Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)

by Mavis Doriel Hay

  “There she is!” cried Basil cheerfully, making a loud scrunch with his heel on the gravel as he halted.

  The man heard, for he started up and came towards the window, crossing the path of light as he did so. Betty, anxious to see him, peered in and she noticed a strange look on his face; was it alarm, horror or merely surprise? In a moment he was in front of the lamp, opening the window, and had become merely a featureless silhouette.

  “We’ve called for Pamela,” Basil explained. “Sorry we lost our way and went blundering round your garden. We’ll come round to the door.”

  Mr. Mort murmured something and shut the window.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  SCOTLAND YARD GOES UP THE RIVER

  IT was Monday morning and Braydon sat in consultation with the superintendent. Braydon was considering a sheet of paper covered with neat notes.

  “Extraordinary amount of coming and going on Friday afternoon along that route from the Parks, over the footbridge, to Ferry House and Persephone College,” Braydon remarked.

  “Rather odd how none of these people met each other, isn’t it, sir?” Wythe inquired.

  “Take a look at the time-table,” said Braydon, flicking the paper towards him.

  Miss Denning leaves Perse. Coll.

  boathouse 1.45

  passes under Parks bridge a bit before 2

  ditto, return journey ?2.47

  arrives Perse. Coll. boathouse 4.16

  Bayes on Parks bridge a bit before 2

  ditto, return journey ?2.47

  Lidgett in fields by river 2.15–3.5, roughly

  meets Bayes in field ?2.40

  Draga Czernak crosses Ferry House

  footpath about 2.15

  Parks bridge ” 2.20

  reaches Sim’s ” 2.30

  leaves Sim’s ” 3.30

  Parks bridge again about 3.40

  Ferry House footpath ” 3.45

  Mort leaves Sim’s 2.45

  Parks bridge 2.55

  Ferry House footpath 3

  ditto, return journey 4.5

  Parks bridge 4.10

  Sim’s 4.20

  Lond arrives at Ferry House

  (possibly) via Ferry Road

  and the lane 3.30

  Wythe studied this for some moments.

  “Seems to me, sir, that Mr. Mort should have overtaken Lidgett in the fields between the Parks bridge and the lane, but he declared in his statement that he saw no one besides Bayes in those fields,” Wythe commented.

  “It’s still possible that Bayes was right in his first idea that he crossed the bridge the second time just after three and that Lidgett came rather more slowly along the bank on Friday than he did with you yesterday. Then Mort might have got across the bridge before Bayes arrived there and would have been well ahead of Lidgett.”

  “Yes, sir.” Wythe studied the schedule. “It seems impossible that anyone could have moved through those fields more slowly than we did yesterday.”

  Braydon laughed. “Anyhow, it’s certain that unless the canoe really passed under the bridge after three, Lidgett couldn’t have run after the canoe and murdered Miss Denning in those fields, because Mort would have seen him. Even an unobservant man could hardly miss a murder right in his path.”

  “That’s true,” Wythe agreed disconsolately.

  “There’s another thing about that schedule,” Braydon continued. “Miss Czernak’s times, as they stand, don’t help us at all. It’s rather odd how they avoid overlapping with all the others. But they have only been guessed at by Coniston and may be all out. I’m going to see her and try to check her schedule. Now, here’s a pretty thing!” He handed Wythe a page from Gwyneth’s Beowulf note-book, on which she had inscribed a fairly accurate copy of Giles Lond’s rhyme.

  Wythe studied it earnestly. “It doesn’t seem to mean much, except that someone, apparently Lond, can’t spell and that a woman is dead. Did he write it?”

  “One of his ancestors carved it on the mantelpiece, in the days when nobody cared whether they could spell or not, and Ezekiel Lond chipped it off on Saturday night. The Londs have always had a superstition about this rhyme and thought it would bring them bad luck if it became generally known. He knows that we were suspicious about him and has wit enough to guess that we would search his house. I think he got into a panic about it, perhaps thinking it would draw still stronger suspicion upon him, and so he removed it.”

