Hobby of Murder

by E. X. Ferrars

  ‘Yes, we’ve a spare set of keys to her front door, her back door and her garage. Wait a moment, I’ll get them.’

  He left the room and was back almost at once with some keys on a ring.

  Standing up, as did the sergeant, Roland looked suddenly at Andrew and said, ‘Care to come with us?’

  That the invitation was meant for Andrew only and not for Ian or Mollie was very clear. He looked at them questioningly, feeling that as their guest it was only courteous to obtain their permission for his suddenly leaving them, but as he had expected, both nodded at him, sending him off. He followed the Inspector out of the house and started along the road with them to what had been Eleanor Clancy’s cottage.

  But before they reached it the Inspector paused, looking towards the common. A small procession of men was coming towards them, and between them they were carrying something. It was a stretcher covered with what looked like a blanket. It was loaded on to the waiting ambulance, which was then driven away. Most of the men who had accompanied the stretcher then got into the police cars parked in the road, though two or three paused at the turnstile, then returned the way they had come.

  Roland leant his elbows on the fence, peering up musingly across the common.

  ‘How long have the Davidges been living here?’ he asked after a moment.

  ‘I think it’s about two years,’ Andrew answered.

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘In a flat in Holland Park.’

  ‘Holland Park—that’s an expensive area, isn’t it?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘And their car’s a BMW.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So they aren’t what Mrs Davidge called hard up.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Nor really wealthy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How long have you known them?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t remember. I’ve known Davidge twenty or twenty-five years.’

  ‘But his wife not so long?’

  ‘She’s his second wife, you know. His first wife died some years ago, and about three years after it happened he married Mollie. She was his secretary.’

  ‘Happy marriage?’

  Only a few days ago Andrew would have answered, ‘Very.’ Now he hesitated, and having hesitated, did not know in the least how to go on. His pause would inevitably have been noticed by Roland, so it hardly seemed worthwhile to say anything.

  ‘Not so very, then,’ Roland said; a statement, not a question.

  ‘Is it relevant?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. Just something in that rag-bag of events your friend was talking about. They hadn’t known the Clancy woman long, had they?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But some of the things Mrs Davidge was saying about her made sense.’

  ‘I suppose they did.’

  ‘For instance, why did this victim of her blackmail, if that was what he was, want to meet her up there by the bridge and not come to her cottage? Of course, the answer’s pretty obvious. He didn’t want to risk being seen going past your house about the time he meant to kill the woman in case you recognized him and remembered it later. And it needn’t have been only passing your home that he was afraid of. Just being seen walking through the village might seem suspicious. So he agreed to meet her, but insisted it should be on the common, which he reached by that lane on the far side of the lake. A very quiet lane. It’s not much used. But he may have been unlucky and met someone, and this, naturally, is the first thing we’re going to try to find out. We’ll be working on that in the lane itself this afternoon. If anyone passed that way they may have left some traces of themselves. Meantime, we’ll want a lot of alibis. But at least the Bartletts are off our list.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘For tonight, of course. And as I see it, that crosses them off too for Singleton’s murder. I don’t really believe we’ve two murderers on the loose. We haven’t the beginnings of an answer to that. Now let’s go in the cottage.’

  They turned towards the cottage.

  There was no need for a key to get into it. They discovered that the lock was broken. Inside it was dark, for the curtains were drawn. It took Roland a moment to find the light-switch as they entered. When he did and the light came on in the little hall, both men stood still, staring incredulously at what they saw. A small bookcase had had all the books that had been on it thrown to the floor. A rug had been kicked to one side. A candle-shaped light bracket on the wall had been twisted round and now hung down by its flex. It was the same in the sitting-room. Pictures, including the photograph of the girls’ cricket eleven at St Hilda’s School that had beaten the girls from Etchingham, had been torn down. Cushions had been ripped open. What books there were had been scattered on the floor. A few small china ornaments had been thrown down and looked as if they had been ground to fragments underfoot. A television had had its screen smashed. A telephone had been pulled away from the wall and lay on its side on the floor. A bowl that had had flowers in it, that stood on a little round table, had been overturned, and the flowers and the water that had been in the bowl lay in a damp puddle on the carpet. The table was on its side.

  The two men stood silently taking it in. Roland was the first to speak.

  ‘Curtains drawn,’ he observed.

  ‘That doesn’t tell us much,’ Andrew said.

  ‘No, but it must have happened after Miss Clancy left the house, so it was probably dark by then and they needed light to do the job. But it’s true it could have happened at any time during the night. Looks as if someone was searching for something.’

  ‘It was a bit more than that, wasn’t it?’ Andrew said. ‘Vandals at work, or else someone simply in a blind rage. The sort of rage that perhaps killed Eleanor Clancy. Who’s going to find anything in a bowl of flowers? Shall we look at the rest of the house?’

  ‘Yes, but don’t touch anything. We’ve got to get the photograph and the fingerprint people in on this.’

  Andrew did not need to be told not to touch anything, yet he was almost automatically about to lay a hand on the banister rail, mounting stairs having been something he had become cautious about during the last year or two, when he recollected himself and went up with his hands hanging by his sides.

