“In connection with the discovery of a body identified as that of Miss Olwen Myfanwy Jones, late of Nanradoc House, Caernarvonshire, a woman is helping the police with their enquiries.”
Timothy had sent off his letter to Grant to catch the last post of the day, and on the following morning he saw the announcement in the paper. More than one interpretation could be put upon it, but, judging from past experience, he was pretty sure it meant that an arrest was imminent. He telephoned Grant.
“Have you had my letter?”
“I have, Mr. Herring.”
“What’s this about some woman helping the police with their enquiries?”
“I will find out, Mr. Herring, and ring you back.”
There were, of course, several possibilities, thought Timothy, comforting himself. It need not be Marion. It could be Mrs. Lloyd, a little puzzled and troubled by her small legacy and his visit. She might have turned the conversation over in her mind—he was sure she did not lack intelligence—and have come to the conclusion that some of his questions had been both strange and unnecessary if he were merely establishing her identity and her claim never to have been dismissed from service at Nanradoc House. She might also have realised that some of her own answers had been the reverse of discreet. She might never have heard of Satanism, but she had certainly referred, although not in detail, (she probably did not know details or else was too modest and “chapel-going” to reveal them), of the disagreeable and possibly orgiastic services in the castle chapel.
If she had alarmed herself, it was quite on the cards that she had gone to the police and retailed the whole conversation. If she were not the woman in question, there were others. Perhaps the little kitchen-maid or the Lewis sister had been suspicious of his advertisement and had decided that it would be wise to tell the police of their experiences at Nanradoc. People of their class, he had gathered, dreaded the thought of being mixed up with the police, but perhaps the woman, whoever she was, had thought it safest to seek them out before the boot was on the other foot and they had pulled her in for questioning.
So much for the obviously innocent. Apart from Marion, whose idiotic confession that she had stabbed Pembroke puzzled him the more every time he thought about it, there remained Leonie Bing and the trousered Birds woman. Leonie might conceivably have gone to the police of her own volition, and certainly the trousered woman and her brother (if that, indeed, was the relationship) had come out of hiding soon enough when they heard that Olwen Jones’s body had been found. There, again, they might have thought it better to come forward rather than to wait until the police pounced on them.
Timothy had to wait until the following day before he received a telephone communication from Grant.
“I would like to speak to Mr. Herring, please.”
“Speaking. That you, Grant?”
“It is. Are you alone, sir?”
“Yes, nobody within earshot of me. What’s the news?”
“The lady at Caernarvon is Miss Marion Jones.”
“Oh, Lord! No! Why on earth has she done that?”
“It was not her wish that she should be called upon to help, sir.”
“You don’t mean they’ve actually pulled her in! On what grounds?”
“Motive. Means and opportunity as yet undecided.”
“Good Lord! Does it mean the magistrates?”
“It looks verra like it, I’m fearing.”
“What do you think I can do?”
“Brief her the best lawyer you can get, sir. She’ll need him badly, I’m thinking. I won’t say more over the telephone. I’ll be sending you a communication.”
“Don’t bother. Just send me a bill.” He rang off and sat down to think. There was no help to be had from Grant. The ex-inspector was an honest man. He believed that the police had hit the right nail on the head and, what with his police training and (Timothy pulled a wry face) his Scottish principles, it was useless to expect him to look for another culprit. He began to whistle a doleful air, and realised that it was the tune put to the old ballad of “The Four Maries.”
Yestreen the Queen had four Maries,
Tonight she’ll hae but three—
One good thing, they did not hang people nowadays. They always had hated hanging women, he had heard. With luck, the guilty person—he refused to conceive that it could possibly be Marion—might get away after nine years. If it could be brought in as manslaughter it would be less, especially if severe provocation could be shown, and Olwen, according to what he had gathered, was not the easiest of persons to have dealings with.