  “At the same time, if he had brought death upon some woman, as the rhyme says, he might think it was a kind of evidence against him and want to remove it for that reason; at least, so it seems to me, sir,” Wythe suggested.

  “It’s possible,” Braydon agreed. “The thing can be explained either way. It’s not evidence, but I’m quite glad to know what he was doing when those girls looked through the window. What is far more to the point, I believe, is this.” Braydon took up Miss Denning’s bank pass-book, which Wythe had obtained for him on the previous day from a bank manager reluctantly stirred from Sunday sloth. He took from between the pages a long slip of paper covered with figures and dates. “I’ve had the manager on the telephone this morning, but he knows nothing about these payments except that they have continued at irregular intervals for years. It’s not his business, of course, to be inquisitive, but he thinks Miss Denning remarked on some occasion that the money was paid to her for her niece. Miss Denning obviously paid all the girl’s expenses—school fees, college fees, doctor’s and dentist’s bills and so forth—from her own private account and gave the girl a small monthly allowance as well. There’s no trace of trust money or anything of that kind, so far as I can see, but I’m going to make another inquiry on that point.”

  “You mean, sir,” Wythe asked, “that Miss Denning received money from someone in cash and used it for her niece’s education and keep?”

  “That’s the idea,” Braydon confirmed. “What she received in cash has been more than enough, for some years past, to cover her outlay on behalf of her niece—so far as I have been able to isolate that expenditure from the rest. But she was a careful woman, I should judge. She made small investments from time to time and some of these probably represent the balance of what she received in these cash payments. There’s nothing in her pass-book to show that they were earmarked for a particular purpose, but I shouldn’t be surprised to find some private record—though I haven’t lighted upon it among her papers yet—keeping a tally of what she received for her niece, what she paid out and what she invested.”

  “Then she doesn’t seem to have made much personal profit out of the affair—whatever it was?” asked Wythe. “That’s queer, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure that it is, from what I hear of Miss Denning,” said Braydon meditatively. “The accumulation of money for someone she was very fond of might have been as powerful a motive with her as private gain would be to someone else. Also there’s another point, which I’ll come to in a moment. But just now the point is that for many years these sums, generally not very large—fifty pounds seems the maximum—have been paid by Miss Denning into her account, in notes. We know what that looks like.”

  Whatever it looked like did not seem pleasing to Inspector Wythe, who indeed had received all this information with an expression of doubt. “Of course, sir,” he suggested, “the bursar of a college handles large sums of money. Undergrads have all sorts of funny little ways; some of ’em might pay their fees in cash. Without suggesting any hanky-panky—which we might look for in a case of suicide, but which doesn’t seem to come into this—isn’t it possible that she found it convenient to pay money into the college account by cheque and——”

  “Wythe! You’re an incurable romantic!” Braydon interrupted. “You’re longing for a solution in which a crazed old man, a deserted Elizabethan house and a rhymed curse carved therein, shall all figure. You reject anything so sordid as blackmail, without really bringing your mind to bear on it. Think, man! The bursar might find it convenient to take cash which was paid to
the college and use it for her personal expenses, replacing it by her own cheque; but you can’t pretend that there would be any point in paying that cash into her own account, unless she were embezzling it. There’s no indication of that. We must trace where that money came from.”

  “Yes, sir,” Wythe agreed meekly. “Somehow blackmail—well, it’s difficult to fit in with my ideas of these university dons.”

  “I know,” said Braydon. “We’re all apt to get fixed ideas about people; classify them and label them and say ‘this lot are liable to go in for such and such crimes’; ‘this lot don’t.’ But we’ve got to remember all the time to allow for the exceptions.”

  “You’ve got some idea, I take it, as to where that money did come from?” Wythe inquired more amenably, soothed by the Scotland Yard man’s generalizations.

