Hobby of Murder

by E. X. Ferrars

  ‘Well, so would I, yet she was expecting money from somewhere, you know. She wrote and told me about it just a day or two before her death. We’d money problems, you see. I’m a widow, living on an annuity I bought with what my poor husband left me, and it doesn’t come to much, and Eleanor, as you know, was a games teacher who gave up when she didn’t feel up to the job any more, and she was living on some life insurance she’d saved up and a bit of a legacy an aunt left her and finding things pretty tight. And we’d a mother to look after between us. She’s got an old-age pension, of course, but she’s always lived with me because, as a matter of fact, she and Eleanor never did get on, but Eleanor always paid her share to me to help look after her. Then suddenly she wrote me this letter last week telling me that our money worries were over, she’d had a bit of luck and I was going to get my share of it, and we could put our mother into an old people’s home, if I’d like to do that. And of course, it seemed too good to be true. I love my mother, but it gets more and more of a strain looking after her. And the fact is, I didn’t really believe it, because Eleanor was always one for exaggerating things, if not telling downright lies. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that now she’s dead, but it’s a fact. She lived in a sort of fantasy a lot of the time, and often did the most ridiculous things. So I thought probably she’d been gambling in some way and had a bit of a win and thought she was going to go on making lots more. But now there’s this queer business of the thousand pounds in her handbag that the police have been telling me about, and this frightful thing about her murder. So what am I to think about all that, will you tell me?’

  Her flow of speech stopped abruptly and she stared at Andrew as if the whole situation were somehow his fault.

  ‘Have the police told you what they make of it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, would you believe it, when I told them all this, which I thought it was my duty to do, that man, Inspector Somebody, asked me if I thought she could have been blackmailing anybody? Blackmailing! Honestly, that’s what he said.’

  ‘And does it seem to you quite impossible?’

  She took a few seconds to reply, then she gave a kind of snort, which might have been a sort of laugh.

  ‘All right, it wasn’t impossible, but what a thing to ask me! I mean, I’m her sister. It’s not likely I’d tell them a thing like that, is it?’

  ‘So you didn’t tell them?’

  ‘Well, actually, I did in a way. I just said nothing’s impossible in this world, is it? But I’ve been thinking about it and I know it’s a thing she could have done if something dropped right into her lap, as it were. I mean, if she found she knew something about someone who was doing something that wasn’t altogether legal or whatever, she just might have tried to cash in on it. When I was a young girl and took to going out with a boy and letting him go a bit farther with me than was thought proper in my family, and Eleanor found out about it, she threatened to tell my father, who’d just about have killed me for it, if I didn’t pay for her to have her hair done very week. She used to care about her appearance in those days, and boys, and a lot of things she grew out of later. But I remember I suddenly got fed up with paying up for those hair-dos and told her to do her worst. And she didn’t do anything. And that’s what I think may have happened here. She frightened somebody, and they paid up, but if they’d called her bluff she wouldn’t have done anything.’

  ‘Not even if whatever she found out was a good deal more serious than you going out with your boyfriend?’

  ‘As to that, I couldn’t say. Perhaps I’m wrong and her threat was serious. Anyway, someone thought it was, or the poor girl wouldn’t have been murdered, would she? Oh dear …’ Tears suddenly welled up in her pale blue eyes. ‘I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this. I don’t know what you’re thinking of me. I don’t often talk much. Mother’s deaf, you see, and doesn’t listen, and I’ve had to give up my work—I was manageress of a very nice little coffee-shop and met lots of stimulating people there—because mother couldn’t be left all by herself. Even to come down here today I had to get neighbours to promise to look after her. So that money Eleanor said she’d be sending sounded wonderful. I wanted so much to believe in it. But it’s lucky for me now that I always had my doubts, isn’t it?’

  ‘About those letters …’ Andrew said tentatively.

  ‘Those letters, of course, I was forgetting about them. They’re probably in the bureau.’ She drew a chair up to the bureau, all the drawers of which had been pulled open and their contents scattered on the floor. ‘If not, they may be in the cellar. There is a cellar, isn’t there? I don’t really know my way around yet. This is the first time I’ve been here.’

