Crimson Snow

by Martin Edwards

  ‘That’ll be So-and-So,’ he said. ‘Thought it might be one of our Gipsy friends. Rice has been chasing them quite a lot. They come round the woods after holly and greenery and hawk it round the town.’

  Through the thinned, leafless tops of the oaks I could see a quick-rising upland of green, which was the golf-course, and almost at once we were turning in at the gates. Quite a few cars were in the park.

  ‘We’ll just have a cold snack and some beer,’ Valence said, ‘then we can get away at once. Suit you all right?’

  So we had sandwiches and beer in the bar. When we went to the locker-room, a couple of men were just going out. One was a tall, powerful looking chap in the late thirties and the other a plump, but far from flabby, parson in the forties.

  ‘Hallo, Padre,’ Valence said. ‘Having another crack at the Demon?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ the parson said blandly. ‘Trying to exercise is perhaps the better term.’

  Valence laughed. ‘And how’re you, Prowse?’ he said to the other chap. ‘This is a friend of mine, Ludovic Travers. This is Mayne and this is Prowse.’

  Mayne, he added, was the local vicar and Prowse the golf demon. A good-looking fellow, Prowse, with the very devil of a grip. Then when they’d gone, Valence told me some more. Mayne was a four man not long, but exasperatingly straight, and positively deadly round the greens. Prowse was plus one.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Did not he put up quite a good show in last year’s Amateur? Or have I got the name wrong?’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he said. ‘He was actually in the last eight. Got knocked out by a winner.’

  We had quite a good game: I’m six feet, three inches and lean as a lamppost, and when I hit them just right they go the devil of a way. Valence is a lusty hitter, too, especially with his irons. At the dog-legged thirteenth he actually took an iron from the tee and played well out to the left. The hole itself lay behind an out-jutting spur of the wood which ran along that track—Frog’s Lane, it was called—where Valence thought he had spotted a Gipsy. The cracks, like Prowse, could carry that spur of wood and get an easy four.

  I almost had a go at it myself, but I was two down and didn’t like to risk it, so I too took an iron and kept away to the left. And, of course, I overdid it, and that was to put me three down. But it did give me the chance to see Prowse driving at the sixteenth—a terrific crack that went straighter and farther than my incredible best.

  When we got back to the clubhouse Prowse and the Vicar had gone, but the steward told us that Prowse had won by two up. Valence and I had tea and then cut in for bridge. We were in the second rubber when he was called to the telephone. He came back all apologies. Something had cropped up and he had to go.

  When we stepped outside there was a fog that might have been much worse. It was more like a heavy mist, with a visibility of about fifty yards, which made it more of a nuisance than a menace.

  ‘Sorry to have to rush you about like this,’ Valence said. ‘It may be for nothing, after all, but some man or other just rang the station and said there was a man’s body in Catley Wood. That’s about half-way home.’

  And that was all he knew. Clare—his Chief-Inspector—had rung him about that anonymous call, and was on the way himself to Catley Wood. Hoax or not, he had at least to make sure.

  A mile on the homeward road and there on the left was the stretch of wood. A car was drawn up on the verge and we stopped just short. Clare was in the wood and we saw the flash of his torch. Valence hailed him and his own torch flashed ahead through the sparse trees. But there was practically no undergrowth, and thirty yards on we picked up Clare and Sprat, the police-surgeon.

  ‘No hoax, sir,’ Clare said, and held his torch to what was on the ground. A small man lay there. An elderly man in a dark overcoat face sideways and arms flung wide. Valence’s own torch caught the face and stayed.

  ‘Good God!’ he said. ‘See who it is, Brewse!’

  Brewse it was. But he got down on one knee and turned the face round. He looked at the eyes and pried open the mouth.

  ‘What killed him, Sprat?’

  ‘Manual strangulation,’ Sprat said. ‘There’s a contusion on the point of the chin, so it looks as if he was knocked out first.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Sprat said. ‘Three hours ago—more or less. Tell you when I’ve got him away. Might do something with that stomach content.’

