Heads You Lose (4 page)

Lady Hart looked warningly at Pendock and sat down on the edge of the bed, her arm round her granddaughter’s shoulders. “Hush, darling. Calm yourself. You’re behaving badly. I’m afraid poor Miss Morland’s had an accident, Venetia. They found her in the garden. Pen’s just been down to see.”

Henry Gold appeared, moving quietly into their midst, dark and a little mysterious, his quick eyes searching their faces. Venetia ran to him. “Henry, Grace Morland’s been killed!”

“Grace Morland?” he said. “What, the woman who was here this afternoon? How on earth could she have got killed?”

“She’s been murdered,” said Pendock harshly, maddened by their stupidly staring eyes and bewildered speech. “It’s the same as the girl in the summer. She’s lying in the culvert at the bottom of the drive, and she’s had her head cut off. Bunsen is there, and I got hold of one of the gardeners.”

“Have you rung up the police?” said Henry.

“No, I haven’t had time to think. I suppose we’d better do that at once. And does one get a doctor?”

“Not if you’re sure she’s dead. The police will see to it.”

“She’s dead all right,” said Pendock savagely, seeing again that dreadful corpse in the ditch. “Her head—look here, Henry, go and ring the police for me, will you? I’ve had a bit of a shock and I feel rather… ghastly…” He walked like an automaton into his bedroom and closed the door.

Pigeonsford village is a collection of cottages and small shops that have grown up around what is commonly known as the “’Ouse.” Its single constable could by no means be got to understand that Miss Morland had been murdered and her body left in Mr. Pendock’s drive. Henry Gold contented himself with instructions that the constable should come round immediately, and himself rang up the station at Torrington fifteen miles away. Inspector Cockrill replied without excitement that he would be over in half an hour.

Fran meanwhile had insisted upon waking James. She leant over his bed, shaking him out of a deep and tuneful sleep. “James, do wake up. Do wake up.”

“Wassamarrer?” said James, heaving the bed-clothes back over his shoulders.

“James, come on, wake up. Something dreadful’s happened.
Do
wake up!”

Lady Hart went to the wash-basin and liberally wetted a sponge. “Try this; I never knew it to fail.”

Fran mercifully wrung out some of the water, and applied the sponge gingerly to James’s face. He sprang upright and sat blinking at them from under his tousled hair. “Here, what’s going on? What the hell are you doing?”

“If you say ‘Is it an air raid?’ I shall scream,” said Lady Hart.

“Something dreadful’s happened,” said Fran again. “Miss Morland’s been killed, out in the garden.”

“Grace Morland?” said James, dumbfounded.

“Yes, she’s been killed, poor thing, and the police will be here asking us a lot of questions, and they’ll want to know whether we’ve all been in bed all night and things like that; of course we have, but we thought we’d better wake you up and tell you what was happening…

A very faint grin appeared upon James’s face.

They were sitting in solemn conclave when Henry came back. “Well, I’ve rung up the police; I. had a frightful time getting hold of anyone with sense, but I finally asked for Cockie and he’s coming over right away.” He stood before them, excitement struggling with conventional regret. “How was it discovered?”

“It was me,” said Lady Hart, shivering. “At least it wasn’t me that actually found Miss Morland, of course, but Bunsen, and he told me and I told Pen. I heard a noise, and there was Bunsen out on the terrace, throwing stones at Pen’s window, the one next to mine. I asked him what he was doing, and he said that there was a girl, or a woman—he actually said ‘a young lady’ I believe—lying in the garden, down by the drive, near the gate. He was terribly upset, poor old Bunsen, and panting like anything from running across the lawns to get Pen.”

“Why the devil didn’t he go straight to Pen’s room?”

“The front door would be locked and it’s miles round by the back; it was the obvious thing to do—don’t interrupt, Henry. Go on, Gran!”

“I said to him, ‘Who is the woman?’ and he said he didn’t know. Her hair was all over her face; but she had on Miss Fran’s hat.”

“My
hat
?” cried Fran.

“Well, that’s what Bunsen said, and he’d seen you with it at tea-time. I expect he was wrong, because what would Miss Morland be doing with your hat? But of course immediately I thought it was you and that’s why I—that’s why I went and called Pen,” finished Lady Hart, rather lamely.

Nobody noticed it. “Oh, Bunsen must be wrong,” said Fran, flushed and excited. “It couldn’t be my hat. Anyway, it’s still on the table in the hall—I can soon find out.” She ran to the stairs and looked over the banisters to where the box stood, open and empty, its lid on the chair beside the hall-stand, a trail of tissue paper littering the table. Henry came to her side and looked over also. “I’m afraid it’s gone,” he said.

