Watson's Choice

by Gladys Mitchell

  ‘It’s a pity you won’t, or can’t, tell me about that afternoon, sir, all the same.’

  Toby stared down at the palms of his hands and at his interlocking fingers.

  ‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I will tell you, but it won’t do me a ha’porth of good, I assure you. After lunching at the office on sandwiches and a half-bot. I went to call on a chap named Raymond de Philippe. I’d wanted to call on him for some time but he’d been on a business trip abroad.’

  ‘You went to call on him, sir? For any particular reason?’

  ‘Yes, for a very particular reason.’ Dance stared down at his hands again. ‘I couldn’t very well ask him to the office. For one thing, I didn’t think he’d come, and, for another, the matter was too private to have even my secretary overhear it. I lunched at the office to save time. I knew, if I wanted to catch him alone, that between two and half past was the best time, so I toddled along to his flat and – and that’s where I was at three, and, until about four, I stayed there. Then I went back to my flat without returning to the office.’

  ‘Anybody swear to that, sir? This Mr de Philippe can confirm the time of your visit to him, I take it?’

  ‘No, I saw nobody when I went back to my flat. Four o’clockish on an ordinary week-day is a dead sort of hour where I live. All the men are still at work and all the women at bridge-parties or a matinée. As for de Philippe – well, I’ve no doubt that he could give me an alibi, but I’m equally convinced that he won’t.’

  ‘How’s that, sir?’

  ‘Well, you see, Superintendent, I went round there with the intention of putting it to him civilly, quietly, and as one gentleman to another, that I had no intention either of divorcing Brenda or of allowing her to divorce me, and would he, so to speak, kindly lay off her and let me mend a broken romance – my own.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Unhappily, Superintendent, I ended up by punching him on the nose.’

  CHAPTER 13

  THE PURSUIT OF THE UNEATABLE CONTINUES

  ‘I must

  Not trust

  Here to any;

  Bereav’d,

  Deceiv’d

  By so many.’

  ROBERT HERRICK – Anacreontike

  *

  ‘WHO NEXT, SIR?’ enquired the sergeant. Collins grunted and consulted the list on which he was checking off his victims as he interviewed them.

  ‘Better be Sir Bohun Chantrey. I shan’t be sorry to get him over and done with,’ he said. ‘What did you make of that last bird?’

  ‘Honest, sir. Don’t you think we could get that chap with the French moniker to cough up that alibi?’

  ‘I’m doubtful,’ Collins answered. ‘Mr Ready-Fist Dance presumably knows him a lot better than we do. All the same, I shall try. He may be a better fellow than Dance thinks. Anyway, get Sir Bohun.’

  Sir Bohun entered with a great show of affability and declared that the sooner ‘this damned mess we’re all in’ was cleared up, the better.

  ‘Brings one’s life to a full stop,’ he continued. ‘Gets one talked about. Sunday papers, and all that sort of unpleasantness. Photographers lurking in the shrubbery. Glad to do anything I can to help, so fire away, Superintendent, and don’t attempt to spare anybody’s feelings.’

  ‘Thank you, Sir Bohun,’ Collins replied, signing to the sergeant. ‘Just one or two questions, then. What can you tell me about the deceased?’

  ‘Nothing much. When I took charge of my brother’s two children I engaged a tutor and a nursery governess. Both came with good references and both have proved satisfactory. Miss Campbell was the nursery governess.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  Sir Bohun looked surprised.

  ‘That’s all I know,’ he said. Collins studied the walnut markings on the polished table beside which he was seated, and then looked up.

  ‘I had some impression, Sir Bohun, that you had offered marriage to Miss Campbell and that she had accepted your offer.’

  ‘Oh, that!’ Sir Bohun waved it aside. ‘You asked me what I knew of poor Linda Campbell, and I thought I had answered you sufficiently. As to what you mention … yes, I had made her an offer of marriage and she had accepted it. It was a business arrangement. This house needs a châtelaine. The matter could have had nothing to do with her death.’

  ‘Why do you think she was killed, Sir Bohun?’

