Hobby of Murder

by E. X. Ferrars

  ‘But what about your birds? You won’t be able to do much bird-watching in London.’

  Ian gave a little sigh. ‘I’ll miss it, but recently, you know, it’s become a bit of a substitute for marriage. And I can still go to Kenya or the Gambia with the RSPB chaps, not only this year, but as long as I feel up to going. For some years, I hope. But I’ll have to find something to occupy me in between whiles. Have you any suggestions?’

  Andrew shook his head. ‘It’s hard enough for me to find the right thing to do myself, now that Robert Hooke’s off my hands. I ought never to have finished that book, you know. Working on it kept me pretty contented. But the idea of seeing it in print became a fatal temptation. I had an absurd sort of idea after meeting Eleanor Clancy that I might settle down to writing a life of her great-grandfather. I was going to ask her to let me take a look at his letters, to see if there was enough in them for me to be able to make something interesting of them. The illustrations, I thought, were all to be found in those quarter-plate negatives she’d kept so carefully. Beautiful things, I was ready to believe. But now just a heap of broken glass. There’s a madman loose in this village, Ian, or else someone exceptionally cunning.’

  ‘What could be cunning about smashing those negatives?’ Ian asked.

  ‘Perhaps to make us say what I’ve just said, that there’s a madman on the loose.’

  ‘You don’t believe there is?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Isn’t there always an element of madness in murder? And with two murders that’s something to think about.’

  ‘Do you think Eleanor really knew who killed Luke Singleton and was blackmailing him for it, and that’s why she was killed?’

  ‘That’s how it looks, doesn’t it?’

  Andrew leant back in his chair, stretching his long legs out before him. He wished that he knew what Ian really wanted now, to have someone to talk to, or to be left to himself, to brood on his own personal problems in quiet. Andrew felt fairly sure that he himself would have wanted to be alone. Not that he had ever experienced anything remotely like what Ian was having to face now. Particularly in Andrew’s early days with Nell, he and she had quarrelled from time to time. Not very often and not at all fiercely. The deeper things in their marriage had never felt threatened. But he had other friends whose marriages, for one reason or another, had gone on the rocks and he had several times found himself the recipient of confidences which embarrassed him because he felt so little able to help. All he could do was listen, something at which he was fairly accomplished, and wait for some sign that would give him a hint of what he ought to do. For the moment he felt that talk of murder and blackmail was a fairly useful distraction.

  ‘She went out on to the common to meet someone who gave her a thousand pounds and then killed her,’ he said. ‘And someone must be feeling very annoyed with himself that in the struggle that I suppose there was, she flung her handbag out into the lake. He’s a thousand pounds the poorer. Why he gave her the money in the first place, I don’t pretend to understand.’

  ‘What strikes me about that thousand pounds,’ Ian said, ‘is that it’s really rather a small sum to find you’ve got to pay if you’ve been detected in a murder. I’d have expected it to be twenty or thirty times that amount at least.’

  ‘It might have been just a first instalment,’ Andrew said. ‘As much as the victim could lay his hands on in a hurry.’

  ‘Or perhaps Eleanor wasn’t a very experienced blackmailer and didn’t know the value of her knowledge,’ Ian suggested.

  ‘Mollie didn’t believe she was a blackmailer at all.’

  ‘And she probably doesn’t believe Brian’s a murderer.’

  ‘But you do?’

  ‘Actually, I find it very hard to believe,’ Ian said. ‘Not because of his character. That’s something I prefer not to think about too much at the moment. But the idea that when he pulled out that flower to give to Mollie he actually managed to flick a pellet of poison into his brother’s cup across the table would mean he’s a cleverer conjuror than I believe he is. But I don’t say it’s impossible. And the only other people who could have done it are Inspector Roland and Felicity. I believe they could have done it fairly easily, sitting either side of Singleton as they were. And Eleanor was so close to them that she might have seen one of them do it. But then there’s the problem of that meeting on the common. I can’t believe Eleanor would ever have gone up there all alone to meet Roland. She’d have been too scared of him. She might have agreed to meet Felicity. Eleanor was the taller and could have thought she was the stronger of the two, but Felicity could have taken her by surprise somehow. And about Eleanor having been given the thousand pounds before she was killed …’ Ian paused, his forehead wrinkled in thought.

