‘And that door there,’ said Fen: ‘where does that lead to?’
They had toured the whole house from cellar to attic and were now back in the large, draughty entrance-hall. Startled, Mrs Danvers peered about her. ‘Which, the which,’ she said incoherently.
‘That one.’ Fen pointed. ‘Of course, if it’s private—’
‘Not at all.’ Mrs Danvers rallied and became brisk again. ‘I quite imagined I’d shown it you already. But really, there are so many rooms …’ Changing course abruptly, like a small yacht in a high wind, she marched back in the direction indicated. ‘So very many,’ she added on a note of artificial complacency, ‘that I feel sure that your – your—’
‘My boys,’ Fen prompted her, following.
‘That your boys would fit in excellently.’ And Mrs Danvers gave a little nod, for emphasis, as she unbolted the door in question and threw it open. ‘Yes,’ she said brightly, in the tone of one who has as yet no notion what words are to follow. ‘Yes … Well, here it is, then. You could use it for – for – well, for a store-room, perhaps.’
‘Ah,’ said Fen. But he could distinguish very little, he found, of what was being shown him. ‘Is there a light, by any chance?’
‘Of course.’ she switched it on, revealing a musty square box of an apartment with a boarded floor and all the windows bricked up; there was no furniture in it of any kind. ‘By fixing shelves,’ said Mrs Danvers, ‘it would be possible—’
‘Just so.’ Fen was already backing away. ‘Very nice indeed.’
‘Or you might even turn it into a little museum.’ A Black Museum, Fen supposed: he sat on the Committee of a society for the regeneration of delinquent youth, and it was their search for a new probationary Home which had brought him to this ill-planned mansion. ‘Ah,’ he said again, unimaginatively; but Mrs Danvers, who was still talking, swamped it. She was a trim elderly woman, well laced in, with greying hair and rather hard features, and she had a good command of that most devastating of a salesman’s weapons, uninterrupted speech.
‘It was my uncle,’ she was saying now, ‘who had the windows sealed – against burglars, you understand – at the time when he was thinking of putting his very valuable collection of porcelain in here, rather than have it scattered all over the house. In actual fact he never did, put it in here, I mean, because the income-tax people made a quite outrageous claim against him, for years back, and he had to sell most of the collection so as to be able to pay, at least he always said he couldn’t avoid selling it, though I really think it must have been partly pique, because Betty, that was his daughter, inherited investments, really quite substantial investments, when he died, and so there you are, but most schools do have a museum, I believe, butterflies and bits of rock and things, and since that’s what it was originally intended for …’
‘I’ll keep the suggestion in mind.’ Fen interposed firmly. ‘And now I’d better be going, I think. My Committee’s due to meet again in a few days’ time, and the secretary will write to you.’ He started edging towards the front door. ‘You’ve been very kind indeed, most kind.’
‘And you will remember to tell them that it’s a new house, won’t you?’ With a skilful flanking movement, Mrs Danvers got ahead of him, thereby temporarily cutting off his retreat. ‘I mean, so many of these huge places are old and falling to bits that the mere size of it may give a wrong impression, but this was built only just before the war, the 1939 war that is, and although I’ve had to keep so many of the rooms shut up it really is in very good condition, no one but the family has lived in it, it’s never been let even, and as to small children and animals, so destructive don’t you think, they just haven’t been allowed inside, not ever, so you see it really has been looked after.’
Mumbling assent, Fen made a break for it and gained the doorstep. ‘Very kind,’ he said. ‘Put you to a lot of trouble, I’m afraid … Other houses being looked at … Can’t be sure what my Committee will decide … Let you know as soon as possible.’ Emitting other such reassurances and farewells, he fled.
The house wouldn’t do, of course, he reflected as he turned into the road through the ornate lodge-gates: it was grotesquely inconvenient for almost any purpose. There was one aspect of it which had aroused his curiosity, however, and he remained pensive, weighing and rejecting alternative hypotheses, as he strolled into the little town … Presently, coming to the Market square, he halted uncertainly. He had intended to catch the 6:13 bus back to Oxford, and so be in time for dinner in Hall; and it would be inconvenient, from the point of view of eating, if he missed that bus. On the other hand, he was by nature voraciously inquisitive, and the oddity he had observed, though apparently trivial in itself, would remain, he knew, to perplex and irritate him so long as he made no attempt to investigate it. In the end, curiosity triumphed. Retracing his steps, he made his way back to a public-house which he had noticed quite close to the house he had been inspecting.
