Uncoffind Clay, page 7
part #57 of Mrs Bradley Series
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘Strange. We know her quite well, but she has never mentioned that her husband was killed in an accident.’
‘Rigg Halstock, his son Walter and that chap Winters were the others in the car. Winters was driving and the car went out of control and hit Breedy’s lorry. Young Walter got a pretty good knock which has left him a bit short in the top storey and with a speech impediment, and Rigg Halstock had an arm amputated and lost his job because of it. He used to be head gardener to Lord Maumbury, but, of course, a one-armed gardener isn’t any sort of use, so Maumbury got him a job as caddy on Clypthampton golf course and helped him out with a small pension which, if you ask me, the Maumbury estate can’t really afford, so I reckon the noble lord acted very decent, considering that the accident was nothing to do with him. Noblesse oblige, as they say.’
‘Is it certain that the farmer was in no way to blame for the accident?’ asked Dame Beatrice.
‘There was a witness, and this is where I don’t like the way things are going, ma’am. The witness was young Mr Hamid Aziz, the victim of the man-trap. He swore to the car going out of control. In any case, Breedy himself wasn’t driving the lorry. It was parked.’
‘I see. So my examination of your local troublemakers is really designed to establish their innocence, is it?’
‘I would not put it quite like that, Dame Beatrice. It’s more a matter of clearing the rubbish out of the way. I wouldn’t put it past any one of those lads to have set that man-trap out of pure boneheadedness and mischief, but there is that other matter, and Rigg Halstock is still a very bitter man. These chaps brood on things a long time before they act.’
‘A one-armed man could hardly set a man-trap,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘True enough, ma’am, but I think he and Winters could have planned it together and enticed young Hamid into the woods that evening with a faked letter from a girl, or something of that sort. I don’t know whether, when you’ve talked to the village lads, you’d like to tackle the boarding school?’
As we should have to pass the turning to Lower Gushbrook and Hallicks had put no time limit on the hours he would be spending with us, I asked Dame Beatrice whether she would like to see the picturesque mere and the baby trout-stream. Hallicks thought well of the idea.
‘Not our most picturesque village, ma’am,’ he said, ‘but the surroundings are real pretty and it would be a pity, as we’re in the neighbourhood, for you to miss the view. Any landscape with water is real nice, I always think.’
So Innes took the Lower Gushbrook road and Mary and I followed in my car. When we reached the village, Hallicks and Innes remained in their car, Mary and I got out of ours and Dame Beatrice joined us. As Mary and I had done on our previous visit, the three of us strolled upstream, passed by the ancient, rotting punt and crossed the tiny clapper bridge to look at the island.
On our return I halted by the punt and looked at it in some surprise. The wild plants I had pointed out to Mary had all gone, but had been replaced by others, and the whole sodden surface had been beautifully tidied up, as had the ground in front of it.
‘What are you staring at, Mike?’ Mary asked.
‘Look for yourself. The plants have been changed,’ I said. ‘Who on earth would have bothered?’
‘Village children, of course,’ she said.
‘Leaving this beautifully tidy surface? I don’t believe it,’ I retorted.
‘Some school project, perhaps, of a botanical nature,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘That would explain it, would it not?’
‘They must be well-disciplined kids to have made such a very neat job of it,’ I said. ‘Quite the professional touch, I would have thought.’
When we got back to his car it was to find Innes and Hallicks deep in a discussion of the car crash which had killed Lorne, so no mention was made of the punt, and Mary and I went back to my car and we drove home.
‘So Lorne was killed, Halstock senior lost an arm, Halstock junior lost some of his marbles and young Hamid gave evidence that no blame attached itself to Farmer Breedy and his lorry,’ said Innes, when we got home. ‘What’s your verdict, Mike?’
‘An open one,’ I replied. ‘I would have thought most of the resentment would have been directed against Winters, who was the driver of the car, especially as he appears to have got off without injury.’
