Untimely Death

by Cyril Hare

  Eleanor, contemplating the fearsome array of silver, murmured that she found men’s minds also a little difficult to understand sometimes.

  “I wish you’d help me, ma’am,” said Mallett. “I’ve been so busy with other things that the matter of a present went clean out of my mind, and I got these in on appro at the last moment. Which shall I have?”

  Tactfully Eleanor steered Mallett’s choice in the direction of the plainest and least offensive of the mugs, and then they became free to talk of other things.

  *

  The christening was fixed for half-past three, with tea at the Grange to follow. Mallett was taking his housekeeper to the service and proposed that his guests should accompany them. Pettigrew was quite prepared to go, but Eleanor, unhappy in the knowledge that her holiday clothes would not stand up to the full finery of the Gorman clan on a state occasion, protested vigorously that outsiders would not be welcome. Eventually it was arranged by way of a compromise that they should accompany Mallett to Minster Tracy, but spend the afternoon with Hester Greenway, who was only too glad to entertain them.

  It was a fine day, and the prospective godfather was in high spirits, until something occurred on the way that seriously discomposed him. As they turned off the high road into the Minster Tracy lane, another car, coming in the opposite direction, turned also and followed them down the lane. Mallett, normally a punctiliously courteous driver, pulled up abruptly where the road was at its narrowest, so that the following car had to stop also. Then he got out and went back to speak to the other driver.

  He was gone some time, and when he returned it was apparent that he was, for him, in a very bad temper.

  “That idiot Parkinson!” he confided to Pettigrew, who was in the seat beside him. “For months now I’ve been on at him to get something done, and he has to choose to-day of all days!”

  Pettigrew could think of nothing useful to say, and accordingly said nothing. Presently Mallett’s sense of justice asserted itself.

  “Of course, he wasn’t to know,” he went on. “And he says it’s too late to stop anything now. He’s promised to keep everyone out of the way as much as possible till the service is over, so I dare say it will be all right. But it is awkward, all the same. It’s my godson I’m thinking of. Are babies of that age easily upset, do you think, Mr. Pettigrew?”

  Pettigrew assured him that according to his experience, babies of that age were not normally upset by the activities of the police, and Mallett regained his calm. By the time they reached their destination, the police car had dropped behind and was nowhere to be seen.

  It was evident when they arrived that the second smallest church in England was going to be fairly crowded that afternoon. Several cars were already drawn up along the road, and Mallett had to go some little distance to find a parking place. Hester Greenway was in position opposite the lych gate, watching the gathering of the clans with unabashed curiosity, and Frank and Eleanor joined her while the others went into the church.

  “It’s a wonderful turn-out,” she told them. “I really think there are more Gormans here than at the last two funerals. Dick has come, with his wife and both the boys, which I think is rather noble of them, considering. Unless the boys mean to try and drown the baby in the font—he has to live till he’s twelve to make things safe for his mother, doesn’t he?”

  Another car drew up. From it alighted a plump young woman in a black skirt that fitted rather too tightly over her haunches.

  “Ethel,” murmured Hester, as they watched her hobble uncertainly towards the church door on her high heels. “Why Tom lets her walk about looking like that, I can’t think. Where is Tom, I wonder? Surely he can’t have decided to give the party a miss?”

  Even as she spoke, a clatter of hooves made them look round. Tom was trotting up the lane on a thick-set dun cob that seemed familiar to Pettigrew. He waved to them cheerfully as he dismounted.

  “I had to take the old horse to be shod this afternoon,” he explained. “There was no time to get home afterwards, so I brought him straight on. Stand there!”

  He walked through the lych gate, leaving the animal standing outside, its ugly, intelligent face looking over the churchyard wall in the direction in which its master had disappeared. Apart from an occasional flick of its tail to dislodge the flies, it stood as quiet and still as the tombstones themselves.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a beast like that!” Hester murmured enviously. “How did Tom train it, do you suppose? It’s not a bit like his other cattle.”

  Hard behind Tom came the party from the Grange, in all the glory of a hired limousine with a uniformed chauffeur. The baby was almost invisible in an elaborate christening robe that must have done duty for generations of infant Gormans, but he and his mother were both eclipsed by the majestic presence of Louisa, splendid in black silk.

  “Well!” said Hester, as the little procession, with Doreen and Beryl at its tail, filed into church. “That’s another hatchet buried, it seems. What next, I wonder?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but one to which Pettigrew was longing to have an answer. Some way up the lane to his left, he had noticed a car drawn into the side under the hedge, well away from those of the guests at the christening. Now out of the tail of his eye he could see that two or three men were following the perimeter of the churchyard, moving eastwards, away from where they stood. Their heads just shewed above the wall, and presently the church cut them off by view. Evidently Inspector Parkinson was doing his best to keep his word, but, as Mallett had said, it was awkward.

