Head of a Traveller

by Nicholas Blake

‘No. I shall come with you.’

  They hurried on, in the hypnotic moonlight. The lane seemed all forks and no signposts. There were four miles still to go. Nigel had the choice of making a wide detour by a hamlet which was itself nearly two miles distant and might not have a telephone, a car or a gallon of petrol to its name, and of pressing on to Great Hammersley. He chose the latter course.

  Janet Seaton at first went stride for stride beside him, like a man. Later, distressed, she slowed down. Nigel stopped for a moment to study the map. Janet’s voice came to him in a rasping breath.

  ‘I implore you! Can’t you let him die in peace?’

  They were the last words she spoke, until they came to the outskirts of Great Hammersley and saw the squat church tower whitely sleeping in the drift of the moonlight.

  Then she said, ‘He may not be here after all. Are you sure that’s what he meant?’

  ‘We’ll soon know.’

  ‘I don’t see the car.’

  ‘He wouldn’t drive it right into the village.’

  They were already whispering, as if in the presence of death. The long grass of the churchyard, sweetly scenting the night air, whispered at their feet as they brushed through it, and cast brilliants of dew, transient tears, along their way.

  I ought to have telephoned to a doctor and asked him to meet us here, thought Nigel: I’ve mismanaged everything. But perhaps it’s for the best.

  His torch-beam presently found a figure of Robert, lying face down, full-length, upon a mound beneath a yew tree in the far corner, his hands stretched out towards the stone at its head, which told that Daisy, the dearly beloved wife of Robert Seaton, rested beneath. A faint smile showed on the poet’s face when Nigel turned him over: his cheek was cold with dew: the body felt warm still to Nigel’s touch, but the heart had stopped.

  ‘Is he dead?’ asked Janet from the other side of the grave.

  ‘I think so. But we must get a doctor at once. Will you find a telephone, please, Mrs Seaton.

  When, a few minutes later, she returned, she knelt down beside the grave and awkwardly touched her husband’s cheek.

  ‘I loved him too. I did love him.’ Her voice was uncomprehending, almost querulous. Then she suddenly drew in a harsh breath. ‘There’s blood on my hand!’

  ‘It’s only a yew berry. You must have squashed it when you knelt down,’ said Nigel. ‘But there is blood on your hands.’

  ‘On my—? What do you mean? Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘I destroyed your husband’s confession. While you were getting your coat. You took such a long time.’

  Janet Seaton, on her knees still, was glaring up at him.

  ‘You destroyed it? Why, you must be mad!’ Her voice seemed to boil up from a deep cauldron of fury. ‘I don’t believe you!’

  ‘I destroyed it because it was not true,’ replied Nigel implacably. ‘You know it was not true, because you killed Oswald Seaton yourself.’

  Chapter 15

  From Nigel Strangeways’ Case Book

  . . . I HAD NOT destroyed the ‘confession,’ of course. I still don’t know what to do about it. It’s one thing to drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead, but another thing to rake them up for public obloquy. Such honoured bones, too. However . . .

  Robert’s confession is a masterly document . . . his last, and by no means his least, piece of imaginative writing. But it was just a bit too imaginative, and there are passages not at all in character with R. as I knew him: for instance, the somewhat artificial trope about his Muse (a girl he never mentioned by that name); but chiefly the analysis of his own sensations before and during the actual ‘murder,’ which gives me the impression of a brilliant, highly sensitive man trying to imagine himself into the mind of a murderer—there is a fictional timbre about these sentences, ‘delicious exaltation,’ ‘my brother was dying at my feet,’ and in the picture of Oswald squatting over the storm-lantern and jeering at R., which doesn’t ring true for me at all. No, Robert slightly overdid the verisimilitude.

  These points did not strike me when I was reading through the letter last night: circumstances were not favourable for such fine perceptions. But I did notice, even then, certain things in it which didn’t fit the facts or the probabilities. Whether they would get by with Blount, I am not sure. For example:

  (a) Is it conceivable that Oswald, who had every reason to be suspicious of Janet, would sit quietly in the dairy for half an hour, raise no outcry, make no attempt to escape (the windows are small and high up, but it could have been managed)? Wouldn’t he assume that J. had locked him in so that she might telephone the police and hand him over for the Mara business?

