Murder at the Manor

by Martin Edwards

  “How do you know it was sudden?”

  “If she’d been ill when Tucker wrote that memorandum, surely he’d have mentioned it.”

  “I suppose so. I really don’t remember. Look here, if anything turns on it, why don’t you go and see Sam?”

  “See him?” Bohun sounded slightly startled. “I imagined —”

  “Good Lord, no. Right as rain. Nearly ninety, but going very strong. Lives at Streatham. I’ll give him a ring and warn him to expect you.”

  ***

  Mr. Tucker lived in a neat, bright house on the exclusive side of Streatham Common. The middle-aged lady who opened the door said that she thought he was in the garden. He usually played clock-golf when the morning was fine. She desposited Bohun in the sitting room.

  It was a cheerful room. The only outstanding piece of furniture was a towering, polished mahogany bookcase which must have been divided several times, laterally and transversely, to get it through the low door. Bohun strolled across to look at it and found that it was entirely filled with Law Reports—the old sets of Chancery and King’s Bench which terminated in the year of Mr. Tucker’s retirement—and a bound set of Law Reports which had been kept up to date, and clearly represented Mr. Tucker’s current reading. There were no other books in the room.

  When Mr. Tucker came hopping in, agile, spry, indestructible, Bohun realised at once that he was in the presence of a natural centenarian. He turned his mind to the Martensen family. The old fellow had no difficulty in recollecting them. His memory was as sharp as when he had quitted the office.

  “Yes,” he said. “I went down to Wapentake, just as I had planned to do. It was not quite the social visit I had anticipated, you understand. Christabel’s sudden death put a stop to that. But there was a lot that could only be decided on the spot. Mr. Horniman was in Geneva. I was the only person available.”

  “You said ‘sudden death’?”

  “Oh, very,” said Mr. Tucker. He looked at Bohun steadily for a moment, then added, “Most unexpected. She was seventy at the time, but in fair health as far as anyone knew.”

  “Cardiac distension,” said Bohun. “I asked a doctor about it. It only really means that the heart stopped beating.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Tucker again. His head was tilted. He looked like a crafty old robin, uncertain whether to pick up an attractive crumb.

  “Have you ever considered,” he said unexpectedly, “how far old people put themselves into the power of their servants? Christabel was living quite alone. A mile in any direction from the nearest mortal. No telephone, even. She was substantially bedridden. Every moment of her day was governed by her servants, Mr. and Mrs. Sherman.” He gave a disconcerting little laugh. “Well, if they were good, kind-hearted people, that was all right. If they were the contrary, consider their power. They prepared all her food. They helped her up and down stairs. They drove her in the pony-cart. They tucked her up at night. They could have killed her at their own convenience.”

  “If they had any reason to do so,” said Bohun softly. “And were cleverer than the police. Who are quite clever men.”

  “Police?” said Mr. Tucker. “I don’t underestimate the police. They are extremely effective in what I might perhaps call an arm’s length murder. But what chance would they have in a cosy, domestic little tragedy of this sort? There were so many things the Shermans could do, or abstain from doing, that would kill an old woman of seventy. One pillow too many or too few. A wedged-open window on a foggy night. The wrong sort of food even, if they kept it up long enough. When things get serious, Miss Christabel wants the doctor. ‘Yes, madam,’ they say. ‘He’s coming as soon as he can. Tom’s gone off in the trap to get him.’ But of course they don’t. Or not until it’s just too late.”

  Bohun was listening with only half of his attention. With the other half he was trying to track down an echo. In the end he realised what it was. Mr. Tucker had spent so much of his life among legal documents that he had come to speak like them. ‘Substantially bedridden’, he said, and ‘Do or abstain from doing’.

  “Did you enjoy your visit?”

  “It was the most remarkable weekend I have ever spent,” said Mr. Tucker simply. “Do you know Wapentake?”

  “I’ve seen pictures of it. It was a show place at one time, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m not a great hand at architecture,” said Mr. Tucker. “It was too draughty for my taste.” He looked affectionately round his own snug room. “All pillars and porticoes and arches of which someone had tired and had them bricked up.”