  The scene of destruction upstairs was the same as it was below. There were two small bedrooms with sloping ceilings and one small window each and a small bathroom. In the two bedrooms mirrors had been smashed, mattresses rolled back and slashed, pillows ripped, with their feathery contents scattered everywhere, drawers pulled out and their contents spilled on the floor. In the room that Eleanor Clancy herself had obviously used, clothes had been torn off their hangers and dropped on the floor. In the bathroom the mirror on a cabinet on the wall above the handbasin had been smashed and the contents of the cabinet, packets of aspirin, laxatives, rolls of sticking-plaster and a bottle of disinfectant, all tumbled in the basin. The odour of the disinfectant was strong in the air.

  Except for muttering to himself as they went along what sounded like a long stream of disgusted obscenities, Roland said nothing, and Andrew also was silent, though from time to time, his breath caught. Going downstairs again, they explored the kitchen. It was in the same state as the rest of the cottage. Flour and sugar had been spilled on the floor and the table, coffee beans mixed up in them, what had been a saucepan full of stew overturned on the electric stove, making a foul greasy-looking pool over the top of it, the refrigerator yawned open with its light on inside but its contents in a heap in front of it.

  ‘Someone must have felt tired when they got to the end of doing all this,’ Roland observed.

  ‘What did he use?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘To smash the mirror and things?’ Roland turned back into the sitting-room. He pointed at a poker lying by the great old empty hearth. ‘Could have been that. But it could have been something he took away with him.’

  ‘We still haven’t looked in the cellar,’ Andrew said.


  ‘The cellar? There’s a cellar, is there? Yes, let’s get it over, then we’ll send for the other chaps to do their stuff. I’ll phone from my car. Better not touch that phone there.’

  He followed Andrew down into the cellar.

  The first thing that caught Andrew’s eye was that all Eleanor Clancy’s carefully hoarded photographic equipment, which by now might almost have had antique value, had been destroyed. What gave him a feeling of blind horror was that the precious negatives, which when he had seen them last had been in neat rows on a rack, and which had probably given a rare glimpse of a period that was long passed and of a country that had totally altered, had been ground into fragments that were now entirely meaningless. They had been precious to Eleanor Clancy and were irreplaceable. Andrew remembered the thought that he had had of discussing with her whether it might not be possible for him, using her photographs and the letters that had come down to her from her great-grandfather, forest officer in Burma in the mid-nineteenth-century, unknown, obscure, but leaving a piece of history behind him, to write the story of his life. But after all, he would have to stick to Malpighi.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Roland said. ‘Vandals, yes, plenty of them about. Telephone-boxes, shop windows and all that. But this systematic destruction of a person’s whole home—that’s something new to me.’

  There was a sound of bitter, though carefully subdued anger in his voice.

  ‘There has to be a reason for it,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Looks to me like the work of a madman.’

  ‘Suppose it was someone who was looking for something and lost his temper because he couldn’t find it.’

  Roland gave him a sardonic look.

  ‘You’ve some idea about it, Professor. Go on and tell me what it is.’

  ‘It just struck me …’ Andrew began, then paused.

  ‘Yes?’ Roland prompted him.

  ‘Well, we’ve been wondering what could have taken Miss Clancy up on to the common at dusk to meet someone she was blackmailing, haven’t we? A dangerous thing to do, as it turned out. But suppose she thought she’d protected herself. Suppose she told her victim that she’d left a full account of how he’d managed to murder Luke Singleton in her home, and that if anything happened to her, that account would be found and he’d be exposed. Only she’d misunderstood the man she was dealing with, someone quite ruthless and very bold. The way he handled the situation was first to murder her, then sometime in the night to come here and search the place from top to bottom for that account she’d said she’d left here. And he didn’t find it and all the violence in him exploded in a fit of blind rage and he started smashing everything he could find. Rage fuelled by fear, because that account may still be somewhere.’

  ‘Here in this cottage, after he’d searched it as he did?’

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps with her solicitor, or in her bank. Or perhaps it never existed.’

  ‘She merely said it did when she began to understand the danger she was in?’

  ‘That’s possible.’ Andrew had managed to withdraw his gaze from the shattered negatives and was looking around the cellar. On a shelf he saw a row of neatly labelled bottles of jam and chutney. He remembered that Eleanor Clancy had said she was going to try making wine from the grapes on her own vine.

  ‘A woman of many hobbies,’ he observed. ‘Everyone I’ve met here seems to have a hobby. And now it looks as if someone may be making a hobby of murder.’

  CHAPTER 7

  When Andrew returned to the Davidges’ house he found that Mollie had gone out. Ian said she had gone shopping. He was alone in the sitting-room with a glass of whisky at his elbow. He offered some to Andrew, who accepted it gladly. He told Ian what he and the Inspector had found in Eleanor Clancy’s cottage, but Ian seemed less interested than he would have expected. He nodded his head from time to time, but asked hardly any questions. It was as if his mind was on something else. He helped himself to more whisky before he gave any indication that this indeed was so, and had drunk half of it before he undertook to tell Andrew what it was.

