Death Comes to Cambers

by E. R. Punshon

  ‘You’re young Dene, then?’ the colonel asked. ‘I’ve heard about you. Your father’s the grocer here, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Eddy answered, and, Bobby fancied, with a touch of resentment in his tone and manner as if he had not much appreciated this loud-voiced reference to the paternal shop. Not that there had been anything offensive or patronizing in the colonel’s tone, he had merely made the observation as stating a fact that helped to establish name, place, and residence. He went on: ‘Well, Dene, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to let us take possession for a time. We won’t interfere with your things any more than we can help. If there’s any information I want from you at any time, I will let you know, Sergeant.’

  Jordan flung open the door.

  ‘Now, Mr. Dene,’ he rasped out, just like the colonel himself, and Eddy obeyed meekly, while the colonel swung round upon Bobby, now the only other person left of all the crowd who had been there before.

  ‘You heard what I said?’ the colonel demanded. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Bobby offered his card.

  ‘I was spending the week-end with Lady Cambers,’ he said. ‘I have some information I think I ought to offer you.’

  Colonel Lawson looked from the card to Bobby and then back from Bobby to the card. The card proclaimed the young man a detective-sergeant of the Metropolitan Police, attached to Scotland Yard, and yet at the same time he declared himself a week-end guest of Lady Cambers. A puzzling world, the chief constable knew it had become, and one in which the old, simple, clear-cut distinctions no longer existed. Why, it was hardly even safe any longer to judge a man by the tie he wore! And once a tie had been so clear a guide through the social grades! Now here was a sergeant of police claiming to have been a week-end guest of a woman in Lady Cambers’s position. But then a possible solution of the anomaly occurred to him. Possibly the young man meant he had been staying there as a friend of the butler or of the cook. He said quite brightly: ‘How was that? Anyone there you know?’

  But the poor colonel got a worse shock.

  ‘Lady Hirlpool is my grandmother,’ Bobby explained, ‘and she’s a very old friend of Lady Cambers. Lady Cambers was nervous about burglars. I believe all her jewellery is kept in the house, and there has been some sort of talk about suspicious characters being seen hanging about recently. My grandmother told her I could put her up to the best way to make things safe.’

  Colonel Lawson blinked. A sergeant of police claiming, in a casual sort of way, a peeress of the realm for his grandmother! Hardly suitable, he thought! One moment he permitted himself in which to regret those older and better days when a gentleman was a gentleman, and, if he had to provide for himself, at least never thought of adopting such a dull, plebeian method as work. All this Bolshevism, he reflected gloomily, and was about once more, and even more emphatically, to invite Bobby’s departure, when that young man produced the fountain-pen and match-stalk he had picked up near where the murdered woman’s body had been found.

  ‘I dare say they aren’t of any importance,’ he remarked. ‘Very likely someone who helped to move the body dropped them. But I thought you ought to see them.’

  ‘Certainly, certainly,’ the chief constable agreed, examining them closely. .

  Bobby had very carefully wrapped up the fountain-pen in his handkerchief. Colonel Lawson commented on this. Bobby explained: ‘In case there might be any finger-prints.’ He added: ‘It’s an expensive-looking thing, mounted in gold like that. I should think it cost two or three pounds, so it’s hardly likely to have belonged to any of the people in the village. It may have belonged to Lady Cambers, perhaps, if she ever used a fountain-pen, though it looks more like a man’s to me. Or there is Mr. Bowman, who saw the body first. I think he is a business man, and it might be his. If not...’

  ‘You mean it may have belonged to the murderer?’ Colonel Lawson observed.

  ‘It occurred to me, sir,’ Bobby answered.

  The chief constable turned to one of his companions, who had been listening in grave silence to all this.

  ‘You look after the thing, Moulland,’ he said. To Bobby, he added: ‘Superintendent Moulland will have charge of the case. Now, what about this match-stalk? It’s marked, “Hotel Henry VIII”. That’s a London hotel, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Bobby answered. ‘Mayfair Lane. Just opened. Very good class, but not too expensive. Probably they give away thousands of their little books of matches every week – they are in every public room in the hotel, and on every table in the restaurant. But it may prove useful, if only as an indication.’

