‘And incidentally, Stagge,’ said the headmaster, ‘is there any news of that girl? All this has been such a shock that I’d almost forgotten about her.’
‘Nothing so far, sir,’ Stagge answered. ‘I’ve made the routine enquiries – railway stations and so forth – but without result. I can tell you, all this business is straining our local resources quite a bit. I may have to ask the chief constable to call in Scotland Yard.’
He glanced at Fen as he spoke, but Fen had not heard. He was thinking of Brenda Boyce, and of the reasons which made it certain that she, too, was dead.
6
Love Lies Bleeding
They came out into the darkness, and were met by the doctor. Wells remained behind to lock up the building, and the headmaster excused himself from accompanying them to Love’s house.
‘I’ve a feeling,’ he said, ‘that my condolences to Mrs Love wouldn’t mix well with your own investigations. Besides, I’m tired, and I don’t really see that I can be any help.’
‘Very well, sir,’ Stagge agreed. ‘And as to the morning—’
‘The chapel service is at ten, but I’ll be in my study by nine. You can get hold of me there and then, and of course I shall be glad to hear what progress you’ve made. For the rest’ – the headmaster was lighting a cigarette, and the match flame threw his cheekbones into relief and evoked fugitive shadows about his eyes – ‘for the rest, it’s going to be a difficult day. I shall be extremely busy, but if you should happen to want me urgently…’ He blew out the match, and the obscurity seemed more oppressive after its small illumination.
‘We’ll be as discreet as possible, sir,’ Stagge promised. ‘I generally turn up at speech day in any case, so my being about won’t surprise people.’
‘Goodnight, then…Oh, Gervase, I’ll leave the front door open for you, and there’ll be whisky and sandwiches in the drawing room. Goodnight again. And good luck.’
He climbed into his car and drove away. The police car and the ambulance, followed by Fen in Lily Christine III, headed for Love’s house. It was a longer journey than Fen had expected, and he calculated that a fast walker would need at the very least a quarter of an hour to accomplish it. The little party reassembled at the gate.
‘I can’t think where we are,’ Fen complained. ‘I’ve simply been pursuing your tail light.’
‘We’re on the far side of Snagshill, sir,’ Stagge informed him; and with this sparse intelligence he had for the moment to be content, since the darkness defied all attempts at orientation. They trooped up the path to the front door, and Stagge rang the bell. The house appeared to be a medium-sized, unremarkable bypass-type villa of flesh-coloured brick. Presently the door was opened by a diminutive, astigmatic elderly woman whose cheeks bore the sticky marks of recent weeping, and whose lustreless grey hair straggled untamably over her ears and forehead. She blinked at them uncertainly.
‘Is it the police?’ she said. ‘I thought you were never coming.’
She stood aside as they entered the hall. It was little more than a passageway, prolific of linoleum, gumboots, antlers, umbrellas and ancient raincoats, its atmosphere compounded in equal proportions of coffee and floor polish. The single electric bulb shone wanly, and there were yellowed visiting cards on a tarnished silver tray. As for the woman herself, the headmaster’s ‘wispy, mousy’ described her very adequately, Fen thought, but he was relieved, if also a little surprised, to see that she showed no signs of hysteria. This fact, indeed, led him to suspect that her lifelong subordination to her husband might not have been entirely to her taste. She was distressed, certainly, yet one received no impression that an indispensable prop had been struck away from her.
As Stagge explained, in halting, hyperbolic phrases, the reason for their delay, her eyes widened.
‘Michael!’ she exclaimed. ‘What a ghastly, ghastly thing…And my husband was devoted to him. Oh dear, it’s a night of disasters.’ She became suddenly voluble. ‘At first it was all right, being alone with Andrew I mean, and then I began to get frightened because no one came, and you’ll think this is silly I know, but I started wondering if it was all a horrible dream, the way you do when things don’t happen as you expect…’ She checked herself, and flushed, like one discovered in a contemptible action. ‘Oh, but you’ll be wanting to see him.’
‘If you please, Mrs Love,’ said Stagge awkwardly.
