The Clocks (10 page)

“I don't think it could be anything of that kind,” said Mrs. Lawton, puckering her eyes in thought and frowning. “Sheila has had one or two boys she's been friendly with, but there's been nothing serious. Nobody steady of any kind.”

“It might have been while she was living in London?” the inspector suggested. “After all, I don't suppose you know very much about what friends she had there.”

“No, no, perhaps not … Well, you'll have to ask her about that yourself, Inspector Hardcastle. But I never heard of any trouble of any kind.”

“Or it might have been another girl,” suggested Hardcastle. “Perhaps one of the girls she shared rooms with there was jealous of her?”

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Lawton doubtfully, “that there might be a girl who'd want to do her a bad turn. But not involving murder, surely.”

It was a shrewd appreciation and Hardcastle noted that Mrs. Lawton was by no means a fool. He said quickly:

“I know it all sounds most unlikely, but then this whole business
is
unlikely.”

“It must have been someone mad,” said Mrs. Lawton.

“Even in madness,” said Hardcastle, “there's a definite idea behind the madness, you know. Something that's given rise to it. And that really,” he went on, “is why I was asking you about Sheila Webb's father and mother. You'd be surprised how often motives arise that have their roots in the past. Since Miss Webb's father and mother died when she was a young child, naturally she can't tell me anything about them. That's why I'm applying to you.”

“Yes, I see, but—well….”

He noted that the trouble and uncertainty were back in her voice.

“Were they killed at the same time, in an accident, anything like that?”

“No, there was no accident.”

“They both died from natural causes?”

“I—well, yes, I mean—I don't really know.”

“I think you must know a little more than you are telling me, Mrs. Lawton.” He hazarded a guess. “Were they, perhaps, divorced—something of that kind?”

“No, they weren't divorced.”

“Come now, Mrs. Lawton. You know—you must know of what your sister died?”

“I don't see what—I mean, I can't say—it's all very difficult. Raking up things. It's much better not raking them up.” There was a kind of desperate perplexity in her glance.

Hardcastle looked at her keenly. Then he said gently, “Was Sheila Webb perhaps—an illegitimate child?”

He saw immediately a mixture of consternation and relief in her face.

“She's not
my
child,” she said.

“She is your sister's illegitimate child?”

“Yes. But she doesn't know it herself. I've never told her. I told her her parents died young. So that's why—well, you see….”

“Oh, yes, I see,” said the inspector, “and I assure you that unless something comes of this particular line of inquiry there is no need for me to question Miss Webb on this subject.”

“You mean you needn't tell her?”

“Not unless there is some relevance to the case, which, I may say, seems unlikely. But I do want all the facts that you know, Mrs. Lawton, and I assure you that I'll do my best to keep what you tell me entirely between ourselves.”

“It's not a nice thing to happen,” said Mrs. Lawton, “and I
was very distressed about it, I can tell you. My sister, you see, had always been the clever one of the family. She was a schoolteacher and doing very well. Highly respected and everything else. The last person you'd ever think would—”

“Well,” said the inspector, tactfully, “it often happens that way. She got to know this man—this Webb—”

“I never even knew what his name was,” said Mrs. Lawton. “I never met him. But she came to me and told me what had happened. That she was expecting a child and that the man couldn't, or wouldn't—I never knew which—marry her. She was ambitious and it would have meant giving up her job if the whole thing came out. So naturally I—I said I'd help.”

“Where is your sister now, Mrs. Lawton?”

“I've no idea. Absolutely no idea at all.” She was emphatic.

“She's alive, though.”

“I suppose so.”

“But you haven't kept in touch with her?”

“That's the way she wanted it. She thought it was best for the child and best for her that there should be a clean break. So it was fixed that way. We both had a little income of our own that our mother left us. Ann turned her half-share over to me to be used for the child's bringing up and keep. She was going to continue with her profession, she said, but she would change schools. There was some idea, I believe, of a year's exchange with a teacher abroad. Australia or somewhere. That's all I know, Inspector Hardcastle, and that's all I can tell you.”

