‘The way I look at it is, you’ll tell me whether I like it or not,’ said the Sergeant. ‘Go on; what is it?’
‘Well, look here!’ said Timothy eagerly. ‘I know we haven’t proved anything yet, but suppose it was Mr Dermott who did it?’
‘All right, I’m supposing it.’
‘He had a row with Cousin Rosemary down by the lake – at least, not exactly a row, but a Big Scene, with her turning him down, and him realising that while Cousin Clement was alive, he would never see her again –’
‘Look here, where did you get all this from?’ demanded the Sergeant, shocked. ‘Nice thing for a boy of your age to be talking about!’
‘Oh, can it!’ begged Timothy. ‘All the skivvies say Cousin Rosemary would have got a divorce if it hadn’t been for Cousin Clement inheriting a fortune. Besides, I’ve seen lots of films where things happen just like that. Only now I come to think of it,’ he added, frowning, ‘it isn’t ever that man who actually did the murder. You simply see him absolutely livid, and stiff with motives, just to put you off the scent. Still, I dare say it’s different when it really happens. Suppose it was Mr Dermott.’
‘I’ve been supposing it for five minutes,’ said the Sergeant.
‘All right. He parts from Cousin Rosemary in a complete flat spin, gets his gun out of the car, which he left half-way down the drive, and bursts up through the shrubbery to the study window, shoots Cousin Clement, bunks into the shrubbery again, and instead of making for the wall beyond the bushes on the other side of the drive, as Mr Roberts thinks he did, goes back to the lake, chucks the gun in, and makes for his car. When I met him he was definitely coming from the lake, and he looked absolutely batty. I’ve worked it all out, and he could easily have done it. What’s more, the only person who could have seen him was Cousin Rosemary, and naturally she wouldn’t split on him.’
‘Sir,’ said the Sergeant, shaking his head, ‘it’s lucky for the rest of us you’re not in the Force. We’d be nowhere.’
‘No, but really,’ protested Timothy, ‘don’t you think there might be something in my theory?’
‘There’s a lot in it,’ replied the Sergeant gravely. ‘But it’s got a weak spot. That’s what you must learn to do if you’re going to be a detective: find the weak spots in your own theories.’
‘Well, I’m not going to be a detective. My mother wants me to be an explorer. Actually, I expect I shall be a barrister, because if you’re an explorer you seem to me to go to the most lousy places, and muck about with camels and things. I like cars. Oh, I say, what is the weak spot in my theory?’
‘Eh?’ said the Sergeant, who had not been attending very closely. ‘Oh, the weak spot! The gun, sir, the gun! People don’t generally carry guns about in their cars just on the off-chance they might need them – not in my experience, they don’t.’
‘That’s just where you’re wrong!’ said Timothy triumphantly. ‘I don’t absolutely know that Mr Dermott carries one now, but he used to, because he told Cousin Rosemary he always had a gun in his car when all those motor-bandits kept on holding people up! So now will you let me show you how he could have got back to the lake without anyone seeing him?’
‘All right,’ said the Sergeant. ‘You show me!’
An hour later, when the Sergeant left Cliff House in company with his superior, Timothy bade him a regretful farewell, addressing him as Sarge, and prophesying that he would be seeing him.
‘You seem to have made a hit with that youth,’ remarked Hannasyde, as they walked down the drive. ‘Has he been a nuisance?’
‘Taking it by and large, Super, no,’ replied Hemingway. ‘I don’t deny he’d pretty well talk the hind leg off a donkey, but one way and another I’ve gleaned a good bit from him. This Dashing Dermott, for instance. He’ll bear looking into. Well, I ask you, Chief! If it’s such common talk Mrs Clement Kane was as near as a toucher to going off with him that a kid of fourteen knows all about it, you may bet your life there’s something in it.’
‘There is something in it,’ said Hannasyde. ‘That young woman is badly scared. When she isn’t engaged on describing her mental reactions to me, she’s trying to throw suspicion on every other member of the household.’
The Sergeant nodded sapiently, and made a pronouncement. ‘There are two kinds of witnesses I’ve got it in for. There’s the one that says too little, and the one that says too much. You don’t get any forrader with the first, and you get too far with the second.’
