Village Affairs (18 page)

“I see,” said Gibbons meditatively. “Well, this has been a great help, Mr. Macklin. Thank you for speaking so freely.”

“I didn’t mind,” answered Macklin. “Though it’s beyond me how this sort of ancient history is a help to you.”

“It’s a matter of understanding people’s characters,” explained Gibbons. “People’s relationships are often very illuminating.”

“I suppose so.” Macklin hesitated. “Sergeant,” he said, “can you tell me if there is any truth to what I’ve been hearing? That you suspect my cousin of murdering her father?”

“She’s only one suspect in a very wide field at this point,” said Gibbons. “We’re still getting it all sorted out at present. Speaking of which, could you tell me what you were doing on the Sunday evening your uncle died?”

Macklin was astonished. “Me?” he said. “But why in the world should I want to kill Uncle Charlie? I haven’t heard from him in years. I didn’t even know he was in England.”

“I believe you, Mr. Macklin,” said Gibbons. “It’s just a routine question. You were related to the victim, after all, and there is the matter of the money.”

“Money? You mean the bequest he left me?”

“That, and the fact that if anything had happened to Eve Bingham before her father’s death, you would now be an exceedingly wealthy man.”

“I would?” Macklin looked amazed. “Do you mean Uncle Charlie left it all to me if Eve died before him?” He shook his head. “That was awfully decent of him. I never knew …”

“So,” prompted Gibbons, “you can see that I have to ask—”

“What? Oh, yes, quite. I don’t really mind telling you; I was just surprised at your asking. My wife and I had some friends in to dinner on Sunday. They came at about seven and left at about eleven, or perhaps just a bit later. I expect you want their names?”

“It would be helpful.”

Macklin produced a notebook and wrote down the names and addresses of his friends. He tore the page out and handed it to Gibbons.

“John Beltock,” he said, indicating the first name, “is the biology teacher here. I think he has a class at the moment, but you can probably catch him afterward.”

“Thank you,” said Gibbons, rising. “You’ve been very helpful indeed, Mr. Macklin. I hope we won’t have to trouble you again.”

“I just hope Eve didn’t do it,” said Macklin.

“There’s every possibility she will be cleared completely,” Gibbons assured him. “Thank you again for your time.”

“If he had anything to do with it, then I’m a blind fool,” said Gibbons as they returned to the car.

“He seemed the very picture of innocence to me,” agreed Bethancourt. “And his alibi holds up.”

“At least as far as we’ve checked it,” said Gibbons cautiously. “But I didn’t see the point of tracking down all the rest of those people.” He sighed. “Not that I ever thought it terribly likely a respectable, middle-aged math teacher had suddenly taken it into his head to kill his uncle, whom he hadn’t seen in years. From all the accounts we have of Bingham, he would have given Macklin money if he’d needed it.”

“True,” agreed Bethancourt absently. “Where the devil is the A57? Get out the map, will you, Jack?”

“We’re on the A57,” replied Gibbons.

“We are? Well, how did that happen?”

“The school was just off it.”

“Oh. Well, that’s good, at any rate. And we must be heading west, as I turned right back there. All’s well then.”

CHAPTER
9

“A
long day’s work,” grumbled Carmichael. “And nothing to show for it.”

“No, sir,” said Gibbons, stifling a yawn. It was late when he and Bethancourt had finally returned to the Cotswolds, and all he had wanted was his bed, but he had found the chief inspector waiting up for him in the darkened bar of the pub, a bottle of scotch thoughtfully purchased before time had been called. Gibbons could hardly refuse his superior’s offer of a drink. “How did you make out?” he asked, though he thought he knew the answer; Carmichael looked distinctly disgruntled and a significant portion of the scotch bottle had been consumed before he arrived.

Carmichael grunted for reply and shifted in his chair. “Inquest was adjourned,” he said shortly. “By the time it was over, it was raining, so I drove to Somerset and back in a downpour.”

“Did you see Mrs. Potts’s sister?”

“I saw more of her than I would have liked,” answered Carmichael. “She’s an aggravating woman—very voluble without ever saying anything. It took me forty-five minutes to discover that when Mrs. Potts visits her, she’s ‘regular as clockwork,’ inevitably arriving after lunch and before tea. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get her to be more specific, or to address herself to the particular Sunday in question.”