He looked at her thoughtfully. Was that really all she knew? It was a difficult question to answer with any certainty. It was certainly all that she meant to tell him. It might very well be all she
knew. Slight as the reference to the sister had been, Hardcastle got an impression of a forceful, bitter, angry personality. The sort of woman who was determined not to have her life blasted by one mistake. In a cold hardheaded way she had provided for the upkeep and presumable happiness of her child. From that moment on she had cut herself adrift to start life again on her own.

It was conceivable, he thought, that she might feel like that about the child. But what about her sister? He said mildly:

“It seems odd that she did not at least keep in touch with you by letter, did not want to know how the child was progressing?”

Mrs. Lawton shook her head.

“Not if you knew Ann,” she said. “She was always very clear-cut in her decisions. And then she and I weren't very close. I was younger than she was by a good deal—twelve years. As I say, we were never very close.”

“And what did your husband feel about this adoption?”

“I was a widow then,” said Mrs. Lawton. “I married young and my husband was killed in the war. I kept a small sweet shop at the time.”

“Where was all this? Not here in Crowdean.”

“No. We were living in Lincolnshire at the time. I came here in the holidays once, and I liked it so much that I sold the shop and came here to live. Later, when Sheila was old enough to go to school, I took a job in Roscoe and West, the big drapers here, you know. I still work there. They're very pleasant people.”

“Well,” said Hardcastle, rising to his feet, “thank you very much, Mrs. Lawton, for your frankness in what you have told me.”

“And you won't say a word of it to Sheila?”

“Not unless it should become necessary, and that would only
happen if some circumstances out of the past proved to have been connected with this murder at 19, Wilbraham Crescent. And that, I think, is unlikely.” He took the photograph from his pocket which he had been showing to so many people, and showed it to Mrs. Lawton. “You've no idea who this man could be?”

“They've shown it me already,” said Mrs. Lawton.

She took it and scrutinized it earnestly.

“No. I'm sure, quite sure, I've never seen this man before. I don't think he belonged round here or I might have remembered seeing him about. Of course—” she looked closely. She paused a moment before adding, rather unexpectedly, “He looks a nice man I think. A gentleman, I'd say, wouldn't you?”

It was a slightly outmoded term in the inspector's experience, yet it fell very naturally from Mrs. Lawton's lips. “Brought up in the country,” he thought. “They still think of things that way.” He looked at the photograph again himself reflecting, with faint surprise, that he had not thought of the dead man in quite that way. Was he a nice man? He had been assuming just the contrary. Assuming it unconsciously perhaps, or influenced perhaps by the fact that the man had a card in his pocket which bore a name and an address which were obviously false. But the explanation he had given to Mrs. Lawton just now might have been the true one. It might have been that the card did represent some bogus insurance agent who had pressed the card upon the dead man. And that, he thought wryly, would really make the whole thing even more difficult. He glanced at his watch again.

“I mustn't keep you from your cooking any longer,” he said, “since your niece is not home yet—”

Mrs. Lawton in turn looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.
“Only one clock in this room, thank heaven,” thought the inspector to himself.

“Yes, she is late,” she remarked. “Surprising really. It's a good thing Edna didn't wait.”

Seeing a slightly puzzled expression on Hardcastle's face, she explained.

“It's just one of the girls from the office. She came here to see Sheila this evening and she waited a bit but after a while she said she couldn't wait any longer. She'd got a date with someone. She said it would do tomorrow, or some other time.”