‘Then you won’t like this case,’ said Hannasyde. ‘We’ve got both.’ He smiled a little. ‘The old lady says she supposes I don’t need her to help me solve the problem.’
The Sergeant looked sympathetic. ‘Bit of a Tartar, so I hear. What did you make of her, Chief?’
Hannasyde shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Impossible to say.’
‘Ah!’ said Hemingway. ‘That’s where psychology comes in.’
‘You should be a soul-mate of Mrs Clement Kane,’ said Hannasyde. ‘Did you pick up anything?’
‘Characters of the dramatis personæ, that’s about all,’ replied Hemingway, whose forte lay in his ability to cajole his fellow-men into talking. ‘Very superior line of servants: stock parts, most of them. They all liked the late Silas, and they all like young James. The late Clement didn’t cut any ice with any of ’em, and as for Mrs Clement – well, what they say about her in the servants’ hall I wouldn’t like to repeat. You can take it from me she doesn’t fit in with the general décor, Chief. As for Dashing Dermott, if the half of what Mrs Clement’s old cook told me is true, he’s a three-act drama in himself. Talk about passion! Well, Romeo wasn’t in it with him. Up at the house now, isn’t he? What did you make of him?’
‘Oh, he could have done it all right!’ Hannasyde answered. ‘He strikes me as being a man who invariably flies to extremes. But I’m not at all sure that he did do it.’
The Sergeant cocked an eye at him. ‘What’s on your mind, Super?’
‘The first death,’ said Hannasyde.
Seven
Superintendent Hannasyde’s visit left everyone but Mrs Kane and Timothy feeling anxious and rather alarmed. Lunch was not a comfortable meal, nor was it made more pleasant by Emily’s refusal to treat Mr Trevor Dermott with common civility. When asked by Rosemary in his presence whether she minded his staying to lunch, she said that, since he would have to pay for it at his hotel, anyway, it was a pity he didn’t eat it there. Dermott, whose method of dealing with old ladies was to assume the jolly air he used with children, laughed heartily, and said: ‘Aha, Mrs Kane, that sounds to me as though you must have Scotch blood in your veins!’
Emily glared at him for one moment, and thereafter ignored him. Miss Allison, who knew that it was not one of Emily’s good days, slipped out of the room to tell Pritchard on no account to put Mr Dermott near her at the lunch-table.
She herself felt a trifle jaded. She had had a trying morning with her employer, for Emily had got up in a bad temper, and had been further incensed by receiving a letter of condolence on Silas’s death from her great-niece in Australia.
Emily’s most common reaction to the sight of a familiar handwriting on an envelope addressed to herself was to regard it with bitter suspicion, and to say in her most disagreeable voice: ‘I wonder what she wants.’ In this instance she added a rider, remarking, as she slit open the envelope: ‘Well, she won’t get anything out of me.’ The fact that Maud Leighton, née Kane, did not want anything, but wrote merely to express her sympathy for what her great-aunt must be feeling, did nothing to soothe her annoyance. She said she thought it a very extraordinary thing in Maud to have written, considering she had only laid eyes on her once in her life, and that when she was a baby; and further expressed a desire to know who had been officious enough to send the news to ‘that Australian lot,’ anyway. Miss Allison rather unwisely advan
ced the suggestion that Clement had probably had the notice of Silas’s death published in the colonial papers. There was no reason why Emily should object to the colonial papers publishing it, except her dislike of Clement and all his works, but she said angrily that she had never heard anything to equal it.
Having unburdened herself of various ill-natured remarks about Maud Leighton at intervals during the course of the morning, she chose the luncheon hour as a suitable time for the recountal to Jim of the whole affair of the letter, leading off with the snappish remark that she should have thought Maud could have found a better use for her money than to squander it sending letters by Air Mail.
‘That lot never could keep twopence to rub together in their pockets,’ she said.
Jim, seated at the head of the table, was being told by Rosemary, on his right, that the visit of Superintendent Hannasyde had shattered the last threads of her nervous resistance. He said bracingly: ‘Oh, I don’t think you need feel like that about it!’ and transferred his attention to his great-aunt, at the other end of the long table. ‘Sorry, Aunt Emily, something about the Australian cousin?’
