‘And I suppose that in the normal way no unauthorized person would be able to get hold of any of those keys – that’s to say that the places where they’re kept would be locked up when no one was there.’
‘That’s so, sir.’
‘During the past week or so, has this place been left open and unattended at any time?’
Shelley hesitated and flushed slightly. ‘Well, sir, I’m afraid it ’as. Yesterday afternoon it was, during the parade. I opened up as usual for the boys to get their rifles, and then I ’ad a bit of a spasm of my stomach trouble, and Major Saltmarsh – that’s our OC – excused me from parade. And I felt so bad I went and sat down for a bit in the orderly room, without lockin’ up first…I shouldn’t ’a done it, I know. Do you think that’s when the pistol was taken, sir?’
‘Possibly,’ said Fen. ‘But I shouldn’t worry too much about your own responsibility. The murders would have happened in any case, whether you’d locked up or not.’ He examined the two small windows. ‘No one came in through these, anyway. It’s obvious they haven’t been opened for months.’
They went out again into the sunlight, and Fen, taking leave of Shelley, walked towards Hubbard’s Building. He reflected that he had taken no precautions in the matter of preserving fingerprints, but since he knew who had stolen the gun, that was unimportant. For the rest, the interview had proved and disproved nothing.
A general movement away from the site was in progress. Cars were being started and driven down to Castrevenford town. In Hubbard’s Building Fen found Stagge concluding his fruitless task, and acquainted him with the substance of what he had learned from Shelley and Etherege. The superintendent did not seem much enlivened thereby.
‘The fact is, sir, that we’re marking time,’ he said, ‘until these alibis are dealt with. I’ve finished here, so I’m going into town now to look at Somers’ rooms and his bank account. I’ve also got a man at the station making that experiment with the reports, and I want to see what results he’s got.’
‘I’ll come, if I may,’ said Fen. ‘And there’s one thing I particularly want to know: has there been any news of Brenda Boyce?’
Stagge made negative signs. ‘Nothing, sir. We’ve made all the routine enquiries and searched in all the likely places, but she seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. The plain fact is that we just haven’t got sufficient men to deal with all this. I’m seeing the chief constable for lunch, and I’m pretty certain he’ll want to call in Scotland Yard.’
They drove to Castrevenford in Stagge’s car. Castrevenford is a substantial and flourishing Warwickshire market town, unusually fortunate in its architecture and almost completely lacking in slums. The farmers of the district are prosperous, and Castrevenford shares their prosperity. It has historical associations of a mild, provincial kind; battles were fought nearby during the Civil War, and a discreet proportion of the famous – commemorated in inoffensive statuary – have been born there. The main road bypasses it, and so it is comparatively quiet. On this splendid day of early June it looked mellow and hospitable.
The car drew up in front of the narrow Palladian house in which Somers had lived, and, accompanied by the landlady, Fen and Stagge went up to his rooms. They found nothing helpful, though Fen took a fleeting interest in a book called The Fourth Forger which Somers had apparently been reading recently; it dealt largely with the fabrication of Shakespeare manuscripts. The private papers were unenlightening, consisting as they did chiefly of modest bills and receipts. Of private correspondence there seemed to be none, and the landlady deposed that to the best of her knowledge he had never received any. He had certainly been a friendless man, Fen reflected – perhaps by inclination eremitical.
They spent no more than ten minutes there before going on to the bank. The manager, who was a personal friend of Stagge’s, made no difficulties about allowing them to examine Love’s and Somers’ accounts. The former offered little of interest; in money affairs Love had evidently been as meticulously regular as in everything else. Somers’ balance was only forty-eight pounds, but on the previous day he had unprecedentedly withdrawn a hundred pounds in one-pound notes. An interview with the clerk who had transacted the business had no useful result, since Somers had given no indication as to the purpose for which he required the money.
‘Interesting, that,’ said Stagge as they left the bank. ‘We didn’t find any such sum on him, or in his rooms. What’s become of it, I wonder? Did the murderer steal it?’
