The Man Who Grew Tomatoes Page 9

  “Well, then…?”

  “I do not think the letter-writer does live in the village, Mr. Camber. If he does not, the gossip will have no effect on him, the letters will continue, and we can tackle the rejected suitors, as you wish to do.”

  “I don’t see how they are to be tackled, I must confess. If they’re innocent, won’t our proceedings be actionable?”

  “We shall not begin by contacting them personally. We shall find out to what extent, if any, they are given to leaving their homes and making excursions, either by rail or by car.”

  “Of course—for the purpose of posting the letters! Exactly so. I say, though, all the same, won’t it soon get round to them, if we begin questioning station-masters and ticket-collectors and garage hands about these fellows’ movements?”

  “Leave it to me, Mr. Camber. So long as you do not appear in the matter, all will be plain sailing.” She paused and Hugh waited, realising that she had more to say. She said it with a gentleness which she realised was not absolutely necessary, for Hugh had not troubled to disguise his feelings with regard to his brother’s widow. “You do realise, Mr. Camber, don’t you, that we shall be wasting our time by tracing the movements of these two men? I am convinced that we need look no further than your own family for the writer of the letters.”

  “Héloïse Camber, you mean? I can see why you think that. My young friend Salaman would agree with you, but I’m afraid I don’t. Héloïse doesn’t like me very much, it’s true, but I don’t see her stooping to anonymous letter-writing. Besides, there are the envelopes to consider. Héloïse may not be over-educated, but she could scarcely manage an unformed fist like that.”

  “How old did you say her son was?”

  “Peter’s eleven, I believe.” Hugh stared at his interlocutor. “Oh, but she wouldn’t drag him in! She’s genuinely passionately fond of the boy. There’s no possible doubt about that.”

  “Have you ever seen a specimen of the child’s handwriting?”

  “No. I used to see to it that he wrote to Héloïse while he was here and she was in hospital, but I had enough of having my own letters censored at school to wish to pry into the kid’s correspondence. He used to post them himself, too. Yes, I can see your point of view but—well, I suppose I don’t want to believe you. I couldn’t possibly tackle Héloïse on such a subject. If you are right, the best thing would be for me to marry Catherine as soon as possible. That should put an end to all this nonsense.”

  “Have you considered that it might also put an end to you?”

  Hugh, who had been carefully cutting the end off a cigar, jerked up his head.

  “You’re not serious!”

  Dame Beatrice studied him; then she said:

  “I am perfectly serious, Mr. Camber. And I have the feeling that you have good reason to agree with me.”

  “Look,” said Hugh, “you may or may not be right about the author of the letters. I’m prepared to keep an open mind there. But I simply do not and will not believe that a tiresome little woman—which is all that Héloïse amounts to—could have murdered a man and a fifteen-year-old boy and is prepared, if I marry, to murder me. You see, it was undoubtedly a man—” He paused.

  “Yes, Mr. Camber?”

  “Well, I’ve a feeling that I am in somebody’s way. The somebody ought to be Héloïse, but, if it is, then she’s managed to get hold of a male stooge.”

  “Tell me the whole story, Mr. Camber. I had no idea that it was already so intriguing.”

  “Well, I got you down here under false pretences, I’m afraid. My excuse is that, while the anonymous letters are facts which can be proved, a possibly murderous attempt on my life is neither absolute fact nor capable of proof. In other words, nothing much happened and not a hair of my head was injured. I did sustain a jolt to the solar plexus, but that was accidental.”

  He recounted the incidents of the night in question economically and sufficiently. Dame Beatrice listened with grave attention until he had finished. Then she said:

  “I should like to inspect the long gallery and then to speak to Miss Salaman.”

  “They won’t have gone to bed yet. They’ll be drinking brown sherry and talking. They talk incessantly. I’ll go and ask her to talk to you.”

  “I will accompany you if we may go by way of the gallery. There is nothing I like better than to roam about old houses at night.”

  They mounted the main staircase together.

