A long sigh came from Constance. “You’ve proof, you say.”
“The simplest proof,” Stonor answered. “He’d a typewriter in his office and the letter you gave us was certainly typed on it.”
“Then he wasn’t a very clever little man, was he?” she said. “He should have stuck to cricket. And now he’s dead. When did it happen?”
“The forensic people have put it at some time between nine o’clock yesterday evening and midnight.”
“I can’t help feeling sorry for him,” she said. “I suppose it was someone else he tried to blackmail who killed him.”
“It seems probable.”
“I know who that may have been.”
That seemed to Andrew to be going a little far, and Stonor’s eyebrows went up, as if he did not believe her.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“I know who got the letter that was meant for my sister concerning her destruction of Mrs. Ryan’s will,” she answered. “It was Nicholas Ryan. He told me so himself. And that makes it likely, doesn’t it, that the letter that came here concerning a murder was meant for him. That seems clear enough to me. The only question is: whom did he murder?”
“Quite a question,” Stonor remarked.
“I thought myself it might be Mr. Wakeham,” she said. “You know he’s disappeared? But I was told this morning Nicholas wasn’t here when that happened.”
He nodded. “That’s right. We’ve been doing some checking up on it, and Mr. Wakeham seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. His former employers haven’t heard of him for about three months, though he’d told no one here he’d left them. Apparently he kept up a show of being in a job when he’d been sacked the first time he gave himself some leave without permission. He left Maddingleigh as usual on Friday morning three weeks ago as if he was going to their office, and he hasn’t been seen since. But it seems that Mr. Ryan, whom you suspect of murder, was in Paris at that time. That’s been checked very carefully and there’s no question of it. So if it was he who killed Dr. Pegler last night because he was tired of being blackmailed, and who probably killed your sister because he thought she knew too much, we’ve still got to find another victim.”
“It couldn’t be Colin,” Constance said thoughtfully, glancing at Andrew as if she wanted support from him. “Nicholas had nothing against the child.”
“Child murderers sometimes have nothing against their victims,” Stonor said. “In their perverse way they sometimes have a sort of love for them. We just caught up with one yesterday. We’d found a boy’s body in the river beyond Maddingleigh some days ago and we thought it might be Colin Gleeson and we got Mr. and Mrs. Gleeson to come along and identify him. A mistake. It wasn’t Colin. We were very sorry to have put his mother through such an ordeal. It was the son of a couple who live in Maddingleigh, who’d reported the boy missing a week ago and who were as desperate about it, poor people, as she is. But at least we’ve got the murderer. His wife suddenly couldn’t stand things any longer and came in to us and broke down and told us all she knew and showed us some of the boy’s clothes which she’d managed to get hold of and hide from her husband to prove her story. And Banks, the murderer, has confessed to that killing and to two others in other parts of the country that hadn’t been solved. But he absolutely denies having laid a finger on Colin Gleeson. He may or may not be telling the truth. We don’t know yet.”
“Banks!” Constance exclaimed. “Isn’t that the name of the man who used to live in the cottage the Gleesons have now and who was sent to prison for receiving stolen scrap iron? And his wife was an alcoholic, and no wonder, if she knew what kind of man he was. And they’d a grey Vauxhall, so I’ve been told. Do you know about the grey Vauxhall that was seen in the lane yesterday morning, Mr. Stonor?”
He shook his head.
“Mrs. Wakeham told us about it,” she said. “She’d been in Clareham to do some shopping and have coffee with some people there, and on her way back she passed my sister at the crossroads, then saw a grey Vauxhall with a man in it parked near the Eckersalls’ gate. She didn’t pay it much attention at the time and she couldn’t describe the man, she just happened to notice the kind of car it was. Has Banks still got a grey Vauxhall?”
“He has, but it wasn’t his car here yesterday morning,” the superintendent answered. “We’d already pulled him in by then.”
