The Case of the Platinum Blonde: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  It was half-past three when I arrived at Ringlands, which was the name of my sister’s Cleavesham cottage. And on the eve of all the happenings I want to make something clear. Throughout this book I am aiming to be direct to the point of terseness. You don’t want to wade through descriptions of scenery or listen to local chit-chat, and I have no wish either to live the one again or listen to the other. Everything then that I relate will be very relevant to the story. The rough map will help you to get Cleavesham clearly in your mind, and if a particular piece of scenery happens to be mentioned, then prick your ears at once, for it will be mentioned for a purpose and not for padding. And of the nine hundred inhabitants of the village, you will hear perhaps a half-dozen talking, and what they say will be very relevant too.

  To begin with Ringlands, then. Unexpectedly it turned out to be a cottage and no more, with three bedrooms and two so-called reception rooms, one of which Helen was proposing to set aside for my sole use. She had brought her old maid with her, and a man—an octogenarian whose dialect I do not propose to imitate—came on three days a week to see to the rather large garden.

  Helen is as far removed from me as it’s possible for a brother and sister to be, and by that I don’t mean that we haven’t a considerable affection for each other. But I’m inquisitive—largely as a result of association with George Wharton—flippant, restless, and mercurially minded. I’m certainly not a man’s man, though there are the devil of a lot of men with whom I get on remarkably well. But Helen is a man’s woman: even-tempered, hating fussiness, broad-minded and always on the spot when most needed and well away from it when not. Perhaps that may explain why she comes very little into this story.

  Tea was on within ten minutes of my arrival, and as we gossiped I didn’t ask her about George’s forgotten face.

  Most of the talk was about the village, which was considered a suburb, and a highly refined one at that, of Porthaven. She knew the Chevalles, for instance, who lived well out of the village on the Porthaven side. Him she liked very much but for his wife she had very little use. Helen, I regret to say, is the least bit of a snob, though only where unpleasant people are concerned, and so I don’t think she disliked Thora Chevalle solely because she was the somewhat promiscuously educated daughter of a wealthy jerry-builder; what she disliked was the particular brand of unpleasantness. What that was I didn’t learn till later. There was a daughter—Clarice, aged just over four—so Helen told me, and a delightful child she was. There was also a poor cousin of Thora Chevalle’s—Mary Carter—who acted as nurse-companion, and I gathered that Helen rather liked her.

  “How do you come to know the Chevalles so well?” I wanted to know.

  It turned out that although Helen had been in Cleavesham only four months she had already been roped in for war work as responsible for the war savings of a third of the village. Mrs. Chevalle did another third, and the people’s warden, a man named Bernard Temple, did the rest. In charge of the whole district, including Porthaven, was a Lieut.-Commander Santon, who had been wounded in the knee at Crete and was now retired. I gathered that not only did the three local savings people have conferences with each other but also once a week with Commander Santon, who luckily lived in Cleavesham too, though on the Porthaven side.

  It was typical of Helen that she didn’t take me round the garden but left me to wander about alone. The octogenarian was weeding an onion bed. He was a sturdy old boy with a beautiful crop of white whiskers, and I told him that I hoped when I was eighty I’d be as hearty as he.

  “It’s quite a pleasure to see a beard again,” I told him. “Reminds me of my young days.”

  “There’s still a few about,” he said, but as if his own was a rarity of which to be proud.

  “How many can you think of?” I asked him.

  He frowned for a bit and then began his short list. I recognised only one name, the Mr. Temple whom Helen had mentioned as a colleague on the war savings committee, so I had to resort to subterfuge. Names would have meant little to me in any case.

  “Who was the man with a beard I passed just now?” I said. “A thinnish, elderly man with a limp.”

  “Ah! that’d be Mr. Maddon,” he said. “Him that lives at Five Oaks. Been here about nine years or so now.”

  “Five Oaks,” I said. “That’s an interesting name. Where is it exactly?”

