A Grave Man

by David Roberts

  ‘So you are batting . . .?’

  ‘Last of all – number eleven. Sir Simon tells me that the game will be over before I am made to bat. I hope so. I do not want to make a fool of myself.’

  ‘You won’t do that,’ Verity said and, without knowing why, blushed. She peered at the green sward. The batsmen, the bowler beginning his run and the crouching wicketkeeper were blurred and it occurred to her that she might need spectacles. It was one of the annoying things about cricket that the action took place so far away.

  Edward was settling in at the wicket when he was unlucky enough to run out his solid, if rather dull, partner. Edmund Cardew had been at the wicket for almost an hour but had scored only five runs. Edward – on the last ball of the over – slipped what he thought might be a single past the wicketkeeper and shouted at his partner to run. Cardew had, unfortunately, turned his back on him, believing the over had ended and, when Edward called to him, was very slow off the mark. The man in the slips made a grab at the ball and managed to sling it at the wicketkeeper before Cardew could reach the crease. The bails were off and he had to walk back to the pavilion, where he was greeted by sparse if sympathetic applause. It looked like a piece of arrant selfishness on Edward’s part and he knew it. He apologized effusively as Cardew set off for the pavilion but Cardew was unable to hide his fury.

  ‘Hard luck, old chap,’ Frank said, as he hurried on to the pitch hoping for better luck.

  ‘I say, Uncle!’ he said when Edward came to meet him. ‘That was a dashed silly thing to do.’

  ‘I know! I don’t know what I was thinking of. Will Cardew ever forgive me, do you think?’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘We’ll take it slowly, eh, Frank?’

  Until the end of the over, Edward played with all the flair of a dead man, blocking the ball even when he might have hit it. As they met in mid-wicket while they waited for the new bowler to take the ball and rearrange his fielders, Frank said, ‘Don’t overdo it, Uncle. We don’t want to turn the pitch into a graveyard. The natives will get restless if we don’t score. There’s probably only a couple more hours of light – three at the most – and we’ve got a long way to go.’

  At that moment, they were distracted by a shout from the pavilion and saw Sir Simon waving what looked like a dog’s lead in the air. Mah-Jongg had somehow slipped his collar and was on the loose. The village boys paddling in the stream scented a hunt and soon spotted the animal running towards trees on the other side of the pitch. Hallooing, they ran after him and managed to drive the lemur on to the pitch where Edward, Frank and most of the fielders joined the chase. Since Mah-Jongg was not a sprinter, they soon caught up with him. Surrounded, he stopped and stared at the ring of faces, mewing in protest. His bushy tail waved angrily and his wicked-looking face dared anyone to come near him. One of the boys, braver or more foolish than the rest, threw himself on the lemur and caught him. He immediately let out a fearful howl and dropped him again. Mah-Jongg had bitten him to the bone and was once again at liberty. Chaos reigned as the chase resumed and it was a full ten minutes before the lemur was recaptured – by Roddy wearing cricket gloves. Meanwhile, the wounded boy was taken off to the cottage hospital to be disinfected and patched up.

  Play resumed with the scoreboard showing fifty-five for the loss of four wickets. Frank, aware that there was very little time if they were to reach a hundred and thirty and win the game, started knocking the ball about and, after a couple of fours, hit a full toss with a resounding thwack. At first he thought it would be caught at the boundary but to his great satisfaction it went well over and dropped into the stream. The boys splashing about in the water looking for the ball were shouting and waving their arms excitedly. Frank waited modestly for the applause and was a little surprised when it died out rather suddenly.

  ‘Well done, old chap,’ said Edward, leaving his crease to congratulate his nephew.

  ‘What’s all that shouting about?’ Frank said, puzzled. Edward looked round and saw a small crowd gathering at the water’s edge.

  ‘I say, something’s up all right,’ Frank said and suddenly. ‘I hope I didn’t knock someone out.’

  Everyone was walking or trotting over to the boundary to see what the matter was. As Edward and Frank approached, they saw what looked at first like a heap of clothes in the water. Dr Morris was directing the efforts of two young men to carry the dripping bundle on to the grass. It was so heavy that it slipped out of their hands back into the water.

