They Died in the Spring

by Josephine Pullein-Thompson

  “And is Paul Barclay likely to make difficulties?”

  “Oh no, Paul’s quite a different kettle of fish, he can’t say boo to a goose; still, he’s not a bad sort, he’s just been under his parents’ thumb too long.”

  “Hasn’t marriage emancipated him?” asked Flecker.

  “Not really, he’s got three masters to serve now, or had rather, and Jean’s not keen to start a family; can’t say I blame her, kids are such a tie and then there’s the expense. I’ve only got Gillian, but what with clothes and school fees, and you’ve hardly got the child a bike when she starts asking for riding lessons. I’ve tried to teach her the value of money . . . But still, as I was saying, you can’t really blame Jean, only Paul would like a family, he’s one of those sentimental men, and that seems to be causing a bit of trouble. At least, Paul’s taken to calling on Lesley Carlson and you can’t say that a friendship with a young and attractive widow is likely to mend matters. I only hope he isn’t going to turn out to be a bit of a Don Juan like his father. Still, I daresay there’s nothing in it.”

  Flecker said, “Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Willis. We’ll come and see you again if we may.”

  “Yes, do. Any time. One way and another I know a good deal of what goes on in the village. Now I must get on. I’ve no end to do before lunch and then there’s the funeral. Gillian,” she called as the detectives went out of the front door, “haven’t you finished dusting those bedrooms yet?”

  “Well, she is a talker and no mistake,” said Browning, as he and Flecker walked down the passageway to Church Lane, where they had left the car.

  “Yes, she seems a bit indiscreet for a devil-dodger’s wife,” agreed Flecker; “but still, she was useful. Strong, silent women are all very well in private life, but when at work I like talkers.”

  Harris, digging over the last strip of Miss Yates’s cabbage patch and casting the rotten stumps on a small, sullen bonfire, had no intention of talking. A look of mulish obstinacy overspread his face at the mention of police officers. “I told the last one all I knew and that didn’t satisfy him,” he said truculently. “I’ve got my work to do,” he added, as he returned to his digging.

  “Miss Schmidt’s body hadn’t been found when Inspector Sims saw you,” Flecker pointed out, “and, since it was found at Well Cottage, we’re bound to ask for your help.”

  “I had nothing to do with putting it there.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that you had,” Flecker said pacifically, “but I expect that you’ve been back from time to time to have a look round or take a few of your vegetables; you may have seen something that would interest us.”

  “I have been back to get the odd dish of greens,” Harris admitted reluctantly.

  “Did you see anyone about?”

  “Once I thought I heard the Colonel there talking to someone. I didn’t want anything to do with him, not after the way he’d gone for me the week before. Called me all manner of names, he did. Names you wouldn’t expect to hear from a man in his position. I didn’t want any more to do with him, so I kept well away. And then last Friday Mr. Paul was there with Mrs. Carlson; he seemed to be showing her round.”

  “No one else?”

  “No.”

  “You never saw Miss Schmidt hanging about?”

  “No, not at the cottage, but I’ve seen her hanging about the lanes waiting to be picked up. They think there’s no one about in the bad weather to see what’s going on; drive the car half into the wood and there you are. Not that it’s any of my business. I mind my own and I expect other people to mind theirs, but sometimes you can’t be off seeing what’s going on.”

  “Do you know who the boy friend was?” asked Flecker.

  “Boy friend! He was old enough to be her father,” answered Harris indignantly. “It was Colonel High and Mighty Barclay, of course, and she wasn’t the first one, I do know that.”

  “Are you absolutely sure it was the Colonel you saw with her?” asked Flecker.

  “It was him all right, but I’m not saying I put my head into the car.”

  Flecker grinned. “We could hardly expect that. And what about a cottage?” he asked. “Have you any hope of another one, because I shouldn’t think that shepherd’s hut will be much fun next winter.”

