Seeing is Believing

by E. X. Ferrars

  SEEING IS BELIEVING

  Frances and Malcolm Chance, the retired headmaster of a minor public school, now live quietly in the village of Raneswood in well-deserved and long-awaited peace. However, this rural tranquility is rudely shattered when their next-door neighbor, Peter Loxley, is shot to death in his own home while his wife Avril is in London.

  At first suspicion falls automatically on Fred Dyer, the red-haired local handyman, who was not only seen entering the Loxley house, but has also been suspected of three sex crimes in another village. Dyer provides an alibi, however, and the case against him begins to look distinctly weaker, especially with the possibility that the killer was wearing a red wig.

  When it is discovered that Avril's marriage was floundering and that Avril herself was the object of another man's desires, it looks as though those with a motive for murder are almost as numerous as the passions that have been seething under the surface of an outwardly calm village life.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  A HOBBY OF MURDER

  THY BROTHER DEATH

  ANSWER CAME THERE NONE

  BEWARE OF THE DOG

  SLEEP OF THE UNJUST

  SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE

  TRIAL BY FURY

  A MURDER TOO MANY

  COME AND BE KILLED

  THE OTHER DEVIL'S NAME

  I MET MURDER

  THE CRIME AND THE CRYSTAL

  ROOT OF ALL EVIL

  SOMETHING WICKED

  DEATH OF A MINOR CHARACTER

  SKELETON IN SEARCH OF A CUPBOARD

  THINNER THAN WATER

  EXPERIMENT WITH DEATH

  FROG IN THE THROAT

  WITNESS BEFORE THE FACT

  IN AT THE KILL

  LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

  MURDERS ANONYMOUS

  ALIVE AND DEAD

  HANGED MAN'S HOUSE

  NO PEACE FOR THE WICKED

  UNREASONABLE DOUBT

  MURDER MOVES IN

  etc., etc.

  CHAPTER 1

  When Malcolm Chance, my husband, retired at the age of seventy, from being headmaster of Granborough, a coeducational, slightly freakish school in the village of Bolding, near to the little town of Edgewater, we had to make up our minds where we would like to settle. Not that we had not been discussing this for the last few years. We knew that we should have to leave the Headmaster's House, where we had lived comfortably for the last ten years, and were torn between a desire to remain in some other house in Bolding, where, after all, we should be amongst most of our friends, and the thought that it would be best to move some considerable distance away, the advantages of which would be that Malcolm need not be continually troubled by seeing the changes that his successor was sure to be making in the running of the school, and that it would really be fairer to him if Malcolm was not close at hand to cast his shadow over him.

  The fact that his successor was going to be Brian Hewlett, who had been second master almost as long as Malcolm had been headmaster, and who was a close friend, did not affect our feelings; in fact, in some ways it only made the argument stronger for moving well out of Brian's way, and in the end this was what we decided to do. We bought a pleasant old house in the village of Raneswood, about sixty miles from Edgewater, and after the expected festivities in the way of dinners and presentations that had occurred on our departure among children and staff, we said goodbye to them all and moved away.

  It was more painful to go than either of us had honestly anticipated, but our house and Raneswood had been a lucky choice. The village was small enough for its activities to have remained intimate in character, and we found ourselves welcomed into them with a pleasant friendliness. Malcolm soon made his mark, in spite of his age, in the cricket eleven, and in helping to organize the village Produce Association; while I became involved in local dramatics. It was on account of the dramatics that Avril Loxley came to see me one Friday morning, bringing with her, it need not be said, her three dogs: a black, curlyhaired retriever, a Labrador and a Belgian shepherd, without which I had very seldom seen her. Though they were all rather large dogs, they were well-trained and by then were used to me and my house, so that although they seemed to take up a considerable amount of space in our sitting room, they were not really much in the way, when Avril got to work, trying on my costume as Juliet's nurse, in the modern dress production of Romeo and Juliet that we should shortly be presenting in the village hall.

