To Love and Be Wise (13 page)

'Haven't the Press been at him already?'

'They haven't had time. The
Clarion
arrived on the doorstep at five this afternoon, I understand, and went away to get information at the Swan when he failed to get it at Trimmings.'

'Trust the
Clarion
to be first. Whitmore would have done better to see whoever it was. Why didn't he?'

'Waiting for his lawyer to arrive from town, so he said.'

'Who was it, do you know? The
Clarion
.'

'Jammy Hopkins.'

'Jammy! I'd as soon have a flame-thrower on my tail as Jammy Hopkins. He has no conscience whatever. He'll make up a story out of whole cloth if he doesn't get an interview. You know, I begin to be sorry for Walter Whitmore. He couldn't really have given a thought to Jammy, or he wouldn't have been so quick to shove Searle into the river.'

'And who is being Die-Hard now?' Grant said.

IN the morning Grant telephoned to his chief, but he had no sooner begun his story than Bryce interrupted him.

'That you, Grant? You send back that Man Friday of yours straight away. Benny Skoll cleaned out Poppy Plumtre's bedroom safe last night.'

'I thought all Poppy's valuables were with Uncle.'

'Not since she got herself a new daddy.'

'Are you sure that it's Benny?'

'Quite sure. It has all his trade-marks. The telephone call to get the hall porter out of the way, the lack of fingerprints, the bread-and-jam and milk meal, the exit by the service entrance. Short of signing his name in the visitors' book, he couldn't have written his signature more clearly over it.'

'Ah, well; the day criminals learn to vary their technique we go out of business.'

'I need Williams to pick up Benny. Williams knows Benny like a book. So send him back. How are you doing?'

'Not too well.'

'No? How?'

'We have no corpse. So we have two possibilities: Searle is dead, either by accident or by design; or he has just disappeared for ends of his own.'

'What sort of ends?'

'Practical joke, perhaps.'

'He had better not try that stuff with us.'

'It might, of course, be plain amnesia.'

'It had better be.'

'There are two things I need, sir. A radio S.O.S. is one. And the other is some information from the San Francisco police about Searle. We are working in the dark, knowing nothing about him. His only relation in England is a cousin; a woman artist, with whom he had no contact. Or says he hadn't. She will probably get in touch with us when she sees the papers this morning. But she will probably know very little about him.'

'And you think the San Francisco police will know more?'

'Well, San Francisco was his headquarters, I understand, when he spent the winter months on the Coast, and they can no doubt dig up something about him there. Let us know whether he ever was in any bother and if anyone was liable to kill him for any reason.'

'A lot of people would like to kill a photographer, I should think. Yes, we'll do that.'

'Thank you, sir. And about the S.O.S.?'

'The B.B.C. don't like their nice little radio cluttered up with police messages. What did you want to say?'

'I want to ask anyone who gave a lift to a young man between Wickham and Crome on Wednesday night to get in touch with us.'

'Yes, I'll see to that. I suppose you have covered all the regular services?'

'Everything, sir. Not a sign of him anywhere. And he is hardly inconspicuous. Short of his having a rendezvous with a waiting plane—which only happens in boys' stories, as far as I'm aware—the only way he could have got away from the district is by walking over the fields and getting a lift on the main road.'

'No evidence of homicide?'

'None so far. But I shall see what alibis the locals have, this morning.'

'You push Williams off before you do anything else. I'll send the San Francisco information to the Wickham Station when it comes through.'

'Very good, sir. Thank you.'

Grant hung up and went to tell Williams.

'Damn Benny,' Williams said. 'Just when I was beginning to like this bit of country. It's no day to wrestle with Benny anyhow.'

'Is he tough?'

'Benny? No! He's a horror. He'll cry and carry on and say that we are hounding him, and that he is no sooner out of stir and trying to make good—"make good"! Benny!—than we are down on him to come and be questioned, and what chance has he in the circs, and so on. He turns my stomach. If Benny saw an honest day's work coming his way he'd run for his life. He's a wonderful cryer, though. He once got a question asked in Parliament. You'd wonder how some of those M.P.s ever had brains enough to ask for a railway ticket from their home towns. Have I got to take a
train
to town?'

