Fen Country (2 page)

“Mr. Gotobed?” she greeted him. “My name is Preedy, and I am your aunt’s companion. Do step inside. We’re still in a bit of a muddle, I’m afraid. You’ll have to remember that it’s only three days since we moved in, and make allowances for us.

“But so cozy, don’t you think, and you must speak up a bit”—this in response to some muttered civility of George’s—“because we’re both hard of hearing, though your aunt has one of these deaf-aid things, no use for them myself—this way, and you’d better leave your hat on that chair.”

George Gotobed’s Aunt Fancy, whom he was meeting for the first time, proved to be of a different order of beings from her companion. She was a little plump robin of a woman, wearing a brooch-spangled frock of unsuitable blue and sitting huddled defensively on a sofa.

Beside her a small radio set discoursed light music in a low murmur. If she was deaf, George asked himself, how on earth could she hear the thing?—and only then noticed the deaf-aid plugged into her ear.

And now she, too, was murmuring at him, uttering the conventional greetings, asking the expected questions. Infected by her diplomatic undertones, George answered in kind—until Miss Preedy impatiently requested them both to speak up: after which they shouted.

But it was not until Miss Preedy went to the kitchen to fetch in the tea that the curious incident occurred. As the door closed behind the companion, the expression on Aunt Fancy’s mild features altered abruptly, giving place to one of alarm.

“George—Mr. Gotobed,” she whispered, “you mustn’t leave me. I don’t know why she’s doing this.” Her eyes shifted. “I’m frightened,” she said. “Don’t go away, will you? Stay the night. Please, please don’t go a—”

And at that she broke off, for the door had opened and Miss Preedy was back. For heaven’s sake, thought George, is this meant to be a joke? Or is the old girl a bit loopy?

As he sat there uncomfortably sipping his tea, with the muted tones of Quilter and Eric Coates still filling the air, he found that for the life of him he was unable to take his aunt’s words seriously. Of course, there had been old ladies whose companions had murdered them for their money. But apparently Aunt Fancy wasn’t well off these days, and—No, no; ridiculous.

They ate and drank and talked politely, and presently George rose to take his leave. The invitation to stay, he noted, was not renewed; and he was steadfast in avoiding his aunt’s eye. Persecution mania, he reflected, as he walked back to the village: poor old thing.

But he always wondered, looking back on it afterward, how far he had really, in his inmost heart, believed that.

Since it was impossible for him to get back to Oxford that night, he had booked a room at the village inn, intending to make the journey in the morning. But in actual fact it was forty-eight hours or more before he reappeared at his college.

“So there I was, sir, stuck with it,” he told his tutor. “Aunt Fancy smothered with her own pillow during the night, the cottage burgled, policemen and lawyers to see, the body to identify—what with one thing and another, I was lucky to get away as soon as I did.”

“My dear George,” said the tutor, whose name was Gervase Fen, “there’s no need to apologize. Without wishing to be unkind, I may say that all this is vastly more entertaining than your opinions on
The Merchant of Venice.
Of course, I’m very sorry about your aunt—”

“That’s all right, sir,” George interrupted him. “I can’t say I’m all that cut up about it—except, of course, for the fact that I deliberately ignored her appeal for help; that’s not so funny. No, the point about it is that I’d never seen the old lady before, and she wasn’t really my aunt even—she was my stepfather’s sister—so naturally I don’t feel—”

“Just so. Am I right in thinking that she was your only remaining relative?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Natural enough, then, that she should remember you in her will.”

“Well, sir, not quite so natural as all that. You see, when my stepfather was alive she quarreled with him violently. And she’s never once written to me till just the other day, when she asked me to come and see her; so I certainly wasn’t expecting to inherit anything from her.”

“Yes. Interesting. Let me get this straight, now. As I understand it, your aunt went out to Kenya some forty years ago and remained there solidly up till last month, when she embarked for England. Incidentally, why the move? Any particular reason?”

“I gather she was running out of cash, sir. And if she’d got to pocket her pride and live on a more modest scale she preferred it to be in England, among strangers.”

“I see. But in that case your inheritance—”

“Life insurance, sir: there’s a big sum to come in life insurance. The companion—Miss Preedy—gets half, and I get the other half. ” George hesitated; then burst out: “Look here, sir, who do you think did the murder? Was it a burglar? Or was it Miss Preedy?”

