“And dumped it in the deepest quarry he could see, madam. He probably knew the quarries, anyway, his mother living so near, and then he properly got the wind up and drove to London and abandoned the car in Yelton where the police found it. The only thing is, why would he choose Yelton, madam? The other lot were bound for Yelton, too, so perhaps my argument breaks down.”
“Not necessarily, George. Yelton had been his home before his mother was widowed and came to live in Dorset. People are creatures of habit. It could have been merely coincidence that the others were also going there.”
“That could be it, then, madam. On the way to London the young soldier could have sent his mother a telegram cautiously mentioning unforeseen circumstances, no doubt. She would guess it was something to do with the purloined car. He probably wrote to her later, explaining what the circumstances were, and telling her to keep very quiet about it, not to get herself involved.”
“Your reconstruction may or may not be correct, George, but it is certainly ingenious and would explain a great many things which have been puzzling me. I congratulate you heartily.”
“Thank you, madam.”
“Yes, there is much in what you say. I have never been able until now to see why those stone-quarries came into the picture. From what Mr. Sparowe has told us, it seems most unlikely that any of the party except Dave knew of their existence. Besides, I doubt whether the murderer, with or without an accomplice, would have thought of leaving the car outside Mrs. Spreadapple’s cottage and parked on her sacrosanct verge, but a local man like Smetton might well have known of her idiosyncrasy and decided, perhaps, to teach her a lesson by saddling her with a car containing a body, but that is a detail. I see only one difficulty. Mrs. Spreadapple saw the two people who left the car at her gate. If Smetton knew her, might not the reverse be true?”
“She may have seen only their backs, madam. She probably knew Smetton by sight, but, even if so, she had probably never seen him or his wife except behind the bar of the Swan Revived, and that is a very different matter from getting a look at their back view in their outdoor clothes as they walked away from her. I remember that the first time I saw the landlord of my own local in his street clothes and wearing a hat I didn’t recognize him.”
“You have an answer for everything, George.”
“I confess to a great interest in this particular case, madam. I feel sympathy with the young fellow who had to face the magistrates. Whoever put the body in that pit, he didn’t.”
“Now how am I going to approach Smetton? I must invoke the cunning of the serpent and the wisdom of the dove. Let us return to the Swan Revived, or we shall be late for lunch.”
“You don’t suspect Mr. Smetton himself of having committed the crime, then, madam?”
“In such a case you think I should not be able to enjoy his hospitality?”
“I beg your pardon, madam. I fear I took a liberty.”
“Oh, no, you did not. Besides, you are quite right. I am certain that Smetton did not kill Gorinsky. Well, here we are at the inn, so now for lunch.”
George’s intelligent theory posed some problems as well as solving others. For one thing, it accounted for the fact that nobody except Smetton claimed to have seen Gorinsky’s woman friend. It also disposed of the difficulty Dame Beatrice had found in accepting that two of the party had left the Swan Revived in Maverick’s little car, dumped the body, and walked nearly four miles back to the inn to rejoin the other three for the journey to London. Then there had been difficulty in deciding which of the party had driven the car to Yelton and abandoned it there, but Mrs. Spreadapple had disposed of that problem, since it was hardly likely that she would have implicated her son unless her evidence was true. Against George’s reconstruction of events was the question of whether Smetton, finding the small car with Gorinsky’s body, might not have disposed of the corpse himself in the manner and with the assistance which George had described. Apart from the likelihood that, far from getting rid of the body with such secrecy and dispatch, he would have elected to telephone the police when he discovered what had been left on his premises, there was the further question of whether he would have invoked his wife’s assistance in getting rid of it. So far as Dame Beatrice was aware, Mrs. Smetton was a homely, good-natured, law-abiding kind of woman and not at all the type to assist in the perpetration of dark deeds in stone quarries, even under the orders of a husband.
On the other hand, the landlord might have acted under the influence of panic. The first thing which might have occurred to him was to get the body off his premises at the earliest possible moment. He probably knew enough about the law, too, to realize that, in the event of discovery, his wife was the one person who could not be asked to testify against him. Then, too, the choice of an abandoned stone-quarry as the repository for the body indicated local knowledge, as she had already conceded, and who more likely to have local knowledge than the landlord of an inn?
Over a solitary lunch she pondered upon the best way to approach the subject with Smetton. A direct approach would be both tactless and useless, she decided. When she had concluded her simple meal she went into the saloon bar. At a quarter past two it was empty except for Smetton himself.
“I met an acquaintance of yours this morning,” she said, when she had ordered a small brandy. “I went along, as a good tourist should, to the village of Heathcote Fitzprior, where, I understand, the poet William Heathcote lies buried, but before I visited the grave I had parked my car in what turned out to be the wrong place.”
“Not on old Mother Spreadapple’s bit of grass?” asked Smetton, grinning.
“It would appear so. She emerged, breathing fire and slaughter.”
“Oh, yes, she would. But what makes you call her an acquaintance of mine? She didn’t make mention of me, did she?”
Dame Beatrice ignored the last half of the question.
“I assumed that her son, if not herself, would be a customer here, as there is no other inn,” she said.