‘Oh, I expect his licence was taken away. He never drives anywhere now,’ said Mary. ‘Besides, there was that potshot from among the trees when he was talking to the sheikh. You said it must have been meant for Winters and not Abdul, if you remember, Innes. You produced chapter and verse.’
‘Yes. I said that if you shot at the sheikh you couldn’t miss him.’
‘How dangerously you Dorset people live! I had no idea,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘It’s been quiet enough in Strode Hillary until now,’ said Innes. ‘Perhaps we’ve been placidly existing on top of an active volcano, but I can’t really think so.’
‘It follows the usual pattern, I expect,’ said Mary. ‘Years go by and nothing happens, and then something triggers matters off and, before you know where you are, the skies are falling. After all, it took only one crazy individual to start up the 1914 war.’
‘So a shot was fired in the sheikh’s grounds,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘and the shot went through somebody’s hat.’
‘That could have been accidental. A chap could have been out shooting and bagged the hat instead of a pheasant or a rabbit, I suppose,’ I said.
‘Hardly a pheasant,’ said Innes, ‘and it must have been a very tall rabbit if the shot went through Winters’s hat.’
‘Gamekeepers have guns,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Why were the sheikh and Mr Winters in conference in the open air?’ she added.
‘The sheikh has his eye on some land he wants to acquire. Winters does land-deals of a rather shady sort,’ said Innes. ‘They were probably on their way to look at Long Fallow.’
‘So, in order of occurrence, as I understand it,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘we have a car accident in which one person was killed, two others injured and from which the driver of the car, although the accident can be attributed to him in that he allowed the vehicle to get out of control, escaped without injury. Then, of course, we have a shot, a cache of stolen goods and a youth caught in a man-trap.’
‘The brakes were faulty,’ said Innes. ‘That came out at the inquest, according to what I have been told. It all happened before we came here, of course, so I know nothing except by hearsay. We know the woman whose husband was killed, but she has never mentioned the matter to us and until now I had not heard the name of the dead man.’
‘That seems somewhat strange, does it not? Do you know the woman well?’
‘In a way I suppose we do,’ said Mary. ‘She is a member of the W.I. and so am I. She comes here now and again for cocktails and occasionally, but less often, we go there. She was prepared to be kind and helpful when we first moved into this house, so now it’s very difficult to dislodge her, as we told Mike, and we don’t want to seem toffee-nosed, of course. The trouble is that she really isn’t our sort.’
‘I see. She is not an acquaintance you would choose to have if you could avoid it. What about this feud between Farmer Breedy and the schoolboys?’
‘I can’t imagine it’s very important,’ said Innes. ‘The boys are children of twelve and thirteen. It’s only a prep. school. They may have set up the scarecrows, but the man-trap is a different matter entirely. Are you going to interview them when you’ve seen Hallicks’ hobbledehoys?’
‘I do not recognise class distinctions,’ said Dame Beatrice, leering hideously at Mary. ‘I would like to find out whether they saw the man-trap when they purloined the smocks and the swingle, that is all.’
‘Does it matter whether they saw it?’
‘I think it might. If they did not see the man-trap when they found the rest of the loot from the museum, I should be inclined to think that the man-trap was the object of the exploit and that the other things were taken under the false impression that they would act as a blind. Again, of course, one must not lose sight of the possibility that the thefts from the museum were merely an act of bravado, that the goods were thrown away as being too compromising to keep, and that then somebody who had nothing to do with the theft discovered the discarded man-trap and used it.’
* * *
chapter 6
FOUR AND THREE
« ^ »
There was plenty of daylight left. It turned out that I achieved my object after all, and that by the simplest means. Dame Beatrice had told Hallicks that before she talked to his suspects she would like to be shown the spot where the man-trap had been placed. Innes, in his capacity as a local magistrate, added himself as of right, with no objection from the Superintendent, whom we picked up at the police station directly after tea, and I tagged along, hoping that my presence, although it could hardly go unnoticed, might at least be tolerated.