Inspector Cockrill was a little brown man who seemed much older than he actually was, with deep-set eyes beneath a fine broad brow, an aquiline nose and a mop of fluffy white hair fringing a magnificent head. He wore his soft felt hat set sideways, as though he would at any moment break out into an amateur rendering of “Napoleon’s Farewell to his Troops”; and he was known to Torrington and in all its surrounding villages as Cockie. He was widely advertised as having a heart of gold beneath his irascible exterior; but there were those who said bitterly that the heart was so infinitesimal and you had to dig so deep down to get to it, that it was hardly worth the trouble. The fingers of his right hand were so stained with nicotine as to appear to be tipped with wood.

He looked very much shocked when he saw the poor body lying so crookedly in the ditch at the bottom of Pigeonsford drive. He had known Grace Morland since her girlhood. Her father had united him (after a little speech which had subsequently proved to have been over-optimistic) to his wife; had buried her when, worn out with the struggle of producing one rather underweight child, she had incontinently died; had buried the child when shortly afterwards it too had died, and with it all his hope and much of his faith and charity. Grace had set her cap at him in after years, but half heartedly, for he was not to be considered her equal in breeding or education; he thought of her, without rancour, as a sentimental goat. But what an end for her to have come to, poor creature! And her head—he gingerly took hold of it by the hair…

Lady Hart and the girls were huddled up on sofas in the drawing-room when, in the early hours of the morning, he came wearily up to the house. Venetia had Henry beside her to hold her hand; but Fran, from very excess of would-be comforters, sat by herself, with Aziz asleep in her lap. An agitated maid handed round strong black coffee.

Cockrill accepted a cup. “And perhaps you’d send some down to my men in the garden, Mr. Pendock? Sorry about all this; it’s a shock for you.” His bright eyes flickered from face to face. He thought:
“One
young lady hasn’t been too much shocked to remember to put on her make-up; or else she never took it off. I wonder…”

Pendock said diffidently: “What about Miss Morland’s house, Inspector? She’s got an elderly maid—well, of course you’ll know her—old Trotty, and I’m afraid this will be a dreadful thing for her. Have you thought about letting her know?”

Cockrill gave him a quizzical glance. “Oh yes, I’ve thought about it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Pendock, flushing. “I don’t want to seem officious.”

Cockrill smiled at him. “Oh, that’s all right. But I’ll see to everything; you can safely leave it to me. Now, about this business? Any of you people know anything?”

“My dear Cockie, how could we possibly?” said Fran; she and Venetia had known him from their childhood.

He looked at her squarely, and then, producing a paper and tobacco, rolled himself an untidy cigarette. “Mr. Pendock, what about your butler? What was he doing coming home at twelve o’clock?”

“He went over to see his sister at Tenfold,” said Venetia.

“That’s right, Inspector. I gave him permission to go over after dinner. She’s been ill, and he had a phone call to say that she was worse. He told me, while we were waiting for you, that he found her very bad and had to get hold of Dr. Newsome, from Torrington; he knew I wouldn’t mind his getting back late. He’s been with me for years and does more or less what he likes.”

“And can you confirm that his sister is, in fact, ill at Tenfold?”

Pendock was taken aback. “Good heavens, yes; what are you suggesting? I saw her myself, two or three days ago. Anyway, Newsome’ll tell you.”

“All right, all right, all right; just asking,” said Cockie equably. “So the butler found the poor lady and informed you, Lady Hart; is that right?”

Lady Hart was by now sufficiently recovered to throw a little drama into her account of the awakening by Bunsen. “… so I went at once to Mr. Pendock’s room and told him what had happened and then, I’m afraid, I collapsed.”

“I rushed down to the drive,” said Pendock, sitting up on the sofa and handing his cup to the parlour-maid for refilling. “When I found that it was Miss Morland, I left Bunsen with her and got hold of a man to stay with him, and came back to the house, and we roused the others.”

“In what order?” said Cockie, carefully avoiding a glance at Fran’s make-up.

“Well, actually, Venetia and Mr. Gold woke themselves; first we went to Fran’s room…”

“Why to hers? Why not, for example, to Captain Nicholl’s?”

“Because Francesca’s room is opposite Mr. Pendock’s, where we were,” said Lady Hart quickly. “We went there first, simply because it was nearest. My granddaughter was in bed and asleep.” She did not look at Pendock. “After that the others arrived and later on we went and roused James; he was still sound asleep, and we had some trouble in waking him. It was then that we found out that the hat was missing…” She broke off suddenly.

