A Judgement in Stone

by Ruth Rendell

  But on Thursday a woman who was neither a landlady nor a hotelkeeper phoned Vetch and gave him some information about a car answering the description of the wanted vehicle. She lived on a caravan site near Clacton on the coast of Essex, some forty miles from Greeving, and Vetch was talking to her in her own caravan not much more than an hour later.

  Residents’ cars were parked in a muddy and unsightly section of field adjacent to the entrance of the site, and Mrs. Burchall, though possessing no car of her own, had often noticed there a maroon-coloured Traveller because it was the dirtiest vehicle in the park and, because of a flat rear tyre, had sunk lopsidedly into the mud. This car had been in its usual place on the previous Friday, but she couldn’t remember whether she had noticed it since. However, it was not there now.

  The owner of the car turned out to be, or have been, a man called Dick Scales. Scales, a long-distance lorry driver, wasn’t at home when they called at the caravan where he lived, and Vetch and his men talked to a middle-aged Italian woman who called herself Mrs. Scales but subsequently admitted she was not married. Vetch could get little out of her beyond cries of “Mamma mia!” and expostulations that she knew nothing about any car and it was all Dick’s fault. She rocked about on a broken chair while she talked, clutching in her arms a fierce-looking little mongrel terrier. When would Dick be back? She didn’t know. Tomorrow, next day. And the car? They were not to ask her about cars, she knew nothing of cars, couldn’t drive. She had been in Milan with her parents since before Christmas, had returned only last week, and wished now she had never come back to this cold, horrible, godless country.

  Police waited for Dick Scales on the M.1. Somehow or other they missed him, while Vetch in Clacton wondered uneasily about the setup. If Scales were guilty, how could the Carters, the Baalhams, the Meadowses, and the petrol station attendant have mistaken a man of fifty for a tall dark youth?

  At Lowfield Hall the drawing room remained sealed up, and several times a day, as Eunice came downstairs to the kitchen, she walked past that sealed door. She never thought of trying to get inside the room, although, had she wanted to, it would have been no very difficult task. The french windows were locked, but the keys to them hung on their hook in the gun room. To such small oversights as these the police are sometimes prone. But in this respect their lack of caution neither damaged their case nor benefited Eunice, for she had no idea that the one piece of evidence which could incriminate her lay behind that door, and they had already dismissed that evidence, or what they had seen of it, as so much waste paper.

  The one piece? Yes, for if she had secured it, been able to read what was written on it, it would have led her by now to that other. More precisely, she would have known what that other was and would not when the time came have rejected it with unthinking indifference.

  She was calm, and she felt herself secure. She watched television and she plundered the deep freeze to make herself large satisfying meals. Between meals she ate chocolate, more than her usual quota, for though unconscious of any real nervous tension she found it a little disconcerting to encounter policemen daily. To maintain her stock of supplies, she walked down to the village store where Norman Smith presided alone, chewing gum from force of habit.

  That morning he had had a phone call from Mrs. Elder Barnstaple to say that she would drop in and collect such copies of Follow My Star as Joan had not had time to distribute. Norman took them down from the shelf, and with them the object that had been found in the back of his van. But he didn’t show it to Eunice. He mentioned it while selling her three Mars bars.

  “Joan didn’t loan a radio from you, did she?”

  “I haven’t got a radio,” said Eunice, refusing the gift of her future and her liberty. She walked out of the shop without asking after Joan or sending her love. Mildly interested to note that there were fewer police about than usual, she observed the absence of Vetch’s car from its usual place outside the Village Hall. Mrs. Barnstaple, arriving, put hers there instead, and Eunice favoured her with a nod and one of her tight smiles.

  Norman Smith took his second visitor into the parlour.

  “That’s a nice little tape recorder you’ve got there,” said Mrs. Barnstaple.

  “Is that what it is? I thought it was a radio.”

  Again Mrs. Barnstaple averred it was a tape recorder, and asked, if it wasn’t Norman’s, to whom it belonged. Norman said he didn’t know, it had been found in the van after Joan’s accident, and perhaps it belonged to one of the Epiphany brethren. In Mrs. Barnstaple’s view, this was unlikely, but she would make inquiries.