  Valence got to his feet. It was dark in that wood—black as black hogs, as they say in Suffolk—and I could barely see the lighter blackness that was his face.

  ‘Sorry about this, Travers. I’ll have you run back and then you could get a meal at the Lion. Or would you rather stay?’

  It was after eight when we got back to town, though Brewse’s body had gone well before that. In Valence’s office we had a look at his clothes, which had come in from the surgeon’s room, and the contents of his pockets. There was a fairish sum of money in what seemed an intact wallet. As for the clothes, the overcoat had lichen stains on the back.

  ‘Almost looks as if he was leaning against a tree in that wood, waiting for someone,’ Valence said.

  ‘A queer spot, surely, to fix for an appointment?’ I said. ‘No undergrowth, and only twenty yards from the road. Anyone could have seen both him and whomever it was he was meeting.’

  ‘Depends when it was.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘If the appointment was for after dark, why should Brewse go all that way? Anywhere would have done. His house, for example. If the appointment was for daylight, then that wood was useless as a screen.’

  ‘I’ve got a vague idea that’d explain some of that,’ he said. ‘The appointment might have been with someone coming from here, and if so, that wood was about halfway.’

  ‘Anyone special in mind?’

  He frowned. ‘Well, there’s always that chap Allgood I told you about. He lost a packet over Brewse. It was an employee of his whom Rice caught tarring a threatening message on the side of Brewse’s house.’

  ‘Anyone in Rendham who lost money over Brewse?’

  ‘There is,’ he said. ‘Mayne did. Only indirectly. An aunt of his lost quite a lot.’

  ‘And what about the man who rang the station about the body?’

  ‘Just an anonymous voice. Might have been the man of a courting couple, going in there and finding the body. A local call, so it can’t be traced. About time, by the way, that we had something from Sprat.’

  He rang through to the mortuary. From his grunts and monosyllables I could guess what he was being told. But the news did turn out to be definite. Brewse’s last meal had been at one o’clock. The stomach content showed death as taking place as so near to three o’clock it made no difference.

  Valence said he’d like to see that housekeeper, so off we went through the mist to Rendham and Brewse’s house. The elderly housekeeper was called Callaby. She was a loyal sort of soul who’d been with Brewse and his people most of her life. She confirmed that he had had his lunch that day at one o’clock sharp.

  ‘Any letters this morning?’

  She said there were none.

  ‘Any telephone calls?’

  He’d explained to me that the telephone had had to be disconnected soon after Brewse’s arrival in Rendham. Scurrilous and threatening messages were always being received. But now the phone was in use again.

  ‘There was a call early this morning,’ she said. ‘Just about nine o’clock.’

  ‘You don’t know from whom?’

  She didn’t know a thing, except that Brewse himself took the call. But she had been thinking. It now struck her that he had been just a bit perturbed after that call. And he had gone out for a walk, which was a queer thing for him. His walks were invariably in the afternoons. He had left for that afternoon walk about a quarter to three. She had seen him fr
om her bedroom.

  That was about all. Valence asked if he might use the telephone, and after he’d finished, we thanked her and left. Valence told me the morning call had been a local one. He added that we might as well drop in on Prowse. I asked no questions, though I didn’t see why.

  Prowse looked surprised to see us. His daily woman had gone and he was in slippers, with a drink at a side-table by his chair. He wanted us to have a drink too. Valence said he was technically on duty, and told him about Brewse.

  ‘This has to be strictly confidential,’ he said, ‘but it’s obvious that if Brewse was murdered, the likely suspects are those whose money he took. My superiors will expect me to question them. But I’d rather not question Mayne.’

  Prowse smiled. ‘You’re surely not suggesting—’

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ Valence told him bluntly. ‘I’m telling you in strict confidence what I have to do as part of my job. All I’m asking is that you’d be prepared to swear, if necessary, that Mayne was never out of your sight this afternoon.’

  ‘But of course he wasn’t!’

  ‘You never broke off the game?’

