Death in the Stocks (12 page)

'I object!' Kenneth said. 'I won't have seedy strangers butting in on a family crime. It lowers the whole tone of the thing, which has, up to now, been highly artistic, and in some ways even precious. Go away, Murgatroyd: no one wants any tea.'

'You speak for yourself, Master Kenneth, and let others do likewise,' replied Murgatroyd, who had come into the studio with her usual purposeful tread, and was ruthlessly clearing the table of its load of impedimenta. 'Well, Miss Tony, so you're back, I see. Where's Mr Giles?'

'He wouldn't come in. He says Kenneth will have to go to the funeral, by the way.'

''There's others could have told him that. And a decent suit of blacks,' said Murgatroyd cryptically.

'Be damned to you, I won't.'

'That's quite enough from you, Master Kenneth, thank you. You'll be chief mourner, what's more. Don't put any of your nasty wet brushes down on the tablecloth, and not that smelly turps neither.'

'Kenneth,' said Leslie Rivers, 'could I have the sketch?'

He glanced down at her, his brilliant, slightly inhuman gaze softening. 'You can.'

'Thanks,' she said.

'You really ought not to give your sketches away,' said Violet, overhearing this interchange. 'I mean, of course, as a general rule. They may become quite valuable one day.'

'Who cares?' said Kenneth, wiping his brushes.

Leslie flushed, and said gruffly: 'Sorry. I didn't think.'

He smiled lovingly at her, but said nothing. Violet got up, and shaking out her skirt, said graciously: 'Oh, naturally, it's different with such an old friend as you, dear. Shall I pour out, Tony, or would you rather?'

'Anyone can pour out as far as I'm concerned,' said Antonia, with complete indifference. 'We may as well have the loaf in while we're about it, Murgatroyd. I'll come and get it.'

She went out and was followed in a few moments by Leslie Rivers, who came into the kitchen, and said unhappily: 'I hate her and hate her.'

Neither Antonia nor Murgatroyd experienced the least difficulty in interpreting this remark. Murgatroyd set the loaf down on the wooden bread-board with a thud. 'Her!' she said darkly. 'Doing the hostess all over our flat! A beauty, is she? Well, handsome is as handsome does, and brown eyes are what I never did trust and never will, not without more reason than I've had yet.'

'I shouldn't mind - at least not nearly as much - if only I thought she'd look after him and understand about his painting,' pursued Miss Rivers. 'But I can't see that she cares about anything except being admired, and having the best of everything.'

'Ah!' said Murgatroyd, emerging from the pantry to collect an errant knife, 'still waters run deep. You mark my words!'

'Yes,' agreed Leslie, when Murgatroyd had vanished again, 'but she doesn't run deep. She's purely mercenary, and she'll hurt Kenneth.'

'Not she,' replied Antonia. 'He knows she's a moneygrubber. Kenneth isn't extraordinarily vulnerable, as a matter of fact.'

Miss Rivers blew her nose rather fiercely. 'She's the sort that would wear away a stone,' she said. 'Quiet persistence. Hard and cold and calculating. And even if I dyed my hair it wouldn't do any good.' With which sibyllic utterance she picked up the bread-board and marched back to the studio.

From the pantry doorway Murgatroyd watched her go, and remarked that that was what she called a lady. 'Why Master Kenneth can't see what's been under his nose ever since you was all of you in the nursery is what beats me,' she declared. 'A proper little wife Miss Leslie would make him, but that's men all over. What happened at that Inquest, Miss Tony?'

'Oh, pretty much what Giles said. It was very dull, and they brought in a verdict of Murder against Person or Persons Unknown. The Superintendent's going to go and have a friendly talk with Giles this evening, so probably Giles will put in a good word for us.'

'Hm!' said Murgatroyd grimly. 'I don't doubt that's what he thinks, but it's a lot likelier that policeman will get him talking about the family, and go fastening on to something that'll land us all in goal.'

'Good Lord!' said Antonia. 'I didn't know there was anything.'

