“Only, as you say, Nicholas happens to have been abroad at the time,” Andrew reminded her. “And I can’t believe he’s Naomi’s lover. There’s something about the way he talks of her that doesn’t fit. Of course, as you said, that could be just his cleverness, covering it up, but I believe the reason he’s been down here so much recently, as you say he has, is simply that he wants to get that house sold.”
“So you agree with Carolyn that David’s idea that he saw Nicholas burying someone could be imaginary.”
“I’d like to, but really I don’t,” Andrew said.
Carolyn finished her drink and stood up. “We don’t seem able to help each other much, do we, Constance? I’m feeling even more confused than when I came. I wish I could get back to London. I’ve been lucky enough to get a job I think I’m going to like and I can’t pretend I miss David. If only he’d died a natural death, or even been in an ordinary traffic accident, I shouldn’t feel so bad about it. But murder’s hard to take. Well, goodbye. I expect I’ll have to stay around for at least a few days, if you should want to see me.”
She went to the door and Andrew saw her out. Then he returned to the sitting room.
“A somewhat hard-boiled character,” he said.
“Oh yes, she was always that,” Constance said.
“Let me get you another drink.”
She held out her glass for him to refill it.
As he brought it back to her she said, “I’m sorry I’ve got you into all this, Andrew. I know you hate it. But I’m so grateful to you for staying here. I can’t think of anyone else I could have turned to.”
“If you want me to be honest about it,” he said as he sat down again, “I’ll admit the situation is beginning to have a ghastly sort of fascination for me. I’m meeting such interesting people. A woman who would be perfectly happy if only her husband had died in his bed or in a head-on crash with a lorry. A couple who dig for a body in their rose bed. Two elderly ladies who believe that planting roses at the wrong time of year is indicative of criminal tendencies. A beautiful young woman who thinks her husband was murdered while working for MI5. An alcoholic doctor who writes anonymous letters and sees visions. No university department I ever had anything to do with could produce a collection like that, yet we’re said to be a fairly eccentric gang.”
“You’ve left out Nicholas,” Constance said.
“So I have.”
“You really don’t think he murdered Mike, do you?”
“Unless he’s faked his alibi, how could he?”
“Can’t alibis be faked?”
“I’m sure they can, but the police seem fairly positive about this one.”
“Suppose then it wasn’t Mike.”
He gave her a thoughtful look. She met his gaze with an unusual air of diffidence, as if she were putting forward some theory which she more than half expected him to tear to pieces.
“You really think it’s possible he might have murdered Colin Gleeson?” he said.
She gave an abrupt shudder. “I know it doesn’t seem possible. He’s too normal. All the same, I wonder if it’s possible to tell about a thing like that. Whenever some character like that man Banks the superintendent was telling us about gets arrested for assaulting and murdering children, half the people they know come forward to say what nice, ordinary sorts of chaps they are. I know Banks’s wife found out the truth about him and at last couldn’t stand it and went to the police, but Nicholas hasn’t a wife. And he isn’t really intimate with anyone here except perhaps Naomi, and you don’t believe in that. So where are we? Now I ought to be doing something about lunch. Can you face bread and cheese again?”
Andrew felt the greatest reluctance to face bread and cheese. Although it was a normal lunch for him at home, he now felt a craving for something hot and sustaining, something like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or steak-and-kidney pie. Only a little while ago, when a similar feeling had come to him, he had thought that it would be shockingly insensitive to suggest to Constance that they might go out together and enjoy a good meal. But now he was inclined to think, from her tone of voice, that perhaps bread and cheese were getting on her nerves too.
“I was wondering if there’s a pub in Clareham where we might get a decent meal,” he said. “It would save you trouble.”
She showed signs of relief.
“There’s the Swan, which isn’t bad,” she said, “and I’d love to get away from this house for a little while. Yes, let’s go. Then I can pick up something in Smither’s for the evening. Something frozen, if you don’t mind. I don’t feel much like cooking.”
“Fine,” he said. “It’s stopped raining. Shall we walk?”
She agreed and went to fetch her coat. The two of them left the house together and started towards the gate.
But there they were checked. Just as they reached it Jean and Kate Eckersall emerged, almost running, from their own gate. The brown dog was leaping about behind them and uttering short, sharp barks, as if he had been infected by the excitement that seemed to have possessed his owners. They came hurrying towards Constance and Andrew. Their brown smocks blew out around them in the wind and their canvas shoes squelched in the mud of the lane.
“Oh, Constance, isn’t it awful?” the one with the green socks, who Andrew was fairly sure by now was Jean, cried out, shouting against the wind. “It’s terrible! We don’t know how to face it. One ought to be able to stop a thing like that, but they won’t listen to us. The police, you know. That superintendent we thought was so nice treated us as if we’re fools. We said we’d get a lawyer, or an injunction, or something, but he just said not to worry, it wouldn’t take any time at all and they’d put everything back very nicely and we needn’t watch. Watch, my goodness! That’s just what we’re going to do, because God knows what damage they’re going to do if we don’t keep a lookout. And I’m sure we’ve some rights as citizens, but we don’t know what they are, and he said something about having a warrant, so we can’t really do anything. But we’ll watch, oh yes, we’ll watch!”
