Head of a Traveller

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘So the silly fellow didn’t destroy it after all?’ the poet murmured. ‘All right, you needn’t hold it in front of me. I’ve got a good memory.’

  ‘You admit you wrote this letter?’

  ‘What is this, dear?’ asked Janet.

  ‘Yes, of course I did.’

  ‘But you concealed the fact from Inspector Gates and myself? Why?’

  ‘Oh, come, Superintendent! That’s not a very intelligent question,’ replied Robert lightly. ‘Once it had been established that the dead man was Oswald, things would obviously look bad for me if I’d told you I’d written inviting him to come down here.’

  Janet Seaton gasped. ‘Robert! What could have possessed you to? You invited him here?’

  Her husband looked a bit sheepish—not guilty so much as apologetic and stubborn at the same time: it might have been some crucial arrangement he had made, knowing it would incur her displeasure, yet convinced he was right to make it. The hypnotic atmosphere of Plash Meadow once again began to creep over Nigel. Here was the crucial point of a murder investigation: and here were the two chief suspects behaving as though nothing was at stake but the invitation of an unwelcome guest.

  ‘Why did you, Mr Seaton?’ asked Blount softly.

  ‘Invite him? Oh, well, he was my brother, after all.’

  ‘I don’t quite mean that. This letter makes it clear that you realised his presence here would be unwelcome to Mrs Seaton. So why didn’t you go to Bristol to see him? Wouldn’t that have been a more natural thing to do, under the circumstances?’

  ‘Natural?’ Robert Seaton seemed to hold up the word in the air before him, examining it from every angle, as if it had been a possible epithet for a line of verse. ‘Ah, no. That would only have been to postpone things. I wanted to force the issue, you see.’

  ‘Will you explain that, please.’

  ‘Oswald would have to have the estate back. But my wife would resist this, I knew. Besides, there were Rennell and Mara to consider: they might have brought up the old affair against Oswald.’

  ‘You mean his criminal assault upon Miss Torrance?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when you said in your letter, “Of course I shall make no difficulties,” you meant no difficulties about his getting back the estate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You were prepared to give up everything, to go back to poverty, to deprive your wife and children of all this’—Blount made a semi-circular gesture with his hand—‘without a murmur?’

  ‘I dare say it wouldn’t have been as bad as that. Oswald might have looked after us. But I had to do what I thought was right.’

  ‘Hmm. So, by “forcing the issue,” you meant inviting Oswald down here and compelling your wife and friends to accept the situation?’

  ‘More or less.’

  Blount leant forward suddenly. ‘Then why all the secrecy? Why those elaborate plans to smuggle him into the house, by night, without your wife’s knowledge? If you wanted to force the issue, wouldn’t it have been more—e-eh—more effective to have announced that Oswald was alive, and that you intended to make restitution? To discuss the matter with the others before you invited him here? Surely you would first have sounded Mr Torrance, for instance, as to whether he was prepared to drop the old charge against your brother?’

  ‘One doesn’t always do what is most effective,’ Robert Seaton’s fine eyes levelly returned Blount’s somewhat pugnacious stare. ‘I wanted to have a private talk with him first—discover the lie of the land—before making it public. What you call “the secrecy” was just a precaution for Oswald’s sake.’

  ‘Whom did you suppose he had to be protected from?’

  ‘Why, I’ve just told you—’

  ‘It was not in your mind to protect him from—well, from your wife, for instance?’

  ‘From Janet? But my dear fellow—’

  ‘You did not know that your wife had arranged Oswald’s fake suicide ten years ago?’

  ‘Superintendent! How dare you suggest—’ exclaimed Mrs Seaton.

  ‘And that she was thus liable to a very grave charge of conspiracy? And that Oswald, the only living witness to this, was a menace to her therefore?’

  Janet Seaton rose formidably to her feet. ‘Superintendent, I insist on an explanation of this extraordinary charge.’

  ‘I am afraid it is you who will have to do the explaining, ma’am. As for instance, the three hundred pounds withdrawn from your mother’s account a couple of days before Oswald’s disappearance, and the large sum of money handed over to John Hanham in return for his services.’

  Mrs Seaton sat down as abruptly as she had risen, her face rigid, glaring at the wall before her. Robert was studying his clasped hands: his small body seemed to have dwindled. The Superintendent turned to him again.

