Murder Fantastical

by Patricia Moyes

  “How strange that you should say so. Yes, it appears that the animal had a distinctly rosy aura, which of course signifies an earthly rather than a spiritual astral state, but that is only to be expected from an elephant. But perhaps I am boring you?”

  “Far from it,” Henry assured her. “Do please go on.”

  “Well, as soon as I saw Mr. Mason come into the house I got up, made a somewhat sketchy toilette, collected the pamphlets, and came downstairs. I found Mr. Mason in here with Violet, and we had an interesting chat. However, I could tell that Violet was anxious to return to the subject of plants—Mr. Mason had brought her some specimens for her rock garden, you see. Now I realize that this is Violet’s house, and I always take particular care never to intrude upon her friends. So I bade Mr. Mason good-by and returned to my room.

  “I suppose it must have been about a quarter of an hour later that I heard the car starting, and judged that I might come downstairs again without interrupting Violet and her caller. It was then that I found the pamphlets, which Mr. Mason had forgetfully left behind. I knew how disappointed he would be not to have them, so I hurried out into the drive after him. I believe Violet was in the hall, telephoning.

  “As you must know, the car had only moved a few yards. It was standing in the drive with its hood open, and Mr. Mason was peering at the motor. I called to him—I can’t remember the exact words I used—and waved the pamphlets to attract his attention. I hurried down the front steps and toward the car. Mr. Mason looked up, saw me, ran out from behind the car, and began waving his arms quite wildly.”

  “Did he say anything?” Henry asked.

  “I fear I cannot tell you. My wretched hearing aid had somehow become maladjusted, and all I could hear was a whistling sound. I am sure of one thing, however. Mr. Mason had seen something which alarmed him very much. The next thing I knew was that he had fallen to the ground beside the car.”

  “You heard the shot?”

  “I have already told you, Mr. Tibbett, that I heard nothing except that curious whistling sound, which—ah—listen!” Miss Manciple had been fiddling with the black box hanging on her chest. Now it began to emit an ear-splitting noise such as might be made by drawing a squeaky chalk over a blackboard. “That’s the noise!” she yelled, drowning the cacophony. “Do you hear it?”

  “Yes, thank you,” shouted Henry.

  “Oh, don’t you? I’ll try to get it louder.” She did.

  “I can hear it!” Henry bellowed.

  “This is the volume control, I think…”

  Desperately Henry shouted at the top of his lungs, “Stop it please, Miss Manciple!”

  Simultaneously two things happened. Aunt Dora switched off the hearing aid, restoring a blessed and decorous silence, and the door opened to reveal a white-faced Violet Manciple.

  “Oh—Mr. Tibbett—is everything all right? I thought I heard somebody shouting…”

  “Yes, Mrs. Manciple, you did,” said Henry.

  “Oh dear, Aunt Dora hasn’t been overexcited, has she? We have to be so careful, with her heart…”

  “I was demonstrating my hearing aid to Mr. Tibbett, Violet,” said Aunt Dora. “However, he failed to hear it.” She sounded a little smug.

  “Well,” Violet Manciple looked uncertainly from Henry to Dora. “If you’re sure you’re all right, and not too tired…”

  “Pray don’t worry about me, Violet,” replied Miss Manciple, and added, with penetrating truth, “I think it is Mr. Tibbett who is a little fatigued.”

  “Well, then—I’ll get back to the lunch,” said Violet, and disappeared.

  Henry and Aunt Dora looked at each other in silence for a moment. Then Aunt Dora said, “Of course, there’s always Maud’s young man.”

  “What about him?”

  “I find him very hard to remember. The face is unfamiliar. Manning-Richards, canning pilchards. Not very good, I’m afraid, but it serves. You have met Maud’s young man?”

  “Once,” said Henry, “for a moment.”

  “I knew a Humphrey Manning-Richards at one time,” said Miss Manciple. She said it slowly, in a wondering voice, as if she had just made a discovery of some importance. Henry, looking up, was surprised to see a tear creeping from the corner of one bright brown eye. Aunt Dora was evidently equally surprised. She flicked the tear angrily away, and added, gruffly, “You had better speak to Edwin about all that.” And then she went on, “I am a little tired, Mr. Tibbett. Violet is quite right. My heart is not as sound as it was. Perhaps…?”

