She seemed consoled by this admission. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I was worrying about it while I walked home from school yesterday afternoon. And about other things, too. People knew there was something I was hiding, and if he got to hear about that he’d imagine I was going to break down sooner or later and let the cat out of the bag, as I probably would have, and he’d take action about it. I wished I had my bike, because the road’s lonely once you get out of Castrevenford, but my three-speed had given up the ghost. I’d phoned Mummy during break and asked her to fetch me in the car, but she couldn’t because she had people in to tea. So I had to walk.
‘I knew Melton Chart was going to be the worst bit. There wasn’t a soul about, and I hadn’t got halfway before he suddenly came out of the trees – Somers, I mean – and slid down the bank. And he had a revolver. I thought, “Well, this is it.” But I wasn’t going to give up without a struggle. I’d got my penknife in my blazer pocket, and there was just a faint chance someone would remember about the game.’
‘Game?’ Stagge queried. They explained. ‘Oh, ah,’ he said. ‘Yes, I get you. Go ahead, miss.’
‘He said, “Don’t make a sound or a false move. We’re going for a little walk together.”’ (Somers’ phraseology, Fen reflected, had been deplorably melodramatic, but possibly Brenda was paraphrasing.) ‘But I had to take the risk, of course. I cut my leg open to work the blood trail business – I was desperate, and I can tell you it was a pretty savage cut – and luckily he thought I was pulling up a stocking and didn’t notice; it only took a second, anyway. Well, then I put on a terrified victim act to delay setting off for a minute, because I wanted there to be some blood in the road to give a starting-point. I didn’t dare look, of course, but by the time he hustled me up the bank and into the wood I thought I must have succeeded.
‘Well, he marched me a long way into the wood with the gun pointing at my back, and I can tell you’ – Brenda had grown rather pale at the recollection – ‘that I never want to have to go through anything like that again. I thought every second was going to be my last…We got to the clearing where you found me, and he brought out a paper and a pencil and an envelope and dictated a kind of ridiculous farewell letter to Miss Parry. I s’pose he wouldn’t let me write it in my own words for fear I’d put in some sort of a concealed message.
‘Then he made me describe exactly where my study was. If I’d had any sense I would have described someone else’s study, and the letter being found there would have made you all suspicious, but at the time I was so frightened that I never thought of it. A moment later – I was standing with my back to him – I heard a thud as he dropped the gun on the ground, and before I knew what was happening he’d grabbed me by the throat. I struggled, and we both fell, and there was an awful pain in my leg, and I don’t remember anything else till I woke up in the darkness. I couldn’t move, so I lay there till you and Elspeth found me.’
The long recital, combined with the injuries to her throat, had made Brenda very hoarse. She coughed, painfully and prolongedly. The nurse hurried forward with a soothing draught.
And Fen was wondering, not very relevantly, why Somers had preferred to strangle Brenda rather than shoot her; perhaps he had derived a sensual pleasure from the thought of his fingers about her white neck…But it was difficult to think objectively about such a mean and cowardly crime.
‘He bungled it,’ Fen remarked. ‘Thought you were dead when you were only unconscious. You’ve been very, very lucky, Brenda.’
‘You’re telling me,’ said that young woman throatily but emphatically.
Stagge was regarding Fen with considerable curiosity. ‘And you knew all this in advance, sir?’
For answer, Brenda handed him Fen’s notes, and he read them aloud.
‘“You saw Somers break open the cupboard in the science building, and steal vitriol. He threatened to kill you if you spoke of it. He met you in Melton Chart on your way home from school, dictated a fake letter, made you tell him the whereabouts of your study, and attempted to throttle you.” M’m.’ Stagge nodded condescendingly; his humility did not run to admitting complete bafflement in front of a third party. ‘Accurate in every detail.’
‘And what now?’ Brenda asked. ‘I suppose you’ll arrest him?’
‘Oh, dear me, no,’ said Fen. ‘Somers is well beyond the reach of mundane laws. You see, Brenda, there was a lot happening while you were lying in Melton Chart. Not to put too fine a point on it, three people have been murdered – and one of them is Somers.’
She stared incredulously.
