Excellent Intentions

by Richard Hull

  The doctor, when Fenby eventually reached him, was legitimately tired and rather disinclined to enter at length into the subject which had brought Fenby there but, sincerely though the Inspector thought it a monstrous imposition that he should be made to do so, he had to be induced to give a full account of what had happened because there was no denying that anyone concerned with Scotney End Hall or its neighbourhood might come under suspicion, and that Gardiner had been in a position to see their first reactions to the news, an opportunity which of course could only possibly occur once.

  He was, moreover, himself quick to see the point and it took very little tact on Fenby’s part to get him to talk, and when he did so, he proved to be of genuine assistance, for he first of all gave his story fully and without comment, and then ended by a few of his own reflections.

  “In a way, you know,” he said, “I am very glad to get all this off my chest for two reasons. First of all, did I do the right thing in letting that carriage be cleaned?”

  Privately Fenby had his own doubts, but it would have been almost cruel to have voiced them. “I think so,” he said. “I don’t imagine that there was anything more to be found out from it. Of course in theory—” Then seeing that Gardiner was looking anxiously at him, he went on hurriedly: “No, on the whole, I think it was best. At any rate there may be compensating advantages.”

  “Which brings me to my second reason for wanting to tell you all about it. At least I think that it does. I’ve had a nasty feeling all day that I wasn’t being quite honest. You see I let everybody think that in my opinion Cargate had died quite a natural death and all the time, or rather most of the time, I was almost certain that he had not. Consequently when Raikes turned and fled, and when Miss Knox Forster let slip that there had been a row between Cargate and Yockleton, I couldn’t help noticing it and at the same time I didn’t like it. It’s all very well for you. It’s your business, but it isn’t mine, and I felt that I was in a false position.”

  “Everybody has got to help the law of course. That’s rather a threadbare platitude and I know that it isn’t entirely consoling, but all the same it is true, and as you have done it, I’m going to take advantage of it.”

  “I was afraid you might.” Gardiner pulled a wry face.

  “If I do, that won’t be your fault; and I won’t bring you into it. All I shall do is to say that I am a detective sent up at the request of the Coroner to make formal investigations. I shall say that in view of the suddenness of the death, the Coroner feels that there must be an inquest, and that therefore enquiries must be made, despite the fact that I understand that Cargate’s own doctor is quite willing to sign almost any certificate. Then I shall begin to make those enquiries. All that I shall suppress is that I come from Scotland Yard and I shall apparently do my work superficially in rather a formal, almost stupid manner, so that everyone, everyone, will think that I am a conscientious but unimaginative sort of chap, fitted only to carry out routine work. I shall get more told to me in that way, and I want you to treat me as if I were such a person and not let anyone know who I really am.”

  “I shall keep quiet. In fact I probably shall not see anyone who is concerned, but I don’t think that you will get away with it.”

  “Why not?” Fenby looked a little hurt and then unexpectedly grinned. “After all, I am pretty stupid.”

  “You may be—though I doubt it. But anyone with as much intelligence as—let us say—the gardener will inevitably smell a rat. I should imagine that Miss Knox Forster must do so, and in the absence of anybody else, she’s rather in control down there.”

  “Until Ley comes down. I have warned him by the way not to talk—a feat which he may find difficult. But, if necessary, I shall have to take Miss Knox Forster into my confidence.”

  “You’ll find her a very useful ally.”

  “Shall I? That’s worth knowing, but I shall see how things go before I take her at all into my confidence. Meanwhile can you tell me anything about any of the staff who have stayed on. I understand that Cargate only came to live at Scotney End Hall quite recently. Also I should like to know more about the vicar.”

  “Cargate has only been there since the spring. I don’t remember the exact date. How long Miss Knox Forster has been in his employment I don’t know. Raikes, I have an impression, for some time, but the housemaids and so on are all new. The gardener is the only local man.”

  “Interesting; but how do you know all this as you weren’t his doctor?”

  “This is a country district and one’s business is not one’s own. Every action of a man in Cargate’s position would obviously be discussed at length, if not always with truth, and as I go on my rounds, they try to gossip to me in every cottage. I honestly do my best to stop them, not so much because it bores or embarrasses me, as because I have not got the time to waste. Nevertheless I am bound to get some of it, especially when there is a grievance, which was exactly what Scotney End had got. Cargate, you see, employed as few people locally as he could, and it made a considerable difference to the parish. They did not mind when it was somebody well established in Cargate’s household such as Raikes, but they did object to newly engaged cooks and housemaids. Hence their knowledge, forced upon me, and a rather nasty feeling in the village.”

  Fenby sighed. If everyone’s hand in Scotney End had been against Cargate, it broadened the field of his search and at the same time it might mean that everyone would rather shield the murderer than otherwise.

  “‘A considerable difference to the parish’,” he repeated. “That brings us back to the vicar.”

  “A very old friend of mine. The soul of honour who never did a dirty thing in his life and to whom everyone in Scotney End, everyone who really belonged there, that is, was devoted, and to all of whom he in his turn was genuinely attached.”

  “So much so that he might be prepared to go to great lengths to help them?”