Gibbons, having seen the skill with which the chief inspector was accustomed to winkle out information from the most unlikely witnesses, was surprised and sympathetic all at once.

“It must have been very frustrating for you, sir,” he said.

Carmichael heaved a sigh. “Frustrating doesn’t begin to express it,” he said. “At least,” he added, brightening, “I did manage to get her chemist to admit he has no customers with a regular prescription for Seconal.”

Gibbons was surprised again. “That was good work, sir,” he said. “How did you manage it?”

“It was easy enough to find out which chemist she used,” Carmichael answered with a shrug. “As I say, the problem was not to get her talking, but to stem the flow. I only had to mention that I needed to call at a reliable chemist’s to get the whole history of her medications. The chemist himself was a bit trickier, but since he does not, in fact, regularly fill a prescription for Seconal, he was willing to own up to that in the end.”

“Well done, sir,” said Gibbons, and then had to stifle another yawn; he had been sleepy to begin with and the scotch seemed to be making it worse. “So do you think we can rule Mrs. Potts out?”

“Tentatively, at least,” said Carmichael. “There’s no doubt in my mind her sister would lie for her, but I can’t think where she would have laid hands on the Seconal.”

“But so far we haven’t found any Seconal anywhere,” said Gibbons.

“True enough,” agreed Carmichael, scowling. “And until we do, we’re no closer to tying this up.” He drained his glass and then sighed. “I’ve just had a bad day, that’s all. At my age, long drives in the rain are no treat, especially when there’s nothing at the end of them. And then there were the reporters on top of that.”

“Reporters?” asked Gibbons.

“Yes, the media has finally twigged to the fact that Charles Bingham, inventor, was the father of Eve Bingham, socialite. They’re camped out at her hotel this minute, and they pestered me here until our landlord kicked them out.”

“Maybe they’ll find out who Bingham’s mistress was,” suggested Gibbons. “It’s their line of country.”

Carmichael laughed. “It is that, isn’t it? Well, so long as somebody finds her, I won’t complain. Because, even if we believe there was a murder committed here, we’ll never get it to court until we’ve brought this mystery woman out into the light of day.”

Astley-Cooper was also waiting up for his houseguest.

“It’s awfully good of you to have me back, Clarence,” said Bethancourt, stripping off his jacket in the entry. “I could have gone to a hotel, you know.”

Astley-Cooper looked up from petting Cerberus and snorted. “Hotels are nonsense,” he said. “Besides, how am I to find out anything if you’re not here? Come into the sitting room—I was just having a brandy.”

There was a fire burning in the sitting room, obliterating the chill of the October evening. Cerberus lay down before it while Bethancourt accepted a glass of cognac and then collapsed into the corner of the sofa.

“I can’t think,” he said, “why driving should always make one feel so grubby. The car’s perfectly clean, after all.”

“You look tired,” said Astley-Cooper.

Bethancourt removed his glasses and rubbed at his eyes a moment before replacing them.

“It was a long day,” he said.

Astley-Cooper, in contrast to his guest, was perched on the edge of his chair, his eyes bright with curiosity. “And was Eve Bingham’s cousin a sinister fellow?” he asked.

“Not a bit of it,” answered Bethancourt. “He was a perfectly ordinary math teacher with a solid alibi. I’m certain he had nothing to do with it.”

Astley-Cooper looked disappointed and Bethancourt smiled.

“On the other hand,” he said, “the hotel staff were unable to give Eve an alibi, so she’s still in the running. And I did find out why Derek Towser has such a reputation as a womanizer. Apparently a woman whose portrait he painted had an affair with him, and her fiancé subsequently cancelled their wedding.”

“I could have told you that,” said Astley-Cooper. “Julie Benson heard the story from some friends of hers in London and that’s how we got to know of it down here.”

“Oh,” said Bethancourt, rather crestfallen. “I never thought to ask you. By the way, is there any news this end?”

Astley-Cooper shook his head. “Martin Winslow barred Josh Landon from the Deer and Hounds last night,” he replied, “and I ran into the Bensons this morning, who say Joan Bonnar will be visiting on Sunday, but that’s all.”

Bethancourt smiled. “That’s not nothing,” he said.

“Well, but it doesn’t have to do with the subject in hand. Go on with what you were saying.”

Bethancourt, unable to remember what that might have been, shrugged and said, “Anyway, I have several feelers out for information about Eve and her relationship with Charlie, so maybe one of them will bear fruit.”

