Cold, Lone and Still (17 page)

‘I am sure it is. What happened to the
sgian dubh
which your brother was questioned about after the murder?’

‘James wanted to get rid of it when that policeman seemed so interested in it, so he tried to sell it.’

‘I gather that he was unsuccessful,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Yes, he was, so we’ve still got the thing. It’s in his room. Do you want to see it?’ She went upstairs and came down with it. It was a lovely little thing, silver-mounted in a black sheath, elegant and slim, a replica, in fact, of the one Freddie Brown had shown us, but the genuine article, not a fake.

‘If he wants to sell that,’ said Laura, ‘and the price is fair, I’m in the market.’

‘Why did he become alarmed when the police interested themselves in this very charming little knife?’ asked Dame Beatrice. Jane came over to me and seated herself on the arm of my chair. I put my own arm round her.

‘Speak away,’ I said. ‘You are in front of the most impartial jury in the world.’

‘Including you?’

‘I’m not really in on this act.’

‘As a fellow Scot,’ said Laura, laying aside the
sgian dubh
with as much reluctance as Julius Caesar, according to Casca, laid aside the circlet which would have made him emperor of Rome, ‘I can assure you we have nothing up our sleeve. All we are doing is to clear the ground. It’s like one of those silly mathematics games, when, after the endless mental toil, you come back to the number you first thought of, so not to worry. We’re only cutting away the dead wood.’

‘James talks too much, but about what?’ I asked, tightening the arm I had put round her. ‘Look, Jane, nobody thinks James killed Carbridge, so what has he got to be so careful about?’

‘He had a quarrel with Carbridge while we were on the tour.’

‘Well, so had I,’ I said. ‘Fortunately for me, I can prove an alibi at the time of the murder. Can’t James?’

‘No, and I can’t help him, but it’s not as though you and he were the only ones. As a matter of fact, before we got to Fort William I think everybody was tired of Carbridge. He and Todd did the last part of the tour on their own, as I suppose you know. He had got under everybody’s skin by that time. He used to call those office girls Red Sails in the Sunset. They laughed about it at first, but it got very tiresome when he laboured it. Then he called me Young Plover’s Egg and when my feet began to play me up he tried to be funny about it —’

‘
Did
he!’ I said. ‘I wish I’d heard him!’

‘Then, the first time he called out “Toro! Toro!” when Todd came into the youth hostel common-room, Todd turned so white that I was afraid he was going to faint. Of course Carbridge saw he had upset him, so he harped on it. Then he used to call Perth the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. It was difficult to deal with him because, on the surface, it was all so good-humoured and he never exactly insulted anybody.’

‘Old boy, old boy!’ I said savagely. ‘What about Patsy Carlow and Coral Platt?’

‘Oh, they took everything in good part and so did Freddie Brown. The other person who objected strongly to Carbridge was Lucius Trickett, but he contented himself by referring to half-baked oafs and he had as little to do with Carbridge as possible.’

‘Most interesting,’ said Dame Beatrice. Something in her tone told me that she had learned a fact which she badly needed to know. Vaguely I connected it with Sally Lestrange and poor old Bull’s autobiography, although what brought that into my mind I could not say. Perhaps I really do have extra-sensory perception. Who knows? Anyway, Dame Beatrice rose from her chair with the satisfied smile of a snake which has tucked its goat safely into its gullet and is now prepared to sleep away the long process of digestion.

‘Mr Carbridge certainly seems to have possessed the gentle art of making enemies,’ she said.

Jane agreed and added, ‘But without the slightest idea that
that
was what he was doing. He was the most myopic fool I ever met.’

‘And, according to Perth, the onlooker who saw most of the game, he died
because
he was a fool,’ I said.

Meanwhile, the police, pursuing their usual unspectacular, mundane, pedestrian tactics, had found what they were convinced was the murder weapon. Bingley, it seemed, had argued that the murderer would have had very little time to get rid of it, so that the chances were he had hidden it somewhere near at hand. The puzzle was to decide his reason for having substituted another knife for it.

‘A case of muddled thinking,’ Trickett said to me when we were discussing the case much later. ‘He must have hoped to throw suspicion on Freddie and Coral and had no idea that the pathologist would spot it was the wrong knife.’

They looked in the obvious places at the hall of residence, such as under a loose floorboard they found in Trickett’s study-bedroom when he pointed it out to them, and at the bottom of the lavatory cisterns and the big tank in the roof, and then one of the coppers noticed that the flowerbeds in the little garden which formed the centre of the London square in which the hall of residence was set had been freshly dug over, so they did a bit of digging on their own account and found what the pathologist agreed could be the knife which had administered to the choked and dying Carbridge his
coup de grâce
.