'There's always something if you look for it,' replied Murgatroyd. 'And the more smooth-spoken the police are the more you want to mistrust them. Always on the look-out to trip you up. Cat and mouse, they call it.'

The simile, as applied to Superintendent Hannasyde and Giles Carrington, was not strikingly apt, nor, if Giles was full of mistrust and Hannasyde on the watch for an unguarded remark, were these respective attitudes at all apparent when Giles's servant ushered the Superintendent into the comfortable book-lined sitting-room that evening. Hannasyde said as he shook hands: 'Nice of you to ask me to look in. I envy you your quarters. They tell me you can't get one of these Temple flats for love or money nowadays.'

Murgatroyd might have detected a sinister trap in these seemingly harmless remarks, but Giles Carrington accepted them at their face value, invited the Superintendent to sit down in one of the deep leather chairs, and supplied him with a drink and a cigar. He had been idly engaged on a chess problem when his visitor arrived, and the sight of the board on the table, with a few pieces set out, naturally inspired Hannasyde, also a humble follower of the game, to inspect the problem narrowly. There was no room for any other thought in either man's head until Black had been successfully mated in the requisite three moves, but when this had been worked out, the pieces put away, a few chess reminiscences exchanged, the scarcity of really keen players deplored, a pause ensued and Giles said: 'Well, what about this tiresome murder? Is it going to be an unsolved crime?'

'Not if I can help it,' replied Hannasyde. 'It's early days yet - though I won't deny that I don't altogether like the look of it.' He scrutinised the long ash on the end of his cigar, debating whether to tip it off or to wait a little longer. 'Hemingway - the chap with me today - is feeling aggrieved.' He smiled. 'Says there oughtn't to be any mystery about the murder of a man like Vereker. You expect to be baffled when it's a case of some unfortunate girl being taken for a ride and bumped off, but when a prominent City man is stabbed it ought to be fairly plain sailing. You have what Hemingway calls the full decor. His hobby is amateur theatricals - it's the worst thing I know of him. Well, we've got plenty of decor, and we've got dramatis personae, and the net result' - he paused, and at last tipped off the ash of his cigar - 'is that we seem most of the time to have got mixed up in a Chekhov play instead of the Edgar Wallace we thought we were engaged for.'

Giles grinned. 'My deplorable cousins. I'm really very sorry about it. It would be interesting to know what you make of them.'

'I haven't the least objection to telling you that I don't know what to make of them,' replied Hannasyde calmly. 'On the face of it, things point young Vereker's way. The motive is there, the opportunity is there, and unless I'm very much mistaken in my reading of his character, the nerve is there, too.'

'I agree with you,' said Giles.

'Yes,' said Hannasyde, with a kind of grim humour. 'I know you do. I'm perfectly well aware that you're as much in the dark over him as I am, and equally well aware that you think things look rather black for him. Well, they do, but I'll be quite frank with you: I wouldn't apply for a warrant for that young man's arrest until I had a cast-iron case against him. His story is the weakest I've ever had to listen to - and I wouldn't let him tell it to a jury for anything you could offer me. Which reminds me, by the way, that Mesurier came up to see me at the Yard this afternoon, with yet another weak story. But I daresay you know about that.'

'I believe I know the story, but I didn't know he'd been to see you.'