  “Yes, I have. To begin with, I suspect that it came to her in larger amounts; she may have kept some for her own use and paid only the balance into her bank account. Or she may have paid it all into her bank in instalments. I think she avoided paying in large bundles of notes, with the idea that that would be too noticeable. So what you may find is withdrawals of larger sums in notes, at longer intervals. If you can find the account of Mr. Denis Mort of St. Simeon’s College, I think you will trace that money.”

  Wythe gazed aghast at Braydon. “Mort!” he muttered.

  “I’m afraid I haven’t been quite fair,” Braydon confessed. “But until last night the pieces of the puzzle didn’t fit together to make up the picture. I still thought there might be some quite different solution, and I was trying to test the other possibilities. What first directed my ideas towards him was his apparent reluctance to answer any of my questions directly, the first time I saw him.”

  “Did you have any suspicion before you went?”

  “Not really,” said Braydon. “As I told you at the time, it seemed, from what the girls said, that he had been near the river at what might have been an important time, and there was a possibility that he could tell us something useful. I did give some thought to a chance remark of Miss Watson’s, that he turned up for the coaching in very shabby old trousers and shoes, his gardening kit which he’d forgotten to change, he told her. But she said, when I asked her, that she didn’t notice that they were particularly muddy, except for the shoes. They could have picked up mud anywhere—but of course there was the mark on Lond’s bank to consider.”

  Wythe frowned over this. “I don’t quite follow it yet,” he admitted. “But just how did he answer your questions, sir?”

  “Of course one had to consider the character of the man; an accurate scholar is often vague on practical everyday matters. But it struck me that he very carefully avoided saying exactly what he did on Friday afternoon. He answered with generalizations, as if he didn’t want to say what actually happened but didn’t find it easy to lie. I asked, ‘Did you take the footpath?’ and he replied, ‘One naturally takes that path.’ That sort of thing. It seemed to be rather more than mere donnish vagueness. The only thing he was quite certain about was the Ferry House boathouse is hidden from view in every direction. It’s significant, you see, that a man who isn’t normally very observant should have noticed that so particularly.”

  “Yes, I see. But what I don’t see yet, sir, is the connection between this man Mort and Miss Denning,” said Wythe, frowning.

  “I’ve picked up scraps of evidence here and there and I feel pretty sure that Mort is the illegitimate father of Miss Denning’s niece.”

  “So that was the pull she had for her blackmail!” Wythe exclaimed. “But I shouldn’t have thought that a man like that would have jibbed at providing for his daughter.”

  “That’s the other point I mentioned just now,” Braydon remarked. “I think that the sense of power over this man, heightened by the atmosphere of intrigue, which the situation gave Miss Denning, was probably as important to her as the actual getting of money. Doubtless she could have received the money in some more businesslike and regular way, but I think she didn’t want to. Mort isn’t a business man, and if Miss Denning didn’t choose to help him he probably saw no way of financing the girl secretly, until she was of age.”

  “You mean to say, sir, that she actually chose to go up the river by canoe, to see him and collect the money from time to time—for I take it that was what she did go for?” Wythe exclaimed, incredulously again.

  “I’m sorry,” Braydon apologized again. “It is rather a queer story, but I believe that’s the fact, and I think she probably enjoyed it. Mind you, the evidence is by no means complete, and if we give the alarm too soon, Mort may remember to destroy something which perhaps it is still possible to find. Keep this very quiet. I’m going to test the time on the river and make a few inquiries and see what I can pick up. I’ll leave you to think out just how it happened, and to go through Miss Denning’s room and see if you can find anything that looks like a record of that money. It’s not in her bureau, but it may be concealed in some place where you wouldn’t expect to find it. Will you have Miss Denning’s canoe taken back to the college boathouse and put in the water there. I shall probably be ready to embark in an hour, or less. Oh, you needn’t be anxious! I have some skill with the paddles.”

