Head of a Traveller

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘Perhaps it was Mr Seaton you saw.’

  ‘Well, he had a look of him, first glance. But he passes by, very quick, where I’m standing behind a tree. And Mr Seaton always walks slow, see? And then this—turns off the ride, down the old right-of-way. And I hear him presently climbing over the gate—the one I told you about, with barbed wire all over it. So I knew it couldn’t be Mr Seaton. He’d never use that gate.’

  ‘Did you notice how this chap was dressed?’

  ‘Had a mac on. Couldn’t see nothing else. He flitted past me like a shadow. Reckon he needed it, too.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Hell of a thunder-shower we had, that night.’

  ‘You know,’ said Paul, ‘this body they found in the river—it had a mackintosh on.’

  Jack Whitford gave him a bland, crafty look. ‘Plenty of mackintoshes about in these parts, Mr Willingham.’

  ‘What time was it when you saw this stranger in the wood?’

  ‘Not long before midnight.’

  ‘Funny if it turned out to be the bloke who got murdered,’ said Paul. ‘Well, drink up, Jack, and we’ll make a four-hand . . .’

  When the game was over, and Paul and Nigel were preparing to leave, Jack Whitford leant over to Nigel.

  ‘You’ll not put down anything I said just now in one of your radio programmes, will you, mister?’—a sharp, foxy grin—‘I’ve got a reputation to lose, see?’

  Nigel reassured him. ‘It’s a queer thing, though,’ he added, ‘a stranger walking through a wood in the middle of the night. You’d think he’d stick to the roads.’

  ‘You’ve said it. And I’ll tell you something more. You’ve not been in Foxhole wood yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, just you try walking through it at night. Proper bleeding rabbit-warren of paths it is, half of ’em overgrown too. You’d lose your way, I’ll lay you a dollar.’

  ‘And this chap was walking fast ahead, as if—’

  ‘Ah, as if he knew it blindfold.’

  ‘And yet he took the path that had been wired up?’

  ‘Ah. Bit of a riddle, ain’t it? Well, cheer-oh, I’ll be seeing you.’

  As the two friends strolled up the village street, Paul said, ‘Interesting evening? I think I handled it pretty well for you.’

  ‘You damn near wrecked the whole thing with that farcical B.B.C. stuff. I could have wrung your neck.’

  ‘Pish. Establishing an identity for you. Most important in a place like this.’

  ‘I like that poacher of yours. He’s no fool.’

  ‘It was the murdered man he saw, I suppose?’

  ‘Or the murderer. But what’s really interesting is the riddle he set me. And I think I’ve guessed the answer.’

  Chapter 3

  Dead End

  AFTER BREAKFAST THE next morning, Nigel set out to walk to Ferry Lacey by a detour through Foxhole wood. On his way he telephoned to Robert Seaton from the public call-box in Hinton Lacey and received a warm invitation to lunch. He then took the road towards Chillingham. A couple of miles along this, he came to the outskirts of Foxhole wood, on the right of the road. If the unknown traveller, whom Jack Whitford had seen in the wood just before midnight the previous Thursday, had walked from Chillingham Junction to this point, it would have taken him the best part of an hour, for the Junction was four miles away. Both the route and the time he had chosen suggested a wish for secrecy. Therefore it was unlikely that he would hang about at the station after getting out of his train. Therefore his train had probably arrived there somewhere about eleven p.m. Nigel made a mental note to find out from the station-master what trains stopped at the Junction around this time, and where they came from.

  It was possible, of course, that the unknown had not travelled by rail at all: he might have taken a bus, or hitchhiked, or even hired a car. Or again, he might have come to Chillingham by train and got a lift from there to Foxhole wood. But these were doubtful possibilities, for each of them would involve a greater risk of the recognition he seemed to have feared: sooner or later, if there were to be a hue-and-cry after him, someone would come forward who remembered giving a lift to a man of his description. But a crowded train, particularly a long-distance express, would be a pretty safe method of travel: expresses from both Bristol and the South Wales ports passed through Chillingham on their way to London.

