Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)

by Mavis Doriel Hay

  “I should like to see that curse, if you’ve got it,” said Braydon slowly.

  For the first time Coniston seemed startled out of his composure. “I haven’t. I burnt the thing.”

  “Didn’t it occur to you that it might provide useful confirmation of your story?”

  “I didn’t think of that. My intellect rejects any belief in curses and magic, but I think I have some vestiges of superstition rooted in me somewhere. Who hasn’t? After what had happened, I didn’t like the thing and was glad to see the last of it.”

  “A pity. Well, Mr. Coniston, I’m much obliged to you for telling the story so fully. I don’t think it need be referred to at the inquest. But I think I must see Miss Czernak. There is a problem of time which she might possibly help to clear up. I promise you that I will be tactful.”

  “I don’t think you’ll get much help about times from her,” Coniston said. “Her ideas on the subject are not very—English.”

  “Well, I must try to anglicize them. By the way, I suppose you cannot give me any information about Miss Denning’s river trips? They seem to have been a habit and I gather that she usually came up the river. You may have met her when out in your own canoe?”

  “Yes, I think I have,” replied Coniston rather doubtfully. “But I can’t remember any particular occasion or any particular place. Isn’t the most probable explanation that she liked that form of exercise? It’s not uncommon up here, you know. And after all, you can only go two ways on a river, up or down.”

  “Quite true,” Braydon agreed, and took himself off.

  He returned to his hotel and sat there for some time, jotting down notes and drawing apparently meaningless diagrams. Then he rang up the police station and, finding that Wythe was there, strolled down to Blue Boar Street.

  Wythe reported on his morning’s work. “They can’t find a thing, sir. Of course, after all this rain, and people passing, a river bank’s not the best place on which to find any sort of track. I wouldn’t say that nothing happened because we can’t find where it happened, but it’s pretty certain, to my way of thinking, that if anything did happen we can only prove it in some other way.”

  “I didn’t really expect much,” Braydon confessed. “I gather that your impression of Lidgett is not favourable?”

  “I don’t know when I had a less favourable impression of anyone,” Wythe admitted. “To begin with, that staying in bed; it’s not natural, in a farmer. I don’t believe he was in bed at all, but he knew from his wife that I called yesterday and maybe he hoped to put me off, or maybe he only wanted to keep me waiting.”

  “He’s the sort of man who might be roused to sudden violence, you think?” asked Braydon.

  “I do,” said Wythe emphatically. “After being as pleasant as you like all the time we were pottering about those fields—though with a nasty sort of sneer in the background, so to speak—he flew into a rage when he saw my men searching the banks. Then, whilst it’s possible that he was out of sight of the river just when the canoe passed, you’ve got to remember that the river’s straight there and you’d see any craft a long way up or down. He’d surely have noticed it when he returned to the bank, and by running he could have caught up with it.”

  “And you think Miss Denning might have come to the bank to talk to him?” Braydon asked. “But why in heaven’s name should she disembark? She could talk to him from the canoe.”

  “Goodness knows. He may have had some trick. Perhaps pretending he wanted her to look at another piece of land,” Wythe suggested. “Or suppose she got out of the canoe of her own accord and he saw her. It’s clear that the one thing that riles him is to see people embarking on his land.”

  “He and Bayes recognized each other?”

  “Oh yes; made no bones about it! Not too pleased to see each other, though. I must say, Lidgett’s story hangs together except in that one point: saying he didn’t see the canoe, when he must have seen it; and then letting slip that he knew just how she was paddling.”

  “No sign of anything that might have been a weapon?” Braydon asked.

  “Not a trace. He carries a stick, of course, but it’s not a very heavy one.”

  “Well, if Lidgett’s our man it’s going to be confoundedly hard to nail it on to him. How about old Lond?”

