Murder Included Page 9

  Sir Charles drove the family car into Harborough, and with him went Bunny, Patricia, Nanny, and Beatrice; behind them went what Patricia disdainfully described as ‘a carload of rubber necks’ — Sidney Rose, driving his wife and the Scampnells. Bunny, looking more than a little odd in a dark grey coat and skirt and a felt hat borrowed from Sybella, felt talkative, but Patricia said that she had had enough of the Reformation at St Olaf’s, and Nanny and Beatrice, whether out of respect for the dead or apprehension of the ordeal before them, confined themselves to whispered monosyllables and short forced laughs. Sir Charles drove in silence. On enquiring where on earth Bunny’s rig-out had come from, he had seemed both surprised and annoyed that it was borrowed. ‘One just doesn’t do these things,’ he had angrily muttered and he hadn’t spoken to her again.

  He came into the court-room looking very pale and severe after identifying the body, and though Bunny made room for him beside her, he sat down by Patricia, and Jardine came over and whispered to them, and Bunny thought that at such moments one knows where one gets off and knew that to the common man and woman, though they bought her books and begged for her autograph and pretended to be a friend of hers when they had really only met her in a fish queue or in the train, she was and would always be exiled from their intimacy, being an oddity, a conjuror of something out of nothing, a creator, presumptuous and strange. With treachery you could conform to their standards; with infinite pains you could imitate their behaviour; you could bottle fruit, watch cricket, and hunt the fox; but they’d smell you out, as of old they smelt out witches, and then they’d put on a face for you, and behind the face was a wariness, never the open silly hearts that they showed to their own kind.

  Sir Charles’s voice affirming that his cousin was sixty-eight years of age, had no financial trouble, no enemies that he knew of; that she had retired to bed apparently in her usual excellent state of health and spirits on the night of Monday, October the twelfth, woke Bunny from her irrelevant daydream. The Coroner, a precise grey little man, whom you’d have summed up as ‘type of all that’s dullest in the British’ if you hadn’t heard of the prodigies of valour performed by him during the brief unreasonable and devastating Harborough blitz, had little more to ask Sir Charles, and he was replaced by Beatrice, tight-faced and trembling. Her story was dragged from her, question by question. Nanny, in her turn, was more voluble: with a person lying dead on the bed you didn’t bother your head about whisky bottles and tumblers; no, she hadn’t suspected foul play: there was no one you could suspect at the Park, but before Miss Hudson came there to live she had had nearly seventy years in which to make enemies. Then Bunny was called. On the morning of Tuesday the thirteenth she had been wakened by the last witness, who told her that Miss Hudson was dead. She went with her to Miss Hudson’s room and found her — er — dead. No, she hadn’t noticed if there was a tumbler on the bedside table, but, as Miss Hudson always drank a nightcap of whisky and water, it must have been there. ‘I agreed with Nanny — Miss Toomer — that Miss Hudson was — er — dead,’ said Bunny, ‘and then I went to call my husband and he got up and telephoned Dr Hope-Johnstone … No, I never heard that she had an enemy but I haven’t known her long or intimately … Well, my own relationship with her was quite ordinary. We hadn’t much in common but I took her as I found her — she was my husband’s cousin and one of our paying guests.’

  Dr Hope-Johnstone was the next witness. Death had been due to poisoning by oenanthotoxin, obtained by some rough-and-ready method from the root of the Oenanthe crocata or water dropwort. Death from this poison had been known to take place in such varying times as five minutes and eleven days. In his opinion Miss Hudson had passed away between one and two o’clock on the Tuesday morning. Yes, he had been a little surprised that nothing had been heard by the other members of the household during the night — among the symptoms of oenanthotoxin poisoning was delirium and gastroenteric disturbance — but he had noticed that the bedroom doors at the Park were of solid mahogany and he understood that Miss Hudson was a lady of determined character and not likely to call or ring for help. No, the taste of the whisky would not be bitter: the root of the Oenanthe crocata had been eaten in mistake for parsnip; there would be a taste, but the deceased might have gulped down the whisky or possibly she had just brushed her teeth; they were her own and he had noticed that she used a strong germicide.

