The Sedleigh Hall Murder

by Roy Lewis

  He heard the door close quietly behind her, and he was in darkness again.

  * * *

  It brought him no relief. First of all, he felt the waves of nausea begin to come back to him, intermittently; then there was the dull throb of pain, difficult to locate. Temples, eyes, but persistent. Normally, the pilocarpine did its work within fifteen minutes and then there was only the shuddering. Tonight, it was different. He had had one attack like this previously: the thought of another agonized him. He walked to the window and looked out. A full moon rode the night sky, above scudding clouds, but the tell-tale halo surrounded it, a diffusion caused by the gathering fluids in his eyes. He went back to the bed and lay down again, still fully dressed, waiting, but it was still there, almost predatory.

  In another room in this great house an old man lay, ill like himself, perhaps dying. He knew the secrets which Ward almost knew . . . and yet more too, the intertwining of so many secrets, a murder, a vanished half-brother, a lost child, a long, long silence after what had happened at Vixen Hill. A quiet grave in a village miles away from here.

  The room was oppressive. He tried to make out the time by his watch but his eyesight was blurred and he dared not put on the light. He rose, and walked unsteadily to the door, sickness rising to his throat, and he wanted to be outside, in the night air, where he might get relief. He walked down the stairs, saw the misty light creeping under the library door and walked past. He thought he heard someone moving in the library but stumbled on, opening the main doors and walking out into the night air.

  It was fresh and cool to his skin, touching his burning eyelids with soft fingers, and he moved carefully down the steps, down to the gravel of the parking area, across the soft, damp grass beyond. He felt the breeze in his face, caressing him, and he turned into it, aware of the brightness of the moon and the deep shadows of the trees about him, but careless of the route he took, conscious only of the pain that lay behind his eyes. He walked for a few minutes and found himself in a lane; he stopped, leaning against a barred gate and looked about him, half dazed. He could make out haloed lights on the hill — Sedleigh Hall. He would walk on a little way more, in the cool evening; then he would retrace his steps, try another dose of pilocarpine before lying down to rest. He did not want to use the damned stuff too much — he felt it would be dangerous, but when the pain came again, in earnest . . .

  He walked on again slowly, and the trees shadowed his progress under the moon.

  To his left he was aware of fields, stretching out silently, further than he could see. Ahead of him the hill rose, fading against the stars. It was time to turn back.

  But he was not alone.

  He had known it for some time, without recognizing or accepting the fact, his senses blurred and unresponsive by the drugged pain. Now, as he decided to turn back the awareness came to him sharply, and he swung around, peering back the way he had come. There was nothing he could make out, just trees and the narrow lane, but the cat stretched lazily again behind his eyes and he shuddered. He started to retrace his steps, his footsteps scraping the gravelly lane, and then he caught a brief glimpse of something dark moving away from the trees to his left and he stopped.

  The shotgun barrel tapped lightly on his shoulder, just below his left ear. ‘You make things easy, my friend,’ the voice whispered and Eric Ward, through a haze of climbing pain, knew this would be how Fred Bridges would have come upon Arthur Egan in the darkness.

  The shotgun nudged his left ear. ‘Turn again, Whittington.’ The pressure increased, making him turn around to face the hill again and then it slipped back, to press lightly against the nape of his neck. ‘All right, you were walking. So walk.’

  Ward stumbled forward, bemused by surprise and pain and the effects of the drug. He moved awkwardly, the shotgun jolting against the back of his neck, and he had walked several paces before he managed to speak. ‘What the hell is this? I’m no poacher.’

  ‘A matter of opinion,’ the man behind him said, still half whispering. ‘But I’ll settle for investigator. You should have got the police out of your system, my friend. You should have stuck with the law?’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Just walk.’

  They walked. Ward’s head was throbbing now and the nausea that had gripped him earlier was rising again. He managed to continue for perhaps another fifty yards and then he suddenly stopped, leaning sideways as he retched violently. He heard the man behind him mutter in disgust, ‘God, you are a mess.’

  But the shotgun barrel prodded him again, a moment later, and they were climbing the hill, under the trees. ‘What’s this all about?’ Ward asked again, his voice sounding hollow in his own skull. ‘Why are you taking me up here?’