‘I won’t go in with you,’ she said. ‘You won’t need me. And I don’t want – I don’t—’
She choked on the words, inhaling in long, ragged gasps. The doctor, proffering consolation of a brisk, professional kind, led her to a chair. After a moment’s embarrassed and unhappy silence, the others went on to a door at the end of the hall, glad of the excuse to escape.
The room in which they found themselves a moment later was clearly Love’s study. In an unpretentious fashion it was luxurious. The volumes on the bookshelves were grouped according to size – an over-decorative habit which Fen irrationally abhorred. There were filing cabinets, a desk, two capacious and sybaritic armchairs. French windows gave on to the back garden, with closed curtains of what looked remarkably like Point d’Alençon lace. On a brass tray of Indian design, which rested on trestles beside the door, stood an untouched tray of coffee and biscuits, with two clean cups. The flexible chromium reading lamp momentarily suggested a laboratory, and the suggestion was reinforced by a pervasive air of surgical spotlessness which was oddly at variance with what they had seen in the hall. The arrangement of the various objects on the desk, Fen noted, betrayed the hand of an almost fanatical precision.
Then they looked at Love, slumped forward in one of the armchairs with his back to the French windows.
He had died as swiftly as Somers, though not, perhaps, so horribly. Lank grey hair had fallen across his high, bony forehead. One hand hung limply over his knee, while the other was tightly clenched in a reflex spasm. His lean, broad chest lay over the left arm of the chair, and his head sagged, stretching the sinews of a thin brown neck. A book was open on his lap, and Fen moved closer to examine it. Pilkington’s French Grammar: The Use of the Subjunctive (I). Then a smear of blood. The trappings of death, Fen reflected, were only too often ignominious. To be hounded into eternity, like Pitt, voracious of pork pies, or with a mind preoccupied, in the last instant, with the French subjunctive…
‘He can’t have known anything about it,’ Stagge was saying. ‘Shot from behind, from the French windows. His head must have been an easy target, above the back of the chair.’ Without moving the body, he crouched down to look into its face. ‘There’s an exit wound through the cheek.’ He straightened up, stared about the room, and after an instant walked rapidly to the desk. ‘And here, I fancy, is the bullet, embedded in the wood.’ Producing a penknife, he began to prise it out.
The doctor joined them, announcing that he had left Mrs Love in the parlour. The ritual of the common room was reenacted. Photographs were taken; likely surfaces, including the handles and frames of the French windows, were tested for fingerprints; the doctor, examining the body, announced that a .38 had again been used, that Love had been dead between one and a half and three hours, and that there were no complications that he could see; and Love’s pockets failed to provide anything of interest.
‘This business is as featureless as the other wasn’t,’ Stagge grumbled. ‘The basic data are the same, of course: he was shot from the same size gun, from the same distance, between ten and eleven. Apart from that…’
He waved one hand acerbly, and vanished into the garden, where he spent some minutes prowling about with an electric torch. Fen, becoming dolorously aware of his own inanition, set himself rather dutifully than optimistically to investigate the contents of the desk. Presently Stagge returned, perceptibly uninspirited.
‘There’s an asphalt path,’ he reported, ‘running from the French windows round the house to the front gate. And the ground’s as hard as rock. No cigarette stubs. No footprints. No fragments of
clothing caught on projecting nails. Nothing.’
‘There’s something here, though,’ said Fen, looking up from a pile of papers which he had taken from a drawer. ‘And it may help us towards the motive. Read this.’
He held out a plain sheet of notepaper with a few lines of neat handwriting on it. Stagge read the words aloud.
‘“This is to put on record the fact that two of my colleagues at Castrevenford School are associated together in what can only be described as a deliberate fraud, which…”’ Stagge snorted in disappointment. ‘And there it stops. But you’re quite right, sir. There’s no doubt this is important.’
‘The really interesting thing about it,’ said Fen, ‘is that he’s half crossed out the word “colleagues”.’
‘So he has. That’s curious. And it’s odd he didn’t finish it. I suppose he was either interrupted, or else decided the statement didn’t serve any useful purpose.’
‘Ah,’ said Fen obscurely. ‘Lend me your lens a moment, will you?’