“Neither,” said Fen promptly. “Have you a photograph of your aunt?”

George shook his head, bewildered. “I haven’t, l’m afraid. But—”

“Then we must rely,” Fen interposed, “on Dawkins—an ex-pupil of mine. For some years now Dawkins has been living and working in Nairobi. Also, he is an indefatigable diner-out. You can take it from me that there is no one more likely to be able to give me the facts about your aunt and Miss Preedy than Dawkins.”

Fen rose. “The cablegram service is quick,” he observed, “so I think that if you were to come back in, say, a couple of hours—”

And two hours later the reply had, in fact, arrived. “
FANCY LOOMIS FAIRLY DEAF,
” George read with astonishment, “
PREEDY NOT DEAF AT ALL GREETINGS DAWKINS.
But what does it mean, sir?” George demanded helplessly.

Fen grunted. “We shall have to confirm it by wiring photographs to Kenya,” he said, “and I’ve already rung up the police, and they’ve agreed to that. But from what you’ve told me, l’ve no doubt about the result.”

“I just don’t understand, sir.”

“Oh, come, George. Surely even you realize by now that the person you thought was Miss Preedy is in fact your aunt; and the person you thought was your aunt was in fact Miss Preedy?

“Nor,” Fen went on, “is there much difficulty about the motive. Here is your aunt, running out of money, with the life insurance her only possible resource. So what does she do? Answer: she comes with Miss Preedy to England, where they aren’t known, swaps roles, and commits murder with a view to inheriting half the life insurance.”

Fen reached for a cigarette. “You were brought into it as legatee and as visitor to the cottage, in order to diffuse a suspicion which must otherwise have been fairly concentrated. And in case for any reason that failed, the burglary was faked to make a supplementary red herring.

“How your aunt persuaded Miss Preedy to the substitution we shall probably never know. But to judge from your description, Miss Preedy was a very biddable person, very much under your aunt’s thumb.
‘I don’t know why she’s doing this.’
Poor creature, she had her suspicions, even so.”

“But how did you know, sir?”

“The radio, George,” said Fen. “The radio, of course. It was playing quietly, you remember. Your ‘aunt’ had a deaf-aid on, too.

“Now, you were talking to her—to start with, anyway—in a low voice. If she was in fact deaf, then the deaf-aid must have been amplifying your voice considerably.

“But in that case, it was also amplifying the radio. If the woman you were speaking to was genuinely deaf—genuinely using the deaf-aid—then the radio must all the time have sounded quite loud to her, even though it sounded quiet to you.

“Can you conceive anyone so circumstanced speaking to you in a low voice, whispering to you? Do you naturally speak to people in a low voice, when you have the radio on loud?

“So the answer was obvious: the woman you spoke to wasn’t deaf at all. And once I realized that a trick had been played, it didn’t take much inquiry to find out why.”

Fen sighed. “Yes, I’m sorry, George; your Aunt Fancy is going to hang. And it’s
The Merchant,
after all, which has the last word.”

“Shakespeare, sir?”

“Shakespeare. Let us,” said Fen, “all ring Fancy’s knell ”

“We’re
all
superstitious,” said Fen. And from the assembled party, relaxing by the fire, rose loud cries of dissent. “But we are, you know,” Fen persisted, “whether we realize it or not. Let me give you a test.”

“All right,” they said. “Do.”

“Let me tell you about the Copping case.”

“A crime,” they gloated. “Good.”

“And if any of you,” said Fen, “can solve it unassisted, he (or she, of course) shall be held to be without stain.

“The Copping family was an old one, and like most old families it had its traditions, the most important of these being, unfortunately, parricide. “This didn’t always take the form of actual
murder
. Sometimes it was accident, and sometimes it was neglect, and sometimes Copping parents were driven by the insufferable behavior of their offspring to open a vein in the bath. Nonetheless, there it was. As the toll mounted with the years, the Coppings inevitably became more and more prone to brood.

“By 1948, however, there were only two Coppings in the direct line left alive—Clifford Copping, a widower, and his daughter Isobel. Isobel, moreover, was married, and consequently no longer lived in the family mansion near Wantage. In August of 1948, however, she and her husband went to Wantage for a short visit. And that was when the thing happened.

