Head of a Traveller

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘Asked for it?’

  ‘Yuh. A few days ago—when was it, Mara?—last Saturday—Janet was in here. We got talking Modern Art. Hopeless old bourgeoise, Janet is. Mara got a bit heated. About the Abstract chaps. That’s Mara’s usual line, you know—three curves and a twiddle, label it “Object,” and bob’s your uncle. Anyway, Janet said Mara couldn’t do a portrait bust, a realistic job so’s you could recognise the sitter, not if she tried for a hundred years. Janet said people only do that Abstract stuff because they’re incapable of significant naturalism. Pretty crude of old Janet, I must say, though I wouldn’t altogether disagree with her. Anyway, this chump here, my daughter, proceeds to fall for it, hook, line and sinker. “Oh, can’t I just?” she says in effect. So she roped in Robert and got him to sit for her.’

  ‘And do you think it is a good likeness?’ said Nigel after a moment’s pause.

  ‘Oh, it was coming along pretty well. Haven’t looked at it for a day or two.’

  He hauled himself out of his basket chair, slouched over to the table and took the cloth off the head. Nigel saw his fat back go rigid. A queer sound came from the man’s throat. He almost overturned the head by the violence with which he flung the cloth over it again. As he stumbled back to his chair, his mouth was jerking.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘My heart goes wrong on me now and then. Mara, get me a drop of brandy, there’s a good girl.’

  ‘I’ll get you some water. You had quite enough brandy after lunch.’

  When the girl had left the room, Nigel said, ‘It’s not really Robert Seaton, is it?’

  ‘What the devil d’you mean? Who else should it be?’ The painter spoke with remarkable vehemence for a man who had just had a heart attack. ‘Robert sat for it. Ask Janet. She made him sit for it.’

  ‘What I meant was that it’s not Robert Seaton’s normal expression,’ replied Nigel, mildly and quite truthfully . . .

  Soon after nine o’clock that evening, Superintendent Blount drove up to Paul Willingham’s farm. His first words to Nigel were:

  ‘So you’re going to stay at Plash Meadow next week, I hear. That’s vairy convenient.’

  ‘Glad you approve. But let me tell you this, Blount: I’m much more interested in Robert Seaton’s poetry than his homicidal tendencies, if any. I shall do my best to defeat the ends of Justice, should it prove necessary. We haven’t so many good poets in the country that we can afford to hang one.’

  The Superintendent looked extremely shocked at this unethical statement. Then his face took on the gratified expression of the Scot who has tracked down a joke single-handed.

  ‘I doubt you’re pulling my leg, Strangeways. Of course, we have no grounds for suspicions against Mr Seaton, as yet. But the household in general—that’s another matter.’

  Blount proceeded to enlarge on this. After the information Nigel had given him this morning, he had narrowed his inquiries in Ferry Lacey to the period round about midnight of Thursday last week. He had discovered that a woman, living in the cottage nearest to the Seatons’ gardener’s cottage, had been expecting a baby that night. Her husband had gone to the call-box shortly after eleven p.m. and telephoned to the doctor. The doctor was out at another confinement, but the message would be given to him on his return. The husband—it was his wife’s first child—had been anxious. From midnight till nearly one in the morning, when the doctor finally arrived, he had stayed out of the house, either in the porch or the road, awaiting the doctor’s arrival. He was quite certain that, during this period, no one had come down the path which led from the right-of-way across the fields, past his cottage, into the road. This evidence, if it could be relied on, must imply that the unknown man had taken the left-hand fork of the right-of-way, leading to Plash Meadow.

  ‘And another significant fact,’ Blount went on. ‘This chap tells me he saw Mr Seaton walking down the road, towards Plash Meadow, not long before the doctor arrived. He couldn’t be exact about the time: thought it might have been about quarter to one.’

  ‘Did you ask Seaton about this?’

  ‘Yes. He said he’d been out for a walk. He often walks at night, it seems—nothing unusual about it. And he’d taken shelter for a wee while when the first thunderstorm came on.’

  ‘I see,’ said Nigel slowly. ‘Of course, when you’re anxiously waiting for a doctor to arrive, time goes very slowly.’

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ Blount glanced at him keenly.

