‘A pole?’ Honeybath hadn’t thought of this particular horror.
‘With a forked end, I’d say. Pushed him down and pushed him down, until the poor bugger was well tangled up. It sickens me, it does.’
‘I’m not surprised.’ What sickened Honeybath was the thought of this deplorable man sitting here almost hard upon Edwin’s death, and entertaining himself with such a revolting fantasy. Or was it a fantasy? Honeybath himself had simply not got round to envisaging in detail just how Edwin had been made away with – if made away with he had been.
‘But who done it?’ Brown asked. ‘Who did it, that’s to say.’ Brown paused with evident satisfaction on this grammatical nicety. ‘Answer me that.’
‘I don’t think I can, Mr Brown.’ Honeybath hesitated. ‘Have you any specific suspicion yourself?’
‘There are those up there at the house that are in a fair panic, Honeybath. I’ll say no more than that. An inside job, it has been.’ Brown gazed darkly in the direction of the serene facade of Hanwell Court. ‘I’ve an eye for such things that seldom goes wrong, although I say it myself. Just keep your own eyes skinned, Honeybath, and you’ll see what you’ll see.’
‘I’ll do what I can. But now I fear I must leave you.’ Honeybath had had enough of being Honeybathed by Brown. He gave a firm nod and walked away.
Rounding Poseidon, he asked himself a new and alarming question. Was the extraordinary Brown perhaps a homicidal maniac? Had he senselessly murdered Edwin, and had he been detected compulsively brooding over the scene of his crime – as such maniacs were said to do? Or, alternatively, had his past criminal associations, whatever they had been during his incarceration, endowed him with unusual acuity in such matters, so that he had really perceived correctly the presence of fear and guilt somewhere in Hanwell Court?
These questions occupied Honeybath’s thoughts during the rest of his walk to the Hanwell Arms, and as they were inherently baffling they naturally received no answer. The pub proved to be an unpretending one, and he had to make his needs known to a man in the public bar. The man was civil but unenthusiastic; declared he must consult some higher authority; and withdrew after serving Honeybath with the pint of bitter it had occurred to him to ask for by way of indicating his goodwill towards the establishment. Honeybath retired to a bench in a corner and took stock of his surroundings.
Two undersized men close to him were chucking darts at a board on the opposite wall. He gathered almost at once from what he could follow of their conversation that they were natives of the place and worked at some racing stables close at hand. The surrounding downs, he remembered, supported numerous concerns of that sort. It was therefore probable that a larger group of men – there seemed to be seven or eight of them – at the other end of the bar were stable lads too. But almost at once he doubted this. Although evidently from a similarly unassuming level of society, there was definitely something alien and urban about them. An unsympathetic observer would have declared that there was a hint of the flashy to them too, and an acute one would have remarked that, although otherwise homogeneous, they divided in point of footwear into two sharply contrasting groups. One group wore very shiny shoes with elongated and pointed toes; the other, thick-soled and stubby boots suggestive of some athletic pursuit the violence of which made an element of in-built protective steel a prudent device. This group of persons seemed not much in its element in its present rural surroundings. There was seldom a moment when one or another individual was not to be distinguished as glancing furtively or warily around him; sometimes – and this was disconcerting – two or three together would turn and look fixedly at Honeybath; at other times they would all disperse about the bar, unconcernedly whistling; and after this they would all come together again and converse in a huddle. Honeybath found himself hoping that these rather disagreeable men were not putting up at the Hanwell Arms. But this was improbable. The pub couldn’t run to more than two or three bedrooms all told.
And now one of the men crossed the room and stood beside Honeybath, but without having any apparent interest in him. He whistled gently and tunelessly; broke off to offer one of the stable lads some technical remark on the game; resumed whistling; and then did address Honeybath in the most casual fashion.
‘You live around here?’ he asked.
‘No, sir, I do not.’
‘Visitor, like?’
‘I have friends in the neighbourhood.’ Honeybath judged this to be veracious after a fashion, and not unduly informative. ‘At a place called Hanwell Court.’
