Cold, Lone and Still (16 page)

‘Now thou hast lov’d me one whole day,

Tomorrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?

Wilt thou then ante-date some new-made vow?

Or say that now

We are not just those persons which we were?’

‘You seem remarkably bobbish,’ said Elsa when I got to the office next day. ‘Have we had a rebate from the taxman?’

‘Not from the taxman,’ I said, ‘but I suppose I’ve had a windfall of a sort.’

‘Are we to be treated to champagne?’

‘No, only to the funeral bakemeats.’

She looked at me with mock concern and said that she was very sorry to hear it, but she asked no questions and the office routine went on much as usual until lunchtime. Sandy asked Elsa to join us at our favourite pub, for we took only a snack and a beer at midday. She refused and he said to me when we had obtained refreshment and were seated at our little table, ‘What’s eating Elsa? When I asked her to join us, she said, “Three’s a crowd and Comrie has something to tell you.” Have you something to tell me?’

‘I could tell you that Perth knows of two daggers which were bought as souvenirs in Fort William. I think Dame Beatrice will hand this bit of information to the police and leave Bingley to sort it out. The two women who bought the daggers intended to give them as presents to Todd. The point of interest now is to discover who did what with them when the tour was over.’

‘You would need to know whether one of them was the weapon which somebody stuck in Carbridge’s back, wouldn’t you? That weapon, according to the papers, has never been found, has it?’

‘No. There was an ordinary kitchen knife in the body, but the forensic chaps know it was planted after the death wound was dealt and the murder weapon pulled out.’

‘Yes. Elsa wasn’t talking about the murder when she said that three is a crowd. Come clean, Comrie. She was hinting at something.’

‘Elsa is too clever by half when it comes to reading people’s minds.’

‘Granted. That’s why she is so valuable to us, so now out with it. What has happened to make her think you are so light-hearted that you prevent yourself only with the greatest difficulty from going about the office with a song on your lips? Has Hera thought better of it and asked for the ring again?’

‘Quite the opposite. We have agreed to part company for ever and ever,
amen
.’

‘Thank goodness for that! Now I can tell you something which I’ve been bottling up ever since I came back from my holiday.’

‘Sweden? I should hardly have thought of that as a holiday. Did you strike lucky with a sort of young Greta Garbo?’

‘Don’t hedge! You know the holiday I’m talking about.’

‘You got mugged, you ass. At least I avoided
that
when I was on The Way.’

‘Yes, I got mugged. Did it never strike you as strange that I made no attempt to go to the police?’

‘No, it didn’t strike me as strange at all. Neither did
I
go to the police when I found that body in those ruins on Rannoch Moor.’

‘Our motives were very different, Comrie.’

‘I shouldn’t think so. Scottish law is what is different. Like me, you did not want to get mixed up with it. We are busy men and to bring in the Scottish police would have meant sacrificing a lot of valuable time and, ten to one, they wouldn’t have tracked down your assailant.’

‘Oh, I would sacrifice any amount of time to bring even one mugger, let alone a rapist, to book,’ said Sandy. ‘It would be a public duty and I should not shirk it. No, it was not that. You see, I had a pretty good idea of the identity of my attacker.’

‘Some frenzied author whose book we have been unable to place?’ (I was playing for time, although I knew that this was only a question of procrastination. I should have to hear his unwelcome views in the end. I felt that already I knew what they were going to be.)

‘I can give you a name, but not that of a disgruntled author. The person who attempted to lay me out — no, perhaps, after all, I had better not say.’

‘You mean you think it was Hera. That is impossible. She was modelling in Paris all that week,’ I said.

‘But she wasn’t, Comrie. I found that out before I ever went up to Scotland.’

‘You old fox! Whatever made you do that?’ I felt I ought to be angry with him, but it would have been nothing more than a gesture. Hera meant nothing to me any more. There was no need for me to defend her.

‘Elsa put me up to it in a way. She asked me whether you and I realised how angry Hera was when we refused to take her into partnership. I said I had a pretty good idea and that I knew how much Hera hated being thwarted. Elsa said, “Sandy, she will stop at nothing. If you were not behind him, Comrie would give in to her. Do look out for yourself.” Well, you know Elsa. She never takes panic stations, so I thought it might be just as well to find out what Hera was planning while I was safely out of the way.’