“First I knew she’d got a son. What’s more, she’s never set foot in this house, so far as I know. Probably T.T., with her sort of attitude towards other folks.”
“Oh, you know of her rabid dislike of having motorists park their cars outside her gate, I see.”
“Everybody all round knows about that. A proper joke, that is. Personally, I’ve never set eyes on the silly old battleaxe. Wouldn’t know her if I met her in the street.”
“She seems to have set eyes on you. You were walking with your wife, apparently, when she saw you.”
“Where was this, then? And when would it have been?”
“Why, in the village of Heathcote Fitzprior itself, to be sure, and I think it might have been sometime last month, perhaps. You and Mrs. Smetton were walking away from her cottage towards the churchyard, I think she said.”
“She was talking through her hat, Dame Beatrice. I don’t know when we were last in Heathcote Fitzprior. Dora! Dora! Come here a minute, will you, love?”
Mrs. Smetton emerged from the room behind the bar.
“What is it now?” she said. “I’m in the middle of washing-up.”
“Nothing much, love. That old mischief-maker Mother Spreadapple told Dame Beatrice she saw us in the village last month.”
“She must have been mistaken,” said Mrs. Smetton flatly. “What would we want in the village? Do all my shopping in Morchester. There’s nothing in the village except that one little general store with the post-office counter at the back.”
“I thought perhaps you bought your eggs from Mrs. Purse, who, I’m told, keeps her own hens,” said Dame Beatrice.
“Yes, and some of her so-called fresh eggs are more than a week old,” said Mrs. Smetton. “I tried her once, but I’ve never set foot in the village since, and that was two years ago.”
Dame Beatrice retired without the honours of war, but convinced that the couple were lying.
Meanwhile Laura and Toby, bound for Leeds, had come to amicable a
greement on the matter of driving the car. Laura liked to take the wheel and Toby was agreeable to having someone else do the work and accept responsibility, so they took Laura’s little car and full advantage of Ml, which they joined a few miles short of Northampton, and did the journey in one day.
Their errand, however, yielded no fresh information concerning the Maverick party and no clue at all to the identity of Gorinsky’s murderer.
“If they do know anything more, they ain’t talking,” said Toby disgustedly, as he and Laura left the Leeds hotel.
“Of course, the biggest mystery, apart from who done it, is no concern of theirs,” said Laura, “and they seemed surprised I mentioned it.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, the three men who stayed here that night and went off without Dave and the old sparring-partner seem to have had the boxing set-up they brought with them all unloaded and taken upstairs, and then loaded up again on the following morning. It seems so senseless, doesn’t it? I wonder why they went to all that trouble just for one night? That’s what Sebastian wondered, too.”
“Perhaps they were afraid of getting the stuff pinched from the car.”
“Could be that, I suppose, but who would want to steal posts and ropes and things? Oh, well, let’s go back and report nothing doing at this end except a confirmation of what you found out when you were in Leeds before.”
“Well, that’s better than contradiction of what I found out,” said Toby, “isn’t it?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Not Golf But Croquet
“A chance may win that by mischance was lost;
The net that holds no great, takes little fish.”
Robert Southwell—Times Go By Turns
Further reflection caused Dame Beatrice more and more to accept George’s theory as approximating to the truth. On returning to the station house she telephoned her grandson in his capacity of Dave’s lawyer and put the point to him.
“I realize it does nothing to clear the boy of the charge,” she said, “but it suggests a new angle and explains some of the matters which, up to now, have been minor mysteries.”
“No, it doesn’t help with the major problem,” Sebastian agreed. “I wonder whether it would be of any use for me to have a word with this Mrs. Spreadapple?”
“I doubt whether she will commit herself or her son any further. As it is, she has made the dangerous admission that her son drove away the car which, it seems, must have contained the body. I am surprised, on thinking over the conversation, that she told me as much as she did. I suppose you have learned nothing more from the boy?”
“I’ve had talks with him, but I don’t think he knows any more. Of course, if the case goes to the Assizes, as it very well may, the charge will be manslaughter under provocation, not murder. Of that I can be certain.”
“What I think you could do with advantage, if you would, is to come down here and talk to the people at the Swan Revived. If they can be persuaded to swear that Dave was locked in his room for that hour and three-quarters during which the murder must have been committed, it seems to me that that would give the boy a loophole through which he might escape. You might also sound the landlord about that bottle of Dubonnet. So far it has received no more than a mention, but, if it was the murder or manslaughter weapon, it has great significance. I am sure there is more to be learned concerning it. Find out where the landlord, his wife, and her cousin were, and what they were doing during that hour and three-quarters between the time Dave knocked Gorinsky down and kicked him and the time the party of five left the inn. Oh, and you might try to break the landlord down over his story that Gorinsky and Scouse brought a woman to the inn on the previous night. I am almost certain they did nothing of the sort. Meanwhile I will make some enquiries at Morchester station, although I do not have much hope that anything will come of them. I think it unlikely, as a matter of fact, that the two men went to meet anybody at all, or even went to the station that evening. They certainly went out. Holley and Biddle can witness to that, but—”
“Why should they have given out that that’s where they were going, then?”
