To Love and Be Wise (15 page)

'Inspector, you offer me a felicity I had never hoped to enjoy. I have always been madly desirous of being asked what I was doing at nine-thirty p.m. on the night of Friday the 13th, but I never really dared to hope that it would happen to me.'

'Now that it has happened, I hope your alibi is worthy of the occasion.'

'It has the virtue of simplicity, at least. Giles and I spent the hours of that lovely midnight discussing Act II, Scene 1. Pedestrian, Inspector, but necessary. I am a business man.'

Grant glanced from the business man to Giles, and decided that in his present stage of discipleship the young man would probably confess to the murder if it would pleasure Toby. A little thing like providing an alibi would be merely routine.

'And Mr Verlaine corroborates that, of course,' Grant said.

'Yes, oh yes, of course; of course I do; yes,' said Giles, squandering affirmatives in the service of his patron.

'It is a tragic thing indeed, this drowning,' Toby said, sipping coffee. 'The sum total of the world's beauty is not so great that we can afford to waste any. A Shelleyan end, of course, and to that extent fitting. Do you know the Shelley Memorial at Oxford, Inspector?'

Grant knew the Memorial and it reminded him of an overboiled chicken, but he refrained from saying so. Nor did Toby expect an answer.

'A lovely thing. Drowning is surely the ideal way of going out of this life.'

'After a close acquaintance with a great variety of corpses taken from the water, I can't say that I agree with you.'

Toby cocked a fish-scale eye at him, and said: 'Don't shatter my illusions, Inspector. You are worse than Silas Weekley. Silas is always pointing out the nastiness of life. Have you got Silas's alibi, by the way?'

'Not yet. I understand that he hardly knew Mr Searle.'

'That wouldn't stop Silas. I shouldn't wonder if he did it as a bit of local colour.'

'Local colour?'

'Yes. According to Silas country existence is one cesspool of rape, murder, incest, abortion, and suicide, and perhaps Silas thinks that it is time that Salcott St Mary lived up to his idea of it. Do you read our Silas, Inspector?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Don't apologise. It's an acquired taste. Even his wife hasn't acquired it yet, if all reports are true. But then, poor woman, she is so busy suckling and suffering that she probably has no time to spare for the consideration of the abstract. No one seems to have indicated to her the possibilities of contraception. Of course, Silas has a "thing" about fertility. He holds that the highest function of a woman is the manufacture of progeny. So disheartening for a woman, don't you feel, to be weighed against a rabbit, and to know that she will inevitably be found wanting. Life, by Fertility out of Ugliness. That is how Silas sees it. He hates beauty. Beauty is an offence. He must mash it down and make it fertile. Make mulch of it. Of course he is just a little crazy, poor sweet, but it is a very profitable kind of craziness, so one need not drench oneself in tears about it. One of the secrets of a successful life is to know how to be a little profitably crazy.'

Grant wondered whether this was merely a normal sample of Toby's chatter, or whether it was designed to edge him on to Silas Weekley. Where a man's personality is entirely façade, as in the case of Toby Tullis, it was difficult to decide how much of the façade was barricade and how much was mere poster-hoarding.

'You didn't see Searle at all on Wednesday evening?' he said.

No, Toby had not seen him. His time for the pub was before dinner, not after.

'I don't want to be intrusive, Inspector, but there seems to me a needless furore over a simple drowning.'

'Why drowning?'

'Why not?'

'We have no evidence at all that Searle was drowned, and some fairly conclusive evidence that he wasn't.'

'That he wasn't? What evidence have you that he wasn't?'

'The river has been dragged for his body.'

'Oh, that!'

'What we are investigating, Mr Tullis, is the disappearance of a man in Salcott St Mary on Wednesday night.'

'You really ought to see the vicar, Inspector. He has the perfect solution for you.'

'And what is that?'

'The dear vicar believes that Searle was never really here at all. He holds that Searle was merely a demon who took human shape for a little, and disappeared when the joke grew stale or the—the juice ran dry, so to speak.'

'Very interesting.'

'I suppose you never saw Searle, Inspector?'

'Oh, yes. I have met him.'