  ‘What brought you?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘Well, as I told you, I thought it was my duty to tell the police about that letter of Eleanor’s. A policeman had been to see me at home—I live in London—but I thought I ought to get in touch with the people here. So I came down this morning, and as I was in Rockford I asked them if there was anything against my coming out here to look round, and they said no, they’d done everything about fingerprints and so on. Apparently there are the fingerprints of lots of people, people who probably just dropped in to visit her now and then, so they aren’t much use. Perhaps there are some of yours among them. But I thought I’d have a look to see if there was anything here worth keeping, but apart from the damage that’s been done, there really isn’t anything. When the police say I can, I’ll just get some clearance people in. There’s nothing I’d want to keep. Now those letters …’

  While she had been talking, she was turning over what was left inside the open drawers, shutting them and after a time shaking her head.

  ‘No, they aren’t here. We’d better look in the cellar. She was great at hoarding things. They may be there.’ She stood up and looked uncertainly about her. ‘Where’s the door to it?’

  Andrew led her to the cellar door, switched on the staircase light and said, ‘Shall I go first?’

  ‘Yes, please do,’ she said. ‘I’ve never cared for cellars. I think I suffer a little from claustrophobia.’

  There was another light at the bottom of the staircase which lit up the devastation there. He heard her gasp as she saw the shattered negatives.

  ‘But who could have done this?’ she cried out. ‘A madman, surely.’

  ‘I think we may be dealing with someone who’s at least a little mad,’ Andrew said. ‘Now, let’s look for those letters.’

  It did not look like an easy thing to do. There were all kinds of boxes on shelves and on the floor, some wooden, some cardboard, some overturned with their contents spilled on the floor, some untouched. The letters might be in any of them. Some had contained photographs that looked as if Eleanor Clancy had taken them herself. Some held odd collections of china and glass, most of it cracked or chipped. One of the boxes held some old shoes and another some sweaters that looked as if moths had feasted on them. It seemed that Eleanor had been one of the people who are incapable of throwing anything away. After stirring about in the rubbish for a while, Andrew felt like giving up the search, when Mrs Jevons suddenly exclaimed, ‘Here they are!’

  She had found them in a small and battered looking briefcase on a shelf, and held it out to Andrew.

  He was disappointed to see how few letters there were, but taking the case from her, he sat down on the only chair in the cellar and took out one letter after another. The paper on which they were written was of the brownish colour of old age and the ink was faded and they were very short.

  After a moment he said, ‘I’m afraid you’re right. There’s nothing much interesting here. They’re just the sort of letters you said they were—’

  ‘Ssh!’ she interrupted in a fierce whisper and gripped his arm. ‘Listen!’

  Andrew heard it at once, the sound of a footstep just over their heads.

  He thrust the letters back into her hands and walked to the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Oh, take care!’ she whis
pered into his ear, standing just behind him, shaking with apprehension. ‘God knows who it is.’

  ‘Who’s there?’ Andrew called out.

  ‘It’s all right,’ the voice of Peter Dilly answered, ‘it’s only me.’

  ‘Peter!’ Andrew began to laugh, then started to mount the stairs. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’

  ‘Trying to find out what you’re up to,’ Peter answered.

  ‘Who is it, who is it?’ Mrs Jevons demanded, still in a frightened whisper.

  ‘It’s a nephew of mine and he’s quite harmless,’ Andrew answered. ‘Come and meet him.’

  She mounted the stairs behind him, to come face to face with Peter Dilly in the little hall of the cottage. In his neat, small way he had his usual appearance of considerable charm. His fair hair had tumbled forward over his forehead and he was just thrusting it back.

  ‘Peter Dilly, Mrs Jevons,’ Andrew said. ‘And I’ve no idea what he’s doing here. Mrs Jevons, Peter, is the sister of Miss Clancy, the poor woman who lived here and was murdered. Now, tell us why you’ve come.’

  ‘Didn’t you want me to find out certain things for you?’ Peter said.

  ‘But I thought you’d telephone. I waited in all the morning, expecting you to telephone.’

  ‘And I didn’t much like the sound of things, so I decided to come. In the light of there having been two murders here, some of the questions you asked sounded decidedly sinister, and I didn’t want you getting into trouble. And I didn’t know if you’d be able to take my call in private, or if there was a risk that you might be overheard.’