  “Blind arches,” said Bohun. “I don’t think they were ever meant to be used. Just ornaments.”

  “It may have been beautiful once. I should not like to state positively. It was after dark when I arrived. And then, so little of it was really being used. The two great wings had been shut for thirty years, and of the main part of the house only one corner was really lived in. It was like —” Mr. Tucker sought about him for the precise description. “It was like living in a box, inside another box, inside another box.”

  “Oil lamps and log fires, I suppose,” said Bohun. He had a very clear picture of the little lawyer hopping down from the trap in the misty autumn dusk and advancing upon the huge, silent house.

  “It wasn’t uncomfortable,” said Mr. Tucker. “As far as it went. I had a very nice dinner in the small dining room, sitting all alone at a table laid for eighteen. The Shermans waited. He was an odd character. White-haired with a sort of absent-minded distinction. You might have taken him for an Oxford don. It was only when you looked at his hair and finger-nails in a better light that you changed your mind. She was a terrible woman. Perhaps I’m being wise after the event, but I don’t think so. Real, hard selfishness writes with an unmistakable pen on the human face. It can be oddly charming in the young. Not so as we come to middle age. She was a big woman, with a white face, and dressed in black. I can really tell you little more about her.”

  Bohun said that he now had a most accurate picture of Mrs. Sherman.

  Mr. Tucker bowed fractionally as counsel do when the judge commends their efforts.

  “After dinner,” he said, “Mr. Sherman went for the coffee and I apprehended that his wife wanted to talk business. I had no objection. For my taste the less time I had to spend there the better. She said, ‘I understand that the heirs are cousins.’

  “‘Second cousins,’ I said. ‘Alastair Martensen’s children.’

  “‘But it’s only the settled property that goes to them.’

  “‘That is so. The house and land pass to them under the Settlement.’

  “‘Little profit they’ll get out of that,’ she said.

  “I must have looked my surprise, for she added rather defiantly, ‘Miss Christabel had no secrets from us. We knew that the land and house and pictures and plate were tied up. But the rest of what’s in the house, she could do what she liked with that.’ She looked at me out of the corners of her eyes.

  “‘Yes,’ I said. ‘She could dispose of her free estate as she wished. But perhaps you’ll excuse me saying,’ I went on, for I was a little nettled, ‘that it’s no concern of yours.’

  “‘Indeed it concerns me—or us, rather,’ said Mrs. Sherman, for her husband had come in with the coffee at that moment. ‘All that she could leave she left to us.’

  “I must have sat staring at her.

  “She swept to the sideboard, picked up a paper she had put ready to hand and laid it before me. Then she went on with the clearing of the table, but with a sort of subdued and ferocious triumph.

  “It was not a long paper, but I read it slowly, because I wanted time to think.

  “The body of the document was in a strange handwriting, but well written and well phrased. As I looked at it my eye fell again on Mr. Sherman and I thought that perhaps my first guess had not been so far from the truth. Here was an educa
ted man who had fallen on evil days. A schoolmaster, or possibly even that professor that my imagination had painted. I felt no doubt that his was the hand that had penned the document. I cannot now recall the precise terms, but its effect was clear and unambiguous. Christabel Martensen left everything that she could leave, including the entire contents of the house (these were specifically mentioned) to the pair of them in grateful recognition of their faithful services. And it was signed by Christabel. I had seen her vast disjointed signature too often to doubt it. Under what compulsion or misapprehension I could not guess, but she had signed it all right.

  “I said, ‘But you know, this isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.’

  “Mrs. Sherman stopped clearing the table. She had the bread-board in one hand and the knife in the other and as she turned the light ran up the blade.

  “‘It’s signed and witnessed,’ she said, quite quiet.

  “‘You and your husband witnessed it,’ I agreed. ‘Unfortunately that means that neither of you can take any benefit under it.’

  “‘Is that the rule?’ she said, and she took a slanting look at her husband, who stood there dumb.

  “‘I’m afraid so,’ I said.

  “I knew, then, as plainly as if they had told me, that they had done murder, and all for nothing. To break the long silence I said, ‘I’ve changed my mind. I’ll have coffee in the library.’

