‘If it isn’t rude to ask, in what direction is duty calling you now?’ inquired Mr Campion.
The Inspector seemed surprised at the question. ‘That fellow William and his hand, of course,’ he said. ‘All new developments must be carefully watched. I think that’s about the first rule in the book. We must find out how he hurt himself. There is just a chance that he was attacked, you know, and if so he must be made to talk.’
‘Here, I say, no bullying Uncle William,’ said Campion in mild alarm.
‘Bullying?’ The Inspector’s expression was bitter. ‘It’s as much as we’re allowed to do to speak to witnesses these days. But if he tells me a cock-and-bull story he can go into the witness-box and tell it to the coroner – and the press.’
‘Ho!’ said Mr Campion.
‘Eh?’
‘I said “ho”,’ repeated the young man. ‘A vulgar expression meaning “indeed”. Oh, well, I’m sorry about all this. I’ll come with you. By the way, I swore Joyce to secrecy.’
‘Good,’ conceded the Inspector. ‘I’m sorry the girl was in it. Still, I quite see you couldn’t go ferreting about the house on your own. I left the package for the analysts and the photographers. We shall have a report in twenty-four hours if we’re lucky. Of course,’ he went on, ‘William is the straight line to follow. He was the only member of the household out of doors at the time of the first murder, with the exception of one of the servants. You can’t get away from that.’
‘Which one of the servants?’ said Campion, conscious of an unwonted feeling of apprehension.
‘The big red-faced woman,’ said the Inspector. ‘I’ve got her name down. The housemaid. Been with ’em for thirty years, just like the story books. She had the day off to go over to her married sister, who lives at Waterbeach, a mile or two out. Half a moment – I’ve got it. Nuddington. Alice Nuddington. She left the house at nine in the morning and got back at ten at night. We can verify her statement easily. All these things have got to be attended to.’
Mr Campion did not speak for some moments. The rain was driving in his face and the wet streets, with their urban drabness even more pronounced by their comparative desertion, gave the tragedy an air of sordidness which it did not really possess. The thought of Uncle William, that bewildered and floundering old reprobate, stirred a sense of compassion within him, however, and he plodded along by the Inspector’s side.
‘I must see the clothes that William wore to church,’ the Inspector remarked, more to himself than to his friend. ‘A dull routine job, this tracking of criminals. Murderers are the most unsatisfactory of the lot. Nine times out of ten you’ve got no past record to go on. What’s the good of your beautiful filing system then? What’s the good of your organization? This is going to be a darned bad inconclusive business, you mark my words.’
The Inspector’s gloom, which increased even when they climbed into the two-seater Rover, was in such direct opposition to Mr Bowditch’s homeric cheerfulness that Mr Campion felt called upon to comment upon it.
‘I like your friend Bowditch,’ he said. ‘A happy man, I deduced.’
Mr Oates snorted. ‘Bowditch!’ he said. ‘A nice chap and a good man. But that smile of his gets on my nerves. I feel I’m wandering about with an advertisement for fruit salts. I told him this was a murder and not a music-hall show, and he laughed till he was nearly sick. You can’t do anything with a fellow like that.’
He relapsed into thought, and it was not until they were in sight of the house that he spoke again.
‘There you are,’ he said, jerking his hand in the direction of the creeper-covered building, ‘that’s where our solution lies. It’s someone underneath that roof. They all know more than they’ve said, and William Faraday comes in for special mention. Here we are.’
However, the stolid gloom of Socrates Close, which seemed to be about to settle upon them once more as they stepped out of the car, was shattered for once. They entered the porch, the Inspector pulled the bell, and as the hollow peal sounded within the depths of the domestic quarters a loud feminine shriek, followed by a burst of hysterical laughter, came out to them quite clearly from the breakfast-room.
The front door was thrown open to them almost immediately by Marcus Featherstone, considerably paler than usual, his reddish hair standing almost upright. Behind him, in the hall near the service corridor, a little group of excited servants clung together, while the distressing sounds from the breakfast-room continued.
Marcus seized upon them. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trying to phone you.’
Stanislaus Oates was slightly surprised for once in his life. He stepped heavily into the hall, Campion following.
‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded.
Marcus shot a harassed glance around him. ‘That awful noise in there is Kitty,’ he murmured. ‘Joyce is with her, but I’m afraid she’s rather bad. You go back to the kitchen, will you, please, cook,’ he added, turning to the maids. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of – absolutely nothing. Look here, Inspector, would you mind coming into the library? You, too, Campion, of course. The fact is, the household has had a bit of a scare.’
