What Happened at Hazelwood? (17 page)

Timmy looked sheepish. So did Mervyn, who was now scrambling to his feet. The two lads eyed each other and I could see that they had made some largely satisfactory discovery. ‘Gentry?’ said Mervyn, his voice at its highest pitch. ‘The little thug is poor uncle George’s house-boy. And he says he won’t get us any tea.’ The high voice rose to a wail. ‘No tea – and it’s after half past four!’

I heard the Inspector breathing rather heavily beside me – a habit he has when overhauling a situation which has got a bit ahead of him. ‘Lady Simney–’ he began.

But Nicolette was dusting Timmy down. She tugged at his ridiculous waistcoat and it came in two in her hand. They were all three quite still for a second and I guessed that they read it as a symbol – as a sort of sartorial token of the disruption of an old order at Hazelwood. For that was the fact. Sir George Simney was dead – and the place was becoming more wholesome hourly. Somebody was surely going to be morally infinitely the worse for what had happened. But a number of people were going to have at least the appearance of being a good deal better.

‘Mervyn,’ Lady Simney said – and she glanced from the one lad to the other – ‘surely your flannels would fit?’

Timmy’s late antagonist hesitated, and I supposed that he was fleetingly wondering about the attitude to all this of his uncle Bevis. ‘Why, yes,’ he answered. ‘Let’s go and see.’

They went out like brothers. ‘Whereas,’ said the Inspector as the door closed on them, ‘these would
not
fit.’ And he pointed to the suitcase we had discovered. ‘They fit nobody in this house.’

There are times when I hate him, and this was one of them. Hounding people about is a disgusting trade. I wish it wasn’t so fascinating.

Lady Simney paled when she saw the suitcase and I could see that this particular triumph of our nosey-parkering was a real shock to her. She sat down. ‘I didn’t kill my husband,’ she said. ‘Nor do I know who did.’

The Inspector crossed the room and stood beside her – a little too close up, so that he was almost standing over her. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘that’s a very extraordinary remark to make. Nobody has breathed a word of such a suspicion, and you start off like that. It sets one wondering at once.’

But he got no change with this. ‘There’s nothing extraordinary about it,’ she said. ‘I’m simply not beating about the bush – and I expect the same of you. Poke among my private possessions if you like. But don’t waste time on making your approaches cunning and foxy. Of course I’m suspected.’

‘Since you’re so sure of that, Lady Simney, perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling us why?’

She gave a sort of quick, severe smile. She had the trick of expressions and gestures which were at once beautiful in themselves and unrelated to any clear conception of her character which you could form. And so, although she was frank and direct enough, and gave herself no airs of mystery, there was a point at which you came to feel that she was a perfect walking Mona Lisa. (But can one conceive Mona Lisa as having legs and going for a stroll round that landscape? I’m talking about a picture. Show this bit to auntie Flo.)

‘Yes, I can,’ she said. ‘I can tell you in a dozen words. My marriage was bad. It began in disillusion – which means sin – and ended downright squalid. My husband’s infidelities were tiresome. But his fidelity was intolerable.’

Well, it sounded straight talk. And again the Inspector was breathing heavily. This was the sort of thing he was accustomed to bully out of the commonalty, or to worm out of their superiors by an elaborate bedside manner. You mustn’t have any pretty fancies about this job of ours.

‘Moreover, yesterday was a sort of crisis. A number of things happened. The young Australian who has arrived here started making love to me in a hothouse. One of my sisters-in-law disapproved. Then George did rather more than start on the same lines with this young man’s wife – and incidentally in what must have been pretty well an icehouse. I came upon them, more or less. He shouted something about having seen my lover – he must somehow have got wind of the hothouse business – and then he struck me. And, of course, before that, life has been hopelessly disordered: quarrels and smashings and fights.’

‘It does appear, Lady Simney, that folk here about are a bit free with their hands.’ He fished out a notebook and affected to consult it. ‘For example, I understand that only a few minutes after the discovery of Sir George’s death there was some sort of quarrel between the young man who has just left us – Mr Cockayne, is it not? – and Mr Willoughby Simney?’

