‘It was right, too,’ said Harriet. ‘Because you said something about its being past midnight and I looked, and it said the same as my watch.’
Peter said nothing, but whistled a couple of bars almost inaudibly. Harriet remained imperturbable; twenty-four hours of matrimony had taught her that, if one was going to be disturbed by sly allusions to Greenland’s coast or anything else, one might live in a state of perpetual confusion.
Crutchley said:
‘Of course it was going. It’s an eight-day, I tell you. And it was right enough this morning when I wound it. What’s the odds, anyhow?’
‘Well, well,’ said Kirk. ‘We’ll take it, then, that you left here some time after 6.10 by that clock, which was right as near as makes no difference. What did you do next?’
‘Went straight to choir practice. See here—’
‘Choir practice, eh? Ought to be easy enough to check up on that. What time’s practice?’
‘Six-thirty. I was in good time – you can ask anybody.’
‘Quite so,’ agreed Kirk. ‘All this is rowtine, you know – getting the times straight and so on. You left the house not earlier than 6.10 and not later than – say 6.25, to let you get to the church at 6.30. Right. Now, as a matter of rowtine, what did you do after that?’
‘Vicar asked me to drive his car over to Pagford for him. He don’t like driving himself after lighting-up. He ain’t so young as he was. I had me supper over there at the Pig and Whistle and had a look-on at the darts match. Tom Puffett can tell you. He was there. Vicar give him a lift over.’
‘Puffett a darts player?’ inquired Peter, pleasantly.
‘Ex-champion. And still throws a tidy dart.’
‘Ah! it’s the power he puts behind it, no doubt. Black he stood as night, Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell, And shook a dreadful dart.’
‘Ha, ha!’ cried Kirk, taken unaware and immensely tickled. ‘That’s good. Hear that, Joe? That’s good, that is. Black? He was black enough last time I saw him, halfway up the kitchen chimney. And shook a dreadful dart – I must tell him that. Worst of it is, I don’t suppose he ever heard of Milton. Fierce as – well, there, poor old Tom Puffett!’
The Superintendent waited to roll the jest over again on his tongue before returning to his inquiry.
‘We’ll see Tom Puffett presently. Did you bring Mr Goodacre back?’
‘Yes,’ said Crutchley, impatiently; he was not interested in John Milton. ‘Half-past ten I got him home, or just after. Then I went back to Pagford on my bike. I got in just on eleven and went to bed.’
‘Where do you sleep? Hancock’s garage?’
‘That’s right. Along of their other chap, Williams. He’ll tell you.’
Kirk was in the middle of extracting further particulars about Williams, when the sooty face of Mr Puffett poked itself in through the door.
‘Excuse me,’ said Mr Puffett, ‘but I can’t do nothing with this ’ere pot. Will you ’ave the reverend’s gun, my lord? or shall I fetch the ladders afore it gets dark?’
Kirk opened his mouth to reprove the intruder, but was suddenly overcome. ‘Black it stood as night,’ he muttered, joyfully. This new way of applying quotations, not to edification, seemed to have caught his fancy.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Harriet. She glanced at Peter. ‘I wonder if we’d better leave it till tomorrow?’
‘I don’t mind telling you, me lady,’ observed the sweep, ‘Mr Bunter’s fair put out, thinkin’ he’ll have to cook dinner on that there perishin’ oil-stove.’
‘I’d better come and talk to Bunter,’ said Harriet. She felt she could not bear to see Bunter suffer any more. Besides, the men would probably get on better without her. As she went out, she heard Kirk call Puffett into the room.
‘Just a moment,’ said Kirk. ‘Crutchley here says he was at choir practice last Wednesday night from half-past six on. Do you know anything about that?’
‘That’s right, Mr Kirk. We was both there. ’Arf-past six to ’arf-past seven. ’Arvest anthem. “For ’Is mercies still endure, Ever faithful, ever sure.” ’ Finding his notes less powerful than usual, Mr Puffett cleared his throat. ‘Been swallowing of the sut, that’s what I’ve been doing of. “Ever faithful, ever sure.” That’s quite correct.’
‘And you see me round at the Pig, too,’ said Crutchley.
