by Roy Vickers
With the passing of his fear he was able to take a view of the whole thing which he called realistic. He was not, he reminded himself, a cruel man. Poor Miss Henson, he was sure, had never known what had struck her. Through himself she had enjoyed four years of happiness. Circumstances, for which he could not be blamed, had ended that phase of her life. Her ultimate fate at the hands of a less scrupulous man was so certain that his act had been equivalent to that of putting an about-to-be tortured animal out of its pain.
He suffered a little through his own sentimentality—he missed her. He missed particularly the moral uplift he had derived from being the architect of her happiness—the chivalrous protector of an unattractive woman. There were even moods in which he wished he had kept the Merthyr as a memento.
Freed from the society of Miss Henson, Aileen became even more amiable. But it was Aileen who produced the first ripple on the surface of his complacency.
“Miss Henson!” she exclaimed suddenly at breakfast from behind her picture paper.
It was a second or more before he could bring himself to ask:
“What about Miss Henson?”
“She’s sold that picture she gave us—for three hundred and fifty pounds. Look! That’s it, all right! Julia, daughter of Sir Anstruther Henson, 1880. I suppose you had to give it back, but it does seem a pity!”
He stared at a photograph which reminded him so vividly of the picture that had hung in the drawing-room. On his way to London he took the paper with him to the local furniture Repository.
“Must be a duplicate!” said the manager. “Nothing of Miss Henson’s has left the warehouse. You can inspect it now if you like, Mr. Bladlow.”
“As I’m more or less responsible I think it would be as well,” said Bladlow.” It took half an hour to produce the picture for his inspection—the picture which was reported as having been sold at a West End auction the previous day.
“Thank you. As you said, it must be a duplicate. Miss Henson will no doubt decide for herself whether her interests are concerned. I am no art expert.”
In a month, he had forgotten the incident. At the half-year he increased the housekeeping allotment and doubled Aileen’s personal allowance. It was a very happy year. Now and again, while Cedric was away at school, he took Aileen to the coast for a week-end in a good hotel.
A few days before Easter 1938, he received a call from Detective Inspector Rason of the Department of Dead Ends.
“I asked for you, Mr. Bladlow,” said Rason apologetically, “but I’ve really come to see Miss Henson. Her late father’s bankers told me that when they last heard from her she was living in your house.”
“Sorry!” said Bladlow. “Miss Henson left here over eighteen months ago. I don’t know her address—I don’t even know where she went from here. She took sudden offence—she was—er—an elderly spinster, you know. If there’s anything I can do—”
“Can you tell me anything about a picture of herself as a little girl? Funny sort of question, you’ll say, but the fact is there’ve been a lot of forgeries of the paintings of well known artists—after they’re dead, of course. Last year we nearly got the gang, but we didn’t quite—and that sort of thing is pushed on to me.”
Over eighteen months ago, Bladlow had seen that he must never tell a single lie about Miss Henson, except the lie that he did not know where she had gone after she left the house.
“The picture you want, Mr. Rason, is at Mentall’s Repository.”
At the Repository, Rason inspected the picture. He was jubilant. The case against the forgers was practically buttoned up. But Chief Inspector Karslake would be sure to say they must get Miss Henson to authenticate. The manager was unhelpful.
“But surely Miss Henson is paying you rent?”
“Yes, but the cheque itself comes from Mr. Bladlow! He told me she had left certain funds in his hands.”
“Funds!” repeated Rason, as he took himself off. “Bladlow hasn’t got the old girl’s address, but he has got her funds. Now I’m here, it wouldn’t do any harm to have a look round.”
He was looking specifically for Miss Henson’s bank—always a good starting point. By a circuitous route he reached the vicar, who had received many a cheque from Miss Henson for charitable purposes.
“We have received no communication from Miss Henson since August, 1936,” said the bank manager.
Under pressure from Rason he interpreted the Bank Acts with a certain elasticity and revealed that an income of £1,150 was being paid into her account, half yearly, by Mr. Bladlow.
The latter item disappointed Rason. By precedent, her income ought to have stopped abruptly. Without much hope, he returned to The Cedars.
“Oh yes—wasn’t that clear in our first conversation!” Bladlow permitted himself to reveal a slight impatience. “I am her financial agent. I hold securities of hers to the value of around thirty thousand pounds.”
“Funds!” ejaculated Rason, impressed by the amount. “Just huffed off and forgot to take her thirty thousand with her? Or has she got other funds besides that lot, so’s she wouldn’t notice? And another banking account?”
“I don’t know.” Bladlow, indeed, had nothing to add to his previous statement.
Rason went back to the Repository and put an official seal on Miss Henson’s property. In the following week, he returned and searched the furniture for relevant documents. He found none. But he pounced on a sketch-book and a litter of charcoal drawings.
“Maybe these are forgeries, too!” he reflected with sublime confusion and carried them back to the Yard for expert examination.
There was plenty of follow-up work to be done. Bladlow did not see him again until the end of August.
Chapter Six
It was a couple of days after Bladlow had returned from his summer holiday, this time in North Wales. It had been an enjoyable holiday, on the whole. He had not allowed his mind to dwell unduly on the detective’s investigations. He was himself entrenched in a veritable Maginot Line of legality.