“As for me, I was making a detour through Wantage, on my way back from Bath to Oxford, so as to be able to have dinner at the White Hart. And it was in the bar of the White Hart, at shortly after six in the evening, that I got into conversation with Isobel’s husband, Peter Doyle. He was drinking a fair amount. And by a quarter to eight he had reached the stage of insisting that I return with him to the Copping house for a meal.

“I didn’t at all want to do that, but as he already knew that I’d been proposing to dine at the pub, alone, it was difficult to refuse. So in the end I gave in, and we set out to walk to the house by way of the fields.

“It was a beautiful evening: I enjoyed the walk thoroughly. There was a cat, a handsome little high-stepping tortoiseshell cat, which adopted us, following us the whole way. ‘She seems to want to come in,’ I said when we arrived at the front door. And, ‘That’s all right,’ said Doyle vaguely. ‘Isobel and my father-in-law are both fond of cats.’ So she did come in, and she and I were introduced to Isobel together.

“I quite liked Isobel. But it was clear from the first that relations between her and her husband were very strained. We all talked commonplaces for a while, and then Doyle suggested that as there was still a little time to use up before dinner, he should take me to meet his father-in-law, who would probably not be joining us for the meal.

“‘He hasn’t been too well recently,’ Doyle explained. ‘You know, broody a bit… But he’d never forgive me if I let you go away without his meeting you.’

‘Well, of course I mumbled the usual things about not wanting to be a nuisance and so forth. And I can tell you, I should have been a good deal more emphatic about them if I’d known then what the inquest subsequently brought out: that for a long time now Clifford Copping had been seriously neurotic, with suicidal tendencies… However, I didn’t know, so I allowed myself to be overruled. Her father was in the top room of the tower, Isobel said. So to the tower, still accompanied by our faithful cat, Doyle and I duly went.

“It stood apart from the rest of the house, 50 feet high or more, with smooth sheer walls and narrow slits for windows; date about 1450, I should think. I expected it to be fairly ruinous inside, but surprisingly, it wasn’t. On the top landing Doyle paused in front of a certain door. I was a little way behind him, still negotiating the last flight of stairs.

“If you don’t mind waiting a moment, I’ll just go in and warn him that you’re here,’ he said—a proposal which didn’t seem to me to march very well with his assurance, earlier on, that his father-in-law would never forgive him if I left without being introduced. However, of course, I agreed—whereupon he produced from his pocket a key which I’d seen Isobel give him, and proceeded to unlock (yes, definitely it
was
locked) and to half-open the door. He looked back at me then, saying in a low voice:

“‘I expect you’ll think it’s odd, but my father-in-law does like to be locked in here from time to time, so long as it’s Isobel who keeps the tey: he trusts Isobel completely. Being shut in, and having these tremendously thick walls all around him—it gives him a feeling of security. Of course, locking him
self
in is what he’d really like best, but the doctor won’t allow that. That’s why all the bolts have been taken away.’

“‘Ah,’ I said. And something of what I felt must have showed in my face, because Doyle added:

“‘He’s all right, you know… But naturally, if you—I mean, would you rather we didn’t?’

“
‘Yes, I’d very much rather,’
would have been the truthful answer to that. But Doyle’s question was plainly of a piece with the Latin
Num?:
it expected a negative—and got one. So then we stopped talking, and, while I waited nervously on the stair, Doyle entered the room. And found the body.

“Actually, to be just and exact about it, it was the cat which saw the body first. While we’d been talking the cat had been looking into the room, and not at all liking what was in there. You know how they arch their backs, and the hair stands up all over the spine…? Well, after about a minute and a half, or perhaps as much as two minutes, Doyle came out again, very slow and white and shaken, and sat down on the top stair with his head in his hands. I could have asked him questions, but I didn’t. I went past him into the room and saw for myself.

“There was a kitchen knife and a severed throat and an almost inconceivable mess of blood. When I’d satisfied myself that no one was hidden there (and also that not even a child could possibly have escaped through the tiny windows) I felt Copping’s skin and looked at the blood and concluded (correctly, as it turned out) that the wretched man had been dead at least an hour (it was then 8:24 exactly). Then I locked the room again and gave the key back to Doyle, and together we returned to the house, where he telephoned the police and a doctor while I went off on my own and—well, you can guess what I did, can’t you?