What Happened at Hazelwood? (22 page)

What happened at Hazelwood? It begins to look as if we shall have precious little to say at the inquest. And yet I have a notion that the chief has got somewhere, or at least that he has seen or senses something that may get him there at any time. One day, and on some case, I shall be there before him. But not, I am afraid, in the Simney affair!

Friday

A couple of days have passed, my dear Dad, and we have not been standing still. A good deal has changed, including the weather. On our first night in this pub there was a thaw. Everything dripped and squelched; the village and the park and the great house all looked pretty drear – and it was in this rather depressing atmosphere that we were visited at the breakfast-table by the local vicar. He brought us a theory of the case – and also one or two facts that he didn’t mean to bring at all. And for bagging these I really get the credit myself, as you will hear.

Mr Deamer was extremely excited. We found it hard to decide whether this was exceptional, or whether he is chronically so. But if I believed the things he believes, I am pretty sure I should be in a great fuss all the time. He appears to regard Hazelwood and an area of some five miles round as labouring beyond all other localities under the divine malediction, and himself as a sort of solitary Abdiel among the faithless. I don’t know that I would myself have chosen Mr Deamer to hold such a key position. To cope with the Devil (and it is the Devil himself whom he regards as conducting operations from the neighbourhood of the Hall) I fancy that judgement as well as zeal would be desirable. And I doubt if Mr Deamer has that. Indeed, his call upon us was an error of judgment, if you ask me.

‘Good morning,’ said Mr Deamer. ‘May I take it that you are the police officers sent down to investigate the grievous scandals and iniquities rife at Hazelwood Hall?’

Inspector Cadover nodded. ‘We are inquiring into the violent death of Sir George Simney. I suppose that ranks as a scandal, sir, and perhaps as an iniquity too.’

Somewhat surprisingly, Mr Deamer shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think so. Sir George’s life was both scandalous and iniquitous. And so, too, I have much reason to believe, are the lives of his wife and most of his relations. But his death must be otherwise regarded.’ Mr Deamer paused and looked from one to the other of us with what was at once a wild and wary eye. ‘Do I understand,’ he asked, ‘that there was a
body
?’

‘Well, sir, there is to be an inquest. And I never heard of an inquest without a body – or a substantial part of one – yet.’

Mr Deamer frowned. ‘Sir George Simney,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘had bartered his soul to the Devil. In such cases it is unusual – altogether unusual – that there should be a body. The Devil appears at midnight, claims his own, and there is an immediate and corporeal transfer to the infernal regions.’

‘Dear me!’ The chief looked genuinely surprised. ‘May I ask whether, in your view, many persons barter their souls to the Devil in these days?’

‘Most assuredly.’

‘Then surely there ought quite often to be no body? And yet one never reads or hears of such a thing from year’s end to year’s end.’

But Mr Deamer was by no means put to a stand. ‘Every day,’ he asked, ‘do you not hear of persons disappearing from their home and never being seen again? These are all cases in point. A bargain has been made and the Devil has appeared to claim it. Close investigation would commonly reveal a slight smell of sulphur and brimstone at the scene of the disappearance.’ Mr Deamer frowned. ‘Though to be candid with you I am not quite clear about the brimstone. It is certainly something extremely unpleasant, but I cannot be confident that it gives off an odour. On the sulphur, however, I am perfectly assured.’

Inspector Cadover listened very patiently to this. I could see that for some reason he had considerable hopes of our eccentric visitor. ‘What you tell us of an infernal bargain,’ he said gravely, ‘is very interesting indeed. I wonder if you would detail your grounds for believing in it? And may we offer you a cup of coffee?’

Mr Deamer accepted the coffee, sipped it, and appeared to go off into a brown study. Presently his lips moved.
‘Sweet Helen
,’ he murmured in a strange voice, ‘ –
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.’

Well, I followed that one. It is what Faust says in the old play when the Devil to whom he has sold himself raises up for him Helen of Troy. And later in the play, of course, there is what Mr Deamer would call an immediate and corporeal transfer of Faust to the infernal regions. ‘Do you mean,’ I asked, ‘that Sir George had made a bargain with the Devil to secure him various remote and impossible mistresses – paramours?’

‘Yes!’ Mr Deamer was suddenly violent. ‘It was precisely that. It can have been nothing else. And the wretched man was snatched to his doom on the very threshold of just such an illicit enjoyment.’

