Adders on the Heath (Mrs. Bradley) Page 4

  “May I get some of my things?”

  “Quite all right to get your things, sir.”

  “And stow away my tent?”

  “Do what you like with your tent. We don’t need it any longer. We’ve about finished here.”

  “I’m moving into the New Forest Hunt Hotel.”

  “Very good, sir. I’ll let the Superintendent know.”

  “He does know. I told him so myself.”

  The sergeant withdrew and Richardson went to his tent. He picked up his pack and inspected the contents. Nothing had been impounded; in fact, it did not appear that anything had been touched. He knew better than to believe this, for the police, in the course of duty, would have looked at everything. All the same, it was a relief to find his belongings intact. He took down the tent and stowed it, waved to the police car without obtaining any response, and tramped, heavily laden, back to the hotel.

  To his surprise and relief, his fame had not preceded him. Barney had been discreet and had kept his mouth shut. It seemed reasonable, however, to warn the management that there might be visits from the police, so, having checked in at the office, he told the story of the mysterious dead, but did not mention that there had been two of these.

  “Oh, yes?” said the manager. “Well, I know the Superintendent, so that’ll be all right. He’s in plain clothes and he’ll see that anybody he brings here is in plain clothes, too. Don’t worry, Mr. Richardson. We expected you and Mr. Bradley last night, but you were otherwise engaged, it seems!”

  “Bradley can’t come until tomorrow. I don’t know what has held him up, but I had a postcard.”

  “You’ll like to see your room, anyway. The porter has the key and has taken your stuff up. Number seventeen. We’ve given Mr. Bradley number twenty-two on the same floor.”

  “Thanks.” He went upstairs to find his gear neatly stowed and the porter about to go downstairs.

  “Will there be anything more, sir?”

  “No, thanks, Barney, not until my suitcase turns up.”

  “Very good, sir.” But Barney loitered.

  “I don’t know anything else,” said Richardson. “I spent the night at the police station, but that’s not as bad as it sounds, because, actually, the Superintendent put me up in his own house.”

  “All of a queer do, sir.”

  “Must have been watching me ever since I began camping up there, I should think, this tramp I mean.” Again he made no mention of duplicates.

  “Do the police suspect foul play, sir?”

  Richardson, alarmed, thought that he had better answer truthfully.

  “Well, continue to keep matters under your hat, but I rather fancy they do,” he said. “I’m told I may have to attend the inquest.”

  “You don’t know the cause of death, sir?”

  “No, I haven’t the least idea. I saw no sign of injury, but I wasn’t looking for anything of the sort. I wonder how the poor devil of a bobby got on who had to stay on guard up there all night?” (Side-track, he thought. It worked.)

  “The Super sent up a car for him to sleep in, and a motor-cycle combination to bring the driver back, so I was told,” said the porter.

  “Some grape-vine!” said Richardson. “Oh, well, we must wait and see what happens. I suppose I’m free to come and go—I haven’t been told I’m not—so I’m going to play golf this afternoon, if the pro can fix me up with clubs and balls. I suppose I can get a game?”

  “I’m sure you can, sir. There’s a notice to say visitors are welcome. I don’t know what sub they expect, but at this time of year it should be easy enough to get a game.”

  The golf course was a mile and a half outside the village, two and a half from the hotel. Richardson went in to lunch at one o’clock precisely and was driving off from the first tee at two-thirty.

  He had been lucky enough to meet the secretary as soon as he arrived, and had been introduced to the local doctor, whose handicap was the same as his own. When the round was finished, Richardson returned the borrowed clubs to the pro, tipped him and said he had enjoyed the game.

  “I didn’t catch the doctor’s name,” he added.

  The pro repeated it.

  “Does the police doctoring round here as well. Seems there’s been a corpse up on Medley Heath. Some chap in a little tent. I don’t know the rights and wrongs, but all over the place that’s spoke of,” he added.

  “Oh, really? What did he die of?”

  “Poison, so they reckon.”

  “Who do? The police?”

  “Them, among others. Doctor Mack you played with just now, got a fine big carryin’ voice!”

  Richardson wondered whether, had he known that his opponent “did the police doctoring,” he would have asked him any questions concerning his findings. He decided that to have done so would have been to risk a snub. As it happened, however, on his way out he met the doctor again just as the latter was getting into his car. The doctor said, immediately, seeing Richardson on foot,

  “Oh, can I give you a lift? Which way do you go?”

  Richardson named his hotel.

  “Splendid. I can drop you on the village side of the level crossing, if that will help.”

  Richardson said gratefully that it would. The car started up and turned left on to a secondary road lined with fairly pretentious houses. Richardson, deciding that it was now or never, risked the snub which he confidently expected.

  “I say,” he said, “the pro was telling me about the dead man on the heath, you know.”

  “Yes?” The doctor kept his eyes on the road ahead, but Richardson detected a slight frown between his thin sandy brows.

  “Well, you see, I’m the person who got stuck with the body,” he said, “so I’m rather interested.”

  “How do you mean—stuck with the body?” The frown disappeared.

