“Is that you, Sir Clinton?” inquired a voice which he recognised as Sergeant Ledbury’s. “I’m sorry to trouble you, sir, but I’d take it as a favour if you’d spare me a short time. I’ve got another motor case on my hands this morning—a suicide, it might be, this time.”
Sir Clinton considered for some seconds before answering. It was hardly his business now to spend his time in assisting the police in affairs which did not directly concern himself; and he felt more than a little inclined to refuse point-blank to give his help.
Ledbury, at the other end of the wire, evidently noted the hesitation and feared a refusal.
“I know it’s a good deal to ask, sir,” he went on. “I’ve no claim on your time; but I’d take it as a personal favour if you’d spare an hour. We found the car at the Bale Stones. It’s no distance away; you’d get there and back in your car under an hour, sir. I wish you’d come.”
At the other end of the line, Sir Clinton started slightly.
“The Bale Stones, you say?” he demanded.
Ledbury seemed to take this inquiry as a sign of awakening interest; and his voice betrayed a tinge of relief.
“Yes, sir. Anyone’ll direct you to them—a lot of old standing stones on the road to Stant-in-the-Vale.”
Sir Clinton’s mind had gone back to the peculiar interest which Roca had shown in the Bale Stones; and this association was sufficient to overcome his scruples.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll come over at once.”
Ledbury was effusive in his thanks, but Sir Clinton cut him short by laying down the receiver. He sought out Mrs. Thornaby, explained to her that he might be late for lunch perhaps, and then took his way to the garage. As he leaned forward to press the knob of the self-starter, his glance fell on the face of his speedometer; and his eyebrows lifted slightly as he read on the trip-dial of the milometer the figures 17. He recalled that when he brought the car home the night before, Linda Anstruther had called his attention to the dial, and he remembered quite clearly that he had re-set the trip-meter to zero. And now it read 17. Someone else had been using his car during the night, clearly enough. Who could it have been?
Sir Clinton stepped out of his car and made a careful examination of the lock on the door of the garage. There were no signs to show that it had been forced in any way. Whoever opened it must have used the proper key or else must have picked the lock. The key, Sir Clinton knew, was left at night in a drawer in the hall, so that it was available to anyone in the house. He made a rapid review of the people at Fern Lodge; his sister, Francia, Johnnie, Elsie, Staffin . . .
The convergence of two apparently isolated trains of events in the past twenty-four hours led him to a conclusion which made his brow darken. Now he felt that he could make a shrewd guess at what lay behind Elsie’s sudden sick turn; and as the possible developments of the situation unfolded themselves in his mind, his face showed how black he feared they might be. This was going to be something very much worse than anything he had anticipated, unless the whole idea turned out to be moonshine. And that, he felt, was hardly likely, though it was still on the cards.
Sir Clinton stepped back into his car, re-set the trip-dial of the speedometer to zero, and drove out of the garage. He had no need to inquire his way to the Bale Stones; his trip thither in Roca’s company was still fresh in his mind, and he took the route which they had followed on that occasion. As he drew near the last turn-off before actually reaching the Stones, a policeman stepped from the side of the road and signalled him to pull up.
“Sir Clinton Driffield, sir?” the man inquired, as Sir Clinton brought the car to a standstill. “That’s all right, sir. Just drive on. The sergeant’s waiting for you. I’ve orders to keep wheeled traffic off this road, sir. That’s why I stopped you, not being sure it was you.”
He saluted and fell back to the roadside, whilst Sir Clinton let his car move on. A glance at the dry surface of the road was enough to show that there was but little to be hoped in the way of tracing the tracks of motor-wheels on it; but evidently the sergeant was taking no chances of having a possible clue destroyed by cars passing along that particular stretch of highway.
When he approached the neighbourhood of the Bale Stones, Sir Clinton pulled up his car and got out, so as not to superpose his wheel-tracks on any which might have been left on the road. As he walked on towards the corner round which he knew the Bale Stones lay, Sergeant Ledbury made his appearance and came forward to greet him.
