Hobby of Murder (15 page)

‘And so he killed her,’ Roland observed drily.

‘Anyway, I don’t believe she’d have been able to scrape together a thousand pounds just like that,’ Mollie said. ‘She was pretty hard up.’

‘But one can be so wrong about people,’ Andrew murmured.

‘Who’s being wrong now?’ she asked.

‘I’ve a feeling it’s you, my dear,’ he said. ‘I don’t see Eleanor Clancy as an example of all the virtues. She may have been a fairly worthy woman, but if the possession of some dangerous knowledge came her way, and as you say, she really was hard up, then I don’t think it’s impossible she might try to use it.’

‘And she was fool enough to go up to a lonely spot like that bridge at twilight to meet this person she was blackmailing and so just happened to get murdered.’ Millie was scornful. ‘Why didn’t she get them to come to her cottage?’

‘I believe that’s a rather important question,’ Andrew said.

‘And it makes me think,’ Roland said, ‘that my next step will be to go to that cottage and take a look round. Her latchkey was in that handbag they found in the lake.’ He looked at Ian. ‘Have you by any chance got a spare? You’re her landlord, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, we’ve a spare set of keys to her front door, her back door and her garage. Wait a moment, I’ll get them.’

He left the room and was back almost at once with some keys on a ring.

Standing up, as did the sergeant, Roland looked suddenly at Andrew and said, ‘Care to come with us?’

That the invitation was meant for Andrew only and not for Ian or Mollie was very clear. He looked at them questioningly, feeling that as their guest it was only courteous to obtain their permission for his suddenly leaving them, but as he had expected, both nodded at him, sending him off. He followed the Inspector out of the house and started along the road with them to what had been Eleanor Clancy’s cottage.

But before they reached it the Inspector paused, looking towards the common. A small procession of men was coming towards them, and between them they were carrying something. It was a stretcher covered with what looked like a blanket. It was loaded on to the waiting ambulance, which was then driven away. Most of the men who had accompanied the stretcher then got into the police cars parked in the road, though two or three paused at the turnstile, then returned the way they had come.

Roland leant his elbows on the fence, peering up musingly across the common.

‘How long have the Davidges been living here?’ he asked after a moment.

‘I think it’s about two years,’ Andrew answered.

‘And before that?’

‘In a flat in Holland Park.’

‘Holland Park—that’s an expensive area, isn’t it?’

‘I believe so.’

‘And their car’s a BMW.’

‘Yes.’

‘So they aren’t what Mrs Davidge called hard up.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Nor really wealthy?’

‘No.’

‘How long have you known them?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember. I’ve known Davidge twenty or twenty-five years.’

‘But his wife not so long?’

‘She’s his second wife, you know. His first wife died some years ago, and about three years after it happened he married Mollie. She was his secretary.’

‘Happy marriage?’

Only a few days ago Andrew would have answered, ‘Very.’ Now he hesitated, and having hesitated, did not know in the least how to go on. His pause would inevitably have been noticed by Roland, so it hardly seemed worthwhile to say anything.

‘Not so very, then,’ Roland said; a statement, not a question.

‘Is it relevant?’ Andrew asked.

‘Maybe, maybe not. Just something in that rag-bag of events your friend was talking about. They hadn’t known the Clancy woman long, had they?’

‘No.’

‘But some of the things Mrs Davidge was saying about her made sense.’

‘I suppose they did.’

‘For instance, why did this victim of her blackmail, if that was what he was, want to meet her up there by the bridge and not come to her cottage? Of course, the answer’s pretty obvious. He didn’t want to risk being seen going past your house about the time he meant to kill the woman in case you recognized him and remembered it later. And it needn’t have been only passing your home that he was afraid of. Just being seen walking through the village might seem suspicious. So he agreed to meet her, but insisted it should be on the common, which he reached by that lane on the far side of the lake. A very quiet lane. It’s not much
used. But he may have been unlucky and met someone, and this, naturally, is the first thing we’re going to try to find out. We’ll be working on that in the lane itself this afternoon. If anyone passed that way they may have left some traces of themselves. Meantime, we’ll want a lot of alibis. But at least the Bartletts are off our list.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘For tonight, of course. And as I see it, that crosses them off too for Singleton’s murder. I don’t really believe we’ve two murderers on the loose. We haven’t the beginnings of an answer to that. Now let’s go in the cottage.’

