The Other Devil's Name

by E. X. Ferrars

  He gulped some coffee which was almost too hot to swallow and made him choke for a moment.

  “Of course that’s what it is,” he said when he could speak. “I’m certain neither of you has ever done anything in your lives for which anyone could blackmail you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, you and I have known each other for a good many years, haven’t we?”

  That was true, but as he said it he recognized inwardly that there were whole areas of Constance’s life of which he knew next to nothing. For instance, though he thought it probable that she had had lovers, she had never spoken about them. But even supposing that she had had any number of them, that was not a thing about which she could be blackmailed nowadays. And he could not imagine that she had ever been engaged in any criminal activities. He was sure that she had never forged a cheque, stolen jewellery or valuables from anyone, or, say, run over someone with her car and failed to report it. She was a gifted, loyal, kindly woman of high integrity and any blackmailer who thought that he could extort money from her must be really in a very bad way. And he had no reason to think that her sister was very different from her.

  She smiled slightly when he spoke and nodded and said, “Yes, you and I have been lucky in our way, haven’t we? Suppose we’d hated one another, what hell we could have made for one another over the years. The academic world isn’t famous for loving-kindness. But I don’t want to take that letter to the police. I’ve got my reasons.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  “Rather a lot. You’ve only to say no, you know, if you don’t want to do what I’m going to ask you. I do realize it’s a lot, and you may not have time for it, or may simply intensely dislike the idea of having anything to do with it. I was going to ask you if you would come to stay for a little while with Mollie and me in Lindleham and meet some of our neighbours and tell me… Well, you needn’t tell me anything if you don’t want to. That would be for you to judge. But I believe you’ve been involved in murder before, haven’t you?”

  “To my sorrow, yes.”

  “You see, Mollie and I have rather lost our heads about all this, and we do want help.”

  He could think of no one who looked less as if she had lost her head than Constance Camm did just then, but he knew her well enough to be aware that whatever turmoil was raging inside her, it would not show.

  “So you really believe there’s been a murder,” he said, “and it was done by someone you know. And someone else you know saw the body being buried and has turned blackmailer. And you’re really scared of what may happen next.”

  “I won’t go so far as to say I actually believe there’s really been a murder,” she answered, “but it’s true I’m scared and I can’t stop thinking about it. And Mollie’s even worse about it than I am.”

  “And you think if I meet your neighbours I’ll be capable of picking out the culprits. I’m very flattered, but, my dear, if you were to put their names in a hat and let me pick one out, I’d be just about as successful. But I’ll come to Lindleham if you really want me to.”

  Her face brightened. “Today?”

  “I suppose today is as good a day as any.”

  It did not take Andrew long to pack a suitcase and to write a note for the woman who came in to clean his flat twice a week to explain his sudden absence. He left it on the kitchen table, made his bed, washed up the breakfast things, left a note with an empty milk bottle at his door, cancelling deliveries till further notice, checked that he had enough money to last him for a few days and rejoined Constance in the sitting room, ready to leave.

  While he had been doing these things he had been muttering, half aloud:

  Lars Porsena of Clusium

  By the Nine Gods he swore

  That the great house of Tarquin

  Should suffer wrong no more…

  It annoyed him intensely that he could not stop himself doing this. It was one of the misfortunes of his life that in his childhood he had had an ability to memorize verse after only one or two readings, and that all of this, especially if it had a strong, jingly rhythm and was about blood, slaughter and all kinds of violence, had remained in his memory ever since. And it had a way of taking possession of his mind whenever there was a threat that it might be filled with something else that he did not want to think about.

  At the moment he did not want to think about murder and Macaulay’s deplorable ballad helped somewhat in keeping thoughts of it at bay, as well as stopping him trying to decide if Constance Camm, whom he had always regarded as the most well-balanced of women, was beginning to show the first signs of mental deterioration in her old age or had sound reasons for her fears and suspicions.

  Her car, a red Volkswagen, was in the street, and it took them about an hour and a half to reach Lindleham. It was only a hamlet, half a mile or so from the village of Clareham, which was about five miles from the old market town of Maddingleigh. The hamlet was built at a crossroads. A small but fine Georgian house was at the corner where the two roads met, and Bell Lane, in which there were several houses, some of them old thatched cottages, expensively modernized, and some of them recently built, branched off on the right.

  Farther along the lane, a Victorian mansion, to the original owners of which all the land as far as the main road had once belonged, stood in a fair-sized but neglected garden. The lane wandered on past it through a chequerboard of open meadows and fields yellow with rape, where once there would have been tall hedgerows and the now vanished elms, small woods with a misty covering of bluebells under beech trees and meadowsweet along the ditches.

  Visits to the country always aroused a sad nostalgia in Andrew. He had grown up in a village at the foot of the South Downs, but the countryside of his childhood was gone for ever. He attempted not to yield to regrets too easily, for change had to come and might in the end be for the best. If the conservationists had got to work only a few centuries earlier than they had, he and Constance might have met wolves and wild boars on their journey down from London. In fact, apart from the traffic, all that they had met as they passed one of the cottages in Bell Lane was a brown dog that stood at the gate and barked at them ferociously.

