A man was painting, wholly absorbed. His fair hair looked bleached against his bronzed skin. His clothes were comfortably dilapidated, and painting gear littered the grass beside him.
As Olivia approached with Pollard she instinctively stopped, and waited. In the act of throwing down a brush and selecting another the artist caught sight of her, stared, surfaced and grinned broadly.
‘Good Lord, it’s Mrs Strode!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’d no idea you were staying on in Italy.’
She found herself unable to speak and looking at him compassionately. He reacted with a puzzled expression, which after a quick glance at Pollard, became one of wariness.
‘Mrs Strode,’ came Pollard’s voice, ‘this gentleman appears to know you. Do you know him?’
‘We were recently passengers on the same cruise,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I knew him as Mr John Bayley.’
‘He is, in fact, Mr James Bayley,’ Pollard went on, ‘and is wanted in connection with a conspiracy to commit arson. Thank you, Mrs Strode.’
At Pollard’s slight dismissive nod she turned and walked away under the trees.
The two men remained, eyeing each other steadily. Suddenly James Bayley flung back his head and laughed. ‘My God, it’s funny,’ he said. ‘With the world in the bloody mess it is, a British bobby comes tailing half across Europe about a semi-derelict house being fired.’
‘If it was merely a question of arson,’ Pollard told him, ‘I shouldn’t be here.’
The other stared at him blankly. ‘I’m not with you.’
‘A man’s body was found in the ruins of the house.’
James Bayley continued to stare, but now with an appalled expression. ‘My God,’ he said again, ‘how bloody awful. He must have been asleep, or something.’
‘The man didn’t die as a result of the fire,’ Pollard replied, watching narrowly. ‘It has been established by forensic experts that his skull was fractured by a series of blows from a metal object.’
There was a tense silence.
‘So what?’ James Bayley demanded loudly and violently.
‘Your brother-in-law, Mr John Bayley, your sister and you yourself, face a charge of conspiracy in connection with the arson. In addition, Mr John Bayley faces a murder charge, and his wife one of being an accessory to the crime.’
With an abrupt movement James Bayley began to sweep his belongings into a painting satchel. ‘I’m returning with you,’ he said curtly.
Precisely at nine-thirty pm that evening the John Bayleys were shown into Pollard’s room at the Yard. As he rose to greet them they were tautly polite.
‘Well, we’ve come along here as you asked, Superintendent, and at some inconvenience, I may tell you,’ John Bayley said. ‘However, I suppose it’s preferable to trekking down to Roccombe again.’
‘I’m sick to death of the whole business,’ Lorna Bayley added. ‘Why on earth was I ever landed with the blasted place? I should have refused the bequest. It’s been a perfect curse from first to last.’
Pollard invited them both to sit down. Chairs were drawn forward by Sergeant Longman and accepted with marked ill grace.
‘We now have information which makes it possible to clear up the whole business of the fire at Mrs Bayley’s house,’ Pollard said in an official tone, ‘and it’s for this purpose that you have been asked to come here this evening. We’ll consider the fresh facts in a moment. But before I come on to them, I want to go back to our last meeting. On that occasion I asked you a number of questions. Would either or both of you care to amend any of the answers you gave to them?’
He watched John Bayley go rigid, and jerk up his head. ‘I’ve no idea what you can mean. The question you’ve just asked strikes me as highly offensive.’
Pollard turned to Lorna Bayley. Beautifully turned out, she was sitting erect with hands tightly clasped, her face expressionless.
‘I’ve nothing to add to what my husband has just said,’ she replied, ‘particularly about your last question being offensive.’
Without comment Pollard pressed a bell on his desk. The door opened.
‘Mr James Bayley, sir,’ Toye announced.
There was an electric silence. James Bayley, still unkempt, stood rooted to the spot, staring fixedly at his brother-in-law in dress suit and black tie. Finally Toye touched him on the shoulder, and he subsided mechanically on to a chair.
‘You all seem to have very little to say to each other,’ Pollard remarked, ‘so I will do the talking. You now realize, of course, that the exchange of identity between Mr John and Mr James Bayley for the period of the Penelope cruise and its purpose is known to us. Mr James Bayley has, in fact, freely admitted it.’