  He said it was very simple. If I went two hundred yards towards Porthaven I’d see a stile on the right-hand side of the road, and a path that would take me straight to it. Used to be a large house there once, hundreds of years ago, but now there was only Mr. Maddon’s cottage. Or I could go a bit farther on and there was a lane that led the same way.

  I thought it best not to ask any more questions. What I did do was to go back to the house and ask Helen if she happened to have a large-scale map of the district. She did have one. It had been the one necessary thing when she arrived in the village, and indispensable for finding her way across field-paths and tracks to collect war savings. Thanks to that experience she knew every short cut in her area, and, what was more, she knew every householder and his family in the whole district north of Ringlands and along the Bycliffe road to the fork.

  While I was having a good look at that map she told me a thing or two that might be useful. Bassetts was the Chevalle house, but if I wanted to see both the Chevalles, then I’d better wait a day or two as Mrs. Chevalle was away on a short holiday in town. Her father was a builder in North London.

  “Didn’t you say that a bit spitefully?” I asked.

  “Not at all, my dear,” she told me, and rather amusedly. “I don’t mind who her father is. Some of the best friends I’ve made in the village are just the ordinary people.”

  “Then what’s the snag about her?”

  “Just her,” she said. “For one thing she simply doesn’t know nowadays what an honest job of work is. She over-dresses and decorates perfectly abominably, and under the veneer she’s just sheer vulgarity. He must have been mad to marry her.”

  “Good-looking?”

  “Well—yes. She’d be better-looking if she made up a trifle less artificially. And, my dear, simply seething with sex. But on very bad terms with him, so they say. And the way she bullies and drives that wretched Mary Carter simply makes me see red.”

  She clicked her tongue and then said we’d better talk about something else. Thora Chevalle was the one person in the village who brought out her worst instincts. Little Foxes, now, just opposite the cross road to Bycliffe, was where Commander Santon lived. One of the most charming men she’d ever met, but a bit of a philanderer.

  “What’s this Five Oaks place?” I asked her.

  “Just a large cottage,” she said. “It comes in Mrs. Chevalle’s area. A man named Maddon lives there. Quite a superior old man I believe, but I’ve never met him.”

  “It looks to me as if you and Mrs. Chevalle share the war saving between you,” I pointed out. “What does the other man, Temple, do?”

  “He does all the outlying places off the main roads, and he’s a sort of reserve if we’re away or go sick.” She smiled a bit spitefully. “That’s pretty often for Mrs. Chevalle.”

  She told me a lot more. That there was an hourly service of buses to and from Porthaven, for instance, and that Bycliffe church was well worth a visit. Bycliffe was six miles from Porthaven and two and a half from Cleavesham. The Wheatsheaf was quite a good pub, she told me, and there were three shops in the village—a post office general stores, another general stores and a butcher’s. And that reminded her. She ought to go along at once before the shop closed and see if she could get anything useful for some of her points.

  I said I’d go with her, and I enjoyed that first glimpse of the village, for I’d arrived via Porthaven. It was a superb afternoon with the scent of hay in the air and the incredible sweetness of a late beanfield. There were hop gardens with the green already well up the poles, and chestnut woods with vistas of valleys between them. Helen said that from L
ittle Foxes one could see the sea, but everywhere else the hills that sheltered Porthaven cut off the sea view.

  There were lovely tile-hung houses and one or two half-timbered larger ones that made my mouth water. Farther along the Bycliffe road, Helen said, there was a bungalow colony, but the main part of the village was not disfigured. The spacious village green was lovely too, even if the cricket pitch was a hayfield, and the grey church stood perfectly placed in the far corner.

  By the church was the post office for which we were bound. As we approached it a man came out, and when he saw Helen he came across. He was about six foot and rather thin, and with a closely cropped brown beard. His manners were far too effusive for my liking.

  Helen introduced him as Temple, and at once he showed me all his teeth in a smile that was perilous for his upper set. But he didn’t hang round our necks. A word or two with Helen about war savings and he said he would be going. A high-pitched voice he had, as if by some special dispensation of providence he had eunuch blood in him.

