The Crime and the Crystal

by E. X. Ferrars

  “Sergeant Ross will be here shortly,” he said to Denis. “I believe you know him.”

  Andrew remembered that Ross was the name of the detective of whom Jan had told him, who had tried only a few days before to persuade her to change the story of her alibi.

  “Ross?” Denis said vaguely and shook his head. “I don’t think so… Oh, I know, he questioned my wife about something to do with Luke Wilding’s murder. I never met him myself. She wasn’t my wife then. We’ve only been married six months. But she told me all about it, of course, and I think she said the man’s name was Ross. Isn’t that right, Bob?”

  He turned his glassy, wandering gaze on Bob Wilding.

  Bob nodded without answering.

  At that moment Tony walked swiftly into the room, holding a bright green towel out before him.

  “Look,” he said, “there’s blood on it.”

  The sergeant stared at him, said nothing for a moment, then asked, “Where did this come from?”

  “From the beach,” Tony said. “I think it’s my wife’s towel. Anyway, it’s one of ours. We’ve several like it and I know she brought one of them with her today.”

  “And you found it on the beach?”

  Tony nodded.

  “You shouldn’t have touched it,” the sergeant said.

  “And had it nicked?”

  “You could have told us about it and I could have sent one of the men down to get it.” The sergeant held out his hand for the towel. “Whereabouts on the beach was it?”

  “Twenty yards or so from where we were all sitting under an umbrella we’d taken down.”

  “It was just lying there on the beach?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t you see who dropped it?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t that kind of queer?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. We all went in to swim more than once, except, I believe, Miss Massingham, so someone could have gone into the water without being noticed and dropped the towel there where we found it.”

  The sergeant was holding the towel out in front of him and was looking it over with care.

  “That certainly looks like blood,” he said, indicating a red smear. “But it’ll have to be tested. Miss Massingham, if you stayed there on the beach, didn’t you see who dropped it?”

  She shook her head. “You know what it’s like there in the afternoon on any holiday. There were people coming and going all the time. I wasn’t paying much attention to them. I wasn’t asleep, but I was in a kind of dream. And I didn’t pay any attention to the towel either. I hadn’t seen it before. Ask Professor Basnett if he noticed anything. He lay there on the beach for quite a time.”

  The sergeant turned to Andrew. “Did you see anything, Professor?”

  “I’m afraid I was sound asleep,” Andrew answered. “For quite a time, I believe.”

  “So you’re saying someone could easily have come down from this house,” the sergeant said, “wrapping himself in this towel, perhaps even draping it over his head so that he shouldn’t be recognized, then dropped it and gone into the sea to wash the blood off that he got on to himself when he was committing the murder. But he didn’t realize there was blood on the towel. Is that your story?” His voice had become increasingly skeptical.

  “It isn’t a story,” David Nicholl said. “It’s what must have happened.”

  “And where’s my wife?” Tony suddenly shouted. “How much longer is it going to take you to find her?”

  At that moment the telephone rang.

  Denis started automatically towards it but the sergeant checked him.

  “I’ll take it,” he said.

  He picked up the telephone, grunted into it, then said, “I see. Yes. Yes, come back.” Apparently the call had been made to him. He listened for a moment while a voice went on speaking, then he repeated, “Yes, come back.”

  Putting the telephone down, he turned to Tony.

  “It looks as if your wife went home,” he said, “took your second car and drove off. You have a second car, haven’t you? My man says there are tyre marks in the garage.”

  “Yes,” Tony said. “A Volvo.”

  “What’s its number?”

  Tony told him and the sergeant wrote it down in his notebook.

  “Can you tell me where she’d be likely to go in the circumstances?” he asked.

  Tony shook his head. But there had been an instant’s hesitation before he did so which Andrew knew him well enough to have noticed. However, Tony’s voice was firm as he answered, “I still don’t understand why she didn’t come down to us on the beach if she’d seen the murder, or even if she only found her sister’s body after the murderer had gone. Wouldn’t it have been the natural thing for her to do? So isn’t it probable that someone forced her to leave? And now God knows what he’s done to her. I think he’s killed her.”

  “If that happened,” the sergeant said, “and I’m not saying it’s impossible, it means someone came in who isn’t one of you here. I understand none of you who had your Christmas dinner here today is missing, except Mrs. Gardiner. But before we settle on the tramp who dropped into the house when he thought it was empty to see what he could scrounge, I’d like to ask if any of you has any idea who else might have hated these two sisters enough to kill them both. Any suggestions?”

  Silence greeted him. Then the doorbell rang.

  In the confusion that followed, which was not really confusion but a singularly orderly process of men going about the work that they had come there to do, and which only seemed to be confusion because there were so many of them, Andrew found himself puzzling how the body of Jan, if she had been murdered like her sister, could have been removed from the house, taken to the Gardiners’ garage and then driven away. It was fairly certain, he thought, that she had left the house on her own feet. Perhaps she had had a gun at her back and had been forced by the murderer to go to her own home, get into the Volvo and drive the two of them to some fairly distant spot where he could commit his second murder and hide her body. In other words, it seemed possible that he had done almost what the murderer of Luke Wilding had tried to do, except that on that occasion it had been a dead man that the murderer had been hauling towards his car, and the place had been a very lonely one.

