The Courtesy of Death (17 page)

‘About that Mr Fosworthy’s property which you recommended,’ I went on. ‘You had better know that his housekeeper has informed the police that she is worried over his
absence.’

‘Oh, not already!’

I heard the clerk at the door and changed the position of my chair. When he was out of the room again and I had my thirty pounds, I got up to go.

‘If you don’t mention this visit of mine, I shan’t either,’ I said. ‘You may have noticed that I did not let your clerk see my neck, and I was careful to hide it
when I walked in.’

‘I don’t quite follow,’ he whined. ‘Perhaps I ought to.’

‘It may become clear in time. I hope it never will. But if enquiries are made, I promise you that there is no traceable connection between a man wanted by the police and Mr Yarrow who is
well known to you and was expected this morning at the bank.’

‘I suppose you have appropriated someone’s clothes,’ he said with the first sign of intelligence I had ever seen in him. ‘I told them at the time that you couldn’t
go anywhere in your condition. It’s not our fault. Really it was not the fault of the rest of us. I hope there is no ill feeling. You and Fosworthy—Oh God, I wish I’d never seen
the place!’

‘Come! Come!’ I replied, shaking the limp hand which was held out to me. ‘Think of your spiritual development! And now you know you’ll never be any good as a murderer.
All gain, my dear man!’

He let me out by a side door. It was twenty to one by his office clock. The police would certainly be looking for me now in Wells, Glastonbury and every neighbouring town. Still, if that poor
patient—to whom I wish a long life without another hospital in it—did not go and die before the operation was over, it could not be known how I was dressed. I took out my hat, punched
it into shape and paid off my taxi-driver. A nearby public lavatory enabled me to put the hat back in its uncomfortable hiding place.

I jumped on a bus which was just starting for Bridgwater. Up to then I had been intoxicated by speed and luck, concentrating always on the next five minutes. Now that I had time to think, I
realised that I would never be any good as a murderer either. Just as soon as the police started to make enquiries of taxi-drivers and my man reported a customer who made a mysterious call at
Warminster, they would be on my trail. I nearly jumped off the bus at the second village in a cold sweat, and had to tell myself firmly that the hell of a lot of good that would do. The taxi had
driven away before I got on the bus. And, anyway, they would be looking for a man in a black hat, and I was sitting on it.

At Bridgwater I found a train leaving at once for Taunton and took it. Once clear of Taunton station, I felt more confident. After all, I was not so important that all Somerset police would be
alerted in the first hour. So I went into a shop and fitted myself out with a cravat—grabbing it off the counter and instantly putting it on—together with a cheap blazer and a
suit-case. I didn’t care whether the police traced that purchase or not. By the time they did, I should have vanished into London.

An express to Paddington. A carefree dinner on the train. A walk to my flat as a harmless, returning holidaymaker. That was that, except that I had not got a key. However, the fire escape and
the cautious breaking of the bathroom window dealt with that problem. I have always longed to know how far ahead of the pursuit I really was. I am sure the police must have guessed I took that
Bridgwater bus, leaving so conveniently, but they never got on to my visit to the bank. I waited with some anxiety to be asked to confirm that I, as Mr Yarrow, had been in Glastonbury and cashed a
cheque for thirty pounds. However, the detective of my imagination never called.

It was, as always, from an entirely unexpected quarter that Fosworthy re-entered my life. After burning the blazer and the cravat—I of course wore another one continuously—and
anonymously returning the anaesthetist’s clothes to the hospital, I spent a peaceful week getting my breath back and trying to convince myself that justice ought to be done. I did not
succeed. I think I can honestly say that it was not only the inconvenience and possible danger to myself which counted. I was also dead certain that Fosworthy would have wished me to leave matters
as they were.

Disengagement, however, was shattered by a letter. Noticing the postmark, I thought it was from Gorm. It was more disturbing.

I remembered the name as that of the farmer whose land adjoined the cart track behind The Green Man. It was he who had grown and wired the formidable hedge in which Fosworthy had been stuck. I
knew he disliked fox-hunting, which gave a rather tenuous connection with Fosworthy.