Its landlord proved affable; and on learning Fen’s mission in the neighbourhood, became voluntarily informative. ‘’Ti’n’t the sort of place I’d want to buy,’ he confided, breathing heavily with the effort of keeping his massive form adequately supplied with oxygen. ‘All right for a school, I dessay, but that’s all. What old Ridgeon wanted to build it so big for, I really don’t—’
‘Ridgeon?’
‘Ah. Old chap as collected china and stuff. You’d think he’d had a family of twenty-seven, what with the size of the place, but there was only the one daughter. But “’Iggs,” ’e used to say to me, “I just can’t abide these little rat-traps of houses. A gentleman,” ’e’d say, “’as to ’ave space to move about.” Well, sir, I ask you, what a line to take, with the servant situation being what it is. It wa’n’t so bad then, mind. ’E started off all right, with three or four. But then there was the war, and by the time that was ’alf over ’e’d only got one left, and ’alf the rooms ’ad ’ad to be shut up. Foolishness, I call it. Arrogance. And that one maid, even she left when ’e died, a couple o’ years ago, and the niece, Mrs Danvers, ’oo’d come to ’ousekeep for ’im, ’ad to do everything ’erself, and there was more rooms shut up, and it’s small wonder she’s trying to get shot of it.’
‘What about the daughter, though?’
‘Ah, Betty ’elped, o’ course. Only she wasn’t really the practical sort, and then when it came to the tragedy—’
Fen stiffened slightly. ‘The tragedy?’
‘Didn’t you never ’ear of that? But I dessay you wouldn’t, being a stranger ’ere. Real shocking, it was.’ And here the landlord addressed himself to the bar’s only other occupant, a quiet, well-dressed, middle-aged man who was drinking a double whisky in a corner. ‘None of us ’ll forget that in a ’urry, Doctor, shall we?’
‘It was atrocious.’ The doctor spoke in a low voice, but with unexpected vehemence. ‘And when you think that there are still a lot of damned vociferous fools who go around saying children oughtn’t to be taught about sex …’ He checked himself, shrugging and smiling; finished his drink and ordered another. ‘But you’d better not get me on to that subject.’
‘What happened?’ Fen asked.
The doctor studied him, and appeared to decide, by some process of intuition, that the question was prompted by some better motive than mere sensation-seeking.
‘There was this girl, you see,’ he said. ‘This girl Betty – Ridgeon’s daughter, Mrs Danvers’s cousin. A nice girl. Very pale ginger hair, and brown eyes with it. But nervous – highly strung. About a year after her father died she met a chap called Venables, Maurice Venables, and fell for him in a really big way.’
‘Fair daft about ’im,’ confirmed the landlord. ‘Fair daft about ’im, she was.’
The doctor grimaced. ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said, ‘I rather liked Betty myself. But after she met Venables, there just wasn’t a chance for anyone else. He was a good chap, too, I’ve got to hand it to him …
‘Well, they got engaged, and the wedding was all set for a day last June. And then, on the actual morning of her wedding-day, Betty disappeared.’
Fen’s eyebrows lifted; and if the doctor had been less engrossed in his story, he might have seen an odd look, almost like satisfaction, flicker across the stranger’s face. ‘Disappeared?’ Fen echoed.
‘Vanished. Went. Some time in the very early morning, they thought. She took some cash with her, but they never traced where she went during the fortnight that followed.’
