Fen Country (14 page)

“Good for me,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Good for me to be able to do that walk, still.”

Ellis unfolded himself, gening up from the chesterfield. Good for me that he hadn’t got a kit with him to test the blotches.

“It’s just a routine inquiry, Mr. Bradley,” he said faintly, his vitality seemingly at a low ebb. “Mrs. Fiddler’s husband, Mr. Oates’s ex-wife, they felt they should inquire. Missing Persons, you see. But iust between ourselves,” he added, his voice livening momentarily, “they neither of ‘em care a button. It’s obvious what’s happened, and they neither of ‘em care a button. Least said, Mr. Bradley, soonest mended.”

He went.

I should feel guilty; but in fact, I feel purged.

Catharsis.

Am I purged of pity? I hope not. I feel pity for Daphne and Stanislas, at the same time as irritation at their unconscionable folly.

Purged of fear?

Well, in an odd sort of way, yes.

Things have got worse for me. The strain of reducing my overdraft by £250 has left me with Mrs. Prance only two days a week, and, rather more importantly, I now have to count the tins of baked beans and the loaves I shall use for toasting.

But I feel better.

The interruptions are no less than before. Wimpole, Chris, my tax accountant all help to fill my working hours, in the same old way.

But now I feel almost indulgent toward them. Toward everyone, even Mrs. Prance.

For one thing, I garden a lot.

I get a fair number of flowers, but this is more luck than judgment. Vegetables are my chief thing.

And this autumn, the cabbages have done particularly well. Harvest cabbages, they stand up straight and conical, their dark green outer leaves folded close, moisture-globed, protecting firm, crisp hearts.

For harvest cabbages, you can’t beat nicely rotted organic fertilizers.

Can I ever bring myself to cut my harvest cabbages, and eat them?

At the
moment
I don’t want to eat my harvest cabbages. But I dare say in the end I shall.

After all, it’s only them.

Max Linster was degenerate in the stricter sense of the word: I mean that he really had had something substantial—education; a good heredity; a stable, by no means poverty-stricken background—to degenerate from. He was aware, therefore, that his errand was very exceptional; so far as Linster knew, this was the first time that an Englishman, in England, had hired another man to commit murder for him since the case of Ley and Smith. That occasion had ended badly; but for a fee of two or three hundred pounds, what could you expect? Linster’s own fee was going to be twenty times larger—and he had every reason to believe that Smith’s fate, the being hanged by the neck until he was dead, would never, never be his.

The house bulked large in front of him as he slipped in through the side gate. In the distance a church clock struck ten—and fleetingly, Linster frowned. He had twenty minutes to work in, or at the very utmost half an hour; for at midnight a certain private plane would be taking off for the Continent from a lonely field in Norfolk, and whatever else happened, Linster, who had cogent motives for not using any of the more conventional modes of transport, was going to be on that plane; he had no intention of relying on a second chance which might never come. Whether he succeeded in this last job in England would consequently depend a good deal on the organization at this end…

He reconnoitered, glancing in circumspectly at the lighted, uncurtained window of the servants’ sitting-room; then went and located the first-floor window to which—through certain intermediaries—he had been directed. To reach its balcony proved in no way difficult; and the french windows, he found, had been left unfastened, as promised. Inside, he deduced his surroundings with his nose. A woman’s bedroom. This was it, all right.

In accordance with his instructions, he waited; and presently, hearing footsteps approaching along the corridor, moved swiftly and silently across the room to station himself behind the door. It opened slowly. A switch clicked; light flooded down from the crystal electrolier…

And Ley came into the room.

Only this man was much younger than Ley—probably not more than thirty-five or so. His thinning, crinkled blond hair gleamed under the electric bulbs; his face was puffy and sullen; the right arm of his dinner-jacket was empty, pinned neatly to his breast. From behind him, as he stood peering sharply about, “Mr. Elliston?” Linster murmured.

Jacob Elliston swung round abruptly, teetering on his heels. And stared…

“So,” he breathed, relaxing his scrutiny at last. “So… You’re who they sent.”

Linster nodded. “I’m who they sent.”