John Bayley turned on James with an expression of such malevolence that Toye quietly took up a stance between them.
One actor, Pollard thought, in an irrelevant flash sparked off by a certain facial resemblance, but playing two characters who are worlds apart.
‘The purpose of the exchange is quite obvious,’ he went on. ‘Mrs Bayley had been left the house at Roccombe. It occupied a site next to a supermarket, the owners of which were anxious to acquire the site for purposes of expansion. Mrs Bayley was equally anxious for the deal to go through, but some local preservation enthusiasts succeeded in getting the house listed as of architectural and historic interest. So demolition was off, and the supermarket proprietors no longer concerned to make a deal. No doubt it was at this point that the idea of arson occurred to either Mrs Bayley or her husband. In due course Mr James Bayley was approached, and agreed — no doubt for a handsome consideration — to impersonate his brother-in-law on the recent cruise by the Penelope in the Mediterranean. There is, of course, a family resemblance between the two Mr Bayleys, who are cousins as well as brothers-in-law, and on the strength of this a temporary exchange of passports was risked, and proved successful.’
Pollard paused. Both the John Bayleys were staring at James, John with hatred and fury, Lorna with agonized appeal.
‘To continue,’ he said, ‘in the course of the cruise Mr John Bayley came back to London as his cousin James. On Thursday, April 26th, he travelled to Roccombe by train, stayed at the Railway Hotel as Mr J. Brockenhurst of Huddersfield, and that night set fire to his wife’s house. He is not an arson expert, and in any case the forensic experts would have detected that the fire was started deliberately. But he might very well have made a successful getaway if there hadn’t been a second person in the house that night, an elderly man whose body was found in the ruins by the fire brigade the next day.’
‘You blasted fool!’ John Bayley spat at James. ‘Too bloody incompetent even to keep your mouth shut. All right —’ he swung round to Pollard — ‘I fired the place, and why the hell not? It was my wife’s property, and if she wanted the site cleared, she’d got a right to it. Call this a free country! It might be a communist state. I tell you, people have had about enough of this bloody interference. They won’t stand for it much longer.’
‘One thing that people aren’t prepared to stand for, Mr Bayley,’ Pollard said quietly, ‘is murder. We know, you see, that the man whose body was found in the wreckage of your wife’s house didn’t die in the fire, his presence having been overlooked by you. His skull had been deliberately smashed in by —’
Before Toye could stop him James Bayley hurled himself at his cousin.
‘You murdering devil!’ he yelled. ‘Dragging Lorna into this!’
The door burst open in answer to Pollard’s ring, and a constable helped Toye and Longman drag the two men apart. Pollard, standing behind his desk, surveyed the scene, aware that this was the crunch.
‘Of course, it’s perfectly clear, Mr and Mrs Bayley,’ he said, ‘why you felt it was too big a risk to let Mrs Audrey Vickers go on living. She had your London address, and proposed to call. You were only safe so long as the exchange of identity by Mr John and Mr James Bayley remained undiscovered, weren’t you?’
The room was very quiet. James Bayl
ey, still breathing fast from the scuffle, stared at Pollard in blank incomprehension.
Suddenly his sister sprang to her feet, and pointed at him with a shaking hand.
‘I tell you, James knows nothing about the Vickers woman,’ she shouted. ‘Nothing! Nothing! How could he? He’d gone from Venice before John met me, and told me he’d killed that man at Roccombe. That’s when I saw that Vickers —’ Her voice cracked ominously.
After supper one evening, some weeks later, Pollard rose from his chair with a groan to answer the telephone.
‘Strode here,’ a voice said. ‘It’s honours easy: we had a daughter this afternoon. Eight pounds two ounces.’
‘Terrific,’ Pollard replied. ‘Both doing fine, I hope?’
‘Both positively bouncing. I’ve just come away from the hospital. They chuck you out at eight-thirty. My mother’s here, holding the fort. We were wondering if you’d both care to come round tomorrow, after supper. She’s just seen in the evening paper that James Bayley’s been granted bail on his second application.’