They turned towards the cottage.

There was no need for a key to get into it. They discovered that the lock was broken. Inside it was dark, for the curtains were drawn. It took Roland a moment to find the light-switch as they entered. When he did and the light came on in the little hall, both men stood still, staring incredulously at what they saw. A small bookcase had had all the books that had been on it thrown to the floor. A rug had been kicked to one side. A candle-shaped light bracket on the wall had been twisted round and now hung down by its flex. It was the same in the sitting-room. Pictures, including the photograph of the girls’ cricket eleven at St Hilda’s School that had beaten the girls from Etchingham, had been torn down. Cushions had been ripped open. What books there were had been scattered on the floor. A few small china ornaments had been thrown down and looked as if they had been ground to fragments underfoot. A television had had its screen smashed. A telephone had been pulled away from the wall and lay on its side on the floor. A bowl that had had flowers in it, that stood on a little round table, had been overturned, and the flowers and the water that had been in the bowl lay in a damp puddle on the carpet. The table was on its side.

The two men stood silently taking it in. Roland was the first to speak.

‘Curtains drawn,’ he observed.

‘That doesn’t tell us much,’ Andrew said.

‘No, but it must have happened after Miss Clancy left the house, so it was probably dark by then and they needed light to do the job. But it’s true it could have happened at any time during the night. Looks as if someone was searching for something.’

‘It was a bit more than that, wasn’t it?’ Andrew said. ‘Vandals at work, or else someone simply in a blind rage. The sort of rage that perhaps killed Eleanor Clancy. Who’s going to find anything in a bowl of flowers? Shall we look at the rest of the house?’

‘Yes, but don’t touch anything. We’ve got to get the photograph and the fingerprint people in on this.’

Andrew did not need to be told not to touch anything, yet he was almost automatically about to lay a hand on the banister rail, mounting stairs having been something he had become cautious about during the last year or two, when he recollected himself and went up with his hands hanging by his sides.

The scene of destruction upstairs was the same as it was below. There were two small bedrooms with sloping ceilings and one small window each and a small bathroom. In the two bedrooms mirrors had been smashed, mattresses rolled back and slashed, pillows ripped, with their feathery contents scattered everywhere, drawers pulled out and their contents spilled on the floor. In the room that Eleanor Clancy herself had obviously used, clothes had been torn off their hangers and dropped on the floor. In the bathroom the mirror on a cabinet on the wall above the handbasin had been smashed and the contents of the cabinet, packets of aspirin, laxatives, rolls of sticking-plaster and a bottle of
disinfectant, all tumbled in the basin. The odour of the disinfectant was strong in the air.

Except for muttering to himself as they went along what sounded like a long stream of disgusted obscenities, Roland said nothing, and Andrew also was silent, though from time to time, his breath caught. Going downstairs again, they explored the kitchen. It was in the same state as the rest of the cottage. Flour and sugar had been spilled on the floor and the table, coffee beans mixed up in them, what had been a saucepan full of stew overturned on the electric stove, making a foul greasy-looking pool over the top of it, the refrigerator yawned open with its light on inside but its contents in a heap in front of it.

‘Someone must have felt tired when they got to the end of doing all this,’ Roland observed.

‘What did he use?’ Andrew asked.

‘To smash the mirror and things?’ Roland turned back into the sitting-room. He pointed at a poker lying by the great old empty hearth. ‘Could have been that. But it could have been something he took away with him.’

‘We still haven’t looked in the cellar,’ Andrew said.

‘The cellar? There’s a cellar, is there? Yes, let’s get it over, then we’ll send for the other chaps to do their stuff. I’ll phone from my car. Better not touch that phone there.’

He followed Andrew down into the cellar.