“But what are they going to do?” Constance asked.
“They’re going to dig up poor little Timmie’s grave,” Jean bellowed as if she were speaking to Constance from a great distance. “They’re going to desecrate it. And all because they think someone may have been buried under it while we were away in Scotland. I believe they think it’s that child Colin, and of course, if it is it’s terrible, monster though he was, and they’ve got to do their duty, but to dig up Timmie’s grave—oh, Constance, we can’t bear it!”
“We’re going to tell Leslie about it,” Kate shouted. “We think she ought to know.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” Constance said quickly. “She’s had enough to go through. She’s had to look at murdered children who turned out not to be Colin and she’s had to wait and hope and despair. Don’t tell her anything till the police have finished what they’re going to do.”
“No, it’s only fair to her to let her know what’s happening,” Jean answered. “She’ll want to be there. Come along, Kate.”
The two sisters set off briskly towards the Gleesons’ cottage.
Watching them go with their smocks ballooning around them, Andrew suddenly exclaimed, “Constance, we’ve been the most awful fools!”
“I don’t doubt it,” she said, “but what’s brought on this attack of self-doubt?”
“It’s because of something I’ve only just thought of,” he answered. “Those letters. We’ve been taking for granted, haven’t we, that two letters got mixed up?”
“Yes. Don’t you think so now? Have you any other explanation?”
“No, they got mixed up all right. But why have we been assuming that there were only two letters? Why didn’t we think there could be three? If there were, you see, it explains a lot of things.”
Chapter Eight
Constance and Andrew hardly talked on their way to the Swan in Clareham. Constance, who had a look of intense concentration on her
face, was trying to work out for herself the implications of what he had said. When they were settled in the old, dark dining room of the pub, with its small windows, its thick ceiling beams and its smell of excellent cooking, she gave a nod and said, “I see. I think I see.”
They were lucky that that day there was roast duckling on the menu with new potatoes and peas. They decided together on a carafe of red wine, whatever that might turn out to be, and before it sherry.
Waiting for their drinks to be brought, Andrew said, “I told you I had a hunch about the whole situation, the feeling that really I knew what had happened, but one of the puzzling things, of course, has been why the murderer waited until yesterday to kill Pegler. We know, from the wording of the letter Mollie got, that that wasn’t the first letter he’d written to the murderer, telling him how and what to pay. So why didn’t whoever it was get to work straightaway, unless it was simply because he didn’t know who’d written the first letter? But if that was how it was, then something must have happened during the last few days which told him it was Pegler. And what did happen? One thing was that Pegler, when he was drunk and frantic because his wife had left him, muddled up at least two letters, one of which came to Mollie and one to Nicholas Ryan. But Pegler himself told us, that evening at the Gleesons’, that there were some other letters he intended to write. He was going to write to various people thanking them for their contributions to the new cricket pavilion. And if one of those letters went by mistake to the man he was blackmailing, he could have recognized the typing as being the same as the original blackmail letter and understood at last whom it had come from.”
“And decided to get rid of him,” Constance said.
“Yes.”
“But why did he have to get rid of Mollie?”
Their sherry had come and she was fingering the stem of the glass, gazing down at it as if it were a specimen that she was examining under a microscope and which of itself would tell her something that she needed to know.
“I think the chances are we’ll never know the exact truth about that,” Andrew said. “I’ve a rough idea of what it probably was, but unless they catch the murderer and he decides to talk, we may never be quite sure. I think Mollie decided she wanted a quiet talk with Pegler about that heart attack of yours. You said she was very worried about it and wanted you to see someone in London, and she may have hoped to be able to have a word about it with Pegler in his surgery. But he was particularly rushed that morning and she didn’t have a chance to do it. So when she was put down at the crossroads by Miss Grace, she stood there, hesitating, thinking that perhaps she’d go to Pegler’s house and wait for him there and hope she’d be able to have a talk with him after the surgery. And while she was there this chap we’re looking for picked her up, persuaded her to go home with him and killed her. And the reason for it—well, I think she must have said something that morning to one of the people she met about meaning to go to talk to Pegler presently about an important matter and been a bit mysterious about it, not wanting to talk openly about your heart attack. But she might have said she knew how serious and dangerous it was, and given this character a completely wrong idea of what she was talking about. So he decided to deal with her before she could do him any damage.”
“You keep saying ‘he,’” Constance said. “But is it really in your mind that it could have been Naomi? It’s she who says she saw Mollie hesitating at the crossroads when Lorna Grace said she set off straight up the lane. I don’t know why Naomi should have told a lie about that, but perhaps she did.”
