Death in the Stocks: Merely Murder

by Georgette Heyer

  ‘Premonition!’ snorted the Superintendent. ‘A very safe bet! Of course something’s going to turn up. All I hope is that it’ll have an alibi I can check up on, and won’t have spent the night walking to Richmond, or in bed with a headache, or alone in somebody else’s house!’

  Giles’s eyes were alight. ‘I’m afraid you’re feeling ruffled, Superintendent.’

  Hannasyde laughed and held out his hand. ‘Can you wonder at it? I must be getting along now. That minx of a client of yours! The idea of saying “Oh, hullo!” to me in Court! Did she tell you we parted yesterday not on the best of terms? You can warn that young brother of hers, if you like, that it isn’t always wise to be too clever with the police. Good-bye!’

  They shook hands. ‘Come to my chambers, and smoke a cigar this evening, and talk it over,’ invited Giles. ‘Without prejudice, you know.’

  ‘Without prejudice I will, gladly,’ replied Hannasyde. ‘Thanks!’

  On this they parted, Hannasyde and the Sergeant to catch a train, Giles to extricate his cousin from the Police Station, and take her to have lunch before motoring back to town.

  She was in a cheerful mood, and appeared to consider herself safely out of the wood. Giles disillusioned her, and she at once declared that to arrest her now would be an extremely dirty trick, and one of which she did not believe Superintendent Hannasyde capable.

  ‘Except for an occasional brush we don’t get on at all badly,’ she said. ‘In fact, I think he quite likes me.’

  ‘That won’t stop him doing what he believes to be his duty.’

  ‘No, but I don’t think I’m really one of his suspects,’ said Antonia. ‘He’s got his eye more on Kenneth, or, rather, he had till Rudolph cropped up. I wish I could make my mind up about Rudolph, by the way.’

  ‘Whether to marry him or not? Let me help you.’

  ‘Oh no, not that! As a matter of fact,’ she added candidly, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he called the engagement off. He was considerably peeved last night, you know. What I meant was, did he do it, or not?’

  ‘You know him better than I do, Tony. It doesn’t look as though he did.’

  ‘No, but I’m not so sure. I didn’t think he’d be so rattled, somehow. Because the only time I’ve ever seen him in a tight corner, which was when a motor lorry shot out of a side-turning one day, he was as cool as a cucumber, and completely and utterly efficient. That was partly why I fell for him. The ordinary person would have jammed on the brakes, and we’d have been smashed into, but he just trod on the accelerator, and sort of skimmed by in a huge semicircle, and then went on with what he’d been saying before it happened.’

  Giles was unimpressed. ‘The biggest ass of my acquaintance is an expert driver,’ he said. ‘It’s one thing to keep your head at the wheel of a car, and quite another to keep it when confronted by the shadows of the gallows, so to speak. My own impression of your elegant young man is that he wouldn’t – to put it vulgarly – have had the guts to do it.’

  ‘That’s what I’m not sure about,’ said Antonia, quite unresentful of this slur upon her betrothed’s character. ‘His mother was foreign – at least, half, because she had an Italian father or mother or something – and occasionally Rudolph reverts a bit. He has white rages. You never know with people like that. They might do anything. Of course, that story he told might have been true, though I admit it sounded thin, but, on the other hand, it might be a masterpiece of low cunning. Same as me now. For all you know I’m being cunning talking like this.’

  ‘Yes, that had occurred to me,’ agreed Giles.

  ‘Kenneth, too,’ pursued his cousin. ‘Kenneth won’t say one way or the other, because partly, I think, he’s enjoying himself, and partly he holds that it’s no use saying he didn’t do it, because naturally he’d be bound to say that. But I’ll tell you one thing, Giles.’ She paused, frowning, and when he looked inquiringly at her, said in a serious tone: ‘If it was Kenneth I’ll bet every penny I’ve got no one’ll ever find out.’

  ‘I shouldn’t, Tony.’

  ‘Well, I would. Because generally murderers get found out because they did something silly, or left some important detail to chance. Kenneth never does.’

  ‘My dear girl, Kenneth is hopelessly casual.’

  ‘Oh no, he’s not! About things that he doesn’t think matter he may be, but when he gets interested in anything, or thinks something worth while, he concentrates on it in a dark and secret way which Murgatroyd says is like our grandfather – not the Vereker one, but the other. By the way, ought he to go to the funeral?’

