The fourth bungalow was owned by a local boat-builder’s family. It was used intermittently during the summer by various members of the clan, but was never let to outsiders. Bungalow five was even less interesting. It was derelict and untenanted, and had been so since it had caught fire some six years previously. There was nothing there.
In respect of number six there was a good deal of information forthcoming. It appeared that it was rented all the year round by a man named Darnwell. He was said to come from London, to be moderately well-off, and to entertain ladies of a type known to those of good understanding, but of limited or inhibited vocabulary, as floosies.
Bungalow seven was rented regularly every summer by a pleasant middle-aged couple who were accustomed to invite young people of their acquaintance, particularly their son and their son’s friends, to spend week-ends with them during June, July and August.
Mrs. Bradley, who, when she liked, could charm the jewel out of a toad’s head, was soon on excellent terms with all her neighbours. The seven bungalows, isolated as they were from the rest of the village whose postal address they bore, had become a self-contained community into which even the promiscuous Mr. Darnwell and his various ‘nieces’ had been accepted. The little outpost was, in fact, as much interested in Mrs. Bradley as she was in its members, and she experienced not the slightest difficulty in becoming acquainted with all of them.
It seemed to her unlikely that any outsider could have fastened the body to the bottom of the dinghy. Anyone from outside, so to say, would have become too much the focus of attention, for the job, involving, as it did, a certain amount of hammering, could hardly have been done except, in apparent innocence, by daylight.
She soon gathered that boat-repairing was a subject now under tabu among the residents. She could scarcely blame them. They were intelligent persons, and they realized (as clearly as she did) that to confess to having repaired a boat during the week when Francis and Miss Higgs had been in Great Yarmouth was as quick a way as any of finding oneself explaining the nature of the repairs to a magistrate.
Apart from this common factor, however, there was no other barrier to a completely free discussion of the murder. Every household had its views, and these were assiduously gleaned by Mrs. Bradley. The only people whose opinions she did not ask for were those of Miss Higgs and Francis. The former, anxious for her charge, sought and obtained permission from the police to take him to his grandfather in Hampshire. She was not at all surprised when Sir Adrian did not answer her letter, but she confided to Mrs. Bradley that she was still determined to go.
Mrs. Bradley, having returned her grand-nephew to his own home, settled down to enjoy herself. She kept careful records of her interviews with the residents of the bungalows, and continued to interview these residents with great method and apparent innocence, beginning with the middle-aged couple, whose name was Coppinger. These people she was strongly inclined (on psychological grounds) to write off at once, particularly after she had verified the information which they gave about themselves.
They were blameless and ordinary people. The man was manager of a factory which made bathing costumes. Some connection existed in his mind between his work and the water in which, sooner or later, that work would be immersed. He could not swim, but he loved to be near a river or the sea. This love had brought him one summer to Wetwode and after that he had never spent a holiday anywhere else. His wife was content to be where he was, and his son was the apple of his eye. The family had no enemies, no debts, no secrets (so far as could be determined) and a considerable number of friends.
Mrs. Bradley, apart from the contacts dictated by good-neighbourliness, soon did not trouble any more about them. Their son, a boy of twenty-two, had his own acquaintances, men and girls, and had always avoided Francis, whom he suspected of not being right in the head. The shy and difficult youth might have apprehended this perfectly well, for he had never made the slightest effort to get to know the family.
About Morris Darnwell, who rented the next bungalow, Mrs. Bradley was far less relenting and certain. To begin with, he was something of an enigma in himself, apart from any question of the murder. Anything less like the paunched and astrakhan-collared Lothario of popular conception could scarcely be imagined; still less the blond beast of Teutonic ideology. Darnwell was a monkey-like little man who had the air of sadness common to nearly all simians, a quiet and cultured voice, exquisitely self-effacing manners and an extensive knowledge of Easter Island art.
He aroused Mrs. Bradley’s suspicions by his heartily-declared aversion to the dead man. He had been, she thought, much too frank and outspoken to be considered quite genuine. This did not necessarily imply, however, that he was guilty of complicity in the murder.
‘Campbell? An unbearable person,’ he declared. ‘He was no more a naturalist than I am. Less, in fact. Those binoculars of his have had a good deal to answer for. I knew a woman who committed suicide because of them. He was a snooper, a blackmailer and a common informer. Any one of a hundred people might have killed him. That touch of fastening the body with those hoops to the bottom of the dinghy was unique, though. The police ought to be able to make something out of that. Macabre, don’t you think? The bottom of a dinghy is not at all the kind of hiding-place that the average mind could have conceived. You’re a psychologist. Can’t you make anything out of it?’
Mrs. Bradley grinned politely and said truthfully that her main interest had been in the reactions of young Mr. Caux.
‘Yes, he’s an odd lad,’ agreed Darnwell. ‘A wonderful swimmer and diver.’ He looked speculatively at Mrs. Bradley, but she refused the gambit, saying carelessly:
‘There’s always some natural compensation for bodily or mental infirmity, don’t you think?’
Upon the subject of his own whereabouts during the week of the murder, Darnwell was disconcertingly frank.
