Hobby of Murder (21 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ Andrew said.

‘Just keep on trying,’ Roland said. ‘Try, try again.’

He went to the door and Ian saw him out of the house.

Returning, he said, ‘I’d better be off to Rockford too. I’ll get back as soon as I can, but don’t wait lunch for me. And help yourself to a drink.’

He went out and made his way to the garage, leaving Andrew alone in the house with the silent telephone.

By the time that Andrew had had his lunch, still listening for the telephone to ring, he was growing tired of his own impatience. On the principle that a watched kettle never boils, he was becoming convinced that his very listening for the call was making sure that it would not come through. Besides that, he was very restless and wanted to get out of the house for a time. Soon after he had cleared his lunch
away, he decided to go out and see if he could get into Eleanor Clancy’s cottage.

He wanted to see if the letters from her great-grandfather were anywhere to be found there. If they were, and if a quick glance at them suggested that they might be interesting, he would try to make contact with the sister who had arrived in Rockford to see if she would allow him to get to work on them. If they seemed dull and colourless, however, there was no need for him to take any steps in the matter. He set off briskly, and in a few minutes was at the door of the cottage, which it turned out was quite easy to open as the lock on the door had been smashed, and watched by a number of children who were in the playground opposite, he pushed the door open and stepped inside.

It looked much the same as when he had seen it last, except for a grey dust of fingerprint powder everywhere. The place to look for the letters, he was inclined to think, was the bureau in the sitting-room, where Eleanor had kept her box of old prints. He started towards it but was immediately checked by a shrill voice calling out, ‘Who’s there?’

He stood still. The voice, he thought, had come from the bedroom.

‘Who’s there?’ the voice repeated on a note of anxiety, but no one appeared.

He called back, ‘My name is Basnett. I’m staying with some neighbours of Miss Clancy’s, the Davidges. If I’m intruding, I’ll go away.’

A door opened and a woman came out.

‘What do you want here?’ she asked.

She was presumably Mrs Jevons, Eleanor Clancy’s sister, but there was very little likeness between them. She looked as if she might be the older by several years and was heavily built, with a large, pale face and features that looked as if they had been clumsily modelled in it by an unskilful hand.
She had heavy brows and she was frowning, but her light blue eyes were apprehensive. She wore a knitted suit that, stout as she was, hung a little too loosely on her.

‘I was hoping to find some letters that Miss Clancy told me about,’ Andrew said. ‘Some letters written, I believe, by her great-grandfather. She was wondering if they might be worked up into a book and asked me if I could help her with it. They sounded interesting and I came here to see if they’d survived the wrecking of the place. But I’ll abandon the idea if you’d sooner I did.’

‘Oh, those letters,’ Mrs Jevons said. ‘Eleanor was always talking about making them into a book and she always asked every new person she met to help her with it. But they’re hopelessly dull. They’re the sort that say, “I hope you are very well, I’m very well, hope to see you soon …” You know what I mean. Of course, there’s a little local colour in them, but not enough to work up into anything, even with the photographs, which really are interesting. If you want the letters, you’re welcome to them. Would there be any money in a book of that sort, d’you think? I mean, one that was mostly photographs, with bits from the letters just saying what they are?’

‘Not very much, I imagine,’ Andrew said.

‘Well, come and sit down.’ She led the way into the sitting-room, righted a chair that had been knocked over and planted herself on it.

Andrew followed her and sat down on the edge of a sofa that had not been overturned.

‘You don’t think she might have got a contract for a book like that, with an advance agreed on—a quite handsome advance?’ she asked.

‘I would find that surprising,’ Andrew said.

