What Dread Hand? (14 page)

‘The police don’t think it was necessarily one of us.’

‘What’ll you bet? But they’ve got to consider every possibility,’ said Jimmy. ‘We needn’t. Who else knew that every day, Old Punctuality caught a train just about that minute, for the club? He almost lived in the club, he had no men friends outside it—and no enemies inside it, apparently; though I find that hard to credit. There was nothing to be gained by a stranger pushing him on to the line—no picked pockets or what not, I mean; and no homicidal maniacs noticeably mopping and mowing on the scene. So unless you count a few old tabbies he used to play Bridge with occasionally—’

‘For all you know, one of them was pulsating with illicit passions…’

‘Oh, come off it, Rufus!’

‘Yes, well, “come off it”! But me and my beard are suspects One and Two, and I don’t care for it.’

None of them cared for it: the guilty no more than the innocent. It was true that none of them liked the other. To have roughed it here together while each pursued his own interests had suited them, hard up as they all were, as a temporary measure; but a life imprisonment together would have been unthinkable at the best of times. And now… To prowl for ever round one another like angry dogs, the innocent unable to know which of the other two to trust, the guilty uneasily aware that here, among those who knew his habits well, lay his greatest danger: danger in the smallest slip of the tongue—which yet must appear to wag freely lest its very lack of confidence give him away… Rufus said: ‘What are the police doing?’

‘Not much. They tested our alibis, they seem to have tested yours: what more can they do?’

‘You haven’t got any alibis.’

‘Perhaps that’s why they seem to have failed to break them.’

‘I trust they have made the rounds of the artificial-beard merchants?’

‘I dare say they have. Dan and I are not in their confidence to that extent.’

‘You told them about my Dop?’

‘We told them what you’d alleged,’ said Jimmy. A pity, he added sourly, that Cousin Rufus had not been here to give his own account. ‘Most convenient for you.’

‘What could I do, for heaven’s sake? I tell you, I knew nothing about any of it. And if you want to check on me, dear boy,’ said Rufus, ‘you go ahead and do just that. I got to Dieppe by the first boat—damn it all, I was
seen
on the thing!—went and had a meal and what not, hired a car and a tent at my usual places—go and ask them!—and started off down south. By which time, poor Tom’s a-cold and lying in the mortuary.’

‘And you conveniently out of touch with civilisation.’

‘But what was convenient about it? I don’t get the message. Yes, sure I was out of touch. I went down to Aries, parked my stuff with the Widow Larivière—go and check if you like—and then just roamed off as usual looking for places to paint. Came back at half time and left the finished stuff and collected fresh canvases. So what? I honestly can’t see that it matters one jot—Uncle Tom had gone Underground by then in more senses than one, and that was that. However, trace away if you feel it will do you any good—thank goodness I seem to be easy to remember, the mad English painter with the big red beard,
tout à fait à la
Van Gogh. Only with both ears. So while you pursued your bird’s-nesting—’

‘I tell you I was down by the lake at the time he was killed—’

‘Nobody else tells me so: nobody can. And nobody can tell me about Dan either, all alone waiting for the man to come and see his feelthy peectures.’

‘Damn it all, I’d had this note, supposed to be from my agent.’

‘When the man didn’t come—why not ring up and check?’

‘So I did. He couldn’t think who had sent the letter.’

‘A man with a big red beard no doubt had sent it?’

‘Nobody knows anything. And of course I’d bunged it away, never thinking any more about it.’

‘But of course,’ said Rufus, sweetly.

The days passed. Dan fiddled with his photographs; Jimmy spent long hours by the lake; Rufus prepared energetically for a show of the new pictures and meanwhile carefully studied the newspapers. At the end of three weeks, he found his way to Kensington and rang a front door bell. ‘Well, Mrs. Jones!’

‘Good lord, it’s Rufus Cross!’ said Dorinda. She backed ahead of him into the little flat, automatically poured liqueur into a tiny glass and handed it to him. ‘What on earth’s this?’ said Rufus.

‘Calvados. Don’t you like it? Good, that’s another cheap one.’ She took the glass out of his hand and poured the contents back into the bottle.

‘Isn’t there any alternative?’

‘No, it’s Calvados or nothing. I have to save money, these days.’ She raised her own glass. ‘Well—I bows to you.’

‘And I likewise bows,’ said Rufus, doing so with a flourish.

‘Meanwhile—to what do I owe the unaccustomed honour?’

‘I saw in the paper that your divorce has come through.’

