“So Sergeant Ledbury found he’d made a mistake?”
“He did so, sir. This Roca has no car—I could’ve told Ledbury that myself if he’d taken the bother to ask me. I was at the station when he arrived by the train. He’d got no luggage bar a suitcase with him. When Ledbury asked him where he been staying before he came here, he was quite open about it. He came up from Micheldean Abbas. He’d been there for the best part of a week, it seems, staying at the inn.”
“Micheldean Abbas is just down the line, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir. Fourth station. Then Ledbury asked Roca about Quevedo, and he said he’d never heard of anyone of that name. Then he hesitated a bit, or something; and Ledbury pressed him a bit harder. Then he admitted that he did know somebody called Quevedo, and the sergeant he thought he’d got on to something good. But it turned out that Roca was thinking of some fellow Quevedo that wrote books in the time of Shakespeare. That was a bit of a leg-pull for the sergeant! I did laugh when I heard it.”
“So it turned out a blank end?”
“Dead blank, sir. Ledbury, of course, he believes in being thorough; and I heard him ring up Micheldean Abbas later on in the day. The inn people confirmed the story about Roca’s movements. When the murder was being done, he was in bed and asleep.”
He hesitated for a moment.
“You’d see what the coroner’s jury brought in, sir? Death by misadventure! That’s a good ’un, knowing what we know. But Ledbury, he must have squared the coroner or something; for none of the real stuff came out in the evidence he gave; and I got the tip not to give the show away, either.”
Sir Clinton disliked the constable’s tone; but he refrained from checking him for fear of drying up what might easily prove a fluent source of private information.
“Well, good luck!” he said in a hopeful tone, as he let the car move off.
Just outside the village, his eye was caught by a familiar slim figure on the road before him; and as he came up to the girl he stopped his car.
“Hullo, Estelle! This is a surprise. Taken to walking, nowadays, for a change?” he hailed her as he opened the door for her.
“Daddy’s using our car this afternoon, so I couldn’t bring it over,” Estelle explained, as she slipped into the seat beside him and laid her tennis racquet on her knee. “Parents are getting a bit selfish in these days, aren’t they?”
“Hungry look in your eye, I notice. Coming to lunch with us, I suppose?”
“According to plan. Elsie rang me up this morning. It seems she’s got two young Peris she wants me to take under my wing. What sort of people are they?”
“Very nice girls, from all I’ve seen of them; so you can set your mind at ease.”
“Right! By the way, you’ve been on holiday, haven’t you? Nice trip?”
“Not bad,” Sir Clinton admitted, unscrupulously plagiarising himself.
“Don’t rave, dear. It makes one so uncomfortable when you break loose like that.”
Sir Clinton grinned youthfully.
“Right! as you say,” he promised. “I’ll restrain my transports. Loquacity’s always been my failing in company manners.”
“Like your new nephew-in-law?” Estelle demanded carelessly.
“I haven’t seen much of him yet,” Sir Clinton confessed. “I’ll take your opinion till I get more experience.”
“Oh, he’s all right. A bit swalmy, you know.”
“Swalmy?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. Rather . . .”
A vague gesture completed her description.
“Thanks. My own thought put neatly into words,” Sir Clinton interjected.
It was curious, he reflected, that Estelle seemed to have the same difficulty as himself in defining the impression left by Francia. Perhaps she, like himself, was influenced by a tinge of jealousy, now that a fresh figure had supplanted her to some extent in Elsie’s affections. Whatever was at the root of it, Estelle evidently did not take whole-heartedly to Francia.
“A case of ‘I do not like thee, Dr. Fell’?” he inquired jestingly.
“Something of the sort,” Estelle answered, with a touch of seriousness in her voice which made Sir Clinton prick up his ears. “But it’s rather mean to say that,” she added quickly, “after he’s been so decent in inviting me to take a trip out to the Argentine with them.”
“You’re going, then?”
Estelle nodded.
