Uncoffind Clay, page 15
part #57 of Mrs Bradley Series
When he had arrived at the station and had parked his baggage, he had strolled down the road to kill time until the station taxi returned. At this point I interrupted him.
‘You mean you hung about because you had made an appointment to meet Chettle,’ I said.
He laughed and gave me what I took to be an Arab gesture of respect.
‘Now why do you say that?’ he asked.
‘Because, wherever you stayed that Sunday night and on the Monday and all day Tuesday, it was not in these parts, or somebody would have recognised you and commented to somebody else and so on. You had to make contact with Chettle and finalise the plans for setting the man-trap. I cannot compliment you on your choice of an ally.’
‘There were two of them. Chettle came on Batcombe’s motorcycle.’
‘Oh, yes, of course.’
‘We made our arrangements and then I got rid of them and waited for the taxi to come back to the station. I stayed at the hotel in Ropewalk and did not go out until dusk on the Tuesday evening. I came back by taxi — a cab from the station at Ropewalk, so that the driver would not know me — got out of the cab by my father’s gates and walked into the woods and on to the man-trap, for Chettle and Batcombe had been as good as their word and set the trap almost at the spot agreed upon.’
‘Almost?’
‘I was dragging my feet and wondering whether, after all, I could go through all that agony when — bingo! — I was caught. I fainted with pain and shock and how I came by the clout on the head which made me continue to lose consciousness until I came to, here in the hospital, I don’t know, and it does not matter now.’
‘It matters if Chettle and Batcombe were in hiding near by and thought it might be as well to silence you for good and all,’ I said grimly. He shook his head and grimaced as the emphatic movement hurt him.
‘I paid them well,’ he said simply. ‘Mercenaries are always faithful.’
‘Well, I can’t quote from the Koran,’ I said, ‘but there is a book wherein I have read: “The hireling fleeth because he is an hireling.” That doesn’t say much for your mercenaries.’
‘ “These, in the day that Heaven was falling,” ’ he quoted back at me.
‘ “And took their wages and are dead,” ’ I reminded him, ‘and so is Winters. One of these days, too, I would not be surprised if Batcombe’s motorcycle does duty as Exhibit A in a trial for murder.’
‘You think those two killed Winters?’
‘Well, I don’t believe his sister killed him. It was not, in my opinion, a woman’s crime.’
‘Not a crime at all,’ he said. ‘There is no crime in killing a rat. I might have done it myself if I were not afraid of the English law. But — life imprisonment? No, not unless my honour was involved.’
‘You say that you were unconscious until you came to in this hospital bed,’ I reminded him. ‘How, then, did Wally Halstock find you and release you? I have been to the place where the man-trap was set. It is well away from the main path through the woods and that is the path Wally would have followed on his way to work. I suppose, although you were unconscious, you must have been groaning.’
Even as I said this, I felt considerable doubt. Even if a person who is totally unconscious is also able to groan, I thought of the distance the Superintendent, Dame Beatrice and I had penetrated into the woods to the place where Wally had freed Hamid from the man-trap, and I doubted whether any groans would have reached Wally’s ears as he tramped the main path. Even if they had, I doubted whether a country lad with a damaged brain would have thought of investigating the sounds. Brought up and nourished on superstition, he would have been frightened enough to break into a run and get out of the woods as soon as he could, I thought.
I had put almost none of Dame Beatrice’s questions directly, but I felt that Hamid had answered them without prompting. I also felt that I had gained items of information which her questions would not have elicited.
‘Of course,’ I said, when I had told her the tale and had read out the shorthand notes I had taken, ‘as I see it, there is nothing against the theory that Hamid himself may be Winters’s murderer. He says he did not get here that Tuesday until dusk, but there is nothing, so far, to substantiate that.’
‘There is the Ropewalk taxi-driver,’ she pointed out. ‘No doubt Superintendent Hallicks will have no difficulty in finding him. Hamid is a striking-looking young man and a taxi-driver would remember him.’