It was thoroughly queer. The intensity with which the vicar of Hazelwood desired to convince himself of this tall story was as queer as anything I have ever met. And suddenly he asked a question – one altogether irrelevant to the line he had been pursuing. ‘How did he die?’ he demanded. ‘You say there was a body. How was Simney killed?’ And this fanatical clergyman glared at us with sweat pouring down his forehead.

But the chief was suddenly uncommunicative. ‘I don’t know about remote and impossible mistresses being summoned by the Devil,’ he said. ‘But perfectly ordinary ones could very well be summoned by Sir George himself up that trellis. It might well have been put there to provide him with amatory amusement without the necessity of stirring his stumps. Always provided, of course, that the mistresses were willing to present themselves. Now suppose, Mr Deamer, that there was something like that. Sir George was proposing to keep a tryst in his study with some little wanton from the neighbourhood. And some other interested party intervened and killed Sir George on the spot. That is pretty well your own story put into naturalistic terms. Does it satisfy you?’

It was at this moment that I found a question of my own to address to Mr Deamer. I had happened to walk over to the window and notice, leaning against a bench outside, an old bicycle with a decidedly rusty chain. I turned back and glanced at Mr Deamer. He was a shabby little man, plainly disregardful of both comfort and appearance. ‘I think, sir,’ I said, ‘that you are fond of gardening?’ He stared in surprise, as he well might do at so inconsequent a question. And then I risked my long shot. ‘Perhaps you will tell us how you came to leave a pair of boots at the Hall on the very night that Sir George Simney was killed?’

If the Devil himself had at that moment appeared in the coffee-room of the Simney Arms and beckoned to Mr Deamer with a sinister ‘Hither to me’ I doubt whether the reverend gentleman would have been more upset.

‘Boots?’ he stammered. ‘A pair of boots?’

‘Certainly – and fairly new ones too. As a result of losing them you have had to put on a thoroughly well-worn pair today.’

Mr Deamer looked down at his feet, and then with his wildest glance round the room. He was engaged, I thought, in some rapid calculation something to which persons unfortunate enough to become involved in criminal investigation are not infrequently reduced. But I had an obscure feeling that these particular calculations were something out of the way. Perhaps Mr Deamer was estimating just how much of the Hither-to-me business people so profane as ourselves would accept. It was as if, in terms of the supernatural, he had a thoroughly tall story to tell, but was rather daunted by the prospect of our blank incredulity. Perhaps he was subject to hallucinations, and really believed that the powers of darkness had robbed him of his boots as a preparatory step to providing him with cloven hooves. Be this as it may, Mr Deamer abruptly descended to a sublunary view of the matter.

‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘My boots. I left them at Hazelwood.’

The chief scratched his chin, thereby indicating that it was still my ball.

‘Quite so,’ I pursued. ‘But will you tell me how you came to leave them in Sir George’s study upon the very night upon which he was killed?’

‘I was tricked!’ The vicar of Hazelwood was vehement. ‘I was tricked by–’ He hesitated and peered uncertainly into his coffee cup.

‘Perhaps by the Devil?’

‘Well – yes.’ Mr Deamer was almost apologetic. ‘I see that I had better not obtrude upon you a point of view which you are unlikely to accept. But I am afraid it
was
the Devil. At the time, I understood it to be Miss Grace Simney.’

‘You thought Miss Simney had taken your boots?’

‘Dear me, no. How confusing this is! I thought it was Miss Simney who spoke to me on the telephone. She is a most devout lady and one of my truly valued parishioners. Again and again she has given information invaluable to me in my ceaseless struggles to curb the terrible immoralities and depravities which here surround us.’

‘You mean that she is a great hand at smelling things out?’

‘It might be put in that way. For example, she was the first to discover that both Sir George and his nephew Willoughby were intent upon seducing the blacksmith’s daughter.’

‘You are sure that Mr Willoughby was not intent merely upon painting her?’

Mr Deamer frowned. ‘It is virtually the same thing, is it not? And, again, there is the shocking
liaison
between Lady Simney and the young man from Australia – Gerard. It was Miss Grace who immediately brought me word of that. I am very well aware that there are maiden ladies who imagine such things. But Miss Grace has always been most reliable. So when on Tuesday evening she rang up and told me of this assignation which Sir George had made with Jane Fairey–’

‘Jane Fairey?’

