Honeybath's Haven (15 page)

 

 

 

But Honeybath too had strayed in. One can't visit a corpse, and as yet there wasn't even any word of a funeral. It would be Melissa who would have to be consulted about that, and about the various practical dispositions to be made thereafter. Melissa hadn't yet showed up, but when she did she would either take charge of things, or nominate persons to do the job for her. The Lightfoots hadn't been divorced; they hadn't even been separated to any legal effect. Honeybath thought it probable that, had it ever occurred to Edwin to make a will, he might find himself appointed as an executor. Meanwhile, he was only a concerned old friend. He had meant what he said, however, when he had told Adamson that he was prompted to remain on the scene for a time and a little cast about on his own. But Hanwell Court wasn't a hotel, so he couldn't simply march up to a desk and book a room. On the other hand he was sufficiently well known to Brigadier Luxmoore, Dr Michaelis and others as the dead man's intimate friend to make it seem perfectly natural and proper that he should come and go for a time, and render a general effect of doing a little tidying up. He decided to walk over to the local pub, secure himself a couple of nights' accommodation there, and then return to Hanwell Court. Considerable mystery
did
attach to the manner of Edwin's death, and he had an obstinate feeling that certain apparently unrelated facts which he alone was in possession of might turn out to be involved in the horrible business after all. He was departing up the drive, and had come in view of
Poseidon urging the Sea-Monster to attack Laomedon
, when it occurred to him that he hadn't yet viewed what his imagination was hinting to him ought to be called the scene of the crime. It may have been the Sea-Monster itself – a sufficiently hideous aquatic phenomenon – that thus put Lady Munden's opprobrious pool in his head. He had a general notion of where it lay. He now turned aside in search of it.

Quite probably, he thought, it would still be under some sort of guardianship by the police, who would be concerned to keep it from intrusion until certain that no more enlightenment was to be dredged from it. His approach, therefore, was made with circumspection. But he proved to be wrong in his persuasion. The pool was deserted. He felt this to be part of the general disposition of the police to play down Edwin's death. It was a curious feeling to have, since it couldn't in any way be averred that Edwin was being cheated of something. Yet he had convinced himself – he recognized this now – that Adamson at least wasn't pleased by what had happened at Hanwell Court. It seemed impossible to make sense of this. Yet the idea clung to him.

It was quite a large pool. Some parts of it were comparatively clear, and others were clotted and crammed with the stringy or ramifying or bulbous or pulpy stuffs which were Lady Munden's peculiar devotion. Lady Munden, he told himself, might be regarded as the Nereid of this nasty flood. She might rise out of it at any moment, waving a conch or other symbol of her watery nature. Or she might be glimpsed in the depths, like Shelley – only
in twisted braids of Lillies knitting the loose train of her amber-dropping hair
. That was Milton's Sabrina, Honeybath told himself as he began to round the pool, and he wondered what on earth (or in water) had brought this snatch of verse within his recollection. Then he remembered that Edwin had obscurely referred to somebody as ‘soggy Sabrina'. It was quite possibly Lady Munden that he had meant.

At the far end of the pool there stood an undistinguished pavilion-like structure, with an extension glassed in on three sides. It recalled the kind of shelter to be found scattered along some seaside esplanades. The people who had provided Lady Munden with her pool were probably in that line of business too, and had added this affair to boost their bill. It wasn't at all congruous with the general elegance of the grounds of Hanwell Court. Honeybath was noting this fact with disapproval when he discovered that the shelter was occupied. The man seated in it – and surveying the scene of the late fatality with a philosophic eye – proved to be the socially anomalous Mr Brown. Honeybath had failed to identify him immediately because he was not, on this occasion, wearing a Panama hat.

‘Ah, good day to you, my dear Honeybath!' This robust and cordial greeting, although perhaps a shade too familiar in the form of words chosen, came from Brown with quite agreeable effect. Honeybath made a suitable reply. Brown, he felt, ought to be encouraged in his laudably pertinacious attempts to recover the manners and assumptions native to him before the unhappy period of his incarceration. (Honeybath had finally come down on the side of what might be called the luckless-financier interpretation of Brown.)