“The hat?” said Cockie sharply. “What hat was that?”

“Well, it’s a very extraordinary thing, Inspector,” said Pendock uneasily. “Fran had a new hat sent to her this afternoon—yesterday afternoon,” he corrected, looking at his watch. “Anyway, she left it in a box on the hall table. No doubt you noticed that Miss Morland had a—was wearing a little flowered hat? Well, that was Fran’s.”

“Not
wearing
it,” said Cockie, thinking back. “She didn’t have it on her head when I saw her.”

“Did
n’t she? I’m sure she—” He pressed his forehead against the palm of his hand: “Ah, yes, of course, I must have taken it off… I believe now that I flung it aside so that I could see the face. I was so terrified that it was Fran, there in the ditch; I—I had to see the face.”

“Why should you have thought it was Fran?” said Cockie, deeply interested.

“Because of the hat, of course,” said Lady Hart sharply.

“Ah, yes. The hat. But, actually, she was fast asleep in bed?”

“Yes,” said Pendock and Lady Hart and Fran together.

“And Captain Nicholl was also asleep in bed; and what about Venetia?”

“Well, I was asleep too, Cockie, of course.”

“And Mr. Gold? You were sharing Venetia’s room?”

“Actually I was sleeping in the dressing-room; but if you’re suggesting…” began Henry hotly.

“All right, all right; just asking.”

He took a brief note of their movements from the time they had last seen Grace Morland and then sent them all off upstairs. “I’m going back to Pigeonsford Cottage now” (Pendock noted the “back”), “but I’ll be here first thing in the morning. You won’t mind, Mr. Pendock, if I leave a man on guard in the hall?”

“I don’t mind, of course,” said Pendock. “But why in the hall? There’s nothing to guard out there.”

“That’s just what I want to guard,” said Cockie, rising and stretching his weary limbs, clapping his shabby old hat sideways on to his head. “Nothing. It’s very interesting—when it’s in a cardboard box.” He stumped off into the night.

They trailed up the stairs, but they could not go to bed; soon they were collected again, sitting about on the landing, perched on the window-sill or propped against the big oak chest; Fran sat on the top step, Aziz in her arms, gazing down to the hall where a sleepy constable guarded the empty box. The hat. Everything seemed to turn upon the hat. Why should that pitiful corpse have been made ridiculous with Fran’s nonsensical little hat? They thought wildly of feuds and vendettas, of strange superstitions and creeds… and then with a wild relief of the kitchen-maid in the wood. Of course! A maniac. Not a pretty thought, but at least, ridiculous though it seemed to say such a thing, at least a
sane
one. A maniac had struck again, and this time had satisfied some crazy impulse by decking the body of the victim with the first bit of brightness and colour that came to hand. But to whose hand? Who could have had access to that hat-box on the hall table? Henry said, for the hundredth time: “You’re sure the front door was locked?”

“Of course I’m sure,” said Pendock irritably. “You all saw me doing it; and I remember struggling with the lock, trying to get out of the door…” Fumbling with the key, battling with the well-known little difficulty in turning it, and all the time with that sickening dread in his heart: half crazy with terror that he might find Fran, his lovely one, lying in the ditch with her beautiful head hacked off… of course, of course he was sure!

“What about the french windows?” suggested Fran, leaning back against the banisters, smoking a cigarette; “after all there are french windows to all the downstairs rooms… the drawing-room, and the dining-room the other side of the hall, and the library, at the back… couldn’t one of them have been left open?”

“It doesn’t sound like Bunsen, does it?” said Venetia doubtfully.

Bunsen had been with Pendock’s father when Pendock himself had been only a boy; the Hart sisters had grown up under his mild blue eyes, and, apart from his sister in Tenfold, these were the only three people in the world he loved. Pendock he treated with a respectful austerity; but Fran and Venetia were the darlings of his heart, and he spent long hours devising small surprises and treats for them, dreaming over their futures and delighting in all their pretty little ways. He was a gentle old man, with a round, pink, wrinkled face and a fringe of neatly brushed silver hair; the impeccability of his dress broke down abruptly at his shoes which were stretched and slashed to accommodate his corns: he wore his trousers very long, in consequence. His whole life had been spent in the service of Pigeonsford, and if there were indeed a great world outside its gates, it was of no interest to him. It was very unlikely indeed that Bunsen had been careless with locks and bolts. “Still we might just
ask
him,” said Fran, scrambling to her feet.