It was not difficult to establish ownership. Called upon separately, Trickett, Freddie, Coral, Patsy, Perth, Tansy and Rhoda identified the dagger as the antique which had been given to Todd. Todd made no attempt at a denial, but said merely (and calmly) that he recognised the knife, that he had lost it soon after his return home and that he could offer no explanation of how it had got into the flowerbed. The police pointed out that it had also got into Carbridge’s body.

‘How did you get on with him?’ they asked. ‘Did you like him?’

‘
Like
the fellow?’ he said. ‘With everybody else I got heartily sick of him by the time that Scottish walk was over, but there was no harm in him. In fact, I had more to do with him than with anybody else on the tour and we finished at Fort William as a twosome, everybody else having chickened out and gone by bus. Any reason to murder the chap? Good Lord, if we were all murdered for our nuisance-value, who would be alive today? Not my Inspector of Taxes, to name but one!’

H
era and I had attended Carbridge’s funeral. So had the warden and his wife, the Scottish tour party and one or two of the students who had made up the orchestra, but of friends and relatives there was no sign. I remembered that none of his own kind had come forward to identify the body and, although I had never liked the chap, I found myself feeling very sorry for him. I began to understand his compulsive gregariousness. He was dependent on strangers for all his social contacts. In other words, nobody had ever really loved him. I stood back mentally and looked at myself. I did not like to think that we were two of a kind.

After all the revelations about Carbridge’s unpopularity, I said as much to Elsa. At the time I was feeling reasonably well pleased, for I had met and vanquished our Luella Granville Waterman. ‘She was clay in my hands,’ I said.

‘Well, you owe that to me,’ said Elsa. ‘When she turned up and asked whether you had recovered sufficiently to talk to her, I said that only your conscientious devotion to our authors had brought you back into harness and I warned her that, if you were excited or frustrated in any way, the chances were that you would drop dead at her feet. We need to keep the old stagers like her, Comrie. They may not be bestsellers, but they’re steady and, like Tennyson’s brook, they go on forever.’

I said I felt sorry for the old girl and would always do my best for her and it was then that I added my reflections concerning Carbridge and myself.

‘Don’t waste your sympathy on
him
,’ said Elsa. ‘People who have no friends don’t deserve to have any. You couldn’t stand the man, if you remember, and you don’t seem to have been the only one.’

‘Well, he irritated me, I allow, but I stopped short of murdering him, anyway.’

‘His will has finally been proved,’ she said. ‘He left quite a lot of money, and all of it to Todd.’

‘Good Lord! But that’s a motive for murder, if ever there was one! Money is nearly always at the bottom of these things.’

‘Todd may not have known the contents of the will until it was proved. He is entitled to the benefit of the doubt.’

‘What do you mean by “quite a lot of money”? Hundreds? Thousands?’

‘About twenty thousand. It seems a lot of money to a poor soul like me.’

‘It wouldn’t even buy half a house.’

‘Oh, don’t be silly, Comrie. Nobody buys a house outright. What are mortgages for?’

‘They equate with the millstones people hang round their own or other people’s necks. So Carbridge left his money to Todd. That much of what you say must be true because you know I can check on it. If he left Todd his money, it would be because he liked the chap, although I must say he used to rile him with his teasing. Young Jane Minch made that very clear.’

‘I expect he showed off in front of other people and hoped to raise a laugh at Todd’s expense, but, from what you’ve told Sandy and me from time to time, weren’t the two of them really very thick? Weren’t they walking on their own quite a bit when you were walking The Way?’

‘I wouldn’t say “quite a bit”, but I think they pushed on ahead of the students and the Minches when the students and Perth loitered to chip bits off the rocks and Jane’s feet got so sore. I carried her back to the hostel on one occasion, I remember.’

Elsa grinned.

‘The devil you did!’ she said. ‘What on earth did Hera say to that? And was it really necessary?’

‘To your first question the answer is self-evident. Hera was not very pleased. As to whether it was necessary to transport the girl in the manner indicated, let’s just say that I wanted the wench in my arms, but don’t ask me why.’

‘Was it satisfactory?’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘I had better begin pricing-up fish-slices, or would you rather have a tea-strainer?’

