“Were,” she said, sadly. “Mrs. Fawcett and I were at school together as girls. When she married Mr. Fawcett – he was a clergyman, as perhaps you know – she went to live with him at Pontley, where he was vicar.”
“So I understand.”
“Then what do you want to know?”
“They had a son,” said Mont, cautiously.
“Oh, yes, Simon. And a daughter, Muriel. She married and lives in New Zealand. Or did. I never hear from her. She may be dead, too. She was never strong.”
“Mr. Simon Fawcett, though? He lives in London, as of course you know.”
“Why do you say that?” Mrs. Sewell showed signs of irritation. “Neither of the children kept up with me. I have hardly ever had news of Simon; none for years now.”
“Indeed? Has he not been to see you lately, then?”
“He never comes to see me. Never writes to me, either. He did not even answer my letter of condolence when his father died. I saw the notice of that in the newspaper, otherwise I should never have known.”
“And yet he gave me Beltonston as the name of – of a place very familiar to him.”
From the way the conversation was going Mont felt he could hardly disclose Fawcett’s mistake or speak of ‘a second home,’ or ‘a much-frequented spot’. On the other hand his curiosity grew.
Mrs. Sewell, noticing the hard bright look in her visitor’s eyes, grew disturbed.
“Is it Simon you have come here about?” she asked, anxiously. “Is he in any sort of trouble?”
“Would you expect him to be?”
“No. No, of course not. But it is natural to ask that, isn’t it, when the police are concerned with anyone? I think you had better tell me what is behind all this before I agree to answer any more questions.”
Mont hastened to reassure her. He explained that he only wanted to fill in Mr. Fawcett’s background, to confirm what he had been told by Mr. Fawcett himself.
“But why? I think I’m entitled to know why.”
Mont explained very briefly the main facts of the Morris case. All the tenants of the Kilburn flats had been interviewed he said, and their stories about themselves had to be checked.
“I see.”
Clearly, Mrs. Sewell was not interested in the Morris case and did not wish to be involved, however remotely with the murder of a cleaner in London.
“As I told you before,” she said, “I saw very little of Simon, or indeed of his parents, after he left school.”
“When would that be?”
“In the middle of the war. It was difficult for them to come over to see us. No petrol. The trains very uncertain and crowded. Muriel was a V. A. D. and never came. Simon only came once during the war. In the summer holidays after he’d left school. He was expecting to be called up, though he had a place at Oxford, and he was dreading it very much, his mother told me.”
“He didn’t tell you himself?”
“He was always very reticent. Very shy, as a child, always. In the early days it was not so noticeable because he and Muriel came together and went off to play in the garden while we grown-ups talked. They always came to lunch and went home after tea.”
“Was this occasion the last time he visited Beltonston?”
“It certainly was. The last time for any of them. On account of his illness, I think it must have been. I never quite understood it. Only that his mother was too upset to want to talk about it to anyone. Even to me.”
This was more like it, Mont thought. To encourage her he said, sympathetically, “Asthma is a particularly trying illness, isn’t it? Very chronic.”
“So he’s told you about it, has he?” Mrs. Sewell seemed relieved. “It was because it happened like that in the war. Stopped him doing any active service. My husband was inclined to think it was all put on, because of what his mother had said about his dread of the army. But I was sure it couldn’t have been. He had a very proud nature, he would have disdained showing cowardice. A bit conceited and vain, my husband always said. He was such a beautiful little boy when he was about five. I know it galled him to be put aside for a physical weakness.”
“Yes.” All this got him no further, Mont decided. The great friendship between the Sewells and the Fawcetts had not stood up well to strain. But that was immaterial as far as he was concerned.
“Well, thank you very much for all you’ve told me,” he said, preparing to leave. “I hope I haven’t taken up too much of your time.”
“I’m willing to do anything to help the son of a very dear friend,” she answered, She meant it, hoping that the word help had been the right one.
“There is just one more thing,” Mont said. “I wonder if you could give me a more precise idea of the actual date in the war – the summer, I think you said – on which you last saw Mr. Fawcett?”
“It must have been the end of July or the beginning of August of 1943,” she answered. “Before Bank Holiday, I’m sure. It was in the same week that poor boy’s body was found in the river. I remember writing to Mrs. Fawcett about it and saying how fortunate it was after they’d been, because the police were dragging the river for a whole day before they found him, caught under the bank. Perhaps you remember it? Rather a famous case at the time.”
Mont did not remember it. He was not in the police force then. He was in the army in North Africa. But he took leave politely and went back with Sergeant Clay to Beltonston police station.
“Any luck?” asked the superintendent there.
“Yes and no.”
He gave some account of his conversation which certainly revealed no lying on Simon’s part though it did give a different aspect to his apparent regard for Beltonston and the Sewells.
“Not been there for donkey’s years,” he said. “And yet he gave it as his home town. Odd, that. This date, now, 1943. Summer. Did you have a famous case, as Mrs. Sewell called it, of a drowned boy?”
“There are always drowned boys here in the summer. 1943? Before my time. I know who might be able to tell us. Is it important?”
“Might be.”