What prompted Timothy to his subsequent courses of action he would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to explain. Grant, from his point of view, must be written off. That sea-green incorruptible was a broken reed, so far as Marion was concerned. He reviewed the sequence of events. He had read (mostly in detective stories, it was true) that the insoluble crime is that which seems purposeless and matter-of-fact, and which the criminal has declined to embroider. He thought of the classic cases in which the police had been successful because of mistakes or over-elaboration by the criminal—George Joseph Smith, who (foolishly) had drowned his third wife; Norman Thorne, who had tried to be too clever; Crippen, who had fled to America with the girl for whose sake—partly, at any rate—he had murdered his unkind spouse; the insane letters written by Neill Cream; the extraordinary conduct of Alfred Rouse after he had burned the body in his car.
Timothy went over the sequence of events which looked likely (he had to face it) to lead to Marion’s arrest. She had been much too eager to press her claim to the full ownership of the Nanradoc house, castle, and estate. Again and again he had blamed himself for that, and no doubt Pembroke and Leonie had come forward with evidence of it. Then there were Marion’s apparent willingness to take on three children and support two of them out of a salary which she must have known would be insufficient; the strange story of Olwen Jones’s shattered leg, leading to Pembroke’s and Leonie’s leaving Nanradoc; Olwen’s teaming-up with the Birds, those extraordinary nightjars—all these facts, if facts they were, must have some sort of significance, but he could not see how to use any of them to Marion’s advantage if she was in trouble in the sense that he feared.
It was when his thoughts reached this point, and he felt he had come to an impasse, that something buried in his consciousness came slowly but with increasing sureness to the surface, and, in the darkness, an idea began to take shape. There was one other strange chapter in the story which had had its climax in Olwen Jones’s death. Why, Timothy wondered, if she was really so bitter about her accident that Pembroke and Leonie had decided to leave Nanradoc for good, had Olwen gone to Chester to look at the exhibition of her brother’s pictures? Did it mean that she had forgiven him? She did not seem to have followed up the expedition by getting in touch with him personally.
Then he thought again. The culmination of that visit to Chester had been the introduction to Nanradoc of the Birds, that extraordinary pair of (it seemed) petty criminals, followed by the descent of their “disciples” and the subsequent departure of the servants. Later, the disciples had left, and it was after they had gone that Olwen had been murdered, and her body, much later, buried in the well.
Time had gone by between that and his own first visit to Nanradoc—two years, probably. Meanwhile the Birds had been living not only rent free, but on an income of sixty pounds a month provided by Pembroke Jones. It was a small income, he realised, but it was steady and it was unearned and tax-free, and the Birds were no longer young, and at Nanradoc their needs were probably few. The problem (and he could see no way to solve it unless the Birds themselves would tell him the answer, and, even if they did, he would not know whether to believe them) was to find out how Olwen had come to be associated with them. Then he remembered that Mrs. Lloyd, ex-cook to the household, had referred to them as “the healers.” That might explain why Olwen had gone to them, gone, with her physical disability and her warped and t
roubled mind, because they claimed to possess the gift of spiritual healing.
Timothy remembered Grant’s reference to back-street abortions. Spiritual healing might have proved more profitable; it was certainly far less dangerous unless it went beyond certain bounds and claims. The longer he thought about it, the more convinced he became that there were two things he ought to do if Marion was not to be implicated in a murder of which he was convinced she knew nothing, and which she certainly had not committed. He decided that he would go to the art gallery in Chester as a starting point—it could be nothing more than that, he surmised—and from there attempt to trace the connection between Olwen and her strange acquaintances.
Here, he thought, he might be reasonably successful, since the newspaper stories of the discovery of the body, followed by the news that the police were being “helped in their enquiries” would have refreshed people’s memories and set tongues wagging. If his enquiries led anywhere, they must, at some point, lead to the Birds. He had no belief whatever in Grant’s theory that petty criminals never mixed themselves up in major crime. The Birds had had much to gain and, while they remained unsuspected of having caused it, nothing to lose by Olwen’s death.
He slept upon these cogitations and opinions, then, on the following morning, he rang up Parsons and asked whether he could stay for a couple of nights, as he had business to do in Chester. He was told to come as soon as ever he liked, and to stay as long as he could.
