A Question of Proof (8 page)

‘Well, as we seem to be in the drawing room, I’ll tell you a nice, clean joke. Oh, I say, that reminds me of a thing the superintendent said to me last evening – damn smart, I call it. Decent fullah, that.’

The company was duly regaled with the superintendent’s witticism, and the talk drifted in his direction. Tiverton doubted the ability of his mind, Griffin the legitimacy of his birth. Gadsby thought he was a clever fullah and a sportsman. Sims remarked with some truculence that he was not going to be bullied by any great hulking lout in a blue uniform. Michael, appealed to as the thumbnail character-sketcher of the party, admitted that he’d been too frightened by the superintendent to get more than a blurred impression of him, but felt that his cleverness or stupidity, whichever it was, was on the grand scale, and that either would therefore be equally dangerous.

At this point the alleged philanderer, Wrench, came in. A certain awkwardness made itself felt in the
atmosphere
, a general looking sideways and fiddling with teaspoons and relighting of pipes.

‘Have some coffee, Wrench?’ said Tiverton. ‘Been putting the boys to bed?’

‘Thanks. Yes, they’re a bit worked up tonight.’

Sims blurted out, ‘There you are, Gadsby,’ and grinned apologetically as four pairs of eyes shot meaning glances at him. Wrench looked about him in a puzzled way. ‘What
are
you talking about? Is this a bet?’ The silence grew even more sultry. Tiverton broke it, like a thunderclap, ‘Gadsby apparently thought you were putting Rosa to bed.’

‘Here, I say, hang it, old man,’ stuttered Gadsby.

Wrench went very white. His eyes narrowed and his nostrils distended: all humanity seemed to have left his face. He rose to his feet, still holding the coffee cup, glaring at Gadsby:

‘You dirty rotter!’ he said, in a taut, brittle kind of voice. ‘You poor, brainless sot! Get to hell out of this!’ His voice rose to a shout and cracked. He threw the coffee cup full in Gadsby’s face.

Gadsby staggered and blinked. Blood and coffee were running down his cheek. He growled in his throat, then lurched towards Wrench and knocked him several feet into a comer, where he lay with a heap of Tiverton’s golf-clubs tumbled over him, whimpering. Evans was on his feet, feeling full of blind, undirected rage. Tiverton had a queer, puzzled look on his face. Only Griffin seemed to be himself. He stood up like a cliff in front of Gadsby, took him
by
the shoulders, twirled him round and put him into the passage, saying quietly: ‘You seem to have done enough mischief for tonight; your presence will not be required any more.’ Then he turned round and got the sobered Sims to help him bring Wrench up to his bedroom. Tiverton and Evans were left alone in the devastated room. Tiverton still had that strange, faraway expression, as though he were trying to think out the answer to a conundrum.

‘Now what on earth,’ he said slowly, ‘what on earth made me say that?’

‘We all seem to be a bit bedlamite this evening,’ answered Michael lamely. ‘Well, I think I’ll go along. Good-night.’

And he went to bed, where he lay awake for hours, coming to realise how the dirty work of murder was only beginning when the victim was dead: going over details of the past day, and as it were piecing together thus the new, changed relationship amongst his colleagues. For there was a change: a kind of reservation beneath the surface. It came upon him with a sickening impact that he and they felt that the murderer was one of their number, and that the events of the evening had been a violent revolt of masked suspicions. He was very glad indeed that Nigel Strangeways was commg.

While the Sudeley Hall staff were showing these premonitory signs of a collapse of morale, Superintendent Armstrong and Sergeant Pearson were
holding
an informal council of war over whiskies and sodas in the former’s house. Sergeant Pearson made his report first. He was a young, keen, open-faced officer. His curly flaxen hair and general air of blue-eyed innocence made him a favourite, especially with middle-aged women, and a success as an interviewer. His face so accurately mirrored his mind, which was entirely straightforward in its workings, that criminals were apt to open their hearts to him as to a brother, or else – hopelessly rattled by his extreme ingenuousness – suspect that it concealed a diabolic cunning and tie themselves up accordingly in knots of duplicity.

