As I’ve said, I came to a full stop at where I had seen the body. I could have added that Lang had told me from somewhere behind me that Chaice was dead.
“And then you rang us, and that was that,” said Goodman.
“More or less,” I said.
His eyebrows lifted and I explained. When Lang said Chaice was dead, Daine asked him if he’d rung the police. Lang said he hadn’t had time. He’d only just discovered the body.
Daine then lifted the receiver but nothing happened.
“What the devil’s wrong with this phone?” he asked Lang.
Lang didn’t know. He was all of a dither in any case, and wondering, so he said, who was going to break the news to Constance and Kitty.
Daine went through to the workshop, but was back in a couple of minutes. That telephone was out of order too, and it wasn’t hard to guess that the murderer had put it out of commission.
“What about your telephone in the barn?” I said. “That’s on a line of its own.”
Daine went off again, and with a torch that Harris found from somewhere. It was over half an hour later before I saw him again, and that was when he joined me in the drawing-room. We’d got Richard out of bed and he’d broken the news to Constance and Kitty. Constance had fainted and everything was at sixes and sevens. Kitty seemed more stunned than distraught and we had got her to go to bed. By we I mean Richard and Lang and myself. Then, as I said, Daine came in.
He’d had the devil of a time. His telephone had been out of order too, and he’d wondered what on earth to do. Then, to save time, he’d not come back to the house but had hurried off as fast as he could in the drizzle and the dark to the nearest house where there might be a telephone. He had had to go almost to the end of Harcourt Avenue before he could find one.
“But the telephones were in order when we got here?” Goodman pointed out to me.
“I know,” I said. “A wire in the workshop had been cut, and Richard—Mr. Richard Chaice—did some quick repairs. He’s a very knowledgeable man at all that sort of thing. When you got here he was repairing the annexe telephone. That had been cut too.”
He grunted for a bit and pursed his lips in thought, and then was asking if there was anything else I could think of. If there wasn’t, then he’d get my statement typed out.
“Make enough copies for me to have one,” I told him. “I like to know how I look in print.”
He grinned at that as he told Smith to get going. When Smith had gone I had something else to say.
“I suppose I can get back to town this afternoon?”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” he said. “If you could stay on for only a day it might help to clear things up.”
“We’ll see,” I said airily. I didn’t feel like making promises just then, though I knew, and he knew, he could hold me there. “But what about answering a question or two of mine? It’s about my turn.”
“What sort of questions?” He seemed just a bit suspicious.
“Well, I haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone in the house—to Mr. Lang, for instance. Just how did he happen to discover the body?”
“Well, it was like this,” he said. “Mr. Lang was tired and was thinking of going to bed. Harris came into the drawing-room and brought him a glass of hot milk which he’d requested. Then Mr. Lang asked him if Mr. Chaice had returned. Harris said he had—at least he’d seen a light from under the door there. So Mr. Lang sipped his milk and said good night to everybody, and Mr. Richard Chaice said he’d be going up too, and the pair of them went out to the hall together. There wasn’t a light then under this door, so he went along to the cloakroom. When he came back there was still no light, so he took a peep in here. As soon as he switched on the light he saw the body. Harris happened to be coming through the hall, and that’s all there was to it.”
“What was Harris doing in the hall?”
“He thought that, since Mr. Chaice was in, everybody was in who’d be likely to use certain rooms, so he was on his rounds to see all windows and doors were shut. He was waiting till you and Mr. Daine were in before he fastened the front door.”
“What about alibis?” I asked brazenly.
“Well, I haven’t been into them fully,” he told me, and I knew he was hedging.
“But those you have checked up on?”
“To be perfectly frank, I haven’t,” he said. “A son—Martin—was in bed most of the day with a bad headache—”
“That alone might take some checking,” I cut in.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, if you’re in a bedroom, that doesn’t say you can’t get out of it, especially in the dark.”
“Know any motive?”
“Now you’re getting ahead of me,” I told him. “Besides, I thought I was asking the questions. What about the other men? Lang and Richard Chaice?”
“All I’ve got so far is a kind of general post in the drawing-room,” he said. “Mr. Richard Chaice spent the whole evening there. Didn’t budge at all, so I’m told. The others were in and out.” Then he gave me a sideways look. “You’re pretty sure it was an inside sort of job?”
“What else could it be?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“A prowler. Burglar, if you like. That french window there was open—not locked, that is to say. He came in, Chaice surprised him, and—”
“And, as they say in the music-halls—Bob’s your uncle.”
I nodded with what I hope was a straight face. “The burglar had his usual strangling apparatus handy, and that’s that.”
“All right, sir,” he said, and laughed. “You needn’t rub it in. I know I stuck my neck out with that one. No casual burglar would have known the whereabouts of the telephones, especially that one of Daine’s in the annexe.”
