Hobby of Murder

by E. X. Ferrars

  Sam Waldron nodded, looking thoughtful.

  ‘You’re quite right, of course,’ he said, ‘and I suppose the only reason why I’m a bit suspicious of Miss Clancy is that I don’t know her. I’ve known Felicity Mace for several years and I feel she’s a person of complete integrity. But except that Miss Clancy once taught my wife lacrosse and cricket, and how to vault over horses in the gym and do clever things on horizontal bars, I don’t know a thing about her. I think Anna once had a bit of a crush on her, but that doesn’t mean she had the least understanding of her. What do you actually know about her, Ian?’

  ‘Very little,’ Ian answered. ‘We put an advertisement in the local paper that we’d a cottage to let, and she answered it, then came to look it over and said she’d take it. She didn’t argue about the rent or make trouble of any kind. She gave the headmistress at the school where she used to teach as a reference and moved in, and she’s been a very good neighbour. She brings us homemade chutney and jam and she’s taken our photographs and she gives me advice about the garden. Mollie likes her.’

  ‘But you don’t,’ Sam said.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Ian replied. ‘We’ve nothing much in common, but I should say she’s an admirable person.’

  Sam nodded again, as if Ian’s answer only confirmed what he had just said. He turned to Andrew.

  ‘You haven’t been very fortunate in the time of your visit,’ he said. ‘I assure you we haven’t had another murder here in living memory. I’d like to invite you up to our house for a quiet drink, but I don’t see much hope of quiet for the present.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Andrew said. ‘You’ll have plenty of visitors shortly, I imagine, without having me there to complicate things. Haven’t the press descended on you yet?’

  ‘By telephone, and that’s partly why I came out. They were threatening to appear in person. Tell me, Professor, what’s your impression of Eleanor Clancy?’

  Andrew gave a shrug of uncertainty.

  ‘I can’t say why it is,’ he said, ‘but I’ve a feeling that there’s something odd about her, apart, I mean, from her obvious eccentricities, which she rather likes to show off. Actually, I find myself in agreement with you that she may have seen something last night about which she’s chosen to keep quiet. A dangerous thing to do. But I really don’t know why I feel it. I may be totally wrong.’

  ‘Yes, we may both be wrong,’ Sam said, ‘but I’m interested that you should have the same feeling as I have. Ian, do you know if she’s wealthy?’

  ‘Far from it, I should say,’ Ian replied.

  ‘I only thought …’ Sam began, then stopped himself.

  ‘Were you wondering if she might make use of her knowledge?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘What, blackmail, d’you mean?’ Ian looked extremely startled.

  ‘I only thought it might be what Waldron had in mind,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Well, for a moment I did think …’ But Sam paused again. ‘No, on our almost non-existent knowledge, it’s outrageous to make such a suggestion. I’m sorry if I gave that impression. Ian, I’ll be going now. I left Anna in bed, with her door locked against possible intruders, and the Bartletts to protect her, but I’d better see how she is. She got no sleep at all and she’s not very strong. I’m worried about her. We’ll see each other again soon, I expect.’

  Ian saw him to the door.

  Returning, he said, ‘I think we’ll have some sherry. Mollie—’ He went to the hall and called, ‘Mollie, we’re going to have some sherry. D’you want to join us?’

  There was no suggestion in his voice that he and Mollie had been close to a quarrel earlier, which had been avoided only by his deciding to go out for a walk. If he guessed what Mollie might have said to Andrew while he was gone, he gave no sign of it.

  But that might be because he did not dream that Mollie would talk about her private feelings to Andrew. In answer to his call she came into the room and Ian poured out sherry for the three of them. She was looking her normal self, with no trace of tears on her face.

  ‘What did Sam want?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry I disappeared, but I felt I couldn’t stand another dose of hashing up this murder. I suppose it was what he wanted to talk about.’

  ‘What I thought he seemed to want,’ Ian said, ‘was to put it into our heads that Eleanor saw how Singleton was poisoned and is keeping her knowledge to herself in order to be able to blackmail whoever it was who did it. You know her a great deal better than I do. Would you say that’s possible?’