  ‘So you’ve found out what I wanted, have you?’

  Andrew was uneasily conscious of Mrs Jevons beside him, feeling more nervous of being overheard by her than he would have been if Ian had heard him at the telephone.

  ‘I think so,’ Peter answered. ‘You made only one mistake. You told me to go to Somerset House. But you don’t go there any more for the register of births, deaths and marriages. You go to St Catherine’s House, at the corner of Holborn and Kingsway.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Andrew said. ‘That comes of not keeping up with the times. It was always Somerset House in the past. How did you find I was in this cottage?’

  ‘Well, I went to the Davidges’ house first,’ Peter said, ‘but there seemed to be no one there, so I asked one of the kids on that playground across the way if they’d seen anyone come out of the house, and she said she’d seen an old man come out and go into the cottage she pointed out to me, but she hadn’t seen Mr Davidge or anyone else. So I thought it might be you, and when I saw the broken lock on the door, I thought I’d arrived on the scene of the crime. And what do you want to do now?’

  ‘Yes, what do you want to do?’ Mrs Jevons said. ‘I’m sure you want to have a talk without me hearing it all, and what I want to do is get back to Rockford and take the next train back to London. Do you think there’s a chance I could phone for a taxi to pick me up here? That’s how I got here, but as I’d no idea how long I’d be staying, I didn’t ask him to wait for me.’

  ‘Peter, how did you get here?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘By car. I drove down,’ Peter replied.

  ‘Then you could drive Mrs Jevons back into Rockford, couldn’t you? And you could take me too.’

  ‘Of course,’ Peter said, ‘but what do you want to do in Rockford?’

  ‘I want to speak to Inspector Roland. I promised him that if I had one of the bright ideas he seemed to keep hoping I’d have, he’d be the first person to hear of it. And after what you’ve just said I think the time has come for that now.’

  CHAPTER 10

  ‘I don’t know where to begin,’ Andrew said.

  He was in Inspector Roland’s office, a bare room furnished with a big desk, several chairs, some filing cabinets and some posters on the walls, mostly of men who were wanted for a variety of misdemeanours. He and Roland were facing each other across the desk. He had had lunch with Mrs Jevons and Peter Dilly in the Black Horse in Rockford, then Peter had driven Mrs Jevons to the railway station, and Andrew had presented himself at the police station, asking to see the Inspector. It was annoying that he felt a little foolish.

  ‘You understand that it’s only an idea,’ he said. ‘I haven’t a shadow of proof of any of it. But you did ask me, in the event that I had any possibly interesting ideas, to tell you about them.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Roland said. ‘Take your time. No need to rush at it. Ideas are what I’m dead short of at the moment.’

  ‘Well, I think I’ll start with something I heard said,’ Andrew went on. ‘It couldn’t happen, so it didn’t happen.’

  ‘The murder?’ Roland said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Luke Singleton’s murder?’

  ‘Yes. It sounds nonsense, of course.’

  ‘I’m afraid I agree with you.’

  ‘But you see, if you state more exactly what you mean, it isn’t nonsense at all. What couldn’t happen is the deliberate murder of Luke Singleton.’

  Roland shook his head. ‘You’ll have to elaborate.’

  ‘Suppose it didn’t matter who got murdered,’ Andrew said.

  ‘That’s something that does occasionally happen, but it’s unusual. It’s generally the work of the insane.’

  ‘In this case it was sane and calculated. What is it that’s foxed you completely over Singleton’s murder? It’s how cyanide could have got into the cup that was put down in front of him by one of those innocent women, when that same cup might have been put down in front of anyone in the room. I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve accepted the fact that no one but the Bartlett sisters got close enough to Singleton during the dinner to have dropped poison into his coffee. I know that you were close enough to have done it yourself, and so was Dr Mace, but if either of you had done it you’d have had to come to the dinner armed with the cyanide for your purpose, and neither of you could have known beforehand that you’d be sitting anywhere near Singleton. So even if you or Dr Mace happens to be guilty of murder, you’d have had to be prepared to use the poison on whoever your next-door neighbour chanced to be.’

