Chapter 13

Robert Seaton Explains

NIGEL STRANGEWAYS EXAMINED the sheet of writing-paper which Blount had laid before him.

‘There is no question of a forgery,’ said Blount. ‘Our handwriting experts have been on to it.’

‘Oh, no, it’s his writing. I should know it by now.’

‘And you see it’s cheap thin paper, torn off a block; not the stuff they generally use here, headed with the address. He was trying to safeguard himself—just in case.’

The letter certainly had neither address nor date on it.

Dear Oswald. This is an incredible surprise to me. Of course I shall make no difficulties. But why didn’t you write long ago to let me know you were alive? By all means let us meet. There is a train from Bristol that gets to Chillingham Junction at 10.58 p.m. Travel by this on Thursday. I’ll leave the courtyard door unlocked and be waiting for you in the drawing-room—don’t enter the house unless or until you see the drawing-room lights are out—I’ll try to get J. to go to bed early, though. You realise she would not welcome your presence, and might make things very awkward for you. I shall not mention your return to her, therefore, till you and I have had a good talk. You must have your rights, I agree: but the matter is very ticklish because of that affair ten years ago. I would try and talk J. over; also Rennell and M. But in the meantime we must go very cautiously. So it is essential that you should destroy this letter and not advertise your arrival here. I rely on you to follow these instructions.

Your affectionate brother,

Robert.

‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ said Blount, as Nigel finished reading the letter.

‘It looks bad, certainly. I don’t wonder Oswald took all the precautions he did.’

‘He didn’t take enough, though,’ Blount grimly replied. ‘Except to keep Robert Seaton’s letter. And that didn’t save him.’

‘How did you find it?’

According to the Superintendent’s account, Oswald Seaton had arrived at Bristol the Saturday before he came to Ferry Lacey. He had worked his passage on a tramp steamer from North Africa under the name of Roger Redcote: he must have been living under this name for some time, since his papers were all in order. On arrival at Bristol, he had taken a room in a house of very dubious reputation: its landlady was already on bad terms with the local police, and this was why they had had no success at first in their efforts to trace him. Finally, however, through the belated evidence of a young person who was one of this landlady’s clients, the presence of ‘Roger Redcote’ in the house, for several days before the murder of Oswald Seaton, was revealed. Blount interviewed the landlady: she was soon induced to part with a suitcase, belonging to Roger Redcote, which she had been keeping in lieu of her unpaid bill; she also told Blount that her lodger had received a letter (Oswald had evidently told Robert to write to him under his alias) on the Wednesday, and had disappeared the following evening.

On forcing open the suitcase, Blount had found the letter from Robert Seaton in the pocket of a coat.

‘And what else did you find in the suitcase?’ asked Nigel.

‘Besides the jacket, there was a pair of trousers, two pairs of socks, a shirt, some cheap underwear, a copy of No Orchids for Miss Blandish, a pair of slippers, pyjamas, a rough towel, a tie—all pretty shabby.’ Blount reeled off the list as if he had learnt it by heart.

‘Was that all?’

‘That was all.’

‘Ah.’

‘Exactly,’ said Blount, with a keen look at Nigel.

‘Yet Oswald was clean-shaven at this time?’

‘Just so.’

‘He expected to be fitted out when he got to Plash Meadow. He wouldn’t bother to bring his worn-out old clothes. But he didn’t leave his shaving things behind at Bristol, or his toothbrush—supposing the horrible creature used one.’

‘This girl who blew the gaffe—she told us he used a cut-throat razor.’

‘Well, there’s your weapon,’ said Nigel. ‘No doubt he was carrying it in his pocket.’

‘You’re taking it all very calmly, I must say.’

‘Do you want me to give a war-whoop? I’m very fond of Robert Seaton. No doubt he said to Oswald, as the thunder rolled and the lightning played, “Could you lend me a razor just a moment, old chap? I left mine in the house by mistake.”’

The Superintendent looked hurt. ‘Oh, come now, Strangeways, you’re not being very co-operative.’

‘I only want you to tell me how the murderer managed to get hold of Oswald’s razor—that’s all: remembering that Oswald didn’t trust a soul here.’

‘Presumably Oswald took off his mac at some point and Robert found the razor in the pocket.’