Turning from him, Elliston pushed the door to and crossed the room to close the curtains. He said:

“Let’s not waste any time… As you’ll have gathered, this is my wife’s bedroom. At the immediate moment, my wife is downstairs with her brother, who came over for the evening. But in the next few minutes, he’ll have to leave to catch his train. She’ll come up to bed.”

Linster’s eyes flickered, and he glanced at his watch; but for the moment he had no comment to offer.

“After that,” Elliston went on, facing him again, “it’ll be up to you. But you must understand that you’ll get no money if you don’t succeed in actually…”

“In actually killing the lady,” suggested Linster with a smile. “Yes, I understand that, Mr. Elliston. Cash strictly on delivery.” He stepped forward—watchfully, for this was the first really crucial stage in the tactics he had planned: unlike one or two men whom he had met, and others he had heard of, Linster had no interest in murder for its own sake; so if robbery would achieve the same end… “But you have the money ready, I hope,” he said.

The muzzle of Elliston’s pistol halted him when there was still some distance between them. And Elliston shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Don’t try that. The money’s ready, certainly, but for the time being it’s in my bedroom safe. If you want it, you’ll have to do the job as specified.”

“Of course.” Linster remained unperturbed. “I never considered anything else. Incidentally, there were one or two details…”

“You are to use both your hands.”

“Yes.” Linster’s gaze strayed to the empty sleeve. “Yes. Very sensible. They go a lot by the bruises.”

“And also you’re to fake a burglary. Force the window catch. Mess the room up a bit… yes, and you’d better take that jewel-box away with you. For your information, there’s nothing very valuable in it. But as it’s locked, you’re not to know that, are you?”

Still holding the pistol in steady alignment, Elliston moved toward the door. “I’m going now—to my own bedroom, where I shall turn the radio on loud.” He opened the door a fraction and paused, listening. “That’s my brother-in-law leaving now. My wife has had a tiring day: she’ll be coming up almost at once. So if I return here with the money in, say, twenty minutes…”

“Twenty minutes,” said Linster, “should be fine.”

And so Elliston left, and soon the sound of a dance band blared out from a room near by. Linster, meanwhile, had been appraising his surroundings. The window curtains were useless to him, he saw, for they barely reached the ground; he had no intention of groveling under any bed, and the floor of the wardrobe was cluttered up with shoes. That left either a clothes cupboard set into the wall, or else the space behind the door—and without more than a minimal hesitation, Linster chose the former. It was true that once inside it, you had no means of seeing what was going on; but at least you could hear… Flexing his fingers inside his gloves, Linster switched off the lights and vanished like a shadow.

When Joséphine Demessieux entered her mistress’s bedroom that evening she was in her usual bad temper. The pretty, callow, inexperienced provincial French girl whose coming to England to work, two years before, had seemed such an adventure, was long since extinct. From the way she was overpaid, Joséphine had correctly deduced herself indispensable: in servant-starved England there was always another job waiting, so why trouble yourself about giving value for money? Moreover, the Elliston household was a wealthy one—so that quite soon sharp envy had joined irresponsibility in hastening the deterioration of Joséphine’s character. Madame could be considerate, to be sure; just now, for instance, when she had decided to walk with her brother to the railway-station, she had said that Joséphine need not wait up. But that was nothing; what was important was that the mistress possessed beautiful things while the maid had none…

So Joséphine performed her few small duties in the bedroom with a slovenly rapidity; and then, lingering, succumbed in Madame’s fortunate absence to the most ancient and inevitable servant-peccadillo of them all, the trying-on of her employer’s envied belongings. The ring, and the brooch, and the mink cape worn over the plain black dress, transformed her; by the time Linster—judging his victim to be now sufficiently relaxed, and conscious that in any case the span remaining to him was too short to allow of further inaction—by the time Linster slipped out from the cupboard, Joséphine was as fine a lady as ever in her wildest dreams she had hoped to be…

Moving noiselessly up behind her, Linster watched her face reflected in the mirror before which she was pirouetting. He was still a foot or two away from her when she saw him and turned—but his left hand was broad and quick, and her throat slender. Thumb on the one side, middle finger on the other, found, and tightened on, the carotid and the vagus nerve. So

Joséphine Demessieux uttered no cry or other sound, and indeed was unconscious for a whole minute, or even more, before at last her lungs burst, and she died…

Linster lowered the body carefully to the floor; then took the folded counterpane, and with it covered the thing that he had done. To break the window-catch, to pull out drawers and disarrange their contents was the work of only a very few minutes. The little jewel-box, after brief consideration, he threw out of sight under the bed. When Elliston re-entered the room, pistol again in hand, Linster was nowhere to be seen; but he emerged at once from his concealment on seeing who the intruder was.

