The Crime and the Crystal

by E. X. Ferrars

  “And it doesn’t suggest anything to you?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “The victim then was Mrs. Gardiner’s first husband. She hadn’t any alibi, but the body was moved a considerable distance after the murder and she couldn’t have done that unless she had an accomplice. She had a motive, of course. Wilding maltreated her and he left her a good deal of money. Another person who had a motive was his son, Robert. He inherited his father’s sheep station and a good deal of money. But he had an alibi. He’d gone out for the day with Mrs. Lightfoot—Miss Ramsden as she was then—who hadn’t married Lightfoot yet and who was thought by some people, mistakenly, I believe, to be having an affair with young Wilding. If they weren’t mistaken and she and Wilding were thinking of getting married, you could say she’d got a motive too. Then if Gardiner was already in love with Janet Wilding and thought she’d marry him if old Wilding could be got out of the way, and liked the idea of a wife with money, he’d a motive too. And Nicholl was the person who found the body. I don’t know of any motive he might have had for murdering Wilding, but it would actually have been easier for him to have done the murder than anyone else. He’d a habit of going to that quarry, hunting for crystal, malachite and so on, and he could easily have done the murder and dragged the body down to the pond, then given the alarm that he’d just found it. And his wife, if she knew about it, would naturally have kept quiet.”

  “I don’t understand,” Andrew said. “Why are you going into all this? Isn’t it Mrs. Lightfoot’s murder you’re investigating at the moment, not Luke Wilding’s?”

  “You don’t see the point?”

  “I can’t say I do.”

  Sergeant Ross gave an unhappy sigh. “Maybe I’m obsessed,” he said. “I’ve been told I am, but I mean to get the man who murdered Luke Wilding before I’m finished. And I was just pointing out to you that everyone who’s here today was somehow involved in the Wilding killing. If we can solve who did the murder today, perhaps we’ll have the solution to the other murder.”

  “Was Miss Massingham involved in the Wilding murder?” Andrew asked. “You haven’t mentioned her.”

  “Perhaps you don’t know she’s had an affair going for some time with Robert Wilding,” Ross said. “And she may like money as much as most people.”

  “Who told you about that?” Andrew asked.

  “Nobody here, but I’ve had my eye on this group of people ever since Wilding’s murder and there isn’t much about them I don’t know.”

  “I believe his murder matters to you more than Mrs. Lightfoot’s,” Andrew said.

  “Didn’t I tell you I’m obsessed?” Ross was pulling at his chin again. “Maybe it’s just that I’ve been told so often I’ll never do it. I don’t like being told I’ll never do a thing. I don’t like being defeated. But let’s go back to Mrs. Lightfoot. The fact is, I just wanted to make sure you knew the background of all these people you’ve met here today and then I wanted to ask you again if anything’s struck you about them that might cast light on the murder.”

  “All I can say is that it was a particularly pleasant day until the murder,” Andrew said. “I found everyone very likeable. The food and drink were excellent. I had two very enjoyable swims and a very restful doze on the beach. In a way, since the shock of discovering the murder, it’s difficult to remember how pleasant it all was. But in fact I haven’t spent such a delightful Christmas Day for a long time.”

  “You didn’t sense any—uneasiness, any tension—between any two people?”

  Andrew decided to say nothing about the tension that he had thought since his arrival existed between Tony and Jan.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then let’s get back to that doze of yours,” Ross said. “And those two swims. Were all the rest of the party down on the beach with you?”

  “I think so, except of course Mrs. Lightfoot and Mrs. Gardiner.”

  “Yes, except them.”

  “And except for the time when I was asleep. I don’t know where they all were then.”

  “You were really asleep?”

  “Dead to the world.”

  “So that during that time anyone could have come and gone without your knowing anything about it.”

  “Easily.”

  “But when you went in swimming, what about then?”