“Daddy’s been rather hard to persuade—can’t lose his dear daughter, you know. But Elsie turned him round her finger in the end; so it’s all fixed up. If these girls are really good sorts, it’ll be quite a happy party. I’m looking forward to it.”
Sir Clinton seemed to think that this called for no comment, and in a few minutes they reached Fern Lodge.
During lunch, Sir Clinton found himself fully occupied in listening to a detailed account of Johnnie’s fishing experiences in the morning; and he took little part in the general conversation at the table. Francia, he noted, seemed to be exerting himself to please Estelle; but it was difficult to see whether he was making much progress or not. She seemed much more interested in the Anstruther girls; and Sir Clinton was not ill-pleased to find that she evidently liked them.
When the meal was over, Francia excused himself almost at once, pleading that he had to attend to some business correspondence. The rest of the party went out to the lawn before the house; but Johnnie soon detached himself to return to his fishing.
“I’ll take a walk down to the lake later on and see what you’re doing,” Sir Clinton promised. “Rex will be here shortly, Johnnie. I’ll send him on as soon as he turns up. See that you pay attention to what he tells you. He’s a first-class fisherman and you’ll learn a lot.”
He watched the boy take the path down to the boathouse, and then turned his attention to the conversation which was going on around him.
“How’s the play getting on?” he heard Elsie ask, addressing her question to the two sisters.
Linda Anstruther shook her head in mock despair.
“We seem to spend half our time in tearing up what we’ve written. Noreen suffers from too many ideas, and she hates to see any of them left out; so we go back and back over it again and again to see if we can’t fit them in.”
She glanced at Sir Clinton, and apparently guessed that he had not heard of the matter before.
“We thought it would be a good idea to supplement the musical part of our show with a sketch or two,” she explained to him shyly. “So we’ve been trying to work up two or three dialogues. It’s not so easy as we thought.”
“I sympathise with you,” Sir Clinton condoled. “I’ve always hated paper-work of any description. Chronic paralysis in the pen is one of my troubles.”
“It’s so difficult to be downright colloquial when one has a pen in one’s hand, I find,” Noreen Anstruther put in. “I used to think one just sat down and wrote; but somehow everything comes out as if it was on stilts—not a bit natural.”
“Why not try over one or two of your sketches?” Sir Clinton suggested. “You’ve got a ready-made audience here. When you came to act the things, you’d soon see any weak points.”
Linda Anstruther seemed to shrink a little from the idea.
“Mr. Francia very kindly offered to look over the things some time and let us know whether they would do. He knows the type of stuff that would suit, you see. What we really ought to do is to get them translated into Spanish and learn them up so that we could patter them off, even if we didn’t really understand what we were saying. The accent would be dreadful, of course; but no one expects much in that way from a foreigner.”
“You don’t speak Spanish, then?” Sir Clinton inquired.
“Not a word of it, either of us. That’s what makes it difficult.”
“Rather awkward, going out to a strange country without knowing the language, isn’t it?” Sir Clinton suggested.
“Of course. But Mr. Francia’s very kind. He’s promised
to look after us until we find our feet out there. He’ll do all the interviewing and so forth, at first; and he says we’ll soon pick up all the Spanish we need for our work.”
Sir Clinton did not pursue the subject; and the girls fell upon a fresh topic which allowed him to drop out of the conversation.
“What about some tennis?” he heard Elsie suggest a little later on. “We’ll leave you here, uncle. You’re too much of a handicap for the partner that gets you.”
Sir Clinton acquiesced in his exclusion.
“What I like about you, Elsie, is that your remarks give one so much to think over. The ambiguity of that last sentence will keep me busy till tea-time, and even then I won’t be too sure of the exact meaning.”
“We’ll leave you to ponder, then. Come on, Estelle. You brought your racquet, didn’t you?”
The four girls rose and went off towards the tennis-court, leaving Sir Clinton and Mrs. Thornaby together on the lawn.
“I’ve asked young Rex Brandon to come across this afternoon,” Sir Clinton intimated to his sister. “He’ll be here any minute now.”
