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The Case of the
Famished Parson
by
George Bellairs
“Which distractions do not only unman men, but they run them upon desperate ventures, to obtain they know not what.”
JOHN BUNYAN.
CHAPTER I
THE TOWER ROOM
WEDNESDAY, September 4th. The Cape Mervin Hotel was as quiet as the grave. Everybody was “in” and the night-porter was reading in his cubby-hole under the stairs.
A little hunchbacked fellow was Fennick, with long arms, spindleshanks accentuated by tight, narrow-fitting trousers—somebody’s cast-offs—and big feet. Some disease had robbed him of all his hair. He didn’t need to shave and when he showed himself in public, he wore a wig. The latter was now lying on a chair, as though Fennick had scalped himself for relief.
The plainwood table was littered with papers and periodicals left behind by guests and rescued by the porter from the salvage dump. He spent a lot of his time reading and never remembered what he had read.
Two or three dailies, some illustrated weeklies of the cheaper variety, and a copy of Old Moore’s Almanac. A sporting paper and a partly completed football pool form. . . .
Fennick was reading “What the Stars have in Store.” He was breathing hard and one side of his face was contorted with concentration. He gathered that the omens were favourable. Venus and Jupiter in good aspect. Success in love affairs and a promising career. . . . He felt better for it.
Outside the tide was out. The boats in the river were aground. The light in the tower at the end of the break-water changed from white to red and back at minute intervals. The wind blew up the gravel drive leading from the quayside to the hotel and tossed bits of paper and dead leaves about. Down below on the road to the breakwater you could see the coke glowing in a brazier and the silhouette of a watchman’s cabin nearby.
The clock on the Jubilee Tower on the promenade across the river struck midnight. At this signal the grandfather clocks in the public rooms and hall began to chime all at once in appalling discord, like a peal of bells being ‘fired.’ The owner of the hotel was keen on antiques and bric-a-brac and meticulously oiled and regulated all his clocks himself.
Then, in mockery of the ponderous timepieces, a clock somewhere else cuckooed a dozen times. The under-manager, who had a sense of humour, kept it in his office, set to operate just after the heavy ones. Most people laughed at it. So far, the proprietor hadn’t seen the point.
Fennick stirred himself, blinked his hairless eyelids, laid aside the oracle, stroked his naked head as though soothing it after absorbing so much of the future, and rose to lock the main door. Then he entered the bar.
The barmaid and cocktail-shaker had been gone almost an hour. Used glasses stood around waiting to be washed first thing in the morning. The night-porter took a tankard from a hook and emptied all the dregs from the glasses into it. Beer, stout, gin, whisky, vermouth. . . . A good pint of it. . . . One hand behind his back, he drank without stopping, his prominent Adam’s-apple and dewlaps agitating, until it was all gone. Then he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, sighed with satisfaction, selected and lighted the largest cigarette-end from one of the many ash-trays scattered about and went off to his next job.
It was the rule that Fennick collected all shoes, chalked their room-numbers on their soles and carried them to the basement for cleaning. But he had ways of his own. He took a large newspaper and his box of cleaning materials and silently dealt with the footwear, one by one, as it stood outside the doors of the bedrooms, spreading the paper to protect the carpet.
Fennick started for the first floor. Rooms 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, with the best views over the river and bay. His gait was jaunty, for he had had a few beers before finally fuddling himself with the dregs from the bar. He hummed a tune to himself.
Don’t send my boy to prizzen,
It’s the first crime wot he’s done.…
He tottered up the main staircase with his cleaning-box and stopped at the first door.
Number I was a single room. Once it had been double, but the need for more bathrooms had split it in two. Outside, on the mat, a pair of substantial handmade black shoes. Fennick glided his two brushes and polishing-cloth over them with hasty approval. They belonged to Judge Tennant, of the High Court. He came every year at this time for a fishing holiday. He tipped meticulously. Neither too much not too little. Yet you didn’t mind. You felt justice had been done when you got it.