  Andrew put an elbow on the desk in front of him, leant his head on his hand and tried to concentrate. It would have been easier if he had not been so tired. But he wanted to help the sergeant. He thought his questions perfectly reasonable. Only to remember what had happened in the afternoon between the massive Christmas dinner and the discovery of the murder seemed extraordinarily difficult. A kind of fog clouded his brain.

  “I think the way it happened,” he said, “is that when we first went down to the beach we all went in to swim. But as you know, you have to go a long way before the water gets deep enough for you to be able to swim properly. After a bit I just struck out into it and so did Wilding—yes, I think it was Wilding, but it might have been one of the others or even some stranger—he swam past me, but I didn’t pay much attention to him or to what any of the others were doing. I was quite alone out there for a while. Then I swam in again, settled down on the beach and went to sleep.”

  “You didn’t happen to notice a bright green towel on the beach before you went to sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Right. Go on.”

  “Well, I saw Miss Massingham under the umbrella thing they’d brought down to the beach with them. And Nicholl and his wife were in the shallow water, near the shore. And after a time I decided to swim again, and when I’d got out some way I met Gardiner, swimming in. He said it was time to be going back to the house and went on past me. I swam about for a bit, then Lightfoot and Wilding, who’d been farther out, came by and we all went in. And it was then that Gardiner noticed the towel.”

  “The towel,” Sergeant Ross said, “is a problem.”

  “I can see it must be if you’ve made up your mind Mrs. Gardiner killed her sister,” Andrew said.

  “I haven’t made up my mind about anything.” There was bitterness in the sergeant’s voice, as if it offended him to have an error of the kind attributed to him. “I’ve got what’s usually called a completely open mind, though you might also call it a bloody blank one. But it’s her towel. Her husband’s sure of that. There’s a tear on the fringe of it which he remembers having made himself some weeks ago. And it’s got blood on it and it was taken down to the beach and dropped there. And Mrs. Gardiner, in her bathers, seems to have taken off in the opposite direction. That’s to say, she seems to have gone home and driven off God knows where. There’s a call out for the car, but nothing’s come in yet. It doesn’t make much sense, as far as we’ve got.”

  “About that towel…”

  “Yes?” The sergeant’s gaze sharpened as if he thought, from Andrew’s tone of voice, that at last he was about to tell him something useful.

  “Do you know anything about a young Englishman called Dudley Blair?” Andrew asked.

  “Blair?” Ross said it in a tone so extremely vague that Andrew immediately felt certain that he knew the name quite well. “Rings a bell, somehow.”

  “He seems to be a sort of dropout,” Andrew said, “who happens to be a gifted silversmith whose things are sold by Miss Massingham in her shop. And he’s a friend of the Gardiners’ and on my first night here at Betty Hill he came in and borrowed a towel. It was a bright green towel, just like the one Gardiner found on the beach and thought was his wife’s. If it wasn’t, is it possible it was dropped there by Blair?”

  “Ah, if it wasn’t…” The sergeant suddenly smiled with both corners of his mouth, not merely with the sardonic tilting of one side of it. “Thank you, Professor, that’s very useful. It opens up all kinds of possibilities.”

  After that he let Andrew go, almost as if he was all at once in a hurry to get rid of him.

  It was three o’clock before An
drew and Tony drove back to the Gardiners’ bungalow. The night sky was clear and the stars were brilliant. The Southern Cross shone low above the horizon. Tony was silent and Andrew felt no inclination to probe into the anxieties that seemed to have raised a wall between the two of them. From the expression on Tony’s face he might have been unaware that there was anyone sitting beside him. He drove more recklessly than usual, and even when he swung the car in at his gate and stopped in front of the door he still said nothing.

  They went into the house and Tony left the door behind him standing open. Frowning, withdrawn and ignoring Andrew, he went quickly from room to room, then out to the garage. Andrew, who meanwhile had gone to the living room and was standing at a window, looking out into the dark garden, saw that he did not put the car away.

