After having been allowed to stand by while a local doctor gave Scanlon’s body a quick once-over, I walked back to the house. The guards were anxious to give me a lift and warned me against catching a cold, but I had four wet and muddy dogs to bring home. It seemed to me, too, that an entrance on foot would be less conspicuous; I did not want it thought that every time I went for a walk I lost my clothes or rendered them unfit for further wear. As it happened, I ran into an assortment of hay-makers, grooms and gardeners near the stables; I suppose it was the beginning of their luncheon break. Perrot, the head man, seemed to be giving them the latest news; he turned towards me with a grin all over his face.
“That was a great thing you just done, sir,” he said. “Only for you we’d have had another death on our hands.”
I looked at his companions; they were all beaming at me. It was nice for them to have something to smile at again, however briefly. I remembered a question that I wanted to ask.
“It was the dogs that led me there just when an extra hand was wanted,” I said. “By the way, I didn’t see them anywhere about yesterday when they were needed. Where were they?”
“Their kennels are on the old grass tennis courts that are never used now. The master shuts them inside the wire netting when he doesn’t want them to follow him. Yesterday he must have forgotten to let them out.”
So that was that — for what it was worth.
It was lucky that I had come to Hazard Point reasonably well provided with clothes; there was still a tweed suit to wear that would not look out of place in the surroundings, though any mishap to that would necessitate my covering my nakedness with formal attire. In the hope that Rossderg could provide a one-day cleaning service I made a rather soggy bundle of the things that I had worn into the sea as well as those that had suffered in yesterday’s hay-making. Then I went down to lunch.
It was not a cheerful meal, though less agonising than it might have been. As was already obvious, the sergeant had called in on his way to Rossderg and had given Barney an account of my good deed as well as the news of the finding of Scanlon’s body. It is probably preferable that, if one’s wife has to be horribly murdered, it should turn out to be the work of a maniac rather than a deed done for a reason — a reason which might itself prove an added horror. Certainly Barney seemed to have accepted — or at any rate to want to believe — that Scanlon had killed Stella as well as Elly and had then shot himself. It was the least unattractive theory possible, though Frankie Marr approached it with hung-over scepticism. He had just got up and took a jaundiced view of the day and all that it had brought or might bring; even his artificial hand shook.
“The suggestion seems to be,” he observed in a rather hoarse croak, “that Scanlon, after killing his wife and setting fire to the cottage, took away with him a shot-gun that he had no reason to know was in the place and kept it with him for the best part of fifteen hours till he had notched up a second and worse murder. Then, I suppose, he went and balanced on the edge of a cliff so that when he shot himself he and the gun both fell neatly into the sea. That makes a very thoughtful bit of garbage-disposal, I guess — and a very tall story. I can’t see Duffy swallowing it.”
“It agrees with the major known facts,” said Barney mildly. “Investigation will explain the minor ones. Standish saw Scanlon. He was shot at very close range. Wasn’t he?”
“Close — not point blank I should have thought. I don’t know how close. I’ve never seen a human face riddled with shot before.”
“He pulled the trigger with his too just to make it more difficult,” Marr suggested. “Then he put his sock and boot on again.” He knocked back a cupful of very hot, very black coffee and shuddered.
“What you need, Frank, is a good stiff hair of the dog,” Barney told him.
After lunch I borrowed a car to take my things into the cleaners in Rossderg. It seemed to me that in my newly won popularity I could afford to move about more freely without giving rise to suspicion that I was attempting flight; that this improved climate of opinion was general was confirmed by the supreme accolade of a kindly word from Mrs. Kealey whom I met when I was passing through the hall. Barney let me have his favourite old station-wagon; he intended to stay at home for the rest of the day because a stream of sympathisers had been flowing up and down the avenue since mid-morning and was expected to continue to flow throughout the afternoon and he felt that he should be there to see some of the older family friends. These comings and goings were an added inducement to me to go elsewhere, for each new caller could only underline the melancholy nature of the occasion. I asked Frankie Marr if he wanted to be driven anywhere but he told me that he was going to stay on at Hazard Point till the calls of his new picture obliged him to leave. For this I gave two-fold thanks: I wanted to be alone on my drive, though I did not want to be alone with Barney during the long evening, or evenings, ahead.
The sun still shone with an obstinate splendour. The sky had taken on a brassy appearance, however, that seemed to me to presage a storm. It should have come when Stella died.
The long straight narrow road from Hazard Point village to Rossderg reminded me that the last time I had travelled it I had feared to find Stella dead, stabbed and burnt. I had feared it because of the coincidence of an essay in mock witchcraft and the passage of a fire engine. Now Stella was indubitably dead, stabbed and burnt, and I had almost forgotten about the witchcraft — or at any rate I had accepted it as no more than a coincidence, as had the sergeant of the Civic Guard. Were we both wrong? Did Duffy share our opinion? Of one thing only was I sure: none of us could tell what that dead-pan detective-superintendent really thought till he chose to let us know.