  The Coroner summed up the evidence and delivered himself of the verdict of murder by a person or persons unknown. The proceedings had taken less than an hour. ‘That doesn’t seem to have got us any forrader,’ said Bunny, as the car waited at the traffic lights where the highroad crossed the undistinguished market square. ‘It wasn’t meant to,’ said Sir Charles irritably. ‘Before the coroners’ powers were curtailed, inquests were a bugbear to the police — under an officious man all sorts of evidence came out before they were ready for it.’ ‘But,’ said Bunny, ‘wasn’t that more English — more “playing the game”?’ The light turned green; Sir Charles ground his gears horribly and the car stalled and refused to start till the light was against them again. ‘That was your fault, Barbara,’ said Sir Charles through his teeth, because of the servants. ‘Dam’ silly thing to say. You want to see justice done, don’t you?’ ‘If I knew it was justice …’ ‘That sort of half-baked high-brow talk,’ said Sir Charles between his teeth still, ‘annoys me.’

  They drove home in silence. Price’s small blue car had passed them at the traffic lights and was considerately parked under the windows of the dining-room. Bunny sighed, ‘I suppose we must give him lunch again. It’s already a moot point whether those three old boiling hens will go round.’ ‘Of course we must give him lunch,’ said Sir Charles, always inclined to suspect his half-French wife of cheese-paring. But Price, discovered in the walled garden where he was attempting to interrogate Perry’s deaf-and-dumb assistant, Clarence Reed, replied that he would lunch in Harborough — he wouldn’t be troubling them at the Park, he said, that afternoon. ‘I bet he’s going to have a conference with his chief before arresting someone,’ said Bunny, whose spirits, dashed by Sir Charles’s admonishments, had been revived by the spectacle of the self-confident Price helpless in the face of rustic inanity. ‘Only, of course, he would call it “prior to concluding the case”.’ ‘How do you know what he’d call it?’ said Sir Charles, still apparently in a state of nervous irritability. ‘We poor bloody authors know that kind of thing,’ said Bunny. ‘No need to tell us the story of your lives or to make a face for us; one look, and we know just what nasty little boys you were at your prep schools and how you felt the first time you tipped a butler and what in your heart of hearts you really think of your wives.’ ‘It’s easy to make a claim like that,’ Sir Charles snubbed her, ‘but all the time you’re probably quite wrong.’

  Bunny was right, however, in so far that during the afternoon Price reported progress to his chief, but he was not yet ready to speak of ‘concluding the case,’ and was further discouraged by a summing up very similar to that which he had impatiently heard last night from the Chief Constable: not much to go upon … Unless some new evidence turns up and why should it? … Difficult to see what line to follow … Later in the evening, in a characterless flat at Earl’s Court, he interviewed Geoffrey Marvin, blue-eyed, golden-haired, and perfectly candid. His alibi in London had been checked and found satisfactory and Price only asked for any light he could throw on the situation. Marvin told his story. He had met the deceased in Ireland. They were staying at the same hotel and they got into conversation and … well, she was a queer old girl and no picture, but she had seemed to understand how bloody civilian life was after the Service. She had persuaded him to take up riding; there was a thrill to be got out of hunting, she promised him, though he hadn’t found it; and she had kept in touch with him, and when she had settled down at Aston Park she had invited him there to get some cubhunting and at the same time to try out country life with a view to farming. ‘Like a lot of these old girls, she was a bit o
n the domineering side,’ said Marvin chattily. ‘She’d made up her mind that I should join up with Hugo d’Estray, but I’d no intention of doing so. He’s a stick, that character, and anyhow I’d decided against farming — too slow.’ ‘Had you communicated your decision to the deceased?’ Price asked him, and Marvin said no; it was dull down at Aston but it was comfortable, the food was wizard, and the old girl liked having him: he had intended to stop there until he found a job he fancied, but now … Price asked if Miss Hudson’s death hadn’t cleared the way for him: hadn’t he anticipated unpleasantness ensuing from his decision to dissociate himself with the plans she had made? Marvin said good lord no; she’d no claim on him, and Price asked if he had anticipated any legacy and Marvin said good lord no; he was a comparatively new acquaintance and there were all the d’Estrays without a cent between them. Price told him that Miss Hudson had left her horse to him and Marvin said good lord! and oh well, he must talk to Pat — perhaps she’d buy the brute from him. Then Price asked if Marvin had noticed any antipathies between any members of the d’Estrays’ household, and Marvin said it was common talk that there was no love lost between Miss Hudson and Lady d’Estray and that he had heard a row going on between Miss Hudson and the kid, Lisa; Hugo, Sir Charles, and Patricia were, he felt sure, devoted to their cousin, and with the exception of Mrs Scampnell, her rival in the hunting-field, the paying guests put up with her rudeness for snobbish reasons and let off steam by laughing at her behind her back.