‘Course I did. I’m not blind. You dropped me there and took vicar on to the Parish ’All and come back not five minutes arter for your supper. Bread and cheese, you ’ad, and four and a ’arf pints, ’cause I counted ’em. Drahnd yourself one o’ these days, I reckon.’
‘Was Crutchley there all the time?’ asked Kirk.
‘Till closin’. Ten o’clock. Then we ’ad to go round and pick up Mr Goodacre again. Whist-drive was over at 10, but we ’ad to wait gettin’ on ten minutes while he ’ad a chat with old Miss Moody. ’Ow that woman do clack on, to be sure! Then ’e come back with us. That’s right, ain’t it, Frank?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And,’ pursued Mr Puffett, with a large wink, ‘if it’s me you’ve got your eye on, you can ask Jinny wot time I got ’ome. George, too. Real vexed, Jinny was, at me settin’ down to tell George about the match. But there! She’s expectin’ ’er fourth and it makes ’er fratchetty-like. I tell her, it ain’t no good blamin’ her dad, but I reckon she gotter take it outer George somehow.’
‘Very good,’ said the Superintendent, ‘that’s all I want to know.’
‘Right,’ said Mr Puffett. ‘I’ll be seein’ about them ladders, then.’
He retired promptly, and Kirk again turned to Crutchley.
‘Well, that seems straight enough. You left – call it 6.20 – and didn’t come back that night. You left deceased alone in the house, with the back door locked and bolted and the front locked, so far as you know. How about the windows?’
‘Shut and locked ’em all afore I went. Burglar-proof catches you can see they have. Mr Noakes didn’t set much store by fresh air.’
‘H’m!’ said Peter. ‘He seems to have been a careful bird. By the way, Superintendent, did you find the front-door key on the body?’
‘Here’s his bunch,’ said Kirk.
Peter pulled Miss Twitterton’s key from his pocket, looked over the bunch, picked out its counterpart and said, ‘Yes; here you are.’ He laid the two side by side on his palm, examined them thoughtfully with a lens, and finally handed the whole thing over to Kirk, remarking, ‘Nothing there, so far as I can see.’
Kirk scrutinised the keys silently and then asked Crutchley:
‘Did you come back here any time during the week?’
‘No. Wednesday’s my day. Mr ’Ancock gives me Wednesday from eleven o’clock on. And Sundays, of course. But I wasn’t here Sunday. I went to London to see a young lady.’
‘Are you a London man?’ asked Peter.
‘No, my lord. But I worked there once and I got friends there.’
Peter nodded.
‘And you can’t give us any further information? Can’t think of anybody who might have come to see Mr Noakes that night? Anybody who might have had a grudge against him?’
‘I might think o’ plenty o’ them,’ said Crutchley, with emphasis. ‘But nobody what you might call special.’
Kirk was about to make a gesture of dismissal, when Peter put in a question.
‘Do you know anything about a note-case Mr Noakes lost some time ago?’
Kirk, Crutchley and Sellon all stared at him. Peter grinned.
‘No; I wasn’t born with second sight. Mrs Ruddle was eloquent on the subject. What can you tell us about that?’
‘I know he made a hell of a fuss about it, that’s all. Ten pound he had in it – or so he said. If ’e’d a-lost forty pound like me—’
‘That’ll do,’ said Kirk. ‘Have we any information about that, Joe?’
‘No, sir. Except it wasn’t found. We made out he must have dropped it out of his pocket in the road.’
; ‘All the same,’ put in Crutchley, ‘he had new locks put on the doors and the windows done too. Two years ago, that was. You ask Ma Ruddle about it.’
‘Two years ago,’ said Kirk. ‘Well – it don’t seem to have much connection with this here.’
‘It explains, perhaps,’ said Peter, ‘why he was so careful about locking up.’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ agreed the Superintendent. ‘Well, all right, Crutchley. That’ll do for the moment. Stay about in case you’re wanted.’
‘It’s my day here,’ said Crutchley. ‘I’ll be workin’ in the garden.’
Kirk watched the door close behind him.
‘It don’t seem as if it could be him. Him and Puffett are alibis for one another.’
‘Puffett? Puffett is his own best alibi. You’ve only got to look at him. The man of upright soul and humour placid needs no blunt instrument nor prussic acid. Horace; Wimsey’s translation.’