  “It seems that he’s a great reader, sir, at the public expense. The assistant in the newspaper-room at the Free Library knows him well and remembers seeing him there on Friday afternoon, certainly till three fifteen. If he went by the quickest way to Ferry House, that’s to say by a bus from Carfax up St. Giles—though they say he never uses them—and through the Lamb and Flag yard and South Parks Road, I should say he couldn’t be there till half-past three. That still gives him a chance, and there’s the watch which may have been altered.”

  “But if Miss Denning passed under the footbridge before three, as Lidgett’s evidence indicates, or even a few minutes past three, as Bayes said, she’d pass Ferry House boathouse long before half-past,” Braydon pointed out.

  “That’s true, but suppose the fancy took her to disembark there and have another look at the site she was so anxious to get hold of, and old Lond arrived and found her there——”

  “Then we go back to the physical impossibility. It won’t do, Super! We must think of something else. I’m going to spend most of this afternoon with Miss Denning’s papers and the college account books.”

  “To my way of thinking, sir, there’s too many impossibilities in this case, and one or other of them’s got to be proved possible if we’re to get any solution,” said Wythe as, in a very dissatisfied mood, he went off to lunch.

  CHAPTER XIV

  PAMELA, NIECE OF BURSE

  SALLY sat in a carefully selected chair in the lounge of the Mitre on Sunday, shortly before one o’clock, keeping an eye on each party of well-behaved relatives and self-assured undergraduates that entered. She wondered what Burse’s niece would be like, whether she could really have been fond of Burse and what it would be like to have Burse as an aunt. Anyhow, all this affair must be perfectly beastly for Pamela, so one ought to be decent to her.

  “Here’s Sally already!” cried Basil’s voice. “Depend on her to be on the spot when a meal is due!”

  Sally shot up out of the deep chair. She achieved this neatly by swinging her legs up in the air and bringing them down again with enough leverage to raise her from the low seat. There was Betty in a large mackintosh with the collar turned up and a great woolly scarf round her neck; beside her was a slim, fair girl in a fur coat. The girl was pretty, undoubtedly, though her nose was rather red from the cold air; Sally noted enviously that she was one of those people who can still look attractive with a red nose, instead of quite awful. Betty introduced them and Pamela smiled at Sally shyly.

  “Yes; this is your sister’s coat; she insisted on lending it to me because she thought I should be cold. But I do hope you’re not simply perished, Mrs. Pongleton.”

  “Betty, please. I simply can’t bear to be reminded that I married such a name! I’m positively hot! There’s nothing like a hideous solid mac. for keeping the wind out and I, knowing Basil’s penchant for rapid movement through the cold air, put on layers of Jaeger undies.”

  “Betty always goes motoring with half a dozen spare coats and a few hot water bottles in case the passengers are cold,” Basil declared. “There was one occasion when she padded a passenger to such an extent that when they got home the poor woman couldn’t be pushed through the front door. Moreover, in the extreme heat, the rubber hot water bottles had melted and fused her garments into a solid mass, so we had to cut away the door frame and knock a few bricks out of the wall before the wrappings could be cut off the victim in the decent obscurity of the house.”

  “Basil writes novels,” Sally explained, “and unfortunately he’s not able to distinguish truth from fiction; but his printed stories aren’t at all bad.”

  “Name your drinks,” Basil commanded. “I must buzz off; I’m
lunching with a man and leaving you three to feed yourselves.”

  Pamela confessed complete ignorance of cocktails. “But I’d like sh-sherry, please.” There was a slight hesitation in her speech when she was a little nervous, which Basil found ravishing.

  “Are you going in the Riley?” Sally asked in her most off-hand manner.

  “Lord no! I understand it costs you about £4 an hour to leave your car standing by the kerb in this place; wonderful how many millionaires you must have, to judge by the cars that line the streets! But what’s your plan?”

  “I just thought I might drive it,” Sally suggested. “If it was doing nothing. I haven’t got any plan.”

  “Marvellous!” said Basil.

  “I should think Pamela has had enough of the car for one day,” Betty suggested.

  “I loved it!” Pamela declared.

