Murder at the Racetrack (25 page)

Three of them, Mrs. Alford, Mrs. Beastock and little Mrs. Capper, had something of the characteristics of those three brass
or plastic monkeys you sometimes see perched up on a mantelpiece: one with two little paws blocking its ears, Hear-No-Evil;
one with paws blocking its eyes, See-No-Evil; and the third with paws crossed carefully over its mouth, Speak-No-Evil. Certainly
no one in the village had ever heard hopping-about, squirrel-like Mrs. Capper say anything unpleasant about anybody, while
fat old Mrs. Alford was so deaf she could hear really neither evil nor good, and Mrs. Bea-stock, who often gropingly wore
both her pairs of spectacles at the same time, would, so they said, have missed a murder even if it were committed under her
very nose.

The three who habitually sat on the other bench, Mrs. Damworthy, Mrs. Emery and Mrs. Finders, were the very opposite. Mrs.
Damworthy was known for somehow getting to discover every little piece of wrongdoing that besmirched the village, whether
it was the curious disappearance of a hen or the stuck-together closeness of a girl and a boy. For discovering them and speaking
her mind about them, loudly. Mrs. Emery was a thin rake of an old dear whom it was almost impossible not to rub up the wrong
way whatever you happened to say to her. And as for bustling-about Mrs. Finders, she was so interested in everything in the
village that she was possessed always of a fund of information, some of it sometimes near the truth.

So how did these six very different old ladies, all of them almost completely ignorant about the events that took place in
the Duke of Richmond’s park every Goodwood Week, contrive to stay together year in year out without any huffy departures?
The answer lay in the lady who would seat herself between the two parties, sometimes squeezing onto one bench, sometimes onto
the other. Old Lady Bentt, shriveled and thin almost as the ancient crook-handled walking stick without which she could go
nowhere, was rumored to be a distant descendant of Lord George Bentinck, the notorious gambler who in 1824 won a race at Goodwood
for which, it was jokingly laid down, every rider had to wear a three-cornered hat, a tricorne, commonly called a cocked hat
(the Cocked Hat Stakes is, of course, still run at Goodwood today). But aristocratic as she might be, Lady Bentt was certainly
a lady in very, very reduced circumstances, poorer most probably than any of the other six on the two benches, widows though
they were. However, what she had retained was her ability to say, in a little piping voice, what should and should not be
done. And it was this that kept the gossip circle—only it was a straight line—from ever breaking up.

It was this, too, that in the end caused the fox not to go free. As he very nearly did.

•    •    •

“That chap hasn’t shown his face here before,” old Mrs. Bea-stock, sitting with deaf Mrs. Alford and ever-kindly Mrs. Capper,
pronounced as a young man with the swept-back greased hair, long sideburns and the tight trousers that marked out the Teddy
Boy, the much-fancied look among the 1950s riffraff, brought a noisy motorbike to a halt just behind the two benches. Leaving
it propped up, he lifted from the back a big strung-together box or crate and staggered away with it.

“And how would you know he hasn’t been here before?” snapped Mrs. Emery from her place among the trio on the other bench.
“You’ve got the wrong pair of spectacles on your nose. As usual.”

“What did she say? What did she say?” Mrs. Alford boomed out. “If you’ve got anything to say, dear,” she added in a voice
designed just to be heard on the other bench and which yet carried halfway across the green, “you should say it so people
can hear. I’m not deaf, you know.”

“I know you’re not deaf, dear,” Mrs. Finders chipped in from the very other end of the row, “I saw you sitting at your window
when I passed by yesterday, nodding away to that little music box you have when I was hardly able to hear it myself.”

“Nothing of the kind,” Mrs. Damworthy contradicted. “The wretched woman was simply nodding off. She’d sleep away the whole
day if she was let.”

Now it was time for tiny dried-up Lady Bentt to intervene.

“None of all that,” she piped, “alters the fact that a young stranger has just come into the village and gone off carrying
a very heavy box of some sort. I can’t help wondering what he can want.”

Speculation at once united all six of the other old ladies.

“Selling something,” suggested Mrs. Alford, to whose un-hearing ears Lady Bentt’s shrill voice seemed always to penetrate.