  ‘There seems to be something wrong with the timetable. Seaton ought to have got home before twelve-thirty. However, I expect this worried young husband misjudged the time. Or else Mara Torrance got it wrong.’

  Nigel told Blount the substance of his conversation with Miss Torrance.

  ‘Oho. We must look into that,’ said Blount formidably. ‘Well, now. Trains. There’s an express from Bristol, gets in at Chillingham Junction at ten fifty-eight. And another, from South Wales ports, which gets in at ten-nineteen. They were both running up to time that night. The Bristol one sounds the more likely, on the face of it. The ticket-collector can’t help. But Gates has made inquiries at and nearby the station: no evidence of any one hanging around there between ten-nineteen and eleven. No reason why he should hang about, as far as we know. On the other hand, Gates hasn’t found any witness yet who saw our man walking away from Chillingham on the road to Ferry Lacey. But it’s early days yet for that. Gates’ll be making inquiries all along the road, as far as Foxhole wood.’

  ‘I take it you’ve not found the man’s head yet, or his clothes?’

  Blount shrugged his shoulders. The County police had examined the grounds of Plash Meadow, and every allotment and cottage garden in the village, soon after the discovery of the corpse. But you couldn’t go digging up the whole countryside in search of one head: and none of the village people had reported sounds of digging that night. Blount had asked the Seatons’ gardener, only this morning, if he’d noticed any signs of freshly-dug earth in their garden on the Friday, and implements out of place in the tool-shed. He had not. ‘Though mind you,’ Blount added, ‘these country people are vairy close. I’d no’ put it past them to lie themselves black in the face to protect the Seatons—the Laceys, perhaps I should say. It’s a vairy feudal type of community still.’

  This very afternoon, shortly after Nigel had left, two of Blount’s men had begun a thorough search of Plash Meadow. Mrs Seaton had made no objection, when the Superintendent asked her permission, though she had insisted on following them round the downstairs rooms to make sure they didn’t damage her priceless possessions. Nothing at all had been found. In the meantime, Blount had interviewed every member of the household. They told him nothing, which Nigel hadn’t heard already, about the Thursday night.

  ‘Of course, I could get no sense out of that unco wee dwarf,’ said Blount. ‘He just yammered at me. And I’ve yet to interview Miss Torrance. She’d gone out when I arrived.’

  Inspector Gates had found no traces of blood anywhere in the farm-buildings during his original search. This afternoon, Blount had questioned the dairyman. But the result was again negative.

  ‘Why the dairyman?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Well, you see, the dairy is tiled. It could easily be hosed down.’

  ‘At night? But that’d be a frightful risk, surely? Somebody might hear.’

  ‘Not if it was done—e-eh—while a thunder-shower was in process. But the dairyman could not definitely say that the place had been sluiced down since he hosed it himself the evening before.’

  ‘I still think you’re concentrating far too much on Plash Meadow.’

  Blount looked wounded. ‘Indeed I’m not. I’ve an open mind. But the murdered man was last seen walking in that direction. And the house stands a little away from the rest of the village. You’d think, if he’d gone anywhere else, to one of the cottages, say, and been killed there, and his head and clothes somehow disposed of—well, all the odds are that one of the neighbours would have heard something, noticed som
ething wrong and started gossiping, isn’t that so? We’ve got to make a start somewhere.’

  ‘Any of the Plash Meadow household taken a trip recently?’

  ‘Mr Lionel Seaton went up to London last Saturday: staying the weekend with friends. We’re following that up, of course. None of the others left the neighbourhood. Och, but they’ve had all the time on earth to get rid of the clothes.’

  ‘But the head wouldn’t be so easy to get rid of?’

  ‘An old house like Plash Meadow will have a few secret panels and such-like, I dare say. But I can’t go tearing the place apart till I’ve some more evidence.’

  ‘Till you know whose head you’re looking for, eh?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘Just so.’ Blount gave him a meditative look. ‘Tell me, Strangeways, do you know anything about Mr Seaton’s brother?’

  ‘Oswald Seaton? I know he’s dead, if that helps you at all.’

  ‘Och aye. He’s legally dead, all right.’

  ‘How d’you mean, “legally” dead?’