‘Then Puffett’s word is enough to let out Crutchley. Not but what he mightn’t have done it later on. Doctor only says, “Dead about a week.” Suppose Crutchley did it the next day—’
‘Not very likely. When Mrs Ruddle came in the morning she couldn’t get in.’
‘That’s true. We’ll have to check up the alibi with this chap Williams at Pagford. He might have come back and done the job after eleven.’
‘He might. Only remember, Noakes hadn’t gone to bed. How about earlier – say, six o’clock, before he left?’
‘Don’t fit in with the candles.’
‘I was forgetting them. But you know, you could light candles at six o’clock on purpose to create that alibi.’
‘I suppose you could,’ agreed Kirk, with deliberation. He was apparently unused to dealing with criminals of so much subtlety as that would imply. He ruminated for a moment, and then suggested:
‘But them eggs and that cocoa?’
‘I’ve known even that done, too. I’ve known a murderer sleep in two beds and eat two breakfasts in order to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise unconvincing narrative.’
‘Gilbert and Sullivan,’ said the Superintendent, a little hopelessly.
‘Mostly Gilbert, I fancy. It’s more likely, if Crutchley did it, that it was done then, because I don’t see old Noakes letting in Crutchley after dark. Why should he? Unless Crutchley did have a key after all.’
‘Ah!’ said Kirk. He swivelled round heavily in his chair and looked Peter in the face:
‘What was you looking for on them keys, my lord?’
‘Traces of wax in the wards.’
‘Oh!’ said Kirk.
‘If a duplicate was made,’ went on Peter, ‘it was made within the last two years. Difficult to trace, but not impossible. Especially when people have friends in London.’
Kirk scratched his head.
‘That’ll be a nice job,’ he said. ‘But see here. The way I look at it is this. If Crutchley did it, how did he come to miss all that money? That’s the thing I can’t get over. That don’t look reasonable to me.’
‘You’re quite right. It’s the most puzzling thing about the case, whoever committed the murder. It almost looks as though it wasn’t done for money. But it’s not easy to see any other motive.’
‘That’s the funny thing about it,’ said Kirk.
‘By the way, if Mr Noakes had had any money to leave, who would have come in for it?’
‘Ah!’ The Superintendent’s face brightened. ‘We’ve got that. Found this bit of a will in that old desk in the kitchen.’ He produced the paper from his pocket and spread it out. ‘ “After payment of my just debts—” ’
‘Cynical blighter! A fine fat legacy to leave anyone.’
‘ “All I die possessed of to my niece and sole surviving relative, Agnes Twitterton.” That surprise you?’
‘Not at all. Why should it?’ But Kirk, slow as he seemed, had seen Peter’s quick frown and now pressed home his advantage.
‘When this Jew-bird, MacBride, started blowing the gaff, what did Miss Twitterton say?’
‘Er – well!’ said Peter, ‘she went off the deep end – naturally.’
‘Naturally. Seemed a bit of a blow to her, eh?’
‘Not more than you might expect. Who witnessed the will, by the way?’
‘Simon Goodacre and John Jellyfield. He’s the doctor from Pagford. It’s all in order. What did Miss Twitterton say when your man discovered the body?’
‘Well, she shrieked a bit and so on, and went off into hysterics.’
‘Did she say anything particular, besides shrieking?’
Peter was conscious of a curious reluctance. Theoretically, he was quite as ready to hang a woman as a man, but the memory of Miss Twitterton, frenziedly clinging to Harriet, was disturbing to him. He was tempted to feel, with Kirk, that marriage was a handicap to a young officer.
‘See here, my lord,’ said Kirk, his ox-eyes mild but implacable, ‘I’ve heard one or two things from these other people.’
‘Then,’ retorted Peter, ‘why don’t you ask them?’
‘I’m going to. Joe, ask Mr MacBride to step here a minute. Now, my lord, you’re a gentleman and you’ve got your feelings. I know all that, and it does you credit. But I’m a police-officer, and I can’t afford to indulge in feelings. They’re a privilege of the upper classes.’
‘Upper classes be damned!’ said Peter. This stung him, all the more that he knew he deserved it.
‘Now, MacBride,’ went on Kirk, cheerfully, ‘he’s no class at all. If I asked you, you’d tell the truth, but it might ’urt you. Now I can get it out of MacBride, and it won’t ’urt him in the least.’
