The Man Who Grew Tomatoes Page 12

  “I shall remain at my house in Kensington until I get it.”

  Immediately after breakfast on the following morning, her car left Norfolk for London. There she looked up Mrs. Hal in the telephone directory and intimated that she proposed to call on her. Mrs. Hal, who sounded flustered, suggested three o’clock on the following afternoon but added that, on her tiny income and with a son to keep, she could not afford to assist charities, even the most deserving. Dame Beatrice reassured her and rang off, surprised that so astute a schemer as she conceived Mrs. Hal to be should have accepted her bona fides without question.

  A very youthful maid answered the door. The flat was on the third floor of a converted Edwardian residence and—there was no doubt about it—it was shabby. Dame Beatrice, however, felt no compunction. She disliked anonymous missives more than she disliked professional money-lenders and almost as much as she disliked blackmail. She came to the point at once.

  “Mrs. Camber, when it is necessary I represent authority. I hope it will not be necessary in this case. These letters you are sending to Norfolk must stop at once.”

  There was not as much stuffing in Mrs. Hal as she had been led to expect. The little woman began to bluster, but her white face and frightened eyes told their own story. In the face of her denials, Dame Beatrice said calmly:

  “Your child can be questioned, you know. He addressed the envelopes. Furthermore, I am prepared to get the police to check your movements at the various places between London and Norwich where you posted the letters. I advise you to drop the whole thing, Mrs. Camber. It can do no good to your son, your possible future husband, or yourself.”

  “I…there is no question of a future husband! I am true to my first husband’s memory.”

  “It will be as well, perhaps, for you if you are!”

  “It isn’t fair!” cried Mrs. Hal, tears springing to her eyes. “It isn’t fair! Why should my child be deprived? Why should I have to live in this sort of squalor when little Peter could be the owner of Camber if only Hugh wouldn’t be so wicked and selfish!”

  “His forthcoming marriage you mean, of course. I can understand your disappointment, but who could have supposed that the other child would be drowned? With him and Mr. Hugh Camber between your son and the ownership of the property, you could hardly have had hopes of the inheritance.”

  “How did you find out that Peter addressed the envelopes?”

  “It was a child’s writing and the anonymous letters could only have come from you. You learnt from Peter, who stayed with him while you were in hospital, that Mr. Hugh Camber was proposing to marry. You learnt, from the same source, the name of the girl and where she lived.”

  “My child is innocent!”

  “I am perfectly sure of that. The crime of using the information he gave you, in the way it has been used, is yours, of course. You yourself wrote the letter you claimed to have received while you were in hospital. You thought that, if you could show that you also were a victim of the anonymous hand, you could not be suspected of having provided that hand. It is the oldest and most uniformly unsuccessful trick of all, as you would have realised if you had given a little more thought to the matter instead of embarking upon a rather contemptible little game of bluff. Well, I have given you my advice. No more letters.”

  She took her leave upon these last words and did not wait for the maid-servant to show her out. Mrs. Hal, however, after a moment of hesitation, almost ran after her and caught up with her at the foot of the stairs.

  “I’m really grateful,” panted Héloïse. “It was good of you to come. I’m quite upset with myself. I was cross when I knew that Hugh had decided to marry. After all, you can’t really blame a mother for trying to stand up for her child’s rights.”

  “But it was not a question of his rights, Mrs. Camber. It might have been a question of his good fortune, but nothing more. Mr. Hugh Camber is in a position, I understand, to do what he will with the Abbey?”

  “You are very hard, Dame Beatrice!”

  “Clear-headed, perhaps. Good day, Mrs. Camber.”

  She returned to the tall narrow house in Kensington to find her secretary with a dozen or more requests for appointments.

  “I haven’t made any,” said Laura, “because I didn’t know when you were likely to be free. Oh, and there’s a telegram.”

  Dame Beatrice sheafed through the letters.

  “Nothing there that cannot wait until I get back from Scotland,” she said.

  “Scotland! When do we go? Kindly remember that it is my native land, the land I love the most. You do want an escort, don’t you? Whereabouts in Scotland?”

