Hobby of Murder (22 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ Andrew said. ‘That comes of not keeping up with the times. It was always Somerset House in the past. How did you find I was in this cottage?’

‘Well, I went to the Davidges’ house first,’ Peter said, ‘but there seemed to be no one there, so I asked one of the kids on that playground across the way if they’d seen anyone come out of the house, and she said she’d seen an old man come out and go into the cottage she pointed out to me, but she hadn’t seen Mr Davidge or anyone else. So I thought it might be you, and when I saw the broken lock on the door, I thought I’d arrived on the scene of the crime. And what do you want to do now?’

‘Yes, what do you want to do?’ Mrs Jevons said. ‘I’m sure you want to have a talk without me hearing it all, and
what I want to do is get back to Rockford and take the next train back to London. Do you think there’s a chance I could phone for a taxi to pick me up here? That’s how I got here, but as I’d no idea how long I’d be staying, I didn’t ask him to wait for me.’

‘Peter, how did you get here?’ Andrew asked.

‘By car. I drove down,’ Peter replied.

‘Then you could drive Mrs Jevons back into Rockford, couldn’t you? And you could take me too.’

‘Of course,’ Peter said, ‘but what do you want to do in Rockford?’

‘I want to speak to Inspector Roland. I promised him that if I had one of the bright ideas he seemed to keep hoping I’d have, he’d be the first person to hear of it. And after what you’ve just said I think the time has come for that now.’

‘I don’t know where to begin,’ Andrew said.

He was in Inspector Roland’s office, a bare room furnished with a big desk, several chairs, some filing cabinets and some posters on the walls, mostly of men who were wanted for a variety of misdemeanours. He and Roland were facing each other across the desk. He had had lunch with Mrs Jevons and Peter Dilly in the Black Horse in Rockford, then Peter had driven Mrs Jevons to the railway station, and Andrew had presented himself at the police station, asking to see the Inspector. It was annoying that he felt a little foolish.

‘You understand that it’s only an idea,’ he said. ‘I haven’t a shadow of proof of any of it. But you did ask me, in the event that I had any possibly interesting ideas, to tell you about them.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Roland said. ‘Take your time. No need to rush at it. Ideas are what I’m dead short of at the moment.’

‘Well, I think I’ll start with something I heard said,’ Andrew went on. ‘It couldn’t happen, so it didn’t happen.’

‘The murder?’ Roland said.

‘Yes.’

‘Luke Singleton’s murder?’

‘Yes. It sounds nonsense, of course.’

‘I’m afraid I agree with you.’

‘But you see, if you state more exactly what you mean, it isn’t nonsense at all. What couldn’t happen is the
deliberate
murder of Luke Singleton.’

Roland shook his head. ‘You’ll have to elaborate.’

‘Suppose it didn’t matter who got murdered,’ Andrew said.

‘That’s something that does occasionally happen, but it’s unusual. It’s generally the work of the insane.’

‘In this case it was sane and calculated. What is it that’s foxed you completely over Singleton’s murder? It’s how cyanide could have got into the cup that was put down in front of him by one of those innocent women, when that same cup might have been put down in front of anyone in the room. I’m assuming, of course, that you’ve accepted the fact that no one but the Bartlett sisters got close enough to Singleton during the dinner to have dropped poison into his coffee. I know that you were close enough to have done it yourself, and so was Dr Mace, but if either of you had done it you’d have had to come to the dinner armed with the cyanide for your purpose, and neither of you could have known beforehand that you’d be sitting anywhere near Singleton. So even if you or Dr Mace happens to be guilty of murder, you’d have had to be prepared to use the poison on whoever your next-door neighbour chanced to be.’

‘I’ll grant you that, and I’m glad to find you don’t seem to suspect either of us. But go on.’

‘Well, suppose there was someone who actually was prepared to do just that, to make sure that someone at the dinner was killed, but it didn’t matter who. Suppose the fact that it was Singleton who got the poison was sheer chance. It might just as well have been me or the Lady Mayoress.’

‘So we’re back to insanity, are we?’

‘Certainly not. Consider. What was the actual result of the murder? What did you yourself and everyone connected with the case immediately start to do?’

‘We started trying to find out who’d murdered Singleton, didn’t we?’

‘Of course. And to do that, what did you do?’

‘Asked a bloody lot of questions, for one thing.’

