Garth laughed. There was something artless about the creature.
‘I reckon it was.’
Cyril edged nearer.
‘Was you at the inquest?’
Garth nodded.
‘What did they say?’ His a’s were all i’s, his London twang pure Stepney.
‘They said it was suicide.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he was found in the church with the door locked and his key in his pocket.’
Cyril gave a scornful laugh.
‘I reckon there was another key all right, mister.’
‘Oh, yes – there are three other keys. The Rector has one, Mr Bush the sexton has one, and Miss Brown who plays the organ has the third. They were all accounted for.’
Cyril said ‘Coo!’ And then, ‘They don’t ’arf believe things, those blokes at inquests. I could tell them something if I liked. And would they believe me? Not ’arf, they wouldn’t! I’m not a clergyman, nor a sexton, nor Miss Brown.’
Garth was leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. He eyed the flushed cheeks and bright blue eyes and enquired,
‘What could you tell them?’
Cyril came closer.
‘Something about a key.’
‘Look here – do you mean that?’
‘Coo – I don’t tell lies! Scouts don’t. It isn’t ’arf inconvenient sometimes, but it’s better in the long run, because people believe you. See?’
Garth saw.
‘All right – what do you know about a key?’
The boy shuffled with his feet.
‘I dunno as I’d better say.’
‘If you really know anything—’
‘O – w, I know all right.’
‘Then I think you ought to say.’
Cyril appeared to consider this. He had obviously spent a happier hour and a half since tea-time in getting as much mud on to his person as possible. His knees were plastered, his hands and arms bedaubed, and his face well smeared. In spite of this he contrived a serious, even a dependable look.
‘If I was to say, I couldn’t take it back afterwards?’
‘No.’
‘If anyone was to get into trouble along of what I said, and it come to a trial, I’d have to get up and say it in front of a judge?’
‘Yes.’
‘And have my picture in the papers? Coo! That wouldn’t ’arf be something to write home about!’ His face lit up with bright anticipation and then was overcast again. ‘I reckon I’d get into trouble though.’
‘Why?’
Cyril edged up another six inches or so.
‘Well, it’s like this. I’m supposed to be in by half-past seven. I gets my supper and a wash, and I’m supposed to be in bed by eight.’ There was a heavy accent on the ‘supposed’.
‘But you don’t always go – is that it?’
‘Well, it’s like this. I have my wash and I go to my room—’
‘But you don’t always get into bed?’
Cyril scuffed with his feet. Garth laughed again.
‘All right – I see. And Tuesday was one of the nights you didn’t go to bed?’
He got a look, at first deprecating but which changed to something uncommonly like a wink.
‘What did you do?’ said Garth.
Cyril kicked so hard as to endanger the toe of his shoe.
‘I reckon I’ll get into trouble,’ he said.
‘Probably. But I think you’d better tell me all the same. What did you do?’
There was another of those sidelong glances, and then, ‘I got out of the window.’
‘How did you manage that?
Having taken the plunge, Cyril became extremely animated.
‘See that window there on the side of the house? That’s my room, and if you get out on the sill and hang with your hands, it ain’t so far to drop on to that bit of roof that sticks out over the libery. There’s a big branch of a tree comes over, and you can get a good holt of it and come along hand over hand and climb down. I’ve done it ever so many times and I haven’t never been caught once.’
Garth considered it a very sporting effort. He knew the tree, the window, and the distance. He wasn’t at all sure that he could have pulled it off at Cyril’s age. He nodded and said, ‘Well, you climbed down the tree. What happened after that?’
‘I larked about a bit, playing Red Indians, crawling up to the house like it was a stockade and surrounding it. Coo – it wasn’t ’arf exciting!’
‘What sort of time was it?’
‘Well, it wasn’t far off a quarter to nine when I got out of the window. You can hear the church clock strike, and it had gone the quarter to.’
‘All right – go on.’
‘Well, after a bit it stopped being dark because of the moon coming up, so I couldn’t go on playing Indians near the house in case of anyone looking out of a window and seeing me, so I thought I’d come out here and make a ambush, and if anyone come by I could play I’d scalped them.’
‘And did anyone come?’
‘Oh, boy – didn’t they just! The lady come first – out of this door.’ He laid his hand on the jamb against which Garth had been leaning.
‘What lady?’ He tried not to speak too quickly.
‘The lady that lives with the old lady at your house – Miss Brown. You know – the lady that plays the organ in church on a Sunday. I was down in the ditch there right opposite, lying down flat, and I reckon if I’d had a bow-an-arrow I could have shot her dead. Well, she stays there with the door half open – that’s when I reckon I could have shot her – and then she comes right out. And then the gentleman comes, and he says, “Where are you going?” and he says her name. It sounded awfully funny to me – something like suet.’
‘Suet?’
Cyril nodded.
‘You know – in a packet – Atora, like my auntie used to send me for to the grocer’s’.
Garth restrained himself.
‘Medora?’
‘That’s right! It isn’t ’arf a funny kind of name. “Where are you going, Medora?” he says. I reckon I could have shot him too.’
‘Yes – go on. What did she say?’