“Well, I wish you luck,” I said, and got to my feet and stretched myself, for my backside was pretty near numb. “Anything else I can do I’ll be only too glad to do.” And as he made no comment, “Like me to send anyone else in?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think I’d like to see Mr. Daine. But wait a minute first. One or two things I’ve got to do. I ought to see Mrs. Chaice, if she’s well enough. Then there’s an alibi I’d like to go into rather specially.”
“Whose?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve overlooked it!” he told me, and looked quite pleased. “It’s the alibi of the gentleman Mr. Chaice went to see last night.”
“Of course!” I said, and clicked my tongue annoyedly.
“That’s why I’d like to see Mr. Daine,” he went on. “You and he can show me which house it was, and I’ll do the rest.”
“And leave us on the doorstep? You wouldn’t be so heartless,” I said.
He grinned as he got to his feet and told me he’d see.
Daine was far from pleased about being routed out. Monday was another busy day for him. All the crankiest of his clients, he said, spent their Saturdays and Sundays worrying about their damned books, and the Mondays always produced shoals of letters. I asked him to show me where his telephone wire had been cut, for I’d been wondering how an entry could have been made. But none had been necessary. The roof of that old barn sloped down to within eight feet of the ground, and the wires had a fastening on the wall before entering just above Daine’s window. In other words, to cut the wire from outside was the easiest thing in the world.
Goodman sent for us sooner than we expected. He had a police car, and I sat alongside him with Daine at the back, and we drove slowly towards the bus stop.
“Which road now, sir?” Goodman asked when we came to that multiple crossing.
“Damned if I know,” I said. “Which do you think, Daine?”
“Either this first one . . .” began Daine, and then stopped dead. “Might have been either. All I know is it was damnably dark.”
“Well, we’ll try ’em both,” announced Goodman, and turned into Harcourt Avenue. On our left the houses were quite of good size and well screened from
each other. They were not all alike, though each had a garage on its left.
“I’m practically sure this is it,” I said, but Goodman drove on, and turned right into Vernon Avenue and so to the bus stop again. “It certainly wasn’t Vernon Avenue,” Daine said. “Too few houses.”
“Then we’ll try Harcourt Avenue,” Goodman said. “How many houses along as a rough estimate?”
I thought six or seven and Daine agreed.
Goodman said he’d leave the car outside No. 4 and work along. We got out, too, and waited. In a couple of minutes he was coming out again. Nobody had called there the previous night. As for Chaice, they knew him by name, of course, but not by sight.
At No. 5 the husband was in town, but the woman of the house made much the same statement. At No. 6 there was nobody at home. At No. 7 a friend had called, but he was nothing to do with Chaice.
“That’s very curious,” Daine said.
“I don’t know, sir,” Goodman told him. “If you two gentlemen are correct there’s only one thing for it. He must have called at No. 6.”
So back we went to No. 6. Daine and I were supposed to wait at the gate, but I spotted something and called Goodman’s attention to it. It certainly was my weigela bush in that narrow shrubbery, and there were the marks of my feet where I had waited.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Goodman said. “We might as well have a look round.”
We went by the garage, where a gravel path led to a side door. Goodman knocked and listened, but there was never a sound. Daine had been casting round and he found feet-marks where he had trodden on the edge of the little kitchen garden.
“No telephone here,” Goodman said, giving a look up.
“Wait a minute,” Daine said. “I think it must have been No. 5 that I telephoned from. You know, when I called the police. If it’s called Rosebank, then it’s the one.”
“Which way did you come then, sir?” asked Goodman.
“The same way we came just now,” Daine told him. “There is no other way.”
He was looking puzzled, so Goodman explained. Hadn’t there been a telephone at one of the lower numbers? Maybe, Daine told him rather huffily. But what he’d done in the dark and drizzle was to overshoot No. 1, and even perhaps No. 2—enquiries would prove which—and at the houses at which he had enquired there had been no telephone, but they’d told him there was one at Rosebank just along the road.
No. 5 was Rosebank right enough, and the three of us went to the door. The woman remembered Daine asking to use the telephone.
“What about the people at No. 6?” asked Goodman. “Do you know them at all?”
She shook her head. No. 6 was a house which was let furnished and the present tenant had been there only about three weeks. It actually belonged to a man who was in the Army, and his wife and two children had gone to live with a sister of hers. That was why the house had been let furnished.
“You don’t know the name of the present tenant?”
“It’s Preston,” she said. “That’s all I know.”
“Married, is he?”
“No, he’s a single gentleman,” she said. “I have seen him once or twice in the mornings, but I think he works down the town. Now I come to think of it, he told me so himself.”
“You’ve spoken to him?”
“Only the once,” she said. “He came to ask me about his newspaper which hadn’t come, and I told him mine hadn’t come either. That was when he said he wouldn’t have it come any more. He’d get it of mornings when he went down town.”
“A shortish, stout man, was he?” I cut in.
“Yes, he was rather,” she said.
