In the silence that followed, Henry could almost hear Frank Mason’s brain working, calculating the most suitable reply. At last he said, “All right. I found it there yesterday. By accident, like you said. I couldn’t know you’d already seen it. I knew it couldn’t have any connection with my father’s death, because the police had told me that they were holding the gun that shot him. So I—I removed the other gun. I thought it might be embarrassing if…”
“What did you do with it?”
Mason blew his nose. He seemed more at ease as he said, “No mystery about that. It’s here in the desk drawer. I was going to…
“To do what?”
“To take it back to Major Manciple. It’s his, after all.”
“I see. When were you proposing to give it back?”
“Well—I’d thought of going up there today. I thought I might…” Again he paused.
Henry grinned and said, “You thought you might find Miss Maud Manciple at home?”
The flush came back into Frank’s face. “You leave her out of this!”
“Very well,” said Henry. “But you’ll have to find some other excuse for visiting the Grange. I’m taking the gun away with me now.”
“Just as you like, Inspector. Here you are. It’s…” Frank opened the desk drawer with somewhat of a flourish. It was the drawer in which Henry had originally found the diary, and it was, as he knew, quite empty.
This time Mason’s astonishment was even more convincing. “But—I put it there yesterday. It must be…”
Henry stood up “You put it there yesterday,” he said, “and now it’s gone. Unfortunate, but not altogether surprising. I dare say the Homer’s Iliad is also missing.”
“Homer’s Iliad?”
“That’s right. Book Six.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” said Henry. “Nevertheless, I think we’ll have difficulty in locating that particular book. Perhaps you could help me look for it.”
Augustus Manciple’s handsomely-bound edition of Homer consisted of a set of six volumes. All bore the Manciple crest on their finely-tooled leather spines; all were bound in pale beige calf and freely embellished with gold. The first volume contained the Odyssey in Greek, with copious and learned notes, while the second was an English translation of the work, again richly annotated. The remaining four volumes comprised the Iliad, in Greek and in English. But of these six tomes, only five were to be found, for all Henry’s searching. The missing book was the first volume of the Iliad in Greek—Vol. III of the set—which had apparently contained Books One to Twelve in Greek, for Vol. IV started at Book Thirteen.
“And you’ve no idea where it is?” Henry said at last.
Frank Mason ran a hand through his red hair, making it even more unruly than usual. “I tell you, I don’t know what it’s all about. I can’t read Greek. I never knew my father had all these books—I suppose he bought them by the yard for snob effect. I’m bloody sure he never read them. If you’re trying to tell me that one of them was so valuable that somebody killed him to get hold of it…”
“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” said Henry, “but one of them was very valuable, and that one is missing.”
“How do you know it’s missing? How do you know he ever had it? He wouldn’t have known the difference if the set had been one short. For heaven’s sake, why don’t you go up to the Grange and see if it’s not there?” There was a little silence, and the Mason added, “I suppose you know that Manning-Richards is a classical scholar?”
“Is he? No, I didn’t know that.”
Frank laughed, ill-humoredly. “When I say scholar,” he amended, “I mean that he played around at Greek and Latin, as he played with everything else. He seemed to think…” Mason groped for the most damning expression he could find. Eventually, he finished, “He seemed to think that education was for fun.”
Henry could not repress a smile. “Poor fellow,” he said. “He must be one of the last people alive to take that view.”
“I’m glad to say,” said Mason aggressively, “that we’ve practically eliminated the privileged class that can afford to study for amusement.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Henry.
“Oh, I can see that you’re in the pockets of the Manciples and the Manning-Richards,” said Mason. “Just as I’d expect. You’re a sad little bourgeois, and you’d give your eyes to be what you call a real gentleman. The fact that one of these precious gentlemen of yours is a murderer doesn’t bother you, of course. The king can do no wrong.”
Henry looked at him seriously for a moment. Then he said, “If you really believe what you’ve just said, Mr. Mason, doesn’t it strike you that you are in considerable danger from this murderer yourself?”
“I can look after myself.”