The servants trailed off down the corridor, and Campion and the Inspector, their curiosity thoroughly aroused, followed Marcus into the great book-lined room in which poor Uncle William had never seen his father at his best.
It was a gloomy but imposing apartment, furnished principally by the enormous carved oak desk set facing the door and a high-backed yellow brocade chair, which stood behind it. The holland blinds were drawn, and as they entered Marcus switched on the lights.
When he turned to them he seemed more himself, and, if anything, a trifle shamefaced. He laughed awkwardly.
‘Now I come to show you what has scared the whole household and driven poor Kitty into screaming hysteria, I feel a bit of a fool,’ he said. ‘It just goes to show how jumpy everyone is in the house. I pulled the blinds down again because the maids kept coming in to stare at the thing. There doesn’t seem to be any key to this room.’
As he spoke he moved over to the long narrow window directly behind the yellow chair and twitched the spring blind, which immediately shot up to the lintel, revealing a view of the bowling-green and the phenomenon which had come like a bombshell into the startled household.
In the centre of one of the large panes was a boldly drawn sign in crimson, simple, entirely inexplicable and certainly presenting a somewhat startling appearance. It consisted of two small circles one above the other, followed by a stroke, with an outer circle round the whole thing, thus:
The Inspector stared at it. ‘When did this appear?’ he demanded.
‘I don’t know,’ said Marcus. ‘But they say it wasn’t here yesterday, and it was discovered about fifteen minutes ago by Kitty, who has taken over Julia’s duty of dusting her father’s room. The blinds in this room were not drawn until after you left last night, Inspector, and it was not entered this morning as far as anyone remembers. Kitty came here with the duster just now, not having had time before. She pulled up the blind and discovered it. The unexpected sight frightened her – she seems to have been on edge anyhow. Her screams brought the household and myself. I came back from the inquest with William to lunch and – well, there you are. Everybody is very frightened. ‘It’s a queer thing to happen, and I am afraid they are all very jumpy.’
The Inspector walked gingerly round the yellow chair and peered at the glass.
‘Chalk, on the outside,’ he announced. ‘The rain’s coming the other way and hasn’t touched it. What an extraordinary thing! Someone’s playing the fool. Any marks under the window? I believe there’s a flower-bed here.’
He raised the sash and leaned out. They heard him grunt softly, and the next moment he was back again, an incredulous expression upon his face.
‘Well, what do you make of this?’ he said. ‘You look here.’
Campion and Marcus accepted his invitation with alacrity. Between t
he path which bounded the bowling-green and the wall of the house there was a narrow flower-bed, and in the centre of this, deep and distinct, as though it had been made in plaster, was the single imprint of an immense naked foot.
There was something ludicrous about it. It was a caricature of a footprint with great splayed-out toes, the whole thing of a size that impressed one at a glance.
Campion and Marcus looked at one another, the same thought uppermost in both their minds. Feet like these were not to be hidden. Campion grinned at the Inspector.
‘Looks like one of your boys,’ he said. ‘Rather overdoing the plain clothes, I should say.’
Inspector Stanislaus Oates did not return his smile.
CHAPTER 14
THE CAT IN THE BAG
‘IT’S ABSURD HAVING a place of this size without a phone,’ said the Inspector, walking up the drive after some cursory telephoning from a neighbouring house. ‘Of course that mark and footprint is a joke in very bad taste on somebody’s part, or at least I hope so. These things usually take the form of anonymous letters. I don’t like it when people start fooling round the premises. I shall have the print photographed and measured and I shall have a man out to search for others. That’s routine, Mr Featherstone, and probably a waste of valuable time.’
‘Suppose it wasn’t a joke?’ said Mr Campion slowly, his long thin figure bent slightly forward. ‘Suppose it wasn’t an evidence of bad taste? Have you ever seen a mark like that before, Stanislaus? Did it mean anything to you?’
The Inspector looked at him sharply. He had known the young man long enough to be sure that these casual remarks that Mr Campion occasionally let drop were never quite as fatuous as they sounded. He considered the question seriously, therefore.
‘I can’t say I have,’ he said. ‘On the face of it, it looks like a tramp mark, but none I’ve ever seen. A regular tramp usually carried two bits of chalk, one red and one white,’ he explained to Marcus. ‘They make signs to warn each other about the neighbourhood. It’s a sort of freemasonry. Of course this thing might be the figure eighteen, but that doesn’t make sense either. Does it convey anything to you, Campion? You are an encyclopædia of odd information.’
