‘Miss Rohan? Then can it be that she has concealed something from the superintendent?’
‘This is no time for idle speculation of that sort. We were discussing a serious question. Now, do you admit that my theory of English class structure is correct?’
‘But perhaps Mr Applecheek told the superintendent something important about Miss Rohan and he had to question her about it at once.’
‘Wrong,’ said the blonde. ‘She was only in there two minutes. Then at last it was the turn again of the lower orders. Now am I right?’
‘It cannot have been an arrest or anything very grave if she was with the superintendent only two minutes. You must be correct. I will put the incident in my diary as an example of class consciousness. And there is another thing.’
‘Yes?’
The blonde hoisted herself on to the kitchen table and sat with her legs dangling.
‘I want your advice,’ said the dark one.
‘Certainly. What do you want advice about? Diet? You eat too many chocolates: that is why you have those spots.’
‘I have not got any spots. And besides this is an intellectual matter.’
‘Then you have come to the best possible person.’
The blonde thrust her left leg out and moved the foot to and fro to get the full effect of the slimness of her ankle.
‘It is this tea party this afternoon.’
‘Ah, the Japanese ceremonial tea. What about it?’
‘It is just this. Should I describe the ceremony in my diary? Does it count as a typical event of a stay in England?’
‘An excellent question. This will require some thought.’
She held up her right leg and examined its ankle.
Silence.
‘Well?’ said the dark one.
‘Yes. It is your duty to find out as much as possible of what happens at this ceremony. It illustrates the well-known links between England and Japan. I will help you. If they think they are absolutely in private they will certainly discuss the murder in very free terms.’
*
‘I think it’s an excellent idea,’ said Honor. ‘I’d very much like to see everybody together in a place where they think they are safe from observation. There might be some very interesting talk about the murder.’
‘Or about Zen,’ said Mr Utamaro.
They were walking side by side up and down the big lawn under the cedar of Lebanon. The grey sky.
‘You haven’t told the superintendent?’ she said.
‘Oh, yes. I mentioned it.’
‘A pity.’
‘I told him because it is important that everybody at the ceremony should feel free from constraint. In Japan nowadays businessmen delight to attend such occasions. They take the chance of looking at themselves from a little distance. In the old days the ceremony was the favourite recreation of the samurai.’
‘You don’t need to dish out the tit-bits of information any more, by the way. The editor has agreed to drop the feature article in favour of the hard news story. I only wish he would do the same about this damned balloon story.’
‘There is no such thing as height,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘You cling deliberately to this distorted view of the world. These attempts to define things by saying they are either this or that, either high or low. Cease to do it, and heights will cease to exist for you.’
‘Easily said. But you don’t seem to understand. I’ve got my living to earn. I’ve got Gerry’s living to earn too if it comes to that. I can’t go in for Zen, even if I wanted to. It would make the only thing I’m trained to do become meaningless.’
She stopped walking abruptly and thrust her hand through her hair.
‘You seem to forget that people are not always free agents. I’m bound to Gerry hand and foot. Don’t you see that?’
‘In Japan Zen monks often marry,’ Mr Utamaro said.
He looked up at the sky.
‘It may rain,’ he said.
‘I suppose it’s possible to have an uncomplicated marriage,’ Honor said.
She set off across the lawn again. At a fast pace.
‘A loveless marriage,’ she said.
A sharp laugh.
‘That would be the ideal, after all.’
‘You see that, that is a start,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘All fine and dandy. Except that I’m incapable of not getting caught up the way I am with Gerry.’
‘It is asking for trouble,’ Mr Utamaro said. ‘It is bad enough carrying about with us an image of ourselves and trying to fit into it at every moment. But to carry about an image of someone else and to try to fit them into it . . .’
He caught hold of Honor’s arm. A surgeon’s grip, firm but not fierce.
‘Break out,’ he said.
Honor shook her head.
‘Too late,’ she said. ‘Much, much too late.’
They stood still. Mr Utamaro’s hand on her elbow. Gentle. Implacable.
‘You see pretty far into things,’ she said.
‘I have learnt not to see far into things but to see things as they are.’
‘Including murder?’
Mr Utamaro let her arm drop and held out his palm.
‘I felt a drop of rain,’ he said.
‘You mean to find out who killed Flaveen, don’t you?’ said Honor. ‘I’ve known that ever since she died.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘there is dust on the floor it must be swept up.’
Honor looked at him.
‘I wonder if we are thinking of the same person?’ she said.
‘No, we aren’t.’
‘You’re very sure.’
‘I am sure of everything. Either I know a thing, or I do not. It is only when you add from your mind to what is put before you that you become uncertain. You wonder whether what you have added is right or wrong.’
Honor jerked round.
‘Do you know who killed Flaveen?’ she said.
‘No,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘You don’t?’
‘No. I have observed some things. There are certain facts. But I will have to see more before I know who killed Miss Mills. More facts may not be placed before me. Who knows?’
‘I may place a fact or two before you sooner or later,’ said Honor.
