To Love and Be Wise (14 page)

Neither did Mrs Brett. After dinner, Mrs Brett said, the family did not worry the staff at all. Edith laid out the bed-time drinks, and after that the baize door in the hall was not normally opened again until the following morning. Mrs Brett had been nine years with Miss Fitch, and Miss Fitch could trust her to manage the staff and the staff premises.

When Grant went to the front door on his way to the car he found Walter Whitmore propped against the terrace wall. He bade Grant good morning and hoped that the alibis had been satisfactory.

It seemed to Grant that Walter Whitmore was visibly deteriorating. Even the few hours since last night had made a difference. He wondered how much a reading of this morning's papers had contributed to the slackening of Walter's facial structure.

'Have the Press been hounding you yet?' he asked.

'They were here just after breakfast.'

'Did you talk to them?'

'I saw them, if that is what you mean. There wasn't much I could say. They'll get far more copy down at the Swan.'

'Did your lawyer come?'

'Yes. He's asleep.'

'Asleep!'

'He left London at half-past five, and saw me through the interview. He had to leave things in a hurry so he didn't get to bed last night till two this morning. If you take my meaning.'

Grant left him with an illogical feeling of relief and went down to the Swan. He ran his car into the paved brick yard at the rear of it and knocked at the side door.

A bolt was drawn with noisy impatience, and Reeve's face appeared in the gap. 'It's not a bit of use,' he said. 'You'll have to wait till opening time.'

'As a policeman, I appreciate that snub at its true value,' Grant said. 'But I'd like to come in and talk to you for a moment.'

'You look more Service than Police, if you ask me,' said the ex-Marine, amused, as he led the way into the bar parlour. 'You're the spit of a Major we had with us Up The Straights once. Vandaleur was his name. Ever come across him?'

Grant had not come across Major Vandaleur.

'Well, what can I do for you, sir? It's about this Searle affair, I take it.'

'Yes. You can do two things for me. I want your considered opinion—and I mean considered—on the relations between Whitmore and Searle on Wednesday evening. And I should like a list of all the people in the bar that night and the times they left.'

Reeve had all a service man's objective attitude to a happening. He had no desire to dress it up, or to make it reflect his own personality as an artist did. Grant felt himself relaxing. It was almost like listening to the report of one of his own men. There was no obvious ill-feeling between the men, Reeve said. He would not have noticed them at all, if they had not been isolated by the fact that no one moved away from the bar to join them. Normally, someone or other would have moved over to resume a conversation that had begun when they were at the bar together. But on Wednesday there was something in their unconsciousness of the rest that kept people from intruding.

'They were like two dogs walking round each other,' Reeve said. 'No row, but a sort of atmosphere. The row might burst out any minute, if you see what I mean.'

'Did you see Whitmore go?'

'No one did. The boys were having an argument about who played cricket for Australia in what year. They paused when the door banged, that was all. Then Bill Maddox, seeing that Searle was alone, went over and talked to him. Maddox keeps the garage at the end of the village.'

'Thanks. And now the list of those in the bar.'

Grant wrote the list down; county names, most of them, unchanged since Domesday Book. As he went out to get his car he said: 'Have you any Press staying in the house?'

'Three,' Reeve said. 'The
Clarion
, the
Morning News
, and the
Post
. They're all out now, sucking the village dry.'

'Also ran: Scotland Yard,' Grant said wryly, and drove away to see Bill Maddox.

At the end of the village was a high clapboarded structure on which faded paint said: WILLIAM MADDOX AND SON, CARPENTERS AND BOATBUILDERS. At one corner of this building a bright black and yellow sign pointed into the yard at the side and said simply: GARAGE.

'You manage to make the best of both worlds, I see,' he said to Bill Maddox when he had introduced himself, and tilted his head at the sign.

'Oh, MADDOX AND SON is Father, not me.'

'I thought that perhaps you were "SON".'

Bill looked amused. 'Oh, no; my
grandfather
was SON. That's my greatgrandfather's business. And still the best woodworkers this side of the county, though it's me that says it. You looking for information, Inspector?'