This surprised Toby so much that Grant was amused.

'The demon attended a party in Bloomsbury, just before he came to Salcott,' he said.

'My dear Inspector, you
must
see the vicar. This contribution to the predilections of demons is of inestimable value to research.'

'Why did you ask me if I had ever seen Searle?'

'Because he was so perfectly what one would imagine a materialised demon to be.'

'His good-looks, you mean?'

'Was it only a question of good-looks?' Toby said, half quizzing half in challenge.

'No,' said Grant. 'No.'

'Do you think Searle was a wrong 'un?' Toby said, forgetting the façade for a moment and dropping into the vernacular.

'There is no evidence whatever on that score.'

'Ah, me,' Toby said, resuming the façade with a small mock-sigh. 'The blank wall of bureaucratic caution. I have few ambitions left in life, Inspector, but one of them is a passionate desire to know what made Leslie Searle tick.'

'If I ever find out, bureaucratic caution will crack sufficiently to let you know,' Grant said, getting up to go.

He stood for a moment looking out at the bright garden with the gleam of the river at the far end.

'This might be a country house, miles from anywhere,' he said.

Toby said that that was one of the charms of Hoo House, but that, of course, most of the cottages on the river side of the street had gardens that ran to the river, but most of them were broken into allotments or market gardens of some sort. It was the keeping of the Hoo House grounds as lawns and trees that made it spacious seeming.

'And the river makes a boundary without breaking the view. It is a sadly mixed blessing, the river.'

'Mosquitoes?'

'No; every now and then it has an overwhelming desire to get into the house. About once in every six winters it succeeds. My caretaker woke one morning last winter to find the boat knocking against his bedroom window.'

'You keep a boat?'

'Just as a prop. A punt affair that is pleasant to lie in on summer afternoons.'

Grant thanked him for being so helpful, apologised once more for having intruded on his breakfast, and took his leave. Toby showed signs of wanting to show him the house, but Grant avoided that for three reasons: he had work to do, he had already seen most of the house in the illustrated press, and he had an odd reluctance to be shown the world's finest craftsmanship by a slick little operator like Toby Tullis.

SILAS WEEKLEY lived in a cottage down the lane that led to the far bend of the river. Or rather, that started off towards the river. The lane, where it met the fields, turned at right-angles along the back of the village, only to turn up again and rejoin the village street. It was an entirely local affair. In the last cottage before the fields lived Silas Weekley, and Grant, 'proceeding' there police-fashion, was surprised to find it so poor a dwelling. It was not only that Weekley was a best-seller and could therefore afford a home that was more attractive than this, but there had been no effort to beautify the place; no generosity of paint and wash such as the other cottagers had used to make the street of Salcott St Mary a delight to the eye. No window plants, no trim curtains. The place had a slum air that was strange in its surroundings.

The cottage door was open and the combined howls of an infant and a child poured out into the sunny morning. An enamel basin of dirty water stood in the porch, the soap bubbles on it bursting one by one in slow resignation. An animal toy of soft fur, so worn and grubby as to be unidentifiable as any known species, lay on the floor. The room beyond was unoccupied for the moment, and Grant stood observing it in a kind of wonder. It was poorly furnished and untidy beyond belief.

The crying continued to come from some room in the rear, so Grant knocked loudly on the front door. At his second knock, a woman's voice called: 'Just leave it there, thank you.' At his third knock supplemented with a call, she came from the darkness at the back and moved forward to inspect him.

'Mrs Weekley?' Grant said doubtfully.

'Yes, I'm Mrs Weekley.'

She must have been pretty once. Pretty and intelligent; and independent. Grant remembered hearing somewhere that Weekley had married an elementary school teacher. She was wearing a sacking apron over a print wrapper, and the kind of old shoes that a woman all too easily gets used to as good enough to do chores in. She had not bothered to put on stockings, and the shoes had left smudges on her bare insteps. Her unwaved hair was pulled back into a tight desperate knot, but the front strands were too short to be confined there for long and now hung down on either side of her face. It was a rather long face and very tired.

Grant said that he would like to see her husband for a moment.