Mrs. Thornaby glanced across at her brother with a certain doubt in her face.
“Do you think that was the kindest thing to do?” she inquired.
“I should think so,” Sir Clinton retorted in a careless tone. “The thing’s done now. He may as well swallow his dose at once and get it over. Nothing like seeing with your own eyes. I asked him on purpose, just to bring things home to him bluntly.”
“It seems rather a brutal cure, doesn’t it? Rex was very fond of her, Clinton.”
“He’s still fond of her; that’s the trouble. He’s not the changeable sort.”
“And yet you think you’ll cure him by showing him the two of them together? Sometimes I doubt if you know so much about human nature after all, Clinton.”
Sir Clinton shrugged his shoulders as though argument were useless.
“Ask him to tea, anyhow,” he said, as he dismissed the subject. “He’s going down to the lake first of all to give Johnnie a few hints.”
Just as he spoke, the figure of Rex Brandon appeared round a bend in the approach to Fern Lodge. He seemed to be coming reluctantly; but when he caught sight of Sir Clinton and Mrs. Thornaby, he pulled himself together, waved to them, and quickened his steps.
“Your pupil’s down by the lake,” Sir Clinton explained, after they had talked together for a few minutes. “He’s in a great state of excitement, so you’d better cut along and not keep him waiting.”
Mrs. Thornaby obeyed her brother’s instructions; and after a very obvious hesitation Rex accepted her invitation; then he set off in search of Johnnie.
“Sound stuff, Rex,” Sir Clinton commented, with a tinge of regret in his voice, as he watched the athletic figure disappear among the bushes which fringed the boat-house path. “H’m! I seem to have finished my cigarettes. I’ll go and get some more.”
He moved across the lawn and entered the house. His stock of cigarettes was in the smoke-room; and he went there to refill his case. But just as he entered the door, the telephone bell rang and he picked up the receiver.
“Yes? Fern Lodge speaking.”
“Can I speak to Mr. Francia?” a voice demanded over the wire.
“Is that you, Dr. Roca?” Sir Clinton asked, since he thought he recognised the voice.
Rather to his surprise, the wire suddenly went dead and there was no answer. He rang several times, and finally the girl at the exchange intervened to tell him that his interlocutor had rung off. Quite evidently Roca had been taken aback by having his voice recognised at Fern Lodge; but, though he puzzled over the matter for a time, Sir Clinton could not hit upon any reason for this behaviour. It was plain enough that Francia was the man of whom Roca had spoken, the man from whom he expected to get the information for which he had come to Raynham Parva; for otherwise the telephone call was unaccountable. Without fathoming the matter, Sir Clinton felt uncomfortable. Francia was becoming rather too much of an enigma to him; and some of the possible solutions raised disquieting thoughts in his mind.
He put down the telephone and crossed the room to the window which looked across the verandah towards the lake. He soon picked up the figures of Rex and Johnnie, evidently absorbed in the study of the art of casting. Sir Clinton found the sight reassuring. Rex was obviously taking his post as instructor very seriously; and that meant that his mind would be occupied until tea-time. He would have no time to brood over the might-have-beens; and that was a clear gain.
Sir Clinton leisurely filled his cigarette-case and went out to rejoin his sister. As he reached the front door, he saw a telegraph-boy approaching on a bicycle, and he strolled down the avenue to meet him.
“Telegram for Sir Clinton Driffield, sir,” the messenger announced in answer to an inquiry. “You, sir?”
He fumbled in his pouch, handed over the wire, made a gesture of thanks for the tip Sir Clinton handed over, and then waited for the envelope to be opened. Sir Clinton unfolded the sheets of a long telegram and glanced at the opening words.
“Planisphere, transit, equatorial, right ascension, asteroid, ecliptic . . .”
Sir Clinton folded the sheets and put them into his pocket.
“All right. There’s no answer,” he told the boy, who remounted his bicycle and rode off again.
