Uncoffind Clay, page 14
part #57 of Mrs Bradley Series
‘Then I shall give my questions to Superintendent Hallicks and tell him the answers I expect.’
‘You mean you know the answers before you ask the questions?’
‘Some of them. I repeat what I think I have said before. If not, I say it now. I can see only one reason for Hamid’s deliberately stepping on to the man-trap. It must have been to enlist his father’s sympathy. Hamid, I am certain, has committed some sin which is bound to come to light and he wants to bulwark himself against his father’s wrath. What I must avoid if I can is having his father present at the interview, whether the Superintendent conducts it or whether I do.’
One thing of importance she had learned after Hallicks had let the two lads go came out a little later. This was a bit of circumstantial evidence on the strength of which, coupled with the noisy quarrel Effie Winters had had with her brother, Hallicks had arrested her.
The Winters had an ordinary household refrigerator but did not possess a deep freeze. However, it had not taken Hallicks long to find out that Effie had access to no fewer than three of these pieces of kitchen equipment. Because of his business associations with the sheikh, Winters had procured a part-time job for Effie as mending-maid to the young boy Murad. She was in request one whole day a week during term-time and two days a week during school holidays to look over his clothes, repair anything which required mending, make sure that anything which needed cleaning or laundering was despatched and, in short, to see that the child was kept bandbox-trim as befitted the boy who had so rich and proud a man as the sheikh for a father.
The sheikh’s was a large household which needed a great deal of food. Effie was accustomed to go into the kitchen for mid-morning refreshments, her lunch and her tea, and must have known of the deep freeze which was not kept in the kitchen itself, but in an outhouse detached from the main building.
Hallicks, however, was thorough. Enquiries and tactful personal visits produced evidence that two other farmhouses, apart from Breedy’s, possessed the equipment he was searching for, and Effie was on visiting terms with both. All the same, I thought Hallicks was taking a long shot in arresting Effie. Mary claimed optimistically that, as the wife of a magistrate, she felt that the law was not an ass and that, under it, no innocent person was likely to be convicted. She felt certain that Effie was innocent.
A different opinion came from Martha Lorne, who made the arrest an excuse for calling on us.
‘So unlikely that a mistake has been made,’ she said. ‘The police have to be so careful about that kind of thing nowadays.’
‘Superintendent Hallicks is still — what do they call it? — pursuing his enquiries, which he would not be doing if he could be sure that poor Effie was guilty,’ said Mary.
‘There is such a thing as looking for enough evidence to secure a conviction,’ said Innes in an aside to me. Martha realised that he had spoken, although I doubt whether she had caught his words. From the window side of the room she said,
‘I suppose Effie Winters will be remanded in custody when she comes before you and Lord Maumbury.’
‘Not a doubt of it,’ he said. ‘We’ve already remanded her once.’
‘It seems to me that the W.I. would be well employed raising money against her trial, if we want to help her,’ said Martha. ‘I suppose she is bound to come to trial?’
‘There is time for fresh evidence to be unearthed,’ said Mary. ‘Hallicks is still busy, as I’ve already said. ’
‘There was the quarrel with her brother.’
‘And, if she gets off, his insurance money,’ said Innes.
‘And, of course, she does have a rather suspect alibi,’ said I, contributing my quota.
‘Well, there you are!’ said Martha in what sounded to me a triumphant tone. When she had gone, I hinted (very reluctantly, I admit) that it was more than time I went home. Mary received the suggestion not with the polite regret which, in a hostess, is often tantamount to saying, ‘I should think so, too!’ She looked genuinely concerned and even slightly alarmed. The latter she hastened to explain.
‘Look, Mike darling, I want two men in the house until all this peculiar business is cleared up. Whoever heard, in these days, of people getting caught in man-traps and human bodies being put in deep freezes? It’s horrible.’
‘In the days when man-traps were in common use, there would hardly have been deep freezes,’ said Innes, speaking lightly but looking at her rather anxiously, I thought. She stuck to what appeared to be her point.