  Price said, ‘Well, that confirms all I’ve heard,’ and was about to take his leave when Marvin’s mother came in and, on being introduced to Detective-Inspector Price, surmised that he had come about Geoffrey’s horrid old Miss Hudson. Stout and smart, with grey hair tightly curled, rings on her fingers and snowy frills cascading down the lapels of her neat black suit, she was almost Price’s ideal of an elderly lady; motherly, but no dowd; a little foolish and on deep or difficult subjects glad of a man’s opinion, but capable of coping with the mechanics of life and of following her own interests — bridge, matinees, an occasional dress-show — suitable interests for her age and sex.

  Price asked Joan Marvin if she had been with her son when he met Miss Hudson in Ireland, and she said no, and told Geoffrey to go and mix them all a little drink, and when he had gone she said no again; if she had been with Geoffrey, Miss Hudson would never have got hold of him. ‘Horsefaced old thing,’ she said angrily, and Price, who, believing that every mother idolized her son, had sustained throughout his married life a fiction that his mother was insanely jealous of Valerie, began to wonder whether he hadn’t stumbled on a motive stronger than any he had found at Aston Park. He was not to be influenced by a pink, plump face, forget-me-not-blue eyes, and tiny hands; it was Joan Marvin’s ‘normalcy’ that he found in her favour and he would have been amazed to hear that there were people — Bunny d’Estray among them — who would sum up as sheer madness her life of walking round shops when she’d nothing to buy, wearing shoes that pinched and a corselet that suffocated her, wracking her brains at card-tables, doing, thinking, saying nothing that was not as well undone, unthought, unsaid. All the same, mother-love was a strong and quite unreasonable emotion and it would be as well to make sure … ‘Now, Mrs Marvin, just a few routine questions: your son tells me that he spent Sunday evening with friends of yours at Surbiton.’

  ‘That’s right — with the Taylors — very nice people. I had accepted an invitation, and I had simply to drag Geoffrey. There are some nice girls there too, and they made a great fuss of him, and I’m sure he must have enjoyed himself, though he pretended he didn’t.’

  ‘And Monday?’

  ‘Well, on Monday we were both rather late getting up. I let Geoffrey lie till twelve o’clock and then we went up west and had lunch at the Troc and went on to a matinee of Bless the Bride. Ever so pretty it was, at least I thought so, but Geoffrey wasn’t struck on it. We had tea in the theatre — don’t they charge for it? — and some supper when we got home and I invited the couple from the flat above to come in for coffee and a rubber of bridge — nice people retired from India, but Geoffrey didn’t care for them much.’ She stopped suddenly and stared. ‘You’re not … you don’t … you’re not asking me all this because you suspect Geoffrey of anything?’.

  Price said, ‘We suspect everyone who ever came into contact with the deceased, Mrs Marvin, but, with the exception of young Mr Rose, your son is the only member of the Aston Park household who can supply us with an alibi, and I called here to-day because I hoped he might have been taken into the confidence of the deceased, particularly with reference to any enemies she might have possessed. What is hindering us is lack of adequate motive,’ he went on as Marvin, bearing a small tray of very small cocktails, came back into the room. ‘Many people disliked Miss Hudson, but as a motive for murder dislike can hardly be said to meet the case.’

  ‘Who has she left her money to?’ asked Joan Marvin. ‘Or is it very naughty of me to ask you that?’

  ‘Except for her horse and saddlery, which go to the Flight-Lieutenant, everything has been left to Mr Hugo d’Estray.’

  Joan Marvin said, ‘I should suspect him then. But whatever will you do with a horse, Geoffrey? They’re such awkward things to keep.’

  Price set down his glass. ‘I’ll leave you to discuss that knotty problem.’ He rose. ‘I suppose you’ll be staying in London, Flight-Lieutenant?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Joan Marvin.