  “I’ve been camping on my own up on Medley Heath since Thursday. I’d pushed over to the hotel for dinner and hung around a bit afterwards, having coffee and a brandy, and, when I got back to my tent, there was this dead man.”

  “Oh?” The monosyllable invited further confidences.

  “So, of course, I called the police and now I think they believe the chap was murdered. I spent the night at the Superintendent’s house. He was very decent, but I don’t think I’m out of his clutches. I’m just wondering how the man was killed. I don’t want the police to connect me with the job!”

  “I can tell you how he was killed. It will be in the papers tomorrow, anyway, so there need be no secret about it. Still, perhaps, you’d better keep it to yourself until it’s public property. He was choked to death with a fir cone.”

  “Choked…?”

  “With the fruit of the Douglas Fir, to be exact. I recovered an elliptical cone nearly three inches long. Didn’t you notice how suffused the face was?—typical case of asphyxia.”

  “No, I didn’t notice. I tried to revive him by that pinch the nose and breathe into the mouth method, but I think I knew he was gone before I started.” (This referred to Colnbrook, he reflected, and realised that he should not have said it.)

  “The mouth was very badly bruised, too,” said the doctor, pursuing his own train of thought. “The bruising, of course, is one reason for believing that he was murdered.”

  “Well, of course! I mean, surely you couldn’t choke yourself accidentally on a fir cone, could you?”

  “Hardly, perhaps, but I suppose you could commit suicide that way.”

  “Surely not! It would be a beastly way to die!”

  “You’d be surprised at how some of them manage it. There was a fellow, some years ago, who slopped petrol all over himself and set himself alight. You wouldn’t think that was possible, but he did it.”

  The car passed a school and the village hall, and drew up just before it reached the village street. Richardson, expressing gratitude, got out and waited on a lumpy bit of pavement until the car turned a bend in the road. Then he strode away past the shops in the village st
reet, over the footbridge which crossed the water-splash, and made his way back to the hotel.

  The doctor (funny swine) had been pulling his leg. Neither of the deaths had been caused by a fir cone. Colnbrook’s most certainly had not. If anything of the sort had choked him (only it hadn’t) it would have been a surfeit of almonds. There had been faint but unmistakable odour of almonds while Richardson was trying to give him that breath-of-life treatment first recorded in the annals of the prophet Elisha.

  Almonds!

  It could have been suicide, of course, yet, recollecting his sight of the two men on the heath and then on the common, their running togs, their field-glasses and their absorption in the job in hand (whatever it was), it seemed highly unlikely that anything so dramatic as a double suicide could have been in their minds. In addition to this, Colnbrook had been the last person on earth, Richardson felt, to have contemplated such a drastic course. He had given the impression of being far too pleased with A. B. Colnbrook to think of doing away with him.

  There was one feasible explanation, of course. One of the men could have murdered the other and then, afraid to face the possible consequences of such an act, have killed himself. There was yet another possibility. When last he had seen them, they had been heading for the heath again. The only dwelling-house they would pass, so far as Richardson knew, was the biggish place from which he had tried to telephone. Could they have been lured in there and murdered?

  He visualised the curl-papered maid who had answered the door to him, and this brought to mind her reference to Cook and Shirl. Cooks, he supposed, could and did perform fearful and wonderful deeds, upon occasion—there was that frightful pie-maker of Dusseldorf—or was it Hanover?—but was anybody called Shirl capable of murder?—let alone the goggling, curl-papered specimen who had answered the door. Besides, he did not believe that three women would have struggled from that house to the tent with the hulking body of Colnbrook and then taken it away and hidden it and substituted the second body for it. Theoretically this might be possible, but for all practical purposes he felt certain that it was not. Only a man would have organised a job such as that.

  He was too late for tea at the hotel, but Barney, who met him as he entered, said, with a conspiratorial nod,

  “Try the kitchen, sir. Mabel’s ‘on’ this afternoon.”

  Richardson crossed the uneven, large, ancient tiles of the kitchen, beyond which lay the modern annexe in which the cooking and serving were done, and turned off to the right, past the foot of a servants’ staircase, also part of the original house, which had been built, very narrow and steep, in the thickness of the wall. It led up to the second floor and the porter’s bedroom.

  In the room past the bottom of this staircase, Mabel was busy washing up. She desisted as Richardson came in and hooked a chair up to a large, scrubbed, wooden table. As was her invariable habit, she grinned widely but did not speak. She made fresh tea, put out bread and butter, jam and a sponge sandwich, and, jerking her head, indicated that he might set to.

  “We’ve had Carrie’s boyfriend, the policeman, here this afternoon. Tell us about the murder,” she said, when Tom had drunk his third cup of tea. Richardson, in a low tone, gave her a carefully edited account of what had happened. At the end, she stood with her arms akimbo, studied his fresh complexion and boyish, candid face, and shook her head.

  “He’s wrong. The police are all wrong. It can’t be you. Ain’t got the nerve,” she said. “No more nor me. Takes nerve, it do, to bring off a nice clean murder. No, Mr. Richardson, it wouldn’t be your sort of lark, no more nor it wouldn’t be mine, whatever Carrie’s boy friend may say.”