  “This is where I tripped up and Hildegarde fell on me,” said Hugh, pausing midway along the gallery.

  “I do not see the tiger-skin rug.”

  “I’ve had it moved. I didn’t fancy the idea of its tripping up one of the servants.”

  They passed on and reached the top of the back staircase.

  “Miss Salaman came by this staircase into the long gallery, then?” said Dame Beatrice. “It scarcely seems the quickest way to the west wing.”

  “Oh, well, there’s a corridor leads off at the bend of the stairs. You will see.”

  He led the way. It certainly was a rambling old mansion, Dame Beatrice thought, and offered endless possibilities for lawlessness if such were contemplated. They arrived at Hildegarde’s door and knocked, but there was no response, so Hugh went further along the passage and knocked again.

  Jacob opened the door. The apartment within was low-ceilinged, heavily panelled, and contained an assortment of worn but comfortable armchairs, a table, and a litter of books and periodicals.

  “Please to come in,” said Jacob. “Hildegarde, we have visitors.”

  Hildegarde produced two more wine-glasses and filled them. Hugh and Dame Beatrice were given the two most comfortable, or least decrepit, chairs, and an atmosphere of relaxation was achieved with the minimum of exertion by the hosts. These were naturally hospitable, in the sense that they expected people to take them as they found them, and would have been in no wise put about by the invasion of a dozen unexpected callers, provided that the sherry and the wine-glasses would go round.

  “And now?” said Hildegarde, when the usual banalities had been exchanged. Hugh glanced at Dame Beatrice and raised his eyebrows as an indication that the trend of conversation depended upon her.

  “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” said Dame Beatrice, accepting a role which she had marked, in any case, as her own. “Miss Salaman, Mr. Salaman, I am here upon an errand different from that which I had supposed was mine. It appears that I am here to advise Mr. Camber how best he may preserve so much of life as may yet be apportioned him. I wonder, Miss Salaman, whether I may trouble you for your account of what happened here three nights ago?”

  “But nothing happened, and please to call me Hildegarde. Hugh fell over the tiger and the man escaped and I fell on Hugh and I screamed very much and the man ran away down my fire-escape. That is all.”

  “May I, in the morning, see the window by which, I understand, the intruder climbed in?”

  “But certainly. Never do I open it again! He will not come that way a second time! Imagine the impudence! To come and then to go—a man!—by way of my bedroom! It is disgraceful!”

  “It must have been someone who knew the house pretty well,” said Hugh. “He not only knew the easiest way to get into the house, but, according to Hildegarde, the way from this wing to the long gallery. That means he knew where my room was, too.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Dame Beatrice. “Has this house ever been thrown open to the public, do you know?”

  “I’m sure it hasn’t,” said Hugh. “Paul was a wealthy man who had no need for the half-crowns of motor-coach parties, and he was far too reserved, not to say selfish, to have opened his house to sightseers, no matter how respectable and even eminent they might be.”

  “The man was a common burglar,” declared Jacob. “He was not dangerous at all, except to money and silver and jewels.”

  “He had a knife. I saw it glint,” protested Hildegarde.

  “Yes, a knife to slip under w
indow-catches or prise open a drawer, perhaps. He was an amateur, I would say. A common sneak-thief. Not even a safe-blower or a proper cracksman,” retorted her brother.

  “Nobody is so amateur to think a knife will break open a house like this,” said Hildegarde crossly. “He came to murder Hugh, as the letters said.”

  “Do not talk foolishness! Nothing in the letters said anyone should murder Hugh. You are an ignorant sensationalist. Why should Hugh be murdered?”

  “Because, when Hugh is dead, the money will go to somebody else, of course. It is you who cannot reason!” screamed Hildegarde.

  Hugh thought it well to intervene before the protagonists, who were now shouting and gesticulating, should become more heated.

  “I’m prepared to keep an open mind, of course,” he said, “but I can’t see what there is here to tempt a burglar, Jacob. There’s only a certain amount of silver, no jewellery, and even the family portraits have no value except to the family themselves.”