‘Exactly. And what were those questions about? The
usual old things, weren’t they, motive, means and opportunity? The means was obvious, cyanide in a cup of coffee. Opportunity was apparently nonexistent, leaving you thoroughly baffled. And that left motive—that’s what you concentrated on, wasn’t it? Who had a motive to kill Singleton? Of course, if it had been the Lady Mayoress who’d been killed, you’d have asked the same questions, but got quite different answers, and your thoughts would have gone in a quite different direction. As it was, you found out that Singleton’s brother had a motive as he stood to inherit a considerable fortune, which was particularly convenient when he wanted to leave his job and take off with someone else’s wife. And Ernest Audley, a Rockford solicitor, who’d never made any secret of his hatred of Singleton, who’d taken off with Audley’s wife. And just possibly Mrs Davidge, who had the same motive as Brian Singleton. And I think a few, not very convincing rumours circulated that Dr Mace might have had some relationship with Singleton at some time, but I don’t think we need pay much attention to them. Now, going back for a moment to opportunity, some thought was given to the possibility that Brian Singleton might have managed to flick a capsule of poison into his brother’s cup when he was reaching out to pull a flower out of that arrangement on the table to give Mrs Davidge, who was sitting next to him. That seemed to be just possible, because Brian Singleton was a bit of a conjuror and might have done something clever with sleight of hand. But Audley was sitting at the far end of the table and certainly had no chance of doping Singleton’s coffee. I don’t know if you gave any thought to Eleanor Clancy, because she’d once known Singleton when they were young, and it happened that she’d a lot of old photographic equipment, including a certain amount of cyanide, but you certainly thought about her later, because she herself was murdered. And what did you immediately think about that?’

Roland had been growing increasingly interested, though the frown on his forehead showed that he did not know where all this was leading.

‘We were inclined to believe that she’d seen who had murdered Singleton, or at least knew how it had been done,’ Roland said, ‘and was trying her hand at a bit of blackmail.’

‘Which was exactly what you were meant to think,’ Andrew said. ‘It seems obvious, doesn’t it? And naturally it wouldn’t have been done by anyone who was demonstrably innocent of Singleton’s murder. And who was the most certainly innocent of that?’

Roland’s frown had deepened.

‘If you mean what I’m beginning to think you mean …’

‘I probably do. The person who most certainly could not
deliberately
have killed Singleton was Sam Waldron. He was in the kitchen throughout the dinner. He didn’t touch the coffee cups. He didn’t give either of the Bartletts any instructions about giving any particular cup to Singleton. But it would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to have put some cyanide—supposing he had some, I don’t pretend to know how he got it—into a cup out in the kitchen and leave it to be put down in front of someone in the dining-room, it didn’t matter whom, just so that you should act as you did at the time and try to solve that person’s murder. Then later, when you found Eleanor Clancy dead, you were to assume that she’d been killed because she knew the answer to that problem. In other words, the real motive for her murder would go unsuspected, and it was that that mattered to Waldron. He had no trace of a motive for killing Singleton, and out in the kitchen couldn’t possibly have done it, but he had a very good reason for getting rid of Eleanor Clancy, as you’ll be able to check for yourself if you’ll go to St Catherine’s House in London and investigate their register of births, deaths and
marriages. I’ve just had a nephew of mine doing that for me and he found out what I thought was probably true. As I told you, I haven’t a shadow of proof of it, but I’m quite convinced Waldron’s your double murderer.’

Roland was tapping his teeth with a ballpoint pen that he had picked up from the desk. He shook his head.

‘If you’re going to tell me that Waldron and his wife weren’t married, and the Clancy woman found it out, that’s hardly a motive for murder nowadays, is it?’

‘No, but wouldn’t you say incest is?’ Andrew said. ‘Sam and Anna Waldron were brother and sister.’

Roland looked startled for a moment, gave a brief, hard glance at Andrew’s face, then got up and went to the window. He stood there silent, looking out.

At last he said, ‘What put you on to that?’

There was faint scepticism in his tone, but no outright rejection of what Andrew had said.