  ‘He committed suicide. Ten years ago. Drowned himself. In the Bristol Channel.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘But you see, the body was never found.’

  Nigel sat back and threw up his hands. ‘Really, Blount, this is too much! D’you mean he left his head on the beach and swam out—’

  ‘I mean, he, the corpus, the man Oswald Seaton, was not found. He left a pile of clothes and a suicide note in the boat he jumped out of. Finis. Body never recovered. But the tides are tricky thereabouts. He died intestate. Robert Seaton, being his next-of-kin, applied for letters of administration. In due course, after all possible inquiries had been made, the court gave leave to presume death, and so Robert came in for the property. The suicide note was perfectly genuine—business worries and so on—people had noticed Oswald Seaton acting strangely some days before—worried, drawn-looking and all that. But nothing criminal: he hadn’t been embezzling; nothing to suggest a fake suicide: otherwise, of course, leave to presume death wouldn’t have been near so readily given.’

  ‘Who told you all this? His brother?’

  ‘Robert Seaton corroborated it just now. But I knew it before. We look up the records of any one even remotely associated with a case, as you will know.’

  ‘Well, then, if it was a perfectly straightforward suicide—’

  ‘Yes, there it is.’ Blount sighed. ‘But he’d have fitted the requirements. A man who knew this countryside well enough to take the short-cut through Foxhole wood, but hadn’t been here for ten years—since that gate was wired up—otherwise he’d not have tried to get out of the wood that way. And it is a funny thing, too,’ Blount added musingly, ‘you and your “head of a traveller”—he’d been one. Head traveller for his father’s firm. Manufacturers of electrical equipment.’

  ‘What about the original police report on the suicide? No distinguishing marks on the body? Can’t Robert Seaton help?’

  Blount shook his head. ‘It’d be something if we could definitely eliminate the possibility that the murdered man was Oswald Seaton. But, as it so happens, what with the state of the corpse here, and the period of years that has passed, Robert Seaton couldn’t be expected to identify it. The original report is rather negative on distinguishing marks—no bones broken, no birthmarks. Age, height, size of feet and hands—they correspond pretty well: but that part of the description would fit hundreds of men. No, Strangeways, I should simply be wasting my time trying to link up this murder here with a ten year-old suicide—’

  ‘Disappearance, you mean.’

  ‘If you like to be pedantic. But the police and the Court of Probate were satisfied. That ought to be good enough for us.’

  ‘I think,’ said Nigel after a pause, ‘I shall have to do some digging on my own, then.’

  ‘Digging? Where?’

  ‘Digging up the past.’

  Nigel’s first excavations took place the next morning, the site being Paul Willingham. The gist of their leisurely conversation, as Paul unloaded his memory in the little stock-scented kitchen garden of the farm, tabulated itself for Nigel under the headings of F. for fact, and H. for hearsay, something like this:

  (F.) Old Mr Lacey, father of Janet, lost heavily in slump of 1930. Compelled to sell Plash Meadow: sold it to James Seaton, father of Oswald and Robert, successful manufacturer of electrical equipment, self-made man, factory in Redcote, other side of river. Old Mr Lacey died soon after. Janet and her mother took cottage in Ferry Lacey. (H.) Janet set cap at Oswald: nothing doing.

  (F.) Oswald and Robert—boyhood in Redcote when it was a small, unspoiled market town—familiar with countryside, fished in Thames at Ferry Lacey, etc.

  (F.) Oswald went into father’s business: worked way up: head traveller: was virtually running business from 1932 to 1936, when the father, already invalidish though indomitable, died.

  (F.) James Seaton: a hard, strait-laced man—petty-bourgeois; Nonconformist conscience. Left whole property to Oswald. Robert cut off with shilling many years before, because (a) he had married, very young, against his father’s wishes, a beautiful but low-born Redcote girl, (b) he had refused to go into the family business, announced determination to support self by writing. (H.) Robert had very bad time in early years; great poverty; first wife died of (?) malnutrition, (?) lack of medical care.

  (F.) After father’s death, Robert, a widower now, paid long visit to Plash Meadow. (H.) Janet set cap at him, Oswald not having come up to scratch. (F.) They became engaged in 1938, shortly after Oswald’s suicide. Robert sold factory when leave to presume Oswald’s death had gone through. In spite of death duties, very well off on proceeds. (H.) General gossip in countryside that Janet married him to get Plash Meadow back for the Laceys.

