The Dreadful Hollow

by Nicholas Blake

  Blount had the press well trained. They’d learned not to disturb him at feeding time. So had Nigel. They chatted desultorily on neutral topics till the meal was cleared away.

  “Well now, Strangeways,” said Blount, mopping his bald head with a bandanna, “tell me all about it. I’ve got a report from Randall—good lad, that. Some of his facts need amplifying, I doubt. But we’ll be sorting them out tomorrow. You’ll have been seeing something of the people involved, now. Maybe you’ve formed some ideas?”

  It was Blount’s way to preserve meticulously the fiction of Nigel as a gentleman of abundant leisure and moderate reasoning power, who from time to time found himself involved, quite by accident, in criminal matters.

  “The crucial point,” began Nigel, “is whether Blick went home, after his visit to the Little Manor, or whether he was impersonated.”

  “Just so,” said Blount, nodded sagely, his gray eyes sleepy behind the pince-nez.

  “If he did go home, all the odds are that he was murdered by one of his sons. They both had pretty strong motives, as you know—Charles the stronger, perhaps, but we can’t be sure of that till we find out exactly what passed between Stanford and his father yesterday afternoon. If on the other hand—”

  “Easy, now, easy.” Blount put up a large hand. “Let’s stick to those two laddies for a minute. I’m just a slow-witted policeman”—he ignored the rude word which Nigel interjected—“who’s never read books about psychology. Now you tell me—what like are the Blick laddies?”

  “As possible murderers? Stanford’s an enthusiast rather than a fanatic; eccentric, but not lunatic, irresponsible; part of him hasn’t grown up yet. Take the binoculars episode—you’ve heard about that?”

  Blount nodded. Nigel gave his own theory of the motive and plan behind that extraordinary occurrence.

  “Aye. Verra like. I’ll have to work on the girl, Rosebay. She’d be the weaker link.”

  “Don’t you be too sure. She’s temperamental, and not very clever. But she’s got plenty of loyalty and protectiveness. She’d just go dumb on you, if she grasped what you were driving at—the implication of what she and Stanford did.”

  “Loyalty to Stanford?”

  “Yes. But it’s loyalty to her sister I meant.”

  “I see. Ye-es,” said Blount slowly. “Now for Charles Blick.”

  “Charles is a weakish character. Good-hearted up to a point; but he’s always suffered from his father’s attitude toward him—Sir Archibald treated him as a plodder, a born subordinate. Then there was this guilt of his about the broken engagement to Celandine Chantmerle. It rose up again recently when he fell in love with her sister, and prevented him taking action. He might easily have cracked up with the strain. He’d recently heard that Celandine gave him and Rosebay her blessing. So his father was the only obstacle. On paper, it’s a strong enough motive.”

  “On paper. Just so.”

  “For all that, I wonder simply if Charles would have the nerve to kill his father. I doubt if he would, in hot blood, as it were. But you can never tell with these repressed, guilt-ridden characters; when they do break out, they’re apt to go the limit and beyond.”

  “It wasn’t precisely hot blood, though—not with the sleeping draught.”

  “That’s certainly a point. Suppose his father returned that night, having failed to get Celandine on his side against the marriage. He’d quite likely go storming up to Charles’s room, to have it out with him. But would he go equipped with a sleeping powder? It doesn’t seem awfully plausible. On the other hand, if Charles was determined to get rid of his father, and somehow persuaded him to take a sleeping draught during the interview, you’d think he’d have given him an overdose and let him die quietly in his bed, not just enough to make him unconscious so that Charles could carry him up to the quarry.”

  Blount rang the bell and ordered drinks to be brought in. When the landlord had retired again, he said:

  “What’s your alternative, then?”

  “That Blick was killed before eleven-thirty, and the murderer impersonated him—went back to the Hall, pretended to go in by the back door, etc. I’d put my money on that, at present. Sir Archibald had said he’d turn out the kitchen light when he got home, but it was still burning next day. I don’t think he was the kind of man to forget a little thing like that, though he might have, being so worked up by then. And I feel pretty sure that Miss Chantmerle’s electric carriage was used. There were its wheel tracks on the grass near the quarry next morning, and they’d run over a clump of daffodils. She planted them in memory of her father, and she’s devoted to flowers; she’d never have run over them wittingly. Therefore they were run over in the dark. She couldn’t have done it herself, as the battery had run out. Therefore somebody must have borrowed the carriage and pushed the body up to the quarry in it; which suggests that Blick was attacked by the murderer somewhere near the Little Manor.”