  (b) Is it conceivable that R., a quiet, peaceable little chap, so well-balanced psychologically, should be provoked into striking his brother. He was an oldish man, after all, and oldish men don’t commonly behave like fighting cocks even if their wives are insulted. Moreover, I am sure R. was speaking the truth about himself when, during the tea-party in June, he said ‘I could never bring myself to facing my victim. It’d have to be one of those long-range murders.’

  (c) Is it conceivable that R. should have got no blood on his clothes from the wound in Oswald’s neck? You have to be standing close to a man to strike him with a razor, and the blood would have jetted out at once.

  (d) Could R. have carried the body to the river and swum out with it, unassisted (except by his ‘anti-self’)?

  The answer to each of these is that it is improbable not inconceivable: that all these conditions should have applied, together, makes for far greater improbability. Add to them (e) that, by R’s account, he could not have got round to sluicing down the dairy till about one-thirty at the earliest, when the second thunder-shower was over, yet nobody heard the sounds of sluicing; (f) Oswald’s own self-defensive measure—his visit to Rennell Torrance; it’s most unlikely that, in the course of a long conversation with Robert, he should not have mentioned this, and that R., knowing there was another witness to his brother’s arrival at Plash Meadow, should still have murdered Oswald; but, if Janet took O. straight out to the dairy and struck him down there at once, he might well not have had time to mention his visit to Rennell; (g) the crucial point of Oswald’s mackintosh; if, as R. says, O. was wearing it when he had his throat cut, why were bloodstains found all over the outside of the mackintosh and on his clothes?’

  This mackintosh, together with Robert’s poetry, was always the key clue to the mystery.

  It was not till his last interview with Blount, two days ago, that Robert decided to make his confession and ‘slip away.’ He had finished the sequence two days before that; so his statement that he was waiting to finish it before confessing is invalid. What decided him, at this interview, that the game was up? My question about the mackintosh, my hints that the whole case would be solved if—He knew then that I had arrived at the truth.

  If what? If Janet had met Oswald and borrowed his mackintosh to walk across the court.

  I tumbled to this as a result of Mara telling me that she had seen Janet’s dress showing beneath the hem of the mackintosh she was wearing: then I saw Janet walk down the drive in a long mackintosh; and at our last interview she agreed this was the only mac she possessed. Therefore, when she crossed the court that night, she was not wearing her own. At first I assumed she’d put on Robert’s: but (a) would she allow her husband to go out into the rain, in her company, without one? (b) how could R. be there at all if the expectant father did not see him walk down the lane till a quarter of an hour later?

  The rational answer was that Janet had met Oswald first, and borrowed his mac to take him over to the dairy. Whether she had read Robert’s letter to him and was expecting his arrival or not, is immaterial. Now, in the pocket of that mac there was a razor. And Janet is a woman of strong physique and a smouldering, ungovernable temper. It may well be that the murder was unpremeditated, that the idea of killing Oswald never occurred to her till she felt the razo
r in the pocket of the mackintosh.

  I am convinced that this was, for her, the flash-point. I believe she followed O. into the dairy and slashed his throat at once, perhaps while he was putting down the storm-lantern. This is the only theory which would satisfactorily account for there being so much blood on the outside of the mac (it spurted on to J. immediately she had struck him), for there also being a lot of blood on Oswald’s suit, and for no blood having been found on any of Janet’s or Robert’s clothing. It also accounts for no outcry having been heard from the dairy, for there was thunder to drown it.