‘I believe there was. They went to have a look at the window through which the attacker had fled, and they seemed to fall into some sort of dispute about I couldn’t hear what. But then, they have never been on very good terms, and they were considerably overwrought.’

‘That, as far as I understand the matter, would apply to several members of the household. And now, will you please explain this suitcase?’

‘Explain it, Inspector Cadover?’ Lady Simney had flushed with sudden anger. ‘And perhaps I am to be required to explain, too, the books on my shelves and the pictures on my walls?’

He looked slowly about the room. ‘It might be useful,’ he said.

And at that she looked startled. ‘It is Owdon,’ she snapped, ‘who has suitcases to explain. Go and ask him.’

‘Will you please explain that? I don’t follow you.’

She hesitated. This was something she had not meant to come out with – or not now. She had simply made a grab at it – so I judged – in order to gain time to think something out. ‘I met him in the park yesterday morning,’ she said. ‘He was hurrying along with two suitcases in an unmistakably furtive way. I have the impression that he was proposing to hide them near the high road. Is Owdon, I wonder, still here? It wouldn’t at all surprise me if he had made a bolt for it.’

I could see she was speaking truthfully – whatever calculations there may have been behind her truthfulness. And I expected the chief to be a bit taken aback. For it was on Owdon’s evidence that our present grasp of the affair, such as it was, turned. And preparations for a bolt made early the previous day surely argued some degree of foreknowledge and complicity which must make his whole statement worthless. But the Inspector, whatever he thought of the importance of this piece of information, was not to be drawn aside to it now. ‘What we were speaking of,’ he said drily. ‘is this suitcase here.’

‘To be sure it was.’ She smiled at him. ‘It belongs to a friend, a Mr Hoodless, who happened to abandon it when going abroad some years ago. I – I am keeping it for him.’

‘Not Christopher Hoodless?’

She looked at him I thought with a glint of fear. But she answered steadily enough. ‘Yes, Christopher Hoodless.’

‘So the pictures on your walls – those charming black children –
do
after all, link up with the suitcase? Mr Hoodless gave them to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now, Lady Simney, when Sir George shouted at you yesterday morning something about having seen your lover, might it have been Mr Hoodless that he meant?’

She caught her breath. But he gave her no time to reply. His mind had made one of its queer spurts and the result was one of the best bits of his high-speed technique.

‘Yesterday’s
Times
, Lady Simney. There was something in it that suddenly made you very much want the issue of the day before. That, I think, was something to do with Mr Hoodless?’

‘I had no notion’ – she went back to his earlier question – ‘that George could be referring to Christopher.’

It was her instinct not to tell fibs. For my own part I was pleased at this, because I admired her. But it annoyed the Inspector. If a witness has something to hide (and it was difficult to feel that Nicolette Simney had not a secret of some sort) truth, skilfully deployed, is his best weapon.

‘Lady Simney, you are a woman of intelligence. It is apparent to you that reticence is pointless upon matters which the testimony of others is bound to declare. There had been, before your marriage, a close friendship between Mr Hoodless and yourself?’

‘We were engaged.’

‘Thank you. Now, Mr Hoodless, you say, has been abroad. That’ – he glanced at the photographs of the playing children on the walls – ‘would be in connexion with his work as a scientist.’

‘As a configurational anthropologist.’

This additional information was no doubt of the kind which the testimony of others would be bound to declare. Even in what must have been a harassing situation Nicolette Simney apparently liked a play of subdued irony. But the Inspector was unheeding. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘that the nature of such work would take him to very distant parts, and that when you say he went abroad some years ago it is to be concluded that he had not been back in England since. Of late, however, you have been expecting his return.’

Lady Simney bowed. ‘It has been increasingly on my mind,’ she said gravely.

‘And yesterday evening you found in
The Times
an announcement which seemed to suggest that he had just arrived. It was in the form of a reference to something in the issue of the previous day. You sent Owdon for that issue at once, and you were a good deal agitated.’

