Penhallow (34 page)

‘Frank!’ ejaculated the Major. ‘I think I’ve seen the young fellow once or twice: generally rather well liked about here.’

‘Well, I rather liked him myself,’ admitted Logan, caressing his chin. ‘Compared with the rest of them, that is. I’d say he isn’t the sort to use poison. Violent young chap: half-killed his twin brother when I was questioning him this morning. It took Plymstock and me quite a time to drag ‘em apart. That was because his brother, as soon as he saw I was taking notice of this Loveday Trewithian business, said he hadn’t a doubt she’d poisoned the old man. Seems Mr Bart told him how the old man had said he’d get Trellick Farm when he died, whatever he did. As I see it, sir, he’s mad with jealousy — you do get that sort of thing in twins, I believe —— and nothing would please him more than to get Loveday Trewithian removed out of his brother’s path. Hates her like the devil. Told me the old man knew very well the thing would die a natural death, given time enough, and that the girl knew it too, which was why she didn’t dare risk waiting for Penhallow to die in his own good time. I daresay he’d have told me a lot more, but that was where Mr Bart walked into the room. Before I properly knew what was happening, there was one chair broken, and a table with a lot of knickknacks on it sent flying, and this Conrad Penhallow flat on his back, with his brother on top of him, trying to choke the life out of him. However, they’re much of a size, and Mr Bart didn’t have it all his own way by any means. It took us quite a time to get them separated.’

‘You take it very calmly!’ exclaimed the Major.

The Inspector’s rather grave face relaxed into a smile. ‘Well, sir, that’s the way everyone else took it. The noise they made brought the old lady — Mr Penhallow’s sister, that is — into the room, with Mr Ingram and his good lady, and all the old lady had to say about it was, "Now, boys!" while Mr Ingram just told them to shut up. Seemed to me there wasn’t anything what you might call out of the way about that little scrap, Mr Bart being given to using his hands a bit quicker than most people.’

‘Good lord! Do you mean to say he’s in the habit of attacking people in that homicidal fashion?’

‘Well, he threw Jimmy the Bastard down the backstairs not so long ago,’ replied Logan. ‘No one seemed to think much of it, and I’m bound to say that kind of high-spirited behaviour doesn’t go with poisoning: not to my mind it doesn’t.’

‘I never heard of such a thing in my life! He sounds to be a most dangerous young ruffian! What about the other two you mentioned? Are they cut after the same pattern?’

‘No, sir, not by a long chalk. Between you and me, I don’t know when I’ve seen a nastier bit of work than Aubrey Penhallow. He’s one of these writing-blokes, who wears his hair long, and goes about in fancy clothes, and smells of scent.’

‘God bless my soul!’ said the Major, properly disgusted.

‘Yes, sir. He thinks he’s got to be funny, too, and I’m not fond of humorists. Not his kind. Regular smart alec. By what I could see of it, he spends his time annoying the rest of them.’

‘In face of what you’ve just told me, I wonder he dares!’

‘Yes, so did I, but he very kindly explained to me when a couple of his brothers looked like getting rough with him that they’d like to kick him into the middle of next week, but didn’t dare to, on account of his knowing Jujitsu."

‘A pleasant lot, upon my word!’

‘Well, they’re not the kind of people you meet ever day of the week, sir, and that’s a fact. But this Aubrey! Well, he doesn’t care who gets pinched for the murder as long as he doesn’t.’

‘Is he implicated in any way?’

‘That’s what I haven’t yet satisfied myself about, sir. Mr Eugene took care to let me know that Mr Penhallow had suddenly taken it into his head to keep young Aubrey at home, and that that wouldn’t suit Aubrey’s book at all. I gather he’s in debt, but I haven’t yet discovered to what extent, nor how serious this living at home business was. I wouldn’t put it beyond him to slip a drop of poison into a man’s drink, but whether he’d poison his father is another matter. You can’t spend long in that house, sir, without coming up against the feeling that however much they quarrelled with the old man, and whatever way he treated them, they all of them, barring, perhaps, Mr Raymond, were proud of him, and even rather liked him. Young Bart, and Mrs Hastings, the old lady, and Mrs Penhallow are definitely upset at him dying. Well, I should think they’d miss him, I must say.’

