What Happened at Hazelwood? (28 page)

‘From the first it appeared certain that Sir George had been taken unawares from behind and deliberately killed without any sort of struggle. In other words, we were dealing with the crime of murder. It is a murderer, ladies and gentlemen, whom we have to find – and I am very sure that we have to find that murderer in this room.’

Cadover’s eye was fixed on the carpet as he said this, and I think we must all have waited breathlessly to see whether he would deliberately raise them to one or other of us. And he did deliberately raise them, but only to meet the glance of his assistant, a harmless youth called Harold, much given to offering me heartening glances on the sly.

‘Perhaps the majority of you had the opportunity to commit this deed, since it turned out that nothing was required except the ability to gain an empty room and climb down a trellis. It seemed to me best, therefore, to pass at least provisionally to the field of motives. But here again there proved to be much scope for speculation.

‘A murder may be deliberately planned, or it may emerge as a sudden necessity imposed by some slip or miscalculation in the prosecution of a lesser crime. Take the possibilities of this latter situation first.

‘What possible crime might make it thus suddenly necessary to kill Sir George? One line of thought is fairly obvious. This room is full of valuable pictures – imported, as I understand, by a whim of Sir George’s, to take their place beside family portraits of somewhat lesser consideration. But would anybody, apart from a professional thief with a very specialized clientele, think to steal such pictures? Would any of you here present think to do so?’

There was a couple of second’s pause during which we became aware that this was not a rhetorical question. Cadover, like a resolute teacher before his class, was determined to have an answer.

Willoughby broke the silence. ‘Well, I suppose aunt Grace might. She regards this ghastly room as a sort of brothel, and I have no doubt that she would like to get at these nudes with a hatchet. I know the feeling. I have it myself at Burlington House every year.’

The feelings of Willoughby on this subject might, I suppose, be called doctrinaire. But in what he said about Grace there was a queer grain of truth – and this it was that moved me to protest.

‘Willoughby’s,’ I said, ‘is surely a most unnecessary and frivolous speculation. Even supposing Grace to have quite fanatical feelings on the matter–’

‘Oh, to be sure!’ And Willoughby insufferably laughed. ‘Of course aunt Grace would have gone about it in quite a different way, calling upon the world to witness her righteous purge. But now, what about myself? If I–’

‘Precisely so!’ It was Cadover who again took the floor. ‘The way in which Mr Willoughby has just dragged in his aunt suggests a temperament somewhat on the sardonic and savage side. Suppose Sir George’s boorish joke’ – and the Inspector made a sweeping gesture at the walls – ‘had come really to irritate him supremely. He respects art, I understand; and at the same time had no great respect for his uncle. He has a taste for rather violent gestures – such as pitching sherry, for example, at his relations. So he might well have decided to do something drastic about the pictures. Perhaps he proposed to purloin the Caravaggio. It would be a sort of knight-errantry to rescue the lady’ – and Cadover glanced upward at the Venus – ‘from among her shady Simney companions. So Mr Willoughby arranged a little mystification and on Tuesday night climbed down to the study by the trellis. But his uncle was in the room, and as Mr Willoughby came through the curtains their eyes met in that mirror’ – the Inspector pointed – ‘and Mr Willoughby realized that he was detected. He relied a good deal on his uncle’s favour, and for a moment he lost his head and struck out blindly–’

Willoughby sat back and laughed again. Then he looked at his watch. ‘And may I ask,’ he said, ‘if there is to be this sort of tale of a cock and a bull about each of us in turn? It will take rather a long time.’ He paused. ‘Mind you, it would have given me a great deal of pleasure to make off with the Caravaggio, and I can almost see myself engineering something of the sort. But however should I contrive a telephone call in aunt Grace’s voice? And nobody strikes out blindly when detected in a prank. Or’ – and Willoughby glanced at Mervyn – ‘no grown-up does.’

‘I quite agree that we are wasting time.’ Bevis spoke in his most authoritative voice. But I noticed that he had moved away from the fireplace and sat himself down quite unobtrusively in a corner. There was no doubt that the police-inspector dominated the room. ‘Incidentally, if Willoughby or anyone else struck out blindly he must have had something to strike out with. Are we to suppose that he came on this picture-stealing escapade armed with a bludgeon?’