‘But this evening!’ she exclaimed. ‘Who – why—?’
Fen stood up. ‘That remains to be seen. But you’ll be well guarded, so you needn’t worry. We must go now, and you must get some rest.’
He leaned across the bed and kissed her gently on the tip of her attractive nose.
‘Oh!’ said Brenda mischievously. ‘Taking advantage, are you? But I should have thought you could have done better than that.’
‘I’m a married man,’ he told her severely, ‘so it’s no use your flaunting your charms at me. Besides, think how nice it will be to go back to Jeremy and the smell of dissected crayfish.’
‘Devil!’ she said, smiling. ‘Do come back tomorrow and explain things.’ She was tired, her eyelids were drooping.
‘I will,’ Fen promised. ‘Pleasant dreams.’
They left her in charge of the nurse, with a constable on guard in the passage outside.
‘I hope she’ll be all right,’ Stagge said anxiously as they went downstairs. ‘I’ve a good deal of admiration for that young lady.’
‘She will,’ Fen answered with confidence. ‘I don’t think anything can possibly happen to her now.’
It was already close on midnight, and presently, after drinking whisky with Mr Boyce, they took their departure. The two cars – Lily Christine and Stagge’s little Morris – were parked outside the gate, and they halted there for a moment before setting off. The rain had almost ceased, a cool wind had sprung up, and the clouds were parting like the curtains of a proscenium arch to display the stars.
‘I see half of it, sir,’ said Stagge slowly, ‘and I could kick myself for not having seen it before. But, damn it’ – he struck the palm of his left hand with his right fist – ‘I can’t understand the other half. I’m still foxed about two of the murders.’
‘It’s all over, superintendent.’ Fen spoke rather wearily. He was carrying his jacket over his arm, and the wind blew chill through his damp shirt. ‘We’ve got hanging evidence now.’
‘Well, sir, our next move is up to you.’
‘We must have the whole thing out. And I think’ – Fen was pensive – ‘that the headmaster had better be there.’
They entered the cars and drove back through Melton Chart to the headmaster’s house. But the headmaster, they were informed, was still over at the school. Fen took the opportunity to towel himself briskly, change his clothes, and swallow three aspirin – a drug he held in uncritical reverence – as a precautionary measure. Then they drove to the study in Davenant’s. The site was bare and deserted in the beams of their headlamps.
The headmaster was alone. He was sprawled in an armchair drinking whisky and staring at the cold grate. His long nose looked greasy in the lamplight, his sparse black hair was dishevelled, and his eyes were blank with fatigue. But he roused himself at their entry to pour them drinks. He had been sitting there, he explained, for the last half-hour, having got rid of a diehard remnant of parents who insisted on harassing him after the play was over.
‘And how did the play go?’ Fen asked.
‘Oh, well enough,’ the headmaster said vaguely. ‘Yes, well enough, I think. But where have you been, my dear fellow? I haven’t set eyes on you since the garden party.’
Very briefly, Fen narrated the events of the evening and the evidence of Brenda Boyce.
‘Good God,’ the headmaster mumbled. ‘Somers…Good God. I didn’t like the man, but
I should never have dreamed…’ He relapsed into silence, twisting his fingers together. Stagge glanced at Fen.
‘I ought to know, sir,’ he said. ‘I ought to be able to work it out on my own. You couldn’t give me a few hints?’
Fen raised his glass and drank before replying.
‘The nature of Somers’ alibi,’ he said, ‘the wristwatch, Love’s statement about a fraud, the common-sense view about the manuscripts, the alibi reports, and the attempt to kill Brenda this evening.’
Stagge considered these arcane indications in silence.
‘No good, sir,’ he said at last. ‘You’ll just have to tell me.’ There was a hint of bitterness in his voice.
Fen put his glass on the mantelpiece. ‘In the first place, you realize that it was Somers who killed Love.’
The headmaster twisted round in his chair. ‘But I understood that he couldn’t—’
‘Just one moment, sir, please.’ Stagge raised a hand in warning. ‘Yes, I’d got as far as that. But—’
‘But you want to know who killed Somers – and Mrs Bly. Very simple.’ Fen smiled faintly. ‘Who could it have been except—’
He checked himself, listening, then strode to the door, flung it open, and peered outside. No one was there.
