Death Comes to Cambers (6 page)

‘It was in my mind,' Bobby admitted. ‘Nothing to it, most likely.'

‘It was him found the body,' reflected Moulland. ‘Must have been pretty quick to see it from the road – of course, if he knew it was there... I'll just mention it to the chief.' By now they had reached the gates that admitted to the Cambers House grounds from the footpath that made a short-cut between village and house. Colonel Lawson, who had been walking on alone, evidently deep in thought, paused here to let the others overtake him. To Bobby, he said: ‘You said something about Lady Cambers being more nervous of burglars lately. Was there any reason?'

‘I understand a stranger had been seen hanging about the house and grounds in a suspicious way, or what she thought was a suspicious way,' Bobby answered. ‘He had been trying to pump some of the servants, too, and then she heard he had been asking a lot of questions in the village. She kept all her jewellery in the house – in a safe in her room – and she got the idea that perhaps it was some advance agent, so to say, spying out the ground for a gang of burglars.'

‘Well, they do that sometimes,' admitted the chief constable, and called Jordan, who was following in the rear. ‘Know anything, sergeant,' he asked, ‘of any suspicious-looking stranger about here?'

‘There's a London business gentleman staying at the Cambers Arms, sir,' Jordan answered. ‘Retired gent. Sold his business in London, and looking for a small house, with a bit of land attached, for fruit and poultry. Made a lot of inquiries to see what he could find to suit.'

‘Better look him up, Moulland,' the chief constable directed. ‘Have you seen him, Jordan? What is he like?'

‘I've only seen him once or twice, sir,' Jordan answered, ‘and I didn't pay any particular attention – seemed no call to. Very chatty and friendly, I've heard. A.1 at darts, but no class at all at shove-halfpenny. Big-made man – about my height; spends his money freely enough. Fond of a glass, but never takes too much. Writes to his wife and family twice a week regular. Long letters, and always takes them into Hirlpool to post. Quite the gentleman always, but not what you would call a gentleman, or anywhere near it.'

The chief constable nodded as if he understood this somewhat cryptic remark.

‘Yes, decidedly, he's got to be looked up,' he said. ‘You'll see to that, Moulland. Though I don't understand how preparations for a burglary, if there were any, would explain her going out alone at that time of night – without saying a word to anyone, apparently.'

‘She seems to have taken a suit-case with her, too, sir,' Bobby remarked. ‘That seems curious, I think.'

‘Yes, I know. It was empty,' Colonel Lawson said. ‘I looked at it. Nothing to show what had been in it.' He added slowly: ‘If we knew that, we should know a lot more.'

Bobby's sense of discipline was too acute to allow him to criticize this remark. He did glance at Moulland, but saw the superintendent nodding a grave agreement.

‘Yes, sir,' Moulland said. ‘If we knew that... Have to concentrate on finding out what that suit-case held.'

Bobby thought otherwise, but thought, also, that very likely he was wrong and they were right. By now they had passed the shrubbery and were near the house. In front of it, on the other side of the broad gravel drive by which the building was approached, and near to a large flourishing clump of rhododendrons growing there, stood three men, talking eagerly and excitedly together. They were: Farman, the butler, in his sober black; Miller, the chauffeur, in shirtsleeves, fresh from the garage where he had been getting out the car; and O'Hara, the gardener. At the front-door the women of the household were standing in a group, talking together excitedly and watching the three men. 

Colonel Lawson said: ‘Looks as if they had found something over there.'

With the other two following him, he walked across to where the three men stood by the rhododendron-bush. Both the butler and the chauffeur knew who he was, and Farman said: ‘There's been someone hiding here, sir. There's matches and cigarette-ends.'

‘Soon as I came along,' explained the gardener, O'Hara, ‘I saw someone had been at the rhododendrons – and no stray dog nor cat, neither. You can see for yourself, sir. It's as plain as the nose on your face there's been someone hiding there – all night long, in my humble opinion.'

In fact, a clearly defined depression in the soft mould provided sufficient evidence that someone had been lying there, concealed, for a considerable time. A number of matches and cigarette-ends were lying about, and their condition, and that of the ground, showed plainly that position had been taken up after, and not before, the heavy rain of the previous night. But careful search failed to reveal anything else of significance.