‘That may have been the week I had Annie here. Macheath was right about women. Nothing unbends the mind like them. If I were sleeping with Annie—and she rejects my favours too often, much too often—a man might play Drake’s drum underneath the windows and I shouldn’t notice it.’
‘The inference is that the job was done by daylight,’ said Mrs. Bradley. Darnwell waved thin hands as delicately-fashioned as the antennae of a butterfly, and shook his head strongly.
‘All the more reason for my having known nothing about it. Annie and I would stay in bed until twelve and then go into the village or out in the car for lunch. These people always tinker with their boats in the early morning. I still say I shouldn’t have noticed. Such are the penalties of love.’
Mrs. Bradley left it at that, but she put a question mark against Morris Darnwell’s name in her notebook. His observations, however, provided another line of investigation. Presumably he had given the same information to the police as he had to her, but Mrs. Bradley’s detective instinct (or, as she, probably honestly, preferred to call it, her insatiable curiosity) prompted her to take independent action upon what she had learned.
This independent action soon bore fruit. It was proved that the dead man had indeed been both a public informer and a blackmailer. The list of his victims went into hundreds. Except that she had a personal desire to know the truth about his death, Mrs. Bradley would have lost interest in him. Someone, she concluded, goaded beyond reason, had decided to make an end of unbearable trouble. She now felt not the slightest sympathy for the dead man. Blackmailers, in her opinion, were far worse than murderers, but in the murder itself she took deep interest.
She turned her attention to the occupants of bungalow four, owned by the boat-builder’s family. During the week in question it had been used by the boat-builder’s cousin, a man named Lafferty, his wife and two daughters. Mrs. Bradley wrinkled her yellow forehead over the name Lafferty and then asked him a direct question, but not of a kind to be resented.
‘The international swimmer?’
‘Used to be. Too old now. I’m forty-five. Still run my loc
al club, though, and the two girls are coming on nicely. Meet the wife, Jane Court that was. You’ve probably heard of her, too. Nereid Swimming Club president and star turn in 1930-31. Only missed the Olympic team by a toucher. Personally, I’d have included her, but perhaps I’m prejudiced.’
Mrs. Bradley was prejudiced, too. She found that her mind refused to consider these people as possible murderers. In any case, the bizarre business of attaching the body to the bottom of the dinghy by iron bands and staples would most certainly have been accomplished on land. It could not have been done under water. Therefore the proof of an ability to swim and dive scarcely entered into the matter, except that she felt that in the murderer’s place she would have wanted to satisfy herself that the body was still in position, still well and firmly fastened, after the dinghy had been put back into the boathouse.
It seemed to her likely that the job itself had been done in the boathouse. This would afford a certain amount of cover (although not very much) for nefarious and secret activities, and would only have involved raising the dinghy on to the wooden slats which sloped in a gentle ramp from the concrete surround to the water. From this position, too, it would have been fairly easy for a powerful and determined man to have turned the dinghy over again and refloated it, even with the added weight of the dead man and the ironwork, although with the help of a second man, a boy, or even a woman, the task would have been much easier. She did not therefore rule out her original idea that there might have been two persons involved, but she thought there must have been a leading spirit in the affair.
The clue which the police were most inclined to follow up was that the body had been fastened with what were obviously specially prepared pieces of iron. The corpse had been secured by the neck, by each upper arm and by each thigh, and the staples used had points so sharp that a single blow from a hammer would have been sufficient to drive them into the stout wooden frame of the dinghy. The police, after consultation, had decided that if they could discover where all this apparatus had been made or purchased, the identity of the person who had used it would soon be apparent.
Mrs. Bradley was not able (even if she had been interested enough to want to do so) to follow up any such line of investigation. It was the psychology of the murderer which interested her. One thing, she assumed, the murderer had not realized; that the body would be discovered so comparatively soon. He must have hoped and anticipated that by the time it was discovered it would be unrecognizable and unidentifiable. And yet, like Rupert Brooke’s poetic non-entity, she knew doubts that would not be denied.
She puzzled for some time upon this oversight on the part of the murderer. It almost looked as though he could not, after all, have been one of the bungalow community, unless he were Francis himself, for the other people surely would have known that Francis was a keen swimmer and was also capable of either rowing or sailing the dinghy, and that the raised centre-board and the behaviour of the boat on its new and terrible keel would immediately attract his attention. There was still the same argument, however, in favour of the murderer’s having been someone on the spot, well known to the rest of the inhabitants, for otherwise, she argued, he would scarcely have been able to come and go without being noticed; and that the work had been done under cover of darkness she found herself unable to believe.
She spent some hours in searching the burnt-out, derelict bungalow after the police had abandoned (for the time only, perhaps) their own search for clues in the immediate neighbourhood, but nothing there gave her any help. The evidence of fire and the equally deplorable evidence of the hosed water which had put out the fire, were all that she discovered. The dead man had been coshed and his skull broken. He could well have been killed in the derelict bungalow except that there was no trace of blood there, but he could equally well have been killed elsewhere and his body transported by car.
