The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Not yet. Something unexpected has come up. For one thing, Miss Clare thinks her friend may still be in the house.” He put a hand under my arm. “Come and talk to my mother.”

  The elder Mrs. Hunter was where I had seen her last, sitting on the little French sofa in the drawing-room. Seeing her there, near to the empty glass case at which she had mistakenly pointed with her stick that afternoon during the tour while she told us the story of the silver goblet that had not been in the case but on the table, I remembered that when I had gone back to that room to look for Vivian, the goblet had been neither on the table nor in the case. The blind woman could not have known this, but her daughter-in-law, to whom the empty case should have meant more than it had to me, had not appeared to notice anything amiss. With more curiosity than I had yet felt about her, I studied her as David Hunter explained to his mother that I thought it possible that my friend Vivian Alford, who was a girl his mother would remember, whom he happened to have married, had seen the cup stolen by the lame foreigner, had been attacked by him and never left the house. It seemed to me that Alison Hunter was in the grip of some intense and rather terrible emotion and, as soon as David stopped speaking, she exclaimed in a high, incredulous voice that it was all nonsense.

  Old Mrs. Hunter took no notice of her. She sat there, looking withdrawn and thoughtful, with a frown on her face. Then she said abruptly, “Go and look – look quickly. Look in the cellar.”

  “But, mother – !” the girl said shrilly.

  “She was with us all at the bottom of the stairs, wasn’t she?” Mrs. Hunter said. “I remember her there. I don’t think she said anything, but she was wearing scent – some quite faint, pleasant scent. But you say she didn’t go up the stairs with the rest of the party and I’m sure she didn’t come in here with me. I heard someone in here, but I know it wasn’t the girl. So if there’s reason to suppose she didn’t leave the house by the door at the end of the passage, but vanished between the bottom of the stairs and this room, it must have been into the cellar.”

  “Mrs. Hunter, was it your son you told your daughter-in-law and me that you heard in here when we were looking for Vivian earlier today?” I asked. “Was this where you thought you heard him?”

  She turned her head toward me, seeming to look straight at me with her mild empty gaze.

  “My son went to London two days ago,” she answered. “He won’t be back till late this evening.”

  “It was that son you thought you heard, was it?” I said.

  She hesitated for just a moment, then said. “Yes. But I was mistaken.”

  Her other son exclaimed something under his breath, turned to the door that led into the passage and strode out.

  I followed him. I had not noticed the cellar door before because it was in the shadow cast by the staircase. The door was low and wide, with massive hinges and a heavy iron latch. Grasping the latch, David Hunter pushed at the door. It did not open.

  He turned on Alison, who had followed me, and demanded, “Where’s the key? Isn’t it usually in the lock?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  He grasped the latch again and tried to shake it.

  “It’d take a battering-ram to bust through this door,” he said.

  “Perhaps there’s another key somewhere that’ll fit,” she suggested.

  He thought for a moment, nodded as if he had thought of a possibility, told us to wait and vanished up the spiral stairs.

  I didn’t like standing there alone with Alison Hunter. It seemed to me that the violent feeling which, in the room behind us, I had sensed behind the almost icy calm of her face, was at least partly a furious resentment of my presence. And partly it was fear. Nothing else communicates itself so easily to another person.

  I felt quite sure by now that her husband had been in the house that day and that he and his wife had conspired to steal the silver goblet, afterwards casting suspicion on some member of the party who had been shown around the house. A lame foreigner had been the most perfect of red herrings.

  I’m sure Alison Hunter saw all my suspicions in my face, and I think that if Mrs. Hunter hadn’t called to me from the drawing-room, some explosion would have happened in another moment. As it was, I was glad to turn back quickly into the room.

  “Tell me, Miss Clare, this foreigner – what did he look like?” the old woman asked me.

  “He was tallish and rather thin and he wore spectacles and had a scar down the side of his face,” I said.

  “And he limped,” she said. “I remember his uneven walk and the sound of his foot dragging on the ground. And his voice – I remember a very guttural accent, though he said very little.”