“Glad you’ve come, sir,” he said, with obvious gratefulness. “It’s an ugly business, this one—uglier even than the other affair. The look of the body . . . ugh!”
“No use being squeamish, sergeant. It’s all in the day’s work, for you, you know. But if you think it’s going to upset my high-strung nerves, I suppose I’d better wish you good day now and go home again.”
“Wait till you see him,” the sergeant advised gloomily. “It’s no treat.”
“Most encouraging mood you seem to be in, now you’ve got me here,” Sir Clinton commented. “If you’d breathed something like that over the ’phone, I might have thought twice about it. However, since I’m on the spot, suppose we waste no time. What’s happened?”
Ledbury pulled out a notebook; but it seemed merely a reserve in case of need, for he was able to give his account of the affair without reference to his jottings.
“First thing we heard about it, sir, was from the driver of a post office mail van that takes this road with the early morning mail. When he came along, he found the wreck of a car standing by the roadside—just round the corner there—all burned and still smoking in places. He got down from his seat and went over to have a look at it. One look did him, it seems. I don’t wonder much, either. It must have been a rum start to come up against a corpse like that, all on one’s lonesome in the early morning.”
Sir Clinton’s face showed that he preferred facts to psychological imaginings, and the sergeant hastily dropped the gruesome and returned to plain narrative.
“The van-driver scuttled back to his motor and drove hell-for-leather into Raynham Parva to give us the news, since we are in charge of this district. He was considerably shaken up by what he’d seen. That was about half-past seven this morning.”
Sir Clinton nodded to show that he had noted the time.
“As soon as I could,” Ledbury went on, “I got hold of some constables and we all came out here on our bicycles. I suppose I’ve no authority to close a road; but I chanced it, and posted men to turn anyone off until we’d finished with things and got the place cleared up a bit. You probably met one of ’em down the road?”
“Yes, go on.”
“We borrowed a big weather-proof sheet from the nearest farm to cover the thing up; and then we had time to get down to business. When we reached the wreck of the car, it was quite hot still; so I take it that it must have been set alight in the late small hours, sir. If the blaze had gone up earlier, someone would’ve seen it and come to find out what it was.”
“Say three, or four o’clock, then, at a guess?”
“Round about there,” Ledbury agreed. “Well, I’ll go on. To start with, it looked as if it might have been an accident, like the Quevedo business. Car catching fire and burning the driver, you see, sir. But two seconds’ thinking knocked that on the head. No live man would sit still in an open car and let himself be burned to death, when he could jump over the side in a tick. If it had been a saloon, he might have been choked by fumes all of a sudden—but not in an open car.”
“Unless he was a cripple?” Sir Clinton suggested slyly.
“Well, he wasn’t a cripple, so that finishes that,” Ledbury retorted. “I’m giving you things just as they came to hand, sir, if you don’t mind. The next thing we did was to lift the body out of the driving-seat—a nice job that was!—and go over the remains of the car. Uncomfortable, we found it. The metal was still pretty hot, here and there.”
He exhibited a large burn on his hand by w
ay of proof.
“We didn’t get much of interest for a while. You see, sir, the fire had destroyed practically everything that would burn. Clothes, papers, anything of that sort: all gone up the flue. But at last, as I was grubbing round in the bottom of the wreck, I picked up this pistol.”
He produced from his pocket a tarnished Colt automatic.
“You can handle it if you like, sir,” he said, as he offered it to Sir Clinton. “After it had been through that fire, there wasn’t much good looking for fingerprints on it.”
Sir Clinton took the weapon into his own hands and turned it over cautiously. The blue-black finish was all discoloured by the heat through which it had passed; and the cartridges in the magazine had evidently been ignited by the rise in temperature, for the stock of the pistol was badly wrenched and the end of the magazine had been blown away in the explosion.
“What do you make of it?” Sir Clinton inquired as he finished his initial scrutiny.
