Fen Country (19 page)

Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, found Ann Cargill waiting for him in his rooms in college when he returned there from dinner at the George on a certain bitter February evening.

She was a quiet, good-looking girl, the most pleasant, if not the brightest, of the few undergraduates to whom he gave private tuition.

“Nice to see you back,” he said. For he knew that Ann’s father had recently died, and that she had been given leave of absence for the first few weeks of term in order to cope with the situation and its aftermath.

“It’s not about work, I’m afraid,” she confessed. “Not altogether, I mean. I—I was wondering if you could help me over something—something personal.”

“Surely your moral tutor—” Fen began, and then suddenly remembered who Ann’s moral tutor was. “No,” he said. “No, of course not… Wait while I get us some drinks, and then you can tell me all about it.”

“I’m probably being several softs of a fool,” said Ann, as soon as they were settled with glasses in their hands. “But here goes, anyway… I don’t know if you know anything about my family, but my mother died years ago. I’m an only child, and my father—well, the important thing about him, for the moment, is that he had a passion for jewels.

“Jewels weren’t his business. They were his hobby. And two or three months ago he sank an enormous amount of money—about three-quarters of his capital, I should think—into buying a single diamond that he’d set his heart on, a huge thing, quite flawless.

“Well, now, at the beginning of this year Daddy shut up our house at Abingdon—I live on my own in the vacs, you see, in a flat in Town; he liked me to do that—and flew out to Australia on business. He didn’t take the diamond with him. It was left in the house—”

Fen lifted his eyebrows.

“Ah, yes, but the point is, it was really quite as safe there as it would have been in the bank. At the time he started collecting jewels Daddy had his study made as near burglar-proof as money could buy; and there was only one set of keys to the door and the safe; and when he went to Australia he left those with Mr. Spottiswoode, his solicitor.”

Ann took a deep breath. “And then he—he was killed. In a street accident in Sydney… I—I went down to Abingdon after the wire came, and wandered about there a bit. Remembering. That was when I saw Mr. Sponiswoode, the solicitor, driving away from the house.

“I don’t think he saw me. I called after him, but he didn’t stop. And, of course, being Daddy’s solicitor, he had a perfect right to be there. But I always hated Mr. Spottiswoode…”

Ann wriggled in her chair. “And I’m pretty sure,’ she added, “that he was a crook.”

After a brief pause “I’ve no proof of that,” she went on. “And you don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to. I only mentioned it because it’s one of the reasons why I’ve come to you. Mr. Spottiswoode—”

“You say he ‘was’ a crook.”

“Yes, that’s the next thing. Mr. Spottiswoode’s dead, you see. He died three weeks ago, very soon after I saw him at Abingdon; quite suddenly of a heart attack. And at that stage he hadn’t yet got what they call a grant of probate of Daddy’s will.

“So that what’s happened since, is that my Uncle Harry, who’s now my legal guardian, has been made administrator of the estate on my behalf. In other words, Mr. Spottiswoode
did
have the keys to Daddy’s study, and Uncle Harry has them
now
.

“And is Uncle Harry a crook too?”

Ann wriggled still more. “I know it must sound as if I’ve got some hellish great neurosis, persecution mania or something, but—well, yes, frankly, I think he is. Only not the same kind as Mr. Spottiswoode. Uncle Harry’s the rather nice, inefficient, sentimental sort of crook who always gets caught sooner or later.”

“In which case we must hope that it’s he who has stolen your father’s diamond, and not Mr. Spottiswoode,” said Fen briskly. “I take it that theft is what you have in mind?”

“It’s crazy, I know, and we shall probably find the diamond in the safe where Daddy put it. But—look, Professor Fen: Uncle Harry’s meeting me at the house tomorrow morning to unlock the study and—and go through its contents. He’s been in America up to five days ago, so there hasn’t been a chance before. lf I could iust have someone with me…”

And Fen nodded. “I’ll come,” he said. For he had known Ann Cargill long enough to be aware that, however erratic her views on
Beowulf
or Dryden, she was nobody’s fool.

Uncle Harry proved to be a big, florid, amiable man dressed in checks with a black arm-band. And like his niece, he appeared at the Abingdon house next morning with a companion.

“Humbleby!” said Fen, pleased; and: “Well, well,” said Detective Inspector Humbleby of Scotland Yard as he shook Fen’s hand: “And what are you doing here?”