We went in two cars, a policeman driving the one containing Hallicks and Dame Beatrice, Innes driving his own with me beside him. We went first to Bourne Farley, where we stopped while Hallicks went into the house for a short courtesy visit to the sheikh. I was in hopes that Abdul the Bulbul would join us, but this did not occur. Hallicks came back alone and the cars traversed a long drive across the home park to where the trees thickened and we entered the woods.
Here, in a clearing, we parked the cars and left the police driver and made the rest of the journey on foot. I suppose we walked at least a mile over the residue of the autumn leaves and past the brilliant spring greenery of hawthorns, before, at another clearing, Hallicks led us along a miry little path, much trodden but so narrow that our shoulders brushed the bushes on either side of it, and we ended in another clearing. Here, footprints were everywhere.
‘This is the place where Wally found Hamid,’ said Hallicks. ‘There’s nothing much to see, Dame Beatrice, except all the footprints — mine and my chaps’ mostly, of course, but we did check those of Hamid and Wally.’
‘The clearing seems a good way from the main path through the woods,’ said Innes. ‘I wonder what caused young Hamid to come here? I quite expected the trap would have been set on the main path.’
‘The most mysterious thing, to my mind,’ I said, ‘is what Hamid was doing in this neighbourhood at all, even in pursuit of female society. I thought he was at college. The university term can’t be more than a week or two old.’
‘His father is expecting a letter from the Dean of his college, sir,’ said Hallicks, ‘as I learned when I called on him just now.’
‘Oh, really? What about?’
‘Young Hamid must have been sent down from college, he thinks, and was fooling about in the woods killing time because he was afraid to go home and tell his father what had happened.’
‘Good Lord! Doesn’t sound like the present generation, does it? — afraid to tell his father, I mean.’
‘Seems that young Arabs may have more respect for their fathers than some of our lot, sir. Well, here we are.’ He drew aside a piece of sacking. ‘Those are the outlines of the implement, Dame Beatrice. There seems to have been no attempt to hide it. Makes me wonder whether the lad was in the woods a lot later than we thought and stepped on the contraption in the dark.’ He replaced the sacking and we walked back to the cars.
I was puzzled. If Hamid had got off the six o’clock train, he must have hung about in the woods for a very long time before he stepped on the man-trap, for it did seem more than likely that he had done so after dark. A young man as well-heeled as the sheikh’s son might have been expected to kill time at a hotel, or he could have left the train at Ropewalk and gone to a cinema to get through part of the evening, and met the girl far more conveniently that in miry woods at that time of year. The sun did not set until just after eight o’clock, so he could have been in the woods for the better part of two hours before he stumbled upon the trap if he had not spent time elsewhere.
Dame Beatrice was to see Hallicks’ suspects that same evenings
‘I may be able to dismiss one, probably only one, of your suspects from any subsequent inquiry,’ she said, ‘but I think it will take a longer time and more than one session before I can make a confident prognosis.’
The lads were Jed Poole, the garage hand, by reputation the bad boy of the neighbourhood; Wally Halstock, written off as ‘thick’ by Hallicks, but actually brain-damaged by the car-crash, son of the now one-armed Rigg, who had been injured in the same accident; Peter Chettle, called by Hallicks a psychopath (but with what authority I did not know); and Ernie Batcombe, the young gardener sacked from Bourne Farley because he had stolen exotic fruits and hot-house flowers and sold them. Left to myself and what I would call juryman’s commonsense, I would have opted for the last of these boys as the man-trap setter.
Hallicks had suggested that either Innes or myself should sit in at the interviews. ‘Dame Beatrice is elderly and frail,’ he said. I thought of those claw-like hands and the beaky little mouth, the brilliance of the eyes and the unnerving cackle of sardonic laughter, and thought it was as well that Dame Beatrice was not present to hear his words. ‘If one of those lads was to turn ugly,’ he went on, ‘I wouldn’t give the old lady much chance.’ As I could write shorthand (‘Good, sir. That will give an inoffensive reason to both parties for your presence at the interviews.’) I was the man selected to be a squire of dames — in this case of the Dame. She, however, refused to entertain Hallicks’ plans for her protection.