‘That seems to me very lame. And it suggests that the murder was unpremeditated—that Robert didn’t think of it till it happened upon the razor. But this letter doesn’t incriminate Robert unless it was part of a plan to get Oswald here and kill him. You can’t have it both ways.’

‘Well, if you can give me any other reason why Robert, who had everything to lose by his brother’s resurrection, encouraged him in it—damn it, Strangeways, he could just have ignored Oswald’s letter! Oswald wouldn’t have dared to appear here, with that criminal charge hanging over his head. Yet Robert writes back to him, “of course I shall make no difficulties.” How d’you explain that?’

‘You’d better ask him. But if my theory is correct that it was Janet who blackmailed Oswald out of the country ten years ago, and that Robert had had no suspicions about her share in the proceedings, until Oswald reappeared, then his recent behaviour makes sense.’

‘You mean, he just wanted to make honourable restitution?’

‘Partly that,’ said Nigel. ‘And partly to protect his wife. He’d soon realise that Oswald could make things as hot for Janet, because of her complicity in his “suicide,” as she could for Oswald. I suggest Robert’s idea was to get every one round a table and discuss how a compromise could be reached. At any rate, he’d want to make sure that Oswald didn’t intend to blow the gaffe on Janet; and, in return for Oswald’s silence about this, he’d promise that no action would be taken over the Mara affair—and possibly throw in some hush-money as well. Didn’t you and Slingsby find out anything in Somerset?’

‘We did. And it supports your theory. But it’s still vairy inconclusive.’

Blount summarised the results of this part of the investigation. Inspector Slingsby, following a ten-year-old trail—and one which had petered out to nothing when the police originally followed it, after Oswald’s disappearance—had interviewed scores of people in the Somerset village where Oswald’s seaside cottage was situated. Having talked to every one who had been living there at the time of the disappearance, and discovered nothing inconsistent with the findings of the original investigation, Slingsby then set out pertinaciously to trace various individuals who had left the village since. His diligence was finally rewarded when he hit the trail of a certain Eliza Hanham. This woman had moved to a village near Bridgwater after the death of her brother in 1942: this brother, a R.N.R. man, recalled to the navy at the beginning of the war, had been killed during a dive-bombing attack upon a convoy in the Mediterranean. Eliza Hanham herself had died a few weeks ago: but in her cottage there had been discovered a hoard of money—nearly £150 in notes of small denominations. Both she and her brother were notoriously close; and the brother had owned a small motor fishing boat, which Oswald and his guests used sometimes to hire. Further investigation disclosed that Eliza Hanham had bought her cottage with the money accruing from the sale of her brother’s boat, and that she had no source of income apart from the pension which came to her after his death. It proved impossible to account for the notes found in her cottage, except on the theory that they had been given to her brother in return for services to Oswald, ten years ago, and kept hoarded ever since. At the time, the police had interviewed this John Hanham; but he and his sister both said he had slept at home on the night of Oswald’s disappearance: asked to account for Janet Lacey’s visiting his cottage two days before it—a visit reported to the police by some neighbours—John Hanham explained that she had come to discuss a fishing trip for Oswald’s house-party. The police had naturally kept an eye open, for some time after Oswald’s disappearance, in case any of the local boatmen started flinging money about in a suspicious way. But John Hanham had been much too fly to do that.

So far, the evidence was pretty negative. Brother and sister being dead—and a couple who in life had kept themselves to themselves—the source of Eliza’s hoard could be confirmed neither by questioning nor through gossip. However, Slingsby had then started at the other end and sought for corroborative evidence in the bank accounts of Oswald Seaton, Robert and Janet Lacey. Here at first he was met with a blank wall. The original investigations had covered this ground and Slingsby found nothing to contradict its conclusions—that none of the three had withdrawn a large sum just before Oswald’s disappearance, and none of them had a private account elsewhere from which the money could have been withdrawn. Superintendent Blount, turning up at this point, had suggested that Slingsby should inquire next into the affairs of old Mrs Lacey—Janet’s mother. This was the only point which, as far as he could tell from the police records, had not been satisfactorily covered. Slingsby set to work again, tracked down the man who at the time had been manager of the Redcote bank where old Mrs Lacey kept her account, and after consultation with him and the present manager, had come upon a very significant fact. It appeared that, two days before Oswald’s disappearance, the Redcote branch received a telephone call from Mrs Lacey in Somerset. The old lady appeared to be panic-stricken about the imminence of war, and asked for all the money in her current account, £300 odd, to be sent to her in notes. The manager tried to persuade her that, even if war did come the next week, her money would be much safer in the bank than in a stocking under her bed. But she was an obstinate old lady; so, after the bank had received a letter of confirmation from her, the money was sent.