“Looking for a diamond,” said Fen. “Miss Cargill is a pupil of mine… Ann, meet the inspector.”

“We’re all looking for a dirmond,” said Uncle Harry. “And from what the inspector told me yesterday, there’s a damn good chance we shan’t find one.”

“Twenty thousand pounds,” said Humbleby, “is somewhere about what the average high-class fence would give for a diamond like your father’s, Miss Cargill. And £20,000 is what Mr. Spottiswoode’s executors found hidden in his house after his death. Being honest men, they came and had a word with us about it at the Yard. We’ve been working on the case for a fortnight now, and we still don’t know where that money came from. Nothing legitimate, you can be sure…

“But there was never any secret about your father’s buying that jewel; and his death was reported in the papers; and his name was on the list of Mr. Spottiswoode’s clients. So of course we started putting two and two together, and yesterday I had a word with your uncle about it, and he very kindly invited me down here, subject to your having no objection—

“Of course not,” said Ann.

“So that now,’ Humbleby concluded, “we shall see what we shall see.”

A woman, Ann explained, had been coming in once or twice a week to keep the house dusted, but her ministrations had not, of course, included the study, which would undoubtedly be in a mess. And so it turned out.

When Uncle Harry had manipulated the elaborate locks, thrown the study door open and switched on the lights (for the room was in darkness, thanks to the solid steel shutters on the windows), they saw that dust—five weeks’ dust—lay undisturbed on the furniture, the bare polished boards of the floor, everything.

Also it was cold in there: while Uncle Harry fumbled with the safe, Ann turned on the big electric fire and stood warming her hands at it. presently, Fen, who had been peering at the marks left by their feet on the dusty floor, lifted his head and sniffed.

“Is there something burning?” heaesked suspiciously.

They all sniffed. “I can’t smell anything,’ said Ann. “Nor me,” said Humbleby. “Nor me,” said Uncle Harry, pausing in his labor: and added ruefully, “But then, it’s years since I was able to smell anything.”

Fen shrugged. “My mistake,” he said. Though as a matter of fact it had not been a mistake, since he himself had not been able to smell anything burning, either. His eye caught Humbleby’s. “Dog,” he confided solemnly, “in the night-time.”

Humbleby scowled. “Dog in the—”

“Eureka!” said Uncle Harry inaccurately: actually, all he had contrived to do so far was to get the safe door open. But a moment later he emerged from it holding a handsome jewel-box. “Would this be—”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Ann. “Open it, please.” And Uncle Harry opened it. And it was empty.

“It couldn’t,” Humbleby suggested, “be somewhere else?”

“No.” Ann shook her head decisively. “I was with my father just before he left, and that was where he put it.”

Uncle Harry grunted. “Anyway, there’s your explanation of Spottiswoode’s £20,000.”

But Fen apparently did not agree. “No,” he said. “Insufflator.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Insufflator. For example, one of those rubber-bulb things barbers use for blowing powder on to your chin. And dust, as such, isn’t really very hard to come by. It would take a little time, and a little care, but I’m willing to bet that given 24 hours you could redust the entire room.”

An ugly gleam had appeared in Uncle Harry’s eye. “Just what,” he enunciated slowly, “are you suggesting?”

“I was suggesting a likely means for you to have used to cover up your traces after stealing the diamond. You stole it last night, I suppose, after Humbleby’s account of Spottiswoode’s hoard—which I should guess is probably blackmail money accumulated over a good many years—had suggested to you how you could disperse the blame. As to why Spottiswoode didn’t forestall you—well, it may simply be that he didn’t know of any means of disposing of such a distinctive stone.”

“The man’s mad,” said Uncle Harry, with conviction. “Now look, sir: granted I
could
have stolen the diamond and then covered my traces with all this—this insufflator rubbish, whar the devil makes you think I actually
did?
Where’s your evidence, man, your proof?”

“The dog in the Sherlock Holmes story,” said Fen, “did nothing in the night-time. And that was the curious incident.”

“Dog?”

“Like this electric fire, here,” Fen explained. “No smell of burning, you recall, when it was first switched on. But there
ought
to have been a smell of burning if the fire had been accumulating dust since (at the latest) Spottiswoode’s death three weeks ago. Ask any housewife. Ergo, the fire had been very recently used…

“And I’m afraid, Mr. Cargill, that that means you.”

