‘I’ll certainly do that.’
‘And the finger—’
‘Is much less painful, thank you.’ Fen glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘And now I think I ought to be getting back to lunch. Many thanks for the blue-bag, and I’m sorry to have interrupted your gardening.’
‘My dear fellow, I’ve enjoyed our talk very much indeed, and it’s been a great relief to be able to confide to someone my behaviour as regards Mrs Flitch. . . . I’ll walk with you to the gate. How is your campaign going?’
‘As well, I think, as can be expected. I’m getting rather tired of it, to tell you the truth.’
‘Ah. Well, you’ve certainly come down here at an eventful time. The unhappy lunatic, who I gather is still at large. . . . And then, these dreadful murders, and the wicked attempt last night on that poor girl at the hospital. I saw her about once or twice, and, do you know, her face struck me as being in some indefinable way familiar.’
‘Really?’ Fen was interested. ‘Did you think you’d come across her somewhere before?’
‘No, not that exactly,’ said the Rector thoughtfully, ‘because I have a good memory for faces. My feeling was . . .’
But for the moment Fen was not destined to be apprised of what the Rector’s feeling was. They rounded the side of the house as he spoke, and came to an open window on the ground floor. The Rector’s glance at first resting incuriously on it, grew suddenly fixed; and he halted.
‘Bless my soul!’ he ejaculated.
Fen could see no reason for his surprise. The room into which they were looking was nothing more remarkable than an ordinary, rather gloomy, clerical study, furnished with dark stuffs and mahogany. In view of what he had heard it was not impossible, however, that the Rector was seeing a ghost, and Fen peered attentively at the room’s obscurity in the vague hope of being similarly favoured.
‘What is it?’ he demanded.
‘The field-glasses,’ said the Rector. ‘Those field-glasses on the table beside the window. They’ve come back.’
‘Come back?’
‘The other afternoon – let’s see, it must have been Monday – I took them out with me on a walk, since I’m interested in bird-watching and for that they’re naturally indispensable. In Porson’s Wood I sat down for a moment to rest, laying them on the ground beside me, and when I proceeded on my way I very stupidly and absent-mindedly left them there. Not more than ten minutes can have – um – elapsed before I realized what had happened and returned to fetch them. But by that time they had been taken, and in view of the almost universal dishonesty which prevails nowadays I never thought to see them again. Well, well, this is very pleasing.’
‘But the way in which they’ve apparently been returned,’ said Fen, ‘is surely odd. If I find something belonging to someone else and I return it, I normally knock at the door and hand it over. . . . And, by the way, how would anyone know they were yours?’
‘My name is written in ink on the inside of the strap. . . . But I agree with you’ – the Rector was mildly perplexed – ‘that this method of replacement has certainly an element of the – um – surreptitious about it.’
‘Though of course that would not apply if the house had been empty at any time during the period in which the glasses were returned.’
‘They were not there when I went to bed last night,’ said the Rector. ‘I’m confident of that. And, as it happens, neither Mrs Flitch nor myself has left the premises since then. Yes, it is undeniably strange – though I daresay that if one could only think of it, there is some perfectly reasonable explanation.’
A vague suspicion was burgeoning in Fen’s mind. ‘Would you object,’ he said, ‘if I were to make an experiment with the glasses?
‘An experiment?’
‘I want to see if there are any finger-prints on them.’
‘Dear me.’ The Rector was startled. ‘By all means do so, though I fail to see why – –’
‘It’s no more than a shot in the dark. I wonder, now, if you could provide me with a soft-haired brush and some fine powder?’
‘The brush I can certainly manage. And Mrs Flitch uses face-powder, if that would do. Lipstick I know she considers ungodly, but as regards face-powder her views are more – um liberal. . . . Mrs Flitch,’ the Rector called. ‘Mrs Flitch.’
Mrs Flitch’s head emerged from a window above them like a cuckoo from a cuckoo-clock. Informed of what they required, she retreated without perceptible surprise to obtain it. The Rector led Fen indoors and into the study, producing from a drawer in an over-full roll-top desk a small new paint brush. And presently Mrs Flitch joined them with a box of peach-coloured face-powder called Nuits d’extase.
‘Now,’ said the Rector.
Fen plied the brush, spreading powder carefully over the field-glasses and blowing it off again. A haze of Nuits d’extase enveloped them.
