They Rang Up the Police: A classic murder mystery set in rural England (Inspector Guy Northeast Book 1)

by Joanna Cannan

  Sleep when it came was disturbed by dreams. “Come along now, Northeast,” said the Chief Constable, turkey-red. “Come along, come along Northeast,” said the Superintendent, thrusting out his jaw. Guy tried to answer, opened his mouth, but no words came. “Come along, Northeast,” they said in swelling chorus. “Come along, come along.”

  7

  Friday

  Guy was up early next morning. He had sent out for the newspapers, and, down in the coffee room, neglecting a desiccated grapefruit and a cup of grayish coffee, he unfolded them. Under such headlines as “Hatchet Fells Horsewoman” and “Dreadful Discovery on Dung Heap,” the London papers, with airy inaccuracy, emphasized the human side of the story. Delia was a leader of county society; Delia was the chatelaine of a magnificent mansion standing in its own grounds: Delia was a fresh-faced girl little dreaming of the fate in store for her; Delia was in turn musical, a well-known figure in the hunting field, the Lady Bountiful of Marley village, an elderly woman of retiring disposition seldom seen outside the old-world cottage that had been in possession of the Cathcart family for three, four, five hundred years. Delia had slept in the garden, strolled in the garden; her skull had been cracked, split, battered by a blunt hatchet, a sharp hatchet, a hammer; she had had many men friends; she had had no men friends; the murderer had left no clue to his identity; the police were in possession of several valuable clues. In spite of these differences of opinion, each account carried in its tail the same sting: in the case of the Marley murder there would be none of the usual bungling since Scotland Yard had immediately been called in.

  Guy turned to the local paper. The Melchester Mercury’s account was strictly accurate and extremely dull, but the sting was there all right. No sooner was Miss Cathcart’s disappearance reported by her family than, with his usual acumen, the well-known and highly efficient Superintendent Dawes was on the scene. The powers that were, however, had thought fit to take matters out of his capable hands, and the supermen from Scotland Yard were now in charge. The Melchester Mercury was therefore confident in predicting that an early arrest would be made. On the picture page was a photograph of Dawes looking noble, and one of Guy, taken at the time when he was bungling the case of Lady Oughborough’s emeralds, looking like a boiled owl.

  Guy laid aside the papers and started on his skinny grapefruit. He was up against it now, he thought grimly; if he mucked up this case he’d not only let himself down, but the Yard. And the Yard wasn’t fond of its failures; the man who blundered was responsible for his blunder; there were no benevolent departmental petticoats under which you might hide. Probably at this moment in his flat at Putney, Superintendent Hannay was reading his newspaper and wondering what sort of a fool Northeast would make of himself this time; soon, on his way to the Yard, he would be thinking the case over, wondering whether, since this was homicide and it’s homicide that gets the publicity, it would be wise to recall Northeast from Marley and send down a more capable man. Guy could see the lids droop over Hannay’s gray eyes as he pondered. He wasn’t a man who suffered fools gladly; he wouldn’t think, give the fellow a chance, or, poor devil, this will make or break him: he’d think only of the prestige of the Yard.

  Guy pushed away the remains of the grapefruit, and, getting coffee and bacon and eggs down into his empty stomach, thought, it’s a long lane that has no turning, and, one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and, it’s always darkest before dawn. After all, there wasn’t anything abnormal about him; he was no Adonis and no genius, but his mental and physical equipment was as good as the next man’s. No one went through life without making mistakes; you were young; you’d been lucky, and you were much too sure. But you learned from your mistakes; you learned that the way to get up a hill is not to keep your eyes fixed emulously on the summit, but to watch your feet going down one after the other till you found that there was level ground beneath them, and looked up, and saw that you were there. Then everybody who didn’t know the trick praised you. Marvelous, they said, and asked you how it was done, but if you told them, they wouldn’t believe you. Success in life couldn’t be due to a prosaic faculty for keeping on keeping on: they wanted to excuse themselves, saying, it’s not my fault that I’ve no talents…

  In a considerably heartened mood, Guy walked round to the police station. The Chief Constable was already there. He smelled of soap and his red face glowed with early morning freshness.

