Here Comes a Chopper (27 page)

‘What for?’ said Roger, who did not much like Mr Simmonds.

‘Well, nothing, really, sir. I thought I saw one of those things, sir, in Lunn’s hair, and, as he is going home at half-term, I thought it only fair to his people——’

‘Oh,
Lord!’
said Roger, putting away the cane. ‘Shan’t I ever get some of my own back on you two pests!’

The morning papers were delivered to the masters at breakfast. Roger opened the paper two mornings after his night ride, read the sports page, turned to the news, and had his eye caught by a heading.

The body of a man identified as Sim, the Whiteledge chauffeur, had been discovered on a common between Effingham and Little Bookham. His head had been cut off and left beside the body, and the features had been so disfigured as to be unrecognizable, but his brother had sworn to the corpse. Roger noted, with quickening interest, that
he himself must have passed the spot on Parkinson’s motor cycle, probably within a few minutes of the time of the murder.

The inspector turned up at school at twelve o’clock, and at twenty minutes past twelve the headmaster sent for Roger.

‘When you have had your lunch, Mr Hoskyn,’ he said, ‘you had better accede to this officer’s request that you show him our countryside as a contribution to his work on a case of, I regret to say, murder. He states that he has met you before.’

‘Yes, headmaster. We met during the Easter holidays.’

‘Very well. You will return, I anticipate, in time to take preparation for Mr Parkinson if he deputises for you in the games field this afternoon.’

‘Certainly. But I don’t quite understand——’

‘The officer will explain, and would like, I dare say, to take lunch in the dining hall with the boys.’

‘I see.’

‘You had better escort him, meanwhile, to the masters’ common room.’

‘It would be better, sir, if you’ve no objection,’ put in the inspector, speaking with great respect but firmly, ‘if Mr Hoskyn could accompany me now at once on our tour of the district.’

‘He will miss his lunch,’ said the headmaster.

‘I shall not keep him long, sir.’

‘Very well. You know your own business. Have you any objection, Mr Hoskyn?’

Roger, who knew that he and the inspector would
lunch at a public house and that bread and cheese and beer would be a satisfactory substitute, so far as he was concerned, for the school meal of stewed beef and boiled cabbage, replied demurely that he had no objection at all.

He and the inspector were to make their round by car, and Roger was at no loss to understand the reason for the jaunt. Somebody must have seen him on the previous Sunday night and reported his movements. He did not feel at all nervous. He knew that, subconsciously, he had expected the inspector to turn up.

‘I understand you were on the spot, sir, at the time the murder took place,’ the inspector observed, as they drove away from the school.

‘On what spot when what murder took place?’ Roger demanded, his heart thumping most unpleasantly.

‘Haven’t you seen the morning paper, sir?’

‘Good Lord!’ said Roger. ‘You don’t mean——’ But it sounded over-done, and he knew it.

The car made a grinding noise as the inspector changed up and the speed increased. They travelled for about another half mile, and then the inspector said:

‘Yes, sir, that’s what I mean. You were known to be out and about in the neighbourhood just about the time the doctor thinks the man died. The head was cut off a bit later.’

‘I saw and heard nothing, I assure you. I can’t help you over this, I’m afraid.’

‘It’s yourself you have to help, sir,’ said the
inspector earnestly. ‘I’ve brought you away from the school deliberately, to see if I could persuade you to come across.’

‘With what? Speak out, man! I don’t know what the devil you’re getting at!’ cried Roger, hoping that this sounded like the truth, but feeling the rope round his neck.

‘Well, sir, the dead man, as you know from the morning paper, was Sim, Mr Lingfield’s chauffeur. We know he had a crack or two at you. Now he’s found dead under very peculiar circumstances, and
you
were in the immediate neighbourhood at the time of his death. I thought perhaps you’d care to give me, as it were, a friendly account of your movements, sir, that’s all, on the night of the crime.’

‘Why, you idiot!’ said Roger, swallowing hard, and wondering why he had thought that he did not feel nervous. ‘You don’t think
I
murdered the perisher? Although, if I had, it was no more than he deserved, as you said yourself!’