‘Well?’ The Rector was leaning forward eagerly.
‘There are,’ Fen answered, ‘no finger-prints on the glasses at all: which means that they’ve been thoroughly wiped.’
The implications of this curious circumstance did not very rapidly penetrate the Rector’s intelligence. ‘Amazing,’ he remarked but less with real comprehension than in the voice of a man who has watched a dog do a difficult trick. ‘Amazing. No doubt the glasses got dirtied in some way, and were cleaned by the person who returned them.’
Fen, to whom this notion had not occurred, was a little taken aback. But he recovered himself after a moment, saying: ‘Even if you clean a thing, you almost inevitably leave one or two prints on it. On these glasses there are none.’
‘But what,’ said the Rector blankly, ‘do you think is the significance of that?’
‘I haven’t,’ Fen replied with truth, ‘the smallest notion. But I’m bound to assume that someone who has been in possession of these glasses is very anxious that the fact shouldn’t be known.’
The Rector sneezed. ‘It’s the powder,’ he apologized weakly. ‘Mrs Flitch. Mrs Fli – oh, you’re here already. We shall need the use of a clothes-brush, Mrs Flitch, if we are not both to be suspected of embracing young women.’
Mrs Flitch, not altogether displeased at this worldly utterance, fetched a clothes-brush and applied it to each of them in turn. ‘Dear me,’ said the Rector, sniffing like a hound at fault, ‘this is a very sensuous perfume, Mrs Flitch, and it makes me wonder what you get up to on your evenings off.’ It was clear from Mrs Flitch’s expression, however, that she had had enough of worldly utterances for the moment, and the Rector, perceiving this, hurriedly changed the subject. ‘Well, now, Professor Fen, I can’t pretend to compete with you in such affairs as this, of the field-glasses. . . . Do you suppose that they can have anything to do with all these other – um – dreadful occurrences we have been hearing of?’
‘It is possible,’ said Fen guardedly. ‘Though at present I can’t imagine what the connexion is. . . . And now I really must be going. You’ve been most forbearing and kind.’
The Rector accompanied him down the path towards the gate. Showers of pebbles were flung at them from an upper window.
‘Really, this is too much,’ the Rector muttered. ‘Excuse me, please.’
He went back along the path and in at the front door, and was heard toiling upstairs. Shortly afterwards there came an angry rapping, and the showers of pebbles ceased. The Rector appeared at a window.
‘That’s stopped it,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Do call in any time you’re passing, won’t you? I’ve very much enjoyed our chat. . . . Good morning to you.’ He vanished from sight.
CHAPTER 17
IT was with a mind occupied rather with field-glasses than with poltergeists that Fen made his way back to the inn. Decisive enlightenment, he felt sure, lay somewhere just outside the perimeter of his thoughts; it hovered there, half glimpsed and unspeakably tantalizing; but for the moment no amount of blandishment availed to bring it out into the open, and the effect of this was as exacerbating as a physical
itch. Fortunately, his arrival at the inn coincided with a scene sufficiently uncommon to put a temporary stop to his reflections.
Watched with proprietary interest by Myra, the non-doing pig was being taken away again. Two men had hold of it by the front and hind legs respectively, and were hoisting it with extreme difficulty on to a small van, while it screamed and struggled incessantly. The job was at last completed and the backboard of the van fastened; peering in consternation over it, like a malefactor being conveyed to a gaol, the non-doing pig was driven away. But now occurred a striking demonstration of animal fidelity. Before the van had rounded the bend in the village street, the non-doing pig had taken a running jump at the backboard, cleared it by a narrow margin, and landed heavily on its head in the road.
Consternation ensued. Both Fen and Myra screamed at the van to stop, and this it ultimately did. They all gathered about the non-doing pig where it lay in the dust. It was not dead, but clearly it was none the better for its experience. After some rather valueless discussion as to the best course to pursue, it was again loaded on to the van, this time without resistance, and removed to a veterinary surgeon. The last Fen saw of it was a small and infinitely reproachful eye fixed upon Myra.
‘Poor thing,’ said Myra compassionately. ‘I really believe he can’t bear to leave me. I shouldn’t have sold him, not if he’d been a bit more seductive, like. But he ate so much, that was the real trouble. . . . There’s been a phone-message for you, my dear.’
‘Oh?’