“Not much, except that he was carrying arms—which isn’t over common in this country. I expect he set fire to the car and then shot himself, thinking that the fire would destroy the traces of what he’d done.”
Sir Clinton subjected the pistol to a more minute examination.
“The safety-catch is on,” he pointed out. “Do you think a man who had just shot himself fatally would take the trouble to snick that into place?”
Ledbury looked doubtful when this piece of evidence was brought to his notice.
“It hardly sounds likely,” he had to admit.
Sir Clinton gripped the pistol and endeavoured to pull back the slide; but the fire had caused a jam, and he was only able to force the breech open to the extent of about half an inch. He peered down into the cavity which was thus exposed and then turned the weapon so that the sergeant could see into the hole.
“No cartridge-case there, sergeant.”
“Quite so,” Ledbury confirmed. “It would be ejected when he fired the shot.”
“And another cartridge would have been forced up into the breech immediately,” Sir Clinton completed the description.
“That’s so,” Ledbury conceded. “There ought to be a cartridge-case there.”
“Obviously, since the safety-catch is on. With that in position, the breech couldn’t open to eject the cartridge-case even if the cartridge in the barrel had been exploded by the heat of the fire. Whence it’s pretty clear that there wasn’t a cartridge in the barrel at all.”
“Just let me think that out, sir,” Ledbury interjected. “You mean that what happened was this. He had his pistol in his pocket, with a loaded magazine. He hadn’t pulled back the slide to bring the first cartridge out of the magazine into the breech of the pistol, ready for firing? So when the fire got to the pistol, it exploded the magazine; but there was nothing in the breech, so there’s no empty case left there. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I infer,” Sir Clinton confirmed. “We’ll just count the stuff in the magazine now; and, if we’re in luck, none of the cartridges has escaped in the explosion.”
He drew a multum-in-parvo knife from his pocket, selected the tool required, and attacked with it the jammed material in the butt of the pistol. For a time nothing came loose; but all at once his efforts were successful; and, on shaking the pistol, he was able to extract the distorted cartridge-cases and bullets from the cavity.
“A full magazine,” he reported, after counting the articles. “I’m afraid that finishes your idea about a suicide by shooting, sergeant. It’s pretty evident that he never had this pistol in a condition to shoot. He still had to pull back the slide and bring his first cartridge up into the breech.”
Sergeant Ledbury grudgingly admitted the force of this.
“What I had in my mind,” he confessed, “was the case I read in the papers a while back—the fellow who poisoned himself in a burning car. I’ve been a bit too previous, it seems.”
“Let’s keep clear of preconceptions,” Sir Clinton suggested. “Now what about the rest of the facts? Anything left of the car that might be useful?”
“Yes, sir, there’s one point. The car’s burned to bits, except for the metal parts; but I noticed that it’s been carrying what looks like a pair of false number-plates screwed on top of the ordinary ones. The fire’s licked all the lettering off, of course, but the metal plates are there, right enough. He must have wanted to conceal something, or he wouldn’t have been playing that game.”
“He couldn’t have foreseen this state of affairs, then,” Sir Clinton speculated. “First, because in any case the numbers would be burned off by the fire. Second, because the identity of the car will be easy enough to establish from the number stamped on the engine. It won’t have been effaced with the heat.”
“You mean that he was using false number plates to cover up something he was doing with the car and that he never meant to commit suicide at all, sir?”
Sir Clinton turned an expressionless face on the sergeant.
“I haven’t seen any evidence for suicide yet,” he pointed out mildly.
“Then you think it’s another murder case, sir?”
“I haven’t seen any evidence for murder, yet,” Sir Clinton varied his phrase. “Your brain’s too swift for me, sergeant. I simply can’t follow these leaps of intuition. Give me the facts first. We haven’t even got the length of the body, and you expect me to give an opinion about the cause of death.”
The sergeant’s face showed that here he thought he had a surprise in store.