  The men who had crowded into the house were photographers, fingerprint specialists, a government pathologist and a plainclothes detective who Andrew discovered was Sergeant Ross. He was attended by a plainclothes constable and appeared to have taken charge. The uniformed sergeant who had appeared first had departed after making a report to Sergeant Ross, who was a tall, gaunt man of about forty and at first sight gave a misleading impression of being too thin, too lightly built to be strong enough for his kind of employment, but who in fact moved with the resilience that comes only from powerful and well-coordinated muscles. He had a high, narrow forehead, a pointed nose and a long, firm chin. His hair was a light brown that almost matched the brown of his skin. His mouth was slightly crooked, with one corner of it lifted in what looked like a permanent sardonic, skeptical half-smile, though the expression of his grey eyes was sombre.

  For a time he moved about the house, surrounded by the other men who had arrived before him, but at last, while they were still going about their work, mostly in the living room and the kitchen, he settled down in a small room that Denis used as a study, and sent the constable who had arrived with him to ask first Denis, then Tony, then one by one all the others who had had their Christmas dinner there that day, to come to be questioned.

  Andrew guessed that he would probably be the last of these. He was a stranger. Except for Tony, he had never met any of the party before that morning. He had nothing to tell the police and probably they realized this. Sitting in a corner of the dining room, he did his best not to get in anybody’s way. If Tony had wanted to talk to him he could have joined him there. But while Denis was being questioned Tony kept walking about the room, sometimes moving his lips as if he were
muttering to himself, and giving no one a chance to talk to him.

  David and Clare Nicholl, however, came to sit with Andrew in his corner. One sat on either side of him. There was something protective in their attitude to him as if they felt that at his age and being a foreigner he might not be able to look after himself in the horror that had come upon them.

  With the strange green eyes in her plump little face looking almost apologetic, Clare gave him a smile and said, “If they weren’t so busy in the kitchen looking for fingerprints and things I’d go and make us some sandwiches. There’s plenty left on that turkey. You must be very hungry by now, Andrew.”

  Though he felt that there was something fundamentally sound about someone who put food before all other considerations even at a time like this and who wanted to be sure that others had everything they needed, Andrew answered, “Thank you, Clare, but I don’t believe I could eat even a sandwich. But don’t let me stop you if you want something yourself.”

  At the Nicholls’ age, he thought, it was probably far more difficult to go without sustenance for any length of time than it was at his.

  But Clare gave her head a worried shake. “Is it those men in there, spreading their powder everywhere, who put you off the thought of food? If I brought the turkey and some bread and butter in here, wouldn’t you like a sandwich then?”

  “No, thank you,” Andrew said. “I find murder takes the edge off one’s appetite.”

  “I suppose it does,” she said uncertainly, as if that were an experience that she had never had. “What about a drink, then?”

  “That I could do with,” he replied.

  David got up, went to the sideboard and brought more brandy and glasses out of a cupboard. Pouring out drinks for the three of them, he said as he sat down again beside Andrew, “This is very hard on you. I mean, coming out here for what you thought would be just a good holiday and have things go crook on you like this. You’ll be able to get them to let you go, I should think, once they’ve checked if you saw anything this afternoon. You didn’t, I suppose.”

  “Except when I was swimming, I spent most of the time asleep,” Andrew said. “But don’t you think they’ll expect me to stay for the inquest?”

  David gave a derisive laugh. “The inquest? That may not happen for several months. And then there may be another one after that. Or there may not be one at all. Sometimes there isn’t if it’s a certain fact that there’s been a murder, and there can’t be much doubt about that today, can there? What the police like to do is to wait till they’re sure what the verdict’s going to be and only bring a charge after that when there’s no risk that it might be innocent, because if it were of course there couldn’t be another trial.”

  “Was there an inquest after Luke Wilding’s death?” Andrew asked.

  “There was an inquiry after about three months. Not an actual inquest. It was simply opened and closed.”

  “Do you think they still believe they’ll ever find the man who did it?”

  “I doubt if they ever close their file on a murder.”

  “That man Ross—I believe he’s the man who’s here today, isn’t he?—has kept harassing Jan about it, so she said.”

  “He has,” Clare said. “She’s told me about it. And now the way she’s disappeared today isn’t going to help her. I wish she hadn’t done it.”

  “Then you think she went voluntarily,” Andrew said.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I’d have thought if she was able to do that she’d have come down to the rest of us on the beach. Why d’you think she went off by herself?”

  The two Nicholls exchanged glances, then David said hesitantly, “It’s just that she’s always been afraid the police are going to frame her sooner or later for Luke Wilding’s murder. I don’t think there’s any risk of anything like that myself, but you can’t get her to talk reasonably about it. And if she came on Kay’s body, but hadn’t seen the actual murder happen, I think she might have jumped to the conclusion that she’d be suspected and lost her head and bolted.”

