The Crime and the Crystal

by E. X. Ferrars

  “And you don’t think it was the Mercedes,” David said.

  “I’m not sure about it. If it wasn’t, it must have gone before you arrived, and that upsets the theory that you interrupted the murderer when he was dragging the body towards it. I wonder if the police found the key to the Mercedes on Wilding’s body, or if it had disappeared with the murderer.”

  “I can tell you that. They found it in Wilding’s pocket.”

  “Which may not mean much, except that you’d think if the murderer was intending to drive away in the Mercedes, he’d have made sure he could get the key and would have pocketed it himself before starting to drag Wilding all the way to the car. But of course, if he’d arrived with Wilding, he might have seen where he put the key and knew that he could get it when he got to the car.”

  “But you think the murderer—he or she—didn’t necessarily arrive in Wilding’s car.”

  “It’s just that there may have been another car, as I said, that came and went earlier.”

  David and Clare exchanged glances which made Andrew feel that the two of them had discussed this possibility before, even if they had never confided their doubts to anyone else. They each seemed to be trying now to discover how openly the other felt that they should talk.

  They appeared to reach some wordless agreement, for David said, “That would mean one of two things, wouldn’t it? Either we’re quite wrong about why the body was dumped in the billabong, or I wasn’t the first person to discover it. Someone else could have arrived before me and frightened the murderer off. And that person didn’t stay long, but drove away in a hurry before I got there and has never come forward to say what he saw.”

  “Which may have been the murderer himself,” Clare said. “And that would mean the murderer’s been in his power all this time and may perhaps have been paying him blackmail. David and I have often discussed it, and we think the likeliest person—”

  “No!” David interrupted swiftly. “Don’t say it. We’ve no evidence of any kind and we don’t want to start up rumours about perfectly harmless people. Really we’ve no idea who it could have been, Professor.”

  “Meanwhile there’s that other possibility we’ve mentioned,” Andrew said, “that we’re wrong about why the body was dumped in the pond. Suppose the murderer wasn’t interrupted by anybody. Isn’t that worth thinking about?”

  “But can you think of any other reason for it?” David asked.

  “As a matter of fact…” Andrew began, but he stopped himself. Like David, he had a feeling that there might be something grievously mistaken about talking too much, even to the friendliest people, when all that he had to discuss were some shadowy suspicions. Yet the suspicions which had not even occurred to him when he started out for his stroll along the road and found the bench to rest on, were now beginning to fill his thoughts. The quiet of that short time, disturbed only by the recurrence of Donuil Dhu and the corpse that had certainly been in the wrong place, followed by his chat with the pleasant young couple, had allowed a pattern to form in his mind. A vague pattern, but one which seemed steadily to be becoming clearer.

  But as it became clearer, a question became more and more insistent. What ought he to do about it?

  During his working life he had never been afraid of responsibility. But the kind of responsibility that he had had to face had been fairly impersonal. It was true that he had once or twice found himself talking to a student who had decided to commit suicide and who for some reason had decided at the last moment that Andrew was the right person to tell of his intention. He had had to do his best then to dissuade the desperate child from taking such a terrible step, and once, he remembered, he had succeeded and once he had failed. When he had failed and the boy to whom he had done his very best to give some hope and reassurance had left him and straightaway had swallowed a bottleful of aspirins, Andrew had felt profoundly and wretchedly inadequate. Yet the truth was that he had tended to think of such people as cases, not as friends. That made his present feeling of responsibility different.

  David stood up.

  “I think we’d better be going home,” he said.

  “How would you like to come with us and have a bite to eat?” Clare asked. “We live only a short way from here and there’s a steak-and-kidney pie warming up in the oven and a peach salad. Do come.”

  Andrew recognized that it gave her great pleasure to feed people, but he said, “That’s very kind of you, but I think Jan and Tony will be expecting me. They’ll be wondering what’s happened to me.”