‘Belong to the Queen, does it?’ The man thus gratuitously catechizing Honeybath seemed impressed.
‘I have no reason to suppose it to be, or ever to have been, Crown property. It describes itself, if you must know, as affording luxury residential accommodation for retired gentlefolk.’ Honeybath had remembered this phrase from the Hanwell Court brochure, and he hoped it might choke this intrusive person off. And his questioner (who suddenly struck him as bearing what might be called a faint vocational resemblance to Mr Brown) did seem a little to lose interest. He continued, nevertheless.
‘Your friends like that?’
‘I find no occasion to discuss them with you.’
‘No offence.’ The man uttered these words in a tone of gentle admonishment which somehow contrived to sound distinctly threatening. ‘Looking for a friend of our own, we are. See? Anxious to make contact on account of what you might call auld lang syne. Been seen in a car, he has, round about these parts.’
‘I think it most unlikely that I can help you.’ Honeybath had become aware of a certain stir – almost of agitation – at the other end of the bar. This deplorable person’s companions were disapproving of his behaviour. They even seemed to be whistling him back to heel. They all looked of undistinguished intelligence, but perhaps this one was thicker than the rest. And Honeybath now believed that he understood the situation. Horse racing, although a pursuit so extensively favoured in England by the more affluent of the propertied class, had attached to it, he knew, an underworld of touts, tipsters and (if the phrase were permissible) straight crooks. One used constantly to be hearing about ‘race-course gangs’, and if the phrase appeared to have dropped a little out of use the thing itself probably lingered on. The gangs, of course, went in for hideous feuds. One of their main activities was slashing one another with razors. And he had stumbled upon such a gang now. Their present activity must be connected with one or another of those training establishments dotted around the neighbourhood.
Having arrived at this reasonable estimate of his situation, Honeybath was about to take some appropriate evasive action when he became aware that the ruffian who had challenged him was taking evasive action himself. He had muttered something which might have been ‘No offence’, repeated this time on a purely conciliatory note, and he was now shambling back to his companions, who clearly regarded him as having taken a technically inadmissible step. And then they all faded away. In a matter of seconds, as it seemed, the public bar was empty.
The barman now returned, accompanied by a woman clearly of superior standing in the pub. She appeared as surprised as she was gratified that an inquiry about accommodation should be forthcoming from a person of Honeybath’s speech and bearing. This was scarcely promising in point of what he was likely to find in the way of entertainment at the Hanwell Arms. But the room he was shown was decently clean, and he closed with it at once – further encouraged, indeed, by the sound he had heard from the inn yard of two rapidly departing cars. The gang – the auld lang syne gang, as it might be called – was pursuing the hunt for its friend elsewhere. No doubt he would be found in a ditch that night, appropriately ‘worked over’, as such people were said to express the matter.
This macabre thought a little distressed Honeybath as he presently ate some indifferent cheese and distastefully plastic bread by way of luncheon. He then walked back to Hanwell Court.
15
The entrance hall of the mansion was a spa
cious area, lofty and with dark-panelled walls on which hung sundry mediocre portraits of unknown eighteenth-century notabilities – these last having presumably ‘gone with the house’ when it was first appropriated to its present communal purpose. Being, moreover, handsomely carpeted and liberally supplied with sofas and easy chairs in crimson leather, it was sufficiently habitable to be referred to from time to time by inadequately cultivated inmates as the ‘lounge’. One would not have expected it ever to become the scene of indecorous behaviour. But as Honeybath entered it indecorous behaviour was undoubtedly going on.
It was being occasioned by Ambrose Prout, who was reprehending Brigadier Luxmoore in the most violent terms for some act of omission or commission which Honeybath for some moments failed to pick up. Mr Brown was assisting at this discreditable episode – although at present only in the passive sense of standing by and taking note.
Honeybath would have been annoyed – although perhaps unreasonably – by Prout’s thus promptly turning up even had his behaviour been irreproachable, since he had by now come to view with the deepest suspicion the integrity of this confounded picture-pedlar’s dealings with his brother-in-law’s affairs. And if it was true that he might quite properly have been sent down by a prostrated Melissa as a representative of the family (which Honeybath himself, after all, was not), it yet couldn’t have been for the purpose of making a vulgar scene. Or at least it was to be hoped not.