  “Sherman picked up the tray and followed me in. Apart from the dining room the library was the only inhabited room on the ground floor. I fancy Christabel had used it as a sitting room. There was a fire of logs alight in the grate, but by that time I wanted somewhere where I could get my back up against a solid wall.

  “‘I’ll sit there,’ I said, pointing to a table in an alcove completely lined by books.

  “‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that, sir,’ said Sherman. ‘It’s rather damp, and there’s a draught from the ventilator. You’ll find it very chilling. I should sit by the fire.’

  “He couldn’t disguise the fact that he was an educated man.

  “‘All right,’ I said. After all, I could move as soon as he had gone. I pulled the armchair up to the fire, and added, ‘I hope there’s plenty of oil in the lamps. I may be sitting up late.’ In fact I had made up my mind not to go to bed at all. As soon as I was alone, and the door had shut (sound died very quickly in that old house. I never heard Sherman move away down the passage), I started to do some thinking. And there was a lot to think about.

  “They had killed the old lady, that I knew. But why in the name of Providence had they done it? She was overpaying them—and those sort of jobs were few and far between. They were not a stupid pair. Far from it. Yet they had done a foolish thing. They must have known the value of everything in the house. The heavy, unfashionable furniture, riddled with woodworm. The carpets which looked regal in the dim light, but fell to pieces the moment you tried to prise them off the floor. A few clothes and a very few jewels. The whole lot would go to Probate for less than a thousand pounds. And on the debit side of the account a sheaf of bad debts and an overdraft at the bank. Net result, nothing. Murder for nothing? Impossible. Then murder for what?

  “My eye fell on the books and this started a new train of thought. The Wapentake library had been a good one—”

  “I thought I remembered the name,” said Bohun. “‘Mercy’ Martensen was a well-known eighteenth-century collector, wasn’t he? A friend of Horace Walpole. He was a nob on Elizabethan poetry and Court Chronicles. I’m sorry. Please go on.”

  “Not at all,” said Mr. Tucker. “That’s very interesting. I knew the library was valuable, but I hadn’t realised it was historic. Everything in it of value had been disposed of in the salerooms over the last, lean, twenty years. But the thought which had occurred to me was this. Suppose that there were books—one really valuable book would do—which we had overlooked. The library had never been offered as a whole, and the books which had been sold had not been selected on any very logical principle. Outstanding ones, like the Book of Masques, had gone early on—Christabel had lived on that book for nearly three years. But I felt a doubt whether any instructed person had gone right through the collection.”

  “But how—?” said Bohun, and stopped. “Oh, I see. You thought that Mr. Sherman might have been knowledgeable enough to spot a winner if he saw one?”

  “Yes. And it made sense of their insistence that ‘all the contents’ should pass to them. Really, it would have been such a—such a safe crime.”

  “Foolproof,” said Bohun. “Can’t you see the story in the newspapers? Devoted old couple get left a houseful of worthless junk. The exciting discovery that among the rubbish has come to light some priceless book. The sale at Sotheby’s and the final close-up of the old pair fading away into well-earned retirement clasping a large cheque.”

  “I am not sure,” said Mr. Tucker, “that I thought it all out there and then, but I remember getting up, picking up one of the lamps and starting a sort of search. It was hopeless, of course. You could have put the most valuable book in the world right down in front of me and I would have lacked the skill to identify it. But I did think of one thing. I walked over to the recess where I had first intended to sit, held the lamp up and looked about me. No sign of damp. No draught. Not even a ventilator.

  “Then why, I asked myself, had Mr. Sherman troubled to lie about it? There was no question of a misunderstanding. He had said, quite clearly, ‘Don’t sit there. It’s damp. There’s a draught through the ventilator.’ Following my previous train of thought, I argued that if there was a valuable book they would not dare remove it from the library, since that would arouse just those suspicions they were anxious to avoid. But they might move it into some out-of-the-way corner, and this was the dimmest corner in the library. So I got the ladder and climbed up to the top shelf, and there, in the darkest angle, between two large volumes, I certainly found a curious book. Whether it was valuable or not, I couldn’t say, even now. Would you care for something? I myself have a glass of warm milk at this hour.”