  “How do you explain the sleeping draught, then?”

  “Blick must have taken it at the Little Manor. Either he felt the need of a sedative, toward the end of his interview with Miss Chantmerle, and slipped it into his whisky without her noticing; or it was put into his drink by someone else.”

  “By one of the sisters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Implying that one of them is the murderer, or at least an accomplice of the murderer?”

  “That doesn’t absolutely follow. Celandine might have felt she’d had just about enough of argy-bargy with her unwelcome visitor. The only way she could get rid of him was to make him feel so sleepy that he had to go. Or Rosebay—she’s madly protective with her sister. It’d be quite natural for her to think, ‘Sir A. is still badgering poor Celandine. Will he never go?’—and drop a powder into a glass for him; she admits she poured out their drinks.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “Blick leaves the house. He’s disgruntled and getting very sleepy. The murderer meets him, knocks him lightly on the head, or very hard; wonders how to dispose of the body, or has already planned it; borrows the invalid carriage.”

  “He might even have found Blick asleep on the ground somewhere, I dare say. Well, who is he, then?”

  “Someone who could have impersonated Blick. Not Rosebay, I imagine.”

  “Why not? She could have left the body lying for a wee while, put on its hat and coat, made her appearance at the Hall, then returned. A woman would need the invalid carriage to transport the body; a man might just as well have carried it, if the distance was as short as your theory implies.”

  “What’s Rosebay’s statement about that period?”

  Blount flicked through Randall’s report. “Says she went to bed immediately after bringing the drinks, went to sleep as soon as Blick had left. No proof. No alibi.”

  Nigel looked worried. “There’s a little discrepancy here. Celandine told me that Blick left about eleven-twenty. ‘He was not absolutely sober,’ she said; ‘he drank rather a lot of whisky here.’ Rosebay said she brought in the drinks ‘not long before’ Buick left the house—about eleven-ten, she thought. That gives him only ten minutes to drink a lot of whisky.”

  “I can drink a lot in five,” commented Blount.

  “Blick was normally an abstemious man, though.”

  “I’ll find out if their maid heard the bell when Miss Chantmerle rang it, and if she noticed what time it was. Randall doesn’t seem to have taken that up. Pass on now. I know what motive Rosebay had. And the others?”

  “The vicar and Daniel Durdle were wandering about that night. Durdle was drunk, the vicar has a gammy leg; either might have given the impression of the unsteady walk which the Hall cook noticed. Both wear dark clothes. At least the vicar does; and Durdle—”

  Blount referred to Randall’s report again. “Aye, it seems Durdle had on his Sabbath garments when he visited the New Inn.”

  “Both had strongish motives.” Nigel enlarged upon these for a few minutes.

  “But woul
d they commit murder, under the circumstances? You know them both.”

  “Mark Raynham might, in hot blood. And of course a man with a gammy leg would be more likely to use the invalid carriage. I’ve seen him lifting Miss Chantmerle a short distance; but to carry a drugged Blick up to the quarry from a spot somewhere between the Little Manor and the Hall—that’d be pretty hard work for him. Durdle—well, I’d put nothing past him. He’s a fanatic, all right; and a fanatic with a keen eye for the main chance. But it seems pretty certain that he gave Blick his nasty information about Raynham’s wife, which means that he exposed himself to Blick as the writer of the anonymous letters. Now Durdle wouldn’t have given Blick this information gratis. And I fancy the quid for his quo would be Blick’s assurance not to go on with his intention to turn Durdle and his mother out of the village. So Durdle’s obvious motive for doing in Sir A. is gone.”

  Superintendent Blount gazed quizzically at his companion. “I’ve never known anyone build so many bricks with so little straw as you do, Strangeways.”

  “I draw the outlines. Your job is to fill them in. You can have a jolly time tomorrow collecting facts and knocking holes in my arguments with them.”