But Fen, though he was unwontedly sober and thoughtful, made no suggestion. They went on to the police station, and the news of the third murder reached them scarcely five minutes after they had arrived there.
8
The Death of a Witch
At this point, our narrative is suddenly enriched by the presence of one Peter Plumstead, a clerk on holiday from an insurance office in London. Mr Plumstead was enjoying a fortnight’s walking tour. He had taken his holiday early in part because, being unmarried, he had only himself to consider, and in part because of a shaky if understandable theory that something had gone wrong with the progression of the English seasons, and that he was therefore more likely to get fine weather in early June than in the dog days. At the start of his travels a day of almost incessant rain had weakened his faith in this hypothesis, but since then he had been abundantly justified, and he sang gaily as he traversed the lanes and fields. He was a young man, earnest but kindly, with rather large green eyes and stiff, intractable brown hair; and he wore the clothes appropriate to his recreation: shorts, stout shoes and open-necked shirt, with a haversack and a stout ashplant.
‘Give to me the life I love,’ sang Mr Plumstead, ‘let the something go by me, tum-te-tum-te-tum-tum-tum, and the something nigh me.’
Warwickshire, he had concluded, was a more interesting and beautiful county than Leicestershire. In the first instance he had taken a train to Leicester, and was now working his way back to London by way of Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Bucks and Middlesex. At Leicester he had dutifully contemplated the Jewry wall, at Nuneaton Astley Castle, at Warwick Lord Leycester’s Hospital; and at Stratford he had both visited the Festival Theatre and perused As You Like It at a secluded spot on the bank of the Avon. Thus it came about that at eleven o’clock on the morning of speech day – a festivity of whose existence he was, however, unaware – he found himself walking along a quiet lane within four miles of Castrevenford School.
‘Bed in the bush with stars to see,’ sang Mr Plumstead, ‘bread I dip in the river, something something a man like me, there’s the life for ever.’
He was in high spirits. There were cowslips in the fields and bluebells in the woods. The hedges were white with may and he had seen blossom on the plum trees. He glimpsed violets half-concealed in the grass which flourished on the banks of the lanes, and picked a handful to cram into a buttonhole. The birds carolled lustily, and on the woods which crowned the low and distant hills the light flowed down like hot gold. The sky overarched the scene, a vivid blue bowl with the sun set like some fabulous fire-opal in its centre.
It was a few minutes after eleven when Mr Plumstead came to the cottage. It stood on the right side of the lane, and was Elizabethan, he thought, or even earlier. The thatch was in a ruinous condition and the chimneys stood askew. The square panes of the small windows were grimy and misanthropic, the garden a wilderness in which even the outlines of the beds were no longer discernible. At the rear, the cottage was hemmed in by dismal-looking larches. A gross and evil-smelling duck looked out upon the world through the bars of the rickety gate. Mr Plumstead, who had already that morning walked eight miles without a pause, halted and returned its truculent gaze. And when this palled, as it very quickly did, he resumed his inspection of the cottage.
The presence of the duck was the only evidence of habitation he had seen so far; the windows were apparently curtainless, and no smoke rose from the chimneys in the still, hot air.
But presently, while he looked,
an old woman appeared behind one of the windows. She did not seem to be paying any attention to Mr Plumstead, but thanks to the coating of dirt on the glass, and the obscurity of the room within, it was difficult to be sure. She was talking, perhaps. To herself? No, there was a shadowy outline somewhere beyond her which might be a man or a woman. Mr Plumstead, indefensibly inquisitive, stood on tiptoe, the better to peer over the straggling, unpruned thicket hedge. But now both figures were moving out of his range of vision; they were gone. Mr Plumstead stepped back on to the dusty road.
And then he heard the scream.
It was in no sense a melodramatic scream. Mr Plumstead described it afterwards as a choking, half-muted wail, very thin and very brief, and for a moment he doubted whether it were human at all. He stood hesitant. It seems likely that had he moved at once he might have been able to save everyone a good deal of subsequent trouble and danger – might even have earned a small immortality among lovers of great poetry. But the fear of making a fool of himself held him temporarily in check. Several seconds passed before he brought himself to open the gate and enter the weed-infested garden.