  Harris’s manner suddenly thawed; he stopped work and leaned on his fork. “No,” he said, “I’ve tramped round all over the place these last three weeks enquiring, but all the cottages round here are being sold off and done up with bathrooms and all the rest; there are very few left to rent. I don’t want all these modern conveniences, give me a nice fire of sticks. There’s not many people left hereabouts that can be bothered to pick up a stick and the woods are full of firewood rotting and wasting. Nowadays people want to press a switch, but I like to go out of a summer evening and do my wooding. Of course they’ve lost the use of their legs, that’s half the trouble. You should see them at the weekends, driving along the main roads, one behind the other like a lot of sheep. They think they’re seeing the countryside, but they never get out of their motor cars. There’s no individuality nowadays either. Think alike, dress alike. Now I’m alone a lot, sometimes I don’t speak to a soul the whole weekend, but I don’t mind, I like to sit down of an evening with a book—or just to think, but most people don’t stop to think, not beyond I want this, I want that, and when they’ve got it are they any happier? Years ago people had their simple pleasures, they didn’t want all this so-called entertainment.”

  “They had some pretty gory pleasures too,” said Flecker. “What about the crowds that turned out to see martyrs and witches burned? And executions were a popular form of entertainment not so very long ago. If you ask me, there was a good deal of boredom about.”

  “Well, television’s changed all that,” said Browning. “You’d be surprised what little grumbling there’s been about police hours since we bought our set. Mrs. Browning’s not particular whether we go out or not nowadays.” Harris was obviously preparing for battle and Flecker, tired of the debating society atmosphere, forestalled him hastily. “Tell me about last Saturday,” he said. “Where did you go for your walk?”

  “Up over to Little Pilkington, round through Ilston and Elbury and back by Redpole Green. There weren’t many people about; too cold for them, I suppose,” said Harris scornfully.

  “You came back to Winmore End through the woods then?” asked Flecker.

  “Not through the Barclay plantation, if that’s what you mean,” answered Harris, his truculent air returning.

  “No, that wasn’t what I meant,” said Flecker equably. “There’s a lane from Redpole Green which runs along the far side of the Barclay woods, so presumably there’s a path of some sort through to Winmore End.”

  “You’re right,” admitted Harris. “It brings you to the Green and that was the way I came.”

  “You’re sure?” asked Flecker. “You went straight to the pub and didn’t feed yourself or the dog? You must both have been pretty hungry by the time you got home that night.”

  Harris was becoming red-faced and angry. “We had a sandwich,” he said. “Not much of a one, they use that ready-sliced bread—too tired to cut a slice off a decent loaf, I suppose.”

  “You didn’t see anyone in the woods?”

  “No, not a soul.”

  “And you didn’t hear a shot?” Harris seemed to debate his answer. “I don’t know whether I did or didn’t,” he said at last. “I can’t be sure.”

  “I expect you heard one later than the much-advertised six o’clock bang?” hazarded Flecker.

  Harris looked at him with surprise. “You’re right,” he said. “That’s just what I did do. Whether young Daff Mullins got it wrong or whether there were two shots, I don’t know, but the shot I heard wasn’t at six, more like ten or a quarter past.”

  “One last question, can you shoot?” asked Flecker.

  “No,” Harris answered emphatically. “Never fired a gun in my life.”

  �
�Well, that has chucked a spanner in the works,” said Browning in disgruntled tones as he and Flecker walked back to the car. “Just when I thought we were beginning to get somewhere.”

  “A spanner? I don’t see why; there are bound to be two shots; both barrels of the gun had been fired.”

  “Yes, but the Colonel ought to have had his go earlier, before six. If his was the six o’clock shot we’re right back where we started from.”

  “We’re not really, you know,” Flecker told him. “Our speed may be infinitesimal but we are moving towards the light. Come on, Crossley police station. We can’t go barging in on the Barclays or Sinclairs, they’re occupied with this funeral. Anyway, I want another look at that gun and Miller may be able to give us a line on the Colonel’s gunsmith. What do you make of Harris?” he asked as they took the corkscrew road through the beechwoods. “Bucolic philosopher or phony?”

  “Well, he’s a character and no mistake, but I don’t think he was putting it on.”

