“The Bandertree case?” Appleby frowned. “Well, yes – I did have something to do with it. But it wasn’t pretty.”
“No more is the name.” The Doctor looked up from the intricacies of mulling a pint of claret. “But was it queer? I’m all for a bizarre story tonight. And Bandertree sounds promising. Who was he?”
“A deeply unfortunate man.” Appleby, staring into the fire, appeared reluctant to proceed.
“How did his case begin?”
“As yours might, or mine, if fate had a whim that way. Bandertree’s troubles started with people beginning to talk. Every day, you know, and in every little suburb, people are beginning to talk. You can never get at the first whisper – the first starting up of a suspicion in some acute or timid or dirty mind. Hundreds of these notions just die away. But a few become the occasion of persistent, sinister gossip, and may reach the police. If they are not quite clearly mere twaddle, they are investigated. And, every now and again–”
“Quite so.” The Doctor sat back. “And now we proceed from the general to the particular. Just pass that nutmeg, would you? And then go ahead.”
“Very well. Bandertree was a middle-aged man with a small private income, a small strange talent as a painter, and a large and intermittently explosive temperament. He had been in bad trouble once as a younger man – I believe over some freakish brutality to a friend who had betrayed him in a love-affair – and the rumour of this had followed him to the little village of Chingford, where he lived by himself in a cottage standing by itself on the south bank of the stream. He lived there for years, a great recluse, and it seems that all sorts of odd yarns were told about him. Even when one discounts the greater number, it is evident that he was becoming very eccentric. And then he got married.”
The Doctor nodded. “With what might be called a composing and normalising effect? I thought so. It’s a not uncommon result – for a time.”
“Bandertree married a war-widow called Agnes Mole. That must have been in 1943; and for a couple of years all went well. They were a devoted pair, despite the lady’s being a completely commonplace person, incapable of telling a Picasso from a Modigliani. What you might call a thoroughly successful, thoroughly carnal marriage.”
Cautiously the Doctor tested his claret with a silver spoon. “And with rocks ahead.”
“It might be better to say a single submerged reef. For what the couple presently ran up against was something thoroughly unexpected and treacherous. Mrs Bandertree proved not to have been a widow after all.”
“This being, in fact, one of those Back-from-the-Dead yarns?”
“Just that. Rupert Mole had been captured, not killed; and for some reason no news of him had ever come through. It was partly, I believe, because he had done one of those brilliant escapes that were apt simply to land a man in hiding with friendly folk in enemy-occupied territory. Anyway, at the end of the war Rupert Mole came home, and presently traced Agnes to Bandertree’s cottage.
“Just what happened at first, I never got fully sorted out. Probably – as so often with such predicaments in real life – it was nothing very clear-cut. I suppose a tug of emotions, of appetites, memories, decencies, loyalties now one way and now another – and, as a result, a state of pure muddle and misery for all three of those people, such as would have taken some powerful external authority to straighten out. But in the end the jam did look like having some sort of decisive issue. The woman said she was going to stick to Bandertree; Bandertree agreed to keep her; and both of them told Mole to clear off. Only he didn’t. He took a cottage just on the other side of the Ching and began a policy of hanging around. It couldn’t be called very wise.”
“Nor very noble.” The Doctor poured out his concoction deftly and sat down again. “But of course it might produce results.”
“What it produced was an abomination. Bandertree began to go queer again. Agnes alternated between clinging to him passionately and moods of guilt and revulsion. And Mole went about pubs and talked.
“This state of affairs continued for some months, and one consequence was that Bandertree could no longer face the world, and ceased absolutely from ever leaving his cottage. He wouldn’t so much as go out into the garden. Only when Agnes did her shopping in the village, he could be seen staring out of the window after her in a sort of bestial fear. Mole, remember, was lurking not much more than a stone’s throw away, across the stream.
“Well, Mole might be driving Bandertree crazy, but for a long time he didn’t seem to be getting much out of the situation himself. He’d sit sullen and silent in a bar parlour of an evening, and then on a third beer he’d open up and curse his wife for her obstinate faithlessness. He was becoming a recognised bore in this way, when there appeared a sudden change in him. For about a week he became strained and utterly secretive. And then one evening he turned up darkly exultant, but taciturn still. It was on gin – something like a bottle of it – that they got him to talk that night. What he had to say was simple. Agnes had promised to return to him next day, and had agreed to their leaving the country together. And she had told Bandertree that she had made up her mind to this.
“And the next day, sure enough, Mole’s cottage was seen to be shut up and deserted – nor did anybody ever set eyes on Agnes again. Bandertree was still to be glimpsed occasionally at a window, but his look was now wandering, and he appeared quite demented. He continued never to leave the house, and lived on supplies which he had persuaded some old woman to leave two or three times a week on his doorstep.
“It was only after about a couple of months that people began the talking – the really sinister talking – that I was speaking of. Eventually it reached the Chief Constable down there – a fellow who is something of a connoisseur in the macabre, and who decided to investigate himself. Bandertree proved to be in sober truth the next thing to crazy. But his story was quite simple. Agnes had simply vanished, and he had no doubt that Mole was responsible.
“So the Chief Constable went after Mole. He was eventually found in Dublin – and alone. His story, too, was simple. Agnes had failed to keep her promise; had simply not turned up. Whereupon he had decided he had had enough, and cleared out.
“There was one plain fact in this tangle: a woman had disappeared, and must be accounted for. The Chief Constable returned to Bandertree’s cottage – and as well as an inquiring mind he took with him a sharp eye. In the middle of the sitting-room the floor seemed to have sunk slightly, as if there had been a subsidence. So he got a search-warrant, had the floorboards up, and dug. Need I tell you any more?”
The Doctor considered, and then smiled grimly. “My dear Appleby, if I know anything of you, the answer is decidedly Yes.”
“Very well. They dug, and found the woman’s body. The question that arose was whether Bandertree would be considered fit to plead. For he was certainly uncommonly strange, and the discovery, as you may imagine, didn’t do him any good.
“It was about getting hold of the right medical line on this that I was consulted, and eventually I reviewed the whole case. There is something to be said for being thorough, even in the dullest and most routine way. I got Bandertree’s whole history in all the detail I could. Then I got Mole’s, and as soon as I read it I went down to Chingford and found what I expected to find. Four months later Mole was hanged.”
“I don’t see it.”
“You would have, if you had learnt from the report on him that as a prisoner of war he had become one of the finest tunnel-diggers on record. He burrowed his way under the Ching and beneath Bandertree’s house. Then he killed the woman, got her body where he wanted it, and sealed that end of the tunnel with what must have been astounding technical skill. After that he had only to wait a bit, and then from a distance somehow contrive to set rumour going in Chingford. He planned, you see, to be revenged on both his wife and her lover. Didn’t I say the story wasn’t pretty? Let’s forget it in this remarkable brew.”