Watson's Choice (20 page)

‘Where was that, sir?’

‘I don’t know. One of the Corner Houses, I believe. I don’t really remember.’

‘Will you give me your business address, sir? Perhaps you’ve a business card I could have.’

‘What the devil for, Superintendent?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Collins, looking him full in the face, ‘when a gentleman who has had some acquaintance with a murdered young woman states first of all that he can’t remember how he spent the afternoon on which she died, and then admits that, on that particular afternoon, he changed all his regular habits, and even stalls about the place where he had his lunch, he needn’t be surprised if the police think his information can do with a bit of checking.
There’s
one other thing I’d like to know. What did you know of Miss Campbell before she came here to work for Sir Bohun Chantrey?’

‘Oughtn’t you to caution me?’ asked Dance, suddenly grinning. ‘I knew quite a bit about Linda Campbell before she came to do the governessing here. In fact, it might be said that I got her the job.’

‘Indeed, sir?’ Collins mentally pricked up his ears. Facts relating to Linda Campbell’s life before she was employed by Sir Bohun were few, and, with all his suspicions of the house-party, Collins still had in mind the so-far unidentified young man whom Linda had met at the road-house. ‘May I ask what was the nature of your acquaintanceship with her, and how you came to meet her in the first place?’

‘Certainly. Neither is anything to be ashamed of, I’m relieved to say. Linda was at boarding school with my sister, who is a good deal younger than I am, and Linda used to come to our house for an occasional week-end. After the two girls left school I saw no more of Linda for two or three years. I married, for one thing, and was not living at home. But not many months ago I received a letter from Linda, sent on from my mother’s, in which she asked whether I could put her in touch with a job for which she didn’t require to train. I hadn’t a clue. She said she couldn’t even type. Then I heard that Chantrey had had two youngsters wished on him and needed a nursery governess, so I put Linda on to him and washed my hands of her.’

‘You have her previous address, then?’

‘No. I threw the letter away.’

‘What did you think when you heard that Miss Campbell was dead?’

‘Nothing in particular. I wasn’t tremendously surprised, as a matter of fact.’

‘How do you account for that, sir?’

‘Well, onlookers see most of the game, and since that Sherlock Holmes party I’ve felt that Linda was asking for trouble. Apart from anyone from outside – I heard rumours that she met a chap at that road-house on the edge of the heath – she was trying to ring the changes on Sir Bohun, Grimston, and Manoel, with occasional passes at any other blokes in her vicinity. I shouldn’t have thought she’d have been such a born fool. Two of ’em aren’t really normal,
and
t’other is a foreigner, and (again according to rumour) Chantrey’s bastard.’

‘Not normal, sir? How do you mean?’

‘Well, everybody knows that Mrs Bradley had Chantrey under her wing for months and months of psychological treatment just before the end of the war, and, as for Grimston, why, the fellow’s as mad as a hatter.’

‘Indeed, sir?’ This confirmation of his own sergeant’s opinion was interesting, Collins decided.

‘Ought to be certified,’ said Dance amiably. ‘Mixes laudanum with his port! Nearly had a fit when first I knew of it. It was Bell who tipped me off about that.’

‘Laudanum with his port, sir?’

‘Oh, yes. He’s a suicide type, you know. I’d never put it past him to confess to this murder just to get himself hanged!’

‘That’s a remarkably interesting suggestion, sir, I must say! You’ll be sure to let me have your sister’s address, sir, and your business card?’

‘Well,’ said Dance dubiously; and again suddenly grinned. ‘No, I’ll come clean. Linda was a pick-up. I met her when I was – when my wife and I weren’t on speaking terms. I knew she was a hussy, even then. She was, you know, Superintendent. She obviously had it coming to her. Anyway, I kept her for a short time, but she was a hard-boiled, shrewish little bitch, and I soon got sick of her. However, I couldn’t let her down flat, so when I heard that some friends of mine were going to advertise for a nursery governess I sent her along. She’d been trained as a teacher – that emergency scheme they had at the end of the war – so I thought she could do the job all right, and I also thought I’d get her off my neck for good. It was a bit of a jolt, I can tell you, to turn up to that Sherlock Holmes party that Chantrey threw last November and find Linda governessing his small nephew. I had to go into a huddle with her, and, for a financial consideration, she agreed to keep her mouth shut about our little affair. Of course, if I’d realized how things were between her and Chantrey I could have saved my money!’

‘Who suggested that she should not give you away, sir?’