“I do hope so. Sometimes the most unexpected people turn out to be very vulnerable.” Henry paused. Then he added, “If you are thinking of visiting Maud Manciple, I think I should tell you that her great-aunt died last night.”
“The ninety-year-old? Well, she’d had her innings, hadn’t she?”
“I’m told,” said Henry, “that there is to be no mourning, because the Manciples don’t go in for it. All the same, I think the old lady will be very much missed. She was greatly loved. I’d be a little tactful, if I were you. And careful.”
“Careful?”
“Somebody,” said Henry, “has that gun. If it isn’t you…” He left the sentence unfinished, and went on. “Have you had many visitors here in the last couple of days?”
“Visitors? Oh, I see what you’re driving at. The person who…” Frank laughed, the laugh totally devoid of any sort of joy or amusement, a laugh he seemed to use as a weapon against the Establishment in the same way that a small boy will stick his tongue out at his elders. “You don’t imagine that Cregwell has been beating a path to my door, do you? I’m not likely to have had any visitors.”
“But did you?”
“I’ve told you, no.”
“Not even the postman or the milkman?”
“Well, yes, of course, they were both here yesterday. But I don’t count them.”
“That’s what I was getting at,” said Henry. “Is there anyone else who has been here whom you don’t count?”
“Your famous Sergeant Duckett, wizard of the Fenshire force, was around here on Sunday,” said Frank with ponderous sarcasm. “Something about checking a statement. And I can do even better. The great Sir John Adamson himself favored me with a brief call on Sunday evening.”
“Did he?” Henry deliberately ironed any interest out of his voice. “In connection with the case, I suppose?”
“To tell me that the inquest is to be next Friday,” said Mason. “Very solicitous of him. He could perfectly easily have let events take their normal course. I had an official notification from the coroner’s office yesterday in any case, which accounts for the visit of the postman, if you’re interested. It came by the afternoon mail.”
“I expect Sir John thought that you’d rather…”
“He wanted to take a good look at me,” said Frank. “Quite understandable. But, of course, simple vulgar curiosity can never be admitted to affect the aristocracy. Oh, no. So he comes here in avuncular mood, dripping patronage.”
“If you care to take it that way…” Henry shrugged. “You seem to have caught a nasty cold,” he added.
“So would anybody in this benighted hole. What’s that to do with…?”
“I just wondered if the Doctor had been up to see you?”
Mason looked surly. “He did drop in yesterday,” he said. “I rang to ask when his hours were, and he said that he had a call to make in these parts and that he’d drop by. He gave me a prescription for some cough mixture and aspirins. Anything sinister about that?”
“I don’t know,” said Henry. “When was this?”
“Yesterday morning, around eleven, I suppose. I didn’t make an accur
ate note of the time.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Henry seriously. He was too absorbed in his thoughts to worry about the irony in Mason’s voice. “Were any of these people left alone in this room for any length of time?”
Mason knitted his brows in thought, and began to cough again. Then he said, “Yes. All of them.”
“Really?”
“Well, the telephone rang in the hall outside while Duckett was here, and I had to go and answer it. That must have given him three or four minutes alone in here. Then, Sir John High-and-Mighty Adamson made it so clear that he expected to be offered a drink that eventually I had to give him one. I went out into the kitchen to get some ice—that must have taken a few minutes. As for old Thompson, he started on about my National Health card, because obviously he’s not the G.P. I’m registered with. I happen to know it’s not necessary to produce the card for a temporary thing like this, but he made quite a fuss, and so I had to pretend to go and look for it. I knew I didn’t have it here, of course. Damned bureaucracy, that’s all it is. Men like Thompson think they can push people around, just because they’ve got a couple of letters tacked onto their names. In a properly-organized society…”
Mercifully, another fit of coughing intervened, for although Henry would have been interested to hear how Mason, who was far from unintelligent, proposed to reconcile a Communist society with the abolition of bureaucracy, he really did not have time for it just then. He waited until the coughing ceased, and then said, “Any other visitors?”
“Not that I know of. But that doesn’t mean that people may not have been prowling around.”