  ‘Yes?’ Andrew said.

  ‘Suppose it was Felicity she met,’ Ian said hesitantly. He was thinking something out as he went along. ‘Eleanor wouldn’t have been afraid of her and might have agreed to meet her on the common. And Felicity gave her the money as a sort of bait and then in the friendliest way possible, drew her, chatting, towards the bridge. She wanted to do the job there, because she wanted to knock her into the water, to make it harder for the exact time of the murder to be fixed. But it was Felicity’s bad luck that the handbag with the money in it went into the water too. She’d have been very angry. I don’t believe Felicity could spare a thousand pounds very easily.’

  ‘But what had Felicity against Luke Singleton?’ Andrew asked. ‘I’ll grant you all the rest is possible. But why did she do that first murder?’

  Ian gave an ironic little laugh.

  ‘I’m not serious, you know. I don’t believe for a moment Felicity did it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, it’s true I know very little about her private life. I’m quite sure there’ve been men in it, and she could probably have been married several times over if she’d wanted it. But she likes her work and I suppose she doesn’t want children. You said just now how lucky Mollie and I are that we haven’t got children, and I agree with you. If we had, I’d feel we’d got to make our marriage stick together somehow. But unless you want children, what’s the point of marrying? Why did I marry Mollie?’

  Ian’s voice had changed. A harsher note had come into it. Andrew began to feel fairly sure that the time had come for him to find some reason for going up to his room. The danger that if he remained where he was he might find himself forced into taking sides seemed a very good reason for leaving. He stood up.

  ‘Well, I’m terribly sorry things have turned out as they have,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad you seem to feel it’ll be all for the best in the end. But I know you’ll both go through a bad time before you can finally put it all behind you. I imagine you’d sooner I went home tomorrow.’

  ‘Go or stay, as you like,’ Ian answered in a tone of indifference. ‘That man Roland will probably want you to stay.’

  Andrew was afraid that that was probably true, though he thought that by next day Ian might be only too glad to be rid of him. However, that need not be settled now. He left the room, climbed the stairs to his bedroom, kicked off his shoes and flung himself, clothed, on the bed. All of a sudden he felt an almost unbearable sense of fatigue. That was one of the great disadvantages of being as old as he was, he thought. Fatigue could overpower you all in a moment and turn you into a useless, thoughtless hulk. It was true that he had every reason for feeling tired. The strain of the last few days might have bowled over a very much younger man. But as long as he had been talking to Ian, he had somehow managed to keep his need for rest at bay, in fact, almost to be unaware of it. Presently, to his great annoyance, his mind, which had felt quite empty, was filled with the rhyme that had troubled him off and on for the last day or two.

  ‘And now I’m as sure as I’m sure that my name

  Is not Willow, titwillow, titwillow,

  That ’twas blighted affection that made him exclaim …’

  Blighted affection! He
had been hearing enough about that since coming to Lower Milfrey. Ian and Mollie. Ernest Audley and his lost wife. And possibly Felicity Mace and Luke Singleton. Not that that last had ever been stated plainly. There had merely been hints that some feeling between them might once have had some existence. Of the people whom Andrew had been meeting since arriving here only the Waldrons appeared to be a reasonably contented couple, and what did he know about them, after all?

  There was a time when he thought that he heard voices downstairs, and he wondered if after all Mollie had come home. But when at last he made himself go downstairs, he found Ian alone, preparing a lunch of ham and salad.

  ‘So she’s gone, has she?’ Andrew said. ‘She didn’t change her mind while she was out shopping?’