“If I’d had my other glasses on,” Mrs. Beastock chimed in, “I’d have seen in a jiffy just what it was he was carrying.”

“I’m sure it’s something nice,” Mrs. Capper happily chirped. “A present perhaps for somebody in the village.”

“Yes, like one of those nasty bombs,” Mrs. Damworthy boomed.

“Oh, I wish you wouldn’t talk about bombs,” said Mrs. Emery. “It’s nothing but bombs, bombs, bombs nowadays, and no one ever
tells me what a hydrogen bomb is. If hydrogen’s what I mean.”

“Ah, I can tell you about that,” Mrs. Finders said with unjustified authority. “It’s all to do with H-two-O. Hydrogen bombs
are just like the water bombs the nasty boys at school used to throw at us.”

The young man with the heavy crate had by now vanished in the direction of the village’s other proud amenity, the public convenience.

•    •    •

But only a few minutes later he appeared again with a somewhat younger stranger, equally affecting Teddy Boy garb. He it was
now who was clasping to his chest the big box. Talking away together, they began to strap it back on to the rear of the motor
bike. But, finding this left no room on the pillion, they eventually set off in the direction of distant, fenced and gated
Goodwood House, with the Fox, if that’s what he was, in front and his fellow hen-run raider, the Cub, desperately clutching
the awkward crate behind him.

“Did you hear what they were talking about?” fat Mrs. Al-ford asked loudly as they disappeared. “I thought it was something
about going for a walk. But I wonder where they’re off to for that?”

“Up to no good wherever they’re going,” Mrs. Damworthy said as loudly.

“You know, I don’t think they said
walk
,” Mrs. Finders commented. “I think they said
talk
.”

“I expect they just want to have a good talk with somebody,” Mrs. Capper sweetly suggested.

There were signs of bristling all along the two benches by now. An argument to be settled, or indulged in.

But little Lady Bentt stepped in once more.

“No, no. What they were discussing was one of those new sort of wirelesses,” she piped. “You know, all sorts of people have
them nowadays, the army, the police, firemen. They’re called walkie-talkies, such a vulgar expression. You can use them to
exchange messages over quite a distance, I believe.”

Perhaps it was as well that the two Teddy Boys had roared noisily away. If they had heard old Lady Bentt they might have decided
to shut her up.

•    •    •

But, as it was, when only some twenty minutes later the pair came roaring back and parked the bike once more on the convenient
patch of gravel just behind the benches, neither of them took any notice of the seven old ladies sitting there in the sun.
But the old ladies, every one of them, took notice that the crate, whatever had been in it, was no longer with them.

“Nah,” the Fox was saying in answer to some question the Cub had asked while the bike engine still thundered away, “can’t
do nothing till the first race comes on, can we? Gotter see if it’s picking up okay, ain’t we?”

Fourteen ears stretched to hear meant that, for a time, six or seven mouths, with a lot to say, remained silent.

But soon Fox and Cub had gone far enough away for comment to be possible.

“They can’t do something, that’s what they said.”

“I saw they were worrying enough about it, whatever it was.”

“I’m sure it was only some game. You know what boys are like.”

“Boys? Youths like those are far from boyish, I’ll tell you that.”

“I can’t abide voices like theirs. Townee voices I call ’em. They’ll be from Brighton, I bet a shilling.”

“They were saying they were going to pick up some girls. Disgusting.”

Only thoughtful Lady Bentt had no comment to make.

•    •    •

Before long the two visitors came strolling back, still discussing their business, whatever it was.

“Yeah, but weren’t you scared?” said Cub.

“Nah.”

“But I mean, going into that place, dead o’ night an’ all.”

“Wouldn’t be such a fool go in there when that old idiot was behind the counter, taking the bets, would I? Not that ’e takes
all that many. Dead-and-alive place like that.”

On they strolled.

“The bigger one said someone was an old idiot. I hope he wasn’t talking about me.”

“I don’t think it was the bigger one, dear. I think it was the younger one. I think he was doing most of the talking, the
one who looks as if he’s only just out of school.”

“I could jump up and go after them, and see which one it really was. You know your sight sometimes does let you down, dear.”

“Sometimes? Huh.”