  Dame Beatrice answered the last question first, but not until she had opened and read the telegram. As she anticipated, it came from Hugh Camber, and read: Brunton hotel near Strathpeffer called Osseuch Hydro.

  “Near Strathpeffer,” said Dame Beatrice. “The Osseuch Hydropathic Hotel—”

  “Oh, I know it! At least, I know of it. So that’s where we go? Does Mr. Camber come with us?” demanded Laura.

  “No. He would only embarrass the enquiry at this stage. Later on we may require his help, but the preliminary negotiations must be conducted by experts.”

  “Many thanks for putting the ultimate mot in the plural. When do we start?”

  “As soon as I have been in communication with Robert.”

  “But Gavin doesn’t cut any ice in Scotland—apart from being a Scot himself, I mean.”

  “His writ will run sufficiently for me to impress the hotel manager, child. Please get New Scotland Yard on the telephone and find out whether your husband can dine with us.”

  On the following morning she and Laura were driven northwards to Harrogate, where they spent the night. From Harrogate next day they crossed the Border and spent the night in Edinburgh, where both had friends and Laura an aunt. Laura visited her aunt, but Dame Beatrice ignored the friends and spent the following morning perusing newspaper files.

  “Our progress seems a bit leisurely,” said Laura, “if we’re on the track of a murderer.” The two of them had met for lunch and Dame Beatrice had announced the result of her researches.

  “You anticipate, child. All I expect to obtain from this excursion is a little more information about Mr. Paul Camber’s last holiday and an indication, I hope, of his state of mind immediately before his death,” she said. “Curious that he was wearing no jacket when he was found, and that the body was only partly submerged.”

  “That means you haven’t ruled out suicide, then?”

  “Mr. Hugh Camber has ruled it out, but, considering that Mr. Paul had recently suffered the loss of his only son, I am not prepared to be dogmatic.”

  “This Mrs. Hal Camber—?”

  “We shall see. You have heard of a pawn on the chessboard, no doubt?”

  They reached Strathpeffer in due course and were well received at the Osseuch Hydro Hotel. It was a few miles out of the town and was the haunt, it appeared, of salmon fishers, for the Falls of Osseuch were famous and the salmon, still fairly fresh from the sea, in good shape in spite of the fact that they were already on starvation diet preparatory to spawning in the late autumn.

  Dame Beatrice booked rooms for a fortnight. The trail of the murderer (if there was one) would be so old, she decided, that a delay of up to ten or fourteen days in attempting to find evidence of it would make no difference to the outcome of the enquiry. The month of March was almost at its end but, in spite of the cold weather and the promise of more snow, Laura, she felt, would enjoy having her feet upon her native heath.

  Dame Beatrice herself soon discovered enough to lend considerable weight to her original theory. Paul Camber might not have been entirely alone when he was drowned. He had set off in the early morning in a chauffeur-driven hired car, accompanied by a Mr. Smith.

  “This Mr. Smith was another guest at the hotel, I take it?” Dame Beatrice said to the hall porter. It appeared that Mr. Smith had joined Mr. Camber during the third day
of his stay. They had often gone out together, usually for fishing. Dame Beatrice sought out the receptionist.

  “Have you Mr. Smith’s home address?”

  “I could scarcely give you that, madam.”

  “Very proper. Perhaps I could see the manager.”

  “Certainly.” The girl smiled and Dame Beatrice nodded.

  “The English police,” she said, when he appeared, “have reason to believe, in spite of the findings at the inquest, that Mr. Camber’s death was no accident, but was the result of foul play. As I am attached to the Home Office in a special capacity, that of consulting psychiatrist, I am making some preliminary enquiries in order to find out whether there are any grounds upon which the police can proceed.” She produced such formidable credentials that the hotel manager cautiously agreed to answer her questions.

  “What did he really look like, this Mr. Smith with whom Mr. Camber seems to have gone fishing?” she enquired.

  “Oh, a man of middle height, stocky, dark-haired, clean-shaven. There would be a hundred, maybe a thousand, like him.”