  ‘Eleanor?’ Mollie gasped. ‘Blackmail!’ She began to laugh. ‘Oh, she isn’t that sort of person at all.’

  ‘You think you know what sort of person a blackmailer is?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever actually met one,’ she said. ‘Anyway, what was there for Eleanor to see? No one’s come up yet with a reasonable suggestion about that. I’m beginning to think that after all, Luke Singleton committed suicide, and deliberately did it in a way that would get his death maximum coverage in the press. I wonder what his religious beliefs were. He may have thought he’d a chance of looking on while that was happening.’

  ‘I doubt if anyone’s ever committed suicide with that in view,’ Andrew said. ‘But he may have had reasons we know nothing about for doing it. Suppose he’d discovered he’d got an incurable illness. AIDS, for instance.’

  ‘Or finally failed with some woman with whom for once he was really in love, and felt he couldn’t face the humiliation,’ Mollie suggested. ‘Oh, it isn’t difficult to find motives for suicide, any more than it is to find motives for his murder among the people who were in the room that evening. But the question remains, how was it done, unless it was done by one of the Bartletts.’

  Ian nodded thoughtfully. ‘I doubt if the police have really made up their minds about them yet, whatever they may be saying about them. Andrew, have some more sherry.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Andrew held out his glass. ‘Now I want to ask you something, and I want you, please, to be absolutely honest in your answer. If the police don’t want me to stay around, would you sooner I went home? It’s a very disastrous thing that’s happened to you, and you might feel better if you didn’t feel you had to bother about me.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Mollie cried with a note of shrill alarm in her voice. ‘I mean, unless you want to. If you do, of course, you must go home. But really it feels so helpful to have you around. You keep your head so well, you’re a tremendous help.’

  It was Mollie’s view of the matter that Andrew had really wanted to know, for there was more than a possibility, he had thought, that by now she might be sorely regretting her confidence to him earlier in the morning. But he noticed that Ian had not answered.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Andrew said. ‘You aren’t going to hurt my feelings if you say you’d sooner be alone.’

  Ian answered then with a kind of reluctance. ‘You’d hardly be human if you didn’t want to go, but Mollie’s right, having you here is helpful.’

  ‘If you’re sure then …’ Andrew said.

  ‘Oh, we are,’ Ian replied.

  Andrew left it at that. It was more or less what he had expected, in spite of his uncertainty about Mollie, and he did his best to tuck away to the back of his mind a slight regret that he had not been given leave of absence.

  What he himself would have felt in their position he did not know. Probably, he thought, he would have eagerly seized the opportunity of not having to cope with a visitor, but then he had become so used to solitude that it seemed to him a normal thing to desire. However, his real use at the moment to the Davidges, he thought, in spite of what he had thought Mollie’s feelings might be, was as a sort of buffer between them, because the problem of Brian Singleton was coming to a head. Ian, he thought, knew all about it and was deeply depressed. Mollie was almost desperate, scared and insecure in the grip of stronger emotions than she had ever felt before. What Brian felt was something that Andrew knew nothing about, and he did not much want to know a
ny more about it. He reflected that in the afternoon he might call on Eleanor Clancy and ask her to show him some of her great-grandfather’s photographs.

  But after lunch he decided to lie down for a little while before setting out, and he had no sooner lain down than he fell sound asleep. The lack of sleep in the night had really caught up with him, and it held him now, deep and dreamless, and when he woke he had to spend a little while trying to remember where he was. There seemed to be no reason for a window to be where it was, or a dressing-table to be in the corner of the room, or for its walls to be pale grey. Then memory returned with a jerk and he sat up hurriedly, thinking of his intention of visiting Eleanor Clancy. But looking at his watch, he saw that it was half past five. He had slept for about three and a half hours, and a visit at this time seemed inappropriate. He got up, combed his hair and went downstairs.