“They were talking about making bets. I never like to hear anything to do with that sort of thing. It’s not right. I’m sure
of that.”

“No, no. They were talking about cinema films, what the youngsters call the flicks nowadays. Someone told me that at Midhurst
last week they had one called something like
Dead of Night.
You all must have heard them say that, didn’t you?’

“Yes,” said Lady Bentt before another argument—well, running quarrel really—could break out. “Yes, we all must have heard
those words
Dead of Night.”

•    •    •

Though none of the old ladies went to the cinema anymore—the village might have two pubs, a public convenience and a telephone
box but that was the full extent of its amenities—they all, except Lady Bentt, were full of notions about the films they never
saw, whether a dozen miles away in Midhurst or in farther-off bright and breezy Brighton, which none of them had visited more
than two or three times in their lives.

So, once the subject of the cinema had been brought to the fore, however mistaken Mrs. Finders may have been about those overhead
words
dead o’ night,
the talk swung this way and that about the comparative entertainment value of films known only by their tides. Fat Mrs. Alford,
though she heard less than half of the talk, was firm in her view that all the stories at the cinema were “nice.” Mrs. Beastock,
who with her failing sight hadn’t seen a film since she had sleuthed along with
Charlie Chan at the Opera
fifteen years earlier, was trenchant in her view that everything you saw in the dark of the cinema was “very clever.” Mrs.
Capper, while modestly admitting she had never been to the cinema, was certain that “nothing nasty” was ever to be seen there.

On the other hand Mrs. Damworthy condemned out of hand, and in a very loud voice, the whole art of cinematography, while Mrs.
Emery recounted at length, and with interruptions, the story of the last film she had seen,
Strangers on a Train,
and how its characters had caused her intense irritation, with Mrs. Finders simultaneously recounting at equal length the
story of a film that turned out after all to have been a play on her wireless.

But all that was brought to an abrupt end when Lady Bentt’s little pipe of a voice was heard saying, “Listen!”

The command—for, softly spoken though it might be, a command it was—brought a sudden silence all the way along the row. Then,
bit by bit, it penetrated to each of the old ladies, even somehow to deaf Mrs. Alford, that they could hear a distant continuous
spiel of talk. There was a voice—it was hard to make out—coming from somewhere saying over and over again what a fine time
some people were going to have.

Suddenly doubly bespectacled Mrs. Beastock, whose hearing was perhaps more acute than any of the others, broke out in exclamation.

“It’s from the Duke’s,” she said. “It must be. I don’t know how we’re hearing it, but that’s what it is. It’s a man telling
the people up there for the racing all about what’s going to happen, and sounding very excited.”

Now all of them were able to make out what was being said by that tiny, tinny, yet somehow plummy, voice that seemed in fact
to be coming not from distant Goodwood House but from somewhere in the village.

It was Lady Bentt who had the final explanation.

“It’s a walkie-talkie,” she said. “Those two young men must have been putting one half of the one in that crate of theirs
somewhere just outside the Duke’s grounds and have left the other half out of the way here, somewhere near the—”

She balked for an instant at the words, but then brought them out at full pipe. “Somewhere just by the public convenience.”

There was general nodding and yes-yessing agreement that this was indeed what had happened, together with a good deal of claiming
to have known it all along.

“Well,” Mrs. Alford said in her unnecessarily loud deaf-person’s voice, “of course I knew all that was coming from a talkie-walkie.
It’s just that they can’t get it as loud as my wireless.”

“And that,” Mrs. Damworthy announced from the other bench, “is so loud it can be heard all over the village, whether anybody
wants to listen or not.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Beastock put in her pennyworth, “my sight may not be quite as good as it was, but I knew it was a talking-walker
that young man was carrying. No doubt about it.”

“Walking-talker?” Mrs. Emery snapped, shrill with indignation. “What you mean is a talkie-walkie. Everybody knows it’s called
that.”

“Well, I’m not sure I knew,” Mrs. Capper said gently. “I thought what he was carrying was that nice present for somebody.”

“And I think I know who’s going to be given it,” Mrs. Finders contributed. “It’s that—”

“Hush,” came Mrs. Damworthy’s strident voice. “Can’t you see the two of them are coming back again?”