Wicked Uncle

by Patricia Wentworth

  “I wouldn’t talk if I were you-unless you want to make a confession.”

  “I never touched him. Take that light away!” He stepped back out of its range, his hand still up to shield his face.

  Abbott said dispassionately,

  “Well, just bear in mind that anything you say is liable to be used in evidence against you.”

  “I tell you I never touched him!”

  “All right. You’d better come along and show me where he is.”

  The drive wound back to skirt a peace of woodland. Frank Abbott thought the man who planned it had gone out of his way to make it as long as possible. Chesterton’s “rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road,” just slid into his mind and out again. Of course that was why he had heard Oakley when he began to run. He had been actually nearer the house then than for most of the rest of the way. Half the lanes in England were like that-you went away from the place you were going to, and then came back to it again.

  They were coming back to it now. The drive came out on a gravel sweep- “That’s where I heard him run. He must have been scared crazy to run on the gravel.” He said aloud,

  “Which way?” And Martin Oakley said, “Round here to the left.”

  There was a belt of shrubbery, not very thick-light leafless tracery of lilac and syringa, with a dense blackness here and there of holly and yew, a path threading it to come out upon a small paved court at the side of the house. Huddled on the paving stones, Leonard Carroll lying crookedly with the back of his head smashed in.

  Martin Oakley said, “He’s dead. I didn’t touch him.”

  “Somebody did,” said Frank Abbott coolly.

  He stepped forward, felt the dead man’s wrist, and found it warm. He stepped back again. Then he sent the beam of the torch travelling here and there. The flags lay damp and furred with moss. Where they met the wall of the house there was a withered growth of fern, the old fronds brown and broken, the new ones curled hard upon themselves like fossils, sheltering against the January frosts. There was no sign of a weapon. The beam slid up the walls and showed rows of casement windows closed and curtained. On the ground floor all the windows shut. No light anywhere to answer the wandering beam.

  Abbott said sharply, “Who sleeps this side?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Then how did you come here?”

  “I came to see him.”

  “But why here? What brought you here?”

  Oakley fetched one of those hard breaths.

  “My God, Abbott-you can’t put it on me! I tell you I was coming to see him.”

  “What brought you here-round to the side of the house?”

  “I came up to the front door. It was only just after ten when he telephoned. I made up my mind to see him, to find out what he meant. I came up to the front door. I thought I heard voices away over here on the left. The front of the house was all dark. I stepped back to listen. I thought I heard my own name. I came this way. My feet made a noise on the gravel. I suppose that’s why I didn’t hear any more. I had a torch. I did stop to listen once. I thought I heard someone. I called out, ‘Carroll, is that you?’ There wasn’t any answer. I went on, and found him lying here the way he is now. I didn’t touch him-I swear I didn’t!”

  “You didn’t think of giving the alarm?”

  “I only thought about getting away. I’m afraid I lost my head a bit. I’d come over to see him, and there he was-dead. My one idea was to get away. I started to run, but when I got on to the gravel I realized what a row I was making and stopped. I tried not to make any more noise. Then I bumped into you. That’s the absolute truth.”

  Frank Abbott wondered. He said,

  “We’d better go up to the house.”

  Chapter XXXII

  The telephone had been busy. Martin Oakley had repeated his story to Chief Inspector Lamb, haled from the borderland of slumber to preside over another investigation and a new murder. Flashlight photographs were being taken of the moss-grown courtyard, and of Leonard Carroll lying there-positively his last appearance on any stage.

  Lamb sat beneath the overhead light, his coarse, curly black hair a little rumpled. It was still thick and abundant except just on the crown, and showed only a few grey threads at the temples. Under this strong dark thatch his ruddy, weather-tanned face had no more expression than a piece of wood. The brown eyes with their slight tendency to bulge remained fixed upon Mr. Oakley’s face, a habit very disconcerting to even the most innocent witness. Martin Oakley could by no means flatter himself that there was any disposition to regard him in this light. His mind, at first possessed by a frantic sense of incredulity, had now to struggle against the feeling that he was being rushed towards a precipice at a speed which precluded intelligent thought. He had expressed his willingness to make a statement, and was now regretting it. He had been cautioned, but could not resist the temptation to explain his actions.