Once again, the evidence could only be called circumstantial. Old Mrs Lacey was dead. There was no proof that her £300 had played a part in the conspiracy which got Oswald Seaton out of the country. But Oswald had been conveyed away. John Hanham had been visited by Janet Lacey just before, and his sister had come into possession of an otherwise unaccountable £150. So it seemed reasonable to suppose that someone, perhaps Oswald himself, more likely Janet, had played upon Mrs Lacey’s fear of war, induced her to take out her money, then ‘borrowed’ or stolen it, to pay John Hanham and to provide Oswald with some ready cash. Blount conjectured that the old lady had been kept quiet, once Oswald’s ‘suicide’ took place, by the assurance that she would benefit from Oswald’s estate when Robert, now engaged to marry her daughter, came in for it.

‘Well,’ said Blount at the end of it, ‘we’ve got to have a showdown now.’

‘With Mrs Seaton?’

‘With her husband. The matter of the conspiracy can wait. I’m going to clear up the murder first.’

‘D’you mind if I sit in?’

‘Please yourself. But no funny business. If Seaton wants help, he’ll have to get his solicitor along.’

‘One thing, Blount, I wish you’d ask him or Janet.’ Nigel explained the point about the mackintosh. ‘It seems odd that a woman who fusses over her husband’s health, as Janet does, should have allowed him to go out with her, just when a thunder-shower was starting, without his mackintosh.’

‘She says she borrowed his, eh? Well, I’ll mention it, but it doesn’t seem to me of any significance.’

Five minutes later they were in Robert Seaton’s study. Sergeant Bower, sitting at the poet’s desk, to one side of which was pushed the little black notebook that held Robert’s immortality—the poem had been finished two days ago—licked his pencil. Nigel was perched on the window-seat. The Superintendent, beside the desk, faced Robert and Janet Seaton: he was, Nigel knew, at his most formidable; yet, such were the presence of Janet and the innate dignity of her husband, that even Blount’s burly form seemed to shrink. He might have been just the local bobby come to enlist their help for a police fête or to examine a gun licence.

‘In view of certain new evidence, Mr Seaton, I am going to ask you to amplify your previous statements to the police. What you say will be taken down, and may be used in evidence. You are under no compulsion to answer my questions. And you are entitled to have a legal representative present, if you wish.’

‘I don’t think there’s any need for that,’ said Robert.

‘Very well, then. Will you tell me under what circumstances you wrote this letter to your brother, Oswald.’ Blount moved bulkily over to Robert and held the letter in front of his eyes for a few moments.

‘So the silly fellow didn’t destroy it after all?’ the poet murmured. ‘All right, you needn’t hold it in front of me. I’ve got a good memory.’

‘You admit you wrote this letter?’

‘What is this, dear?’ asked Janet.

‘Yes, of course I did.’

‘But you concealed the fact from Inspector Gates and myself? Why?’

‘Oh, come, Superintendent! That’s not a very intelligent question,’ replied Robert lightly. ‘Once it had been established that the dead man was Oswald, things would obviously look bad for me if I’d told you I’d written inviting him to come down here.’

Janet Seaton gasped. ‘Robert! What could have possessed you to? You invited him here?’

Her husband looked a bit sheepish—not guilty so much as apologetic and stubborn at the same time: it might have been some crucial arrangement he had made, knowing it would incur her displeasure, yet convinced he was right to make it. The hypnotic atmosphere of Plash Meadow once again began to creep over Nigel. Here was the crucial point of a murder investigation: and here were the two chief suspects behaving as though nothing was at stake but the invitation of an unwelcome guest.

‘Why did you, Mr Seaton?’ asked Blount softly.

‘Invite him? Oh, well, he was my brother, after all.’

‘I don’t quite mean that. This letter makes it clear that you realised his presence here would be unwelcome to Mrs Seaton. So why didn’t you go to Bristol to see him? Wouldn’t that have been a more natural thing to do, under the circumstances?’

‘Natural?’ Robert Seaton seemed to hold up the word in the air before him, examining it from every angle, as if it had been a possible epithet for a line of verse. ‘Ah, no. That would only have been to postpone things. I wanted to force the issue, you see.’

