Dead-Nettle

by John Buxton Hilton

  There seemed a new advancement in the spring as I walked across the park to Margreave Hall: a warmer shaft of sunshine than had so far blessed the Low Peak in this month of March. But it did not suffuse me with lyrical hope. Summer and fruition would come to these fields in season. But yet another life – I was not thinking now of Hetty Wilson – was as good as over.

  Someone had ridden away on horse-back? Why was I being so stupidly confident that Slack, and Lomas, and Isobel, had come to the cottage on foot? Might not Lomas, leaving the chapel – or either of the other two, abandoning their intention to meet him as he came out – have gone on foot to Fuller’s stables to get a horse?

  Why should they? Because they knew in advance that they would be wanting to make a quick get-away? Something of my sense of relief departed from me.

  As I came within sight of the Hall, I saw that Slack and Burgess had at last begun work on that fallen statuary. Cupids and shepherds, discus-throwers and poised Olympian athletes with javelins missing from their outstretched arms had been raised on their pedestals, but not yet transferred to their final posts. They had been right-dressed in a ludicrous military line.

  Within the Hall a new regime was making itself felt, even to the eyes of a relatively detached observer. Desperately incapable of nursing his daughter himself, Esmond Fuller had sent for his deceased wife’s sister, a mindless meddler, a mistress of the art of making herself indispensable. I do not mean to imply that she was making a set at Fuller himself. She was one of those women who cannot conceive that anyone should not comply with her will; and yet about her will, mostly an accumulation of trivialities, there was no discernible philosophy. As she took off her coat in any house, her pattern established itself about her. She took me into her morning room and Esmond Fuller was sitting with his mid-morning claret and biscuit, his wine-table set on the wrong side of his chair. There was no immediate sign of Frank Lomas about the house. I presumed – and hoped – that he had been allowed up to the sick-room.

  ‘How’s the patient?’

  ‘On the better side, I think,’ Fuller said. ‘But beyond my reach.’

  When I looked at him for enlightenment, he got up and walked about the room, without, I think, really knowing that he had left his chair.

  ‘I may as well tell you. Our doctor has no nonsense about keeping confidences from those who might be able to help – even if he does pay lip-service to wrapping them up. She will improve rapidly as she settles down to her condition, that’s how he put it.’

  He looked at me as if uncertain whether I would grasp this.

  ‘So now you know. And so do I. And I am not surprised, I am not disgusted. My sister-in-law is disgusted. I am doing my best to feel glad.’

  ‘Lomas is with her now?’

  He nodded, a trifle vacantly. ‘On Monday, just after you left, I thought I had lost her altogether. Tuesday the same. She could not talk continuous sense. She seemed to have returned to childhood. I listened in vain for anything that she might let slip. But there was nothing. And I was surprised at her collapse. She was the last person on earth I would have expected to go under.’

  ‘She has had a lot to carry.’

  And he took this very gravely.

  ‘Too much. And it was beyond me to cope. I sent for Dorothy.’

  He did not complain about, hardly even seemed to notice, the vexations that had been brought into his way of life.

  ‘On Wednesday she was suddenly much better. A woman of remarkable resilience, as I had always thought. Remarkably better – only she would not admit it to me. She just lay there, looking at us – her aunt, the doctor, me. You could see that her eyes were clear again. She knew where she was, and I think she had pieced together most of what must have happened. Her eyes were watching us, but she did not seem able to bring herself to talk.’

  ‘She’s talked since?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Let’s hope Lomas puts that right,’ I said. ‘I have been waiting for him to make the move. I have known all along that he had it in him. Like the time, I am sure you have heard the story, when he stood on the authority of his two stripes.’

  ‘Because he knew he was entitled to them. Or suddenly felt he was, for the first time.’

  ‘You’ve come to a very clear understanding of him,’ I said.