  Clare put a hand on his arm and gave it a little pat.

  “Don’t brood too much on all this,” she said as she stood up beside David. “I know one can’t stop thinking about it, but there’s really nothing one can do.”

  She put an arm through David’s and the two of them walked away into the deepening twilight.

  But Andrew did not go straight back to the Gardiners. He stayed where he was for a little, trying to arrange his thoughts. While he did so he noticed that all the gulls had flown away and that there was no one on the beach. After a while he stood up and started walking, not towards the Gardiners’ house, but in the opposite direction. He knew that somewhere ahead of him was the busy suburb of Glenelg, where it was possible, he thought, that he might find a taxi.

  Reaching a wide-open space which had a town hall, a police station, a hotel and a number of shops surrounding it, he stood looking about hopefully, but there were no taxis in sight. In the middle of the square, however, there was a tram.

  Andrew could not remember how many years it was since he had last ridden in a tram. But there was one here on rails that ran along the centre of a street which he thought led in the direction of the city, and which had a queue of people just filing into it. Joining them, he asked if the tram did indeed go to the city and was assured that it did. Climbing aboard, he took a seat and after a brief wait found himself being jolted along in a way that rather pleasantly brought back memories of a time when travel by tram had been normal for him, while taxis had seemed unthinkably expensive.

  A conductor came along the tram, collecting fares. After a look at Andrew, gauging his age, he asked him if he was a pensioner. Had he been, Andrew understood, his trip would have been free. But replying honestly that he was a foreigner and not entitled to this privilege, he paid for his ticket, then sat back, wondering whether he would really go ahead with what, while he had been sitting on the bench above the beach, had seemed to him a good idea, or whether he would simply return by the next tram and make his way to the Gardiners’ house.

  He had not yet entirely made up his mind about this when the tram reached its terminus, a wide square dominated by the familiar figure of Queen Victoria. It made him feel for a moment that when he had told the conductor that he was a foreigner he had not quite been speaking the truth. He was not sure how, in the modern world, he ought to describe his relationship to this far-off land, yet he did not feel altogether like a foreigner. He had felt equally foreign, if not more so, on visits to Wales, to the Hebrides, even at times to unfamiliar parts of London. He got up and made his way towards the exit.

  He was about to step off the tram into the street when the conductor stopped him.

  “This tram’s been running since 1929,” he said with pride.

  “Has it really?” Andrew said, impressed.

  “That’s over fifty years. There are people tried to get rid of them, but we stood out against it.”

  “Good,” Andrew said. “One should protect one’s heritage.”

  “Well, have a nice visit,” the man said.

  “Thank you.”

  Andrew descended to the pavement and asked a man who was standing there, waiting to get into the tram, if he could direct him to police headquarters.

  The man gave him intricate instructions, which made it sound as if the place must be a long way off, yet Andrew reached the block of offices in only a few minutes. Going in, he approached a uniformed constable behind a coun
ter and asked him if it would be possible for him to speak to Detective Sergeant Ross. There followed so much telephoning, apparently in pursuit of the sergeant, that Andrew felt that his quest was hopeless and that he might as well leave. But eventually the sergeant was tracked down and Andrew was told that if he would sit down, the sergeant would see him shortly. A flicker of hope that Sergeant Ross would not be available and that Andrew would be compelled to abandon his project, like it or not, died as he did so. The course of action to which he had committed himself now seemed to him wildly insane, but there was no escape from it.

  Sergeant Ross saw him in a small but pleasantly furnished office with good air conditioning and a not too formal air. The sergeant himself took Andrew by surprise. He had remembered him as far more heavily built than he was and as looking altogether more formidable than he now appeared. Perhaps it was because of the things that Jan had said about him, but Andrew believed that the man whom he was coming to see would have a look of bullying strength. Instead he saw a thin, bony man with a high, narrow forehead that had an almost scholarly air, and pale blue eyes which were sombre but not unfriendly. It was only the tilt of his mouth that Andrew had remembered correctly, the way it lifted at one corner, which gave it a permanent sardonic, skeptical smile and which suggested that when he chose he could be formidable.