  “The burglar may not have known that,” argued Jacob.

  “Yes, he would! You did not listen to what was said! The burglar, as you call him, must have known the house. If he knew the house, he knew what is in the house,” declared Hildegarde passionately.

  “Well, we can leave it at that for the present,” said Hugh. “Is there anything else you want to know from Hildegarde, Dame Beatrice?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “In that case…?”

  They bade the brother and sister good night and went back to the long gallery. The principal guest-room was at the far end of it, next door but one to the library. Hugh accompanied Dame Beatrice to the library door and, before bidding her good night, he said abruptly:

  “If you can prove that Héloïse wrote those letters, I think we can scare her into admitting it. I don’t think she’s a very tough type. It needs to be remembered, however, that she’d do anything—and that, I think, means literally anything—to obtain this place for the boy.”

  Dame Beatrice nodded, and bade him good night. She watched him walk along the gallery, but no intruder sprang out on him. She stood there until he switched off the gallery light and went into his room. Even then, she waited a little longer, listening intently. Everything was silent.

  She retired to her room but did not go to bed immediately. She stood at the window and gazed out into the darkness, thinking over all she had heard that evening. She summed up Hildegarde Salaman as reliable up to a point, but prone, possibly, to exaggeration, and, under duress, to lying. There was no proof that any intruder had intended a murderous attack on Hugh Camber. It would be interesting to know what he had intended, although she thought she could guess. Still, all this, she felt, had only a secondary interest compared with the mysterious drownings of Stephen Camber and his father.

  Mysterious, she felt, they most certainly were. The picture of a staggering, shouting, idiotically laughing boy was a dreadful one, especially once she had obtained the vital clue to his condition. Atropine, not alcohol, was the answer. It had never been diagnosed because the actual cause of death was drowning and nobody—certainly not the coroner, who was dependent upon the medical evidence—had suspected that the drowning might have had a predisposing feature.

  The death of Paul, also by drowning, presented no very clear picture. To begin with, Dame Beatrice, who had a complete visual image of the delicate boy, could form no mental portrait of his father. Then, apart from the fact that it had occurred in Scotland and on a fishing holiday, she had no picture, either, of the scene of Paul’s death. Loch, salmon-river, trout-stream, even the open sea, were all possible locations.

  The simplest explanation of Paul’s death was that it had been suicide, brought about by overwhelming grief for the death of his son, but she doubted whether an intending suicide would have been likely to go on a fishing trip to Scotland in order to commit an act which, much more conveniently and much less expensively, could have been carried out in Norfolk. If the death had to be made to look like an accident, an overturned yacht on the Broads or on one of the many rivers, or a bathing fatality off a treacherous part of the coast were obvious alternatives.

  A second theory was tenable: that Paul, for some unknown reason, had killed his son and that someone who knew of the crime had killed Paul. The tutor, Verith, had been fond of the boy and had good reason to detest the father, who had dismissed him with ignominy from his post for a reason which the tutor had claimed was not valid. It remained to be determined what manner of man Verith was, and whether there were any grounds for supposing that he had been in the vicinity (wherever that proved to be) at the time of Paul’s death.

  There remained a third possibility—the culpability of the angry farmer, Beresford, father of a misguided daughter; grandfather of a bastard. Beresford might have had motive enough to have encompassed both deaths. He might have punished Paul by killing Stephen and then he might have decided to kill Paul, too. This theory was unobjectionable, technically speaking, but for one thing: it postulated that Paul, and not Verith, was the father of the Beresford baby. Still, even that, according to Hugh, had been broadly hinted, and Marion Bembridge would certainly have gone bail for it.

  Any attempt to prove or to disprove any of these theories must begin, Dame Beatrice decided, with an investigation into the death of the boy. Upon this thought, she went to bed and slept lightly but sufficiently until seven in the morning.

  By a quarter to eight she was out in the drive. She made her way to the village inn to find her chauffeur and make arrangements for a short but, she hoped, productive tour in her car. She found George giving it a final polish after cleaning it.