  By then Andrew had reached the stage of weariness when he no longer wanted to go to bed. There was no hope that he would sleep if he did. He would only toss and fret and soon get up again and start wandering restlessly about the house. He began longing for the dawn. Once daylight was back, he thought, it would be possible to cancel out, as it were, this dreadful night and start the business of normal living again.

  Not that it really would be. But at the moment he could almost convince himself that morning would bring back everyday life, with some good strong coffee for breakfast, and with luck, if he could find it, a small piece of cheese. He always found it difficult to believe that a day had really begun till he had had some cheese. What had begun as a dietetic experiment in which he had not had much faith had become almost an addiction.

  He was thinking about this and wondering if it might not be a good idea to make some breakfast now since Jan was not there to do it when it suddenly occurred to him that Tony was still moving rapidly about the house. He heard the slam of a cupboard door, then in another room a drawer being opened and violently closed, then what sounded like a kettle being filled at the kitchen sink, then an outburst of swearing. A moment later Andrew heard coffee being ground in the electric grinder. So Tony was making coffee. That was very satisfactory. Andrew went to the kitchen. There was bread, butter and some boiled ham out on the table and it looked as if Tony had started to make some sandwiches.

  “Can I help?” Andrew asked.

  “Why don’t you go to bed?” Tony said.

  “I don’t feel much like it.”

  “You look flat out.”

  “I’m all right.” As he said it Andrew’s eyes fell on a suitcase on one of the kitchen chairs. “Going somewhere?” he inquired.

  “That’s the idea.” Tony slammed some ham onto a slice of bread, clapped another slice on top of it, then took a large bite out of the resulting sandwich. “Help yourself,” he said. “I’m just making some coffee, then I’ll be off.”

  “Where are you going?” Andrew asked.

  “Looking for Jan, of course.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “I’ve a pretty good idea. I looked around here to make sure she hadn’t come home after that cop came looking for her, and I looked in the garage to make sure the Volvo’s gone, and since it has and since she isn’t here, I can make a fair guess at where she probably is.”

  “You told me, and I believe the sergeant too, that you didn’t know.”

  “So I did.”

  “Wasn’t that a mistake?”

  “Why should it be? She’d her reasons for doing what she did. I don’t want to get in her way.”

  “But they’ll catch up with her sooner or later and then it isn’t going to help her that you’ve obstructed them.”

  “I’m not obstructing them, and as it happens at the moment I’m only making a guess. If I find her I may try to persuade her to give herself up to them.”

  The kettle began to whistle. Tony poured the boiling water into a coffee filter and the fragrance of it filled the kitchen. While he was doing it Andrew made himself a ham sandwich.

  “You don’t want to tell me where you’re going, then,” he said.

  “As a matter of fact…” Tony paused and seemed to be giving all his attention to the dripping of the coffee through the filter. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking of asking you if you’d feel like coming with me, but I guess you’re too tired. You need a rest.”

  “If you’d tell me where you’re going…”

  “To Hartwell, of course. When Jan’s in trouble, she goes to her father. She’s always done that. And he still lives there.”

  “How long does it take to get there?”

  “A couple of hours.”

  “So if you’re right that that’s where she’s gone, she’ll have got there by now.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “So why don’t you telephone and ask if she’s there? It might save you a wasted journey.”

  Tony brought the coffeepot and two cups to the table and poured out the coffee.

  “The old man’s deaf as a post. He’s got a telephone, but he never uses it. Half-blind also, but amazingly independent. Lives alone and won’t have anyone to help him. And I don’t think there’s much risk the journey’s going to be wasted. As I said, when Jan’s in trouble, she goes straight to him. And apart from the trouble she’s in, she’ll have thought someone’s got to break the news to him about Kay’s death. He was never very fond of Kay as far as I could see. For some reason they always got across each other. But after all, she was his daughter.”

  Andrew sipped some coffee, then bit into his sandwich. After a moment he said, “Do you really want me to go with you, Tony?”