  ‘Because I heard tonight what you know — that Sarah Boden was murdered.’

  ‘Sarah Boden? But what—’ He stopped speaking as the shotgun barrel moved again, the muzzle pushing against the right side of his head, moving him away from the lane towards a gap in the hedge. He stumbled through, and the grass was long, soaking his shoes. They were crossing a field, the moonlight whitening the grass in front of him, and they were near the crest of the hill. He shook his head, puzzled. ‘I don’t understand—’

  ‘If you know Sarah was murdered, you must know more. And if you don’t, you’re intelligent enough to put it all together.’

  ‘The police know she was killed too. It’s where I got the information.’

  The muzzle wobbled against his shoulder and there was a short silence, broken only by the swishing of the grass under their feet. Then the man behind him sighed. ‘All right, you may be telling the truth, though I doubt it, for nothing’s appeared in the newspapers. It makes no difference. You’d soon have found out about French.’

  ‘The man from Carlton Engineering?’ Ward asked in surprise.

  The shotgun muzzle was thrust angrily against his skull. ‘You bastard! You know about it all! I was right—’

  ‘No! I only found out he worked for the company this evening! I don’t know the significance of it. Except . . . except you must have been the man he met in Warkworth.’

  ‘That’s right . . .’ The whisper was low, and there was an edge of excitement to it.

  ‘They’ll reach you through French, if you were meeting him there. They’ll reach you and trace you and fix that murder on you—’

  ‘No. To begin with, French is unlikely to tell them. Too much at stake. I’ve been keeping him informed regarding the Inland Revenue negotiations so that as soon as the decision is taken to sell the Newfoundland shares, Carlton Engineering, or rather, its parent firm, can step in and take them for a song. You see, my friend, a little bit of industrial espionage has told them that those shares will blow sky-high within the year — an oil-bearing rock offshore — and Morcomb will have unloaded his shares for virtually nothing! That’s why French will keep quiet. And even if he didn’t, there’s no problem. What reason would I have for killing Sarah Boden? Only you and I know that!’

  ‘Me?’ Ward shook his head, puzzled. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t play me for the fool, Ward.’ The shotgun tapped against his back. ‘All right, just stand there and turn around. Slowly. Right, hold it there.’

  He stood outlined in the moonlight, shadowy through the blurred lenses of Ward’s pain-racked eyes, the shotgun pointing straight at Ward’s chest. The breeze lifted his hair; the breeze Ward felt at his back. ‘Now, slowly,’ the man with the shotgun said, ‘backwards, one step at a time, slowly.’

  ‘I tell you,’ Ward said evenly. ‘I’ve no idea what this is about. You and Sarah Boden—’

  ‘You want to see Lord Morcomb, don’t you?’ The voice had taken on a grating quality. ‘I knew there was something in the air, when you visited Vixen Hill, and when I heard you were going to see Sarah Boden. So when I met French at Warkworth, and saw you come down to dinner, I left, and thought as a matter of curiosity, I’d go to see her. And the silly ol
d bitch told me. And she would have told you . . .’

  Ward understood at last. Sarah Boden had been killed to silence her — the secret she had kept for over twenty years, as an old woman she had been prepared to tell, senility overcoming secrecy. And she had spoken, only to die because of it.

  ‘You won’t be seeing Lord Morcomb now, and the past will all be buried. A step more my friend, a step more. The past . . . it will all be buried, as soon you will be. An unfortunate accident . . . glaucoma . . . stumbling in pain in the dark—’

  ‘David!’

  The scream razored through the silence, and the shotgun wavered, turning in an arc, and Eric Ward threw himself forward desperately, his hands thrusting for the gun.

  They stood braced against each other in the moonlight, the tall, slimly powerful figure of David Penrose and the thicker, older frame of Eric Ward, the shotgun between them, both men gripping it, barrel and stock. Penrose’s finger was on the trigger but Ward’s hand was clamped on his and there was only the stamping of their feet and the hissing of their breath to break the silence as Anne Morcomb came running across the grass.