Dame Beatrice telephoned me on the following day to ask me to accompany her on a visit to the warden at the hall of residence. He had terminated his vacation and was staying there because he had plenty to do before the new term began. I could not imagine what more Dame Beatrice required of the warden, still less could I fathom her purpose in taking me with her to visit him. When I told Sandy I had to be out of the office again, all he said was, ‘And to think I once fondly imagined that you worked here!’ I said I had an idea that we were about to reach a climax in the matter of finding out who had killed Carbridge but, when Dame Beatrice and I reached the hall of residence next day, her first question to the warden gave no hint of this.

‘Would you mind telling me how long you have been in charge here?’ she asked.

‘I have been here for a little more than five years. My predecessor retired at the end of an Easter term and I took over in the following May.’

‘Had you any previous knowledge of any of the students who were here when you took office?’

‘No, none of them, nor would they have known me. I came here from Hull, and at the time I had no contacts in London.’

‘Would there be records of former residents of this hall? — students, I mean.’

‘Oh, yes, of course. We like to keep up with our students’ future progress. Some of them turn out to be quite notable people in their own field.’

‘I imagine you do not keep records of those attendant on them while they are in residence.’

‘If you refer to the cook and the maids and so forth, no, we do not. I inherited the domestic staff when I accepted the post and they have remained faithful, I am glad to say. I suppose your immediate interest is in the man Bull. He, too, was here when I came and, on the whole, has given very satisfactory service.’

‘Would it be possible for me to look at your lists of former students?’

‘Of course, Dame Beatrice. As a matter of fact, I myself looked them over not long after that unfortunate party to see if I recognised the names of any of the older guests, as it seemed likely that whoever committed the murder had an inside knowledge of the building. I was very much in two minds whether to grant permission to Trickett to hold that party. Parties can be allowed, and
are
allowed, during term, but then, of course, my wife and I are on hand and can keep a grasp on the reins. However, Trickett is a steady, reliable youth, so I acceded to his request. How much I wish I had not!’

‘Few of us have the gift of foresight,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I am particularly interested in the name Todd.’

‘The strange thing is,’ the warden said, ‘that the only Todd I could find would be at least sixty-five years of age by now. It is really rather puzzling.’

‘And most intriguing,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘because the Todd I have in mind must have changed his name.’ The warden produced his lists. As Dame Beatrice finished checking each year’s intake, she handed the document to me. It appeared that the hall of residence could accommodate thirty-six students in groups of twelve, for as the normal college course lasted for three years, twelve students were all that could be admitted in any particular year. I took the precaution of going back twenty-five years, but the only Todd that I, like the warden, tracked down, was indeed an elderly gentleman who could not possibly be the Todd we were after.

We worked steadily through the lists and then Dame Beatrice, handing them back, remarked, ‘You appear to get a number of foreign students here.’

‘Most places of higher education do. Here we get West Indians, Pakistanis, students from other parts of India, occasionally one or two from European countries —’

‘And, if his name is anything to go by, one from Spain.’

‘Spain?’ said the warden. Dame Beatrice handed him one of the documents. ‘Oh, yes, a man named Grantoro. Why did you single out that name? Simply because it is Spanish?’

‘I have never met it before.’ Both the warden and I saw this as an evasive answer and Dame Beatrice realised this and cackled. ‘ “The proper study of mankind is man”,’ she said, ‘and the study of man includes the language he uses to disguise (we are told) his thoughts.’

I glanced at her and light dawned on me. ‘
Toro
,’ I said, ‘means bull.
Grantoro
, big bull.’

‘Exactly,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I wonder, Mr Terrance, whether we might send for your caretaker?’

Puzzled but acquiescent, the warden touched the bell and sent a servant to find Bull. As soon as the old man saw Dame Beatrice, he stiffened and a look of obstinacy came into his face, but it was to me he spoke. ‘I’ve give it up,’ he said. ‘The young lady don’t want to do me life story. She ain’t been nowhere near me all this week.’

‘No. She is away from home,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Bull, why did you tell her (and Mr Melrose here) all those lies about your former profession?’

‘They wasn’t lies. I
was
assistant to the public executioner.’

‘Yes, in a Spanish province, not in England. You were not a hangman, but a garrotter. Your son was so bitterly ashamed of your public image that he did not register at the polytechnic in your name, but translated it to Grantoro.’

‘That wasn’t nothing to do with my job. I’d give it up. It was because he didn’t care to be known as the caretaker’s son.’