Fennick had been sitting on his haunches. Now and then he cocked an ear to make sure that nobody was stirring. He moved like a crab to Number 2 gently dragging his tackle along with him.
This was the best room, with a private bath. Let to a millionaire, they said. It was a double, and in the register the occupants had gone down as Mr. and Mrs. Cuhady. All the staff, from the head waiter down to the handyman who raked the gravel round the hotel and washed down the cars, knew it was a lie. The head waiter was an expert on that sort of thing. With thirty years’ experience in a dining-room you can soon size-up a situation.
That was how they knew about the honeymoon couple in Number 3, too. Outside their door was a pair of new men’s brogues and some new brown suede ladies’ shoes. “The Bride’s travelling costume consisted of … with brown suede shoes….” Fennick knew all about it from reading his papers in the small hours.
There were five pairs of women’s shoes outside Number 2. Brown leather, blue suede, black and red tops, light patent leather, and a pair with silk uppers. All expensive ones.
Five pairs in a day! Fennick snarled and showed a nasty gap where he had lost four teeth. Just like her! He cleaned the brown, the black-and-red and the patent uppers with the same brushes for spite. The blue suede he ignored altogether. And he spat contemptuously on the silk ones and wiped them with a dirty cloth.
Mr. Cuhady seemed to have forgotten his shoes altogether. That was a great relief! He was very particular about them. Lovely hand-made ones and the colour of old mahogany. And you had to do them properly, or he played merry hell. Mr. Cuhady had blood-pressure and “Mrs.” Cuhady didn’t seem to be doing it any good. The magnate was snoring his head off. There was no other sound in Number 2. Fennick bet himself that his partner was noiselessly rifling Cuhady’s pocket-book….
He crawled along and dealt with the honeymoon shoes. They weren’t too good. Probably they’d saved-up hard to have their first nights together at a posh hotel and would remember it all their lives. “Remember the Cape Mervin … ?” Fennick, sentimental under his mixed load of drinks, spat on all four soles for good luck…. He crept on.
Two pairs of brogues this time. Male and female. Good ones, too, and well cared for. Fennick handled them both with reverence. A right good job. For he had read a lot in his papers about one of the occupants of Room 4. An illustrated weekly had even interviewed him at Scotland Yard and printed his picture.
On the other side of the door were two beds, separated by a table on which stood a reading-lamp, a travelling-clock and two empty milk glasses. In one bed a good-looking, middle-aged woman was sitting-up, with a dressing-gown round her shoulders, reading a book about George Sand.
In the other a man was sleeping on his back. On his nose a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles; on the eiderdown a thriller had fallen from his limp hand. He wore striped
silk pyjamas and his mouth was slightly open.
The woman rose, removed the man’s glasses and book, drew the bedclothes over his arms, kissed him lightly on his thinning hair, and then climbed back into bed and resumed her reading. Inspector Littlejohn slept on….
Fennick had reached the last room of the block. Number 5 was the tower room. The front of the Cape Mervin Hotel was like a castle. A wing, a tower, the main block, a second tower, and then another wing. Number 5 was in the left-hand tower. And it was occupied at the time by the Bishop of Greyle and his wife.
As a rule there were two pairs here, too. Heavy, brown serviceable shoes for Mrs. Bishop; boots, dusty, with solid, heavy soles and curled-up toes, for His Lordship. Tonight there was only one pair. Mrs. Greyle’s. Nobody properly knew the bishop’s surname. He signed everything “J. C. Greyle” and they didn’t like to ask his real name. Somebody thought it was Macintosh.
Fennick was so immersed in his speculations that he didn’t see the door open. Suddenly looking up he found Mrs. Greyle standing there in a blue dressing-gown staring down at him.
The night-porter hastily placed his hand flat on the top of his head to cover his nakedness, for he’d forgotten his wig. He felt to have a substantial thatch of hair now, however, and every hair of his head seemed to rise.