  ‘An honest man. And what else would a man look for, for his daughter? And apart from that sort of sentimentality, they have everything ahead of them. I shall not always be here, and I do not know what they will make of this place. But they cannot go wrong. If only –’

  ‘If only I would go away,’ I said. ‘That will not be until my work is finished, Mr Fuller.’

  ‘You can do no good here, Mr Brunt. You may satisfy the law, but the law won’t remember with any sense of gratitude. I doubt whether you’ll even succeed in bringing a conviction. There’s too much blood and mud on everybody’s boots.’

  ‘But not on everybody’s reins and saddles,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’

  ‘How honest is an honest man?’ I asked him.

  ‘I was never brought up to believe that there were varying degrees of truth.’

  ‘Honest enough to come forward of his own accord, if I were to make a wrong arrest? You would expect an honest man to do that?’

  ‘In theory.’

  ‘But in fact he might weaken?’

  ‘Who can tell?’

  I was reluctant to commit myself to this way out. I certainly could not attempt it more than once, and if it were to come unstuck, I would be in fearsome trouble. Moreover, the more innocuous my false arrest, the more likely the manoeuvre was to fail. I could, for example, without much difficulty concoct a prima facie case against Florence Belfield, perhaps without too much harm done. But might not our honest murderer be prepared to write Florence Belfield off, at her age and in her state of mind, without much more than a wrinkle on his integrity? It depended on what he meant by integrity. Whatever Esmond Fuller might say about standards of truth, an honest murderer stepping forward to claim his death penalty must surely struggle through some coils of casuistry first. He – or she – might consider even Gilbert Slack expendable. A conscience looking anxiously round for narcotics might easily let itself be persuaded that Gilbert Slack’s was the deepest moral guilt for all that had happened at Dead-Nettle.

  I could so easily pull Slack in, on the mainly nugatory count of deliberately misleading us. But would that be enough? It would be uppermost in everyone’s mind that a more serious charge was pending. Wouldn’t my man just sit tight until it actually materialised? Or didn’t?

  Isobel’s aunt came into the room. ‘I think that that man has been up there long enough,’ she said.

  That was what she had to think. Things had been going on long enough which she had not even been invited to control. She looked at Fuller and me in turn for decision. Neither of us answered her.

  We were on the brink, I felt, of an irrelevant interchange. But I saw the door-handle turn – we had heard nobody outside – and Lomas pushed open the door for Isobel to precede him into the room. She was wearing a grey cashmere dressing-gown, not new, her hair was loosely tied in a ribbon at the nape of her neck, and her face was as pale as I had expected it to be. Weak after days in bed, she was uncertain of her balance.

  Lomas bore the look of a raw amateur actor concentrating fiercely and in near panic on the lines he had learned, waiting his delayed cue to say them, knowing that his confidence would support him once he had heard the sound of his own voice. They were a couple who had made up their minds on the most fundamental issue in their lives. And in view of what was going to happen within the next few minutes, it was right that they should have done so. Every shred of decency and humanity within me demanded that I should leave them alone with Fuller for a short space of time. I even played with the idea of taking Aunt Dorothy out for quite unnecessary questioning. But I took myself firmly in hand. I must not miss a nuance. We even had to suffer
Aunt Dorothy.

  ‘Are you still here?’ Isobel Fuller asked me, not rudely, registering objectively a melancholy fact.

  ‘Did you think I wouldn’t be?’

  ‘I wish you no harm, Mr Brunt. And I know you’re not going to vanish.’

  ‘Certainly I am not.’

  She went round behind her father and planted a kiss on his temple. ‘There is something we have to say to my father. Or, at least, Frank has. He insists on doing everything strictly according to form.’

  She was certain that that would get rid of me. I had risen on her entry, and not taken seat again yet, but I stood immovable.

  ‘In that case,’ she said, ‘for God’s sake get it over and done with.’