  ‘Not for a second. We played straight on.’

  ‘Good enough,’ Valence said. ‘Keep what I’ve asked you under your hat. Call it red-tape or what you will. And now I think we’ll have that drink you offered us.’

  Prowse poured the drinks and he noticed me looking round.

  ‘Something struck me as unusual,’ I said, ‘and I’ve just found out what. This is Christmas Eve, but there’s no holly.’

  ‘No holly for me,’ he said. ‘I’m a widower, with no chick or child. Christmas is just something you’ve got to forget.’

  One of my minor hobbies is to spot accents, and by that I mean to identify a person’s native country. Prowse, when I asked him, said he was a Londoner. He’d been in Rendham only a few years. The property had actually been bought just before his wife died, and he’d then intended to sell it again. Then he’d changed his mind, fallen in love with the countryside and had become virtually a Rendhamian.

  We’d been talking just for sociability over the drinks, and in about ten minutes we left. Allgood was waiting in the annex to Valence’s room and Valence had him in at once. He was a beefy-looking man of about sixty. Valence told him about Brewse, and before he’d recovered from what seemed a shock, talked about red-tape and so on.

  ‘You didn’t like Brewse.’

  ‘I hated the swine,’ Allgood told him. ‘I don’t give a damn if he’s dead or alive. I still hate him.’

  ‘Then, just for the records, where were you at three o’clock this afternoon?’

  ‘Well—’ His eyes suddenly goggled. ‘That’s funny. At three o’clock I was within a stone’s-throw of Brewse’s place. Tell you how it was. I had a man to see at Cambridge and I was on my way when I got a puncture just where I said, and when I got the wheel off and the spare on, I found I hadn’t got my pump with me, so I had to wait till a car came by, and that wasn’t till just on three. I happened to stop a lorry and the driver gave me a hand.’

  ‘Name and name of his firm? Still just for the records.’

  ‘Darned if I know,’ Allgood said. ‘He drew up his lorry ahead of me, so I didn’t see any name. And I didn’t think to ask him his. I did tip him half-a-dollar.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Valence said. ‘Suppose you didn’t happen to see Brewse by any chance?’

  ‘Matter of fact, I did. I happened to look round and there he was, walking towards the village. I hadn’t seen him come out of his house, because I’d been busy over that spare.’

  ‘What’d be the time when you saw him?’

  ‘Be about a quarter to three,’ he said. ‘He was just short of the turn.’

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ Valence said when Allgood had gone. ‘Confirms what that Miss Callaby said about Brewse going out. And I’d say he was going to see the one who rang him this morning.’

  ‘Then he couldn’t have been killed before a quarter past three,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t a fast walker and it’d have taken him half an hour to get to Catley Wood. It’s a good mile and a half.’

  ‘Stomach content isn’t accurate to a second,’ Valence said. ‘A quarter of an hour either way is good enough. I don’t know about you, but I’m damnably hungry.’

  We managed to get sandwiches and coffee brought in. Valence asked me if I had any ideas, and I said I’d never a one.

  ‘Just one thing that’s rather footling,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure that Prowse told me a lie.’

  His eyebrows raised at that.

  ‘Nothing to do with Brewse,’ I hastened to say. And I told him about that hobby of mine and how I was dead sure—as a Suffolk man myself—that Prowse was a Suffolk or South Norfolk man. Certain subtleties of accent and intonation had made that unmistakable.

  Valence seemed rather amused. If he was interested, it was only out of politeness. I said it wasn’t important, but I just happened to have a tidy mind: one that resented being cluttered up with irreconcilables.

  He left me to finish the sandwiches while he went to Clare’s room. While I was lighting my pipe I happened to drop my pouch on the floor, and when I picked it up, my fingers had a red stain. I looked at the pouch and that was where the red came from. For a moment I thought of blood, but I hadn’t scratched my hand. Then I looked on the floor and there was a crushed holly berry, and I had to smile. I even thought of those lines from the old carol—

  The holly bears a berry

  As red as any blood.

  and I didn’t think any more, because Valence had to come back just then and he was saying that everything was well in hand and we might as well get along to the flat and have a real, belated meal.

