What Happened at Hazelwood? (20 page)

‘You mean to say that you actually–’

Something that might have been a blush spread over the florid features of Hippias Simney. ‘Nothing else to do,’ he said. ‘Those anthropologist chaps, who might a little have controlled the brutes, were still being hurried right out of the battle and had become pretty well hull-down over the horizon. A get-away was the only thing. And George did turn up again, after all. In fact, he turned up to diddle us in the matter of Dismal Swamp.’

‘I can well believe it. For it seems improbable that he would return to you precisely in a grateful state of mind. You had joined with your kinsmen, Mr Simney, in a disreputable foray, and in a moment of danger you and your hireling companions deserted them like cravens.’

‘Well’ – Hippias was prepared to be reasonable – ‘I did say they led me into things that rather scared me, didn’t I? And I don’t mind admitting that I was scared then.’

‘You were demonstrably so. And would you be good enough to tell me now just what were the consequences of this blackbirding affair?’

‘Well, I felt a bit bad, I’m bound to admit.’

‘The legal rather than the moral consequences, Mr Simney, are what I have in mind.’

I could see that the chief didn’t like Hippias at all, and that the blackbirding shocked him much less than the turning tail and leaving those two young cousins floundering among savages in the water. And Hippias felt that he was distinctly not liked; he gave us a nasty look as well as a scared one before he mopped his forehead and spoke again.

‘There weren’t any legal consequences to speak of, I’m glad to say. If those anthropologists had traced our lugger to Cairns they might have got the whole lot of us. And if they’d managed to stir the authorities into a real rummage among the connexions of Denzell Simney I suppose it would have been the same. But somewhere or other they must have come up against good sense and the feeling that they ought to mind their own business. Nobody had been killed, you know, or nobody except George and Denzell – and George, of course, turned up after all, and diddled us nicely. So the affair was let die down, except that the only one of us known by name – Denzell, that is to say – was posted as wanted by the police. So, you see, the adventure hadn’t ended too badly, after all. Denzell was no doubt due for from five to ten years according to the feelings of the judge, but he had got eternity anyway. And George, although he lay low for years feeling that the police might be on his track too–’

‘As most certainly they ought to have been!’ The chief interrupted with more emphasis than I have ever heard him use before. ‘A simple inquiry into Denzell Simney’s Australian connexions–’

‘No doubt, Mr Inspector, no doubt.’ Hippias looked momentarily complacent. ‘But then all colonials are deuced easy-going, as you must have heard. And, of course, we weren’t exactly nobodies in New South Wales.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said the chief grimly, ‘you’ll find it rather different here.’

‘My dear man, it would be quite different at home nowadays. Only wharfies and coalminers receive the slightest consideration from an Australian government at present. But aren’t we rather straying from the point?’

‘I think perhaps we are. What proof was there that Denzell did not, in fact, survive?’

‘I don’t know that there was what you would call logical proof – although we got it admitted legally, as I’ll explain. You see, my father started squaring things, and he worked out a story for me to tell, and for some other fellows to tell–’

‘Your father seems to have been quite the Simney too.’

Hippias chuckled. ‘Oh, quite definitely so. And he had just got up this story for having both George and Denzell legally presumed dead in some more or less respectable way, when we had word from George on the quiet that he was alive and kicking, although he had seen Denzell go down. He was going to keep out of the way for a time, but he hoped to give us the pleasure of his company at Hazelwood later. Well, we just changed the story a bit and said that Denzell was dead but that George had gone off to another part of Australia. Quite another part. And, as you know, it’s a big place.’

Darkness had fallen over the snow-covered park outside. With Hippias Simney we were getting on famously (or rather the chief was) and vital information might at any moment spill itself all over the study carpet. Nevertheless I was beginning to have uneasy thoughts of what scraps of cold meat and rinds of cheese were likely to be left at the Simney Arms. Australia, as Hippias had just assured us, is a big place – and the human stomach is assuredly a small one. But in sheer emptiness the one can match the other very well.