‘Don’t tell me I’m to add your name to my list of suitors.’

‘No, I think you’ve got enough Crosses notched up already on your little hatchet. I shall have to be content to cherish you as an in-law.’

‘Don’t you wish you may?’ said Dorinda.

‘What, neither of them?’

‘I’m afraid not, Rufus.’ She looked rather sad about it.

‘You astonish me. I thought it was positively going to be Dan?’ He considered it. ‘The trouble is, Dorinda,’ he said, shrewdly, ‘that Mrs. Daniel Cross would be one thing; but Mrs. Halberd Hall is more than you could stomach?’

‘Well…’ She lifted elegant shoulders in a rueful little shrug. ‘You must say, one is not a girl for a life of unrelieved Tudor Gloomery.’

‘You make me exceedingly anxious, Dorinda,’ said Rufus and went away looking very thoughtful.

Another week and another week; and a morning came when Dan said: ‘Jimmy never mentioned, when he went off on Saturday, that he’d be staying away. If he doesn’t show up tomorrow, I shall tell the police.’

‘I’m going up to see them this afternoon,’ said Rufus.

They faced one another, grimly. ‘If anything’s happened to Jimmy, Rufus—then I
know
it was you.’

‘Spare me the act when we’re alone together,’ said Rufus. ‘We both know it was you. I couldn’t have killed Uncle Tom and I wouldn’t have killed Jimmy. Why the hell should I want to?’

‘If you had half his share, you could get away from this place. What’s the use of it to you, when all you want is to paint? You can’t paint at Halberd: you hate the countryside round here. You wanted Uncle Tom’s money to set up as a great artist and now you want Jimmy’s—and mine too, for all I know—so that you can get away from here and
be
a great artist. As for me,’ said Dan, ‘I don’t care two hoots about getting away. I can set up a decent studio here, proper dark rooms and all the rest of it—I like the life.’

‘And Mrs. Jones, of course, will simply love it?’

‘What do you know about that?’ said Dan, going white.

‘Only that Dorinda will never marry you while it means having to bury herself here. You’re the one that needs money. And I’ll tell you something, Dan: I saw this coming. Only I wasn’t too sure it wouldn’t be me.’

‘You seem quite settled in your mind that Jimmy’s been murdered.’

‘What’ll you bet?’ said Rufus. ‘Only I’m taking no odds: you’d be betting on a certainty. But I’ll tell you what
I’ll
bet—that a man with a large red beard will turn out to have been involved in it somehow.’

And that afternoon he went up to London to see the police. But first he dropped in again on Mrs. Dorinda Jones. ‘Now what?’ said Dorinda.

‘Now Jimmy has disappeared.’

‘He’s got his birds mixed up at last,’ said Dorinda, ‘and gone off with one.’

‘You know very well there’s only one bird in Jimmy’s life.’

‘Well, anyway, this time it has nothing to do with me.’

‘Everything Dan and Jimmy ever do has something to do with you. You know that, Dorinda. I think they’re both a bit insane where you’re concerned. When did you last see him?’

‘Who, Jimmy? Well, on Saturday, when I saw him coming out of the pub opposite, with you.’

‘You
what?’

‘On Saturday, when the pub closed. The Shorn Lamb.’

‘On Saturday when the Shorn Lamb closed, Dorinda, the Rose and Crown, opposite my art school, also closed; and I was there.’

‘Oh, for Pete’s sake, Rufus! You were with Jimmy. I waved to you and you waved back.’ She got up and poured some Calvados, came across to him with the little glass, said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t, do you?’ and all in one movement turned and went back to the table with it. She said: ‘You’re right about one thing, Rufus: Jimmy’s half dotty about me. He’s as jealous as all hell, and every time Dan came to the flat he used to go and hang about in the Shorn Lamb opposite, and watch him in and out and see how long he stayed…’

‘Did Dan know this?’

‘No, what was the point of telling him? It would only start another row. Besides it was so—well, humiliating for him, poor old Jimmy. I used to squint out and watch him establish himself in his window seat, eking out tankard after tankard; and when Dan had gone, he’d come up here, pretending he’d just arrived on the scene: and scene was the word.’

‘This was when he was supposed to be squatting in a hide, watching duck?’

‘I’m afraid that’s just what he was doing; only I was the duck.’

‘And last Saturday evening?’

‘Well, Dan always came on a Saturday. My dear husband had a detective following me about,’ said Dorinda, ‘and Saturday seemed to be his afternoon off; I suppose they have to have them, poor pets.’