'Oh yes!' said Hannasyde. 'He went down to that cottage to shoot Vereker, but found him already dead, so returned to town. What I should really welcome would be some suspicious character with a good, strong, probable alibi. I believe it would be easier to disprove. Hemingway fancies Mesurier more than I do. He will have it the man's a dago. I've set him to work on that car alibi, but I don't myself see a way round it. So leaving Mesurier out of it for the time being, we're left with a chauffeur whose alibi I don't altogether trust, as it's supplied by his wife, but whom I don't really think had sufficient motive to murder Vereker; with one unknown man who visited Vereker on Saturday, possibly with the idea of blackmail (and blackmailers don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs); and with Miss Vereker and her brother.' He stopped and drank some of the whisky-and-soda in his glass. 'Taking Miss Vereker first,' he continued, 'if I were to set the facts down on paper, and show them to any one man, I should think he'd wonder why I haven't had her arrested on suspicion long since. But so far I've nothing to show that she murdered her brother, and that particular kind of candour she treats me to, which looks at first glance to be so damning, is the sort of candour that would get her off with ninety-nine juries out of a hundred. Mesurier's type - trying to conceal facts he thinks might tell against him, contradicting himself, hedging - is easier to deal with. Ask him if he quarrelled with Vereker, and he says he would hardly call it a quarrel - with any number of people ready to swear that they heard him quarrelling. Ask Miss Vereker whether she got on with her half-brother, and she says she hated the sight of him. She doesn't appear to conceal a thing. It's the same with her brother: you don't know whether they're very clever, or completely innocent, or a pair of lunatics.'

'I can set your mind at rest on one point: they're quite sane,' said Giles. 'And since you've been so frank with me - admitting what I've known from the start - I'll tell you in return that Miss Vereker, who knows her brother as well as anyone, is willing to bet her whole fortune that if he committed the murder it will never be proved against him.'

The Superintendent's eyes had twinkled appreciatively at one part of this speech, and he replied at once: 'That piece of information ought to be very useful — to Miss Vereker, if not to me. But I'm too old a hand to accept it quite as you'd like me to.'

Giles got up to replenish both glasses. 'As a matter of fact I didn't mean it like that at all,' he confessed. 'Whatever I may or may not think about Kenneth, I am quite convinced in my own mind that his sister had nothing whatsoever to do with it.'

'That doesn't surprise me at all,' said Hannasyde dryly. 'Moreover, I very much hope you're right - for both your sakes.'

Giles handed him his glass without comment. A slight flush had crept up under his tan, and the Superintendent, repenting, said with superb inappropriateness: 'And why - perhaps the most important question of all - was the body placed in the stocks?'

Chapter Twelve

Giles Carrington, in the act of raising his glass to his lips, lowered it again, and looked down at the Superintendent with a startled frown. 'Yes, of course, that's an important point,' he said. 'Stupid of me, but I really don't think I've considered it. Does it mean anything, I wonder?'

'Yes, I think so,' said Hannasyde. 'Without going to the length of searching for some obscure incident in Vereker's past which had a bearing on stocks, I imagine that there must have been some reason for putting the body there.'

'Unless it was the murderer's idea of humour,' said Giles, before he had time to stop himself.

The two pairs of eyes met, Giles Carrington's quite limpid and expressionless, the Superintendent's full of a kind of amused comprehension.

'Quite so,' said Hannasyde. 'I'd already thought of that. And now I'm going to be really frank. It's the kind of humour I can easily imagine young Vereker indulging in.'

Giles smoked for a moment in silence. Then he said: 'No. I'm speaking now merely as one who - to a certain extent - knows Kenneth Vereker. It may be helpful to you. Kenneth would not place his half-brother's body in the stocks as a senseless practical joke. If he did it, it would be for some very good, and probably rather subtle reason. That is my honest opinion.'

The Superintendent nodded. 'All right. But you'll admit you can visualise circumstances under which he might have done it.'

'Yes, I'll admit that. But you're assuming that the body was placed there after death.'

'At the moment I am, because it seems the most likely hypothesis.'

'No blood on the grass around the stocks,' Giles reminded him.

'There was very little external bleeding - and no signs of any struggle,' replied Hannasyde. 'So that if you incline to the theory that Vereker was stabbed after his feet were put in the stocks, you must work on the assumption that he sat there quite willingly. Now the time was somewhere between eleven at night, or thereabouts, and two o'clock in the morning. We know from the medical evidence that Vereker can't have been drunk. Does it seem to you credible that he should choose that hour of night to try what sitting in the stocks felt like - when he could have done it any day he happened to be in the village?'

