Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Nicholas Blake
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
More from Vintage Classic Crime
Copyright
About the Book
Nigel Strangeways is summoned to Easterham Manor in the depths of winter to investigate a series of strange events, which culminate in the apparent suicide of a wealthy young woman whose behaviour has scandalised the village.
As Nigel begins his investigations into the dead girl’s past it soon becomes clear that someone in the manor is trying to hide something, and they will stop at nothing to keep their secrets safe.
About the Author
Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.
Also by Nicholas Blake
A Question of Proof
Thou Shell of Death
There’s Trouble Brewing
The Beast Must Die
The Widow’s Cruise
Malice in Wonderland
The Smiler with the Knife
Minute for Murder
Head of a Traveller
The Dreadful Hollow
The Whisper in the Gloom
End of Chapter
The Worm of Death
The Sad Variety
The Morning After Death
NICHOLAS BLAKE
The Case of the Abominable Snowman
CHAPTER ONE
‘Oh that I were a mockery king of snow.’
SHAKESPEARE
THE GREAT FROST of 1940 was over. The great thaw had set in. For nearly two months the flat lands around Easterham Manor had been lying under a monotony of snow which, like an enchanter, turned even the most familiar landmarks into strange and silenced shapes. Gazing out from behind the blurred panes of the nursery window, John and Priscilla Restorick could see Easterham village, a mile away, gradually emerging from its snow-white trance. In this country of level fields and winding, hedgeless roads there had been little else but the villages to arrest the steady flow of the blizzards. Easterham had been half obliterated by drifts. As often as men had dug passages through its one street and their own backyards, the snow had come to fill them up again. To-day, Easterham resembled a series of half-finished excavations in a white desert: the snow, sliding off its red-tiled roofs and melting to a yellowish slush where the inhabitants walked, pattering down from the vicarage elms, wearing threadbare on the allotments, was beginning to reveal the outline of the village the children knew.
But John and Priscilla had little attention to spare for the village. They were staring, with all the intense absorption of their age, at the snowman on the lawn just beneath their window.
‘Queen Victoria is being liquidated,’ murmured John, who had a knack for picking up well-worn words from his elders and minting them afresh. He used this word sotto voce, knowing that his father did not at all approve of it. It was, no doubt – like ‘strumpet’ and ‘bloody’ – one of those words which were all right for Shakespeare and grown-ups to use, but did not do for children. At any rate, Will Dykes, their mother’s friend, who was staying in the house, had used it at lunch one day; and their father had closed his eyes slowly in the gesture of rebuke so painfully familiar to John and put on a shocked, not-before-the-children expression.
‘Queen Victoria is being liquidated,’ John murmured again, savouring the word pleasantly on his tongue and watching another patch of snow slide off the disintegrating widow.
‘Queen Victoria is being decontaminated,’ exclaimed Priscilla, not to be outdone. She rubbed the misty mark on the window where her snub nose had pressed.
‘You’re a fool,’ said John amiably. ‘Decontaminated is what they do when you’re covered with mustard gas. Or else you come out with bloody great blisters and they go pop.’
‘You shouldn’t use that word.’
‘I don’t care. Anyway, Aunt Betty was always using it.’
‘She was grown up. Besides, she’s dead.’
‘I don’t see that makes any difference. I say, Mouse, don’t you think it was awfully queer about Aunt Betty?’
‘Queer? What do you mean, Rat?’
‘Well, having policemen here and the whole household whizzing about like mad.’
‘They didn’t whizz. They all sat around looking as if – as if they were waiting for a train. Yes,’ Priscilla elaborated, ‘it was like when we’re going off for the summer holidays. Everyone keeps sitting down and then standing up and rushing off somewhere, and they’re too busy to play with us, and you never know if they’re going to be extra decent to you or snap your head off.’
‘But you don’t have policemen whizzing around when you’re going off for the holidays.’
‘I like Mr Strangeways. He’s my best policeman.’
‘He isn’t a policeman, you spotted pard. He’s a private impersonator.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s – well, it’s a private impersonator, like Sherlock Holmes. He puts on a false beard and tracks the criminal to his lair, when the police are baffled.’
‘Why can’t he track the criminal to his lair without putting on a beard? I don’t like beards. Dr Bogan tickles when he kisses me.’
‘Don’t be’ an ass. He puts on a false beard – oh well, it’s one of the things you’ll understand when you’re older.’
‘I’ve never seen Mr Strangeways in a false beard. And anyway, I’m as old as you, twin-rat.’
‘You were born ten minutes after me.’
‘Women are always older for their years than men. Every one knows that.’
‘Oh, tripe and onions! You’re not a woman. You’re an infant cheeild.’
‘Don’t copy Miss Ainsley. She’s a stuck-up vampire.’