  He was only half way down them when he became aware, from voices in the sitting-room, that the Davidges had a visitor. It was a man’s voice he heard, and thinking that it might be Brian, he considered returning to his room and taking refuge in Agatha Christie. But something about the voice convinced him that it was not Brian, and he continued downstairs. The visitor was Ernest Audley.

  It sounded as if he had only just arrived, for he was explaining to the Davidges why he had come.

  ‘I thought to myself, I’ll call in on the Davidges,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll find out if they’ve been badgered by the police as much as I have. To the best of my belief you don’t keep a supply of cyanide on the premises, as I do.’ He saw Andrew at the door and immediately stood up. ‘Good afternoon, Professor,’ he said. ‘I was just telling Ian and Mollie that I’ve been most infernally troubled by the police today, and all because I still happened to have kept one or two of the killing bottles my father used to use when he went out after his butterflies. They insisted on removing them, I can only assume to check whether there were any signs of some of the stuff having been abstracted. Would they be able to find that out, do you think? And you’re a scientist. Can you tell me if the stuff would have retained its potency, or by this time have become innocuous?’

  ‘I rather think it would still be pretty poisonous,’ Andrew replied, ‘but I can’t speak with any authority. It’s a matter I never had any reason to investigate.’

  They had both sat down. Mollie was in a chair by the window, where the remaining light of the early evening fell on some embroidery in a frame, on which she was working. Ian was standing with his back to the empty fireplace, his hands in his pockets.

  ‘I’m the prime suspect, of course,’ Audley went on. ‘I hated the bastard from the bottom of my heart and if I were to meet the murderer I’d shake him by the hand. But motive and means aren’t sufficient for an arrest. There’s got to be opportunity too. And even our brilliant Inspector Roland hasn’t managed to come up yet with any theory as to how I could have lobbed cyanide from where I was sitting near the bottom of the table to where Singleton was sitting. Have you any theories of your own, Professor, as to how it could have been done?’

  ‘None,’ Andrew said.

  ‘My own view is the simplest one,’ Audley said. ‘Generally the simpler a theory is, the more convincing it is. It’s that the Bartlett sisters aren’t what they seem. I doubt if any motive they might have had for killing Singleton would have been sexual. Wide-ranging as his tastes were, I doubt if those worthy elderly sisters would have appealed to him. But he might have damaged someone to whom they were devoted and who was more his type. That seems to me quite probable. The damage might have been emotional, physical, economic, social. The police will certainly be looking into all that. Because it stares one in the face, doesn’t it, that it would have been the easiest thing in the world for one of the sisters to drop a little poison into Singleton’s cup while she was serving him? How she acquired any cyanide I don’t presume to guess, though I’m certain it wasn’t from me. Concerning that, however, I’ve wondered about our dear Miss Clancy. You know she photographed the sisters, don’t you? She thought the two of them, side by side, so dignified, so precise and decorous, made a splendid subject. And she had cyanide connected with her ancestor’s photographic work and they might have had a chance to help themselves to some while they were in the cottage. So there you are, a solution to the whole mystery.’

  Andrew had not remembered, from his previous meetings with Audley, that he spoke with such pomposity, but a good deal of it now was assumed, Andrew thought, with a note of irony in it. Audley really made very little effort to conceal the fact that he felt a certain pleasure in the murder, and it amused him to blame the least likely persons for having committed it. There was an animation in his pale, blotchy face that was not usually there. His light blue eyes under their thick lashes gleamed.

  ‘I know you aren’t taking me seriously,’ he said, ‘but can any of you come up with a better solution?’

  ‘I don’t think you want us to,’ Ian said. ‘I think you’ll be very pleased if this murder is filed away among unsolved crimes.’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps,’ Audley agreed. ‘I don’t see why anyone should be too concerned if it is, except for his publishers. They’ll be the only people I know of who’ll have a truly sincere regret for Singleton’s death. My ex-wife will probably cry a little about it. Even after he deserted her she nursed an absurd amount of affection for him.’

  ‘Have you and she ever thought of joining up again?’ Ian asked. ‘Will Singleton’s death make any difference to that?’