  Almost anyone with a spark of curiosity in his make-up would, after the object’s function had been defined, have fiddled about with it and made it play. Not Norman. He was pretty sure he’d only get hymns or confessions out of it, so he put it back on the now empty shelf and went back to sell Barbara Baalham an air letter.

  Some hours before, as a worried Dick Scales was beginning the drive from Hendon in northwest London to his home in Clacton, a young man with long dark hair walked into Hendon Police Station and, in a manner of speaking, gave himself up.

  Friday, the day of the funeral.

  It took place at two in the afternoon, and it was well attended. The press came and a few carefully chosen policemen. Brian Caswall came from London and Audrey Coverdale from the Potteries. Jeffrey Mont, the worse (or perhaps the better) for drink, was there, and so was Eunice Parchman. The Jameson-Kerrs, the Roystons, Mary Cairne, Baalhams, Meadowses, Higgses, and Newsteads. Under a blue sky, as brilliant as on the day Giles Caswall was christened, the closest mourners followed the rector from the church door along a little winding path to the southeast corner of the churchyard. Rugged elms and yew trees’ shade, and an east wind blowing. George Coverdale had bought a plot under those yews, and in this grave his body and the bodies of his wife and daughter were laid to rest.

  Mr. Archer spoke these words from the Wisdom of Solomon: “For though they be punished in the sight of men, yet is their hope full of immortality. And having been a little chastised, they shall be greatly rewarded.…”

  Giles, at his father’s desire, was cremated at Stantwich, and there were no flowers at the brief service that was held for him. The wreaths that came for the Coverdales never reached the destination for which Peter intended them, Stantwich Hospital—to decorate Joan Smith’s bedside?—but shrivelled within an hour in the February frost. At the suggestion of Eva Baalham, Eunice sent a sheaf of chrysanthemums, but she never paid the bill the florist sent her a week later.

  She was driven back to the Hall by Peter, who advised her to go upstairs and lie down, a suggestion which met with no opposition from Eunice, thinking of her television and her Mars bars. In her absence and that of the police, in the terrible silence and the harsh cold, he took away the kitchen table, chopped it to pieces, and burnt it down by the blackthorn hedge while the frosty crimson sun went down.

  Vetch did not attend the funeral. He was in London. There he heard from Keith Lovat the story which had been told to the Hendon police and, accompanied by Lovat, he went to the house in West Hendon where Michael Scales rented one furnished room and Lovat another. At the end of the garden were three lockup garages, surrounded by a high fence. On the concrete behind this fence and at the side of the garages, Vetch was shown what appeared to be a car concealed by a canvas cover. Lovat removed the cover to disclose a maroon-coloured Morris Minor Traveller which, he told Vetch, he had bought from Michael’s father, Dick Scales, on the previous Sunday.

  The car, Lovat said, had been for sale for eighty pounds, and he and Michael had gone up to Clacton by train to take a look at it. They arrived there at three and had a meal in the caravan with Dick Scales and the Italian woman whom Lovat called Maria and referred to as Michael’s stepmother.

  “Maria had this little dog,” Lovat went on. “She’d brought it back with her from Italy in a basket with a cover over it, and she’d got it through customs without them knowing. It was a snappy lit
tle devil, and I left it alone, but Mike kept playing with it, teasing it really.” He looked at Vetch. “That was how it all happened, that was the cause of it.”

  The flat tyre on the car having been changed for the spare one, he and Michael Scales decided to leave for home in it at seven, but not to take the A. 12 from Colchester, a fast road which would have taken them into East London. Instead they intended to go westwards to Sudbury and then south for Dunmow and Ongar, entering London by the A. 11 and the North Circular Road to Hendon. But before they left Michael was again playing with the dog, offering it a piece of chocolate and snatching it away when the dog came to take it. The result of this was that the dog bit him on his left hand.