‘She’s not. She helped Uncle Andrew and us to build the snowman.’
‘She is. She’s got bloody fingernails and sharp white teeth.’
‘The better to eat you with. Aunt Betty used to do her fingernails red. And her toenails. I saw them that night she came in.’
‘What night?’ asked Priscilla.
‘The nigh
t she died and went to Heaven. She came in and looked at me, and then she went out again. She thought I was asleep. Her face was white as death. I could see her in the moonlight. She looked all frozen, like a snowman.’
‘I expect it was her ghost.’
‘Don’t be an ass,’ said John, a shade less robustly. ‘How could she be a ghost when she wasn’t dead?’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be the first time a ghost had walked in this mouldering mansion.’
‘I say, what are you drivelling about?’
‘It’s a secret. I heard Daddy and Mr Strangeways – ssh, someone’s coming!’
Hereward Restorick entered the nursery. The twins’ father had retired Army and Country Gentleman written all over him. His flaxen, drooping moustache, worn rather longer than the cavalry fashion, reminded one of his Saxon ancestry. The Restoricks of Easterham are older than Domesday Book.
Hereward glanced round the nursery with a preoccupied eye: he had the look of an officer inspecting his men with something else on his mind.
‘Whatever’s all this?’ he asked, indicating a conglomeration of toys and games on the floor.
John stuck out his underlip, as if bracing himself for trouble. But Priscilla was not at all dismayed. She tossed back her dark curls, in a winning, independent gesture caught from her American mother, and said:
‘We’re tidying out the toy cupboard, Daddy.’
‘Tidying? Hm. Oh well, John can finish that. It’s time for your music lesson, moppet.’
The deep-lying snow and quarantine for measles had kept the children away from school this term, and their parents had been giving them occasional lessons. Hereward Restorick, rather surprisingly to those who saw in him the very type of the outdoor sportsman, possessed a talent for the piano.
Priscilla, running to him, took his hand and dragged him excitedly towards the door. As they were going out, he glanced back at his son who was now staring out of the window again.
‘Get on with it, old man,’ he said – not unkindly, but with an undertone of suppressed impatience in his voice that made the boy stiffen a little. ‘Tidy it up. You can’t stay mooning there all the morning.’
‘We were watching the snowman melt.’
‘Well, that’s all right. He’ll be there still when you’ve tidied up. That air-gun of yours isn’t loaded, is it? Are you sure?’
‘Uncle Andrew said I could shoot at birds out of the window when he gave it to me.’
‘I asked you was it loaded, son.’
‘I have to keep it ready in case I suddenly see a bird, and –’
‘I’ve told you before, John, never to keep a gun loaded, haven’t I? You’re ten years old, and it’s time you learned sense about firearms. Very well, let me see you take the shot out now, before you forget.’
John did as he was told. He was a fearless child: but he knew better than to provoke the raging, terrifying temper which any insubordination aroused in his father. Instinctively he realized that, though his father was normally a patient and kindly man, this temper was a hair-trigger affair which the lightest touch might explode. And lately, there was no doubt of it, his father had been somehow different. It was all part of the changed atmosphere in the house since Aunt Betty died, part of a bewildering picture which for John included also his absence from school, the coming and going of policemen, the burst pipes, the snowman, the hushed conversations of grown-ups which were apt to break off abruptly when he or Priscilla entered the room. The general unsettlement of a household that normally ran as smoothly as an eight-cylinder engine.
Putting the air-gun away in a corner, John returned to the window. He opened it and leaned out. Everywhere the thaw was perceptible: in the snow flaking off the evergreens behind the tennis-court, in the dank, mild air that brushed his face so softly, and most of all in the tinkling water-music made by the running gutters, the stream tumbling over its miniature waterfall at the bottom of the rock-garden, the whole melting landscape beyond.
Only the snowman seemed to resist this universal dissolution. Its surface was beginning to look pocked and granulated, but its lumpish figure still retained something of the contour given to it by its creators; and the snow all round it, trodden hard by many feet, reminded John of its fashioning and his dream. He remembered that afternoon, several weeks ago, when Uncle Andrew, Mr Strangeways, Priscilla, and himself had built it. Miss Ainsley was there, too, wearing scarlet woollen gloves and furry snow-boots, making a lot of silly, queer remarks he didn’t understand. She was the sort of woman who sat about making remarks. She had even brought out a kitchen chair to sit on, but Uncle Andrew soon tipped her off that and rolled her in the snow, and Miss Ainsley had laughed a lot and been quite sporting about it, though John fancied she didn’t really enjoy it as much as she pretended. Then Uncle Andrew took the chair for the snowman to sit on. He said it was a throne, and the snowman would be Queen Victoria; and Miss Ainsley said something vulgar about the Good Queen getting piles if she sat out in the cold. The children rolled up great balls of the clinging snow, which Uncle Andrew lifted into position and scraped and prodded till he had produced a figure really just like the Queen in John’s history book. Then they stuck halfpennies in the face for eyes, and Miss Ainsley found an old widow’s bonnet and veil in the acting cupboard to place on its head. But, for some reason, Daddy didn’t approve of that part of it when he came out to look, and they had to put the bonnet back again.
