Death in Desolation (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

by George Bellairs

  She gave them whisky and cigarettes and then left them. They did not see her again that night.

  The place was either a renovated old one or else someone, presumably Timothy Quill, had started from scratch. There was a lot of newness about the house. Fittings, central heating equipment, expensive metal fireplace, polished floor with Persian mats scattered on it made it less like a farmhouse and more like a country retreat of some opulent city commuter. Outside, too, from what they had seen in the half darkness of coming night, the buildings had the look of an orderly, well-run factory, ranged in a precise square behind the house. Someone had casually said in the course of the enquiry that Timothy Quill had done well for himself. He had been bailiff at a farm, miles away, owned by a wealthy county wholesale grocer and had married his master’s daughter. This set-up was the obvious result.

  There was a small round oak table between the chairs occupied by Littlejohn and Cromwell and there were a few country magazines and social periodicals on it. Cromwell leaned and looked them over and finally took up a foolscap size leather-bound book and casually turned over the pages. He raised his eyebrows and passed it to Littlejohn.

  It was a modern version of a family album with photographs in it. The first few pages were concerned with the erection of Stillwaters. An old building, little more than a country cottage, with a few outhouses. Then the bare site. And then the gradual erection of the new farm itself. Several pictures of a garden party and some dogs. There were no children about. In a family as prolific as the Quills, this seemed strange. Perhaps it was explained by the blank spaces whence several photographs had been removed, like those, in days past, of the family rakes and remittance-men withdrawn after their misbehaviour and banished for ever.

  Footsteps sounded heavily from the rear and then Timothy Quill appeared in the doorway. He was the type who, according to the talk of the Quills about pride and the one-time manor house state of affairs at Sprawle, ought to have been the lord of Great Lands.

  In his youth, he must have cut a fine figure. Now, nearer fifty than forty, he had run to seed. He still had a good head of dark curly hair, now tufted at the sides with grey, but it had grown thin and showed his scalp through it, and had been carefully brushed over bald patches. His nose had thickened and the bone structure of his face, once triangular with a long pointed chin, had accumulated the bloated flesh of good living. He was still straight, six feet tall and heavy. He was wearing well-polished gumboots and a dark pullover and grey flannel trousers tucked in the boots. He stood for a moment in the doorway, frowning, one hand shading his eyes from the sudden light.

  ‘This is a late hour for police business, isn’t it?’

  Littlejohn apologised. They had been fully occupied in Marcroft all day, he said. They would not take much of Mr. Quill’s time.

  Quill nodded that he accepted the excuse and crossed to the whisky bottle and helped himself to a stiff drink and shot in a little soda. Another member of the family who had broken the traditional pledge against what they called strong drink.

  ‘Either of you have another?’

  They thanked him and declined.

  ‘Well, let’s get on with it. I can’t think what you want to ask me that will help you solve this crime. I see from the evening paper that it wasn’t committed by the gang who were robbing farmhouses. Or, at least, not by the black gang. It might have been done by another crowd imitating them. That sort of crime spreads. It’s so easy.’

  ‘You may be right. All the same, we must investigate every avenue …’

  ‘Well, I haven’t even got an avenue. I don’t see how I can help at all.’

  ‘I hear you and your late uncle got on very well.’

  ‘Where did you hear that? We never quarrelled, if that’s what you mean, but we weren’t in any way buddies. We rarely met. I never visited Great Lands. It turned my stomach, as a practical farmer, to see the place in such a shocking condition. It was our old family home, but had no sentimental ties for me. I suppose there’s a sense of property in the Quill blood, but that sort of property has no appeal to me. My uncle ought to have been hanged for letting it get into such a condition, though. And yet …’

  He paused and looked hard at the glass in his hand. He rose and refilled it.

  ‘And yet … I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the old man. Do you know how much he paid for the two hundred acres his father sold to pay off his stupid debts. Five thousand pounds!’

  He looked at them both to see their astonishment at the news and when they didn’t seem surprised, he shouted it again.

  ‘Five thousand pounds! Wilderness, it was. Valueless almost. And he left himself without a cent to restore it. He must have gone off his head.’

  Littlejohn shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I must confess, sir, that whenever we try to talk about Harry Quill, the state of the farm and the lost two hundred acres seems to dominate everything. As far as the discovery of who committed the murder goes, the farm itself and the land Harry Quill bought back are red herrings. We want to know had Harry Quill any enemies. Had he anybody who hated him so much that they’d go to his farm and strike him down in the night, with nobody but a helpless wife to witness the scene and call pathetically for help by firing a haystack to which she must have had to crawl across the farmyard? That effort killed her. She died without recovering consciousness. The murderer has two crimes on his conscience, if he has any conscience at all.’

  ‘You talk about discovering who committed the crime. I suppose you think that if it wasn’t the work of one of those gangs of hooligans, somebody in the family did it. Am I right?’

  ‘We’ve formed no ideas or theories yet. We’re just beginning the investigation.’

  Tim Quill took another good drink. He did it eagerly as though seeking some kind of inspiration in it instead of quenching his thirst.

  ‘All the same, you’re doubtless thinking somebody in the family might have done it with a view to benefiting from Harry’s will? That’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘That type of motive always has to be taken into account. Why?’

  ‘Because there’s no sense in it in this case. Have you seen Great Lands and the farmhouse property? A dead house, like an empty sepulchre. And five hundred acres of desert. No money with which to run it …’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Uncle Harry was dead broke after he bought the last of the land his father had sold. He needed capital to carry on with and he just hadn’t got any. Aunt Millicent had a little money of her own, but wouldn’t part with any of it. I don’t blame her. Uncle Harry made the rounds of the banks and finance offices, but they wouldn’t play. Great Lands farm was just a write-off as security. They’d have been mad to advance a bean against it. So Harry tried the family. He came to me. He told me the full story. He couldn’t justify the purchase of the land his father had sold in any practical way. All he could say over and over again, was that it was his, and he’d promised his father on his deathbed that he’d get it back again. And he was determined to have it back. He was mad. He just wanted it, like a child crying for something that takes his fancy. What he was going to do with it when once he’d got it, didn’t seem to matter. All he could do, in the circumstances, was just to sit and watch it go wilder than it already was.’

  ‘You refused to help?’

  ‘Of course I did. I’ve got a good set-up here, but I’m fully extended and haven’t any cash to spare. To throw my resources away on that sort of folly would have been lunacy.’

  ‘Did your uncle say what he proposed to do after you’d refused him?’

  ‘He said he’d have to try others in the family.’

  ‘Your brothers?’

  Quill laughed unpleasantly.

  ‘Have you met them?’

  ‘Inspector Cromwell has interviewed Gerald. I haven’t met either of them. Your other brother has been in hospital for three weeks, I hear.’

  ‘Yes. They haven’t two sixpences to rub together bet
ween them. My uncle despised them. Called them a pair of twerps. He certainly had no intention of asking them for assistance.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Probably Aunt Clara. She’s the wealthiest of the lot of us. She’s my great aunt, really, and a widow. She’s eighty.’

  ‘Tell us about her.’

  The old dog on the hearth, which had slept through everything like a dead thing, now began to twitch and yap in his dreams. Quill crossed and gently patted and comforted him and he stretched himself and settled again.

  ‘Aunt Clara is the widow of Algernon Quill. Algie, for short. He was a little tinpot corn-merchant in Marcroft when he married Aunt Clara. He was what you’d call a fancy-man. All dressed up to the nines, with his hair pomaded and plastered down and his moustache waxed. He had a way with the ladies. She was a school teacher and turned out to be a fine business woman. After the marriage, I gather, she handled all the business and Algie became a kind of drone. When he died, about thirty years ago, they owned between them three shops, a corn mill, four large farms, and a whole lot of house property. They occupied a nice Georgian house in Longton Curlieu, about ten miles south of Marcroft, and my aunt still lives there. They had a staff of servants and a carriage and pair, later to be replaced by a Rolls Royce, in which Aunt Clara will probably arrive at tomorrow’s funeral. It’s now a vintage model. Until he died, Algie used to be seen regularly in Marcroft, with a flower in his buttonhole, ogling all the girls just like the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Aunt sold out most of her enterprises years ago and therefore must have plenty of ready money.’

  ‘Did Harry approach her?’

  ‘I guess he did. I can’t be sure. But the answer was obvious from the state Great Lands remained in. I saw Harry a time or two in the mart at Marcroft after that, but he never said anything about his money affairs. I didn’t ask. As for Aunt Clara, she doesn’t associate much with the Quills. I don’t blame her. We’ll all be seeing her, though, tomorrow at Harry’s and Millie’s funerals. She attends all the family burials.’

  ‘Will you be there?’

  ‘Of course. Nunn, the lawyer, is officially in charge and has advised all the family of arrangements. It’s like an edict. If I don’t attend, I’ll have half the family calling here to know the reason why. Wanting to know if I’m sick or something … God knows why this family spirit keeps so many incongruous people hanging together, but it does. I’ll have to show up to keep those I don’t want from my doorstep. My wife won’t be going, of course, and there’ll be an inquisition about that, too.’

  ‘Was Harry friendly with all of them?’

  ‘Not a bit of it. If any of them turned up at Great Lands, he kept them standing at the door and soon gave them a rude hint that they’d better push off. And yet, if I’d died before him, he’d have been at the cemetery with all the rest to see me laid away and throw dust on my coffin.’

  ‘So, you’d say that though he kept his relatives at arm’s length, Harry Quill never hurt them so much that they’d want to kill him for the affront?’

  ‘Certainly they wouldn’t want to kill him. Any of the Quills murdering Harry is unthinkable. As a matter of fact, he was quite a family character. He and Aunt Clara were the eccentrics of the Quills, and I don’t need to tell you that such oddities become legendary among their relatives and exaggerated tales are bandied about concerning them. They create a sort of family pride and envy by their behaviour. After Aunt Clara’s phenomenal appearance tomorrow, when she’ll only speak to one or two chosen ones, in spite of the obsequious efforts of all the rest, the family will remember her antics and take pleasure in reminding one another of what she did and said.’

  Cromwell smiled to himself, thinking of his great-aunt Lucy, who ran away with a married man, a porter on Rugby station, who had fallen for her as he carried her bags from the Peterborough to the Crewe train.

  ‘Do you know Rosie Coggins?’

  Littlejohn changed the subject so suddenly that Tim Quill was taken aback. His lips moved, but no words came. He sat upright and swallowed a large drink and then slowly placed his glass on the table.

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  The conversation, from being good humoured, seemed to have taken a nasty turn now.

  ‘You know, I suppose, that Harry Quill and Rose were good friends?’

  ‘I’ve heard it talked about in the cattle market, but regarded it as bawdy gossip of the sort that flourishes there.’

  ‘It was true. We’ve confirmed it. They met frequently in her flat where, it seems, Harry used to retire and drink the stout he was ashamed to consume in public.’

  ‘What does Rose Coggins have to say about it? I suppose you’ve asked her?’

  ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘As barmaid at the Drovers Inn, that’s all. What had she to say about Uncle Harry?’

  He persisted angrily in his question, as though family pride were rising again.

  ‘She didn’t deny the rumour. He visited her for a friendly chat, a bottle of stout, and nothing else, she said.’

  ‘Nothing wrong in that, is there?’

  ‘No. But some people refuse to believe that it ended there.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. A barmaid!’

  Again! As though Harry had been a wealthy lord of the manor, instead of a bankrupt farmer, living on his wife’s income, dressed in old clothes, cloth cap and muddy boots and without a collar, a brass-topped stud glistening in the neckband of his shirt.

  ‘Why ridiculous? Rose seemed to think he was a gentleman for all his rough appearance and in spite of his poverty.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that! Even if it did come from the barmaid of a two-bit pub.’

  Then, suddenly, he thought of something else.

  ‘He hasn’t made a will in her favour, has he?’

  ‘You’ll know the answer tomorrow when the will is read. I suppose wills are read at the family gatherings.’

  ‘You know! And he has been up to something in his will, hasn’t he?’

  Tim Quill was quite upset. He filled up his glass again without offering more to the other two, and drank heavily.

  ‘I’ll be damned! Now what’s going to happen? I’ll have to see Nunn before that will is read. She’s not getting away with this.’

  ‘You’d better be quite sure Rose is involved before you start behaving like a bull in a china shop, sir.’

  No reply. Quill was too obsessed by his thoughts and a new horror in the situation. He wanted to be rid of his visitors.

  ‘Is that all? I want to think this all out before I go to bed. I’ll have to be in Nunn’s office good and early tomorrow. The funeral’s at eleven!’

  It seemed a thin sort of dismissal but there was no point in staying on.

  ‘One final question, sir. Where were you on the night your uncle died?’

  Quill looked alarmed.

  ‘You surely don’t think I killed him?’

  ‘Just routine, sir.’

  ‘I was at a meeting of the Farmers’ Union in Marcroft till eleven o’clock. Then I took a friend home. He lives a mile from here on the road to town. We’d a few drinks there and parted at one o’clock. Will that suit you?’

  ‘Quite well, thank you.’

  They bade him good night. He hardly seemed aware they were going.

  Mist was drifting up from the fields as they left and obscuring the lights dotted in the darkness. Somewhere a dog was barking.

  In the front windows of an upper room of the farmhouse lights were still burning. It must have been Mrs. Tim Quill, who had looked at the end of her tether and empty of all hope, waiting anxiously to know why the police had been there so long.

  7

  Gathering of the Clan

  ‘WHO ARE those two men? Are they reporters? We don’t want any intruders.’

  Aunt Clara descended from her ancient car assisted by Mr. Nunn. They were the last to arrive and now the process of interring Harry Quill and his wife could proceed.
<
br />   She pointed an ebony walking stick, with a large rubber ferrule on the business end of it, at Littlejohn and Cromwell, modestly watching in the shade of a huge marble monument denoting the last resting place of a former mayor of Marcroft. His period of office had been marked by the bulldozing down of the town centre and its re-erection, and his record on the memorial slab ended ‘Peace, perfect Peace.’

  ‘They’re the detectives from London investigating Harry’s death.’

  Aunt Clara screwed her lips tightly and then opened them briskly again with a noise like a popping champagne cork.

  ‘Tell them right away I wish to see them after the funeral. They’d better join us at the Marcroft Arms for coffee.’

  Mr. Nunn hesitated, as the proceedings had been held up long enough. Some of the family had been at the graveside for an hour or more, not quite knowing why they were there so early, but attracted like the crowd at a coronation or a football match.

  ‘Be off with you, Nunn. I’ll wait for you …’

  Which meant they’d all wait. So, the lawyer delivered the message.

  Everybody was dressed in black. Some of the men, bolder than the rest, had put on coloured pullovers under their coats, but changed their attitudes when faced by the family phalanx and had buttoned their jackets to conceal their finery. Those who had grown too large for their ceremonial suits were now deeply waisted and out of shape like large, distorted hour-glasses, as the buttons bit into their paunches.

  Many had come from distant parts. William Quill, a cousin of the dead man and usually known as Bill Quill, had even travelled from some remote spot in the south, seventy miles away, by motor-cycle, bringing with him his wife and family in a sidecar resembling a sedan chair. He had received an ovation as he eased his huge, pneumatic wife, panting for breath, from the sedan followed by a huge wreath and three children, one of whom he allowed to follow her mother and the other two, after hitting them each on the head, he impounded in the sidecar. His cap was back to front when he showed up and this he respectfully turned round to normal before he joined his tribe.

  Aunt Clara wore black, too, stockings and gloves and all, and a misshapen black felt hat squashed on her head. A small thin woman, very upright still, her face was brown and shrivelled like an old walnut, and her prominent scythe of a nose and pointed chin struggled to meet over her thin colourless lips.