Murder has a Motive

by Francis Duncan

  What he had not bargained for was the absence of Blenkinson. He had expected that the manservant would be in the house and that Vaughan’s attitude would be conditioned by that fact. He was paying now for that miscalculation. He was alone with fear and a madman.

  Vaguely, as though it came from a great distance and was muffled by cascading waters, he heard the big man’s voice.

  ‘You’re right—I was in love with Lydia. You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you? How I followed her out of the house that night, went round by the roadway and waited for her in the copse and killed her! You know just what I did, and why and how. You know just how I got rid of Blenkinson this afternoon so that I could go out and kill Edith Lorrington and get back without being seen! Or maybe that was something you didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t occur to you when you came here tonight that there would only be the two of us in the house. Maybe that was where your plans went wrong.’

  Vaughan was grinning mirthlessly. Tremaine was conscious only of the big man’s wild eyes and of his form towering over him, grown monstrous in size so that everything else seemed to have been blotted out. The voice went on, telling his doom.

  ‘It’s almost foolproof. If I were to kill you no one need ever know. You’d just disappear. With all my experience it wouldn’t be difficult to find a way of disposing of the body. It would be just another unsolved mystery. You’ve been too clever, Tremaine. You’ve walked right into my hands and you’re too dangerous for me to risk letting you go. You might talk. You might start asking all those questions of yours. . . .’

  All the horror of Dalmering was in the room. It was as though all the terror which had overlain the loveliness was concentrated in this tiny space, black and dreadful. Within this curtained enclosure in this lonely house they were cut off from the world as surely as though they were isolated on another planet, and with them there was only a great and terrible evil.

  Mordecai Tremaine’s mind was working in an hysterical incoherence. The lawless nature of Vaughan’s early life; his obsession with ancient peoples with their savage blood cults; his deep-seated passions and his love for Lydia Dare; his dreadful madman’s strength—his knowledge of all these coalesced suddenly to give him the final warning that unless he could force Vaughan to hear him, unless he could reach beyond the bitter rage which had mastered him, he was lost indeed.

  ‘Wait, you madman!’ he croaked. ‘They’ll hang you!’

  Vaughan laughed—a short, horrible sound.

  ‘Only once,’ he said. ‘Only once. For Lydia, for Hammond, and for Edith. Only once for all of them!’

  Tremaine made one last desperate effort and suceeded in forcing the big man’s hands apart for one brief instant.

  ‘For God’s sake, stop!’ he gasped. ‘I know you didn’t kill them!’

  A change came over Vaughan’s features. Slowly the glare went from his eyes. He released his grip. Tremaine’s knees seemed to dissolve beneath him as the hands which had been holding him against the wall fell away and Vaughan caught him under the armpits and lowered him into the big leather chair.

  He opened a small cabinet and took out whisky and a tumbler. He poured a stiff drink of the neat spirit. Tremaine was huddled in the chair. He was shuddering and his hands were not under his control. Vaughan guided the tumbler to his lips and forced the whisky between his chattering teeth.

  It burned a fiery path down his bruised throat. He gasped with the sting of it. Vaughan allowed him a moment or two longer in which to recover. And then:

  ‘What was it you said?’ he demanded.

  Tremaine put up a hand to his neck and winced.

  ‘I said I know you didn’t kill them,’ he repeated shakily.

  16

  PAULINE CONROY WAS not acting. She was displaying a stormy fury which owed nothing to her dramatic talent. Mordecai Tremaine found himself inclined to quail under the angry flash of her dark eyes. He thought of Kipling’s line about the female of the species and ruefully acknowledged its apt quality. Pauline in this mood was undeniably dangerous.

  It was the morning after Edith Lorrington’s murder. The actress had stopped him in the village square and it had been obvious from her first words that her friendly attitude towards him had undergone a drastic revision.

  She had made no effort to conceal the reason for her antagonism.

  ‘I want to see you!’ she had said, as she had caught sight of him, and had stepped full in his path so that he had had no chance of avoiding the meeting. ‘Just what are you up to?’