  Nigel took out his large-scale map, set his stop-watch going, and turned into the wood, just where a notice warned Trespassers, in exceptionally stringent terms, that they would be Prosecuted. The bridle-path along which he walked was fairly well defined: his map told him that it was a right-of-way—no doubt the one the London syndicate had closed. But, as Jack Whitford had said, the wood was a warren of paths. At night, unless one knew the path well, it would be almost impossible not to stray down one of the tracks, hardly less narrow than the right-of-way itself, which led off from it.

  The morning was bright, and fresh for August. The leaves made a lace of light and shadow. Presently Nigel came to a broad ride, furrowed by the wheels of tractor and trailer which had been at work on thinning out the wood. This ride, according to his map, bisected the wood on a diagonal, and the right-of-way ran down it for several hundred yards to the right, then branched off to the left again, its opening half overgrown with brushwood. It was here that Jack Whitford had seen the stranger making for the edge of the wood. At night, no one unfamiliar with the wood could have found so readily the point where the right-of-way branched off from the main ride.

  Nigel followed it for a quarter of a mile. Then the trees thinned away and he was confronted with a high, narrow gate, positively swathed in rusting barbed wire. There were footprints and crushed undergrowth all around, traces of the police search. Nigel struck off the path, emerged from the wood further to the right, and stood blinking in the sunshine, which showed him a vestigial path running across a meadow towards Ferry Lacey and the glittering ringlets of the Thames. The path led him into the Seatons’ pastureland, where it forked, one branch going right-handed to the village itself, the other towards the iron gate in the walled orchard of Plash Meadow. Nigel noticed that this gate was locked, and the key not there, but the wards and hinges were oiled. He glanced at his stop-watch: it had taken him twenty-one minutes to walk from the far side of Foxhole wood to this point; say one and a half hours, by night, from Chillingham Junction to Ferry Lacey—not more, perhaps ten to fifteen minutes less if the traveller had walked fast the whole way.

  Nigel now turned back from the gate and strolled down to the river. He scrutinised for a few moments the short, shingly incline which dropped away below the bank into deep water—the bathing-pool Robert Seaton had shown him during his previous visit. One could easily launch a boat from here, he said to himself. Or a corpse. Only the corpse was found half a mile downstream. And Paul had told him that there were no boat-houses on the stretch of river immediately below the Ferry Lacey footbridge.

  ‘Not my job, anyway,’ he muttered.

  It was at this moment that, looking up, he saw, just round the corner of a clump of reeds to his left, a head resting upon the silver Thames, as it might be John the Baptist’s on the platter—dank, drowned, black hair falling about the dead-white face, whose eyes were fixed upon his. For a second or two he gaped at it, stupefied and unrecognising. Then the mouth of the head opened. A cool voice said:

  ‘Why don’t you come in? You look hot. Been chasing someone?’

  It was Mara Torrance. Nigel’s heart resumed its normal beat.

  ‘No. You come out. And do stop staring at me like John the Baptist. You gave me quite a turn,’ he added irritably.

  The young woman emerged, dripping. She unloosed the shoulder-straps of her scarlet bathing-dress and lay down on the bank beside him.

  ‘I thought you’d be turning up soon,’ she said. ‘And with heads on your brain. I presume they haven’t found it yet, or you wouldn’t have been so startled by mine.’

  ‘Th
e police? As far as I know, they haven’t.’

  ‘Did I really look like a corpse—from the neck upward, I mean? It’s not very flattering of you,’ Miss Torrance pursued.

  ‘You don’t now.’

  ‘What do I look like then, Nigel Strangeways?’ Her eyes, shaded with one hand from the sun, stared insolently into his.

  ‘Oh, you look very nice. And you also look like a girl who has a good deal of sleep to make up,’ said Nigel, looking down at the magnolia-white face, the skin puffy about the eyes.

  ‘I don’t sleep well without a man in my bed. And that’s not so easily arranged in these parts.’

  Nigel laughed unaffectedly. ‘Good gracious! Are you trying to shock me? With simple physiological facts?’ The girl’s right hand, which had turned palm upwards on the grass and slid towards him, clenched itself. ‘You ought to get married, then.’