His report was long but apparently barren. He and the Sudeley constable had first verified Gadsby’s alibi at the Cock and Feathers. He had arrived and left at the hours stated. He had been alone in the private room for five or six minutes after his arrival, but had then sought the more congenial atmosphere of the public bar. Pearson had then gone the rounds of all the parents living in the vicinity who had attended the sports. None of them had seen the unfortunate Wemyss. Only one recollected talking to Mr. Wrench at the sports, and that was after the 440 yards race; neither had he blue eyes nor a son called ‘Tom.’ None of them had noticed Mr. Wrench talking to a blue-eyed man in a brown suit at any time before or during the sports; though several fathers had had the requisite colour of eyes and clothing.

Meanwhile some of the sergeant’s men had been combing the neighbourhood; but, if the boy had
left
the school grounds at all, he apparently had done it in a cap of invisibility. An extensive inquiry had also been set on foot into the whereabouts of that class described as ‘having no fixed abode’; the results of this were still coming in, and no support for the headmaster’s theory had as yet been found. The labourers who had found the body had been put through a searching examination, the result of which was nil.

All these facts Pearson retailed in a regulation voice, sitting bolt upright and gazing dreamily at a picture of some anatomically deformed angels above the superintendent’s head. He now relaxed, transferred his attention from angels to whisky, and waited for Armstrong to speak.

‘Well, George,’ the superintendent said, ‘you’ve done a good day’s work. I didn’t really expect those lines to lead anywhere, but it narrows down the field to be shut of them.’

He then proceeded to outline his own activities. He had first examined the rumble and front seats of Gadsby’s car; there had been no sign of either having recently been occupied by a body, though that by no means eliminated Gadsby as a possible murderer. He had next interviewed the whole staff of servants at Sudeley Hall. They were now practically exempt from suspicion, having been underneath each other’s noses – if not actually tumbling over each other – either in the kitchen or the garden, during the hectic period between lunch and the sports. At this point
Armstrong
made a pregnant pause. Knowing his superior’s weakness for a dramatic effect, Pearson said, ‘ ‘Practically’ you were saying, sir?’

‘Yes. I stumbled over two curious pieces of evidence. The groundsman, Mould – he’s a bit lacking in the upper storey – but he was quite certain that a number of his sacks, full ones, had been moved since he went into his shed that morning. When he and Mr. Griffin went in, he said, he found them in a sort of lean-to position against the far wall. They were placed in such a way as to make a possible hiding-place – I got him to put them back for me as he remembered finding them after lunch.’

Sergeant Pearson whistled in a way cunningly calculated to express both astonishment and admiration. The superintendent continued:

‘My other exhibit is Rosa. She is one of the maids. She was in the kitchen, helping to wash up, till just before two. Then she said she felt unwell and went up to her bedroom to lie down. We have no corroboration of her movements from then till she joined some of the other servants at a dormitory window watching the sports – soon after two-thirty. Miss Rosa is a pretty hot piece of goods, I can tell you, and what’s more, she’s frightened. I didn’t press her at all. I’m just leaving her to simmer for a bit.’

Armstrong leaned back, took a good swig at his glass, breathed stertorously, and beamed upon the sergeant.

‘I got some interesting sidelights from the servants,
too
. Mr. Evans, it seems, is quite the gentleman but a bit standoffish. Mr. Wrench is the reverse, in both particulars. Mr. Sims gives no trouble; Mr. Tiverton a good deal – “fussy old geezer,” were the words, I think. Mr. Griffin and Mr. Gadsby are “jolly, pleasant-spoken gentlemen,” though the latter does keep whisky bottles under the bed. The Rev. Mr. Vale seems to be a holy terror, with a tongue “like I never did”; in fact, no one would stay on for a minute if it wasn’t for Mrs. Vale, who is “a real lady and ever so nice,” though “some do say as how she’s a bit flighty and who wouldn’t be with an old devil like that for a husband.” ’

The superintendent filled up his glass and the sergeant’s before proceeding to relate the rest of his activities. After his interview with the domestic staff he had made a thorough search of the wood; result – nil. Had tested all suitable surfaces in Mould’s shed for fingerprints; result – hopeless. Had verified from several boys that Tiverton had been in and out of the day room after lunch. Had found a copy of
Mademoiselle de Maupin
in Wrench’s room, the illustrations of which caused him to amend his views about school textbooks. Had finally left the school and paid a visit to Mr. Urquhart in Staverton.