  The maid had come into the room, but Bohun had been so engrossed that he had not heard her.

  “What—oh, milk will suit me. What sort of book was it?”

  “I took it back to the light,” said Mr. Tucker, “and examined it. The outer cover was a sort of yellowish wallet—it had once been white, I suppose—of vellum. The inside came right out, and was a series of pages, some old, of parchment, others rather newer, of paper. When I looked more closely I saw that at some time—the work was by no means recent—the original parchment pages had been taken apart and interleaved. I looked first at the writing on the parchment, but I couldn’t make a lot of it, except that it was in English. The letters were difficult. There was nothing to choose between ‘n’ and ‘u’ and ‘v’, and the ‘e’ looked like an ‘s’ and the ‘s’ like a straggly ‘f’.”

  “Extremely interesting,” said Bohun. “Was there writing on the interleaving?”

  “Yes. A transcription of what was on the parchment, or so I judged. It was old-fashioned writing, such as I’ve seen in legal deeds, but perfectly legible. It was a play. I’ve never been a reader, apart from the law”—Mr. Tucker glanced with apologetic pride at his bookcases—“but once I had got into it, do you know, I found it interesting. It was about a family—I can’t remember many of the names—but this girl was very beautiful and was being wooed by a boy who lived near her home. The boy had a so-called friend, but he was a bad lot really. He told a nobleman, who was his patron—the friend’s patron—about this girl, and the nobleman lured her away. He was actually helped by the girl’s mother, Megira. She wasn’t a very nice character, either. The boy went after the girl to try and rescue her. The queen of the country, who was on a progress, was staying near the nobleman’s house. The boy appealed to her, but the nobleman and Megira told the queen a lot of lies, and she refused even to give him audience. The boy h
ad a friend, a sort of clown, called Euthio, who was always trying to comfort him. Rather a superior sort of man for a clown. I suppose this is all terribly difficult for you to follow.”

  “Far from it,” said Bohun. “Tell me, are you familiar with the works of Scott?”

  Mr. Tucker’s face lighted up. “Of course, of course,” he said. “I think I have them all. His book on Contingent Remainders is the one I have found most useful.”

  “Not that Scott,” said Bohun. “Another one.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Tucker. “Yes. You mean the novelist. I’m afraid that I’ve never found much time for that sort of reading.”

  “Then that,” said Bohun, “makes it even more interesting. Can you recall anything that was said in the play? What form was it in? Some sort of verse?”

  “Well, it didn’t rhyme. Most of it was in—what would you call it?—blank verse. That’s right. One line sticks in my memory. When Euthio was talking to the boy, trying to comfort him, you see. He said: ‘What Time has swallowed comes not forth again.’ I thought that rather neat. In fact, it was all a good readable yarn and a lot of it was very nicely expressed. I got quite engrossed.

  “I never heard the door open. And when I suddenly saw that woman’s face behind me, I thought for a second it was Megira! She had some heavy thing in her hand and she slashed at my head with it. It was the woodworm that saved me. I had noticed that the chair was rickety, and as I twisted round sharply one of the chair-legs snapped right off, so I was already falling sideways when the thing hit my head, and instead of breaking my skull, it only dazed me. I had the sense to lie still. I could see Mrs. Sherman’s face from where I lay. There was no room for doubt. She was quite mad. She must have been going that way for some time and the shock of what I had told her at dinner had toppled her over.

  “I don’t think she had much idea of what she was doing. She stood for a few minutes peering round the bookshelves, then she picked up the lighted lamp and tossed it on to the floor. It went plop and there was a woof of flame and the paraffin ran all over the carpet with the fire chasing after it. I scrambled up on to my knees. If she saw me, she took no notice. She picked up the other two lamps, and tossed them down too. Then she went out and I heard her shut and lock the door. It was awkward for a moment because the windows up my end of the room were all the thin sort which you open at the top with a rope. Then I remembered there was another door in the corner beside the fireplace. I ran through and found myself in an annexe. It had larger windows, of plain glass, and I stood on the sill, kicked a hole and climbed out. I rolled down the grass bank into a flower-bed, and then fainted off properly.”