  ‘I? I have no idea at all. She was a vain, harmless sort of girl, a bit of a hussy, I dare say, but nothing that one could take hold of, otherwise I should not have dreamt – couldn’t afford it, in my position – J.P. and all that, don’t you know.’

  ‘To revert to Miss Campbell’s references – I suppose you took them up, sir? – verified them, that is to say?’

  ‘Didn’t bother much. Preferred to form my own opinion of the girl. Found her satisfactory. That’s as far as it went.’

  ‘Yes, I see, sir. We have a report that she may have left this house at about midnight on the occasion of a party last November. Can you suggest any reason for her doing such a thing?’

  ‘Indeed, no; neither do I attach much importance to the rumour. Of course, she may have gone out that night while the party was still on. Young women take these romantic fancies.’

  ‘To wander about in thick fog, sir?’

  Sir Bohun again waved the point aside.

  ‘Fog, hail, rain, midsummer moonlight – it’s all one to them,’ he declared. ‘All women are slightly mad, young women considerably so, and adolescent girls completely so. It’s a known fact. Ask any reputable psychologist. Look at poltergeists, for example.’

  Collins, under his breath, consigned poltergeists to the region from which he had no doubt they came, and tried a different tack.

  ‘The tutor, sir, Mr Grimston.’

  ‘Ex-tutor. I sacked him. I don’t know why you brought him back here. Lot of nonsense. Apart from his total inability to kill a fly, the fellow’s as mad as a coot. You couldn’t get any sense out of him, however hard you might try.’

  Collins was inclined to agree, but he ignored the statement and asked patiently:

  ‘Can you give me any details as to how you came to engage him, sir? We have to check up, you understand.’

  ‘Came from a scholastic agency – forget their name. Find you their letter, if you like.’ He rummaged and soon produced it. Collins pushed it over to the sergeant, who made a note of the address and the date, and returned it to Sir Bohun.

  ‘And you know nothing more about him?’ pursued Collins.

  ‘Don’t keep a dog and bark myself,’ retorted the baronet. ‘These scholastic agencies are supposed to vet the chaps on their books, I take it? They sent him, and he brought references, and that’s all I knew or cared. Nobody could have supposed that the wretched girl would get herself into this kind of mess, and the wretched boy get himself arrested for it.’

  ‘He hasn’t been arrested for it, Sir Bohun! We shall not make that sort of move until we are perfectly sure.’ Sir Bohun snorted, and Collins went on in gentle tones: ‘There are just one or two things we would like to get quite clear. We have received information that Miss Campbell was acquainted with at least one person in this neighbourhood – a youngish man – who was not a member of your household and who did not appear at your party. She met this man at the Queen of the Circus near here, and later she disappeared.’

  ‘Yes, so Mrs Bradley told me. I didn’t know the girl had any acquaintances in the neighbourhood, if that’s what you were going to ask me. I don’t know anything about the girl at all.’

  ‘Yet,’ said Collins, in inoffensive tones, ‘you were proposing to marry her, sir?’

  Sir Bohun ignored this.

  ‘Grimston ought to see a psychologist,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you let Mrs B. run a foot-rule over him? He and his dreams! Dreams like that get people into trouble, same as Joseph! Nobody ever learns anything! Dreams, indeed! Silly young fool!’

  Collins tapped thoughtfully on the arm of his chair f
or a moment, and then asked, in a casual, almost uninterested tone:

  ‘Is there anything you yourself can tell us which might help, sir?’

  Sir Bohun pulled at his lower lip. To Collins’ surprise – for he had expected nothing from this shot in the dark – there was something not only hesitant but furtive in the baronet’s manner. The Superintendent waited hopefully.

  ‘Well,’ said Sir Bohun at last, ‘don’t really suppose it has any bearing, but two unexpected things happened on the night of the Sherlock Holmes party, apart from Linda taking that walk in the fog. That is, if it was Linda. Mrs B. is not committing herself, you know. But a very odd – ’

  ‘We know about the dog, sir.’

  ‘Oh, you do? Well, when the dog arrived I was really expecting something else.’