  ‘Do you claim to have known nothing, suspected nothing, about your brother’s “suicide”? You were quite unaware, till now, that your wife had engineered it so as to get his estate into your hands and hers? And that the lever she used was the Mara Torrance affair—blackmail, in fact?’

  ‘I cannot answer that question.’ The poet looked small and sick.

  ‘He does not need to answer it,’ put in Nigel. ‘The first sentence of his letter to Oswald is the answer. “This is an incredible surprise to me.” If Mr Seaton had known the truth about his brother’s disappearance, it would be gratuitous and pointless for him to pretend surprise when Oswald reappeared. What Mr Seaton may have suspected later is quite another matter.’

  Blount shrugged his heavy shoulders. ‘Let us go back to your letter, then. It was in reply to one from your brother. Have you kept his letter?’

  ‘No. I destroyed it.’

  ‘Just so. Can you remember exactly what he said?’

  ‘Not word for word. He said he was at Bristol; gave me a name and address to write to; asked me what I was going to do about it.’

  ‘Did he—e-eh—make any threats?’

  ‘No. Unless you call that last remark a threat.’

  ‘He said nothing about his “suicide”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He assumed you knew the truth about it, then.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what he assumed. It was a brief letter, anyway—only a few lines.’

  Blount hunched himself in his chair. ‘Now, this is important, Mr Seaton. Could any one else here have known you had invited your brother down? Did you leave your reply to him lying about before you posted it, for instance?’

  ‘No. I wrote back to him the same day as I received his letter. In any case, no one but Finny—and, of course, Janet—comes into my study.’ Robert chuckled. ‘It’s a sanctum, in the strictest sense of the word.’

  ‘Did you post the letter yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I ask one question?’ said Nigel. ‘Did you use your Stylograph to write it?’

  ‘Why, yes, no doubt I did.’

  ‘But you didn’t use your ordinary headed notepaper.’

  ‘No.’ Robert gave Nigel a look as much as to say, “ You at any rate will understand this.” ‘I—it would have been in rather bad taste somehow. Rubbing in the fact that I was the usurper of his own property.’

  ‘I fancy such refinements of—e-eh—sensibility would be wasted upon Oswald Seaton,’ said Blount dryly. ‘However. Having carefully arranged for him to arrive secretly, at night, when your household had gone to bed, you then decided not to wait for him here at all. You went for a walk instead. What explanation can you give for this change of plan?’

  ‘I changed my mind at the last minute; thought I would go a little way to meet him. It never occurred to me that he’d take the short cut.’

  ‘I see. And when you did eventually meet him—after you’d got back here again—’

  ‘Oh, but I didn’t. You mustn’t lay these traps for me, Superintendent,’ remarked Robert Seaton mildly.

  ‘You would be prepared to swear, on your oath, in a court of law, that you nev
er saw your brother that night?’ asked Blount with impressive solemnity.

  Nigel noticed that Janet Seaton’s eyes were tight shut, her head pressed back against her chair, as if at the peak of an ordeal.

  Robert Seaton gazed levelly at Blount, an expression of boyish, almost cherubic innocence on his face. ‘I am willing to swear, on my oath, that I never saw Oswald alive after that day, ten years ago, when he disappeared.’

  ‘But you saw him dead, eh?’ asked Blount sharply.

  ‘I had to—er—view the body, as you know. And I was present when the head was found.’

  Blount allowed a silence to protract itself, like an evening shadow, over the room. Janet lay back in her chair, inert as a corpse. Briskly rubbing his hands, the poet glanced up towards Blount, then to Sergeant Bower whose pencil was poised to attention.

  ‘Very well,’ said Blount at last, a little wearily. ‘You returned from your walk. You were still expecting your brother to arrive. Yet you went out twice into the courtyard with Mrs Seaton, within the next half hour, although Oswald might turn up at any moment. How do you square this with your intention to keep his arrival a secret?’

  ‘It was very awkward, I agree. But Janet was restless that night—wouldn’t go to bed—the storm, you know. So I had to risk Oswald running into us the first time. But I calculated he would avoid Janet if he saw her: that’s why I took out the storm lantern—a sort of danger signal. And the second time, when we went to look for Finny—well, I imagined something must have prevented Oswald coming, it was so late by then.’