‘Well, so would I, yet she was expecting money from somewhere, you know. She wrote and told me about it just a day or two before her death. We’d money problems, you
see. I’m a widow, living on an annuity I bought with what my poor husband left me, and it doesn’t come to much, and Eleanor, as you know, was a games teacher who gave up when she didn’t feel up to the job any more, and she was living on some life insurance she’d saved up and a bit of a legacy an aunt left her and finding things pretty tight. And we’d a mother to look after between us. She’s got an old-age pension, of course, but she’s always lived with me because, as a matter of fact, she and Eleanor never did get on, but Eleanor always paid her share to me to help look after her. Then suddenly she wrote me this letter last week telling me that our money worries were over, she’d had a bit of luck and I was going to get my share of it, and we could put our mother into an old people’s home, if I’d like to do that. And of course, it seemed too good to be true. I love my mother, but it gets more and more of a strain looking after her. And the fact is, I didn’t really believe it, because Eleanor was always one for exaggerating things, if not telling downright lies. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that now she’s dead, but it’s a fact. She lived in a sort of fantasy a lot of the time, and often did the most ridiculous things. So I thought probably she’d been gambling in some way and had a bit of a win and thought she was going to go on making lots more. But now there’s this queer business of the thousand pounds in her handbag that the police have been telling me about, and this frightful thing about her murder. So what am I to think about all that, will you tell me?’

Her flow of speech stopped abruptly and she stared at Andrew as if the whole situation were somehow his fault.

‘Have the police told you what they make of it?’ he asked.

‘Yes, would you believe it, when I told them all this, which I thought it was my duty to do, that man, Inspector Somebody, asked me if I thought she could have been
blackmailing anybody? Blackmailing! Honestly, that’s what he said.’

‘And does it seem to you quite impossible?’

She took a few seconds to reply, then she gave a kind of snort, which might have been a sort of laugh.

‘All right, it wasn’t impossible, but what a thing to ask
me!
I mean, I’m her sister. It’s not likely I’d tell them a thing like that, is it?’

‘So you didn’t tell them?’

‘Well, actually, I did in a way. I just said nothing’s impossible in this world, is it? But I’ve been thinking about it and I know it’s a thing she could have done if something dropped right into her lap, as it were. I mean, if she found she knew something about someone who was doing something that wasn’t altogether legal or whatever, she just might have tried to cash in on it. When I was a young girl and took to going out with a boy and letting him go a bit farther with me than was thought proper in my family, and Eleanor found out about it, she threatened to tell my father, who’d just about have killed me for it, if I didn’t pay for her to have her hair done very week. She used to care about her appearance in those days, and boys, and a lot of things she grew out of later. But I remember I suddenly got fed up with paying up for those hair-dos and told her to do her worst. And she didn’t do anything. And that’s what I think may have happened here. She frightened somebody, and they paid up, but if they’d called her bluff she wouldn’t have done anything.’

‘Not even if whatever she found out was a good deal more serious than you going out with your boyfriend?’

‘As to that, I couldn’t say. Perhaps I’m wrong and her threat was serious. Anyway, someone thought it was, or the poor girl wouldn’t have been murdered, would she? Oh dear …’ Tears suddenly welled up in her pale blue eyes. ‘I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this. I don’t
know what you’re thinking of me. I don’t often talk much. Mother’s deaf, you see, and doesn’t listen, and I’ve had to give up my work—I was manageress of a very nice little coffee-shop and met lots of stimulating people there—because mother couldn’t be left all by herself. Even to come down here today I had to get neighbours to promise to look after her. So that money Eleanor said she’d be sending sounded wonderful. I wanted so much to believe in it. But it’s lucky for me now that I always had my doubts, isn’t it?’

‘About those letters …’ Andrew said tentatively.

‘Those letters, of course, I was forgetting about them. They’re probably in the bureau.’ She drew a chair up to the bureau, all the drawers of which had been pulled open and their contents scattered on the floor. ‘If not, they may be in the cellar. There is a cellar, isn’t there? I don’t really know my way around yet. This is the first time I’ve been here.’

‘What brought you?’ Andrew asked.

‘Well, as I told you, I thought it was my duty to tell the police about that letter of Eleanor’s. A policeman had been to see me at home—I live in London—but I thought I ought to get in touch with the people here. So I came down this morning, and as I was in Rockford I asked them if there was anything against my coming out here to look round, and they said no, they’d done everything about fingerprints and so on. Apparently there are the fingerprints of lots of people, people who probably just dropped in to visit her now and then, so they aren’t much use. Perhaps there are some of yours among them. But I thought I’d have a look to see if there was anything here worth keeping, but apart from the damage that’s been done, there really isn’t anything. When the police say I can, I’ll just get some clearance people in. There’s nothing I’d want to keep. Now those letters …’

While she had been talking, she was turning over what was left inside the open drawers, shutting them and after a time shaking her head.