  “Good morning, Inspector,” snapped Dawes, exhaling germicide, and the Chief Constable heartily shouted, “Well, Northeast, how are you this morning? Ready to make an arrest?”

  Guy’s bolstered-up spirits sank abruptly. He said, “I don’t know about that, sir. It doesn’t do to get the wrong man — or the right one on insufficient evidence.”

  “Seen the newspapers? They seem to expect something spectacular. World’s got its eye on you, Northeast.”

  Dawes cut the cackle. “Perhaps the Inspector will let us know the result of his last night’s deliberations.”

  Not without satisfaction Guy laid his neat chart on the table. He hadn’t expected that it would be particularly well received by Dawes, but he had felt sure that the Chief Constable, as a military man, would approve of it. But Major Carruthers had never worn a brass hat. “What’s this? What’s this?” he shouted irritably.

  Guy explained the chart and, step by step, his reasoning. “Oh well,” said the Chief Constable, setting his brain to work with the air of a man who winds up a magnificent machine for a probably futile purpose, “let’s get down to it. Take this column One. Now, Northeast, how many men really have alibis for the hours they spend in bed, and that’s when the crime was committed? What I mean is, a married man can say he was in bed with his wife, but she isn’t evidence. A single man may go to bed all right and then pop through the window.”

  “Exactly,” said Dawes. “In this case, to consider opportunity gets us absolutely nowhere.”

  “I agree,” said the Chief Constable, “and then this column headed Motive. I knew Delia Cathcart well, and I can’t imagine anyone having any reason for murdering her. And there’s one idea you’ve got in your head, Northeast, which I’m still convinced is sheer nonsense. She wasn’t the sort of young woman to muck around with a groom.” Guy was ready with an answer, but Dawes interrupted him. “This man, Forbes, sir. He’s our man. Just the type. All right sober, but violent when drunk and doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  Guy began, “I thought Ames was your fancy,” but he was shouted down again, this time by the Chief Constable.

  “Look here, the time’s come for action, not for talk. Northeast — what’s your program for this morning?”

  Guy sat for a moment looking down on his discredited chart. Oh fools and blind, he thought, the light growing. And since they were the fools, he could suffer them. “You’re right, sir,” he said. “It’s no use concentrating on the vague time we have for the murder. We have one fixed time element — the time that the woman in blue passed the barrier at the station. I’m going to pin everyone down to their movements that morning. Only the murderer can have planted the suitcase…”

  “A woman?” said Dawes. “I shouldn’t have thought it was a woman’s crime.”

  “I was going on to say, sir, that if the murderer was a man, he must have had a female accomplice…”

  “Oh, good God, another needle in the haystack! What you’d better do, is to get going, Northeast.”

  Guy rose to his feet. “Very well, sir.”

  “Just a minute,” said Dawes. “I’ve got the report of the P.M. here — nothing to add to what Doctor Baker told us. And there’s one piece of information — definite information — that I collected yesterday. The cashier from the bank came in to tell me that the notes he gave Miss Cathcart were new ones and he happens to have a note of their numbers.”

  Guy gave Dawes a bit of his own back. “That’s not much help, if the handbag’s at the bottom of a horse pond.” But a second thought was better and he was honest enough to s
peak it. “But, of course, the murderer may have taken the notes out. Very few of us would be strong-minded enough to throw ten pounds away. We may get some useful news if you advertise the numbers.”

  His honesty did him no good. When he had gone the Chief Constable said, “My God, how that fellow does shilly-shally.”

  “I don’t like to run a man down, sir,” said the Superintendent, “but I’m afraid he’s proving a washout. That chart now — did you notice he’d put ‘X’ at the bottom, and given him full marks? Childish, I call it, when ‘X’ is an imaginary person…”

  Guy walked round to the garage. His ears weren’t burning, but he felt sure that the two men he had left were talking him over. Well, they had asked him what his program was and he had begun to tell them, but they’d been too impatient to listen; get going! they’d shouted before he’d had time to remind them that it’s because of their mistakes that murderers swing, and to tell them that it was not by shouting out, “Here’s our man!” and hounding first one and then another of their suspects, but by concentrating on a trivial discrepancy that he would solve this puzzling case. On the whole he was glad that they hadn’t listened to him; they had no use for theories; he could see now that the best way to handle them was to keep them in the dark until his evidence was complete.

