‘Or communicated with her in any way?’ The chief had taken a couple of strides in the melting snow and turned to face the anthropologist.
‘Nor have I communicated with her.’ Hoodless looked first at one and then the other of us bravely. ‘I had entered that park feeling only a relationship with her; now I was in a relationship with her husband as well. It needed considering.’ Hoodless paused. ‘A couple of hundred years ago the solution would have been comparatively simple. But a duel would be distinctly eccentric today, nor do I suppose he was the sort of man who would have hazarded himself after that fashion. I don’t know that our customs have changed for the better in these ways. Cultures in which there is some form of judicial combat usually escape a good deal of underhand violence.’
Inspector Cadover was looking appraisingly at the sinister little building called Sir Basil’s Folly. ‘You meditated underhand violence yourself?’ he asked.
‘Violence, certainly. One does in such a situation think of killing one’s man. But such thoughts are atavic and one presently recognizes them as such. Sticking the Simney carving knife, or the ancestral Hoodless stiletto, into Sir George would by no means have mended matters. I decided to sleep on my problem – and when I woke up it was to hear an excited landlord telling a group of yokels that Sir George had been murdered. All his earthly accounts were closed – my own, which was the latest opened, among them.’
We had mounted the steps of the temple as Hoodless spoke, and walked half round the little terrace before it. The chief surprised me by unceremoniously forcing a window and entering. We waited in complete silence until he came out again. ‘Nicely fitted out,’ he said. ‘Conveniently appointed.’ He frowned and added a most unprofessional remark. ‘Do you know, I cannot feel that society has lost much in the late Sir George?’
‘I imagine,’ said Hoodless, ‘that, on the contrary, the gain is considerable. Still, the brains even of very bad hats should not be scattered about the carpet. If I can help clear the thing up, I will.’
Inspector Cadover brought out his pipe. ‘If you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘I’ll just fumigate a little after inspecting the love-nest. And now, sir, it will be best that I put a few direct questions. Sir George has come to this violent end and Lady Simney must be presumed in considerable distress of mind. Why have you not attempted to have any communication with her?’
‘I had to think things out.’
Impatiently the chief struck a match. ‘That seems to be your line every time.’
Hoodless flushed. ‘You don’t understand. But I think you will when you have asked your remaining questions.’
‘Very well. What were you doing on Tuesday, Mr Hoodless, shortly before midnight?’
‘Prowling about within a stone’s throw of Hazelwood.’
We both stared at him dumbfounded. ‘When you remarked that you probably had no alibi,’ said the chief, ‘it looks as if you weren’t far wrong. Have you any explanation of so extraordinary a proceeding?’
‘I was in love.’
There, was a silence. The thing was perfectly adequate. Men do behave just so. But it took some swallowing, all the same.
‘You rallied us,’ said the chief, ‘on the fascination of footprints in the snow. Well, you didn’t leave any.’
‘I suppose I kept to the carriage sweep, which had been pretty well cleared. Why shouldn’t you believe me? It would be absurd to invent such a story.’
‘It would seem to be so.’ The chief was cautious and plodding. ‘While you were on this prowl, then, did you see or hear anything material?’
‘I certainly did. It put me in grave doubts as to how to act at the time. I was watching the house – there was, as you will have heard, a glimmer of moonlight – when I saw a dark figure apparently scaling one of the wings. I couldn’t make out how it was being managed, but it appeared to be a fairly easy ascent.’
‘I see.’ We had turned from Sir Basil’s Folly and were moving through the oak trees. ‘You have quite a talent, Mr Hoodless, for failing to break new ground.’
The anthropologist laughed a trifle shortly. ‘Professionally,’ he said, ‘I hope it is otherwise. And I don’t at all know what you mean.’
‘That yours, so far, is what is called corroborative evidence. But please go on.’