  Pettigrew had no desire to add to the awkwardness. “Shall we be going?” he suggested. “I think we have seen all there is to see.”

  They turned to walk away, but had only taken a few steps when by common consent they halted.

  Someone was coming up the lane towards them, a stoutish, pallid man, round-shouldered and unshaven, moving heavily and uncertainly. From his gait and from the state of his shoes it looked as though he had walked some way. In one hand he carried, incongruously enough, an enormous sheaf of scarlet gladioli. It was not until he was quite near to them that Pettigrew recognized Mr. Joliffe.

  Joliffe was the first to speak.

  “Why, it’s Mr. and Mrs, Pettigrew!” he said, in a voice that suggested he had been drinking. “This is a surprise! And Miss Greenway, too—I might have known you wouldn’t be far away on such an occasion.”

  “Have you come for the christening?” Hester asked incredulously,

  “Yes. I’m late, I know. I ran out of petrol down the road. Forgot to fill the tank—I forget things very, very easily nowadays, ever since—you know.” He looked from one to another of them out of red-rimmed eyes. “And it needn’t ever have happened—any of it—if I’d only known. That’s the—what d’you call it?—irony, that’s the word, the irony of the situation. My grandson! I’m entitled to come to his christening, aren’t I?”

  He took off his hat with a gesture. “Good-bye. Glad to have met you,” he said, and walked past them through the lych gate, and up the path towards the church door.

  Pettigrew contrived to get there before him.

  “Mr. Joliffe,” he said. “The service must be nearly over, and they’ll all be coming out in a minute. Don’t you think it would be better to wait outside instead of going in now and disturbing them?”

  To his relief, Mr. Joliffe accepted the suggestion quite meekly.

  “Good idea,” he said. “I don’t want to disturb anyone. All I do want is to see the little chap, and his mother. And the girls of course. They used to be fond of their old granddad. But it’s my daughter I want the most, Mr. Pettigrew. It’s her I brought these flowers for”—the gladioli, trembled in his hand—“my own daughter!”

  Mr. Joliffe was lachrymose, pathetic and quite horrible, Pettigrew averted his eyes. A moment later the church door opened and the christening party poured out into the sunlight.

  What happened next was in the nature of an anticlimax. For some t
ime nobody noticed the presence of Mr. Joliffe at all. A cheerful throng of bonhomous Gormans elbowed him to one side while everyone took photographs of nearly everyone else. The mother, the godparents, the parson, Louisa, Doreen and Beryl were posed in varying permutations and combinations. The baby itself passed from one set of arms to another like the ball travelling down a line of three-quarters at Twickenham. It was Doreen who interrupted the orgy of photography by suddenly exclaiming, “Mum! There’s grandpa!”

  Edna Gorman was being photographed at the moment, with her son in her arms. She broke her pose at once, handed the infant to Louisa, who was standing near her, and went straight towards her father. The clamour of laughter and chat that had been filling the air was suddenly stilled, and the two met in utter silence.

  “Edna, my dear, forgive me,” said Joliffe. “But I had to come. These—these are for you, my dear.”

  With a clumsy gesture he thrust the flowers at his daughter. She stood motionless, looking at him as though at a stranger, making no move to take them.

  “Take them, please!” he pleaded. “I meant all for the best, I did indeed.”

  With a sudden movement she snatched them from him. “Thank you, father,” she said, in a small hard voice. “I wanted some flowers for Jack’s grave. These will do very well.”

  She turned abruptly and walked down the side of the church towards the further end of the churchyard. Mallett, who had been in the background, a silent spectator, came suddenly to life. “Not that way, Mrs. Gorman!” he called. “Not that way! Stop her, someone!” But it was too late. She had gone, and her father, still pleading and protesting, with her.

  An ancient yew tree, marking no doubt what had formerly been the boundary of the graveyard, stood on the south side of the little church, level with its east end. Its branches now extended almost to the church walls, and tree and church between them effectively screened from sight the end of the churchyard where the most recent graves had been dug. Edna Gorman and her father came down the path between tree and church and stopped aghast. Between them and their objective a rough canvas barrier had been erected. A group of men, some in police uniform, were standing talking beside it. A little to one side, two others were leaning on spades, awaiting orders. As the purport of what she saw dawned upon her, Mrs. Gorman opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came. The flowers dropped from her hand, and Mallett was just in time to catch her as she fell.

  Pettigrew was close behind Mallett. As he went forward to help he saw Joliffe coming back towards him, his face distorted with fear. He dodged past Pettigrew, and shambled rather than ran back along the way he had come to the west end of the church, into and through the group of men and women assembled there and on towards the lych gate. It was Tom Gorman who started the chase. “Tally-ho, boys! After him!” he cried, and Joliffe dashed into the lane with half the Gorman family in pursuit, hallooing and shouting, running after him because he was running away, they knew not why.