  ‘Yes, of course. He must.’

  ‘Well, that’s what Murgatroyd and Violet say. It’s about the only thing they’ve ever agreed on. But Kenneth says no. He says it would be artistically wrong. However, I’ll tell him what you think.’

  Her method of conveying this information was characteristic, and wholly lacking in tact. Set down at the entrance to the mews shortly before four o’clock, she ran up the outside stairway to the front door, let herself into the flat, and went at once to the studio. Undeterred by the presence not only of Violet Williams, but of Leslie Rivers, who was curled up on the divan, watching Kenneth at work, and of a tall, fair man in the early thirties, who was smoking a cigarette in the window-embrasure, she said: ‘It was a rotten Inquest, so you didn’t miss anything. But Giles says of course you must show up at the funeral, Kenneth. Hullo, Leslie! Hullo, Philip, I didn’t see you. Has anyone taken the dogs out?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Leslie, in her slow, serious way. ‘You asked me to.’

  ‘Well, thanks. Giles says you can hire the proper clothes.’

  ‘I daresay, but I won’t,’ replied Kenneth, somewhat inarticulately, because he was holding a paint-brush between his lips. ‘Get rid of these people, will you? They think they’ve come to tea.’

  ‘They may as well stay, then,’ said Antonia.

  ‘Is that a vague instinct of hospitality, or mere supineness?’ inquired Philip Courtenay.

  ‘Supineness. What have you come for, anyway?’

  ‘Curiosity. Moreover, my dear, I’ve been interviewed by a bird-like policeman in plain clothes who asked me the most embarrassing questions about Arnold’s private affairs. I can’t be too thankful I relinquished the post of secretary when I did.’

  ‘Well, at least, Eaton Place was more or less bearable when you were there,’ said Antonia. ‘How’s Maud? And the baby?’

  ‘Both very fit, thanks. Maud sent her love.’

  Violet said: ‘But do tell us! What did the detective want to know?’

  ‘Hidden scandals. I hinted that subsequent secretaries might be of more use to him, but it transpired that the longest tenure of office since my departure had been five weeks, so that wasn’t much use.’

  Kenneth removed the brush from his mouth. ‘Subsequent secretaries is good,’ he remarked. ‘Had Arnold got a mie?’

  ‘Dozens, I believe, but out of my ken. I wasn’t as private as that.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ Violet said, fixing her eyes on his face. ‘Do the police suspect a crime passionnel?’

  ‘“He done her wrong” motif,’ said Kenneth, screwing up his eyes at the canvas before him. ‘What sordid minds policemen have!’

  ‘Blackmail,’ said Courtenay, looking round for an ashtray, and finally throwing the stub of his cigarette out of the window. ‘Seventy pounds and a seedy stranger were the main subjects of my policeman’s discourse. I was regretfully unable to throw light.’

  ‘I object!’ Kenneth said. ‘I won’t have seedy strangers butting in on a family crime. It lowers the whole tone of the thing, which has, up to now, been highly artistic, and in some ways even precious. Go away, Murgatroyd: no one wants any tea.’

  ‘You speak for yourself, Master Kenneth, and let others do likewise,’ replied Murgatroyd, who had come into the studio with her usual purposeful tread, and was ruthlessly clearing the table of its load of impedimenta. ‘Well, Miss Tony, so you’
re back, I see. Where’s Mr Giles?’

  ‘He wouldn’t come in. He says Kenneth will have to go to the funeral, by the way.’

  ‘There’s others could have told him that. And a decent suit of blacks,’ said Murgatroyd cryptically.

  ‘Be damned to you: I won’t.’

  ‘That’s quite enough from you, Master Kenneth, thank you. You’ll be chief mourner, what’s more. Don’t put any of your nasty wet brushes down on the tablecloth, and not that smelly turps neither.’

  ‘Kenneth,’ said Leslie Rivers, ‘could I have the sketch?’

  He glanced down at her, his brilliant, slightly inhuman gaze softening. ‘You can.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘You really ought not to give your sketches away,’ said Violet, overhearing this interchange. ‘I mean, of course, as a general rule. They may become quite valuable one day.’

  ‘Who cares?’ said Kenneth, wiping his brushes.