‘What is called a cat-burglar would no doubt present just such an appearance. I wondered whether I ought to give an alarm. But to account for my presence would have been uncommonly awkward. And, after all, Sir George’s spoons and forks were nothing to me.’
‘To be sure they were not. Can you give us an idea of the hour, by the way?’
‘I have no idea of it. I had got into the sort of state, I am afraid, at which time makes very little impression. But one very acute sense I always have – that of hearing. I doubt if, from where I was standing, any normal ear would have heard what I heard then. It was a scream – a scream of rage and terror.’
How the chief took this I don’t know. For my own part I nearly jumped out of my skin. For these were the very words which Owdon – or Denzell Simney – had used to describe what he had heard from Sir George’s study. This was corroborative evidence with a vengeance.
‘And then the figure reappeared again and re-descended to the darkness of a terrace. I fancied I heard sounds of a scuffle. Then I heard the panting breath of somebody approaching me, and the figure of a man came into sight quite close at hand. I had just decided that it was the cat-burglar, and was wondering whether to do a rugger tackle, when he came fully into view. Three things were surprising about him and made me hold my hand.’
The village was now before us and I could see a thin wisp of blue smoke rising from the Green Cow. Dramatic sense had made Hoodless fall silent while we walked a dozen paces. ‘Three things?’ I asked.
‘Yes. First, the cat-burglar was a clergyman. Second, he was running through the snow in his stockinged feet. And third, his face in the moonlight bore such an expression of horror and fear as I had never before seen, or seen only in New Guinea natives who believed themselves haunted by demons.’
‘I see.’ Inspector Cadover looked inquiringly into the bowl of his pipe. ‘You might say he was like a man who had run up against the Devil?’
‘Yes. Against the Devil and all his works.’
We climbed a stile and were again on the high road. ‘In the matter of those New Guinea natives,’ said the chief. ‘Your experience of them wouldn’t, I suppose, go back twenty years or thereabouts?’
‘Heavens, no. Not ten.’
‘Did you ever come up against b1ackbirding?’
Hoodless stared in surprise. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I never did. It’s an evil that has pretty well died out. But then so have the potential blackbirds, poor devils.’
‘Did you ever hear of two anthropologists who went on a trading voyage with some natives and had a brush with blackbirders?’
‘Never.’
‘Have you ever heard anything whatever of a family of Simneys in Australia?’
‘I’m very sure I never have.’
‘You say you wrote frequently to Lady Simney after her marriage. I suppose, therefore, that she wrote to you. Did she tell you anything whatever of her husband’s relations or family connexions?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘Would you be surprised to learn that the butler at Hazelwood is really the late Sir George’s brother living under an assumed name?’
Hoodless laughed. ‘I would think it a very tall story indeed. For surely–’ He broke off abruptly. ‘Hullo. There’s something up.’
Outside the Green Cow a little knot of villagers had gathered, and in their midst was a panting youth whom I recognized as some sort of garden-boy from Hazelwood. Whatever news he brought had evidently been worth the rapid carriage, for surprise and awe were evident on the faces of those around him. The chief took one look at the scene and then pushed in without ceremony. ‘Now then,’ he said – and thirty years appeared to drop from him as he spoke – ‘Now then, what’s all this?’
The garden-boy looked at him in consternation. ‘Please, sir,’ he said, ‘I was sent down by Sergeant Laffer to fetch you. It be Mr Owdon, sir – shot dead in his pantry.’
Well, I doubt if either of us had remotely envisaged another violent death – although such things, just like funerals, do tend to breed each other at times. We left Hoodless at his inn and hurried to Hazelwood. The chief spoke never a word on the way. But he whistled – which is a thing altogether uncommon with him, so far as I know. He whistled one tune after another in a perfunctory sort of way, and I had a strong impression that he wasn’t simply seeking to soothe his own savage breast. With every fragment of tune his brow grew darker. The garden-boy, who draggled along uncertainly beside us, stared at him round-eyed.