  Nigel had to admire the stoical way in which Blount took this blow to his case: yet another article of suspicion, the storm-lantern, had been naturally, credibly disposed of. It began to dawn upon Nigel that, as things were going, there simply were not adequate grounds for arresting Robert Seaton, and that Blount realised this too.

  ‘When you went out of the house the first time, with Mrs Seaton, it was raining and she borrowed your mackintosh?’ asked the Superintendent.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me now, Mrs Seaton—you allowed your husband to go out into a heavy thunder-shower—’

  ‘It was only just across the courtyard, and my own mackintosh was upstairs.’

  ‘Your only mackintosh, did you say?’ put in Nigel.

  ‘I didn’t. But, as you ask, I have only the one.’

  ‘The long one I saw you wearing the day Lionel and Mara went off?’

  ‘Presumably.’

  Robert Seaton was at last looking really worried. ‘What is the point, Nigel? You’re not suggesting that this was the mackintosh found upon the body, are you? I only possess one myself, and that’s hanging up in the hall.’

  ‘No, I had something else on my mind. Did you have your mac with you when you were out for your walk?’

  ‘I—yes, I think I did.’ Robert answered with something less than his usual crispness.

  A frenzied ringing of a bicycle bell came to their ears from the courtyard below.

  ‘You see,’ Nigel went on slowly, his eyes fixed upon Robert’s, ‘it would explain everything—how that chap down the lane saw you at quarter to one, how Oswald was killed, and why, and by whom—oh, everything, if—’

  Feet were galloping up the stairs. A voice cried, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’

  ‘If what?’ asked Robert Seaton, more intent than Nigel had ever yet seen him.

  ‘If it wasn’t your mackintosh that—’

  Before Nigel could finish the sentence, the door was flung open as if by a mighty, rushing wind, and Vanessa, pink-cheeked, hair flying, breathlessly announced:

  ‘Daddy . . . I’ve found . . . Mara!’

  PART THREE

  Chapter 14

  Farewell to the Roses

  A FEW MINUTES later, Blount had swirled off in his car to Hinton Lacey. Vanessa’s story was that she had bicycled over there earlier in the morning, to fetch a couple of chickens which had been ordered from Paul Willingham. Waiting for them to be dressed, she had been left alone in the parlour. She was sitting in a big armchair there and counting her money, when she found a sixpence was missing. She thought it might have fallen into the chink between the seat and the side of the chair. She pushed her fingers in, and pulled out, not the sixpence, but a woman’s handkerchief, which she recognised at once as Mara’s. Paul Willingham, coming in that moment, took it from her rather unceremoniously, saying that Mara must have left it behind during her last visit. Vanessa asked when this had been, and Paul said a fortnight ago. But Vanessa knew this handkerchief had only been bought a couple of days before Mara’s disappearance, for Mara had shown it to her then.

  Vanessa, at once bitten by intense curiosity and the detective urge, kept her head. She took the chickens, paid for them, put them in her bicycle basket, and pedalled away. But she went no farther than the village inn, where she left her bicycle; then, summoning up all her resources as a tracker, returned to the farm and cautiously reconnoitred. She had instantly jumped to the conclusion that Paul Willingham must have made away with Mara, and concealed the body somewhere on the premises. But while peering round, from the cover of an outbuilding, for signs of freshly-dug earth, she noticed that the curtains of a spare bedroom in the farmhouse were drawn. This struck her as curious, since Paul normally kept all the curtains open during the daytime: so she settled down to keep the window under observation; and after half an hour she was rewarded by the sight of the curtains being cautiously parted and the face of Mara Torrance appearing for a moment at the window.

  ‘So I deduced that Paul had been hiding Mara and hadn’t murdered her after all,’ Vanessa concluded, a faint note of disappointment in her voice. ‘Or perhaps he’s keeping her prisoner, for felonious reasons of his own.’

  ‘Well done, lassie,’ said Blount. ‘I must ask you all to stay in the house till I return.’

  Robert Seaton passed his hand wearily over his face, when Blount had left the room. ‘There’s got to be an end of this,’ Nigel heard him mutter.

  Janet rose. ‘Where are the chickens, Vanessa?’