‘Hang on a minute,’ Pollard said. ‘I’ll just find out from Jane how we’re fixed.’
He returned to say that unless he were suddenly yanked off to a case, they would love to come.
‘I agree that it was very wrong of James Bayley to go in on the arson plan,’ Olivia Strode said, ‘but all the same, I liked the man. I’ve never believed for a moment that he had anything to do with Audrey Vickers’ death.’
‘Your feminine intuition was absolutely sound,’ Pollard replied. ‘But we had to have the facts. I’ve been out to Italy again, you know.’
‘Not again?’ she exclaimed.
‘I’ve been green with envy,’ Jane Pollard remarked. ‘Look how business wives gallivant all over the world, with all expenses paid.’
‘Why not join Women’s Lib?’ suggested David Strode. ‘Better still, let’s park our offspring on doting grandparents, and go on an uncluttered holiday ourselves.’
‘I’m on,’ said Pollard. ‘Reverting to James Bayley, I went out to check up on his own statement and his sister’s about his movements before and after the cruise. Their statements agreed, incidentally. She’s been desperately anxious to convince us that James knew nothing about either of the murders. Her concern for him’s something in her favour, anyway.’
‘I suppose the arson was planned some time ago?’ Olivia asked.
‘Yes, last summer. As soon as a preservation order was put on the house, and the deal with the supermarket people was off. James turned up at Trafalgar Terrace in October. By this time the John Bayleys were agreed that he couldn’t possibly play the lead in the affair, but should be able to manage a supporting role. He was perfectly willing to come in, and admits that he saw it as a good joke. His knowledge of Venice came in very useful, of course, when the three of them got down to detailed planning.’
‘The details are what I’m longing to hear about,’ Olivia said. ‘It seems to me that they took the most incredible risks.’
‘It’s amazing what you can carry off, given the nerve,’ remarked her son. ‘Carry on, Super.’
‘It’s a bit involved,’ Pollard replied, ‘but I’ll try to be coherent. On the day the cruise started, James arrived in Venice by an early train, and left a suitcase containing his personal belongings in a luggage locker at the station. Meanwhile the John Bayleys flew out to Venice from London on a morning scheduled flight, instead of coming with the bulk of the cruise passengers in the chartered planes which arrived after lunch. They had booked their return flight on the afternoon of Monday 30 April.’
‘I see,’ Olivia said. ‘I remember Charles Moreton-Blake remarking that they’d been very lucky to get seats at such short notice.’
‘Nothing foreseeable was left to chance. Later on in the morning John and James met casually, and under cover of chatting for a few minutes they exchanged passports. They are roughly the same height and colouring, and sufficiently alike to get by on the average passport scrutiny. James then joined up with his sister at a prearranged spot, and they proceeded to while away the time until embarkation as husband and wife sightseeing in Venice. John took the next train to Milan, and returned to England on James’s passport, as James.’
‘I suppose the Odyssey people sent prospective passenger lists to everybody who’d booked?’ David Strode enquired. ‘The Bayleys would have vetted theirs carefully, and just had to trust to luck that no one they knew would turn up at the last minute on a cancellation.’
‘This was one of the main hazards, but their luck held. So did John’s — as James — in London. No one seems to have taken any interest in him. The John Bayleys haven’t been long in their present house, and James had only visited them there twice. John stayed indoors a lot, and spent most of his time in the studio to be in character. We know that he donned hornrims for the trip to Roccombe, and probably stuck rubber pads in his cheeks, and tried a few other minor dodges to disguise himself not too obviously.
‘Well, we now come to the morning of Monday, 30 April, when the Penelope docked at Venice. You come in here, Mrs Strode. The two Bayleys were at breakfast as usual, I imagine?’
‘Yes, they certainly were,’ Olivia replied. ‘We were all rather early that morning, and talked about how we were going to spend the day. I can remember Mrs Bayley saying that they were going to ring their solicitor, and find out if there was really any need for them to cut short their holiday because of the fire. Immediately after breakfast I went off for the whole day with my friends. At dinner that evening the other people at our table said that the Bayleys’ solicitor had strongly advised them to return at once, and they’d left on an afternoon plane.’