  Lamb’s voice struck robustly on his ear.

  “Pearson’s account of your telephone conversation with Mr. Carroll is substantially correct?”

  “I think so.”

  “Would you like to look at it again?”

  “No-it’s all right-that’s what he said.”

  “Well now, how long was it before you made up your mind to come and see him?”

  “Oh, almost at once.”

  “Who rang off-you or Carroll?”

  “He did. He banged down the receiver. I only hung up my end for long enough to get the exchange again.”

  This was something new. Frank Abbott looked up from his notes, Miss Silver from her knitting, which had for the moment required a somewhat closer attention than she usually gave it

  Lamb’s “What did you want the exchange for?” rang sharply.

  “I wanted to get on to Carroll to tell him I was coming over.”

  “Did you get him?”

  “Yes.”

  “He knew you were coming over?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I said, ‘Look here, you can’t leave it like that. If you think you saw anything you’ll have to tell me what it was. I’m coming over.’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “He laughed, and I hung up.” The urge to explain drove him. “That’s why I went round to the side of the house-I thought he was calling me-I thought I heard my name. I came up to the front door. He was expecting me-I thought perhaps he’d be there to let me in. But when I heard my name-”

  Miss Silver gave the slight cough with which she was wont to demand attention.

  “Mr. Oakley, are you sure you heard your name?”

  He turned a ravaged face on her.

  “I’m not sure about anything. I thought I heard it. That’s what took me round to the side of the house. Don’t you see I must have had some reason for going there?”

  The Chief Inspector said without any expression at all,

  “We don’t know what reason Mr. Carroll had for going there. But he did go there. The person who murdered him would have that motive for following or accompanying him.”

  There was a pause during which, and not for the first time, Mr. Oakley became convinced that he would have done better to hold his tongue. He was dismissed to the company of the other guests assembled in the drawing-room under the solemn gaze of a large local constable. If this young man had had any thoughts to spare from his job he might have reflected that the company presented some strange contrasts, but beyond concluding that it was a rum start he was conscious of little else than that this was a murder case, and that one of these people was probably a murderer. That being so, it did not matter to him that Mr. Tote was wearing blue serge trousers and a tweed overcoat; that Mrs. Tote had got back into the tight black cloth dress which she had worn for dinner, a garment rather ostentatiously smart in the hand but reduced by her to a sort of limp dowdiness; or that the other elderly lady had come down in a thick, old-fashioned grey dressing-gown, in spite of whi
ch she sat there shivering and looking as if she would never be warm again. Of the two young ladies, Miss Brown was in a tweed skirt and jumper, and Miss Lane in a very fancy dressing-gown, poppy-red and as flimsy as they come. Mr. Masterman was in a dressing-gown too, a very handsome garment and quite new.

  Well, there they all were, and there they sat, not one of them with a word to throw to anyone else. And time went on.