‘You surely didn’t think I would agree in your absence to anything which so closely affected us both?’

‘No, of course I didn’t think that, but, well —’

We finished our snack of a meal in silence. I knew there was more that he could tell me, but the pub was closing for the afternoon and in any case I wanted time to think. As I had received the news of Hera’s marriage to Todd, so I received this fresh view of her conduct. That is to say, I was so far from being shattered by it that all I remember feeling was intense curiosity concerning the activities of a woman I had imagined I knew well.

I even found myself trying to work out, with cold logic and in an entirely unemotional way, whether it was she who had killed Carbridge. At any rate, my cogitations reached a satisfactory conclusion on that point. If the medical evidence concerning time of death was correct even within a couple of hours — and the doctors themselves, I thought, had given rigor mortis ample scope — there was no way on earth that Hera could have had the opportunity to put a knife in the man’s back on that Saturday afternoon. As for strangling him beforehand, she had neither the physical strength nor the complete lack of squeamishness to attempt such a method of inducing death. Neither did I believe that, had she indeed been the mugger, she would have intended any more harm to Sandy than to put him out of action for a week or so.

At half-past three Elsa herself came into my office with two cups of tea, her own and mine.

‘What?’ I said. ‘The queen of Sheba waiting upon King Solomon? Has the typing pool Hebe gone on strike?’

She set down the cups and took a seat.

‘I have just dismissed Luella Granville Waterman from these sacrosanct precincts,’ she said. ‘I was sure you had forgotten that she had an appointment with you at a quarter to three, so I didn’t send her in.’

We had a habit of referring to our more difficult and obstreperous authors by names culled from
Psmith, Journalist
. This helped to keep us sane and good-humoured in dealing with them, and again was Elsa’s idea.

‘Good Lord!’ I said. ‘I had forgotten all about her!’

‘A fact which, in your interests, I failed to mention to her.’

‘Did you contrive to soothe that savage breast?’

‘What else do you pay me for? I’m to let her know tomorrow the doctor’s report. I said he was still with you.’

‘What on earth are you talking about?’

‘You hover between life and death, dear. It was only by convincing her of that hardly self-evident fact that I could persuade her to leave. But that is not the reason for my being here and ministering unto you with my own delicate hands.’

‘Any excuse for a session with you is as good as any other. So to what am I indebted?‘ I asked.

‘Do you know what unpardonable liberties are?’

‘I ought to.’

‘Oh, you mean when you punched a man in the eye for attempting to put his arm round Hera. I heard about that. Well, I am about to tell you of an unpardonable liberty I took because, if I don’t confess it, Sandy will tell you that it was he who took it.’

‘He has told me already, I think. He checked on Hera’s visit to Paris.’

‘As a matter of fact,
I
did. She did not go to Paris. I know which agents she uses for her modelling jobs and it seemed to me very strange that she should be going off to Paris just when Sandy was going to be out of London and you and I were to be left holding the fort here.’

‘So she didn’t go to Paris. She went to Scotland and did her damnedest to disable Sandy. I find that difficult to believe, you know.’

‘Suit yourself.’ She drank her tea. I pushed my cup aside.

‘It’s utterly ridiculous,’ I said, ‘and neither of you has any proof at all.’

‘With Sandy out of the way, she could have worked on you to take her into the partnership.’

‘What about you? Wouldn’t you have had something to say?’

‘I wasn’t a partner at that time. I should have chucked my job, of course. I could never work with Hera.’

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘strong-arm stuff is not her line. Whoever clocked Sandy in those woods or wherever it was made a boss shot. That’s the only reason I’m prepared to admit it
could
have been Hera. I still don’t believe it was.’

‘Typical of a woman who was not used to what you call strong-arm stuff. A real mugger would have made a much better job of it.’

‘What did Luella Granville Waterman want to see me about?’ (I was anxious to change the subject.)

‘That’s right. When defeated in argument, always take a different line. What
she
wants to change is her publisher.’

‘But because old Timothy once had an affair with her mother, Timothy’s sons have been publishing that bilge of hers for years.’

‘They haven’t lost on it, you know. She’s got her following.’

‘Heaven help them! What do I say to her tomorrow?’