  ‘Good Lord!’ Edward exclaimed. ‘Isn’t that . . .?’

  Verity had removed her shoes and stockings and waded into the water, which hardly came above her ankles. She saw Edward and said, ‘It’s Maud. She’s . . . I think she’s dead.’

  There was a hush at her words and the crowd parted to let Edward through. Why this happened Verity did not know. When she thought about it later, she had to acknowledge that Edward had an air of authority which people instinctively respected. Maud was on her back and her dress had ballooned about her. Her straw hat with its circlet of flowers floated limply beside her. Her sodden clothes made it awkward to manoeuvre her with dignity but, with Verity holding her head and Miss Schuster-Slatt – who was also in the water – holding her dress round her legs, Maud was half-carried, half-dragged on to the bank.

  ‘Is she drowned? Can she be revived?’ Edward asked the doctor, who had had his hand on her pulse.

  ‘How could she have drowned?’ Verity demanded. ‘The stream is so shallow here and she is on her back. I don’t understand it.’

  Edward, still in his cricket pads, knelt clumsily beside her and suddenly exclaimed, ‘Look here, doctor!’

  He was pointing to her side from which a pink dribble was staining the grass. Very gently, they turned her on her front and saw the hilt of a dagger.

  ‘She has been stabbed,’ Verity said unnecessarily.

  The police constable, who had been fielding at the boundary, made a great effort to pull himself together. ‘Get back, everyone. Please give us some room here.’

  Sir Simon appeared. ‘What’s happening? I was in the pavilion . . . Oh God! Is that Maud? Has she committed suicide?’

  ‘No, indeed, sir,’ the police constable said. ‘She has been murdered. Do you see the knife?’

  ‘Good heavens! That dagger . . . it’s the one from the collection . . . I’m sure of it.’ He leant forward to examine the hilt more closely but the constable barred his way. ‘Don’t touch, sir. Might I ask you to send someone up to the house to telephone the police station? I will remain here until Inspector Jebb arrives.’

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . . of course,’ Sir Simon said, retreating, understandably dazed by the disaster which had overtaken them. ‘I’ll go myself . . . straight away. Murder at Swifts Hill – I cannot believe it! Where’s Ginny? Where’s my wife?’

  ‘She went back to the house,’ Isolde said. ‘I’ll go and tell her what has happened and ring the police.’

  Edward and Verity stood up and, with Dr Morris, stared down at the dead woman.

  ‘A very great tragedy,’ the doctor said. ‘To be honest, Lord Edward, I would not have been surprised if the poor lass had killed herself. Some suicide attempts are little more than cries for help but I thought, when she cut her wrists, she knew what she was doing. But this . . . Who could have done such a thing? And why?’

  ‘That’s what we must find out,’ Verity said grimly.

  Edward made a little grimace. ‘We let her down . . . I let her down. You were right, Verity. I said Pitt-Messanger’s murder wasn’t our business but of course it was our business. She was so frightened . . .’

  ‘Frightened?’ Verity said in surprise. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘She told me so.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose there is no more harm that I can do her.’

  ‘You’ve done her harm?’

  ‘She confessed to me, just before I went in to bat, that – as I suspected – she had killed her father.’

  ‘
What!’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘She murdered her own father? For God’s sake, why?’

  ‘I thought it was because he had made her life a misery and prevented her marrying the man she loved.’

  ‘Sidney Temperley?’

  ‘Yes, V, and then he told her she could not marry Graham Harvey – not if she wanted his blessing and his money. I thought that might have tipped her over the edge.’

  ‘That’s why she killed him?’

  ‘Isn’t that reason enough, V? But, no. In fact . . . Damn it! She was about to tell me why when I had to go and get ready for my . . .’

  ‘You put cricket before finding out why she murdered her father!’ Verity looked at him as though he was mad.

  ‘I said I would see her in a few minutes down by the river . . . as soon as I was out.’ Edward said miserably. ‘She said she was frightened but I thought she was frightened about what would happen to her now she had confessed.’