‘From the Superintendent. He says will you look in at the police-station in Sanford Morvel some time when you have a moment.’
‘I think,’ said Fen, ‘that I’d better go over there straight away.’
‘Does that mean you won’t be in to lunch, my dear?’
‘It does, I’m afraid. And I’m supposed to be canvassing all afternoon. I’ll see you at opening time this evening.’
‘Very well, sir,’ said Myra demurely.
Fen got into his car and drove to Sanford Morvel. As on the previous day, he found Wolfe and Humbleby just leaving the police-station for lunch. They took him with them to ‘The White Lion’, where at a nearby table he saw Captain Watkyn still wilting beneath the inexorable pressure of Mr Judd’s political opinions.
‘Food first,’ said Wolfe. ‘Talk afterwards. We have revelations to make, of a sort. Unluckily they don’t help us as regards the central problem, but they clear up a few loose ends. And talk about melodrama . . .’
He refused to say more until they were settled with their coffee in a secluded corner of the lounge. Then he produced the small black steel box which he had taken from Jane Persimmons’ room on the evening of her accident.
‘We’ve opened this,’ he said, tapping it. ‘You remember I couldn’t at first find the key – Well, it turned out that the hospital people had it – it was on a chain round the girl’s neck. So I didn’t, after all, have to commandeer a locksmith. What we found . . .’
He hesitated, glancing at Humbleby. And Humbleby, a match held to the end of his cheroot, said:
‘Wolfe has doubts – and very proper ones, I’m sure – about whether we ought to communicate our discovery to you – not to you in particular, I mean, but to any outsider. The matter is a decidedly private one, and not to be bruited abroad. But I feel sure, and I’ve said as much to Wolfe, that we can rely on your discretion.’
On this case, Fen reflected, his discretion was having to work overtime: first Bussy, then the Rector, and now this, whatever it might be. He made, however, noises of reassurance which Wolfe seemed to find acceptable.
‘You’d better look through the contents of the box, sir,’ he said. ‘That’ll explain the business as quickly as we could do.’
With undisguised curiosity Fen acted on the suggestion. At first glance, the contents of the box were not startling – a number of letters, and, lying on top of them, a ring. But as Fen examined the ring more closely, his first insouciance vanished. It was of finely wrought gold, set with a ruby, and although Fen made no claim to the expert eyes of a lapidary, he could see that the stone was flawless, uncommonly large, and beyond all question enormously valuable. The workmanship, he thought, was not modern; provisionally he assigned it to the seventeenth century.
He put the ring aside and took up the letters. There were about thirty-five of them, of varying lengths, and all except one were written by the same person. The notepaper had a crest for heading and was yellowed at the edges; time had blanched the sprawling calligraphy and the unvarying signature ‘Robert’; the dates covered the period from August 1924 to May 1926.
And Fen, reading them through, was curiously moved; for they were love-letters of a touching sincerity, re-enacting endearments and caresses long since left castaway in the vanished years; and the ghost of their dead passion stirred in his mind a primeval bitter-sweet sense of transience. So for a while he was unaware of his prosaic environment, reliving, with a kind of compassion, the emotions of a man whom he had never known and would never know. And it was with something of reluctance that he eventually laid down the last of these letters and turned his attention to that other sheet, in a finer and more precise handwriting, which would explain and complete the tale.
It ran as follows:
April 7, 1939.
My Darling,
When you come to read this I shall be dead, and I’m afraid you may be very unhappy. Please don’t be. Your father used to say that we should none of us mind death and dying nearly so much if we didn’t insist on regarding life as a basically pleasant thing with unpleasant intervals, instead of as an unpleasant thing with intervals of happiness. And I think he was right. But I don’t want to write a sermon, and you won’t be wanting to read one. This letter is to tell you, Jane dear, about your father:
You’ve always supposed he died before you were born, but that isn’t true. He’s alive now, I know, and perhaps still may be when you read this. But legally – I’m afraid I’m saying this terribly clumsily – legally you haven’t got a father. I was never married to him.
Well, it’s out. Please don’t hate me too much, my darling. Somehow I’ve never been able to bring myself to tell you, and I know now I never shall. So I’ve taken this way, which I know is cowardly and may hurt you. Please forgive me. I don’t know what to add, except that I hope that one day you’ll be as marvellously happy as I was with Robert. Except for your sake. I haven’t any regrets. And I’m leaving you his letters, because seeing how sincere and fine he was may help you to understand.