‘Looks like burglary. Looks like someone watching for a chance to get inside,' Colonel Lawson remarked. ‘One of the gang, hiding and waiting here. Another of them commits the murder and bolts. First fellow waits here till he gets tired, and then clears off, too. Only, what made Lady Cambers go out, and what had she in her suit-case?' Bobby thought this obsession about what the suit-case had contained was unfortunate and more likely to confuse than help. But still he supposed he might be all wrong in holding that belief. He had been examining the cigarette-ends, and now he said: ‘Bulgarian Tempo, sir. There's one here only half smoked, with the name quite plain on it. Expensive things; not the sort a burglar would be likely to smoke – not unless he was very flush. And then he wouldn't be out on a fresh job.'

‘I don't think that follows,' observed Colonel Lawson. ‘I suppose big jobs are often planned months ahead; it doesn't follow a job is taken on because of being hard-up. Or expensive cigarettes might come from some other burglary – part of the loot.' He turned to Farman: ‘You don't know anyone here who smokes that brand of cigarette, do you?' he asked.

‘No, sir; not that I ever noticed, sir,' Farman answered, his face so wooden and expressionless Bobby felt certain that he lied.

For a little time longer they all lingered, staring, wondering, guessing, all oddly affected by this idea of the unknown watcher who had stayed in hiding here, watching and waiting after murder had been committed elsewhere.

‘Did he know?' Colonel Lawson said, half to himself. ‘If he knew, why did he stay? If he didn't know, why did he come?'

But these were questions to which none of those present knew the answer.

Except for the scattered match-stalks, the numerous cigarette-ends, the depression in the damp mould so clearly marked as to prove that the person making it had been lying there some considerable time, and for one or two plainly defined footprints, there was nothing to suggest who that personage had been, or what the object and intention of so prolonged a vigil. And footprints in these days of the mass-production of boots and shoes are seldom of much value, nor did these present any characteristic likely to be of use in tracing their owner.

‘Number eight size, I think,' Bobby remarked. ‘No hobnails or anything like that. But that doesn't go for much. Every farm-labourer to-day has his heavy boots he wears at work and his light shoes for afterwards.'

‘There had better be plaster casts taken,' Colonel Lawson said.

Jordan was left on guard to see that nothing was disturbed, and the chief constable, accompanied now only by Moulland and by Bobby, so freely had he been obliged to shed his retinue, went on to the house, where, at the front door, all its inmates were gathered to await him.

For the discovery that some unknown person had for some unknown reason been hiding among the rhododendrons had completed their disarray. Only Lady Hirlpool, upheld by a sense of responsibility, and Amy Emmers, Lady Cambers's own maid, upheld by her own strength of character, retained their self-control. The cook was in tears; the kitchenmaid in flight; the parlourmaid in something like hysterics; the first and second housemaids in each other's arms; the tweeny in a chair, hovering between an instinct to faint and a presentiment that no one would take any notice if she did. The arrival of the chief constable and his two followers did little to reassure them. Apparently the least they anticipated was immediate arrest, and not until they had all been shepherded back into their own special domain, behind the green-baize service door, could Colonel Lawson begin his task.

‘All lost their heads,' he grumbled, ‘except that tall girl. Who is she?'

‘Amy Emmers,' Lady Hirlpool explained. ‘She was poor dear Lotty's own maid; and of course they've lost their heads. Their mistress has lost her life.'

‘Oh, yes, well,' conceded Lawson, admitting, as it were, that possibly a murder in a quiet country house is more disturbing, and even terrifying, than it appears to the calm official mind.

‘Besides,' Lady Hirlpool went on, pressing her advantage, ‘it's simply awful to think of poor Lotty's murderer hiding in the rhododendrons, waiting for her to go out. I feel like screaming, myself, when I think of it.'

‘Yes, yes,' agreed the chief constable, somewhat hurriedly, for he was by no means sure that the threatened screams were not on the point of production.

Indeed that very nearly happened, for Lady Hirlpool, upheld before the household staff by a certain sense of responsibility, had lost that feeling in this official presence. What saved the situation before she finally yielded and let herself go was that Bobby moved forward and whispered ferociously into her ear: ‘Buck up, grandmother. Buck up, I tell you.'