‘We must go in. It is raining too much now,’ Mr Utamaro said.
‘Rain? I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Yet the drops fell on you. Your blouse is quite wet.’
‘I was thinking of something else.’
‘Thought makes you blind. It is best to see.’
They hurried round the side of the house and in at the wide front door. It began to rain hard. A steady downpour from a soft grey sky.
They stood looking at it from the shelter of the doorway.
‘Yes,’ said Honor, ‘I think pretty soon the time will come. You say the superintendent knows about the tea ceremony?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you asked him if we need be disturbed?’
‘I asked if it would be a convenient time.’
‘And he said?’
‘He said he could make no guarantee that his duties would not force him to see one or the other of us at that time.’
‘A very typical remark. He seems to be a great one for his rights.’
‘But he added that he didn’t expect to need to see anyone again in the immediate future.’
‘So we shall be on our own?’
‘Most probably.’
‘Then perhaps you will find a few more facts that you may not know coming in front of you.’
*
Mr Utamaro left the lunch table. The second course, trifle again, was just being served. He walked along into the hall and out through the front door. Rapidly but without haste.
As he went through the hall the grandfather clock in its dark corner struck five. Its hands pointed to two minutes before a quarter past one.
Mr Utamaro smiled.
It was still raining. S
teadily but not hard. The leaves of the trees glistened damply. Water trickled down the walls of the house, running, hesitating, running on again till it reached the ground and soaked away. The turf of the big lawn squelched slightly as Mr Utamaro walked across it. Only at the very heart of the huge cedar was there a small area of dryness.
Mr Utamaro crossed the lawn and went through a narrow archway on one side of it. A tangle of rose briars brushed his shoulders on either side. Through the arch a grass path led round to the back of the house.
The rain falling silently. The minute sound of the heavier drops coming off the projecting parts of the house and tapping faintly on the stonework below them. A blotched stain slowly darkening under one of the windows. The slosh of Mr Utamaro’s footsteps.
He went through a second rose-tangled archway and came out on to a small lawn backing on to a range of brick outbuildings. A few bedraggled creepers partly covered the walls. A narrow flower bed surrounded the lawn. It was filled with daffodils not quite out yet. The flowers hung heavily, pointing to the ground. Drops of rain ran over the pale yellow skins of their buds and launched themselves into the air.
In the middle of this lawn Mr Utamaro had erected a small hut. Incongruously Japanese. Its low pitched roof was made of straw thatch and its walls were of a thick greyish paper supported by light bamboo sticks. Mr Utamaro looked at it with anxiety. He glanced up to the unvarying leaden sky.
Then he entered and looked round the single room. Satisfied that the rain was not coming in he left and walked back along the grass path towards the cedar tree. His footsteps evenly squishing.
As he went through the archway on to the big lawn he heard an unexpected sound.
‘Psst’
He looked round.
Standing under the ineffective shelter of one of a clump of lilacs growing between the house and the archway was Superintendent Padbourne.
His hands thrust deep into the pockets of a trench coat. A green pork-pie hat protecting his head.
He held up a finger and beckoned to Mr Utamaro. Raindrops ran down his hand and into the warmth of his sleeve. He flicked them out, his mouth wrinkling with distaste.
Mr Utamaro turned back through the arch and made his way to where the superintendent was standing pushing through the interlaced branches of the overgrown lilacs. Their flower cones just showed faint purple.
The superintendent looked at him.
‘This damned rain doesn’t seem to worry you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I suppose you’re above noticing such things.’
‘No,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘I feel the rain. But there are times when one goes out into it and times when one keeps dry.’
‘I saw you going out,’ the superintendent said, ‘so I took the opportunity to have a word with you while no one was about to see us. Matter of duty.’
He shook his head and shoulders vigorously. Heavy drops of rainwater whirled into the air.
‘It is best not to fight against it,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘I dare say,’ Superintendent Padbourne said.
The corners of his mouth drooped gloomily.
‘What I wanted to know,’ he said, ‘was what Mrs Manvers – do you call her that, or do you call her Miss Brentt, I don’t know – wanted with you in such a hurry. Don’t tell me it was a talk about Zen.’
Mr Utamaro grinned. A flash of white teeth in the green gloom of the lilac thicket.
‘No,’ he said, ‘if we are to divide things up, this came into your department.’
‘I thought as much. That’s why I beat a retreat. I had a feeling she’d say things to you that she wouldn’t say to me. She thinks I’m a stupid policeman.’
‘And you think she’s a pestilential woman reporter,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘It is better not to think like that at all’
‘That’s as may be,’ said the superintendent.
He jabbed his right hand at his collar, inserted a podgy finger and tried to scrape out the trickle of rain that had just penetrated. When he had convinced himself that it was hopeless, he hunched his shoulders again and said:
‘Well, what did she want?’
‘She wanted to tell me she knew who had killed “That girl”,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘But she didn’t of course give you a name?’
‘No.’
Mr Utamaro smiled.