For all his earlier self-assurance, Elliston was sweating now; his eyes, as he stared at the huddled shape under the counterpane, looked almost blind. He said:

“It—it’s done.”

Linster nodded. “It’s done.”

“You’re certain she’s…”

“Yes, Mr. Elliston, she’s quite dead.” Linster stooped, pulled a flaccid white hand from under the counterpane. “If you don’t believe me, feel this.”

But Elliston jerked backward, shuddering. “That ring,” he mumbled presently, still staring as if hypnotized. “It’s one she hardly ever—”

Linster straightened up, dropping the hand. He said: “The money, Mr. Elliston. Five thousand.”

In silence the packets of notes changed hands. “So I’ll be leaving you now, Mr. Elliston,” said Linster when he had stowed them away; and as a malicious afterthought: “Sorry I can’t stay to make a pass at that nice little maid your wife has. But that’s life.”

Elliston’s white, uncomprehending face turned slowly. “The—the maid?”

“The maid. I looked in at the window of your servants’ sitting-room before I climbed up here, and there she was. Dark. A soft-looking mouth. Quite a girl. I’d recognize
her
again, anywhere. But”—shrugging—”I had this urgent appointment. And you don’t ever get the money till you’ve delivered the goods—some soft of goods. And a man must live.”

Elliston was gazing blankly at him. He said: “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

But Linster, with one leg already over the edge of the balcony, only shook his head.

“You will, Mr. Elliston,” he said pleasantly. “You will.”

In a room high up in a corner of New Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Humbleby turned to his visitor and said “Look here, Gervase, if you’d like to go on ahead…”

“No, no, no.” From the depths of an armchair, Gervase Fen gestured dissent. “I’m quite happy as I am. But what exactly is this telephone call we’re waiting for? Anything interesting?”

“The case it’s concerned with is interesting in some ways,” said Humbleby. “I was assigned to it when the Chief Constable of Wessex asked us for help. I’ve been working on it with a local CID man called Bolsover. It’s him I’m expecting to hear from—just a routine report until such time as I can get back down there again.

“Cassibury Bardwell, the place is called. It’s a sort of hybrid—too big to be a village and too small to be a town. In the countryside round about there are, apart from the farms, a few remote, inaccessible little cottages, and one of these was occupied, until he was killed last Saturday evening, by a young man named Joshua Ledlow.

“Here is this Joshua, then, thirty years old, unmarried, and of a rather somber and savage temperament. He is looked after by his sister Cicely, who shows no particular fondness for him and would in any case prefer to be looking after a husband, but who remains unwooed and, having no fortune of her own, housekeeps for Joshua as a respectable substitute for earning a living.

“Joshua, meanwhile, is courting, the object of his fancy being a heavily-built girl called Vashti Winterbourne. He has a rival, by name Arthur Penge, by vocation the local ironmonger; and it is clear that Vashti will soon have to make up her mind which of these suitors she is going to marry.

“In the meantime, relations between the two men degenerate into something like open hostility, the situation being complicated latterly by the fact that Joshua’s sister Cicely has fallen in love with Penge, thereby converting the original triangle into a sort of—um—quadrangle. So there you have all the ingredients for a thoroughly explosive mixture—and in due course it does in fact explode.

“With that much preliminary I can go on to describe what happened last Saturday and Sunday. What happened on Saturday was a public quarrel, of epic proportions, between Joshua, Cicely and Penge. This enormous row took place in the entrance-hall of a pub called The Jolly Ploughboy, and consisted of (a) Penge telling Joshua to lay off Vashti, (b) Cicely telling Penge to lay off Vashti and take her, Cicely, to wife instead, (c) Penge telling Cicely that no man not demonstrably insane would ever dream of marrying her and (d) Joshua telling Penge that if he didn’t keep away from Vashti in future, he, Joshua, would have much pleasure in slitting his, Penge’s, throat for him.