  “Tony doesn’t think that,” Andrew said. “He thinks she was forced to leave.”

  “Perhaps he’s right.”

  “Is it possible the murder could have been done in the house without her knowing it?” Andrew asked.

  “Oh yes, I think so,” David said. “We know she changed into her bathers, don’t we? Well, if she’d been in the bedroom, changing, with the door shut, and someone came quietly into the house—after all, the front door wasn’t locked and anyone who knew the Lightfoots would have known it probably wouldn’t be at that time of day—so someone could have come in and taken Kay by surprise in the lounge, knocked her unconscious before she’d time to scream, finished the job of killing her and made off without Jan hearing a thing.”

  Andrew nodded thoughtfully. “I suppose it’s possible. But this person who came in…”

  “Yes?”

  “You think it’s someone who knew the Lightfoots well, someone who knew the door wouldn’t be locked and knew she was in the house, in other words, very likely someone in this room?”

  David shook his head. “We aren’t the only people who’d know a thing like that. They’d lots of friends—I mean acquaintances, people they’d often entertained here. They led a very social sort of life. Denis being director of the Institute, they seemed to think that was part of the job.”

  “So you think Kay had a relationship with one of those people which no one else knew about, which made that person hate her so much that he came here to kill her at a time when there was actually someone else in the house. Isn’t it more likely that some vagrant had seen us all go down to the beach, thought the house was empty, came in to see what he could pick up, was taken by surprise by Kay and killed her?”

  “Yes,” Clare said. “Yes, I’m sure that’s how it was. It couldn’t have been any of us here. I’m sure Andrew’s right, David.”

  “But if it had happened like that,” David said, “I mean if Kay took him by surprise and not the other way round, she’d have had time to scream, wouldn’t she, and Jan would have heard her? So it doesn’t help us to guess how or why Jan’s vanished.”

  “But at least it suggests a motive for Kay’s murder,” Andrew said.

  “Mr. Nicholl”—a uniformed constable interrupted them—“Sergeant Ross would like a few words with you in the other room.”

  David got up and left them. Clare was the next to be questioned. Andrew, as he had guessed he would be, was the last. Just before he was summoned to the study he glanced at his watch. The time was nearly two o’clock in the morning. The house was no longer so full of people. Most of them had finished the work that they had come there to do. Kay’s body had been taken away to the morgue. The piece of crystal on which Kay’s blood had dried had been wrapped up in a sheet of plastic and removed with the care of something precious.

  Andrew was very tired. It occurred to him as he waited for his turn to meet Sergeant Ross that he had not really stopped feeling tired since he had left Heathrow. It had taken him at least two days to recover from the journey, then there had been the difficulty of adjusting to the ten hours’ difference in time, and then there had been the fact that, much as he had enjoyed the sunshine and the swimming, the sudden change from the chill of a London December to a temperature of ninety degrees was surprisingly exhausting. As he was led by the constable to the study he caught himself giving a deep yawn and hoping that the sergeant would not keep him long.

  Sergeant Ross saw the yawn, let his crooked mouth tilt up in his sardonic smile and said, “Tired, Professor?”

  “A little,” Andrew admitted.

  “Well, sit down. We’ll try not to keep you long. You’re here on a holiday, I believe.”

  The sergeant was sitting at a desk on which there was a litter of papers which Andrew supposed belonged to Denis and that had been thrust aside. Andrew took a chair facing the sergeant across the desk.

  “Yes,” he said.

>   “Ever been in Australia before?”

  “Once, for a short time.”

  “When was that?”

  “About four years ago. I’d just retired and I took a trip round the world to celebrate, so to speak, doing some lecturing here and there.”

  “You came to Adelaide?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why was that?”

  “I’d been invited to lecture at the university.”

  “It wasn’t to see Dr. Gardiner?”

  “He was working at Canberra at that time. I did go there to see him.”

  “You’ve known him for some time, then.”

  “Yes, he was a student of mine in London when he was working for his Ph.D. and we’ve always kept in touch.”

  “He wasn’t married when you were here before?”

  “No.”

  “How long have you known his wife and her sister?”

  Andrew had a feeling that it was only then that the sergeant’s questioning really began. Until then he had only been feeling his way, trying to find some point at which he might make contact with Andrew.

  “I’ve known Mrs. Gardiner since last Thursday, when I arrived,” he said. “I met Mrs. Lightfoot for the first time this morning.”

  Sergeant Ross took his long chin in his hand and tugged at it thoughtfully.

  “Does anything occur to you,” he said, “has anything struck you about the relationships of the people you’ve met here today, which could have any bearing on what’s happened?”

  “So you think it’s one of them who’s probably guilty,” Andrew said. “Not some outsider who came in here by chance.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that,” the sergeant said. “But there was another murder about a year ago which most of the same people were involved in. Have you heard about that?”

  “Yes, I’ve been told about it.”