“Chester?” said Parsons, when they met. “Visiting that art gallery which Pembroke Jones uses as his shop window? Is that what you’re thinking of doing?”
“Saul among the prophets! Yes, as a matter of fact, it is.”
“I’m afraid you’ll be unlucky,” said Diana Parsons. “Pembroke Jones and Leonie Bing are not exhibiting again until the spring. I always get the leaflet the gallery sends out. It came last week. That gallery always seems to be booked up—there must be a lot of interested people living in Chester—and the present exhibitors—I’d better find the leaflet—yes, here we are. Oh, dear! Does it mean you’ve had your journey for nothing? Never mind! Your loss is our gain.”
“No, I didn’t come hoping to look at Jones’s pictures,” said Timothy. “In fact, I’m very pleased he isn’t exhibiting at present, because it means I’m not likely to run into him or Leonie Bing. The people I want to see—not that I imagine they’ll be able to tell me what I want to know—this is very much a shot in the dark—are the people who run the gallery. I’ve got the address. You supplied it, if you remember, so that I could write and get Jones’s address from them. I want to ask them what they remember, if anything, about a visit Olwen Jones paid to the gallery to look at her brother’s paintings.”
“But that must have been years ago! I mean, she’s been dead for—how many years?” said Diana.
“Oh, I know. I don’t really expect to get anything useful from them. The fact is that I’m almost at my wits’ end. You’ve read in the papers that some woman is helping the police at Caernarvon with their enquiries, I suppose? Well, it seems to be Marion, and you know what that usually means.”
“You mean that, after all, they believed her when she confessed she stabbed Pembroke?”
“I mean they must have a bee in their bonnets and believe she murdered Olwen.”
“Well, the two things would seem to hang together, wouldn’t they?” suggested Diana.
“Yes, I think they would, but I’m sure it wasn’t Marion. I believe it was one of those beauties who were living at Nanradoc after Olwen’s death.”
“Much more likely. I wonder the police haven’t cottoned on to that.”
“According to a private eye I briefed to watch Marion’s interests—only he declined to do any such thing and handed in his cards—the police have a long list of petty crimes committed by that pair. Their name is Birds, by the way, and they are affectionately known to the authorities as the Woodpecker and the Crow.”
“A long list of convictions? Then, surely . . .” said Parsons. Timothy groaned.
“I know,” he said. “I shouldn’t have thought they needed to look any further for Olwen Jones’s murderers. But they’ve got some dyed-in-the-wool, unshakeable official theory that petty criminals don’t go in for major crime, and that murder is the last thing they commit. I argued with Grant, but he’s an ex-inspector of police and takes the general view.”
“But the motive!” said Diana. “It sticks out a mile!”
“I know. Well, anyway, there it is. Of course, Marion is the prize chump to beat all prize chumps. She proved that, I think, when she took on kids she had to starve herself to keep. If only she hadn’t confessed to stabbing Pembroke she’d never have occurred to the police at all, I’m perfectly certain.”
“But I thought they disregarded the confession.”
“Only because they were after bigger things. I still can’t think why Marion was idiot enough to go to them and tell them she’d done it. They could so easily work out that if she was in school that afternoon she couldn’t have got to Nanradoc in time for the end of that feast.”
“If she was in school that afternoon,” said Parsons. “That would need to be proved, wouldn’t it?”
“I can tell you why she confessed,” said Diana, unexpectedly. Timothy stared at her.
“You can?”
“Oh, Tim!” she said. “You must know how she feels about you! She must think it was you who stabbed Pembroke Jones.”
Timothy continued to stare.
“But why on earth would I want to stab Jones?” he asked. “The girl must have been off her head if she really thought that!”
“Take the suggestion or leave it,” said Diana. Timothy, recovering, laughed.
“Which women’s magazines do you patronise?” he asked. “And let’s have a look at your library list, shall we?”
