What Happened at Hazelwood? (27 page)

These two women, although naturally rattled, were not bad witnesses, and I knew that in a court what they said would carry a good deal of conviction. But it was otherwise with Joyleen Simney.

Hers was the same story, for apparently at Hazelwood she had been given a room to herself at some remove from her husband’s, and here she had retired and gone to sleep about eleven o’clock. Again it was an account easy to stick to. Nevertheless under the chief’s questioning Joyleen was uneasy from the first. Was it simply that certain other of her Hazelwood adventures had given her a bad conscience, and that she feared lest at any moment the spotlight might be switched to Sir Basil’s Folly? Or had she really been up to some mischief, relevant or otherwise, at this crucial hour?

Now with the gramophone, and now with these wretched women, the chief continued to beguile the afternoon. In desperation I took out the notes we had been given and ran over this whole
alibi
business as it affected everybody we could at present believe concerned. With what might be thought of as the outside people – Deamer and Hoodless – we had recently dealt; both told odd stories which there was no positive controverting nevertheless. And of those domiciled or visiting at Hazelwood the facts were colourless and few. The butler’s routine and Lady Simney’s bath had already been prominently in the picture. Bevis Simney – Sir Bevis, as it appears he must now be called – and his son Willoughby, claimed to have been together in the latter’s bedroom, smoking and talking over the day’s shooting, until Willoughby emerged to investigate what proved to be the tragedy. This, I suppose, is an
alibi
of a sort, but as Sir George’s death has put both father and son in the way of a baronetcy it cannot be called impressive. And no more can the only other pairing off that investigating reveals. Here again it is a matter of father and son, for Hippias and Gerard Simney declare themselves to have been playing billiards in a somewhat remote part of the house until disturbed by the general turmoil of discovery. This left Timmy Owdon, who declares himself to have been asleep throughout in his room over the stables, and Mervyn Cockayne. Mervyn has the room immediately above Sir George’s bedroom. He maintains that he was restless on Tuesday night; that he looked out of his window and discerned movement on the terrace; and that he then ran downstairs and outside to engage in his notable encounter with Mr Deamer.

These, then, were the facts which I briefly chewed over to the accompaniment of the chief’s inexplicable gramophone. Nobody had shaken any of them; nobody’s testimony contradicted that of anyone else; no one member of the household had spotted any other on the prowl. Nor did the fact that the study might be reached by a climb from above appear at all to limit or define the issue. For the room above the study was a large untenanted bedroom; any member of the household might, as far as I could see, have reached it unobserved, climbed down and up again, and returned to base without meeting anyone. This meant that Nicolette Simney alone was positively out of it. She possessed no means of ascending to the upper storey without first emerging upon Owdon in the corridor. And, even if she had, it was just not possible for her to take such a route to the study and thence back to her bathroom in the time available to her. But anybody else might have achieved the exploit that way, and it appeared to me essential to believe that somebody had. And the telephone call designed to elicit the appearance of an attack from without must be an integral part of the plot.

I had got as far as this – and saw small prospect of getting further – when I noticed that the gramophone had abruptly stopped and that the chief was striding from the room. With no more ceremony towards the ladies than he himself had shown, I followed him into the corridor. ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘what is all this, sir? Is it a variant of Sherlock Holmes’ violin?’

For a moment he stared at me unheeding, and with a look in his eye that I have certainly not seen before. ‘Holmes?’ he echoed. ‘Certainly not. Cuvier, my lad – nothing but Cuvier.’

‘Cuvier?’

‘That feather of his brushed against my cheek right at the beginning, and I just couldn’t grasp it. But I knew’ – and he grinned at me with sudden disconcerting cheerfulness – ‘that I might snare it with song. Did you notice what that last record was?’

‘No, I didn’t.’ This mystery-mongering made me feel at once excited and aggrieved. ‘I was trying to get some line on the whole beastly case.’

‘And were you, indeed? Now, Harold, that’s very commendable. But I’m afraid you must wait till next time. The case is–’

Inspector Cadover broke off as he noticed Sergeant Laffer approach. And I saw at once that from the local officer’s point of view something had gone terribly wrong. He came up to us with a face as long as a fiddle – Sherlock Holmes’ or another. ‘Timmy Owdon,’ he said sorrowfully and in a low voice. ‘He’s the only one we’ve managed to catch tripping, after all.’

