What Happened at Hazelwood? (19 page)

‘Quite preposterous.’

‘At one time this hold was so strong as to protect the man from the consequences of – um – a serious moral lapse with some female member of the family. Sir George was not in a position to dismiss the man. But, only the other day, the situation changed. Your own arrival at Hazelwood, which I understand to have been unexpected, in some way struck at the roots of Owdon’s sinister power over your kinsman. He at once became, on the contrary, alarmed for his own safety, and was driven to make plans for flight. And this situation may have produced further consequences of which we cannot yet confidently speak. Of course these are merely speculations. But have you anything to say about them?’

‘Nothing whatever.’

This looked like being Hippias’ formula. But the chief was pertinacious. ‘As I understand the matter, Sir George – or Mr George, as he then was – went out to Australia as a young man and in the company of his younger brother?’

‘Quite right. Denzell. Nice lad. Year younger than Bevis.’

‘What happened to Denzell?’

‘He lost his life in a sailing accident. Uncommonly sad thing.’

‘Were you there?’

Hippias Simney hesitated. He had meant to say nothing at all, and now he was badly in need of more time to think. ‘There?’ he repeated querulously. ‘All this, you know, was a deuced long time ago.’

‘Come, come, sir. We know very well whether we were or were not present at a fatal accident, even if it did take place twenty or thirty years ago.’

‘I didn’t say I didn’t know whether I was there or not. I meant that it was all far too long ago to have anything to do with this business now. Of course I was there, I remember being very much affected – very much affected, indeed.’ And Hippias felt up his sleeve for a silk handkerchief, evidently feeling that the watery end of Denzell Simney might appropriately be graced with a reminiscent tear.

‘And was the man Owdon there?’

Hippias shook his head decidedly. ‘At that time Owdon had never been heard of.’

‘Perhaps you will tell us a little more about this accident? It was on a lake – a river?’

Again Hippias hesitated. And it occurred to me that he was doing, much more clumsily, what Lady Simney had done. He was endeavouring to speak openly about matters which he knew must be somewhere on record, while keeping close on related matters which he conceived it unhealthy to reveal. ‘River?’ he repeated. ‘Well, no. As a matter of fact, it was something that happened at sea. Out among the Islands. And certain aspects of it were – ah – kept rather quiet.’

‘Um.’ The Inspector’s voice was ominous. ‘I somehow felt that sooner or later we would come upon matters which had been kept rather quiet. But now, I think, is the time for a good clear look at them. What, exactly, were the circumstances of Mr Denzell Simney’s death?’

Hippias was still standing by the open door of the study. Now he looked over his shoulder and down that crucial corridor in which Owdon (if we were to believe him) had kept guard the night before. Perhaps he was making sure that he was not overheard, but I think he was rather hoping for assistance from some mind more nimble in prevarication than his own.

‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I’ll try.’ He produced the silk handkerchief and wiped, not his eyes, but his brow. ‘Only it’s difficult not to convey a wrong impression. It was all a good long time ago, as I’ve said. And they were wilder times out there with us. People did these things without any particular feeling of being criminals, or anything of time sort.’

We looked at him with a good deal of expectation. It seemed as if in this there might be a little light at last.

‘You see,’ Hippias said, ‘it was a matter of blackbirds.’

‘Anthropologists and missionaries,’ pursued Hippias Simney, ‘have pretty well messed all that up. Government too, for that matter. Nowadays you’ll find an administrator or commissioner or some other sort of superior policeman on every atoll. But in the old days it used to give a very good holiday and probably quite a handsome sum after all expenses paid. Bevis was inquiring about buffalo hunting the other day. But for real sport I’d choose blackbirding every time.’

He looked round the study as if hoping to find a decanter which might support him through his narrative. ‘No more you know’ – and his voice was at once jaunty and uneasy – ‘than getting hold of a big lugger and turning it into a sort of mail-boat for the niggers. Bit crowded at times, no doubt. Nothing in the way of the games deck, and the cuisine a trifle limited during the voyage. Still, just transporting niggers about. Taking them where they’re useful, that’s to say.’

Inspector Cadover was leaning over a heavy, high backed chair by the fireplace. ‘In fact,’ he said ‘to go blackbirding is simply to engage in the slave trade?’