Enlightenment came to the inspector. The girl he had passed in the street! He knew now why she'd made him think of shoes. Of course. It was the girl who had received him in the Cavendish Bureau and the girl who, when he left, had been holding up a shoe with a stiletto heel torn off it, and had been discussing in unhappy puzzlement how on earth she was going to get home like that. A nondescript kind of girl, he remembered, not very attractive, sucking some kind of sweet as she talked. She had recognized him when she passed him in the street, although he had not recognized her. She had hesitated, too, as though she thought of speaking to him. He wondered rather idly what she had wanted to say. Had she wanted to explain why she was calling on Sheila Webb or had she thought he would expect her to say something? He asked:

“Is she a great friend of your niece's?”

“Well, not particularly,” said Mrs. Lawton. “I mean they work in the same office and all that, but she's rather a dull girl. Not very bright and she and Sheila aren't particular friends. In fact, I wondered why she was so keen to see Sheila tonight. She said it
was something she couldn't understand and that she wanted to ask Sheila about it.”

“She didn't tell you what it was?”

“No, she said it would keep and it didn't matter.”

“I see. Well, I must be going.”

“It's odd,” said Mrs. Lawton, “that Sheila hasn't telephoned. She usually does if she's late, because the professor sometimes asks her to stay to dinner. Ah, well, I expect she'll be here any moment now. There are a lot of bus queues sometimes and the Curlew Hotel is quite a good way along the Esplanade. There's nothing—no message—you want to leave for Sheila?”

“I think not,” said the inspector.

As he went out he asked, “By the way, who chose your niece's Christian names, Rosemary and Sheila? Your sister or yourself?”

“Sheila was our mother's name. Rosemary was my sister's choice. Funny name to choose really. Fanciful. And yet my sister wasn't fanciful or sentimental in any way.”

“Well, good night, Mrs. Lawton.”

As the inspector turned the corner from the gateway into the street he thought, “Rosemary—hm … Rosemary for remembrance. Romantic remembrance? Or—something quite different?”

I
walked up Charing Cross Road and turned into the maze of streets that twist their way between New Oxford Street and Covent Garden. All sorts of unsuspected shops did business there, antique shops, a dolls' hospital, ballet shoes, foreign delicatessen shops.

I resisted the lure of the dolls' hospital with its various pairs of blue or brown glass eyes, and came at last to my objective. It was a small dingy bookshop in a side street not far from the British Museum. It had the usual trays of books outside. Ancient novels, old text books, odds and ends of all kinds, labelled 3d., 6d., 1s., even some aristocrats which had nearly all their pages, and occasionally even their binding intact.

I sidled through the doorway. It was necessary to sidle since precariously arranged books impinged more and more every day on the passageway from the street. Inside, it was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them
down. The distance between bookshelves was so narrow that you could only get along with great difficulty. There were piles of books perched on every shelf or table. On a stool in a corner, hemmed in by books, was an old man in a pork-pie hat with a large flat face like a stuffed fish. He had the air of one who has given up an unequal struggle. He had attempted to master the books, but the books had obviously succeeded in mastering him. He was a kind of King Canute of the book world, retreating before the advancing book tide. If he ordered it to retreat it would have been with the sure and hopeless certainty that it would not do so. This was Mr. Solomon, proprietor of the shop. He recognized me, his fishlike stare softened for a moment and he nodded.

“Got anything in my line?” I asked.

“You'll have to go up and see, Mr. Lamb. Still on seaweeds and that stuff?”

“That's right.”

“Well, you know where they are. Marine biology, fossils, Antarctica—second floor. I had a new parcel in day before yesterday. I started to unpack 'em but I haven't got round to it properly yet. You'll find them in a corner up there.”

I nodded and sidled my way onwards to where a small rather rickety and very dirty staircase led up from the back of the shop. On the first floor were Orientalia, art books, medicine, and French classics. In this room was a rather interesting little curtained corner not known to the general public, but accessible to experts, where what is called “odd” or “curious” volumes reposed. I passed them and went on up to the second floor.

