The Cornish Coast Murder (British Library Crime Classics) (16 page)

“Ned gave me a hand in setting up a few hurdles and getting a couple of ewes into shelter, then we walked down on to the road, reckoning to get to the ‘Ship’ afore closing-time. That was nine o'clock. The clock struck the hour just as we reached the road. We set off along the road at a tidy jog-trot, seeing it was pretty wettish. About a hundred yards afore we reached the Greylings entrance we heard a car coming towards us. We drew into the side of the road, seeing that the car was travelling at a tidy pace. But as it went by I just had time to see who it was driving.” He turned to Grouch. “That writer chap here—Hardy. Exceeding the speed limit, I reckon, Constable.”

“That's just where you're wrong,” corrected Grouch. “There isn't any speed limit. It's been abolished. You don't read your newspaper.”

The Inspector cut short any further banter with a curt question.

“You're sure it was Mr. Hardy?”

“Aye. I know his car, too. There's no other car like it in Boscawen. Besides, Ned recognised him. I held up my lantern as he shot by and the light fell on his face. As the hood was up he wasn't wearing a hat. Oh, it was Mr. Hardy sure enough!”

But Inspector Bigswell still looked dubious about Bedruthen's assertion. A dark night, a fast car with the hood up and blinding headlights—it was curious how certain the man was as to the identity of the driver.

“But what about the headlights?” he asked. “Surely you were pretty well blinded at the moment when the car passed you?”

“That's just it,” said Willy Bedruthen impressively. “There weren't no lights! He was driving his car hell-for-leather without so much as a pin's head of light to guide him.” He turned to the Constable. “You'll be telling me next that lights has been abolished, eh?”

“No lights!” exclaimed Bigswell. “That's curious. Dangerous, too. How the devil could he see the road?”

“There was a faint glimmer of moonlight just after nine, sir,” put in Grouch. “Enough to distinguish the lighter surface of the road from the common on either side.”

“But why no lights?”

“Looks as if he didn't want to be seen,” suggested Grouch. “People a long way off might have noticed the lights without hearing his engine. Looks as if he wanted to avoid that, eh?”

“It's the only feasible explanation,” acknowledged the Inspector. He turned to the shepherd. “Anything more you wish to tell us, Mr. Bedruthen?”

“No, sir. Only it struck me that you might like to know about Ned Salter being with me from a quarter to nine and that we saw Mr. Hardy on the road just after nine o'clock.”

“Quite right. What you've told us is very important. I think we can safely say that Ned Salter is entirely cleared of suspicion. We know that Cowper saw Mr. Tregarthan alive at a quarter to nine. Ned Salter met you a minute or so after the quarter. Unless my calculations are all at sea, I imagine it would be impossible for anybody to get from the cliff-path to the church in less than five minutes. The murderer must have wasted at least a minute in luring Mr. Tregarthan to the window. It's uphill all the way. Even a trained athlete could scarcely have covered the distance in the time, let alone the fact that it was slippery underfoot and dark at that. No—I think Ned Salter, thanks to you, Mr. Bedruthen, has got his alibi all right. He didn't appear out of breath when he asked you for a light?”

“Not a bit of it, sir.”

The Inspector held out his hand.

“Well, we needn't keep you longer. You did the sensible thing in coming forward, Mr. Bedruthen. Good morning.”

The shepherd, after shaking hands with the Inspector, nodded to Grouch and went out into the mist followed by his dog. They heard his heavy boots scrunching over the gritty road and die away in the distance.

For a long time there was silence in the little room.

Then: “Well, I'll be damned!” exclaimed Inspector Bigswell. “Where the devil are we getting to now, Grouch? Why only one shot? And how the devil did Hardy, supposing of course that he
did
murder Tregarthan, manage to leave Cove Cottage at a quarter to nine, take his car from the garage, drive up on to the road somewhere above Greylings, run down to the cliff, cross the hurdles, climb the wall, get his man to the window, murder him, retrace his footsteps, start the car and pass Salter and Bedruthen a few minutes after nine? Is it possible, d'you think, Grouch?”

Grouch considered the question for a moment.

“It could be done,” he said at length. “Just.”

“There's only one way to make sure.”

“And that, sir?”

