by John Bude
“How?”
“Get rid of the poison in his system—to put it medically. Purge his mind of accumulated phantasms. There have been cases ...”
The Vicar nodded. He was thinking of his last meeting with Ronald Hardy on the cliff-path and how disturbed he had been by the boy's white face and jerky movements. Boy, he said. But then, even a man of thirty-four seems young when one is nearing the last rungs of life's ladder. A fine and sensitive type, thought the Vicar. A mind like steel which had bent and bent but never snapped. A typical product of those nightmare experiences which had hounded the life of the world's young manhood not so many years ago. A pity, perhaps, that the boy had never married. He was the type which would respond favourably to feminine ministrations. He wanted looking after. He had the peculiar lost air of a man who lived so much in his work that the humdrum factors of existence both perplexed and annoyed him. There were rumours, of course. There always were rumours in Boscawen, particularly about Ronald. He had been looked upon as a figure of mystery and romance ever since he had settled in Cove Cottage two years ago. An author was a new species in the village. But, wondered the Vicar, was the rumour which coupled Ronald with Ruth Tregarthan based on anything more than mere supposition? He himself had seen them walking and talking together on a few occasions. But bless one! that was natural enough. Ruth was a charming, intelligent girl—a bit lonely perhaps living the “small life” in that bleak, old house with her uncle. Ronald was a vivid, entertaining talker once his natural reserve had been pierced. Somehow it seemed inevitable that they should find a sort of consolation in each other's company. But beyond that ... well, well ... it might be something warmer than a mere intellectual interest—on the other hand it might not.
His ruminations were cut short by a sudden exclamation. Pendrill was pointing at the window.
“Phew. Did you see that? Through the cracks in the curtain ... lightning. We're in for a tidy storm by the look of it.”
As if to confirm his words a low rumble of thunder muttered, first in the distance, then rolled up and burst with a crash, seemingly over the roof of the vicarage itself.
“I've been expecting it,” said the Vicar, adding, after a contented puff at his cigar, “I've an unholy fear of storms, Pendrill. Not for myself, of course—but for my church. It's so isolated and open. I can't imagine what would happen if the tower collapsed and the Greenow clock with it. I always keep an eye on the ‘grandfather’ over there, my dear fellow, until the storm blows over.”
“Why?”
“Oh, reassurance. I look out of the window and set that clock by the Greenow one in the tower every day. Never fail to. When my clock strikes and the church clock fails to respond ... don't you see?”
“There'd be such an almighty crash ...” put in the Doctor. “Clocks wouldn't matter.”
“Listen,” said the Vicar.
Faint and melodious the Greenow clock chimed the hour, and the nine strokes which followed came thinly down the wind. Before the church clock had completed its task the Vicar's “grandfather” purred like a kitten and broke into a jingling accompaniment.
The Doctor pulled out his watch and shook his head, censoriously.
“Two minutes slow, Dodd. It won't do. You'd better abandon your old-fashioned methods and set your blessed clocks by wireless.”
“Ah, this spirit of modernity,” sighed the Vicar. He countered his friend's criticism with a hoary one of his own. “I'll install a wireless set in the Vicarage, Pendrill, the day after I see you attending divine service. All these years and you've never yet had the decency to sit under me. There's a sermon I have there ...” He nodded toward the big, mahogany, knee-hole desk near the window. “A high-spirited and, I may say, controversial affair. I'm delivering it next Sunday. Now what about it? I have to sit here and listen to you talking medicine. Why don't you return the compliment and hear me on religion for a change?”
“When you visit my surgery, I'll visit yours,” contested the Doctor. “When I feel spiritually out-of-sorts I'll come to you for repairs, Dodd. But until then I'll remain——”
“An atheist?” enquired the Vicar maliciously.
“An agnostic,” commented the Doctor.
“But, my dear Pendrill, don't you see that there is infallible proof that God——”
And the next minute they were launched on one of their interminable metaphysical arguments. The Doctor dour and scientific—the Vicar bubbling over with professional enthusiasm and persuasion, throwing out his plump hands, shifting in his chair, pulling wildly at his unlighted cigar, even hammering on his knee when Pendrill refused, through pretended ignorance, to take up a point in the pro-Christian side of the argument.