‘A darned good miss, I should imagine! Is that the full list of the people you suspect?’

‘No, sir, I’ve got one more suspect, and one man I’ll have to look into this afternoon. There’s Mrs Penhallow’s son, this one they call Clay. Nervous boy, scared stiff of me, and trying to carry the whole thing off in a breezy kind of way. Seems his father had just taken him away from college, and meant to article him to his cousin — Hastings, of Blazey, Blazey, Hastings, and Wembury. I had all this from Eugene and Conrad and Aubrey. Apparently Master Clay never has got on with the rest of the family — well, it isn’t likely he would: he’s the soft kind, and I should think a chap like that would have a pretty thin time in that household. He’s been going about talking in a wild way about how he’d go mad if he had to live at Trevellin for the rest of his life, and how he’d sooner be anything than a solicitor. What’s more, he tried to hatch up some sort of an alibi for himself, which didn’t exist; and altogether he struck me as a chap worth watching.’

‘H’m! And the other man you mentioned?’

‘Well, I don’t know that there’s much in that, sir, but I’ll have to investigate it. Miss Penhallow — who seems to have got an idea that it’s she and not me who’s conducting this case ,tells me that a Mr Phineas Ottery, who was the first Mrs Penhallow’s brother, went up to Trevellin to call on Mr Penhallow yesterday afternoon and insisted on seeing him privately.’

‘I don’t see much in that.’

‘No, sir, no more did I, but it’s obvious the Penhallows do. They all say it was highly unusual of Mr Ottery to come to Trevellin uninvited, and there isn’t one of them that has any idea of what he could possibly have wanted with their father. None of them saw him, except the old man himself, and they all seem to think there was something fishy about the visit. All except Mr Raymond, that is. When I spoke to him about it, he said there way nothing odd in it at all, and that his father probably had a bit of business with him. I shouldn’t think much of it if it weren’t for the fact that none of the servants showed Mr Ottery out of the house, and no one can tell mc whether Mr Penhallow went with him to the door or not.’

‘Penhallow? I thought he was bedridden, or next door to it?"

‘No, not entirely he wasn’t, sir. He had a wheeled chair which he used whenever he got out of that extraordinary bed of his. He was up yesterday. Got up after lunch, and didn’t go back to bed until late in the evening. That’s the factor that makes this case a bit of a teaser. By what I could get out of Martha Bugle — she’s the old woman that used to be nurse to the sons, and has looked after Penhallow ever since he first took ill — the room was turned out during the afternoon, but finished, and left ready for Penhallow, by five o’clock. Except for this Jimmy we’re hunting for going in just before dinner to make up the fire, and draw the curtains, which they say he did, I can’t discover that anyone went near the room until Penhallow was put to bed again, which would have been somewhere around eleven o’clock at night. In fact, sir, from five till eleven the coast was perfectly clear for anyone to go into the room, and do what they liked there. As far as the family’s concerned, you can rule out the dinner-hour, when they were all present and correct, but after dinner two of them left the room where the rest were sitting: Mr Bart, who says he was with Loveday Trewithian, and is borne out by her and by his twin brother, who had to fetch him to help get their father to bed; and Master Clay, who says he spent the evening knocking the balls about in the billiard-room. But in between five and eight, when dinner was served, there was nothing to stop any of them tampering with the old man’s whisky, which was kept in a cupboard in his room, and there’s not one of them has an alibi for the whole of that period. Several can prove they were somewhere else for part of the time, but that’s all. The room’s right at the end of the house: you can get to it down a broad sort of passage on the ground floor, or through a garden-door leading into the small hall it opens into, or by way of a staircase leading down into that hall. It’s at the opposite end of the house to the kitchen premises, and the chances are that at that hour of the day you wouldn’t stand much chance of meeting anyone in that wing.’

