Eternity Ring (10 page)

Chief Detective Inspector Lamb sat at the pedestal table in the parlour at Tomlin’s Farm. The two photograph albums and the family Bible had been removed with their attendant mats, leaving the whole shining walnut top to a blotting-pad, an inkstand, a pen-tray, and an attaché case, which lay open, disclosing a pile of papers.

Frank Abbott, sitting across the corner of the table, pencil in hand and notebook before him, was struck with the complete harmony between his Chief and these surroundings. The large man in the large overcoat, with his florid colouring and the strong curling dark hair a little gone back from the temples and not quite so thick on the crown, might very well have passed for a farmer in his Sunday clothes. Mrs. Stokes’ parents, looking down from their photographic enlargements on either side of the hearth, could have accepted him as a relative in an effortless, matter-of-course kind of way. The big feet planted squarely upon the old flowered carpet, the square capable hands, the heavy face, the shrewdness of the eyes, would have passed him in any English market town. Nothing surprising about it either, since he came of farming stock and had learnt his A.B.C. in a village school. When he spoke, the country lingered on his tongue.

“Well, then, here we are,” he said. “This young fellow Joe Turnberry, he’s the natural suspect. Trouble with you college boys is, the more a thing’s shoved under your nose, the more you’re too educated to see it’s there. It’s not clever enough, so you’ve got to go rummaging and raking around for something else. Like those French words I’ve warned you about. The plain English of a thing isn’t good enough—you’ve got to have something fancy!” He gave a kind of snort. “Puts me in mind of the breakfast I had this morning, at that hotel—a lot of muck served up with Frenchified names!”

Frank laughed.

“I can assure you, sir, that it would have horrified the French.”

Lamb grunted.

“When I see a lot of foreign words on the menoo of a country hotel I know what I’m in for. It’s a cover-up, and pretty fools they must think anyone is to be taken in by it. Now let’s get back to this Joe Turnberry. He’s the natural suspect, and I’m taking him first. We’ll have him in.”

Joe Turnberry brought his reluctant feet, his shaking hands, and his tallowy face into the room and across the floor. Arrived over against this formidable London police chief, he made an attempt to straighten his sagging shoulders. Lamb let him stand for a bit before he looked up from the papers on his blotting-pad.

“You are Joseph Turnberry?”

“Yes, sir.” The words knocked against one another.

“H’m—police service—h’m—good character—age… Local man, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any service in the Army during the war?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How long?”

“Two years.”

“Joined up when you were eighteen—I see. Well then, you knew this girl Mary Stokes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keeping company with her?”

“No, sir.”

“You say no—other people say yes.”

Joe Turnberry gave a gulp.

“It isn’t true, sir. She wouldn’t have me.”

“Meaning you wanted to keep company and she didn’t? But you met her yesterday afternoon. Go on—tell us what you did. Here, you’d better have a chair.”

Joe sat down, the large bucolic frame balanced uneasily on the edge of an upright chair, the big red hands hanging helplessly between the knees. He gave another gulp and said,

“She told me she was going in to Lenton. She’s got a girl friend there. I told her, ‘What’s the sense of coming home in the dark by yourself?’ So she said all right, we’d have tea and do a picture and I could see her home, so we did.”

“What terms were you on?”

“Terms?”

“You heard me. What sort of terms were you on? Did you quarrel?”

Colour rushed into the tallowy face, mounted to the edge of the dark hair, receded slowly.

Lamb said, “Well? Did you quarrel?”

Joe Turnberry said in a wretched voice,

“No, sir.”

“Now look here, my lad, telling lies isn’t going to get you anywhere, you’d better stick to the truth. You met Mary Stokes and her friend Lily Ammon and had tea with them.” He picked up a paper. “This is what Lily Ammon says. ‘Mary told me Joe Turnberry was meeting us for tea, and he did. She told me he was wanting to go with her, but she wouldn’t. Not likely, she said. She told me he was ever so jealous. When we were having tea he got all worked up with Mary—something about her meeting somebody else. I don’t rightly know what it was, because there was a girl the other side of the room, she’d promised me a jumper pattern, and I went over to remind her. When I came back they were at it hammer and tongs—something about fingerprints and her meeting this chap, I don’t know who. He said she’d left these fingerprints all over the place, and who was she meeting? And she said it wasn’t his business, was it? So then I said, “Well, I’m meeting Ernie”—that’s my boy friend—and I left them to it.’ Do you still say you didn’t quarrel with Mary Stokes?”

