“That’s terribly kind of you; I’m sorry to be such a bother,” Lesley apologized, but Flecker and Browning had already set off up the lane.
Browning called, “No bother at all, madam,” as he hurried after the Chief Inspector. “My God, I should have fore-seen this,” said Flecker, breaking into a run as he turned down the passage between the rectory walls.
“But he was here, with us, not twenty minutes ago,” protested Browning, who’d been looking forward to his beer. “He can’t have gone far.” Flecker didn’t answer, he had already reached the door in the New Rectory wall; he raced up the garden path, banged the door-knocker violently and burst in. Gillian Willis appeared and was startled out of her habitual sullenness by the sight of the detectives in the hall. “Everyone’s out but me,” she said.
“Has Anthony been here?” asked Flecker.
“Yes, not long ago. He had lots of exciting news, but Mummy made me go to the shop for something she’d forgotten, blooming swiz, and when I got back he’d gone; he has lunch at one; so I suppose he was told not to be late.”
“Where are your parents?”
“I don’t know. We don’t have meals at proper times, we have them when they’re ready, worse luck. I suppose Daddy’s somewhere around the church and Mummy’s probably gassing with Mrs. Sinclair or someone; she spends hours gassing.”
“And Mr. Harris?”
“Oh, he’s somewhere around, or he was. I expect he’s eating his lunch.”
“Where does he generally eat it?” asked Flecker, trying to keep the urgency out of his voice.
“I don’t know. He used to eat it in the stable, but now we’ve moved here we haven’t got one, worse luck.”
“Well, if you should see Anthony, tell him that his mother wants him urgently,” said Flecker over his shoulder as he hurried out of the house. He glanced quickly round the walled garden, but there was no one about, and then stood for a moment trying to think. “Now where?” he said aloud and, “Surely not Well Cottage again?” Then he realized. “The empty Rectory, of course.”
Opposite the dark green door in the New Rectory wall was an identical one into the Old Rectory garden. Flecker tried the handle and then threw himself upon the door in an attempt to break in. Browning added his weight, but the door stood firm. “Bolted top and bottom, I bet. Shall I go over the wall?” he asked.
“Quicker to go round,” said Flecker, observing the height and the uninviting crest of glass.
They ran up the passage to the lane. Dobson’s car had gone, but Hedley’s still stood in the shadow of the chestnut. Giving the doorbell a perfunctory ring, Flecker let himself in. To the left of the Carlson stairs was the passage on which three of the doors into the Old Rectory opened; they were all locked. Lesley appeared on the stairs. “Have you the keys for these doors?” demanded Flecker breathlessly.
“No, I’m sorry, I’m afraid I haven’t. Joan Willis has them. We thought that as I was going at the end of the month it would be better if she had them—” she broke off, for the detectives had gone.
“I don’t suppose the front door’s open, there’s just a chance, otherwise we’ll force a window.”
“I’ll do the window,” gasped Browning, “you’ll only cut yourself.” Flecker tried the door, but it was locked too. Browning broke a pane and in a matter of moments, with the skill born of practice, opened one of the drawing-room windows. They climbed inside. Then they separated and searched. Flinging wide the doors of the shapely, shabby Regency rooms they searched, and found them empty. There was absolutely no sign of life. Then in the bathroom Flecker paused. “Listen,” he called, and they both heard the sound of water throbbing in the pipes.
“There’s a tap on somewhere,” said Browning. They turned and ran downstairs. The kitchen taps were off, the scullery taps were off. “It could be Mrs. Carlson in the flat, I suppose,” said Browning suddenly, and at the same moment Flecker found an unopened door, among the confusion of pantries and bootholes. “The cellar,” he called, and as he felt for the light switch they heard the hollow splash of water falling from a height on water.
“I don’t think there’s a light,” said Flecker. “Have you got your torch?” Browning’s slim pocket torch was in his hand before he’d finished asking. The stone steps were steep; the pencil of light shone down and reflected darkly on the murky water below.