‘She isn’t coming tomorrow. I have promised to let her know when you are out of danger. I have also told her we’ll try Peregrines if she likes, but that they start new authors at only seven and a half on the first five thousand. That ought to shake her. Oh, and by the way, I’m going to marry Sandy.’

‘Not me?’ I spoke jokingly, but the news took me completely by surprise.

‘No, dear, not you. My union doesn’t allow me to accept other women’s leavings,’ she said, getting up from her chair.

‘You devil!’ I said. I caught her and kissed her. ‘I hope you will be very, very happy. Good old Sandy! I had no idea!’

‘Well, you don’t have many ideas, do you, dear?’ she said. ‘You should have got a line on your Hera months ago.’

S
o, all these extraneous details being settled, we were back to the murder. Hera was a late riser when she was not working, so at nine the next morning I went to her flat and pushed through her letter-box the package containing the ring. This meant that I arrived at the office earlier than usual, for Sandy and I did not show up usually until ten.

I found Elsa busy dealing with the morning’s correspondence.

‘My, my!’ she said. ‘Couldn’t we sleep? Was our conscience troubling us? That policeman has been here asking to see you. I told him to try again later.’

‘What does he want, I wonder? There is nothing I can tell him about myself that he doesn’t know already.’

A telephone call came through half an hour later. Polly answered it and put Bingley through to me. I said I would be charmed to see him whenever he wanted an interview and he replied to this that he would come round at once. Sandy had arrived before Bingley turned up, so, when I had congratulated him on his engagement to Elsa, I told him what was in the wind and prophesied (rightly, as it happened) that somebody under pressure had magnified the story of my punch-up with Carbridge at Crianiarich.

I took Bingley into my office, told Elsa to see that we were not disturbed and waited for Bingley’s opening gambit. It was what I had expected.

‘You had a serious disagreement with the deceased while you were on your Scottish tour, Mr Melrose.’

‘Disagreement, yes. Serious, no.’

‘It concerned your fiancée, Miss Camden.’

‘May I point out that you are behind the times, Detective Chief Inspector? Not my fiancée any longer, and not Miss Camden. Try Mrs Todd.’

‘Are you serious, sir?’

‘Oh, yes. The walking tour was an experiment before Mrs Todd applied for a divorce so that she could marry me. The result has told us both where we stand — apart.’

‘What you tell me lends a different aspect to the matters arising. The reports I have received may have been somewhat exaggerated, sir.’

‘A bit of luck for me, if you think so.’

‘Yes, you may say that, sir. I shall need to check this new piece of information before taking further steps. Mrs
Todd
, you say?’

‘Alas, yes. Love’s young dream is over, so far as I am concerned.’

He looked at me and at the flower in my buttonhole. It was a pink rosebud given me by Polly because, she said, it looked festive and so did I. Bingley must have agreed with her, for he said that I appeared to be taking my bereavement extremely well. He left soon after he had said that, and I had the impression that he was a baffled man. I wondered whether he had come to the office with a warrant for my arrest. Of one thing I was certain. If he had received an exaggerated account of the punch-up, it would have come from one of three people. It could have been from Hera herself, from Todd (with whom I had exchanged words, although not blows) or Perth. There was a possible fourth, namely James Minch, always ready with a rush of words to the mouth. Neither he nor Perth would have intended any harm, but they might have done my cause a great deal of mischief, all the same.

Whichever one of them it was, there could be no doubt that I had given Bingley something to think about and, as any respite is to be preferred to sudden death, I was grateful for it. I expected Bingley to return later in the day, but he did not do so and the next step in the solution to his problem came in the form of a telephone call to me from Dame Beatrice. She had been called upon officially in her capacity as psychiatric adviser to the Home Office, she said, and at Bingley’s request.

‘I have to question certain members of the Scottish expedition,’ she said. ‘I shall take Laura with me to record the interviews, but I need your support in reassuring my suspects.’

‘Perth would be far more useful.’

‘Laura said that you would jib.’

‘No, no, I’m not jibbing. Of course I’ll do anything you say.’

‘The police,’ said Dame Beatrice in a reminiscent tone, ‘are seldom wrong when they have very definite suspicions that they know the identity of a criminal, but sometimes there are factors which they do not take into account.’

‘You mean Bingley thinks he knows who murdered Carbridge?’

‘Yes, and I can follow his reasoning, although I do not think he is right.’

