Hobby of Murder

by E. X. Ferrars

  Roland was tapping his teeth with a ballpoint pen that he had picked up from the desk. He shook his head.

  ‘If you’re going to tell me that Waldron and his wife weren’t married, and the Clancy woman found it out, that’s hardly a motive for murder nowadays, is it?’

  ‘No, but wouldn’t you say incest is?’ Andrew said. ‘Sam and Anna Waldron were brother and sister.’

  Roland looked startled for a moment, gave a brief, hard glance at Andrew’s face, then got up and went to the window. He stood there silent, looking out.

  At last he said, ‘What put you on to that?’

  There was faint scepticism in his tone, but no outright rejection of what Andrew had said.

  ‘It’s hard to say just when I began to think about it seriously,’ Andrew answered. ‘Looking back, it’s easy to trace the things that put it into my head, but at the time I didn’t take much notice of them. For instance, there was something that struck me about Eleanor Clancy the first time I met her. It was a way she had of looking at people as if she was trying to fix their image in her memory. And later she boasted to me about how good she was at recognizing people. She seemed to imply that it was almost a trick. But then, as soon as she’d said that, she seemed to get a little scared at what she said. It didn’t mean anything special to me at the time, but later I thought of the way she’d looked at Waldron when she met him at the Davidges’ party. It was with what you might call a surprised sort of thoughtfulness. And I began to think it looked just as if she’d recognized him, but that he wasn’t what she’d expected. And I think the fact was that she did recognize him, though it was years since they’d met. You know Anna Waldron had lost both her parents in a plane crash and was brought up by her grandparents. They sent her to that school, St Hilda’s, and it’s quite common in such schools for relatives to come down and visit the children and take them out for lunch and so on. Well, that was what Waldron, a cousin, might have done and Eleanor might have met him and then recognized him at the Davidges’. But if so, why didn’t she simply greet him and remind him of their meeting, as she reminded Anna? And why didn’t he give any sign either that he remembered having met her at the school? It’s true she may not have made any impression on him, and that he genuinely forgot her, yet Anna had a crush on her, so we’ve been told, and would probably have made a point of introducing them to one another, of course telling Eleanor that he was her brother. But it was Eleanor’s silence about what I began to feel sure had been a meeting with him that interested me more than his not remembering her. Was that diffidence on her part? I didn’t think so. She wasn’t in the least a diffident woman. There had to be a reason for it of some sort.’

  Roland turned and came back to the desk.

  ‘So that’s all you’re depending on,’ he said. ‘Clancy’s silence about possibly having met Waldron once before?’

  ‘It was all I was depending on until I got my nephew to get some information for me, as I told you, at St Catherine’s House,’ Andrew said. ‘You’ll find there that Martin and Agatha Waldron died when their daughter was ten. They left two children behind them, a son, Samuel and a daughter, Suzanna. There was a big gap between the ages of Sam and Anna. But there’s no evidence that Anna ever had a cousin called Sam, or for that matter, any cousins at all, and also there’s no evidence that she ever married anybody. When Sam and Anna decided to settle down together and come to live in a place where nobody knew them, they didn’t actually go so far as to go through a marriage ceremony.’

  ‘But why did they pose as a married couple?’ Roland asked. ‘Why didn’t they simply settle in here as brother and sister, and keep their sexual relationship to themselves? No one would have suspected anything.’

  ‘Wouldn’t their servants have caught on pretty quickly that there was something strange going on?’

  ‘Hm, yes. I suppose so. If you feel you’ve got to have servants, I suppose you’ve got to be careful about things like that. So you think Clancy understood what the situation was and tried her hand at blackmail.’

  ‘That’s how it looked to me and this morning I had a talk with her sister, Mrs Jevons, which made me sure of it. She’s got very little money and has an aged mother to look after, and recently she’d had a letter from Eleanor telling her that she’d had a bit of luck and that her sister needn’t worry about money any more. Hasn’t that the smell of blackmail, in the circumstances?’

  Roland nodded. ‘Mrs Jevons told us about that letter from her sister this morning, but blackmail hadn’t entered her head. But I agree with you, it seems pretty obvious that that was the reason for her murder. Blackmail that had nothing to do with Singleton’s murder, as we were meant to think it had, to put us off thinking of anything like the incest business. And that explains why Anna Waldron cashed a cheque for a thousand pounds before that murder. She’d already been threatened by Clancy and got ready to pay a first instalment. But how did she persuade Clancy to meet her on the common in the evening, when there’d be no one about, and why was the cottage wrecked?’