  “Well, you might be a help,” Tony answered. “We could talk the thing over and you might stop me running away with some crazy ideas I’ve got. The idea, for instance, of what it’ll mean if we don’t find Jan at Hartwell. She’s there, I’m sure, but just suppose she isn’t… Andrew, I can’t bear to think of it.”

  “All right, let’s go,” Andrew said. “Just let me finish this sandwich.”

  Chapter Five

  The road was steep, with one bend after another, and Tony’s driving that night was terrifying. He swung round corner after corner in a way that shook Andrew from side to side in his seat. As they climbed they saw the whole city of Adelaide spread out beneath them, a shining pattern of lights printed on the darkness, all in rectangles. There can be few cities in the world where the planning of its streets has so meticulously avoided any curve. The main streets were wide straight lines bisected at intervals by other wide straight lines, the spaces between them filled by other narrower straight lines, all of them aglitter.

  Their brilliance in the clear air seemed strange to Andrew, accustomed as he was to the way that the lights of London are softened by the London atmosphere. But soon the sparkling outlines of the city vanished, as the car swooped round a bend and dived between hills. There was a full moon in the sky and he could dimly see their shapes. He did his best to relax and not let himself be too scared by Tony’s driving.

  Tony had said that he would be glad of a chance to talk to Andrew, among other things of what it might mean if they did not find Jan at Hartwell. But now he showed no sign of wanting to talk. He sat crouched over the wheel, scowling at the road ahead of him. Andrew had never seen the expression on his face that he saw there now. He had never seen it other than open, candid and friendly. But now it was withdrawn and hard. It made Andrew wonder what it meant to Tony that Jan should have gone in her trouble, if he really believed that she had, to her father rather than to him.

  Andrew snatched a little sleep as they drove on. The road had become dead straight and level and he succeeded in dozing for brief spells. Dawn came before they reached the end of the journey. The moon disappeared, the sky grew softly grey, then presently a line of flame appeared along the horizon. They were driving across a great plain edged in the far distance by mountains and covered by a ragged mass of mallee, a straggly, angular kind of scrub. The road was still a narrow straight line across it. There was no other traffic. Tony had lost the look almost of ferocity with
which he had started the drive and now looked only tired and lost.

  It was he who at last broke the silence as the road dipped, then curved, then passed a few buildings which appeared to be on the outer edge of a small township.

  “If Jan isn’t here, I shan’t know what to do,” he said.

  “What will you do if she is?” Andrew asked.

  “Try to find out what made her run away. But it may be no good. There are things she won’t talk about.”

  “Will you try to get her to go back with you?”

  “That may be no good either. She had her reasons for coming, and if the reasons seem good enough I shan’t try to make her do anything she doesn’t want to. It wouldn’t work, anyway. She’s stubborn, you know. She looks such a fragile little thing, but there’s steel somewhere inside her. I’ve known her for a long time, and I think I understand her pretty well.”

  “Tony, do you really believe you’re going to find her, or do you believe what you said at first, that someone made her leave and may have driven away with her in the Volvo?” Andrew did not end the sentence in the way that he did in his thoughts, “… and may have killed her?”

  Tony drew his breath in sharply with a sound that was almost a sob. “We’re going to find her. Once I’d thought of her coming to her father, I knew the other idea had been just a nightmare. Of course we’ll find her.”

  Andrew nodded as if he had no doubts of it himself.

  Tony went on, “Tell me something, Andrew. We know each other pretty well. Do you think I’m capable of committing a murder?”

  “It would surprise me very much if you were,” Andrew said.

  “But you don’t think it’s impossible.”

  “Impossible is a big word. I don’t know what I might possibly do myself, given the circumstances. But I don’t believe I could kill anyone in cold blood. It would have to be hot blood, and I’m not sure how much I’ve got in my system.”

  “So you think I might have killed Luke.”

  Andrew was startled. “For God’s sake, Tony, I didn’t say that.”