  One barrel blazed into the night sky, ineffectually, and then the second roared as Penrose’s finger tightened involuntarily against the straining muscles of Ward’s body. Ward could see almost nothing; a red agonized haze blurred his vision and shock waves of pain thundered through his head and tore at his eyeballs. Though Penrose was younger than he, and strong, in normal circumstances the rough-housing tactics Ward had learned in the police would have been enough to overcome the man, but the pain debilitated him, robbed him of decision, and made him waver clumsily, struggling to maintain his grip on the shotgun.

  The wire caught him at the back of the knees, he felt the scoring pain as iron seared against his thigh and then he was falling backwards, still gripping the shotgun, with Penrose falling with him, half astride him, obscenely struggling to maintain his balance and his upright position. They rolled, and the grass had given way to stone and the night breeze fanned their hot faces. He heard Penrose gasp, felt the grip on the shotgun slacken as Penrose’s shoes scrabbled against loose stone and Ward pulled, heaving suddenly at the gun. It came away, Penrose’s grip breaking, and almost in the same movement Ward’s training reasserted itself and he swung the stock in a short arc.

  He felt the stock strike Penrose’s jaw with a crunching sound. Penrose moaned softly, and tried to rise, away from Ward’s body, and then he slipped sideways on his knees, falling, half conscious.

  A moment later, with the sliding rattle of stones, he was gone, with just one single cry, and Eric Ward was alone, on his back in the moonlight, with sharp stones biting into his back.

  But not alone. On the other side of the protective, but broken wire, was Anne Morcomb.

  ‘Crawl,’ she said, half sobbing. ‘Eric, for God’s sake crawl — but carefully!’

  And Eric Ward understood. Half blind, he dragged himself carefully away from the edge of the quarry until the grass was long about him and Anne Morcomb was crying desperately on his shoulder and the nerve-ends around his eyes quivered with the pain that tore relentlessly at them.

  * * *

  She had been in the library, had discussed it with David before he left, then worrying over what Ward had said about Sarah Boden’s death, anxious to discover what it had to do with her father, she had heard him come down the stairs. She had heard the front door open and had seen him crossing the lawn. She had run upstairs to don a sweater to follow him, realizing he felt ill, but she had lost him in the darkness of the lane until she saw two dark figures crossing the moonlit field, towards the quarry.

  And she had saved his life.

  And now here he sat, still pursuing his obsession, as the morning sunshine gleamed through the bedroom window and picked out the pale scalp beneath Lord Morcomb’s thinning hair as he sat in his dressing-gown, facing him, slouched in the easy chair. There was a sunken look about his cheeks and his eyes were hollow, but there still gleamed in those eyes a cold defiant light as he stared at Eric Ward.

  ‘I liked that boy. He had no background, but I liked him and I looked after him. And now you say he tried to swindle me.’

  He was a man with an eye for the main chance. He’d been using his inside knowledge of your affairs to feed information to an employee of Carlton Engineering. I suspect, like your financial adviser Henried, that they never really intended to start open-cast mining in the area — that was a bogus pressure, designed to make you sell your shares rather than the land. For that’s what they wanted — a sale of Amalgamated Newfoundland Properties, in which Carlton’s parent company, Western Consolidated, have a major holding. They wanted to increase it, get a majority holding — and at a low price. It’s what they’d have got if you’d unloaded your large holding on to the market. They’d have snapped it up — and paid a handsome fee to Penrose. He kept their man informed of the estate duty negotiations, which were, in a sense, the key. Once the matter was decided, he could tell them the share sales would go through soon. They’d be ready and waiting. And it almost worked.’

  ‘That was hardly enough reason to try to kill you,’ Lord Morcomb said carefully. ‘Hardly enough reason to die.’

  ‘That wasn’t the only reason he attacked me.’ Ward held the old man’s glance. ‘The main reason was Arthur Egan.’

  The cold eyes flickered; a tongue touched dry lips. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When Arthur Egan died he left a sum of money. And a small house. Otherwise, all he kept was a letter, some photographs, a lock of blond hair. Little enough, wasn’t it? But he was a lonely man.’

  ‘There’ll be some point to this, I trust?’ Lord Morcomb said sardonically.

  ‘One of the photographs was of a grave, in Hartburn church.’