It was no use funking the meeting. In any case this did not smell of blackmail or of any half-baked attempt on me.
You are quite safe so long as we are
Jedder had said. I took the simple
precaution of arranging the meeting in a public place and wrote off at once asking Mr Hawkins to tea—since he did not like public houses—at a neighbouring café.

I felt at ease with him at once. He was an old-fashioned West Country farmer, probably the son of a farmer. Very properly he wore a bowler hat in London—a tradition much earlier than that
of regular soldiers and civil servants with their rolled umbrellas and brief cases. To me, brought up with a respect for market towns, it did not seem eccentric. Indeed there was nothing
extraordinary about him except that he radiated honesty and individualism. He was a contented man who could not possibly be one of Jedder’s tight-lipped associates.

He let me know his business within a minute of sitting down at the table. He was that sort of character: not abrupt, but promptly weighing up the other fellow, right or wrong, and going straight
to the point.

‘I’ve come about a friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Likely as not you won’t know him, but if you’re going to live down our way, as Mrs Gorm tells me you’ve a
mind to, it won’t be long before you hear tell of him. I hope so. I hope indeed he’s not in any trouble.’

He told me that on the morning of September 3rd he had gone down early to have a look at an ailing ewe, and his eye had been caught by a red and yellow rag in his boundary hedge which, he was
sure, had not been there the day before. ‘If that don’t belong to Barnabas,’ he said to himself, ‘I’m a Dutchman.’

His introduction was detailed and gave me time to compose my face and to avoid showing any sign of recognising the name. Fosworthy had evidently lost his handkerchief while squirming through the
hedge; he always kept it in his left sleeve, and it was always of coloured silk with a Paisley pattern. I don’t know whether these expensive squares were his only luxury, or whether he had
some theory that germs were more contented in silk.

‘Hedge looked a bit worse for wear,’ Mr Hawkins went on, ‘But he might be up to anything, Barnabas. Might have found a sheep stuck in the thorn, though there weren’t no
bramble and not enough fleece this time of year. And the Lord knows what he was doing of any way.

‘Well, more’n a week later I was passing his house. When the woman as does for him comes to the door, I asks: ‘where’s his reverence?’ which is what we called him
though he never set foot in church nor chapel. ‘Hopped it unexpected,’ she says. ‘Trust him to leave his toothbrush or such behind him, but not every blessed thing!’ Well, I
asked if he was all right. He wasn’t what one would call touched, Mr Yarrow, but he had some ways which ain’t yourn nor mine.

‘I’ve ’ad a postcard from Reading,’ she says, ‘and another from London, so he’s all right in the flesh, but I’m not that sure of his head. You
won’t believe it,’ she says, ‘but he’s running after some ’ussy.’ ‘You don’t say, missus!’ I said. ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘because
I ’eard him walking up and down his little library whispering
Darling! Darling!
to himself.’ I told her it must have been something he read in a book. But she would have it that
it was a different voice, not like him talking to the author and saying he’d got hold of the right end of the stick.’

I asked Mr Hawkins innocently if this Fosworthy hadn’t made arrangements for someone to look after his stock while he was away.

‘Oh, he don’t farm! Always with his books and such! A vegetarian, he is. I got to know him when he was holding forth about blood sports, as he called them. Myself I ain’t for
’em or against ’em. But on my land it’s live and let live. If I kills a fat capon for my Sunday dinner, that’s what fowls are for. And if fox kills one for his’n,
that’s what foxes are for.’

He looked at me challengingly. In his own way he had just expressed the famous synthesis; but of course it begged far too many questions for Fosworthy ever to have noticed the resemblance.

‘He’s full of goodness,’ Mr Hawkins went on. ‘That’s why some folk think him not right in the head. They ain’t used to it. That woman who does for him,
now—blowed if she hasn’t told the police that someone might shut him up by mistake!’

‘You don’t think that is what happened then?’