  “And have you any more of these—e-eh—skeleton theories for me?”

  “Oh yes indeed. There’s Stanford and Charles.”

  “Guid presairrve us! Not again?”

  Nigel pointed a dogmatic finger at him. “What evidence have you that they both went to bed early and didn’t get up again till next morning? Only their own word. The man the cook saw might have been Charles Blick returning, after killing his father. He’s the one of our suspects who most resembles the dead man physically. What he’d done would tend to make him walk unsteadily. He’s the obvious accomplice, supposing it was Rosebay who doped the drink.”

  “I doubt you’re talking sense at last.”

  “Unfortunately, there’s an outsize snag in this theory. Just now, I overheard Charles say to the girl, ‘What happened to you last night, Bay? Why didn’t you come?’ Take it how you like, that’s a damned odd thing for a murderer to say to his accomplice, even when he didn’t know—or was past caring—that someone else was listening.”

  Blount’s face was transformed by a look of excitement and intelligence, which he seldom allowed to be seen upon it.

  “I’ll ask ye two things, Strangeways. First, if there’d been no murder, what would ye have said this Charles laddie was refairring to?”

  “A lover’s assignation,” replied Nigel at once.

  “And now”—Blount’s Scots accent grew more marked, as it always did when he was most serious— “and now, forget everything else, ignorr the mateerial fa-acts, juist consider motive—pure motive. Which of all these people wud ye say had the strongest motive, by and large, for wishing Sir Errchibald Blick dead?”

  Nigel’s answer came less readily this time. Finally, his pale blue eyes absently regarding the tankard of beer before him, he said: “Celandine Chantmerle, I suppose.”

  The next morning, while Blount and Detective Sergeant Reid were about their business, Nigel was meditating upon two anonymous letters which Randall had shown him the previous evening. They had been delivered by the same post as the letter Sir Archibald had received, and their envelopes too bore the Moreford postmark. It was reasonable to suppose that all three had been posted together, in the box opposite the New Inn. And, if this was so, to be delivered by the afternoon post, they must have been put in the box some time between 3:15 the previous day and 8:15 the next morning. Daniel Durdle had been under observation during this period. It was established that neither he nor his mother had gone near the New Inn post box. Yet the letter Blick had received, both in its style and in its malignant exposure of Rosebay’s secret, was very much after the manner of Daniel Durdle.

  But did Daniel know that Blick was coming down to Prior’s Umborne next day? The visit had been decided upon very suddenly. A telephone call to Stanford now produced the information that he had, in fact, mentioned to Durdle on the previous day that they were expecting his father. So the only problem which remained was the actual posting of the letters.

  Suddenly Nigel saw how it might have been done. Durdle could have put them, unstamped, among the outgoing mail which the van collected in the morning. They would be sorted at the G.P.O. in Moreford, stamped there, and sent back to Prior’s Umborne for the afternoon delivery. But they should have been stamped at the Prior’s Umborne post office. Surely the sorters at Moreford would notice three letters which failed to bear the official stamp. Nigel rang up Inspector Randall, to be categorically informed, after a pause for investigation, that no such letters had been received at the G.P.O.

  It was extremely aggravating. And the other two anonymous letters offered no sort of clue. They had been sent to Rosie, the village tart, and a smallholder named Biddle, accusing the latter of too great familiarity with his sister, the former of familiarity with every male in Prior’s Umborne. Routine stuff, thought Nigel. The voice was the voice of Daniel; but it seemed the hand could not have been his. Some talented pasticheur had been at work. But who? and why? There seemed three possible explanations. Either Daniel Durdle had contrived to post the letters in some way yet to be discovered, or they had been written by some other crackpot, touched off by the earlier poison-pen campaign, who knew of Sir Archibald’s visit; or—and Nigel thought this the most likely—they were part of a calculated plan, the letters to Biddle and Rosie being a blind to conceal the real purpose of the letter which Blick had received. But what was this purpose? On the face of it, Charles and Rosebay seemed to be the targets. Was it possible, however, that this letter might have been part of the plan for murdering Blick? Whatever its purpose, its effect had been to send Blick raging up to have it out with Celandine. She had refused to see him, yet he had forced his way into her presence—that much was established.