  ‘In my bicycle basket still. Shall I give them to Cook?’

  ‘Yes. And please understand, Vanessa, there’s nothing to be proud of in spying upon people.’

  Vanessa gazed at her stepmother, her face drained white with shock. Then tears filled her eyes, and she rushed from the room, slamming the door.

  ‘Janet, you shouldn’t have said that. It was unpardonable.’ Robert’s voice was quite impersonal. He looked straight at his wife—a look without love, without even the anger which comes of love abused: Janet might have been a stranger to him, thought Nigel, as he went to his own room . . .

  When he heard Blount’s car return, Nigel walked across to the Old Barn. He found Mara, with her father and Blount in the studio.

  ‘You’re a fool, Mara,’ Rennell was saying as he entered. ‘It’s only a matter of time, the Superintendent has told you, before Lionel is picked up. So why not tell us where he is.’

  ‘Because I don’t know,’ said the girl in an exasperated voice. ‘Oh, hallo, Nigel. I wish you’d stop these people badgering me. I don’t seem able to make the Superintendent understand that I don’t care two hoots whether I’m put in prison for obstructing the police in the performance of their duties, or whatever the rigmarole is.’

  You may not care,’ exclaimed her father, ‘but—’

  ‘But there’d be nobody to cook your meals. It’d be just too bad, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘You make me sick! Don’t you ever think of any one else but yourself, and that young thug you’ve got yourself tangled up with?’

  Mara, smiling secretly to herself, ignored it.

  ‘Robert has finished the poem, my dear,’ said Nigel.

  The girl’s face became vivid, almost transfigured. ‘You’ve seen it?’ she asked eagerly. ‘But I know it’s wonderful. It was sure to be.’ She sighed, relaxing in her chair. ‘It was worth it. Oh, I feel so happy! I don’t mind what happens now. I’ve paid my debt,
haven’t I, Nigel?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said her father, his pudgy face twisted almost out of shape with malice. ‘As long as Robert can writing his piddling verse, nothing else matters. Not even a murder. Well, let me tell you, my girl, he’ll not do any more.’

  ‘Any more poetry? Why shouldn’t—?’

  ‘Any more murder. And therefore any more poetry.’

  ‘Father! You’re insane! What do you mean?’ Mara was standing over him, her fists clenched. Rennell, as if intimidated by the words which naked jealousy had forced out of him, averted his eyes from her and would not answer.

  ‘Come now, Mr Torrance,’ said Blount. ‘It is your duty to tell the police anything you—’

  ‘He doesn’t know anything,’ cried Mara. ‘Don’t believe a word he—’

  ‘Hold your tongue, young woman!’ The Superintendent lost his self-control for a moment. ‘Take her out of here, Strangeways; she’s made quite enough nuisance of herself.’

  Mara allowed Nigel to lead her upstairs to her own room, where she flung herself on to the bed, sobbing.

  ‘It’s not true! It’s not true! He’s always hated Robert. Oh, God, I—’

  ‘Listen to me, Mara,’ said Nigel firmly. ‘Pull yourself together! There’s one question you must answer. About what you saw that night.’

  Nigel asked the question.

  Mara’s stricken eyes opened wide; her body seemed to be held in a vice. ‘Yes,’ she whispered at last. ‘Yes, it could have been. But—’

  ‘That’s all I want to know. No, don’t ask questions. Tell me about your own adventures. It was hare-brained thing to do, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I’d do anything for Robert.’

  Mara’s tale was soon told. On returning in the motor canoe to Ferry Lacey, after her conversation with Nigel, she had thought it only fair to let Rennell know about it. A little later she heard her father telephone to the Superintendent, saying he wished to make a statement. She had at once sought out Lionel, and they decided they must somehow listen in to this statement: now that Rennell knew the police would be informed of the Mara-Oswald affair, and of Oswald’s arrival at the Old Barn that night, Mara feared that he might try to incriminate someone else. The plan for over-hearing what he said to Blount was then elaborated into a scheme for drawing suspicion upon Lionel. Neither of them, Mara now perhaps too urgently insisted, had ever believed that Robert was the culprit. But they did realise he must be under grave suspicion: and it was Lionel’s idea that, if he himself could create a temporary diversion, the police would stop pestering his father, who would then have time to finish his poem without distractions.