Inspector Cadover walked over to the window recess and lightly touched its only ornament, a boy’s bronze head set on a marble pedestal. ‘This,’ he said soberly, ‘was the weapon. It was given a wipe and replaced almost immediately, but the experts tell me that there can be no doubt about the fact. And, of course, I am bringing no accusation against Mr Willoughby. I am merely, you will remember, reviewing the possible motives behind one reading of the murder, whereby we are to suppose it the sudden action of a wrong-doer detected at something else. You will all see that the point about the bludgeon is a substantial one. The fact that the weapon was simply something snatched up for the purpose powerfully suggests this reading. But it is not, of course, conclusive evidence. The criminal might, after all, be one who had deliberately formed the design of murder, and who relied upon a known object which he knew would mislead by suggesting the contrary supposition.

‘Have we now exhausted the picture as a motive or magnet? Not quite. Mr Deamer, we may believe, had very much the same feeling about them as Miss Grace. Might he not have been prompted by some fanatical iconoclastic urge to destroy them? He has told a strange story of being lured here to prevent an – um – ungodly encounter, and of climbing to this room and then going away again. But what if the facts were quite otherwise, and what if he received no telephone-call at all?’

‘Fiddle-faddle!’ Hippias, who had been pacing nervously at the far end of the room, turned impatiently round upon Cadover. ‘Never heard such bally rot. If this parson fellow had come in on George and started arguing about his mistresses and dirty pictures and what-not the thing might be possible enough. George could he deuced irritating, and might prompt any fellow to hit out. I know’ – and here Hippias laughed uneasily – ‘because I pitched a bottle at him myself. Didn’t find its mark, of course. Damaged his bally portrait instead. But the point is this: there’s no reason whatever to suppose that the most iconoclastic clergyman would creep up behind George and bat him on the head. It isn’t as if George had been a plaster saint, you know.’ And Hippias glanced round the room as if calling upon us to take notice of this little joke – which was certainly a better one than he commonly contrived. ‘Hasn’t anyone thought to bring in a damned spot?’

Mervyn Cockayne, clinging close as he now constantly did to Timmy, giggled shrilly. ‘Out, out, damned spot,’ he said, ‘not in, in.’ He glanced round expecting applause, much as Hippias had done. But nobody thought Mervyn funny. ‘Mama–’ he began – and seemed to recall that these antics now belonged to a past phase of his development. ‘If you mean whiskey,’ he said gloomily, ‘there’s some by the door.’

Silently Gerard crossed the room and poured his father’s spot. Since my encounter with him in the orangery we had scarcely spoken, and I had the impression that he was being equally taciturn with everybody else. There was some pressure of thought on his forehead. It was as if he were making a final attempt to work out something that had long puzzled him. But now he did speak. ‘Get on,’ he said curtly to Inspector Cadover. ‘Come to something, for heaven’s sake, and let this damned futile curtain-raising be. Let’s find out why those two men died and hang someone for it and be through with the matter.’

I must say I felt it to be a sensible speech. But it showed yet another member of the family who was considerably on edge.

‘Very well.’ Inspector Cadover, who sat at the centre of the long study table, took another speculative glance around us. ‘We will eliminate as a motive any proposal to steal or destroy pictures. Can we find anything else which might have been the criminal’s main object, and so retain the hypothesis that the killing of Sir George was unpremeditated and incidental?’

‘The safe,’ I said. For here again, it seemed to me, the Inspector did not design a merely rhetorical question.

‘The safe, undoubtedly.’ He bowed to me with a certain formal courtesy. ‘And there is, of course, one special circumstance here. The safe is concealed behind Sir George’s own portrait, and to some of you its very existence may have been revealed only as a consequence of the–’

‘The rough house, officer.’ It was Hippias who again interrupted, and with an affectation of bluffness horridly false. ‘Happened when I threw the bally bottle.’

‘Quite so. There may well, then, have been a design to rob the safe. The unexpected presence of Sir George–’

Bevis stirred sharply. ‘Damn it, man, there could have been nothing unexpected about my brother’s presence in this room. He entered it like clockwork every night.’

