Hand in Glove (9 page)

My dear:

What can I say? Only that you have lost a devoted brother and I a very dear friend. I know so well, believe me so
very
well, what a grievous shock this has been to you and how bravely you will have taken it. If it is not an impertinence in an old fogy to do so, may I offer you these very simple lines written by my dear and
so Victorian
Duchess of Rampton? They are none the worse, I hope, for their unblushing sentimentality.

So must it be, dear heart, I’ll not repine,

For while I live the Memory is Mine.

I should like to think that we know each other well enough for you to believe me when I say that I hope you won’t dream of answering this all-too-inadequate attempt to tell you how sorry I am.

Yours sincerely,

Percival Pyke Period

“There you are,” said Superintendent Williams. “That’s the whole story and those are the local people involved. Or not involved, of course, as the case may be. Now, the way I looked at it was this. It was odds-on we’d have to call you people in anyway, so why muck about ourselves and let the case go cold on you? I don’t say we wouldn’t have liked to go it alone, but we’re too damned busy and a damn’ side too understaffed. So I rang the Yard as soon as it broke.”

“The procedure,” Alleyn said dryly, “is as welcome as it’s unusual. We couldn’t be more obliged, could we, Fox?”

“Very helpful and clearsighted, Super,” Inspector Fox agreed with great heartiness.

They were driving from the Little Codling constabulary to Green Lane. The time was ten o’clock. The village looked decorous and rather pretty in the spring sunshine. Miss Cartell’s Austrian maid was shaking mats in the garden. The postman was going his rounds. Mr. Period’s house, as far as it could be seen from the road, showed no signs of disturbance. At first sight, the only hint of there being anything unusual might have been given by a group of three labourers who stood near a crane truck at the corner, staring at their boots and talking to the driver. There was something guarded and uneasy in their manner. One of them looked angry.

A close observer might have noticed that, in several houses round the Green, people who stood back from their windows were watching the car as it approached the lane. The postman checked his bicycle and, with one foot on the ground, also watched. George Copper stood in the path outside his corner garage and was joined by two women, a youth and three small boys. They, too, were watching. The women’s hands moved furtively across their mouths.

“The village has got on to it,” Superintendent Williams observed. “Here we are, Alleyn.”

They turned into the lane. It had been cordoned off with a rope slung between iron stakes and a Detour sign in front. The ditch began at some distance from the corner, and was defined on its inner border by neatly heaped-up soil and on its outer by a row of heavy drainpipes laid end to end. There was a gap in this row opposite Mr. Period’s gate, and a single drainpipe on the far side of the ditch.

One of the workmen made an opening for the car and it pulled up beyond the truck.

Two hundred yards away, by the side gate into Mr. Period’s garden, Sergeant Noakes waited selfconsciously by a disorderly collection of planks, tools, a twelve-foot steel ladder, and an all-too-eloquent shape covered by a tarpaulin. Nearby, on the far side of the lane, was another car. Its occupant got out and advanced: a middle-aged, formally dressed man with well-kept hands.

“Dr. Elkington, our divisional surgeon,” Superintendent Williams said, and completed the introductions.

“Unpleasant business, this,” Dr. Elkington said. “Very unpleasant. I don’t know what you’re going to think.”

“Shall we have a look?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Bear a hand, Sergeant,” said Williams. “Keep it screened from the Green, we’d better.”

“I’ll move my car across,” Dr. Elkington said. He did so. Noakes and Williams released the tarpaulin and presently raised it. Alleyn being particular in such details, he and Fox took their hats off and so, after a surprised glance at them, did Dr. Elkington.

The body of Mr. Cartell lay on its back, not tidily. It was wet with mud and water, and marked about the head with blood. The face, shrouded in a dark and glistening mask, was unrecognizable, the thin hair clotted and dirty. It was clothed in a dressing gown, shirt and trousers, all of them stained and disordered. On the feet were black socks and red leather slippers. One hand was clenched about a clod of earth. Thin trickles of muddy water had oozed between the fingers.

Alleyn knelt beside it without touching it. He looked incongruous. Not his hands, his head, nor, for that matter, his clothes, suggested his occupation. If Mr. Cartell had been a rare edition of any subject other than death, his body would have seemed a more appropriate object for Alleyn’s fastidious consideration.

After a pause he replaced the tarpaulin, rose, and, keeping on the hard surface of the lane, stared down into the drain.

“Well,” he said. “And he was found below, there?” His very deep, clear voice struck loudly across the silence.