  ‘I’ll grant you that, and I’m glad to find you don’t seem to suspect either of us. But go on.’

  ‘Well, suppose there was someone who actually was prepared to do just that, to make sure that someone at the dinner was killed, but it didn’t matter who. Suppose the fact that it was Singleton who got the poison was sheer chance. It might just as well have been me or the Lady Mayoress.’

  ‘So we’re back to insanity, are we?’

  ‘Certainly not. Consider. What was the actual result of the murder? What did you yourself and everyone connected with the case immediately start to do?’

  ‘We started trying to find out who’d murdered Singleton, didn’t we?’

  ‘Of course. And to do that, what did you do?’

  ‘Asked a bloody lot of questions, for one thing.’

  ‘Exactly. And what were those questions about? The usual old things, weren’t they, motive, means and opportunity? The means was obvious, cyanide in a cup of coffee. Opportunity was apparently nonexistent, leaving you thoroughly baffled. And that left motive—that’s what you concentrated on, wasn’t it? Who had a motive to kill Singleton? Of course, if it had been the Lady Mayoress who’d been killed, you’d have asked the same questions, but got quite different answers, and your thoughts would have gone in a quite different direction. As it was, you found out that Singleton’s brother had a motive as he stood to inherit a considerable fortune, which was particularly convenient when he wanted to leave his job and take off with someone else’s wife. And Ernest Audley, a Rockford solicitor, who’d never made any secret of his hatred of Singleton, who’d taken off with Audley’s wife. And just possibly Mrs Davidge, who had the same motive as Brian Singleton. And I think a few, not very convincing rumours circulated that Dr Mace might have had some relationship with Singleton at some time, but I don’t think we need pay much at
tention to them. Now, going back for a moment to opportunity, some thought was given to the possibility that Brian Singleton might have managed to flick a capsule of poison into his brother’s cup when he was reaching out to pull a flower out of that arrangement on the table to give Mrs Davidge, who was sitting next to him. That seemed to be just possible, because Brian Singleton was a bit of a conjuror and might have done something clever with sleight of hand. But Audley was sitting at the far end of the table and certainly had no chance of doping Singleton’s coffee. I don’t know if you gave any thought to Eleanor Clancy, because she’d once known Singleton when they were young, and it happened that she’d a lot of old photographic equipment, including a certain amount of cyanide, but you certainly thought about her later, because she herself was murdered. And what did you immediately think about that?’

  Roland had been growing increasingly interested, though the frown on his forehead showed that he did not know where all this was leading.

  ‘We were inclined to believe that she’d seen who had murdered Singleton, or at least knew how it had been done,’ Roland said, ‘and was trying her hand at a bit of blackmail.’

  ‘Which was exactly what you were meant to think,’ Andrew said. ‘It seems obvious, doesn’t it? And naturally it wouldn’t have been done by anyone who was demonstrably innocent of Singleton’s murder. And who was the most certainly innocent of that?’

  Roland’s frown had deepened.

  ‘If you mean what I’m beginning to think you mean …’

  ‘I probably do. The person who most certainly could not deliberately have killed Singleton was Sam Waldron. He was in the kitchen throughout the dinner. He didn’t touch the coffee cups. He didn’t give either of the Bartletts any instructions about giving any particular cup to Singleton. But it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to have put some cyanide—supposing he had some, I don’t pretend to know how he got it—into a cup out in the kitchen and leave it to be put down in front of someone in the dining-room, it didn’t matter whom, just so that you should act as you did at the time and try to solve that person’s murder. Then later, when you found Eleanor Clancy dead, you were to assume that she’d been killed because she knew the answer to that problem. In other words, the real motive for her murder would go unsuspected, and it was that that mattered to Waldron. He had no trace of a motive for killing Singleton, and out in the kitchen couldn’t possibly have done it, but he had a very good reason for getting rid of Eleanor Clancy, as you’ll be able to check for yourself if you’ll go to St Catherine’s House in London and investigate their register of births, deaths and marriages. I’ve just had a nephew of mine doing that for me and he found out what I thought was probably true. As I told you, I haven’t a shadow of proof of it, but I’m quite convinced Waldron’s your double murderer.’