There was a convulsive movement of the throat. What had been a gulp became a sob.

“I never touched her, sir—I swear I never!”

The Chief Inspector’s eyes, which Frank Abbott had been known to compare irreverently to those hard bulging peppermint sweets known as bullseyes, neither softened nor wavered. Fixed, brown, and slightly protuberant, they maintained their enquiring stare.

“I’m asking you if you quarrelled with her.”

Joe Turnberry lifted a terrified gaze.

“We had words—”

“Anything you’d like to add to that?”

“She told me off—said what she did wasn’t no business of mine—said if she liked to go with a chap, I’d got a nerve to say anything—asked me who I thought I was—” He stuck.

Lamb helped him out.

“So then?”

“I said I was sorry, and she said, ‘All right,’ and we went along to the Rex.”

“H’m. Any more quarrelling?”

“No, sir.”

“Well then, you came home in the bus that gets in at ten minutes to eight. We’ve got statements from the other passengers. They say you and Mary Stokes never said a word to one another all the way in.”

“There wasn’t anything to say, sir.”

“And then you walked home with her through the village and up the track between the Common and Dead Man’s Copse?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Still not speaking?”

“There wasn’t a lot to say.”

“Any sweethearting?”

“No, sir.”

“Kiss her goodnight?”

The boy’s face twitched.

“No, sir.”

“Well, what happened when you got up to the farm?”

“Nothing, sir. She said, ‘Goodnight, Joe,’ and I said, ‘Goodnight, Mary,’ and she went in and shut the door and I come away.”

“Did you see anyone, or hear anything to suggest that there was anyone else about—either coming or going?”

“No, sir.”

Lamb had been sitting back in his chair, a large square hand on either knee. He leaned forward now, both arms on the table.

“You served in the Army. Taught you that trick of how to break a man’s neck, didn’t they? Taught you how to do it quick and quiet?”

“Sir—”

“They did—didn’t they? You could have done it easy enough when she turned to go into the house.”

Joe stared at him.

“Why would I want to? I thought the world of her.” The words came slowly spaced. When they were out he lifted his head. “I swear to God I never touched her, sir!”

Lamb let him go.

When the door had shut he said,

“It’s likely enough it happened that way, but there’s no proof. It’d be a thinnish case—unless something more turns up. A peaceable kind of chap by all accounts, but you never can tell what a man’ll do if he’s pushed too far. Would you say she was that sort of girl?”

“Well, yes—” Frank Abbott sounded reluctant.

He got Lamb’s formidable stare.

“Too easy for you—that’s what, isn’t it? Not enough of the high-class mystery touch.”

“No, sir—but look here—”

“Well?”

Frank Abbott ran his hand back over his immaculate hair.

“Well, sir, if he killed her, why did he open and shut the door? There’s no sense in it, is there? If you were killing a girl you wouldn’t exactly draw attention to the fact by slamming her front door.”

“Who says it was slammed?”

“It must have been shut pretty hard, or the Stokeses wouldn’t have heard it in the kitchen.”

Lamb grunted.

“Suppose the girl had opened the door and was just going in—he’d shut it, wouldn’t he, for fear of anyone coming along before he got the body out of the way?”

Frank cocked an eyebrow.

“Well, he wouldn’t bang it. But the girl might.”

“Why?”

“She might have had enough of Joe in the sulks. Not one of our brighter conversationalists at any time. Or—have you thought of this? Suppose she was meeting someone else, it would be a signal to him and, perhaps she may have thought, a bit of a safeguard for her. I don’t think we can entirely keep the Louise Rogers business out of it. If there was any truth in what Mary Stokes said she saw, then there was someone in the neighbourhood with an interest in shutting her mouth. There is also quite undoubtedly someone whom she had been meeting at the Forester’s House. And that wasn’t Joe Turnberry—we checked up on his fingerprints at once. It seems to me we’ve got to find the chap she was meeting before we can get any farther. As a preliminary, I suggest getting the fingerprints of Grant Hathaway, Mark Harlow, and Albert Caddie, and asking them what they were doing last night.”