‘But you have to find proof?’ I said.

She cackled. ‘Yes, indeed. I have to find proof, and when I find it he may be somewhat surprised.’

‘So you think he has set his sights on the wrong person?’

‘There are factors he has not taken into account.’

‘For instance?’ I looked for enlightenment, but it did not come. All that she added was: ‘Cast your mind back to the one evening you and Miss Camden spent at Fort William. Can you remember whether the home addresses of the various parties were exchanged? I know that Mr Trickett had a list, or he could not have sent out the invitations, but I think there must have been others.’

‘Oh, yes, there was a good deal of writing down and promising to keep in touch and all that kind of thing, but, anyway, I suppose people could have found out during the tour where other people lived if they were interested enough. Trickett, as you say, must have had a complete list. I believe he was the only person who asked for Hera’s address and mine. We were rather the odd men out because we had been with the rest of them so little.’

‘Then I think a telephone call to Mr Trickett will be sufficient for my purpose. Perhaps you would be good enough to make it for me. Ask whether Miss Coral Platt or Mr Freddie Brown is a home student. They were the two in charge of the catering at the students’ party, I am told.’

‘Ah!’ I said. ‘The kitchen knife that was found in the body and which was not the knife the pathologist thinks was the murder weapon.’

So, my having ascertained from Trickett that Coral was a home student but that Freddie was a boarder at the hall of residence during term-time, Dame Beatrice herself did the telephoning and fixed up an appointment with Coral for the following evening. Coral’s father insisted on being present at the interview and to this Dame Beatrice made no objection. She came straight to the point.

‘Where did you get the vegetable knife?’ she asked.

Coral looked distressed. I think she might have refused to answer the question, but her father said, ‘Speak up. Let’s have done with all this moping and worry. Your mother and I knew something was wrong. We thought you were pining over a love affair, but it sounds more serious than that. I’m sure Dame Beatrice knows you had nothing to do with that shocking affair.’ He put his hand over the girl’s and she turned her palm and clasped his fingers. Then she spoke out resolutely.

‘I borrowed the vegetable knife from our kitchen,’ she said. ‘I knew we were going to have hamburgers at the party, so I thought it would come in useful for chopping up the onions. I like a knife I’m used to and I didn’t know what sort of cutlery I should find at the men’s hall.’

‘I am afraid you will have to identify the knife which the police have in their possession,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but do not be afraid. We know the murder was not committed with it. It was used merely as a substitute. The inference is that, if the lethal weapon had been found, it would have given a clue to the identity of the killer.’

‘I wonder why he left Coral’s knife in the body and did not get rid of that, as well as his own weapon?’ I said.

‘He reasoned, no doubt, that Miss Platt’s knife would not be traced to him. Now, Miss Platt, you borrowed the vegetable knife from your mother’s kitchen. When did you realise that it had disappeared from the hall of residence?’

‘When Freddie and I got back from tea. We went to a Wimpy’s and when we got back the knife was gone, but I didn’t worry too much at the time because I had chopped up the onions — more, actually, than I thought we should need — before we went out to tea. It was after — well, you know — after we knew that a kitchen knife had been found in the body -’

‘Yes,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘do not distress yourself. When you knew that, you connected it with the disappearance of your own knife. Did the caretaker Bull come into the kitchen while you and Mr Freddie Brown were making your preparations?’

‘No, I’m sure he didn’t. He was helping in various ways, but I don’t remember him in the kitchen.’

‘When the police ask you to identify the knife, have no fear. As it was not the murder weapon, it has only secondary interest for them.’

Then we visited Freddie Brown. He was at the hall of residence and was cutting sections of rock plants and looking at them under a microscope. Sunny-tempered as ever, he showed no sign of resentment at being interrupted.

‘Now, Mr Brown,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘you may remember that, when preparations were being made for the students’ party, a small knife with which Miss Platt had been chopping onions was missing.’

‘Yes. We didn’t worry much, at least, not at the time. We thought one of the others had come into the kitchen and whipped it for some reason. There were quite a lot of people milling about, helping to get things ready. It was only when I read about the knife found in the body and told Coral that she began to panic. She begged me to say nothing to anybody about her loss of the knife, so, of course, I promised. Anyway, we don’t know that the knife
was
her knife, do we?’

