A Country Way of Death (The Inspector Felix Mysteries Book 4)

by R. A. Bentley

  'Greater love hath no woman than she should lay herself down for her friends,' chuckled Sir Neville, who seemed rather taken with this aspect of the case.

  'Quite so, sir,' smiled Miles. 'So now we had the vicar and the village headmistress involved in whatever it was. We still hadn't much to go on, but the list of possible murderers of Rowsell was growing ever longer.

  'We also had to consider the "gold and silver," the possession of which Rowsell so deplored. If he wasn't being bribed with it, where did it fit in? Whose was it? Just one person's or several? And who in the village was rich enough to qualify? Colonel Trenchard we quickly rejected – he'd apparently played no part in the business and is not particularly well off – and that left Sir Rupert. He was rich, and he was Baverstock's uncle. But he'd been away, both at the time of Baverstock's death and Rowsell's. Any involvement in the matter would have had to be indirect.

  'It was then that our friends Travis and Frampton turned up, and we learned from a thoroughly frightened Sir Rupert all about the lost tiara. But who had it now? And was that, rather than Baverstock's death, what all the secrecy was about? Was, perhaps, half the village sharing the loot? That would certainly explain Rowsell's anger and disgust. There was the Clements' palatial farmhouse, Bulloch's agricultural empire, Shutler's new garage, even Pruitt's early retirement and foreign holidays to account for, none with any obvious source of funds. To me, however, it seemed unlikely. Some evidence in that regard would surely have come to light before now. I was convinced it was someone's life and liberty they were protecting, possibly more than one person's, for the scale of the deception seemed to require it. My only clue to this was a report from a disinterested witness – a rare beast in Bettishaw – on the fight between Rowsell and the other man at the Boxing Day dance. Rowsell was seen leaning over the table of a group of them, laying down the law, and they had all shown equal concern, even fear. Could it have been those men who as boys were involved in Baverstock's death? Hanging or imprisoning them now would tear the heart out of the village - a disaster. But if Baverstock died of natural causes, what had they to worry about?

  'It was Rattigan who reminded me of the theory we had built on the basis of Rowsell's draft letter. It was purely an exercise, but now it seemed to make sense. Suppose Baverstock, a millionaire's nephew in apparently rude health, had precipitately died, somehow implicating the innocent occupants of that table? What would they have done? Suppose, also, that Ellen, recalling the threat on the music score, had been able to lay hands on it again? One could imagine her hanging them all, if in her grief she had produced the thing at a trial. A pretty and innocent young woman, her fiancé cruelly stolen from her, only days before her wedding. Prosecuting counsel could have made much of that! And somehow involved was an exotic piece of stolen jewellery of barely imaginable worth. It would have become a cause célèbre — front page news. We felt that to ordinary country folk, even a village headmistress, the odds would have appeared stacked against them. Hiding the evidence seemed perfectly rational behaviour, under the circumstances.'

  Sir Neville, who had listened for some time in silence, compressed his lips and nodded, slightly reminding Miles for a moment of Miss Pruitt. 'Perhaps they were right to be concerned,' he admitted. 'One likes, of course, to believe that things have changed in one's lifetime and that they'd be safe enough now, but who can say?' He smiled wryly. 'I notice you've carefully neglected to mention their names, Felix. No! Don't tell me. It's a long while ago, and if you're sure they were innocent I'm prepared to trust your judgement.'

  Miles breathed a secret sigh of relief. 'Thank you sir. That is my judgement. I do have the advantage of knowing them – for half my life, in fact – and can't believe that any of them would have offered Baverstock serious harm for the crime of pinching their girl.

  'But that was then. Who, now, had gone so far as to kill Rowsell? The same men, no longer young, who'd been somehow associated with the unfortunate death of Baverstock, now had wives and children and businesses. One or more of them might have felt that to murder a man who would take all that from them, purely to avoid breaking a rather pharisaical interpretation of the ninth commandment, would be fully justified. But who on earth had taken it into his head to do it in the middle of the village at lunchtime, next to a crowded pub? It could only be that the murderer knew where Rowsell was going next — to see me and tell all. It was an act of desperation.