  ‘No, and taken the car, says she’ll bring it back when she and Brian have sorted things out, so now I’ve got to manage without it. The one thing I’m scared of now is that she and the car will come back together, because I don’t honestly believe she’ll be happy living with a murderer. And he’s got to be the murderer, hasn’t he? God knows how he did it, but no one else had the chance. And I think she knows it, knows how it was done and all. Well, it’s her choice. If she can live with a murderer, who am I to stop her?’

  The rest of the day passed quietly, except for two or three visits from the press, and both Ian and Andrew went to bed early. Next morning they had a silent breakfast in the kitchen, then Ian settled down with his bird photographs, mounting them in an album, whistling under his breath while he did it. Andrew sat in a chair by the window with The Times. He read an account of the murder of Eleanor Clancy, and that the police were considering the possibility that it was linked to that of Luke Singleton, but that there was so far no proof of this. There was an article devoted to the work of Luke Singleton, which was somewhat patronizing in tone, though it gave full marks to him for the money that he had made. So if what everyone had been assuming was correct and all that money had been left to his brother, then Mollie Davidge had gone from mere comfort and security to riches.

  It was at about ten o’clock that Ernest Audley came to the house. He came in apologizing for calling on them at such an hour, but said that he had thought that he would look in before leaving for his office in Rockford, because he wanted to know if they knew anything about the death of Eleanor Clancy. The red blotches on his cheekbones seemed to be particularly bright against the pallor of his thin face. The sandy hair that stood straight up from his narrow forehead looked a little as if he had forgotten to comb it that morning. Yet on the whole he looked cheerful.

  ‘Of course you’ve heard the Bartletts have alibis for the woman’s murder, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘And that seems to clear them of poisoning Singleton. And I’d be suspect Number One for his murder if only they could tell me how I did it. You know, if I could think of a way I could have done it, I believe I’d be telling them about it, I’d be so proud of myself. And certainly I’d have sold my story to the popular press so that there’d be a nice hoard waiting for me when I came out of gaol. What d’you think I’d get? Life, of course, but that doesn’t mean life nowadays. Sometimes it’s a mere ten years. And I don’t know that ten years in prison would be all that much worse than ten years in a solicitor’s office in Rockford.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Ernest,’ Ian muttered. ‘You didn’t do it, so don’t give yourself airs.’

  ‘No, and the fact is, of course, that nobody did it,’ Audley said. ‘It couldn’t happen, so it didn’t happen. By the way, where’s Mollie?’

  ‘Out shopping,’ Ian lied.

  ‘She liked that Clancy woman quite a lot, didn’t she?’ Audley went on. ‘Is she badly upset?’

  ‘About as much as you’d expect,’ Ian answered.

  His tenseness did not seem to quell Audley, who seemed to be in particularly good spirits that morning.

  ‘D’you believe she was blackmailing someone?’ he asked. ‘That’s what I heard.’

  ‘How?’ Ian said.

  ‘How was she blackmailing someone? Easy enough, I suppose, if she happened to know what nobody else does.’

  ‘I meant, how did you hear it?’ Ian said.

  ‘Oh, from my cleaning lady, whose husband’s a policeman. I’m often put into possession of interesting information through her before other people get it. For instance, before this murder of Eleanor Clancy, I heard that the police were leaning to the idea that Singleton’s death was suicide. I was ready to believe it myself. Choosing the most exhibitionist way possible of killing himself was quite in character.’

  ‘So that’s what you really meant when you said his murder couldn’t happen, so it didn’t happen.’

  ‘No, no, I meant that we’d all been hypnotized into believing it had happened, when it simply hadn’t happened at all.’ Audley gave a pleased little chuckle. ‘Complete illusion. You know, I thought Mollie must be taking the news of Clancy to Brian. I saw your car outside his bungalow. Tell me, won’t you, if you have any bright ideas about how that Singleton murder was done?’

  He gave a little wave to Andrew with one hand and let himself out.

  ‘Bastard,’ Ian muttered, not getting up to see him out and going on pasting photographs into his album.

  About eleven o’clock he suddenly suggested, ‘D’you feel like dropping in on the Waldrons? I’d be glad to know what Sam makes of the whole situation. After all, it was at his dinner that everything started. I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s got theories about it by now, and they’ll be a little more soundly based than mass hypnotism. Are you coming?’