‘And last Saturday—day before yesterday, that is:—you saw me with Jimmy? Complete, no doubt, with large red beard?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Rufus. Last Saturday Dan came, we had our drama, Dan went away; I sat here and had a little howl and when I next looked out of the window, you and Jimmy were walking out of the pub together. I gave you a wave and you waved back. I took it you’d told Jimmy I must have been giving Dan his congé, and that’s why he didn’t come up afterwards to see me. I mean, after last time we talked together, you pretty well knew, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Rufus. He thought it all over. ‘Dorinda. You say that Dan always came on a Saturday; and Jimmy was always there, watching him. Our Uncle Tom was killed on a Saturday. Were they here that day?’

‘Every Saturday in living memory,’ said Dorinda.

‘So if Dan says he was hanging about waiting for an agent, and Jimmy says he was by the lake—?’

‘Oh, phoohey!’ said Dorinda. ‘The agent and the lake were always just other names for Me.’

So Rufus went to the police.

‘My cousin, Jimmy Cross, has disappeared. I now find he was last seen on Saturday evening, coming out of a pub called the Shorn Lamb, in Kensington, with my well known Döppelganger. At the time, I may say, I also was in a pub; but it was the Rose and Crown, opposite the Turner School of Art where I go once a week for life classes. You can ask the landlord—he’ll have seen me there.’

‘We have asked him,’ said the police.

‘You know about all this?’

‘Information has been laid,’ said the police.

‘In other words, Madame Dorinda Jones has been on the blower. Well, well!’ said Rufus. ‘And the landlord said—?’

‘The landlord said that half a dozen customers that evening probably had beards and several of them probably were red. The Turner School of Art, it seems, is patronised by a good many gentlemen with beards.’

‘It is in the nature of art schools,’ said Rufus.

‘It’s never occurred to you that one of
them
might have laid on this Döppelganger act?’

‘No, it hasn’t,’ said Rufus. ‘I hardly know the people at the school, I just use the life class models at the week-end, when the ordinary students don’t come. No one there knows me well enough to play silly tricks.’ Meanwhile, he added, while they parleyed here, his cousin James was missing believed—by him, Rufus, anyway—killed.

And not the only one, said the police. His cousin Dan was now also missing—believed fled the country.

‘No!’

‘His passport was stamped at Dover this morning.’

‘And you let him go?’

‘We had no reason sufficient for holding him.’

‘But what about Jimmy?’

‘A pity you didn’t tell us about that a bit earlier.’

‘You realise that those two were in fact in London on the day of my uncle’s murder? In time to have killed him and then gone on to Mrs. Jones’ place?’

‘Yes; we realise.’

‘You got that from Mrs. Jones too?’

‘We have our methods,’ said the police, twiddling their thumbs.

‘He can’t have got far. Can’t you trace him? I mean, Interpol and all that?’

‘It shouldn’t be difficult. It appears,’ said the police, ‘that your cousin is wearing a large red beard.’ And they leaned forward and with a murmured apology gave his own beard a little tug. ‘Well,
that’s
real enough,’ they said, sitting back, exchanging confirmatory nods between themselves.

There was nothing for it but to go home and get on with preparations for his show. He knew that it was going to be a success: the best work he had ever produced, bold, brilliant stuff, such as Van Gogh himself had done in the same sunny countryside. Not that he set up to be a Van Gogh, but the paintings would catch on, he knew they would. Even hung round the walls of the unused drawing-room at Halberd, when he had been working out his selection for the show, they had lighted up the darkness like Rembrandt gleams of gold.

Dorinda had said not to offer ordinary old champagne at the Private View. ‘Have Calvados; lots of people hate it, so it goes much further. And it’ll be cuter.’ Dorinda herself was undeniably cute, weaving through the mob with her hand hooked possessively into his arm, chatting up prospective buyers. ‘Don’t you think this one is gorgeous? Number 27. Provence, Late Evening… What, Rufus? Oh! Oh, well, he says it’s Provence, Early Morning, but so what? Two for the price of one, I say—every morning you could look at it and think, What a lovely morning!—and every evening you could look at it and think, What a lovely evening…!’ She prattled profitably on; but by six o’clock, standing triumphantly alone together in the emptied gallery, he thought, glancing at her face, that she looked pale and very weary. ‘You’ve been wonderful, Dorinda. Even in Calvados, I raise my glass to you—and I bows.’