  Richardson felt that the Delphic Oracle had spoken. He did not even resent the slur cast upon his courage. What Mabel believed today he hoped and trusted that the police would believe tomorrow. He thanked her for the tea, went into the small drawing-room which served to house the visitors’ library and, most days, an irascible ex-Naval officer, and, surveying the volumes on the bookshelves, took down E. F. Benson’s masterpiece, The Luck of the Vails, trusting that the flute-playing villainies of Mr. Francis Vail would blot out, for a space, his own anxieties and problems.

  The anodyne worked. Somewhere a clock struck the half-hour. Richardson took the book to his room, and, putting it on the bedside table, went off for a bath before dinner.

  After dinner, the mixed feeling of being, at the same time, in a trap and at a loose end, assailed him again, but a joyful surprise was in store. He was loitering in the front hall, trying to decide between the respective attractions of The Luck of the Vails and the television lounge, when the front door opened and in came the porter with a couple of suitcases. He was followed by a slender, tall young man with thick brown hair and wide-apart grey eyes. The young man was carrying a violin case in one hand and a flute, cased in leather, in the other.

  “Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Richardson, joyfully. “Uncle Francis Vail in person! Well, well, well!”

  The newcomer apparently understood the reference.

  “Oh, Geoffrey,” he said reproachfully, naming one of the heroes in the book, “I did so hope that people would mistake it for a telescope. Then it would seem as though I’d been in the Navy. It’s a terribly good thing to have been in, and I should be much respected if people thought I’d ever belonged to it. Are you sure it doesn’t look like a telescope? It’s really meant to look like one, you know.” He put the flute in its case to his eye.

  “Quite sure, Scab, you lunatic. Come and sign the book. Which is his room, Barney? I’ve forgotten.”

  “Number twenty-two, sir. I’ll get the key.”

  “And is our escutcheon still unsullied, or have you been up to something?” asked Denis, in his disconcerting way.

  “I’ve been up to something,” said Richardson. “Are you hungry, or shall I a tale unfold?”

  “I dined in Winchester with a bloke I know. Is there a bar here?”

  “There is. Let me lead you to it.”

  “Right. I’ll dump my kit and then I’ll join you.”

  “I’ll put the car away while you’re dumping. Somehow I don’t think we’re going to need it tomorrow.”

  They met in the bar a quarter of an hour later.

  “Tell me why we shan’t need the car,” said Denis, over a pint of bitter. “I thought you were going to walk your legs off while you were alone, and that we were to ride in the stately limousine as soon as I turned up. Incidentally, I’m sorry for the delay, but I got let in for playing polo.”

  “You mean you preferred playing polo to getting down here when you said you would? Then it serves you right that you’ve missed all the fun of being my fellow gaolbird.”

  “You don’t say!”

  “I do say. I’ve been scared out of my wits until now, but I don’t seem to care quite so much now you’ve turned up.”

  “Absolutely the right spirit. Tell me all. I can see you’ve lost weight since last we met.”

  Richardson told him all. It was a straightforward narrative but, as Denis remarked at the end of it, fraught with unusual interest.

  “There’s only one thing to do,” he said.

  “Confess, and get myself hanged?”

  “That would be going too far and is, in any case, unnecessary. No, what you need, at this crisis in a young man’s affairs, is the advice and assistance of my great-aunt.”

  “Not Lady Selina?”

  “Perish the thought! I refer to the one and only Dame Beatrice. Your corpses will be meat and drink to her.”

  “Dame Beatrice? But?—Oh, she wouldn’t take me on, would she? I mean, I’ve never even met her!”

  “The loss is hers and can soon be remedied.”

  “You’ll really ask her?”

  “Yes, of course, and I know she’ll come. You must tell her everything, you know, just as you’ve told it to me. No hedging or ditching. She can’t be expected to work with blinkers on. Your two rows with Colnbrook must be exposed with all their low-life implica
tions and you’ll have to confess that you saw these two birds on the heath, so that you knew they were in the neighbourhood. And if I were you,” continued Denis earnestly, “I’d come clean to the Superintendent, too. He’s bound to dig it all out sooner or later—the police do, you know—and you’ll be in a far stronger position if the information comes from you in the first place.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said Richardson, very doubtfully. “I’m certain that he suspects me, whereas Dame Beatrice, I take it, will not.”

  “She’ll start from scratch, keeping an open mind. Still, you have an ingenuous, unbearded sort of face and are obviously frightened to death, so perhaps she’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  “You are a Job’s comforter!” said Richardson; but he looked quite happy again.

  “Meanwhile,” Denis added, “I will bend my own not inconspicuous intellect to your problem and let you know my conclusions in the morning. Sleep well!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In Search of a Body

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments.

  Shakespeare

  “What we ought to do,” said Denis, on the following morning, “and I’ve slept on this, I might tell you, because it actually occurred to me last night when I got to bed…”

  “Is to tell the Superintendent there’s Colnbrook’s body hidden away somewhere. He won’t believe us, you know. Besides…”

  “You go too fast. Let me finish. It occurred to me last night, as I tossed restlessly on my pillow, that what we must do is to find that second body—or, rather, that first body—before they hold the inquest on the body found in your tent by the police.”