  “Yes, his accent was strong, but he knew quite a lot of English,” I said. “He got into quite a complicated argument with your daughter-in-law upstairs.”

  “Did it occur to you at any time during the afternoon that he and your friend might have been acquainted?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “She came here, I suppose, this friend of yours, to try to pick up where she left off with David.”

  “I suppose so,” I said. “She didn’t confide in me.”

  I was going to add that whatever Vivian’s reason for coming might have been, I honestly didn’t believe she was capable of stealing, when I heard Alison Hunter call out something in the passage.

  I thought that she was calling me. Later I realized it had been a cry of warning and not to me. But I went out to her at once and, when I reached the passage, I saw that the door at the end of it that led out to the garden was open and that a man was standing in the doorway. It was the lame foreigner.

  He seemed as startled as I was. For an instant we both stood motionless, staring at each other, then I opened my mouth to shout for David Hunter. As I did so, a hand came over my mouth from behind, the man came swiftly forward, took a key from his pocket and unlocked the cellar door. I was given a violent push from behind and, as I went reeling down the stairs into darkness, one of my ankles crumpling under me with appalling pain, he shut the door on me. The image of his face and the echo of his voice, whispering after me, “Scream down there – scream all you want to!” filled with hideousness and terror all the consciousness that was left to me. But the face and the voice together made no sense, for though the face was the face of the lame foreigner, the voice was the voice of David Hunter.

  It was the narrowness of the stairs that saved me. As I flung out my arms, they both met the curved stone walls and so, although I found afterwards that one shoulder had been badly bruised, they broke my fall. I dropped in a heap only a few stairs down, instead of crashing all the way to the bottom.

  I began to recover a little when I realized that, apart from my ankle, nothing about me seemed much hurt and that I could move. Remaining sitting, I began to work my way from step to step toward the light below. And, when I reached the bottom of the stairs. I saw that this light came from a small grating that seemed a long way away down a shadowy, vaulted passage. I began to crawl towards it.

  Then I let out another scream. I heard it ringing in the cellar, though I have no memory of how it was torn out of me. What I remember is the feeling of the cold hand that my own hand had touched on the cellar floor.

  It was Vivian’s hand. Even before my eyes, growing accustomed to the murky light, had begun to make out the shape of her body lying there on the stone paving of the cellar and the pale blur of her face and the faint shine of her staring eyes, I knew by the feel of a small ring that she always wore that the hand was Vivian’s.

  I snatched my own hand away almost as soon as I touched her and, as I did so, touched something that was lying beside her. It was a stout stick. As my fingers closed on it convulsively, as if it were something with which I could defend myself against the danger that was coming, I remembered the stick the blind woman couldn’t find.

  As I did so, the door above me opened. A shaft of light shone down the staircase.

  David Hunter’s
voice said urgently, “I tell you I heard something. And she’s got to be somewhere. She wouldn’t just rush off without explanations – not that girl.”

  I heard his quick tread on the stairs and a moment later he was standing over me.

  I could not have stood up or even moved. I was shaking all over and I’m not sure what he said to me. I don’t think I really heard it. But I remember seeing that his face was not the face of the lame foreigner or anything like it, and my thinking that it would be began to feel like part of a nightmare out of which I was beginning to wake. A good deal of me was still lost in it, but I was able to recognize the blank horror in David’s eyes when he looked at Vivian and to hear the gentleness in his voice when he spoke to me.

  “The foreigner – the lame foreigner – I saw him,” I said. “And Alison pushed me.”

  He thought I was just babbling and murmured something reassuring to quiet me, then slid an arm around me and began to help me to my feet. But it had to end with his picking me up and carrying me up the stairs, taking me to the drawing-room and setting me down on the yellow sofa.

  While David was taking off my shoes, sliding a cushion under my foot and feeling the ankle with gentle fingers, I started to speak to Alison Hunter.