  'The first problem was that almost everyone we might reasonably have suspected of the crime was in the vicinity of the garage at the time. We might once have rejected Shepherd and Pruitt as unlikely, but I thought I knew enough by then to put them firmly on the list. The second problem was the unlocked back door. The murderer could well have fled that way, and if no-one saw him enter or leave the garage it could have been anyone in the village who had done it. Whatever conclusions we came to, that had at least to be borne in mind.

  'We decided on a reconstruction. Rattigan was of the view that someone from out of the Bell had done the deed; the man, in fact, who had got into the fight with Rowsell at the dance. It would have needed only a minute or two for him to be away from the bar, and he had, by his own admission, used the Bell's outside toilet that lunchtime. But what was the weapon? There was nothing easily to hand in the public bar of the Bell, and the murderer wouldn't in any case have known he'd need one until he saw Rowsell or his car. I should explain that we at first assumed it was a spur of the moment crime, for who would have known Rowsell was going to be there at that exact time, buying petrol? We then discovered there was probably no suitable weapon to be found just inside the garage either, although that relied on the testimony of our annoyingly nonchalant village mechanic, who had been away at the time, delivering a car. We inferred from the position of the body that Rowsell had been struck from behind while walking towards the office to pay for his petrol, so that, failing some rather unlikely circumstances, the murderer would have had no weapon to hand. That suggested he'd brought whatever it was with him and that suggested the crime was a planned one. Not many folk habitually carry in their pocket an item solid enough to smash a skull. That it was pocket-sized seemed likely as they would hardly have risked walking in with it in their hand.

  'An unpremeditated murder had never much appealed to me, so I was rather inclined to embrace the idea of someone deliberately setting out to kill him. But if the murderer had planned the assault, he must either have known the precise moment that Rowsell was due to arrive – he would hardly have wanted to hang around waiting for him – or he'd been following him, presumably by car, or he'd actually arrived in Rowsell's car with him. The first, though not impossible, would require rather fine timing and an intimate knowledge of his victim's movements. The second would make perfect sense in a town or city, but seemed less likely in Bettishaw, where few folk even own a car. And where was the car? If it had come up the High Street, or emerged from Long Lane, my mother would in all probability have seen it as she came down from Upper, a walk of about ten minutes. So, I plumped for the third possibility — the murderer and Rowsell had arrived together in Rowsell's car. That would explain, if nothing else, why Rowsell's assailant had not been seen, for a matter of moments would have got him from the car into the garage.

  'The next question was: who with a motive to kill Rowsell was most likely to have been a passenger in his car? Firstly there was Pruitt, who might or might not have made the connection between Rowsell and the fire that killed her friend, and who might or might not have known that he planned to come to me that afternoon. I was inclined to believe that she'd guessed about the fire. She'd denied all knowledge of the provenance of the note, but I was by now pretty well convinced she was Rowsell's lover and would have known his writing style perfectly well. She would probably have known, in any case, that he'd courted Ellen, and when, and would have drawn her own conclusions. If the note was what the intruder was looking for, it was more than likely to be Rowsell looking for it, so unless she couldn't bring herself to believe it
– unlikely in so rational a woman – that would have cooked his goose as far as she was concerned. Among them all, she had, potentially, a double motive. There was therefore a good chance she'd bitten her tongue and got into the car with him with the full intention of preserving the village's secret while exacting revenge for the death of Miss Ashton, not to mention the ruination of her own life. She was easily strong enough, and disciplined enough, to do that. In fact, for a while she was my chief suspect.

  'As to the others, it seemed unlikely that Rowsell would have let any of Baverstock's tormentors into his car after the Boxing Day dance debacle, and that left the Reverend Shepherd. One shies from thinking the worst of a man of the cloth, but I was convinced by that time that he knew all about Rowsell's doings and had knowingly concealed them from us. That suggested, if nothing else, a certain moral flexibility. He couldn't be ruled out.