“Straight down from where they’ve put him. On his face. With the drainpipe on top of him.”

“Yes. I see.”

“They thought he might be alive. So they got him out of it. They had a job,” said Superintendent Williams. “Had to use the gear on the truck.”

“He was like this when you saw him, Dr. Elkington?”

“Yes. There are multiple injuries to the skull. I haven’t made an extensive examination. My guess would be it’s just about held together by the scalp.”

“Can we have a word with the men?”

Noakes motioned them to come forward and they did so with every sign of reluctance. One, the tallest, carried a piece of rag and he wiped his hands on it continually, as if he had been doing so, unconsciously, for some time.

“Good morning,” Alleyn said. “You’ve had an unpleasant job on your hands.”

The tall man nodded. One of his mates said: “Terrible.”

“I want you, if you will, to tell me exactly what happened. When did you find him?”

Fox unobtrusively took out his notebook.

“When we come on the job. Eight o’clock or near after.”

“You saw him at once?”

“Not to say there and then, sir,” the tall man said. He was evidently the foreman. “We had a word or two. Nutting out the day’s work, like. Took off our coats. Further along, back there, we was. You can see where the truck’s parked. There.”

“Ah, yes. And then?”

“Then we moved up. And I see the planks are missing that we laid across the drain for a bridge. And one of the pipes gone. So I says: ‘What the hell’s all this? Who’s been mucking round with them planks and the pipe?’ That’s correct, isn’t it?” He appealed to the others.

“That’s right,” they said.

“It’s like I told you, Mr. Noakes. We all told you.”

“All right, Bill,” Williams said easily. “The Superintendent just wants to hear for himself.”

“If you don’t mind,” said Alleyn. “To get a clear idea, you know…It’s better at first hand.”

The foreman said: “It’s not all that pleasant, though, is it? And us chaps have got our responsibility to think of. We left the job like we ought to: everything in order. Planks set. Lamps lit. Everything safe. Now look!”

“Lamps? I saw some at the ends of the working. Was there one here?”

“A-course there was. To show the planks. That’s the next thing we notice. It’s gone. Matter of fact they’re all laying in the drain now.”

“So they are,” Alleyn said. “It’s a thumping great drain you’re digging here, by the way. What is it, a relief outfall sewer or something?”

This evidently made an impression. The foreman said that was exactly what it was and went into a professional exposition.

“She’s deep,” he said. “She’s as deep as you’ll come across anywhere. Fourteen-be-three she lays, and very nasty spoil to work, being wet and heavy. One in a thou’-fall. All right. Leaving an open job you take precautions. Lamp. Planks. Notice given. The lot. Which is what we done, and done careful and according.…And this is what we find. All right; we see something’s wrong. All right; so I says, ‘And where’s the bloody lamp?’ and I walk up to the edge and look down. And then I seen.”

“Exactly what?”

The foreman ground the rag between his hands.

“First go off,” he said, “I notice the pipe, laying down there with a lot of the spoil, and then I notice an electric torch — it’s there now.”

“It’s the deceased’s,” Williams said. “His man recognized it. I thought best to leave it there.”

“Good. And then?” Alleyn asked the foreman.

“Well, I noticed all this, like, and — it’s funny when you come to think of it — I’m just going to blow my top about this pipe, when I kind of realize I’ve been looking at something else. Sticking out, they was, at the end, half sunk in mud. His legs. It didn’t seem real. Like I said to the chaps: ‘Look, what’s that?’ Daft! Because I seen clear enough what it was.”

“I know.”

“So we get the truck and go down and clear the pipe and planks out of it. Had to use the crane. The planks are laying there now, where we left them. We slung the pipe up and off him and across to the far bank like. Then we seen more — all there was to see. Sunk, he was. Rammed down, you might say, be the weight. I knew, first go off, he was a goner. Well — the back of his head was enough. But—” The foreman glared resentfully at Noakes. “I don’t give a b— what anyone tells me, you can’t leave a thing like that. You got to see if there’s anything to be done.”

Noakes made a noncommittal noise and looked at Alleyn. “I think you do, you know, Sergeant,” Alleyn said, and the foreman, gratified, continued.

“So we got ’im out like you said, sir. It was a very nasty job, what with the depth and the wet and the state he was in. And once out — finish! Gone. No mistake about it. So we give the alarm in the house there and they take a fit of the horrors and fetch the doctor.”

