“So you went for a swim?”
“I think you know everything that happened after that.”
“You came out from your swim to find that your clothes and towel had been taken, so you returned to the water till two of the local guards happened to come along the beach.”
“That’s right.”
“Coming or going, did you see anyone at all other than the two guards?”
“Not a soul — except the hay-makers.”
“What exactly did you lose in the way of clothes?”
“Brown shoes, greyish socks, old grey jeans and a greenery-yallery shirt, all very sweaty — and a green bath-towel and red bathing-trunks, unused.”
Duffy consulted one of the papers before him. “We shall ask you to identify articles answering to that description,” he said. “They were found under a hedge not far from where you say you left them.”
“Oh!” I considered the implications of this. “I haven’t really thought of it before, but I suppose I’m suspect number one.”
“Rather the contrary, as far as the clothes-business is concerned. The two guards searched the place where they were subsequently found while you were in the water, and you don’t appear to have had any opportunity of putting them there since then — and why should you want to? And the footprints in the place where you undressed tend to confirm your story: your bare feet with shod feet walking over and then your bare feet again, nothing good enough to take casts from — because the sand is too powdery and shifting — or to prove anything in court, but the two gaurds were satisfied.”
“They must be more switched on than I gave them credit for being.”
“Switched on — and bright. In any case I have no suspects, merely an open mind.”
“I suppose that should be a comfort but, to be honest, I don’t give a damn. I’d hate to be suspected by anyone I know, but the law after all is just a machine that suspects everyone on general principles.”
“A computer with human components.”
“Exactly. Some of the other humans about the place seem to be eyeing me rather nastily though, but perhaps that’s just because they suspect me of doing what I actually was doing. That would be bad enough but to have anyone think I could stick a fork into a woman and then ——” I shivered as I saw again in my mind the picture of Stella as we had found her. “At first I accepted that whoever had killed Elly Scanlon had killed Stella too.”
“You’ve changed your mind?”
“Franklyn Marr changed it for me. It’s obvious, really: the murders must have been done by one maniac or by two distinct killers with different motives. Maniacs can be cunning, I know, but aren’t they more direct? Would one take the trouble of hiding my clothes to keep me out of the way while he got to work? Would he have timed the fire so well to assist his getaway?”
“It seems unlikely.”
“A tricky business lighting that fire. Hay blazes up quickly and goes out quickly.”
“That gives you an alibi, doesn’t it? With the help of two guards.”
“Do you know how the fire was lighted?”
“There is no direct evidence.”
“Have you thought of a magnifying glass?”
“Certainly. We have been unable to find one.”
“There were a lot of us milling about after the fire was put out. Anyone could have nicked it.”
“But only the murderer would have failed to hand it in to the guards?”
“One would think so.”
Duffy was staring at me more speculatively than he had yet done, but I still had no clue as to what he was thinking; his poker-player’s mask held good.
“One thing puzzles me,” I said. “You told me that Stella could have been stabbed with one hand by anybody with strength enough to hold the fork. I can’t really believe that.”
“From the angle of the wounds and from an examination of the fork itself, the experts consider it probable that the end of the haft was allowed to rest on the ground and that, as Mrs. Hazard began to slide from the top of the wind, the prongs were pushed forward against her body so that she slid down on to them and impaled herself.”
The picture appeared so vividly in my mind that I almost vomited, as Juliet had done when she saw the shrouded body.
“No great muscular strength would have been needed for that,” pursued Duffy in a voice that was as empty of feeling as his face was of expression.
“The bikini,” I said.
“Yes?”
“She wouldn’t have got down from the wind and put on the bikini and then got back on to the wind. The fact that she got down at all probably means that she had finished with sun-bathing; putting on something new, and in its way rather smart, seems to clinch it.”
“Perhaps.”
“If one of the workmen or a stranger had come along while she was still on the wind with nothing on, she’d have slipped into the clothes that she had with her on the wind — obviously.”
Duffy merely nodded.
“The clothes she’d been wearing were sweaty and covered with bits of hay, though, so she might have asked someone she knew to hand her up the only other thing she had to wear before sliding down from the wind. And it would have been much easier for someone she knew than for a stranger to work that trick with the hay-fork — wouldn’t it?”
“The inference seems not unreasonable,” he admitted. “Have you any ideas about the identity of this person whom she knew.”
I shook my head. “That’s as far as I can go.” It was as far as I had any intention of going at any rate.
“Then that is all for the moment. Thank you for being so co-operative.”
The young man who had been taking down our conversation in shorthand shot from his chair to open the door for me, thus reminding me of his presence; he had been so self-effacing that I had forgotten him. He was almost knocked down by the torrent of dogs pouring into the room, dogs still subdued vocally but imbued with restlessness. Were they looking for Stella, I wondered, or did they know that she was dead? Duffy distributed a few comforting pats among them; they seemed to like him.
“Where were these chaps yesterday?” he inquired.
“What do you mean?” I was not with it; I was thinking of Stella.
“One would expect them to have been in on the hay-making.”
“They weren’t. I wonder why?”
