“It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”
“And someone else saw it being done?”
“Yes, it could have been seen from the lane. I checked that.”
“And then he wrote a letter that got to Mollie by mistake? Don’t you think it’s far more probable that Colin was picked up by someone in a car, taken away, perhaps sexually assaulted, perhaps tortured and murdered, and then his body dumped somewhere, like that poor child Leslie told us about this morning?”
“Actually I do.”
“For some reason that seems to me far worse than that he should simply have been killed by someone in a plain fury,” Constance said. “That might even have been done unintentionally. Yet the end result’s the same. Death. There’s only the degree of suffering he might have undergone while it was happening.” She had sat down in a chair near the empty fireplace. She had her elbows on her knees and had taken her head in her hands. Small, neat and restrained, at the moment she looked more vulnerable than usual. “I know I ought to tell you what I think was in the letter really meant for Mollie, Andrew.”
“I think I know,” he answered.
“About her?”
“Yes.”
“How did you find out?”
“I guessed it after the talk I had with Nicholas this morning. But did she really destroy Mrs. Ryan’s second will? It’s my impression it’s what he believes.”
“I’m afraid she did.”
“Has she actually told you she did?”
She hesitated, then nodded sombrely.
“After she’d done it, she completely lost her head,” she said. “She wanted to go straight to the police and tell them what she’d done. And perhaps that would have been the best thing to do. It was I who stopped her. You see, the will cut her out completely except for a legacy of a few thousand. And Mrs. Grainger too. And that seemed so unfair. Both of them had worked for the old woman for years, looking after her devotedly, and she’d made this earlier will, leaving Mrs. Grainger a good legacy and the rest of her money to Mollie, and just the house to Nicholas. I believe it rather amused her at the time to leave him the house, because of the sort of things he used to say about it. She was a rather malicious old thing. But then he came down to see her and spent a few days here, using all his charm on her, and she suddenly made up her mind that everything ought to go to her only relative, and she scribbled a new will and got David Pegler and Miss Grace to witness it, and only three days later she died. I didn’t believe she’d been in her right mind when she did it, but David swore she was, and so when Mollie told me what she’d done and I was really scared on her account, I told her to keep quiet about it. And she’s inherited the money which I think is rightfully hers. But I’m afraid someone may know what she did and is trying to blackmail her, though I don’t see how they can prove anything.”
“Was any question ever raised about Mrs. Ryan’s death?” Andrew asked. “If that second will hadn’t been destroyed, you could say she died at a very convenient time for Nicholas.”
She shook her head. “It was a second stroke. David signed the death certificate without any hesitation.”
“And he and Miss Grace and Nicholas and Mrs. Grainger and Mollie all knew about the existence of that second will?”
“Yes.”
“So if you’re right about what that missing letter contained, any one of them except for Mollie could be your blackmailer.”
“I suppose so, yes.”
“What sort of man is Pegler?”
“A very ordinary sort of man,” she answered. “Yes, very ordinary.”
Yet all of a sudden her eyes avoided his and she sounded doubtful. Andrew began to wonder if the local doctor might not be as ordinary as all that.
Andrew had an opportunity to form his own opinion about this that evening, for when he, Constance and Mollie arrived at the Gleesons’ cottage at about six o’clock they found Dr. Pegler already in the Gleesons’ sitting room with a glass of gin and tonic in his hand.
He was a short, plump man of about fifty, dressed in a neat, dark suit, appropriate for his visits to patients. He had a round face under which a double chin had already begun to form folds, a forehead from which the brown hair had receded far enough to make it seem unusually high, grey eyes that looked tired and somehow bewildered and a small mouth which produced a hesitant smile when he greeted the other visitors.
A shy man, Andrew thought, very unsure of himself, and though conscientious, probably not very competent. If Andrew had been his patient, he would not have had much confidence in him. A bored man too. It did not appear to interest him to meet Constance or Mollie or Andrew. He looked as if he would have liked to gulp his gin in a hurry and leave them.