The young man hesitated. ‘I may be potty, of course,’ he said, ‘but I have a hunch that it’s the letter “B”. I saw it before once, drawn by a child. She copied the whole alphabet like that, as though only the inside whites of the letters registered on her mind. The “A” was a triangle with a sort of square-cut croquet hoop underneath it, like this.’ He took out an envelope and pencilled the figure on the back of it, which he held up for them to see.
Marcus was sceptical, but the Inspector, who was a doting father himself, was interested immediately.
‘Yes, it might be that,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of that before, now you come to mention it. But it’s certainly not a kid in this case. Did you ever see a footprint like that? I’ll have a cast made of it if it’s only as a souvenir.’
By common consent they walked round the side of the house to take another look at the flower-bed. Stanislaus had previously covered the footprint with several thicknesses of newspaper, weighed by stones at the corners.
‘A man,’ he said, looking at it. ‘And rather unusually heavy, I should say, although, of course, he was putting all his weight upon this foot to get at the window.’
‘It’s so extraordinary it being bare,’ Marcus burst out almost angrily. Like many men of his calling, the illogical irritated rather than attracted him.
The Inspector squatted on the edge of the gravel and peered forward. Then for the first time that afternoon he grinned.
‘He had a sock on,’ he said, ‘but it doesn’t seem to have reached past his instep. A sort of mitten. There are some shreds of worsted in this mud, I believe. We’ll cover it up again if you don’t mind.’ He replaced the paper and straightened himself. ‘Looks like old Bowditch’s lie-about,’ he said.
‘Aha!’ said Mr Campion. ‘The owner of the green hat. “Mysterious nomad signals to accomplice within House of Secrets.”’
The Inspector paused in the very act of rising as this new explanation, with all its possibilities, suddenly presented itself to his mind. For a moment his grey eyes met Campion’s speculatively. Then he shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s not worth powder and shot. It’s not that kind of show. Don’t worry,’ he added, turning to Marcus. ‘We shan’t neglect any clues. We shall follow everything up. That’s routine – and a very slow business it is. I shall leave the fancy work to you, Campion,’ he continued, grinning at him mischievously. ‘You think as much as you like, my boy. I called the fellows on guard off last night at about twelve o’clock, but I’ll put them back. We can’t have monkey tricks like this going on, and the last thing I want is to have this household alarmed unnecessarily. We’re all kid-glove men now, you know.’
They entered the house by the side door, which led to a small passage running parallel to the staircase.
‘I came up originally to see Mr William Faraday,’ observed the Inspector, watching the others remove their wet coats. ‘Is he about?’
A slightly embarrassed expression appeared in Marcus’s eyes.
‘Mr Faraday isn’t very well, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘He’s upstairs in his room. Is it important?’
The Inspector smiled, but stood his ground. ‘I think I’d better see him if you don’t mind,’ he said, and added deliberately, ‘I don’t mind if you’re both present at the interview. A man can always have his lawyer with him if he’s questioned by us nowadays.’
Campion glanced at Marcus. ‘As we agreed before the inquest this morning,’ he said, ‘I gave the Inspector all the information which Mr Faraday did not consider relevant at the first inquiry. I feel it would be in his interests to see the Inspector.’
Marcus’s worried expression did not vanish. ‘He’s up in his room,’ he repeated. ‘I’ll go and tell him. You’ll take off your coat, won’t you, Inspector? I see you’re very wet.’
He hurried upstairs, and as Campion helped the Inspector off with his raincoat the older man chuckled.
‘You’ll get yourself into hot water,’ he observed. ‘It looks a bit like running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, but I suppose you’ve got your reasons.’
‘The best in the world,’ said Campion. ‘Based on the time-honoured theory that when a man is innocent the more he talks the better. My good man, this old boy has gone through two campaigns, including the Great War, without killing so much as a rabbit. He’s not likely to have begun now. I admit he may know something, but he’s no more guilty than I am.’
The Inspector grunted, but made no other comment, and presently Marcus reappeared.
‘Mr Faraday is in his room,’ he said, ‘sitting before the fire in his dressing-gown. He tells me that he still feels very seedy, and although I advised him to see you, and I told him you were kind enough to say that Campion and I might be present at the interview, he still doesn’t feel like coming down. I wondered if you would mind seeing him in his room?’
‘Not at all,’ said the Inspector, relieved that the news was no worse. ‘I’ll come up right away.’
Uncle William sat before his bedroom fire in a gaily coloured dressing-gown. His white hair stood on end and his moustache drooped dejectedly. He glanced up as they entered, but did not attempt to rise. He looked older and more pathetic than usual, his toes in his carpet slippers turned inwards, one pudgy hand resting on his knee and the other hanging in a black silk sling. He certainly looked ill. His skin was patchy and his eyes were slightly bloodshot.
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