  “You pushed me,” I said. “You stopped me calling out when I saw that man and you pushed me down the cellar steps, just as he pushed Vivian this afternoon when he thought she saw him take the cup you’d carefully left out on the table for him. She’d just had a shock, so she was standing there at the bottom of the stairs, but she can’t really have seen him take the cup or she’d have screamed when he grabbed Mrs. Hunter’s stick and came toward her. So she was killed for nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “You’re mad,” Alison Hunter said in a high, hoarse voice. “I didn’t push you. I wasn’t anywhere near you. It was that foreigner who killed your friend and stole the cup. I don’t know anything about him.”

  “Stop!” the old woman said fiercely, striking the top of a flimsy little table with one of her great fists. “There was no foreigner. There was only my son pretending to limp and using a foreign accent so I wouldn’t recognize him. But when he ran down the passage to attack the girl, he forgot to limp and I knew him.”

  She walked slowly towards Alison and the girl shrank away.

  “You’ve stolen a good many things between you, haven’t you?” the old woman went on. “And you knew David and I had become suspicious, and that explains why we had to have this farce of the foreigner, with a false scar on his face and spectacles. It was so that several innocent people, like Miss Clare and the couple who were here with her this afternoon, should send the police off after an imaginary man and incidentally convince me that you’d had nothing to do with the theft. And you almost succeeded.”

  “All right,” another voice said. “Let’s not argue any more. Let’s finish things.”

  It was David Hunter’s voice. Or rather, it was so like his that I almost had to tell myself aloud that really he was still beside me, while the man who had spoken was in the doorway with a gun in his hand.

  “Mother,” the man said, but still looking at me and not at the old woman, “you can have your cup back. You can put it back in its glass case and go on showing it to people and telling them about it and charging them a couple of bob a time while you live on your old-age pension. And you can forget everything that’s happened today – which, of course, includes forgetting this girl and her friend and all about what happened to them. D’you understand? That’s all you and David have to do – forget everything!”

  He raised the gun as he spoke.

  David sprang to his feet. The gun moved so that it pointed at him instead of at me.

  “Don’t, David,” his brother said. “You don’t think I like the idea of being hanged or even imprisoned for life, do you? I may not like the idea of shooting you, either, but I mind it much less than the other. For one thing, this is all your fault. If you’d agreed to selling up when I suggested it, none of this need have happened. So don’t come any nearer. Alison, get that girl and – ”

  But what he was going to tell his wife to do with me I don’t know, because at that point old Mrs. Hunter started toward him.

  “Give it to me,” she said sternly. “Give it to me at once.”

  Both David and I shouted at her to stand still, that her son had a gun. She walked straight on, holding out one hand.

  “Give it to me,” she repeated.

  The man in the doorway seemed suddenly petrified, watching her come. Then the gun pointed straight at her.

  David lunged forward. He meant, I think, simply to throw himself against his mother and knock her to one side, but before he reached her his brother gave a curious sob and, as if he were powerless to do anything else, tamely laid the gun in the blind woman’s outstretched hand. Then he turned and ran. His wife cried his name wildly and ran after him. A moment later a car roared away.

  Mrs. Hunter seemed to be staring down at what she held in her hand. To this day I don’t know for certain whether, when she went toward her son, holding out her hand, it was the gun or the silver goblet that she had been demanding. After a moment she laid the gun down on a table near her and, without a word, walked slowly away.

  None of us knew until much later that night that the car we had heard drive away crashed at a sharp bend in the winding road only a few minutes after leaving the house. I’ve always believed that it was deliberate, though David disagrees. He says that from childhood his brother had believed he could get away with anything. But I feel sure that at least Alison knew there was no hope of getting away with what they’d done.

  But as David turned to me after his mother had gone, neither of us spoke of his brother or Alison. Both of us knew that there was a great deal to be done, the police to be called and a doctor, too, and that when they came there would be a story to be told and questions to be answered. We had no time yet for one another, and I don’t think we even thought much about one another that night. He crossed the room to me and his hand rested briefly on mine, then he said unsteadily, “I’m – I’m going down to Vivian for a moment. You’ll be all right?”

