Head of a Traveller

by Nicholas Blake

  First, Oswald’s farewell letter, which was indisputably genuine.

  Second, the testimony of the members of his houseparty as to his disordered state of mind during the previous days, the way his business affairs had been preying on his spirits, etc.

  Third, the fact that he had not drawn any large sums out of the bank in the preceding weeks, which he would certainly have done if he was planning a disappearance.

  Fourth, the fact that within the last three years the bodies of two holiday makers drowned off this stretch of coast had never been recovered.

  The crucial point, as Nigel and Blount agreed when they were discussing Rennell Torrance’s information later in the day, was the third one. Clearly Oswald Seaton could not have got out of the country without money. He had withdrawn no large sum from his own bank: therefore he must have been financed. A considerable amount of money would have been required, for, apart from Oswald’s personal expenses, it seemed pretty certain that he must have been taken off his own dinghy by some local fisherman or boatman and landed farther along the coast under the cover of the sea-mist that night, and this man would have to be paid a lot of money to keep his mouth shut during the subsequent inquiry.

  ‘A fairish outlay of cash,’ said Blount. ‘Two or three hundred pounds at least, I’d imagine. The question is, whom did it pay to lay out such a sum?’

  ‘Robert Seaton. On the face of it. But it’s not as simple as all that. In the first place, he was very poor still, as far as we know. Where’d he raise the money? Secondly, I just don’t believe he’s the kind of man who’d organise a conspiracy of this kind in order to get hold of his brother’s property.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion. Besides—look here, Strangeways, it was your own theory that Oswald was persuaded or compelled to disappear by some person or persons who knew a guilty secret of his, knew he’d committed some criminal offence which so far had been kept dark. Isn’t that so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, then, Robert Seaton is a quixotic character, you say. And I got the impression myself, talking to him this afternoon, that in spite of everything he’d had a real feeling for his brother—there was a sort of bond between them. Don’t you think Robert might have helped his brother to fake a suicide, not for what he’d get out of it himself, but simply to save him from worse—from imprisonment, from ruin and total disgrace?’

  ‘Ye-es. Yes, I do think that’s possible,’ said Nigel slowly.

  ‘And it would account for the Torrances being his pensioners. Rennell Torrance was there at the time. He’d every opportunity to discover that some hanky-panky was going on. We’ve only his word for it that he saw the last of Oswald Seaton on the dunes that night. He may have followed him down to the foreshore and heard him being transhipped later. At any rate, he’s been living in comfort here since 1945. And you can’t account for the Seatons tolerating a slob like him about the place, except on the theory that he discovered the conspiracy of Oswald’s “suicide,” and has been cosily blackmailing Robert ever since. Can you?’

  Nigel looked worried. At last he replied, ‘Well, I could. Though I mightn’t be right. There’s more than one kind of blood-money . . . I wonder. I really shall have to have a talk with young Mara now. I’ve put it off too long.’

  But the talk was fated to a further postponement. That same evening, at six o’clock, just as Nigel was walking across the court towards the old barn, he heard the galloping of hooves. It was Vanessa Seaton, on Kitty. She tore into the courtyard, her hair streaming behind her, reined up the horse near Nigel and excitedly called:

  ‘I’ve found Finny!’

  Chapter 9

  Finny Black Turns Up

  TAKING THE HORSE by the bridle, Nigel led it and its fair rider out of earshot of the house. Vanessa dismounted, rather cumbersomely, slung about as she was with a variety of impedimenta—haversack, field-glasses, water-bottle, camera-case and an ancient bandoleer—so that she resembled some intrepid pioneeress of Covered Wagon days.

  ‘You’d better tell me about it while you unharness this animal,’ said Nigel.

  ‘He’s in the church. I saw him from Meldon hill. On the tower. Has he taken sanctuary, d’you think? What’s the rule about that nowadays? Can police drag him from the altar, or must they get the Vicar’s permission first?’

  ‘Just a minute, begin at the beginning. You can take Kitty’s saddle off while you talk. My word, she’s been sweating.’

  ‘Yes, I galloped all the way back. Janet would be furious if she knew. You won’t tell her, will you?’