The Major’s face began to lengthen. ‘This doesn’t sound promising, Inspector.’

‘No, sir, it isn’t promising, and that’s a fact. Talk about murder made easy! Why, even the butler played into the murderer’s hands, by having made it a rule never to leave more than a couple of drinks in the whisky decanter in his master’s room! And as for fingerprints, we can rule them out, because the only ones on the decanter that aren’t hopelessly confused are Penhallow’s own; and the only one on the veronal phial belongs to the housesmaid who admits she moved all the bottles when she dusted the shelf this morning.’

‘It boils down to this, that you’ve got nothing to go on then, unless something unexpected transpires?’

‘That’s about the size of it, sir. Still, we’ve not caught Jimmy the Bastard yet, and you never know how people will give themselves away once they get a bit scared. I think I’ve rattled one or two of them already, and I don’t despair, not by any means. After all, they don’t know how little I’ve got to go on.’

The Major shook his head. ‘It looks nasty to me, very nasty, Logan.’

‘You’re right, sir: it is nasty, or I’m much mistaken. I got the feeling I’m only on the fringe of the truth of all that’s been happening in that house lately. Every now and then it came over me that I was standing on the edge of a regular volcano. And I’m not what you’d call fanciful, either. Plymstock felt it too. He passed the remark to me as we came away that it wouldn’t surprise him if something was to break at any moment.’

‘Well, we’ll hope it may,’ said the Major.

‘Yes,’ agreed Logan slowly. ‘We’ll hope it may, sir.’

Chapter Nineteen

Inspector Logan, although he might suspect that his investigations had alarmed some members of the household, had as yet little conception of the extent of the turmoil into which Penhallow’s death, coupled with his own activities, had plunged Trevellin. Faith, watching with growing terror the unforeseen results of her crime, felt as though she had loosed a relentless tide which would soon engulf them all. When the Inspector’s suspicions seemed to draw first this innocent person into his net, and then that, her horror caused the danger in which she herself stood to occupy a secondary place in her mind. It had never occurred to her that any suspicion at all would attach itself to Penhallow’s death; far less that the death of the one person from whom every ill had seemed to her to emanate, should, instead of solving all difficulties, have been as a match set to a train of gunpowder.

Bart’s open avowal of his intention to marry Loveday had precipitated a storm whose repercussions were felt even in the kitchen, where Reuben, thunderstruck at a development quite unsuspected by him, solemnly cast off his niece; and Martha, shocked out of her abandonment to grief, declared that in her day no girl who had caught the Master’s fancy would so far have forgotten her station as to dream of marriage. ‘Look at me, you malkin!’ Martha said. ‘I did things decent! I knawed my place! I never prated to un of marriage, nor there wasn’t no one troubled by the bit of pleasure I had with un!’

Sybilla, having loudly congratulated herself on being no blood relation of such a shameless hussy, penetrated into the front of the house, and confronted Raymond there, laying it upon him that he owed it to the family, to poor deluded Bart, and to the blessed memory of his father to put a swift end to so unnatural alliance. When he told her impatiently that he had no control over Bart’s actions, she sought out Bart himself; reminded him of the innumerable occasions when she had spanked him across her knee, expressed her fervent desire to perform this office for him again, and would have favoured him with a most unflattering reading of Loveday’s character had he not first shouted her down, and then, when her shriller tones mastered his, slammed out of her presence.

Bart was at bay, only his sister supporting him in his resolve to marry Loveday. He, whose quick rages so soon blew over, had an uglier look in his eyes than Faith had ever seen there. His quarrel with Conrad was so bitter that all attempts at peace-making between them failed at the outset. The alliance which had weathered eves storm seemed to be broken past repair. When Bart had entered the room in time to hear Conrad casting the blame of Penhallow’s death on to Loveday, he had flung himself on to his twin with murder in his heart. It had taken all Logan’s and the Sergeant’s combined strength to hold him, when they had dragged him off Conrad’s throat; and such terrible words had been spoken then as would not easily be forgotten.