  “I hope I’m not taking up your time for nothing,” Andrew said when they had shaken hands and had both sat down with a wide desk between them. “But I’ve got some things on my mind and there’s no one else I can think of with whom I can discuss them. I won’t pretend, however, that I can tell you anything you’re likely to find useful. It’s rather the other way round. I’m hoping you can tell me a few things I’d like to know.”

  The sergeant raised his eyebrows and the one-sided smile tilted up a little further.

  “I’m not much used to answering questions till I get into court,” he said, “but give it a go.”

  “Then I want to ask you,” Andrew said, “do you seriously believe Mrs. Gardiner had anything to do with the murder of her first husband and her sister?”

  Sergeant Ross passed a hand across his mouth as if he wanted to blot out his smile and knew no other way of doing it.

  “I’m a serious bloke,” he said, “but I’m not sure if I want to answer that.”

  “She thinks you do believe it, you know,” Andrew went on. “She thinks you’ve made up your mind she’s guilty.”

  “Is that right?”

  “You know it’s right. Haven’t you been trying deliberately to keep her frightened?”

  “Deliberately, you say. In a case like this you don’t do as many things deliberately as you might think. You feel around till you suddenly begin to get that feeling in your bones… But you aren’t interested in that.”

  “I’m interested in Mrs. Gardiner’s alibi,” Andrew said. “I don’t mean for her sister’s death. I know she’s none for that. But she told me you’d been questioning her only a few days ago about where she was when Luke Wilding was killed.”

  The sergeant nodded. “That’s right. We got some new information and I wanted to find out what she had to say about it.”

  “Information about a Mrs. Mayhew—I think that was the name—who’s supposed to have been in the hardware shop in Hartwell when Mrs. Gardiner came in to buy some bags for her freezer.”

  “You’re very well informed,” the sergeant observed.

  “Mrs. Gardiner told me the story herself just after you’d seen her,” Andrew said. “She says the man who runs the hardware store, whose name I don’t remember—”

  “Preston.”

  “Yes, Preston. She says he claims she didn’t come into the shop until around twelve o’clock, when she says she went in about nine o’clock, after having been dropped there by her husband. If she’s telling the truth, of course, it gives her an alibi, because even if she’d driven to the quarry with her husband, she’d have had to walk back, and could hardly have got to Preston’s shop almost as soon as it opened.”

  “But if she isn’t telling the truth and it was twelve o’clock when she and Mrs. Mayhew were in the store, she’d have had time to walk back, which puts a different complexion on it, doesn’t it?”

  “Have you questioned Mrs. Mayhew about this?”

  The sergeant brought the tips of his fingers together and looked down at them thoughtfully, as if he could not make up his mind whether or not to answer. Then after a little while he looked up at Andrew.

  “I can’t see why I shouldn’t tell you about that,” he said. “Mrs. Mayhew’s in Sydney and the Sydney police have asked her a few questions for us. As we’ve got the story now, Mrs. Mayhew was in Preston’s store about twelve o’clock on the day of the murder and she did see Mrs. Gardiner come in.”

  “About twelve o’clock?”

  “Yes.”

  “So her story that she was there at nine o’clock is untrue?”

  “I can’t say that. Perhaps she was there at nine and at twelve. Her husband might have dropped her there at nine, waited for her, then driven her on with him to the quarry. If that happened, I don’t know why she should have gone back to the shop at twelve, but she might have had some reason for doing it. And remember, none of this is on oath. There hasn’t even been an inquest. Everyone concerned can change their stories if they feel like it before we get around to anything positive. It’s always best to keep that in mind.”