When I passed through the village the afternoon bus to Rossderg had been about to start on its run, and here and there on the roadside I saw a few prospective passengers waiting for it. At a crossing near the Myleses’ place a girl in jeans and a sweater was sitting on a fence. She was a very attractive girl, as I had time to realise before I recognised her. She had the palest of fair hair, a slim figure and long elegant legs, which became the more noticeable when she ran out into the road to wave; she was my cousin Juliet. Without the look of bad tempered bitchiness that had hovered over her like a thunder-cloud at our last meeting she looked a different girl.
“I was hoping you’d come,” she called.
The look of eager anticipation dropped from her face when I pulled up the car beside her. Though she did her best to hide her disappointment, it was obvious enough that she had expected to find someone else at the wheel, and that someone could only have been Barney. In the moment while her expression was in neutral, while she changed gear from one kind of smile to another, I had time to observe that she was a more sophisticated and better-looking young woman than I had realised. I suppose one takes one’s growing cousins for granted and does not examine them too closely; certainly I was taken by surprise as much by the elegance of the bone structure discernible when her face was in repose as by the fleeting glimpse that I had of determination and calculation. I began for the first time to think of her as an adult.
“What luck that you’re alone,” she said.
“How did you know it was I?”
“I saw you, you chump. You’re much bigger than Mr. Hazard; his nose only just shows over the top of the wheel.” She climbed in beside me without invitation. “I was waiting for the bus.”
“You seem addicted to buses. Why are you so full of joie de vivre this morning?”
“Because everything’s all right now. Haven’t you heard the news?”
“The guards have found another dead body, if that’s what you mean. That makes three, and things are supposed to go in threes. Perhaps you think there will be no more killing now? I don’t suppose there will, but that doesn’t make me happy; I think three was more than enough.”
“Oh, Standish darling, I’m so sorry. I forgot you were in love with Stella.” She patted my knee encouragingly. “Everyone else round here loathe
d her so much that it’s hard to remember. I’m sorry she’s dead, of course, and I’m sorry for the girl who died in the cottage — I’m even sorry for Scanlon — but I can’t help being happy because the air was sticky with suspicion and now it isn’t any more.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Don’t you know? Scanlon killed his wife, then he killed Stella and then he shot himself. The sergeant dropped in and told us. Anyhow Jack was in Rossderg this morning; he said the news was all over the town.”
“Who’s Jack?”
“Jack Myles — who else?”
“Kinky’s husband?”
It was the first time that I had heard the pipe-sucking character referred to by his Christian name and I did not think that it suited him; that, however, was scarcely of moment. I wondered when he and Kinky and Juliet found time to do any work on the costumes for the forthcoming pageant but that, too, was beside the point. If all Rossderg had it that the murder cases had now been solved, the rumour must have come unofficially from the Civic Guard station and was therefore presumably well founded. Duffy would surely have scotched it at once if it had not accorded with his own views, though it seemed strange that he was allowing the sergeant to shoot his mouth off so soon. In spite of the continuing desolation into which Stella’s death had plunged me, I felt undeniable relief. I had no reason to suspect anyone that I knew of having killed Stella, yet Stella had been killed and no strangers had been seen in the vicinity and the air had been — to use Juliet’s phrase — sticky with suspicion. I felt that I must talk some more to this cousin of mine while I had her to myself, accordingly I slowed down to fifteen miles per hour and looked for a place where I could pull in off the road.
“What’s up,” she asked.
“I want to talk to you.”
“If you were anyone else, I’d say you were going to make a pass at me.”
“If I were anyone else, you’d probably be right.” It was most likely what the girl needed to cure her tantrums, I thought.
As I pulled on to a wider than normal stretch of grass at the side of the road, I saw in my rear-view mirror a black car overtaking us; there was plenty of room for it to pass, I decided, though I was not quite so sure about the bus which must be somewhere behind it — then I recognised some familiar ruts on the far side of the ribbon of tarmac.
“This is where I fell on my head in the ditch,” I announced.
“The ditch seems all right. What are you going to do, put up a monument?”
“I’m not even going to do what Byron suggested doing on Castlereagh’s bones.”
“What was that?”
“Never mind.” The black car had stopped a few hundred yards behind us, and a man in a mustard-coloured suit was tinkering at the engine; there was still no sign of the bus, though I could see for miles. “That party the other night.”
Her body stiffened slightly. “What about it?” she asked.
“The asses who were playing the witchcraft game asked for a doll to stick pins in.”
“Yes.”
“It was you who suggested that the doll should be named.”
“It was only a game.” She smiled at me tolerantly but her eyes were wary. “At that point it was only fun.”
“Up to that point. That’s when the blasphemy started.”
She snuggled up close to me, as if I really had been making a verbal pass at her. “Standish darling, for an actor, you’re very squeamish about that sort of thing. Anyhow I wasn’t to know that there was going to be any blasphemy.”
“And I suppose you weren’t to know the name they’d give the doll — or did you suggest that too?”
The wretched girl positively giggled. “I didn’t suggest it, but I’ll bet I know what they called the doll.”
“Didn’t you hear?”
“No. There was so much row going on.”