All this police business is a matter of putting two and two together. And here was at least a patch of the present affair in which he had been doing that pretty rapidly. He had been handed Hoodless’ name. He had known that Hoodless was an anthropologist (mere miscellaneous information can be uncommonly useful: I have often noticed this with auntie) and this had led him to infer a good deal from the photographs. In the one personally furnished room of Lady Simney’s they were an assertion of something valued and held to. That gave, in fact, something very close to
lover
– and this he connected at once with what the dead man had shouted at her in the park before striking her. Then there was her statement that she had not at the time realized that it might have been Hoodless her husband was referring to. If accepted, this was a startling admission in itself. It made the reading of
The Times
of that day the likely occasion of her discovering the possibility. Her husband had seen Hoodless presumably here in the neighbourhood of Hazelwood; he had referred coarsely to their former association; he had struck her. And his death followed within a little over twelve hours.

Lady Simney had crossed to the window and was looking out over the snow. I guessed that she was squaring up to the new situation with which Inspector Cadover’s penetrations had confronted her. Presently she turned round. ‘And where,’ she asked, ‘do we go from here?’

‘To the brief interval, Lady Simney, between your glancing first at
The Times
and the moment when your husband died. At eleven-forty you came out of this room and asked Owdon to fetch you the issue of the day before. Five minutes later he came back, found that you had gone to your bath, left the paper in this room, and proceeded to the study. It was empty and Owdon tidied round as usual, at the same time closing the window from the bottom. Now, we know that at about this time somebody arrived below that window and presently climbed the trellis. We know, too, that at the bottom of it again Mr Cockayne had some sort of struggle with an unidentified man at what can only have been a matter of moments after Sir George was killed. Do you think that this intruder might have been Mr Hoodless?’

There was a fraction of a second’s silence – followed by a cry of horror, or of horror and passionate repudiation. ‘No!’ she gasped. ‘No…it’s impossible!’

‘Moreover the circumstances give you yourself something under five minutes’ freedom to act unobserved. Say three and a half minutes between Owdon’s disappearing in quest of
The Times
and your slipping into the bathroom just before his return. Did you in that interval go to the study window yourself?’

She stared at him round-eyed and pale. ‘No!’ she cried again. ‘No…why ever should I do such a thing?’

There was silence. The Inspector wrote in his notebook. A coal clicked in the grate. I looked at the Papuan children absorbed in their games, and waited for what he was waiting for too: some further, and rash, word. But Lady Simney said nothing more. She had asked a question and left it at that, expecting an answer.

‘What I have in mind, your ladyship, is no more than one of a great many hypotheses which it would be possible to form. I hope you will understand that it is my duty, in an affair so obscure as this, to think out every possible role that the persons chiefly involved could conceivably play.’

She made a gesture of impatience.

‘Very well. I know nothing of your relationship with Mr Hoodless. I know nothing of his temperament. But very possibly both may be what is termed romantic. Suppose him already a little familiar with Hazelwood. And suppose that during his absence you have occasionally corresponded. He may know that your marriage has been unhappy. He may have urged you to leave your husband. He may have made you a promise.’

She looked at him a little wearily now. ‘A promise?’

‘Something like this: that if on returning to England he found you still with Sir George he would break in on the stroke of midnight and carry you away – carry you away from the cave of the dragon. And into Hazelwood there is one route that any dragon-killer would take – the trellis that leads straight to the study and your part of the house.’

But Lady Simney was now thoroughly nerved to cope with all this. ‘You are talking a deliberate mingling of sense and nonsense,’ she said. ‘It is true about
The Times
. Yesterday’s copy had something which implied that Mr Hoodless’ return to England had been mentioned in the issue of the day before. And the news did agitate me, rather. We had been engaged, as I said.’

‘You had been expecting his return round about this time?’

She hesitated. ‘Yes, I had. And it did present rather a problem – but not one I want to discuss.’

‘Very possibly not, Lady Simney.’

She flushed. ‘But after that you talk nonsense. Of course I had no reason to suppose that he might have appeared at that very moment beneath George’s study window. No rigmarole about the cave of the dragon can give the slightest colour of probability to such a suggestion. Would you dare to talk such stuff in a law court? Then why waste your time talking it to me?’