  ‘No. But she’s bound to have heard you. You sounded like the charge of the Heavy Brigade. Well, you were on Meldon hill—’

  ‘Yes. It’s just over there.’ Vanessa pointed at a cobweb on the stable ceiling. ‘I saw him through my field-glasses.’

  ‘What were you doing on the hill?’

  ‘I was Developing my Initiative. Lieutenant says that tracking is one of the best ways of developing your initiative. She says that the mothers of the future must be fearless and self-reliant, and of course truly womanly. You know?—Steel true and blade straight—that’s how Englishmen like their mates, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, some do, no doubt,’ replied Nigel cautiously. ‘But—’

  ‘I don’t see, myself, how tracking makes your blade straight, since you’re bent double half the time—oh, damn this buckle!—Where was I?’

  ‘On Meldon hill.’

  ‘Oh, yes. As a matter of fact I’ve been tracking Finny ever since he disappeared. In my spare time. I thought he was a gargoyle at first.’

  ‘A gargoyle?’

  ‘Yes. There’s one at each corner of the tower, you know. So when I was raking the countryside with my powerful glasses and saw his head, sort of resting on the coping of the church tower, I thought for a moment it was a gargoyle. Poor Finny. He’s ugly enough for one, isn’t he?’

  ‘Did he move? I mean—’

  ‘Oh, he’s not dead, I went to see.’

  ‘Did you indeed?’

  ‘Yes. I galloped down the hill and up the spiral staircase in the tower—I left Kitty outside the church, of course. But he wasn’t there any longer. Expect he heard me coming. Guess what I found, though.’

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Crumbs,’ announced Vanessa, in a blood-curdling whisper. ‘Here, help me off with my accoutrements . . . Thanks awfully. I put them in one of the pocket things of the bandoleer. Detectives always seem to carry envelopes about with them to put clues in: but I hadn’t—oh, here it is.’

  She hooked out with her middle finger a few morsels of cake.

  ‘Do you recognise these crumbs?’ she demanded.

  ‘Well, no, I don’t think—’

  ‘I do. I’ll swear they’re from the cake I helped Mrs Fitch to make the other day. I bet you Finny’s been getting into the house at night and taking things from the larder. What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘There was no sign of him in the church?’

  ‘Only these crumbs. I found them in such a funny place too. Guess where.’

  ‘In the pocket of the Vicar’s cassock.’

  ‘No. Have you been in our church? Well, there are some effigies of the Laceys, kneeling at sort of stone prayer-desks. In a chapel over the vault. And the crumbs were on one of the desks. Just as if this crusader Lacey was saying grace after eating his tea.’

  ‘Did you call to Finny when you were in the church?’

  ‘No, of course not. I was tracking him, I told you.’

  ‘Have you told any one else? As you went through the village, for instance?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good. Now I want you to do two things. First, find out tactfully from the cook if she’s missed any food out of the larder during the last two days. Second, don’t tell her or any one else that you’ve seen Finny. Nobody must know. O.K.?’

  ‘Not even Lionel?’

  ‘Not even Lionel. It’s very important.’

 
; ‘Well, I’ll try,’ said Vanessa dubiously. ‘But Li. always seems to know when I’ve got a secret, and he worms it out of me somehow.’

  As soon as Vanessa had left him, Nigel made off to the Vicarage, which stood beside the church at the other end of the village. He introduced himself to the Vicar, whom he had not met before, as a friend of the Seatons; the telephone at Plash Meadow was out of order, he said—might he use the Vicar’s?

  After two ineffectual calls, he got Blount at the Redcote police station. He told him of Vanessa’s discovery. He asked Blount for two men to be posted unobtrusively, one in the church, one in the churchyard, by dusk. No, they were not to look for Finny: he would keep till tomorrow morning. Yes, he could guarantee that Finny would not make a break for it. No, he had not been into the church yet himself, but he had a pretty good idea where Finny was concealed. Yes, that was the idea—either Finny would emerge to steal some more food from Plash Meadow, in which case one of the watchers could follow him; or someone at Plash Meadow would be bringing food to the church under cover of darkness, in which case—no, he didn’t know who it was. Yes, he was pretty sure that, if any one at Plash Meadow was concealing Finny Black, that person would show his hand tonight.