  “Certainly, Miss Manciple.” Henry was on his feet in a moment.

  “If you’d just help me up—drat this rug—oh, excuse me, Mr. Tibbett; we were used to plain speaking in the jungle, I’m afraid. No, no, that’s quite all right, I can manage—if you’d just open the door for me. Thank you so much…”

  As he held the door open Henry said, “Miss Manciple, about Mr. Manning-Richards…”

  “It has been a pleasure, Mr. Tibbett,” said Miss Manciple very firmly. And with that, she touched the switch on her hearing aid and passed from the room enveloped in a cone of high treble sound.

  It was a minute or so later that Violet Manciple came back into the drawing room. Henry explained that Miss Manciple had felt a little tired and had gone to her room.

  “I heard her,” said Violet, giving Henry a curious look. “Oh, by the way, Mr. Tibbett, Julian is most anxious to speak to you when he gets back from church.”

  “Certainly, I’ll be delighted to see him this afternoon. And the Bishop, if I may.”

  “Edwin? I can’t think that Edwin will be able to help you, Mr. Tibbett.”

  “You never know,” said Henry.

  “Very seldom, I’m afraid,” Violet Manciple agreed seriously. And she added, “You’ll stay to lunch, won’t you?”

  “It’s very kind of you, Mrs. Manciple, but I think not. They’re expecting me at The Viking, and I want to call in at the police station. I’ll be back about half-past two, if that suits you.”

  Half-past two. The Bishop arrived in the study in great form. He was carrying his clarinet, but otherwise looked remarkably episcopal in the dark suit which he had worn to church in the morning. He seemed surprised when Henry mentioned Julian Manning-Richards.

  “Julian? Julian? What about Julian? Charming boy. Son of old friends of ours from Bugolaland. Grandson of Aunt Dora’s beau. What makes you so interested in Julian?”

  “I believe he was on bad terms with Raymond Mason.”

  The Bishop snorted slightly. “The man was mentally defective,” he said. “The more mature of us were able to view the man’s aberrations with Christian charity, but when a high-spirited young man like Julian hears that his fiancée is being pestered by a man who imagines himself to be a poached egg—and twice her age at that…”

  With some difficulty Henry guided the conversation back to the Manning-Richards family. Soon, Edwin had settled down comfortably into a mood of reminiscence.

  “Humphrey Manning-Richards,” he said, “was a district commissioner in Bugolaland when I first went out there as a young man. Mind if I smoke?” Henry nodded his assent, and the Bishop brought out a tattered oilskin tobacco pouch and began to fill his pipe with leisurely enjoyment. “Yes, he was quite a chap. Big-game hunter, handsome, cricket blue—Oxford, of course—quite fearless, and delightfully modest with it—the best type of English man. A lot older than I, of course. He was married to a charming woman, and they had a son.”

  “Julian?”

  “No, no. Tony. Julian’s father. About fifteen, Tony was, when I first went out to Bugolaland. It was a couple of years later that the tragedy happened. Mrs. Manning-Richards came down with a fever. Dead in a matter of days. Aunt Dora had come out by then to keep house for me, and naturally she did what she could for poor Humphrey and the boy. In fact, between ourselves, it seemed only a question of leaving a decent interval after the wife’s death, before… Very suitable, in every way. Both of them in their late forties, a mot
herless boy to care for, and I was by that time engaged to my future wife, and to tell the truth I was a little worried about Aunt Dora’s future. But,” Edwin sighed, “it was not to be.”

  There was a pause and Henry said tentatively, “Another tragedy?”

  “If you like to call it so,” said the Bishop. “Humphrey Manning-Richards went on home leave. I personally am convinced that he would have proposed to Dora the day before his boat sailed, had it not been for the fact that the rains broke early that year and put an end to the farewell picnic which I had organized for him. At any rate, be that as it may, Manning-Richards sailed for home without—er—speaking to Dora. And the next thing we heard was that he had married a young person from the chorus of a musical comedy, which was currently playing in London. A foreigner, into the bargain. Serbo-Croat or Yugo-Slav”—the Bishop pronounced it Juggo—“or one of those Balkan countries which were changing their names so rapidly at that time. Magda, her name was.”

