Root of All Evil

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Why?”

  “Well, I thought of going home,” he said, “but then I thought that leaving Mrs. Cavell to cope with everything by herself was hardly fair on her, though to tell you the truth, I’m not sure she wouldn’t just as soon be left alone. You want to leave, do you?”

  “Yes, but then—well, you think one ought to stay, do you?”

  “Oh, I’m only speaking for myself. In your case, I suppose it depends a good deal on how Quentin feels about it.”

  “It doesn’t really,” she said, “because, you see, we aren’t engaged any more. We decided to break it off this afternoon.”

  “I’m sorry,” Andrew said.

  She gave him a withering look. “Why should you be sorry? D’you know, people always say they’re sorry if someone says they’ve broken off an engagement or decided to have a divorce? Yet it may in fact be the best thing that could have happened to them. Why can’t they ever say they’re delighted to hear it?”

  “I’m afraid it’s just automatic to indicate one’s sorry a person hasn’t been as happy as one assumed. You haven’t been happy?”

  “We were very happy as lovers,” she said. “But getting married—now that’s a different thing.”

  “I thought it wasn’t so very different nowadays,” he said.

  “Oh, it is. It’s committing oneself, you see. Or that’s how I look at it. But then if you find the person isn’t quite what you thought they were, it’s terribly upsetting.”

  He looked at her curiously. Her slightly crooked profile was set as she strode along beside him.

  Mostly because he realized she needed to talk, he said, “What’s wrong with Quentin?”

  “His family, for one thing.”

  “But you don’t marry a family.”

  “You do, in a way. You marry his relationship with his family. That’s part of him. And I’ve never seen it before, but he seems quite a different person when he’s with them. He seems to think about money almost as much as they do, and I don’t really quarrel with that because of course everybody does it, but it’s brought out a sort of instability in him that scares me. He’s already planning what he’s going to do with Felicity’s legacy when he gets it. He’s going to give up his job and go and live somewhere abroad and start writing again. And that isn’t what I bargained for.”

  “You don’t want to live abroad?”

  “It isn’t exactly that. It’s just that I’ve realized I haven’t got enough faith in him to do it. I mean, I don’t think he’s got the talent to justify it. He’ll get through the money without achieving anything and then he’ll be back where he was, needing a job but a bit older and out of touch with things...Oh God, I oughtn’t to be talking like this, it’s horribly disloyal, because I’m really very fond of him, you know. But I did want to ask you if you thought it would look very bad if I walked out on him now. Really it would, wouldn’t it? I’d better not do it.”

  “You think it might look as if you suspected him of being involved in these murders?” Andrew asked.

  She took a moment to reply. “You understand, it’s not that I do suspect him.”

  “No, of course not.”

  She gave him a faintly scowling look. “No, it isn’t! It’s just a question of how it would look. That’s really why you’re staying on, isn’t it? It isn’t really because of Agnes, it’s because of how it would look if you hurried away.”

  “You may be right,” Andrew admitted. “Incidentally, do Quentin’s family know you’ve broken off the engagement?”

  “Not yet. And that makes things a bit embarrassing. Not that it matters much, but naturally I’d like to go home. We haven’t exactly quarrelled—we’ve been appallingly good mannered about it and ever so nice and understanding to each other—but it all feels a bit unreal. But please do tell me, do you think I ought to stay or not?”

  “My dear girl, how can I possibly tell you?” Andrew began to feel impatient. Throughout his working life, when he had often been asked for advice by the young, the forlorn and the bewildered, he had never felt happy about giving it. “We hardly know each other.”

  “That’s why I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I thought you’d be able to take an objective view of things.”

  “Well, I can’t. And whatever I say, you know as well as I do that you’ll end up working the problem out for yourself.”

  Instead of the scowl, he was given a sudden smile. “Of course I shall. All the same, thank you very much for letting me talk. I expect it was an awful bore for you. I’m really very grateful. Talking to the police just made me feel explosive because they gave me such suspicious looks, or that’s how I felt about them anyway. But now I’ve really calmed down quite nicely. And this is where our roads part.”

  They had come to a crossroads, the road ahead being the one that would take Andrew into Old Farm Road and the turning to the right being the one, he supposed, that led towards the home of Derek Silvester’s family, for it was in that direction that Patricia took a step or two. But then she paused.

  “If I want to come and talk to you again, may I do it?” she asked.

  “Any time, as long as you aren’t hoping for words of wisdom,” he said.

  She gave him another smile and started off down the road.

  Andrew went on to Ramsden House. He had to ring the bell to be admitted and while he waited after he had heard it peal inside, he wondered if it would be audible upstairs if Agnes happened still to be in her room, and what he should do if he could not get in. However, she opened the door almost immediately. She looked subdued but calm, quite unlike the desperate woman who had cried out at him so wildly and then gone running up to her room to hide herself. She did not speak or go into the drawing-room with him, but disappeared into the kitchen from which a savoury odour of something good reached him. So she had sought stability, he thought, by returning to her normal routine of cooking. An excellent thing. He felt more than ready for a good meal.