  He drove through the center of the town and drew up in a side street beside a window crowded with unappetizing but highly colored cakes. At this early hour the staff of the Cosy Cafe were not prepared for customers and as he entered the shrill squeals of a feminine quarrel met his ears. “Somebody’s lying!” “Well, it’s not me. I’m a respectable girl, I am.” “Oh, go and roll!” Guy coughed, and with a triumphant toss of her head a platinum blonde waitress stepped through a curtain of bamboo and beads.

  It wasn’t the platinum blonde who had served coffee and cakes to a chauffeur and a dark girl probably dressed in blue last Saturday morning; if it had been, she would have remembered for she was a noticing sort and took a real interest in the customers. She was ever so sorry not to be able to help. What was the trouble? Oh, the chauffeur had had money left him, had he? Lucky chap! There were ever so many things she wanted, but money didn’t come her way. Yes, of course Guy could see the other young lady, but it was doubtful if she’d be able to tell him anything. Some people didn’t use their eyes.

  The blonde screeched, “Doris!” and a more homely girl came through the beads. With a meaning look at her colleague, she did remember serving a chauffeur and his young lady; she remembered it because she had never seen a girl eat so many cream buns. Yes, she could tell Guy the time to a minute because the Minster clock had been striking eleven as the couple came in, and it had struck half past before they had left — she knew that because, as the chauffeur had sat down, he had said, “What a din,” only he had used a nasty word, and when the half hour struck she had been adding up his bill and he had asked her if the noise didn’t get on her nerves, and she had said that it used to, but it didn’t now. No, he hadn’t hurried off. He had waited outside the shop for his young lady, who had gone to the…er…cloakroom.

  With rising spirits Guy drove out to Marley and down the lane which led to the Willoughby’s farm. Halfway down the lane he saw Mrs. Willoughby in a green smock and broad-brimmed hat, sitting on a camp stool and sketching a view of distant fields. “You may call me an escapist,” she said. “Certainly I have only to take up my pencil to find myself in another world.”

  “I hate to bring you back,” Guy said, “but there’s a question I want to ask you and then I hope not to have to worry you again. Where were you last Saturday morning between eleven and twelve?”

  “My dear man, how do I know? I’m too intelligent to worry about something that isn’t. Time isn’t. It only exists for the benefit of the insane majority…”

  “I know,” said Guy, “but I’m one of them and I’m asking you this question because I’m investigating a case of murder. Please try to cast your mind back…”

  “Why should I? A horse-faced woman has died, but what’s death?”

  “I see your point of view,” said Guy, wondering what the Chief Constable and Dawes would make of this aggravating woman. “But seriously, Mrs. Willoughby, if you answer my question now, you won’t have any more trouble. If you don’t, you’ll have endless policemen coming out here to ask you endless questions, and they’re sure to come just when you’re in the mood for sketching.”

  Gerda Willoughby winced at the word “sketching,” but the point went home. She said, “Oh, all right, but it’s the end of my morning’s work. Saturday was the day my husband went off, wasn’t it? Well, I hung about here thinking how sordid it all was, and later, when the car had come back, I went into Melchester.”

  “And what did you do there?”

  “I bought things. I remember a pyramid of oranges — all the brightness and sweetness of Old Spain.”

  “A fruit shop?”

  “A stall in the market place. I hate smug shops.”

  “What time were you there?”

  “Eleven o’clock. I heard the Minster tell the hour — lovely strong bells used for an ignoble purpose…”

  “And then?”

  “Oh, then I went to Woolworth’s and bought some clothes pegs and a sink strainer. There were lots of other things on my list, but I forgot to look at it till I was half way home.”