He examined the handwriting, comparing it with other examples of Love’s calligraphy which he had found in the desk. ‘It’s authentic, all right,’ he remarked, ‘and to judge from the condition of the ink, written not later than this morning.’ He handed the lens and the paper to Stagge, and seemed about to make some further comment when he caught sight of a stack of corrected essays on the desk. He picked up the top one and contemplated it thoughtfully.
‘Listen to what this boy has written,’ he said. ‘“The phrase ‘ἀϱχόμενοϛ ὡσὲι ἐτῶν τϱιάϰοντα’ used in St Luke’s gospel is ambiguous.” And this is Love’s marginal correction. “The word ambiguous can only properly be used of something which has two possible meanings, not of something which has more than two; substitute vague or indefinite”.’
Stagge looked very blank. ‘I don’t see what you’re getting at, sir.’
Fen replaced the essay. ‘No?’ he said cheerfully. ‘It’s quite relevant, I think…Well, what now?’
Stagge consulted his watch. ‘Half past one. I don’t see that there’s much more we can do apart from talking to Mrs Love. Is she fit enough to answer questions, doctor?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ said the doctor. ‘She’s had a nasty shock, but I doubt if she’s bowled over with grief. I knew Love slightly, and he was domineering in an insidious, underhand sort of way. His wife may look characterless, but I suspect that secretly she resented her serfdom.’
‘Could she have shot him?’ Stagge asked curiously.
‘Psychologically, you mean? I don’t see why not.’
‘Except that she didn’t,’ said Fen, and spoke with such tactless certainty that the superintendent showed signs of irritation.
‘That remains to be seen,’ he stated curtly. ‘Doctor, you’d better get him out to the ambulance while we’re talking to her.’
The parlour, in marked contrast to the study, was a shabby, untidy room, as characteristic of the wife as the other had been of the husband. Its only remarkable feature was a spirited depiction over the fireplace, in a large gilt frame, of Lot’s wife being transmogrified into a pillar of salt, with the cities of the plain burning tumultuously in the background and Lot himself looking on rather as though the metamorphosis were some interesting technical process specially exhibited for his enjoyment. Beneath this overwhelming canvas, like votive offerings at the shrine of some pagan deity, a profusion of unfinished attempts at sewing, knitting, darning and embroidery lay scattered on the chairs and tables. Even to the uninstructed eye it was evident that Mrs Love’s housekeeping was of the most primitive and desperate kind, and Fen, meditating on the incessant small stresses which must result from the marriage of a chronically tidy man with a chronically untidy woman, was no longer surprised at the lack of serious grief in Mrs Love’s reactions to the evening’s event.
Her volubility had returned, and although she sat twisting a tear-sodden handkerchief in her hands, an unhealthy gleam of excitement lurked in her eyes. Stagge, embarked on a prolegomenon of discreetly consolatory phrases, found himself cut short.
‘Who did it, Mr Stagge?’ she exclaimed. ‘Did he kill himself? What happened?’
Stagge disguised an obscure sense of outrage as best he might. ‘We don’t think your husband killed himself, Mrs Love, since we found no weapon in the room. As to what happened, we were hoping you would be able to help us there.’
He paused, and from the hall they heard the tramp of feet and the murmur of voices.
Mrs Love said, ‘But how can I help you, Mr Stagge? I know nothing about it, nothing, the whole thing has been a complete surprise to me, I should say a most terrible shock. And dear Michael, too, such a nice boy. I remember him well at Merfield, my husband had a house there, you know, Peterfield it was called, though I think the system they have here of naming houses after housemasters is much better. Anyway, dear Michael was head boy for a year before he left, or was it a year and a term—’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Stagge broke in hurriedly. ‘We know something about that. But as to this evening—’
‘It was the coffee,’ Mrs Love said unexpectedly.
‘I beg your pardon, ma’am?’
‘I’d run out of coffee, a most unusual thing for me, I’m sure I don’t know how it happened unless Mrs Fiske, that’s my charlady, has been using it, servants are so difficult nowadays, one never knows what they’re doing when one’s back is turned, but anyway, I knew Andrew wouldn’t drink tea or cocoa, he’s exceedingly particular about things like that and never touches alcohol of course, so I thought to myself—’
‘Just one moment, Mrs Love, let’s get everything in order. Exactly when did you last see your husband alive?’