“Have it your own way,” said Diana calmly. “When you have eliminated the impossible, what remains must be the truth. She must have thought she was protecting somebody by her confession, and, judging from what I’ve seen of her—little enough, I grant you, but that little has been significant—unless she thought she was protecting one of her own children, whom it is impossible to think of as the stabber of a grown man, (as you will be the first to admit), well, we are left with you. After all, apart from any warmer feelings which she may have for you, she has plenty of cause for being grateful to you, hasn’t she?”
“And plenty of cause for being the reverse. She’d never be in this mess, remember, if I hadn’t interfered in her affairs in the first place.”
“But you couldn’t be expected to know that it would land her in a mess,” argued Diana. “You were only playing Don Quixote.”
“I’ll take jolly good care never to do it again.”
“What you need, you know,” said Diana, with a glance at her husband, “is a wife. She’d keep you out of mischief.”
“Thanks very much! You and my sister might be identical twins,” said Timothy sourly.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Iconoclast
As befitted a man in perfect health and with no money troubles, Timothy was usually a sound sleeper, but on that first night in Shrewsbury he found that his mind was too busy to make immediate slumber possible. He lay wide-eyed, therefore, passing in review all that had happened on the evening of the Nanradoc banquet and in trying to deduce what had caused Marion to believe that he was the person who had stabbed Pembroke Jones.
He had a retentive memory, both visual and aural, and he employed it that night in re-creating the scenes and in recalling the conversations of that extraordinary evening. One or two points were significant and one thing had never been explained. That was the business of Pembroke Jones’s car. The moving of it half a mile down the road towards the village could only be regarded, he supposed, as an unkind and thoughtless practical joke. There had been a party of boisterous and slightly inebriated young people present, those who had made off with the steak-knives. It was
easy enough to imagine them playing some senseless prank. What it was impossible to imagine was how they had managed to get into the car in order to drive off. Presumably Pembroke would have locked it when he arrived. It was also locked when the Parsons and Timothy had found it. They had watched Leonie unlock it. He could swear to that.
The only answer which made any kind of sense was that Pembroke, on leaving the dinner-table, had driven it off down the road, and then, feeling the call of nature, had walked back to the castle and into the woods. But that did not make any real sense, either. What was to prevent him, at such a late hour and on such a lonely highway as the Pass of Nanradoc, from relieving himself at the roadside? And if, in the brilliant moonlight, he had not cared to do that, why not have driven straight back and then gone into the shelter of the woods? Why walk? There was nothing wrong with the car. Leonie had tested it and he himself had driven it back to the castle.
Then an explanation came to him. It seemed far-fetched at first, but, the more he examined it, the more it seemed to him that it was, at any rate, the least unlikely of the possible solutions. He himself had already suggested part of it, he remembered. It concerned Leonie. If Leonie had stabbed Pembroke—and, although they seemed, on the surface, compatible, he could imagine less likely things—she might have decided that she preferred not to be among those present when his wounded body was found.
She was an intelligent woman. She had worked out that if her own car was missing when the Parsons and Timothy were ready (and were the last) to go home, they would be compelled to offer her a lift. The suggestion had been made by Parsons that he should drive her back to her home in Mold, but, since her own car had to be found (for she would scarcely have felt prepared to abandon it) she herself, he remembered, had mentioned that Pembroke had probably gone to the hotel in the village for a drink. This, of course, was not unlikely, except for the lateness of the hour.
The village was in the opposite direction to her home. The car had been located and, at that point, Timothy had put himself in the position of cat’s-paw number one, he reflected ruefully, by offering to drive it back to Nanradoc and shout for Pembroke there, while the others, Leonie included, had gone on to the hotel to see whether Pembroke had reached it. This ensured that it was someone other than Leonie who came upon the wounded man. It was possible, thought Timothy (she had been compelled to admit that she and her husband had had a row in order to account for his defection) that Leonie expected him to find a dead man. The darkness of the wood probably accounted for the fact that she had misjudged her aim, although, apparently, not by much. (His former theory he abandoned.)
Late and Cold (Timothy Herring) Page 20