‘Dame Beatrice is a great responsibility while she stays here. There will have been all sorts of gossip about her. There always is in this place when people have visitors who stay longer than overnight. Her reputation as a Home Office psychiatrist is bound to be known all over the village by now. What is the murderer going to think, once the information about what and who she is gets around to him? You must stay, Mike, and help cope.’
‘So you really don’t believe Effie is guilty?’ I said.
‘I’d be very glad, old man,’ said Innes, ‘if you would stay. Her next move, as I understand it, is to have another go at young Hamid. Between ourselves, Hallicks isn’t all that excited about having arrested Effie Winters. It’s the transportation of the body to Lower Gushbrook that bothers him. He told me privately that he was keeping a very open mind.’
‘Those village lads were certain that the man-trap caught the person it was meant for,’ said Mary.
‘Yes, and that Hamid insisted upon being told exactly where it was and deliberately stepped on it. Strange, if true,’ I said. ‘He must have known it was a foolhardy thing to do.’
‘You don’t think it was his idea to attempt to establish an alibi for the time of the murder, do you?’ asked Mary. ‘Such a thought might have come to a desperate inexperienced boy if he had killed Winters either by design or accident.’
‘Seems very far-fetched to me. Besides, why would he want to murder Winters?’ asked Innes.
‘Well, somebody tried to shoot Winters and we know now that Hamid was in the neighbourhood at the time that happened. He could have been the marksman. Effie might — just might — put a knife in her brother’s back, but I’m certain she didn’t fire that shot,’ said Mary.
‘That’s why Hallicks is still pursuing his enquiries, I suppose,’ I said.
* * *
chapter 12
HAMID AZIZ COMES CLEAN
« ^ »
Whether it was because young Hamid had told Dame Beatrice that he would not answer questions put to him by a woman, or whether it was a reward to me for having given her the important clue which had resulted in the discovery of Winters’s body in the punt, I did not ask. Dame Beatrice joined me while I was wandering round Innes’s garden and made me her deputy. I was to memorise a list of questions she wanted to be put to the young Arab and write down the answers if Hamid’s mood permitted me to record him on paper. If he jibbed, I was to do the best I could to remember what had been said.
‘For, of course,’ she observed, ‘any one question and answer may lead to some disclosure which I have not foreseen, and then the conversation may take a different turn from that which we have planned. Are you good at extempore invention, Mr Michael?’
‘I expect so,’ I answered, with a confidence I did not feel. I thought of the times I had rehearsed in my mind an interview or an argument, only to find, when it came to the actual confrontation with my opposite number, that none of my carefully rehearsed speeches or arguments (particularly the arguments) had the least force or could be related in any way to the point at issue.
My first real facer came as soon as I was allowed into Hamid’s private room, for there in the bed I thought I saw my young would-be suicide of the plank bridge. I was, of course, mistaken, particularly as he did not recognise me. A second’s thought convinced me that it was the farmer’s son, after all, whom I had encountered. To my surprise, Hamid seemed pleased to see me. I suppose he was well enough now to be suffering from boredom. I opened the conversation by saying that spring was a lovely season.
‘In my walks in the woods I was luckier than you seem to have been,’ I said. He smiled. In spite of a purplish tinge in his olive cheeks he was a handsome young specimen, if you like curling, sensuous lips, large, moist-looking brown eyes, a small silky moustache and long, rather greasy hair, although not much of his hair was visible because his head was still bandaged.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘the man-trap, yes. No doubt that was foolish of me. If so, I have paid for my folly. On the other side of the coin, however, I have had better luck.’
‘Your father has forgiven you?’ I asked, seizing upon a chance to put to him one of Dame Beatrice’s questions, although it was not the first on the list I had memorised. He looked amused rather than startled, and a little colour came into his cheeks.
‘Well! What do you know?’ he said. It appeared to be a genuine question rather than the usual American-style exclamation, and I decided to treat it as such, hoping that I would not be upsetting Dame Beatrice’s probably carefully arranged chessboard by so doing.