Here archaeological, natural history, and other respectable volumes were rather inadequately sorted into categories. I steered my
way through students and elderly colonels and clergymen, passed round the angle of a bookcase, stepped over various gaping parcels of books on the floor and found my further progress barred by two students of opposite sexes lost to the world in a closely knit embrace. They stood there swaying to and fro. I said:

“Excuse me,” pushed them firmly aside, raised a curtain which masked a door, and slipping a key from my pocket, turned it in the lock and passed through. I found myself incongruously in a kind of vestibule with cleanly distempered walls hung with prints of Highland cattle, and a door with a highly polished knocker on it. I manipulated the knocker discreetly and the door was opened by an elderly woman with grey hair, spectacles of a particularly old-fashioned kind, a black skirt and a rather unexpected peppermint-striped jumper.

“It's you, is it?” she said without any other form of greeting. “He was asking about you only yesterday. He wasn't pleased.” She shook her head at me, rather as an elderly governess might do at a disappointing child. “You'll have to try and do better,” she said.

“Oh, come off it, Nanny,” I said.

“And don't call me Nanny,” said the lady. “It's a cheek. I've told you so before.”

“It's your fault,” I said. “You mustn't talk to me as if I were a small boy.”

“Time you grew up. You'd better go in and get it over.”

She pressed a buzzer, picked up a telephone from the desk, and said:

“Mr. Colin … Yes, I'm sending him in.” She put it down and nodded to me.

I went through a door at the end of the room into another
room which was so full of cigar smoke that it was difficult to see anything at all. After my smarting eyes had cleared, I beheld the ample proportions of my chief sitting back in an aged, derelict grandfather chair, by the arm of which was an old-fashioned reading or writing desk on a swivel.

Colonel Beck took off his spectacles, pushed aside the reading desk on which was a vast tome and looked disapprovingly at me.

“So it's you at last?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Got anything?”

“No, sir.”

“Ah! Well, it won't do, Colin, d'you hear? Won't do. Crescents indeed!”

“I still think,” I began.

“All right. You still think. But we can't wait forever while you're thinking.”

“I'll admit it was only a hunch,” I said.

“No harm in that,” said Colonel Beck.

He was a contradictory man.

“Best jobs I've ever done have been hunches. Only this hunch of yours doesn't seem to be working out. Finished with the pubs?”

“Yes, sir. As I told you I've started on Crescents. Houses in crescents is what I mean.”

“I didn't suppose you meant bakers' shops with French rolls in them, though, come to think of it, there's no reason why not. Some of these places make an absolute fetish of producing French croissants that aren't really French. Keep 'em in a deep freeze nowadays like everything else. That's why nothing tastes of anything nowadays.”

I waited to see whether the old boy would enlarge upon this topic. It was a favourite one of his. But seeing that I was expecting him to do so, Colonel Beck refrained.

“Wash out all round?” he demanded.

“Almost. I've still got a little way to go.”

“You want more time, is that it?”

“I want more time, yes,” I said. “But I don't want to move on to another place this minute. There's been a kind of coincidence and it might—only
might
—mean something.”

“Don't waffle. Give me facts.”

“Subject of investigation, Wilbraham Crescent.”

“And you drew a blank! Or didn't you?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Define yourself, define yourself, boy.”

“The coincidence is that a man was murdered in Wilbraham Crescent.”

“Who was murdered?”

“As yet he's unknown. Had a card with a name and address in his pocket, but that was bogus.”

“Hm. Yes. Suggestive. Tie up in any way?”

“I can't see that it does, sir, but all the same….”

“I know, I know. All the same … Well, what have you come for? Come for permission to go on nosing about Wilbraham Crescent—wherever that absurd-sounding place is?”

“It's a place called Crowdean. Ten miles from Portlebury.”

“Yes, yes. Very good locality. But what are you here for? You don't usually ask permission. You go your own pigheaded way, don't you?”

“That's right, sir, I'm afraid I do.”

“Well, then, what is it?”

“There are a couple of people I want vetted.”

With a sigh Colonel Beck drew his reading desk back into position, took a ball-pen from his pocket, blew on it and looked at me.

“Well?”