  Leslie flushed, and said gruffly: ‘Sorry. I didn’t think.’

  He smiled lovingly at her, but said nothing. Violet got up, and shaking out her skirt, said graciously: ‘Oh, naturally, it’s different with such an old friend as you, dear. Shall I pour out, Tony, or would you rather?’

  ‘Anyone can pour out as far as I’m concerned,’ said Antonia, with complete indifference. ‘We may as well have the loaf in while we’re about it, Murgatroyd. I’ll come and get it.’

  She went out and was followed in a few moments by Leslie Rivers, who came into the kitchen, and said unhappily: ‘I hate her and hate her.’

  Neither Antonia nor Murgatroyd experienced the least difficulty in interpreting this remark. Murgatroyd set the loaf down on the wooden bread-board with a thud. ‘Her!’ she said darkly. ‘Doing the hostess all over our flat! A beauty, is she? Well, handsome is as handsome does, and brown eyes are what I never did trust and never will, not without more reason than I’ve had yet.’

  ‘I shouldn’t mind – at least not nearly as much – if only I thought she’d look after him and understand about his painting,’ pursued Miss Rivers. ‘But I can’t see that she cares about anything except being admired, and having the best of everything.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Murgatroyd, emerging from the pantry to collect an errant knife, ‘still waters run deep. You mark my words!’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Leslie, when Murgatroyd had vanished again, ‘but she doesn’t run deep. She’s purely mercenary, and she’ll hurt Kenneth.’

  ‘Not she,’ replied Antonia. ‘He knows she’s a money-grubber. Kenneth isn’t extraordinarily vulnerable, as a matter of fact.’

  Miss Rivers blew her nose rather fiercely. ‘She’s the sort that would wear away a stone,’ she said. ‘Quiet persistence. Hard and cold and calculating. And even if I dyed my hair it wouldn’t do any good.’ With which sibyllic utterance she picked up the bread-board and marched back to the studio.

  From the pantry doorway Murgatroyd watched her go, and remarked that that was what she called a lady. ‘Why Master Kenneth can’t see what’s been under his nose ever since you was all of you in the nursery is what beats me,’ she declared. ‘A proper little wife Miss Leslie would make him, but that’s men all over. What happened at that Inquest, Miss Tony?’

  ‘Oh, pretty much what Giles said. It was very dull, and they brought in a verdict of Murder against Person or Persons Unknown. The Superintendent’s going to go and have a friendly talk with Giles this evening, so probably Giles will put in a good word for us.’

  ‘H’m!’ said Murgatroyd grimly. ‘I don’t doubt that’s what he thinks, but it’s a lot likelier that policeman will get him talking about the family, and go fastening on to something that’ll land us all in goal.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ said Antonia. ‘I didn’t know there was anything.’

  ‘There’s always something if you look for it,’ replied Murgatroyd. ‘And the more smooth-spoken the police are the more you want to mistrust them. Always on the look-out to trip you up. Cat and mouse, they call it.’

  The simile, as applied to Superintendent Hannasyde and Giles Carrington, was not strikingly apt, nor, if Giles was full of mistrust and Hannasyde on the watch for an unguarded remark, were these respective attitudes at all apparent when Giles’s servant ushered the Superintendent into the comfortable book-lined sitting-room that evening. Hannasyde said as he shook hands: ‘Nice of you to ask me to look in. I envy you your quarters. They tell me you can’t get one of these Temple flats for love or money nowadays.’

  Murgatroyd might have detected a sinister trap in these seemingly harmless remarks, but Giles Carrington accepted them at their face value, invited the Superintendent to sit down in one of the deep leather chairs, and supplied him with a drink and a cigar. He had been idly engaged on a chess problem when his visitor arrived, and the sight of the board on the table, with a few pieces set out, naturally inspired Hannasyde, also a humble follower of the game, to inspect the problem narrowly. There was no room for any other thought in either man’s head until Black had been successfully mated in the requisite three moves, but when this had been worked out, the pieces put away, a few chess reminiscences exchanged, the scarcity of really keen players deplored, a pause ensued and Giles said: ‘Well, what about this tiresome murder? Is it going to be an unsolved crime?’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ replied Hannasyde. ‘It’s early days yet – though I won’t deny that I don’t altogether like the look of it.’ He scrutinised the long ash on the end of his cigar, debating whether to tip it off or to wait a little longer. ‘Hemingway – the chap with me to-day – is feeling aggrieved.’ He smiled. ‘Says there oughtn’t to be any mystery about the murder of a man like Vereker. You expect to be baffled when it’s a case of some unfortunate girl being taken for a ride and bumped off, but when a prominent City man is stabbed it ought to be fairly plain sailing. You have what Hemingway calls the full decor. His hobby is amateur theatricals – it’s the worst thing I know of him. Well, we’ve got plenty of decor, and we’ve got dramatis personae, and the net result’ – he paused, and at last tipped off the ash of his cigar – ‘is that we seem most of the time to have got mixed up in a Chekhov play instead of the Edgar Wallace we thought we were engaged for.’