‘He is?’ The chief was already exultant, but this news appeared to fill him with actual glee. ‘You’ve caught the little blighter out?’

‘Yes, sir. It’s the head groom’s story – a most reliable man, and uncommon upset about it. Apparently on Tuesday night he woke up a little short of midnight and imagined there was a smell of burning somewhere in the stables. So he went right through them at once. And Timmy Owdon was not, as he has claimed to be, in his room. His bed had not yet been lain in.’

‘Capital!’ And the chief bustled me towards the hall. ‘I think it gives us just what we require.’

We passed out of the house in silence. I was not only puzzled. I was more depressed than before. Timmy Owdon ought to have been nothing to me, yet I rather liked the lad. ‘You were saying,’ I prompted, ‘that the case–’

‘To be sure, Harold, the case. Now, what do you think of it?’

This wasn’t what I wanted. But I came forward with the one thing clear to me. ‘There are two strands to it – and they don’t intertwine. In fact, one of them takes none of the strain at all.’

‘That is very good, Harold, very good indeed.’

‘One can approach it by way of Hoodless, or by way of the Australian cousins. It was the turning up here of one or the other that set matters moving. But between those two turnings up there is no connexion; that they happened virtually simultaneously is mere coincidence. And it follows, I think, that, although each may have some mysterious elements, only one can lead us directly to the death of Sir George. Owdon’s death – if we are still to call him that – is another matter. It is almost certainly part of the Australian story, and not of Lady Simney’s.’

‘That is all very true. But I can’t see, lad, why you should be so aggrieved about it.’

‘I’m not aggrieved.’ I paused on hearing the thorough peevishness in my own voice. ‘Well, sir, it’s like this. The Hazelwood affair is rather too full measure for my taste. Here are two mysteries, so to speak, and one of them is just something in the way, and entirely useless to us.’

The chief chuckled. ‘Not a bit of it. You see, the case… I think you were asking me about the case?’

‘Yes, sir. I was.’

‘Well, the case is closed.’

‘Closed!’

‘Nothing mysterious remains to it. What we are now confronted with is a question of proof. And even if one of the aspects is, as you say, irrelevant, it may be possible to exploit it. In fact, I rather think I see how it can be used to force the issue. But we shall need luck as well as our usual moderate cunning.’

I looked at him dumbfounded. ‘Do I understand,’ I asked, ‘that the whole wretched business has solved itself through the instrumentality of that indifferent old gramophone?’

He smiled cockily. Really, he might have been the youngest constable in the Force. ‘In a way,’ he said. ‘But sister arts are involved.’

There is not much to be done with him when he is like this. We were out on the drive now and trudging towards the village. ‘And may I ask,’ I murmured, ‘what the next step is to be?’

‘Tea. A nice cup of tea, lad, at the Simney Arms. Then a sleep for me, and a couple of hours in which you can go on writing to dad and auntie Flo. And, after that, we can begin to organize the party.’

‘The party?’ This sort of stupid echo was about all that I could contrive.

‘Certainly. We are going to give a party at Hazelwood.’ He chuckled again. ‘And entirely at the expense of Hazelwood’s new baronet.’

Nicolette

I resume the pen (as a Victorian heroine might say) aware, Gentle Reader, that you now know quite a lot. The Hazelwood mystery is clearing up; it is realized that both George and Denzell Simney died on the premises and that both here and in the appearance of Christopher a good deal of past history is involved.

Right at the beginning I let out that it wasn’t I who killed my husband, and perhaps this has been a bad failure in technique. But then I am an amateur – and doubtless amateur crime-writers are just as painfully incompetent as amateur actors. But at least there was no failure in Inspector Cadover’s technique, and the only criticism I can make of his plan is that we might – some or all of us – have simply refused to play. Clearly when people blow out their brains or have their heads stove in it is necessary to answer the questions of the police. But witnesses are not, I suppose, obliged to forgather in a large family party on the seat of the original crime and there suffer being played off against each other with very considerable ingenuity. It was simple curiosity that Inspector Cadover exploited, or that and the perennial fascination which anything with an element of drama holds. No doubt I ought to have been quite at home with this aspect of the thing. But I can’t really pretend that I enjoyed it. For one thing, Cadover led off with a nasty jolt for myself.