“Blackmailers?” Detective Inspector Humbleby finished his coffee and began groping in his pocket for a cheroot.

“Well, yes, one does of course come across them from time to time. And although you may be surprised to hear this, in my experience they’re generally rather nicer than any other kind of crook.

“Writers of fiction get very heated and indignant about blackmail. Yet, by and large, it’s always seemed to me personally to be one of the least odious and most socially useful of crimes. To be a blackmailer’s victim you do almost invariably have to be
guilty
of something or other. I mean that, unlike coshing and larceny and embezzlement and so forth, blackmail has a—a punitive function—

“Naturally, I’m not claiming that it ought to be encouraged.” Having at last disinterred his cheroot, Humbleby proceeded to light it. “At the Yard, we have plenty of occasions for thinking that we’re being deprived of evidence against a suspect in order that someone else may use it for private profit.

“On the other hand, a blackmailer can
acquire
such evidence more easily than we can—not having Judges’ Rules to hamper him—and like Socrates in the syllogism, he’s mortal. The death of a known blackmailer is a great event for us, I can tell you. It’s astonishing the number of ‘Unsolved’ files that can be tidied up by a quick run through the deceased’s papers. Sometimes even murders—Saul Colonna, for instance; we’d never have hanged him if a blackmailer hadn’t ferreted out an incriminating letter and then got himself run over by a bus.”

“Two Armagnacs, please,” Gervase Fen said to the club waiter. “Colonna? The name’s vaguely familiar, but I can’t remember any details.”

“It was interesting,” said Humbleby, “because the incriminating letter didn’t on the surface
look
incriminating at all… There were these two brothers, you see, Americans, Saul and Harry Colonna. They came over here—their first visit to England—early in April of 1951, Saul to work in the office of the London correspondent of a Chicago paper, Harry to write a novel.

“New country—fresh beginning. But they’d hardly had a chance to unpack before Harry succumbed at long last to the cumulative effects of his daily bottle of bourbon. With the result that
his
first few weeks among the Limeys were spent at a sanatorium in South Wales—Carmarthenshire, to be exact: no alcohol, no tobacco, lots of milk to drink, regular brisk walks in the surrounding countryside—you know the sort of thing.

“Harry didn’t like that very much. His brisk walks tended to be in the direction of pubs. But at the same time he did acquire an awe, amounting almost to positive fear, of the formidable old doctor who ran the place. So that when at last he decided that he couldn’t stand the régime any longer. he felt constrained to arrange for a rather more than ordinarily unobtrusive departure, such as wouldn’t involve him in having to face a lot of reproaches for his failure to stay the course. Quite simply, abandoning his belongings, he went out for one of his walks and failed to return.

“That was on the afternoon of 7 May. About midday next day, both brothers arrived by car at Brixham in Devon, where they took rooms at the Bolton Hotel; for after only a month’s journalism Saul had been sacked, and so had been free to respond to Harry’s SOS from the sanatorium, and to assist in his flight. Once in Brixham, they proceeded to enjoy themselves. Among other things, they bought, actually
bought
, a small Bermudan sloop. And did quite a lot of sailing in it…

“Then, on the evening of the 12th, having ignored numerous warnings from the weather-wise, they got themselves swept out into midchannel by a gale. And in the turmoil of wind and darkness Harry was knocked overboard by the boom and drowned.

“That, at least, was Saul’s account of the matter, when the Dartmouth lifeboat picked him up; and it was a credible story enough. Even the subsequent discovery that Harry’s life had been well insured, and that Saul was the beneficiary, failed to shake it. If a crime
had
been committed, it was undetectable, the police found—with the inevitable result that in due course the insurance companies had to pay up. As to the body, what was left of that came up in a trawl about the beginning of September, near Start Point. By then there wasn’t much chance of diagnosing the cause of death. But the teeth identified it as Harry Colonna beyond any reasonable doubt…

“So that without Laking, that would have been the end of that.

“Barney Laking was clever. He was a professional, of course. Though he’d been inside several times, he always went straight back to blackmail as soon as he’d done his term… So you can imagine that when a number 88 ran over him, in Whitehall, we lost no time at all getting to his house. And that was where, among a lot of other very interesting stuff, we found the letter—
the
letter.