“I’ll get on to old Joe. Retired D. I. Runs one of the locals. Does very well out of it.”
A longish conversation on the telephone sent the superintendent to the station files. He brought the relevant one to show Mont.
“You saying ‘drowned boy’ put me off. ‘Murdered boy’ would have rung a bell.”
Mont looked quickly at Clay, who nodded eagerly.
“Let’s have it,” Mont said.
“Child of twelve or thereabouts. Went to fish in the river from the towpath, on the afternoon of August the second, 1943.”
“She got the year right, then,” Mont said.
“The poor kid never went home that evening and we were notified about nine o’clock that he was missing. His fishing rod – a home-made affair – and a jam jar with water but no fish in it were found on the bank. We searched and dragged and the body was recovered next day. The postmortem showed death was not from drowning but from manual strangulation. No sexual offence committed, so motive unknown.”
“No clues to the murderer’s identity?”
“One. That we still have, according to the file. I’ll have to look that up separately, if you’re interested. We had advice from you people in London, but did the job here. A man’s, or at any rate, adult’s thumb and third finger prints on the lad ‘s jam jar. Mixed up with the boy’s own dabs, of course.”
“But you never found the owner?”
“No. Eventually we took the prints of the whole male population in the town. We chased half a dozen tramps, too, who’d been noticed along the river side.”
“But you did not examine the male visitors to private houses who had come from outside the town that day?”
“That would have been quite a job, wouldn’t it? Finding out if there’d been any and where they’d visited. I suppose it could have been done. It wasn’t. D’you think this chap of yours might come up trumps? That’d be quite something afte
r all these years.”
“Wouldn’t it, just? Not that it’d help my own case materially.”
Sergeant Clay ventured to remark, “Wouldn’t it, sir? It was another manual strangulation.” But the others were staring at each other and paid no attention to him.
“I’d be grateful if you’d check on that print you’ve got,” Mont said, “Make sure it’s available and all that.”
“It’ll be available, here or in London.”
“There’s only one other thing. I’d like to see the spot on the river where the body was found and the place where the jam jar and tackle were lying. If that’s possible.”
“Certainly.” The superintendent consulted the file once more, then got up.
“There’s a diagram of the place. I know where it is. I’ll run you along, myself.”
The three men drove off together, through the town, over one bridge and back across another.
“Our river winds a lot,” said the Superintendent, unnecessarily. “Quicker to keep crossing than go round.”
He stopped in a short lane where the water appeared in front of them.
“Not supposed to take cars on to the towpath,” he said. “We’ll walk the rest.”
The river here was leaving the town. On the far bank the backs of some square buildings, looking like small factories, turned blank grimy windows to the stream. On the other, separate houses could be seen through trees and bushes, whose leaves were already beginning to change their green for gold and bronze.
“Here’s the place,” the superintendent said, stopping. “According to the file the rod was cracked but still in one piece, lying half in the water. The jar was up by the hedge on the other side of the path. These houses belong to …”
“Mrs. Sewell, for one,” broke in Sergeant Clay, eagerly. “I recognise the tele aerial on her roof. It’s not the same pattern as the rest.”
“It’s not an unique pattern,” said Mont, heavily, annoyed at being forestalled. “What’s more to the point is this acacia.”
He reached up to a branch that hung over the wooden fence. “I noticed it especially from the window of the room we were in.”
He turned to the superintendent.
“This door in the fence. Kept locked, I suppose?” He turned to try it, noting the rusty hinges at the side. “Yes. Locked. But easy enough for a lad of eighteen to climb over. This is Mrs. Sewell’s property, isn’t it?”
“It’s hers, all right. And they never thought of the day visitors. Come to that, I’d not have thought of them, myself. Not in this part of the town.”
Chapter Seven
“Looks like he’s a nut, then, after all, sir? Doesn’t it?” Sergeant Clay asked, on the way back to London.
“You’re jumping to conclusions. It’s still too early to make up our minds,” Mont answered. “The Beltonston case is stone-cold, mummified, dust and ashes, except for that finger-print. The only man who remembers the case personally, from the police point of view, is old Joe, the pub owner. At this stage you can’t say anything at all against Fawcett. We haven’t a scrap of evidence about his mentality, one way or the other. But whether the Beltonston chaps come up with their finger-print or not, we’re for Pontley, as soon as I’ve made one or two arrangements and looked at anything that’s waiting for me.”
Chief-inspector Mont was kept in London for the whole of the next day. But on the following one he and Clay set off for Pontley.
As they expected, the present occupant of the vicarage could tell them very little about the Fawcetts.
“The old man retired very shortly after his wife died,” the vicar said. “I was a curate in the north of England at the time. I very much wanted to get my family to the country. I happened to know our bishop personally and I was willing to take on two smaller parishes as well as this, where they had been managing with lay readers and occasional visits from the archdeacon.”
“Quite,” said Mont, firmly. “Had Mr. Fawcett left by the time you got here?”
“No. He stayed on for a month, to introduce me to the parishioners. But his wife’s death had been a great shock to him. It broke him. He never recovered.”
“So I’ve been told. Then you really know nothing about the Fawcett family? The younger members, particularly.”