  Two days went by and Valence was making no headway. A search of the wood where the body was found had revealed never a thing. Someone had simply come up to Brewse, given him that quick upper-cut to the jaw, strangled him, and gone. But Valence did have some other, faint ideas. Allgood might have gone after Brewse and had words with him and lost his temper and strangled him, and then carted the body to where it was found.

  After all, a puncture was an easy thing to fake. Even if the supposed lorry driver was found, Allgood still had no real alibi. But might was what they call the operative word, and what Valence was anxiously dreading was having to call in the Yard. The Allgood theory was largely hope.

  And I couldn’t tag along all day at Valence’s heels. I had plenty of time to myself not that that worried me. I was more concerned about Valence’s really pathetic apologies, which persisted even when I assured him that I was happy doing nothing in particular.

  But one can’t have leisure without thought, and I did quite a lot of thinking, and I have what’s known as a harum-scarum mind. Unsolved mysteries nag at me, however insignificant they may seem, and I was pestered by a wonder why Prowse had told me that lie, for lie I was sure it was. Then I happened to run into Rice, the constable, who’d been at Rendham for some years. I had to be tactful in mentioning Prowse, and only as a golfer.

  ‘How long’s he been at Rendham, Rice?’

  ‘Mr. Prowse?’ he frowned. ‘Be just seven years come January.’

  ‘Of course!’ I said it as if I’d just remembered. ‘A London firm brought his things, didn’t they?’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Two vans. Harridges it was. I know, because I had a few words about a smashed gate-post with one of the drivers.’

  So Prowse had come from London, and somehow I was wrong. But I still didn’t know. To come from London doesn’t make one a Londoner. So I did some more thinking, and when thinking got unbearable I rang the Broad Street Detective Agency. This was in the days when Bill Ellice owned it.

  I told him about Prowse and gave a full description. He was to find out what he could from Harridges. That was early in th
e morning.

  At seven that evening he rang me as arranged. The furniture had indeed been collected by Harridges, but not from a London address. It had come from a little village called Felling, which is near Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk.

  ‘Right, Bill,’ I said. ‘Get busy on this at once. Get a good man down to this Felling place and have him find out everything he can about Prowse. Give me a ring this time tomorrow night.’

  Then when I’d hung up I wondered why the devil I’d given him that assignment. It wasn’t the expense that bothered me, but merely an apprehension of futility. Why worry one’s head about Prowse when he, like his partner, Mayne, could not conceivably have had anything to do with the killing of Brewse? The only answer was that I was both hunch-ridden and curiosity-ridden, and it would probably cost me a couple of ten-pound notes.

  Meanwhile Valence was worried. He’d found that lorry driver, but the Allgood theory was unaffected, and to carry that theory forward into proof was proving beyond him. While he had found someone who had seen Allgood’s car on its way through Rendham to Cambridge, nobody had seen it going back towards Worbury, as it must have done if he had been carrying Brewse’s body.

  Valence, in fact, was on the point of calling in Scotland Yard. Any man takes pride in his job, and it more than irked him that this, a murder case that had naturally excited a pretty general interest, should need the Yard for its solving. I was sorry for him, but there was nothing I could do to help.

  I ran into Mayne as I was leaving the cinema that early evening. He told me he was playing Prowse again in a day or so.

  ‘Plucky of you challenging him on level terms,’ I said.

  ‘The last time it was he who challenged me,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t work out too dear at ten bob a time. Sooner or later I’ll be at the collecting end.’

  I wished him luck and went on to the post office for Ellice’s call. And I got one of the surprises of my life. Prowse’s wife had been Brewse’s niece, and Felling village reckoned that it was the disgrace of her uncle’s imprisonment that had killed her. But there was more to come. Prowse’s name wasn’t Prowse at all. His name was Palfrey. He had changed to Prowse after leaving Felling.