“Oh, my God!” said Flecker, wondering what horror they were going to find. A water pipe running along the cellar wall close to the ceiling was fractured, he could see it now, and water was cascading down the wall. He stepped down into the water; it wasn’t deep yet, and he almost fell over an inert body; Anthony was lying face downwards in the coal-black pool. Filled with frightful foreboding, Flecker knelt beside the boy, fumbled for his pulse and listened for the sound of his breathing. “He’s all right,” he said joyfully, when he was sure. “Knocked out, I imagine, but still alive.”
“He wouldn’t have been all right in another couple of minutes,” observed Browning in grim tones, for the water was over his shoes. “Here, let me take him; you’ve got the torch.” They carried Anthony up to the kitchen and laid him, dripping liquid grime, upon the table, while they looked at the patch of blood-matted hair on the back of his head.
“Seen worse,” said Flecker.
“Yes, he’ll do,” Browning agreed.
“Whatever on earth’s going on here?” asked a voice, and they looked up to see Harris standing in the doorway.
Browning stiffened visibly and stepped forward as though to challenge him; Flecker shook his head. Harris looked at Anthony’s sodden, lifeless form with horror. “Don’t tell me he’s dead?”
“No,” Flecker answered, “he’s had a crack on the back of the head; we found him in the cellar. Can you open that window? We want to carry him through and all these damned doors are locked.”
Flecker broke the news to Lesley, who took Anthony’s appearance with outward calm, but was robbed, by a paralysing inward terror of her usefulness. She stood dazed and helpless while Dr. Hedley listened to the Chief Inspector’s brief explanation and then took charge. In a few moments he had the boy wrapped in a blanket and laid on the back seat of his car with Lesley beside him and they departed for the hospital almost without a word.
As the car disappeared into the lane, Flecker turned to Harris. “Did you see Mrs. Willis?” he asked.
“Yes, she came through the garden about five minutes before you did. She didn’t see me, I was having my dinner down by the cedar tree; no sense in being indoors this lovely weather.
Flecker said, “I shall want a statement from you, but we’ll come and see you tonight. Meanwhile, if you know where the Old Rectory stop-tap is, perhaps you could turn off the water supply? I’ll let the water company know about the burst pipe because I don’t want anyone down in the cellar until I’ve had a poke round.”
“Yes, I’ll do that for you,” said Harris. “Two or three winters ago we had a burst pipe, and a terrible hunt round we had for that stop-cock. It was the cellar that got flooded that time, I remember, a couple of feet, there was, by the time we found the tap.”
“Right. Well if you’ll see to that,” said Flecker. He turned to Browning. “Come on, last port of call before lunch.” There was a grim look about him as he led the way down the passage and up the path to the New Rectory front door. Joan Willis answered his ring. “What, you again?” she demanded in over-familiar tones. “If you ask me, you’d better come and live here and have done with it.”
Flecker said, “We’d like you to come to the police station with us, Mrs. Willis, and answer some questions about the death of Colonel Barclay. I must warn you that whatever you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence. I would also like the shoes you’re wearing, if you wouldn’t mind changing into another pair.”
“I really don’t know what on earth you’re talking about, but if you want some questions answered, I suppose I’d better come.” She looked down at her feet, neat in their
brown strollers and saw, too late, the faint black film. “And if you want my shoes I suppose you’d better have them. They’re none too clean, I’ve just been fetching in the coal.”
Chapter Eleven
IT was four days later, on Saturday afternoon, that Flecker was at last allowed to visit Anthony Carlson in hospital and that evening he wrote his final report. Then, on Sunday morning, he and Browning drove up the dual carriageway and through the green-canopied beechwoods for the last time. Church Lane was heavy with the scent of hawthorn blossom and there were white candle flowers on the chestnut tree in the Old Rectory stableyard. Everywhere, the lane and the garden and the field, seemed to have shrunk; to have become small and secret and very green.
“Hell!” said Flecker as they left the car. “The dear doctor is with us.” And then he thought, well at least she was at home, he was going to see her. And then, though he had spent the last few days telling himself that the whole idea was ludicrous, he was filled with a sudden and absurd elevation. “‘Oh, what a beautiful morning’,” he sang, grinning at Browning, as he rang Lesley Carlson’s bell. She was looking happier than he’d seen her before and younger and she wore a frock that suited her, though afterwards he could remember no more of it than tiny flowers.