Lamb pursed up his mouth in a soundless whistle.

It was a little later on in the morning that Maggie Bell was tantalized by a brief conversation between that Miss Silver and Mr. Frank. First there was the signal which meant a call for Tomlin’s Farm, and a policeman’s voice saying “Hullo!” Must have been someone from Lenton, because it wasn’t Joe Turnberry. As likely as not Joe was arrested by now. Maggie quivered with anticipation as she heard a slight cough, and then a woman’s voice asking for Sergeant Abbott.

“Miss Silver speaking. Will you be so kind as to ask him to come to the telephone? I have something of importance to say.”

But when Mr. Frank had been fetched, Maggie got no more out of it than that Miss Silver would be glad to see him with as little delay as possible.

“What is it?”

“I think, my dear Frank, that I will say no more until I see you.”

Maggie gritted her teeth. Wasn’t that an old maid all over— making mysteries and wanting to have a finger in everyone else’s pie! Mr. Frank wasn’t best pleased either—you could hear it in his voice.

“Well, I don’t know—”

That silly cough again.

“Mrs. Abbott asked me to say that she hoped you would bring the Chief Inspector here to lunch.”

Mr. Frank sounded doubtful.

“Well, I don’t know. Got an ace up your sleeve?”

“It might be.”

Funny way of talking, Maggie thought. She waited while Frank Abbott went away, and she had to wait quite a long time.

Lamb’s reactions to the news that Miss Silver was at Abbottsleigh were of a mixed nature. He wanted to know what she was doing there, the tone of his voice suggesting that if he had been in the habit of using strong language, it might have been, “What the devil!” On being assured that she was on a private visit to Mrs. Abbott he relaxed.

“My aunt has a very good cook, sir. It will be a great deal better than the hotel.”

Lamb grunted.

“Well, I won’t say anything about lunch. It depends how we get on. You say Miss Silver wants to see you?”

“Well—I thought she’d got something up her sleeve.”

Maggie was feeling very impatient by the time he got back to the telephone, and then there was nothing worth waiting for— no more than an “All right, I’ll be along.”

Miss Silver looked up from her knitting as he came into the morning-room. After a brief greeting she said gravely,

“I hope you do not imagine that I would have intruded on your time without a very special reason. I felt that it would be indiscreet to say any more than I did upon the telephone. There is a young woman in the village who, I am informed, makes a regular habit of listening in. Since she is a cripple she has plenty of time at her disposal, and on an occasion like this she would be particularly interested. So I thought if the Chief Inspector could spare you—I hope he is well?”

Frank laughed.

“I’ve never known him anything else. They turned them out tough where he came from. Well, here I am. What are you going to spring on me?”

She deposited the infant’s coatee in her lap and handed him a small leather-bound book open.

“What’s this?”

Resuming her knitting, she informed him.

“It is the book which Miss Grey so kindly lent me—written by her father, the Reverend Augustus Grey, formerly Rector of this parish, and privately printed in 1868 during the early years of his incumbency when he was a good deal interested in local superstitions. If you will begin at the top of the left-hand page, I think you will find something which may give you food for thoughts. Perhaps you would care to read it aloud.”

He pulled up a chair, sat down at a little distance, and began to read.

A slight cough checked him.

“I have not troubled you with the preliminaries, but what you are about to read is a transcript from the Day Book, or diary, of Sir Roger Peel, a local landowner and magistrate who was a contemporary of the Edward Brand who hanged himself in Dead Man’s Copse. Mr. Grey was able to copy it by the courtesy of a descendant, Sir Humphrey Peel. Sir Roger had been approached by a widow of the parish whose name is given as Thamaris Ball, which the Rector supposes to be a mistake for Damaris. Now, if you would care to begin—”

Frank looked at the yellowing page and read:

“ ‘This Thamaris Ball said and deposed that her daughter Joanna was picking of blackberries in the wood by the Common, and being venturesome she came as far as the edge of the clearing where the Forester’s House is. And this Joanna did say and swear that she did there see the man Edward Brand a-making of clay mammets—’ ”

He looked up with a quizzical smile.