  Blount said he would attend to the matter himself, in company with Sergeant Bower. Would Nigel arrange for the Vicar to receive them about nine p.m.? They could wait in the Vicarage till it was quite dark.

  Nigel rang off and returned to the Vicar’s study, feeling more than ever a snake in the grass, if that reptile can be supposed to entertain qualms of conscience. He reminded himself that all he was doing, at the moment, was to safeguard Finny’s life. Or was he? In a sense there seemed no necessity to do so. If Finny were a danger to X, and if X knew where Finny was, X would not be so officiously keeping him alive. But perhaps the food had been brought by Y. Perhaps there was a Y who had arranged for Finny to lie concealed in . . .

  ‘I believe you have some remarkable effigies in your church, sir.’

  ‘You are an antiquarian, sir?’ asked the Vicar, a waffling and wellnigh senile man.

  ‘I am interested in the Lacey family.’

  ‘You must let me show them to you. Very fine twelfth century stonework. Can you spare ten minutes? No trouble, I assure you. I do not have my supper for half an hour yet.’

  They stepped into the small, musty church. A greenish light filtered through the window, half obscured by ivy, of the little chapel in the south-east corner. The chapel was chock-full, like a boxroom, with relics of mortality. Tablets, urns, recumbent figures; enough miscellaneous stone legs and arms, detached from their original trunks, to have fitted out, it seemed, a whole dynasty of Ozymandiases: and, against the south wall, six figures in pairs, husband and wife, kneeling each at a prie-dieu.

  ‘Observe the chiselling of the baldric,’ quavered the Vicar enthusiastically. ‘These are probably the finest examples of—’

  But Nigel was observing a small door, let into the thickness of the great stone plinth upon which the effigies knelt: three steps led down to it from the east side, and there were footprints in the dust that lay thick upon them.

  ‘—the normal practice of the stone-masons of the twelfth century,’ the Vicar was saying. His dim eye became aware of a certain inattentiveness on Nigel’s part, who was in fact trying with his little finger the keyhole of the vault door.

  ‘Ah, you are interested in the family vault. Note the coat of arms, subscribed with the motto, “Quis Lacey Lacesset?” Who dares provoke, or perhaps better, challenge a Lacey? The homophone, or play on words, can hardly be rendered in our own tongue. A most historic family, the Laceys.’ The Vicar groped at the back of his mind, like a short-sighted man for a lost collar-stud, and produced, ‘Si monumentum requiris, circumspice’—which seemed to Nigel, under the circumstances, something in the nature of a truism.

  ‘Do you have a key to this door?’ he asked.

  ‘I—er—yes. But it may not be opened, of course, without the authorisation of Mrs Seaton, or her legal representatives. No doubt, should you wish to inspect, to—er—examine the vault, she would lend you her own key. It has not been opened since her dear mother was laid to rest: some six or seven years ago, that would be.’

  Nigel privily rubbed a stain of oil off his little finger and professed himself satisfied.

  At dinner, an hour later, Vanessa studiously avoided his eye. It was apparent to him that she had not been able to keep the secret. Which was what Nigel had counted on.

  Lying awake, soon after midnight, he heard footsteps cautiously approach his door and stop. He breathed louder and slower, mumbled to himself as if in sleep. The feet moved away. Nigel pulled the bedclothes closer and composed himself for genuine sleep. It was up to Blount now . . .

  The next morning Vanessa entered his bedroom, looking sullen and mutinous.

  ‘You’re to have breakfast in bed,’ she announced, still avoiding his eye. ‘There’s a flap on downstairs.’

  ‘Finny?’

  She nodded dumbly; then burst into tears. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ she sobbed. ‘I couldn’t help seeing him on the tower—and telling someone—telling you. Li. is furious.’

  ‘You told him the secret too? Last night? Oh, Vanessa!’ said Nigel gently.

  ‘He heard me asking Mrs Fitch if she’d missed any food. You know how you have to bawl at her. Then he dragged it out of me.’

  ‘And had she missed any?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, I hate all this,’ she desolately exclaimed. ‘Why should it happen to us? I’d been so looking forward to these holidays. And now everything’s gone wrong. Every one’s trying to keep things from me, and snapping my head off if I ask questions, and Daddy’s been too busy to talk to me like he used to and go on expeditions. And Lionel—why is every one so different? Oh, I do feel miserable! They ought to be glad I found Finny for them. But—’ she choked, and burst into tears again.