‘It’s hard to say just when I began to think about it seriously,’ Andrew answered. ‘Looking back, it’s easy to trace the things that put it into my head, but at the time I didn’t take much notice of them. For instance, there was something that struck me about Eleanor Clancy the first time I met her. It was a way she had of looking at people as if she was trying to fix their image in her memory. And later she boasted to me about how good she was at recognizing people. She seemed to imply that it was almost a trick. But then, as soon as she’d said that, she seemed to get a little scared at what she said. It didn’t mean anything special to me at the time, but later I thought of the way she’d looked at Waldron when she met him at the Davidges’ party. It was with what you might call a surprised sort of thoughtfulness. And I began to think it looked just as if she’d recognized him, but that he wasn’t what she’d expected. And I think the fact was that she did recognize him, though it was years since they’d met. You know Anna
Waldron had lost both her parents in a plane crash and was brought up by her grandparents. They sent her to that school, St Hilda’s, and it’s quite common in such schools for relatives to come down and visit the children and take them out for lunch and so on. Well, that was what Waldron, a cousin, might have done and Eleanor might have met him and then recognized him at the Davidges’. But if so, why didn’t she simply greet him and remind him of their meeting, as she reminded Anna? And why didn’t he give any sign either that he remembered having met her at the school? It’s true she may not have made any impression on him, and that he genuinely forgot her, yet Anna had a crush on her, so we’ve been told, and would probably have made a point of introducing them to one another, of course telling Eleanor that he was her brother. But it was Eleanor’s silence about what I began to feel sure had been a meeting with him that interested me more than his not remembering her. Was that diffidence on her part? I didn’t think so. She wasn’t in the least a diffident woman. There had to be a reason for it of some sort.’

Roland turned and came back to the desk.

‘So that’s all you’re depending on,’ he said. ‘Clancy’s silence about possibly having met Waldron once before?’

‘It was all I was depending on until I got my nephew to get some information for me, as I told you, at St Catherine’s House,’ Andrew said. ‘You’ll find there that Martin and Agatha Waldron died when their daughter was ten. They left two children behind them, a son, Samuel and a daughter, Suzanna. There was a big gap between the ages of Sam and Anna. But there’s no evidence that Anna ever had a cousin called Sam, or for that matter, any cousins at all, and also there’s no evidence that she ever married anybody. When Sam and Anna decided to settle down together and come to live in a place where nobody knew them, they
didn’t actually go so far as to go through a marriage ceremony.’

‘But why did they pose as a married couple?’ Roland asked. ‘Why didn’t they simply settle in here as brother and sister, and keep their sexual relationship to themselves? No one would have suspected anything.’

‘Wouldn’t their servants have caught on pretty quickly that there was something strange going on?’

‘Hm, yes. I suppose so. If you feel you’ve got to have servants, I suppose you’ve got to be careful about things like that. So you think Clancy understood what the situation was and tried her hand at blackmail.’

‘That’s how it looked to me and this morning I had a talk with her sister, Mrs Jevons, which made me sure of it. She’s got very little money and has an aged mother to look after, and recently she’d had a letter from Eleanor telling her that she’d had a bit of luck and that her sister needn’t worry about money any more. Hasn’t that the smell of blackmail, in the circumstances?’

Roland nodded. ‘Mrs Jevons told us about that letter from her sister this morning, but blackmail hadn’t entered her head. But I agree with you, it seems pretty obvious that that was the reason for her murder. Blackmail that had nothing to do with Singleton’s murder, as we were meant to think it had, to put us off thinking of anything like the incest business. And that explains why Anna Waldron cashed a cheque for a thousand pounds before that murder. She’d already been threatened by Clancy and got ready to pay a first instalment. But how did she persuade Clancy to meet her on the common in the evening, when there’d be no one about, and why was the cottage wrecked?’

‘I think Eleanor agreed to meet her when she suggested it because she had no suspicion of danger. I think Waldron himself was keeping in the background, so that Eleanor felt she had only Anna to deal with, and if she worried about
danger at all, she’d have thought she was much the bigger and stronger of the two. But I think the probability is that Anna, prompted by Sam, managed to make things sound as if they were on a friendly basis, I mean, that Anna was quite ready to help Eleanor look after her poor old mother and they might meet for a little walk on the common and sort things out without any ugly talk of blackmail. So they met, and Anna steered Eleanor towards the bridge where Waldron was waiting among the trees, and it was only at the last moment that she realized that in fact she was in deadly danger. And it was then that she thought of saying that she’d left a letter in the cottage, telling the truth about the Waldrons’ relationship and that if they killed her the truth was certain to come out.’