A Painted Devil

by Jamie Probin

  Whilst Janet worried that she would be unable to pick out Hollingsworth in the crowd, he had no problems at all in identifying her. In a room full of elderly ladies who were deliberately trying not to seem like they were courting attention, the young woman anxiously craning her neck in every direction stood out like the proverbial sore thumb.

  ‘Miss Lamb? I’m Inspector Hollingsworth.’

  Hollingsworth gave a reassuring smile and held out a hand, which Janet shook nervously.

  ‘I’m very grateful to you for giving up your time and meeting me here.’

  ‘Not at all inspector. I only hope I can help.’

  They ordered afternoon tea, and exchanged a few disposable pleasantries as they awaited the arrival of the pot and scones. Once the jam and cream had been spread and the two sugars stirred, Hollingsworth judged that the young woman had been put sufficiently at her ease, and moved to the reason why he had requested the meeting.

  ‘Miss Lamb, I realise it was a number of months ago, but I need to ask you about a passenger in one of your cabins on the crossing from Le Havre to Southampton last May. The twenty-first of May specifically. Now I realise you may need to check some records to recall the specifics -’

  Miss Lamb held her hand up, and her eyes lost focus. Hollingsworth was struck with the impression that she was sorting through some mental filing system.

  ‘What was the passenger’s name?’

  ‘Erm...’ Hollingsworth had to think for a moment. He had been quite thrown by this impression of a stage mind-reader. ‘Ronald Asbury.’

  Janet screwed her eyes up for a couple of seconds and then nodded.

  ‘Yes, Mr Asbury, I remember him. Cabin 207.’

  ‘You can remember him?’ gaped Hollingsworth. ‘After all this time?’

  She smiled coyly at him. ‘Inspector, my job requires me to remember people. I have to learn names and faces very quickly and recall them at a moment’s notice.’

  ‘Well I see that must be true. But I can’t believe you can still remember them months later. What about all the passengers you’ve had since?’

  ‘Eventually, of course, we will forget details. But surely there are some criminals you have caught that you can still remember years later?’

  ‘There are,’ agreed the policeman, ‘but I hope you don’t remember your passengers for the same reason!’

  ‘Sometimes you’d be surprised,’ replied Janet, and he was pleased to see a smile crack her anxiety. It was a very pretty smile, and he thought she needed to flash it more often. ‘If I’m honest I probably couldn’t remember all the passengers from that trip, but Mr Asbury rather sticks out in my mind.’

  ‘Oh yes? Why is that?’

  Miss Lamb blushed. ‘Well, he was rather charming. He would pay me compliments.’ She giggled girlishly at the admission. ‘He was quite a... a rogue!’

  She uttered this last word as though it were rude.

  Things made a little more sense to Hollingsworth as he looked at the stewardess. She was not unattractive, and with some good advice on comportment and hair might even be rather pretty. But her natural awkwardness and timidity probably meant that a lot of men failed to even notice her. He could well imagine a young and roguish passenger who paid her attention making quite an impression. He felt some sympathy for Janet Lamb, but this was possibly a great stroke of luck for him.

  ‘Tell me what you remember about him.’

  ‘Well, as I say, he was very charming. He would always be saying how nice my eyes looked, or how well I looked after him. He was quite a... a nice-looking gentleman.’ She flushed again. ‘To be honest, inspector, I think he was probably like that with all the ladies.’ Well, thought Hollingsworth, at least she realised that. ‘And he was just as charming with the men on board. Everyone seemed to like him.’

  Hollingsworth weighed his next question carefully. ‘This may sound a bit odd, Miss Lamb, but would you say Mr Asbury was trustworthy?’

  Janet took another sip of tea as she thought about this. ‘Well, naturally inspector, I was never called on to trust him about anything. But if I understand your question, then I would probably say no. And it’s funny, but I’m not sure why. May I ask why you are asking me these questions? Has something happened?’

  Hollingsworth saw no reason not to lay his cards on the table, and nodded. ‘As a matter of fact, Miss Lamb, I’m afraid Mr Asbury was killed the day he disembarked at Southampton.’

  She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh how awful! Killed? My goodness! How frightful!’