The only bungalow residents still on Mrs. Bradley’s list were the two fishermen, Grandall and Tavis, but it had been clearly proved by the police that neither of them had been in Wetwode at the time of the murder. Their alibis, however, were not, to Mrs. Bradley, satisfactory. Grandall had been in Switzerland, where his mother, an invalid, had had a serious relapse so that he had been sent for at short notice, and Tavis had remained in London because he was not interested in going to Wetwode alone. On the other hand, the police had wiped the two men off their list of possible suspects, and, under these circumstances, Mrs. Bradley was prepared to do no more than note down the fact that it had proved extraordinarily useful to Tavis and Grandall that the latter’s mother had contrived her serious illness at such a convenient time.
The police soon ferreted out the blacksmith who had made the iron bands and supplied the staples used by the murderer to fasten the body to the bottom of the dinghy. He lived less than ten miles from Wetwode and he declared that none of the inhabitants of the bungalows, man, woman or adolescent, was the person by whom he had been commissioned. There was no reason to think that he was either lying or mistaken, and he was able to describe in reasonable detail his customer. Unfortunately, in the era of mass-produced, off-the-peg clothes, the description of a middle-aged, strongly-built, high-complexioned man wearing a tweed jacket, a woollen pullover, flannel trousers, a soft hat and a raincoat, did not carry the enquiry further forward. The police confronted him with all the possible suspects, one by one, but the blacksmith, an unimpressionable, sober, non-suggestible Norfolk man, was firm. His customer, he was positively certain, had not been in the least like any of them. He added one further clue, but it did not seem a very helpful one. The customer had spoken, he thought, like a West Country man. He had not been a Norfolk man or a Londoner.
He refused to attempt to imitate the accent, and this Mrs. Bradley thought was perhaps as well, since it might have been even less helpful than his refusal to commit himself on the subject.
It was at this interesting and unhelpful juncture that Miss Higgs, shopping with Francis in the village, slipped on the steps of the Universal Emporium and broke her left leg. She also struck her head, and the resultant concussion made it impossible for her to be allowed visitors at the hospital to which she was taken.
Mrs. Bradley left messages of sympathy, and also a note which stated that she proposed to take Francis to his grandfather, whose address she had previously acquired from Miss Higgs. It seemed unlikely that Miss Higgs would be in a fit state to receive the messages or to read the note for some days.
Although, according to Miss Higgs, Sir Adrian had not even troubled to reply to letters, Mrs. Bradley had no doubt of her own ability to return his grandson to his care now that Miss Higgs was no longer able to assume responsibility for the youth. The idea of personal failure was, and had always been, absent from Mrs. Bradley’s consciousness. In any case, she had no intention whatsoever of finding herself in the position of guardian angel. Francis was Sir Adrian’s responsibility, and she proposed to plant that responsibility firmly where it belonged. Without attempting to convey her intentions to the boy, she simply packed his bags, sent for her chauffeur, and directed the car to Mede.
CHAPTER SIX
Mede
*
‘… I say that our race would be happy if we could only fully satisfy our love and return each to his primitive nature and find his beloved.’
Plato: Symposium
*
EVEN SIR ADRIAN, sporting an eye reminiscent of an over-ripe plum, could not contrive to have the cricket match resumed on the Saturday. There had been a mêlée of a sumptuous kind, in the immortal words of Private Mulvaney, following the discovery of the visiting captain’s body, and into this fracas (to Tom Donagh’s astonishment) Derek, his pupil, had entered with considerable spirit.
He had come back on to the field at the first sounds, and, shrieking, in a high girlish voice near to tears, ‘Don’t you dare touch my Grand,’ he had sailed in with some pretty right hooks which connected neatly with the ears and ribs of those towards whom they were aimed. In addition, until the poli
ce arrived, battle was remorselessly waged between the two elevens and their supporters until the field around the pavilion resembled an abattoir and crawled with bright blood and crept with tiny strips torn berserk-like from cricket shirts and fancy scarves.
Tom, in self-defence, had put in two or three shrewd punches, and then had dragged his charge from the maelstrom and hustled him back into the house. He was absolved from having to make any attempt to rescue his employer, for Sir Adrian had already retired hurt, and was the first person to telephone for the police. These arrived in force from Lymington, broke up the affray, and, at Sir Adrian’s instigation, arrested most of the visiting team.
It then occurred to Sir Adrian to mention the murder, and the local doctor, who had been acting as one of the scorers, made his report. This was subsequently endorsed by the police surgeon, and after the body had been photographed and removed, the police investigation began in earnest, and, owing to the extraordinary nature of the circumstances, those arrested for disturbing the peace were released so that they might testify (to the best of their ability) without there being any reason to have them suppose that they would be subjected to unfair pressure.
Statements were taken from everybody on the ground before either cricketers or onlookers could depart, but, at first sight, there was remarkably little to be learnt. The body had been found in the room devoted to showers and washbowls on the visiting team’s side of the pavilion.
The pavilion at Mede was a well-constructed building very simple in plan. Three wooden steps ran the whole length of the verandah (which had no rail) and at the centre back was a door leading to a through passage which ended in another door some forty feet away. It was customary for the home team to use this back door when they came to the pavilion from the house.
The Echoing Strangers (Mrs Bradley) Page 6