“We must make a test and time ourselves, Grouch. The moment this mist lifts, I'll get Grimmet to run the car into Hardy's garage and I'll see what I can do over the same course. Mind you, we can only make fairly sure—not absolutely—and even then we can't explain away the mystery of that single shot!”

CHAPTER XI

THEFT FROM THE BODY

A
S
luck would have it, whilst Grimmet and the Inspector were lunching in the deserted parlour of the “Ship,” the mist lifted. A breeze sprang up and within an hour the air was clear and sunlit. Wasting no time for fear that the mist might descend again, the Inspector ordered Grimmet to drive him up to Cove Cottage. There he explained to Mrs. Peewit that he wished to make use of Mr. Hardy's garage for a moment, and finding the door open he got Grimmet to back in the car and shut off the engine. From Mrs. Peewit he ascertained that Hardy usually kept the doors of the garage locked. He kept the key, along with others, in a drawer of his writing-desk. The Inspector decided, therefore, to start from the sitting-room and allow himself the necessary time for unfastening the padlock on the garage door.

Grimmet took out his watch. It was exactly 2.10. The Inspector walked at a fairly brisk pace from the cottage to the adjacent woodshed, which had been converted into the garage. Then he went through the motions of unlocking the doors, opened them and climbed into the car. Grimmet, watch in hand, hopped in quickly beside him. The Inspector pressed the self-starter, and the engine, after a couple of false promises, broke into a hum. The car swung out on to the hill and began to mount up out of the cove. At the crest of the hill, where the main road forked, Bigswell got into top gear and accelerated. The car gathered speed, humming along the deserted road, between the hedgeless sweeps of the common. The speedometer trembled over the forty mark. In less than a minute Greylings hove in sight.

The Inspector had previously reckoned that Hardy would have drawn up about a quarter of a mile from the Vicarage. He did not want his car to be seen and commented on. The chances were, considering the lateness of the hour and the state of the weather, that nobody would pass along the open road. On the other hand, if he approached too near to the Greylings entrance, the car might have been noticed from a window of the Vicarage. Besides, it might occur to somebody in the Vicarage, when questioned later on, that they had heard a car stop just outside the gate and later continue on its way along the road. It was the sort of thing people did notice in an isolated house.

About four hundred yards from the Greylings drive, therefore, the Inspector pulled into the side of the road, shut off his engine and jumped out of the car. As he raced off diagonally down the sloping moorland to the garden wall, Grimmet called after him: “Five and a quarter minutes, sir!” The Inspector, anxious to save his breath, waved a hand in acknowledgment. He covered the distance with creditable speed and, coming to a point where he imagined the last hurdle had been placed, he went through the motions of unlacing his boots. Then striding across the intervening patch of muddy ground he climbed up on to the wall and worked his way cautiously to the middle of it. Allowing a feasible amount of time to elapse, during which he supposed himself to have flung the gravel against the window-panes and attracted Tregarthan, he fired, in imagination, the three shots. The revolver, as he saw it, dropped to the ground. A moment's hesitation—then he was off on his return journey.

He reached the end of the hurdles, made pretence of putting on his boots and roughly lacing them. Then with pounding heart and clenched fists he jogged up the steep rise towards the anxiously waiting Grimmet. He crossed the road, tumbled, breathless, into the car and restarted the engine. The car leapt forward.

On Grouch's reckoning he had formed a fairly good idea as to where Ned Salter and Bedruthen had met the car. Bedruthen had mentioned that they were about a hundred yards from the Greylings entrance. At this point, according to Grouch, there was a heap of stones used for road-mending. As the car rushed by this landmark, therefore, the Inspector sang out: “Now!” and jammed on his brakes.

Grimmet noted the time. It was exactly 2.29.

“Which means,” said the Inspector after a quick calculation, “that I've taken just nineteen minutes. So if Bedruthen saw the car, say at nine-four, it was just possible for Hardy to have covered the course in time. D'you think a 1928 four-cylinder Morris could equal our performance, Grimmet?”

Grimmet considered the question for a moment.

“It's possible, sir,” he acknowledged. “A lot, of course, would depend on the actual condition of the engine. But provided she wasn't missing badly and the chap that was driving her knew how to get the best out of the car—I think his time wouldn't fall far short of ours.”