Clara shook her head sadly over it, and said that there seemed to be no end to the troubles besetting the house.

‘"They’ll make it up,’ Faith said uneasily. ‘They always make it up, Clara!’

‘I never knew them quarrel like that before,’ Clara replied. ‘You see, my dear, they aren’t easy to handle, the Penhallows, and there’s no one to hold them now Adam’s gone. I never knew anyone to drive a difficult team better than he did. Well, he’s dropped the reins, poor soul, and it’s a runaway team now, that’ll very likely overturn us all into the ditch.’

‘Raymond — Raymond will take his father’s place!’

‘Raymond doesn’t want to take his father’s place, my clear. Raymond’s a skirter, just as Char said. He wants to be rid of them, that’s all.’

‘Clara,’ Faith said desperately, ‘wouldn’t it be better for them to be free? To make their own lives?’

‘It’s no good asking’ me, my dear. I’m a Penhallow, and it’s a bitter day to me that sees the family breakin’ up. I don’t say they haven’t had their quarrels, but they’ve always stuck together.’

When the family met at lunch-time, an uneasy tension seemed to hang over them. Bart sat silent, his eyes lowered and his brow thunderous; Conrad’s sore spirit found relief in the utterance of bitter jibes at the expense of anyone who offered him the smallest opening. This had the effect of arousing Eugene’s animosity, and led to several passages of arms between them. Eugene, aggrieved by the disturbance to his peace, sensitive to any fancied aspersion cast at Vivian, and deeply chagrined by the news, clumsily conveyed to him by Clifford, that his portion amounted only to four thousand pounds, was in a querulous, spiteful mood ready to pick a quarrel with anyone. Vivian looked white and strained, and, choosing to read covert accusations into quite innocent remarks, had adopted a defiant attitude calculated to provoke hostilities. Clay afforded his brothers an opportunity of venting their feelings at his head by pointing out, with wearisome insistence, that it was absurd to suppose that he could have had anything to do with his father’s death. Charmian, ignoring the bickering and the sudden spurts of temper, held forth in an argumentative tone on the various aspects of Penhallow’s murder until Raymond, who until then had maintained his usual taciturnity, rounded on her, and bade her hold her tongue. As he enforced this command by bringing his fist down on the table with considerable force, all the glasses jumped, and Faith gave one of her nervous starts.

‘Naughty temper!’ said Aubrey. ‘Is it getting on your nerves, Ray dear? Personally, I adore listening to Char laying down the law, and telling us how the deed was done, because she’s almost certainly wrong, and I do like people to make fools of themselves, don’t you?’

‘You’re probably in a position to know!’ Raymond said.

‘I’m glad somebody has put that into words,’ observed Eugene unpleasantly.

‘Oh, how too dreadfully unkind of you!’ Aubrey said. ‘Oh, I do think you oughtn’t to have said that, Ray! After all, I am your little brother!’

‘One cannot help feeling that the Bastard’s disappearance was providential — with, or perhaps without three hundred pounds in cash,’ said Eugene.

Aubrey smiled sweetly upon him. ‘Oh, no, Eugene! No, really, I wouldn’t commit a murder for three hundred! So paltry!’

‘I maintain,’ struck in Charmian, ‘that there was something extremely fishy about Uncle Phin’s visit, and it ought to be investigated.’

Raymond turned towards her. ‘For God’s sake, can’t you shut up about that? Your views are of no possible interest or value to anyone! Uncle Phin had nothing whatsoever to do with Father’s death!’

‘How do you know?’ Conrad put in swiftly.

‘Oh, I was longing to ask that question!’ said Aubrey. ‘I didn’t quite like to, but Con’s so wonderfully uninhibited!’

‘Far be it from me to make groundless accusations,’ began Eugene.

‘Oh, shut up!’ Charmian interrupted.