  ‘Quite so,’ agreed Lawson. ‘Quite so. You seem to know how to use your eyes. Are you on leave?’

  ‘Only week-end leave,’ Bobby answered, a trembling hope dawning in his soul. ‘I’m due to report for duty at two this afternoon.’

  ‘I wonder if they would spare you for a little longer, as you were on the spot,’ the chief constable said, and then turned to Moulland. ‘What do you think, Moulland? The young man’s presence might be useful, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ agreed the superintendent. ‘He was staying at the house; there’s a good deal he may be able to tell us.’

  ‘I was Lady Cambers’s guest,’ Bobby said, in a low voice. ‘If I can do anything to help...’

  ‘I’ll ring the Yard up and ask,’ Lawson said decidedly.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ murmured Bobby.

  One of those who had accompanied Colonel Lawson, and had since been busy at the table where lay the body of the dead woman, spoke now. He said: ‘The cause of death is plain enough. Strangling. With a cord – bit of washing line, very likely. Sort of thing Dene sells by the dozen yards. Every house and cottage in the village has it. Probably slipped over her head from behind, and pulled tight. Simple. Efficacious. Silent. Never knew anything about it, most likely.’

  The speaker was a Dr. Ball, a general practitioner in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Ought to be a post-mortem, though,’ he added. ‘Might be something else as well.’

  ‘Yes, that would be best,’ Lawson agreed. He turned to his superintendent again. ‘Moulland,’ he said, ‘look after that, and have a search made to see if any piece of washing-line can be found. It’s a clue worth following up – somebody may know something in the village.’ He turned back to the doctor. ‘Can you say what time death occurred?’

  ‘Probably about eight hours ago. I should say a little before midnight. Very heavy rain about eleven. She wasn’t in that. Clothing only a little damp, and quite dry next the skin. I’ve noted the rectal temperature. Best guide. Of course, I’m assuming she was murdered where they found her. Bit different if body had been kept in warm, dry room. But not much different. Rectal temperature is pretty safe, taken with other indications.’

  ‘I think Dene was with Lady Cambers till half-past ten or thereabouts,’ Bobby volunteered. ‘I remember hearing Farman saying he would be nicely caught in that heavy rain there was last night.’

  ‘Who is Farman?’ Colonel Lawson asked.

  ‘Lady Cambers’s butler,’ Bobby answered.

  ‘I suppose Lady Cambers did not accompany Dene – there’s no suggestion that she went out with him, or followed later on?’

  ‘I hardly think so,’ Bobby answered. ‘I was playing bezique with my grandmother. Lady Cambers had been in her own sitting-room with Dene since soon after dinner. When we finished our bezique, about eleven, my grandmother said she would go to bed, but first she would say good night to Lady Cambers. I think she was a little curious to know why they had been talking so long. She came back to get her glasses, and she remarked to me that Lady Cambers seemed very agitated and upset, but wouldn’t say what the matter was. She went to bed then, and I sat reading till nearly half-past eleven. Then I went to bed, too.’

  ‘You didn’t see Lady Cambers again, hear anything unusual, or hear her go out?’

  ‘No,’ Bobby answered. ‘But there is a garden door only a little way down the
passage from her sitting-room. She could easily have slipped out without anyone being the wiser, if she had wished to. I believe Farman found all the doors and windows fastened as usual this morning.’

  ‘Then, apparently, except for Lady Hirlpool, when she went to say good night, Dene is the last person who saw Lady Cambers alive?’

  ‘Except the murderer,’ Bobby answered gravely.

  CHAPTER 5

  FIRST SUSPICIONS

  From the shed, Colonel Lawson and his party, to which Bobby had now, unostentatiously but firmly, attached himself, proceeded across the fields towards Cambers House, where the chief constable meant to continue the investigation. On the way they had to pass the spot where the murdered woman’s body had been found, and to the colonel’s intense indignation most of those he had expelled from the shed, together with a number of new-comers, had gathered here, to begin again gazing, arguing, gossiping. But heated arguments as to exactly where and how the body had lain the colonel interrupted with a flow of pungent eloquence beneath which the crowd melted somewhat sulkily away.

  ‘Every inch of ground trampled over and over,’ complained Moulland, and neither he nor his chief were much comforted by Bobby’s assurance that every track or trace or useful sign had long before been obliterated by the restless feet of the first-comers to the scene.