‘We shall know when she identifies it,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Oh, I say! You’re not going to make the poor girl do that, are you? They don’t think it was that little knife which did the damage, but I suppose nobody but the murderer would have left it in the body.’

‘Quite so. Now, Mr Brown, to another matter: will you tell me whether you remember purchasing a souvenir in Fort William?’

‘Not me; hadn’t got the cash and didn’t see anything I wanted except a Caithness decanter which I couldn’t possibly afford. Some people bought things, but not me.’

‘Some people bought daggers, for example.’

‘Yes, two of the women who were hoping that Todd would — well—’

‘Extend his favours to them?’

‘I suppose you could put it like that, but, as Coral said to me, anybody could see with half an eye that they didn’t stand an earthly. He had his sights on —’ He looked at me and left the sentence unfinished.

‘Yes, I understand that Mr Todd refused to accept the gifts and that subsequently they passed into other hands,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Well, if you want to know, one of them passed into
my
hands,’ said Freddie. ‘I don’t know what happened to the other, but I got one in a raffle.’

‘Ah, yes, the weapon which was more than a hundred years old and therefore passed as an antique.’

‘Oh, no, absolutely not that beastly thing! I expect Todd kept that. It was valuable. The one that got raffled was the
sgian dubh
. I had just enough money to take a ticket and it seemed a suitable souvenir, being of the Highlands and all that. Minch laughed when the girl showed it off to the others before she tried to give it to Todd. Minch said it was only a toy and that he had a real one which he would show her sometime. I’ve got mine in my room. Would you like to see it?’

‘Very much,’ said Dame Beatrice. He was not gone long. He came back with the little dagger. It had a silver-mounted black sheath with a whacking great cairngorm stuck in the handle. Dame Beatrice looked it over and handed it to Laura. Their eyes met and I saw Laura shake her head. She remarked that some girls had more money than sense.

‘Well, thank you, Mr Brown,’ said Dame Beatrice. Laura handed back the
sgian dubh
and, as we were leaving, Freddie said nervously that he hoped he had not welshed on anybody. It had been a good tour and he had been glad he went on it until all this rotten business had followed on.

When I got back to my flat that night a most uneasy idea came into my mind. I mean, by that, an idea which made
me
uneasy. When Dame Beatrice and Laura came next day to my office and told me that they had an afternoon appointment with the Minches and hoped I would accompany them, I came out promptly and explosively with what was on my mind.

‘Look here,’ I said, addressing Laura instead of challenging Dame Beatrice’s brilliant black eyes, ‘you are not doing a Roger Ackroyd on me, are you?’

‘The elliptical form of your question nevertheless makes your meaning clear,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘No, my dear Comrie, we have no Hercule Poirot up our sleeves. Your presence is merely to assure our patients (if I may call them so) of the respectability and open-mindedness of our intentions. Do you forget that you also have been a patient of mine?’

‘Meaning that she knows you from soup to nuts, to borrow a phrase from my favourite author,’ said Laura. ‘So be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed (to borrow from yet another source of inspiration), so buck up. All is not lost.’

‘What was wrong with Freddie’s
sgian dubh
?’ I asked.

Dame Beatrice nodded to Laura, who replied, ‘Nothing was
wrong
with it, but those silver mountings were hardly hallmarked and the blade, when I examined it, was hardly a thing of tempered steel. In other words, I would take my oath that, wherever Freddie Brown’s
sgian dubh
came from, it is merely the tourist catchpenny implement James Minch despised and thereupon, if I am not mistaken, hangs a very interesting tale,’ said Laura.

‘And that is why we are going to visit the Minch family,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I am now working in close collaboration with Detective Chief Inspector Bingley and he tells me that James Minch denied having a
sgian dubh
in his stocking at the students’ party, though he admitted he had one at home.’

The Minches lived with their parents in a very pleasant house amid Oxshott woodlands. A maid answered the door. Dame Beatrice sent in her card and Jane Minch came along. Her father and James, she said, were playing golf and her mother had gone to a matinée. She asked us in and seated us.

‘I thought we were to meet your brother,’ said Dame Beatrice mildly.

‘My father says James talks too much, and he does, of course,’ said Jane. ‘My father says that anything James could tell you I can tell you equally well, and that is true, too.’