‘No, do let him go on, Char!’ begged Aubrey. ‘Whenever anyone says far be it from him to do something it means he’s going to do it, and I should simply love to hear who it is Eugene’s going to accuse!’

‘All I wish to point out,’ said Eugene, ‘is that if we are to ask ourselves who stands to gain the most out of Father’s death there can be only one answer.’

‘But how beautifully put!’ Aubrey said admiringly. ‘You couldn’t call it actually offensive, could you?’

Raymond looked grimly at Eugene. ‘If you and your wife hadn’t sponged for years on Father, you’d have been a bigger gainer today than you are! You can put that in your pipe and smoke it!’

This remark made Vivian flare up at once. She demanded to be told in what way Eugene could be considered to be any more to blame for the wasting of Penhallow’s fortune than any of his brothers; and added that for her part she had always hated Penhallow, and would rather have gone out charring than have subsisted on his generosity.

‘Let me advise you,’ said Charmian, ‘not to be quite lavish with your abuse of Father, my good young woman! Your position is not so unassailable that you can afford to make it worse.’

‘I know very well you think I poisoned your father, any way I don’t care what you think, any of you!’ declared Vivian, shaking with indignation. ‘If I’d thought of it, I would have!’

‘Now, that’ll do!’ said Clara. ‘It was Jimmy killed Adam, whatever Char and Ray may say, and so we shall find, you mark my words!’

By tea-time it had been established that Penhallon had died from swallowing an overdose of veronal; and Inspector Logan had learnt from Phineas Ottery that he had visited Trevellin to consult Penhallow on a small matter of business connected with house-property. ‘My nephew, Raymond Penhallow, will bear me out that my errand to Mr Penhallow was of the most trifling nature,’ had said Phineas, with a wave of his hand. ‘He was present during a considerable part of the interview, so you may see for yourself, Inspector, that there was nothing particularly secret about it. Merely, I did not wish to admit the whole family into my confidence.’

However plausible in itself, this explanation could not fail, coming as it did after Raymond’s assertion that he had not seen his uncle, to arouse the Inspector’s suspicions. He said nothing about this to Phineas, but returned to Trevellin, to request an explanation of Raymond.

Raymond reddened angrily, and said something under his breath. Mentally he cursed Phineas for dragging him into an episode which neither of them could satisfactorily explain; and if he had not been afraid that panic might betray his uncle into making some admission that would lead the police to discover the truth, he would flatly have denied his statement. As it was, he took time to think out his answer, and said at last: ‘Very well, then, I did see him. I know nothing about his business with my father, however.’

‘Why did you inform me that you had not seen him, sir?’

Raymond shrugged. ‘Did I say that? I don’t remember: I probably wasn’t attending to you very closely. To all intents and purposes, I didn’t see my uncle, since I know nothing of what his business may have been with my father, which is what you want to find out, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t be satisfied with that answer, Mr Penhallow.’

‘Then perhaps you’ll be satisfied with this instead!’ Raymond retorted. ‘You’re chasing a red herring! My father’s dealings with my uncle were entirely trivial, and can have nothing whatsoever to do with this case!’

As this brief interchange took place in the morning room, with the door communicating with the Yellow drawing-room, where Eugene was reclining upon a sofa, standing ajar, it was not surprising that by tea-time the news that Raymond, for reasons best known to himself, had been giving false information to the police should have spread round the family. Curiosity of the most morbid nature was immediately roused, and when a hired car presently brought both Phineas and Delia to Trevellin, it was generally felt that there was more Charmian’s theory than had at first been supposed. To Faith, it appeared so fantastic that the Otterys should be caught up in the meshes of the appalling net which she had woven that she could almost have believed herself to be struggling in the toils of a nightmare.

Ostensibly, the Otterys had come to offer their condolences to the bereaved family, but although the scared look on Delia’s face, and the horror and dismay to be detected in Phineas’s manner, might ordinarily have been considered to be the natural results of hearing of an old friend’s murder, they were taken, under existing circumstances, to denote a personal concern in the affair, as intriguing as it was incomprehensible.