  “All the same, I think I know now what you believe,” Andrew said. “It’s possible, if not certain, that Mrs. Gardiner could have been on the scene of Luke Wilding’s murder, but if she was, she’s been covering up for the murderer, and she may be for her sister’s murderer too, and I can think of only two reasons why she might do that.”

  The sergeant’s eyebrows went up again. He waited for Andrew to go on.

  “She may be frightened of someone,” Andrew said, “or she may be shielding someone.”

  “Or both. Had you thought of that?”

  “I can’t say I had, but I agree it’s possible.”

  “And even if you don’t know who may have frightened her, you’ve probably a fairly clear idea about whom she might shield.”

  “Ah,” Andrew said, “I see. So that’s what you think. I’ve had a feeling all along that that was it.”

  “I don’t believe I’ve said I think anything.”

  Andrew stood up. “But I think we understand each other. Well, thank you for giving me your time.”

  “My pleasure,” the sergeant replied. “Nothing else you’d like to ask me while you’re about it?”

  “As a matter of fact, there’s one thing,” Andrew said. “I’ve been wondering if it’s necessary for me to remain here. I don’t think I’m much use to anyone. In fact, I feel rather in the way. Would you have any objection to my moving on?”

  “Where are you thinking of going?”

  “I’m going to stay with some friends in Sydney in about a fortnight’s time, but of course they aren’t expecting me yet, so I thought I might pay a visit beforehand to Tasmania.”

  “Beautiful country, Tasmania.”

  “So I’ve been told. I’ve heard it’s rather like the Highlands of Scotland, but with a blue sky over it.”

  “Sounds about right, though the only time I went there it rained without stopping for three days. But perhaps you’ll be luckier than I was. Just leave us your address before you go. Enjoy your trip.”

  “Thank you,” Andrew said as he had said to the friendly conductor on the tram.

  Making his way out to the street, he was fortunate enough, almost at once, to pick up a taxi.

  When he reached the Gardiners’ bungalow there were lights in the windows of the living room but the rest of the house was in darkness. It had begun to worry him in the taxi that Tony and Jan had probably held back their evening meal until he should return. When, on an impulse, he had set off on the Glenelg tram, he had not thought of that, or that they might have been concerned about what was keep
ing him out so long. But now, he supposed, he would have to explain himself, though he was not sure how much he wanted to tell. Not the whole of it, that was certain. Perhaps none of it. He might say that he had fallen asleep on the bench. Yet Jan and Tony might have heard the taxi drive up to the gate, which would take a little explaining. The only thing to do, he thought, was to see how the situation developed.

  When he rang the doorbell, Tony came to open the door.

  “So you got here at last,” he said. “We thought you must have got lost.”

  He did not seem much concerned or curious about it, so Andrew thought he could treat the remark as one that did not need an answer.

  “Lovely evening,” he said. “I met the Nicholls. We had quite a long chat.”

  “Well, come in and have a drink. I’ll get some food in a minute.”

  “I hope you haven’t been waiting for me.”

  “No, it’s only a cold chicken I got from the barbecue place down the road. We’ve been sitting talking, going round and round what’s happened and getting nowhere.”

  Tony led the way into the living room. Sam Ramsden, Denis Lightfoot and Bob Wilding were there, all sprawling in easy chairs with glasses of whisky in their hands. But Jan was not in the room.

  Andrew asked where she was.

  “She’s still lying down,” Tony answered. “She doesn’t want to come out and talk to anyone. I don’t think there’s anything the matter with her except sheer shock. I suggested we ought to get our doctor round to give her a sedative, but she won’t hear of it. She says all she wants is to be left in peace. And that’s probably sensible. Now what will you have, Andrew? Whisky?”

  “Please.”

  Tony poured out a drink and brought it to him and he sat down and sipped the whisky. It was only as he did so that he realized how much he had been wanting it. He looked at Sam Ramsden.

  “Staying here for the night, Sam?” he asked.

  “Too right, I am,” Sam said. “I’ve done enough driving for one day and there are no planes as late as this.”