Perhaps, I thought, we ought to have expected just this. The butler had turned ashen at the arrival of mysterious visitors out of the past. The butler had dropped trays, sneaked about with suitcases, sagged in a nasty way at the knees. Surely conduct so conventional could only end with a pistol-shot. Perhaps he would prove to have murmured as he expired a few exquisitely enigmatic words to an under-housemaid – supposing Hazelwood to have any under-housemaids left. Perhaps a fragment of some cryptic message would be found clutched in his hand…
This silly sort of reverie meant no more than that I was getting hopelessly out of my depth. From the Simneys and their obscure Australian hinterland we had been whisked to the psychopathology of Christopher Hoodless. Now we were back with that old blackbirding incident and all that had followed from it. In a sense the death of Owdon came in neatly enough on top of what we knew. He had lived for years under false colours and within the shadow of a crime. Those had returned who knew – or were about to penetrate to – his story: and now there had been a pistol shot and he was out of the mess. The sequence was logical enough. But what of the centre of the whole affair – the violent death of his brother? Had he first attempted to stifle the past by silencing George, who had in any case treated him so vilely? And when this horrible expedient proved futile had he then in desperation taken his own life?
I couldn’t see it that way. Owdon’s testimony, I had firmly decided, was true so far as it went, though certainly it might have gone further. His account of Tuesday night had given us virtually our whole physical framework for the affair, and to say the least it would be tiresome to have to scrap it. But, quite apart from this, I was obstinately convinced that its essence was true. To Alfred Owdon – or Denzell Simney if one preferred to think of him that way – Sir George’s death had been both unexpected and inexplicable, a mysterious catastrophe in what he knew to have been an empty room. The wretched Deamer, watched by the sombre Hoodless, had come up that trellis. But who had descended it from above? The death of Owdon brought us no nearer a solution of that.
We rounded a sweep of the drive and the great manor house lay before us. A groom was leading a couple of horses across a paddock and near at hand a gardener placidly performed some indistinguishable task beside a lily pond. The life of the place went on, and would presumably continue to do so until impersonal economic forces strangled it. Until then the Simneys would continue their ways here. There would always be a Sir Somebody adding his portrait to that unengaging gallery in the study. Only the interspersed ladies a change of taste or humour might banish from that sinister room…
Sergeant Laffer received us in the hall, a good deal awed by this second stroke of violence. He was a simple fellow and likeable; and his one tenet of faith in the affair hitherto had been that Sir George’s death was to be laid to the charge of some casual marauder. He said nothing of this now but led us through green baize doors to a small apartment assigned to the butler’s professional offices. Owdon lay sprawled across a table much as his master, and brother, had done. A writing-pad and fountain-pen had been pushed to one side; on the other side was a revolver which might well have fallen from his own hand. The shot had certainly been at short range and the bullet had gone in at the temple. He must have died at once.
Timmy Owdon and Mervyn Cockayne were standing silent in a corner of the room. Both were dressed in Mervyn’s clothes, so that more than ever they looked like twins. But whereas Mervyn’s expression displayed both shock and decent sorrow Timmy’s showed tragic and stark. Years had fallen upon him like a burden; he was as one still mastering a complex and overwhelming experience. Dark circles had drawn themselves round his eyes – but his shoulders were square and his chin had tilted upwards.
We made what examination was worth making. The two lads watched us, quite silent. And then, suddenly, Timmy turned and left the room. I was prompted to follow him. He walked to the baize doors which marked the boundary of the servants’ quarters, and for a moment regarded them fixedly. He passed out into the hall and looked deliberately round. He moved to the fireplace and passed his hand over the arms of the Simneys carved above it. He crossed to a table and paused, frowning at a small bronze nymph which was its sole ornament – a vulgar little thing, and no doubt prized by Sir George on that account: Timmy took it up and pitched it into a wastepaper-basket. ‘Mervyn,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘let’s get some air.’
And he passed out into the bleak afternoon sunlight.