‘Certainly. But if it was proved that Hamid was lying about the time of day, it could be he who took the pot-shot which missed its mark and then he could have followed Winters up when Winters left Bourne Farley, stabbed him and still have carried out the man-trap business to provide himself with an alibi.’
‘Hiding the body in whose deep-freeze?’ asked Innes sardonically.
‘His father’s, of course,’ said Mary, backing me up. ‘Whatever Hamid had done, his father would have stood by him, I’m sure. Besides, with the sheikh’s huge cars and the sheikh’s bodyguard of huge men, transporting the body from wherever Hamid did the killing would have presented no difficulties at all.’
‘Thank you, darling,’ I said.
‘Oh, yeah?’ said Innes. ‘And whose bright idea was it to bury Winters in that punt? The sheikh has acres of ground of his own where he can bury what he likes and no questions asked and nobody to split on him.’
‘Chettle and Batcombe buried the body, of course,’ said Mary.
‘Well, they do seem to be well mixed up in the business,’ I said.
‘I can’t imagine the sheikh putting the slightest confidence in either of them.’ said Innes. ‘Chettle, if not Batcombe, would rat at the slightest sign of trouble.’
‘Not if he was paid enough and promised more for every month he kept his mouth shut,’ said Mary. I thought of Hamid’s ‘I pay them well,’ and wondered. Does one balance a monthly income, however princely, against a possible life sentence? Bank robbery is one thing, unless it results in a killing. Accessory to murder, in my book, is quite another.
I looked at Dame Beatrice, but she did not join in the discussion.
* * *
chapter 13
MARTHA LORNE
« ^ »
He’s protecting somebody,’ said Hallicks, when he heard my story. ‘Who would deliberately walk into a man-trap?’
Dame Beatrice pointed out that Hamid’s action, according to what he himself had confessed to me at the interview, was not, in the end, either voluntary or deliberate. He had been caught by the horrible device because Chettle had set the thing a little nearer the main path than had been agreed upon and therefore Hamid, already in two minds about going through with his grisly project, had trodden on the man-trap unawares.
There remained the question of who had crept up and hit the helpless boy over the head and whether this had been a misguided act of intended mercy by keeping him unconscious and therefore putting him out of his agony for a time, or whether, as both Innes and Hallicks himself thought more likely, it was a deliberate attempt to kill him before he could grass on those who had caused his injuries. As Innes pointed out, they must have been paid their money, or Batcombe could not have afforded to buy a motorcycle. Presumably they thought they had nothing more to gain from Hamid and, because they had not set the trap in the agreed spot, but had forced him to walk into it whether he wanted to, in the end, or not, they must have believed that he would shop them to the police.
As for accounting for his presence in his father’s woods at night, Innes went on, what could be easier than for Hamid to explain that he had an assignation with a girl? It would have been a cast-iron reason to give because everybody would have believed him.
Unfortunately for Hamid, my interview with him had produced a motive for the murder of Winters at his hands.
Blackmail is an ugly crime. Hamid’s admitted fear of his father and his underlying other fear that there was always a chance that Winters, in his cups or otherwise, might let out the fact of the mixed marriage, this coupled with what must have been a smouldering, deep-down hatred of the man who had him in his power, provided a much sounder motive for murder than the one so far attributed to Effie Winters.
‘I must have a go at him,’ Hallicks said. ‘These Arabs hold life cheaper than we do. If he’s been under pressure from Winters, he probably decided to release himself by getting rid of the fellow. It would not have seemed to him a wrong thing to do, perhaps, and off the record I don’t know that I blame him, but of course in my job I can’t allow that to make any difference. I’ll give him a day or two to forget his talk with you, sir. Meanwhile I shall pull in those two lads and knock a confession out of them. It shouldn’t be difficult. Master Batcombe will soon come clean, even if that young snake Chettle tries to wriggle off the hook.’