  “I hope you will like our little village, Major Travers,” he said. “We’re humble people but I’m hoping you’ll like us.”

  “We’ll probably be humble all together,” I told him, and he didn’t quite know what to make of that. But he smiled again in farewell and then bent over Helen’s hand like a shopwalker.

  “Delighted to see you again. Don’t forget next Tuesday’s meeting.”

  He turned back along the Bycliffe road.

  “Where’s he live?” I asked.

  “You can just see his cottage on the left,” Helen told me. “That one with the rose arch in front. Rose Cottage. It’s just beyond the stile.”

  I didn’t go into the shop as there was a seat—erected to celebrate the coronation—under an oak just in front, and I sat there and enjoyed the view. A tractor passed with a load of split-pale fencing, and through the gap between two cottages I could see men haying. Then there was the faint sound of planes and soon I could see a whole packet of ours heading across the Channel. Then Helen came out and we walked round the green for a change of route, and so towards home again.

  “My dear,” she suddenly said, “weren’t you just a bit superior with that poor Mr. Temple?”

  “I know,” I said. “I apologise. I’m sorry, but I just didn’t like him.”

  “He’s rather amusing,” she said. “He does try so hard to make an impression, and he really does do quite a lot in the village besides war savings and being people’s warden. How old would you think he was?”

  “Don’t know,” I said. “Very near fifty perhaps. Beards are always deceptive.”

  On the rest of the way she told me about other people in the village, the moneyed sort principally. Most of the men were away and the few left did Home Guard jobs or worked in Town and came down only at week-ends. I said she ought to be doing well with war savings with all that dormitory class about, but it appeared that they subscribed on big occasions in big amounts to Santon direct. There wouldn’t be any necessity for me to meet any of them, she said, and that was good hearing. I loathe polite teas and local discourse. I may be public school and Cambridge but neither is very likely to apologise for disowning me, and I loathe particularly those cast in the same mould—the soft-voiced and discreet, the strong silent men whose taciturnity conceals inanity and whose information is a poor re-hash of the correspondence columns of The Times.

  I’ve got to say this some time, for it’s highly important if we are to understand each other, and so I’ll say it here and now. If Wharton boasted of collecting faces, then I collect characters. Work at the Yard may have got me into the habit and made me a student of humanity, but for me a railway compartment or a tram or a pub has all the excitement that some people find in the theatre. I like to look at people and listen to them and lure them into talk, and so deduce their circumstances, their general make-up and even their counties from their speech. If they are uninteresting or hackneyed types, then they can be discarded at will, and if not, then they can be savoured and enjoyed. It doesn’t matter from what walk of life they come. One of my best discoveries was a chimney sweep and another a Cabinet Minister. And look at George Wharton, a man whom most would pass in the street without a second look. What a rich and fruity personality! No age can wither his infinite—if home-made—variety.

  Well, we reached Ringlands again and I lounged about till the evening meal, which was at seven prompt. We had strawberries, I remember, though very little sugar, and altogether it was just the meal for a sultry evening. Thunder was in the air and Helen thought we should be lucky if we missed a storm.

  “If you don’t mind I think I’ll go for a very short stroll,” I said. “Just enough not to tire me.”

  She suggested just what I wanted, the field-path to Five Oaks, and home by Rose Cottage, which would be just about a couple of miles. I asked if she’d come too, but she said she hadn’t better. When she walked it was always at a furious pace, whereas I would have to go steady and not tire myself. I said we’d compromise but she laughed and said she knew what compromises were, so I set off leisurely and alone. Perhaps of all the walks I’ve ever taken, it was to be the most amazing.

  CHAPTER II

  THE PRIZE SPECIMEN

  I soon came to the stile and guessed it was the one against which Wharton had put on his spare tyre and had caught a glimpse of a face that had so intrigued him. I also did a quiet chuckle. Already I knew the man’s name and it looked a thousand to one as if within a week Wharton would have his mind at rest and I’d be entitled to claim a drink, though whether or not I’d ever get that drink was a vastly different matter.