'I expect Rodgers will give you a car to Crome and you can get a fast train there,' Grant said, smiling at the horror on his colleague's face at the thought of train travel. He himself went back to the telephone and called Marta Hallard at the Mill House in Salcott St Mary.

'Alan!' she said. 'How nice. Where are you?'

'At the White Hart in Wickham.'

'You poor dear!'

'Oh, it isn't too bad.'

'Don't be so noble. You know it is primitive to the point of being penitential. Have you heard about our latest sensation, by the way?'

'I have. That is why I am in Wickham.'

There was a complete silence at that.

Then Marta said: 'You mean the
Yard
are interested in Leslie Searle's drowning?'

'In Searle's disappearance, let us say.'

'You mean, that there is some truth in this rumour of a quarrel with Walter?'

'I'm afraid I can't discuss it over the telephone. What I wanted to ask you was whether you would be at home this evening if I came along.'

'But you must come and stay, of course. You can't stay at that dreary place. I'll tell Mrs——'

'Thank you with all my heart, but I can't do that. I must be here in Wickham at the centre of things. But if you like to give me dinner——'

'Of course I shall give you dinner. You shall have a beautiful meal, my dear. With one of my omelets and one of Mrs Thrupp's chickens, and a bottle from the cellar that will take the taste of the White Hart beer out of your mouth.'

So, a little heartened at the prospect of civilisation at the end of the day, Grant went out on his day's task, and he began with Trimmings. If there was to be a reckoning of alibis it was fitting that the inhabitants of Trimmings should be the first to give an account of themselves.

It was a fine blue morning, growing soft after an early frost, and no day, as Williams had pointed out, to waste on the Bennys of this life; but the sight of Trimmings standing up unblushingly in the bright sunlight restored Grant's wavering good humour. Last night it had been a lighted doorway in the dark. Today it stood revealed, extravagantly monstrous, in all its smug detail, and Grant was so enraptured that his foot came down on the brake and he brought the car to a standstill at the curve of the drive, and sat there gazing.

'I know just how you are feeling,' a voice said at his elbow. And there was Liz; a little heavy-eyed, he noticed, but otherwise calm and friendly.

'Good morning,' he said. 'I was a little dashed this morning because I couldn't drop everything and go fishing. But I feel better now.'

'It is a beauty, isn't it,' she agreed. 'You don't quite believe it is there at all. You feel that no one could possibly have thought it up; it just appeared.'

Her thoughts shifted from the house to his presence, and he saw the question coming.

'I am sorry to be a nuisance, but I am busy this morning getting rid of the undergrowth in this case.'

'Undergrowth?'

'I want to get rid of all the people who can't possibly enter into the case at all.'

'I see. You are collecting alibis.'

'Yes.' He opened the car door, so that she might ride the short distance to the house.

'Well, I hope we have good ones. I regret to say that I haven't one at all. It was the first thing I thought of when I knew who you were. It's very odd, isn't it, how guilty an innocent person feels when he can't account for himself on the umpteenth inst. Do you want everyone's alibi? Aunt Lavinia's and mother's and all?'

'And those of the staff, too. Of everyone who had any connection with Leslie Searle.'

'Well, you had better start with Aunt Vin. Before she begins her morning chore. She dictates for two hours every morning, and she likes to begin punctually.'

'Where were you, Miss Garrowby?' he asked as they arrived at the door.

'At the material time?' He thought she was being deliberately cold-blooded about it; the 'material time' was when Leslie Searle had presumably lost his life, and he did not think that she was forgetting that fact.

'Yes. On Wednesday night.'

'I had what they call in detective stories "retired to my room". And don't tell me that it was "early to retire", either. I know it was. I like going upstairs early. I like being alone at the end of the day.'

'Do you read?'

'Don't tell, Inspector, but I write.'

'You too?'

'Do I disappoint you?'

'You interest me. What do you write—or shouldn't I ask?'

'I write innocuous heroines out of my system, that's all.'

'Tilda the tweeny with the hare-lip and the homicidal tendencies, as antidote to Maureen.'

She looked at him for a long moment and then said: 'You are a very odd sort of policeman.'

'I suspect that it is your idea of policemen that is odd,' Grant said briskly. 'Will you tell your aunt that I am here?'