  Even the precaution Bobby had taken of piling some stones on top of one another in a tiny pyramid to mark the precise tuft of grass in which he had found the fountain-pen had been rendered nugatory by someone who, noticing the stones in their careful pyramid, had promptly yielded to humanity’s profound destructive instinct and amused himself by kicking them away.

  ‘You should have stopped here yourself to see nothing of the sort happened,’ frowned the chief constable, who had a lively sense of the duty laid upon him to point out the shortcomings of his subordinates, and Bobby supposed, ruefully, that in fact he ought to have done something of the kind.

  ‘Who saw the body first?’ Colonel Lawson demanded next. ‘Farman was the name, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No, sir,’ answered Bobby. ‘Farman is Lady Cambers’s butler. It was Mr. Bowman saw the body, from the road. He went to tell Mr. Hardy, who is the farmer, and it was they who moved the body to the shed up there.’

  ‘Know anything about Mr. Bowman?’

  ‘I understand he is in business in Hirlpool. I think he was on his way to catch the early train there,’ Bobby answered. ‘I’m told there is a sister, a Miss Bowman.’

  It was because he remembered the story Ray Hardy had repeated that Bobby mentioned her name, and he fancied from his manner, but was not sure, that the chief constable, too, had heard the gossip evidently current in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’ Then, rather with the air of deliberately changing the subject, he turned to Moulland, and asked: ‘Do you know this Mr. Bowman? Was he one of that crowd?’

  ‘Couldn’t say, sir,’ Moulland answered. ‘Don’t know him by sight, sir, only by name. Can inquire.’

  ‘I was told it was a great shock to him, and he went straight home after helping to move the body,’ Bobby said. ‘Apparently he said he felt sick, and lighted a cigarette to calm his nerves, he said. So that match-stalk may be his.’

  ‘Try to get hold of him,’ Lawson said, to his superintendent. ‘We had better hear what he has to say before his imagination gets to work on the details. If he went straight back home, he may be there still. I suppose he lives near?’

  ‘I think in one of those houses over there – you can just see the chimneys,’ Bobby said, pointing to the chimneys Ray Hardy had indicated as those of Mr. Bowman’s house.

  ‘Send and find out if he’s there,’ the chief constable ordered again. ‘If he is, get him along to Cambers House. We shall have plenty to see about to keep us there for the rest of the day. But most likely every bit of useful information has been lost or destroyed already.’

  ‘I told Farman,’ interposed Bobby, anxious to retrieve some of the kudos he had lost over the failure of the precaution he had taken to identify the fountain-pen tuft of grass, ‘to lock the door of Lady Cambers’s bedroom and sitting-room, and to see that as little was disturbed as possible.’

  The chief constable received this information with a non-committal grunt. His theory of discipline was that blame should plentifully fall, like rain from heaven, upon both the just and the unjust, but that, as the old saw says, ‘praise to the face is open disgrace’.

  So Bobby got no comfort, and, as they went on towards the house, he fell back a step or two to walk by Moulland’s side. The superintendent was a tall, heavily built man with a heavy moustache, a somewhat wooden expression, and large, light-blue eyes that seemed to look out upon the world with a gravely puzzled expression, as though feeling that it, and most things in it, entirely evaded explanation. Bobby summed him up as a man who could very efficiently and patiently and carefully carry out instructions, but who always required instructions to act on.

  ‘There seems to be some sort of talk about this Miss Bowman, sir, isn’t there?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘There’s some say,’ Moulland answered, ‘it was on account of her Lady Cambers wanted a divorce – only the vicar here, Mr. Andrews, wouldn’t hear of it. He’s all against divorce, and there was many thought her ladyship would have been glad enough to get Sir Albert back.’

  ‘Does Miss Bowman live with her brother?’

  ‘Did. She kept house for him, but now she’s gone off – London, they say. There was a good deal of talk going on, and very likely she didn’t find things too comfortable. Now the talk is, she’s followed Sir Albert.’