Above their heads, as the argument progressed, the elements also seemed to be wrangling. Peal after peal of thunder rode in from the sea and broke high over the rain-swept coast.
“Oh, I grant you that! I grant you that!” The Vicar was getting shrill in his excitement. “But why base all truth on scientific proof? What about Faith, my dear chap? Yes, Faith with a capital F. Good old early Christian Faith. After all Faith is the one essential ...”
The Vicar stopped, as it were, in mid-air. His hand, half-way through an incomplete gesture, dropped on to his tubby thigh. The telephone on his desk was shrilling away with the maddening insistence of a trapped mosquito. Overhead another long peal of thunder rose in a furious crescendo and exploded with a cannon-crack.
“The tranquillity of our country Vicarages ...” laughed Pendrill, as the Rev. Dodd eased himself out of his chair and toddled across to the ringing instrument. “England's rural quiet remains one of the ...”
“Please!” sighed the Vicar, glowering at Pendrill in much the same way as he would have glared at an incorrigible child. “It may be the Bishop!”
He took up the receiver. “Hullo? Yes. Speaking. Who? Oh, yes, he's here. Urgent? Hold on—I'll tell him.”
He turned with a worried look on his usually amiable and cherubic features and frowned at Pendrill.
“For you. It's Ruth Tregarthan. She sounds upset, Pendrill. It's urgent.”
Pendrill snatched the proffered receiver as a further blaze of lightning stabbed into the room through the chinks of the curtains.
“I'm here,” he said briskly. “What's the trouble?”
For the moment the Vicar stood in a furore of curiosity. What was it? What had happened? Ruth's voice had sounded queer and—what was the expression he wanted?—horror-struck. That was it.
Then after curious staccato noises had issued from the phone, Pendrill's voice: “Good God! I'll come at once. Don't do anything until I get there.” He swung round on the Vicar. “Tregarthan's been shot,” he said curtly. “You must get on to the police. Ring Grouch and tell him to bicycle up to Greylings as fast as he can.”
“Tregarthan shot?”
The Reverend Dodd stood in the middle of his study utterly bewildered. His puzzled eyes glinted strangely through the lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles. Shot? Tregarthan? Poor Ruth. What a tragedy!
Pendrill had already rushed into the hall, shuffled himself into his overcoat and crammed his hat over his head. The Vicar called out to him as he flung out through the front-door to where his car was drawn up.
“Pendrill! It's an accident, of course?”
The Doctor's voice came back above the hum of the car's engine.
“Accident? No! From what I can make out from Ruth—of course, I don't know the details—her uncle's been murdered!”
CHAPTER II
THE UNDRAWN CURTAINS
GREYLINGS, the house toward which Doctor Pendrill was heading in his car, stood close to the sea. It was a square, unimaginative building of grey stone and green-grey slate, materials which were, of course, quarried in the locality. It was an isolated place, shrouded on the land side by a few weather-stunted beeches, with its western windows looking out directly on to the slow swell of the Atlantic. The ground which intervened between the road and the house shelve
d considerably, whilst linking one with the other was a steepish drive about a quarter of a mile in length.
On the sea side of the house was a little walled-in rectangle of lawn edged with untidy flower borders, beyond which ran the cliff-path. On the far side of the path, the cliff, some fifteen feet high at this point, dropped sheer into deep water. There was never any foreshore visible along this stretch of the coast, for the simple reason that the land curved out from the village and formed a broad ness, upon the most seaward tip of which old Tregarthan, Ruth's grandfather, had elected to build his house. The windows were in rough weather continually wetted by the spray, for the Atlantic breakers pounding against the cliff-face rushed up like sheets of glass, their ragged crests whipped by the wind. Ruth's grandfather had declared that if his bedroom had only been large enough to swing a lead sinker, he could have fished from his upper windows. A justifiable boast seeing that his little patch of lawn was barely the length of an average fisherman's cast.