“Your guess, as Laura would say, is as good as mine. Am I to expect you here?”
“Yes, I’ll be down as early as I can. I’ll get lunch on the way and hope to be with you by about half-past two unless anything crops up in the morning and holds me back.”
Dame Beatrice’s theory that nothing would come of her visit to Morchester station was borne out. She learned nothing whatever there except that the police had asked the same question, only to be given the same answer. This was that the last train of the day came through at half-past ten, so that anybody thinking of meeting a passenger later than that would have been obliged to keep that passenger waiting. This had not occurred, so far as the ticket-collector was aware.
Sebastian Lestrange drove up to the Swan Revived to interview the Smettons. They were aware of the fact that he was Dave’s lawyer and he found them perfectly willing to talk. Their story, however, offered little fresh material to work on. To his mind, apart from the main puzzle, the most interesting aspect of the case concerned the woman Gorinsky and Scouse had or had not brought back to the inn, and at first he concentrated on this part of the story.
“You see,” he said to the Smettons, who had no need to be in the bar during afternoon closing hours and so were being interviewed in the parlour, “a very serious charge has been brought against the two of you and it is bound to come up if Holley is sent for trial.”
“A charge? Against the two of us?” said Mrs. Smetton sharply. “Oh, but that isn’t possible! We’ve always been law-abiding folk. Never any trouble about the licence and always most particular about closing-time and the under-eighteens and the betting laws and not serving folks as has had enough when they’ve had enough—I don’t see what there would be to tell except wicked lies, and I don’t know of no one who would want to tell lies against us and against the conducting of this house. We’ve always been most respectable and careful, and that I can assure you of.”
“Well, it’s nothing like that, as a matter of fact,” said Sebastian, in his pleasantest, most conciliatory tone. “It’s about Gorinsky’s death. First, at the risk of being tedious, let me go over your evidence once again. Now, Mr. Smetton, at or around midnight you opened the door to Gorinsky, Scouse, and an unknown woman. Why didn’t you leave the door unlocked so that they could get in without disturbing you?”
“I thought I explained about that in court, sir. What’s more, I told Gorinsky I shouldn’t lock up. ‘Come to the side door, which is nearest for you when you’ve parked your car,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave it so’s you’ve only to turn the handle. Then if you wouldn’t mind just shooting the bolt when you get inside,’ I said. But no! They must come hammering on the door and fetching me out of bed.”
“And you’re quite sure you admitted three people, and that one of them was a woman?”
“Well, there, you see, that isn’t quite exactly right. I thought as how I explained that, too.”
“Oh? You can’t swear to the woman, after all?”
“Oh, yes, sir, I can swear to her all right, but—not as I can see it makes any difference—I can’t swear to Gorinsky.”
“Really? How was that, then?”
“Simple, really. When I opened the door there was Scouse and this woman, so I says, a bit sharp like, being woke up out of my sleep, ‘I left the door on the latch so’s you could get in,’ I says. ‘You only had to turn the handle,’ I says. ‘I told Mr. Gorinsky special,’ I says. Well, Scouse says he didn’t know about it, and there was no point in me making a song and dance, as it wasn’t his fault I was dragged out of bed. So I asked where was Mr. Gorinsky and Scouse said he was putting the car away and, if I’d show the young woman where she was to sleep, he’d stay and see that Gorinsky locked up.”
“And did you show the young woman to her room?”
“Certainly. I just said, ‘This way,
miss,’ and she followed me up the stairs and I opens Daffy’s door and says, ‘In here, miss,’ and in she goes, and that’s the last I ever see of her. It’s a mystery to me where she could have got to, but, what with the fight upstairs next morning and the row they made hustling young Holley up to his room, and then the fussation about bringing Gorinsky round, and then them all going off so sudden, the young woman kind of slipped my mind till later on.”
“But what was that about us being spoke against, sir?” asked Mrs. Smetton anxiously.
“Well, you’ll have a perfect answer to it, no doubt, but we have a witness who thinks she saw you both in Heathcote Fitzprior village walking away from the car which was parked on Mrs. Spreadapple’s verge.” Sebastian had been given George’s theory by his grandmother.
“Which she couldn’t have done,” said Smetton flatly.
“I know,” said the young lawyer soothingly, “but how can you prove it?”
“Saw both of us, she says?”
“Both of you, yes.”
“Well, there’s your proof, sir. Mother and me can’t never both be away from the bar during opening hours, not both of us at the same time.”
“What about Miss Daffy?”
“Leave Daffy in charge of the bar? She’d have a fit, and so would we. Besides, she’d gone to Mrs. Purse for eggs, and that can be proved, too and all, if anybody want to make anything of it.”
“Yes, of course. Well, thank you very much. It seems as though we can dispose of this witness without bringing her into court.”
“The busy-bodying nosy old faggot!” exclaimed Mrs. Smetton. “I’d like to give her the rough end of my tongue, trying to get honest folks into trouble with her lying, snaky ways.”
Gory Dew (Mrs. Bradley) Page 16