‘She says it hasn’t got anything to do with him, and he says oh, yes it has, and what’s that she’s got in her hand. And she says, “Nothing”. And he says, “Oh, yes, you have, and you’ll ’and it over to me! You’re not using any keys to let yourself into the church tonight. If you want to listen to him playing you can stand out here, and if you want to talk to him you can do it in the day time. ’And over that there key!”
‘And did she?’
‘I’ll say she did! He’d got her by the arm, twisting it like, and the key fell down. And she says “Oh!” like she was going to cry and pulls her ’and away and back into your garden and shuts the door, and the gentleman he picks up the key and puts it in his pocket and goes off.’
‘Which way did he go?’
An extremely dirty finger pointed in the direction of the church.
‘Sure?’
‘Ow, yes!’
‘Who was it?’ said Garth. ‘Do you know?’
Cyril looked surprised.
‘Course I do!’
‘Who was it?’
‘The one as they call the professor.’
Here was something with a vengeance. Garth said, ‘Are you sure?’
Cyril nodded emphatically.
‘Coo –I wouldn’t say a thing like that if I wasn’t! It was him all right. Ever so angry he was – put me in mind of Boris Banks in Murder at Midnight. It was a smashing picture – he didn’t ’arf carry on. You see, he’d murdered a lady—’
Garth recalled him firmly.
‘Cut all that and get back to Tuesday! What makes you sure who it was you saw?’
Cyril looked obstinate and a little dashed.
‘Well, mister, I seen him. I told you as how the moon was up – bright as bright it was. It was him all right. Lives in the house u
p at the top of the lane where the held is with the ruings. The gentleman that was shot, he lived there too.’
Garth whistled.
‘Well, if you’re sure, you’re sure. But you mustn’t say you are if you’re not. It’s – very important.’
Cyril nodded again.
‘Coo – I know that! It was him all right – name of Madoc.’
Garth stood there a moment. Then he put a hand on Cyril’s shoulder.
‘While he was there – while he was talking to Miss Brown, could you hear anything else – anything from the church?’
‘Only the other gentleman playing the organ.’
‘You did hear that?’
‘Ow, yes!’
‘All right – go on. What happened after that?’
Cyril stared.
‘Nothing. I went back in.’
‘How do you get back?’
‘Up the tree, mister, and a bit higher up – then if you crawl along, there’s a branch you can get hold of that brings you down where you can swing on to the window ledge.’
Garth thought of his Aunt Sophy’s feelings. He remembered performances of his own which included sliding down the outer slope of the roof and finishing up with his heels in the guttering, yet the human boy survived. He laughed and said, ‘Sounds quite a stunt. Then you went to bed, I suppose?’
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t hear anything after that?’
Cyril shook his head regretfully.
‘I went to sleep. If I hadn’t I might have heard the shot. I don’t ’arf want to kick myself when I think about it. I didn’t hear nothing. Oh boy – I wish I had!’
FIFTEEN
THE NEXT FEW hours saw a good deal of activity on the part of a number of people. Garth walked to Perry’s Halt and from there took the train to Marbury, from which sizeable town he judged that he could without indiscretion ring up Sir George Rendal. As a result of this conversation strings were pulled, a Chief Constable was tactfully approached and prevailed upon to request that the Harsch case should be taken over by Scotland Yard.
Garth, having finished with the telephone, partook of a horrible and very expensive meal at the Station Hotel and made his way back by the late slow local, wondering what hotel crooks did to food to make it so repulsive.
As he walked across the dark fields from Perry’s Halt he was wondering about other things. Madoc – why should Madoc have murdered Harsch? Jealousy over Medora Brown? A good stock answer out of all the melodramas that had ever been written. It did seem extraordinarily unlikely. But then people did do very unlikely things, and melodrama was a most constant factor in human affairs. Every day the snappier papers produced the most lunatic stories of human behaviour. Medora wasn’t his cup of tea, but she might be Madoc’s. She might even have been Michael Harsch’s. She was quite a handsome woman in her way. She could have sat or stood for almost any one of the darker heroines of Greek tragedy. A little old perhaps for Cassandra, but quite a possible Electra, who could never have been young, and a very credible Clytemnestra. Or Medusa. Yes, Medusa had it – a Medusa who had seen something which had turned her to stone. The legend in reverse.
Well, Madoc was bound to be arrested unless he had a very good explanation to hand about the key. He found himself wondering how Madoc would take arrest. These men who got angry about trifles sometimes found control in an emergency. He wondered, and wondered again, why Madoc should have shot Michael Harsch. There was the obvious melodramatic motive of jealousy. There was the impossible-possible twisted motive of the pacifist who sees himself rescuing the world from the latest perversion of science. It might be either of these, or a tangled mixture of both. He thought the police might have their work cut out to get a case that would hold water. A jury wasn’t going to like hanging a man on the unsupported evidence of a boy of twelve. He was glad the thing was off his shoulders anyway. He had made the report he was bound to make, and that finished it as far as he was concerned.
It felt like the middle of the night, but it was actually no more than eleven o’clock when he got back to the Rectory, where he discovered Miss Sophy in a woollen dressing-gown sitting up for him with hot coffee and sandwiches, over which she became very chatty but most admirably abstained from asking any questions. In her generation the men of the family came and went, and you never dreamed of asking them where they had been. It simply wasn’t done.