  “But, Basil, if we do want a drive, may I take the Riley?” Sally insisted. “You know I really am careful and you don’t know how well I drive because when you’re there I’m all of a dither, but when you’re not I’m as steady as the rock of Gibraltar.”

  “O.K.,” said Basil with resignation. “But look out for the one-way streets!”

  He departed, and the others gathered in the private sitting-room in which Sally had already ordered lunch to be served. Betty had resigned herself to this extravagance with the thought that, after all, this visit to Oxford would be less of an ordeal for Pamela if she didn’t have to be on view in public rooms all the time.

  Sitting opposite to Pamela at lunch, Sally studied her in detail and finally approved. She was rather tall and—as Basil had said—a regular sylph. Her hair was of flaxen fairness which is so often seen on children and so seldom on grown-ups, and which, therefore, gives those who have it an air of innocence. It was fastened in thick coils low down on her neck and soft strands of it waved round her forehead and over her ears. Her eyes were blue and set very wide apart; her nose quite undistinguished, freckled and slightly tip-tilted.

  “Do you know a don here called Mort? He belongs to Sim’s, I believe,” Pamela asked Sally.

  “I should say so; I’m coaching with him this term; he’s rather an old stick, but a good sort. Do you know him?” Sally was surprised, remembering how Pamela had apparently been kept from any association with Oxford.

  “Ye-es,” Pamela told her eagerly. “He came to see me last term at Cambridge. H-he had to be there on some business he said; something to do with research, I think. He said he looked me up because he was a friend of my father. I didn’t think he was sticky at all.” She was a little indignant.

  “Of course I’ve only seen him in coachings,” Sally explained. “He’s all right, but—I don’t know—sort of shut up. As if he was on his guard all the time against anyone being too personal. Not that medieval history leads much to personalities; it’s more a feeling I had about him than anything he says. Have you known him long?”

  “That was the first time I’d seen him, but I hoped I’d get to know him quite well. He was that sort of person, I thought; you feel he’s nice and he’ll be nicer still when you know him. I thought he’d have written when—when this happened. It made me feel awfully alone, you see, and I felt he was a dependable sort of person who could help. I was most awfully glad when I heard you were coming to fetch me,” she added to Betty.

  “I don’t think he would have had time to write,” Betty suggested. “You see, the news wasn’t in the papers until Saturday afternoon.”

  “No—I see. Do you think I might call on him? He won’t know I’m here, and I feel almost sure he will write or go to see me or something. It may seem rather odd, but he said when he came to see me that I was to let him know if ever I was in trouble. It seemed a queer thing to say, but I thought of it when—I heard.”

  Sally had been trying hard to readjust her view of Mr. Mort and consider him as someone who might be regarded as a friend, a human being. “I wonder he hadn’t looked you up before,” she suggested.

  “Well—” Pamela seemed a little embarrassed. “P-perhaps he d-definitely waited till I was grown up; and then, you see, Aunt Myra didn’t want me to know him.” She became rather pink and stopped.

  “Why not go to see him this afternoon?” Sally suggested, to create a diversion. “Dons are always at home on Sunday afternoon. I think they inaugurated the Sunday tea festival to demonstrate that they really are human and can eat buns with the best of us.”

  “Won’t there be crowds of people there?” asked Pamela.

  “Why not ring him up?” Betty suggested. “Sally could do it, as she knows him, and tell him you’re here. Of course you don’t want to be landed in the middle of an Oxford tea-party.”

  “And I could drive you up in the Riley,” Sally agreed, delighted at this heaven-sent opportunity to take out Basil’s car. “Unmarried dons generally live in college, but the Morter lives in a little house, called the Back End, just outside the college walls. I’ve heard that he was the sole support and comfort of an aged mother and wanted to live with her, and that was why he got that house. Probably there’s no great run on it by the married dons because it’s so small. His mother died some years ago and there’s a rumour that the Morter’s working on some great scholarly tome and has his notes laid out all over the house and can’t move for fear some of them would get lost. The Back End’s an awfully out-of-the-way spot, reached by a road that goes nowhere else, and he has his own backwater that runs alongside his garden, with a boathouse.” She paused in her flow of explanation, suddenly realizing that boathouses were not a good subject of conversation. “I tell you what! I’ll go and ring him up now. Sure to find him in. Keep my ice from melting!”