  “An Englishman?”

  “Not a Scot, maybe. He had a queer, sing-song accent.”

  “Have you any idea of his profession or occupation?”

  “No, no, but I put him down as an open-air kind of man—although I could not say why. He talked mainly of salmon-fishing, as was natural, although, to my mind, he knew very little about it.”

  “When Mr. Camber went fishing, did he go alone?”

  “He went out alone until Mr. Smith joined him.”

  “Smith can be a Scottish name, can it not?”

  “Aye, but it can be English, too.”

  “Did he catch salmon?—Mr. Camber, I mean.”

  “He had great stories always, but we saw no fish. Maybe he would have sent them straight to England without bringing them back here, but it is most unlikely. He was the kind of man to flourish a big fish.”

  “True of all anglers, I dare say.” She departed in search of her secretary and they went in to dinner. Early next morning she had the car brought round and, having enquired the way to the Falls of Osseuch, she and Laura went to visit them.

  “This is as near as I can get the car, madam,” said her chauffeur, respectfully and with regret, pulling up on the narrow hill-road opposite an unobtrusive signpost which read: Falls of Osseuch. “It will be down the path there, but I am informed it involves very rough walking.”

  “We shall manage,” said Dame Beatrice; and, accompanied by Laura, she essayed a downhill, steepish slope broken here and there by boulders. About a quarter of a mile of walking brought them within sight of the river as it leapt, foamed, cascaded, and roared over and around the formidable rocks in its bed. It was a notable salmon-leap and a very impressive one.

  “So this is the place?” said Laura. “Do you mind if I leave you here to admire the view while I have a scramble around?”

  “I shall be glad to have a little time for thought, child. Scramble as you will, but do not break a limb if you can help it.” She climbed on to a boulder of convenient height and gazed with pensive interest at the foaming river, and, from time to time, followed the progress of her secretary, as Laura, emulating the chamois, leapt, as it seemed to her fascinated employer, from crag to crag when she was not negotiating the smooth and treacherous rocks which offered a precarious surface of clay-like colour and slipperiness on the higher banks of the stream.

  Behind her she heard the sound of footsteps. She turned her head and saw a young man approaching. She came to a decision, got up, and barred his way. He stopped politely and raised his tweed hat.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “If you will. The cousin of a friend of mine was drowned here while he was fishing. Whereabouts would he have fallen in? You may have read of the occurrence. It happened last summer. A man named Camber—”

  “Oh, yes, I heard about that.”

  “I really should like to see the place.”

  “Oh, well, look here, if I give you a hand, I daresay you can manage to get down, and then I can show you the very spot, if local gossip can be trusted.”

  “That is extremely kind of you. We could not imagine how it happened, but I suppose anybody playing a fish could slip into the river from those rocks.”

  “If he’d hooked a big fish he might have missed his footing, I suppose, but the fact seems to have been”—he paused and weighed up his companion carefully—“he seems, from all accounts, to have been extremely drunk at the time.”

  “But I understood that he was alone when he was drowned.”

  “My story comes from local gossip, as I indicated, but there isn’t much doubt about its truth. The people around these parts are not given to exaggeration. They appear to have been deeply shocked by his rather uninhibited behaviour.”

  “How did he behave?”

  “Oh, laughing and shouting and staggering about, so I heard. There seems to have been a coach-driver with a party from Lancashire who came down to look at the Falls and try to get a glimpse of a salmon. The driver swore to his condition.”

  “These details do not appear to have engaged any interest at the time.”

  “Well, the man was drowned, and drunkenness, in itself, is not exactly a crime. Now, mind how you come! This path is steep and a bit slippery. Let me give you a hand.”

  At the foot of the precipitous little path there was a congestion of variously-shaped rocks. Her conductor insisted upon hauling Dame Beatrice up the smooth, slightly inclined surface of what appeared to be a species of greenish clay but which was as firm as granite beneath her feet, and from the top of it he indicated the igneous rocks and the granite boulders which lay in the course of the stream. He pointed:

  “He must have gone in about there.”