‘Yes, Bobby, I'll try,' she answered, as meekly as though never had she applied her slipper to the appropriate portion of his anatomy, and with a sigh of relief for the crisis he saw averted, Colonel Lawson went on: ‘Puzzling feature of the case, that is. Looks as if the fellow had been there nearly all night. Yet it seems the murder was committed somewhere before midnight – soon after that heavy rain there was. If he was the murderer, what was he waiting for? And if he was someone else, what was the motive?'

‘Waiting to get into the house,' explained Lady Hirlpool, ‘and then, most likely, he would have murdered us all.' She caught her grandson's stern warning eye and gulped down the trembling sob of fear she had not quite been able to repress. ‘Poor Lotty kept all her jewellery in the house. I told her it wasn't safe,' she added.

‘Nothing's been disturbed, I hope?' Lawson asked. ‘I want to examine her rooms very carefully.'

‘Oh, no, nobody's touched anything,' Lady Hirlpool assured him. ‘Nobody would have, even without Bobby's message. Everyone was too frightened. Bobby's my grandson, you know. He's at Scotland Yard. It's so lucky he's here. He'll be able to tell you just what you ought to do.'

‘Oh, yes, yes, quite so,' agreed the chief constable, with a baleful glance at the unlucky Bobby, on whom, too, Superintendent Moulland fixed a cold, menacing gaze, so that shivers ran up and down that young man's back as he miserably drooped and wished with ardour that grandmothers were both less partial and less outspoken.

But Lady Hirlpool beamed on him, quite sure that now she had retrieved her position in his eyes she knew her near approach to a breakdown had slightly compromised.

‘But he needn't have worried about anything being touched,' she went on. ‘After we knew what had happened, none of us dared move. We all just held each other's hands and tried to think it wasn't true – all except Emmers. She's braver. And then O'Hara called Farman outside, because he had found that someone had been hiding in the rhododendrons. After that,' said her ladyship frankly, ‘we' all made up our minds we were all going to have our throats cut immediately. Even Emmers, too.'

‘Could you take us to Lady Cambers's room?' Lawson asked, just as, more than a little to the relief of Lady Hirlpool, Farman appeared in the doorway.

‘Oh, here's Farman. He'll show you everything,' she said. ‘I'll go and sit with the maids. They won't be so frightened if I'm with them. Bobby can come and tell me if you want anything more.'

As no objection was made, she vanished through the baize door with some precipitation, and probably it was not only the maids who found themselves less afraid in company. The chief constable beckoned to Farman.

‘Which is Lady Cambers's room?' he asked. ‘I understand there is one sitting-room she used more than the rest.'

‘Yes, sir. This way, sir,' Farman answered, and led them down the passage leading from the hall to the garden door out of which opened the room required. The door was closed but not locked, and for that Farman apologized.

‘The bedroom door I locked myself, sir,' he explained, ‘but I hadn't the key for this. Lady Cambers kept it herself. She used to lock the door sometimes when she was busy with letters or business. But I told the staff no one was to touch anything, and I'm sure none of them did. None of them moved out of the hall, I think, sir. Very upset, sir. Naturally, sir, if I may say so.'

‘Where did Lady Cambers keep her keys?' Lawson asked.

‘In her hand-bag. She was very particular about them,' answered the butler.

The chief constable turned to Moulland and Bobby.

‘I can't remember there were any keys found on her,' he remarked.

Neither Bobby nor Moulland had seen any keys, though it was Sergeant Jordan who, while waiting the arrival of his superior officers, had checked the possessions of the dead woman.

They all entered the room. It was of only moderate size, comfortably and plainly furnished, in good taste, and with touches of daintiness and refinement, but also with a show of severity that proclaimed its use for the business of the estate. By the window stood a writing-table; on it a blotting-book, pens, and ink. There was a larger table in the middle of the room, with two chairs drawn up between it and the fire-place, as if two persons had been sitting there and talking. In one corner was a small safe, built into the thick outer wall of the old house. Lawson went across to the writing-table, looked at the leather-bound blotting-book lying there, opened it with some vague idea of finding important information on the blotting-paper, observed that it was quite clean and new except for a row of figures that did not interest him, and then began to open in turn the drawers of the table. Bobby took the opportunity of saying to Farman: ‘Do you know if Lady Cambers ever used a fountain-pen? I don't think I ever saw her with one.'