  ‘Indeed, sir?’ Collins sounded only mildly interested. He was anxious not to give any impression of the eagerness which possessed him. One ray of light, however faint, might make all the difference to the enquiry. At the moment there were several suspects, and, except for Grimston and his dream – which might or might not have any bearing on the matter – there seemed no more reason to suspect one rather than another. He had talked matters over with Gavin, who had given him all the information he himself had gleaned, including the affair of the dog at the deserted station and the fact that Celia Godley had fed it under conditions which indicated a desire for secrecy, and he had come to the conclusion that Grimston was not necessarily the most likely criminal. He looked forward to an interview with Miss Godley. ‘Something else?’ he repeated after Sir Bohun. ‘Connected with the dog, do you mean, sir?’

  ‘Not connected with the dog – no. I hadn’t thought of the dog. Can’t find out who did, either. That’s the oddest thing. I know it scared some of the women when we opened the door and saw it there, you see, but it was such a good idea – the Hound of the Baskervilles, dash it – that one would have expected somebody to come forward and claim the credit. But I can’t get any one of them to own to it. Odd, that. I mean, it was no sort of accident. The dog had been touched up here and there with luminous paint, so it was meant to be part of the evening. You’d think somebody would have owned to bringing it, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘What happened to it in the end, sir?’

  ‘I have no idea. Mrs Bradley fed it and turned it out again, and one doesn’t go about the grounds on a foggy November night looking for a dog the size of a donkey, even if one is an addict of Holmes. I suppose that whoever brought it got rid of it somehow. I suspected that young Miss Laura Menzies, with the connivance of Mrs Bradley’s chauffeur, and tackled her on the subject, but she denied any knowledge of it, and she isn’t a girl to tell lies. Said she wished she had thought of it, and I believe her.’

  ‘So you hadn’t planned to introduce the dog, sir, and yet you had planned something of a surprise. Would that have had any bearing on what has happened?’

  ‘I don’t see how it could, but, for what it’s worth, I’ll tell you. I’d planned to let a flock of geese into the drawing-room.’

  ‘Geese, sir?’

  ‘Yes, geese. The Blue Carbuncle, you know. I was disappointed when they didn’t turn up. The idea was to have a sort of competition to see which of the guests selected the one which was supposed to have the blue carbuncle in its crop. I had decided upon the one when I went to see the dealer. I had a nice prize ready, too, a very nice prize.’

  Collins mentally dismissed the flock of geese from the case, but enquired, for politeness’ sake:

  ‘And what had happened to the geese, sir?’

  ‘Lost in the fog in a van. Driver got hopelessly muddled, and landed up in a ditch on the other side of East Bealing. Never came within miles of my place. I’d paid for the geese, too. Still, I sent them to hospitals for Christmas, which I’d planned to do in any case. Very disappointing not to have had them at the party, though, all the same.’

  ‘Yes, it must have been. You mentioned Miss Laura Menzies, but you had an even younger lady staying here at the time – your niece, I believe.’

  ‘Celia? Yes. She’s still here. I like to have people in the house. You can see the girl, of course, if you want to, but I don’t think you’ll get much out of her that will help you.’

  ‘As a matter of routine, sir, I had better see everybody here, including your servants. Sometimes one gets a pointer from a completely innocent person. He doesn’t realize that what he’s telling you may be just the one missing link in a chain of evidence, but time and again it is apt to turn out like that, especially in a case of murder.’

  ‘Oh, well, you go ahead, of course. Celia has nothing to hide.’

  From what he had heard, Collins did not share this opinion. He ignored it, and fired in his last and deadliest question, but, so to speak, with a silencer on the gun.

  ‘By the way, sir – a routine point only, of course, so don’t answer unless you wish – will you tell me where you were and what you were doing between the hours of three and five on Thursday January eleventh last?’

  ‘Doing? And where? Bless my soul, that would be when it was done, would it? Oh, dear me, now! Let me see. I don’t remember doing anything different from usual, so I should have been – yes, yes – in the library, probably looking forward to my tea. I always look forward to my tea.’

  ‘Could anyone confirm this, sir? Just for our records, you know.’

  ‘Ah, now, I wonder! Why, yes, of course! Manoel was with me for most of the time.’