“Did Marla agree to nose around in Paris?”

“In the end,” said Bethancourt wryly. “And I wouldn’t call it ‘nosing around’ to her face if I were you.”

“Well, she might find something anyway.”

Bethancourt yawned. “There may be nothing to find,” he said. “The girlfriend is still the best bet.”

Astley-Cooper considered this. “What about the sleeping tablets?” he asked. “Have you found out where they came from?”

Bethancourt shook his head. “No. Presumably they came from the girlfriend, since nobody else seems to have access to Seconal.”

“But mightn’t he have borrowed them from a friend?” asked Astley-Cooper. “People do trade their prescriptions around, even though they’re not supposed to. Yes, listen to this: supposing he’d had a near accident with his car that day, on the way to wherever it was. He might have been feeling jumpy and taken a pill to calm himself down.”

“I should think,” said Bethancourt, “he’d have been more inclined to have a drink.”

“Well, he did do,” said Astley-Cooper. “Perhaps it didn’t do the trick, so he had a pill as well.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Bethancourt. “I will admit that if one had trouble sleeping, one might borrow a pill from a friend, but I can’t see anyone taking a sleeping tablet just to calm down. Especially not someone like Bingham, who’d spent the last fifteen years in the remoter areas of China. He can’t have been terribly pill-conscious, so to speak.”

“There you go,” said Astley-Cooper, getting excited. “It comes back to that girlfriend of his. He goes to see her, and they have a drink. Then they, er, you know, but he can’t sleep afterward. So she says, ‘Have one of my sleeping pills.’ And it does him in.”

Bethancourt was amused. “But, Clarence,” he said, “Bingham died before nine P.M. Even if he had been engaging in a romantic interlude, why should he have wanted to sleep so badly that he took a pill?”

“Oh,” said Astley-Cooper sorrowfully, “I’d forgotten about the time. I don’t seem to be very good at this kind of thing after all. I expect it can’t have been an accident, then.”

“I suppose,” said Bethancourt slowly, “someone might have meant to just knock him out for a bit. But why should anyone want to do that? I’m an imaginative fellow, but I can’t think of a reason. Not one that makes sense, anyhow.”

“But there’s not much more reason for anyone to want him dead,” argued Astley-Cooper.

“There’s the money,” said Bethancourt.

“Yes, but no one knew he had it.”

“Eve did.”

“Oh, yes, she did, didn’t she?” Astley-Cooper shook his head. “I can’t keep it all straight. How on earth do you manage it?”

“Practice,” said Bethancourt sleepily. “Next time you’ll do better.”

“I don’t want there to be a next time,” replied Astley-Cooper. “It’s all very well to sit around the fire of an evening, speculating. But, well, old Charlie’s dead, isn’t he? And I liked Charlie, Phillip. We all did.”

“Jack and the chief inspector will sort it out,” said Bethancourt soothingly. “They always do.”

Bethancourt woke late the next morning and found himself deserted. Gibbons and Carmichael, when he rang, had already left the pub, and Astley-Cooper had left him a somewhat incoherent note from which he deduced that his host had some sort of business in Cirencester.

Accordingly, he took Cerberus for a long walk around Stutely Manor’s extensive park, and then drove into the village in search of lunch. He parked in the square and was just opening the back door for his dog when he caught sight of the vicar emerging from the newsagents. He was dressed as usual in his cassock, with a brown tweed jacket over it, and today had added a scarf knitted of brilliant blue, red, and yellow. Bethancourt assumed it had been a parishioner’s gift.

He greeted Bethancourt cheerfully and bent to pat Cerberus.

“We’ve been wracking our brains,” he announced, “trying to remember bits and pieces of Charlie’s conversation. It’s made a wonderful change from writing my sermon.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bethancourt guiltily. “I didn’t mean to put you off your sermon.”

“Nonsense,” said the vicar, “we’ve rather enjoyed it. And writing a sermon every week is one of the things I like least about being a clergyman.”

“I suppose it must be rather tiresome,” said Bethancourt. “Like having essays at school.”

“Sometimes it’s all right,” said Tothill guardedly. “Sometimes, when I’ve been reading up some theology or something, it all comes together beautifully as soon as I sit down to write. But one can’t expect that to happen every week, and mostly it’s a bit of a struggle. Of course,” he added, cheering, “it’s better since I was married.”