The chief had turned on the lights long ago, but he was still leaning across the high-backed chair by the fireplace, with Caravaggio’s Venus looking inviting above his head and two departed Simney baronets looking more than repellent on either side of her. The chief seemed prepared to stand there all night if more could be extorted from Hippias; I could see he felt that there was a good chance of getting the old rascal on the run. And Hippias had not the air of a man who feels well over the brow of the hill; I had an idea, indeed, that he felt the steepest gradient to be yet in front of him – indeed, that what he saw there was Alps on Alps arise. (See if auntie Flo knows that one.)

George was due to turn up again – Hippias had got his narrative as far as that – and I was just hoping to get at least the Dismal Swamp affair clear once for all when the study door opened and Gerard Simney, Hippias’ son, came in. He took a quick look round. ‘I want Lady Simney,’ he said abruptly, and turned to leave the room.

But his father’s eager voice restrained him – the voice of a man uncommonly anxious to find moral support. But at the same time it occurred to me that there was cunning as well as anxiety in Hippias’ appeal; it was as if he had seen some positive tactical advantage in the arrival of his son. ‘Looking for Nicolette?’ he said. ‘Deuced sensible of you, my boy. Nice woman. But don’t hurry away. Have a spot. And if there’s nothing to drink send for Owdon. These men – gentlemen, that is to say – and I are having a quiet crack about old colonial days.’

‘To the devil with old colonial days.’ Gerard Simney, although considerably more personable than his father, seemed to have something of the family violence of speech. ‘The old colonial days were for the most part disgusting, so far as I can make out. But Australia has her chance now. A decent sort of social-democracy can conceivably be set going there. Spiritually and culturally it will be something thoroughly inglorious. But it will be a whole heap better than most other places.’

‘Now, that’s a very interesting proposition.’ Hippias looked at the chief and myself with a naïve cunning. Deserves a bit of discussion to my mind. It was only a little time ago that I said to the High Commissioner–’

‘Rubbish.’ Gerard interrupted his parent without ceremony. ‘At the present moment the subject has no interest whatever – either to these gentlemen or to ourselves. Certainly not to me. I’m looking for Nicolette.’ And suddenly the young man’s eye glinted at us rather wildly – and it was a glint, I realized with a start of recognition, that I had noticed somewhere about the walls of this room within the past half-hour – in fact some ancestral Simney look. ‘And I want to know’ – Gerard’s voice rose defiantly – ‘if a dead man can be a co-respondent.’

Of course this is just how it is with police work. You are getting tidily along with what looks like some principal aspect of the affair when in swims some beastly red herring and demands to be attended to. Here were the chief and I jerked some twelve thousand miles from the Pacific Ocean to Hazelwood Hall, and required to discover why Gerard Simney should have come out with a remark so exceedingly odd. The dead man to whom he referred could hardly be other than his kinsman the late Sir George – the duration of whose acquaintance with Gerard’s wife Joyleen could most conveniently be reckoned in hours. And the same reckoning held of Gerard himself and Lady Simney. That Gerard should want to part with his wife two or three glimpses of the young lady made it very possible to believe. That he should do so with a view to taking on George’s widow was somewhat sudden, to say the least; nevertheless it was a rational enough scheme for a man to form. But that George and Joyleen had furthered it by posting with such celerity to an intimacy citable in a divorce court was a little startling.

And Hippias seemed to agree. ‘Come, come,’ he said. ‘Pull yourself together, my dear boy. Poor George may have acted not quite nicely in the matter to which you refer. After all, he diddled us of Dismal Swamp, so that we knew what sort of fellow we had to deal with. But he’s not yet in his grave, you know – or rather not yet in that deuced disheartening family vault. So hold off a bit, my dear chap. Plenty of time, after all. No chance of George’s coming back from the grave this time, I’ll be bound. And – by the way – that’s just where you can help. I was telling these gentlemen – officers, that is to say – about his turning up on us again when you were a lad – time of your first riding-breeches, I think he said.’

Gerard Simney frowned impatiently. ‘I was no more than a child. I scarcely remember.’

‘Oh, come. You must remember a good deal. And rather a useful thing, if you ask me, to tell these – um – people from the police your own story. Independent testimony. Show I haven’t been spinning them a yarn.’

It was to be observed that with Hippias the chief and myself were sinking rapidly in the social scale. Presumably this indicated that he was regaining some feeling of confidence – and indeed there was now in his eye the look of a man who sees the first thinning of the wood before him. Of this I didn’t at all feel that I had the hang… But now Gerard did, as he was requested, take up the tale.

‘Riding-breeches I may have had, but certainly I was scarcely out of the nursery. Even there, though, it was known that our kinsman George Simney was a legend – as was his dead brother Denzell too. Long ago – indeed some years before I was born – the two of them had gone off on some queer expedition with my father here and some other men, and the result had been Denzell’s death and George’s going off into hiding in another part of Australia. For a time it had been believed that both brothers had died together, and then somehow my grandfather had learned about George’s being alive. Something like that was the story I used to hear as a kid at Hazelwood Park.’

Inspector Cadover tapped the chair before him with a restless finger. ‘May I ask if you can put a date to all this?’

‘Well, I don’t suppose I can have been more than eight or nine when the legendary George turned up. You may bet I stared at him! He was obviously a Simney – just as my father and grandfather were, and as I could see that I was myself. It was the first thing that made me feel the queer weight of heredity, I believe. Whether George stopped with us for long I don’t remember, although it was long enough to get the information which enabled him to play the family that low trick over Dismal Swamp. He didn’t feel himself on the run any longer, I believe. On the other hand I doubt whether, outside Hazelwood Park, he was yet going by his real name. George could always pick up money, it seems, and he just found it easier to be any wandering rascal than George Simney. I have a notion that we heard of him several times in an indefinite way between that last visit to us and his returning home to the baronetcy. Under one name or another I suspect there was a good deal of trouble waiting for him in various parts of Australia, but nothing against him in his own identity – or nothing serious enough to count when he had made his get-away to respectability and become a country gentleman.’

As a witness, Gerard Simney seemed to me a good deal more satisfactory than any we had encountered so far. I was prompted to put a question to him. ‘And this man Owdon that George picked up in Australia,’ I said. ‘What do you know about him?’

‘Nothing at all. There was no Owdon with him on that visit he paid us when I was a kid.’ Gerard hesitated. ‘One possible explanation of Owdon, however, has, come into my head.’

Hippias looked up quickly. ‘Explanation?’ he asked. ‘What do you mean by that?’

Gerard considered. ‘Well, it has struck me that there is something queer in this fellow Owdon’s position here. Apparently he is the father of the youth Timmy, and apparently Timmy’s mother was some woman member of our family. One can’t say that’s not queer. And for George to keep the fellow on is queerer still. So I have a notion that Owdon may have had some hold over George.’

Hippias nodded. ‘Quite so. The constable here has already mentioned some such possibility. I can’t say I think much of it myself.’

‘It has even occurred to me’ – and Gerard glanced rather sharply at his father – ‘that George’s association with Owdon might go right back to that expedition on which Denzell lost his life. It may have been a more serious affair than I know of – after all, you’ve never told me much about it – and Owdon may have turned up on George again later and threatened disclosure. And the price of his silence may have been his butler’s job.’

‘But don’t you think,’ I asked, ‘that a butler’s job would be rather an odd price to ask, even if it included a chance of seducing the female members of the family? Who wants to spend his life pouring another man’s wine? George was wealthy enough. A fat pension and no duties would be a much more likely demand.’

‘Precisely!’ Hippias spoke with emphasis. ‘in fact, the blackmail theory – for that’s what it amounts to – doesn’t really hold water. I should judge Owdon to be a very respectable man – apart, that is to say, from the little matter of his son. Don’t take me to condone fornication.’

‘Respectable?’ said Gerard. ‘There seems to be an impression in the household that he is a retired pirate. Such a past would fit in with my suggestion well enough. But it may be a story started by the mere appearance of the man.’

‘Pirate?’ asked Hippias. ‘Probably nothing more disreputable than a pilot. The two, you know, have been confused before now.’ And in a cracked voice he began humming some stave from Gilbert and Sullivan. That was the era, I suppose, to which Hippias belongs.