  She looked at me bitterly now. I was reminded of that other look on her face, on Monday morning in the ante-room amongst the crumpled linen. It was strange in this case how imprecise was all the evidence, if one dared call it that, that had prompted my most productive thinking. Horse’s hooves, or no horse’s hooves? Stained garments or no stained garments?

  I let a silence weigh heavily on them all, but this was not entirely histrionic. My own mind was still making itself up. I deliberately opened my note-book and unscrewed the cap of my fountain-pen.

  ‘Strictly according to form, then –’

  I think it is true to say that until I actually opened my mouth again, I did not know what name it was that I was going to say. Gilbert Slack? Florence Belfield?

  ‘Francis Lomas –’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Isobel said, and her aunt helped her into a chair.

  I did not proceed. Lomas looked at me as if he did not understand. Esmond Fuller stirred irritably, and his elbow caught the misplaced wine-table.

  ‘You’re surely not going to charge him, Inspector?’ he said.

  ‘I fear I have evidence that you aren’t aware of.’

  I knew he was wrestling within himself. I did not want him to have time to think. Once it was out, it was out.

  ‘Circumstantial evidence, Inspector?’ he asked.

  ‘Evidence that I’m sure a jury would find compelling.’

  I must not try too hard. I must not pretend to tell him any more. I must not risk feeding his lingering doubts. He moistened his lips. All along he had maintained the unthinkable: that here was a case where the law ought to turn a blind eye. All along, I now thought, he had intended to come forward if injustice threatened. He was that kind of man; but between the initial intention and the ultimate decision there must yawn a dark gap.

  ‘You are looking uneasy, Mr Fuller.’

  ‘I am trying to think.’

  He was a man who claimed to have lost everything; but in this moment he could see all that he had not yet lost.

  ‘I’m sorry about this, Lomas,’ I said. ‘You are a man whom I have grown to like. It is moments like this that make a police officer wish he had chosen some other calling. But –’

  ‘Stop!’

  I could see that Fuller’s struggle was now as much a physical as an emotional one. His breathing, his pulse rate, his blood pressure, were all out of rhythm.

  ‘Yes, Mr Fuller?’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I, that my alibi for Sunday night was a very imperfect one? You saw fit to see that as a strength rather than a weakness. You implied that that gave it credibility. I told you I had plenty of time, between Isobel going out and Cook coming in with my glass of warm milk, to ride over to Dead-Nettle Drift. I went there with the intention of killing that woman – but it was all academic, really. I had not actually pictured myself committing the act. It was when I saw her, tearing away at the walls of that cottage, that I realised her: I knew then how callous and casual she was. I saw what was true behind the tales that Slack had tried to get me to believe. I picked up one of Frank Lomas’s wedges –’

  Isobel was gazing with conscious fixation at a spot on the carpet.

  ‘So how am I going to convince you that this is no confession of convenience, Inspector?’

  I needed no such persuasion; but material evidence was always grist to the mill.

  ‘Your riding-clothes, perhaps,’ I said.

  ‘You are a smart man, Inspector. And I have a smart daughter. It was my hose-tops she missed, when you made her go through my things. After that, she would not have trusted herself to go to my wardrobe. She wouldn’t have found my breeches or hacking-jacket, either. But I can take you to where they are hidden. Destined for the boiler – but I haven’t had the nerve to handle them again.’

  He turned to the other two.

  ‘I have a bad time coming, but you two have everything ahead of you. You’ll have a bad time, too. But you’ll survive.’

  I walked with him across the park towards the village. There was no need to put cuffs on his wrists. We passed the absurd line of statues, all shapes and sizes and postures, drawn up like a guard-mounting parade awaiting the orderly officer. Fuller looked back over his shoulder at them and began to laugh maniacally; but not without a certain measure of self-control.

  Copyright

  First published in 1977 by Macmillan

  This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world

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  ISBN 978-1-4472-2943-8 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1-4472-2942-1 POD

  Copyright © John Buxton Hilton, 1977

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