  Denis Mort was considerably surprised to be rung up by Sally Watson; in fact, at first he seemed to have difficulty in remembering who she was. Just like a don, thought Sally in disgust, not to know you out of hours. “You coached me on Friday afternoon,” she reminded him reproachfully.

  “Yes, yes,” he answered wearily.

  Well, really, thought Sally, he needn’t speak as though my essay gave him a pain. It was rather a good essay.

  “Miss Denning’s niece, Pamela Exe, from Girton, is staying here with my sister and would like to see you—you remember her? I wanted to know if I could bring her round some time to-day. But she doesn’t want to meet masses of people at tea, you see.”

  “Pamela? Here in Oxford? Yes, of course; I should like very much to see her. Will you bring her at four, or earlier if it suits her. I’ll see that she isn’t bothered with people. Tell her, please, that I shall be very glad to see her.”

  Sally’s indignation was not lessened by the fact that he obviously remembered Pamela, whom he had only seen once, quite well. What a funny gaspy way he had of speaking through the telephone; but then he really was a medieval relic and it was quite natural that he should be unable to get over his surprise that a human voice should issue from the thing.

  Betty, meanwhile, was gently leading Pamela on to speak of her aunt. She felt that the girl wanted to get something off her chest and had no one else to confide in. Pamela’s forlorn situation appealed to Betty’s sense of responsibility as a married woman; she had definitely taken the girl under her wing and would look after her thoroughly.

  “We were sorry we didn’t see more of you at Bala,” she told Pamela. “But Basil’s an awfully late getter-up, and so we missed you that last morning and we had to go on that day because we’d promised to have tea with some people a long way off.”

  “I was awfully sorry too,” said Pamela, and paused. “We set out early on purpose,” she confessed suddenly. “Aunt Myra didn’t want me to see you again, I’m sure. She didn’t say anything, but she was very determined about that picnic and starting early. I’m rather glad to be able to talk about this, because it’s been worrying me a good deal and there’s no one else I can tell.” There was more than her usual hesitation between one word and the next, but she obviously wanted to confide in someone. “You see
, Aunt Myra was awfully good to me and gave up all her time to me when she wasn’t at Oxford and was always planning for my future, but she was a bit—difficult. She didn’t like it at all when I told her that Mr. Mort had been to see me. In fact, she said I wasn’t to see him again; we had rather a row over it.”

  They heard Sally’s approach and Betty wondered if this would put a stopper on Pamela’s flow of confidence, but Pamela quickly noticed the look of anxiety, and as Sally entered she said, quite boldly: “I was telling your sister how Aunt Myra didn’t like Mr. Mort coming to see me. In fact she went so far as to say she didn’t think he was a good influence. I wanted to ask you about him. I mean, there are such things as dons who always try to hold hands when you coach with them; I’ve never met them, but I’ve heard of them. He didn’t strike me as that sort at all. But Aunt Myra was a bit old-fashioned and she might take fright at the slightest rumour of that sort, and she never believed I could look after myself at all.”

  “I’m perfectly certain that the Morter’s frightfully respectable,” Sally assured her. “All that I ever heard about him is that he’s a complete hermit and is absolutely wrapped up in the middle-ages and the strip system and that sort of thing, and walks about without ever seeing anyone who passes.”

  “I felt sure he was all right,” Pamela replied. “And I think my first idea was right—that it was because he knew my father that Aunt Myra didn’t want me to see him. He knew my mother too, he told me, and so he must have known Aunt Myra as well, years ago, and if he’s been here for ages it was rather odd that she never said anything about him to me.” She switched away from the subject abruptly, as the waiter came in with coffee. “Is it all right for me to call this afternoon?” she asked Sally.