‘I remember her parents bringing her here when she was a baby. Of course, they always liked coming here when they were in England. It saved having to pay hotel bills,’ said Emily.
Miss Allison, having a shrewd suspicion that this remark was levelled at Dermott, created a diversion by asking Timothy how he had spent the morning. His answer, that he had been helping Sergeant Hemingway to hunt for clues, had the effect of making Dermott break into a diatribe against dunder-headed fellows who had the impudence to call themselves detectives. ‘Really, their methods are laughable!’ he said.
‘I bet some people won’t do much laughing by the time the Superintendent’s through!’ retorted Mr Harte.
‘Shut up, Timothy!’ said Jim.
Mr Harte muttered: ‘Well, I bet they won’t that’s all.’
‘Your Cousin Silas sent her a very handsome present when she got married,’ pursued Emily. ‘Far too generous, in my opinion. Leighton was no good at all. I told your cousin I didn’t want to be mixed up with any of them. Encroaching lot!’
‘I’ve got such a feeling that it was one of the Mansells,’ said Rosemary, gazing straight in front of her with the slightly narrowed eyes of one seeking to see through a fog. ‘I can’t shake it off.’
Jim, who did not think that she had tried to, said bluntly: ‘If you’re wise, you won’t say so. You’ve nothing to go on, and that kind of remark’s likely to lead to trouble.’
‘I’m afraid it’s too late to try to change my whole nature,’ replied Rosemary with a faint smile. ‘I’ve always been honest – perhaps disastrously so. I must say what I think. I dare say I should find life much easier if I didn’t see things so terribly clearly. I seem to be able to detach myself in the most extraordinary way. I mean, I’m perfectly calm now, the inside me – just as though a part of me was utterly aloof from everything that’s happened. I don’t say I feel it was one of the Mansells from spite, or any emotional impulse whatsoever. It’s just as though a voice was saying in my brain –’
‘I see she’s living in Melbourne now,’ said Emily, who had not been paying the least attention to this speech. ‘They used to live in Sydney. I dare say it’s much the same thing.’
No one but Trevor Dermott felt any inclination to argue this point. He was always rather pleased when a woman made an irrational remark, because he could then correct her folly, not unkindly, but with an indulgent laugh at the limitations of the female brain. He began to tell Emily how wrong she was in her conception of Australia.
‘Most people talk about having intuitions when they simply don’t know the meaning of the word,’ continued Rosemary; ‘I’m not a bit like that. In fact, I think I usually mistrust my instinct. I’ve got a much more logical mind than most women – I’m not patting myself on the back about it; it just happens to be so. I can always see all round a question. But just occasionally – probably because I’m rather the spiritual type, if you know what I mean – I get an intuition that’s like a blinding flash of light. And,’ she concluded impressively, ‘when it happens like that, it’s nearly always right.’
‘Sez you!’ murmured Mr Harte to his plate.
‘I don’t suppose you know what it’s like. I don’t think men ever get it,’ said Rosemary, looking pitifully at her host.
‘For God’s sake stop talking about it!’ said Jim. ‘I never heard such drivel in my life!’ He pulled himself up, and added: ‘Sorry, but I really can’t do with a lot of – of –’
‘Baloney,’ supplied Mr Harte helpfully,
‘– on top of everything else!’ ended Jim, apparently accepting this suggestion.
‘But don’t you see, Jim, that if the Mansells didn’t do it, there’s only you left?’ asked Rosemary.
‘Not quite, I think!’ struck in Miss Allison, showing her claws.
Mr Harte looked up approvingly. ‘Attabababy!’ he applauded.
Emily, who had been sitting in somewhat toad-like immobility, staring before her, while Trevor Dermott lectured her on the size of Australia, chose at this point to demonstrate her deafness by demanding of Miss Allison what Timothy had said.
‘I said Attabababy, and what’s more I meant it!’ announced Timothy with a hostile glance at Rosemary. ‘Considering everything, I think it’s a bit thick of Cousin Rosemary to go about saying no one but the Mansells or Jim could have murdered Cousin Clement! I can jolly well think of two other people who could have done it, and if you like, I’ll tell you who they are!’