‘But what reason—’
‘Well, she was frightened, it seems – frightened about the physical side of the marriage. Mrs Danvers knew that, and there were one or two girl-friends who confirmed it. She wasn’t cold, mind you, not that sort at all; just scared.’ The doctor’s brow darkened. ‘Why they don’t teach these girls something about it … However. Oh, and by the way, I’m sure it wasn’t Venables’s fault. He’s a nice gentle chap. No, it’s just that the girl was both ignorant and highly-strung, and the combination turned out fatal. In spite of being so much in love with him, she funked it at the last moment. Poor kid …’
He brooded while Fen ordered fresh drinks for himself and for the landlord. Then, resuming:
‘Anyway, for a whole fortnight she vanished,’ he said. ‘And then, one night, she came back. No one saw her, and she didn’t go to the house. Instead, she seems to have slept in an old barn just outside the town, Abingdon way. But you can imagine what she was feeling. She must have felt she could never face Venables again – though, Lord knows, he’d have forgiven her all right. With him gone, everything was gone. So she got hold of an old kitchen knife somewhere – they never found out where – and cut her throat with it, and that was how they found her.’
There was a brief silence, broken only by the landlord’s asthmatic wheezing. Then, dismissively, the doctor said:
‘They’d searched for her, of course. It was quite a to-do, I can tell you. Everything ready – cake, reception, parson and all the trimmings – and then Mrs Danvers had to ring up Venables and the police and meet them at the gate and tell them what had happened, and you can imagine how everyone felt. Though that was nothing to what they felt when the body was found …’
‘Who,’ Fen demanded abruptly, ‘was to have given her away?’
The doctor looked at him in surprise. ‘Why d’you ask? It was an old friend of her father’s, actually, because the only relative she had living was Mrs Danvers.’
‘And was he staying at the house?’
The doctor’s puzzlement visibly grew; but it was the landlord who answered.
‘No, sir,’ said the landlord. ‘’E was staying ’ere … Mrs Danvers,’ he added with some gratification, ‘said ’e’d be more comfortable ’ere than with them, so there was only Mrs Danvers in the ’ouse when young Betty did ’er bunk.’
‘That was what I was getting at, yes,’ said Fen. ‘Interesting. Has the house ever been let?’
The landlord shook his head. ‘Not to my knowledge, sir, never. But why—’
‘And just one other thing.’ Fen’s smile robbed the interruption of all offence. ‘Mrs Danvers can’t stand small children and dogs, I believe.’
‘That’s so, sir. D’you remember the time you went there with your Alsatian, Doctor, and ’aving to leave ’im tied up outside? In’uman, I call it, but there’s no accounting for some people. O’ course, when old Ridgeon was alive, and before ’e sold ’is collection, it’d have been silly to ’ave dogs and kids rushing about knocking valuable pieces over and smashing ’em. I dessay if old Ridgeon ’ad put all ’is vases and so forth in that room ’e ’ad got ready for ’em, it’d ’ave been all right then. But ’e never did – and anyway, ’e di’n’t like children nor animals, nor Mrs Danvers don’t, neither.’
With this stately procession of negatives Fen seemed very content. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘if you could just tell me whether Mrs Danvers has a car, and something about her shopping habits …’ And presently he was able to finish his beer and depart, well primed.
There was a silence in the bar after he had left. Then the doctor said:
‘Impressive sort of bloke, in an odd way. Formidable, somehow. I wonder what he thought he was getting at?’
The landlord grunted. ‘For-mid-ab-le, yes,’ he agreed, pronouncing the word with the precaution which its length required. ‘Not the sort o’ chap you’d like to ’ave for an enemy, really. As to what ’e was after, I don’t know. ’E di’n’t look like police, not to me anyway. A bit cracked, per’aps.’ Then, dismissing the topic: ‘Well, Doctor, ’ow about another of the same? Does you a bit of good, this weather, doen’t it – whatever anyone may say.’
But neither of them saw the object of these varied compliments when he returned next morning – for Fen’s second visit was not one which he wished to have generally known. For all his faults, he is not a particularly expert housebreaker; but on this occasion no great expertise was required, since Mrs Danvers had gone to the shops leaving several ground-floor windows open; and so he was able to do his work, and get away after it, without leaving any traces behind him. He had with him only a thin-bladed knife, some sheets of paper, and some envelopes. But on arriving back safely in Oxford he supplemented these with various purchases at a chemist’s; and once home, he went straight to that room which, to the disgust and apprehension of his family, he uses as a makeshift laboratory, and locked himself in. For some little time he was happily occupied with filter paper, hydrogen peroxide, and a solution of benzidine sulphate in glacial acetic acid. Then he went to the telephone …
By a stroke of luck, it was Detective-Inspector Humbleby who was eventually sent down from Scotland Yard to handle the case.
