact I only want to look at the clock.’

  ‘The clock?’ Herbertson bent over the battered and twisted bits of metal. ‘I expect she is in pieces. Were you thinking she would go again? She has stopped, you see, at seven minutes to four o’ clock, and I think she will never reach the hour by the look of her; but do you take her, sir, and show her to Miss Powell.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Herbertson, you’ve told me what I wanted to know; but what do you want me to look at?’

  Herbertson scratched his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I have, it seems, told you what you wanted without knowing what you wanted. Will you not do the same for me?’

  Dr Spencer laughed good-humouredly. ‘All right, Herbertson. But I did say “Look at the clock”. What part of this mess am I to look at?’

  Herbertson became grave. ‘The brakes, sir, the brakes.’

  Some few minutes later, Dr Spencer looked up equally seriously. ‘You’re right, Herbertson. No stones, or anything like that, could have caused cuts so new and so clean.’

  ‘No. And look you, we can guess here. I may be only the manager of the Wynneland Garage who isn’t good enough to sell some little beasts petrol, but I have got eyes, and I am not quite without brains.’

  ‘Yes, and please, Herbertson, with also the sense to keep your mouth shut. This isn’t proved, but if you’re right in your guess – and you know it’s only an absolute guess with no evidence behind it – it’s for Miss Powell to decide what to do.’

  And here Herbertson showed what a genuine man he was. He believed, I subsequently found out, that he was making himself liable as an accomplice after the fact and might end by going to prison for it; but he was quite prepared to leave the whole thing to Dr Spencer and me, simply because he trusted us implicitly.

  3

  After that my old friend felt that he ought to take me into his confidence, especially as he now considered that I was sufficiently recovered from the shock of the accident to stand this new strain.

  Naturally, at first I refused to believe it, I don’t think I had ever been under very great illusions as to the extent of Edward’s affection for me, but it was one thing to believe that he showed no gratitude and little affection, another to believe that he was prepared to murder me. Looking back on it I can see that perhaps I had, in a way, always kept too tight a curb on him; yet, in another, the curb had not been tight enough, since it had not been effective.

  Gradually, however, Dr Spencer persuaded me to examine the evidence, and, on the whole, pretty flimsy I thought it at first. There were really only two main points, the delay and the brakes. Now, as to the first of those I felt there might easily be some simple, natural explanation. As a matter of fact, I now know there was. Really, it was hard lines on Edward that his one and only decent natural feeling, the revulsion that made him physically sick, should have been one of the first causes of our suspecting him, but there it was. Things aren’t always quite fair.

  Then as to the brakes, it was all very well for Dr Spencer and Herbertson to be so confident, but it seemed to me they were jumping to conclusions and assuming what was only suspicion to be fact. After all, mightn’t something have started a cut in the brake cables and the final accident have made them snap so that the break would look like a clean cut? For instance, running through Abercwm is a canal which passes under the main road to the south, very frequently beneath a series of sharply humpbacked bridges, and these bridges are well known as a local peculiarity. Any car driver round here knows how careful you have to be over them because their steepness makes them practically blind. I have often noticed that cars with a low clearance practically touch the ground as they cross their arched tops. Well, then, mightn’t I have scraped the brakes against them? I only throw it out as a suggestion indicative of what was in my mind. I don’t want to lay down the law about it, because, unlike Edward, I’m no great mechanic and not quite sure offhand where the brakes are. All the same, as the sequel will show, I’m not quite ignorant of the geography of cars.

  But getting back from this red herring. I didn’t really feel certain about it, and nothing Dr Spencer could say about the minor points of the case would convince me. I think, really, that though in my heart I was gradually beginning to see that the doctor was right, it was simply a case of refusing to believe what I did not want to believe. And then there came a further little bit of evidence.

  I had made up my mind that the point where I had driven straight off the road was perhaps rather a dangerous one, and so I had some slight alterations made, a small bank which would, for all practical purposes, prevent any repetition of such a thing. One morning I was just seeing how the work was getting on, for though I am deeply fond of everyone in Llwll (which, by the way, is very beautiful and quite easy to pronounce), I know that, as workmen, they need constant supervision – well, while I was doing this, Llewellyn Williams came up to me and said he wanted to talk to me.

  It was a little ruefully that I walked a few yards down the road with him. I know what talks with him generally mean, and really I think I have helped him out of troubles very nearly enough times. But this time it was not another baby, nor a fine for being drunk on market-day, nor a new roof for his pigsty, nor even a loan for just a few days. It was Edward.

  Edward apparently had been breaking down his fence again. He led me to the piece of timber which Dr Spencer had already pointed out to me had made so convenient a stile for Edward to hurry over and see me and my car descending.

  ‘But, Mr Williams, I don’t understand. I can see that someone could get over the fence here easily – in fact it rather looks as if someone had – but the fence is perfectly good and sound.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Miss Powell, but look you, that is not the trouble. Here the fence is good, yes, but it is not good where this stake has been taken from. I would not like to trouble you, Miss Powell, but on the other side of the field where
this was, there is now a gap once more open which I had closed with it.’

  ‘How can you know it’s the same stake, Mr Williams?’

  ‘Look you, there was a gap. I filled it. Now there is once more a gap and no sign of the timber I put in. Here is the same, or, at least, very much the same timber, and tell me now why should there be any stake here? You see, there is no need. The fence is sound without.’ And, indeed, when he pulled away the offending piece he left behind a perfectly good fence.

  ‘I’m sorry about the gap, Mr Williams. If there’s any reason for thinking it’s anything to do with Mr Edward, I’ll have it filled up.’ Privately I could not help thinking this was just another of Williams’ devices for getting me to do what was really his job. I half expected to find some colossal yawning cavern which could never have been filled by so little wood as had been removed from the fence. Williams’ next words, however, showed that that was certainly the wrong tack.

  ‘As for the gap, Miss Powell, I would not be worrying you, she will be easily mended. But I would prove to you that you might not think I was talking at random, look you, that I have some reason for thinking this was Mr Edward.’

  ‘And that was?’

  And thereupon Williams described to me how he had encountered Edward’s Pekingese scurrying across the road away from an invisible but present Edward at this very spot, and how the dog had amazingly found a biscuit on the other side of the road, and of the attempts he had made to make friends with So-so and indirectly with Edward, and of his failure to make any progress with either of them. If it had ended there it would have been strange enough, but Williams went on to explain that he had seen Edward and his dog there on at least one other occasion, and he thought on two others, though he was not sure. Clearly then, this was at least a regular spot where So-so was taught a trick, and that was why he had bolted across the road so recklessly in front of me. That, too, accounted for Edward’s concern about our special crinkly biscuits. Poor Edward! And I thought it was all greed!