‘Wait,’ he said, and disappeared. Only a few seconds ticked away when they heard his voice from beyond the windows.
‘Quickly!’ he shouted. ‘Quickly, for God’s sake! He’s getting away!’
15
Rout
The conclusion of the case was a strange blend of farce and tragedy.
On emerging from Davenant’s, Fen had heard footsteps hurrying away across the turf in the direction of the school gates. Pausing only to yell at Stagge and the headmaster, he set off in pursuit. It was unlikely, he thought, that the murderer would have any satisfactory means of leaving the country, but to lose him now might just possibly be to lose him for ever.
Fen had hardly begun to follow, however, before he heard the slam of a car door and the whirr of a self-starter somewhere in the drive. He broke into a run. A hundred yards ahead of him, powerful headlights blazed out of the darkness, and a long, low shape moved swiftly away towards the main road.
‘Hell and damnation,’ said Fen. He turned back to meet Stagge and the headmaster, who had rushed from the study at his summons. ‘There he goes,’ he said tersely.
Each of the three men flew instantaneously to his own car. Fen was the first away. He turned by the simple process of ignoring lawns and flower beds, and, leaving a train of devastation and ruin in his wake, rattled vociferously down the drive. Although doubting in his heart if so petulant and eccentric a vehicle as Lily Christine could keep pace with what looked remarkably like a Hispano-Suiza, he was determined to be in at the finish if it were mechanically possible. Stagge followed, and after him came the headmaster. Their little fleet passed through the gates.
Fen was just in time to see the Hispano’s tail light disappearing from the main road into a turning which he recognized as leading towards Ravensward. And it soon became apparent that this evasive action had been a distinct mistake on the part of their quarry, for the side road was so narrow and tortuous as to vitiate the difference in capacity between his car and their own. Moreover, although the headmaster continued to follow Fen with the unquenchable faith of a martyr, Stagge had kept on along the main road. He knew of a detour, and hoped to cut the Hispano off. But unluckily he had underestimated the detour’s length, with the result that he rejoined the procession in precisely the position from which he had left it – namely, between Fen and the headmaster.
They sped on grimly through the night, sending watchdogs into paroxysms of frantic barking, startling placid cattle, bedevilling the dreams of sleeping rustics. Suburbia gave place to arcadia. Trees, hedges, barns, cottages and telegraph poles fled past them like leaves before an autumn gale; benighted wayfarers took to the ditches, hens were crushed unhousel’d beneath their wheels. And soon they came to Ravensward itself – over the humpbacked bridge, past the Beacon, past the diminutive green, and so along the lane where Mrs Bly’s cottage was situated. Stagge knew that their quarry, seeing the disadvantage under which he laboured, was making again for the main road.
But it was here that Lily Christine began to display symptoms of disaffection – disaffection which quickly merged into open mutiny. Strange popping sounds reverberated beneath her bonnet, developing with horrid swiftness into a noise like gang warfare with sub-machine guns. A belated courting couple, clutched in a passionate embrace beneath the hedge, leaped apart as though a flaming sword had been thrust between them. The accelerator ceased to function, the engine died, the car lost way. With a spectral groan Fen pulled in at the side of the lane and watched Stagge and the headmaster sweep past him unregarding.
‘Help!’ he yelled after them in rather a futile fashion. ‘Help!’
The courting couple, approaching, resolved itself into the familiar figures of Daphne Savage and Mr Plumstead.
‘Good Lord,’ said Daphne, ‘it’s Professor Fen. But what on earth—?’
She stared enquiringly. Fen climbed out of the car.
‘It’s useless,’ he announced sombrely. He was easily daunted by setbacks.
‘Broken down?’ Mr Plumstead asked, not very intelligently. ‘I’ll fix it for you.’ He suffered from the common delusion that he understood cars. ‘Gaskets gone, I expect.’
Fen eyed him without optimism.
‘It always seems an extraordinary thing to me,’ he said, ‘that scientists should traipse about, boasting of all the benefits they’ve conferred on mankind, when they’ve never succeeded in inventing a single thing which can be relied on in an emergency to work.’