Followed by the dogs, I went out of the room. The door was shut behind us.
The dogs! Why had I not thought of them in the hay-field? Why had their absence not seemed conspicuous when I was going over the events of that horrible yesterday in my mind? The answer, I suppose, is that from the arrival of Grace’s letter I had been torn between thoughts of her and of my newly acquired responsibility to Stella, as well as of my impending treachery to Barney; so much for the time before we found Stella’s body, and since then I had been trying not to think at all. It was imperative that my mind should now get working not only on the past but on the future, for there was once more a future to be considered for mine, if not for me, a future for my son. If only I had received Grace’s letter twenty-four hours earlier, if only I had read it when I did get it — there was, however little point in brooding on that; what was done was done. Stella remained dead and I had made love to her before she died. The one thing on which my mind was clear was that I must get out of this house and be alone to think.
I should have liked to take a car and drive out into the wilds but, if I were to borrow one of Barney’s, it would probably be thought that I was fleeing from justice, not by Duffy, perhaps — he seemed a sensible sort of fellow — but by some of his myrmidons or by Barney’s retainers; I had no wish to strike a spark of suspicion, or to fan one into flame if it already existed. Of Barney there was no sign; in fact the house was as silent as if everyone in it had died with Stella. Only the dogs seemed disposed to be friendly and their sympathetic presence might be tolerable where human company would not; I took them for a walk — or perhaps it woul
d be truer to say that they took me, for I followed where they led.
We went round the side of the house through the gardens and past the stable-yard, meeting in the one a gardener and in the other a groom who flitted out of sight on my approach, then through a belt of pines and Scotch firs out on to the bare slopes of the headland that even on small-scale maps was called Hazard Point. Here the great brownstone cliffs were higher, more nearly perpendicular and more impressive than anything that Rossderg itself could boast, so high that even when the Atlantic rollers were breaking in fury against the rocks beneath no sound of the sea reached the ears of anyone at the top. To-day the vast expanse of water was unruffled — though it had often been far otherwise on my previous visits — and the only sense of movement was conveyed by the sea-birds wheeling lazily hundreds of feet below me. Somewhere in those not uninviting depths, I felt, Scanlon must be, if it were he who had spitted his wife with a hay-fork and burnt her body in the cottage. How tempting it was to believe that he, too, was responsible for Stella’s death, but I could no longer entertain the idea. No one could hide in this bare landscape for long; the only cover was on Barney’s home farm and that had been thoroughly searched after Elly Scanlon’s death and even more thoroughly after Stella’s. Not only the guards but the villagers and every cottager for miles around were on the look-out for the man, yet no trace of him had been found; surely it followed that, if he had ever returned to Hazard Point, he had left the place immediately after his wife’s death and before the search had started, most probably by way of the cliffs.
I had come out to think but constructive thought still eluded me. The vast distances of sea and land stretching away on all sides to a misty horizon filled me, as they had always done, with a vague longing for the unattainable. What was it that I sighed for to-day? Was it for Stella who was gone, or for Grace who seemed now more than ever beyond my reach, or for the son who had been conceived in a night of love and anger and parting before a smoky fire in a Midlands hotel? Had I had tears, I should have been prepared to shed them for any of the three — though perhaps what I most urgently sought was just peace of mind. I walked on, following the line of the cliffs while the dogs chased imagined rabbits over the smooth downs.
I have said that it was possible to see for many miles; there were, however, folds and pockets in the ground into which one could only see when one came immediately above them. It was when I reached a point overlooking one such fold, big enough almost to be called a small valley, that I had my first sight of human movement since the groom had ducked out of my way in Barney’s stable yard; in that place the movement, such as it was, might have been described as activity.
The little valley sloped down to meet the landward end of a small fiord at a point where the cliffs, though still formidable, were lower and far less nearly perpendicular than the lofty buttresses of rock which over-hung the fiord’s mouth and shut off even the midday sun from the water. On the level turf of the valley’s floor above the lowest part of the cliffs were parked two big black station-wagons; to confirm my view that these were not just picnickers’ cars, a uniformed guard was craning over the cliff-edge conducting with some person or persons out of my sight below him a shouted conversation his end of which I could dimly hear but not follow. While the dogs and I stood at gaze, the guard bellowed a final monosyllable, ran back to one of the cars and drove off up the valley in the general direction of the nearest road. It seemed to me an odds-on bet that Scanlon’s body had been found. I ran down the slope towards the remaining car.