  ‘So Lionel tells me. But it’s no good . . . I’m not . . . I can’t . . .’ Her voice faltered. She tried again. ‘He’s too much under his stepmother’s thumb for me. Could you fancy Janet as a mother-in-law?’

  ‘Lionel?’ said Nigel, surprised. ‘I should have thought, if any one was under her thumb, it’s Robert Seaton.’

  ‘Oh, Robert can afford to be under her thumb: or to seem to be.’

  Nigel glanced at the girl sharply. It was the first perceptive, un-egotistic remark she had made.

  ‘You admire him very much?’ he asked.

  ‘Robert? I—I venerate him. He’s the only really good man I’ve ever met. He was wonderful to me, when I was—when something foul happened. A long time ago. But that’s not important. He’s a great poet.’

  ‘Yes . . . Well, to revert to your insomnia for a moment. What about last week? Did you sleep badly every night? Friday night, for instance?’

  Nigel was aware of a quick tension, and relaxing of it, in the girl beside him.

  ‘Oh, Friday? No, we all slept like logs that night, I should imagine.’

  ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Because we’d had such a hellish time the night before.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Nigel, gazing non-comittally down his nose.

  ‘Yes. There was a cracking thunderstorm. Not long after midnight. It went on and on. Went away and came back again. I hate thunder and adore lightning. I watched the storm out of my bedroom window.’

  ‘Which way does it face?’

  ‘Over the courtyard.’

  ‘You didn’t see any mysterious strangers gliding along—with or without heads—I take it?’

  ‘No. The police have asked me all this, anyway. It’s a frightful bore.’

  ‘And the rest of the family had a bad night too?’

  ‘Well, Robert and Janet did, certainly. I saw them crossing the courtyard soon after half-past twelve—the first drops of the thunder-shower were just beginning to fall. And Vanessa apparently saw them there again, half an hour later, when the second thunderstorm was in progress.’

  ‘What on earth were they doing?’

  ‘I asked Janet the next morning. She said she’d got worried about Kitty—that’s the mare—being frightened by the storm, and maybe kicking her loose-box to bits. So she went out with Robert to see.’

  ‘And the second time? When Vanessa saw them?’

  ‘Oh, Janet said she must have been dreaming. Vanessa stuck to it that she had seen them, in a flash of sheet lightning, just under the big chestnut tree.’

  ‘What? Sheltering under it?’

  ‘No, hurrying past it, away from the house. I expect Vanessa was dreaming. But Janet needn’t have been so brusque with her. As a matter of fact, she was very queer and edgy all Friday, took to her bed before dinner.’

  ‘Janet?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘And what about the others? Lionel, for instance?’

  ‘Oh, Lionel claims to have slept through the whole thing. Says the war taught him to sleep through any bombardment.’ Mara added, rather pettishly, ‘He has to have his eight hours of sleep every night. Very regular habits, our Lionel.’

  ‘And your father? Did the storm keep him awake?’

  The young woman paused before answering. ‘I shouldn’t think so. He—well, he was a bit plastered that evening. Why are you asking me all this, anyway?’

  ‘Thursday night may turn out to be rather important.’

  ‘But it was Friday night you began asking me about.’

  ‘A slip of the tongue,’ replied Nigel blandly.

  ‘“Slip of the tongue”! You liar! You’ve just been leading me on. It’s contemptible!’ She was sitting bolt upright now, positively glaring at him.

  ‘Now you mustn’t get worked up. The police will soon be asking you all a lot of questions about Thursday night. You’ve just had a dress rehearsal with me. That’s all there is to it. And you’ve told me nothing that could possibly incriminate any one, so far as I can see. After all, there’s no evidence that the murdered man came to Plash Meadow. Yet.’

  ‘I think you’re rather a frightening man, Nigel Strangeways,’ she said, looking at him doubtfully.

  ‘And I think you’re not nearly as wicked a woman as you try to make out.’

  She seized his hand, drove her nails viciously into it and threw it away from her.