‘Why didn’t you admit you knew Carbridge?’ asked the warden. ‘You recognised the body as soon as you saw it, didn’t you? Carbridge and your son were fellow students here, although Grantoro was a third-year and Carbridge a first-year. This morning, I received a letter from my predecessor, who has only just heard about the murder. He says that, several years ago, Carbridge also changed his name. He is down in the lists simply as “Bridge” — that’s why no one noticed before.’

‘And at some time during their student days,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘Bridge found out that Todd, then calling himself Grantoro, was your son and he also found out what your former profession had been. My granddaughter found that out, too, and decided that she wanted no more to do with your autobiography. Mere squeamishness, of course, but most girls are squeamish when it comes to putting an iron collar round a criminal’s neck and tightening it until it throttles him. A drop at the end of a rope seems infinitely preferable to women if a criminal has to be executed.’

Bull said sullenly that the men he had dealt with were murderers, and that they deserved what they got. He added that he had always wanted to have his son educated in England.

‘I wanted as he should better himself,’ he said. ‘I wanted as he should have chances I did not have. I was twenty-four years of age when the Spanish Civil War started. I was married to an English girl and we had the one kid. She, the wife, didn’t like my job, either, so, what with the war and everything, I quit and we all come back here to live. I never let on what my job had been, thinking it would go against me, but I got work and built meself up a character for being reliable, which, as Mr Terrance will testify, I am, and when the job here was going they give it to me and I been here ever since, which I hope, if there’s going to be trouble, as Mr Terrance, sir, you will bear witness as I have always give satisfaction.’

The warden may or may not have intended to answer this appeal, but just then the telephone rang. Bingley was on the line.

‘I’ll take it in my study,’ said the warden. He left us and we were aware of a seriously alarmed Bull.

‘What’s
he
want with the warden?’ he asked in anxious tones.

‘Perhaps we shall know when the warden comes back,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Was it your idea or did my granddaughter herself decide not to attempt your autobiography?’

‘Reckon you knows the answer to that as well as I does, or better.’

‘I think your life was threatened if you published. As for Sally, I thought she might be in some danger, too, so I took steps to remove her from your orbit.’

‘I wouldn’t have harmed a hair of her head. We didn’t reckon we had enough of me memoirs to make into a book, that’s all.’

The warden was gone for what seemed a very long time. Bull became restless and, it was obvious, more and more uneasy.

‘I better be going,’ he said.

‘Not until the warden comes back,’ said Dame Beatrice. Such was the force of her personality that Bull re-seated himself in the chair from which he had risen and, muttering something about ‘suit yourself’, he leaned back, closed his eyes and opened them again only when the warden, Bingley and Bingley’s sergeant came in.

‘Well, Bull,’ said the detective-inspector, ‘Dame Beatrice has told me an interesting little story. I should like to know what you think of it. Of course I could tell it to you down at the station, but I daresay the warden and Mr Melrose would like to hear it, so I’ll tell it here and now. It concerns an honest man and a devoted father.’

‘You got nothing on me or on my boy.’

‘In other words, you don’t want to hear my story. Well, I don’t blame you. But why on earth, man, when you found the body in the loo passage, did you substitute another knife for the one you found in the wound? And I can tell you, before you answer me, that you may think yourself lucky that, owing to Dame Beatrice’s good offices on your behalf, I am not going to hold you as an accessory after the fact of murder. I ought to, but, as she points out, there are extenuating circumstances attaching to this case.’

‘I suppose,’ said Dame Beatrice, addressing Bull, ‘you thought you were helping your son by trying to throw suspicion on those two young people who were preparing the food for the party.’

‘I swear I never thought of nothink of that sort. All I wanted was to — was to — I don’t know how to put it.’

‘Create a diversion? Provide a red herring?’

‘Sommat o’ that sort, I’s’pose, but, honest, I never knowed as the knife belonged to the young lady student. I thought as how it were one of our own cook’s knives and I knowed she couldn’t be blamed, being on ’er ’olidays at the time and the rest o’ the kitchen staff likewise. There was plenty of other students millin’ around. I didn’t think the police would be able to pin the knife on anyone special, honest I never!’

‘I suppose it was you who buried the dagger we found in the garden in the square,’ said Bingley. ‘I really ought to run you in. You had a key to that garden—’

‘Who says I has?’

‘— and, of course, you found the body long before Mr Melrose stumbled upon it. That is when you removed the electric lightbulb by standing on a kitchen chair. You recognised the antique knife as the one your son had shown you, the present he was given by a woman member of the tour party.’