  Before it, she brought sherry into the drawing-room.

  In a low voice she said, “I’m very sorry about the way I behaved this afternoon. Please forget everything I said.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It was natural enough.”

  “It won’t happen again. Are you staying here, Professor Basnett, or going home?”

  “Which would you prefer?” he asked.

  “Whichever you prefer yourself, if the police agree to it.”

  “Suppose we leave it till tomorrow and see whether or not they’ve anything to tell us.”

  “Very well.”

  She poured out sherry for them both and, sitting down, sipped hers, then closed her eyes. Nervous exhaustion had added a look of ten years to her age. Andrew did not try to talk to her and during the meal that soon followed of a very good soup, grilled chops and fruit salad and cream, they were both nearly silent.

  Soon after it he went up to his room and as he had done the evening before got into bed, switched on the table-lamp beside it and resumed reading the Agatha Christie that he had started. He read for a time until he realized that he was turning the pages without having taken in a word of what was on them. To his extreme irritation, a verse began to hammer in his brain and would not be stilled.

  “When all the world is young, lad,

  And all the trees are green;

  And every goose a swan, lad,

  And every lass a queen;

  Then hey for boot and horse, lad,

  And round the world away...”

  When he had been only eleven years old, at the time when the lines had been indelibly imprinted on his memory, he had wondered how you got round the world on a horse. Now that point seemed unimportant and it merely annoyed him that he could not stop the verse repeating itself on and on in his tired mind. The events of the day had kept him free of it, but now it was back, pounding away pointlessly in his brain.

  Yet perhaps not altogether pointlessly, for once or twice during the evening he had caught himself thinking
that if he was really to inherit twenty thousand pounds from Felicity, he might spend at least some of it on a second trip round the world. He had enjoyed his last trip immensely, even though he had often felt desolated by the fact that Nell was not there to enjoy it with him. He had not grown used to loneliness yet. But the truth was that if he simply invested the money in government securities, as his habit was, it would bring in only a relatively small addition to his income, whereas spending it on something that would give him real pleasure, even if he was not young and his world not particularly green any more, would surely be of positive value.

  Finding himself thinking of this, however, disgusted him. Even if he had never been fond of Felicity, he owed her more than that. So soon after her horrifying death, how could he do it? Sadly he supposed that money meant as much to him as to the people to whom he would have liked to feel superior.

  Next morning he got up, as he usually did, at seven o’clock, went downstairs without concealment and helped himself to some cheese that he found in the refrigerator. Returning to his room, he had a bath, shaved and got dressed. He and Agnes breakfasted together at eight o’clock. She was still in the quiet mood of the evening before, offering him the Sunday paper and plainly hoping that he would occupy himself with it.

  Because it was Sunday, Mrs. Godfrey was not to be expected, but when Andrew suggested that he should lay the fire in the drawing-room, Agnes rejected the offer and proceeded to do it herself. He felt that the best thing that he could do for her was to keep out of her way as much as possible. After all, it might be best if he did not stay on, but returned to London later in the day if the police had no objection to his doing so. He could find out about that presently. The day was fine and calm and a walk down to the police station would not be disagreeable.

  It turned out to be unnecessary. About ten o’clock Chief Superintendent Theobald and a young sergeant appeared. Agnes showed them into the drawing-room where Andrew was sitting with the various sections of the Sunday paper scattered around him beside the fire which was now burning brightly. Theobald remarked that it was nice to see a fire nowadays, that it was a nice morning and that he hoped Mrs. Cavell and Professor Basnett had slept well. Andrew thought of certain African tribes who greet each other on meeting with fiery but actually harmless dances to show that they come in peace, and he wondered if Theobald’s going through the equivalent British rituals indicated that he was not bringing trouble.

  When he went on to speak Andrew was not sure at first if it meant trouble or not.

  “I came to tell you that we’ve identified the man Laycock,” Theobald said, “and I think the chances are you’re lucky to be rid of him. We traced him easily by his fingerprints. He’s a man who came out of prison about four months ago, after doing five years for the armed robbery of a bank in Croydon. He’d been in trouble once or twice before for relatively minor offences and done short spells in prison and he had a new name for each occasion. He’s called himself Spencer and Parker and Prosser. Which of them, if any, is his real name, we don’t know. But what’s strange is that the one thing he’s never done before is a job of work of the kind he’s been doing here. It would almost look as if he’d been trying to go straight, if he and Mrs. Silvester’s diamonds hadn’t disappeared together.”

  Agnes let out a long breath. Andrew realized that she had been holding it ever since Theobald had begun to speak of Laycock.

  “D’you know, I’ve sometimes wondered if his history mightn’t be something like that,” she said. “Of course I knew he wasn’t what he was trying to appear. But I liked him and if he was trying to go straight, I wanted to help him. But what about his reference? How did he get it? Who was the woman Felicity talked to?”