  ‘Don’t be paternal with me!’ she exclaimed furiously. ‘Don’t you dare to be—’ She ran away from him, into the river, and swam strongly out on her back. It occurred to Nigel that a strong swimmer could have towed the corpse some way downstream, then let it go. He stood up.

  ‘Won’t you walk along to the house with me?’ he called.

  ‘No, I’ll have to creep in by the back way. Janet doesn’t like me showing off my figure in full view of the front windows. She’s a great one for the proprieties. Why don’t you come along to the barn after lunch? See you then.’

  Nigel waved and set off along the bank. He went through a gate into the lane that led up to the village from the footbridge, climbed its steep slope for a hundred yards or so, then he was in front of Plash Meadow.

  The house looked different. It seemed less enchanted, more awake than when he had last seen it. The roses—that was it: most of them had withered, and there was a tarnished look on the few that were left. It was a beautiful house, oh yes; but only a house now, not a brilliant, enervating dream any more. What on earth am I doing here, Nigel mused. What sort of a trap am I walking into? And why should the idea of a trap come into my head at all. A great poet, his well-born and distinguished wife, his son, his daughter—what could be more reassuring? Just because a headless body is found half a mile away from their house, I come here with a mind already half-poisoned, looking for the sinister detail in every hole and corner, in every artless word. A girl plunges into a river, and I have to think of a corpse being towed out from the bank.

  Nigel pulled himself up, realising that the house was beginning to cast its spell on him again, roses or no roses, and more swiftly this time. No, there are certain queer anomalies, he said to himself. As, for instance, why should Janet Seaton, that race-proud woman and stickler for the proprieties, allow a raffish couple like the Torrances to live in her barn? And how did Mara Torrance, who so venerates Robert Seaton, come to do that woodcarving in which he so discreditably figured? And why had Robert called it ‘auto-therapy?’ And when was it—

  ‘Hallo! You look awfully worried. Have you come about our murder?’

  Vanessa Seaton’s head, in its tawny cloud of hair, had risen up from the other side of the low garden wall, a foot away from his own face. Nigel gave a dramatic start.

  ‘Heavens! You frightened me out of my wits. Where did you spring from?’

  ‘I’ve been tracking you. Our Lieutenant—’ she blushed rosily—‘in the Guides, you know—Lieutenant taught me tracking last term. She’s wizard at it. The great thing is to sink into the landscape, freeze quite still if any one looks in your direction. Then you’re practically invisible.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Nigel, eyeing Vanessa’s plum
p contours in a marked manner. ‘And did you trail the police too, when they were here?’

  ‘You bet I did. There were hoards of them. Well, three at least. All over the garden and orchard. Peering at the ground.’ Her voice sank to a hoarse and blood-curdling whisper. ‘Do you know what they were looking for? Freshly-turned earth! That’s what Lionel says. A new policeman came this morning. His name is Superintendent Blount. He’s just down the road now, talking to Hubert.’

  ‘Hubert?’

  ‘Our gardener.’

  ‘I must have a word with him. Like to come?’

  Vanessa drew back, took a run at the wall, vaulted it and fell in a heap on the other side. ‘I don’t seem to have got the knack of landing yet. Lieutenant can do it absolutely pro style. But she’s our gym mistress too, of course.’

  She walked up the lane beside him, chattering hard. They passed a row of cottages on their right. Beyond this row there was a path, meeting the lane at right-angles. Vanessa led the way down it. At the far end Nigel saw a stile and the path continued over the meadows beyond: he recognised it as the other fork of the right-of-way. If the unknown had not taken the left-hand one, leading to the orchard gate of Plash Meadow, he must presumably have come down this way into the village.

  ‘That’s Hubert’s cottage,’ said Vanessa, pointing through a gate in the hedge to their left.

  ‘Will you go in, and if the Superintendent is still there, tell him Mr Strangeways would like a word with him.’

  ‘I say, d’you know the Superintendent? Could you get his autograph for me? I simply didn’t dare ask him for it.’

  ‘I expect so.’

  When Blount emerged from the cottage, towed by Vanessa, Nigel said:

  ‘Good morning, Superintendent. I’ve told Miss Seaton you’ll give her your autograph.’