  (F.) Torrances first turned up in district summer 1937. Caravan holiday. Rennell Torrance had already divorced wife, obtained custody of only child, Mara, then about fourteen. They returned, caravanning, the next year. Nothing further known of them till they came to live in the old barn in 1945. No known connection, before then, between Torrances and Seatons.

  (F.) Finny Black: brought back to Plash Meadow by Robert and Janet Seaton after their honeymoon. No account given of his provenance. The pair honeymooned in Dorset. (H.) Village gossip that Finny is Robert’s bastard son.

  ‘So there you are,’ said Paul, leaning back in his deck-chair and gently fishing a stray bee out of his beer mug. ‘That’s the best I can do for you. What d’you make of it? What’s your theory?’

  ‘I haven’t one.’

  ‘Well, I have then. I suggest to you that the man we know as Robert Seaton is not Robert Seaton at all.’

  ‘Indeed? Who is he?’

  ‘Brother Oswald. Oswald had the reputation of being a bad hat. Addiction to popsies—the younger the better. He gets into bad trouble over one, fakes a suicide, pays Robert a large bribe to get out of the country, shaves off his beard—’

  ‘Oh, he had a beard, did he?’

  ‘—yes, and returns to Plash Meadow impersonating Robert. He was only a couple of years older, after all, and quite like Robert to look at.’

  ‘So alike that Lionel and Vanessa were taken in?’

  ‘Well, they hadn’t seen their father much the last few years, after his wife died. He sent them to live with relations, you know. Janet, of course, realises the truth and thus blackmails Oswald into marrying her. Then, ten years later, Robert returns from abroad. Oswald is threatened with exposure and slays him. How about that for a solution? Bang-on, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘It’s a mass of large holes, with nothing even to tie them together. On what do you base this farcical theory?’

  ‘On the fact that the alleged Robert Seaton has written no poetry for the last ten years,’ said Paul, leaning earnestly forward.

  ‘But—’

  ‘You’ve only got his word for it, and Janet’s, that he’s been composing an epic of the First World War. Very shaky, old boy. Don’t you believe it. All those ti
ddly little notebooks you brought back yesterday—nothing new in them, is there? You ask him for the manuscript of something he’s written since 1938. Bet you a pint you don’t get it.’

  ‘And where do the Torrances come in?’

  ‘The Torrances? Well, let me see now; I hadn’t got them in the picture yet. I know—Torrance, waking from a drunken stupor on the dunes, sees Oswald lay a heap of clothes and a suicide note at the brink of the Bristol Channel, then slink off inland again. He investigates, discovers the hanky-panky, and blackmails Oswald up to the eyeballs. So “Robert,” the ci-devant Oswald, has to provide Torrance with a cosy home for life.’

  Nigel gazed gravely at his friend.

  ‘I think you had better stick to agriculture,’ he said.

  Paul grinned. ‘You reject my reconstruction in toto? Can’t say I’m surprised. I only thought it up a minute ago.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Nigel, ‘you’ve laid your clumsy great finger on two quite crucial points. I wonder—D’you know any one round here who knew the Seatons well in the old days?’

  Paul thought for a bit. ‘There’s old Keeley. Edits the Redcote Gazette. He’s a local man: might be able to help. I could give you an introduction to him. In fact, I could drive you over tomorrow morning. I promised him some eggs, and I’ve got to see a man about a calf—that takes care of the petrol aspect. Then I can drop you off at Plash Meadow on the way back.’

  At eleven-thirty the next morning Nigel was sitting in the editor’s room. Paul had made an appointment for him by telephone, and brought him in to the Redcote Gazette office, a dingy building near the station.

  Mr Keeley, a grey-haired, fatherly-looking man in shirt sleeves, took the basket of eggs from Nigel and plumped it down in the litter on his desk.

  ‘Thank Mr Willingham very much, will you? The wife’ll be glad of these. Funny how we’ve got back to the old system of barter these days.’

  ‘And what does Paul get in exchange?’ Nigel ventured.