She appeared surprised at the question. ‘Why, at dinner, of course. After dinner Andrew always worked alone in his study until a quarter to eleven exactly, and he made it a rule that he wasn’t on any account to be disturbed, so inconvenient because people who didn’t know his habits realized he was in and I had to explain that he couldn’t see them and often they went away offended.’
Fen, awaiting a hiatus, saw his opportunity. ‘But of course,’ he said, ‘the other masters would be aware of all this.’
‘Oh yes, it was something of a joke among them. They always said they could set their watches by Andrew, and it was as near true as made no difference, sometimes I used to chaff him about it, tell him he mustn’t get into a rut, but he’d never alter his ways, and naturally I had to fit in with them, and not being temperamentally a punctual person I’ve always found it difficult, still, you can’t have everything, can you?’
To this proposition Stagge very heartily agreed, less because he was impressed by its sapience than because he foresaw that the interview would last until dawn if he did not take every available chance of getting a word in. ‘And what happened after dinner?’ he said.
‘Why, Andrew worked alone in his study and I sat in here writing letters, it’s a job I hate, I always leave them till the last possible moment and beyond, though Andrew makes a point of answering his the very day they arrive, which is the only way really, because otherwise they prey on one’s mind.’
‘And did anyone call during the evening?’
‘Oh, no, Mr Stagge. Didn’t I tell you about Andrew being so regular in his habits? You see, he always—’
‘Yes,’ said Stagge hastily. ‘You did tell me. I quite understand. Now, did you hear anything unusual during the evening?’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Love, after pausing, unprecedentedly, for reflection, ‘there was a weird play on the wireless, very intelligent I expect, but not the sort of thing I like, they do broadcast such extraordinary things sometimes, I dare say Andrew would have made something of it, I always felt with him that I had so much to live up to, in a way it was a strain.’
‘No doubt,’ Stagge remarked rather tactlessly. ‘No doubt it was a strain. And you didn’t leave the house at all?’
‘But I did. I went out to post my letters.’
‘At what time, ma’am?’
‘I can tell you that because I always have to have my eye on the clock, and I remember thinking that there was just time enough to post them if I hurried and then they’d go by the early morning post, and although it’s tiresome the pillar-box being so far away I felt I ought to put myself out because two of the letters I should have written weeks ago, and although one post earlier probably wouldn’t make much difference one feels in a case like that that one has to do what one can.’
Stagge suppressed a sigh of impatience. ‘But you still haven’t told us, ma’am, what time you did go out.’
‘Oh, haven’t I? It was at twenty-five minutes past ten. I left the kettle on for our nightcap, you see—’
‘And when did you return?’
‘At twenty to eleven, Mr Stagge. And it was then I found there was no coffee left, I use the kind you just mix with milk or water, and the tin was quite empty, I’m sure it was Mrs Fiske, I shall speak to her about it, and I knew Andrew would be annoyed, because he likes his coffee at a quarter to eleven punctual to the minute, but it couldn’t be helped, I ran to Mrs Philpotts’ house to borrow some, it was the best thing I could think of, and what with her chatter, some people seem to be able to talk for hours without taking breath, I don’t know how they do it I’m sure, anyway it was eleven by the time I got the coffee ready and took it in to Andrew, and – and’ – her garrulity suddenly expired – ‘and found him.’
She dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief. It was not a feigned emotion, Fen thought, but it stemmed from the nerves rather than from the affections.
‘One thing more, ma’am,’ said Stagge, taking advantage of her quiescence. ‘Do you know of anyone who might have wished your husband harm?’
A welter of explanation followed, but divested of its encrusting irrelevances it came to very little and offered no useful suggestion of motive. And since the question had been a purely formal one, Stagge decided that no useful purpose could be served by their remaining longer. He got to his feet, eyeing Fen eloquently, and Fen, who by this time was partially comatose, obediently followed his example.
Love Lies Bleeding Page 7