The duck backed apprehensively along the path, like a courtier quitting the presence of royalty, and, when Mr Plumstead quickened his pace, turned and fled into a nearby clump of foxtail grass, where it set up a surly quacking. Mr Plumstead knocked nervously on the door, but there was no movement from inside the cottage. After a short pause he tried the door, and found it open. A taproom smell drifted to his nostrils. He peered into the shadowy passage.
‘Hullo!’ he called. ‘Is there anyone there?’
Apparently there was not; the occupants of the house, like the haunted listeners in de la Mare’s poem, made no reply.
‘Hullo!’ said Mr Plumstead more loudly.
But the silence remained absolute. Not a footfall, not a breath, not the click of a latch.
Mr Plumstead, suppressing a sudden panicky instinct to retreat, entered the cottage. His foot skidded on an empty gin bottle, and the effort of saving himself from a fall did nothing to soothe his disordered nerves. The bottle rolled away and struck against a wall. Mr Plumstead paused to get his bearings.
The cottage was as neglected inside as out. Its furniture was rudimentary and its atmosphere stifling. Mr Plumstead calculated that the first door on the right must lead into the room where he had seen the old woman. He opened it and entered a kind of living room.
Dust was omnipotent here. There was a single, frayed easy chair, its seat bulging with defective springs. A table with one leg slightly shorter than the others supported a loaf from which the bread had apparently been torn in handfuls, a dirty glass, and a cracked plate covered with bacon rind and congealed fat. A heap of empty bottles lay in a corner, and one, half-full of rum, was on the mantelpiece beside an unlighted candle held upright by its own grease. The walls were panelled in oak. On the broad hearth, which looked as old as the house itself, the ashes and cinders of a long-dead fire were overlaid by a malodorous collection of garbage in which potato peelings predominated. The June sunlight struggled wan and diluted through the panes of the one small window, and much of the room was deep in shadow. For this reason Mr Plumstead did not perceive the body of the old woman until he was on the point of falling over it.
‘Lord,’ he muttered. And then, more self-consciously, ‘Damn it all…’
Even in youth she could scarcely have been beautiful, and age had not improved her. Her face – or what could be seen of it under the blood – was incredibly lined, her nose was curved like a crossbill’s beak, and her grey hair was matted with filth. She wore a stained and ragged black crepe dress and a pair of ancient carpet slippers, still mud-encrusted, though there had been no rain for at least a week. And beside her on the floor was a twisted, heavy iron poker.
But if Mr Plumstead assimilated these details at all, he did not linger over them. He stared, with a nausea which rose until it clutched, hot and bitter, at his throat, at the hole in the old woman’s head; at the obscene mingling of grey hair and grey brains and blood and splintered bone.
The shock held him aghast and motionless, talking dis-jointedly to himself. And so he never heard or suspected the swift, stealthy movement behind him – knew nothing until consciousness was shattered into a motley constellation of stars through which he reeled downward into an aching void. He felt the cushioned impact as he fell across the old woman’s body; he felt, or perhaps only imagined feeling, fingers about his right wrist. Then the beating of his heart swelled to a hammering like drums, and blackness engulfed him.
He discovered afterwards that he was unconscious for little more than five minutes. For a townie, Mr Plumstead had considerable physical stamina and resilience, and the blow on the back of his head may have been ill aimed. His first action on recovering consciousness was to roll hurriedly clear of his macabre mattress. Then he got slowly and cautiously to his feet. Apart from himself and the old woman, the room was empty. Mr Plumstead, lusting for air and light, left it and went out of the front door. The sunshine dazzled his eyes. He clung to the doorpost and, with the duck as an impassive or perhaps vaguely hostile audience, vomited prolongedly on to a clump of wallflowers.
After that, he felt very much better – so much better as to be capable of summoning assistance. To go back, he thought, would not be desirable; the cottage was the first human habitation he had passed in two miles. So he trudged on along the lane, tenderly fingering the bruise on his head, and with a step considerably less sprightly than it had been ten minutes previously.