  Constance and Mollie lived in a small, modern house facing this cottage. There was a flowering cherry by the gate, which had given the little house its name. As Constance turned the Volkswagen in at the gate Mollie came out to greet them. She was a slightly younger, larger and in some way curiously blurred version of her sister. There was a considerable resemblance between them, yet everything that was neat, taut and sharply defined in Constance was rounded, sagging and vague in Mollie. She had a cloud of thin, curly grey hair which on even the stillest day managed to look windblown. Her eyes were blue, like her sister’s, friendly and gentle but without any brilliance. Her clothes hung on her loosely, the hem of her skirt uneven, her shoes flat-heeled and heavy and her stockings wrinkled at the ankles.

  She had been married briefly when she was young to a man called Martin Baird, who had been killed in the war, and after his death she had been a secretary, then the assistant manageress of a guesthouse, then had helped in a craft shop in Maddingleigh, and eventually had settled down to being the companion of the old woman who had lived in Lindleham House, the Victorian mansion farther along Bell Lane.

  Mollie had stayed with her for about fifteen years and at last, about a year before, had been rewarded for her patience and good nature by a considerable legacy. She had then bought the house into which she now welcomed Andrew, having chosen it because after living there for so long she had wanted to remain in Lindleham, and Constance, who had lived in London until then, had joined her there. It had never seemed to Andrew that the two sisters had anything in common, yet he knew that they had a great deal of affection for one another.

  They took him into the living room, a long, bright room with a window at each end, plenty of comfortable chairs covered in flowered chintz, a few pieces of not very interesting reproduction furni
ture, a remarkable number of staring, blank-faced Staffordshire dogs, the collecting of which was a hobby of Mollie’s, and on the walls some delicate old flower prints, which were Constance’s contribution to the room. There were several vases of flowers in it, filled with boughs of flowering cherry, tulips and wallflowers.

  “You’ll have a drink, won’t you, while I get us some lunch?” Mollie said. “Then I’ll make your bed. I didn’t get a room ready for you till I was sure you’d come. Connie said you would, but I wasn’t certain. I was afraid you’d simply feel we were imposing on you. Connie said you weren’t like that, but I rather thought myself it was what we were doing. It’s so good of you to come and advise us. I suppose it’s stupid of us not to be able to make up our own minds about what we ought to do. Of course, Connie’s shown you the letter.” She had a hasty, slightly incoherent way of talking.

  Andrew said that he had seen the letter.

  “And you don’t think we’re just being hysterical, worrying about it?”

  During the drive down from London, Andrew had begun to think that possibly that was just what they were, but she was suddenly looking extremely anxious, and in any case, now that he was here, he could hardly say that he was inclined to think that she and Constance might be making a fuss about nothing.

  “It can’t do any harm to look into the matter,” he said.

  “Yes, yes, that’s how I feel,” Mollie said. “Now what will you have to drink?”

  He chose sherry, and she poured it out for him, and a glass for Constance, then one for herself, which she carried out to the kitchen, her heavy shoes thumping on the polished floor as she went.

  Constance was looking at him with a faint, sardonic smile.

  “Of course, you’ve begun to think it’s all nonsense, haven’t you?” she said. “A practical joke or something. I noticed it about Pangbourne. You began to be very tactful with me. You’d begun to wonder if I’m getting senile. Senile dementia. It’s hit better people than me, and younger ones too.”

  “Perhaps I’m the one who’s suffering from it,” he said. “It’s true I’m finding it difficult to take the matter seriously.”

  “Well, as you said, it can’t do any harm to look into it. We’ll talk it over properly after lunch. And if you think it’s all too boring, I’ll drive you home again. Meanwhile, like Mollie, I think it’s very good of you to have come and I hope you’ll stay at least until tomorrow.”

  He assured her that that would be a pleasure, and they had more sherry and a little later were called into the dining room by Mollie to eat cold chicken, salad and cheese, and if it had not been for an almost glazed look of worry that from time to time appeared in her mild blue eyes, it would have been easy to forget that it was a strange and surely nonsensical letter about the burying of a body that had brought him there.

  But as soon as the meal was over and coffee, made by Constance, had been brought into the living room, the two sisters fell silent, looking at him in an expectant way that made him feel more than a little foolish. It did not altogether surprise him that Mollie, simple soul that she was, should assume that he would be able to help them with their problem, but that Constance should be hoping that he could do so puzzled and disturbed him.

  “Now let me get things clear,” he said as he accepted his coffee cup. “That letter came yesterday, it was posted in Maddingleigh, and for some reason you believe it was intended for someone you know. And that’s the first thing that puzzles me. Suppose you’re right that it was put into a wrong envelope and that the letter that was meant for you has gone to someone else, why shouldn’t that person live, say, in London, or even abroad? What is there about it that makes you think it was sent to someone in this neighbourhood?”

  “We don’t, exactly,” Constance answered. “That’s to say, if it wasn’t, then we don’t much care where it went. If it went to someone who’s never heard of us and can’t identify us, then it really doesn’t matter and we can forget the whole thing. But there’s the address on the envelope, you see. Bell Lane, Lindleham. It seems to us that it would have been easier for this person, whoever he is, to muddle up the two letters if the addresses were fairly alike.”