  Andrew dropped The Times and stood up. He was glad to be able to do something active, rather than remaining in a house that seemed to have lost all that had given it life. He went with Ian out into the road.

  ‘We’ll have to walk, since Mollie’s taken the car,’ Ian said.

  They set off into the village.

  That it seemed so normal, that the people they saw were going about their usual business, just as if drama and tragedy had never come near them, seemed strange, though in its way it was reassuring. The morning was a grey one, with pale, level clouds covering the sky. There was no breeze, yet it felt colder than the day before. Autumn was upon them, and soon it would be winter. Winter could come with very little warning, even if it was to make only a foray of a few days of bitter cold, then to become mild again, perhaps not returning for several weeks. But Andrew knew that some of the cold that he felt had nothing to do with the time of year, which after all was only September, but was inside himself. He was glad Ian felt inclined to walk fast. Andrew could still walk fairly fast, for which he was thankful, though catching sight of his reflection in the window of the village grocer as they passed it, it struck him that his stoop had increased markedly since he had noticed it last. Winter, his own winter, was waiting for him.

  He and Ian were silent for a while, then Ian remarked, ‘Audley’s a queer chap, isn’t he? I don’t believe I could ever work up the state of hatred he seems to live in. He’s really glad, you know, that Luke Singleton was murdered, and he doesn’t seem much concerned that one of the results of it was that poor woman getting killed.’

  ‘You’re sorry for her even if it turns out she’s a blackmailer?’

  ‘Of course I am. I hate violence of all kinds.’

  ‘Isn’t blackmail a kind of violence?’

  ‘You don’t have to give in to it, do you?’

  ‘It must be very difficult sometimes not to.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m not altogether convinced she was a blackmailer. Mollie may be right about her.’

  ‘I gather you don’t have any very violent feelings against Brian.’

  ‘No. I don’t even really dislike him. What’s happened isn’t his fault, or Mollie’s either, or even mine. It was just something that was going to happen sooner or later, and it might as well be with Brian as anyone else.’

  ‘How long ago did you realize it was going to happen?’

  ‘Well, it’s easy
to be wise after the event, but I’ve an idea it was about from the start. I knew quite soon, so it seems to me now, that Mollie would leave me sooner or later.’

  ‘And I suppose that makes things easier now.’

  ‘Oh yes, as I told you yesterday, it’s a kind of relief.’

  After that they were silent again for some time.

  About a quarter of a mile beyond the end of the village they reached the gates that opened on to the drive that led up to the Waldrons’ house. Seeing it in daylight, Andrew thought what a pleasantly dignified place it was, without any ostentation or pretension, though standing on a slight rise, as it did, it seemed to overlook the village. He could see now the park stretching around it, with some fine old chestnuts near the house, just beginning to show the first faint tints of autumn. When Ian rang the doorbell it was some time before the door was opened by Anna Waldron. Andrew was struck at once, as he had been when he saw her first, by her air of diffidence, yet at the same time by the grace of her movements. She was wearing well-cut dark blue jeans and a sweater of emerald green. Her dark hair was tied back from her face with a bright green ribbon.

  ‘Oh, Ian, how nice to see you—and Professor, how good of you to come!’ she exclaimed. ‘The only other people we’ve seen for the last day or two have been the police. And of course, the Bartletts have left us. You know that, do you? And how we’ll ever manage to replace them I don’t know. How do you find people who’ll come and work in a place where there’s been an unsolved murder? Yet I can’t possibly cope with things by myself. Of course, Sam and I can manage for the moment, but as everything begins to get dusty and horrible we’ll just have to move out. Go abroad perhaps to somewhere like Portugal, where I believe you can still get servants. Oh, why am I talking like this? Do come in. Sam will be so glad to see you.’

  She was chattering in the way of a shy person who is afraid that if she stops for a moment she may be quite unable to get started again, and who is really very much afraid of the people to whom she is chattering.