  “We went just the same. Maria tied Mike’s hand up with a handkerchief, and I said he’d better have it seen to when we got home. Dick and Maria got into a bit of a panic on account of her bringing the dog in like that, and Dick said they could get fined hundreds and hundreds if they got caught. Well, Mike promised he wouldn’t go to a doctor or a hospital or anything, though the blood was coming through the bandage by then. We started off, and the fact is I lost my way. The lanes were pitch-dark, and I thought I’d missed the Sudbury road, though it turned out I was really on it. Mike didn’t know anything about people not being allowed to bring animals into the country without putting them in quarantine, so I told him a bit about that, and when he said why not, I said it was on account of not spreading rabies. That really scared him, that was the beginning of it.”

  They had turned into what was evidently Greeving Lane. The time? About twenty to eight, Lovat said. At the Blue Boar in Greeving Michael washed his hand and had a double brandy. They were directed to a self-service petrol station on the Sudbury road which, Lovat realised, was the road they had mistakenly left half an hour before.

  “Mike had got into a state by then. He was scared he’d get rabies and scared to go to the hospital in case he got his dad into trouble. We got home around eleven—I couldn’t get more than forty out of the car—and when we got home I parked it down there and put that cover over it.”

  Lowfield Hall? said Vetch. They must twice have passed Lowfield Hall on their way into and out of Greeving.

  For the first time Lovat’s voice faltered. He hadn’t noticed a single house while driving along Greeving Lane. Strange, thought Vetch, when you remembered that Meadows’ farmhouse on its raised ground loomed over the only real bend in the road. But for the time being he let it pass, and Lovat went on to say that on the Tuesday he had realised it was he and Michael Scales for whom the police were hunting. He begged Michael to go with him to their local police station, but Michael, who had been in touch with Dick Scales by phone, refused. His hand had begun to fester and swell, and he hadn’t been to work since Wednesday. On Thursday morning Dick Scales phoned the Hendon house from a call box in the north of England, and when he heard of his son’s state he said he would call in on his way south. He reached Hendon at nine in the evening, and he and Michael and Keith Lovat had sat up all night, discussing what they should do. Dick wanted Michael to go to a doctor and say he had been bitten by a stray dog, mentioning nothing about the car or his visit to the caravan, and Michael was in favour of this. Lovat had been unable to make them see his point of view, that all the time they were getting themselves deeper into trouble and could be charged with obstructing the police. Moreover, he was prevented from having repairs done to the car and, as far as he could see, from using it perhaps for months. At last he decided to act on his own. When Dick had gone he walked out of the house and went to Hendon Police Station.

  It was a story not entirely consistent with this one that Vetch finally elicited from Michael Scales. Scales was lying in bed in a filthy room, his arm swollen up to the elbow and streaked with long red lines, and at the appearance of Vetch and his sergeant he began to sob. When Vetch told him that he knew all about the car, the possibly rabid dog, and the visit to the Blue Boar at Greeving, he admitted everything—and admitted something about which Lovat had evidently stalled. On their way into Greeving they had stopped at the entrance to the drive of a large well-lighted house, and Lovat had gone up the drive to ask for directions to Sudbury. However, before he reached the door his courage had failed him, on account, Scales said, of the clothes he was wearing and the dirt he had got on himself from tinkering with the car.

  After some prevarication, Lovat admitted this. “I never knocked on the door,” he said. “I didn’t want to scare the people, not at nighttime and in a lonely place like that.”

  It could be true. Lovat and Scales struck Vetch as being as pusillanimous and indecisive a pair as he had ever come across. Describe the house, he said, and Lovat said it was a big place with two long windows on either side of the front door, adding that he had heard music coming from the house as he hesitated on the drive. The time? Twenty to eight, said Lovat, and Scales said nearer a quarter to.

  Vetch had Maria Scales charged with contravening the quarantine laws, and Michael Scales was removed to hospital where he was put into isolation. What to do with Lovat? There was as yet insufficient evidence to charge them with the murder, but by some string-pulling Vetch arranged with the resident medical officer to have Lovat taken into hospital also and kept in under observation. There, they were out of harm’s way for the present, and Vetch, with a breathing space, considered what he had been told about the time and the music.