That was all she knew. The houses of Harcourt Avenue, as I said, were well screened from each other and it took a good time to get really acquainted with a neighbour unless one walked with him of mornings to the bus stop. She didn’t know, for instance, if Preston had a woman come in to do housework or if he fended entirely for himself. Her husband had never seen him in the back garden. She did think he spent most of his nights indoors, because on one or two occasions she had seen chinks of light through the black-out curtains.
That was that, and Goodman didn’t say a word till we were back at the car. I wasn’t at all sure that he’d remembered G. H. Preston.
“A bit of luck that, Inspector,” I said.
“You mean about Preston?”
“Who is Preston?” broke in Daine.
“A man called to see Chaice one day,” I said. “Didn’t you hear about it? Lang saw him and got rid of him. A rather objectionable person, I gathered.”
“So that was Preston,” he said, and then frowned. “Didn’t Chaice tell Lang he knew him or something?”
“Well, he acted as if he did,” I said, and then Goodman was motioning for us to get in the car. He drove a few yards and then pulled up.
“Now then, sir,” he said to me, “you said you followed Mr. Chaice for two houses back and then he went in at a gate. Wouldn’t that be this one—No. 3?”
“I wouldn’t be positive,” I told him.
“Well, if he actually called at another house, then it wasn’t No. 4, because we’ve already enquired there. You gentlemen wait here and I’ll enquire at No. 2.”
“Nothing doing,” he told us when he came back. Daine and I were out of the car again, and we followed him to the door of No. 3. A woman opened it. Goodman told her his name and said a burglar had been operating in Harcourt Avenue. Had she heard or seen anything?
She hadn’t, and she had had no visitors the previous night who might have seen anything either. Goodman said his information was that the man had been seen entering the gate of No. 3, and might he have a look round at the back in case there were signs of an attempt at an entry?
The woman was mightily relieved when there was never a sign. Goodman said we’d look along the back garden in case there might be suspicious footprints. We followed him along a concrete path to a back gate that opened on a narrowish, unmetalled lane. Just across it was the boundary fencing of Lovelands, and the polled, interlaced poplars that backed the shrubbery. So dense was that shield that there was nothing to be seen of the house. But in that fencing, and almost opposite the back gate of No. 3, was a door. Goodman tried the handle and the door opened.
“There we are, gentlemen,” he told us. “That’s why Mr. Chaice went right through at No. 3. He took a short cut back to his own house.”
“Rather a brazen sort of thing to do?” I said.
“Not for Austin Chaice,” said Daine cynically. “But what’s that, Inspector?”
He was pointing to the lock of the door. Plainly enough it had been forced back, and the marks of the forcing were fairly recent.
“Maybe Chaice didn’t have a key on him,” I suggested. “He forced the lock to get through.”
“Might be that,” Goodman agreed. “Let’s have a look inside.”
Inside the door a weedy gravel path cut back to our left and came out at the summerhouse. The path actually branched, with its main part going right round to the summerhouse veranda. The other branch led to the back, where there was a door in the summerhouse with steps that led up. There was also an Elsan closet that seemed to have been cleaned out some time ago and hadn’t been used since. Up against it was propped a rubber-tired wheelbarrow covered with a piece of tarpaulin.
Goodman looked across at the house from the veranda.
“Was there a tennis court in front of here?”
“Before the war—yes,” Daine told him, and then I saw the faint difference in the colouring of the grass. “Then balls were difficult to get, so Chaice had the surrounding posts taken up and the whole thing incorporated in the ordinary lawns.”
“Locked, I see,” Goodman said, trying the handle of the front door.
“No real use for it now,” Daine said. “Chaice used to come and browse here sometimes, that’s all.”
“He had a new Yale lock fitted.”
That was obvious, and we neit
her of us made any comment. Then Goodman was having a look at the grass, and taking a few steps and trying to see what impressions his own feet made. From the shrug of his shoulders it was easy to tell that the comparatively light rain of the last twenty-four hours had softened the lawn but very little.
He stood there for a minute or two rubbing his chin and looking about him.
“I don’t think I need trouble you gentlemen any more,” he said. “Unless Mr. Daine has anything he can think of.”
Daine said he couldn’t think of anything, but he’d be glad to answer any questions.
“I don’t know that there are any,” Goodman said, and then was giving a somewhat quizzical look. “Unless you have any ideas about who could have killed Mr. Chaice? In strict confidence, of course.”
Daine’s lip pouted, then lapsed to a cynical smile.
“I can’t go into details, but I think I could tell you the names of quite a few who’d have been—well, not inconsolable at hearing the news of his death.”
“He wasn’t popular?”
“He had a fine collection of enemies.”
“Maybe,” said Goodman dryly. “But any of them in the house itself?”
“Sorry, but I can’t answer that,” Daine told him tersely. The quick frown went and he began to hedge a bit. “You know how things are. There isn’t a family that hasn’t its tiffs and rows. Or that doesn’t take sides. And people’s nerves get a bit frayed after five years of war.”
The Case of the Missing Men: A Ludovic Travers Mystery Page 9