“They’re all posted from towns which are on the railway, so there’s no particular reason to suppose that a car enters into it.”
“First clue gone west,” said Hugh cheerfully. “Let’s try again. They are all posted south of Norwich. Does that get us anywhere?”
“The words are all cut from print. Does that?”
“Well, it would be the obvious thing to avoid putting pen to paper.”
“Ah, but there are the envelopes. You have all but one, I believe. Surely we can do something with those.”
“It seems as though we ought to be able to, but, apart from the fact that they’re written in an unformed hand, they don’t appear to tell us anything.”
“What else can you suggest?”
“The next suggestion is not my own, but, the more I think it over, the more reasonable it appears.”
“Yes?”
“That somebody doesn’t want me to marry Catherine.” He waited to see the effect of these words. The vicar’s face did not disappoint him. It changed, and assumed an expression of horror.
“But they’ve all been with reference to the deaths of your cousin and his son!”
“Yes, but don’t you see…?”
“I do see.” Arthur’s face resumed its normal expression. “Yes, there’s certainly something in that. I must think it over. But who—besides myself!—and that was only at first, you know, my dear Hugh—wouldn’t want Catherine to marry you? With me it was mere selfishness, I admit, but, in any case, it is Catherine’s happiness that counts. I should never attempt to put any obstacles in her way, even”—he laughed in a natural, unforced manner—“even were I prepared to put some in yours!”
“I was hoping you might be able to suggest somebody besides yourself who might have some reasonable objection to the marriage. Is there, possibly, a rejected suitor in the offing?”
“Well, there are two, if not three, but I can’t imagine…”
“Nobody ever can, in these sort of cases, I believe. It always seems to be somebody of apparently unimpeachable character who turns out to be the anonymous menace. I think these unfortunate rejects could bear closer inspection. Who are they?”
“My dear chap, I do assure you, it could not be one of those fellows. It really could not! It would not be at all fair to give you their names.”
“All right, then. What about getting my psychologist on to the job?”
“That might work.”
“If you think so, why won’t you give me the names of these men? She can’t be expected to work in the dark.”
“She?”
“Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley. I’ve worked with her before—in my Department, you know, when I was at the Ministry.”
“Oh, I see.” Arthur hesitated, but only for a second. “Isn’t she rather expensive?”
“I don’t know. I only know that she’s internationally famous. Anyway, I’ve plenty of money.”
“Look, Hugh, I realise that it’s more your business than mine. But don’t you think that, if we take no notice, the whole thing will die down?”
“It’s an instinctive thought, by which observation I mean that I’ve nothing on earth to go on, but I don’t believe it will die down. I feel there’s something here that I’ve got to fight. I’ve got to get this nasty business settled, one way or another. The point is—are you with me or against me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your own convenience does mean more to you than your sister’s happiness?”
“No, no. But I certainly don’t want my sister to marry while all these anonymous accusations are flying about. Murder’s a horrible business.”
There was a long pause. Hugh broke it.
“You know, Arthur, sometimes I think I’d give a lot to have my old life back again. In fact, if it weren’t for Catherine…”
“I’ll now tell you what I think,” said Arthur.
There was another long pause, as though Arthur hesitated to speak and as though Hugh, guessing what was coming, hesitated to hear him.
“Well?” he asked, at last. “What do you think, Arthur?”
“That the person most nearly concerned is your younger brother’s widow, Mrs. Hal Camber.”
“Her character isn’t very attractive,” Hugh admitted, “but I can’t see her writing this anonymous rubbish. Where could she think it would get her?”
“Women,” said Arthur, “always expect to get their own way and are apt to lack scruple.”
“That’s as may be. I still want to know the names of Catherine’s rejected suitors. Won’t you give them to me? I promise to be both circumspect and fair in my dealings with them. For their own sake we ought to wipe their names off the slate. Surely you agree about that?”
“That is not logical. They have no idea that you have written their names on the slate, as you call it. Not that you have—yet!”