Andrew shook his head. “I don’t think the nurse saw what Mollie actually did. She drove straight on herself and probably didn’t look back at Mollie. But even though a woman could have picked Mollie up and perhaps killed her, I don’t think she could have handled her body afterwards. Even if she’d done the murder in the car and then driven straight on to the stream to get rid of her, she’d have had to drag Mollie out of the car into the stream, and I don’t think that would have been possible. Anyway, I don’t think she was killed in the car. She was stabbed several times and there’d have been a good deal of blood, and there’d certainly have been bloodstains in the car which the police would have found by now. I think she was enticed into somebody’s house with the offer of coffee or a drink, and killed perhaps in the kitchen, where it would have been fairly easy to wash the blood away, and then bundled into the car and taken to the stream.”
“And about the man in the grey Vauxhall, then?”
The duck arrived and smelled very good, and in attending to it and to the carafe of red wine, it took Andrew a moment to answer Constance’s question.
“Ah yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it’s that grey Vauxhall that makes me more suspicious of Naomi than anything else.”
“Do you mean you think it was someone she knew?”
“No,” Andrew said as he started on his duck, “it’s simply that no one but Naomi seems ever to have seen that car, or the man in it, and so I can’t help wondering if it really had any existence except in Naomi’s imagination, which is known to be fertile. I think possibly she invented the Vauxhall and the man.”
“But why?”
“The answer to that might be that she was trying to cover up for someone. If she knew who had killed Mollie and for some reason wanted to protect him, she may have tried to drag a red herring across the path. And she thought of a grey Vauxhall simply because she used to see one in the lane in the days when the Banks family lived in the Gleesons’ cottage. She couldn’t know that Banks had a perfect alibi for that day, being in police custody.”
Constance put down her knife and fork and sat back in her chair.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t eat. I thought I could. I thought I wanted to. But I can’t.”
“Don’t worry,” Andrew said, though it pained him to think of good roast duckling being wasted. “Have something else. Have some bread and cheese after all.”
She shook her head. “No, thank you. But don’t let me stop you. I’ll just have some wine.” She picked up her wineglass and sipped. “So if Naomi’s covering up for someone,” she went on after a moment, “it looks as if we’ve got back to Nicholas, doesn’t it? Yet he was in Paris when Mike Wakeham disappeared and I can’t think of any reason why he should want to kill Colin. So perhaps if they find anything at all when they dig up the dog’s grave in the Eckersalls’ garden, they’re going to find the body of a complete stranger.”
“You don’t think by any chance Naomi would cover up for Jim Gleeson?”
Constance thought that over before replying and while she did so absentmindedly picked up her knife and fork again and ate a little. Then she ate a little more and seemed to have forgotten that she had thought that she would be unable to eat.
“You know, I can’t think of Naomi covering up for the murder of a child,” she said. “For a husband or a lover, yes, I can see her doing that. But a child, no. And I don’t mean only because I don’t think she’s got that brand of cruelty and perversity in her. I think it’s at least partly because I don’t think she’d be sufficiently interested. I think she rather liked Colin, but I don’t think she’s ever cared much about his disappearance. If she heard he’d been murdered, she’d say, ‘Oh dear, that’s too bad—I do hope I don’t get involved in this.’ And certainly she wouldn’t take any risks to shield the murderer.”
“I see.”
Andrew began to think of what was going to happen that afternoon in the Eckersalls’ garden. He thought of the decaying body of a Yorkshire terrier being unearthed and then of the digging going on, deep into the subsoil, in the search for another grave, another body.
Thud, thud…
He could imagine the sound of the spades in the hard ground, the growing tension when perhaps the bones of a hand or some rags of clothing were uncovered, and all of a sudden the duck seemed difficult to eat. The sight of Constance quietly proceeding with hers was faintly shocking.
In a hurry t
o evade that thudding sound in his head, he said, “Of course, you understand why Stonor thanked you for your information about the Gleesons digging up their rose bed.”
Constance shook her head. “I can’t really say I do.”
“It’s just that he’d thought of having that done himself. What you told him saved him the trouble. It made him able to concentrate on Timmie’s grave, the other place where the ground has been recently disturbed. I believe they’re really expecting to find something.”
Constance gave her sardonic smile. “Perhaps after all they’ll find old Mr. Eckersall there. Has it struck you, Andrew, that that letter that came to Mollie said, ‘Don’t forget I saw you bury him.’ You. That can be singular or plural, can’t it? So perhaps the letter was meant for the two sisters, who between them could have buried the old man. Of course, the body of a child like Colin could have been handled by one person.”
Thud, thud…
Nowadays, Andrew thought, the bare earth of an open grave is tactfully covered at a funeral by a sheet of bright green plastic grass, which is supposed to protect the sensibilities of the grieving from the crude facts of death and decay, though it makes nonsense of the harsh beauty of the burial service. “Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes…” Only a few weeks before, he had been at the funeral of an old friend and colleague where, on those words being spoken, the undertaker had delicately taken a polythene bag out of his pocket, had extracted a little earth from it and sprinkled it on the coffin. Andrew had felt that the earth, if it really was earth and not some synthetic substance, had probably been disinfected and deodorized. But if a putrefying corpse were to be dug up in the Eckersalls’ garden it would certainly not have been treated with such fastidiousness.
The Other Devil's Name Page 17