  Janet, then, had both means and opportunity. What of the motive? Now, all along, there could be no question that she had by far the strongest motive of all the suspects. She is a highly possessive woman. That afternoon last June, Mara said, accurately and prophetically, ‘Janet’s ruling passion is Plash Meadow. She’d kill any one to protect it.’ She had been prepared to marry Oswald himself, and had then married Robert, in order to get back the Lacey property. She doted on Plash Meadow and its contents almost to the point of mania; it, and the family name, were her obsession: I saw it on my first visit in the way she touched the ornaments. But Oswald, as the investigations in Somerset were later to prove, was doubly a menace to her. Not only was he the rightful owner of the property, but he knew—he was the only surviving person to know—the truth about the conspiracy which underlay his ‘suicide’ ten years before. So Janet could not safeguard her property now by handing Oswald over to the police on the Mara charge: for, if she did so, Oswald would at once inform against her for having organised the ‘suicide’ conspiracy, and she would lose the property just as surely as if Robert had himself restored it to his brother.

  Robert’s ‘confession’ was a brave and remarkably ingenious effort to turn all the points against himself which were in fact pointers to Janet’s guilt. Particularly brilliant was his treatment of the first episode: realising I now knew that it was Oswald who had crossed the courtyard with Janet at twelve-thirty, he developed this in a perfectly natural way to consist with her innocence of the crime or of any complicity in it. I think it just possible that his confession might convince the police. It is convincing, largely because so much of it is true.

  This brings me to the question, why should Robert confess at all to a crime committed by a wife he did not love? Surely he was not a man to carry quixotism that far? I believe there were two reasons: first, Robert was implicated in the murder as an accessory after the fact; since this was so, and he would be likely to go to the gallows anyway, he decided to try and clear his wife. Second, I believe the very fact of his not loving her drove him to this decision: his sense of not having given her the love she required of him would create, in so good-hearted a man, a feeling of guilt and remorse. The ‘confession’ was, in effect, also an expiation.

  Nevertheless, it confirmed me in my opinion that Robert had been implicated in the murder—one sentence, particularly, where he says he fetched the string bag because he revolted from the thought of carrying the head about by the hair. For me, that has the ring of pure truth. I doubt if the keenest effort of imagination could have hit upon an explanation so odd, so simple, so natural. Of course, it was possible that Janet had disposed of the body and the head by herself and then confessed to Robert, who later used all the details for his own ‘confession.’ But this raises again the very serious difficulty as to the disposal of the body single-handed. Janet is a hot-tempered woman, but not a cold-blooded one. Could she have gone through, unsupported, all the horrors that had to be gone through after the murder? I very much doubt it. Robert, in a mood of exalted altruism, could have done so. Apart from this, the way Janet’s and Robert’s stories tallied, at the various stages of the investigation, indicates that there was close collusion between them.

  My reconstruction1 of the events is as follows, then: Janet takes Oswald to the dairy, kills him, gets out of his bloodstained mackintosh and leaves it and the razor in the dairy, which she locks behind her. The crime was unpremeditated: she is dazed, has lost her nerve. She hurries back to the house to find Robert. When he returns from his walk, she tells him everything—probably says it’s all his fault, really, for having invited Oswald to the house. Robert says he will help her to conceal the crime. After that, everything takes place as in his confession, except that the pair of them do it between them. The head was clumsily severed, because it had to be done by the light of the storm-lantern alone. I should imagine that Robert would undertake the more gruesome jobs, but that they both carried the body down to the river, and while they were doing this, Finny stole the head. The phrases about the ‘anti-self’ in his confession are perhaps significant here, in view of Robert’s relations with Janet: it’s just the sort of mischievous twist he might have given to it—that ‘assisted by my anti-self, who gave me preternatural strength, I hoisted up the body’ etc.

  Lionel’s subsequent behaviour is contributory evidence of Robert’s complicity. One must take into account what he said to me on the lawn, the first day I was staying at Plash Meadow: particularly his remark that he must ‘see Vanessa through the present dust-up,’ and the way he tried to sound me then. Again, if he had not seen Robert behaving suspiciously at sometime that night, why should he go to such extraordinary lengths to divert suspicion upon himself? He certainly wouldn’t have done it for his stepmother, at any rate. And he’d hardly have done it merely to give his father time for finishing the poem; for, if Lionel had no reason to suppose his father implicated in the crime, then he equally had no reason to fear that the discovery of the truth about the crime would put a stop to his father’s writing.