“Look, Arthur, I’m going into the matter of this anonymous stink as closely as I can. You don’t seem to realise that I don’t much care to be called a dirty murderer.”
“I can’t help that, Hugh. I’m not prepared to name innocent men so that you can pursue them. I have met them both. Both are thoroughly decent, respectable chaps and I’m not going to be a party to having mud slung at them.”
“My dear fellow! Whatever next? It is the anonymous letter-writer who is doing the mud-slinging, and I’m tired of being one of the targets, that’s all.”
“If you want those names you will have to ask Catherine for them, Hugh. I’ll have no part in it. One thing I can tell you, though; one name I can give you. If you want to pursue your enquiries in what might be a worthwhile direction, go and have a talk with Farmer Beresford.”
“I’ve had a talk with him. His daughter ran into trouble with the man Verith, as we’ve mentioned, I think, before.”
“What can you expect of a family that never attends church?”
“Not necessarily a lack of virtue. What do you suppose Beresford could tell me that I don’t already know? The most likely thing he’d tell me, I should say, is to take my something face out of the light before he gives it a push to lend emphasis to his words. I should think the last thing a father would put up with is some nit-wit asking for details of a daughter’s regrettable lapse.”
He gave a nod and strode off at a pace rapid enough to cool his temper. Arthur, whether intentionally or not, made him both angry and impatient. He walked so far and so fast that it was not until he reached a five-barred gate which blocked the way to a farm-yard that he realised how his subconscious mind had tricked him. He was at the entrance to Beresford’s farm.
An old man carrying a bucket of swill came up to the gate. Hugh, by virtue of his position and from the fact that he read the Lessons in church, was a public figure, so the ancient knew him by name.
“Good day, Mr. Camber. If you wanted Mr. Beresford, that’s gone to Norwich. Missus be in and so be Miss Nessie.”
“Oh, I’ll come in, then, if I may.”
The old man put down the bucket and opened the gate. Hugh walked past byres and a gobble of turkeys to the respectable Georgian front of the farmhouse. The door was closed. He clanged the bell. From inside the house a voice bade Nessie to see who that was, and a young woman holding a baby came to the door. She stared at Hugh.
“Did you want anything?” she asked. Hugh remembered that the family did not go to church and thought, too, that the girl probably did not take her love-child into the village.
“My name is Hugh Camber,” he said. “May I speak to you? I take it that you are Miss Beresford?”
The girl flushed deeply, but looked him straight in the eye.
“There’s nothing I want from you…yet,” was her surprising reply. Hugh gazed at her.
“I came upon business with your father,” he said quietly, “but you and your mother could be just as much help, I daresay. I’ve already met your father, so…”
“You’d better come in,” said the girl. “Shut the
door, please, or we’ll have the turkeys in as well.”
She led the way into the first room which opened out of the hall, asked him to sit down, and then went to the door and called to somebody named Lizzie to come and take the baby.
“What is it, Nessie?” called out the voice which had told the girl to answer the door.
“Mr. Camber, the new Mr. Camber, come to see Dad, but he says we’ll do as well. Will you see him?”
“Yes, when I change my apron.”
The girl attempted no conversation. She seated herself opposite Hugh and gazed out of the window.
“Crops coming on all right?” asked Hugh, to break the silence.
“I suppose so.”
“You do mixed farming here, I believe?”
“The only kind that pays nowadays.” She was obviously so loth to talk that Hugh gave up all attempt to make her do so, and waited to make his next remark until Mrs. Beresford entered the room. She had the placid face and far-seeing eyes of that countryside and she greeted Hugh with caution and unsmilingly.
“Good day, Mr. Camber. Was there anything you wish?”
“Well, yes, Mrs. Beresford. I am wondering whether you can help me.” The woman stared at him, but not discourteously.
“That don’t belong here, Mr. Camber,” she said, with immense dignity. “We have no call to help anybody of your name.”