  ‘If there is anything really serious in it,’ Bobby remarked thoughtfully, ‘I suppose, now Lady Cambers is dead, there is nothing to prevent their getting married?’ Moulland pondered this for some time in silence, and the puzzled look in his eyes grew still more marked. Finally he said, as if at last coming to a conclusion: ‘No, I don’t suppose as there is – if so be they still want it.’ Bobby nodded. He knew well enough that this sort of intrigue is often dropped quickly enough; especially when an obstacle that had seemed to make the affair as deliciously safe as deliciously daring, disappears suddenly. But then, also, there are cases in which passion overwhelms every other consideration, every scruple, too. He said presently: ‘Do you know anything about Mr. Bowman? If he is in a good position and so on?’

  ‘There’s nothing against him,’ Moulland answered. ‘Always well spoken of. Accountant and estate-agent. Not in a big way; only a girl and an office-boy for staff. I suppose it might mean a good deal to him in the way of standing and connection if his sister became Lady Cambers, if that’s what you are getting at.’

  ‘It was in my mind,’ Bobby admitted. ‘Nothing to it, most likely.’

  ‘It was him found the body,’ reflected Moulland. ‘Must have been pretty quick to see it from the road – of course, if he knew it was there... I’ll just mention it to the chief.’ By now they had reached the gates that admitted to the Cambers House grounds from the footpath that made a short-cut between village and house. Colonel Lawson, who had been walking on alone, evidently deep in thought, paused here to let the others overtake him. To Bobby, he said: ‘You said something about Lady Cambers being more nervous of burglars lately. Was there any reason?’

  ‘I understand a stranger had been seen hanging about the house and grounds in a suspicious way, or what she thought was a suspicious way,’ Bobby answered. ‘He had been trying to pump some of the servants, too, and then she heard he had been asking a lot of questions in the village. She kept all her jewellery in the house – in a safe in her room – and she got the idea that perhaps it was some advance agent, so to say, spying out the ground for a gang of burglars.’

  ‘Well, they do that sometimes,’ admitted the chief constable, and called Jordan, who was following in the rear. ‘Know anything, sergeant,’ he asked, ‘of any suspicious-looking stranger about here?’

  ‘There’s
a London business gentleman staying at the Cambers Arms, sir,’ Jordan answered. ‘Retired gent. Sold his business in London, and looking for a small house, with a bit of land attached, for fruit and poultry. Made a lot of inquiries to see what he could find to suit.’

  ‘Better look him up, Moulland,’ the chief constable directed. ‘Have you seen him, Jordan? What is he like?’

  ‘I’ve only seen him once or twice, sir,’ Jordan answered, ‘and I didn’t pay any particular attention – seemed no call to. Very chatty and friendly, I’ve heard. A.1 at darts, but no class at all at shove-halfpenny. Big-made man – about my height; spends his money freely enough. Fond of a glass, but never takes too much. Writes to his wife and family twice a week regular. Long letters, and always takes them into Hirlpool to post. Quite the gentleman always, but not what you would call a gentleman, or anywhere near it.’

  The chief constable nodded as if he understood this somewhat cryptic remark.

  ‘Yes, decidedly, he’s got to be looked up,’ he said. ‘You’ll see to that, Moulland. Though I don’t understand how preparations for a burglary, if there were any, would explain her going out alone at that time of night – without saying a word to anyone, apparently.’

  ‘She seems to have taken a suit-case with her, too, sir,’ Bobby remarked. ‘That seems curious, I think.’

  ‘Yes, I know. It was empty,’ Colonel Lawson said. ‘I looked at it. Nothing to show what had been in it.’ He added slowly: ‘If we knew that, we should know a lot more.’

  Bobby’s sense of discipline was too acute to allow him to criticize this remark. He did glance at Moulland, but saw the superintendent nodding a grave agreement.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Moulland said. ‘If we knew that... Have to concentrate on finding out what that suit-case held.’

  Bobby thought otherwise, but thought, also, that very likely he was wrong and they were right. By now they had passed the shrubbery and were near the house. In front of it, on the other side of the broad gravel drive by which the building was approached, and near to a large flourishing clump of rhododendrons growing there, stood three men, talking eagerly and excitedly together. They were: Farman, the butler, in his sober black; Miller, the chauffeur, in shirtsleeves, fresh from the garage where he had been getting out the car; and O’Hara, the gardener. At the front-door the women of the household were standing in a group, talking together excitedly and watching the three men.