There was no one at the cliff-top to give me information but there was more activity to be seen. Beneath the cliff was a narrow strip of rocky boulder-strewn beach; on the beach were a number of men, and off it two curraghs, the only kind of small boats that can stand up to continuous service in the seas off that rugged coast. One of the curraghs lay some hundred yards offshore while its occupants watched the other boat which had been brought as close in as possible to that hostile-looking beach. The men ashore began to wade out to the nearer boat; it was not an easy job. Sometimes a man slipped on submerged weed, or fell over an unseen rock, or stepped off a shelf to find himself suddenly out of his depth; unpleasant as the short journey must have been, however, it was not as unpleasant as what awaited them in the boat. I could see it, a bundle like a big fifth of November guy, propped in the bows because — I suppose — there the rowers would not have to look at it. I could sympathise with their feelings; enough corpses of the violently dead had come my way in the last two days for me to know that a jacket over the dead face did not so very greatly lessen the horror. I wondered at the choice of such a place for the transfer of the body from boat to shore when a few hours of rowing would have brought the boat round the great headland to the beach but assumed that whoever was in charge of the operation considered the saving in time worth the difficulty. There was a barely perceptible path, a sort of mountain-goat-track leading from where I stood down to the beach; down it went the dogs. Slowly and in more gingerly fashion I followed them.
For some reason I was imbued with the desire to help. I have always felt at home in the water and it seemed indecent to see men struggling and not lend a hand. I should have to go away leaving my curiosity unsatisfied or join in; curiosity allied, I hope, with a sense of duty prevailed. Whatever the precise motive, it must have been strong indeed to send me down that path, not that the descent presented any essential difficulty; the rub was to keep from going down too fast. I have little recollection of how I managed to make the beach — I was far too busy snatching at anything that might check the rate of my descent to have time to think — but make it I did and in one piece; of the bruises and abrasions that I sustained on the way I was scarcely aware till afterwards. I collected myself and my wits in time to see the body — of course it was a body — being transferred from the boat to the hands of the four men who were to convey it ashore. It appeared to me at first that, despite my haste, I had arrived too late to be of much use.
Three of the four men were members of the guards; the remaining one, as I later learned was a fisherman and, like most western seamen, unable to swim. Obviously this man could go no more than shoulder-deep into the water; nevertheless by reason of his having been lucky enough to find a submerged ledge of rock running in the right direction he arrived at the boat ahead of his better equipped companions who had had to contend with all sorts of booby-traps and pit-falls on their way. The ledge was too narrow to accommodate more than one man at a time but its user was the man who most needed it, and it was he who was able to take the greatest part of the weight when the tricky operation began of lowering the body from the boat into the waiting hands of the men in the sea. One of the guards was treading water but the other two had managed to find temporary footing on submerged rocks, while the fisherman on his ledge seemed firmly anchored; the boat, however, was not. It flirted away from the shore when the strain came; the fisherman stepped after it, stepped right off the end of his ledge and with a yell which ended in a gurgle vanished beneath the calm surface of the sea. It was unfortunate that he succeeded in taking Scanlon’s body with him.
It was Scanlon all right, as the local guards who had known him averred when the body was at last brought to the beach. This feat was accomplished by the three guards while I fished out the fisherman; he was very good, once he had got over his initial fright, and allowed me to tow him ashore with a minimum of trouble. Thereafter everyone seemed to think that I had saved his life, though any one of half a dozen other people, if one counts the boat’s crew, could have hauled him out with equal ease. There was one advantage, however, in being for a moment a minor hero: I was allowed to remain on the beach while the body was having its first cursory examination by the guards who had brought it ashore. Without wanting to look too closely, I was able to see some things for myself.
Scanlon was a well-built man of about my own age with a spreading moustache and sandy hair. His body was not bloated as I had expected it to be, nor had it been
mangled by falling on rock. The guards seemed to share my surprise.
“He wasn’t long in the water anyway,” said one of them.
“And it’s not drowned he was at all,” pronounced another.
The sergeant, the same one who kept on turning up, looked down at the body for a moment in silence before observing — “And it wasn’t any kind of a fish that did that to his face.”
I moved over and looked more closely. What at a distance I had taken to be some sort of pock-marks were unmistakably the entry-wounds of shot-gun pellets. Judging by the closeness of the grouping, the range had been short.
CHAPTER IX
The finding of Scanlon’s body had some strange results: it sent a wave of relief flooding through the little community of Hazard Point; it made easier the task of Duffy and his men by loosening people’s tongues and inspiring them to admissions that — before the finding — they might have thought would cast suspicion on themselves or their friends; then, of course, came the reaction. The cause of the relief was the suggestion — popularly adopted as a fact — that Scanlon had committed both murders and then taken his own life; this theory was to some extent supported by Joyce’s assertion — of which the sergeant told me on the beach — that he had left a shot-gun in a cupboard at the cottage and by the undeniable fact that no trace of the gun had been found after the fire. From a first cursory examination of the body medical opinion was prepared to admit that Scanlon’s death could have followed Stella’s by a matter of hours. Even I shared for a short time the general sense of relief — I, who should have known better — or worse.
For me the most immediate and welcome effect of my wetting was the betterment of my relations with the local people; saving the fisherman’s life had put me on the side of the angels. I suppose it was thought that a positive life-saving effort, however negligible the danger and the trouble involved, proved that I was incapable of murder. I cannot agree with such reasoning; people are motivated to kill, whether sanely or insanely, but the pulling of a drowning man out of the water is a natural reflex action to any swimmer. It might even, I imagine, be a calculated one on the part of a calculating killer. Nevertheless I was not disposed to argue; being treated less like a leper made life that much more tolerable.
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