  We were rather proud of ourselves for having ventured on modern dress. It made us feel progressive and intellectual, but since we had, I could not really understand why I need not wear one of my everyday dresses. But Avril had insisted that I must be dressed like a real nanny of the upper classes, and being a clever dressmaker, with not enough to do to fill her time, she was enjoying running up a pale blue cotton dress for me, and making me a rather fanciful little cap. There was a large quantity of theatrical gear of all kinds in a cupboard in the village hall left over from earlier productions, for we were a very active group, and Avril was in charge of these, but this time they would not be needed except for a few things such as rapiers and a lute or two. But she managed to keep pretty busy, inducing us to exchange clothes with one another whenever she thought the characters required this, and so succeeding in keeping nearly as fully occupied as she would have been if we had been producing the play in full Elizabethan grandeur.

  ‘I'm going to London tomorrow,’ she remarked, crouching at my feet as she pinned up the hem of my blue cotton dress. ‘I'm having lunch with my cousin, Lynne Denison. You know she's my cousin, do you?’

  She looked up at me questioningly as she said it. Of course I knew it. The whole village knew it. Ever since Lynne Denison had been awarded an Oscar for her performance in Dark Shadows, a particularly gruesome murder story, we would have had no chance of escaping knowledge of the relationship. Like her cousin, Avril had started a career in films, but either had not had the talent, or the dogged capacity for hard work that would have been necessary for even modest success, and had given it up in favour of marriage.

  She was quite as good-looking as her cousin; tall, slender, and with a natural grace in all her movements, fair hair that she drew back almost austerely from her oval face, wide-spaced blue eyes, and delicate features. She was thirty-five and married to a man about seven years her junior, but seeing them together, this would not have occurred to anyone. Peter Loxley was very good-looking too, in a dark, muscular, slightly formidable way which tends to look older than it should in youth, but not so very much older twenty years later. He was a junior partner in the publishing firm of Loxley Matthews, which had been founded by his father, from whom he had inherited the dignified old Queen Anne house in which he and Avril lived. They were our next-door neighbours.

  Perhaps at this point I should say a few things about myself. I was sixty-seven at the time of which I am writing: small, weighed eight and a half stone, had hair that had once been dark and curly, but had long ago gone grey, and as it had turned grey it had also rather mysteriously lost its curliness and become almost straight. I wore it cropped short, which I had never thought of doing while it waved about my ears and forehead. I have a square sort of face, dark eyes and undistinguished features.

  I had begun life as a nurse, which perhaps made my part in our production of Romeo and Juliet most appropriate, though I seldom thought about those early days now, as I had been married to Malcolm for nearly forty years. He had been teaching in a conventional public school when we first met, and it had never occurred to me then that I should end up as the wife of a headmaster, and of a place like Granborough. I had never tried to be a headmistress, but I had always been a good deal involved in the life of the school, and had had to entertain a fair amount because there
had always been a steady stream of parents visiting the place, old Granborough pupils, and sometimes notabilities who happened to be interested in our ideas of education, or who came to give us lectures on sometimes very obscure subjects, or otherwise to entertain us. So I confess that for a time I found life in Raneswood rather quiet, but after a little while came to recognize that this suited me very well. I sometimes thought of the old life with nostalgia, but would not have gone back to it even if I had ever had any opportunity of doing so.

  ‘So she's come over to England, has she?’ I said, as Avril sat back on her heels, studying the hem of my dress and frowning slightly as if she were not quite satisfied with it. ‘Is she staying long?’

  Lynne Denison had lived in Hollywood for some years.

  ‘She hasn't told me,’ Avril answered. ‘She arrived last weekend and we've only spoken on the telephone … No, I think it ought to be at least an inch longer. Just turn round, will you? I'll start again from this seam at the back.’

  I was growing a little tired of standing still in the middle of the room, and thought that if only Avril would take a tape-measure to the job it would be finished in a few minutes, but she preferred to rely on her own eyes.