Hippias looked mildly apologetic.’ You might put it that way. All those niggers uncommonly lacking in enterprise. Home-keeping youths, as Shakespeare says, and need stirring up a bit. Point is that excellent employers – humane and that sort of thing – used to be simply crying out for them. And, mind you, we were only a little ahead of our time. Look round about you today. Ministries of Labour and Directorates of Manpower shoving people round all the time. Come to think of it, my dear fellow, you and I are treated no better than blackbirds ourselves.’

‘It appears to me, Mr Simney, that some of us might very justly be treated as blackguards.’

‘Come, come – I call that a bit strong.’ Hippias was elaborately reasonable. ‘Black sheep, if you like. Simneys are very often black sheep, of course. It’s something very common in the oldest families, I think you’d find. And if you went blackbirding you were a bit of a scamp, I don’t deny. As for the particular scrape we got into that time – well, we could hardly have foreseen it, could we?’

‘Possibly not – nor the complications it might one day cause. But please come to the actual events.’

‘To be sure.’ And Hippias appeared to exchange a brief glance with one of the least engaging of his ancestors on the wall before him. ‘George and Denzell, you know, came out to Australia when they were little more than lads, and before George looked like being heir to the title. They weren’t altogether reliable boys, I’m afraid. There had been some troubles about the banknotes, and they had done some more or less permanent injury to a lad in the village who had offended them, and there had been an affair with a girl in which they had been – um – a little too impetuous in their methods of courtship. So they were sent out with the idea of taking up land and perhaps entering Australian politics later. Gentlemen still went into our parliament in those days. But, of course, that never came off.’

‘A great pity, Mr Simney. They were plainly youths admirably well-qualified to be legislators.’

Hippias, far from being offended by this heavy irony, chuckled with delight. ‘Quite so. But colonial life, I’m sorry to say, is far from being what it was. Well, these lads came out when George was about nineteen and Denzell a couple of years younger. They came to Hazelwood –
our
Hazelwood, that is to say – when I was just on twenty-one myself. We got on not badly, through I’m bound to say I was a bit frightened of them.’

‘Frightened of them?’

Hippias nodded. ‘They were uncommon wild. I didn’t mind that, and I’m sure they taught me a great deal. But I hadn’t their guts, and at some of the things we did I used to get scared afterwards. I used to wonder what would happen if the troopers found out.’ And Hippias Simney shook his head. ‘I never did like troopers, or police, or people of that sort. Still, I did go blackbirding.’

‘How long after the young men came out did this blackbirding business occur?’

‘I should say five or six years. But we made several expeditions before the fatal one happened. The bush, you know, gets deuced monotonous for a young chap who feels that things ought to be stirred up a bit from time to time. And a voyage over a decent stretch of the Pacific, with a slice of fun and a slice of mischief at the end of it, was an uncommon attractive thing. All we had to do was to square my father, who was naturally glad enough to get rid of us for a few months now and then.’

‘Most naturally, I should imagine.’

‘Well now, on this unlucky occasion we had gone up to Cairns and got hold of a lugger, and of three or four precious rascals by way of crew. We had rather a good scheme. The common thing in collecting blackbirds was simply to find a fairly large native village and begin by bargaining. Political organization, if you can call it that, appears to vary enormously among the islands, and sometimes you found a chief with whom you could do a deal and there was an end of the matter. But often dealing in a village turned out – um – a rather messy business. Moreover, you never quite knew where you were, and islands were being grabbed at that time by this government or that. You might run into a squad of Dutch or Portuguese soldiers, or – what was rather more awkward – into a gentleman in tropical whites and a topee straight from the Colonial Office. So this time we planned to pick up our black friends at sea. Only, of course, we didn’t reckon on those damned anthropologists.’

‘Anthropologists?’ I interrupted. Not everything in police work links up as it would in some logical game, and there was probably no remote connexion here with Lady Simney’s young Mr Hoodless and the beautiful photographs hanging in her room. But I was startled. ‘Anthropologists, Mr Simney?’ I repeated.