And it at once turned out, indeed, that the matter at issue was one about which neither Melissa nor anybody else beyond the walls of Hanwell Court could know anything as yet. Within the last hour there had been a burglary perpetrated on the premises. Or if not aburglary (which implies intent to commit a felony) at least a breaking-in. It had happened in those comfortable apartments which Edwin Lightfoot had now quitted for good. The door admitting to them from the body of the house had been locked by the police, who presumably proposed some routine examination of them later for anything that might throw light on the dead man’s circumstances or state of mind. A passing servant, however, had heard somebody give what she described as ‘a kind of sudden laugh’ within, and had reported this perplexing mild indecency to Brigadier Luxmoore. The solitary policeman remaining in the house had been summoned; the door had been unlocked; and nothing in any way untowards had at first appeared. The constable, however, examined the windows with care. Although the rooms were on the first floor, a couple of the windows gave directly upon the flat roof of what had once been a billiard-room, and one of them had been forced open ‘in what the constable declared with authority to be an unskilful manner. But theperpetrator could have taken his time had he desired to do so, since the disposition of the adjacent walls was such that he would have been virtually secure against observation.
It was this perplexing incident that Prout was creating about – and with a vehemence and agitation than Honeybath judged unseemly in the circumstances. That some sort of sneak-thief had conceivably been prowling the dead man’s property was almost as shocking in itself as that he should have been mysteriously and rashly prompted to audible laughter. But matters were not improved by making a vulgar row.
Brown now revealed himself as being almost as upset as Prout. Honeybath recalled that Brown – if Gaunt, the somewhat eccentric stiletto man, was to be believed – had provided the establishment with obscurely professional advice on protecting itself against such depredations. So perhaps it was just that Brown’s vanity was affronted by the ease with which an intruder had broken in. Luxmoore – a thoroughly reasonable man, but one whose job probably required him to be constantly smoothing ruffled feelings of one sort or another on the part of his inmates – was inclined to play the episode down. Not so, it appeared, the constable, who was now on the telephone, summoning higher authority back to the scene. And the constable, of course, was right. Honeybath saw this clearly. Hard upon Edwin’s still totally mysterious death, Edwin’s rooms had been raided by a person unknown. The obvious inference was that he had been concerned to secure, and remove or destroy, documents or other material of an incriminating character bearing upon the fatality. But it didn’t seem to be this that was in Prout’s mind, or in Brown’s either.
Honeybath realized, too, that this fresh mystery affected his own position. He had felt, a little vaguely, that it would be in order for him to have some access to Edwin’s rooms himself, and that this would at least rationalize his impulse to stay around as an observing presence for a time. In this assumption he had perhaps been encouraged by the apparent disposition of Adamson, that high-ranking officer, to take an open-and-shut view of the case. But in face of this new development the police would at least have to suspend their persuasion that Edwin had died because he was a melancholic or a drunk. And as a consequence of this they would be much indisposed to have an amateur assistant poking around where he had no business to be.
So Honeybath now rather regretted having booked that room at the Hanwell Arms. On the other hand he was determined not to let Ambrose Prout remain in any sense in command of the field. For Prout, he told himself, was up to no good. On the contrary, he was (if the expression was possible) up to bad. Honeybath even had a glimmering sense of what that bad might be. And as his mind now turned that way, one of those striking ideas of his came to him. Prout’s present fuss and indignation was a blind. He and the man who had broken into Edwin’s rooms were confederates, fellow-conspirators. It was as simple as that.
Or, of course, as complicated. What would Adamson say if he came forward with so bizarre a notion? Or the urbane Luxmoore, for that matter? Or even the still invisible Dr Michaelis? Why had Michaelis visited Prout in London? Was Michaelis a conspirator too? And what about Brown, of whom it was a tenable theory that he owned some sort of criminal past? Was Brown one as well? And what about that gang in the pub? Faced with these thronging suspicions, Honeybath suddenly felt very much on his own.
He also felt that he wanted to see Michaelis at once. He wanted to have it out with the man – although he wasn’t, indeed, altogether clear about what he meant by ‘it’ in this connection. The cardinal fact about the Medical Superintendent – at least in relation to Edwin – was that he had revealed himself as an out-and-out Philistine. Hadn’t he talked of Edwin’s efforts to regain command of his art as he might talk of some old woman who had to be encouraged in her basketwork by way of ‘occupational therapy’? Such a man couldn’t have been in any sympathetic relationship with an artist; he wouldn’t know whether Edwin was painting well or ill; he couldn’t care less, so long as the employment was having a composing effect upon one whom he quite gratuitously regarded as his patient. Still, it did seem as if he and Edwin had fairly regularly conversed over a considerable period of time. What he had to say about Edwin’s being, or not being, suicidally inclined, or as having, or having not, given way to secret nocturnal drinking, ought at least to be listened to. In this persuasion Honeybath slipped away from Brigadier Luxmoore and the two men pestering him, and made his way to Michaelis’ subterranean quarters.
He knocked on the door, appeared to hear a summons from the interior, and entered the room. Michaelis’ back was turned to him, and he was peering into the gloom of a bookcase so excessively Gothic in inspiration that it looked less like a bookcase than a tomb. Michaelis turned round, recognized Honeybath, and jumped. People don’t often really jump out of their skins. The image is extremely extravagant. But that seemed to be roughly what Michaelis’ spasmodic movement aimed at. Had Honeybath been Adamson, and had there been ranked behind him a posse of policemen brandishing truncheons and manacles, the man could not have been more alarmed. Honeybath had been told by Brown that panic was abroad in Hanwell Court. Here, surely, it was.
‘Ah, good afternoon, Mr Honeybath. Can I help you in any way?’ Michaelis had endeavoured to pull himself together. But the question was so absurd (being, no doubt, the man’s customary formula when visited by inmates in a professional way) that Honeybath was for a moment at a loss how to answer it.
> ‘Good afternoon,’ he said. ‘I came down to Hanwell at once when I heard the news. I hope not intrusively. You may recall that I was one of Edwin Lightfoot’s oldest friends.’
‘No, not at all. That is to say, yes – yes indeed. Won’t you sit down?’ As he made this suggestion, reasonable in itself, Michaelis looked wildly round his handsomely furnished room, as if despairing of any possibility of finding a chair in it. ‘A marvellous day,’ he said idiotically. And this was really too much for Honeybath.
‘Dr Michaelis,’ he said severely, ‘Lightfoot’s sudden tragic death is a sad and shocking thing. But you appear to me, if I may say so, in an unduly perturbed condition.’ (He had been about to say ‘in a filthy funk’, but remembered it was an expression he hadn’t used since his prep-school days. The alternative he had adopted perhaps erred, on the contrary, on the formal side.)
‘Yes, of course. I mean, no – not at all. That is to say, I am considerably upset. I feel, Mr Honeybath, that I have failed in proper vigilance. Lightfoot was at risk, undoubtedly at risk. It was my duty to keep an eye on the situation.’
‘At risk? In what sense, may I ask, do you employ the expression? Do you suppose anybody to have been threatening him?’
‘Oh, no – no, indeed not!’ Michaelis had actually done the jumping trick again – this time in a sedentary position, since he had collapsed into a chair. ‘I mean simply that Lightfoot, as an advanced neuropath, was likely to be subject to suicidal impulses. And death by water, indeed, was precisely what I ought to have been apprehensive of. A uterine fixation, Mr Honeybath. Had he shot or hanged himself it would have been altogether more surprising.’ Michaelis showed a flicker of returning confidence as he gained this mushy professional ground. ‘So that was it,’ he said firmly. ‘But very sad, of course. A talented man, without a doubt. I was myself a great admirer of his work. And he was much liked here – very much liked. I hope that, despite any theological difficulty, there may later be a quiet memorial service in our local parish church.’
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