  ‘I think Eleanor agreed to meet her when she suggested it because she had no suspicion of danger. I think Waldron himself was keeping in the background, so that Eleanor felt she had only Anna to deal with, and if she worried about danger at all, she’d have thought she was much the bigger and stronger of the two. But I think the probability is that Anna, prompted by Sam, managed to make things sound as if they were on a friendly basis, I mean, that Anna was quite ready to help Eleanor look after her poor old mother and they might meet for a little walk on the common and sort things out without any ugly talk of blackmail. So they met, and Anna steered Eleanor towards the bridge where Waldron was waiting among the trees, and it was only at the last moment that she realized that in fact she was in deadly danger. And it was then that she thought of saying that she’d left a letter in the cottage, telling the truth about the Waldrons’ relationship and that if they killed her the truth was certain to come out.’

  ‘Why didn’t they simply kill her in the cottage? Why do something so risky as kill her out in the open?’

  ‘Because they were afraid of being seen going into the cottage. They’re quite well-known hereabouts. If they’d met anyone they knew, it would have spoiled everything. An approach along that quiet lane beyond the lake must have looked far more promising. And then, after dark, they did go to the cottage and hunted for the letter and didn’t find it, probably because it never existed, and Waldron, going into a blind rage, which it must be rather easy to do when you’ve got into the way of committing murder, smashed everything he could find. It was Clancy herself he was killing all over again, because she’d come along and ruined his nice satisfactory life with his sister.’

  ‘It can’t have been all that satisfactory to her, or she wouldn’t have committed suicide.’

  ‘No, that’s true. It’s possible the incestuous situation was really more than she could stand. That would explain why she’d tried to kill herself twice before. But she did her best to clear her brother of murder before she tried for the third time. When I saw her last she went into a hysterical state in which she insisted quite violently that Singleton’s death was suicide and that Eleanor had been killed by some prowling pervert. But perhaps she did that simply because she couldn’t face the fact that she herself had been accessory to two murders and was really as guilty as Waldron. Her solution of the crimes may have been simply what she desperately wished was the truth. Poor woman. A rotten life from the start.’ Andrew paused and gave Roland a quizzical smile. ‘Well, how does it strike you, Inspector? I told you I’d no proof or anything. It’s all just one of my ideas.’

  ‘Except for the little matter that Sam and Anna were brother and sister,’ Roland said. ‘We can check on that.’

  ‘Yes, and I think you’ll find there’s no mistake there.’

  ‘What we need are some witnesses. If you’re right about Singleton’s murder, I doubt if we’ll ever be able to prove it, but we may have better luck with Cl
ancy’s. Anyway, many thanks for your help. It’s been a very interesting conversation. If you should ever feel inclined to take up a hobby, Professor, you might try the solving of crimes of violence.’

  To Andrew’s surprise, the witnesses that the Inspector required were in the end forthcoming, though it took them more than a week to make up their minds that it was their duty to tell the police what they had seen. They were a boy of nineteen and his recent girlfriend of fifteen. He came from Rockford and she from Lower Milfrey and they had met at a dance only a few weeks before. At the time of Eleanor Clancy’s murder they had been together in the trees beside the stream that flowed out of the lake, behaving in a way that would have deeply horrified the girl’s parents, and as her father was given to a certain degree of brutality she was terrified of allowing him to know what she had been doing when she and the boy heard Eleanor’s one scream. Even when they heard it, the girl had stayed hidden where she was, refusing to come out from the trees to see what was happening, but the boy had gone running towards the bridge, to see a man and a woman making off down the lane. He did not know either of them, but later, when he and the girl had decided to face the wrath of her parents and tell the police what they knew, he had picked out Sam Waldron’s photograph from a number that he was shown, and again had picked him out in an identity parade.

  That Sam Waldron and Anna had committed incest had told heavily against him, and although he was ably defended when his trial for the murder of Eleanor Clancy eventually came on, he was sentenced to imprisonment for life.

  However, as Inspector Roland had predicted, the murder of Luke Singleton was never officially solved. Roland believed that Andrew had arrived at the truth of it, but he was sure that no jury would be convinced of it. In the meantime, as soon as he could after the inquest, which had been adjourned, Andrew had returned to London, and one evening he and his nephew Peter Dilly had dined together once more in a restaurant in Charlotte Street. Peter had been leaving for his villa in Monte Carlo next day and had tried to persuade Andrew to visit him there.

  Andrew had felt almost tempted to accept the invitation, but had been checked by a feeling he had had that his life had a way of being more peaceful, calmer, more serene, in St John’s Wood than anywhere else.

  ‘Well, at least come out for Christmas,’ Peter had said. ‘There’s nothing to keep you here.’

  ‘Oh yes, there is,’ Andrew had replied. ‘I’ve just started on a new and very interesting study. It takes up all my time.’

  ‘You mean you’ve actually got a hobby at last?’

  ‘I suppose you could call it that. Anyway, it’s the sort of thing that really suits me.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just the life of Malpighi. It’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, even though I don’t know if I shall ever live to finish it.’