‘No! What worries me, Mr Yarrow, is that on the night he left his handkerchief in my hedge, why didn’t he call and see me? So just on the chance the Gorms might have set eyes on him,
I asked ’em. Old Gorm looks up his book and says that was the night you stayed in his bungalow, and if there was anything to be heard at the bottom of my land you’d have heard it. And
that’s why I’m here.’

I said I much wished I could help him—which was true enough so far as it went.

‘Well, now I’ve talked to you, I know you would if you could,’ he replied. ‘But what happened to the cat?’

‘What cat?’

‘The cat with a broken back which scratched you.’

‘I’ve no idea. It sort of struggled off,’ I said.

‘They do hide themselves proper. I had a good look round the old stables to see if there was any trace of Barnabas. But there wasn’t no cat either.’

I saw the whole thing now. When Mrs Gorm mentioned the accident and the mess in my bed, Hawkins began to wonder just whose blood it was.

‘Haven’t his friends any notion of where he could be?’ I asked.

‘A mazy lot! Chap called Jedder is the only one that’s any use when he ain’t shooting or hunting. And look where that’s got him! And there’s the vet. But I
don’t want to bother him with the trouble he’s in himself.’

I didn’t take up the reference to Jedder, but I did ask what trouble the vet was in, to see what Hawkins would say about him.

‘Lost his arm. Aviston-Tresco, his name is. Him and Barnabas Fosworthy was thick as thieves. But he gives me the creeps, he does. I won’t have him on the place. I’m all for a
man being pitiful, if you see what I mean, but not when it comes to whispering to an old cow with the staggers that he’s sorry for what he has to do. Yet I’ve heard folk speak of him as
if he was a sort of saint. And I’ll say this for him! He wouldn’t hurt a fly, no more than what Barnabas Fosworthy would.’

Cheerful, that was! I saw myself trying to persuade a hard-headed Somerset jury against the solid evidence of all the witnesses to character.

‘
Are you seriously telling us
,
Yarrow
,
that these harmless citizens whom you attacked and maimed for life believed that murder was justifiable because there wasn’t
any death?

‘
I am.
’

‘
And you say they were inspired by these remarkable paintings which you yourself hoped to exploit commercially?
’

‘
Well, it’s not so easy as all that
. …’

‘
Answer yes or no!
’

The scene was far too vivid in imagination. When I said good-bye to Emmanuel Hawkins, I was glad that I had not given way to temptation and told him what I knew.

That mood did not last when I was alone. I asked myself what Hawkins would have done in my position. The desperate Fosworthy could easily have called on him, not me. Well, of course he
wouldn’t have stood for this nonsense a moment. On the other hand he would have been in the clear from the word go. Nobody could accuse him of plotting to cash in on the underground National
Gallery.

I hate indecision. Time and again in my career I have lost patience with the dithering of managers and partners, and acted. That may be why I have never had steady success. I’m not a good
committee man. I mention this only because I want to make it plain that I thoroughly disliked myself and could not recognise myself.

Though the horror of Fosworthy’s death and my imprisonment was fading, I could no longer carry it alone. After Hawkins’ visit and the suspicions which—for the time
being—he had dropped. I had to ask for advice, or not so much advice as moral support. There was only one man from whom I could get it: Dunton. I called him up and asked if he would give me
an hour or two of his evening. So long as I did not go through Wells and did not stop until my car was outside his front door, the chance of any policeman recognising me was negligible.

I drove down the following afternoon. There they were again in the evening light—the mother, the daughters, the ponies, the radiance. I felt inexorably separated now from this simplicity,
as if the memories which I carried into the house were visible. It was not fair, for I could not put my finger on any guilt of mine or deliberate aggression. Yet I was dirtied.

‘I felt I might see you some time soon,’ Dunton said as soon as he had given me a drink. He had taken me into his study, not into the garden.

I replied that if there were anything at all in telepathy, he should have felt it pretty strongly, that I had spent twenty-four hours trying to reach him.

‘Where’s Fosworthy?’ he asked.

‘Why that question?’

‘Remembering our last conversation. You were interested in Aviston-Tresco and Alan Jedder.’