  ‘How long is it since you last met?’ I asked.

  ‘About three years. In fact, I haven't seen her since she became really successful. I hope it hasn't changed her much. I always knew she was headed for success, of course, and when we were young I used to be furiously jealous of her. But she was too nice for me to keep it up. If she's staying long enough in England, I'm going to try to persuade her to come down here for our Romeo and Juliet. She might be able to help us quite a lot.’

  ‘She won't do that,’ I said. ‘She's a professional, and if there's one thing that the professional actor or actress hates and despises, it's an amateur. And that isn't true only of stage people. Most real professionals in any line have no use at all for the amateur. Take scientists, and chefs, and writers, and politicians — oh, any kind of people where there's a real distinction between the ones who have learnt to work at the job for a living, as against the ones who only do it for fun.’

  I felt a slight twinge of conscience as I said this, because a few weeks before, Malcolm had started to write his autobiography. He had never yet written a book, though he had written enough lectures and papers to make one, and I thought it sure to be obviously the work of an amateur, like the autobiographies of so many elderly people who are afflicted by the desire to write about their lives in the days of retirement. If they have always been writers, the results may be interesting; but if they have merely been people of general talent and intellect, they are only too likely, however interesting their lives have been, to produce something boring and flat. I had come across a number of such things, which had made me try to dissuade Malcolm from attempting to write his life story, but as it happened, at that very moment he was upstairs in his little room that we called his study, working away at it.

  ‘Well, I'm going to do my best to persuade her to take an interest in us,’ Avril said, and looking down at her as she crawled round me, I recognized the stubborn expression on her face that I had often seen there. It could change her calm and gentle-looking face to something hard and determined. ‘After all, a lot of her success has been luck. If she hadn't met Walt Denison when he was on the way up himself, she'd never have had her first chance.’

  ‘Is she still married to him?’ I said.

  ‘Oh no, there've been two since then. I'm not sure what the situation is at the moment, but no doubt I shall hear tomorrow … There, I think that looks about right.’ She stood up and took a step backwards to look at her handiwork. ‘That's very nice, though I admit you may have been right that Juliet's nurse wouldn't have been wearing a uniform. After all, Juliet was fourteen, wasn't she — a bit young to be having a passionate love-affair, but a bit old to have a nurse.’

  ‘When I was young myself,’ I said, ‘I used to think it was absurd that she should be so in love at her age and I thought that Elizabethans must have been very strange people, but times have changed recently and if you'd seen what I did at school, you wouldn't think there was anything strange about it. And the young Montagues and Capulets were just the kind of gangs who fight each other nowadays, though ours mostly have motorbikes.’ I knew the idea was not original, but it pleased me. ‘But at least they don't seem to have had trouble with drink and drugs.’

  ‘Did you have trouble with drink and drugs at that school of yours?’ Avril asked.

  ‘A bit. Not much. Not nearly as much as there'd have been at an urban school.’

  ‘I hope our Juliet isn't that way inclined. She seems so perfectly right for the part.’

  ‘I think she's a pretty sober young thing, even if she's got a boyfriend.’

  As it happened, the boyfriend was Romeo. There had been a faction in our dramatic society who had wanted Peter Loxley to be Romeo, but it was Fred Dyer who in the end had been given the part. Peter was Mercutio, while Avril was Lady Capulet. There were people in the society who felt uneasy about Fred. We really knew so little about him. He had simply appeared some months ago in the company of Sharon Sawyer, our Juliet, and made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was living with her.