“Then probably it had nothing to do with my sister’s death. It was just someone who’d lost his way.”
He nodded. “Probably. But we’ll look into it.”
Andrew noticed that Sergeant Southby had rapidly produced a notebook and was writing in it.
“Did Mrs. Wakeham tell you nothing about the car when you questioned her yesterday?” Andrew asked.
“No.”
“I suppose she hadn’t realized its possible importance, even if it didn’t belong to Banks. But I’ve just thought of something. Dr. Pegler told us that for a time when his wife left him he took to drinking very heavily. But he said that even after drinking a bottle of whisky he’d be stone-cold sober. That was his phrase. And he said that when he had to go out on a call in the evening he was sure his patients noticed nothing the matter with him. And I think it somehow stuck in my mind that a doctor is someone who sometimes has to go out late at night and that on one of those trips he might have seen something… Well, if you’re sure he was the blackmailer, we know he did, he saw a body being buried. But why did his victim wait till last night to murder him? Why didn’t he do it as soon as the blackmail started?”
“Possibly because he didn’t find out till some time in the last few days who his blackmailer was,” Stonor said.
“And there’s another thing,” Andrew went on. “If Pegler saw a body being buried on one of his late calls, doesn’t it mean that if you can trace from his records what calls he made during the relevant time, you’ll at least know what routes he followed on those occasions and be able to check what he might have been able to see from the various roads he may have driven along?”
“That’s an interesting thought,” Stonor said, but something in his tone gave Andrew the feeling that he had already thought of it himself.
Constance gave a sharp little ironic smile.
“Then how we were wasting our time this morning,” she said. “That rose bed behind the Gleesons’ cottage wouldn’t have been visible from the lane in daylight, let alone in David’s headlights.”
“A rose bed?” Stonor said, tilting his head slightly in a request for an explanation of what she meant.
“Yes, we’ve been watching a man digging up a rose bed, looking for a body,” Constance replied.
She told him what she and Andrew had done that morning, of how they had found Jim Gleeson digging up the rose bed at the back of the cottage and of the quarrel that he and Leslie had been having about it when she and Andrew had arrived. She said she believed it had been the Eckersall sisters who had put it into Leslie’s head that her son’s body might be there, but that it had been obvious enough, she thought, even before Jim Gleeson had resumed his digging after the rain had lessened, that nobody, even a child, could be buried there.
A little to Andrew’s surprise, Stonor showed a deep interest in the story.
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully as Constance ended it. “Yes, I see. Quite so. Exactly. Of course nothing to be found there. All the same, very interesting…” He seemed to be muttering almost meaninglessly to himself. “A very valuable piece of information. It’s always rewarding to deal with intelligent people. Thank you.”
He got to his feet and looked as if he were in a hurry to be gone. The sergeant tucked his notebook into a pocket and got up too.
“I’m sorry we’ve nothing to tell you yet about your sister,” the superintendent said. “As soon as we have, of course we’ll be in touch. And concerning Pegler…” He paused. “You know, he’d just got himself an aquarium full of some kind of tropical fish. Quite an expensive sort of thing. Mrs. Jolson said he wa
s crazy about it. He didn’t expect to die, though a blackmailer should always remember he’s at risk. Thank you for your help. Goodbye.”
Andrew saw the two detectives out.
When he came back into the sitting room Constance exploded. “Now what in hell did he mean by that, Andrew? ‘A very valuable piece of information…’ About that rose bed. Hadn’t I just explained to him that it meant nothing at all?”
“He’s nobody’s fool,” Andrew said. “And he knows much more about this kind of thing than you or I do. What you said may have given him some idea. Shall we have a drink?”
She nodded without answering and sat staring broodingly before her.
“Valuable information!” she muttered. “And our help! What nonsense!”
Andrew poured out sherry for them both.
“Constance, have you thought at all about what you’re going to do when all this is over?” he asked. “This house, along with Mollie’s money, will go to Ryan, won’t it?”