‘That’s the point, sir,’ said the inspector, gazing stolidly through the windscreen, ‘and that’s what we’ve got to clear up. If you had, it would have been no more than he deserved. And we’re with you there, sir. You’ve had a lot to put up with since Mr Lingfield’s body was found. Nobody knows that better than the police. Well, sir, there was you in the offing of
that
murder, and there’s you in the offing of
this
murder——’

‘Look here,’ said Roger, ‘what exactly are you getting at, damn it!’

‘This, sir. If it was in self-defence, I’d advise you to say so at once.’

‘Get it into your fat head that I know absolutely nothing about Sim’s death except for what I read in the paper this morning! As for the other murder, you know I’ve told you nothing but the truth.’

‘I hope you’ll reconsider that statement, sir. All I want——’

‘All you’ll get is a thick ear,’ said Roger wrathfully. ‘Hang it all, I was simply chasing two kids who’d broken out at night to go to a show. A dozen men might have been murdered. I still don’t see that you’ve any reason whatever for trying to fasten anything on me.’

The inspector, who had been driving all this time towards Godstone, did not reply until he had turned in to the courtyard of the fine old sixteenth-century inn of that place.

‘Let’s have some lunch, sir,’ he said, ‘and after that we’d better track out your movements on the night in question. Any objection to that programme?’

‘None, so long as you don’t keep calling me a murderer.’

‘Such was not my intention, sir, as I think you know. But I’d be glad of a full explanation.’

‘All right. We’ll call an armistice. I could do with a drink, couldn’t you?’

They had some beer, and then had steak and kidney pudding, some more beer, and an apple tart.

‘And now, sir——’ suggested the inspector,
when he had smoked a pipe and Roger a couple of cigarettes.

‘Look here,’ said Roger, recalled by this elliptical remark to the exigencies of the situation, ‘perhaps I’d better tell you just what happened.’

He described in careful detail his night’s work.

‘And the boys would support this account, sir?’

‘I suppose so, but you’d have to promise to keep it dark from the headmaster.’

‘That could no doubt be arranged, sir. And now, as to where you went, and the time you took——’

‘So you don’t believe me? All right. Suit yourself. My story is true and I stick to it.’

‘Very good, sir, though I don’t know that I’d say very wise. Still, you must please yourself.’

So the car was driven into Guildford and beyond it, past the half-timbered cottages of East Clandon, past the elms of West Horsley and the fine front of West Horsley Place, past Effingham, and then to where Roger had turned the motor cycle and returned to the theatre and his boys.

‘And where exactly was the body found?’ he enquired, feeling that he was entitled to some information in return for that which he was supplying to the inspector.

‘That’s neither here nor there, sir,’ the inspector imperturbably replied. ‘I must congratulate you, sir, on being either a very cool customer or on knowing as little about Sim’s death as you say you know. We have now passed the spot twice, and I noticed very particularly that you never turned a hair.’

‘Oh?’ said Roger, unimpressed by this dubious compliment. ‘And what the devil do you want with me now?’

‘Particulars of your acquaintance with Mrs Denbies, sir. The whole thing seems to us to hang on that.’

‘But I haven’t any acquaintance with Mrs Denbies! You know that as well as I do! I had never set eyes on her until——’

‘Maundy Thursday, sir? How came it, then, that you confessed to knowing her, and that in front of witnesses?’

‘When?’

‘When you arrived at Whiteledge House, I understand, sir.’

‘Well, but—hang it all, Inspector, I expect I said I’d seen photographs of her in the illustrated papers. After all, she is a celebrity, isn’t she?’

‘There is that, sir, but your subsequent actions——’

‘Eh?’

‘Well, they were remarked upon, sir. Lady Catherine herself——’

‘Lady Catherine my foot! What on earth are you getting at? Are you trying to suggest that that weak-minded old woman has been leading you up the garden?’

‘I suggest nothing, sir. But from what I heard——’

Roger was both baffled and furious.

‘You heard nothing that could have any bearing,’ he said, ‘on——’

‘Yes, on what, sir?’ The inspector drew up the car at the entrance to the school grounds. ‘Bearing on what?’

‘On the murder of Lingfield, of course!’ said Roger, savagely. ‘If you ask me, Lady Catherine did that herself! She’s crazy enough to do anything!’