‘He told me, after the usual lawyer’s demurring, that Mr. Vale, as the deceased’s next-of-kin, stood to come in for a considerable sum of money; he would not like to stipulate the exact amount, etc., etc. He himself had managed the boy’s financial affairs since
the
parents’ death, Mr. Vale seeing to the educational side. Mr. Urquhart is the sole executor of the will, and only comes in for a small legacy himself, so he tells me.’

Armstrong hovered again, as it were in midflight, and the sergeant gave the requisite cue.

‘You are not satisfied with his story, sir?’

‘Mark my words, young man, that fellow’s frightened of something. Half the people in this case are, as far as I can make out. But I’m coming to the funny part of it. I asked him for his movements on Wednesday. He blustered a bit – all these lawyers do – then he told me a very curious story. Says he got a typewritten anonymous note by the morning post, with a Sudeley postmark, asking him to be in Edgworth Wood, that’s less than a mile from Sudeley Hall, you know, at one-forty-five, when the sender would tell him something to his advantage. “Absolute secrecy,” “burn this note”; all the usual stuff.’

‘And did he?’

‘Did he what? Oh, yes, he burnt it, so he says.’

‘I meant – did he go, sir?’

‘Aha, George, you’re coming on. You’re wondering why a respectable solicitor should take any notice of a shady communication like that.’

Pearson hadn’t thought of this at all, but he nodded his head portentously. ‘And I suppose nobody turned up,’ he said.

‘You suppose right, my boy, if Urquhart is to be believed. Now if the thing was a genuine hoax he
would
probably not have destroyed the note. On the other hand, if he really did meet someone, he would be eager to produce that someone to prove an alibi. Anyway, I’ve left him to simmer, too. We’re going to see him again tomorrow, though he doesn’t know it. I’ve put a tag on him, of course, and I’ve sent Wills and Johnson to inquire whether anyone saw him or his car anywhere about Edgworth. It’s a deserted sort of place, though.’

‘You mean, you think it’s possible that he –?’

‘He might have done it; yes.
But
I doubt it. He doesn’t stand to gain much by the boy’s death. No, I’ve other ideas about Mr. Urquhart. Lives very well for a solicitor, don’t he?’ the superintendent added irrelevantly. ‘Big car, posh house and all. Well, well, we shall see. Now, George, what is your theory about this crime?’

This was another favorite gambit of the superintendent’s, and Pearson made the conventional movement in reply. He scratched his head, stared dismally into his whisky and soda, and mumbled something about not seeing the wood for the trees yet. Armstrong took so deep a breath that his buttons threatened to fly off and expelled it to the visible perturbation of his moustache; his decks thus cleared for action.

‘All right, then,’ he said, ‘let’s take a look at the trees. Assuming for the present that Wemyss was murdered where the body was found, some time between one and four p.m. Can we narrow the time down?’

‘Well, sir, no one but a loony would have killed him during the sports. Hayfield’s in full view of most of the sports ground and that particular haystack is only about thirty yards from where some of the spectators were standing.’

‘Twenty-six and a half, actually,’ said Armstrong with elaborate negligence. ‘Yes, you’re right there. We can take two-thirty as one limit. Probably two-twenty; because people were coming out on to the field by then. Now, Mrs. Vale says she was in that haystack till about one-twenty-five, and she wouldn’t be likely to admit it if it wasn’t true. What do you think of her, George?’

George grinned sheepishly. ‘She’s a bit of all right, she is.’

‘Aha! Fallen for a skirt again. You’ll never make a detective, young man,’ rallied the superintendent ponderously. ‘Now, if you ask me, I’d say she was a deep one. Got nerve, too. Wonder if she’s got enough nerve to take her lunch beside a corpse.’

‘Good Lord, sir, you can’t mean that?’ The sergeant was genuinely shocked.

‘I should say she’d strength enough to strangle a young whippersnapper like that. And there’s the money, don’t forget that.’

‘Well, if you’re thinking of that motive, what about old Brimstone?’ said Pearson disrespectfully.

‘Mm. Took half an hour to change, he says. Had plenty of time to slip down before his wife came up. Mr. Urquhart told me the school was prosperous,
though
, and I can’t see Brimstone taking a risk like that unless he was on his beam-ends – if then.’

‘Surely that applies equally to Mrs. Brim–Vale, doesn’t it?’ said the chivalrous Pearson.

‘From that point of view, perhaps, though we don’t know that she may have run into debt privately. Dresses pretty expensively. But you’re forgetting what the servants said.’