  What music? The Coverdales’ record player, radio, and television set were all in the morning room. Therefore it looked as if the music had been an invention of Lovat’s, though there seemed no reason why he should have invented it. More probably he and Scales had arrived much earlier at Lowfield Hall and had killed the Coverdales for what reason? It wasn’t up to Vetch to find a reason. But they could have entered the Hall to wash, to cadge a drink, to use a phone, and had perhaps met with physical opposition from George Coverdale and his stepson. It fitted, and the time, if Lovat were lying, also fitted. But Vetch had to be sure of one thing to start with or, as he told himself in the days that followed, face the music.

  It was to the young Coverdales that he went for help, and at once Audrey Coverdale told him what had been perplexing her and yet what had seemed irrelevant to the discovery of the perpetrators of the crime.

  “I’ve never been able to understand why they weren’t watching Don Giovanni. Jacqueline wouldn’t have missed that for the world. It’s like saying an ardent football fan would miss the Cup Final.”

  But the television set was in the morning room, and they couldn’t have been in the morning room from seven onwards, for they had taken coffee in the drawing room, and no amount of juggling with time could make that coffee drinking take place before seven. On the other hand, guilty or not, Lovat had said he had heard music. On Sunday afternoon Vetch broke the seals on the drawing-room door and revisited the scene of the crime. He was looking for signs that the television set had been in this room but, finding none, it occurred to him to check on the time the opera had begun. Vetch could easily have secured himself a copy of the Radio Times for that week from any newsagent. He still does not know to this day what made him pick up the Observer from the coffee table on the chance a Radio Times might have been underneath it. But it was. He opened it at the relevant page and noticed that page was splashed with blood. If anyone had previously observed this, he had not been told of it. In the margin, between and beneath the blood splashes, were three scribbled notes:

  Overture cut. Surely no ascending seventh in last bar of Là ci darem. Check with M’s recording.

  Vetch had seen enough examples of Jacqueline’s handwriting to recognise that these notes had been made by her. And clearly they had been made by her while watching this particular broadcast. Therefore she had watched it or part of it. And, beyond a doubt, it had begun at seven. The only expert he had immediately to hand—and how much of an expert she was he couldn’t tell, he knew nothing of music—was Audrey Coverdale. He had the door resealed, and lingered for ten minutes to d
rink the tea Eunice Parchman had made for him. While he chatted with her and Eunice told him she had heard no music when she came in at five to (or five past) eight, that the television set was always in the morning room and had been in the morning room at the time of her discovery of the bodies, the Radio Times was a few feet from her, shut up in his briefcase.

  Audrey Coverdale was preparing to leave, for she had to be back at work in the morning. She confirmed that the notes were in Jacqueline’s hand and quailed at the bloodstains, glad that her husband was not present to see them.

  “What does it mean?” said Vetch.

  “Là ci darem is a duet in the third scene of the first act.” Audrey could have sung every aria from Don Giovanni and told Vetch, within minutes, the precise time at which each would occur. “If you want to know when it comes, it’d be—let me see—about forty minutes after the beginning.”

  Twenty to eight. Vetch simply didn’t believe her. It was useless consulting amateurs. On Monday morning he sent his sergeant into Stantwich to buy a complete recording of the opera. It was played on a borrowed player in the Murder Room in the Village Hall, and to Vetch’s astonishment and dismay Là ci darem occurred almost exactly where Audrey had said it would, forty-two minutes after the commencement of the overture. Overture cut, Jacqueline had written. Perhaps the whole opera had been cut. Vetch got on to the BBC, who let him have their own recording. The opera had been slightly cut, but only by three minutes in the first three scenes of the first act, and Là ci darem occurred in the recording at seven thirty-nine. Therefore Jacqueline Coverdale had been alive at seven thirty-nine, had been tranquil, at ease, concentrating on a television programme. It was impossibly farfetched to suppose that her killers had even entered the house by that time. Yet Lovat and Scales had been seen in the Blue Boar at ten to eight by nine independent witnesses. Someone else had entered Lowfield Hall after Lovat’s departure and before five past—it now had to be five past eight.