It took her a moment to come back from some distance to which her thoughts had briefly departed. She looked confused as if she were still thinking of something else.
“I suppose it will, unless they get proof that he’s the murderer,” she said. “You can’t benefit from a crime you’ve committed, can you? Financially, I mean. No, I haven’t really started to think about the future yet. I shan’t stay here, I know that much. London’s my natural habitat. I’ll take a small flat somewhere and perhaps I’ll copy you and settle down to writing somebody’s life. Malpighi’s, for instance.”
Malpighi was a seventeenth-century botanist who had explained the structure of a plant stem. Andrew felt some doubt whether that possible life would progress much farther than the life of Robert Hooke with which he had been engaged for the last few years, but with Constance you never knew. If she decided to apply her formidable mental energy to the task, it might prosper in a way that would put his own efforts to shame.
“Of course, you’ve got your pension,” he said. “It’s not wealth, but you should be able to manage.”
“Oh yes, I shan’t be in want.”
The door knocker sounded.
“I’ll see who that is,” Andrew said, put down his glass of sherry and went to open the door.
A young woman stood there whom he was sure that he had never seen before, yet he had a curious feeling that there was something familiar about her. He thought that she was about thirty-five. She was almost as tall as he was and wide-shouldered, with narrow hips and long legs in black jeans and she was wearing a black nylon windcheater, zipped up to her throat. She had short brown hair that clustered round her face in curls and was spattered with raindrops. There was something boyish about her build and she was handsome in a hard-featured way.
The rain had almost stopped, but the paved path behind her was dotted with puddles in which small splashes showed that the shower was not quite over.
She looked as if his appearance took her aback.
“Oh, I didn’t know—” she said uncertainly. “Are you the police?”
“No, I’m a friend of Professor Camm’s,” he answered. “I’m staying with her.”
“I’m Carolyn Pegler,” she said. “Is Constance in? Can I see her?”
“Yes, come in.” He assumed that Constance would be accessible to this woman, if not to many other people. He remembered now where he had seen her. It had been in the photograph that Leslie Gleeson had shown him, a photograph taken just after he had scored a century against the formidable might of Little Millpen. “My name’s Basnett.”
“Ah, I’ve heard of you from Constance,” she said. She stepped inside. “Have the police been here?”
“Yes, and told us about your husband’s death. May I say how sorry—”
“Don’t, don’t!” she interrupted, to his relief, for he had not the least idea how one should express sympathy about the death of her husband to a woman who had recently left him, a man, moreover, who the police were completely sure was a blackmailer. “Of course it’s awful—I mean, murder, all those stab wounds, horrible. But he had it coming to him, as I warned him before I left.” She went into the sitting room. “Hallo, Constance,” she said. “We’ve all got our troubles, haven’t we? I’ve heard about Mollie—I’m so sorry—and I understand you’ve heard about David. I’ve just been saying to Professor Basnett that David had it coming to him. But now it’s happened, I can’t take it in. I’ve a feeling I’m to blame. I am, you know, because I knew what he was doing. It was why I left him. Yes, thank you,” she added to Andrew, who was offering her a drink. “Gin and tonic, please.”
Constance, who had not stood up when the other woman entered, was giving her a long and penetrating stare.
“So you aren’t a victim,” she said.
“A victim—of what?” Carolyn Pegler asked. “Yes, I’m a victim of my own stupidity and cowardice. I couldn’t face all the trouble there’d be if I let on to anyone what David was doing, or why he was doing it, so I just went away.”
She sat down and accepted the drink that Andrew had poured out for her.
“But you’re alive,” Constance said. “It appears we’ve a murderer loose in our midst, but we don’t know who he’s murdered. And I just wondered, since you’d disappeared, if it might perhaps be you.”
Carolyn gave a short laugh.