‘No, they aren’t here. We’d better look in the cellar. She was great at hoarding things. They may be there.’ She stood up and looked uncertainly about her. ‘Where’s the door to it?’

Andrew led her to the cellar door, switched on the staircase light and said, ‘Shall I go first?’

‘Yes, please do,’ she said. ‘I’ve never cared for cellars. I think I suffer a little from claustrophobia.’

There was another light at the bottom of the staircase which lit up the devastation there. He heard her gasp as she saw the shattered negatives.

‘But who could have done this?’ she cried out. ‘A madman, surely.’

‘I think we may be dealing with someone who’s at least a little mad,’ Andrew said. ‘Now, let’s look for those letters.’

It did not look like an easy thing to do. There were all kinds of boxes on shelves and on the floor, some wooden, some cardboard, some overturned with their contents spilled on the floor, some untouched. The letters might be in any of them. Some had contained photographs that looked as if Eleanor Clancy had taken them herself. Some held odd collections of china and glass, most of it cracked or chipped. One of the boxes held some old shoes and another some sweaters that looked as if moths had feasted on them. It seemed that Eleanor had been one of the people who are incapable of throwing anything away. After stirring about in the rubbish for a while, Andrew felt like giving up the search, when Mrs Jevons suddenly exclaimed, ‘Here they are!’

She had found them in a small and battered looking briefcase on a shelf, and held it out to Andrew.

He was disappointed to see how few letters there were,
but taking the case from her, he sat down on the only chair in the cellar and took out one letter after another. The paper on which they were written was of the brownish colour of old age and the ink was faded and they were very short.

After a moment he said, ‘I’m afraid you’re right. There’s nothing much interesting here. They’re just the sort of letters you said they were—’

‘Ssh!’ she interrupted in a fierce whisper and gripped his arm. ‘Listen!’

Andrew heard it at once, the sound of a footstep just over their heads.

He thrust the letters back into her hands and walked to the bottom of the stairs.

‘Oh, take care!’ she whispered into his ear, standing just behind him, shaking with apprehension. ‘God knows who it is.’

‘Who’s there?’ Andrew called out.

‘It’s all right,’ the voice of Peter Dilly answered, ‘it’s only me.’

‘Peter!’ Andrew began to laugh, then started to mount the stairs. ‘What the devil are you doing here?’

‘Trying to find out what you’re up to,’ Peter answered.

‘Who is it, who is it?’ Mrs Jevons demanded, still in a frightened whisper.

‘It’s a nephew of mine and he’s quite harmless,’ Andrew answered. ‘Come and meet him.’

She mounted the stairs behind him, to come face to face with Peter Dilly in the little hall of the cottage. In his neat, small way he had his usual appearance of considerable charm. His fair hair had tumbled forward over his forehead and he was just thrusting it back.

‘Peter Dilly, Mrs Jevons,’ Andrew said. ‘And I’ve no idea what he’s doing here. Mrs Jevons, Peter, is the sister of
Miss Clancy, the poor woman who lived here and was murdered. Now, tell us why you’ve come.’

‘Didn’t you want me to find out certain things for you?’ Peter said.

‘But I thought you’d telephone. I waited in all the morning, expecting you to telephone.’

‘And I didn’t much like the sound of things, so I decided to come. In the light of there having been two murders here, some of the questions you asked sounded decidedly sinister, and I didn’t want you getting into trouble. And I didn’t know if you’d be able to take my call in private, or if there was a risk that you might be overheard.’

‘So you’ve found out what I wanted, have you?’

Andrew was uneasily conscious of Mrs Jevons beside him, feeling more nervous of being overheard by her than he would have been if Ian had heard him at the telephone.

‘I think so,’ Peter answered. ‘You made only one mistake. You told me to go to Somerset House. But you don’t go there any more for the register of births, deaths and marriages. You go to St Catherine’s House, at the corner of Holborn and Kingsway.’