‘Will you explain that, please.’

‘Oswald would have to have the estate back. But my wife would resist this, I knew. Besides, there were Rennell and Mara to consider: they might have brought up the old affair against Oswald.’

‘You mean his criminal assault upon Miss Torrance?’

‘Yes.’

‘And when you said in your letter, “Of course I shall make no difficulties,” you meant no difficulties about his getting back the estate?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were prepared to give up everything, to go back to poverty, to deprive your wife and children of all this’—Blount made a semi-circular gesture with his hand—‘without a murmur?’

‘I dare say it wouldn’t have been as bad as that. Oswald might have looked after us. But I had to do what I thought was right.’

‘Hmm. So, by “forcing the issue,” you meant inviting Oswald down here and compelling your wife and friends to accept the situation?’

‘More or less.’

Blount leant forward suddenly. ‘Then why all the secrecy? Why those elaborate plans to smuggle him into the house, by night, without your wife’s knowledge? If you wanted to force the issue, wouldn’t it have been more—e-eh—more effective to have announced that Oswald was alive, and that you intended to make restitution? To discuss the matter with the others before you invited him here? Surely you would first have sounded Mr Torrance, for instance, as to whether he was prepared to drop the old charge against your brother?’

‘One doesn’t always do what is most effective,’ Robert Seaton’s fine eyes levelly returned Blount’s somewhat pugnacious stare. ‘I wanted to have a private talk with him first—discover the lie of the land—before making it public. What you call “the secrecy” was just a precaution for Oswald’s sake.’

‘Whom did you suppose he had to be protected from?’

‘Why, I’ve just told you—’

‘It was not in your mind to protect him from—well, from your wife, for instance?’

‘From Janet? But my dear fellow—’

‘You did not know that your wife had arranged Oswald’s fake suicide ten years ago?’

‘Superintendent! How dare you suggest—’ exclaimed Mrs Seaton.

‘And that she was thus liable to a very grave charge of conspiracy? And that Oswald, the only living witness to this, was a menace to her therefore?’

Janet Seaton rose formidably to her feet. ‘Superintendent, I insist on an explanation of this extraordinary charge.’

‘I am afraid it is you who will have to do the explaining, ma’am. As for instance, the three hundred pounds withdrawn from your mother’s account a couple of days before Oswald’s disappearance, and the large sum of money handed over to John Hanham in return for his services.’

Mrs Seaton sat down as abruptly as she had risen, her face rigid, glaring at the wall before her. Robert was studying his clasped hands: his small body seemed to have dwindled. The Superintendent turned to him again.

‘Do you claim to have known nothing, suspected nothing, about your brother’s “suicide”? You were quite unaware, till now, that your wife had engineered it so as to get his estate into your hands and hers? And that the lever she used was the Mara Torrance affair—blackmail, in fact?’

‘I cannot answer that question.’ The poet looked small and sick.

‘He does not need to answer it,’ put in Nigel. ‘The first sentence of his letter to Oswald is the answer. “This is an incredible surprise to me.” If Mr Seaton had known the truth about his brother’s disappearance, it would be gratuitous and pointless for him to pretend surprise when Oswald reappeared. What Mr Seaton may have suspected later is quite another matter.’

Blount shrugged his heavy shoulders. ‘Let us go back to your letter, then. It was in reply to one from your brother. Have you kept his letter?’

‘No. I destroyed it.’

‘Just so. Can you remember exactly what he said?’

‘Not word for word. He said he was at Bristol; gave me a name and address to write to; asked me what I was going to do about it.’

‘Did he—e-eh—make any threats?’

‘No. Unless you call that last remark a threat.’

‘He said nothing about his “suicide”?’

‘No.’

‘He assumed you knew the truth about it, then.’

‘I’ve no idea what he assumed. It was a brief letter, anyway—only a few lines.’

Blount hunched himself in his chair. ‘Now, this is important, Mr Seaton. Could any one else here have known you had invited your brother down? Did you leave your reply to him lying about before you posted it, for instance?’

‘No. I wrote back to him the same day as I received his letter. In any case, no one but Finny—and, of course, Janet—comes into my study.’ Robert chuckled. ‘It’s a sanctum, in the strictest sense of the word.’