‘I am not accustomed to have anybody else in the room when I am at work,’ she said, ‘and until I can be sure that these young men are guilty and have to be turned over to the police, they are sacred and my patients.’
‘They themselves may not see it that way,’ I argued; but she was adamant and we had to give in. That the lads did not see it ‘that way’ was obvious from the beginning. They were self-conscious, resentful and suspicious. Hallicks’ assurance that none of them was under suspicion of having set the man-trap and that, so long as they told the truth, they had nothing to fear, had hardly the result of reassuring them.
However, they were sufficiently obedient to his authority and (or so I thought) sufficiently the victims of their own guilt-complexes to assent grudgingly to his suggestion that they should be interviewed separately by Dame Beatrice. He pointed out that there was no need for them to answer any of Dame Beatrice’s questions if they did not wish to do so, that they were in a private house and not at the police station, and that neither His Worship (Innes) nor himself would be present at the interviews. As Dame Beatrice had already decided that this applied to me, too, when the boys had been given pork pie and beer in the kitchen and three of them had settled down to watch television, Wally Halstock was conducted to the library to be interviewed.
The evening was a long one. This was not because Dame Beatrice took all that much time to question each youth, but because the boys were not willing to abandon any television programme in which they were interested. We got through, in fact, only when the late film ended and they had finished all that remained of the beer.
‘Of course I can’t use any of your findings officially, Dame Beatrice,’ said Hallicks, ‘but if there is anything I can follow up… ?’
‘There is one thing,’ she said, ‘which may interest you. The man-trap did catch the person it was meant to catch.’
‘Which of them told you that?’
‘None of them, in so many words, but in a day or two I shall be in a position, I hope, to substantiate what I say.’
‘Are they all involved?’
‘You may dismiss the garage hand, young Jed Poole, from your calculations, I think, and I would also exonerate your gardener.’ Her last interview had been with Batcombe. She had been told about the thefts from the hot-houses, of his summary dismissal by orders of the sheikh, and of the fact that since his dismissal he had been unemployed. She gave us an account of the interview.
‘Do you go to church, Mr Batcombe?’
‘Course I do. Sing in the choir, don’t I?’
‘From your voice I deduce that you are a powerful baritone.’
‘That’s right.’
‘You know your catechism, no doubt.’
‘Used to. You have to know it to get yourself confirmed.’
‘Ah, yes. “To keep my hands from picking and stealing—” ’
‘Come off it! That’s old hat, that is!’
‘So you seem to have proved lately, but there was a time… ’
‘ ’Tain’t right some should have it all and others nowt.’
‘I’m afraid it is the way of the world, but no doubt you thought you were right in attempting to adjust matters to some limited extent.’
‘The old buster never took me to court. I’ll give him that.’
‘Perhaps he sympathised with your sociological motives.’
‘Come again?’
‘Who set that man-trap, Mr Batcombe?’
‘You asked him outright?’ exclaimed Mary.
‘I might have expected this question to evoke a spirited response,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but, to my great satisfaction, Batcombe looked down at his powerful, countryman’s hands, then at me again and said:
‘ “Everybody know that, but I don’t reckon nobody be going to squeal.”
“When you worked for the sheikh, how did you get on with his sons?” I asked him.
‘ “I never see much of ’em ’cepting the little ’un what live at home all the time. Nice little chap. Learnt me to acrobat like he says the beggar kids does in his country, although him being a sort of a kind of prince, he weren’t supposed to play with ’em, but he says as all men be equal in the sight of the Prophet. He said as Allah the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate, made all men equal, and a lot more of that sort of heathen stuff. I learnt him how to imitate bird-calls and how to make a whistle out of a bit of reed, and how to put a ferret down a rabbit-hole, things like that. I like the little beggar.”