  ‘Er – were you active or passive, sir?’

  ‘Look here, what the devil are you getting at?’ demanded Sir Bohun, suddenly red in the face. ‘If you must know, we were playing a fool game with his espada – the sword bull-fighters use, don’t you know. Bell was on short leave, so we had the library to ourselves.’

  ‘I see, sir. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Checking my story against Manoel’s, I suppose,’ said Sir Bohun, restored to good humour. ‘That’s the end of the inquisition, then, I take it?’

  ‘Thank you very much, sir,’ Collins repeated stolidly. Then, when Sir Bohun had gone, ‘Get Miss Godley quickly, before he has time to prompt her,’ he said to the sergeant.

  Sir Bohun’s niece did not give the impression of someone with nothing to hide. Collins saw a slightly-built, fair-haired, insipidly-pretty girl who was patently on the defensive. He wasted no time. He glanced at his sergeant, nodded, asked Celia to sit down, and then said genially:

  ‘Well, Miss Godley, I’ve come to see a lady about a dog.’

  The girl stiffened immediately.

  ‘Yes?’ she said. ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles, you mean, I suppose? But that had nothing to do with me. It was Linda Campbell’s idea, I think.’

  ‘Really? She could not have mentioned it to Sir Bohun, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh, no, she wouldn’t have done. It was to be a surprise.’

  ‘I gather that it succeeded in its object. She took you into her confidence, then?’

  ‘Yes – well, I mean – well, yes, I suppose she did.’

  ‘And you undertook to look after the dog, and you continued to look after it until her death.’

  Celia looked helplessly at him.

  ‘No, of course not. I had nothing to do with it,’ she said.

  ‘You were seen to go and feed it more than once, Miss Godley, long after the party was over and done with.’

  ‘I? I feed it? Oh, nonsense! It was an awful great brute! I wouldn’t have dared go near it!’

  ‘Indeed? My informant seemed quite certain that you fed it. The evidence was that you cycled along beside the railway track and that the dog was kept at the disused station which has now been superseded by the new halt at Keatsdown.’

  Celia moistened her lips.

  ‘Oh, nonsense! I’ve never been there in my life,’ she said, ‘except once or twice in the train.’

  Collins nodded, and there was a long silence. Celia broke it at last.

  ‘Do you want me any more? May
I go now? I have rather a lot to do.’

  ‘Very good, Miss Godley. If you should reconsider what you’ve just told me I hope you won’t hesitate to come along.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ demanded the girl. Collins looked at her, and did not reply. She gave him a wild look, began to get up, hesitated, and then sat down again.

  ‘I – I found that there was a dog chained up in that deserted station,’ she said in a tone of defiance. ‘I couldn’t make it out. It didn’t seem right, so, as soon as I could, I got on my bicycle and went back to investigate.’

  ‘You had seen it from the train, of course.’

  ‘Yes … yes, from the train.’

  ‘And, as soon as you could, you got on to your bicycle and went back to investigate. Where was the dog when you saw it first?’

  ‘On – on the platform.’

  ‘And you took it food and water?’

  ‘Yes. I – I could quite easily manage on my carrier and in my basket.’

  ‘Quite, quite. How did the dog get into the waiting-room, Miss Godley?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘It was always on the platform when you saw it and fed it?’

  ‘I – I only went once.’

  ‘Only once?’

  ‘Yes. I was afraid I might be trespassing. I didn’t like to risk it again.’

  ‘I see. Thank you, Miss Godley. If you should chance to remember something which you have not told me, you won’t hesitate to come and find me, will you? I shall be in and out of this house for quite some time, I expect.’

  ‘But there couldn’t be anything else! I’ve told you everything I know!’ She sounded hysterical.

  ‘That is not what I have been informed from other sources, Miss.’ He nodded, and Celia scurried out like a child glad to escape from a too-inquisitive adult. Collins rang the bell and told the butler to ask Mrs Dance to spare a few minutes for a talk. She could not have been far away, for it was in less than a minute that she sailed in and smiled at the Superintendent. He indicated a chair, and reseated himself in the place he had previously occupied.