[Mrs Bradley 50] - Late, Late in the Evening Page 18

  'But Merle wasn't in my way! I had finished with her and she knew it. I admit I was a bit of a heel where she was concerned. She told me so in letters, anyway. I also admit I never intended to meet her in the grounds that night. I had nothing to say to her. The call I was planning to receive was just a myth, as you say. I intended to leave the house and drive off. I usually ride a horse in the village, but I use Doctor Matters' car at times and always after dark. Anyway, any double-cross act I'd planned with Merle proved unnecessary. A genuine call came through and I made the most of it.'

  'Ah, yes, the genuine call. Tell me about that.'

  'It came from Doctor Matters. I shouldn't criticise him to outsiders, I suppose, but he really is the most frightful old ass and to my mind completely gaga. He rang up to say that as I'd borrowed the car I was to go at once to the Pratts' house-he gave me the address-and tell them he'd given a wrong prescription and that if they'd already been to the chemist with it, Mrs Pratt was on no account to touch the stuff, but to bring it to the surgery next morning.'

  'And this errand took you out of the party at an early stage in the proceedings?'

  'Yes. I went off at once, of course. You can't play about with dangerous drugs.'

  'And you were absent for nearly four hours?'

  'Well, not as long as that.'

  'Doctor Tassall, I refuse to credit your story. For one thing, Doctor Matters does his own dispensing. He does not issue prescriptions to be handed in at chemists' shops. Furthermore, it could not possibly have taken you all that time to perform such an errand. Doctor Matters' practice would have to extend to the other side of the County if it had. For your own sake, tell me the truth. I will be plain with you. If I could believe that you had any reason for disposing of Mr Ward, I would subscribe to your immediate arrest, but, so far as I know, you had no motive for that. All the same, you did have a motive for murdering Miss Patterson and doctors have committed murder before this. Come, now. For all we know at present, there may be two murderers in this village and there is nothing, so far, to show that you are not one of them.'

  He shrugged his shoulders and decided to make the best of it.

  'Oh, well, if you must have it,' he said, 'as I say, I never intended to meet Merle for a showdown. It couldn't do any good. I'd arranged with one of the chaps at the medical school to call me. I'd bought those lizard costumes from him, so I knew he'd oblige me. I had a few dances with Amabel under the disapproving eye of Mrs Kempson, then the chap's call came through. It was an invitation to join a gang of students in a rather low pub in the town. We had a few drinks and then I went back to the chap's room with two or three of the others and we played cards and had a few more drinks until I realised that Merle must have given up and gone home. The Kempson and Conyers tribe would be in bed, I thought, and a clod aimed at Amabel's window would bring her to the front door.'

  'Instead of which, you found yourself pulled in to assist in the search for Miss Patterson. I cannot understand why you did not come out with this story at the beginning. Surely you realised that it gave you an alibi for the time of Miss Patterson's death?'

  'I didn't realise at first that I needed an alibi. I'd committed myself to this story about being called out to a maternity case and I thought Amabel and her people, especially Mrs Kempson, would take a very dim view if they knew I'd left the birthday party to go on a toot with the lads. I couldn't have let Amabel know, either, that I'd agreed to a tête-à-tête with Merle out in the grounds. You know what girls are. She'd have thought it was-she'd have thought I was double-crossing her, and that would have been the end of everything.'

  I felt that I had the truth from him at last. It remained to check his alibi and this I have done. There is no doubt in my mind that, whatever happened in the case of Mr Ward, young Doctor Tassall had no part in the murder of Merle Patterson unless the medical evidence respecting the time of her death was hopelessly out.

  This left me with one obvious suspect, but there were difficulties. Only if we could prove that Nigel Kempson had mistaken Merle Patterson for Lionel Kempson-Conyers did his guilt appear even possible, but it made the death of Mr Ward rather less unaccountable. However, we still had to find the reason, if there was one, for Nigel to want to kill either of them. In no way could he hope to inherit the Hill Manor estate, so it was not possible to determine how the child's death could benefit him. The same fact applied in the case of Mr Ward, even if Nigel had believed that the man who had been murdered was the rightful heir.

  All the same, even though the photographer had proved a broken reed in that he had lied about waiting for Nigel to pick him up outside the cinema, it was necessary to reconsider Nigel's statement that he had arrived at the pick-up point and hung about there in his car for about an hour before returning to Hill House.

  As in the case of Doctor Tassall, there was a time-lag to be taken into account. To pick up the photographer at eleven, Nigel would need to leave Hill House at least not later than ten-forty. At that time Mrs Kempson was in bed, her daughter and son-in-law had retired to their own quarters, Doctor Tassall had been called away and Merle Patterson was still in the house.

  As (presumably) Nigel could not have known that Merle had made an appointment to meet Tassall out in the grounds, he could have mistaken her for Lionel and killed her when he met her on his return. If this had been the case, he might not have gone to the town at all, since, according to the medical evidence, Merle could not have died later than about eleven o'clock and it would have been impossible for him to have driven to town, waited for even the shortest time outside the cinema and returned to the grounds of the manor by eleven.