‘I suppose,’ said the superintendent, ‘that she’ll come to me when she thinks she’s got proof and I’ll be expected to give her special facilities for her paper.’
‘That was what she told me she would do,’ Mr Utamaro said.
‘And do you think she does know?’
‘I cannot tell,’ Mr Utamaro said.’ She knows something that she thinks no one else does. I’m sure of that. But whether it is what we want to find out I don’t know. Tell me something.’
‘Oh, there’s things I can tell you, are there?’ said the superintendent.
He looked up at Mr Utamaro, making the water that had collected in his hat brim spill out on to his chin. He dabbed at it and hunched himself up again.
‘What exactly is Mrs Manvers’ alibi?’ said Mr Utamaro.
The superintendent risked another quick glance up at him. This time the piggy eyes were speculative.
‘I wondered whether she might not be worth looking into before the alibi came to light,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to leave her aside because it looks certain that she’s out of the question. But she’s impulsive all right and ruthless, in a way. She could kill someone, but I’m not sure that she’s at all the type for a premeditated business like this.’
‘She drives herself,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘But you can forget about her, or I’m a Dutchman. Just go over the facts. Miss Rohan saw the girl leaning out of an upstairs window at more or less exactly 12.27 p.m. She came in in a huff and happened to speak to you, and the subject of the time came up and provided a check. All right?’
‘I am not the person to point out flaws in logic,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘After all, I deny logic exists.’
‘Well, it does exist, you can take it from me,’ said the superintendent. ‘Now then, almost immediately you yourself set off from the house where the girl is still alive and you walk all the way up the garden to that little summer house right on the edge of the grounds. A ten-minute walk. And there you find Mrs Manvers. Had she just arrived after running full pelt from the house round by some way you couldn’t see her?’
‘No,’ said Mr Utamaro, ‘she would have had to have taken a long route round and to have approached the summer house from the opposite direction to myself to have achieved that. And she was by no means puffing and panting or showing any signs of a long run.’
‘Exactly,’ said the superintendent. ‘I’ve been over the ground myself. I’ve checked the time it takes to walk from the house. I’ve made sure that you can’t approach the summer house except on foot. It couldn’t be done.’
He peered up at Mr Utamaro with one questioning eye. And stooped to avoid the little dollop of rain slopping out of his hat brim.
‘You must not expect me to perform a miracle for you,’ Mr Utamaro said.
‘You almost had me hoping you might,’ said the superintendent. ‘It was really Mrs Manvers you saw, wasn’t it? Not her ghost, or her spirit manifestation or the idea of her or something?’
‘Nothing of any of them,’ said Mr Utamaro. ‘I watched Mrs Manvers herself sitting in that little summer house, and then I talked with her.’
‘And you talked with her just long enough to make it impossible for her to have got back to the house in time to commit the crime at the other end of the possible period,’ the superintendent said. ‘Even if we discount her husband’s evidence that she was with him all the time until they came into the common room after lunch.’
He looked despondently at his sparkingly polished shoes. Mud spattered.
‘I thought I might be on to something,’ he said, ‘when I heard that they gave different accounts of what they had been doing o
ver the lunch period. But whatever they were doing it can’t have been killing Flaveen Mills. At the very latest according to the pathologist she was killed about the time they left you up at the summer house. They would have had to have gone a long way round to get back without you seeing them, and the quack won’t agree to a time as late as that. Firm as a rock on it. The only interesting thing he did tell us is that the body was dropped from a height of a few feet after death. That’s almost certainly the balcony in the library there. I’m pretty sure she was killed in her own room, which is just opposite the door to the gallery, and the murderer waited for a chance and nipped across with the body. They could have done it in two seconds. Not that all this gets us any forrader.’
He lifted one foot and moved it cautiously. A lump of soft earth came up with it.
‘Damn,’ he said.
‘I think you had better watch the tea hut this afternoon from a distance,’ Mr Utamaro said.
The superintendent looked more cheerful.
‘You think there may be a scene?’ he said.
In his eagerness he moved his head too vigorously. Rainwater splashed on to his face again. His hand came out of his trench coat pocket and he dabbed at himself with a handkerchief.
‘Mrs Manvers seemed to promise a scene,’ Mr Utamaro said. ‘There is one small window overlooking the tea hut from the house at ground level. It belongs to the larder, I think.’
‘All right,’ said the superintendent. ‘I hope something comes of it. Otherwise I’m getting nowhere fast. No one’s got any sort of motive. That’s the trouble. I thought about the old clergyman when he told me he took the sword. You knew about that, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Utamaro.
‘It might be a motive of a sort. The girl may have threatened to blackmail him. We know nothing about her: it’s possible. But what had she got to blackmail him over when you get down to it? I’ve just heard the result of an inquiry to his bishop – what they call a discreet inquiry: all ifs and ans – but what it amounted to was that the bishop knew all about him and so did everyone else who mattered.’
‘Yes, he only pretended to deceive himself about how well his trouble was known,’ Mr Utamaro said.
Zen there was Murder Page 17