  Braydon went first to the Mitre and sent a message to Mrs. Pongleton. In a few minutes Betty appeared in the lounge.

  “Good morning, Inspector,” were her words. But her voice and look said, “What on earth do you want? Is there any trouble that concerns Pamela?”

  “Mrs. Pongleton, I want to ask Miss Exe a few questions about Miss Denning’s financial affairs,” Braydon explained. “I don’t think they will be very difficult; she will either know the answers or she won’t. You can be present if you think that will reassure her, and then you can see that I don’t try any third degree!”

  “Yes, I think Pamela might find it less alarming if I were there,” Betty agreed, reassured by his friendly smile. “She and I are just finishing breakfast. If you will go up to our sitting-room, where you came yesterday, I will bring her along.”

  Betty, with Pamela, followed close on Braydon’s heels. Pamela gave him a long, searching look from her blue eyes when Betty introduced him.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your breakfast,” he apologized, “but one small point in connection with Miss Denning’s financial affairs has cropped up, which you may be able to settle for us.”

  “I-I knew practically nothing about Aunt Myra’s m-money matters,” said Pamela. “She p-paid my college fees and everything and gave me an allowance.”

  “Do you happen to know whether your aunt held any money in trust for you? Or was there any other trustee, perhaps, of money that may have been left for you by your parents?”

  “T-that’s rather difficult,” Pamela confessed. “B-but I’m sure no one else held money in trust for me. I d-don’t think there was exactly a t-trust at all, but I know that my father left some money for me; Aunt Myra once told me that.”

  “He left it to your aunt, perhaps; and it was at her discretion to use it as she thought best, for your education and so forth?” Braydon suggested.

  “Y-yes.” Pamela obviously felt that there was something here which demanded explanation, but she made no comment.

  Braydon caught Betty’s puzzled look. She, also, was struck by the thought that this was an unexpected arrangement, considering the antagonism which had apparently existed between Pamela’s father and her aunt.

  “I’m sure Aunt Myra had charge of the money,” Pamela continued, after a pause. “You see, I think she had an idea that I sh-shouldn’t bother about money until I was of age, and so she d-didn’t tell me details, though I d-did ask because I thought it was better that I should know how I stood. Aunt Myra would only say that there was plenty. Sh-she was awfully generous to me. I sometimes wondered if she wouldn’t tell me because there was really very little and she was making it up from her own.” Pamela paused again, and then added: “I’m sorry. I haven’t explained at all well,
but really it was so vague!”

  “Thank you very much. I think that does explain it. Now I’ll leave you to your coffee and marmalade. I hate to be interrupted myself until I’ve finished my sixth cup. Good-bye!”

  Betty followed Braydon downstairs and when he parted from her in the lounge he held her hand a moment after taking his leave.

  “Look after that child!” he added hurriedly. “I’m very much afraid that the solution of this business may give her an even worse time than she has had already. In fact, if you could get her away from Oxford immediately after the inquest, it might be as well. Keep her with you somewhere for a day or two, but let me know where you are.”

  With that he was gone.

  He walked rapidly along the High, turned up Cat’s and strode on to Persephone College. Here he asked for Miss Cordell and was presently shown into the principal’s study.

  He noticed her strained look as she turned from her bureau to face him. In truth she was suffering not only from worry over the mysterious death of Miss Denning and the ensuing publicity, which alone was enough to make her nights miserably wakeful. Worse still was the sense that she had lost a friend on whose personality she had become dependent.

  “Good morning, Miss Cordell. I want to ask if I may have a few words with Miss Czernak. No—” Braydon continued hastily as he saw her expression of anxiety—“nothing wrong, but she may be able to tell me something that may help to fix a time.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Miss Cordell, “the Slav race has an ill-developed sense of time; I have noticed it when travelling in eastern Europe and I see it again in Draga Czernak.”

  “But still, I may be able to get something useful,” said Braydon cheerfully.