Grant got all the information Maddox could give him, and as he was going away Maddox said: 'You happen to know a newspaper-man called Hopkins, by any chance?'

'Hopkins of the
Clarion
? We have met.'

'He was round here for hours this morning, and do you know what that bloke actually believes? He believes that the whole thing is just a publicity stunt to sell that book they planned to write.'

The combination of this typically Hopkins reaction and Bill's bewildered face was too much for Grant. He leant against the car and laughed.

'It's a debasing life, a journalist's,' he said. 'And Jammy Hopkins is a born debase-ee, as a friend of mine would say.'

'Oh,' said Bill, still puzzled. 'Silly, I call it. Plain silly.'

'Do you know where I can find Serge Ratoff, by the way?'

'I don't suppose he's out of bed yet, but if he is you'll find him propping up the counter of the post-office. The post-office is in the shop. Half-way up the street. Serge lives in the lean-to place next door to it.'

But Serge had not yet reached his daily stance by the post-office counter. He was coming down the street from the newsagent's with a paper under his arm. Grant had never seen him before, but he knew the occupational signs well enough to spot a dancer in a village street. The limp clothes covering an apparently weedy body, the general air of undernourishment, the wilting appearance that made one feel that the muscles must be flabby as tired elastic. It was a never-ceasing amazement to Grant that the flashing creatures who tossed ballerinas about with no more effort than a slight gritting of teeth, went out of the stage door looking like under-privileged barrow boys.

He brought the car to a halt at the pavement as he came level with Serge, and greeted him.

'Mr Ratoff?'

'That is me.'

'I'm Detective-Inspector Grant. May I speak to you for a moment?'

'Everyone speaks to me,' Serge said complacently. 'Why not you?'

'It is about Leslie Searle.'

'Ah, yes. He has become drowned. Delightful.'

Grant offered some phrases on the virtue of discretion.

'Ah,
discretion
!' said Serge, making five syllables of it. 'A bourgeois quality.'

'I understand that you had a quarrel with Searle.'

'Nothing of the sort.'

'But——'

'I fling a mug of beer in his face, that is all.'

'And you don't call that a quarrel?'

'Of
course
not. To quarrel is to be on a level, equal, how do you say, of the same rank. One does not quarrel with
canaille
. My grandfather in Russia would have taken a whip to him. This is England and decadent, and so I fling beer over him. It is a gesture, at least.'

When Grant recounted this conversation to Marta, she said: 'I can't think what Serge would do without that grandfather in Russia. His father left Russia when he was three—Serge can't speak a word of Russian and he is half Neapolitan anyhow—but all his fantasies are built on that grandfather in Russia.'

'You will understand,' Grant said patiently, 'that it is necessary for the police to ask all those who knew Searle for an account of their movements on Wednesday night.'

'Is it? How tiresome for you. It is a sad life, a policeman's. The movements. So limited, so rudimentary.' Serge made himself into a semaphore, and worked his arms marionette-wise in a travesty of point-duty signals. 'Tiresome. Very tiresome. Lucid, of course, but without subtlety.'

'Where were you on Wednesday night from nine o'clock onwards?' Grant said, deciding that an indirect approach was just a waste of time.

'I was dancing,' Serge said.

'Oh. At the village hall?'

Serge looked as if he were going to faint.

'You suggest that
I
, that I,
Serge Ratoff
, was taking part in a '
op
?'

'Then where were you dancing?'

'By the river.'

'
What?
'

'I work out the choreography for a new ballet. I burst with ideas there by the river on a spring night. They rise up in me like fountains. There is so much atmosphere there that I get drunk on it. I can do anything. I work out a very charming idea to go with the river music of Mashako. It begins with a——'

'What part of the river?'

'What?'

'What
part
of the river?'

'How should I know? The atmosphere is the same over all.'

'Well, did you go up river or down, from Salcott?'

'Oh, up, most certainly.'

'Why "most certainly"?'

'I need the wide flat spaces to dance. Up river they are there. Down river from the village it is all steep banks and tiresome root crops. Roots. Clumsy, obscene things. They——'

'Could you identify the place where you were dancing on Wednesday night?'

'Identify?'