  Edwin paused again, and then snorted. “Magda Manning-Richards. He brought her back to Bugolaland with him, but I fear she was not well received. Oh, she was an attractive little thing, I agree, but a good twenty years younger than he; more his son’s age than his, to be truthful. I’ll be frank with you, Mr. Tibbett. Nobody liked Magda Manning-Richards, and few people took any trouble to conceal the fact. We were a small European community in Alimumba at the time, and Aunt Dora was greatly loved. There was a lot of resentment, and the Manning-Richards were more or less ostracized socially. That meant a lot in those days.

  “Well, to cut a long story short, Humphrey soon cottoned on to what was up, and he did the only sensible thing. He applied for a posting, and was transferred to East Bugolaland some hundreds of miles away—he and his wife and the little boy, Tony. Not so little by then either.

  “We quite lost touch with the whole family. The next thing I heard was about ten years later—that Humphrey had died of a heart attack. Then Violet wrote and told me that she’d seen the announcement of Tony’s marriage in The Times. He’d stayed on in Bugolaland and was farming there. Married a local girl, a clergyman’s daughter, I believe. I thought no more about them until I read one day that Tony and his wife had both been killed in a car smash somewhere up in the eastern hills. He’d stayed in the east, very sensibly. Much better climate—almost cold in the winter. Well, it was very sad, of course, but I hadn’t seen Tony since he was a schoolboy and I’d never met his wife. So that seemed to be that.

  “You can imagine how surprised I was when Violet told me that Maud had met this young man called Manning-Richards at the Sorbonne in Paris. ‘Bless my soul,’ I remember saying, ‘I wonder if he’s related to the family we knew in Bugolaland?’ He was, of course, Tony’s son. He’d been orphaned by that car smash when he was only six, and brought up in Bugolaland by his step-grandmother until she died recently. He’d come over to Europe to finish his studies in England and Paris. And met Maud, by a strange chance.” Edwin puffed at his pipe. “I can’t think of anything else. Is that what you wanted to know?”

  Henry smiled. “Yes and no,” he said. “It’s all very straightforward. I had an idea that perhaps—but obviously I was wrong.”

  “Wrong—wrong—and mature, at that,” remarked the Bishop, knocking his pipe on a large pewter ash tray.

  Henry thought quickly. Then he said, “Five letters?”

  “Of course.”

  “Grown. Mature. Anagram of wrong.”

  The Bishop beamed. “I misjudged you, Tibbett,” he said generously. “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time. I expect you’d like to see Julian. He’s been asking for you.”

  Maud and Julian came into the study together, hand in hand, like children.

  “Well now,” said Henry, “what can I do for you?”

  “Julian didn’t want me to come with him,” said Maud, “but I was determined…”

  “She thought that if we both came, you might take it more seriously, you see, sir,” said Julian. “I mean, I know it sounds a bit thin…”

  “Now, now, one at a time,” said Henry. “Why don’t you sit down for a start?”

  Reluctantly, Julian released Maud’s hand and ushered her into a chair, as gently as if she had been made of egg shell. Then he sat down himself, and said, “It’s about Frank Mason.”

  “I thought it might be,” said Henry.

  “You mean—you know?”

  “I’ve met young Mr. Mason,” said Henry.

  “I—I knew him slightly at London University.”

  “I gathered that much from him,” said Henry. “I also gathered that you and he didn’t exactly hit it off.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” said Julian. “He was a thoroughly unpleasant type of man. Too many of them around these days, if you ask me. It’s not socialism per se that I object to, it’s the lack of mental discipline which contents itself with woolly theories of pie in the sky and never bothers to work out the cost.”

  I suppose, Henry thought, that he can’t help sounding pompous. He’s young, after all. Aloud, he said, “I don’t quite see what all this has to do with…”

  “I’ll explain,” said Julian. “For a start, one of the things I objected to most strongly in Mason was his attitude to his father. Taking as much money as he could from him with one hand and kicking him with the other. Sorry about the mixed metaphor, but you see what I mean. As soon as Mason had had a couple of drinks, he began to tear down his old man and all he stood for in a disgustingly hypocritical way.” Julian almost choked at the memory, as though his vocal cords had become tied in knots.