  “I don’t think he enjoys his hermit-like existence half as much as he’d have us believe. Too much of an air of the ancient mariner about him. According to some sage or other, only gods and wild beasts delight in solitude and I don’t think he falls into either category. Anyway, if he heard a shot at six-fifteen and didn’t get to the pub till seven, he took a devil of a long time to walk through that wood.”

  *

  Inspector Miller, delighted to be of assistance, produced the shotgun that had killed Colonel Barclay, telephoned a local sportsman and found that Barclay had patronized the old-established Bretford gunsmith and suggested that he should elicit the information Flecker wanted from the Colonel’s bank manager—a fellow Rotarian—an offer which Flecker accepted gratefully. After an early lunch at the Swan, Browning was dispatched to Bretford with the shotgun and instructions to call on Mrs. Garfield and find out what he could about her telephone call to Mary Barclay on the evening of the murder, while Flecker set out for the hospital on foot.

  The bright sunshine lent a holiday air to Crossley; people sauntered, unwilling to reach their destinations; women had already changed into gayer clothes, cats sunned themselves on windowsills and doorsteps. On the outskirts of the town the small gardens were transformed with spring flowers; the almond trees, whose buds had remained in frozen immobility for several weeks, had blossomed at every gate and in the straggling ivy-clad copse opposite the hospital, birds were singing.

  Built as a memorial to the dead of the first World War, Crossley Hospital had been designed by timid men; eschewing the functional, they had produced an overgrown private house, red brick, many-gabled and decorated here and there with sham Tudor timbering. It wasn’t a large place and Flecker went in, wondering that a man of Hedley’s apparent ability should have got no further. But when he was shown into the doctor’s consulting room, the reason soon became obvious; Hedley, a man of undistinguished appearance and quiet manner, had met with some accident; one side of his face was scarred and his mouth was very slightly distorted. But though the wounds had faded until now there was nothing horrifying about them, Hedley was evidently still conscious of his appearance; he seemed unable to look his visitor in the face and spoke out of the good corner of his mouth, mostly in an inaudible mutter. As he shook hands the mutter seemed to relate that Scott was the police surgeon and the proper person to consult, so Flecker explained hastily that it was the ballistic angle in which he was interested at this moment rather than the medical one. “Scott sent in your report and I showed it to our ballistic boys in London. They were most impressed,” Flecker told him.

  Hedley smiled in a crooked, self-deprecatory way and muttered something about sitting down. Flecker sat; he pulled a bundle of envelopes from a pocket of his tweed suit, pushed back a lock of hair and enquired, “Are you a shooting type yourself?”

  “Used to do a bit,” muttered Hedley. “Had an uncle with a small place in Suffolk, used to stay with him in the school holidays. Had some experience of accidents.”

  “Well, first of all,” said Flecker, “a possible and certainly the most comfortable and tidy solution to the whole business would be that the Colonel and Miss Schmidt were having an affair and that they quarrelled or she became troublesome and Barclay killed her. Then, regretting what he had done, he took his own life. Now from my point of view that’s possible, though there are one or two points that would want clarifying, but from your point of view I gather that suicide and accident are out of the question?”

  “No,” answered Hedley. “Not out of the question.” He spoke slowly and thoughtfully. “You see, he could have propped the gun in the fork of a tree, attached a string to the trigger, stood back ten feet and pulled the string. He could have been shot accidentally provided that someone else shot him. My point is that you can’t hold a gun and shoot yourself at a range of ten feet and you can’t stumble and shoot yourself at a range of ten feet.”

  “And you’ve no doubt at all that the range was ten feet?”

  “It’s like this,” said Hedley, meeting Flecker’s eyes as he warmed to his subject. “At point-blank range the whole charge goes in together, wadding and all, making one horrible sort of rat hole. But, as the range gets longer, the pellets begin to wander off and in Barclay’s case we found a spread of four inches, instead of the hole from one to two inches in diameter that we would expect from a self-inflicted wound, and the wadding hadn’t gone in, it was adhering to the outside of the wound. Then there was the absence of powder grains; not that that would be in any way conclusive, but the sum total of facts pointed to a range of approximately ten feet.”