  “Ridiculous. Of course I see what you mean, but you don’t know Yockleton.”

  “I don’t, and really so far only the vaguest ideas are in my mind. All the same it seems to me that paradoxically one can only connect him with it if he is an absolutely first-class man, prepared to sacrifice himself for the benefit of others.”

  “He is all that, but all the same—”

  “Oh! I agree. It’s very far-fetched and I don’t really mean it. Besides, in any case, a bad tenant is better than none at all, and big houses are very hard to let these days.”

  “Scotney End Hall isn’t so vast as that, and I must admit that it has always been said that it is one of the few houses for which there would always be a purchaser or an occupant of some sort. The old squire always said that he could have let it at any moment and he often talked of doing so. But every time that it came to the point he couldn’t bear, hard up though he was, to contemplate anyone else living there, even for a moment. Certainly when he died, his executors had no difficulty in selling it at once. I heard a rumour that they were rather sorry about it. The family’s recovered some of its money and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if they bought it back now. There’ll be great rejoicings in Scotney End if they do. But all the same, don’t get ideas into your head about Yockleton.”

  Fenby laughed and admitted that any ideas at all were premature. Nevertheless it did seem to him that so far Cargate’s death was proving too exclusively an unmixed benefit.

  “Probably,” he thought to himself, “I shall end by deciding to suspect only the people who are injured by it. I must say that I hope it won’t come to that. A purely altruistic murder would be the devil to solve. All the same I shall have to talk rather earnestly to the Reverend Mr. Yockleton.”

  Had Fenby but known it, the subject of Cargate’s death was at that moment keeping the vicar of Scotney End, a man who usually went to bed very early, sitting up in his study at an hour that he regarded as incredibly late.

  As yet, of co
urse, no word of Fenby had reached him. There had been talk of a Coroner, he understood, and his friend, Dr. Gardiner, had, he heard, strangely impounded the snuffbox, that beautiful piece of craftsmanship which he had always longed to examine more at his leisure, and which indeed he had had a brief chance to examine only the morning before, but these, so the vicar was told by Miss Knox Forster, were normal activities.

  Therefore it was not such things that were worrying him but the fight with his own conscience. For, for the first time in his life, he was glad of the death of a man, violently and unrestrainedly glad, and equally violently and unrestrainedly ashamed of being so delighted. Until the point was settled so that either he had ceased indecently to rejoice, or alternatively had come to an honest conclusion that it was not wicked to do so, there would be no sleep for him.

  From the very first moment when he had met Cargate he had felt that an evil influence had come into his life, or rather, and it mattered more to him, into the life of everyone in his parish. It was not that Cargate was rich; Yockleton was far beyond the cant of thinking that rich men must necessarily be bad or that they must necessarily have acquired their riches by devious means when in fact he did not know how they had been obtained. His complaint was not even that Cargate used his riches badly. In fact, Yockleton saw no harm in most of the things on which Cargate spent his money, which apparently consisted on the one hand of paying too much to those who did anything for him, and on the other, forming collections of objects varying from snuffboxes to postage stamps. There could be no objection to any of this, but there was harm, to Yockleton’s mind, in the open way in which Cargate flaunted and worshipped his wealth.

  Next came the question of religion. Yockleton was not a narrow-minded man and he was prepared to believe, though with difficulty, that there could be good in those who neglected to pay even a formal lip service to the Church of England or any other form of Christian worship. It would have been hard for him to have as his principal parishioner one who was not a member of his flock, but it would not have produced the intensity of feeling which he had if Cargate had not so openly sneered at religion of all sorts. When, for instance, Cargate, with a very real interest in the subject, had wanted to pull down the vestry or break open two tombs, simply in order to find out if there were really as he believed the remains of something, and Yockleton had never quite found out what, underneath, he had been genuinely hurt and shocked; and Cargate, with whom archaeology was occasionally an overmastering passion, had been almost equally shocked at his refusal.

  Then there had been differences of opinion about employment in the parish, for to Yockleton the first duty of the man who lived at Scotney End Hall was to see to the welfare of the inhabitants of Scotney End. As an idea it might have been dubbed not unfairly as old-fashioned, out-moded relic of squire-archy, but it was generally held by the vicar as a duty, and to his mind people ought in no circumstances ever to neglect their duties. Whereas Cargate regarded the village people as surly, unfriendly, incompetent, and wished so far as possible to ignore their very existence. The only thing that he could see in their favour was that they seemed to want, in their turn, to ignore him. Unfortunately that was a delusion.

  The state of affairs then, when on the morning of Thursday, July 12th, Yockleton had gone up in a last desperate effort to bring Cargate round to his way of thinking, had been anything but propitious. Even Yockleton himself had known really that his visit could serve no useful purpose, but he had felt that he ought to try. His actual excuse was the return to Scotney End of a possible under-gardener, known locally as Scottish Hardy.

  It should be explained that in the village the Hardys were so numerous and so invariably christened William, that they were usually distinguished by adding their occupation or abode—both Hardy the Hedger and Hardy Except were well-recognized descriptions, the latter living in a row of cottages built by a pious man who had caused to be inscribed along their entire front: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain who build it.”