“We came,” he said, “to tell you about Anthony—we saw him yesterday—and to see that everything was all right. It’s an unofficial visit; we’re on our way home.”
“How very nice of you.” She sounded, he thought, genuinely pleased. “Come up,” she said, leading the way. “Dr. Hedley’s here, but he wants to hear about Anthony too. We’ve been awfully in the dark about the whole horrible thing.”
Flecker thought that Hedley looked a little put out at the sight of them, but he muttered welcoming sounds out of the corner of his mouth.
“As it’s an unofficial visit, I can offer you a drink,” said Lesley tentatively. “There’s not much choice, I’m afraid. Would gin and tonic do?”
“It would be exactly right,” answered Flecker. He went to take the drink from her. “We found Anthony very cheerful; he produced sheets of paper and we had to sign our names six times each. I gather autographs are a kind of currency at school.”
“I’m afraid that now he’s better, he’s revelling in all this sensation and the nurses are spoiling him so much I don’t think he’ll ever settle down again, but I suppose really it’s lucky he’s taken it like that. Of course he doesn’t remember anything more than going down the cellar steps with Joan Willis behind him.” She shuddered. “I feel it much more than he does. Did he tell you that he’d abandoned a lifelong ambition to join the Merchant Navy in favour of the police—CID of course?” She smiled at Flecker, leaving him speechless.
“Better get that one out of his head quickly, madam,” advised Browning. “It’s not much of a job.”
“I don’t know.” Flecker had recovered his composure. “We see life.”
“Only the seamy side as a rule,” argued Browning. “I won’t say that I haven’t had some good times in the police, but I’d want something better for Clifford.”
“They never do what they say they’ll do at ten; we all know that.” Hedley sounded impatient. “Did Anthony give you the information you wanted?” he asked Flecker.
“Yes. It seems that after he’d told me about the clothes not being among the jumble up to tea-time on Saturday, he trotted round to the Willises and related the complete conversation to Mrs. Willis and Gillian. It must have given Mrs. Willis quite a shock, but there was nothing she could do, as I had already been told. Then, inspired, I’m afraid, by my complimentary remarks, Anthony began casting his mind back and remembered that when they tried the coat on it had been wet. Gillian remembered that too, and it was then that she was sent off to the shop.
“Anthony continued to discuss the case with Mrs. Willis and suddenly she said that she remembered taking the clothes to the stable on Saturday, just after four. The Barclay jumble had to have arrived on Saturday now, because no one was going to believe that they would have been bothering about jumble on Sunday with the Colonel dead. At the same moment Anthony remembered that when they found the coat was wet, he suggested to Gillian that the stable roof leaked and she had answered that it couldn’t be that because Mummy had only brought this lot of stuff over that morning. Mrs. Willis promptly remembered taking it over on Monday; it had spent the weekend in the New Rectory porch, because she hadn’t had a minute to spare to take it to the stable; that was why it was damp.
“Then, Anthony says, she seemed to get quite keen on detecting, and she suddenly remembered something very odd in the Old Rectory cellar. A half-burnt candle in a bottle and a pile of sacks or blankets in a corner, it hadn’t struck her at the time, she said, but now, well, perhaps the murderer had been camping there. They must investigate at once and then Anthony would have something to tell the Chief Inspector. I can just hear her,” said Flecker.
“Anthony told us that he wasn’t all that keen, he didn’t fancy meeting the murderer, but Mrs. Willis said surely he wasn’t afraid and that was it.” Flecker pushed back his hair and turned to Lesley. “I’m never going to forgive myself for this, you know,” he said. “I should have realized that anyone as ingenuous as Anthony would trot straight round to the Willises and blow the lot to Gillian. Well, perhaps I shall forgive myself in time, since no harm seems to have come of it, but if we’d been too late—”
“I’m only grateful that it didn’t happen earlier, before you were on to Joan Willis,” said Lesley seriously. “Anthony and Gillian were always trying to detect, but then, luckily, they hadn’t realized that the jumble was involved. Anyway, if it wasn’t for you, he would have been drowned; none of us would have thought of looking in the cellar, until it was too late; when you found him I had only just started to fuss.”