  It came abruptly after a short silence.

  ‘Mollie’s leaving me,’ Ian said.

  There did not seem to Andrew to be any answer to that, so he said nothing.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised,’ Ian said after a moment.

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ Andrew said. ‘I’m surprised that she’s actually made up her mind to do it, but she confided in me a certain amount about her feelings for Brian, and I realized it was possible. You don’t seem surprised yourself.’

  ‘No, I’ve seen it coming for some time,’ Ian said. Except that his large, dark eyes looked very tired and his round face which was normally a cheerful one had a kind of expressionless emptiness about it, he showed no signs of emotional disturbance.

  ‘Are you sure about it?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘Yes, I think it’s final this time,’ Ian said.

  ‘Oh, then you’ve talked about it before, have you?’

  ‘God knows how often.’

  ‘She didn’t tell me that,’ Andrew said. ‘She gave me the impression you didn’t know much about it.’

  Ian gave a slight shake of his head. ‘Mollie’s never been able to keep anything to herself. Almost as soon as she and Brian met I could see there was something between them, and just in the way she assured me there was nothing, it was obvious that there was. It’s been like the way she’s talked as if this house is perfection and the house she’s always wanted, I could tell she was overdoing it and was longing to get away.’

  ‘That struck me too,’ Andrew said.

  ‘The only perfection about it was that by coming here she met Brian.’ For the first time there was some bitterness in Ian’s voice. ‘But she tried hard to make it work, I’ll give her that.’

  ‘You’ve been trying, too.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I’ve felt responsible for things going wrong. I ought never to have married her. I didn’t give her the kind of love she wanted. I’m too old for her, for one thing.’

  ‘She didn’t have to marry you.’

  ‘I think she felt she did. She’d seen what I went through when Vera died, how lonely and helpless I was, and I think she felt she’d got to look after me. And she wanted to be married to someone. She wasn’t young any more, and though she’d had her affairs before, they’d none of them lasted and I was offering her security and a change in her whole way of living. Must be pretty boring, being a secretary in an accountant’s office. She didn’t think about the fact that there are all sorts of ways of being bored. As she didn’t think that after she was safely married she might meet with Brian Singleton.’

  ‘Ian, I’ve got a feeling that you’re experiencing a kind of relief at what’s happened this morning,’ Andrew said.

  Ian swirled round the remains of the whisky in his glass, looking into it as if he might find some truth lurking in its depths.

  ‘Well, perhaps I do,’ he said. ‘It’s as if I’ve shed a load I didn’t even know I was carrying. We’re very fond of each other, you see. We’ve a lot of real affection for one another. And we’ve neither of us wanted to hurt the other. Now I can stop trying to have feelings I haven’t got. I expect I sound a pretty cold-blooded fish to you.’

  ‘No, only someone who set himself standards he couldn’t possibly live up to. This not wanting to hurt each other, the truth is it’s probably what you’ve both been wanting to do more than anything else ever since the affair with Brian started. The affection may be real, but so’s a lot of hate and anger.’

  ‘I don’t hate Brian,’ Ian said. ‘I’m not even angry with him.’

  Andrew looked sceptical.

  ‘I’m quite glad he’s going to take Mollie off my hands,’ Ian insisted.

  ‘You’re sure he will?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘When she spoke to me about it, she didn’t seem really certain what his feelings were.’

  ‘I don’t think she nee
d have any worries about it now that he’s going to have plenty of money.’

  ‘I’d never have thought she was mercenary.’

  ‘I don’t think she is. But Brian wouldn’t care for going through with a divorce, however peaceful, while he’s in his present job, and Mollie might not like going on living here through it and remarrying and trying to fit in with the wives of his colleagues. Not that they’d have much difficulty about all that nowadays, but they’d probably prefer to get away. It isn’t as if the job’s anything specially distinguished or that Brian’s particularly talented. I don’t believe he is. My guess is they’ll look for something abroad. Anyway, money always makes everything easier.’

  ‘You’re lucky you haven’t any children.’

  ‘Thank God, yes!’

  ‘She told me she wished you’d find another woman for yourself.’

  ‘I think that’s something I can do without.’

  ‘What will you do? Stay on here?’

  Ian looked vacantly at the empty fireplace. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought. I haven’t even begun to think what it’s going to mean. I’ve just got this feeling something’s settled and on the whole I’m thankful for it. You never went through anything like this, did you, Andrew?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve a feeling you think my attitude’s all wrong. I oughtn’t to be taking it all so calmly.’

  ‘Indeed I don’t, Ian. I think it’s very fortunate you can feel as you do. Whether you’ll still be feeling quite so calm when the shock’s worn off I wouldn’t like to prophesy.’

  ‘I think I’ll probably move back to London,’ Ian said. ‘I might find something in your neighbourhood. Have you anything against that?’

  ‘Of course not. But you’ll find it pretty expensive these days. When Nell and I bought our flat there it was going for a song, but prices have gone as mad there as everywhere else.’

  ‘Luckily, money isn’t one of the things I’ve got to worry about.’