‘She did, the little harpy! You see, she’d found out – how, I don’t know, but for those sort of people the walls seem to have tongues as well as ears! – that I wanted to make up with my wife, so she’d got me cold, and she knew it.’

‘Blackmail, sir?’

‘Yes, of course it was. But I didn’t kill her, for that or any other reason.’

‘It’s a pity you won’t, or can’t, tell me about that afternoon, sir, all the same.’

Toby stared down at the palms of his hands and at his interlocking fingers.

‘All right, then,’ he said. ‘I
will
tell you, but it won’t do me a ha’porth of good, I assure you. After lunching at the office on sandwiches and a half-bot. I went to call on a chap named Raymond de Philippe. I’d wanted to call on him for some time but he’d been on a business trip abroad.’

‘You went to call on him, sir? For any particular reason?’

‘Yes, for a very particular reason.’ Dance stared down at his hands again. ‘I couldn’t very well ask him to the office. For one thing, I didn’t think he’d come, and, for another, the matter was too private to have even my secretary overhear it. I lunched at the office to save time. I knew, if I wanted to catch him alone, that between two and half past was the best time, so I toddled along to his flat and – and that’s where I was at three, and, until about four, I stayed there. Then I went back to
my
flat without returning to the office.’

‘Anybody swear to that, sir? This Mr de Philippe can confirm the time of your visit to him, I take it?’

‘No, I saw nobody when I went back to my flat. Four o’clockish on an ordinary week-day is a dead sort of hour where I live. All the men are still at work and all the women at bridge-parties or a matinée. As for de Philippe – well, I’ve no doubt that he
could
give me an alibi, but I’m equally convinced that he
won’t
.’

‘How’s that, sir?’

‘Well, you see, Superintendent, I went round there with the intention of putting it to him civilly, quietly, and as one gentleman to another, that I had no intention either of divorcing Brenda or of allowing her to divorce me, and would he, so to speak, kindly lay off her and let me mend a broken romance – my own.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Unhappily, Superintendent, I ended up by punching him on the nose.’

‘I must

Not trust

Here to any;

Bereav’d,

Deceiv’d

By so many.’

ROBERT HERRICK
–
Anacreontike

‘
WHO NEXT, SIR?’
enquired the sergeant. Collins grunted and consulted the list on which he was checking off his victims as he interviewed them.

‘Better be Sir Bohun Chantrey. I shan’t be sorry to get him over and done with,’ he said. ‘What did you make of that last bird?’

‘Honest, sir. Don’t you think we could get that chap with the French moniker to cough up that alibi?’

‘I’m doubtful,’ Collins answered. ‘Mr Ready-Fist Dance presumably knows him a lot better than we do. All the same, I shall try. He may be a better fellow than Dance thinks. Anyway, get Sir Bohun.’

Sir Bohun entered with a great show of affability and declared that the sooner ‘this damned mess we’re all in’ was cleared up, the better.

‘Brings one’s life to a full stop,’ he continued. ‘Gets one talked about. Sunday papers, and all that sort of unpleasantness. Photographers lurking in the shrubbery. Glad to do anything I can to help, so fire away, Superintendent, and don’t attempt to spare anybody’s feelings.’

‘Thank you, Sir Bohun,’ Collins replied, signing to the sergeant. ‘Just one or two questions, then. What can you tell me about the deceased?’

‘Nothing much. When I took charge of my brother’s two children
I
engaged a tutor and a nursery governess. Both came with good references and both have proved satisfactory. Miss Campbell was the nursery governess.’

‘Yes, sir?’

Sir Bohun looked surprised.

‘That’s all I know,’ he said. Collins studied the walnut markings on the polished table beside which he was seated, and then looked up.

‘I had some impression, Sir Bohun, that you had offered marriage to Miss Campbell and that she had accepted your offer.’

‘Oh, that!’ Sir Bohun waved it aside. ‘You asked me what I knew of poor Linda Campbell, and I thought I had answered you sufficiently. As to what you mention … yes, I had made her an offer of marriage and she had accepted it. It was a business arrangement. This house needs a châtelaine. The matter could have had nothing to do with her death.’

‘Why do
you
think she was killed, Sir Bohun?’

‘I? I have no idea at all. She was a vain, harmless sort of girl, a bit of a hussy, I dare say, but nothing that one could take hold of, otherwise I should not have dreamt – couldn’t afford it, in my position – J.P. and all that, don’t you know.’