  Giles grinned. ‘My deplorable cousins. I’m really very sorry about it. It would be interesting to know what you make of them.’

  ‘I haven’t the least objection to telling you that I don’t know what to make of them,’ replied Hannasyde calmly. ‘On the face of it, things point young Vereker’s way. The motive is there, the opportunity is there, and unless I’m very much mistaken in my reading of his character, the nerve is there, too.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ said Giles.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hannasyde, with a kind of grim humour. ‘I know you do. I’m perfectly well aware that you’re as much in the dark over him as I am, and equally well aware that you think things look rather black for him. Well, they do, but I’ll be quite frank with you: I wouldn’t apply for a warrant for that young man’s arrest until I had a cast-iron case against him. His story is the weakest I’ve ever had to listen to – and I wouldn’t let him tell it to a jury for anything you could offer me. Which reminds me, by the way, that Mesurier came up to see me at the Yard this afternoon, with yet another weak story. But I daresay you know about that.’

  ‘I believe I know the story, but I didn’t know he’d been to see you.’

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Hannasyde. ‘He went down to that cottage to shoot Vereker, but found him already dead, so returned to town. What I should really welcome would be some suspicious character with a good, strong, probable alibi. I believe it would be easier to disprove. Hemingway fancies Mesurier more than I do. He will have it the man’s a dago. I’ve set him to work on that car alibi, but I don’t myself see a way round it. So leaving Mesurier out of it for the time being, we’re left with a chauffeur whose alibi I don’t altogether trust, as it’s supplied by his wife, but whom I don’t really think had sufficient motive to murder
Vereker; with one unknown man who visited Vereker on Saturday, possibly with the idea of blackmail (and blackmailers don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs); and with Miss Vereker and her brother.’ He stopped and drank some of the whisky-and-soda in his glass. ‘Taking Miss Vereker first,’ he continued, ‘if I were to set the facts down on paper, and show them to any one man, I should think he’d wonder why I haven’t had her arrested on suspicion long since. But so far I’ve nothing to show that she murdered her brother, and that particular kind of candour she treats me to, which looks at first glance to be so damning, is the sort of candour that would get her off with ninety-nine juries out of a hundred. Mesurier’s type – trying to conceal facts he thinks might tell against him, contradicting himself, hedging – is easier to deal with. Ask him if he quarrelled with Vereker, and he says he would hardly call it a quarrel – with any number of people ready to swear that they heard him quarrelling. Ask Miss Vereker whether she got on with her half-brother, and she says she hated the sight of him. She doesn’t appear to conceal a thing. It’s the same with her brother: you don’t know whether they’re very clever, or completely innocent, or a pair of lunatics.’

  ‘I can set your mind at rest on one point: they’re quite sane,’ said Giles. ‘And since you’ve been so frank with me – admitting what I’ve known from the start – I’ll tell you in return that Miss Vereker, who knows her brother as well as anyone, is willing to bet her whole fortune that if he committed the murder it will never be proved against him.’

  The Superintendent’s eyes had twinkled appreciatively at one part of this speech, and he replied at once: ‘That piece of information ought to be very useful – to Miss Vereker, if not to me. But I’m too old a hand to accept it quite as you’d like me to.’

  Giles got up to replenish both glasses. ‘As a matter of fact I didn’t mean it like that at all,’ he confessed. ‘Whatever I may or may not think about Kenneth, I am quite convinced in my own mind that his sister had nothing whatsoever to do with it.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me at all,’ said Hannasyde dryly. ‘Moreover, I very much hope you’re right – for both your sakes.’