‘Shut up!’ said Jim sharply.
‘Leave the boy alone!’ commanded Emily.
‘Of course, I quite understand how you feel about it,’ said Rosemary. ‘But one has to face facts, you know. You mustn’t think I believe it was Jim just because my reason tells me that it might have been. I’m only pointing out –’
‘Really, you know – really, I wouldn’t,’ put in Dermott uneasily. ‘Case of “least said soonest mended,” what?’
She turned her wide gaze upon him. ‘But don’t you see that it’s important, Trevor? I’m trying to be absolutely dispassionate. I want to know the truth. I can’t bear pretence! Let us, for God’s sake, be honest with each other!’
This impassioned plea drew a response only from Mr Harte, who said: ‘I bet you’d be pretty sick if we were.’
‘Will you shut up?’ said Jim.
‘I don’t think anyone could seriously accuse me of shrinking from facts,’ said Rosemary. ‘You none of you understand how I feel about things. I don’t deny I care for Trevor; I don’t deny that Clement’s death hasn’t touched the essential me. I can even see that people who don’t know him might think Trevor could have done it. Only I know, inside me, that he didn’t.’
Trevor Dermott turned a dark red. There was an awful pause. Emily’s voice broke the silence. ‘Very nice,’ she said dryly. ‘I’ll thank you to ring the bell for my chair, Miss Allison.’
It was generally felt that this request had relieved the situation. Everyone rose from the table, and Trevor Dermott was heard to draw a sigh of thanksgiving. When Emily had left the room he and Rosemary went out into the garden. He said: ‘Darling, I know how frank you always are – damn it, I love you for it – but you shouldn’t have said that.’
‘It’s true,’ replied Rosemary. ‘I am not ashamed to own it.’
‘No, no, little woman; but that’s not the point! Look here! We’re in a damned tight corner, and the least said about – well, about our caring for each other, the better. You dealt me a knock-out on Saturday. I’m not blaming you: I do understand how you felt, and anyway, that’s all over and done with now. But don’t talk about us being in love! Do you see?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Rosemary. ‘I believe in being honest, and as everyone
knows –’
His face darkened again; he seized her by the shoulders, and gave her a shake. ‘Don’t be such a little fool!’ he said in a low, angry voice. ‘Do you want to get me arrested for murder?’
‘Of course not. But I absolutely believe in you. Something tells me you didn’t do it.’
‘Oh, to hell with that rubbish!’ he said. ‘Keep your mouth shut, that’s all I ask of you!’
She said in a voice of ice: ‘Indeed! Well, that’s interesting, at all events.’
‘I didn’t mean that!’ he answered quickly, releasing her. ‘But it seems to me you don’t realise how serious this is. Of course I didn’t do it – naturally I didn’t! – but when I left you I went back to the Royal and had one or two, and like a fool started to drive up to town. Got pinched about ten miles from here. You see how suspicious it looks? Then there’s that little swine, Timothy, yapping to the police about having seen me drive off from here in a flat spin. All lies, of course, and so I told that thickheaded superintendent.’
‘Why do you say that to me?’ asked Rosemary calmly. ‘You were quite beside yourself. I don’t blame you, but it’s quite useless to tell me that you were –’
‘All right, go and tell the police I was crazy with the shock of having lost you! Go on, tell them, if you’re so damned keen on the truth!’
‘Whatever else I am,’ said Rosemary, ‘I am loyal.’
Miss Allison would have enjoyed the unconscious humour in this remark, but Dermott saw nothing absurd in it, and replied at once: ‘I know, I know! Fact of the matter is, the whole thing’s a bit on top of me. You must be guided by me.’ He gave an unconvincing laugh. ‘That pretty little head of yours wasn’t made for all this brainwork, darling. Just do as I say, and everything will be all right.’
He left her, and after vainly trying to engage Miss Allison in a discussion on the affair, with particular reference to her own spiritual reactions, Rosemary rang up Mrs Pemble, and begged her to come to tea. ‘I feel stifled here!’ she announced. ‘There’s no one I can talk to. I feel if I have to bottle it all up much longer I shall go out of my mind.’
They Found Him Dead Page 11