  Scottish Hardy, however, had not found work in the village. He had—and the village was inclined to regard the action as in doubtful taste—joined the army as an accidental result, due to an adventurous disposition, of going up to London to see the Cup Final, which incidentally he never reached. There were several rather confused stages before he reached the recruiting office, but even so he had never intended to do anything more exotic than join the battalion of his own county, but an excessive emphasis on the name of the village in which he lived had resulted in the authorities, who in any case found his East Anglian speech hard to follow, placing him in what they understood was his local battalion, the Royal Scots Fusiliers.

  Now, after a period of reasonably blameless and quite undistinguished service, followed by a period at a vocational training centre, he found himself unemployed and alleged to be trained as a gardener. Even Yockleton felt a little doubtful as to how exhaustive was the training which had been crammed into the last few weeks or months of his service.

  But he had no doubt that Cargate, who wanted several gardeners, ought to give Scottish Hardy a trial and a certain amount of additional training. Cargate, however, did not see it in the very least.

  “What I need are competent people who know their jobs,” was the opinion that he expressed. “I am neither capable nor willing to teach people what they ought to know before I employ them.”

  “But you have got a man he would work under.”

  “And a fat lot he knows, so far as I can see.”

  “But he’s been here for years and years!”

  “And learned nothing the whole time.”

  Yockleton was nothing if not persevering. “Scottish Hardy has had some training, you know.”

  “You don’t call an army vocational centre training, do you? Just a smattering of knowledge is all they give them, so that they can impose themselves upon a trusting public.”

  “I really think that they do more for them than that. I’m only suggesting that you give him a trial. If he doesn’t prove to be any good, well, then it’s a different matter, but I’m sure he will. For one thing he’s a disciplined man and so he’ll be easy to teach.”

  But Cargate had laughed openly at that suggestion.

  “They don’t stay in the army long enough to get discipline as a second nature, and directly they come out, they react at once and become quite impossible. All they remember or ever learn in the army is how to dodge work, and they are pretty good at doing that.”

  “I do not agree with you. Not for a moment.” The vicar was on the verge of losing his temper. “Besides, I can’t help being aware of the fact that accommodation for anyone who does not belong here is very difficult to get. Now Scottish Hardy’s family live just by the post-office—”

  “I am aware—very well aware—of the difficulties placed in my way in this village and I think,” he looked significantly at Yockleton, “that I know to whom I am entitled to attribute the presence of those impediments.”

  “Are you suggesting—?”

  “I am.” Cargate did not believe it for a moment but he wanted to be done with the vicar’s interferences once and for all. “I’m not quite such a fool as you appear to think that I am, and when I find organized obstruction amongst a lot of uneducated peasants who would be quite unable for themselves to think of any practical method of expressing the dislike with which they honour me, and quite unable to carry it out if they did, I look round to see who can be the organizer, and when I find only one person present who can possibly have sufficient intelligence to devise the scheme, well, I put two and two together.”

  “Of course if you start from a series of utterly false premises, it is possible to build up a logical structure and arrive at results which are grotesquely absurd—”

  “I always start from known facts. I must apparently remind you that you yourself mentioned that difficulties were being put in my way.”
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br />   “They certainly are. But they arise not from me, though I will admit that there are many aspects of your conduct which make the carrying out of my duties difficult. I had hoped to discuss some of those with you to-day, but in the mood in which we both are, that would be impossible.”

  “Quite. Suppose then that this interview ceases? Once and for all.”

  “Those difficulties arise,” Yockleton went on, ignoring the interruption and determined to go on with what he felt it was his duty to say, “from the spontaneous action and unanimous opinion of everyone in Scotney End—”

  “And you really pretend that that opinion has not been carefully coached? Would it surprise you to know that I have proof of that?”

  “It would indeed.”

  “Very well then, I shall give it to you.” Cargate turned to ring the bell and then stopped. “On the whole,” he said, “I think that I shall get it myself. It’s a very simple proof but I forget exactly where I put it.”

  In a few minutes he was back again in the room and striding indignantly to the fireplace where he angrily pulled the bell.

  “That clock in the hall is slow again, Raikes,” he said when the butler appeared. “It is now 11.17 and it points to 11.15. I told you yesterday to have it put right.”

  “The man from Great Barwick, sir, has not yet—”

  “I told you to have it put right. Now, Mr. Yockleton, it may surprise you to know that I take in your parish—” Cargate broke off suddenly. “I see you are looking at my snuffbox, a beautiful thing, is it not? It belonged to one of the Prince Regent’s friends who, like myself, took an occasional pinch. I expect he took it more often than the once every other day that I permit myself. That is his monogram worked round that central emerald. By the way, Mr. Yockleton, that emerald was there this morning when I handed it to Raikes to clean out some fragments that lingered in it of stale snuff. It’s very strange that it should be missing just after you have been looking at it. However, to return to your parish magazine. This article of yours on ‘The Duty of Mutual Help’ in a small community such as you rightly observe, Scotney End is, would seem—”