  “I see,” Andrew said. “I realize, of course, that you aren’t going to tell me what you’re afraid was in the letter that may have gone to one of your neighbours and told them something about you that you don’t want me to know, so suppose we stick to murder for the moment. When there’s been a death in the family, you can generally reckon there’s a noticeable gap left behind. A lot of people will be aware of the fact that someone has dropped out of sight. They may have gone to the funeral themselves if it was all legitimate and aboveboard, or they may simply have seen a few lines about it in the deaths column of The Times, or they may just have heard about it by chance, in which case they can’t be absolutely certain that it’s happened. Well, have there been any unconfirmed deaths among your neighbours?”

  The two sisters exchanged looks, then shook their heads.

  “No deaths,” Constance said.

  “Disappearances, then,” Andrew suggested.

  “Disappearances, yes,” she answered.

  “Go on and tell me about them.”

  She gave a rueful smile. “The extraordinary thing is how many people have disappeared. It hadn’t occurred to me till we started counting them up yesterday, thinking along the same lines as you, but when we did count them up we were really astonished.”

  “Yes, astonished,” Mollie said. “One person after another and all of them seeming perfectly natural, except—except perhaps one.”

  “Start with that one, then,” Andrew said.

  “No, I think we’ll save him up for the end,” Constance replied. “Let’s begin with the Eckersalls. It happened first, for one thing, about three months ago. They’re two sisters, Jean and Kate, both in their sixties, I should say, and they live in that thatched cottage you may remember we passed in the car before we turned in here where the dog was in the gateway, barking at us. They’re crazy about dogs. And they’re crazy about gardening. They’ve a beautiful garden. You hardly ever pass it without seeing one or other of them at work in it. They’re very good neighbours. If one’s got a touch of flu they’ll always go shopping for one, and they bring one bulbs and seedlings for the garden, and they invite one in for enormous teas, where all the cakes are homemade and so good that if you aren’t accustomed to having tea at all, as I’m not, you’re completely put off eating anything else that day.”

  “And which of them has disappeared?” Andrew asked.

  “Oh, neither of them,” Constance answered. “It was their old father who vanished one day.”

  “He must have been at least eighty-five,” Mollie said, “but according to what Jean told me one day, he suddenly took it into his head to go out to Australia to stay with his son Kenneth, who went out years ago and I think has a fruit farm near Adelaide. He’s been home once or twice, but not for some time now, and the old man made up his mind, Jean said, that he wanted to see him once more before he died. So off he went and naturally we didn’t give it a second thought till yesterday, when Connie and I began to wonder—well, we haven’t exactly been wondering, because of course that would be absurd if you knew Jean and Kate. All the same, we put him down on our list of people who’ve disappeared.”

  “What’s he like?” Andrew asked. “Are they fond of him?”

  “He’s a possessive, domineering, selfish old bastard,” Constance replied. “If he’d been my father I’d have been delighted to see him go off to the Antipodes and shouldn’t have grieved much if he hadn’t survived the journey.”

  “Oh, come, Connie,” Mollie protested. “He wasn’t as bad as all that.”

  “As bad or worse,” Constance said. “But people like that, if only they’re ruthless enough and insensitive enough, have a way of getting away with everything they want. I honestly believe his daughters, poor souls, are devoted to him.”

  “Do they ever talk abou
t his coming back?”

  The sisters looked uncertainly at one another. Constance frowned.

  “I can’t say I remember their ever having done so,” she said. “But Mollie knows them much better than I do. Have they ever talked about it to you, Mollie?”

  “I remember Jean saying they were going to redecorate his bedroom for him before he came back,” Mollie said, “but that was some time ago and she didn’t say anything about when it was likely to be. I got an impression he might be away for a fairly long time.”

  “So that’s our first possible victim,” Andrew said. “Unpleasant bully of an old father, murdered by two daughters who couldn’t take it any longer. Who’s next?”

  Mollie gave an uneasy little titter. “It sounds dreadful, putting it like that,” she said. “It makes it all sound quite unreal.”

  “That may be a good reason for doing it. Go on.”

  “Well, there’s Mike Wakeham,” Constance said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “The Wakehams are our next-door neighbours. They’re young and good-looking and I think moderately prosperous and they hate one another.”

  “That sounds more promising,” Andrew said. “And he’s vanished, has he?”

  “Please,” Mollie interrupted, “you mustn’t take too much notice of what Connie says about people. She pretends to be much more censorious than she really is. She doesn’t mean half of it.”

  Andrew was inclined to believe that she meant most of it. He had never thought of Constance as exactly an intolerant woman, but only as someone who from time to time enjoyed sharpening her wits at the expense of other people, and who certainly did not suffer fools gladly.

  “He’s got rather a habit of vanishing,” she said. “He’s done it at least twice before, to my knowledge, and when he does it, Naomi, his wife, has a way of coming to see Mollie and weeping on her shoulder and saying she can’t stand it anymore, she’s simply got to divorce him. But it always ends with her taking him back.”