  Joliffe took a despairing look over his shoulder. They were gaining on him, and there was no escape. Then, as he ran alongside the churchyard wall, he came abreast of Tom’s horse, standing where it had been told to stand, its ears cocked, its nostrils quivering with excitement. In desperation he reached up for the reins and tried to put his foot in the stirrup. Tom shouted a warning, but it was unheard. In an instant the dun horse whipped round, tore the reins from Joliffe’s grasp with a toss of its head, and, rearing on its hind legs, struck him two appalling blows full upon the chest with its new-shod fore-feet.

  *

  “Silver Blaze,” said Mallett to Pettigrew some time later. “As you said, the answer was in my library all the time. It’s one of my favourite Holmes stories, too. I should have guessed it.”

  “You hadn’t my advantages,” said Pettigrew. “I had seen this horse in action at Bolter’s Tussock and knew what he was capable of. I suppose Jack tried to sneak off on him while his master was harbouring a stag in Satcherley Copse, and paid the penalty.”

  “Yes. Tom tells me that he found the body when he came back to where he had left his horse and decided that the easiest course was to say nothing about it. I have told him how foolish he has been——”

  “Say no more, I beg. I have a strong fellow feeling for Tom in that respect. And after all, he was not to know that the animal was going to give a public demonstration of its lethal properties.”

  “But I don’t understand,” said Eleanor. “Why was Mr. Joliffe running away?”

  “If you have murdered a man and seen him comfortably buried, it’s only natural to run away when you find the police are digging him up again.”

  “But Jack wasn’t murdered.”

  “No. But Gilbert was.”

  “Gilbert?”

  “It’s obvious when you come to think about it, isn’t it? Only nobody ever did think about it. Joliffe had to ensure that Jack’s death should seem to occur after Gilbert’s. So he postponed the apparent date of Jack’s decease, but he could only do that up to Tuesday morning, when his butcher’s shop would reopen for business. There was a fair chance that Gilbert would be dead by then, but he couldn’t be sure—so he made sure.”

  Hester could not contain her excitement.

  “Ellie!” she exclaimed. “When we met him on that famous Saturday he had come straight from seeing Gilbert at the Grange. He said so himself.”

  “Exactly,” said Pettigrew. “He was quite open about it—he could afford to be. He was paying a charitable call on his kinsman by marriage whom everybody knew to be dying of an incurable disease. What more natural than that in the course of his call he should give the sufferer a glass of water—and who was to know that there was anything in it besides water?”

  “What was in it?” Hester asked.

  Mallett supplied the answer. “So far as my enquiries go,” he said, “Joliffe on Saturday morning went to the chemist and bought a bottle of calomel—perfectly harmless to the ordinary man, but fatal to a patient in the last stages of kidney disease—or so the doctor tells me. Calomel, of course, contains mercury, and if that is what he used, the mercury could be traced in Gilbert’s body easily enough. Parkinson will tell me when the pathologist makes his report, but I think that explains why Joliffe ran away.”

  “And he had only to leave things alone for nine months for everything to turn out as he desired,” said Eleanor. “What was his expression? ‘The irony of the situation’!”

  *

  At the end of their stay at Sunbeam Cottage, Eleanor and Frank made an early start on their way home. As they drove across Bolter’s Tussock the morning mists were just clearing in prospect of a fine day. Opposite the place where Jack Gorman’s body had lain Eleanor stopped the car and they walked out together on to the moor. A tall stag, his antlers still in velvet, rose from his couch in the heather and trotted quietly away. A curlew called unseen from the clouds close above their heads. The Ling Water babbled its quiet song from the valley below. It was entirely peaceful. The ghosts were gone from Bolter’s Tussock.

  About the Author

  Cyril Hare was the pseudonym for the distinguished lawyer Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark. He was born in Surrey, in 1900, and was educated at Rugby and Oxford. A member of the Inner Temple, he was called to the Bar in 1924 and joined the chambers of Roland Oliver, who handled many of the great crime cases of the 1920s. He practised as a barrister until the Second World War, after which he served in various legal and judicial capacities including a time as a county court judge in Surrey.

  Hare’s crime novels, many of which draw on his legal experience, have been praised by Elizabeth Bowen and P. D. James among others. He died in 1958 - at the peak of his career as a judge, and at the height of his powers as a master of the whodunit.

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 1957

  under the title He Should Have Died Hereafter

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street />
  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2012

  All rights reserved

  © Cyril Hare (Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark), 1957

  The right of Cyril Hare (Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark) to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–28874–8