'Point it out to me.'

'How can I? I don't even remember where it was.'

'Can you remember if you saw anyone while you were there?'

'No one who was memorable?'

'Memorable?'

'I trip over lovers in the grass now and then, but they—how you say, go with the house. They are part of the—the set-up. Not memorable.'

'Do you remember, then, what time you left the river bank on Wednesday night?'

'Ah, yes, that I remember perfectly.'

'When was it that you left?'

'When the shooting star fell.'

'What time was that?'

'How should I know? I dislike shooting stars. They make butterflies in my stomach. Though I did think that it would be a very fine ending to my ballet to have a shooting star. A
Spectre de la Rose
leap, you know, that would set the town talking, and show them that I can still——'

'Mr Ratoff, can you suggest how Leslie Searle came to be in the river?'

'Came to be? He fell in, I suppose. Such a pity. Pollution. The river is so beautiful it should be kept for beautiful things. Ophelia. Shallott. Do you think Shallott would make a ballet? All the things she sees in the mirror? It is an idea, that, isn't it?'

Grant gave up.

He left his car where it was and walked up the street to where the flat stone front of Hoo House broke the pinks and chromes and limes of the village's plastered gables. The house stood on the pavement like the other cottages, but three steps to the front door raised the ground floor of the house above street level. It withdrew itself a little, in a dignity entirely natural, from everyday affairs. As Grant pulled the Victorian bell in its bright brass circle he spared a thought to bless the man, whoever he was, who had been responsible for restoring the place. He had preserved the structure but had made no attempt to turn it back into its original form and so make a museum piece of it; the tale of the centuries was there, from the worn mounting-block to the brass bell. A great amount of money had obviously been spent to bring it to its present condition of worthiness, and Grant wondered if perhaps the saving of Hoo House was sufficient to justify Toby Tullis's existence.

The door was opened by a manservant who might have walked out of one of Toby's plays. He stood in the doorway, polite but impenetrable; a one-man road-block.

'Mr Tullis does not see anyone before lunch,' he said in answer to Grant's inquiry. 'He works in the morning. The appointment with the Press is for two o'clock.' He began to move his hand towards the door.

'Do I look like Press?' Grant said tartly.

'Well—no, I can't say that you do—sir.'

'Shouldn't you have a little tray?' Grant said, suddenly silky.

The man turned submissively and took a silver card tray from the Jacobean chest in the hall.

Grant dropped a piece of pasteboard on to the tray and said: 'Present my compliments to Mr Tullis and say that I would be grateful for three minutes of his time.'

'Certainly, sir,' said the man, not allowing his eyes to stray even to the vicinity of the card. 'Will you be kind enough to step into the hall and wait.'

He disappeared into a room at the rear of the house, and closed the door behind him on some very unworkmanlike sounds of chatter. But he was back in a moment. Would Inspector Grant come this way, please. Mr Tullis would be very pleased to see him.

The room at the back, Grant found, looked into a large garden sloping down to the river-bank; it was another world altogether from the village street that he had just left. It was a sitting-room, furnished with the most perfect 'pieces' that Grant had ever seen out of a museum. Toby, in a remarkable dressing-gown, was sitting behind an array of silver coffee things; and behind him, in still more remarkable day clothes, hovered a callow and eager young man clutching a notebook. The notebook, from its virgin condition, appeared to be more a badge of office than the implement of a craft.

'You are modest, Inspector!' Toby said, greeting him.

'Modest?'

'Three minutes! Even the Press expect ten.'

It had been meant as a compliment to Grant, but the effect was merely a reminder that Toby was the most-interviewed individual in the English-speaking world and that his time was priceless. As always, what Toby did was a little 'off-key'.

He presented the young man as Giles Verlaine, his secretary, and offered Grant coffee. Grant said that it was at once too late and too early for him, but would Mr Tullis go on with his breakfast; and Toby did.

'I am investigating the disappearance of Leslie Searle,' Grant said. 'And that involves, I'm afraid, some disturbance of people who are only remotely connected with Searle. We have to ask everyone at Salcott who knew Searle to account for their time, as far as they can, on Wednesday night.'