  “A stall at the market and then Woolworth’s. I’m afraid there’s not much chance of anyone remembering you.”

  “Why should they?” asked Gerda Willoughby, goggling her pansy velvet eyes at him. “If you’re trying to establish alibis, or whatever you call them, why do you pick on that time — eleven to twelve? I don’t often read the newspapers — so sordid — but this morning I did happen to glance at a picture paper, which I take for the maids. It said that Delia Cathcart was found dead in her dressing gown, and, from what I know of her, I’m sure she wouldn’t have been in her dressing gown after half past eight or nine.”

  Guy thought he would go mad if he talked any longer to Gerda Willoughby, so, after giving her a chance to produce a firmer alibi and getting a dissertation on the nonexistence of place, he tore himself away and drove to the Dog and Duck, where he ordered his usual lunch of bread and cheese and bitter. It was only by chance that, as he leaned against the bar waiting for someone to attend to him, he saw printed in block capitals on a cardboard sheet propped on the mantelpiece, the name, Ames. Idle curiosity, or the habit of casting his net wide, took him across the room. S. Ames, he learned, had reached the final of the Marley Green Darts Competition.

  “I see you’re having a darts competition,” he said, when Mr. Hogmore had wished him good morning and expressed satisfaction at seeing him back again, and Hogmore said, yes, it was an annual event and there were several first-rate players in the village. “The final’s on tonight,” said Hogmore. “’Arris v. Ames. Worth seeing that’ll be, if you ’appen to ’ave ’arf-a-nour to spare.”

  Guy said he’d have to be back in Melchester and went on to ask which of the two men was likely to win. Harris, it appeared, was steady, but Ames, though erratic at times, was brilliant when his back was against the wall. It had been a treat to see him last Saturday morning; he’d started like one of the Sunday evening motoring crowd, but at the end he’d been playing like a bloody automaton.

  “Saturday morning? But how did they manage to play it then? Isn’t this the fellow who was groom to the late Miss Cathcart?”

  “That’s right. Well, you see, it was like this. What with the chaps working late haymaking and young Fred ’Arris being laid up with a poisoned finger, we’d got be’ind, and, so, Miss Cathcart not being about, Ames slips out and we sends word to Fred, who couldn’t get off in the afternoon or evening, being footman at the ’All. That,” said Mr. Hogmore placidly, “was ’ow it was arranged.”

  Guy suggested, “Awkward for Ames if he’d been caught. By all accounts Miss Cathcart wouldn’t have stood for that kind of thing.”

  “
Ah well, it was just on eleven when Stanley come in ’ere and Miss Cathcart, she’d properly vanished by then. Them other two — Miss Sheila and Miss Nancy — they don’t take much notice. Soft, they are.”

  “Sporting of him to risk it, though. He must have been away…well, for how long?”

  “What with talking it over friendly and drinks all round, ’e was gone about a nour. But there, nothing venture, nothing win, specially when you’re young. Now what’ll you ’ave, sir? We’ve got a tasty bit of cheddar in today…”

  Guy ate his lunch outside in the sunshine and his despised and neglected chart was spread on his knee. Ames, because he was a man, might well have made a mistake in packing a woman’s evening outfit; he’d scored full marks in the column headed Mistake, but now a thick black line went through his name. Blasted idiot! To cover a small fault, which was none of Guy’s business, he’d lied, concealing the very fact which would have taken him off the list of suspects yesterday. And Funge and Jessie were off, and that left Forbes and Willoughby, and in the “Mistake” column neither Forbes nor Willoughby had scored any marks at all. Now that Ames was off, only X had full marks in that column. Then, X, why did you err?

  Guy ate his lunch as quickly as anyone can eat bread and cheese, and, since escaping from Mr. Hogmore was child’s play to a man accustomed to escaping from Gerda Willoughby, he was soon on his way to Marley Grange. Elspeth opened the door and before she could usher him into the inner hall he said, “I had a nice talk with your husband yesterday.”

  It was a slight variation from the old, “All is discovered — fly,” but Elspeth was deceived. She said, “So he told you…?”