  Hollingsworth felt that these exclamations could go on for some time if left unchecked, and cut in. ‘And we believe the man who killed him may have been a fellow passenger on that boat. I want you to think very hard, Miss Lamb, and see if you can remember anyone who seemed to spend a lot of time with Mr Asbury, or who seemed particularly interested in him.’

  The stewardess thought in silence for almost an entire minute. Eventually she nodded. ‘Yes, there was one man. He seemed rather quiet and kept himself to himself at the start of the voyage, but then suddenly whenever I saw Mr Asbury this other man seemed to be around. Almost as if following him.’

  ‘Following him?’ echoed Hollingsworth, sharply. ‘You mean trailing him?

  ‘Trail... oh no. I actually meant following him like a dog follows its master, but that is unfair. What I mean is he was always with Mr Asbury, as though they had become friends. They were always talking. But I still got the feeling it was this other man following Mr Asbury around, rather than Mr Asbury’s choice, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘So you didn’t get the impression they had met prior to that sailing?’ Miss Lamb shook her head. ‘Or that Mr Asbury was in any way frightened, or intimidated by the other man?’

  ‘Oh no, not at all. At first I thought he seemed a little put out by this other man following him wherever he went, but by the second day he seemed to enjoy the company.’

  ‘What did this man look like?’

  She pursed her lips and gave a similar list of nondescript characteristics that the staff at the Metropole had used to describe Sidney Carter: medium height, light brown hair, medium build.

  ‘Oh, it’s an awful description isn’t it?’ cried Janet. ‘I’m afraid I’ve never been too good at that kind of thing. That could have equally described Mr Asbury himself, or half the other male passengers on the ship for that matter. That’s the problem with a lot of young men these days isn’t it? They don’t actually look the same, but they dress the same and comb their hair the same. If you tried to pick one from a crowd based on a description, you’d be stuck – unless you had some special feature like a mole or a big nose or something to go on.’

  Hollingsworth told her it did not matter, and not to worry. Then he mentally crossed his fingers and asked the big question: ‘Do you know who this other man was?’

  Miss Lamb, who had been quite energised during her recent descriptions, paused, then shook her head sadly.

  ‘I have no idea, I’m afraid. He wasn’t from one of my cabins, so I never actually met him.’

  ‘Miss Lamb, I want you to think very hard, and see if you can remember anything, anything at all, that might allow us to find out his name. You can’t, for instance, remember seeing which cabin was his? Or hearing someone address him? Mr Asbury never used his name in your earshot?’

  Janet Lamb placed her elbows on the table and lowered her shoulders until her outstretched fingers supported her forehead. It was a pose of intense concentration, and Hollingsworth wondered whether this woman had some kind of photographic memory. Her recollection of Ronald Asbury was far more thorough than he had dared hope, and he acknowledged that she was his best hope in this current line. If she could not remember, it would seem, no one could.

  Hollingsworth sat in silence, watching the stewardess concentrate, willing her to remember and trying to remain patient. Just when he thought he could not contain himself any longer she looked up and shook her head sorrowfully.

  ‘I’m
sorry inspector, I can’t. It’s just too long ago.’

  ‘I understand. You tried your best.’

  The melancholy must have shown on his face, because she looked at him with sympathy, and added: ‘There is one thing. I have this niggling idea that the man’s first name might have been Nathaniel.’

  ‘Nathaniel?’ The optimism exploded in Hollingsworth’s voice.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, but determined not to be responsible for false hope she added, ‘but I want to be clear this is a very vague idea and quite possibly wrong. I would never have told you if I thought you would take it as definite. I can’t think of any specific situation where I heard Mr Asbury use that name, and I might be getting confused with someone else...’

  ‘But?’ Hollingsworth interjected into the silence at the end of the hanging statement.

  She smiled self-consciously at him. ‘But I don’t think I am.’

  Hollingsworth denied himself the victorious punch in the air he itched to perform, and contented himself with a beaming smile of his own.

  He intended to respect her unwillingness to commit more certainly to her memory, but if she was right... There surely could only be two or three passengers at most named Nathaniel on that particular sailing? And surely only one would fit the description of the man in room 315? Yet even if they all did, the process of cross-referencing the names from the passenger manifest and using their addresses to locate their current whereabouts was not a daunting one.