She talked instead about Miss Brown.
‘I am afraid Mr Harsch’s death has been a very severe shock. I would not let her sit up – she is really not at all herself – but I hope perhaps in the morning, with the inquest behind her, she will be feeling better.’
Garth had his doubts. He felt concerned and embarrassed, and made haste to talk about Miss Doncaster. He had heard Aunt Sophy become quite animated on the subject before now, but tonight she merely sighed and said, ‘You know, my dear, I am sorry for her. She and Mary Anne had a very difficult time when they were young. Their father was a most peculiar man. He didn’t like people coming to the house, and they never had any opportunities even when they were abroad. I think they would have liked to marry, but they never met anyone. Mr Doncaster was really so very reserved, and he lived till they were both past middle age. And now Mary Anne is a complete invalid, so I feel sorry for Lucy Ellen, though sometimes she does make me lose my temper.’
Garth felt very warmly towards his Aunt Sophy as he said good-night.
At a little after ten o’clock next morning a very empty train approached Perry’s Halt containing two officers sent down from Scotland Yard. They were Chief Detective Inspector Lamb, a large imperturbable person with a sanguine complexion and strong black hair wearing a little thin upon the top, and Detective Sergeant Abbott, between whom no greater contrast could be imagined. They might, in fact, have furnished material for a cartoon entitled ‘The Police Officer, Old and New’ – Abbott being an extremely elegant young man who had arrived at his present position by way of a public school and the Police College. His fair hair was slicked back from rather a high brow. His clothes were of the most admirable cut. His expression as he sat opposite his superior officer was one of boredom verging on gloom. He had, as a matter of fact, just had his fourth application to be allowed to join the RAF refused, and refused with what could only be described as an official raspberry. To his Chief Inspector’s well meant recommendation to look upon the bright side he replied bitterly that there wasn’t one.
Lamb looked at him reprovingly.
‘No call to say things like that, Frank. I can feel for you all right, because the same thing happened to me in nineteen-fifteen. Downright put out about it I was, but I’ve come to see things different, and so will you.’
There was a faint insubordinate gleam in Sergeant Abbott’s pale blue eyes as he passed in review the shoulders, the girth, the very considerable avoirdupois of his superior, the reproof of whose glance became intensified.
‘Now you listen to me! I don’t mind betting – not that I’m a betting man or ever have been, but that’s just a manner of speaking – well, I don’t mind betting that you’ve been thinking, “What’s it matter whether an odd professor gets murdered, when there’s thousands blowing each other to bits all over the world?”’
Abbott’s lips framed inaudibly the words, ‘Archibald the All-right’, and then passed rapidly to a bowdlerised version.
‘You’re always right, sir. That is exactly what I was thinking.’
‘Then you stop it and listen to me! What’s at the bottom of this and every other war that’s ever started? Contempt for the law, just the same as any other crime. Someone wants something, and he goes to grab it. If anyone gets in his way they get hurt, and he doesn’t care. Pity of it is, when it’s nations there isn’t anything strong enough to stop them. But when it’s what you might call private crime there’s the law and there’s us. Every time we lay a criminal by the heels we’re making people see that the law is there to protect them and to be respected. That’s the way you get
a law-abiding people. And when you’ve got that, you’ve got people with a respect for other people’s law – what you might call International Law. You can’t keep things like that for yourself unless you’re willing for other people to have ’em too – not when it’s law anyway. That’s what’s gone wrong with the Germans – they’ve stopped respecting the law – other people’s first, and then their own. Well, that’s not going to happen over here. But the law’s got to be served, and that’s where we come in. Servants of the law – that’s you and me, and it don’t matter whether we’re flying, or driving a tank, or hunting a murderer, we’ve got to do our job. Well, here we are. There’s the local man on the platform, and I hope he’s got a car.’
He had, and they were driven in it to the police station at Bourne, where they interviewed a cocksure and uplifted Cyril Bond and took his statement. Questioned upon it, he gave definite and very clear replies, and was dismissed with an injunction to keep his mouth shut. After which Lamb announced that they would walk to the Rectory if someone would show them the way, but they would like to see the church first.
SIXTEEEN
MISS BROWN FACED them across the table in the old rector’s study. She was of such a pallor as to rouse some apprehension lest she should bring the interview to a sudden close by fainting. She wore a black dress. She sat stiffly upright. She kept her eyes upon the Chief Inspector’s face – haunted eyes with dilated pupils.
Sergeant Abbott sat at one end of the table with a notebook. He had seen a good many frightened people in the course of his professional duties, but he thought Miss Brown had it as badly as any of them.
After an impressive pause old Lamb was leading off.
‘You are Miss Medora Brown?’
‘Yes.’
‘You gave evidence yesterday at the inquest on Mr Michael Harsch, during which you stated that, having used your church key on Tuesday morning, you put it back in the top left-hand drawer of Miss Fell’s bureau, and that you did not go to the church again.’
The Key (The Miss Silver Mysteries Book 8) Page 9