Flecker said, “My God, it gave me a fright; the worst of my career.” They stood, looking at each other, bound about by a silence full of shared horrors. Hedley fidgeted in his chair, restive at the turn the conversation had taken and Lesley’s sudden remoteness. “Would it be very out of place to ask how you got on to Mrs. Willis, Chief Inspector? When you were here on Tuesday morning you put on a very convincing act of suspecting Mrs. Carlson and young Barclay, but apparently you already knew that Mrs. Willis was the murderer—or didn’t you?” Flecker turned away from Lesley and they both sat down.
“I’m glad it was convincing,” said Flecker, grinning at Hedley. “It was an act. I wanted to know what time Paul Barclay really left the Sinclairs and I’d found out so many of his half-truths and untruths that I didn’t think he would be very willing to confess to another, so, when he walked in that morning, I decided, rather on the spur of the moment, to give him a fright; I was only sorry that it meant giving Mrs. Carlson one too.”
“The first clue,” muttered Hedley, “was, I suppose, your conviction that there were two guns?”
“Well, yes, and the fact that the Colonel didn’t take his gun dogs which made one think of an assignation, and the five pounds in the envelope which he might have been about to give or have just received. And then there was the gun in the cottage, which made it look as though he’d been followed from the assignation down into the wood, and the fact that the murderer wore gloves, though the crimes seemed unpremeditated. All quite handy little points, the sort the police thrive on, but the real puzzle was the two shots. It was the close season; rabbits were only a cover-up. The Colonel hadn’t even bothered to load, and yet two shots had been fired and only one into the Colonel. Could the first shot have missed? It was possible, but as there appeared to be ten minutes between the two it seemed reasonable to suppose that the Colonel would have taken some sort of evasive action and at least have loaded his own gun. My conviction that the murderer was someone who had rarely, if ever, fired a gun and who had fired one barrel to see how the thing worked, narrowed the field a good deal. I didn’t suspect Barclay of killing his father, but I did think he might be covering up for one of the non-shoo
ters. When you stole the limelight,” he went on, smiling at Lesley, “I had to reconsider the case from the beginning.”
“I still don’t know why you didn’t clap me in gaol,” said Lesley. “I was a much more obvious suspect than Joan Willis.”
“I didn’t see why you should have shot Barclay first,” answered Flecker. “And then you didn’t seem a very blood-thirsty sort of person. Anyway, I reconsidered, and came upon a very illuminating passage in one of Inspector Sims’s interviews. Mrs. Willis had called upon Mrs. Sinclair at about six, she said, to arrange some detail of the jumble sale, and then she had gone next door to see Mrs. Dawson and they’d stood on the doorstep talking, ‘and all the time Mr. Barclay’s Land Rover was outside;’ they both agreed on that. ‘In fact,’ said Mrs. Willis, ‘it was still there when I left.’ A fine backhanded alibi she’d given herself as long as Barclay wanted one too. And when she was asked whether she would put the time as late as five or ten-past six, she answered, ‘Oh quite that.’
“Of course it’s easy nowadays,” he went on, after finishing his gin and tonic. “Once you know where to look the labs do the rest for you. We ransacked the New Rectory and found a pair of gloves with bloodstains and traces of the same grease that the Colonel used on the inside of the barrel of his gun—I suppose she broke it to see if it was loaded. Then there were partly washed-out bloodstains on her overcoat, on a scarf—I think she used that to wipe the butt of the gun with which she killed Miss Schmidt—and on the tweed jacket of which we’ve deprived poor Mr. Harris. Mrs. Willis was economical and, like me, kept envelopes. We found two of the brand which the colonel used. A rather good quality sort, as supplied with headed writing paper and fairly easy to trace. They’d both been folded once to go in a wallet and then smoothed out before being put for further use in the Rector’s desk; the Willises normally buy their writing paper and envelopes at the village post office.”
“But what was her motive?” asked Hedley. “Was the woman mad?”
They Died in the Spring Page 16