“House called Diana Lodge. Actually, 20, Wilbraham Crescent. Woman called Mrs. Hemming and about eighteen cats live there.”

“Diana? Hm,” said Colonel Beck. “Moon goddess! Diana Lodge. Right. What does she do, this Mrs. Hemming?”

“Nothing,” I said, “she's absorbed in her cats.”

“Damned good cover, I dare say,” said Beck appreciatively. “Certainly could be. Is that all?”

“No,” I said. “There's a man called Ramsay. Lives at 62, Wilbraham Crescent. Said to be a construction engineer, whatever that is. Goes abroad a good deal.”

“I like the sound of that,” said Colonel Beck. “I like the sound of that very much. You want to know about him, do you? All right.”

“He's got a wife,” I said. “Quite a nice wife, and two obstreperous children—boys.”

“Well, he might have,” said Colonel Beck. “It has been known. You remember Pendleton? He had a wife and children. Very nice wife. Stupidest woman I've ever come across. No idea in her head that her husband wasn't a pillar of respectability in oriental book dealing. Come to think of it, now I remember, Pendleton had a German wife as well, and a couple of daughters. And he also had a wife in Switzerland. I don't know what the wives were—his private excesses or just camouflage. He'd
say
of course that they were
camouflage. Well, anyway, you want to know about Mr. Ramsay. Anything else?”

“I'm not sure. There's a couple at 63. Retired professor. McNaughton by name. Scottish. Elderly. Spends his time gardening. No reason to think he and his wife are not all right—but—”

“All right. We'll check. We'll put 'em through the machine to make sure. What
are
all these people, by the way?”

“They're people whose gardens verge on or touch the garden of the house where the murder was committed.”

“Sounds like a French exercise,” said Beck. “Where is the dead body of my uncle? In the garden of the cousin of my aunt. What about Number 19 itself?”

“A blind woman, a former school teacher, lives there. She works in an institute for the blind and she's been thoroughly investigated by the local police.”

“Live by herself?”

“Yes.”

“And what is your idea about all these other people?”

“My idea is,” I said, “that if a murder was committed by any of these other people in any of these other houses that I have mentioned to you, it would be perfectly easy, though risky, to convey the dead body into Number 19 at a suitable time of day. It's a mere possibility, that's all. And there's something I'd like to show you.
This.
”

Beck took the earthstained coin I held out to him.

“A Czech Haller? Where did you find it?”

“I didn't. But it was found in the back garden of Number 19.”

“Interesting. You may have something after all in your persistent fixation on crescents and rising moons.” He added thought
fully, “There's a pub called The Rising Moon in the next street to this. Why don't you go and try your luck there?”

“I've been there already,” I said.

“You've always got an answer, haven't you?” said Colonel Beck. “Have a cigar?”

I shook my head. “Thank you—no time today.”

“Going back to Crowdean?”

“Yes. There's the inquest to attend.”

“It will only be adjourned. Sure it's not some girl you're running after in Crowdean?”

“Certainly not,” I said sharply.

Colonel Beck began to chuckle unexpectedly.

“You mind your step, my boy! Sex rearing its ugly head as usual. How long have you known her?”

“There isn't any—I mean—well—there
was
a girl who discovered the body.”

“What did she do when she discovered it?”

“Screamed.”

“Very nice too,” said the colonel. “She rushed to you, cried on your shoulder and told you about it. Is that it?”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said coldly. “Have a look at these.”

I gave him a selection of the police photographs.

“Who's this?” demanded Colonel Beck.

“The dead man.”

“Ten to one this girl you're so keen about killed him. The whole story sounds very fishy to me.”

“You haven't even heard it yet,” I said. “I haven't told it to you.”

“I don't need telling,” Colonel Beck waved his cigar. “Go away to your inquest, my boy, and look out for that girl. Is her name Diana, or Artemis, or anything crescenty or moonlike?”

“No, it isn't.”

“Well, remember that it might be!”