“Have you seen my husband?” said Mrs. Greyle, or Macintosh, or whatever it was. “He went out at eleven and hasn’t returned.”
Fennick writhed from his haunches to his knees and then to his feet, like a prizefighter who has been down.
“No, mum … I don’t usually do the boots this way, but I’m so late, see?”
“Wherever can he be … ? So unusual….”
She had a net over her grey hair. Her face was white and drawn. It must have been a very pretty face years ago…. Her hands trembled as she clutched her gown to her.
“Anything I can do, mum?”
“I can’t see that there is. I don’t know where he’s gone. The telephone in our room rang at a quarter to eleven and he just said he had to go out and wouldn’t be long. He didn’t explain….”
“Oh, he’ll be turnin’ up. P’raps visitin’ the sick, mum.”
Fennick was eager to be off. The manager’s quarters were just above and if he got roused and found out Fennick’s little cleaning dodge, it would be, as the porter inwardly told himself, Napooh!
It was no different the following morning, when the hotel woke up. The bishop was still missing.
At nine o’clock things began to happen.
First, the millionaire sent for the manager and raised the roof.
His shoes were dirty. Last night he’d put them out as usual to be cleaned. This morning he had found them, not only uncleaned, but twice as dirty as he’d left them. In fact, muddy right up to the laces. He demanded an immediate personal interview with the proprietor. Somebody was going to get fired for it….
“Mrs.” Cuhady, who liked to see other people being bullied and pushed around, watched with growing pride and satisfaction the magnate’s mounting blood-pressure…
At nine-fifteen they took the bishop’s corpse to the town morgue in the ambulance. He had been found at the bottom of Bolter’s Hole, with the tide lapping round his emaciated body and his head bashed in.
The first that most of the guests knew of something unusual was the appearance of the proprietor in the dining-room just after nine. This was extraordinary, for Mr. Allain was a lazy man with a reputation for staying in bed until after ten.
Mr. Allain, a tall fat man and usually impurturbable, appeared unshaven and looking distracted. After a few words with the head waiter, who pointed out a man eating an omelette at a table near the window, he waddled across the room.
They only got bacon once a week at the Cape Mervin and Littlejohn was tackling an omelette without enthusiasm. His wife was reading a letter from her sister at Melton Mowbray who had just had another child.
Mr. Allain whispered to Littlejohn. All eyes in the room turned in their direction. Littlejohn emptied his mouth and could be seen mildly arguing. In response, Mr. Allain, who was half French, clasped his hands in entreaty. So, Littlejohn, after a word to his wife, left the room with the proprietor….
“Something must have happened,” said the guests one to another.
CHAPTER II
BOLTER’S HOLE
HARRY KEAST was quite a character locally. He had been drawing old-age pension for two years. Before that, he had been out-porter at Port Mervin railway station and graduated through the horse-and-cart stage to running an old Ford truck. When Harry got his pension he sold-out and became a hanger-on at the golf club. Sometimes he helped with the mowing machines; sometimes he acted as caddy.
At 7.30 one morning Harry turned up at the links. There was nobody about. Not even the groundsman. The dew was heavy on the grass and as you walked across it, you left a trail of footprints behind.
Keast made a practice of being there early in the season. He had a nose like a gun-dog for golf balls. First thing in the morning he found most of the balls abandoned the day before by despairing players. Besides, on holidays you give up the search earlier, for you value every minute of the game. Money doesn’t seem to matter much then, so what’s an odd ball or two …?
Harry was a little thin man with a thick white thatch covered by a cloth cap. He often wore the peak front to back. He had a ragged moustache, hollow, tanned cheeks, pale blue twinkling eyes and a neck toughened and wrinkled like leather from exposure. He had little or no formal education, but experience and shrewdness made up for a lot. He was fond of long words, but knew hardly any. So he made them up as he went along for the sheer pleasure of mouthing them.