  He would get straight back to the station and get Sergeant Davies onto the task with him. If all went well he might have his hands on the murderer by tomorrow evening.

  Chief Inspector Crout faced his chief constable and tried not to look as much of a failure as he felt.

  ‘So where are we Crout?’ asked Sir Oliver Anstruther. ‘I’d rather hoped to have this case tied up by now. Instead, apart from you apparently proving one of my oldest friends a murderer, the case is as wide open as ever.’

  Crout considered pointing out that it was Dr Harris who had shown Sir George to be a killer; on the other hand promoting the fact that an amateur saw the truth before he did would not improve his overall standing with the chief constable.

  ‘I’m hopeful that when I hear back from Detective Inspector Hollingsworth and Dr Harris I may have something more to go on sir.’

  Sir Oliver sighed in what he hoped was a conciliatory manner.

  ‘I’m sorry Crout, I don’t mean to be hard on you. I can see what a hell of a case this is.’

  ‘It is sir,’ agreed Crout eagerly, sensing a chance to justify himself, ‘I’ve never known one like it.’

  ‘All the same,’ continued Sir Oliver, sucking on his pipe and blowing out a huge cloud of bluish smoke, ‘it needs solving.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Any new ideas?’

  ‘Well sir, it did occur to me to try looking at opportunity across the whole case and see if any common threads stood out. I’ve looked at motive again and again and gotten nowhere.’

  ‘I thought we’d looked at opportunity and it was a dead end?’

  ‘Well yes sir, but that’s just it. I mean, it seems to me that it has to mean something that we can’t find a single person who could have done all the things we’re looking at. Somehow, some of our ideas must be wrong, and I thought if we could find which ones, well, that might give us a new lead.’

  Sir Oliver sucked on his pipe stem thoughtfully. ‘It’s an idea that. Let’s recap each incident one at a time.’

  Crout pulled out his notebook, having anticipated this, and leafed to the correct page.

  ‘In chronological order then, and trying not to omit any suspect, however unlikely:

  ‘For the incident in the church, the only people who definitely could not have dislodged the statue were Charles Wentworth and Ronald Asbury, as they were standing underneath at the time. We can’t categorically rule out anyone else. We don’t have any information about peoples’ whereabouts at the time and it’s too late to get anything of value now; we know Rev. Johnson was there but as to whether anyone else was in the vicinity of St Anne’s, we have no idea.

  ‘Next came the incident with the gunshot in the folly. Again there are only people who we can definitely eliminate as suspects: Charles Wentworth and Andrea Ketterman.’

  ‘And George Wentworth,’ added Sir Oliver.

  ‘No sir,’ replied Crout, with awkward delicacy. ‘Sir George’s testimony that he heard the shot from his study and hurried outside had no witnesses.’

  ‘Blast it Crout, are you suggesting that George Wentworth tried to shoot his own son? Why he practically worshipped the lad.’

  ‘No sir, not at all. But if you recall, the purpose of this exercise is listing opportunity, not motive. I am trying not to be influenced by who might have wanted to do or not do such-and-such, just whether they could have done it.’

  Sir Oliver had the grace to look chastened. ‘Very true, Crout. My mistake. And I suppose there is really no reason why anyone else could not have crept unobserved into the bushes near the folly and fired.’

  ‘Exactly sir. The only other person we can rule out is Ronald Asbury, who by this time was in Europe.

  ‘And of course,’ continued Crout, ‘it is Asbury’s murder that comes next. Here we have the opposite problem, a virtual dearth of suspects. Technically there was nothing to stop anyone from travelling to Southampton from Upper Wentham and killing Asbury, but there would be a huge burden of proof needed for that suggestion. There was some investigation on the whereabouts of the villagers for this one, which basically seemed to show that no one in the village that day had enough time to get to Southampton, check in, shoot Asbury, stay overnight in room 315 and return the next day.

  ‘Now I wouldn’t put it beyond the realms of possibility that someone could have done that and faked a flimsy alibi; life in a place like Upper Wentham runs so much to routine that someone may imagine they saw another person even if they didn’t, merely because they do every other day.’