“Good,” Alleyn said, “couldn’t be clearer. Now look here. You can see pretty well where he was lying although, of course, the impression has been trodden out a bit. Unavoidably. Now, the head was about there, I take it, so that he was not directly under the place where the planks had been laid, but at an angle to it. The feet beneath, the head out to the left. The left hand, now. Was it stretched out ahead of him? Like that? With the arm bent? Was the right arm extended — so?”

The foreman and his mates received this with grudging approval. One of the mates said: “Dead right, innit?” and the other: “Near enough.” The foreman blew a faint appreciative whistle.

“Well,” Alleyn said, “he’s clutching a clod of mud and you can see where the fingers dragged down the side of the ditch, can’t you? All right. Was one plan — how? Half under him or what?”

“That’s right, sir.”

Superintendent Williams said: “You can see where the planks were placed all right, before they fell. Clear as mud, and mud’s the word in this outfit. The ends near the gate were only just balanced on the edge. Look at the marks where they scraped down the side. Bound to give way as soon as he put his weight on them.”

The men broke into an angry expostulation. They’d never left them like that. They’d left them safe: overlapping the bank by a good six inches at each side; a firm bridge.

“Yes,” Alleyn said, “you can see that, Williams. There are the old marks. Trodden down but there, undoubtedly.”

“Thank you, sir,” said the foreman pointedly.

“Now then, let’s have a look at this lamp,” Alleyn suggested. Using their ladder, they retrieved it from its bed in the ditch, about two feet above the place where the body had lain. It was smothered in mud, but unbroken. The men pointed out an iron stanchion from which it had been suspended. This was uprooted and lying near the edge of the drain.

“The lamp was lit when you knocked off yesterday, was it?”

“Same as the others, and they was still burning, see, when we come on the job this morning.”

Alleyn murmured: “Look at this, Fox.” He turned the lamp towards Fox, who peered into it.

“Been turned right down,” he said under his breath. “Hard down.”

“Take charge of it, will you?”

Alleyn rejoined the men. “One more point,” he said. “How did you leave the drainpipe yesterday evening? Was it laid out in that gap, end to end with the others?”

“That’s right,” they said.

“Immediately above the place where the body was found?”

“That’s correct, sir.”

The foreman looked at his mates and then burst out again with some violence. “And if anyone tries to tell you it could be moved be accident you can tell him he ought to get his head read. Them pipes is main sewer pipes. It takes a crane to shift them, the way we’ve left them, and only a lever will roll them in. Now! Try it out on one of the others if you don’t believe me. Try it. That’s all.”

“I believe you very readily,” Alleyn said. “And I think that’s all we need bother you about at the moment. We’ll get out a written record of everything you’ve told us and ask you to call at the Station and look it over. If it’s in order, we’ll want you to sign it. If it’s not, you’ll no doubt help us by putting it right. You’ve acted very properly throughout, as I’m sure Mr. Williams and Sergeant Noakes will be the first to agree.”

“There you are,” Williams said. “No complaints.”

Huffily reassured, the men retired. “The first thing I’d like to know, Bob,” Alleyn said, “is what the devil’s been going on round this dump? Look at it. You’d think the whole village had been holding Mayday revels over it. Women in evening shoes, women in brogues. Men in heavy shoes, men in light shoes, and the whole damn’ mess overtrodden, of course, by working boots. Most of it went on before the event,
all
of it except the boots, I fancy, but what the hell was it about?”

“Some sort of daft party,” Williams said. “Cavorting through the village, they were. We’ve had complaints. It was up at the Big House: Baynesholme Manor.”

“One of Lady Bantling’s little frolics,” Dr. Elkington observed dryly. “It seems to have ended in a dogfight. I was called out at two-thirty to bandage her husband’s hand. They’d broken up by then.”

“Can you be talking about Désirée, Lady Bantling?”

“That’s the lady. The main object of the party was a treasure hunt, I understand,”

“A hideous curse on it,” Alleyn said heartily. “We’ve about as much hope of disentangling anything useful in the way of footprints as you’d get in a wine press. How long did it go on?”

“The noise abated before I went to bed,” Dr. Elkington said, “which was at twelve. As I’ve mentioned, I was dragged out again.”

“Well, at least we’ll be able to find out if the planks and lantern were untouched until then. In the meantime we’d better go through the hilarious farce of keeping our own boots off the area under investigation.…What’s this?…Wait a jiffy.”

He was standing near the end of one of the drainpipes. It lay across a slight depression that looked as if it had been scooped out. From this he drew a piece of blue letter paper. Williams looked over his shoulder. “Poytry,” Williams said disgustedly. The two lines had been amateurishly typed. Alleyn read them aloud.