  ‘Look, Vanessa—come and sit on the bed a minute. There. I know it’s absolutely foul for you. But you’ve just got to live through bad times like this. Every one does. They come to an end, sooner or later, and you find you’re still alive, and you can look back at them and understand what they were all about. At your age, it’s difficult to believe they won’t go on for ever, isn’t it? It’s like one of those dreams, when you dream you’re lost, and you know you’re dreaming, yet you can’t wake up. But you always do wake up.’ Nigel stroked the girl’s hair. ‘My wife was killed in the war. She was driving an ambulance through a blitz: refused to get out and take cover. Well, I thought that was the end of my life. You understand? She was rather like you, in some ways. She was extremely brave: an explorer. Perhaps you’ll be one, when you grow up. Her explorations made her a famous woman. I remember her telling me once how she’d got lost in a wood, quite near home—she was about thirteen then. Just about your age. She got into an absolute panic, worse and worse, she told me, and went tearing round in circles bashing into trees: well, really, it was as if the trees were bashing into her, and the branches deliberately whipping her face, and the brambles tripping her up. She was quite lost. Everything seemed against her. And soon it would be night. Do you know what she did?’

  Vanessa shook her head, glancing up at him sideways through her tumbled hair.

  ‘She sat down with her back against a tree, and made three resolutions. First, always to carry a compass with her in the future: second, to remember that no wood goes on for ever: and third, to go to sleep for a bit. And that’s what she always did afterwards, when she became an explorer and got a bit panicky.’

  ‘And what happened that time, in the wood?’

  ‘Oh, she went to sleep, and woke up an hour or so later, and walked slap out of the wood as easy as pie.’

  Vanessa gazed at him a moment with tear-brilliant eyes. Then she flung her arms round his neck, kissed him heartily, and ran out of the room.

  Three hours later, as Nigel was walking in the orchard to clear his head before the meeting Blount had
fixed for midday, he came upon Vanessa Seaton. Her back was against a tree. Tip-toeing up, Nigel perceived she was peacefully slumbering, a small pocket compass on her lap. ‘Pleasant dreams,’ he murmured, and retraced his steps. Poor Vanessa!—she would have need of them before long.

  ‘Yes, we found him all right,’ Blount had said hurriedly when they met an hour ago. ‘He came out of the vault—had a key in his pocket. And we found Oswald Seaton’s clothes there. A lot of bloodstains on ’em. Why didn’t Gates think to look? Why didn’t I, for the matter of that?’

  ‘Not a church-going generation,’ Nigel offered.

  ‘Pish! And who should turn up in the middle of it all? Robert Seaton. Out for one of his nocturnal perambulations, he said. No food on him, anyway. Heard a noise in the church. You bet he did: I was trying to get a grip on the wee dwarf—he fought like a demon: then Seaton came in and called out to him and he went quiet as a lamb.’

  So now, Nigel apostrophised the calm face of Plash Meadow, so now what have you got in store? How many more tricks up your sleeve, you charming illusionist? And when will you cease pulling wool over my eyes?

  What Plash Meadow had had in store for him, thought Nigel as he entered the dining-room a few minutes later, appeared to be a Board Meeting. Robert, Janet and Lionel, Rennell and Mara Torrance sat round the table, fidgeting, muttering or impassive, each according to his temperament. At the head sat the Chairman of the Directors, impersonated by Blount. A little behind Blount, note-book open on knee, the confidential secretary, Sergeant Bower. The eyes of Henry Lacey gazed bleakly down at them from above the mantelpiece: the Company is not what it was, they seemed to be saying, when I was Managing Director.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Strangeways,’ said Blount. ‘Sit down. I thought you had all better be present when I questioned Finny Black. As you know, we found him last night. He’d been hiding’—Blount coughed primly—‘or hidden, in the family vault. He’s none the worse, I’m glad to say, for his—e-eh—immurement. Of course, one of you must have given him the key that night he ran away after attacking Mr Strangeways, and kept him supplied with food. It’d save a lot of trouble if that person would now come forward.’