  What had Pruitt and Shepherd been doing in the hour or so before the murder? Both had been at a committee meeting until about twelve forty-five, easily checked, then lunching together at the rectory; a lunch prepared, presumably, by Mrs Pinnick the cook-housekeeper. They then claimed to have sat talking in the vicar's study before calling out to Mrs Pinnick, that they were leaving &ndash which she later confirmed to me &ndah; and walking down the rectory drive to the High Street, where Shepherd had parked his car. Shepherd claimed that he'd then intended to visit a parishioner after he had himself topped up with petrol. Pruitt claimed to be going home. They spoke briefly to a couple of patrons of the Bell – which those gentlemen independently confirmed – and were moments later caught up in the aftermath of the murder. Indeed, they were first on the scene after Mrs Clement and my mother, having responded to the former's call for help. Assuming the honesty of Mrs Pinnick there seemed, on the face of it, little scope there for deceit.

  'As for Rowsell, there was about a quarter of an hour between his leaving home and falling into the pit that was unaccounted for. If I was right, it was during that quarter hour that he must have visited and brought away with him his assailant, a person he was presumably content to have in his car. If it was Pruitt or Shepherd, he must have called on them at the rectory, perhaps entering through the garden door, and, minutes later, leaving with one or both of them the same way. The murderer had only to wait for him to get his petrol, follow him into the garage and do the deed before scuttling back to the rectory, re-entering through the garden door and thus making the whole expedition unknown to the servants, or, one assumed, to anyone else.

  'So far so good, but why on earth would the pair of them then go back to the garage? If anything pointed to their innocence it was that. The sensible thing would have been to stay safely in the rectory until the hue and cry had died down. There would, of course, have been no time to do the deed after they got back to the garage, as Mrs Clement was already waiting outside it. All I could think of was that the murderer became aware of having left behind an incriminating piece of evidence – some personal property, perhaps, or even the weapon itself – and had hastened back to recover it. Did I have any evidence for this? Not the slightest, except for the mildly suspicious behaviour of Pruitt remaining all alone in the garage, at a time when Shepherd had come out again and my mother had prudently chosen to telephone to my father from the Bell.

  'Late in the afternoon of New Year's Eve, we'd been interviewing the Clements to no great advantage, except that Josie Clement, weary, perhaps, of dissembling, had told me what we'd long since guessed, that everyone in the village knew what had happened to Baverstock, and that I and my family were the only ones who did not. She also said she knew I'd eventually get at the truth, but that it wouldn't be coming from her. Then she kicked me out. I'd just about had enough of it by then and decided to confront the vicar. I had no reason to suppose he was not a gentleman towards the fair sex and I felt he was unlikely to have allowed Pruitt to act as executioner when he could do it himself. If, however, it was Pruitt who was the guilty party – and I felt it had to be one or other of them – it would be interesting to see how he dealt with that. If I was wrong about both of them it could only move us forward. I did not, however, think I was wrong. Sending Rattigan to a well-earned evening off, I equipped myself with a spade and drove down to the rectory. By then it was almost dark or I might have done a bit of excavating in the rectory garden. I was pretty certain that it was where the dog was buried, and later it proved to be so.

  'Shepherd was out, his car not there. Mrs Pinnick said he was due back shortly for tea and would I like to wait? I said I'd return later but instead let myself in by the garden door, which, it transpired, was always left unlocked. I propped the spade, suitably muddied, against the curtain, settled myself in the armchair by his desk and waited. It was dark when he came in, and the first thing he saw on lighting the lamp was me sitting there, playing rather pointedly with the Buddha paperweight. Even that was a guess, but it seemed reasonable that it was the murder weapon. Nothing else in the room was heavy enough yet small enough to fit a pocket and not show too much, and he wouldn't have had time to search the house for something better. Then he saw the shovel. Sensibly, he said nothing, but I knew from his face that he was my man, and he knew I knew. I told him it was late and that I'd return in the morning. In the meantime he might wish to consider his position. The next time I saw him he lay dying.'

  'You hoped he'd think it over and confess?'

  'Yes, sir. I couldn't arrest him, I had no evidence, but I'd found my murderer, I was sure of that. There was nothing else to be done then, so I went home to my fiancée, hoping to enjoy New Year's Eve with her.'