  ‘Most unlikely, I should say.’ Audley said it emphatically and quickly; a little too quickly, Andrew thought, for it to sound entirely convincing. Was it possible, he wondered, that Audley’s satisfaction at Luke Singleton’s death was not wholly due to his simple hatred of the man, but had in it an element of hope that if the man was finally lost to her, his wife might return to him?

  When Audley had left, which he did a few minutes later, Andrew asked Ian if he knew what sort of woman Mrs Audley had been.

  ‘We never met her,’ Ian said. ‘The whole affair happened before we came to live here, but I know she was a friend of Felicity’s and I think she sometimes hears from her.’

  ‘I wish we could work out a way Ernest could have done the murder,’ Mollie said. ‘He’s got such an excellent motive for it, and he actually likes to parade it. He’s very sure, isn’t he, that he simply can’t be suspected—’ She broke off as the telephone rang.

  Ian went into the hall to answer it. The call was brief and when he came back into the room there was a very strange expression of bewilderment on his face.

  ‘That was Sam,’ he said. ‘Of all crazy things to happen, the Bartletts have disappeared.’

  It was not until next morning that the Davidges and Andrew heard how the disappearance of the sisters had happened. They heard it from Inspector Roland, who called in on them at about ten o’clock, accompanied by a young man whom he introduced as Sergeant Giles. Mollie once more offered them coffee, but it was again refused. The two men did not even sit down. They seemed in a hurry.

  ‘I don’t expect you to be able to help us,’ Roland said, ‘but we’re asking everyone along this road, as it’s the road to London, if they saw anything of the two women in an old red Mini drive past some time between two and four yesterday afternoon. That’s when they must have left the Waldrons’ house. Mrs Waldron had been in bed all day, and only saw Enid Bartlett, the older of the two sisters, when she brought up a tray with her lunch. Mr Waldron had his lunch served to him in the dining-room, then went to lie down for a rest, and says he heard the sisters moving about—there was a lot of clearing up to do after the trouble the night before—until he fell asleep, which he thinks happened about two o’clock. He woke up about four and presently went downstairs to make sure some tea would be taken up to his wife, but there was no sign of the Bartletts. He was surprised, because it was unlike them simply to go out without making sure beforehand that it was convenient, and even though it was a Sunday, and their usual a
fternoon off, he’d assumed that after the events the night before they wouldn’t have gone. However, he didn’t worry much about it until about six o’clock when a married sister of theirs who lives in the village rang up to ask if they were all right, because they hadn’t gone to see her as they usually did on their Sundays off. She’d heard about the murder, of course—who hasn’t?—and she thought their not coming to her must have something to do with that. But they didn’t come back to the Waldrons at all that evening, and about eleven o’clock Mr Waldron got in touch with us about it. And they still haven’t appeared. We’re to blame, of course, for having made it possible for the women to have got away like that without being stopped, but it’s too late now to worry about that, the main thing is to find them.’

  ‘Why do you think they went to London?’ Ian asked.

  ‘Their sister seemed to think it was probable,’ Roland replied. ‘They’ve another sister there, a widow, who runs a boarding-house in Finchley, and she thought that they might have gone to her. But inquiries in London haven’t led to anything. Apparently they haven’t been in touch with that sister, or she swears they haven’t. However, London’s an obvious place to go to if you want to disappear.’

  ‘But why should they want to disappear?’ Mollie asked.

  ‘I think they must have been scared that they’d come under suspicion,’ Roland answered. ‘They must have realized they were the only people who could easily have given the poison to Singleton.’

  ‘But did you suspect them?’

  Roland gave a slight shrug. ‘We couldn’t say it wasn’t possible they’d done it, could we? As long as we can’t find any other way that the poison could have been administered to Singleton, we’ve got to think about them.’

  ‘But if you do,’ Andrew observed, ‘then isn’t Mr Waldron the most likely person to have arranged for them to do it?’

  ‘And no one is more aware of that than he is himself,’ Roland said. ‘He’s very anxious for us to find them.’