  If he had not attempted to keep the appointment with the photographer, it was necessary to find out what he had been doing, since he had not actually come back into the house until well after midnight.

  The obvious explanation was that he had been burying Mr Ward's body, but that brought me up against the brick wall which had been a so far insurmountable obstacle throughout the whole enquiry. If Nigel had buried Mr Ward, the inference needs must be that he had killed him. But why? Nobody except Mrs Kempson had anything to gain by Ward's death, and even her gain would only be the saving of a few miserable pounds a week which she could well spare. There seemed no sense in Mr Ward's death, and that, my dear Sir Walter, intrigued me vastly.

  To whom, I asked myself for perhaps the hundredth time, was Mr Ward such a menace that, at whatever risk, he had to be removed? The only answer which has suggested itself so far is that he might have become a menace to the first Mr Ward, the mysterious figure who had appeared upon the Hill House scene five years earlier and then must have disappeared within a matter of days, only to be impersonated by the second (and subsequently murdered) Mr Ward.

  I placed the matter before the inspector.

  'We can be pretty certain Kempson did not show up outside the cinema that night,' he said.

  'Upon the now completely false evidence of the photographer?'

  'No. We've got two witnesses, quite unbiased, both of them. One is the commissionaire at the cinema who states he was on duty there until after the place closed down at eleven, and the other is our man on the beat. They both swear that no car was parked outside or even reasonably near the cinema up to eleven-fifteen that night. The commissionaire went off duty when the cinema closed down, but my chap was up and down all the time, on and off, until midnight, and there was no parked car. I took their statements separately and there's no doubt about it. Wherever Kempson went that night, he did not turn up outside that cinema.'

  I went back to my notebooks, beginning with the first letter I had received from Mrs Kempson and continuing with all the jottings I had made subsequent to that. It was then that the truth not only dawned on me, but did so in a kind of sunburst. The identity of the first Mr Ward was no longer a mystery. Once I realised that, the rest of the puzzle fell into place as certainly as the apparently unpredictable ball at the roulette table falls into its mysteriously appointed compar
tment and stakes are won and lost at one and the same time. I was certain of the identity of the criminal and I did not think there would be much difficulty in proving it.

  Mrs Kempson's first letter and later remarks were helpful up to a point. She was doubtful whether the man who had claimed to be her brother was, in fact, Ward, yet there was something about his voice which appeared to be familiar to her.

  She was determined to secure the inheritance for her grandson, but she also had not quite a clear conscience with regard to Ward, even though he had declared himself an emulator of Esau and was prepared to forfeit his inheritance for a mess of pottage.

  All the same, it has been shown, since the two murders, that both the Mr Wards were impostors and that the real Mr Ward died in America before he had a chance of claiming the Hill Manor estate.

  Only two points still needed to be worked out, but I had considered them before and I felt that I had positive answers to both of them. There was the question of the time-lag once again. In the case of young Tassall and Nigel Kempson it was a matter of hours, hours which I felt I could now account for, but in the case of the first Mr Ward there was an interval of five years to be bridged.

  There was also the question of the substitution of the first Mr Ward by the second Mr Ward, a change unsuspected by either Mrs Landgrave, who had never seen the first one, or Mrs Kempson who, by her own choice, had never set eyes on the second one while he was alive.

  The explanations I could find to fit in with my theories were that, during the five years' time-lag, somebody had been making either overt or disguised attempts to get Mrs Kempson to change the terms of her will. The most likely person to have so employed his time was Nigel Kempson. With regard to the substitution, it seemed that it must have been necessary to have a Mr Ward at Mrs Landgrave's, since otherwise Mrs Kempson might find out that her monthly money orders were not being cashed. As for Mr Ward's lodgings, the Landgraves, as I summed them up, were certainly not the people to take money for a non-existent lodger.

  The inference was that the first Mr Ward was known elsewhere and it was necessary for him to appear in his usual haunts, a thought which had occurred to me earlier, but not in connexion with Nigel.

  Again I went over my notes. Then I turned up Mrs Kempson's letters to me, and there it all was. The voice she had heard before; the discussion she had had with Nigel and they agreed that Mr Ward should receive thirty thousand pounds at her death in consideration of his abandoning all claim to the estate; the substitution of another Mr Ward as Mrs Landgrave's lodger, since Nigel himself had a lucrative position and had to be in London most of his time; his mother an actress and his father possibly an actor, so that he was able to play the part of the first Mr Ward without arousing more than the dimmest of doubts in Mrs Kempson's mind; the untidy moustache; the pince-nez; most of all, the gloves.

  This all seemed obvious enough, but it still did not account for the two murders. A prime factor, I decided, was the mental deterioration of the second Mr Ward. Nigel must have wondered whether there would come a point when this individual (probably an ex-criminal whom Nigel had promised to help) would give the game away. There was also a possibility that he had been in no wise as crazy as his conduct would suggest, but had tried his hand at a little mild blackmail, for, to some extent, Nigel must have been obliged to take him into his confidence.

  This could explain the first murder, but it still did not account for the death of Merle Patterson. The reason for that remained speculative, but I thought I knew the answer.