‘What I know is mostly surmise,’ I said. ‘My only real piece of information (which I have been able to check, I must tell you) is that although you received your injuries on that Tuesday evening, you were in this neighbourhood some days earlier. That is to say, you left your train and, incidentally, your luggage, on the Sunday.’
‘You know a great deal, I see. I will tell you the rest. Now that my father has forgiven me, I have nothing to fear, and neither has Peter Chettle.’
‘What makes you mention Chettle?’
‘Oh, that is where the man-trap came from. I heard that he had it. It was my idea that he should set it for me. I am sure that is not news to you. I do not think I covered my tracks very well. Tell me some news. I am so bored here.’
I told him of the story we had heard about Farmer Breedy and his son, and I remarked that when I entered the room I thought at first it was young Bob Breedy in the bed.
‘The lad had his troubles,’ I said, ‘and a strict father much, I imagine, like yours.’
‘And what were his troubles?’ asked Hamid. ‘You know, there is an English poet named Housman who wrote much about young men and their troubles. I would call him a universal poet, for all young men have the same troubles — wars and crimes and women and violent, relentless friendships, and sadnesses they cannot account for. It is all part of adolescence and it is very significant and painful while it lasts.’
I had outgrown the nostalgia of A Shropshire Lad and the Last Poems long enough ago, but I remembered my own youthful reaction to them and felt sympathy with Hamid, for his gazelle’s eyes were fixed on mine as though in search of reassurance that the particular emotions which A. E. Housman had evoked would pass with the passing of time.
‘You were going to tell me a story,’ I reminded him. ‘I have a particular reason for needing it, because, of course, the man-trap is a police matter and so is the murder.’
He surprised me by saying that he knew nothing about a murder, but he explained that, in a private room, he had had no contact with the other patients, that he had not felt equal to reading the papers and that the doctors and nurses had been keeping him so quiet that nothing of an exciting nature had reached him. His father had sent every day to enquire about his progress and he had had two visits from him. The first, by doctor’s orders, had been very short, and at the second, which was very recent, he had confessed to his father that he was married to an English girl.
Dread of having his father find out about this mésalliance on account of racial and, more important, religious grounds, had caused Hamid to contemplate self-destruction, for somehow Winters (the boy almost spat as he mentioned the name) had got hold of the truth and had been blackmailing him during the whole of the summer vacation.
‘But how could he have found out?’ I asked. ‘I suppose your wife is not a local girl?’
‘I did what my religion forbids, but at college it is not always easy to live by the Koran.’
‘You got drunk, and talked in your cups, I suppose,’ I said. ‘It’s happened before. You should have told Winters to go to hell. Don’t you realise, you silly young clot, that if Winters had dared to go to your father with such a story all he would have got was the hell of a beating-up from your father’s guards? He would never have risked that. He was simply taking you for a ride.’
‘But, after the beating-up, he could still have proved his point.’
‘It would never have come to that, I tell you. I suppose you were ass enough to drink here, at the local pub.’
‘It was standing the rounds that did it,’ said Hamid, who seemed to be accepting my avuncular strictures with surprising meekness. ‘At college we give parties, but we do not stand rounds.’
‘I know how pernicious this standing of rounds can be,’ I said, my mind going back to an occasion on which I had been a member of a Rugby football club and had nearly passed out for good and all. ‘Why didn’t you take up residence again at college at the beginning of this term?’
‘I was too much worried and afraid. I thought I would come back and keep an eye on Winters.’
‘But I thought term had begun a week or more before you came back. We — and this includes the police — know quite a bit about your movements, you see.’
‘Yes, I see. I spent the days with my wife, but then, as I tell you, I wanted to be where Winters was. I suppose I wanted to keep him in my sights.’
‘Somebody did so by putting a bullet through his hat. How did you get to know him in the first place?’ I asked, without giving him time to ask the obvious question, which, in any case, I could not answer.
‘Oh, he was often at Bourne Farley. There was land my father wanted to buy and Winters was the negotiator,’ explained Hamid.
