The Longer Bodies (15 page)

Mystified, Miss Caddick did as he had requested. Her bedroom door was next to that of old Mrs Puddequet. Her bedroom window looked on to the east side of the house.

Thoughtful, but cheerful, the inspector again sought out Kost and confronted him with Miss Caddick's story. Unperturbed, the trainer admitted its truth.

‘And now,' said Bloxham, ‘you've given me trouble enough. Don't hide anything else. Why didn't you confess that you got out into the sunk garden at about one o'clock in the morning and chucked a brick at what you thought was Miss Caddick's window in order to attract her attention? Also, why didn't you come clean about these sleeping arrangements and own up to shoving young Brown-Jenkins down the stairs? Also, why didn't you say that in your search for Miss Caddick's door you lost your way about the house and barged into Miss Yeomond's room by mistake? And did
you
see or hear anything of the bathchair that night?'

Kost gazed at him in sheer amazement.

‘But why should I do these things, perhaps?' he demanded. ‘What, the first time in a fortnight that I sleep on a bed that
is
a bed, shall I arise myself at one o'clock in the morning and throw large stones at the window of my benefactress, that disinterested, philanthropic lady who is not beautiful—no! but who overflows with the kindness of a great heart, yes! Shall I alarm and disturb her with stones and wanderings, perhaps? Ask yourself! I spit at the ungratefulness of such an action.'

He did so with a wholehearted completeness which was in tune with his remarks.

‘Now, look here, Kost,' said the inspector, ‘you've told me so many lies that I'm not going to believe this one. I'm not saying anything more than that you were up, dressed, and acting the fool. I'm not accusing you of anything else, so do just come clean for once, and do yourself a bit of good. Clive Brown-Jenkins says he recognized you! So come on, now. Perhaps you were hungry, and wanted Miss Caddick to find you some food? Be advised by me; tell me the truth, or you'll be in a nasty hole.'

Kost gave a howl of fury.

‘Get away from here, you fool of a policeman, perhaps!' he yelled. ‘Or sure as sure I will throw you over my hut. As for Clive Brown-Jenkins, the sulky, lubberly boy, I will twist his neck for him, perhaps! Arrest me for the murder if you like, but for the ungrateful insulting of kind ladies, unbeautiful it is true, but good-hearted like which is never to be comprehended by the big, vulgar policeman, perhaps, no! Get away! Get away, I say!'

THE SCROUNGER PEERED
forth into the night. The night was a poet's night—‘chilly, but not dark'—luminous with stars. The mere, broad and placid under the sky, stretched away into a ghostly darkness of its own, and between the stems of the reeds it made queer little eerie sucking noises, at once attracting the attention and repelling the imagination of the solitary wanderer on its banks. The pollard willows, fantastic by day, almost unseen under the stars, wagged their ungainly branches in a sudden sharp gust of wind which blew from the southwest, and were as suddenly still again. A water vole swam across the broad stream to some secret opening into wonderland, and the Scrounger, knocking the dottle out of his long-finished pipe, spat in the water for luck and emerged from cover.

Apparently the omens were propitious, for, leaving the shelter of the pollard willow, behind whose gnarled, ancient, and goblin trunk he had been ensconced for the past quarter of an hour, he crept along the bank, dodging from tree to tree, until he was behind the high diving-boards at the upper end of the mere. Under his left arm he held a small wooden box. Inside the box something scratched and scrabbled. The Scrounger sat on the lowest step of the diving-board and wiped his brow with his right cuff.

‘Gawd!' said he, with immense feeling. He set the wooden box on the ground and apostrophized it in a whisper.

‘Now, what's to be bleedin' well done?
You
dunno!
I
dunno! I'll 'ave to plant yer where you'll grow nicest. That there Caddick! But 'ow's it goin' to be did? If only I knowed the time, it 'ud be some 'elp! Well, I gotter leave yer 'ere for the present, any'ow. So long! Be good till Dadda comes 'ome!'

He placed the box gently on the step above that on which he had been seated, then, very cautiously, he made his way, under cover of the fence, round the sports field and towards the kitchen garden. As he passed the hut in which Hilary Yeomond slept, someone coughed. The Scrounger melted almost into the fence in dismay, for the cough came from outside, not inside the hut. A drop of cold sweat ran down his body and made him shudder.