Your father is the present Lord Sanford. You’ll want to know why he didn’t marry me, and why he left me, and why we haven’t kept in touch. But it’s a long story, Jane dear, and one that’s better forgotten. I know I was as much to blame as he was, so you mustn’t feel resentful against him. He gives me a generous allowance, and I hope by the time you read this you’ll be settled in life and able to forget about him. Perhaps it’s wrong of me to tell you at all; I don’t know. But one day you might find out by accident, and I should hate you to think that I’d been too ashamed and frightened to tell you myself.
Besides, there’s something I want you to do for me. The ring with this is a Sanford family heirloom, given to the second Earl by Charles I. Robert made me accept it, though I didn’t want to, and made me promise to keep it as a memento of him as long as I lived. Well, I shall keep my promise, but afterwards it must go back to the family, to Robert if he’s still alive or to his son. Please do this for me, Jane. You must decide whether to take it yourself or whether just to send it. And remember it’s worth a lot of money. For my sake don’t feel you have a right to it, or that you have a claim on the family in any way. But I needn’t have written that, because I know you won’t.
I think that’s all, darling. Now you know everything, forget everything and try not to blame me too much. You’ve been the best and most loving of daughters, and you ought to have had a much better mother. Remember I love you very much.
YOUR M
OTHER.
P. S. – I’m afraid a daughter with so many prizes for English Composition won’t think much of the style of this letter! It was terribly difficult to write – but you’ll understand. God bless, my darling.
In silence Fen returned the letters and ring to the box, closed it, and handed it back to Wolfe.
‘In spite of his generous “allowance”.’ he commented thoughtfully, ‘I can’t say I feel very much enthusiasm for the late Lord Sanford. . . . However, he’s dead, and censoriousness is therefore a rather futile exercise.’
Humbleby was contemplating his well-manicured nails. ‘So Jane Persimmons,’ he observed, ‘is a natural daughter of the last Lord Sanford, and a half-sister of the present one.’
‘The Rector,’ said Fen, ‘told me he thought her face familiar, and a resemblance between the two would account for that.’
‘There certainly is such a resemblance.’ Wolfe, with the end of his index finger, was gently rotating a scallop-shell ash-tray on the table beside him. ‘I noticed it myself – but naturally I dismissed it as accidental. . . . Well, we at least know why she came here. It was to return that ring. Which means, presumably, that her mother has just recently died.’
‘Without, it seems, first seeing the girl “settled in life”.’ Humbleby scowled at Wolfe’s fidgeting, and after a moment took the ash-tray away from him on the pretext of stubbing out his cheroot. ‘I take it she had in mind – has in mind, I suppose I should say – some kind of overture of friendship to Lord Sanford.’ And as he considered this feeble statement, Humbleby’s scowl returned. ‘The situation is a delicate one,’ he asserted, even more feebly.
Neither Wolfe nor Fen was paying much attention to his remarks. Wolfe looked as if he might be ruminating some intricate problem of professional etiquette; and Fen was equating the rather Wilkie Collinsian revelations of the black box with what he had observed of Jane Persimmons’ behaviour prior to her accident. She had been clearly spying out the ground before deciding what would be the most reliable and dignified approach – which accounted for the curious little episode he had witnessed in the grounds of Sanford Hall. He felt considerable sympathy for her hesitation, since in returning the ring she would be obliged to explain her possession of it, and, if you are at all sensitive, the announcement to a strange young man that you are an illegitimate child of’his father is not made without a good deal of preliminary soul-searching. A fictitious recital would, of course, be possible, but Fen suspected that Jane was not the sort of person who has recourse to fictitious recitals in order to avoid unpleasantness. . . . In this aspect of the affair, only one minor mystery remained -the problem of why Jane had chosen to deliver the ring in person – with all the explanation which that necessarily involved – rather than send it anonymously by registered post. She was, it appeared, not likely to be well off, and in that case she might conceivably be hoping for some kind of financial assistance from Lord Sanford. But this hypothesis conflicted hopelessly with Fen’s diagnosis of the girl’s character; she would almost rather starve, he thought, than ask for money, and especially on that pretext. Well, the point was comparatively unimportant. No doubt when Jane was conscious again it would be cleared up.
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