‘Farmer Breedy was the other party, I believe.’ At this, Hamid opened his eyes very wide indeed.
‘You do know it all,’ he said. ‘Winters told me — but not my father, who is too honourable a man to enquire into ways and means if these are dubious…’
This struck me as being such an original way of defining an honourable man that I laughed and said, ‘So Winters knew how to put the screw on Breedy as well as on you, did he?’
‘My information,’ said Hamid, in a tone of dignified rebuke for what, apparently, he regarded as a flippant attitude on my part, ‘does not go so far as that, but Winters seemed certain that he could persuade Breedy to sell Long Fallow to my father.’
‘Be that as it may, what did you do with yourself between the Sunday you came back and the Tuesday when you stepped on the man-trap? I have reasons for asking.’
He said that I was beginning to alarm him and, although he said it mockingly and with a smile, I think he meant it. I wondered, not for the first time, whether the man-trap incident was not so much an appeal for his father’s sympathy as an alibi for the murder of Winters. We had established that Winters could have been murdered as early as the Tuesday night and his body put into cold storage until a convenient time came to bury it, but, if Effie Winters, her quarrel with her brother and what Hallicks thought was her contrived alibi were discounted, there was no reason, so far as I could see, why Winters should not have been killed as soon as he left the sheikh’s premises following the shot through his hat: that is to say, long before dark.
Granted this, then, if Hamid claimed to have come in by train at six o’clock on the Tuesday instead of on the previous Sunday, as we know is what actually happened, his alibi for the time of Winters’s death could have been stronger. However, as I argued to myself, surely an intelligent young man such as, in spite of some youthful follies, I took Hamid to be, would have realised that a simple enquiry at the station would have established the day of his arrival, particularly since he had been so spectacularly loaded with luggage, luggage which he had left in the booking-clerk’s charge. Against this, Hamid might have felt that nobody would think of making enquiries at the station as to the day of his arrival and, of course, on my first visit there, it had not occurred to me to do so.
‘I’m afraid I’m tiring you,’ I said, ‘but we would like to have a clear account from you as to how you spent the time between the Sunday and the Tuesday.’
‘Did that old woman send you?’
‘Well, you refused to talk to her, so, as the matter is of great importance and she is attached to the Home Office, it was decided that I should deputise for her. You see, there is something which you do not appear to know. In fairness to yourself and the person who is now in custody, I think you should be put in the picture.’
‘By our religion,’ he said, smiling, ‘we do not put human beings in pictures.’
I smiled in my turn and said that I did not believe all their artists had kept to the letter of the law. He became grave again and asked:
‘Is Peter Chettle in custody?’
‘No. It is Miss Winters.’
‘I don’t know her.’
‘She is Winters’s sister. She is suspected of murdering him.’
He looked incredulously at me.
‘Winters is dead?’
‘Dead and buried.’
‘No wonder my father has forgiven me.’
It sounded an extraordinary remark. I suppose it made sense to him; it made none to me. However, it certainly started the ball rolling, for he began to talk in such a non-stop stream that my shorthand had all its work cut out to keep up with him.
He began with his courtship and subsequent marriage and I learned that the girl was not the tobacconist’s assistant, the local barmaid or the landlady’s daughter, those stock characters in undergraduates’ personal dramas, but a history student at one of the women’s colleges. They had slept together, boated and walked together, talked, gathered wild flowers, made love — all this, according to Hamid, in the most idyllic and delightful manner — but the girl insisted upon legalising the proceedings.
‘And I was so much in love,’ explained Hamid, ‘that I put out of my mind my father and my religion and we are man and wife. Then, of course, as I told you, I got drunk here at the pub with Winters and some others and gave myself away. I have wrestled with my thoughts and my fears while I have been paying Winters the hush-money, and then I made up my mind for suicide, and then I thought my father might soften his heart because of the man-trap and then I would confess and ask his forgiveness and swear to make my wife a Mohammedan.’