From the moment the cliff-path passed to the bottom of the Greylings garden, it began to recede in a slow arc toward Boscawen itself. The village, in fact, clustered about a sandy, rock-strewn cove typical of that particular coastline. Greylings was, by the cliff-path, three-quarters of a mile from the cove, though somewhat more by road, since the drive and the road itself formed two sides of a triangle.
At the point where the Greylings drive debouched into the road, but on the other side of it, stood the Vicarage. From the window of Dodd's study Greylings appeared between the Vicarage and the Atlantic, though considerably below it owing to the steep drop of the land. Adjoining the Vicarage was the church, a Norman edifice with a stout, square keep, and, of course, the famous chiming clock presented by one of the present Lady Greenow's ancestors. Whether the original architects of the church had placed it a mile from the village as a test of their affirmed faith, it is impossible to say. In any case Sunday in Boscawen always saw a straggling cavalcade of faithful Christians plodding along the bleak, treeless highway, to be mildly harangued at the end of their journey by their extremely affable pastor, the Reverend Dodd.
The Doctor, therefore, had only a few hundred yards to cover before he drew up in front of the unlighted porch of Julius Tregarthan's house. The rain had ceased and a smoky moon appeared, fitfully, among the shredding clouds. Thunder still grumbled inland, but it was obvious that the storm had passed over and was now spending its energies elsewhere.
During those few minutes of transit, however, Pendrill's brain was active with speculation. Why had Julius Tregarthan been shot? Pendrill drew a blank. He certainly had no great personal regard for Ruth's uncle, a feeling that was generally rife in the village, but there was a wide gulf between disliking a man and murdering him. Tregarthan was reserved, secretive even, liable to fits of ill-temper, which alternated with moods of surly cynicism and a general disregard for other people's feelings. On the other hand, he was a man of judgment and, as far as Pendrill knew, of absolute integrity. He was a Parish Councillor, a church-goer, president of one or two local clubs and a J.P. on the Greystoke Bench. As a man of independent means he had given generously, though spasmodically, to the various charitable organisations of the district. There was no mystery about his past. He had lived in Greylings ever since the death of Ruth's father, fifteen years ago and since Ruth's mother had died in her early childhood, Julius had been left sole guardian of his niece's welfare—a rôle which he had apparently filled with good sense and a full measure of generosity. Ruth had been educated at a boarding-school, spent a couple of years travelling on the Continent and had returned to Boscawen perfectly satisfied to make Greylings her permanent home until such time as she should, if ever, marry.
And now, into the placid routine of this very ordinary household, tragedy had broken.
No sooner had Pendrill slammed the door of his saloon than Ruth flung open the front-door and came to meet him, Pendrill was shocked by her appearance. All the colour had drained from her cheeks. Her usual practicality and common sense seemed to be atrophied by an excess of strong emotion. When she grasped hold of his hand he noticed that she was trembling violently. Without a word, slipping her hand through his arm, he strode into the lighted hall, threw his hat on to the telephone table and went into the sitting-room.
Tregarthan was lying on his side by the uncurtained french windows. One arm lay curled beneath him. The other projected at right angles from his body like a signal-arm. His massive head lay in a spreading pool of blood which had already trickled some feet over the polished boards along the edge of the skirting. The heavy jowl was thrust forward like the prow of a ship, whilst his teeth, tightly clenched, were bared in a hideously unnatural grin. Slightly to the left of his high forehead was a neat, black-rimmed hole.
There was no doubt that Tregarthan was dead. Death must have been instantaneous. Pendrill knew that as far as medical aid was concerned this man had passed beyond the reach of it.
During his cursory examination of the body, Ruth collapsed on to the settee, hiding her face in her hands, whilst Mrs. Cowper, the housekeeper, who had been hovering wide-eyed in the background, kept up a ceaseless flow of verbal consolation.
Cowper, the gardener and odd-job man, came forward deferentially and proffered his help.
Pendrill shook his head.
“There's nothing to do, Cowper, until the police arrive. He's dead right enough.” He turned to Mrs. Cowper and cut short her inane babbling with an incisive air of authority. “Now, Mrs. Cowper, I want you to take Miss Ruth to her room.” He approached the girl and helped her to rise from the settee. “There's no point in your remaining here any longer, my dear. I'll deal with the police when they arrive. They will want to see you later, but until then I should just lie quietly on your bed. Understand?”