  Dame Beatrice followed the pointing finger, at first with her eyes and then (to the almost ludicrous horror of the stranger) by descending, with the sure-footed confidence of a goat, to the edge of the wild waters. There was a deep pool under the rocky margin of the stream, an oasis of quiet, peat-brown innocence beyond which the foaming torrent leapt and sang.

  In a moment the fisherman was beside her, and they stood side by side, their elbows touching, on a narrow neck of rock, a tiny peninsula around the end of which the deep brown pool was placidly untroubled by the turbulence of the stream. Behind them Laura’s voice spoke softly.

  “Well, well! I thought I was the one to do the scrambling!”

  “So you are, child, so you are,” said Dame Beatrice, without turning her head. Her companion was considerably startled, however, and only Dame Beatrice’s iron fingers on his coat-sleeve prevented him from tumbling into the river. “I can see how easily it could happen,” she went on, conversationally. “Yes, indeed. Have you regained your balance?”

  “Thanks, yes. I’m much obliged to you. I should hate to fall in just here.”

  “Very narrow, and obviously dangerous, much more so than the pool in which Mr. Camber’s body was found. And now I think I will just cross the river for the view. May I enquire your name?”

  “Wayland. Can I help you up the slope?”

  “No, no. Laura will cope. The little path I espied as we descended to water-level should lead to the bridge, I fancy. Yes, the stream is noticeably narrow, here in the gorge. I suppose one would call it a gorge? It is as narrow, one would say, as the weedy dyke in Norfolk in which Paul Camber’s son met his death.”

  “Yes, quite as narrow,” said Wayland.

  “So there’s our murderer,” said Laura, when they had left him well behind and were almost in sight of their car.

  “You jump to conclusions, child.”

  “And how! Do you really mean to tell me that this Wayland didn’t follow us down here to find out what we were up to?”

  “Who can say? But your natural instincts are not altogether at fault. There is something very interesting about Mr. Wayland. I wonder…”

  “I don’t,” said Laura, with finalit
y. “I don’t wonder at all. I’m sure he followed us. Didn’t you notice him flapping his ears when you were talking to the receptionist this morning? If I hadn’t seen through him and come along when I did, I wouldn’t put it past him to have pushed you into the river.”

  “I had no such eventuality in mind, child. I do agree, however, that we should not altogether lose sight of Mr. Wayland, although I do not believe that Wayland is his name.”

  “There you are, you see. You do think he was up to N.B.G. My instinct, indeed. What about your own? I certainly think we should hang about and keep an eye on him for a bit. It strikes me he could bear watching pretty closely. You notice that he knew about the boy’s death? That means that he’s got a pretty fishy finger in the pie.”

  Dame Beatrice made no reply, and they climbed the steep and muddy path to where the chauffeur was waiting with the car.

  “There is just one thing,” said Dame Beatrice, when she got back to the hotel, “that I have to enquire of you, Mr. McKintyre. You remember that, on the morning of his death, Mr. Camber left here in a hired car accompanied by Mr. Smith?”

  “Only so that Mr. Camber could be put off at the Osseuch Water to fish, while Mr. Smith went on to Strathpeffer station to catch the London train.”

  “And did he catch it?”

  “Oh, yes. He was sworn to at the station. The Fiscal would have required his evidence if he had been with Mr. Camber at the time of the drowning.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “So that’s that,” said Laura.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Wayland, but Not Smith

  “No drought upon thy wanton waters fall

  To make them Leane, and languishing at all.

  No ruffling winds come hither to discease

  Thy pure, and Silver-Wristed Naides.

  Keep up your state, ye streams; and as ye spring,

  Never make sick your Banks by surfeiting.”

  Robert Herrick

  “It’s just one of those things,” argued Laura, as they drove back to the hotel, “which makes the astute sleuth say ‘Ha, ha, among the trumpets.’ You can argue as you like, but I’m absolutely convinced that Wayland knows more about the death of Paul Camber than he’s prepared to say, and, because of that, he’s going to keep the tabs on us because we’re rather obviously interested.”