“Brognostication is the thief of time,” he said to himself by way of excusing his early appearance on the links.
With a stick, Keast pounded the tussocks of the rough and dislodged a number of balls. He was like a man searching the roosts for eggs. He knew all the spots and hardly ever came empty away. He gathered a fair lot of mushrooms, too, and filled a carrier bag with them. More than ten bob a pound in the shops in town!
From the centre of the ninth fairway the seabirds rose crying. They soared around, glided to earth and vanished, as though the earth had ejected and swallowed them up again.
There was nothing mysterious about the phenomenon. This was Bolter’s Hole, one of the hazards of the game.
At Bolter’s Hole the sea suddenly makes a concentrated rush inland for quarter of a mile. In their tireless search for flaws in the coastline, the waves have found this thin wedge of soft rock and with all the time of geology at their disposal have crept farther and farther inland until, at last, reaching hard rock, they have been forced to turn and retreat.
That is what you think when you reach Bolter’s Hole. A long, narrow gorge flanked by jagged walls of rock about a hundred feet high. It looks deeper than that. At the ebb a quiet retreat for sun-bathing, for the floor is covered in pale sand. At full-tide almost like a little inland lake. The sea enters by a thin neck at great force, expands, rushes on and then, encountering the bastion of hard rock about a quarter of a mile farther on, boils and whirls in anger, thrashes itself into flying foam and finally retreats with a drag which sucks all the flotsam around through the portal into the open ocean.
The fury of the waves where the solid rock turns them about has worn a sort of amphitheatre in the middle of the land, in shape something like the bulb of an old pneumatic motor-horn with the tube as the gorge leading out to the sea.
“Obsequious portentatiousness,” said Harry Keast expressing to himself his awe at the sight. He surveyed the grandeur of the cliffs, with the gulls flying to them and then rising with wild cries as though the earth had shaken them off.
With an expert eye the solitary figure examined the place. The tide was out and the time was ripe. If you weren’t long and sure on number nine your ball went right in Bolter’s Hole. Of course, if you didn’t care to risk it, you could play a dog-leg and av
oid the hazard. But most players took the risk and prayed for a good ball, and if it didn’t come off, blamed something else. Unfamiliarity with the course, or even the face of somebody passing by. Never their own bad play….
Harry had on special occasions found as many as thirty good balls in the Hole after a bad day. Those which landed square on the beach were soon drawn to kingdom-come at the ebb. But the rocks and seaweed caught a lot ….
The watcher was looking at some rocks and seaweed just below the normal tide-line. A small fissure running down to the floor of the Hole began in a spongy ledge, with a crack in the middle. From the fissure projected what looked like a pair of boots.
“Idiosyncratic circumstances,” said Harry and began to scramble down the face of the cliff to investigate. He was nimble for his years and wore nailed boots for the job. He was soon there.
What Harry saw made him whistle. Head downwards, suspended by its boots, which were wedged in the top of the fissure, was a long, thin body. In its present position, it looked longer than ever.
The aged caddy’s vocabulary temporarily gave out, and then, death seemed to stimulate him to a religious effort.
“’oly Nebuchadnezzar!” was all he could say.
He touched the body and found it cold. The face was to the bare rock, but he turned it sufficiently to see the gaunt, pale-green features, the craggy jaw, the heavy, thick-based nose, and, beneath them, the clerical collar and coloured episcopal front.
The back of the head had been smashed in by some terrible blow or other….
Sadly Harry surveyed the corpse for a moment.
“Itchabod!” he said, scrambled up the rocks, stood on the edge of the Hole for a moment and looked back at the corpse, and repeated himself.
“H’itchabod.”
Then he hared off to the golf house.
He knew where there was an easily opened window. He entered and rang-up the Mervin police.
“Come instantaneously,” he shouted by way of speeding them.
The Case of the Famished Parson (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery) Page 1