  “Good, well that settles that one,” said Flecker, turning to the next envelope. “Now, you saw Miss Schmidt’s body. Would you say that the contusion on the back of her head could have been made with the butt of a gun?”

  “Yes,” Hedley answered at once, “it seemed very likely to me and I had a good look at the gun, but there wasn’t a trace of blood or hair; if it was cleaned it was done very thoroughly.”

  “I think we shall find there’s more than one gun about.”

  Hedley looked surprised. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

  “Does it strike you as odd that both barrels had been fired, but only one into Barclay?” Flecker asked. “Supposing Barclay saw a rabbit and fired, wouldn’t he then have re-loaded? He had the wherewithal, there were half a dozen cartridges in his pocket and the gun had an ejector and extractor mechanism.”

  “It would have been normal practice to re-load,” said Hedley slowly. “But of course if he met someone at that moment he might have delayed!”

  “And then there was the absence of the Colonel’s fingerprints,” said Flecker reflectively. “I know that Paul Barclay handled the gun when they found the body, but I don’t think that accounts for the entire absence of prints, and added to that I cannot imagine that a man of the Colonel’s calibre would have let his murderer take a gun off him without a struggle. There have got to be two guns.”

  A glint of amusement crossed Hedley’s face. “Well, if you say so; you’re the great man.”

  “You don’t play cricket, do you?”

  The doctor shook his head.

  “Pity. I want to know if local feeling really ran high over this proposed ploughing of Church Field. Well, I won’t keep you; you’ve been a great help.” He got up to go.

  “Can’t help you there,” muttered Hedley. “The only person I know in Winmore End is Mrs. Carlson; she was a temporary secretary here last autumn when Miss Thomas was sick, but I don’t suppose she knows much about cricket . . .”

  *

  At three o’clock that afternoon they buried the body of Claud Barclay in the little cemetery behind the church. A small square, cut out of the fields, when the churchyard itself could take no more dead, the cemetery looked across the vivid green of winter wheat and the warm rich brown of plough to where the beechwoods, purple-flushed with risen sap, waited quiescently for the sun to loose their leaves. The Barclays, black as c
rows and highly embarrassed by notoriety, fled from the scene through a crowd of commiserating friends, inquisitive acquaintances and the press cameramen at the lych-gate. With hurried handshakes and perfunctory kisses the relations piled into cars and departed and the family escaped on foot along the passage to the Old Forge.

  Veronica darted into the kitchen to put on the kettle. “Tea won’t be long, Ma,” she announced as she returned. Out of the public gaze Mary Barclay’s steel-like stateliness left her; looking old and forlorn, she crumpled into a chair; ignoring Veronica’s remark about the tea, she blew her nose. Paul, who’d never outgrown his schoolboy horror of emotion, disassociated himself from Veronica’s red eyes and his mother’s sniffing by standing with his back to them looking out of the window, gazing fixedly across the Green. Aubrey poked at a small, sullen fire.

  “Where have you parked the children, Veronica?” asked Jean.

  “Oh well, Joan Willis offered to have them. She is good, you know, considering all she’s got to do with moving and everything, but I’d already fixed up with Lesley Carlson, who’d offered first.” Veronica tried to keep her voice casual as she mentioned Lesley’s name. An unhappy silence fell, wrapping each of them in with his own uncomfortable thoughts.

  “There were a lot of flowers.”

  “That sounds like the kettle.” Jean and Veronica both spoke at once.

  Aubrey followed Veronica out to the kitchen. “Can I carry?” he asked and, standing close to her, offered the comfort of his presence.

  “You take the tray, I’ll bring the teapot,” said Veronica, searching for the kettle holder and then using an inadequate handkerchief instead.

  Mary Barclay revived a little as she drank her tea. “I’m glad your Aunt Margaret didn’t come down from Scotland,” she said. “It’s too far. Later on I’ll go up and stay with her.”

  “That’s a good idea, Ma, you’ll need a change.” Veronica injected an encouraging note into her voice.