From the back of the hut a dark shape detached itself and took form as a human being. Silent as a shadow it trotted towards the mere. Joseph Herring waited while he counted his fingers seven times, then he broke from cover and darted in at the gate of the kitchen garden, which he had left open two hours earlier. In less than three minutes he had gained admission to the outer scullery and was painstakingly and methodically cleaning some yellowish clay and some dark-brown mud off his boots. Many times during his labours he stopped to listen, but all was silent save for the slight sound of water running away down the sink.

Joe finished grooming the left boot and placed it on the stone floor. Then an idea occurred to him. In his stockinged feet he stepped over to where the boots and shoes of the household had been placed in a neat row awaiting his early-morning attentions, and selected a pair of ladies' walking shoes. He picked them up, carried them back to the sink, and then, carefully removing with the blade of a clasp-knife as much of the damp and dirty residue as possible from his own right boot, he plastered it generously about the soles and toecaps of the shoes he had selected. Then he walked over to the windowsill with one of the shoes in his hand, pressed the sole of it firmly down on the clean white sill, and again in the middle of the stone floor, cleaned up all other marks on the floor, and replaced the shoes where he had found them.

He then smiled sweetly, and, boots in hand, admitted himself to the inner scullery, went through it into the kitchen, and so proceeded up the back staircase to bed. His alarm clock showed that the time was five minutes past one.

Joseph was soon between the sheets, where he slept the sleep of a little child.

Miss Caddick had had a disturbing evening. To begin with, Miss Celia Brown-Jenkins, a distressingly independent lady of immature years but fully fledged hardihood, had not appeared at dinner, and Miss Caddick, having been beguiled into a promise to conceal guilty knowledge of her whereabouts, had been compelled to sit through what seemed an interminable and tasteless meal listening to old Mrs Puddequet's diatribes on present-day young madams who flew into a pet over nothing and sulked in their bedrooms. Miss Caddick knew perfectly well that the erring Celia was not in the house at all, but had made clandestine escape from Great-aunt Puddequet's somewhat oppressive mansion into the brilliant life of one of London's dance halls, and would return anon. How much anon Miss Caddick could not determine.

Clive did not appear at dinner either, but Great-aunt Puddequet's convenient assumption that he had been out cycling all the afternoon and had lost his way home relieved the strain of what would have been an intolerable half-hour had the old lady realized the truth, which was that Clive, also tiring of country solitude, had slipped off on his bicycle to Southampton and was playing billiards with a sportsman named 'Arry in a haunt of vice not far removed from the docks. Clive's natural tastes ran neither to billiards nor to haunts of vice, but he felt that a complete change of surroundings and company would be beneficial to his nerves. Therefore, just as Great-aunt Puddequet was imbibing her bedtime barley water, the sportsman named 'Arry was in process of indicating to Clive Brown-Jenkins that seventeen-and-a-tanner was the amount the umpire declared owing, and Clive, in his pugnacious way, was thrusting forward his powerful jaw, and enquiring exactly where the umpire had learned his bookkeeping. The result of the argument was in the best traditions of the house, and Clive found himself, at ten twenty-four at night, sitting on the most squalid bit of pavement he had ever seen in his life, with an ear that felt like a pumpkin, an eye out of which he could see nothing, thirty-three miles of secondary roads between himself and Little Longer, and no idea of the best way out of town.

Luckily he had left his bicycle at a garage near by, and from the men there he received fairly concise directions as to the route he should follow to get out of town. Clive, furiously conscious of the spectacle he presented, thanked them shortly, mounted, and rode off.

Thirty-three miles is not a long distance, even to a moderate cyclist. To Clive it was a mere hour and a half's spin, given good roads and a fair knowledge of the way. This time, however, ill luck dogged him. He had barely left the lights of the town behind, when his own lighting set failed. Attempts to resuscitate it proved futile. He remounted, but was obliged to proceed at little more than a jog-trot pace, for, in the darkness, he was afraid of riding into the ditch. Fifteen miles on his way he picked up a puncture. It was impossible to repair it, for he could see nothing, so for five miserable miles he bumped along on a flat rear tube until he could endure the discomfort no longer; he dismounted and walked the rest of the way. At nearly three o'clock in the early morning, a weary, battered, indescribably angry young man, pushing a bicycle, entered the gates of Longer and made his way to his hut.