  ‘She was frightened of her murderer,’ the doctor said.

  ‘And you abandoned her to him.’ The scorn in Verity’s voice made Edward wince.

  ‘You cannot blame me more than I blame myself.’

  ‘Well,’ said Dr Morris after a long pause, ‘that’s all water under the bridge.’ And then wished he had not said it.

  Verity felt an immediate, if unreasonable, stab of jealousy. Why had Maud confided in Edward, whom she had only just met, rather than in her? She would not have left her in her moment of need to hit a cricket ball about. She knew she was being unfair but she was bitter. Her vanity had been hurt. She thought she had convinced Maud that she was her friend but, when she needed someone, she went to Edward . . . because he was a man. She told herself not to be idiotic. What did her amour propre matter at a time like this?

  ‘But how did the murderer know she had not already told me?’ she asked.

  ‘I suppose, if she had, you would have told the police and then, of course, the murderer would have known the game was up. There would have been no point in killing her.’

  ‘Hold on a minute. What are we saying here? Maud’s killer saw her talking earnestly to you but he – or she – cannot possibly have known what she was saying.’

  ‘I think he asked her. She told him the truth and so he killed her,’ Edward said bluntly.

  Verity looked puzzled. ‘She would have told him that you now knew she killed her father, so why did he stab her?’

  ‘Because,’ Dr Morris said, ‘the murderer wasn’t concerned about that. What he cared about was that she had not told Lord Edward – and must never be allowed to tell anyone – why she had killed her father.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Edward agreed. ‘She said she hadn’t killed her father because he had stopped her marrying the man she loved but for some other reason. Once we know what that was, we’ll know who murdered her.’ He rubbed his forehead, as he always did when he was under pressure. ‘I think it must have something to do with her brother and his disappearance.’

  ‘Are you sure she had told no one but you that she murdered her father?’

  ‘Wait a moment, V. I remember now! She said she had told Graham Harvey and he had told her that she was justified in doing what she did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And she told me someone else had said she would have to be punished. I’m sure that was what she said.’

  ‘And that someone else was the murderer?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Edward said sombrely.

  ‘While everyone was chasing Mah-Jongg . . .’ Verity said, thinking aloud.

  ‘. . . Maud was murdered. It couldn’t have been at any other time otherwise the boys would have seen something,’ Edward finished. ‘Curse that animal. In Madagascar, where Mah-Jongg comes from, lemures are spirits of the dead. I wonder who released this particular spirit.’ He sighed and murmured to himself, ‘“Too much of water, hast thou, poor Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my tears . . .”’

  7

  Inspector Jebb looked gloomily at the scene of the crime. Lord Edward Corinth had explained why the murdered woman was walking near the stream. These amateur sleuths! Any competent policeman – himself for instance – would have asked her a few direct questions and cleared up the matter of her father’s death once and for all and, in doing so, prevented her murder. He grunted. Cricket! For the sake of cricket the woman had lost her life. To be fair, Corinth had looked very shame-faced and that girl of his had given him hell, but still . . .

  He had told Corinth that the only person who could be blamed for Maud’s death was her murderer but, in fact, he did blame him for deserting her at such a moment. Jebb stroked his chin and considered. Was he being harsh? He had a prejudice against the aristocracy but he had to admit that Lord Edward seemed to be less arrogant and more sensible than most of his breed. He snorted derisively. He must put the man out of his mind and concentrate on solving the murder.

  The corpse had been photographed and removed in an ambulance. His men were already searching the stream and the banks. He needed to find exactly where Maud Pitt-Messanger had been killed. There was grass and mud on the back of her shoes and clothes which showed she had been dragged some distance although Dr Morris was almost certain the body had been put in the water immediately after the stabbing because the blood was still liquid and there was no sign of rigor mortis. The stream was so shallow that the body could not have drifted more than a few feet. The murderer would have been in a hurry and might have left something which could help identify him, but the water had washed away much that might have been helpful to the investigation. The crowd which had gathered on the bank when the body was found and the efforts to remove it from the stream had literally muddied the ground.