'No, I can't say it does,' admitted Giles. 'Though I can conceive of situations where it might be entirely credible.'

'So can I,' agreed Hannasyde. 'If he was motoring down with a gay party after the theatre, and they were all in a light-hearted mood. Or even if he was with one person alone, whom we'll assume to have been a woman. We know he had a puncture on the way down; suppose he picked it up at Ashleigh Green; and after changing the tyre sat down on the bench to admire the moonlight, or cool off, or anything else you like. I can picture him being induced to put his feet in the stocks, but what I can't picture is the woman then stabbing him. It can't have been Miss Vereker, for whatever I disbelieve about her I entirely believe that she was on the worst possible terms with her half-brother. Very well, then, was it some lady of easy virtue motoring down to spend the week-end with him at his cottage?'

'Quite likely,' Giles said. 'I see what's coming, though, and I confess I can't offer a solution.'

'Of course you see it. What should induce any such woman to murder him? You've seen the knife. It's a curious sort of dagger - might have come from Spain, or South America. Not the sort of thing you carry about with you in the normal course of events. That proves the murder was premeditated.'

'Some woman who had a grudge against him,' suggested Giles.

'Must have been a pretty large size in grudges,' said Hannasyde. 'And one, moreover, that Vereker didn't set much store by. If he'd done any woman an injury big enough to give her a motive for cold-blooded murder, do you suppose he would quite unsuspectingly have put himself into a helpless position at her instigation?'

'No. On the whole he had rather a suspicious nature,' replied Giles. 'And in justice to a somewhat maligned man I'm bound to say that I don't think he would have done a woman any serious injury. He was amorous, but not ungenerous to his fancies, and not unkindly.'

'That's rather the impression I gathered,' said Hannasyde. 'I don't rule out the possibility of an unknown woman in the case - but my department hasn't been idle, you know, and so far we can't discover any woman who had the least reason for wanting to murder Vereker. I don't mind telling you that we checked up on several, too. That shabby stranger the butler described to us made me think there might be some woman who'd been got into trouble, because there's a smell of blackmail about that odd visit. But I haven't discovered anything of the kind. On the contrary, Vereker seems to have been pretty decent, and his women were the sort who can look after themselves.'

Giles sat on the arm of his chair. 'Yes, I should think they were. Arnold was no fool. And I'm ready to admit that you've made it seem highly improbable that the murder was done after Arnold was in the stocks. But do you mind looking at the other side of the picture? Does it seem to you probable that having stabbed a man to death the murderer conveyed his body to the stocks - the most conspicuous place he could well think of- and arrange it most carefully in a natural position there, which I imagine must have been not only a gruesome, but also a somewhat difficult task? Impossible for Miss Vereker to have done it; too macabre for Mesurier; too senseless for Kenneth.'

'It may not have been senseless,' said Hannasyde. He glanced at his wrist-watch, and got up. 'That's what I've got to try and find out - amongst other things. By the way, we've been trying to trace those notes Vereker had on him the day he was killed. You remember we found the counterfoil of a cheque for a hundred pounds drawn to self, and only thirty pounds in his pocket? Well, only one of these has come in, to date, and that one is a tenpound note which a man in a blue suit handed to a waiter at the Trocadero Grill in payment of his bill for dinner on Saturday evening. The suit might have been a dark grey, I may mention, and the waiter really couldn't call the gentleman's face to mind, because there were a lot of people dining that night. You can't say we policemen get much help! Look here, I must be going! Many thanks for by far the most pleasant hours I've spent on this case yet.'

Giles laughed. 'Well, I hope they'll prove to have been profitable ones.'

'You never know,' said Hannasyde. 'It's always good to get another point of view.'