‘Two fellows who had actually gone on this ritual trading journey in order to study it. Just fancy studying such tommyrot! Probably they were only after the women, if you ask me.’ Hippias paused, perhaps dimly aware of the fatuity of this. ‘Not, of course, that there are any women on these voyages. That’s why we were proposing to break in on one. We were out for business, you know, and a good cheque at the end, and we thought there would be altogether less fuss that way. It’s difficult to describe those voyages. Ostensibly they are a matter of trading from island to island, but really they are like a great country dance covering hundreds of miles of ocean. The goods are taken in sea-going canoes from island to island in some intricate ritual pattern, with each island sending off parties both clockwise and anti-clockwise, and in the end, and after weaving a sort of great invisible chain, everything ends up pretty well where it began. Sheer useless foolery. It was only sensible, if you ask me, to nobble some of those niggers from time to time and set them to honest work.’

‘Such as you were yourself engaged in, Mr Simney.’

‘Exactly so. Well, we decided to lie in wait for a couple of big sea-going canoes out on that sort of thing. And, as it happened, we made very good speed in meeting with what we wanted. There were two canoes with no end of young, able-bodied niggers. And we pinned them up against a reef and had them nicely. Nobody could have guessed what trouble was to follow. We had just got out our guns – for, of course, it was ten to one that a little wounding and maiming would be necessary before the fellows would be persuaded to come quietly – when up bobbed a couple of damned white men in the nearest canoe. I’ve explained what they were: bally anthropologists making the trip for learned reasons – and as high in favour with the niggers as you could imagine. Of course they knew what we were about in no time, and before you could say six one of them was on board the lugger and telling young George just what he thought of us. Well, we could either have taken a strong hand, or agreed to sheer off and no harm done – for those fellows presumably didn’t know us from Adam and would have had hard work to trace us. George and I had tackled the fellow and were pretty well set to bolt for it, when up came Denzell. The anthropologist fellow took one look at him. “Denzell Simney!” he said. “I’m sorry to see you mixed up in a low game like this.”

‘Apparently he had been Denzell’s house-master not so many years before – and a pretty pickle the recognition landed us in. Still, the situation could still have been retrieved, for once we had made a successful get-away the fact of this identification would have been hard to prove. Unfortunately, Denzell lost his head. He turned his gun on the chap and tried to shoot him – and I’m damned if he didn’t miss. This, mind you, at a range of about four yards.’

Inspector Cadover had been listening to this narrative in grim silence. Now he spoke. ‘Not many would-be murderers, Mr Simney, have that much luck.’

‘No doubt.’ Hippias was becoming increasingly agitated. ‘But although Denzell didn’t kill this old schoolmaster of his he did wing a nigger. The bullet got a fellow in the farther canoe and smashed his shoulder. The result was hell upon earth – or upon the Pacific Ocean. Nothing pacific about it either. The mere presence of those white men somehow got us down at the start, and correspondingly it gave the niggers the courage of demons. Their first idea seemed to be to get their two white friends out of danger – did you ever hear of anything queerer than that? – and no sooner had they stormed the lugger than they carried off the fellow who had recognized Denzell and thrust him by main force into the canoe which contained his companion. And then off that canoe went – no doubt to summon reinforcements of the black devils – and meanwhile we were left to fight it out with some thirty of the brutes armed with spears and some very nasty-looking knives. Of course there wasn’t a man of us who hadn’t a brace of revolvers at his belt, and we ought to have won that fight hands down. Yet, I’m ashamed to say that we didn’t manage to kill one of them.’

‘Fortunate again,’ said Inspector Cadover. ‘Quite mysteriously so.’

‘It’s the stark truth.’ Hippias Simney was now sweating profusely. ‘The first thing that happened was that Denzell went down with a spear through his thigh – he had done the shooting, so they made a dead set at him – and the next was that the devils had managed to pitch him overboard. The sharks were pretty plentiful in those waters.’

Inspector Cadover nodded, unmoved. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘in the trade you were carrying on sharks were an obvious professional risk.’

‘There was only one thing to do, and while the others fought the savages back I worked on the donkey-engine. The idea was simply to get away as fast as we could and then fight off as many of the enemy as were already on board. But when the engine started with a bit of a roar the effect was as queer as you could imagine. I suppose they believed that a demon had joined the fray, for their courage deserted them and they were overboard before you could say Jack Robinson. Which was excellent in itself.’ Hippias paused. ‘Unfortunately in their panicky rush to the side they carried George with them. I last saw him just where I had seen Denzell – struggling in the water. After that, it was comparatively plain sailing. The rest of us just got away as fast as we could.’