  To return to Janet’s guilt. It was finally proved, to my own private satisfaction, last night in the churchyard. Also, by her attempts to delay our arrival there, which she pretended were for Robert’s sake—so that he might not be prevented from committing suicide and avoiding arrest but actually were made so as to ensure that he did die before he could be questioned about his ‘confession.’ But also, in the course of the investigation, she gave herself away more than once. (1) On the day after the murder she was ‘very queer and edgy,’ according to Mara; (2) she resisted a police search of the house; (3) during her first conversation with me, she fell into the trap of agreeing that the night of Thursday/Friday was the operative period, though she should not have known, at that time, when Oswald was killed; she managed to cover up this slip pretty well; (4) she was extremely discomposed when I first questioned Robert and herself about the unknown man who had lived here all his life and left the village under a cloud nine or ten years ago; (5) she was equally rattled—and indeed contradicted herself—when I asked her whether she had borrowed Robert’s mackintosh to wear across the court. Now each of these points is open to a more innocent interpretation—that Janet knew of Oswald’s return, suspected Robert of having killed him, but was chiefly worried lest the investigation should reveal her share in the conspiracy of Oswald’s ‘suicide.’

  But then (6) comes the affair of the clay head. In his ‘confession,’ Robert had to skate very lightly over this: he speaks of using Janet as ‘an unwilling tool in my scheme to discover if it was Finny who had taken the (Oswald’s) head.’ Yet, if J. was no more than an ‘unwilling tool,’ if she did not yet know the identity of the murdered man, why did she provoke Mara to do a head of Robert? How could she know that the murdered man bore a strong facial resemblance to her husband and that therefore a clay head of the latter would be most likely to cause Finny to repeat his performance of head-snatching? This was the crucial question which I decided not to ask her at the time. But, still more betraying, was (7) Janet’s extraordinary admission that Finny was her bastard son. In the first place, the police have found not a trace of evidence to support it. Second, if it were true, it is inconceivable that a woman of Janet’s pride should have admitted it, except in a desperate effort to avert some worse situation. She did, in fact, come out with this confession, as a last resort, to give colour to her story that the whol
e clay-head stratagem was aimed at the protection of Finny Black. But I simply could not believe that a woman of Janet’s character would make such an appalling admission in defence of Finny, or even of her husband—in defence of anyone but herself. Moreover, on Finny’s own evidence, it was Janet who had told him not to ‘answer’ the police’s questions.

  All this pointed at least to Janet’s complicity in the crime. But it did not prove that it was she who struck the fatal blow. On the other hand, I am morally certain that Robert did not; so, by elimination, and apart from the evidence of the bloodstained mackintosh, etc., Janet must have done it. I am convinced that Robert, in spite of the strong murder-motives he set down in his ‘confession,’ had an excellent reason for keeping Oswald alive. So we come to the roots of the case—Robert’s poetry.

  The main thread was put into my hands that day in June, when I met Robert Seaton for the first time. That oddly revealing little remark about the hens looking ‘so much at a loose end’: the signs of hobbies taken up and dropped: the impression of boredom: the look of misery on his face when Janet referred to the epic of the Great War, which he was supposed to have been at work on for years, but which there was no trace of in his manuscript books: above all, his version of the Sleeping Beauty story. ‘Have you thought what really kept her there? Not the thorns, but the roses.’ And ‘the Queen took away all the spinning-wheels’: a perfect Freudian slip; in the real story it is the King who takes them away: Robert was expressing his unconscious resentment against Janet, against Plash Meadow, and everything they stood for, because they had deprived him of his power to write poetry. So, ‘the poor girl’ (his Muse) ‘had nothing to do but moon about and admire her own reflection in the roses.’ What’s more, Rennell Torrance, when he made that outbreak of his, said, ‘One of these fine days you’ll be asked to account for your talent. And you’ll have to answer, “I buried it, Master—buried it under a heap of roses.”’ Rennell had a pretty good notion that Robert had been for years inactive.