  In the study Lamb said,

  “He was struck on the head with something that broke his skull. There’s no sign of the weapon. It’s got to be somewhere. There’s no sign of it in the house. I don’t say it couldn’t have been cleaned and put back wherever it came from, because it could. There’s fire-irons, flat irons, golf-clubs, and all manner of things, but getting things clean and putting them back takes time, and there was precious little time. The man could have been no more than just dead when Frank got here. Take it any way you like, that telephone conversation was over by a quarter past ten, because that’s when Pearson finished locking up and saw Carroll go upstairs. At five-and-twenty past Miss Silver is ringing the Ram. Frank gets going by the half hour, and bumps into Oakley six or seven minutes later. Now if Oakley left the Mill House after his second telephone call he wouldn’t get here before half past-not walking in the dark-I don’t see how he could. If he killed Carroll he had about six minutes to do it in and get back down the drive to where Frank met him. I don’t say it couldn’t be done, because of course it could, but he’d got to meet Carroll who was quite probably looking out for him, induce him to go round to the side of the house-why?-quarrel with him to the point of murder, hit him over the head, and make off down the drive. If it was Mr. Oakley, he may have brought the weapon with him, or he may have picked up something on his way. A big stone would have done it, or a brickbat, in which case he must have thrown it away as he ran, and we shall find it when we can make a thorough search by daylight. He won’t, of course, have been able to do anything about cleaning it up, so unless there’s something very heavy in the way of rain we shall be able to identify it all right. What puzzles me is why either Carroll or the murderer should have been where the body was found.”

  Miss Silver coughed in a tentative manner.

  “Mr. Carroll’s bedroom windows look out that way.”

  Lamb grunted.

  “Yes, but they were shut and the curtains drawn.”

  Her needles clicked above the pale pink vest.

  “If someone had desired to attract Mr. Carroll’s attention, a handful of gravel might have been thrown up at one of the closed windows. Mr. Carroll would then have looked out. That he was persuaded to a meeting with his murderer is certain. There is nothing improbable in the supposition that he may have closed the window again and drawn the curtains.”

  Frank Abbott broke in with “How did Oakley know which was Carroll’s window? He’d never been to the house until he dined here on Saturday night, and he hadn’t been here since. That is to say, he’d never been here by daylight. Yet we’re asked to believe that he made a bee line for Carroll’s window and got it with the first shot. I can’t swallow it myself.”

  His Chief had a frown for this.

  “A bit free with your opinions, aren’t you, my lad? I’ll ask for them when I want them. I don’t say there isn’t a point there, but I’m quite able to see it myself. And here’s an answer. Who says Oakley didn’t know the house? Who says he’d only been here once? Who says he didn’t fix it up with Carroll on the telephone to come round under his window?” He hit his knee with the flat of his hand. “Oakley-Oakley-Oakley every time!”

  Frank Abbott had an impenitent frown.

  “I just can’t see why, sir.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t see why Oakley should have chosen such a place for a private conversation. At that hour everyone would be upstairs. Five of the upstair windows look down on to that court, two in each of the small wings, and one in the middle of the side wall of the house, all double casements. The two on the left belong to Carroll’s room, the two on the right to the bedroom shared by Mr. and Mrs. Tote. The one in the end wall lights the passage. Now, would Oakley, who had every reason to desire privacy, choose a place like this for the sort of conversation he was going to have with Carroll? To my thinking it’s all wrong. How could he know that the Totes wouldn’t have their windows open? If they had, they could have listened to everything that was said. Oakley was obviously in a fever about his wife-he’d have wanted to talk privately between four walls-”

  This time Lamb hit the table.

  “What makes you think he wanted to talk? If he’d got his mind made up for the murder he wouldn’t come into the house -he’d get Carroll to come out!”

  “And take him round under the Totes’ windows? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Look here,” said Lamb-“suppose it was this way. He throws his gravel up at the window-I’ll have that looked for-or makes some other signal, and Carroll comes down. Well, suppose he gets out of one of those ground-floor windows-no, that won’t do, because they were all fastened on the inside, and Oakley couldn’t have fastened them.”

  “Suppose it wasn’t Oakley, Chief.”

  “Well?”

  “Suppose it was someone in the house. He could have got back by the open window and shut it after him, couldn’t he?”

  Lamb’s colour had deepened.