  The savagery of the stabbing meant the killer had to be a man – or an exceptionally strong woman – and surely no ordinary woman could have dragged the body into the stream. The village boys, still in a state of high excitement, were able to say that the body had definitely not been there when they had gone off to chase the lemur. Jebb was familiar with Mah-Jongg. He had seen the nasty little creature in its cage when he had been called to the house to investigate the theft of the dagger. What was Lady Castlewood thinking of, keeping such a thing as a pet?

  What about the timing? The boys had recovered a ball Corinth had knocked over the boundary into the water just before he had run out Cardew. It seemed fairly obvious to Jebb that the killer had seen Maud walking alone by the stream. The only people near enough to notice anything untoward were the boys. So the murderer released the lemur to cause a distraction, counting on Maud to remain where she was. She was probably too wrapped up in herself to hear the hullabaloo or, if she had heard it, to join the chase. The objection to this theory was that the murderer would have been hard pushed to release the lemur, rush back to the other side of the ground and kill Maud before Mah-Jongg was recaptured, And wouldn’t he have been seen hurrying away from the chase as everyone else hurried to join it? Mrs Cardew, who had remained in her deck-chair throughout the incident, had seen no one running or even walking towards the stream. Furthermore, the murderer could not have counted on the lemur biting the boy and it taking so long to recapture the animal.

  Perhaps he had not been responsible for the lemur’s escape. Perhaps he had simply taken the opportunity fate had provided to kill the woman who threatened him. If what Lord Edward had said was correct and Maud was waiting to tell him something important, maybe her killer had not had the chance to plan anything. Or perhaps there was an accomplice who created the distraction to give the killer time. Jebb kicked at a molehill. Was this case going to be a mountain or a molehill? He couldn’t be sure.

  Could Maud have been paddling in the stream when she was attacked? It was a hot day – but, no, she had her shoes on and there was the grass and mud on her clothes. Then there was the fact that the body had been laid in the water, not thrown in. There was an element of . . . he would not say ritual, but at least deliberation. The killer must be a cool customer. Given that he could ha
ve had very little time and must surely have feared being noticed by someone returning from the lemur hunt, it was odd that he had taken the trouble to drag the body into the stream and lay her out as though she were resting on her bed. Corinth had mentioned Ophelia and he had nodded knowingly but, when he got home, he would have to send his wife to the library to check in Shakespeare exactly how the girl had died. He remembered seeing a reproduction in a magazine of a painting of a girl on her back in a river with flowers in her hair. He had an idea that it was Ophelia but it might have been The Lady of Shalott. He shook himself – what did it matter? This was real life – or rather real death – not fantasy. He scratched his head.

  The only other time he had investigated the killing of a woman, she had been walking alone after dark on her way to meet her lover. The murderer had, unsurprisingly, turned out to be the husband. This murder had peculiar features – most notably being carried out in full view of twenty-two cricketers, two umpires and several dozen spectators – but it ought not to be too difficult to establish who had done the deed. He hunched his shoulders and pursed his lips. It ought to be easy but he had an intuition that it might not be quite as easy as it should be. For one thing, there was the difficulty of the murder having taken place at Swifts Hill. It was awkward to start accusing a powerful man like Sir Simon Castlewood of harbouring a murderer among his guests. He knew Sir Simon reasonably well and respected him. He was a Justice of the Peace, a friend of the Chief Constable and a generous contributor to the Police Benevolent Fund.

  He sighed and turned to walk up to the house. One thing was certain. The interviews must take place as quickly as possible, before those present had time to forget what they had seen or concoct their own version of events. Of course, he must interview all the village team and their supporters but the village eleven was fielding when the murder took place and visible to all. Anyway, which of them was likely to know Maud Pitt-Messanger, let alone have a motive to kill her with a knife stolen from Sir Simon’s museum? He needed a complete list of those who had been watching the cricket. Perhaps one of them had taken the opportunity of carrying out this savage killing while all eyes were on Lord Edward Corinth and his good-looking nephew. It was ridiculous how there was still this fascination with the aristocracy.