‘The blacksmith’s daughter, of course! She was to climb the trellis to Sir George’s study just after eleven o’clock.’

‘
Eleven
o’clock?’ Inspector Cadover broke in. ‘The voice on the telephone said that?’

‘Yes. I was greatly shocked. And I fell in with the suggestion which the D –, which the voice made, that I should keep watch and surprise the wretched girl in her intention.’

I looked at Mr Deamer with some compassion. Despite his cycling and his gardening he was a miserable wisp of a man, tormented by heaven knows what obscure fires within. ‘Rather a chilly job,’ I said.

‘It was very cold. I stood for a long time on the terrace and nothing happened. Sometimes’ – Mr Deamer hesitated – ‘I felt rather ridiculous. Various images kept coming into my mind. Mr Pickwick, for instance, when he was tricked into keeping a not dissimilar vigil in the garden of a girls’ school.’

The chief chuckled – but not unkindly. This, indeed, was the first human gleam we had had from our reverend visitor.

‘But then there were other images too. I became convinced that I had arrived too late, and that if I wished to tax the unhappy Jane with her abominable fornication I must wait until – until–’

‘Quite so,’ said the chief.

‘And at that a very strange urge came upon me. I must know the worst.’

‘Ah,’ said the chief.

‘It was very dark all around. And in my mind were vivid and shocking fantasies. I determined to climb to the study and – and investigate.’

‘Your impulse,’ said the chief gravely, ‘was not altogether out of the way.’

‘But I was apprehensive of making a noise, and I distrusted myself on that trellis. I therefore removed my boots and knotted them round my neck. Doubtless it would have been more sensible to leave them on the terrace. But I was obscurely distrustful.’

‘The distrustfulness,’ said the chief, ‘I discerned. But it was my colleague who discerned the gardening.’

Mr Deamer looked at us helplessly. ‘The trellis turned out to offer no difficulty and within a minute I found myself in a window-embrasure, heavily curtained. I peered into the room. There was low light, sufficient to show me that the place was deserted.’ Mr Deamer made a long pause. ‘And at that,’ he said in a strangled voice, ‘the horror of what I was doing came upon me.’

‘Horror?’ asked Inspector Cadover mildly.

‘I searched my heart. And it was impure. I believed that I had come to combat sin. But I had a horrible feeling that I had really come to – to peer at it.’

The chief nodded. ‘It was a situation,’ he said soothingly, ‘in which your judgement would naturally be strained, Mr Deamer.’

For some moments the vicar was silent. I would have said, at a guess, that he was wrestling with his conscience. But whether retroactively, so to speak, and in the matter of the peering, or whether because at this point he felt it necessary to tell us something rather less or other than the truth, it was impossible to say.

‘I was horrified. My one impulse was to get down again and away. I turned and groped for the window, and as I did so the boots must have slipped from my neck. As I climbed down I was trembling all over, and when I reached the terrace I believe I went into some sort of faint or coma. When I recovered myself – and it may have been considerably later – I was still feeling very weak. And it was then, and as I was beginning to slip away from the terrace, that somebody jumped on me from behind. I found myself engaged in something like a bout of fisticuffs.’

‘Had you any idea, Mr Deamer, who your assailant was?’

‘None whatever. It was a mere confused scuffle in the dark. And presently I broke away and made my escape across the park.’

So here, I thought, was the antagonist a drawn fight with whom had so raised the confidence of Mervyn Cockayne! But then a more important reflection struck me. If the vicar’s story was true – and I was pretty sure that a good part of it was – we were more badly off then ever for footprints in the snow. What, for instance, of Jane Fairey, the blacksmith’s daughter? Either she had been transported to Sir George’s study by demons through the middle air (and this, it seemed, was not a view that Mr Deamer himself would find it hard to swallow) or the whole story of the assignation was no more than a hoax. The latter was almost certainly the true explanation. It was possible, of course, that Miss Grace Simney had really telephoned and that her information had been at fault. But if this were so why had she not already come forward with facts so obviously relevant to her brother’s end? It was far more likely that somebody had played a trick – a Pickwickian trick – on Mr Dearner, whose zeal in the pursuit of sexual irregularities must be very generally known. Jane Fairey’s footprints, then, we had no need to sigh for.