  I nodded and listened to his steps as he went along the hall and down to the cellar.

  SEQUENCE OF EVENTS

  When the Evening Herald commissioned Peter Hassall to write a series of articles on forgotten murders they did not, of course, expect him to solve the problems which, over the years, had baffled the police. What they wanted from him was simply an account of the after-effects that the murders had had on the communities in which they had occurred. Had they truly been forgotten, or did people still talk about them? If they did, what were they saying now? Had they theories of their own about the truth of what had happened five, or ten, or even twenty years ago? Hassall was left to choose his murders for himself and without hesitation he decided that the first one that he would investigate was that of Dr. Joseph Armiger, in the village of Newton St. Denis.

  Hassall’s reason for this was that Dr. Armiger was the only victim of a murder whom he himself had ever met. It had been about seven years ago at a small party in Bournemouth, given by friends of Hassall’s with whom he had been spending the weekend. Dr. Armiger at that time had been Director of a research station near Bournemouth under the Agricultural Research Council, but he had been just about to retire and that evening he had talked a great deal about his retirement. He had talked with a refreshing lack of the fears and regrets that beset so many people at that stage of their lives. He had been a short man, thin, very upright, brisk and abrupt in his movements, with a red, sharp-featured face, thick grey hair and an amiable, animated manner. Hassall’s friends told him that the amiability lasted just as long as no one opposed him, but that when they did his temper could flare up suddenly and alarmingly. He had already bought a cottage in Newton St. Denis, he told Hassall, where he was going to live with his sister and where he intended to create the most beautiful of gardens. He had talked on and on about
his plans for the garden. Hassall had not paid much attention at the time, for there had been a very beautiful young woman in the room with whom he would far sooner have been talking. But when, about two years later, he read of Armiger’s murder, he had recalled the evening in Bournemouth and wondered how far that wonderful garden had progressed. Had Armiger yet achieved anything, or were two years too little for results to appear? Had the brief time of his retirement been wholly wasted?

  His death had seemed a pure waste, a brutal and senseless tragedy. He had been on his way, late one summer evening, to post some letters in a letter-box near his cottage, when he had been set upon by some person or persons unknown and battered to death. The police had tried to obtain information about a gang of boys on motor-cycles who had been seen that evening driving wildly through the village, but although they had been traced it had been impossible to prove the guilt of any of them. Whatever suspicions of them the police had entertained, in the end they had had to abandon the inquiry. No other suspects had been found and the affair had dropped out of the newspapers.

  Five years after the murder, driving down to Newton St. Denis, Peter Hassall did not give a thought to the possibility that he might discover the murderer. He assumed that the boys on the motor-cycles were responsible. But he was curious what impact that self-assertive little man had made on the village. Had he still been too much of a newcomer there for the slow village mind to have become fully aware of his existence, or had he already managed to impose himself on the community as he had certainly intended? Did his sister still live in the cottage? What did she believe about his murder?

  That was something that Hassall never discovered, for Miss Armiger had been dead for a year and was buried in the village churchyard. She seemed to be only vaguely remembered, but a neighbour thought that she had heard that the old lady had died of a stroke. The cottage had been sold since her death and the people now living in it, a young couple with several young children, knew nothing about the Armigers. The garden that was to have been so beautiful was laid out to vegetables, struggling up not too successfully through nettles and bindweed. The vicar and the doctor were both new since the Armigers’ time. The landlord of the Coach and Horses said he remembered Mr. Armiger, that he used to drop in from time to time for a pint and that his death had been a bad business, the sort of thing to get the neighbourhood a bad name and that the police hadn’t cracked down nearly hard enough on them hooligans. One or two other people in the village whom Hassall questioned said more or less the same thing, but on the whole it was disappointing. There was no drama for him to write up, nothing personal about the victim to develop into a story. His own memory of Armiger seemed to be rather more vivid than that of the people among whom he had lived for two years. Regretfully Hassall began to think it best to leave Joseph Armiger in the oblivion in which he rested and go on to investigate the next murder on his list.