  Nigel directed the searchlight of his mind upon Celandine Chantmerle. It was perfectly true, if one considered motive alone, she stood out from the rest. She held Blick responsible for her father’s death, and Blick had been made to meet his end in the same place. Blick had threatened to cut off her income, and had exposed her idolized father’s lapse—perhaps taunted her with it. There was almost a superfluity of reasons why she should have killed him. But physically, it was impossible for her to have killed him in the way he was killed; while practically, all her possible motives but the first—revenge for her father—failed to fit in with the idea of a planned murder, for it was only just before his death that Blick had threatened and insulted her.

  Suppose, however, she had planned ahead to kill Sir Archibald. She would still need an accomplice to manage the physical part of it. Charles? the vicar? Stanford? Rosebay herself? Nigel’s theory about the field glasses eliminated Stanford and Rosebay. The vicar loved Celandine; but was he so besotted about her that he would commit murder under her influence? Nigel could not see him as another Macbeth. In hot blood, he might have struck; but throw a sleeping man over a cliff—surely not?

  So there remained Charles Blick, that elusive, unsatisfactory creature whose ordinariness cloaked him like a hurriedly-assumed disguise. Nigel could imagine him playing Macbeth to Celandine’s Lady Macbeth. Indeed, it was far easier to imagine him committing murder for her sake than for Rosebay’s. What if Charles had fallen in love with Celandine again, or never fallen out of it? No doubt his father would put the same veto on his marrying her as Rosebay; they were both tainted stock. The “understanding” with Rosebay might have been a blind, to conceal the murderous intention he shared with Celandine. Anyway, even before the crime Charles had given the appearance of anguish, uneasiness, guilt; and to look guilty is not inevitably a sign of innocence. His words to Rosebay “What happened to you last night? Why didn’t you come?”—they took a different color now. Perhaps he had arranged a meeting with the girl, to establish an alibi, and she had failed to turn up. The words had seemed to make nonsense of the theory that Charles and Rosebay
were accomplices; but they rang very differently tested against the idea of Charles and Celandine.

  As Nigel explored this new idea, he saw Rosebay Chantmerle walk rapidly past the window. Then she came into his room, very pale and breathing hard.

  “I must talk to you. No, not here. Can you come out?”

  Her eyes avoided his, but he felt her will tugging at him like a child’s hand.

  They went over to the crossroads; past the post office, where Mrs. Durdle regarded them bleakly through her window; and turned off the village street to the left. Not till the cottages were behind them did Rosebay speak again. Then she said abruptly: “Let’s stop here. I can’t go back. There are policemen everywhere up there. I’m frightened.”

  “Have they interviewed you yet?”

  “No. Not till eleven o’clock. Superintendent Blount wants to see Dinny and me then.”

  She spoke fast, jerkily, her hands clenched on the bar of the stile where she was sitting, her eyes darting at him timidly.

  “Blount won’t bully you. He’s not the strong-arm type,” said Nigel.

  The girl looked at him and down again, with a pathetic gratefulness. “I wish you’d be there, though. . . . Oh, damn and blast! It’s my last decent pair.” She must have laddered her stocking as she climbed onto the stile. “I’m always hitting things, knocking things over—” Her voice quavered away, and she began to sob desperately.

  Nigel took her thin wrist and held it, feeling the pulse beat like a frightened animal’s, and thinking—not for the first time—that Charles Blick ought to be in his place, supplying the consolation.

  There were ragged, rainy clouds in the low sky. Rosebay’s hair flamed sullenly, flickered by the gusty wind. She is passionate, Celandine is sensual, said Nigel to himself, then wondered why so naïve and irrelevant a thought should come into his head. Rosebay’s manner, by turns direct and evasive, seemed to be infectious.

  Her tears had stopped suddenly, like an April shower, but leaving no freshness and fragrance behind. From her body, as he stood close beside the stile, came an animal smell of fear, stuffy, almost rank. Or was he imagining this too? He felt an overmastering desire to clear the air. Holding her wrist firmly still, and stroking it a little, he said: “Look, we simply must get this field-glasses business out into the open. How can you expect me to help you, if—?”