He was accountable to no one but Miss Henson for his management of her money. The police, of course, had realised this, or they would have tried to subject him to further questioning. No news was obviously good news. They must either apply to presume death, which would be pointless, or find the body which was, virtually, impossible.
Rason arrived late in the afternoon. With him was another burly looking man whom he introduced as Chief Inspector Karslake.
“My superior officer,” said Rason when they were all seated in the morning-room, “knows a great deal about art.” Ignoring Karslake’s glare he went on: “He’s still worried about Miss Henson’s ownership of that picture. He wants to ask you—”
“I’ll ask my own questions,” snapped Karslake. “Mr. Bladlow, can you give me the date of Miss Henson’s departure?”
“I can’t remember whether it was the Saturday or the Sunday—August 2 or 3.”
“But you do remember,” cut in Rason, “that your wife and child had gone to Bournemouth and that, as from Saturday morning, you and Miss Henson were alone in the house except for the servants?”
“How thorough your investigations are!” smiled Bladlow. “Yes, we were alone. Hence our rather embarrassing quarrel.”
“According to the servants and a baker’s delivery man, Mr. Bladlow, you left this house in Miss Henson’s company on the Saturday morning? That would be before you had the quarrel?”
“Obviously!”
“Where did you go with Miss Henson?”
“Really, Inspector! All that time ago! I often gave Miss Henson a lift. I simply don’t remember.”
“Did you take her to Winterbourne Manor?”
That was a bombshell for Bladlow—a fact duly noted by Rason, who pressed on.
“If you did not go with her, you joined her there later. The place was your property then. You gave her permission to go there as often as she liked.”
“She never asked me for any such permission!” B
ladlow was at sea. “I’ve no reason to believe she ever went there in her life.”
Rason grinned at Karslake, inviting him to note the answer.
“My superior officer,” he announced, “is not satisfied with that answer. If you want to know how we traced the body to Winterbourne Manor—”
Bladlow caught his breath. Karslake sprang up.
“You’ve no right to say that, Rason!” he cried angrily. “It’s flat against the Rules and you know it.”
“My superior officer,” mouthed Rason, “is quite correct. I ought to have said—if you want to know how we traced Miss Henson to Winterbourne Manor, I’ll show you.” From a bag, he took a sketch book and a number of charcoal drawings. “These—before you bother to think up something, Bladlow—are sketches made by the deceased—beg pardon!—made by Miss Henson. Sketches of the Nefeld panels!”
Bladlow forced himself to stare at the sketches, while he thought: She was only in the room for a minute or so and she didn’t sketch anything. These sketches are the work of a good many hours. He dimly remembered that she had gushed about having some ‘confession’ to make.
“Miss Henson might have visited the empty house, unknown to me—not knowing that it was my property.” In the last few seconds he had abandoned hope, but he went on: “These sketches don’t prove anything.”
“Not a thing! They’re what Mr. Karslake calls a location clue!” chirped Rason. “Fact is, that dealer you sold those panels to had ’em written up in an art magazine, with illustrations. And one of our art boys—not Mr. Karslake—linked up these sketches. Funny how these things happen, isn’t it, Bladlow! You put a lot o’ brain work into this job—refusing four offers for the house, so’s to give the earth time to settle. If you’d only thought to bury these panels along with the—you know!—you’d have got away with the boodle.”
“The boodle!” An hysterical laugh broke from Bladlow. “If I had been thinking in terms of ‘boodle,’ Mr. Rason, I might have done as you suggest—except that the observation pit wouldn’t have been big enough to hold the whole set of panels, as well.”
A couple of hours later the police had located the site of the observation pit, whereupon they began digging operations.
PART FIVE
A FOOL AND HER MONEY
Chapter One
In the reports of a trial for murder, the defendant and the victim are generally seen as cardboard figures against the background of the crime. By tradition, the cardboard woman is coloured brightly and the cardboard man darkly.
Thus, in the Cosy Nook murder, Hedda Felbert fitted neatly into the cliché of the woman scorned, and William Surbrook into that of the money-seeking male who overreaches himself. Legally, it is irrelevant that Hedda did not know she had been scorned, and that Surbrook never moved a finger to possess himself of her money.
The money sequence was short and clear-cut. It began in Surbrook’s office in Throgmorton Street on a morning in February 1929, two days after Henry Fauburg—the Fauburg who tried to corner quinine—had shot himself. Surbrook was a thoroughly respectable member of the Stock Exchange with a small but steady clientéle, of whom Fauburg had been the wealthiest. The suicide meant that Surbrook must conjure twenty thousand pounds out of the void within five days, or be hammered.
It ought not to have been possible for Surbrook to be involved. But no sane broker would be starchy about Stock Exchange rules with an apparently gilt-edged client like Fauburg—and that was the limit of Surbrook’s adventurousness. As to his position, you could have added or subtracted a nought, for all the chance he had of raising the money.
Surbrook’s reputation was spotless. A hammering was so rare and universally detested that he very nearly cherished the hope that the bank might waive the matter of securities and come to his rescue out of sheer public spirit. That, or a miracle, would save him.