At the ‘Romany' fancy-dress dance, Celia Brown-Jenkins enjoyed herself. True, she was not in fancy dress—there had been no time to arrange that—but an affectionate maiden and two polite, well-brilliantined young men had met her at Paddington station and carried her off in triumph to the almost West End. At precisely twelve-twelve a.m. another sleek-haired young man was waving his hat at a departing train in which sat Celia. She was rather tired, and a little frightened because she had just realized that nobody had been asked to let her into the house on her return, and that it would be a horribly dark walk from Market Longer station. Seated there in an otherwise empty compartment, she also recollected that, not so many days before, a man had been murdered in the sunk garden; of course, no one was going to murder
her
, she knew, but, all the same, she felt that she would be just as glad when she was safely in bed.

The train reached Market Longer at twenty minutes past two, and a tired girl of eighteen reached the gates of Longer exactly one hour and twenty minutes later.

She walked up the path to the sports field, opened the wooden door, and skirted the cinder track. On the opposite side of the ground, outside the fence, but rising high above it, she saw the flames of an enormous bonfire.

Celia felt sick.

‘It's one of the huts!' she thought. In spite of her weary feet she broke into a trot, and shouted as she ran:

‘Fire! Fire! Fire!'

To add to Miss Caddick's sense of impending ill, old Mrs Puddequet was suddenly and obstinately smitten with the determination to sit up and play bezique. There were two reasons why Miss Caddick dreaded these attacks, which recurred at intervals of about twelve weeks; one reason was that they made the old lady overexcited, so that when she did at last decide to go to bed she could not sleep, and her wretched companion was compelled to spend the hours of beauty sleep in reading aloud to her; the other reason was that Great-aunt Puddequet awoke on the morning following one of these debauches with a splitting headache and the temper of a fiend.

The book chosen by old Mrs Puddequet on this particular evening was
Little Women
, and she herself turned over the well-worn pages to find the part of the story best suited to her mood. Miss Caddick dreaded the choice of
Little Women
as a bed-book, for the old lady, when once the story was launched, declined to be satisfied until, out of sheer exhaustion, she fell asleep. Miss Caddick outlined the adventures of Meg at the Moffats, followed it with the inauguration of young Lawrence as a member of the Pickwick Club, and had reached the very end of the pleasant chapter describing Camp Lawrence, when the listener suddenly started up in bed and cried:

‘What's that?'

Miss Caddick started nervously, her mind divided between trying to decide whether the sound was the noise of a second murder, or whether Celia Brown-Jenkins had returned from London and broken her neck trying to climb the gate leading into the sunk garden.

Both women listened intently.

‘There it is again!' said Great-aunt Puddequet. ‘Go and find out who is throwing stones at the window, companion.'

Miss Caddick laid
Little Women
face downwards on the coverlet and blinked nervously at her employer.

‘I don't think it is a stone against the window,' she demurred. ‘It didn't sound to me like someone throwing stones against the window. The window overlooks the side of the house, Mrs Puddequet, and that noise came from the front.'

‘Then go and see what it is,' squealed the old lady, ‘and don't be such a fool!'

Miss Caddick rose from her chair, and very unwillingly proceeded towards the door.

‘I know what it is!' cried old Mrs Puddequet suddenly. ‘It's someone banging on the door of the sunk garden. My ridiculous grandson, I expect. What is the hour, Companion Caddick?'

Miss Caddick compared a minute wristwatch with the handsome grandfather clock which stood in the far corner of the room.

‘I make it seventeen minutes to twelve,' she said, ‘and Mr Golightly makes it eleven minutes to twelve.' The clock in question was always referred to in this way out of respect for its previous owner, an old gentleman whom Mrs Puddequet had known in her youth.

‘Ah,' said Great-aunt Puddequet, shaking her head, ‘he's fast. At any rate, the gate into the sunk garden is locked by this time, so, if Grandson Timon is on the wrong side of it, he can just stay there, that's all. Go to bed, companion! What are you standing there for?'