But there was no need to announce him. Miss Fitch was in the hall as Liz ran up the steps, and she said in tones more surprised than grieved:

'Liz, you are five minutes late!' Then she saw the Inspector, and said: 'Well, well, they were right. They said that no one would ever take you for a policeman. Come in, Inspector. I have wanted so much to meet you. Officially, as it were. Our last encounter could hardly be termed a meeting, could it. Come into the morning-room. That is where I work.'

Grant apologised for keeping her from her morning's dictation, but she professed herself glad to postpone for at least ten minutes her business with 'the tiresome girl'. Grant took the 'tiresome girl' to be the current Fitch heroine.

Miss Fitch, too, it seemed, had retired early on Wednesday night. At half-past nine, to be exact.

'When a family are in each other's pocket all day long, as we are,' she said, 'they tend to go to their rooms early at night.' She had watched a radio play, and had lain awake a little, half-listening for her sister coming in, but had fallen asleep quite early after all.

'Coming in?' Grant said. 'Was Mrs Garrowby out, then?'

'Yes. She was at a W.R.I. meeting.'

He asked her about Searle, then. What she had thought of him, and what in her opinion he was liable to do or not to do. She was surprisingly guarded about Searle, he thought; as if she were picking her steps; and he wondered why.

When he said: 'Did Searle, in your opinion, show signs of being in love with your niece?' she looked startled, and said 'No, of course not!' too quickly and too emphatically.

'He did not pay her attentions?'

'My dear man,' Miss Fitch said, '
any
American pays a girl attentions. It is a conditioned reflex. As automatic as breathing.'

'You think he was not seriously interested in her?'

'I am sure that he wasn't.'

'Your nephew told me last night that he and Searle had telephoned to you each night on their way down the river.'

'Yes.'

'Did everyone in the household know about the message on Wednesday night? I mean, know where the two men were camped?'

'I expect so. The family certainly did; and the staff were always anxious to hear about their progress so I suppose everyone knew.'

'Thank you very much, Miss Fitch. You have been very kind.'

She called Liz in, and Liz took him to her mother and went back to the morning-room to record the doings of the latest Maureen.

Mrs Garrowby was another person without an alibi. She had been at the W.R.I. meeting at the village hall, had left there when the meeting broke up at half-past nine, had accompanied Miss Easton-Dixon part of the way home and had left her where their roads branched. She had come in about ten; or later, perhaps: she had strolled home because it was a lovely night; and had locked up the front of the house. The back door was always locked by Mrs Brett, the cook-housekeeper.

Emma Garrowby did not fool Grant for a moment. He had met her counterpart too often; that ruthless maternalism masquerading in a placid exterior. Had Searle got in the way of plans she had made for her daughter?

He asked her about Searle, and there was no step-picking at all. He had been a charming young man, she said. Quite exceptionally charming. They all liked him enormously, and were shattered by this tragedy.

Grant caught himself receiving this mentally with an expressive monosyllable.

He felt a little suffocated by Mrs Garrowby, and was glad when she went away to find Alice for him.

Alice had been walked-out on Wednesday night by the under-gardener, and had come in at a quarter past ten, whereupon the door had been locked behind her by Mrs Brett, and they had gone up together, after having a cup of cocoa, to their rooms in the back wing. Alice really was shattered by the fate that had overtaken Leslie Searle. Never, she said, had she had to do for a nicer young man. She had met dozens of young men, gentlemen
and
others, who considered a girl's ankles, but Mr Searle was the only one she had ever met who considered a girl's feet.

'
Feet?
'

She had said as much to Mrs Brett, and to Edith, the parlourmaid. He would say: 'You can do this or that, and that will save you coming up again, won't it.' And she could only conclude that this was an American characteristic, because no Englishman she had ever come across had ever cared two hoots whether you had to come up again or not.

Edith, too, it seemed, mourned for Leslie Searle; not because he considered her feet but because he was so good-looking. Edith proved to be very superior and refayned. Much too refayned to be walked out by an under-gardener. She had gone to her room to watch the same play that her mistress was watching. She heard Mrs Brett and Alice come up to bed, but the wing bedrooms were too far away to hear anyone come into the main block, so she did not know when Mrs Garrowby had come in.