‘Oh yes, it’s blood all right,’ said Humbleby. ‘And what’s more, it’s human blood. And what’s even better, it’s the same group and subgroups as Betty Ridgeon’s (good thing she was a blood-donor, by the way: that’s saved us an exhumation). So the assumption is that she did in fact cut her throat in that little room, and not in the barn where she was found.’
‘You got plenty of it, did you,’ said Fen, ‘out of those crevices between the floor-boards?’
‘More than enough, even after you’d been at it. The wretched girl must have bled pints … We managed to salvage some from the barn, too – cat’s blood, most of it, part of Mrs Danvers’s ingenious scene-setting. Apparently it never occurred to anyone to test it, at the time. So far so good, then: Betty killed herself—’
‘Or was killed.’
But Humbleby shook his head. ‘No proof of that. There were all the proper suicidal signs, apparently, the little tentative cuts before the final one and so forth … Oh yes, I grant you Mrs Danvers had motive enough. Betty was intestate: if she died after her marriage, the estate she’d inherited from her father would go to Venables, and if she died before, it’d go to Mrs Danvers – as in fact it did. But we can’t hope to prosecute for murder. In my view, the likeliest way for it to have happened is this: Mrs Danvers, in mere panic at the thought of losing the chance of old Ridgeon’s money for good, shuts Betty up on the wedding morning, and invents this very plausible tale about the girl being scared and running away. Then—’
‘But look here,’ Fen interrupted fretfully, ‘what the devil can the Danvers woman have imagined she was going to do with the girl, after she’d locked her up? She’d either have to let her out eventually, and take the consequences, or else silence her for good. So that, surely, is reason enough in itself for supposing—’
‘It isn’t, you know.’ Humbleby was unexpectedly brusque. ‘In my view, Mrs Danvers simply acted without thinking. What I will admit as likely is that she deliberately gave the girl a sharp kitchen knife to eat her food with; and that the girl, unhinged by her imprisonment and by whatever psychological warfare, on the subject of Venables and the marriage, Mrs Danvers chose to subject her to, eventually used the knife on herself: it was only her fingerprints that were found on it, you know … Afterwards, Mrs Danvers must have taken the body and the knife by night to that barn, in her car, and dumped it there with the cat’s blood.’
‘Fingerprints,’ Fen grumbled. ‘As if they proved anything. But if what you say is right, it was morally murder.’
‘Oh, quite. Only unfortunately our law doesn’t punish people for moral murders.’
‘Well then, at least there’s the imprisonment – assault, battery, unlawful restraint or whatever you call it.’
‘My dear Gervase, we’ve no proof of that whatever. The only thing we can prove is that Betty Ridgeon died in that little room, and not in the barn. And you know what sort of a charge that leaves us with, to punish that abominable woman? Concealing a body in order to prevent an inquest. Seven days, if the magistrates are harsh. That’s a nice, fat, satisfying revenge for poor Betty, isn’t it?’
Fen contemplated him gloomily. ‘The father,’ he ventured, ‘Ridgeon, I mean—’
‘Died naturally. The post-mortem was done yesterday, immediately after the exhumation, and the Home Office isn’t a bit pleased at our having dug him up and not found anything, even though we warned them it was a gamble … Mrs Danvers isn’t saying anything, by the way – anything at all, I mean. She refuses to make a statement or answer questions until she’s charged.’
For a long while after that both men were silent, angry at the law’s impotence. Then Humbleby said:
‘The only thing I don’t see is what put you on to it in the first place, before you knew anything about Betty.’
‘Oh, that … I should like to think that it would help,’ said Fen, ‘but I’m afraid it won’t. Here was this room, you see, with the windows blocked up, so that there was no question of burglars from outside getting through it into the rest of the house. And the house had never been let, and there had never been any small children or dogs in it, to be excluded from the room in case of damage they might do …
‘So can you think of any reason – other than imprisonment, I mean – why there should have been a bolt on the outside, the hall side, of that door?’