“Look, Mrs. Beresford, I won’t pretend I don’t know what you mean, but, really, this is a different matter entirely. It’s about some letters which have been sent to various people—anonymous letters.”
“Oh? Well, nobody here write them.”
“Of course not. But they’re not very pleasant things to have, and I am by no means the only person concerned. I am trying to track down the writer and I wondered whether…”
“What do they say?”
“Generally speaking, that I murdered my cousin and his son in order to get the property for myself.”
“That’s silly talk.”
“I know, but it’s not very nice talk, either. You see, the woman I’m engaged to marry has had one, so has her brother, the vicar here, and so has a relative by marriage of my own. For these people’s sakes, as much as for my own, I want these letters stopped.”
“Then tell Mrs. Hal Camber to stop writing them,” said Nessie.
“Nessie, that’s too bad! You shouldn’t bandy names like that!” cried the older woman.
“Only one name, Mother, and you know as well as I do why I say it. One of these days I’ll have what’s due to me, in spite of you and all the other Cambers,” she added, turning her eyes full on Hugh again. Hugh picked up his hat, apologised for taking up their time, and made for the door. “In spite of you—and I mean it both ways!” cried Nessie, flinging the words at his retreating back.
CHAPTER SIX
Enter Circe
“…and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’s a beard.”
Shakespeare
“I wish,” said Hugh to Catherine, over dinner at the country club of which he had become a member, “you’d do something for me. I may add that it’s something Arthur has refused to do.”
“How nice and truthful you are, Hugh. But if Arthur has refused to do it, whatever it is, I am not sure that I should be justified in obliging you. I must point out that we’re not married yet.”
“No, and if this anonymous serpent gets his way we never shall be. Do the letters make you think, in those depressing small-hours of the morning, as you lie tossing on your couch, that perhaps there’s something in the insinuations that I murdered two fairly close relatives in order to get Camber for myself?”
“No. I don’t lie awake in the small-hours, you see. I sleep soundly from eleven until seven. I am a woman whose sunny good-temper is marred only if she doesn’t regularly get her eight hours.”
Hugh smiled at the raillery, but looked serious again as he asked:
“Don’t the letters bother you any more?”
“Well, they’re a bore, of course, but I think of the poor wretch who writes them. She must be mentally afflicted.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You and Arthur both seem to think the letters are written by a woman, but I have a different theory. I think they may come from a man.”
“Unlikely, psychologically.”
“Yes, I realise that, of course, but the man I’m thinking of may have a very special reason. Catherine, will you tell me about the men who may have proposed marriage to you and been turned down?”
“My poor Hugh!”
“It may be a laughing matter, but I’d rather like to prove that it is. I want to find this letter-writer and scotch him, and, to do that, I’ve got to eliminate all the people who might have a motive. Don’t you see the force of that?”
“But, Hugh, dear, I can’t have you going round to Bill Maitland and Raymond Tunstall and asking them whether they write anonymous letters! Of course they don’t!”
“Has either of them married since you turned them down?”
“Well, no, but it was so recently that they asked me, they’d hardly have had time.”
“Dangerous chaps, bachelors. I ought to know. Oh, well, let’s enjoy the rest of our dinner in peace, and then I’ll drive you out to look at the river by moonlight.”
“We’d better not. It’s ten o’clock already. I have my brother’s reputation to think of. It would never do for the vicar’s sister to come home at dawn. Besides, remember my eight hours!”
This was the last truly light-hearted conversation they indulged in for some time. Hugh drove Catherine home, refused Arthur’s invitation to come in, and went straight back to Camber. Ethel brought his night-cap of whisky into the library and Hugh bade her good night and decided to read for an hour or so before he locked up the house.
As Camber was rambling and old, with sudden, awkward outcroppings of two or three stairs in the middle of corridors, dim and eerie little alcoves which appeared to be purposeless, and, on moonlight nights, ghostly effects of shadows on mullioned windows, he was sufficiently old-fashioned to believe that going the rounds of such a house after nightfall was a task for a man, and that it was unfair to expect the women-servants to carry it out. He had no butler, as Jacob had declined this office.