  They lived in the ground-floor flat of a house that had once been a vicarage, but which was much too large for the modest needs of our present vicar and had been converted into flats. Sharon worked in the library in Otterswell, our nearest small town and was a quiet, pretty girl who knew her Shakespeare so well that she had hardly needed to study her part. Nobody knew quite what Fred Dyer did, except that he would mend electric light fittings that had gone wrong, and paint doors and window-frames, and look after your garden if you were lucky, and wash your car. There was a story that he was a poet, though I was certain that he had never said so himself. Either Sharon had spread it, or someone had guessed it because there had to be some explanation of what he was really doing in a place like Raneswood. It did not seem improbable that a penniless poet should spend his spare time as an odd-job man and there was something pleasantly romantic about the idea. He had a black leather jacket and jeans, which was convenient, as it was how we had decided the young Montagues and Capulets should be dressed.

  Avril stood up and began packing up her dressmaking tools, while I removed my blue nurse's dress and started scrambling into my slacks and sweater. Her dogs recognized this correctly as a sign that she was going home and got to their feet too, stretching, yawning, wagging their tails to show their satisfaction, and began wandering about the room, seeming all at once to fill it almost completely. It was not a large room, though usually I did not think of it as small, but when three big dogs took it into their heads to explore it yet again after having done so on arriving, it seemed to shrink in size. The house was really a cottage, but it was Georgian and the ceiling was fairly high, the fireplace elegant, the doorway not the kind which forces anyone entering to stoop if they do not want to risk giving their heads a knock, but for the moment it seemed to be all damp noses and lolling tongues, and into the midst of this came Malcolm, having apparently decided that he had spent enough of the morning on his autobiography.

  ‘Ah, Avril,’ he said, ‘at work as usual. You aren't just leaving, are you? Have some sherry.’

  ‘That'd be nice,’ she said. ‘Mrs Henderson always looks shocked if she sees me drinking alone at home. I always wait till she leaves before I help myself.’

  Mrs Henderson was the Loxleys’ daily help, a little angular woman of extreme efficiency, who came to them from nine to twelve six days a week, and the reason why Avril would have had to drink alone if she had returned now was that Peter not only went daily to London, but sometimes remained for several days at a time in a small flat that they had in Fulham. I thought that that was where he was staying at the moment.

  Malcolm went to the corner cupboard where we kept our drinks and brought out sherry and glasses. He is a tall, spare man, taller, in fact, than he looks
now, because he has acquired a slight, elderly stoop. His hair is grey, but still thick and stands up in a bristling way above a high forehead. His eyes are a cool, clear blue. His chin is square and firm and his mouth wide. His face in general is a kindly one, though it can become remarkably stern if his mood happens to be disapproving. The change in it can still sometimes take me by surprise. He was to be Friar Lawrence in our production, so he was the one member of the cast who was going to be clothed in something taken from the store of fancy dress that belonged to the society.

  ‘You'll be at Hugh's this evening, I expect,’ he said as he brought Avril her sherry. ‘Will Peter be there?’

  Hugh Maskell was an acquaintance of ours in the village who was directing our production, and who had asked us over for drinks that evening.

  ‘If he gets home in time,’ Avril answered. ‘He thought he would; but it depends on the traffic, doesn't it? It sometimes takes two hours to get here from London, specially on a Friday evening.’

  The dogs had investigated Malcolm, had decided that he had a right to be there and had settled down again, though rather reluctantly, more or less where they had been before.

  ‘How are you dressing Juliet?’ Malcolm asked, as he poured out drinks for me and himself and settled down on the sofa under the window. ‘I hope not in jeans or a mini-skirt.’

  ‘Definitely not in jeans,’ Avril said, ‘but the questionof the mini-skirt isn't quite decided. I rather like the idea myself. After all, the girl's got very good legs.’

  ‘No,’ Malcolm said positively. ‘The mini-skirt's only a whim of the moment, and the fact is, according to my observation, it's permissible these days to wear skirts of any length you choose. It's not like it used to be a little while ago. I can remember when Frances gave away two perfectly good dresses to Oxfam simply because the hemline was in the wrong place. A year or two later, she'd have been glad to have them back, because the hem had moved again. But now that simply doesn't arise. So why not put Juliet into something long and graceful? She'll look far more charming in it.’