  “She’s vanished into thin air, if she ever existed,” Theobald said. “Mr. Little says she was a Lady Graveney and we traced her address from the telephone number he’d noted down. It’s a block of small furnished flats and the flat she had she took only for a month and she was joined there by a man. She’s been described to us by the caretaker as a middle-aged woman with black hair and he as a round-faced and boyish-looking man a good deal younger than she was. He may or may not have been her boyfriend, but it’s fairly certain he was Laycock, whoever she was. We thought she just might be Margot Weldon, but when we showed the caretaker her photograph he said it was nothing like her.”

  “But do I understand you suspect him only of the theft of the diamonds and not of either murder?” Agnes said.

  “We don’t suspect him of the murder of Margot Weldon,” Theobald said. “It isn’t only his girlfriend, Myra Bartlemy, who’s a quite respectable girl who works for a firm of travel agents in Braden, who’s given him an alibi. The two of them were seen going into a cinema together a bit before the time Margot Weldon was killed and then having supper in the Ring of Bells. And as Laycock’s got no car of his own, he’d have had no way of transporting her body to the common or running over it there. He might have borrowed Mrs. Silvester’s car without its being noticed by her—apparently he sometimes did that—but Myra Bartlemy swears that he was on foot that evening and we’ve found a witness who saw the two of them arrive at the Ring of Bells on foot, without having to park a car outside it. So it looks as if we still have to look elsewhere for Margot Weldon’s murderer.”

  “But if Laycock’s got a criminal past of the kind you’ve just told us about,” Andrew said, “he may have known someone quite unconnected with anyone else here who’d do the job for him while he was careful to set up an alibi.”

  “I thought you’d say that,” Theobald said. “Just what I thought myself at first. And of course it’s possible. If the person who did the murder and dumped the body then came on here to murder Mrs. Silvester, letting in that draught that you and she felt, it must have been someone who knew the ways of the house and Laycock could have told him about all that. But he did know you were here, Professor, as we’ve said before, which rather knocks that theory on the head.”

  “Yet you aren’t sure he didn’t kill her,” Agnes said.

  “That’s true,” he agreed.

  “Why?”

  “I’ve told Professor Basnett. Laycock heard Mrs. Silvester say she was going to change her will. He’d have realized what that would mean to all the other Silvesters, so he may have offered his services to one of them, or for all I know, to all of them, to make sure she hadn’t time to do it. He’d have asked a high price for doing it. The diamonds, probably, would have been only part of the loot. This may be completely wrong, of course, but at least it suggests a motive.”

  The door opened and Laycock walked in.

  “Police here?” he said, looking round the room with a smile. “And something tells me you may have been talking about me. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  Chapter Seven

  Nobody answered him. He stood in the doorway, looking cheerfully sure of himself. Yet, as the moments passed and nobody spoke, he began to look strained, as if an entrance that he had planned had not gone as he had intended.

  “Well,” he said to Theobald, his worn boy’s face growing sullen, “don’t you want to see me?”

  “Very much,” Theobald said, “but only if you’re prepared to answer a few questions.”

  “I don’t have to, you know,” Laycock said. “I don’t have to say a thing. And if you feel inclined to charge me with anything, I can call my solicitor.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Theobald answered drily.

  “If I answer your questions, it’s only because I want to be helpful.”

  “Is that why you came back?”

  “Why else should I have come?”

  “Yes, indeed, why?”

  “Go on, go on then. What d’you want to know?”

  Something about the young man had struck Andrew the moment that he had started to speak. It was that he had dropped the kind of refined cockney accent which apparently he had thought appropriate to the role of Felicity’s manservant and was talking with one which s
uggested a good education, probably a public school, perhaps Oxford or Cambridge.

  Andrew was aware that a great many of the young these days are virtually bilingual, that they can talk the cultured English which was the normal manner of speech of their parents and which they themselves had spoken as children, but that whenever they feel like it they can adopt the accent of their contemporaries who have been less expensively reared. They do it usually out of self-defence, so that the people whom they would like for friends should not think them pretentious, but occasionally the ability to speak two utterly different versions of their mother tongue might have less innocent uses.

  “I want to know why you went away on Friday,” Theobald said, “and now, of course, why you’ve come back.”

  “I think you’d better come in and sit down, Ted,” Agnes said. “You’ll find there’s a good deal to talk about.”

  He came forward and sat down, crossing one leg over the other.

  “Mind if I smoke?”

  No one answered, which he appeared to assume was permission to do so, for he brought cigarettes out of a pocket and lit one. Except that his self-assurance was perhaps a little overdone, he seemed perfectly at ease. He smiled at Agnes.

  “Sorry about the way I walked out on you,” he said. “You may have found it inconvenient.”

  “Don’t talk like that!” she said with sudden anger. “You know the situation’s terribly serious. It’s not the time to be flippant.”

  “Sorry,” he said again. “Yes. And of course that’s why I came back, because it’s so serious.” He turned to Theobald. “Why did I go? That’s the first thing you want to know, isn’t it?”

  Theobald nodded.

  “Well, when you’ve a record like mine, which I suppose you know all about by now,” Laycock said, “you don’t like it much when you find the police under your feet all the time. From the time the Weldon woman’s body was found and they started coming round here, I began to think of clearing out. But I might not have done it if it hadn’t been for what happened on Friday afternoon.”