“Wouldn’t you have seen them?”
“Not if I was out.”
“But you’d have noticed if any of the doors or windows had been forced…”
“I don’t lock doors,” said Frank Mason. “I trust my fellow workers.”
“There seem to be an awful lot of people you don’t trust, all the same,” said Henry.
Suddenly, disarmingly, Frank Mason smiled. Henry was amazed to see how a real smile, as opposed to a sneer, could illuminate his face and fill it with interest, as a shaft of sunlight reveals the contours of a landscape. “The people I distrust,” said Frank Mason, “are the rich people. And there’s nothing in this house worth locking up against people of that sort.”
Henry, in his turn, smiled, but a trifle bitterly. “I think you’re wrong,” he said. “Or at least, you were. There was something worth taking, but now it’s gone. So I wouldn’t bother about locking up. Remember the old proverb about the stable door. Well, I’d better be off. I’ve a lot to do this morning. And by the way,” he hesitated, “I’d like to read your book when it’s finished.”
“You’d—what? Trying to make something out of that, are you?”
“Not in the sense you mean. I’ve always been interested in Xenophanes. He certainly anticipated a great deal of modern radical thinking, and I’d be interested to see how you relate him to Marx.”
“What do you know about it?” said Frank Mason suspiciously.
“Well—take his ridicule of the idea of gods created in men’s images,” said Henry. “That cleared away more cobwebs of superstition than…”
“You surprise me,” said Mason. “I should have thought you’d be a Heraclitean, with your attitude to the Establishment.” In spite of his sneering tone he was obviously intrigued.
Henry laughed, “I’m not quite such a die-hard as that,” he said. “Of course, panta rei…”
“Everything flows,” said Mason. “There’s a great deal to be…” Then he stopped.
Henry said, “You do read Greek, don’t you?”
Mason went a furious red. “So you were simply trying to trick me, were you? Everybody knows what panta rei means. You don’t need to be a Greek scholar…”
“I wasn’t trying to trick you at all,” said Henry. “It wasn’t necessary.”
“What does that mean?”
“Simply that a man as brilliant and as conscientious as you would never embark on such a book if he couldn’t read his original sources.” Mason said nothing. Henry added, “There was no need to lie about it.” He sounded almost sad. “No need at all.” He walked out into the windy garden.
Life at Cregwell Grange was evidently continuing its usual course, regardless of Aunt Dora’s death. As Henry got out of his car, he could hear the sound of firing from the range, indicating George Manciple’s whereabouts. From another part of the garden came the penetrating but tremulous notes of a clarinet, inexpertly played; that could only be the Bishop. The front door stood wide open, and from the inside of the house the whirring of a vacuum cleaner made a continuous obbligato to the soloists in the garden. Nevertheless, for all its air of apparent normality, Henry fancied that he could detect the oppressive atmosphere of a house in mourning. It depressed him profoundly to think that he was about to add a further dimension of distress to that mourning. However, there was nothing to be done about it. He rang the bell.
The tinkling echoes had not died away before there was a clatter of footsteps on the stairs. The vacuum cleaner was switched off, and simultaneously Maud’s voice called from above, “I’ll go, Mother! It’s probably…” At this point she appeared at the bend of the staircase, saw Henry through the open front door, and exclaimed, “Oh! It’s you,” with obvious surprise.
“I’m afraid so,” said Henry. “I’m sorry to have to worry you at a time like this…”
“Don’t apologize,” said Maud. But her voice was slightly edgy. “I expect Mother told you that we don’t go in for mourning.”
“Yes,” said Henry, “she did.” He noticed all the same that Maud was wearing a white dress, and he knew that this was the color of mourning in some countries. It made her look more fragile than ever.
“Well, come in. What do you want?”