The library was at one end of the long gallery which, as a matter of convenience, housed all the books which the room itself was not large enough to contain. One of Hugh’s first pleasures in owning the house had been to carry out the task of putting what he termed the “readable” books into the library and to relegate to the glass-fronted shelves of the long gallery dozens of snuff-coloured volumes which it seemed incredible that anybody should have written, let alone expect anybody else to read.
He settled himself with the third volume of Parson Woodforde’s diary in the edition of John Beresford, 1927, and prepared to spend a pleasantly relaxed hour before he went to bed. He helped himself to whisky and began to turn the pages.
“I was not quite so well as I could wish this Evening took a small dose of Rhubarb going to bed.”
Hugh sipped his whisky and soda. It seemed to add relish to the “small dose of rhubarb.”
“Reed a Note this Morning from Dr. Thorne informing me of the death of his Nephew Walker, and that he should be glad to have him buried at Weston on Thursday next.”
There was a sudden loud creak of the library door. Hugh looked up sharply. The word “death,” combined with the slightly startling sound, turned his thoughts again to Paul and Stephen. Paul would never walk…but what about the boy? A drowned child, crying for vengeance? A reedlike wraith come back to tell the tale of a death out of its proper time? “The small slain body, the flower-like face.” Not an accurate picture of the thin, spidery, fifteen-year-old Stephen of Hugh’s imagining, perhaps, but it fitted Hugh’s change of mood.
He replaced Parson Woodforde in the bookcase, gave him an affectionate pat, and walked over to the window. It was unc
urtained and looked out on to a small informal garden at the side of the house. The night was so dark that he could not have said that he saw anything; all the same, he felt certain that something had darted away from such small portion of the garden as the light from the window illumined and that this something must now be in front of the terrace.
Hugh had had short experience of being a householder, but it had been long enough to persuade him that lurking figures which darted away from the light cast from uncurtained windows were little likely to be those of his friends and acquaintances. He left the library and rapidly descended the main staircase to the front door. This he locked and bolted. Then he stood for a few moments and listened, but there was nothing to be heard, so he made the rounds of the ground floor as rapidly as he could, shooting bolts and testing windows as he went, and then returned to the library by way of the long gallery which, he thought, seemed excessively dark; the lamp probably had a failing bulb, for the house was electrically lighted. He groped his way past shelves upon shelves of books and spared no glance for the windows in the opposite wall. Upon regaining the library he felt a sense of self-congratulation which, when he thought it over, seemed strange. However, he had had a feeling that danger lurked near by, and there was no doubt that it would have been easy to take him by surprise in the gallery.
As it was, he poured out another tot, took down Parson Woodforde again, and was reading: “Killed another fat Pigg this Morning and the weight was 9 stone and half,” when he was roused by a scream on a female upper register not unlike, he thought, the scream of the said fat pig at its killing.
“Ee! Ee! Ee!” went the scream. Hugh put down Parson Woodforde and went to the door. The one dim light burned mid-way along the gallery. With the open door behind him, Hugh listened. Nothing stirred. Concluding that one of the women servants had been having nightmare, he stepped back into the room and, to prove to himself the soundness of his nerves, switched off the light and walked along the gallery to his bedroom at the opposite end. When he was less than half-way, the light in the gallery went out. Another presence in the gallery was indicated. Hugh began to advance, intent only upon doing so without a sound. He was thinking of the best way of tackling the intruder, when he tripped over the head of a defunct, magnificent tiger, the skin of which had been made into a rug. At the same instant there was a scurry of feet along the gallery and the scream was repeated at such close quarters that Hugh who, although he had struck his head in falling, still had his senses unimpaired, thought he detected the war-cry of the excitable and volatile Hildegarde.
The Man Who Grew Tomatoes Page 7