‘I see,’ said Peter. ‘Painless extractions a speciality.’
He walked up to the fire and kicked the logs moodily.
Mr MacBride came in with great alacrity; his face expressed that the sooner all this was over, the sooner to Town. He had already given the police the details of the financial situation and was straining like a greyhound at the official leash.
‘Oh, Mr MacBride, there’s just one other thing. Did you happen to notice what sort of effect the discovery of the body had upon the family and friends, so to speak?’
‘Well,’ said Mr MacBride, ‘they were upset. Who wouldn’t be?’ (A silly question to keep a man waiting about for.)
‘Remember anything special said?’
‘Oh, ah!’ said Mr MacBride. ‘I get you. Well, now, the gardener chap – he went as white as a sheet, he did – and the old gentleman was badly put about. The niece had hysterics – but she didn’t seem as much surprised as the rest, did she?’
He appealed to Peter, who avoided his sharp eye by strolling over to the window and gazing out at the dahlias.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, when the servant came in and said they’d found Mr Noakes, she yelled out at once, “Oh! Uncle’s dead!” ’
‘Did she now?’ said Kirk.
Peter swung round on his heel.
‘That’s not quite fair, MacBride. Anybody could have told that from Bunter’s manner. I know I could.’
‘Could you?’ said MacBride. ‘You didn’t seem in any hurry to believe it.’ He glanced at Kirk, who asked:
‘Did Miss Twitterton say anything else?’
‘She said, “Uncle’s dead and all the money’s gone!” just like that. Then she had the jim-jams. Nothing like £ s. d. for going straight to the heart, is there?’
‘Nothing,’ said Peter. ‘You, if I recollect rightly, asked whether they’d found any money on the corpse.’
‘Quite right,’ admitted Mr MacBride. ‘He was no relation of mine, you see, was he?’
Peter, worsted at every thrust, lowered his weapon and admitted defeat.
‘The legal profession,’ he said, ‘must present you with a comprehensive picture of Christian family life. What do you think of it?’
‘Not much,’ replied Mr MacBride, succinctly. He turned back to the table. ‘I say, Mr Superintendent, are yo
u going to want me any more? I’ve got to get back to Town.’
‘That’s O.K. We’ve got your address. Good morning, Mr MacBride, and thanks very much.’
As the door shut behind him, Kirk transferred his glance to Peter. ‘That right, my lord?’
‘Quite right.’
‘Ah! well, I think we’ll have to see Miss Twitterton.’
‘I’ll get my wife to fetch her down,’ said Peter, and escaped. Mr Kirk sat back in Merlin’s seat and rubbed his hands thoughtfully.
‘That’s a real nice gentleman, Joe,’ said Mr Kirk. ‘Straight out o’ the top drawer. Pleasant and easy as kiss-me-’and. Well eddicated, too. But he sees which way the wind’s blowing, and he don’t like it. Small blame to him.’
‘But,’ objected the constable, ‘he can’t think Aggie Twitterton coshed old Noakes on the ’ead with a mallet. She’s a little slip of a thing.’
‘You never know, me lad. The female of the species is deadlier than the male. That’s Rudyard Kipling. He knows that, though it’s agin his upbringing to say so. Not but what he’d a-made it sound a lot better if he had said it, instead of leaving it to MacBride. But there! he couldn’t lay tongue to it, I suppose. Besides, he knew well enough I’d have it out of MacBride in the end.’
‘Well, he ain’t done her much good, as I can see.’
‘Them sort of feelings,’ pronounced Mr Kirk, ‘commonly don’t do much good, except to complicate things. But they’re pretty, and, if taken the right way, ’armless. You got to learn to get round ’em, when you’re dealing with gentry. And remember this: what they don’t say is more important than what they do say, especially when they’ve got good brains, like this here gentleman has. He sees well enough that if Noakes was killed for what he had to leave—’
‘But he hadn’t nothing to leave.’
‘I know that. But she didn’t. Aggie Twitterton didn’t know. And if he was murdered for what he had to leave, that ’ud explain why the £600 wasn’t took off the body. Maybe she didn’t know it was there, and if she did, she didn’t have to take it, because it ’ud all be hers in the end. Use your ’ead, Joe Sellon.’
Peter in the meantime had caught Mr MacBride on the doorstep.
‘How do you get back?’
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