  The country was undulating and in a few minutes I could catch that glimpse of the sea about which Helen had told me. Much of the land was arable now and the crops looked in fine heart. Then I halted as I came to the first woods and watched men loading hop-poles, and then lighted a second pipe and strolled on again. Almost at once I caught sight of a man coming towards me along the path, and at once I knew him for Maddon.

  Wharton’s memory had been good and his description apt and I will add little to what he told me. But as I neared the man I knew by how he carried himself that he was of some breeding, and when I gave him a good evening he answered in quite a pleasant, cultured voice that it looked as if we were in for a storm.

  “Then aren’t we both rather risking it?” I asked.

  He smiled and I thought I discerned an irony. “What would life be worth if there were no risks?”

  “True enough,” I said, and then tritely: “But that’s no reason for going to meet them.”

  “Well, let’s hope we both get back without a soaking,” he said. “But this is my regular evening walk and no storm’s going to stop me. You’re staying here?”

  The question had been fired a bit suddenly and I rather stammered over what I thought the minimum of information. But it did seem to me that he was very interested in even the little I told him, though at the end he merely nodded and said we had both better be pushing on.

  So on we went and that was that. I began reviewing what I’d noticed about him. His clothes, for instance, were old but well cut. The arthritis was worse, for the knee now had a decided bend in it, but the purple colouring of the face was far less prominent than I’d gathered from Wharton. The grey beard was fairly compact but untrimmed, and the face reminded me rather of the doctor in Luke Fildes’s picture. The full sensual lips were the worst part about it, and the whole expression, I thought, had been the least bit supercilious, except at that moment when I had been telling him about myself. As for my deductions, frankly they were very sketchy. I thought him a man who had once wielded a considerable authority and had come to regard life with a certain cynicism or amused indifference. And that was about all, and a pretty bad effort for one who claimed to be a student of humanity. Then I knew I should soon be seeing that cottage of his. Know where a man lives and you’ll know the man himself, I could tell myself consolingly.

  But Fi
ve Oaks was to be a surprise. Perhaps I can best describe it to you by saying that it reminded me of the scene of Hardy’s Woodlanders. All round it were the chestnut woods, interspersed with oaks, and before it was a meadow of mown hay. It had the same atmosphere of cool, remote shadow, and a serene and aloof antiquity. It was rather larger than a cottage, with a garden in good order and its front hedge neatly clipped, and its long, low roof of ancient tile was incredibly colourful in that evening sun. A lovely place, I thought, for an author or poet, or any man who wished to keep himself to himself and emerge from that peaceful solitude only when the mood took him.

  Now I guessed that Maddon would be taking the walk that avoided the village—the triangle to the stile, then to the fork and so back by the field-path—and so I sat down on an old oak stump and ran my eye over the house again at some leisure, a something which the absence of its owner permitted me to do. But no sooner did I sit than I heard a noise as of hammering. It seemed quite near—coming from the back of the house, in fact—and with that insatiable curiosity which is an ineradicable part of my make-up, I decided to explore.

  So I retraced my steps for a few yards to where I remembered having seen a back gate. Young chestnut, trimmed back to make a shady avenue, hid the rear of the house from me, but the noise was very near. So I opened the little gate and made a cautious way along the dry path. The path turned sharply right and it was as suddenly that the back of the house came into view. What I had rather expected to see was a gardener working overtime and hammering at something or other, but at what I did see I drew back behind a thick holly clump.

  A man was nailing something to the door and I was in time to see him put the last nail to the corner of some sort of a white placard and drive it home with a tiny hammer. Then he drew back and surveyed his effort, nodded at it with apparent satisfaction, replaced the hammer in his pocket and then turned my way. All I could think was that Five Oaks must be up for auction and that the man was an auctioneer, or a clerk, affixing notice of the sale. And that put me in a state of immediate alarm, for it would mean that Maddon was going away.