“They called it Stella.”
“But of course they would. I told you they all hated her.”
Though she did her best to appear sympathetic, I believe that she thought it was funny. I got cigarettes out and took my time about lighting up; I had been rather put out of my stride. The man in the mustard-coloured suit seemed to have solved his problems, for he was readjusting the bonnet of his car, and only just in time; I could see the roof of the bus rolling up behind him, and he had stopped on one of the narrower stretches of the road. Supposing that he were unable to move under his own steam, would he — I wondered — be pushed to Rossderg?
“Who hated Stella?” I asked.
“Everyone — I told you.”
“For instance?”
“Most of the boys and girls at the party were members of the Inishmore Drama Club and some of the others were semi-pros; they were all going to get small parts, or walk-ons, in Franklyn Marr’s new picture. Stella put an end to that.”
“What had it got to do with her?”
“She said she didn’t want the local riff-raff camping about in a picture that she had anything to do with, so she persuaded Marr to drop the idea.”
“I think it would be very hard to persuade him to do anything that he didn’t want to do.”
“Perhaps she didn’t persuade him — perhaps he was only looking for an excuse — but they all think she did, which comes to the same thing. That’s why they hated her.”
“Not enough to kill her.”
“Maybe not, but enough to christen a doll with her name and then stick pins in it and hope they hurt her.”
With a jerky apologetic motion the black car came past us, its engine coughing asthmatically, then came the bus smoothly and without difficulty. A few of the younger passengers pasted their faces to the windows to see what Juliet and I were up to; they must have had little else to look at.
“Who really hated her?” I asked.
“I told you — everyone,” she repeated.
“Let’s have names. What about the Myles fellow? Did he hate her?”
“Did he not! She used to amuse herself by working him up to make passes at her and when he at last got the nerve to have a go she let him see that she wouldn’t touch him with a forty foot pole. He loathed her guts.”
Stella had been so damnably attractive that better men than Myles might have got the impression that she was encouraging them. I accepted the story as being possibly true, from Myles’s point of view, though I wondered how Juliet had come to know of it.
“The man is probably sane,” I said. “He wouldn’t kill in cold blood for that. Was Kinky in on the hate business too?”
“Kinky had more reason — a lot of reasons. I’m not suggesting that she would have killed Stella — of course she wouldn’t; anyhow we know that Scanlon did. But I want to explain to you why it was that, if pins were to be stuck in a doll, that doll would have to be called Stella. It was a joke, it was fun, but they all really did hate her.”
“You were telling me about Kinky.”
“She had the best reason of all. She is in love with Barney.”
“Oh — poppycock.”
“Why shouldn’t she be? He’s a sweet little man — and he didn’t get on with his wife.” Juliet glanced up at me, perhaps to see how I was taking all this. She let a hand stray to my chest, as if to play with my tie, but she was foiled because I was wearing a polo sweater; however she let the hand stay where it was. “Kinky has been meeting him — in all sorts of places — and that’s not very satisfactory, you know. She knew he could never divorce Stella.”
“Of course he couldn’t. He’s a Catholic — even if he’s not a very good one any longer.”
“Then there was the business of the field.”
“What field?”
I knew damned well what field she meant but her mentioning it had come as a surprise, all the more so since I had just remembered something that Stella had said when she first told me of it.
“You don’t know about it?”
“No.”
“Nor about the oil?”
“I’ve heard a rumo
ur about oil — that’s all.”
“What on earth have you been talking about at Hazard Point?”
“I got here the day before yesterday just after a girl had been murdered; yesterday Stella was murdered; to-day I helped fish a dead body out of the sea. What the hell do you think we’ve been talking about?”
“There’s no need to bite my head off, Standish.” She took her hand from my chest and moved a few inches away from me. “Oil is supposed to have been discovered all round here. As you probably know, it’s all part of the Hazard estate. In the middle of it there’s a little field of a few acres at the only point where the land slopes down to the sea; Barney gave the field to Kinky to build a cottage on, because the lease of their own is up next year.”
“Gave it to her?”
“Oh, there was a token price — just for the look of the thing. Then in the early summer a solicitor that acted for Stella wrote offering a big price for the field. Of course Kinky thought that it was Barney who wanted the land back for some reason and that he was offering the big price as a way of giving her a present and compensation, but she couldn’t ask him because he was in America on business, so she accepted the offer. Then when Barney came back from America he told her that he just had to have the field, on account of the oil, and told her she could have almost anything else she liked to name in place of it. But of course she’d already sold it, and it was no use her saying that she thought she had sold it back to him when all the solicitor would say was that he had bought it in trust for a client who wished to remain anonymous so Barney naturally thought that she had just sold his present for what she could get out of it and that that proved she didn’t really give a damn for him. As you can imagine, that all put Barney right off Kinky for a bit, especially since he got it into his head that she might be playing along with people who were trying to muscle in on his oil-field. Afterwards Kinky found out that it was Stella who had bought the field and kept mum about it just to get Kinky in wrong with Barney. Kinky could have killed her.”
Affairs of Death Page 16