‘To revert to Miss Campbell’s references – I suppose you took them up, sir? – verified them, that is to say?’

‘Didn’t bother much. Preferred to form my own opinion of the girl. Found her satisfactory. That’s as far as it went.’

‘Yes, I see, sir. We have a report that she may have left this house at about midnight on the occasion of a party last November. Can you suggest any reason for her doing such a thing?’

‘Indeed, no; neither do I attach much importance to the rumour. Of course, she may have gone out that night while the party was still on. Young women take these romantic fancies.’

‘To wander about in thick fog, sir?’

Sir Bohun again waved the point aside.

‘Fog, hail, rain, midsummer moonlight – it’s all one to them,’ he declared. ‘All women are slightly mad, young women considerably so, and adolescent girls completely so. It’s a known fact. Ask any reputable psychologist. Look at
poltergeists
, for example.’

Collins, under his breath, consigned
poltergeists
to the region from which he had no doubt they came, and tried a different tack.

‘The tutor, sir, Mr Grimston.’

‘Ex-tutor. I sacked him. I don’t know why you brought him back here. Lot of nonsense. Apart from his total inability to kill a fly, the fellow’s as mad as a coot. You couldn’t get any sense out of him, however hard you might try.’

Collins was inclined to agree, but he ignored the statement and asked patiently:

‘Can you give me any details as to how you came to engage him, sir? We have to check up, you understand.’

‘Came from a scholastic agency – forget their name. Find you their letter, if you like.’ He rummaged and soon produced it. Collins pushed it over to the sergeant, who made a note of the address and the date, and returned it to Sir Bohun.

‘And you know nothing more about him?’ pursued Collins.

‘Don’t keep a dog and bark myself,’ retorted the baronet. ‘These scholastic agencies are supposed to vet the chaps on their books, I take it? They sent him, and he brought references, and that’s all I knew or cared. Nobody could have supposed that the wretched girl would get herself into this kind of mess, and the wretched boy get himself arrested for it.’

‘He
hasn’t
been arrested for it, Sir Bohun! We shall not make that sort of move until we are perfectly sure.’ Sir Bohun snorted, and Collins went on in gentle tones: ‘There are just one or two things we would like to get quite clear. We have received information that Miss Campbell was acquainted with at least one person in this neighbourhood – a youngish man – who was not a member of your household and who did not appear at your party. She met this man at the
Queen of the Circus
near here, and later she disappeared.’

‘Yes, so Mrs Bradley told me. I didn’t know the girl had any acquaintances in the neighbourhood, if that’s what you were going to ask me. I don’t know anything about the girl at all.’

‘Yet,’ said Collins, in inoffensive tones, ‘you were proposing to marry her, sir?’

Sir Bohun ignored this.

‘Grimston ought to see a psychologist,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you let Mrs B. run a foot-rule over him? He and his dreams! Dreams like that get people into trouble, same as Joseph! Nobody ever learns anything! Dreams, indeed! Silly young fool!’

Collins tapped thoughtfully on the arm of his chair for a moment, and then asked, in a casual, almost uninterested tone:

‘Is there anything you yourself can tell us which might help, sir?’

Sir Bohun pulled at his lower lip. To Collins’ surprise – for he had expected nothing from this shot in the dark – there was something not only hesitant but furtive in the baronet’s manner. The Superintendent waited hopefully.

‘Well,’ said Sir Bohun at last, ‘don’t really suppose it has any bearing, but two unexpected things happened on the night of the Sherlock Holmes party, apart from Linda taking that walk in the fog. That is, if it
was
Linda. Mrs B. is not committing herself, you know. But a very odd – ’

‘We know about the dog, sir.’

‘Oh, you do? Well, when the dog arrived I was really expecting something else.’

‘Indeed, sir?’ Collins sounded only mildly interested. He was anxious not to give any impression of the eagerness which possessed him. One ray of light, however faint, might make all the difference to the enquiry. At the moment there were several suspects, and, except for Grimston and his dream – which might or might not have any bearing on the matter – there seemed no more reason to suspect one rather than another. He had talked matters over with Gavin, who had given him all the information he himself had gleaned, including the affair of the dog at the deserted station and the fact that Celia Godley had fed it under conditions which indicated a desire for secrecy, and he had come to the conclusion that Grimston was not necessarily the most likely criminal. He looked forward to an interview with Miss Godley. ‘Something else?’ he repeated after Sir Bohun. ‘Connected with the dog, do you mean, sir?’