Under a relentless, although (from what I knew of Hallicks) a perfectly fair, inquisition both boys, interviewed separately, admitted to setting the man-trap, but remained immovable in their argument that Hamid had paid them for doing so and had promised them immunity from the law if they did as he wished.
Their answers to Hallicks’s further questions failed to tally on only one point. Batcombe alleged — and stuck to the assertion — that, apart from the fact that it was to be set in the sheikh’s woods, he had never been told of the exact spot which had been chosen. He added that he had never believed that Hamid would go through with the project — ‘anybody would chicken out of a fool stunt like that, when it comes to the crunch, sir’ — but he thought perhaps the contraption might catch a rabbit or even a deer, certainly not a man who had walked into it deliberately.
Chettle was obliged to admit to an agreement with Hamid as to where the man-trap was to be placed, but asserted vehemently that he had kept strictly to the agreement and that, if Hamid had walked himself into the trap, it was of his own choice and of his own free will.
Hallicks did not believe him, but he could not shake him. He dismissed Batcombe with a solemn warning that he might be wanted again for police questioning and said that it would be better for him if he did not attempt in the meantime to leave the neighbourhood. Then he turned his big guns on Chettle.
The youth held out, however, giving cheeky answers learned from television programmes featuring teenage hooligans in conflict with ‘the pigs’, and refused to be worn down and penned by what, said Innes, who told us the story he had received from Hallicks, he no doubt regarded as “pig’s” logic. At any rate, Chettle refused to admit hitting Hamid over the head.
‘Went back to see if there was anything I could do,’ he said. ‘Didn’t know whether he was catched in the trap or not, did I? When I got there he was a-groaning sommat cruel and I done my best to let him out. It were plaguey dark in them woods, though, and I didn’t have nothing but my little torch to see by, and even then I has to lay it down on the ground so as to have both hands free to pull the trap open. Well, I can’t shift them iron jaws, can I? They was too deep into his leg. So I goes and knocks up my mate, but he don’t want no part in it.’
Hallicks suggested that Batcombe had not been asked to render any more assistance and came back to the point at issue, which was that Chettle had deliberately hit Hamid over the head with the intention of killing him. This the youth again strenuously denied and asserted that it was not Batcombe to whom he referred, but Wally Halstock.
‘His dad answered the door,’ he said, ‘so I tells him the tale, don’t I? — and all he says is as it serves that Arab scum right, as it were his evidence at the inquest on Mr Lorne as put Breedy’s lorry in the clear and cut the compensation money down to nowt. Wally come to the door when he heared his dad and me talking, and us fixed up as Wally would give a look at the trap on his way to work in the morning, which he done.’
‘Strange that he could set Hamid Aziz free if you couldn’t,’ said Hallicks; but to this Chettle replied that Wally was very much the stronger of the two of them, a statement which Hallicks could not gainsay.
One thing which had resulted from all the excitement, combined with the visit of Dame Beatrice and myself to Strode Hillary, had been the curtailing of Mary’s and Innes’s social life. They were a gregarious couple and had a good many friends, both in Strode Hillary and outside it. Except for the visits of Martha Lorne, who had become somewhat of an incubus and was not, except in her own estimation, a close friend, and the dinner with the Maumburys, the social activities of my brother and his wife had been non-existent.
When, therefore, they received an invitation to the birthday party of a child whose parents lived on the other side of the county, both Dame Beatrice and I urged that they accept it. Dame Beatrice said that she would like to go home for the day and telephoned her chauffeur to this effect, and I admitted to a hope that I might get a book out of my visit and therefore would be glad of an opportunity to explore more of the countryside in search of background material.
‘And for that,’ I said, ‘I need to be on my own.’
We saw Dame Beatrice off, then I drove my own car to the garage, filled up the tank and decided to let my fancy lead me. I felt that I knew the countryside to the south-east of the village sufficiently well for my purpose, so I headed west and a little to the south and bypassed the turning which led to the viewpoint from which Innes had given me my first real aspect of the local countryside.
Leaving this turning on my right, I followed a good road which had a surface slightly in need of repairs, until I came to a village almost large enough to be called a town, and here I found I had a choice of routes.
So far as I was concerned, the choice was arbitrary, so I took a righthand fork and soon found myself in what I can describe, without any fear of contradiction, as a typical Dorset lane.
It was wet from rain which we had not had in Strode Hillary, and wound this way and that as the contours of the hills suggested. It was so narrow that I wondered what would happen if I encountered a farm vehicle or another car (for there were no passing-places), and either the lane was enclosed by high banks topped by shorn hedges or else it serpentined through an open countryside of hills, valleys and pasture of an unbelievable, almost startling green.
The banks and the roadside were covered in wild daffodils (now, like those in Mary’s tubs, past their best, but still a bright show of sunlight colour) and the even brighter butter colour of the lesser celandine.
Then, on all the banks there were primroses, and where I reached a little church at which I pulled up, there was a tiny brook, shining and freely flowing, growing cresses and burbling over stones.
I went into the church and also walked all round it. When I got back to the car I looked at my watch and decided that by the time I reached Strode Hillary, where I intended to make some notes for my novel, it would be lunch-time. There was no village near the church, which was situated on a knoll completely covered in daffodils, primroses and the ubiquitous lesser celandine, all growing amid that incredible verdure. I was loth to leave the spot, but drove off at last. I was approaching the hill-tunnel near the viewpoint of Strode Hillary when I was aware of a woman who, almost at the entrance to the tunnel, was thumbing a lift. On the whole — in fact, with very few exceptions — I do not stop to pick up persons thumbing lifts. For one thing I do not see why I should purchase, insure and maintain a car in order to give casual strangers a free ride, and to go on with, there are the safety risks, both to the passenger and myself. Young girls frighten me and so, of course, do youths with flick knives and revolvers. At least, the thought of them frightens me enough to refuse them a lift. However, a middle-aged woman is a different matter. Besides, I recognised the woman. It was Martha Lorne. I pulled up well short of the entrance to the tunnel and tooted the horn. She came towards me and I stretched out and opened the car door.
‘Ah,’ she said, getting in beside me, slamming the car door with unnecessary force and pulling the seat-belt across her bosom, ‘this is very nice of you, Michael. Can you go to Cross Street?’
‘If you will direct me,’ I said. ‘Is it a turning out of the Square?’
‘Well, no. It’s in Ropewalk. I have a very important appointment there. I tried to get a taxi but there is only the one and he was booked up, so I called at Mary’s to ask whether you or Innes could take me, but there was nobody at home.’
‘Wouldn’t you have stood more chance of a lift if you had walked back into the town?’ I asked.
‘Well, yes, but I didn’t really want any of the W.I. members to know my business, and one of them would have been sure to spot me and wonder why I was trying to get a lift. Everybody minds everybody else’s business in a small place like this. One can’t keep anything to oneself.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ I said. I was not at all pleased at the idea of spending time to take her to Ropewalk. I wanted to get my notes down while my impressions were fresh in my mind and I badly wanted my lunch, which I had planned to have at the Stag. Besides, I had a foreboding that she would want me to wait in Ropewalk while she transacted her business and then would expect me to drive her home.
Fortunately this did not occur. She directed me when we reached the outskirts of Ropewalk, and when we arrived at what she claimed was her destination, I was surprised to see Farmer Breedy standing on the pavement at the rear of a vintage Rolls Royce.
I got out, went round to Mrs Lorne’s side and opened the car door for her. She stepped on to the pavement and I realised for the first time that she was unusually smartly dressed and was wearing a hat covered with velvet violets. Moreover, she was carrying a white handbag and a pair of violet-coloured gloves to match the hat.