Henry went into the hall. At once he was aware of the agreeable, flinty scent of chrysanthemums. The house had been filled with them, great bowls of shaggy blooms, many of them white. It was, of course, September, and the height of the chrysanthemum season; but Henry had remarked that few grew in the gardens of Cregwell Grange, and certainly no specimens like these, whose great heads, the size of grapefruit, proclaimed them as showpieces from an expensive florist. Chrysanthemums, Henry knew, were regarded in most European countries as the flowers of the dead and were by tradition heaped on family graves at the festival of All Souls. It certainly seemed as though somebody at Cregwell Grange was defying the Head’s edict and was mourning Aunt Dora. Henry felt somehow pleased at the fact.
“I’m afraid,” he said, “that I must have a word with Major and Mrs. Manciple.”
Maud gave him a direct look. “Can’t you leave them in peace for a moment?” she said. “Raymond Mason is dead. Surely your investigations, or whatever you call them, can at least wait until after Aunt Dora’s funeral?”
“What I have to say to your parents has nothing to do with Raymond Mason, Miss Manciple.”
“Oh. You mean, it isn’t official business?”
“Yes and no.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“It means that I have to talk to Major and Mrs. Manciple.”
Maud looked at Henry as though she did not like him at all, and he realized, not for the first time, just how tough she was in spite of her fairy-doll fragility. It also occurred to him what a dangerous enemy she would be, with her beauty, her brains, and her whiplash strength of character—and what a useful ally. He also found himself wondering how George and Violet Manciple had managed to produce such a child, and at once answered his own question. Maud was a direct throwback to her grandparents. He remembered the photograph which George Manciple had shown him, and marveled that he had not noticed at once the strong resemblance between Maud and the long-dead Rose Manciple. He also glanced, instinctively, at the portrait of the Head, which dominated the hall. Maud, following his eyes, said at once, “Yes, I am very like him.”
“You
must be a mind-reader,” said Henry. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, dissolving miraculously from a deadly member of the Erinyes into a small, vulnerable girl in a white cotton dress.
As she opened the drawing-room door for him, Maud said, “People often tell me how frightening I can be. I don’t mean it, you know. It must be a trick of the light playing on the Manciple bone structure. Just wait in here and I’ll call Father.”
The drawing room, too, had been embellished by two big bowls of chrysanthemums. Henry watched from the window as Maud made her way down the garden toward the shooting range. As she disappeared behind the privet hedge, Edwin Manciple came up toward the house from the opposite direction. He was wearing khaki shorts and he carried his clarinet, a collapsible music stand, and an untidy collection of sheet music. He saw Henry standing at the window and waved his clarinet in a welcoming manner before disappearing around the corner of the house in the direction of the front door.
A moment later Maud and her father came out from the shelter of the hedge and walked up toward the house. They both looked grave and were deep in conversation. On the lawn outside the drawing-room window, Maud stopped, said something to George, and went off down the garden again. George Manciple sighed, tucked his gun under his arm, and came in through the French windows to the drawing room.
“Maud says you want to see me, Tibbett,” he said.
“I fear so,” said Henry, “you and Mrs. Manciple.”
“Together?”
“That’s largely up to you,” said Henry.
“To me? What do you mean?”
“it’s about Miss Manciple.”
“About Maud?” The Major looked really alarmed.
“No, no. Miss Dora Manciple.”
“Poor Aunt Dora. Surely she may be left in peace, now that she’s dead?”
“I’m afraid she can’t,” said Henry. “I know it will be very distressing for you, but I have to tell you. I’m not at all satisfied about her death and I think there should be a post-mortem examination.”
For a moment George Manciple gaped at Henry as though he were some sort of imbecile. Then he let rip. Henry, he said, in an ever-thickening Irish brogue, had been called in to investigate the death of Raymond Mason. This he had not done. Had as good as told Sir John Adamson that Mason committed suicide, which was arrant nonsense, as anybody with a modicum of intelligence could see. He, Henry, had then proceeded to hang around Cregwell, doing nothing, upsetting everybody, and coming to no sensible conclusions. Now, to crown it all, he was making unfounded and positively indecent suggestions concerning poor Aunt Dora, who had done no more than die quietly in her bed of a weak heart, God rest her soul, and if she hadn’t a right to do that at ninety-three, he, George, would like to know who had.
Murder Fantastical Page 17