‘Would you say, now, that the Sargasso Sea looks like that?' As he asked this question, Brown waved a hand over Lady Munden's saline pool.

‘There may well be a certain resemblance.' Honeybath, although his mood was sombre, managed to be amused by this question. ‘I have never seen the Sargasso Sea.'

‘Wonderful yarns I used to read about it as a boy. Spanish galleons and the like stuck in it as thick as flies on fly-paper and mouldering away for centuries.'

‘Ah, yes! I read that sort of thing too. An imaginative conception. I believe the actual thing is fairly patchy, and that the possibility of craft being permanently stuck in it was disproved early in the present century.' Honeybath felt that this was too much in his informative vein. ‘But one likes to think of those stranded Armadas. Serving a kind of maritime life sentence, one might say.'

‘Just that.' Brown took this analogy – prompted by Honeybath's recollection of his curious interest in such matters – entirely in his stride. ‘But your friend Lightfoot,' he said briskly ‘
He
got stuck. I've been sitting here thinking about it. A sad event, Honeybath. A very sad event, indeed. And happening just before his exhibition, too.'

‘His exhibition?' Honeybath was puzzled. ‘What was that?'

‘What he told me about one day, shortly before the two of you went abroad together. That there was soon to be an introspective exhibition…'

‘A retrospective exhibition?'

‘That was it. Of everything he'd ever done, he said. At the Tate Gallery, down near Imperial Chemicals.'

‘Ah, yes.' Honeybath avoided any tone of surprise. Poor Edwin must have been in a particularly freakish mood to spin the imperfectly informed Brown such a tale.

‘And then he tumbled into this nasty stuff. Or did he?'

‘Or
did
he?' This time, Honeybath was really startled.

‘It was done to him, if you ask me. Nobody will believe it, of course – but that's my view. Somebody was looking after him. Don't ask me why – but these things happen. Tipped him in, and then used a pole, likely enough.'

‘A pole?' Honeybath hadn't thought of this particular horror.

‘With a forked end, I'd say. Pushed him down and pushed him down, until the poor bugger was well tangled up. It sickens me, it does.'

‘I'm not surprised.' What sickened Honeybath was the thought of this deplorable man sitting here almost hard upon Edwin's death, and entertaining himself with such a revolting fantasy. Or was it a fantasy? Honeybath himself had simply not got round to envisaging in detail just how Edwin had been made away with – if made away with he had been.

‘But who done it?' Brown asked. ‘Who did it, that's to say.' Brown paused with evident satisfaction on this grammatical nicety. ‘Answer me that.'

‘I don't think I can, Mr Brown.' Honeybath hesitated. ‘Have you any specific suspicion yourself?'

‘There are those up there at the house that are in a fair panic, Honeybath. I'll say no more than that. An inside job, it has been.' Brown gazed darkly in the direction of the serene facade of Hanwell Court. ‘I've an eye for such things that seldom goes wrong, although I say it myself. Just keep your own eyes skinned, Honeybath, and you'll see what you'll see.'

‘I'll do what I can. But now I fear I must leave you.' Honeybath had had enough of being Honeybathed by Brown. He gave a firm nod and walked away.

Rounding Poseidon, he asked himself a new and alarming question. Was the extraordinary Brown perhaps a homicidal maniac? Had he senselessly murdered Edwin, and had he been detected compulsively brooding over the scene of his crime – as such maniacs were said to do? Or, alternatively, had his past criminal associations, whatever they had been during his incarceration, endowed him with unusual acuity in such matters, so that he had really perceived correctly the presence of fear and guilt somewhere in Hanwell Court?

These questions occupied Honeybath's thoughts during the rest of his walk to the Hanwell Arms, and as they were inherently baffling they naturally received no answer. The pub proved to be an unpretending one, and he had to make his needs known to a man in the public bar. The man was civil but unenthusiastic; declared he must consult some higher authority; and withdrew after serving Honeybath with the pint of bitter it had occurred to him to ask for by way of indicating his goodwill towards the establishment. Honeybath retired to a bench in a corner and took stock of his surroundings.