We need not dwell upon his mental torture. It reached its highest point at the moment when he decided that he must go out to lunch, to keep up appearances, even if it choked him. It was then that the miracle appeared to happen—only he didn’t believe it was a miracle. The message from the bank was no more than a form, stating that twenty thousand pounds had been credited to his account by a well known firm of financial agents.
There was no violence in his relief—he was calm as a reprieved murderer. Some minutes had passed before he made a constructive attempt to cheer up—with very qualified success. He must behave decorously. During the lunch hour, he sipped a coffee, then rang the financial agents.
He was interrupted almost as soon as he had announced his name.
“Our commission was to make the payment. We have no further instructions.”
He replaced the receiver without surprise, and made no further attempt. For five days he tried to humbug himself with one absurd explanation after another. Then, his reputation saved by the twenty thousand, he went in search of Hedda Felbert, whom he had not seen for some seven years—not since the day, to be precise, on which he had married Myra.
There was no difficulty in tracing her to Beringham, thirty miles out, in the Surrey hills. He checked with a local directory—Felbert, H. Miss, Cosy Nook.
Cosy Nook! His laugh held a touch of brutality. The moment she had a house of her own, she would inevitably call it Cosy Nook, even if it were a mansion. She had not changed. Some girls never changed—only became, as it were, more so.
With some difficulty he found it on the outskirts of the town. It was not a mansion, but a small, brick-built bungalow. There was nothing about it to suggest the home of a woman who could throw away twenty thousand pounds on the basis of a single courtesy kiss, bestowed more than seven years ago.
Chapter Two
His mother had started what he and Myra had called the Hedda Felbert saga. It was in the summer following his demobilisation after the Kaiser’s war. As part of the programme of resettling him in civil life, his mother had given a series of tennis parties.
“I want you to make sure that Miss Felbert enjoys herself, Willie. I met them during the war. Her father is a builder or something, and he was splendid at the Red Cross, but he’s a bit—stiff. Hedda acts as his secretary and I’m told she’s very clever. But I don’t think they go about much.”
In 1919 Hedda was thirty, three years older than himself. She was of medium height, with a figure which inclined to lumpiness, but would have yielded to treatment. She had a mass of brown, unruly hair and brown eyes, a shade too prominent. Her mouth was firm and her nose well formed. Though she could never have attained an insistent appeal, she could certainly have turned herself into a reasonably handsome woman, had she but perceived her need to assist nature.
Surbrook partnered her in a mixed double, when it became painfully clear that someone ought to have advised her to say that she did not play tennis. The game became a face-saving contest, in which their opponents co-operated. Surbrook felt more than a little annoyed with his mother. But the feeling passed at the end of the set, when he glanced at Hedda. She was very hot, and the unruly hair was in open rebellion, but her eyes were the eyes of a happy child. She had enjoyed every minute of it, had no suspicion that there had been any face-saving.
Later, when there was some danger of her being involved in another four, he detached her and gave her a lesson in clock-golf. She paid profound attention to his instructions, which she could understand but could not implement. Perseverance was among her qualities; but she failed to observe that she was keeping him from his guests for an unpardonably long time.
“I must try again,” she would say, and, with dreadful archness: “I mean to make you thoroughly proud of your pupil!”
It was not possible to squirm—it was only possible to pity. She was not stupid, but imperceptive. It might even be true that she was clever at her work. But as a woman she was a lout, a predestined spinster.
His interest in her had been noticed and misunderstood. Thereafter, when people invited him, they tended to invite her also. Her existence became a
mild nuisance to him, but he could not bring himself to the point of snubbing her. Her social life, he foresaw, would be a pageant of snubs.
He did not actively dislike her—he looked upon her as some sort of relation whom one had to treat kindly, because she was a little backward. He neither encouraged nor repelled her. He did not, in the phrase of today, make a date with her. True that he gave her a box of chocolates—by a regrettable coincidence, the decoration was a coloured photograph of Miss Mary Pickford playing clock-golf—but this was only by way of apology for spilling coffee on her stockings.
His conduct was blameless, except in the matter of the courtesy kiss—which was a mistake, made in the utmost good faith.
They had been fellow guests at a birthday dance and there was no one but Surbrook to drive her home. Drawing up at her father’s house, he was seized with a doubt—suppose she had found out that men generally kiss girls when they drive them home after a dance? Some girls have a pretty grim time—and some old maids have pretty grim memories, when you come to think of it.
He touched cold, bewildered lips, wondered whether he had made a fool of himself—went on wondering on the drive home, certain only that she had not been offended. Poor kid! She just couldn’t get the hang of things. At least, she would now be able to brag to herself that a man had kissed her.
He did not guess that sexual charity is a virtue of which Nature does not approve. Surbrook, in fact, had grossly underestimated the extent to which Hedda failed to ‘get the hang of things.’ In matters of organisation and finance she was practical, efficient, and even talented. Except for a brief period at a kindergarten, she had been educated by her father, who had given her a view of human relationships which her budding womanhood was bound to reject. Accordingly, she had retreated into a world of her own of which she herself was the hub—a world of friendly women and gallant men.