The first thing that caught Andrew’s eye was that all Eleanor Clancy’s carefully hoarded photographic equipment, which by now might almost have had antique value, had been destroyed. What gave him a feeling of blind horror was that the precious negatives, which when he had seen them last had been in neat rows on a rack, and which had probably given a rare glimpse of a period that was long passed and of a country that had totally altered, had been ground into fragments that were now entirely meaningless. They had been precious to Eleanor Clancy and were
irreplaceable. Andrew remembered the thought that he had had of discussing with her whether it might not be possible for him, using her photographs and the letters that had come down to her from her great-grandfather, forest officer in Burma in the mid-nineteenth-century, unknown, obscure, but leaving a piece of history behind him, to write the story of his life. But after all, he would have to stick to Malpighi.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Roland said. ‘Vandals, yes, plenty of them about. Telephone-boxes, shop windows and all that. But this systematic destruction of a person’s whole home—that’s something new to me.’

There was a sound of bitter, though carefully subdued anger in his voice.

‘There has to be a reason for it,’ Andrew said.

‘Looks to me like the work of a madman.’

‘Suppose it was someone who was looking for something and lost his temper because he couldn’t find it.’

Roland gave him a sardonic look.

‘You’ve some idea about it, Professor. Go on and tell me what it is.’

‘It just struck me …’ Andrew began, then paused.

‘Yes?’ Roland prompted him.

‘Well, we’ve been wondering what could have taken Miss Clancy up on to the common at dusk to meet someone she was blackmailing, haven’t we? A dangerous thing to do, as it turned out. But suppose she thought she’d protected herself. Suppose she told her victim that she’d left a full account of how he’d managed to murder Luke Singleton in her home, and that if anything happened to her, that account would be found and he’d be exposed. Only she’d misunderstood the man she was dealing with, someone quite ruthless and very bold. The way he handled the situation was first to murder her, then sometime in the night to come here and search the place from top to bottom for that account
she’d said she’d left here. And he didn’t find it and all the violence in him exploded in a fit of blind rage and he started smashing everything he could find. Rage fuelled by fear, because that account may still be somewhere.’

‘Here in this cottage, after he’d searched it as he did?’

‘Perhaps. Or perhaps with her solicitor, or in her bank. Or perhaps it never existed.’

‘She merely said it did when she began to understand the danger she was in?’

‘That’s possible.’ Andrew had managed to withdraw his gaze from the shattered negatives and was looking around the cellar. On a shelf he saw a row of neatly labelled bottles of jam and chutney. He remembered that Eleanor Clancy had said she was going to try making wine from the grapes on her own vine.

‘A woman of many hobbies,’ he observed. ‘Everyone I’ve met here seems to have a hobby. And now it looks as if someone may be making a hobby of murder.’

When Andrew returned to the Davidges’ house he found that Mollie had gone out. Ian said she had gone shopping. He was alone in the sitting-room with a glass of whisky at his elbow. He offered some to Andrew, who accepted it gladly. He told Ian what he and the Inspector had found in Eleanor Clancy’s cottage, but Ian seemed less interested than he would have expected. He nodded his head from time to time, but asked hardly any questions. It was as if his mind was on something else. He helped himself to more whisky before he gave any indication that this indeed was so, and had drunk half of it before he undertook to tell Andrew what it was.

It came abruptly after a short silence.

‘Mollie’s leaving me,’ Ian said.

There did not seem to Andrew to be any answer to that, so he said nothing.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ Ian said after a moment.

‘Well, yes and no,’ Andrew said. ‘I’m surprised that she’s actually made up her mind to do it, but she confided in me a certain amount about her feelings for Brian, and I realized it was possible. You don’t seem surprised yourself.’

‘No, I’ve seen it coming for some time,’ Ian said. Except that his large, dark eyes looked very tired and his round face which was normally a cheerful one had a kind of expressionless emptiness about it, he showed no signs of emotional disturbance.

‘Are you sure about it?’ Andrew asked.

‘Yes, I think it’s final this time,’ Ian said.

‘Oh, then you’ve talked about it before, have you?’

‘God knows how often.’

‘She didn’t tell me that,’ Andrew said. ‘She gave me the impression you didn’t know much about it.’