‘In actual fact, they didn’t call their solicitor. They went to an hotel and collected an envelope addressed to J. Bayley, Esq, James presenting John’s passport as evidence of identity, and Mrs Bayley booking a table for lunch for two. Inside the envelope was James’s passport, left there earlier by John, who had come out on a night flight. All right?’
Olivia clutched her head. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But where was John Bayley in the meantime?’
Pollard grinned. ‘Sunbathing on the Lido,’ he said.
‘Sunbathing on the Lido?’ chorused his hearers incredulously.
‘Why not? What can be more anonymous than a row of semi-nude torsos on a beach?’
‘I call that a master stroke,’ said David. ‘Do go on. I can’t wait.’
‘Having now got his own passport, James returned John’s to his sister, to be handed over to its owner in due course. They then went back to the Penelope, announced that they had to leave at once for England, and shifted their luggage by water-taxi to the air terminal. They then mingled with the crowds and parted unobtrusively. In the meantime John was organizing his return from the Lido. He either had to come by vaporetto, and risk running into cruise passengers whom he wouldn’t be able to recognize, or hire a water-taxi, with a much greater risk of being remembered by the boatman if questions were ever asked. He chose the water-taxi.’
‘From your tone, obviously, a mistake,’ Jane commented. ‘But the other might have been complete disaster, too. One couldn’t know.’
‘No, one couldn’t,’ agreed her husband. ‘Well, John Bayley joined up with his wife, again at some prearranged spot. One has to remember how inconspicuous meetings and partings can be in big holiday crowds like those in Venice at this time of year. She handed over his passport, and they went along to the hotel where she had booked a table for lunch. It can’t have been a very successful meal. In the course of it, she learnt that her husband had killed a man at Roccombe, and he learnt from her that Audrey Vickers could turn up at any time in London and discover about the impersonation.’
‘And James?’ asked Olivia.
‘On parting from his sister James went to the railway station, to retrieve his suitcase, and get a train out of Venice. He found that one was shortly leaving for Padua, and took a ticket. Then a hitch occurred for which he�
��ll be thankful for the rest of his life, I should think. When he went to his luggage locker the key jammed, and he had to get help from an official. You can imagine the excitement, and the witnesses to his last-minute dash for the train.’
David Strode whistled. ‘Meaning that there were witnesses to the time he left Venice, and, harking back, also a witness to the time John Bayley disembarked from his water-taxi?’
‘This is it. The gist of it is that James was out of Venice half-an-hour before John returned to it from the Lido. It was the disclosures over the lunch-table which sparked off the plan to liquidate Audrey Vickers, and by that time James had vanished into the unknown. I was able to establish all this by going out to Venice: hence the success of his second application for bail.’
‘I’m so thankful he’s clear as far as the murder goes,’ Olivia said with feeling. ‘Of course, he’s got a terrible time ahead of him, over his sister, I mean. His own prison sentence — I suppose he’ll get one in connection with the arson conspiracy — looks like being the least part of his troubles, poor man.’
‘He’ll get over it all in the long term,’ Pollard said with conviction. ‘He’s the buoyant type.’
David Strode raised his glass. ‘Had I a hat,’ he said, ‘I’d take it off to you, Pollard.’
‘Nice of you,’ Pollard replied, reciprocating, ‘but it’s been anything but a one-man job, you know. It was Mrs Strode who put us on to the identity swop. Actually, if I’d been a bit more receptive, I should have realized that my sergeant was groping along the same line at an earlier stage in the case. It was when we were assuming that James had done the arson job. He made a remark to the effect that the artistic temperament and carefully planned arson didn’t seem to hang together.’
‘Is that Sergeant Toye?’ Olivia asked. ‘I remember him at Affacombe. Very quiet and serious, and taking it all in.’
‘The same chap. Only he’s just been promoted to Inspector on the strength of what he’s pulled off during this Vickers affair.’
Cyanide With Compliments Page 19