Two undersized men close to him were chucking darts at a board on the opposite wall. He gathered almost at once from what he could follow of their conversation that they were natives of the place and worked at some racing stables close at hand. The surrounding downs, he remembered, supported numerous concerns of that sort. It was therefore probable that a larger group of men – there seemed to be seven or eight of them – at the other end of the bar were stable lads too. But almost at once he doubted this. Although evidently from a similarly unassuming level of society, there was definitely something alien and urban about them. An unsympathetic observer would have declared that there was a hint of the flashy to them too, and an acute one would have remarked that, although otherwise homogeneous, they divided in point of footwear into two sharply contrasting groups. One group wore very shiny shoes with elongated and pointed toes; the other, thick-soled and stubby boots suggestive of some athletic pursuit the violence of which made an element of in-built protective steel a prudent device. This group of persons seemed not much in its element in its present rural surroundings. There was seldom a moment when one or another individual was not to be distinguished as glancing furtively or warily around him; sometimes – and this was disconcerting – two or three together would turn and look fixedly at Honeybath; at other times they would all disperse about the bar, unconcernedly whistling; and after this they would all come together again and converse in a huddle. Honeybath found himself hoping that these rather disagreeable men were not putting up at the Hanwell Arms. But this was improbable. The pub couldn't run to more than two or three bedrooms all told.

And now one of the men crossed the room and stood beside Honeybath, but without having any apparent interest in him. He whistled gently and tunelessly; broke off to offer one of the stable lads some technical remark on the game; resumed whistling; and then did address Honeybath in the most casual fashion.

‘You live around here?' he asked.

‘No, sir, I do not.'

‘Visitor, like?'

‘I have friends in the neighbourhood.' Honeybath judged this to be veracious after a fashion, and not unduly informative. ‘At a place called Hanwell Court.'

‘Belong to the Queen, does it?' The man thus gratuitously catechizing Honeybath seemed impressed.

‘I have no reason to suppose it to be, or ever to have been, Crown property. It describes itself, if you must know, as affording luxury residential accommodation for retired gentlefolk.' Honeybath had remembered this phrase from the Hanwell Court brochure, and he hoped it might choke this intrusive person off. And his questioner (who suddenly struck him as bearing what might be called a faint vocational resemblance to Mr Brown) did seem a little to lose interest. He continued, nevertheless.

‘Your friends like that?'

‘I find no occasion to discuss them with you.'

‘No offence.' The man uttered these words in a tone of gentle admonishment which somehow contrived to sound distinctly threatening. ‘Looking for a friend of our own, we are. See? Anxious to make contact on account of what you might call auld lang syne. Been seen in a car, he has, round about these parts.'

‘I think it most unlikely that I can help you.' Honeybath had become aware of a certain stir – almost of agitation – at the other end of the bar. This deplorable person's companions were disapproving of his behaviour. They even seemed to be whistling him back to heel. They all looked of undistinguished intelligence, but perhaps this one was thicker than the rest. And Honeybath now believed that he understood the situation. Horse racing, although a pursuit so extensively favoured in England by the more affluent of the propertied class, had attached to it, he knew, an underworld of touts, tipsters and (if the phrase were permissible) straight crooks. One used constantly to be hearing about ‘race-course gangs', and if the phrase appeared to have dropped a little out of use the thing itself probably lingered on. The gangs, of course, went in for hideous feuds. One of their main activities was slashing one another with razors. And he had stumbled upon such a gang now. Their present activity must be connected with one or another of those training establishments dotted around the neighbourhood.

Having arrived at this reasonable estimate of his situation, Honeybath was about to take some appropriate evasive action when he became aware that the ruffian who had challenged him was taking evasive action himself. He had muttered something which might have been ‘No offence', repeated this time on a purely conciliatory note, and he was now shambling back to his companions, who clearly regarded him as having taken a technically inadmissible step. And then they
all
faded away. In a matter of seconds, as it seemed, the public bar was empty.