  Tremaine had blinked at her in a bewildered fashion, adopting the pose of ineffectiveness which served as his main line of defence.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he had told her.

  But she had brushed aside his protests.

  ‘You understand all right! What’s the idea of setting your detective friends to spy on me?’

  It had not been a question but a statement. She had gone on to make other statements, all of them pointed and some of them vituperative. She was still making them.

  ‘I trusted you! I thought that you were my friend, not a cheap spy! I’m not going to stand for it, d’you hear! I’m not going to be watched and followed everywhere I go!’

  ‘My dear Miss Conroy,’ said Tremaine, trying to stem the flood, ‘surely you should be speaking to Inspector Boyce, not to me? After all, I can’t order policemen to go around watching people or to stop watching them. I’m just an ordinary member of the community like yourself.’

  ‘Don’t try and fence with me. Everybody knows that you and that Scotland Yard detective are as thick as thieves. You told him to spy on me. You told him to set those men following me around.’

  The hostility in her voice stung Tremaine into replying in kind. There was an edge to his own voice.

  ‘Innocent people don’t object to the police carrying out their duty,’ he said coldly. ‘From your attitude one might think that you and Mr. Galeski had something to hide.’

  Whether it was his suddenly uncompromising attitude or his unexpected mention of Galeski’s name which was the cause of her discomfiture he was not certain. But some of the fire died out of her eyes and was replaced by a flicker of fear.

  ‘Why are you bringing in Mr. Galeski?’ she said breathlessly.

  ‘His name just occurred to me,’ said Mordecai Tremaine, ‘that’s all.’

  But he was looking straight into her face as he spoke and she read more into the words than their bare meaning. Her expression was momentarily overshadowed by anxiety, and then, without a further word, she turned and left him.

  Evidently, thought Tremaine, as he saw her go hurrying through the village, Jonathan Boyce had taken (with a painstaking literalness) the advice he had given him to watch Pauline Conroy. So much so that she had very quickly become aware of it. In such a restricted area as that of Dalmering, of course, it was impossible to shadow a person for long without being detected. He saw the current shadow as the thought came to him. The man did not have the air of a policeman and in a city he would in all probability have carried out his task unnoticed, but here in Dalmering he was an obvious stranger and as a stranger he inevitably attracted attention, despite the influx of strange faces during the past few days.

  However, the important point was not that Pauline Conroy had discovered that she was under observation, but that she had revealed herself to be considerably disturbed over the fact. The extent of her angry outburst a few moments earlier had demonstrated just how disturbed she was.

  Tremaine put up a carefully exploring hand to his throat and caressed it tenderly. It was painful and swollen and he had difficulty in swallowing. Martin Vaughan’s iron hands had left their mark. His investigations seemed to be leading him into deep waters. It still caused him a shudder to reflect just how near he had come to death on the previous night. The madness in the big man’s eyes had held the promise of his destruction; he knew that he had been only just in time to save himself.

  Exactly what had he told Martin Vau
ghan? He recalled that scene when he had sat huddled in the leather armchair in the big man’s study, fearful that the other might repeat his attack. When one’s life was at stake it was no time to indulge in scruples. One could not always employ strict accuracy in one’s statements, and Tremaine was aware that he had said several things which were not altogether true. But in doing so he had gained his ends. He had been an immeasurably relieved man when he had been walking away from ‘Home Lodge’, alive and free to breathe the night air which had seemed to possess the headiness of wine after the terror of the house.

  Whilst the thoughts were running almost idly through his mind, his eyes had been scanning his surroundings for he had come out upon a definite errand. Outside the Admiral he espied Barry Anston’s tall form and he hurried towards him.

  The journalist greeted him soberly.

  ‘It looks as though things are getting out of hand,’ he observed. ‘I’ll be believing soon that this place really has some particular hoodoo attached to it. Poor old girl—I was speaking to her yesterday morning. She wouldn’t have harmed a fly. Who could have wanted to kill her?’

  ‘Someone with a good reason,’ said Tremaine.

  Anston looked at him enquiringly, and as he did so he saw the ugly discoloration on his companion’s neck.

  ‘Hullo, what have you been up to? Been having a nightmare or something?’

  Tremaine clutched at the operative word with all the fervour with which the drowning man is alleged to clutch at the legendary straw.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said eagerly. ‘A nightmare. Must have been something I ate for supper, I imagine. I woke up trying to throttle myself.’

  Anston regarded him disbelievingly.

  ‘You seem to have made a pretty good job of it,’ he remarked drily.

  Tremaine was not anxious to undergo a cross-examination. He knew that questions were on the journalist’s lips, and he did not wish to reveal his adventure of the previous night. He said quickly:

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about Shannon. You know something about him. I thought you were going to tell me what it was the other night when you produced Mrs. Hammond instead.’

  ‘I think I know something,’ returned the other. ‘I’m expecting confirmation today. It should be through by this evening, but until then I’m keeping quiet. After all, I may be wrong.’

  ‘I don’t think you are,’ said Tremaine. ‘By the way,’ he went on, without offering any explanation for his statement, ‘I haven’t seen Hornsby around lately—the private enquiry agent. Has Mrs. Hammond called him off? There’s no further need for him now, of course. There won’t be any divorce court evidence required.’

  ‘I wonder whether it would have been used, anyway?’ said Anston slowly. ‘It was an odd business. Both those women were undoubtedly in love with Hammond. I didn’t see much of Hammond, I know, but from what I did see he didn’t strike me as being the sort of fellow many women would fall for. Yet he must have had some fascination for them. The woman he was living with here—Karen is she called?—is a lovely creature. You’d think she’d have had dozens of men after her and yet she chose Hammond and was what we smugly call living in sin with him. And despite the way in which he was deceiving her and the fact that she was employing Hornsby to watch him, his legal wife didn’t really want to divorce him, you know. That’s pretty obvious from the way in which she talked to me.’

  ‘It’s a queer, tortured business,’ said Tremaine heavily. ‘And God knows just how tragic it’s likely to turn out to be.’ His eyes stared into the distance without seeing anything for a moment or two, and then he glanced up at his companion again. ‘Do you know where Hornsby is now?’

  ‘Probably in Colminster,’ returned Anston. ‘He’s been staying there. It’s the next station up the line. I dare say he thought he’d be less conspicuous, although, as you know, plenty of people spotted him in the village here as it was.’

  Mordecai Tremaine remained talking to the journalist for a little while longer, partly in the hope that Jonathan Boyce might appear, but there was no sign of the inspector and eventually he said good-bye to Anston and began to make his way back to ‘Roseland’.

  Had Boyce been able to report progress in his investigations to his superiors, or had the murder of Edith Lorrington left him groping in the same fog of uncertainty which had surrounded the two previous murders? He had no doubt that the inspector was a very harassed man. Dalmering was in the limelight now. Boyce had to get results and get them quickly. Three unsolved murders in rapid succession was the stuff of which Scotland Yard nightmares were made. Tremaine suspected that the Commissioner himself would have been on the wire, demanding hourly reports, insisting on immediate results and leaving the hapless inspector with the uninspiring knowledge that his career hung dangling on a tenuous thread over the edge of the abyss.

  For the newspapers, of course, it had been a sensation worthy of their fullest attention. The murder of Philip Hammond had given them every incentive to compete to produce the most arresting headlines; this latest tragedy could not have failed to have moved them to even greater heights. The evening newspapers would contain articles which would descend in a verbal deluge upon Scotland Yard and call forth even more fiery comments from the Commissioner to blister Inspector Boyce’s already suffering soul.

  The next development was obvious. The inhabitants of Dalmering would be demanding protection. If there had been three murders, there might be a fourth, and a fifth. So far Scotland Yard appeared to have accomplished nothing. There was no knowing when the terror would cease.

  Immersed in his thoughts Tremaine did not notice where he was walking and almost collided with someone coming in the opposite direction. He looked up hastily, an apology on his lips, and saw that it was Geoffrey Manning.

  ‘There’s no harm done,’ said Manning cheerily. ‘As a matter of fact, we saw that you were preoccupied and were keeping a good look-out.’ His tone was noticeably carefree. Phyllis Galway was with him, and Tremaine saw that both their faces were flushed and that they shared an air of elation.

  ‘You both look very pleased with life,’ he observed, a little surprised in view of the prevailing circumstances.

  ‘We are,’ said Manning. He glanced at the girl and she appeared to give him consent, for he said: ‘You’re the first person we’ve seen and I’ve just got to tell you. Phyllis and I are engaged.’

  Normally, Mordecai Tremaine would have warmed to the note of excitement Geoffrey Manning could not keep out of his voice. His sentimental soul would have been filled with delight, for to see the blossoming of romance was one of his keenest delights. But today he was too conscious of oppression, too much aware of the evil which was loose to respond with his wonted enthusiasm.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he told them. ‘I hope you’ll both be very happy.’

  His voice gave him away.

  ‘I know.’ It was the girl who spoke. ‘You think that we shouldn’t have done it—not now, not with all the tragedy there is around us. You think it doesn’t—doesn’t fit.’

  ‘Well—perhaps,’ said Tremaine. ‘Perhaps it is just a little premature, shall we say.’

  ‘I understand what you mean,’ she said. ‘After all, there’ve been so many terrible things. Poor Edith—’

  ‘I don’t wish to imply,’ said Tremaine hastily, ‘that you shouldn’t become engaged. The world has to go on. Young people still have to live their lives even if tragedies happen around them. It isn’t fair to cramp them. It was just that—just that I think it might be wise not to announce it just yet.’

  ‘I didn’t really want to tell anyone yet,’ she admitted. ‘But you know how it is—you begin to feel that you simply can’t keep it a secret. It’s stupid, of course. People aren’t all that interested in you. And I know that Geoffrey wanted to tell you—’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’ Manning broke in quickly. ‘Why should we try to hide it?’

  ‘I confess,’ said Tremaine, ‘that I’m a little surprised. When I ca
me here a few days ago I didn’t realize that you were on such close terms.’

  Manning seemed to be searching for an answer.

  ‘Phyllis’s parents don’t altogether approve of me,’ he said at last. ‘They think I’m not settled enough in my career—I’ve ambitions to become an artist although I’ve a job with a firm in Kingshampton at the moment. We didn’t let people suspect how we felt towards each other. There’s always so much talk in a village.’

  ‘It isn’t exactly that Daddy and Mummy don’t approve of Geoff,’ said the girl. ‘It’s just the money question. I suppose they think they’re doing it for my own good. But they’ll come round—I know they will.’

  ‘We’re engaged now,’ said Manning. ‘I want them all to know. We’re going to get married as soon as possible.’

  ‘You must forgive Geoff,’ said the girl, with a smile. ‘He’s a little light-headed, I think. You’d imagine he had only a few days to live to hear him talk!’

  ‘Maybe we have,’ said Manning. ‘You’ve got to enjoy things while you can. How can you tell what’s going to happen next? Look at this place—last week it was just a quiet little village. Now, everybody’s scared, even if they won’t admit it. Who’s going to be the next to go? That’s what they’re all asking. I’m scared for Phyllis. I want to get her away!’

  ‘Geoff—you mustn’t talk like that! You sound as though you think these dreadful murders are going to go on!’

  Tremaine looked fixedly at Manning. There was an unnaturally tense expression in the other’s face. He hesitated for an instant or two. And then:

  ‘I’d like to ask you something,’ he said quietly. ‘You say that I’m the first person you’ve told of your engagement. Would you keep it a secret just a little while longer?’

  Phyllis Galway looked at him in a puzzled fashion, but the undoubted seriousness of his tone stayed her questions.

  ‘All right,’ she said slowly. ‘Perhaps it would be better if we did, after all.’

  Manning looked as though he had been going to raise objections but had changed his mind. He nodded. ‘If Phyllis agrees I will,’ he said reluctantly. ‘We won’t say anything just yet.’