‘Did you post the letter yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘May I ask one question?’ said Nigel. ‘Did you use your Stylograph to write it?’

‘Why, yes, no doubt I did.’

‘But you didn’t use your ordinary headed notepaper.’

‘No.’ Robert gave Nigel a look as much as to say, “ You at any rate will understand this.” ‘I—it would have been in rather bad taste somehow. Rubbing in the fact that I was the usurper of his own property.’

‘I fancy such refinements of—e-eh—sensibility would be wasted upon Oswald Seaton,’ said Blount dryly. ‘However. Having carefully arranged for him to arrive secretly, at night, when your household had gone to bed, you then decided not to wait for him here at all. You went for a walk instead. What explanation can you give for this change of plan?’

‘I changed my mind at the last minute; thought I would go a little way to meet him. It never occurred to me that he’d take the short cut.’

‘I see. And when you did eventually meet him—after you’d got back here again—’

‘Oh, but I didn’t. You mustn’t lay these traps for me, Superintendent,’ remarked Robert Seaton mildly.

‘You would be prepared to swear, on your oath, in a court of law, that you never saw your brother that night?’ asked Blount with impressive solemnity.

Nigel noticed that Janet Seaton’s eyes were tight shut, her head pressed back against her chair, as if at the peak of an ordeal.

Robert Seaton gazed levelly at Blount, an expression of boyish, almost cherubic innocence on his face. ‘I am willing to swear, on my oath, that I never saw Oswald alive after that day, ten years ago, when he disappeared.’

‘But you saw him dead, eh?’ asked Blount sharply.

‘I had to—er—view the body, as you know. And I was present when the head was found.’

Blount allowed a silence to protract itself, like an evening shadow, over the room. Janet lay back in her chair, inert as a corpse. Briskly rubbing his hands, the poet glanced up towards Blount, then to Sergeant Bower whose pencil was poised to attention.

‘Very well,’ said Blount at last, a little wearily. ‘You returned from your walk. You were still expecting your brother to arrive. Yet you went out twice into the courtyard with Mrs Seaton, within the next half hour, although Oswald might turn up at any moment. How do you square this with your intention to keep his arrival a secret?’

‘It was very awkward, I agree. But Janet was restless that night—wouldn’t go to bed—the storm, you know. So I had to risk Oswald running into us the first time. But I calculated he would avoid Janet if he saw her: that’s why I took out the storm lantern—a sort of danger signal. And the second time, when we went to look for Finny—well, I imagined something must have prevented Oswald coming, it was so late by then.’

Nigel had to admire the stoical way in which Blount took this blow to his case: yet another article of suspicion, the storm-lantern, had been naturally, credibly disposed of. It began to dawn upon Nigel that, as things were going, there simply were not adequate grounds for arresting Robert Seaton, and that Blount realised this too.

‘When you went out of the house the first time, with Mrs Seaton, it was raining and she borrowed your mackintosh?’ asked the Superintendent.

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me now, Mrs Seaton—you allowed your husband to go out into a heavy thunder-shower—’

‘It was only just across the courtyard, and my own mackintosh was upstairs.’

‘Your only mackintosh, did you say?’ put in Nigel.

‘I didn’t. But, as you ask, I have only the one.’

‘The long one I saw you wearing the day Lionel and Mara went off?’

‘Presumably.’

Robert Seaton was at last looking really worried. ‘What is the point, Nigel? You’re not suggesting that this was the mackintosh found upon the body, are you? I only possess one myself, and that’s hanging up in the hall.’

‘No, I had something else on my mind. Did you have your mac with you when you were out for your walk?’

‘I—yes, I think I did.’ Robert answered with something less than his usual crispness.

A frenzied ringing of a bicycle bell came to their ears from the courtyard below.

‘You see,’ Nigel went on slowly, his eyes fixed upon Robert’s, ‘it would explain everything—how that chap down the lane saw you at quarter to one, how Oswald was killed, and why, and by whom—oh, everything, if—’

Feet were galloping up the stairs. A voice cried, ‘Daddy! Daddy!’

‘If what?’ asked Robert Seaton, more intent than Nigel had ever yet seen him.

‘If it wasn’t your mackintosh that—’

Before Nigel could finish the sentence, the door was flung open as if by a mighty, rushing wind, and Vanessa, pink-cheeked, hair flying, breathlessly announced:

‘Daddy . . . I’ve found . . . Mara!’