Sir Clinton had recognised the code, which was one that had been supplied to him for use while he was on the Continent recently; but without the key it was impossible for him to decipher the message. Re-entering the house, he went up to his own room, locked the door, and set to work with the help of a small volume. The communication, he found, dealt with some details of a report which he had sent in after his return from the Continent. Apparently some amplifications of one or two points were desired. He drafted a reply which he put into cypher with the help of his book and copied out on some telegram forms which he took from an attaché-case. Then, after burning his rough drafts, he placed his answer in his pocket and went downstairs again. There was no particular need to get his wire off immediately. Any time that evening would do quite well.
Mrs. Thornaby had left the lawn; and, after a glance in search of her, Sir Clinton moved off towards the lakeside. He was not unwilling to take the opportunity of uninterrupted thinking which had been presented to him. Since his arrival at Fern Lodge, he had been irritated by uncertainty. With the best will in the world, he could not bring himself to like Francia; and the thought of Elsie in the hands of a man whom he distrusted was a continual irritant to his mind. No doubt the fellow had succeeded in attracting her; one had only to see them together to be sure of that. But often a girl takes a fancy to a “wrong ’un.” Her insight counts for very little in such things, as Sir Clinton knew. A man can cover up a lot of his deficiencies if he can make love to a girl in the way she expects; and the bigger experience a man has had in that field, the more likely he will be to go the right way about it in a particular case, especially if he starts with the advantage of a certain attitude towards women.
That was the basic factor in the problem which presented itself to Sir Clinton; and the other features of the situation naturally attached themselves to it in the mind of the late Chief Constable.
First of all, there was Quevedo. He was an associate of Francia, and hence anything connected with Quevedo had its value as an aid to assessing Elsie’s husband. There seemed to be little doubt about Quevedo, so far as Sir Clinton could see. To the ordinary mind, the affair with Staffin and Teddy Barford pointed to one conclusion and one only: Quevedo had been planning to get control of the girl. He had temporarily disarmed her suspicions, quite cleverly; and she had been fool enough not to see through him: but the facts of the case could hardly be twisted in a way which would evade the obvious inference. If Quevedo was free from the taint of White Slave traffic, then the whole business was inexplicable.
As to Quevedo’s death, Sir Clinton had no doubts on the matter at all. Roca and his confederate were at
the back of that affair; for nothing else seemed capable of fitting the facts which he knew. One or other of them had done the murder.
And, as he followed this line of thought, Sir Clinton came again to a problem which had been exercising his mind since the morning. What was his own position in the case? Since he had resigned, he was no longer an official and could look on the affair from a more aloof standpoint; but that hardly covered the whole ground. He had been drawn into assisting Ledbury in the Quevedo case and had uncovered the neatly concealed tracks of Roca and his accomplice, which would never have been detected except for his intervention. Could he draw back now, if he were asked to go further with his assistance? If he did, would his refusal not lead to Ledbury suspecting something? Ledbury was by no means a fool; and he was hardly likely to turn off from a track merely because Sir Clinton declined to go any further along it with him. Sir Clinton recalled the fact that Ledbury had checked even his own statements about his doings on the night of the Quevedo murder, although on the face of things there could be no connection between the two.
Then there was Roca himself, whether he was the actual murderer or not. Sir Clinton had only one interview with the doctor, and yet Roca had established something which almost amounted to sympathy between them. Despite his acquaintance with the seamy side of human nature, Sir Clinton had retained a certain protective attitude of mind when women came into a case. He hated the thought of a woman being ill-used; and he had every sympathy with the feelings of Roca when he thought of the sufferings of an unwilling girl in the Argentine infernos. This was hardly a case in which one could stand above the battle on a platform and deprecate the employment of crude methods to square the account. If Quevedo had really been mixed up in the White Slave traffic, Sir Clinton was enough of a realist to waste no energy in censuring the final act in the business. At the same time, as a member of the general public, he had a moral duty imposed upon him: he ought not to become an accessory after the fact by suppressing information which had come into his possession. That was where the shoe pinched.
Nemesis at Raynham Parva (A Clinton Driffield Mystery) Page 12