‘My first suspect,’ he said blandly, ‘was, of course, Lady Simney. And this for several reasons. She had for long had much cause to detest and fear her husband. His morals, it appears, were bad and his manners brutal. He had actually struck her in the face on the very day upon which he died, an action altogether out of the way, I must suppose, in the upper reaches of society.’

Inspector Cadover paused on this bit of irony or whatever it is to be called. Deliberately, I don’t doubt. For it was part of his scheme to get us all thoroughly irritable and edgy.

‘Again, Mr Hoodless, to whom her ladyship had at one time been engaged, was newly returned to England, and it was not impossible, despite certain indications to the contrary, that she had already known this for some days. Now, the mere fact of a former lover’s returning in this way might well be sufficient to precipitate a crisis in a woman of emotional temperament. And Lady Simney, being as I understand an actress of some talent, was endowed with such a temperament as likely as not.’

There was another brief silence. I can’t deny that this manner of speech got me riled at the start. As for Christopher, I could see his knuckles going white on the arms of his chair. He didn’t like the good Inspector’s little testimonial to my acting at all.

‘There was another very obvious point. A telephone call had been sent to Mr Deamer’ – and here Inspector Cadover turned to glance at our vicar, who sat fidgeting nervously in a chair near the window – ‘and the effect of this call was to procure the appearance of certain evidences very misleading in the case. Mr Deamer is convinced that the speaker was Miss Grace Simney, but this suggestion Miss Grace denies. Lady Simney is the likeliest person successfully to imitate another woman’s voice.

‘More important than all this was the fact that Lady Simney appeared to have a conclusive
alibi.
We are always inclined, you know, to hold suspect anything obtrusive of that sort. The butler – if we are to believe him – found this room empty. He came out and thereafter had the door continuously under observation. Sir George passed him and entered. Sir George was killed. The butler rushed in, and on coming out again met Lady Simney emerging from her bathroom. Now, you may say that it might have been possible for her to slip
out
of the room while the butler was occupied with the body. But assuredly she had no means of slipping
into
it – of slipping into it, that is to say, by the door. Could she, then, have got out of the bathroom window and along the terrace? The state of the snow negatived this, or appeared to do so until I observed a significant fact. I think, Lady Simney, that you go in for winter sports?’

And Inspector Cadover looked at me sharply. This was the nasty jolt. And yet I couldn’t see that it was so very effective. ‘You mean,’ I asked, ‘that you found my skis?’

‘Just that. I even found in the snow the suggestion of such tracks as I supposed skis might leave. But inquiry convinced me that these were a mere fortuitous effect of the wind. In point of fact skis could not be used to obviate footprints. Their tracks would be unmistakable, it seems.

‘One possibility remained. If Lady Simney could not have gone
down
from her bathroom she might have gone
up
, climbing to the next storey and then descending to the study window by the trellis. But I found that while anyone, once on the upper storey, could get down to the study easily enough, the ascent from the bathroom was impracticable without tackle which it would have been impossible rapidly to clear away.

‘Well, every obtrusive
alibi
is not a bogus one. So much, I said, for Lady Simney. It is necessary to step back and take an altogether broader view of the case.’

It was clear that we were expected to settle in for a substantial evening’s instruction. A fire had been lit in the study – I can’t think by whom, for it is my impression that by now pretty nearly all the servants had quit. It flickered on the Simneys, animate and inanimate, ranged round the room; it cast a soft palpating warmth over the relaxed limbs of Danae and Pasiphae on each side of the window and threw into a darker shade Caravaggio’s lurking Venus above. Bevis had planted himself before the hearth as if to indicate that, however intrusive policemen might comport themselves, authority at Hazelwood now centred in himself. I wished him joy of it heartily, and was not without a moment’s speculation as to which fashionable portrait painter might most effectively add his heavy features to the collection of baronets about us. Perhaps Willoughby might manage it, and add a self-portrait later. But at the moment Willoughby’s eye was fixed on myself and I felt fairly sure that he was speculating on what plastic properties I might present with or without a bath towel. I turned my attention back to Inspector Cadover, who also had his mind on theoretical issues.