Mr Charles Carrington, hearing something of the visit next day from his son, paused in his search for the pencil he distinctly remembered placing on his desk not five minutes earlier, and said: 'Absurd! You can't run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, or if you can you shouldn't. An Eversharp pencil - you must have seen me use it hundreds of times! Use your eyes, Giles! Use your eyes! So Superintendent Hannasyde doesn't know what to make of those Vereker brats! Now I come to think of it the boy baffled me too. More in him than I thought. God bless my soul, a pencil can't walk away!'

Kenneth, getting wind of Hannasyde's visit, loudly endorsed his uncle's verdict, adding a rider to the effect that if there was any double-crossing going on he should immediately change his solicitor. When Giles gave every evidence of regarding such a happening in the light of a Utopian dream, he forgot his original complaint in pointing out his own virtues as a client. He was in one of his more incalculable moods at the time, and his cousin's somewhat unwise rejoinder that the vaunted virtues had escaped his notice provoked him to give a trenchant resume of his own case. He walked up and down the studio, with his eyes very bright, and with what Antonia called his elf-smile on his lips, and held his cousin partly in dismay, partly in admiration, of the ingenuity with which he postulated various fantastic ways in which he might, had he been feeling like it at the time, have murdered his half-brother.

With the Superintendent's remarks in mind, Giles demanded a reason for putting Arnold Vereker's body in the stocks. The result of this, though entertaining, was not helpful, for Kenneth threw himself into what he conceived to be the spirit of the inquiry with huge zest, and, abandoning the dramatisation of himself as the murderer, advanced a quantity of the most astonishing theories, not the least brilliant of which involved the reputation of the Vicar of Ashleigh Green, a gentleman entirely unknown to him.

Giles gave it up. There was nothing to be made of Kenneth, who, if he were indeed playing a dangerous game, obviously preferred (and Giles could only applaud his wisdom) to play it alone.

A more immediately pressing anxiety than the question of whether or not he was guilty of murder was, in the estimation of his entourage, the problem of how to induce him to attend Arnold Vereker's funeral. Exhaustive, and at times heated, discussions, into which tiles was dragged, raged throughout the evening, Murgatroyd, Violet, Leslie and Giles being banded upon the side of respectability, against Kenneth, who was supported by his sister, and his own quite irrefutably logical arguments. The contest was won eventually by Violet, who, though lacking Murgatroyd's stern piety, was quite as insistent that Kenneth must at least appear to accord a proper respect to the dead. Finding that he was unmoved by argument or entreaty, she got up in a cold anger that was only partly feigned, and signified her intention of departing without permitting him to kiss her, or even touch her hand. Some spark of wrath kindled in his eyes, but was quenched by the closing of the door behind her. He hurried after her; what passed between them in the hall the others had no means of knowing; but in a few moments they came back together, Kenneth meekly bound by his word to attend the funeral, and Violet as charming and as sweet-tempered as she had been angry before.

'If Kenneth marries that young woman he won't be able to call his soul his own,' Giles remarked later to Antonia at the door of the flat.

'I know; it's sickening,' she agreed. 'He isn't really in love with her, either. He's in love with what she looks like.'

'Which reminds me,' said Giles. 'What has become of your intended?'

'I don't know, but I'm beginning to be afraid he's going to jilt me,' replied Antonia, with undiminished cheerfulness.

This theory, however, proved to be incorrect, for Mesurier attended the funeral the following afternoon, and returned with Kenneth to the flat afterwards. He had recovered his poise, and nothing could have been more graceful than his apology for having left Antonia in anger when they had last met. He apparently considered that his action in seeking out Superintendent Hannasyde at Scotland Yard with the revised version of his story exempted him from any future inquiry, but Kenneth did what he could to disillusion him on this point, and succeeded so well that within two days of being reconciled to his fiancée, Rudolph's nerves began to show signs of fraying, and he exclaimed, in exasperation at the Verekers' absorption in other and more everyday matters: 'I don't know how you two can go on as though nothing had happened, or was likely to happen!'

'What is likely to happen?' inquired Antonia, looking up from a collection of guide-books and railway timetables. 'We could quite well go to Sweden, Ken. I've worked it all out.'