In about a quarter of a mile he came to an assemblage of buildings almost large enough to justify the name of a village, and at the first of these there were telephone wires. It was a cottage scarcely larger than that which he had just left, but later in date and a great deal more seemly in aspect. Mr Plumstead halted at its gate, which gave on a neat and colourful front garden. Then he hastily cleared his throat, to call attention to his proximity.
The young woman who was lying on a rug on the lawn looked up with something of a scowl. She was blonde and pretty, and she wore sandals and quite the scantiest two-piece bathing suit that Mr Plumstead had ever imagined possible. At the moment, however, he was too distressed to offer mental homage to the shapeliness of her suntanned limbs. ‘Er,’ he remarked inconclusively; and at this the young woman removed her sunglasses and gazed at him in surprise.
‘Can I do anything for you?’ she said.
‘Telephone,’ mumbled Mr Plumstead, reddening. ‘Wondered if I could use your telephone…You see, there’s been a murder.’
The young woman scrambled precipitately to her feet. ‘A what?’ she demanded.
‘A murder,’ said Mr Plumstead, much harassed. ‘Must phone the police.’
‘But who? Where?’
‘At the cottage down the road. An old lady.’
‘Do you mean Mrs Bly?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mr Plumstead helplessly. ‘Is that her name? I was passing the cottage when I heard a scream, so I went to see what was up, and…and there she was.’
The young woman scrutinized him shrewdly for a moment. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Come inside.’
Mr Plumstead followed her obediently. Modesty suggested to him that he should avert his eyes – the young woman’s costume was decidedly exiguous – but she was so agreeably unselfconscious that he ignored its prompting. The telephone was in a small, sunlit hall.
‘Dial O,’ said the young woman, ‘and…’ Her tone changed. ‘Good Lord, what have you done to your head?’
‘Someone knocked me out,’ Mr Plumstead admitted ruefully. ‘Is it bleeding?’
‘A bit. I’ll get some iodine. You telephone.’
‘Where am I?’ said Mr Plumstead. ‘I mean, what’s the name of this place and this road?’
‘The village is Ravensward, and this is Maiden Lane,’ said the young woman. ‘I don’t know what Mrs Bly’s cottage is called. I don’t think it’s got a name…Wait here when you’ve p
honed. I’ll be down in a minute.’
She ran up the stairs. Mr Plumstead, dialling 0, conveyed the substance of his discovery to the Castrevenford police.
When the young woman returned with a jar of iodine, she had changed her bathing suit for a sleeveless white muslin frock. Mr Plumstead noted that while better satisfying the demands of modesty this had enhanced rather than diminished her beauty. She said, ‘Would you like some beer?’ and on Mr Plumstead’s gratefully indicating that he would, fetched four pint bottles and two glasses and carried them out to the rug on the lawn. Here they settled down, and she examined the bruise on his head.
‘It’s not too bad,’ she said presently. ‘You pour out the beer, and I’ll rub on some iodine.’
Her fingers were cool and efficient. It was seldom, Mr Plumstead reflected, that life provided so agreeably traditional a consummation to an adventure.
When she had finished, he said, ‘You’ve been awfully kind…By the way, I ought to have told you that my name’s Peter Plumstead.’
‘Mine’s Daphne Savage.’ She drank her beer appreciatively; then, putting down the glass, ‘And I’m simply itching to hear all about it.’
Mr Plumstead told her; being an honest young man, he did not – though he would have liked to – attempt to minimize his own rather ignominiously passive role in the proceedings.
When the recital was over, Daphne was silent for a moment; then: ‘Why do you think you were knocked out?’ she asked.
‘I imagine because whoever it was wanted to make sure he wasn’t seen getting away.’
‘But you saw him through the window. Wouldn’t you recognize him again?’
Mr Plumstead shook his head. ‘It was only a shadow. I couldn’t even swear it was a man.’ He hesitated. ‘Can you think why anyone would do a horrible thing like that?’
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