‘That is very good – very good indeed.’ And Cadover turned upon Bevis the same sort of irony that he was wont to direct upon the attendant Harold. ‘In fact, at this point we are carried right away from any unpremeditated homicide. If the safe was to be opened without great trouble, Sir George had to be present, dead or alive. And perhaps preferably dead. The key was in his pocket, and very likely nothing would have persuaded him to take it out.’

Inspector Cadover again made his slow inspection of the circle of faces around him. The action was coming to give rather the effect of a searchlight.

‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, what would be in the safe? Family papers, one would say. Perhaps documents about old colonial days. Any one of a number of people might want them. Mr Hippias here, or Mr Gerard. Or the butler, Owdon.’ Cadover made his longest pause yet. ‘Or Timmy Owdon, the butler’s son.’

‘We all stirred uneasily – or all except Timmy himself, who stood leaning against the mantelpiece with an expression of fixed calm. Mervyn nudged him. ‘Master Timmy, the butler’s son,’ he murmured. ‘And, oh, what a happy, happy family we are!’

It was now a friendly joke; Timmy acknowledged it with a faint smile; the Inspector gave an odd, weary sigh and went on.

‘But what the safe proved to contain was Mr Deamer’s boots. Well, that is a bit of a surprise. But then we are not the first to be surprised in this affair. Sir George himself was uncommonly surprised – and a split second before his death.’

Inspector Cadover scratched his chin and of a sudden looked fixedly at Hippias. ‘But that’s not all. The surprises began on Monday night with the arrival of Sir George’s Australian relatives. The butler was surprised – indeed shattered.’

Mervyn giggled. ‘I would say he did the shattering. At least a dozen wine glasses went at a swoop.’

‘And Sir George himself was shaken. Presently there was a row in this study. Put it like this: several angry and bewildered Simneys were faced with a thoroughly awkward situation and couldn’t at all agree on what to do about it. And this is the business that must be cleared up first. I propose to do so here and now. Mr Hippias, perhaps you will be good enough to tell us what your arrival at Hazelwood revealed to you, and what you intended to do about it?’

‘He intended to collect a cheque.’

Everybody stared at me, and I had a moment to wonder what had prompted me to this revelation.

‘I eavesdropped,’ I continued. ‘On Tuesday morning I eavesdropped in the park. Bevis made Hippias a proposition. I think it was twenty thousand pounds to keep his mouth shut. Hippias didn’t think much of the amount. Bevis said he thought it was handsome in view of the fact that he had to consider me as well – whatever that might mean. They walked away to beat it out. Bevis was full of fine moral feeling. Hippias was just plain unscrupulous.’

Joyleen was looking at me round-eyed. Gerard had flushed darkly – and, catching his eye, I am bound to say I felt rather a cad. But I was tired of the Simneys. Within limits, I was all for the truth.

And at least I had the satisfaction of throwing Inspector Cadover right out of his stride. He was almost as round-eyed as Joyleen. ‘Do I understand,’ he asked me sharply, ‘that – that Sir Bevis appeared to have a
large
interest – a major
economic
interest in the suppression of whatever revelation threatened? And that the threat was – was analogous to that constituted by the possibility of your having a male child?’

‘Oh, most decidedly.’ Having taken on the role of a treacherous little bitch I played it whole-heartedly enough. ‘Bevis was putting it on grounds of high moral tone and family shame. He is, as it happens, just that sort of humbug. But actually he was dead scared of losing something he didn’t want to lose.’

‘And you came in?’ Inspector Cadover’s reiteration appeared positively stupid. ‘You and the revelation
both
came in?’

‘Yes. He stood to lose equally by the revelation – Hippias’ revelation – and by me.’

‘If you had a son he would lose the baronetcy?’

At this point the young man called Harold exclaimed. Not articulately. What he produced was a sort of startled yelp.

Inspector Cadover’s face was a study. One reads of people being dumbfounded. One seldom meets it in the flesh.

But Timmy’s face was a study too. It was lit by a sort of quiet irony. Not for the first time, I was aware that he was the subtlest of the Simneys.

‘I had it utterly upside down.’ The Inspector’s eye, still startled, circled us all. ‘Had I not, Mr Bevis?’

Bevis’ brow darkened. ‘What the devil–’

‘And you, madam’ – he had turned to me – ‘may I ask if you have greatly prized your position as Lady Simney?’

I shook my head. ‘No, Inspector Cadover, I don’t think I have.’