“We’ve examined the body, sir.” He made a wry grimace at the recollection. “Everything was burned off it except some ash and a few bits of cloth which might have been the seat of his breeches. Protected from the main flames for a good while, you see, sir. And of course we picked up the clips of his suspenders and things like that. But anything in the way of papers had been burned completely; and he didn’t seem to have any identifiable metal stuff in his pockets. One or two coins we found—that was all. But amongst the stuff in the car we picked up his wrist-watch, with the strap burned through; and on the back of that his name was engraved.”
“Ah! Very fortunate, that.”
“His name, sir, was Roca—that Dr. Roca who was staying at the Black Bull the other day.”
“Indeed?”
Sir Clinton seemed hardly so surprised as the sergeant had anticipated.
“You’ll be able to tell us something about him, sir?” Ledbury inquired, with an air of innocence which was rather overdone. His little eyes were fastened on Sir Clinton’s face as though he suspected something.
“I met him twice, sergeant. He was a medical man, a South American . . .”
“Like Quevedo, sir?” the sergeant interjected. “You do seem to have a knack of running up against these South Americans, don’t you? It was you that met Quevedo on the road that night he was murdered, I remember.”
Sir Clinton laughed unaffectedly.
“Two South Americans meet with violent deaths. Driffield has met these two South Americans. Therefore Driffield is a suspicious character. Is that the chain of reasoning, sergeant? It seems a bit weak in some links.”
Ledbury joined shamefacedly in Sir Clinton’s laugh; but he did not take his gimlet eyes from the face of the late Chief Constable; nor did he disclaim the suspicions in words.
“I’d like to hear some more about this Roca,” he reminded Sir Clinton.
“You’re quite right to suspect everybody,” Sir Clinton admitted. “But it must make investigation a bit complex when you cast your net as wide as all that, sergeant. About Roca, now. He had private means, I believe. I didn’t know he had a car. He was interested in archaeology—to some slight extent, I gathered. From some things he let fall, as from one official to another, it appeared that he was a secret agent investigating the White Slave traffic.”
“Oh, indeed? Was he?” the sergeant inquired with a slight start. “Now that might be a useful bit of news.”
“He had
some grudge against the traders,” Sir Clinton added, to complete his summary of his conversation with Roca.
“He had? That’s interesting.”
The tone of the sergeant’s voice suggested something different from the actual words; and he still kept his eyes fixed on Sir Clinton, as though he expected to detect a sign of uneasiness in his manner. Sir Clinton suppressed a desire to laugh. It was evident that Ledbury really had at the back of his mind a vague suspicion, based on the coincidence that Sir Clinton had come across the two dead men since he arrived in the village. It was apparently part of the sergeant’s policy to suspect everyone who had the slightest connection with the case in hand—an interpretation of “thoroughness” from the Ledbury standpoint.
“Well, let’s see what we’ve done so far,” Sir Clinton suggested. “The pistol, the body, the car: nothing more about them, is there? Suppose we have a look round about, now. Have you examined anything except the road?”
The sergeant seemed to wake up suddenly from his reflections.
“No, sir,” he admitted, with a slight increase of politeness in his tone. “Since it seemed to be a suicide business, I haven’t bothered about that part of the thing vet. But we could do it now, if you like.”
Sir Clinton had been racking his brains to recall the exact sequence of events on the day when he had brought Roca to the place before. It was now clear enough to him why Roca had been interested in the prehistoric monument. It was a landmark in the countryside; and quite obviously Roca had picked it out as a meeting-place which a stranger could readily identify. He had come up to see if it would suit his purpose; and, after inspecting it, had evidently found that it would do. Then he had made an appointment with someone—and that appointment had resulted in his death. The telephone call to Francia fitted neatly into that series of events, if Francia was the man whom Roca desired to meet. Sir Clinton had hazarded this hypothesis to himself in the garage. Now it seemed on a firmer basis; and the prospect was a gloomy one. If Francia were detected, Elsie would be stamped as the wife of a murderer.
Nemesis at Raynham Parva (A Clinton Driffield Mystery) Page 15