  The old man’s head came up, in a spasm of disbelief. For a moment an old hatred flickered in his eyes, and then it was muffled and gone. He waited.

  ‘The past has a way of always being with us,’ Ward said. ‘It can influence the present; it can affect the future, and in a manner we never expect. You were married twice, weren’t you, Lord Morcomb? Joseph Francis mentioned to me that the first marriage ended with a nullity decree.’

  ‘I don’t see—’

  ‘There aren’t many grounds on which a nullity decree can be obtained. Certain grounds are laid down by statute — unsoundness of mind, venereal disease and so on. But they weren’t the grounds on which your first marriage was nullified, were they?’

  Lord Morcomb’s head had dropped, chin on chest.

  Eric Ward felt a stab of sympathy, but he had to go on for the sake of a dead man he had never met. ‘It was incapacity, wasn’t it?’ he said quietly. ‘Not wilful refusal. I think your wife obtained a nullity decree because of your incapacity to consummate the marriage.’

  ‘This has nothing to do with you,’ Lord Morcomb grated.

  ‘But it helps me fit all the pieces together. I should have gone out to Hartburn sooner. But when I did go last weekend, and saw the grave, it all came together for me. Vixen Hill, a lock of blond hair, twenty thousand pounds, Fred Bridges’s attitude, it all slotted together when I saw that tombstone. Elizabeth Morcomb’s grave!’

  The old man stirred fretfully. He struggled to a more upright position, and glared angrily at Eric Ward.

  ‘So she was buried at Hartburn. It was where she was born! There is no reason—’

  ‘But Arthur Egan had taken a photograph of that grave — and kept it by him through all his lonely years at Westerhope! Why did he do that? Why did he accept the trumped-up charge against him for the murder of Colonel Denby? Where did that twenty thousand pounds come from? Who put pressure on the police to get Egan put away? Why did he return, almost as soon as he was released, to hang about Vixen Hill? They are questions that have bothered me, puzzled me — but they were answered as soon as I saw the grave of your second wife, Anne’s mother.’

  ‘This is a lot of nonsense and I—’

 
‘Because it explains also his reluctance, his reticence, right at the end. He was dying, he wanted to make sure his child was financially secure. But he didn’t name her . . . he was torn. To name her was wrong, and yet to leave her unprovided for, in case she might be turned away after all these years . . . In his cancer agony he could hardly think straight, so he left a cryptic note.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I’m telling you,’ Ward said evenly, ‘that I know Arthur Egan was Anne’s father — not you!’

  Lord Morcomb’s hand shook. His eyes were fixed on Eric Ward, denying the truth of what he said, but at the same time the past was sweeping over him in a great passionate wave of anger, and hate, and the urge to possess, the drive to destroy. He wanted to deny what Ward asserted, but the urge to explain it after all these years was greater. ‘All right!’ he almost shouted. ‘But do you understand? Motives — the tangled web of deceit we were caught up in? When I married Elizabeth I loved her. I loved her and I thought it would be all right. It wasn’t my fault I . . .’ He shook his head in a vague desperation. ‘How can it be explained? The doctors told me it was nothing physical . . . merely psychological. Merely psychological! Elizabeth understood; she was sympathetic at first, and for a few years . . . But then she got moody, depressed, unhappy. But there was nothing I could do, and we began to drift apart.’ He fell silent, contemplating the past, hardly aware of Eric Ward’s presence.

  ‘And then Arthur Egan came along.’

  Lord Morcomb nodded, slowly. His voice was a husky whisper. ‘I don’t know how it started. She used to ride, a favourite ride past Seddon Burn. And he looked after the stables there — a stable hand, for God’s sake!’ The lash of hurt pride came back to him momentarily, but subsided again. ‘And at last she came to me, told me she had been having an affair with this man Egan, that she was bearing his child and wanted to leave with him.’ He looked up, his eyes no longer cold, but burning angrily now. ‘I saw Egan. He was nothing. A well-set young man, goodlooking . . . but he could offer her nothing — except that one thing I could not. Sexual love. So I talked to her, I told her exactly how it would be for her, living with this man in virtual poverty. But she was stubborn — said she loved him . . .’