Mr Plumstead did not reply to this observation. He already had the bonnet open and was engaged, to all appearances, in dismantling the entire engine. Bits of metal clattered on to the ground at his feet. He breathed stertorously.
‘Isn’t he clever?’ said Daphne admiringly; and when Fen showed no disposition to confirm this judgment, ‘But what exactly is happening, Professor Fen?’
Fen briefly explained, while Mr Plumstead went on with his labour of decimation.
‘Heavens,’ said Daphne, impressed. ‘But who—?’
She interrupted herself. For a minute past the sounds of the chase had been beyond earshot, but now they heard a car approaching from the direction in which it had gone, and when it came into view Fen recognized it by the numbers of supernumerary lights as being the Hispano-Suiza. It was obvious what had occurred. In an attempt to shake off his pursuers, their quarry had turned in at a gate or drive, switched off his lights and his engine, waited for them to go past, and then come back on his tracks. The manoeuvre had gained him a little distance, but that was all, for Fen could already see the lights of the other two cars returning in his wake.
‘Quick!’ he screamed.
Startled, Mr Plumstead knocked his head against the radiator pipe, and emerged clutching it bemusedly.
‘Push the car across the road!’ Fen commanded.
A wild flurry of disorganized activity ensued. Mr Plumstead thrust Daphne masterfully out of the danger zone; Fen leaped for the brake handle; and together, by gigantic efforts, they got Lily Christine on the move. But the Hispano was already very close; it was on top of them; and a second later, its wheels skidding on the wet grass verge, it had scraped past.
‘Hell!’ said Fen.
Lily Christine, moving under her own impetus, swung across and buried her nose affectionately in the opposite bank, blocking the lane entirely. And they had barely time to appreciate the necessary results of this situation before Stagge’s car and the headmaster’s pulled up an inch short of them with a tortured stridulation of brakes and tyres.
Stagge’s face, a dim white blob, appeared at the driving window. ‘Get that blasted car out of the way!’ he yelled.
They hastened to obey. Without another word the two pursuers set off again.
/> ‘Stop!’ Fen cried pitifully. ‘Wait for me!’
They did nothing of the kind. Stagge, having his duty to do, could not afford to delay even an instant, and the headmaster, imbued with an unseemly, dionysiac lust for the chase, had eyes and ears for nothing else. The roar of their engines died away. Fen slumped down on the grassy bank. Mr Plumstead returned to his destructive toil. And Daphne stood in gloomy silence, watching them.
Presently they again heard a car approaching, this time from the direction of Ravensward village. Fen scrambled to his feet, stared towards it, and was instantly possessed by something like hysteria.
‘He’s done it again!’ he ejaculated. ‘Quick!’
Undeniably he had, for the car they saw was certainly the Hispano. But this time Stagge had been prepared for the trick, and the distance between hare and hounds was perceptibly less. Fen and Mr Plumstead strained frantically at Lily Christine’s scarlet chassis.
And then, incredibly, it all happened as before. True, the Hispano had even less room to spare, and given another second they would have stopped her once and for all time, and probably have been horribly killed into the bargain. But she squeezed through, miraculously, and once again, being unable to check Lily Christine’s progress rapidly enough, they succeeded in bringing Stagge and the headmaster to a standstill. Only this time Stagge’s car actually hit Lily Christine, broadside on, propelling her, crabwise, two or three inches along the lane.
They could not see Stagge’s complexion, but they visualized it – correctly – as being purple with fury.
‘Are you mad?’ he demanded in a cracked and frantic voice. ‘Are you all MAD?’
They bent anew to their humiliating task. On this occasion, however, Fen abandoned Lily Christine without even troubling to put on the brake, and leaped in beside the headmaster just as his car was moving off. Daphne scrambled somehow into the back, and Mr Plumstead, though his reactions were slower, managed to jump on to the running-board, where he held on as though legions of devils were attempting to dislodge him. Fen had a glimpse of Lily Christine’s vitals spread forlornly over the surface of the road, and the next moment they were away.
Love Lies Bleeding Page 19