  “One day I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I put it to him, fair and square, how he had the nerve to live on the profits from his father’s business while professing the political and social ideas that he did. And I’ll tell you what he said. He said that the only possible justification for a man like his father was that his ill-gotten gains should pass eventually into the hands of somebody who would use them to promote world revolution. ‘Like you, I suppose?’ I said, and he said, ‘Precisely.’ ‘Which means,’ I said, ‘that you are looking forward eagerly to your father’s death, does it?’ And, believe it or not, he actually said, ‘But of course, old man. I’d bump him off tomorrow if I thought I could get away with it.’ ”

  “How very interesting,” said Henry.

  “I know it’s true,” Maud burst out, “because Julian wrote and told me, and I’ve still got the letter, only it’s not here, it’s at Bradwood; and so you see that proves…”

  “Oh, I believe you,” said Henry. He smiled. “I can almost hear young Mr. Mason saying it. So you think he murdered his father.”

  Julian looked a little taken aback, “I didn’t mean to put it as strongly as that,” he said.

  There was a little pause, and then Maud said, “Go on, darling. Tell him the rest.”

  Julian still hesitated. “I don’t know whether I…”

  “If you won’t, then I will,” said Maud. Her small jaw was set in a determined line, and Henry was vividly reminded of the portrait of the Head which hung in the hall. She leaned forward. “Mr. Tibbett, this terrible Mason man is almost certainly going to accuse Julian of killing his father.”

  “Really?” Remembering his conversation with Frank Mason the previous evening, Henry was intrigued. He decided to give nothing away. “Whatever makes you think that?”

  “Well, you see, when Maud turned him down—you’d heard that old Mason had the effrontery to propose to her, I suppose?”

  “I’d heard,” said Henry.

  “Naturally, Maud refused him, but he kept on pestering her. And so I—well—I had a row with him.”

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘pestering’?” Henry asked.

  There was a vibrant silence.

  Julian said, “Well—coming to see her, telephoning…”

  “Miss Manciple,” said Henry, “you are a very modern young woman, with a very strong personality, if I may say so. Did you really need this s
ort of Victorian chivalry?”

  “You’re laughing at me,” said Maud angrily.

  “Yes,” said Henry. “And I shall continue to do so until you tell me what it was that really upset you about Raymond Mason.”

  The glance that the two young people exchanged was as eloquent as a page of written statement. Then Maud said, “Oh, very well. It was about Julian.”

  “What about Julian?”

  “Well, not about Julian really. About Uncle Claud.”

  “Could you be a little more explicit, Miss Manciple?” Henry asked politely.

  “I’ve applied for a job at Bradwood as Sir Claud’s personal assistant,” said Julian loudly. It was almost a shout of defiance. “I heard last week that I’ve gotten it. Is there any harm in that?”

  Henry remembered something that Violet Manciple had said. “You mean,” he said, “that Mason was hinting at nepotism?” There was a dead silence. Henry elaborated. “Marry the niece and make sure of the job with the uncle. Is that it?” Silence again. “Just what are your qualifications, Mr. Manning-Richards?”

  This goaded Maud into angry speech. “He’s got all the qualifications he needs. It’s an administrative job, after all. It’s not supposed to be a position for a physicist, just for an able organizer with a good knowledge of science and physics, which is exactly what Julian has. I don’t see why we should all be put at a disadvantage, just because Uncle Claud happens to be the Director-General at Bradwood!”

  “Nobody has made any insinuations against you, have they, Miss Manciple?” Henry asked. “I’ve been told that you got your job entirely on your own merit, and that Sir Claud didn’t even know you had applied until…”

  “It’s rather a different case, sir,” said Julian. He spoke stiffly. “This particular appointment—the one I hope to get—is in Sir Claud’s personal gift. He chooses the chap he wants,” he added, lapsing into the vernacular.

  “I see,” said Henry. “And this was upsetting Raymond Mason.”

  “It wasn’t upsetting him at all,” said Julian. “He was reveling in it. Using it to pursue Maud with these vile insinuations that I was only marrying her because—well—you can imagine. That was why I had that row with him.”