  “Good morning, George.”

  “Good morning, madam. May I ask when you require to go out in her?”

  “When I’ve had breakfast, I suppose. Fancy your having the car out and ready! You might be a mind-reader, George!”

  “I thought you’d be bound to take a trip round the neighbourhood soon, madam, to get the lie of the land, and I informed them here accordingly. Please to come on in, madam. There are eggs and rashers cooking.”

  “The eggs and rashers are for you, George, not for me.”

  “This is not what I would call a close-fisted house, madam. Please to come in. A double supply can be rustled up immediately, or so I am informed by the young woman who helps with the cooking.”

  Dame Beatrice enjoyed her early breakfast. She enjoyed, too, an informal chat with the girl who served it.

  “We have no excitement down here, madam? Oh, but we do! If you had been in Camber village when the news come of Mr. Paul and poor young Master Stephen, you think there was excitement enough. Of course, there was talk about Mrs. Hal Camber, but nawthen could be done about that.”

  “Why should they talk about her?”

  “That try hard enough to be mistress up at the Abbey. Everybody know that. That’s common talk around here.”

  “I’m staying at the Abbey. The new Mr. Camber is a friend of mine. He has said nothing about Mrs. Hal becoming mistress of the Hall. Why should she?”

  “On account of Master Peter being the heir, now poor Master Stephen go, poor little boy. Some say she had a hand in matters, but I can’t believe that. That would be too wicked altogether.”

  “So, George, suspicion has been cast upon Mrs. Hal Camber with regard to the deaths of her cousin-by-marriage and his son,” said Dame Beatrice, when they were once more in the inn yard.

  “I think it’s only idle talk, madam. I’ve heard similar opinions expressed, but suspicion is too strong a word, in my view, according to what I’ve gathered.”

  “Mrs. Hal Camber certainly is not beloved in the village, George.”

  “True enough, madam. Where would you wish to be driven?”

  “Is the village of Hill Rising on your map?”

  They reached Hill Rising by way of one of the secondary roads which led to Yarmouth. They turned off it after a dozen miles or so and followed the course of the river until the r
oad did indeed begin to rise as it left the water. Broad acres stretched on either side of the road, and the young wheat was already showing. A church tower stood among trees. On the water-meadows, towards which the road was wending, a windmill stood dark and stark, without sails, against the pallor of the early-morning sky.

  Abruptly the road swung to the right and rose to a hump-backed bridge, and another mile and a half brought the explorers to a village, a small place centred round a very large church, two public houses, and a post-office. The main thoroughfare turned sharply between the second public-house and the post-office, but George took a right-hand turn alongside the church and drew up in a broad and tree-lined road.

  “I can park here, madam,” he said, “while I make enquiries. Can you tell me any name I can ask for?”

  “Huckle—there are two of them, I believe.”

  He returned at the end of twenty minutes to report that the brothers Huckle were at breakfast and would be at her disposal, in about a quarter of an hour, down by the camping site.

  “It seems a pity to spoil a village like this with a camping site, George, does it not? Caravans, I presume.”

  The camping site, however, was a long, quiet mooring for yachts and cruisers and, at that time of year, was almost deserted. There were two or three boats of fair size, however, and these appeared to be still in commission.

  “Floating homes, no doubt, madam,” said George, when she pointed this out. “I dare say they’ve been in occupation all winter.”

  “Not the ideal winter quarters, George, one would venture to think, and, in any case, somewhat cramped.”

  The car had been run on to a narrow rectangle of grass which bordered a short path alongside the water, and it was not long before a motor-cyclist with a pillion passenger pulled up beside it. George identified the newcomers.

  “Mr. Huckle and his brother, madam.”

  “I am making a report on the accident to Stephen Camber,” stated Dame Beatrice.

  “If you care to follow in your car, we can take you to the spot where the youngster fall in the water,” said the pillion passenger, a man of slow speech but ready intelligence. “Drive on, bor Harry.”