“What in the world is a mammet?”

She was knitting briskly now.

“It is rather an interesting derivation,” she said—“from Mahomet, whom the Crusaders ignorantly supposed to be an idol worshipped by the Saracens. They brought the word back to England, where it became corrupted into mammet or mommet and was used to describe a small image or doll.”

He murmured, “Revered preceptress—” under his breath and went back to the book:

“ ‘—did see the man Edward Brand a-making of clay mammets in the likeness of divers gentlemen of the neighbourhood and their ladies and putting them to dry in the sun. And said further that some of them that were dry he took into the house and after a while came out and went away through the wood. Then the said Joanna, being curious to see what was done with the said mammets, went privily to the back of the house and so entered. When she could not see the said mammets in any of the rooms she went down into the cellar and there found them with many others. And one in the likeness of a Bishop with a cope and mitre, and others like the Parson and the Clerk. And some with pins thrust through, and some with rusty nails. And one that was all scorched from burning at a fire. Then did this Joanna become very fearful and ran out through the house and through the wood, and so came sobbing and weeping to her mother, the said Thamaris Ball—’ ”

Miss Silver reached out a hand and resumed the book.

“Well, my dear Frank?”

His very fair eyebrows rose.

“Am I expected to know what you are getting at?”

“Indeed you are.”

He shook his head.

“I’m at the bottom of the class, unless it’s some coincidence between the ‘said Joanna’ and Mary Stokes—they both ran through the wood in hysterics. But you’re not asking me to believe that Mary was frightened by a mammet, are you?”

“Think, Frank!”

He looked at her blankly.

“You’d better tell me.”

The knitting-needles clicked.

“You have allowed yourself to be distracted by a number of picturesque details. The point is, what did Joanna do? She went into the Forester’s House to look for something, and when she couldn’t find it in any of the rooms she went down into the cellar.”

Frank Abbott sprang to his feet.

“Gosh—what a fool! The cellar—she went down into the cellar!”

Miss Silver coughed.

“Old houses always do have cellars—I ought to have thought of it immediately. And if Edward Brand was occupying himself with forbidden arts, it is very probable that the entrance to this cellar would be masked. I would suggest an immediate search of the premises, and especially a thorough investigation of the panelled side of the staircase. It is where I should expect to find a continuation of the stair to the cellar.”

Neither Sergeant Abbott nor Chief Inspector Lamb was to partake that day of the excellent lunch prepared for them at Abbottsleigh.

The Forester’s House echoed to the tramp of policemen’s boots, to knocking, tapping, hammering. In the end they broke down the panelling where it gave back a hollow sound, and disclosed a narrow stair which went steeply down to a bare cellar. Lamb stood on the bottom step and saw the light of a powerful electric lamp go to and fro over old stone flags. He stood there frowning, intent, and silent. After quite a long time he said,

“There’s a lot of dust—”

Inspector Smith spoke from behind him.

“That’s what you’d expect, sir, isn’t it?”

Lamb grunted, then spoke over his shoulder.

“Get that lamp down here, Frank—I want it lower!”

As the light came down, he said the same thing over again and amplified it.

“There’s a lot of dust, and as Smith says, it’s what you’d expect. But what I wouldn’t expect is for it to look like it does. Here, get the light more this way! See what I mean! Looks to me as if it had been swept. I don’t reckon broom marks ’ud last getting on for a couple of hundred years, which would be about the time since there was any call to use a broom here. But if it’s been swept lately, that’d mean somebody wanting to sweep his footprints out.” He swung about and began to go up the stair again. “We’ll have those flagstones up, Smith. Get the men on to it at once!”

Louise Rogers was under the flags in the far corner. She wore the black coat described by Mrs. Hopper and by Mary Stokes. Her skull had been fractured by a heavy blow. Her fair hair hung down as Mary Stokes had seen it hang, a single diamond earring bright in the stained tangle—an earring like an eternity ring.