But perhaps that was only normal in someone whose wife only recently had suddenly left him. If he could still carry on at all with his work it was to his credit, and if a merely social evening was rather more than he could bear, it was hardly surprising.
Jim Gleeson greeted his visitors with an air of casual indifference which made Andrew feel that Leslie’s idea of having her friends in for drinks had been unfortunate. He gave the impression of being as anxious for them to leave as David Pegler was to get away. Plainly, it was not going to be a particularly pleasant evening. Jim Gleeson poured out drinks for them all in a way that managed to suggest that one drink was all that they need expect and that he would be obliged if they did not take too long over it.
He was a big man of about forty, wide-shouldered and heavily built, wearing an open-necked shirt and cotton trousers. He had heavy, rather coarse yet in some way handsome features. His hair was thick and dark and he had thick dark eyebrows ruled almost straight across his face, above oddly staring dark eyes. A somewhat brutal face, Andrew thought, and wondered just what the boy Colin had suffered at the man’s hands before running away. Granted that killing a dog with a catapult was not the sort of thing to be encouraged, it was easy to imagine that punishment by a man of this sort might possibly go too far.
Leslie had changed out of the shirt and jeans that she had worn in the morning into a straight white sleeveless dress with several ropes of beads round her neck. She had brushed her red hair sleekly back from her face and was wearing long earrings of some brightly coloured enamel. The signs of tears had faded from her face, or else had been covered up round her eyes by a thick layer of greenish makeup. She was making an effort to look cheerful, as if the last thing on her mind was that at any moment the telephone might ring and dire news of calamity be sprung upon her.
The room was a small one with a low beamed ceiling. Almost the whole of one wall was taken up by a great open fireplace in which at present a big bowl of lilac stood. A glass door led out into the garden. There was rather too much furniture in the room, as if the Gleesons had moved there from a larger house, but it was extremely tidy and there was a faint aroma of furniture polish in the air, which made Andrew think that Leslie must have whiled away an empty afternoon sprucing the room up to be ready for her guests.
“I saw the Eckersalls in their garden this morning,” Leslie said when they had all been supplied with drinks and had sat down. “Home from Sutherland with a new dog. Not a very beautiful fellow, I’m afraid, but friendly once he got tired of barking at me.”
“It doesn’t seem to take long to get over the death of a dog,” Gleeson said. “Why don’t we all have dogs instead of children?”
Pegler gave him a swift, reproving look, while Leslie pretended not to have heard what her husband had said.
“Carolyn and I used to talk sometimes about having a pet of some kind,” the doctor said. He spoke in a hasty, nervous way, as if once he had got started he was afraid that he might be interrupted. “But we never agreed about what to have. She wanted a dog, but I’m a cat person. Cats always take to me. It’s lucky now we didn’t get either, as most of the time there’d be no one at home to take care of it. I’ve been thinking lately of acquiring an aquarium with some of those beautifully coloured fish wit
h long, floating tails in it. Come from Hawaii or somewhere like that, don’t they? It would be something more alive than television to have in the house and they’d look after themselves when I have to be out for hours. I’m considering it seriously.”
Andrew felt some admiration for the plump little man. Although it was obviously an effort for him, he had plainly decided that the subject of his wife and of her leaving him was not to be taboo.
He went on, still hurriedly: “I heard from her yesterday, you know. It felt rather strange. We talked on the telephone for quite a while and I found it difficult to remember she wasn’t just on a visit to friends, or shopping in London, or something, and that she wouldn’t be coming home in a few days’ time. She asked me how I was and had I got over the cold I’d had when she went away. But actually she’d rung up to discuss a divorce. I told her I didn’t know much about the divorce law nowadays. I don’t believe either party has to be what they used to call guilty. But I said she should go to a solicitor and get advice and I’d agree to anything she wanted. And I must admit, from my own point of view, the sooner she does it, the better. I don’t like loose ends.” He emptied his glass and stood up. “Thank you for the drink, Leslie—that was nice. You must come and have drinks with me some day soon when I’ve got myself sorted out a bit better than I am at present. But I’ve got to get along to a committee meeting of the cricket club now. We’re discussing the new pavilion. We’ve had some quite generous donations towards it. I’ve had to write a lot of acknowledgements. Goodbye, Mollie. Goodbye, Constance. Nice to have met you, Professor. No, Jim, don’t bother to see me out. I know my way.”