  ‘I would have thought that not seeing a person on a particular day that you expect to see would actually draw attention, rather than pass unnoticed,’ argued Sir Oliver.

  ‘Perhaps,’ agreed Crout. ‘I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate to offer a reason how it might be possible. Ironically the only two people who we know for certain to actually be in Southampton seem to be ruled out of it. Neither Andrea Ketterman nor her brother could have been in room 315 that night.

  ‘Furthermore we know this person was male. Interestingly most of our male suspects – Douglas McKinley, Joseph Hollins, Richard Carmichael – were all away from Upper Wentham that day without a decent alibi. Even our gardener friend Harold Dunsett, or whatever his name is, had the day off. Only Charles Wentworth has a definite alibi, as he was at a board meeting in London which ran over both days. And on top of all that, we would still have to explain how anybody actually knew Asbury was in Southampton.

  ‘That brings us to the least useful incident in terms of opportunity: it’s hard to see how anyone could be ruled out of sending the poisoned chocolates.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Sir Oliver, ‘that does seem like a non-starter. Anyone could have easily found out about the friend that sent Charles the box every year, and arsenic isn’t difficult to come by. But the incident at my house...’

  ‘Yes sir, that one is just the opposite. On the face of it there are very few people who had the opportunity to sever the brake lines.

  ‘Well,’ Crout corrected himself, ‘very few if we omit those of your guests who were unconnected with Upper Wentham. Perhaps that is our mistake?’

  Sir Oliver, sensing the delicate way his man was about to tiptoe through this minefield, held up his hand to cut Crout off.

  ‘I’d like to think that I’ve been in this game long enough to look at something objectively and without prejudice. Obviously all those people at the dinner were friends – or, at the very least, acquaintances – of mine, and that can be challenging when
it comes to being objective. But I tell you Crout, I have thought long and hard about each and every one, not to mention doing a little investigating here and there, and I’m willing to stake my reputation that none of those people are suspects.

  ‘And yet I am equally certain that if Jones, my gatekeeper, says that no other car came to the hall that night, then no other car did. The only possibility I can think of is that someone parked away from the entrance and crept onto the grounds through the trees. But there just aren’t that many people in Upper Wentham with a car!’

  ‘I did have one idea about that,’ began Crout, hesitantly.

  ‘Go on.’

  Crout looked unwilling to trust his thought to words, but pressed on. ‘Well, it’s maybe a bit far-fetched, but it did occur to me that when two people drive in a car they don’t really pay attention to the back seat. It’s possible – only possible, I wouldn’t go any further – that someone could have hidden themselves in the rear of Charles Wentworth’s car. That way they would be right there at the scene, and could cut the brakes at their leisure.’

  Sir Oliver stuck his lower lip out as he thought about this, an action he often did when considering a new idea.

  ‘I suppose it’s feasible,’ he agreed. ‘But you see the problem it would leave?’

  Crout nodded. ‘How would our perpetrator return to Upper Wentham? If his plan was for Charles Wentworth to suffer a fatal crash he would hardly be likely to get back in the car for the return journey.

  ‘I suppose if they were determined enough they might walk back to Upper Wentham in the pitch black for hours, but I don’t know if that is practical.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Sir Oliver pondered this incident in silence for a few moments further, before moving on.’ Now since I take it that we agree Dr Harris is correct over his reconstruction of the death of Peter Grantham?’ (Crout nodded.) ‘Then we come, finally, to the murder of George Wentworth himself.’

  ‘Exactly sir. Here again, whilst it would certainly take a degree of risk and courage – two qualities that our murderer does not lack – there are only a very few people who can be definitely ruled out as suspects. Charles and Andrea Wentworth were unquestionably flying over the Channel at the time, and we have witnesses who can confirm that Rebecca Carmichael was in London that day. Beyond that, I wouldn’t like to commit myself. No one was observed near the house, but in the grounds there was only Dunsett the gardener in the morning – watched by Smethurst, you’ll recall – and, for an hour or so, that mechanic from Cirencester, and they were both working. Just because they did not see anyone, that doesn’t mean much.’