The Inspector grunted, and when he had changed places with Grimmet and ordered him to drive back to the village, he began to analyse the reliability of his test. It was pretty rough and ready, of course—nothing could be timed with absolute certainty. For instance, there was no actual proof that Hardy had removed his boots before crossing the hurdles and climbing the wall. He might, considering his extremely hurried exit from the cottage, have been wearing slippers. Shoes, too, would take far less time to unlace and kick off than boots. Then, again—the garage door—it might not have been locked on that particular evening. Tregarthan might have come to the window with greater alacrity than the Inspector estimated. Factors like these would do much to shorten the time—whilst a cold engine, a missing plug, the darkness of the night and so on, would considerably lengthen it. What exactly had he gained by the test? Simply this. Provided no unanticipated misfortune overtook Hardy from the time he left Cove Cottage to the time when he passed Salter and Bedruthen on the road, it was well within the bounds of possibility that he could have committed the murder.

It was, in a way, a negative result. It got him no further along the road to the actual solution of the mystery. It merely upheld the possibility of the theory which he had advanced in the Superintendent's office.

But the single shot still puzzled him. Three shots had been fired. One shot had been heard and that, according to Bedruthen's statement, at about ten minutes to nine. But at ten minutes to nine on Monday night Hardy, according to the test, would have just been on the point of drawing up at the roadside, about a quarter of a mile from the Greylings drive-gate. Then what on earth had induced him to discharge the revolver before he got out of the car? Had it been an accident? Had he perhaps been examining the Webley with one hand and driving with the other, and the revolver had gone off unexpectedly? He recalled Bedruthen's remark about the sound of the shot appearing to come from the left of the house. That would fit in with the theory. The only possible explanation, otherwise, was that the single shoot had nothing at all to do with the murder of Tregarthan. Just a chance factor, though a confusing one, in the case. But both Bedruthen and Salter believed it to be a shot, and who the devil would take a gun out in the middle of a storm to shoot rabbits? If Salter had not been with the shepherd it might have been his effort with a sawn-off shot-gun—but poachers usually affect less noisy methods and, besides, Ned
was
with Bedruthen.

Could it have been a signal from Ruth Tregarthan to show that the stage was set and the coast clear? Mrs. Peewit, though not certain of the time, believed the girl had arrived at the cottage at ten minutes to nine. This was the exact time when the shot had been heard. This theory, therefore, did not seem to hold water. Moreover, a signal of that sort was hardly in keeping with the cool and deliberate scheme which Hardy and the girl had obviously hatched between them.

How, then, to explain the single shot? The Inspector couldn't. He gave up the attempt. It was left to float like an irritating speck in the back of his mind.

Reaching the Constable's office he put through a call to Greystoke. But the Superintendent had nothing to report. So far the Yard had failed to trace the whereabouts of the missing man. Nobody had come forward to offer any information.

Inspector Bigswell cursed under his breath. As far as he could see there was little he could do to further the progress of his investigations until Ronald Hardy had been run to earth. Once lay his hands on the missing man and subject him to a detailed cross-examination, and he believed the final bits of the puzzle would fall into place of their own accord. The fellow, confronted by the evidence collected, wouldn't have a leg to stand on. He might deny the girl's complicity in the crime. That was understandable—even commendable—but his own case, on the face of things, was hopeless. Better for him to make a clean breast of it and let the law take its own inevitable, inexorable course. He was sorry for the girl. She had been too much under the sway of the man's influence. But there it was. Murder was murder. It was not for him to dissect the queer and tortuous reasoning of his fellow-creatures. It was for him to deal in facts and facts alone.

Inspector Bigswell's ruminations were cut short by the ringing of the telephone bell. He crossed to the Constable's desk and took up the receiver. He recognised the quiet and affable voice of the Reverend Dodd. The Vicar had thought it possible that the Inspector would be at the Constable's office. He was speaking on behalf of Miss Tregarthan. Would the Inspector have any objection if he, the Vicar, paid a visit to Greylings? It was a financial matter. Miss Tregarthan had the Cowpers’ wages to pay and other current expenses usually paid by her uncle. Her uncle, in fact, had been over to Greystoke on the morning of the 24th and cashed a cheque for forty pounds. As she had not been through the effects found on her uncle's person after the murder, she had not as yet had the money. Would the Inspector object to the Vicar going down, at once, to Greylings and collecting it? Yes—it was in notes. Tregarthan always drew out his monthly cheque in notes.