“Only that the daughter was married and in New Zealand. The son is a schoolmaster, I believe.”
“But you never met him?”
“No. Never. There was some feeling about that in the village, I recollect. You see, Mrs. Fawcett is buried in the churchyard here and her husband said to me several times before he left that he looked forward to lying beside her there and hoped it would be soon. So it was, poor man, but his son buried him in the town where he died, against his father’s expressed wish. So I never met young Mr. Fawcett. I wrote a letter to him, reminding him of his father’s intention and offering to make all the arrangements. But he did not answer my letter. Finally I wrote to the owner of the guest house where the old man spent his last months and she wrote back to say the funeral had been carried out at the church Mr. Fawcett had attended while he was with her. As I say, a good many of my older parishioners were very sad and also very indignant. They thought a lot of Mr. Fawcett.”
“So there are people living here who knew the family?” Mont asked.
“Oh, several. The one most likely to help you would be Emily – Miss Skinner. She used to cook for them from before the war, I believe. She was too old, even then, for any sort of national service. She stayed on until Mr. Fawcett himself left here. My wife would have liked to keep her, but she insisted upon leaving and really she was too old. She must have been over seventy then, so goodness knows what she is now.”
“Not likely to be any help, is she?” Sergeant Clay said, as they left the vicarage to walk to Miss Skinner’s cottage. “Over eighty and all that.”
“I don’t know what you mean by all that. I’ve known old people in their nineties remember the past as fresh as if it was yesterday. It’s often the present that foxes them.”
This did not seem to make much sense to Clay, but he walked on in silence.
Miss Skinner lived with her niece, a grey-haired woman in her fifties, who opened the door to the two men. She was reluctant at first to let them speak to her aunt, but a high demanding voice from inside the house made her step back from the front door and allow them to pass her.
Miss Skinner was indeed very old and very bent, but her eyes were bright and quick and she took much less time than her niece to grasp what was wanted of her. Probably because she had known the Fawcett family so well and the other woman, who had not lived in Pontley until after she was widowed, not at all.
“Mr. Fawcett was a saint,” Miss Skinner declared. “She did her best, but she wasn’t a patch on him. Too nervy, by half!”
“Mrs. Fawcett, you mean?”
“Who else? But then she had her trials, in which we all shared, I may say.”
“We – being?”
“What’s that you say?”
“Who were you including in the trials?”
Miss Skinner found this amusing. Her old face split into a wide grin, followed by chuckles and choking and streaming tears, until she had gasped her way back to solemnity.
“I was including the kitchen,” she said. “Me and Joan, that was the girl that came in to clean. Only fourteen, just left school.”
“Can you tell me when this was?”
“It was the time of Mr. Simon’s illness. The vicar wanted him to go away, but she wouldn’t hear of it. He must be nursed at home. She must nurse him. You can see what that meant. A trial for us all, like I said. The girl left because she couldn’t stand it.”
“Couldn’t stand what?”
“Mr. Simon’s ways. Asleep from morning to night some days. And others pacing his room, up and down, up and down. Poor soul. What he suffered. What we all suffered. He’d have done better in hospital. But Mr. Fawcett was a saint and devoted to her. He wouldn’t force her. It�
�s my belief she’d have gone the same way if he’d insisted.”
Her curious mirth had left her. Perhaps it had only been the excitement of having strangers to visit her. The tears that rolled down her lined face now were sorrowful. She had been part of the life of the vicarage, had shared their woes, had grieved for their distress. To Sergeant Clay, London born and bred, her attitude was incomprehensible. He put her agitation down to her extreme old age.
“You’d better go,” the niece said, speaking severely. “You’re only upsetting her.”
But Mont was determined to finish what promised so well.
“I’ve been given to understand,” he said, “that young Mr. Fawcett suffered from asthma.”
Miss Skinner’s face changed. A look of cunning spread slowly over it; she leaned forward to touch the Chief inspector’s sleeve.
“That’s what was given out,” she said. “And quite right, too. But my own dear mother had the asthma and what I didn’t know of it would go on a penny piece.”
“It was not asthma, then. Was it a nervous breakdown? It sounds like that from your description.”
She shook her head.
“I made a promise and I’ll never break it,” she said, firmly. “I don’t know for why you come to me with your questions and your curiosity. You’d better ask Dr. Marshall, him that was in charge of the case. Or that young fellow that’s his partner now. Not that either of them will tell you.” She peered up triumphantly into Mont’s face. “Doctors don’t tell, do they?”
“Is Dr. Marshall still practising here, then?” he asked. But Miss Skinner had closed her eyes and did not seem to hear him.
He moved away, Clay following. At the door, held open by the niece, he repeated the question.
“Dr. Marshall’s dead,” she said. “She doesn’t know. We thought it might be too much for her – too much of a shock. It’s Dr. Campbell now. She thinks he comes because Dr. Marshall is too busy. Dr. Campbell treats her very well.”
“Would there be anyone else in Pontley who knew the Fawcetts?” Mont asked her.
“I couldn’t say, I’m sure.”
The Hunter and the Trapped Page 14