Moving with a bouncing sort of speed, the doctor shot out of the door.
As they heard his car drive away, Leslie said, “He’s really awfully brave about Carolyn leaving him, isn’t he?”
“If he’s the kind of man who thinks that fish with floating tails are a good substitute for a woman, I don’t blame her as much as I did,” her husband said.
“That was only a joke,” she retorted.
“But she must have had a good reason for going,” he went on. “And he’s never said a word about there being another man in the case. It may be he’s not as satisfactory to live with as you’d suppose.”
“If there is another man, David probably wouldn’t say so,” she said. “He’d feel we’d think he meant it to her discredit and he’s much too nice for that.”
“Actually I never took much to Carolyn,” Gleeson said. “She seemed to me an ambitious bitch who thought when they married that David was going to make it in the medical world in a way there was never any hope of his doing. Life in a country village, with David wrapped up in his patients and his cricket club, bored her stiff. And if that was so, the best thing for her to do was to get out without hanging around any longer. It’ll give David a chance to get married again.”
“He talked more about her than I’ve ever heard him do before,” Mollie said. “D’you think that was because of her telephone call? Perhaps it made him think she might come back to him.”
“I’ve a photograph of the two of them that she gave me some time last year,” Leslie said. “It was taken after the match when he made his century against Little Millpen.” She opened a drawer in a bureau and took out a photograph album. “Look, here it is. Don’t they look happy together?”
She handed the open album to Mollie.
She looked at it, smiled, then handed it on to Constance, who only glanced at it, then handed it to Andrew. He looked at the photograph with interest. It showed the doctor in the white trousers and pullover that are still the uniform for cricket, and wearing a pair of dark glasses, but not the helmet and mask that have become normal wear for professional cricketers. Little Millpen’s bowling was perhaps not very ferocious. He looked relaxed and cheerful, but it was at the woman who stood beside him with her arm through his that Andrew looked the more thoughtfully.
She was taller than he was and wide-shouldered for a woman, with narrow hips and long legs in black jeans. Her short-cut brown hair clustered around her face in curls. Her features were strongly defined and aquiline. Her attitude to her husband gave the impression of affection and yet of a slightly amused kind of contempt for the pleasure that he was taking in his recent triumph. It was true that the two of them looked happy enough, yet Andrew could easily imagine her being an ambitious woman who found her husband perhaps more than a little ridiculous.
But it was not of this that he spoke when later he, Constance and Mollie returned across the lane to Cherry Tree Cottage. He had been glad when Constance had given the signal for them to leave, for even though Leslie had seemed anxious for them to stay and tried to start a discussion of a serial that was being shown at the time on television, Gleeson had shown no sign of wanting them to stay. He was a hard, ironic man, Andrew thought, determined above all things not to show any sense of guilt at what had happened to his stepson.
“Am I right,” Andrew asked as Mollie led the way into the house, “that there was something rather boyish about Mrs. Pegler’s appearance?”
“Perhaps there was,” Constance said. “Yes. I remember the first time I saw her she was on a bicycle, going shopping in Clareham, and I wasn’t actually sure if she was a boy or a girl. It was only when she called out ‘Good morning’ to me, and her voice was certainly a woman’s, that I was certain about it. Why do you ask, Andrew?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “She’s one of your vanished ones, who may have been killed by your murderer, but we’ve been writing her off because of the letter referring to a male, when she’s a female. But seen at a slight distance by someone who didn’t actually know her and very likely in darkness, mightn’t she easily be mistaken for a boy? I think you must add her to your list of possible victims. And that, it seems to me, means that you’ve got to consider your fish-loving doctor as a possible murderer.”