As he gazed down at the snowman now, John felt a queer sort of exultation. It was as though he were God, looking down from Heaven and commanding the snowman to melt. One of the halfpennies dropped silently out of an eye socket. ‘It is the Lord’s doing, and wonderful in our eyes,’ John muttered dreamily. He willed a crack to appear on its head: and presently, sure enough, the crack did appear. ‘Look, Mouse, Queen Victoria is cracked!’ he exclaimed, forgetting that his sister was not in the room.
Once again, he remembered his dream. It was over a week ago, but still extraordinarily vivid to him. He had dreamt that he woke up in the middle of the night and went to the window. It was a moonless night, but bright with stars. A few miles away, the serried searchlights of the Outer Defences stood straight up into the sky, a palisade of light. On the lawn below he could just see the glimmering, stocky outline of the snowman. But, in his dream, it kept appearing and disappearing, as though (he thought next morning) someone was passing to and fro in front of it. It was almost as if someone were building another snowman, but the next morning Queen Victoria was still there, without a consort; a little bulkier and more ragged, perhaps, for more snow had fallen in the night, but still recognizably the same figure of majesty.
He had not mentioned this dream to anyone but Priscilla, and, in the excitement of getting an air-gun from Uncle Andrew, it had been temporarily forgotten. But this morning, when there were no plump, feather-ruffled birds on the lawn to pot at, for the thaw had sent them back to their normal winter ways, John seemed for a moment to be living in the dream again.
It was odd, he reflected vaguely, that he had not been at all frightened by it, only interested, and – in a remote way – excited, as though part of himself had been down on the lawn while part watched from the window.
The sound of Priscilla playing the piano in the drawing-room below now stopped. Everything was silent except for the musical shush and tinkle of thawing snow. John’s pony in the paddock away to the right suddenly kicked up its heels and galloped to the hedge, sending up snow like spindrift. Priscilla was running up the stairs. Mummy appeared, in Wellingtons, talking to the gardener. John remembered there was something he wanted to ask Priscilla.
‘I say,’ he called when she entered the nursery, ‘What was all that bilge about a ghost?’
‘Bilge yourself. I heard them talking about it. Well, Scribbles saw the ghost anyway, Mummy said.’
‘Cats don’t see ghosts.’
‘Scribbles is a very wise cat.’
‘Scribbles is a naughty old stinkerado. Saw it where
, anyway?’
‘In the Bishop’s room. That’s all I heard. They dried up when they saw I was there listening. Oh yes, and someone said it was funny the way Scribbles kept bouncing off the walls.’
‘Bouncing off? Oh, you’re crackers! I say, Mouse, come and look at Queen Victoria. She’s cracked, too.’
The children, side by side, leaned out of the window. As they watched, the crack at the top of the snowman’s head deepened. A segment of snow slid, smoothly as a camera shutter, off its face. Its face ought to have gone. But it was still there. The squat, shapeless snowman still had a face – a face almost as white as the snow which had covered it, the dead, human face of someone who shouldn’t have been there at all.
John and Priscilla gave each other one frozen, terrified glance. Then they raced for the door and went pelting downstairs.
‘Daddy! Daddy!’ John yelled. ‘Come quick! There’s someone inside the snowman! It’s …’
CHAPTER TWO
‘Ingenious Fancy, never better pleas’d
Than when employ’d to accommodate the fair.’
COWPER
NIGEL STRANGEWAYS’ INTRODUCTION to the macabre and tragic events which he later named ‘The Case of the Abominable Snowman’ came, several weeks before the snowman revealed its secret, in the shape of a letter to his wife Georgia. She handed it to him across the breakfast table in their Devonshire cottage, grinning with amusement. The letter was written on thick, cream paper, headed ‘The Dower House, Easterham, Essex’, and written in a script of peculiar character and delicacy. Nigel began to read it aloud:
‘DEAR COUSIN GEORGIA, – It would give an old woman much pleasure if you and your husband were to do her the honour of visiting her. I live, as you know, not much in the world, and it would be vastly agreeable to me to have your company for a week, could you engage yourselves to make the journey in such desperate times. I am not insensible of the inconvenience to which my request may put you: but, leaving aside the gratification your visit would cause me, I have a little problem which, I take leave to suggest, your husband, whose fame has reached even to my rural seclusion, would find intriguing. The problem, to be brief, concerns a cat –’
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