  “And what would he be doing, meeting Carroll out there? And why should Carroll go outside to meet anyone who was living in the house? They could pick any room they liked to talk in, couldn’t they? Everyone had gone to bed. Now you look here-facts are what we’ve got to stick to. Carroll left the house and went to that court. It’s no good asking why he did it, or saying it’s not the sort of thing he would have done-he did it. The same applies to Oakley. It’s no good saying, ‘Why should he choose a place like that to meet Carroll?’ He went there, and he left Carroll lying dead. There’s no evidence to show whether he found him alive. He says no. That’ll be for a jury to decide- unless any of these people we’ve got boxed up in the drawing-room has got something useful to say. I’m going to start with Mrs. Tote.”

  During the first part of this conversation Miss Silver had appeared very much abstracted. Those rapid needles of hers slowed down and came to a standstill, her hands resting upon the pale pink wool. Towards the end she was giving her attention to what was being said, but with the air of one who has something to say and is waiting for the first opportunity of saying it. She now coughed in a very definite manner and said,

  “Just a moment, Chief Inspector-”

  It was almost as if he had forgotten she was there. Or perhaps the surprise in his look was intended to remind her that her presence was so very far from being official that the less said about it the better. He would not have used the word sufferance, but it may have been in his mind. It is certain that there was a graceful feminine deference in voice and manner as she said,

  “I wonder if you would be so very good as to allow me to put a question to Mr. Pearson in your presence. It may prove to be of no importance at all, in which case I shall have to apologize for taking up your time. Or it may prove to be very important indeed.”

  She had all his attention now. It had a quality of frowning displeasure.

  “I’m seeing Mrs. Tote next-if you don’t mind.”

  Frank Abbott pressed his lips together. The Chief being sarcastic was not the Chief at his best. The simile of the hippopotamus presented itself to an irreverent mind. Miss Silver, on the contrary, evoked admiration. She appeared to have withdrawn to so considerable a distance that one might almost imagine her to have retreated into the Victorian age. From this distance she smiled and addressed the Chief Inspector.

  “Then you will perhaps permit me to be your messenger. I will inform Mrs. Tote that you are ready to see her.”

  When the door had closed behind her Lamb rustled the papers on the blotting-pad. Frank’s eyes travelled to the fluff of pale pink wool poised amo
ngst its needles upon the arm of a just vacated chair. He had an idea that Maudie had turned the tables, and that it was his respected Chief who was feeling snubbed. He looked at the infant’s vest, the ball of pink wool, and the knitting-needles, and was comfortably assured that Maudie meant to come back. He allowed himself a very faint smile, and had his head bitten off for an idle, insubordinate young pup.

  “And I tell you what, my lad, if you don’t watch your step you’ll be getting into trouble one of these days-sniggering and sneering when you think I don’t see you! Answering back too, and in French as likely as not! And perhaps just as well!”

  Frank bowed to the storm in his most respectful manner. It would blow itself out.

  Chapter XXXIII

  Miss Silver did her errand. The hall was empty as she came through. If there had been anyone there, she might have been observed to go over to the hearth and, standing there, give some moments of close attention to what remained of the fire. The logs of which it had been composed were sunk together upon a deep bed of ash. They were not wholly consumed, but so charred and eaten away as to be mere frail shells, almost as light and insubstantial as the ash upon which they lay. They still looked like logs, but at a touch they would crumble and fall apart-with one exception. Tossed in upon the back of the burned-out fire was just such a log as might have served for the sign of one of those old inns which take their name from the Crooked Billet-a roughly L-shaped faggot, heavy and gnarled. It lay tilted against a pile of banked-up ash.

  Miss Silver bent forward and looked at it closely. The heat had died out of the fire, but there was still a glow from the ash. She put out a hand and drew it back again, after which she shook her head slightly, pursed her lips, and proceeded to the drawing-room to summon Mrs. Tote.

  They came back to the study together, and found the Chief Inspector restored. He addressed Mrs. Tote in as genial a manner as he thought proper.

  “Come in and sit down. I’m sorry to keep you up so late, but I am sure you see the necessity. I suppose you have no objection to Miss Silver being present while I ask you a few questions? She is representing Miss Brown.”