“Don’t!” Mollie cried out. “Oh, please, don’t!”
“Why, Mollie?” he asked, surprised at her vehemence. “Are you specially fond of him?”
“Yes. No. I mean, I’ve always liked him,” she said. “But tomorrow I’ve got to go and get my usual pills from him, and if I thought he was a murderer—well, I couldn’t take them, I just couldn’t!”
Andrew put his arm round her shoulders.
“I’m sorry, Mollie,” he said. “Don’t take any notice of me. Of course I’m not serious.”
She gave him a questioning look, trying to make out if he meant what he said. Andrew did his very best to look as if he had done so.
Chapter Four
Next morning, which was Friday, soon after breakfast Mollie set off to the surgery that Dr. Pegler would be holding in Clareham that day to pick up her pills. She did not take the car, but went on foot. After she had gone Andrew asked Constance what kind of pills they were.
“Just mild tranquilizers,” Constance answered. “I don’t know if they really do her any good, but she thinks they do, which is the main thing. She started taking them after Mrs. Ryan’s death and she’s stayed on them ever since.”
“And was it because of Mrs. Ryan’s death that she needed them, or because of her troubled conscience?”
They had gone to sit on the bench under the old walnut tree at the bottom of the garden. The sky was a clear blue and the sunshine was brilliant. Not a breath of wind stirred the branches over their heads. There was a scent of lilacs in the air.
“Mostly her conscience, I suppose,” Constance said unwillingly. “Andrew, you think it was terribly wrong of me, don’t you, to have stopped Mollie telling the police what she’d done with the will when she herself wanted to do it?”
“I think it may have been unwise,” he said. “I don’t like the idea of taking it on myself to say how wrong it was.”
“It was wrong. I know now it was wrong.” She turned away from him as if she did not want to see in his face how deeply he might be criticizing her. “But I was so angry. As I saw it at the time, that old w
oman had cheated Mollie. If she’d never said anything about leaving her the money it would have been different, but she’d told her explicitly that except for the legacy to Mrs. Grainger and the house that she was leaving to Nicholas, Mollie was to have everything. It was a promise. So it seemed as if at last, almost for the first time, something was going to go right for her. She’s had a terrible life, you know. One thing after the other has gone wrong.”
“I don’t know much about her life,” Andrew said. “You’ve never talked a great deal about her.”
“I suppose I haven’t. By the time you and I got to know one another there wasn’t much to say except that she was in a mental home for a while, and that wasn’t a thing I specially wanted to talk about. It wasn’t for long and it wasn’t for anything much. She recovered completely. Or it seemed as if she did. When she told me what she’d done with the will I did wonder if perhaps some of the old difficulties lingered on, and that was partly why I didn’t want her to tell anyone else what she’d done. I thought it might push her over the edge again. Now I think it would have been the best thing for her to do. Her mind would have been at ease. But I can’t say my own conscience has ever troubled me about it. For me it was always a question of what would be best for Mollie.”
“You said she’d had a terrible life,” Andrew said. “What else went wrong?”
“Well, you see, it began so promisingly. She was such a sweet, affectionate, cheerful child, and you can’t think how pretty she was. I might have been jealous of her if she hadn’t always been so fond of me. I was just the clever one, and that never seems very important to the young. Mollie was really beautiful. She was our mother’s favourite too, though our father always tried to make me feel that he expected great things of me. He was a solicitor and he rather hoped at one time that I’d go in for the law, but science was nearly as good and he always gave me all the help he could and I’ve had a very good life. I achieved far more than I ever expected. But Mollie obviously was destined for marriage, so she never really got trained for anything. And then, sure enough, when she was only twenty, she married Martin Baird.”
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