Ruth, somewhat calmed by the Doctor's matter-of-fact voice, nodded, speechless, and dutifully did as she was told. As Mrs. Cowper was following her out of the room, the Doctor called her back.
“Hot milk and a good stiff dose of brandy in it,” he said. “And see that she drinks it. No nonsense. It's been a big shock.”
Alone with Cowper, the Doctor closed the door and made a rapid examination of the room. He turned his attention first to the windows. These were in three sections; two fixed and one in the form of a door which opened outward on to the little rectangle of lawn. Each panel was subdivided into six panes. Three shots had starred the glass—one high up in the right-hand fixed window; one about six feet from the base of the door; and the third midway in the left-hand fixed window. It was obvious that the shot which had struck Tregarthan in the head was the one which had drilled its way through the central panel.
The curtains, which divided in the middle, were drawn right back. Pendrill turned to Cowper, who had followed him in watchful silence about the room.
“These curtains, Cowper—is that usual? I mean was it Mr. Tregarthan's habit to sit here with the curtains undrawn?”
“No, sir. That's just what I didn't understand when I first come in here. My wife always draws the curtains most particular before she serves the coffee.”
“And to-night?”
“Oh, they were drawn, sir. I came in with a trudge of logs just after Mr. Tregarthan had finished his coffee. They were drawn then—I'll swear to it, sir!”
“You can do that later ... to the police,” said Pendrill. “That sounds like the Constable now,” he added, as the front-door bell jangled in the silence of the house. “Let him in, Cowper.”
But it was not the Constable. It was the Vicar.
“My dear Pendrill, I had to come down. I've rung Grouch. He's on his way. I had to come. I was thinking of Ruth. Perhaps I can ...” His eye encountered the body of Tregarthan slumping by the window. “So it's hopeless,” he added quietly. “Poor fellow.”
Cowper drifted up looking a trifle green about the gills.
“If there's nothing more, sir ... it's upset me ... this.”
“No. Go and have a stiff whiskey. But min
d you—the police will want to question you when they arrive.”
With a grateful nod Cowper drew his fascinated stare away from the body and stumbled quickly out of the room.
Pendrill pulled out his pipe and lit it. The Vicar, on careful feet, was ambling slowly about the room, peering at things through his gold-rimmed glasses.
“You've noticed these?” he said, pointing to the windows.
“Yes—three shots. The middle one got Tregarthan. No doubt about that.”
“None at all, provided he was standing. But why should he stand at an uncurtained window when there's nothing outside to look at?”
“There was the lightning,” suggested Pendrill. “He may have drawn the curtains to watch the effect of the storm over the sea.”
“He did not draw back the curtains, I suppose?”
The Doctor told him about Cowper's statement.
“Curious,” said the Vicar as he drifted away from the window to the far side of the room.
He was experiencing a peculiarly mixed set of emotions. Horror and dismay at the tragedy which had come so swiftly out of the night and put an end to Julius Tregarthan's life. A compassionate pity for the girl who had been so unexpectedly bereaved. But beyond these perfectly natural reactions he was fired with an ardent glow of curiosity and interest. One side of him warred with the other. He felt that it was abhorrent to look upon crime, especially murder, as anything more than foul and unthinkable. At the same time this little devil of curiosity kept on tugging at his sleeve demanding attention. Yes—he must confess it. Apart from the tragic human aspect of the case he was deeply absorbed in an explanation of the mystery. The detective element in him was spurred to new energy now that he was in the midst, not of a mystery story, but a murder in real life. It was wrong of him, of course, sinful even, but that little devil was stronger than his conscience. He wanted to find out. He wanted to solve the problem of Julius Tregarthan's death, if indeed there proved to be a mystery attached to the crime. Of course the police would take things out of his hands. It was their job to apprehend criminals. It was his job to instil his fellow-men with a brotherly love which would make criminals impossible. The argument was good. But the little imp of curiosity was better.