  The police were certain that the girl had not been killed down by the sheepwash where her body was found. Neither they nor I had ever really believed that, dressed as she was, she would have strayed so far from the house. There was, however, the distinct possibility that, believing Doctor Tassall to have been called away on a genuine case, she had gone as far as the lodge gates to meet him on his return.

  There somebody had dragged her inside the deserted lodge and killed her. My theory was that this was because she had come upon Nigel humping the body of the second Mr Ward out of the lodge where he had hidden it after he had killed his understudy on the previous day, having first enticed him up to the house, on what pretext I cannot say.

  Of course, all this was mere speculation, and the only way or proving it, it seemed to me, was to confront Nigel with such evidence as we had, accuse him to his face and find out whether he could refute the accusation. The reason for his lengthy absence from the birthday party was a factor to take into account. He had two dead bodies to dispose of. He transported both by car, I think. He was to have picked up the photographer in a car, you will remember. I think he drove first straight down Lovers' Lane and put the girl's body, with the fancy costume torn to pieces, beside the sheepwash in the hope that the gypsies would be credited with the crime, as, at the very beginning, one of them was-and indeed he might well have been convicted-but for the intervention of the two children and the evidence supplied by their uncle.

  Then Nigel returned for Mr Ward's body. He knew where to hide it, for young Lionel Kempson-Conyers who, according to the Clifton children, 'always blabbed', could have told him about the grave-like hole in the floor of the ruined cottage. It was sheer bad luck-if one can call it bad luck when a murderer is hoist, so to speak, with his own petard-that the children should have had sufficient curiosity regarding the filled-in hole to get the poor village idiot to dig it out for them, and that Mrs Winter knew the sound of his car.

  You may ask why, having, in his capacity as the first Mr Ward, assured himself of thirty thousand pounds under the terms of Mrs Kempson's will, Nigel did not add her murder to his tally. I think he had genuine feeling for her and was willing to wait for her death from natural causes. Because of the difference in their ages he probably thought that he would not have to wait very long. Like other murderers I have met, he was by no means altogether bad.

  Of course, sooner or later he would still have had to dispose of the second Mr Ward had that unfortunate man remained sane, but I think he had planned to do that after Mrs Kempson's death. Then he would have presented himself to the lawyers in his disguise as the first Mr Ward and claimed his thirty thousand pounds.

  Chapter 19

  Margaret And Kenneth

  So it was poor Nigel Kempson after all, although I do not know why I still think of him with compassion. He was a double murderer and he had killed an entirely innocent, although I think a very silly, lovesick young girl as well as the madman we knew as Mr Ward.

  Mrs Lestrange Bradley (Dame Beatrice as she became later on) got our address from Aunt Kirstie and came to see us in our London home to tell us all about it. She said that our discovery of Mr Ward's body when Kenneth thought we were getting Peachy to dig for buried treasure had been of great help to the police, but that did not comfort us very much. The only good thing about it all, so far as I could see, was that they did not hang Nigel. He went shooting rabbits on Lye Hill and accidentally or purposely shot himself before he could be arrested. I think he realised that Mrs Bradley was getting at the truth.

  I suppose thirty thousand pounds is a great deal of money, especially if you compare it with the five thousand which was all that Nigel stood to obtain in his own name under Mrs Kempson's will, but, on thinking it over, I do not really believe that the late Mr Kempson had made any stipulation as to how his wife was to leave the money when she died.

  I think she believed that Nigel was Mr Kempson's own illegitimate son whom he had never had the courage to acknowledge and, although she loved Nigel in her possessive way, largely because she was so lonely with her husband dead and her only daughter abroad most of the time, I imagine that she resented and never forgave her husband's infidelity (if unfaithful he had been) and for that reason she refused to have Nigel legally adopted, which might have given him a title to the estate or, at any rate, a substantial share in the late Mr Kempson's fortune. Instead, he was to be left a beggarly five thousand pounds instead of the sum which no doubt he felt
he had a right to expect.

  For how long he had planned to impersonate Mrs Kempson's brother Ward it is impossible to say, but, of course, it could not have been before Mrs Kempson received the news of Ward's death.

  So what Mrs Bradley calls 'the first Mr Ward' made his appearance and (possibly again to vent her spite against her dead husband, so strangely are people constituted) Mrs Kempson told Nigel that she was leaving her 'brother' thirty thousand pounds, little knowing that her beneficiary was the other party to the agreement.

  It was the last holiday we ever spent in Hill village, for our grandfather died that winter, all the property was sold up and the aunts and Uncle Arthur moved away. However, we were given bicycles the following summer and father cycled with us to visit his relations in another part of Oxfordshire.

  One day we decided to cycle to Hill on our own, but when we came to the culvert which led on to The Marsh, Kenneth said:

  'I don't believe I want to go any further.'

  'Well, let's spend our money at Mother Honour's,' I said, 'and then go back. Other people will be in Aunt Kirstie's and grandfather's, so it wouldn't be fun. Even the hermit's cottage isn't there any more. Look! Do you see? They've pulled it down. Do you believe there was ever any treasure hidden in it?'

  'I did when I was younger,' said Kenneth.

  * * *

  END