  'And then came the most extraordinary part of it, to my mind.'

  Miles smiled. 'The Battle of Bettishaw! A development we hadn't anticipated, though we might have done if we'd known more about Travis. After twenty-five years in an Indian gaol, he was an angry and dangerous man. He wanted revenge for being, as he saw it, abandoned to his fate, and, more importantly, he wanted his share of the tiara. First, however, he had to find his erstwhile partner in crime.

  'He will have guessed that Rupert Willoughby had returned to England, but there was no realistic way of finding him here, except by pure chance. Operating in India under a nom de guerre, Willoughby had been careful never to reveal to anyone his true identity, still less to Travis, whom he mistrusted. The only possibility was to employ an expert in jewellery with sufficient contacts to discover the necklace and tiara. They, in turn, might lead him to his quarry. He was fortunate in finding Frampton, whose less than scrupulous methods cut many corners and who was prepared to work for a share of the proceeds.

  'In the event, the necklace proved fairly easy to find. It had gone to a young marchioness, a wedding gift from her father-in-law. From there, the trail led backwards to a buyer in Hatton Garden. Yes, he remembered it well. Unfortunately the sunburned gentleman who sold it to him had insisted on being paid in cash and he'd learned nothing about him. What of the tiara, then? It was impossible that such a thing could have come onto the market and not become instantly famous. Could anyone even afford to buy it, unless from a desperate man? The answer was obvious; if sold at all, it had been broken up. Could the individual stones be identified? What were the most distinctive of them? That, surely, was the "precious opals," as they are termed.

  'As fate would have it, the opals were what Beatrice Pruitt – if it was she – had chosen to sell. Jewellery probably isn't her strong suit, and to her, with their bright colours, they would perhaps have seemed commonplace when compared with diamonds and rubies; the sort of thing an ordinary person might own. Also the setting was such that they were some of the easiest to remove without the whole thing falling to bits.

  'It was what Travis and his associate had been hoping for, and they quickly struck lucky. Just such a gem had been purchased and sold into the trade by a man in Blackfriars. A kindly and sympathetic old chap, he remembered the lady saying she must hurry for the train. Waterloo seemed likely. Had she, perhaps, sold nearer to home? There were
not so many well-heeled jewellery buyers in the southern main-line towns that they couldn't all be questioned, and, sure enough, another opal had been purchased by a dealer in Southampton. Yes, he too remembered her. A handsome, well-spoken lady, fairly tall, nice figure, and aged, he supposed, in her thirties. A widow, she'd told him, with a mortgage to redeem. It was a most unusual colour, which is why he recalled the purchase, and had fetched a tidy sum. It was, he reminded them, fifteen years ago at least, before the war.

  'The rest was footslog and patience. It's wonderful what lengths a man will go to when a king's ransom in jewels is on the end of it. Was this unknown woman his erstwhile partner's wife? He could imagine the craven fellow lurking in some provincial town or village, sending her to do his dirty work. Like himself, he'd be going on for sixty now, living very comfortably, no doubt, on the proceeds of those gems and the necklace. It seemed likely, however, that the bulk of the tiara remained unsold. How, after all, could one spend such an immense sum? The man who lived like that would stick out a mile.

  'What had he to go on? A shortish fellow, he recalled, probably getting tubby by now, with a taller wife of good figure. He'd had, he remembered, a middle-class accent – he couldn't readily hide that – and an irritating, cocksure manner. Living in Southampton, no doubt, or its hinterland, he'd have a nice house and the life of a gentleman. It ought to be possible, if one stuck at it. It was unfortunate for Sir Rupert that he did, indeed, have a taller wife of good figure.

  'In the event it took them six months. The night after we left there, Travis and his gang descended on Bettishaw Hall like the wolf on the fold, cutting the telephone wire, terrorising the servants and smashing anything there was to smash. Sir Rupert was only too happy to tell them the tiara was twenty years gone, but not until they'd removed his fingernails and started on a housemaid were his protestations believed. Armed with the story of Baverstock's disappearance and, unfortunately, my own investigations, they turned their attention to the rest of the village, leaving one of their number to guard Willoughby.