  ‘I shall have to go down to Aston, Mother,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I’ve left most of my gear there, and then there’s this horse business, and I suppose I ought to show up at the funeral, whenever it is.’

  ‘It will take place to-morrow afternoon,’ Price told him.

  ‘I’ll go down to-morrow morning then,’ Marvin decided. ‘And I daresay I’ll stay over the week-end.’

  ‘Oh, Geoffrey, surely now Miss Hudson’s gone …’ protested his mother.

  ‘Well, Mother, I’ve got to fix things up, haven’t I?’ said Geoffrey irritably, and then, ‘Will you be there, Inspector?’ but Price couldn’t tell him. This interview had got him nowhere; the Marvins were both beyond suspicion; it was a million to one against picking up anything if he turned the only stone he’d left unturned and went gossiping round Hugo d’Estray’s dog-kennels and in the village. But there was that chance and, ‘Yes, I shall have to get back there,’ he told Valerie as they sat in the dining-recess eating a substitute for macaroni, covered with a sauce made from dehydrated milk and faintly flavoured with cheese fit for mousetraps, and he sighed, ‘Nothing to look at but cows and cabbages, nothing to hear but the rain dripping off the trees — it’s all very well to spend a day in the country, but you’ve no idea how stopping there gets you down …’

  CHAPTER SIX

  ON Friday October the sixteenth Elizabeth Hudson was buried in the churchyard at Aston. With her will she had left a sheet of paper directing, ‘My funeral to be very simple — no hearse or mutes — only garden flowers — a farm wagon if possible,’ and the d’Estrays carried out her wishes: she went to her rest in a yellow wagon piled with Michaelmas daisies and drawn by two shire horses, and behind the wagon Patricia led Brutus with an empty saddle. Hugo brought his hounds to the gate of the churchyard and blew the ‘gone away’ when the service was over, and though Ronald Price wasn’t a Christian, he thought it all very shocking. The villagers, however, didn’t agree with him; they said it was nice to see the ’ounds and things done as they used to be; they said that the d’Estrays were good people and it was a shame they should be done away with; they reckoned that Miss Hudson had been poisoned by one of them paying guests from London. They spoke with reserve, knowing who Price was, but being puzzled by his manner; because they were country folks — to him a cross between a cow and cabbage — on addressing them he raised his light voice to its loudest, grinned like a Cheshire cat, gripped their hands ferociously, beat his leg with a stick, asked how ‘the crops’ did, opined that rain was needed. At
the kennels, hounds, breathing fish, leaped up at him, soiled his suit, clawed his tie, knocked his nose and set it bleeding; the kennelman was affability itself, even showing him the most disgusting sight he’d ever seen — the skinning-shed. For his pains he learned that Hugo d’Estray was a grand sportsman, a real gentleman, and the finest amateur huntsman in the land.

  At the Park the rest of the day passed quietly. The family retired into the west wing, leaving the guests free to discuss the funeral. Cecily Scampnell, with tears in her eyes, said that it had been topping and hoped that her husband or Margot would give her just such a send-off when her time came to gallop on. Henry Scampnell said that it wasn’t every parson who would allow it; the d’Estrays, of course, had the Rector in their pocket. Margot thought that the blowing of the horn was just a little irreverent. Sidney Rose agreed absolutely with Mrs Scampnell, but Mrs Rose thought that garden flowers, though a nice idea, looked poor. Geoffrey Marvin angrily said, what the hell! plenty of blokes had had to do without funerals during the war, whereat Sybella Rose said she couldn’t agree more, only if you did have a ceremony, you didn’t want people to think that you’d grudged money, and if you used your own farm wagon it did look as though you were saving money on a motor hearse. Sidney Rose retorted that he had read quite lately about a Duke or an Earl whose coffin had been taken to the church on a farm cart, and Margot said she thought it was just a little theatrical, and her mother said what rot, Margot, if people liked simple country things and had spent their lives among them, the least you could do was to see that they jolly well had them at the end. She left the room abruptly, and her husband excused her. ‘She’s taking this hard, you know. I expect that you, like Margot and myself, were often amused by the rivalry between our two Dianas, but I honestly believe that in a queer way of their own they were fond of one another.’