“Would you care to tell me what you’re talking about?” she said. “I came here to tell you how bad I feel about Mollie because I’ve a feeling David was somehow involved in her death, but I didn’t expect to be told I’m supposed to be dead myself.”
“I didn’t think that very seriously,” Constance answered. “But I’m glad you’ve been eliminated from our list of suspect corpses. But d’you mean you’ve known for some time, Carolyn, that David was trying his hand at blackmail?”
Carolyn Pegler leant back in her chair, sipped her drink and said, “Yes, I saw a letter David wrote to Mollie. He’d just typed it and it was lying on his desk and I picked it up and read it. It said he’d known for a long time that she’d destroyed Mrs. Ryan’s last will and that now he needed money and she’d got to pay for his silence. But it wasn’t signed and the money was to be sent in cash to an accommodation address in London. I tore the letter up and we had a flaming row and I told him that if he ever tried to do such a thing again I’d go and tell Mollie myself who’d written it and if she wanted she could go to the police. And he laughed and said she’d never believe me. If she suspected anyone in particular it would be Lorna Grace, because she was the other witness of the will. Actually he was blind drunk at the time and I couldn’t get him to talk sense. He used to get through a bottle of whisky every evening and he was always convinced no one could tell he wasn’t sober. So I left him.” She gave a little shudder. “I’d been on the edge of doing it for some time because of his drinking and he knew it, and I believe that’s why he took to blackmail. He thought if he could give me more money I’d stay. But money had nothing to do with it. I was bored, I didn’t love him, I didn’t trust him and I like money, but not if it’s come by that way.”
“Do you know anything about his having seen someone burying a body?” Constance asked. “Do you know of anyone besides Mollie whom he was trying to blackmail?”
Carolyn’s eyebrows went up in surprise. They were very thin eyebrows that looked as if they had been drawn with pencil on her pale, hard face.
“No,” she said, “I don’t know anything about that. But what happened? I don’t understand.”
“You see, someone—I didn’t know it was David then—sent Mollie a letter saying he’d seen her burying a body,” Constance said. “He demanded money. And Nicholas Ryan got a letter accusing him of destroying Mrs. Ryan’s will and demanding a thousand pounds, but the way that letter was worded it seemed obvious it was meant for Mollie. So it’s fairly certain, isn’t it, that the letters got mixed up and got into the wrong envelopes?”
“And Nicholas is a murderer?” There was incredulity in Carolyn�
��s voice. “Oh no!”
“We can’t say that until we find a body, can we?” Constance said. “The corpus delicti.”
“Which isn’t me!”
“Just so. But did David ever say anything, drop a hint, tell you anything that sounded to you like half-drunk maundering, to suggest he’d found out something really dramatic about somebody?”
Carolyn frowned, her thin eyebrows almost meeting above her aquiline nose.
“No,” she said. “But you know, the whole thing could have been purely imaginary.”
“You mean he didn’t really see anything?”
“Yes, it could have been a kind of delusion. He may have wanted so much to have power over someone because they’d committed some really serious crime, like murder, so that he could demand a great deal more than a thousand pounds, that he just made it all up.”
“When he was drunk?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I believe that,” Constance said. “Mollie’s death wasn’t imaginary. Nor was David’s. Someone’s got a secret which they’ll commit murder to hide.”
“But he was certainly drunk when he mixed up Mollie’s letter with the one to Nicholas, wasn’t he?” Carolyn said.
“I suppose so. And so we get back to Nicholas as a possible murderer. But the only person I think of whom he’d any motive for murdering is Mike Wakeham and the police have told us he was abroad when Mike disappeared.”
“Why should he have murdered Mike?” Carolyn asked.
“It could have happened during a quarrel between them over Naomi. It might not actually have been Nicholas who started it. If Mike was jealous he could have been the one who began it, and it’s even possible that Nicholas killed him by accident, defending himself when Mike attacked him. Mike was much the more violent of the two.”
The Other Devil's Name Page 16