'Oh.' She took it in slowly, as if her mind were still with the crying children. 'I'm sorry things are so untidy,' she said vaguely. 'My girl from the village didn't come today. She often doesn't. It just depends on how she is feeling. And with the children it is difficult——. I don't think I can disturb my husband in the middle of the morning.' Grant wondered whether she considered the children were making no disturbance at all. 'He writes in the morning, you see.'

'I see. But if you would give him my card I think he will see me.'

'Are you from the publishers?'

'No, I'm——'

'Because I think it would be better to wait, and not interrupt him. He could meet you at the Swan, couldn't he? Just before lunch, perhaps.'

'No, I'm afraid that I must see him. You see, it is a matter——'

'It is very important that he shouldn't be disturbed. It interrupts his train of thought, and then he finds it difficult to—to get back. He writes very slowly—carefully, I mean—sometimes only a paragraph a day, so you see it is——'

'Mrs Weekley,' Grant said, bluntly, 'please give that card to your husband and say that I must see him, whatever he happens to be doing.'

She stood with the card in her fingers, not even glancing at it, her mind obviously busy with the search for some excuse that would convince him. And he was all of a sudden aware that she was afraid to take that card to her husband. Afraid to interrupt him.

To help her, he said that surely there would be no interruption where the children had been making so much noise. Her husband could hardly be concentrating very hard.

'Oh, he doesn't work here,' she said. 'In the house, I mean. He has a little house of his own at the end of the garden.'

Grant took back the card she was holding, and said grimly: 'Will you show me the way, Mrs Weekley?'

Dumbly she led him through a dark kitchen where a toddler sat splay-legged on the floor enjoying his tears, and an infant in a perambulator sobbed in elemental fury. Beyond, in the bright sunshine of the garden, a boy of three or so was throwing stones from the pebble path against the wooden door of an outhouse, an unproductive occupation which nevertheless made a satisfying noise.

'Stop that, Freddy,' she said automatically, and Freddy as automatically went on throwing the stones against the door.

The back garden was a long thin strip of ground that ran along the side of the back lane, and at the very end of it, a long way from the house, was a wooden shed. Mrs Weekley pointed it out and said:

'Perhaps you would just go and introduce yourself, would you? The children will be coming in from school for their midday meal and it isn't ready.'

'Children?' Grant said.

'Yes, the three eldest. So if you don't mind.'

'No, of course I don't mind,' Grant said. Indeed, few things would please him like interrupting the great Silas Weekley this morning, but he refrained from saying so to Silas Weekley's wife.

He knocked twice on the door of the wooden hut—a very trim wooden hut—without getting an answer, and so opened the door.

Silas Weekley swung round from the table at which he was writing and said: 'How
dare
you walk into my——' and then stopped as he saw Grant. He had quite obviously expected the intruder to be his wife.

'Who are you?' he said rudely. 'If you are a journalist you will find that rudeness doesn't pay. This is private ground and you are trespassing.'

'I am Detective-Inspector Grant from Scotland Yard,' Grant said and watched the news sink home.

After a moment or two Silas got his lower jaw under control again and said: 'And what do you want, may I ask?' It was an attempt at truculence and it was not convincing.

Grant said his regulation piece about investigating the disappearance of Leslie Searle and accounting for the movements of all those who knew Searle, and noted with the unoccupied half of his mind that the ink on the script that Weekley was working on was not only dry but dark. It was yesterday's ink. Weekley had done not a line this morning although it was now past noon.

At the mention of Searle Weekley began a diatribe against moneyed dilettantes which—in view of Weekley's income and the sum total of his morning's work—Grant thought inappropriate. He cut him short and asked what he had been doing on Wednesday night.

'And if I do not choose to tell you?'

'I record your refusal and go away.'

Weekley did not like the sound of this, so he muttered something about being badgered by the police.

'All that I am doing,' Grant pointed out, 'is asking for your co-operation as a citizen. As I have pointed out, it is within your right to refuse co-operation.'

Silas said sulkily that he had been writing on Wednesday night from supper-time onwards.

'Any witnesses to that?' Grant asked, wasting no frills on Silas.