‘Now you’re talking, sir,’ said the inspector. He drove gently in at the school gates and pulled up on the gravel path outside the headmaster’s house.

A
NONYMOUS
(16th century)

KIRBY AND HEALY-LUNN
were greatly impressed by the inspector. He had asked Roger, in the presence of the headmaster, to lead him on to the cricket field and introduce him to a couple of intelligent boys, and Roger, who understood the hint, at once went out with him and found him the two he wanted. Roger went back to an empty common-room, and wrote to Mrs Bradley.

Mrs Bradley was sympathetic. She wrote in return long and soothingly, giving comforting hints of her own activities and conclusions in the matter of the two murders, and suggesting that Roger should not worry himself unduly, even if he were arrested. She added a postscript to the effect that, once he had been cautioned by the police, he was not to say anything at all about the murders.

Meanwhile the inspector had had Roger’s story
confirmed not only by Kirby and Healy-Lunn (who begged him not to betray them to the headmaster ‘because, you see, it would get Mr Hoskyn into no end of a jam’), but by the pink shirt and the blonde at the theatre.

‘He went off for about half an hour, but he certainly came back all right,’ said the pink shirt. ‘And if he told you we were discussing the contemporary theatre, well, of course, quite actually, we were. And he certainly collected two boys. I saw them go. Chrystabel can confirm.’

This Chrystabel did at once. In response to the inspector’s next question she said that she would certainly have noticed blood on Roger’s clothes. ‘Our play was
called
“Blood,” and you see the connection?’ she added, looking at the inspector as though she felt sure that he did not.

This evidence, coupled with that of the boys, convinced the inspector that unless there was a flaw in the time scheme which had not yet made itself evident, Roger was not very likely to have been the murderer of Sim.

‘One thing strikes me, too, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘How far from the railway was the body?’

‘Yes, I know,’ said the inspector. ‘The whole thing’s the spit and image of the murder of Mr Lingfield.’

‘If it
was
Mr Lingfield,’ said the sergeant.

It was very shortly after this that Dorothy was invited to spend the Whitsun week-end at
Whiteledge. As this week-end coincided with Roger’s half-term, she scarcely knew whether to accept the invitation or not. She did not, after his proposal, want to meet him, but, on the other hand, it seemed unkind to put herself entirely beyond his reach. The thought, however, that at Whiteledge she might be in a position to find out more of the mystery than she would be able to do by remaining outside what now seemed to her the magic circle of that place, tipped the scale and persuaded her to accept the invitation.

It had come from Mary Leith.

‘We saw so little of you,’ wrote Mary, ‘and should like to have seen so much more.’

This was flattery of the wrong sort, but, to Dorothy’s pleasure, the first person she met at Whiteledge was Mrs Bradley, this on the lawn in front of the house. The archery targets were in position, and Mrs Bradley, clad in a bilious green woollen pullover and a heather-mixture skirt of an almost incredible hairiness, was practising with bow and arrows and had scored, it appeared, a gold and two reds, a total of twenty-three points.

She walked up to the target and withdrew her arrows before she greeted the girl. When she did, it was with none of the usual formulae. She said merely:

‘That’s how it was done, and that’s why the head was removed. But the questions still remain of who did it, and where is the head, and who enticed Mrs Denbies out of the house that night, and where she went. We must endeavour to find
out which members of the house-party understand how to use a bow and arrows. Do
you
understand their use, child?’

Dorothy laughed.

‘You can hardly expect me to say that I do,’ she replied. Mrs Bradley cackled, and led her towards the house.

‘I have requested that you should occupy the bedroom they gave you last time,’ she said.

‘Are
you
responsible for my invitation here?’ Dorothy enquired.

‘Yes, child.’

‘But what about Roger?’

‘He must amuse himself for today and tomorrow. After that you can meet him if you like. Are you afraid of ghosts?’

‘N-no.’

Mrs Bradley cackled again at the expression of indecision on the girl’s face. They walked into the house together, and Mrs Bradley handed her bow and the sheaf of arrows to Bugle. He received them with an inclination of the head, thumbed the bow knowledgeably, and then said: