Grave Mistake (21 page)

“Only because I was going to ring up and ask if I might have a word with you about him. I think you introduced him to the Upper Quintern scene, didn’t you?”

“Well — fleetingly, I suppose I did.”

Verity said: “Would you excuse me? I’ve got a telephone call I must make and I
must
see about the flowers.”

“Are you being diplomatic?” Mr. Markos asked archly.

“I don’t even know how,” she said and left them not, she hoped, too hurriedly. The two men sat down.

“I’ll come straight to the point, shall I?” Alleyn said. “Can you and if so, will you, tell me anything of Dr. Schramm’s history? Where he qualified, for instance? Why he changed his name? Anything?”

“Are you checking his own account of himself? Or hasn’t he given a satisfactory one? You won’t answer that, of course, and very properly not.”

“I don’t in the least mind answering. I haven’t asked him.”

“As yet?”

“That’s right. As yet.”

“Well,” said Mr. Markos, airily waving his hand, “I’m afraid I’m not much use to you. I know next to nothing of his background except that he took his degree somewhere in Switzerland. I had no idea he’d changed his name, still less why. We met when crossing the Atlantic in the
Q.E
. Two and subsequently in New York at a cocktail party given at the St. Regis by fellow passengers. Later on that same evening at his suggestion we dined together and afterwards visited some remarkable clubs to which he had the entrée. The entertainment was curious. That was the last time I saw him until he rang me up at Mardling on his way to Greengages. On the spur of the moment I asked him to dinner. I have not seen him since then.”

“Did he ever talk about his professional activities — I mean whether he had a practise in New York or was attached to a hospital or clinic or what have you?”

“Not in any detail. In the ship going over he was the life and soul of a party that revolved round an acquaintance of mine — the Princess Palevsky. I rather gathered that he acquired her and two American ladies of considerable renown as — patients. I imagine,” said Mr. Markos smoothly, “that he is the happy possessor of a certain expertise in that direction. And, really, my dear Alleyn, that is the full extent of my acquaintance with Basil Schramm.”

“What do you think of him?” said Alleyn abruptly.

“
Think
of him? What can I say? And what exactly do you mean?”

“Did you form an opinion of his character, for instance? Nice chap? Lightweight? Man of integrity?”

“He is quite entertaining. A lightweight, certainly, but good value as a mixer and with considerable charm. I would trust him,” said Mr. Markos, “no further than I could toss a grand piano. A concert grand.”

“Where women are concerned?”

“Particularly where women are concerned.”

“I see,” said Alleyn cheerfully and got up. “I must go,” he said, “I’m running late. By the way, is Miss Foster at Quintern Place now, do you happen to know?”

“Prunella? No. She and Gideon went up to London this morning. They’ll be back for dinner. She’s staying with us.”

“Ah yes. I must go. Would you apologize for me to Miss Preston?”

“I’ll do that. Sorry not to have been more informative.‘’

“Oh,” Alleyn said, “the visit has not been unproductive. Goodbye to you.”

Fox was in the car in the lane. When he saw Alleyn he started up his engine.

“To the nearest telephone,” Alleyn said. “We’ll use the one at Quintern Place. We’ve got to lay on surveillance and be quick about it. The local branch’ll have to spare a copper. Send him up to Quintern as a labourer. He’s to dig up the fireplace and hearth and dig deep and anything he finds that’s not rubble, keep it. And when he’s finished tell him to board up the room and seal it. If anyone asks what he’s up to he’ll have to say he’s under police orders. But I hope no one will ask.”

“What about Gardener?”

“Gardener’s digging the grave.”

“Fair enough,” said Fox.

“Claude Carter may be there though.”

“Oh,” said Fox. “Aha. Him.”

But before they reached Quintern they met Mrs. Jim on her way to do flowers in the church. She said Claude Carter had gone out that morning. “To see a man about a car,” he had told her and he said he would ba away all day.

“Mrs. Jim,” Alleyn said. “We want a telephone and we want to take a look inside the house. Miss Foster’s out. Could you help us? Do you have a key?”

She looked fixedly at him. Her workaday hands moved uneasily.

“I don’t know as I have the right,” she said. “It’s not my business.”

“I know. But it is, I promise you, very important. An urgent call. Look, come with us, let us in, follow us about if you like or we’ll drive you back to the church at once. Will you do that? Please?”

There was another and a longer pause. “All right,” said Mrs. Jim and got into the car.

They arrived at Quintern and were admitted by Mrs. Jim’s key, which she kept under a stone in the coal house.

While Fox rang the Upper Quintern police station from the staff sitting-room telephone. Alleyn went out to the stable yard. Bruce’s mushroom beds were of course in the same shape as they had been earlier in the afternoon when he left them, taking his shovel with him. The ramshackle door into the deserted room was shut. Alleyn dragged it open and stood on the threshold. At first glance it looked and smelt as it had on his earlier visit. The westering sun shone through the dirty window and showed traces of his own and Carter’s footprints on the dusty floorboards. Nobody else’s, he thought, but more of Carter’s than his own. The litter of rubbish lay undisturbed in the corner. With a dry-mouthed sensation of foreboding he turned to the fireplace.

Alleyn began to swear softly and prolifically, an exercise in which he did not often indulge.

He was squatting over the fireplace when Fox appeared at the window, saw him and looked in at the yard door.

“They’re sending up a chap at once,” he said.

“Like hell, they are,” said Alleyn. “Look here.”

“Had I better walk in?”

“The point’s academic.”

Fox took four giant strides on tiptoe and stooped over the hearth. “Broken up, eh?” he said. “Fancy that, eh?”

“As you say. But look at this.” He pointed a long finger. “Do you see what I see?”

“Remains of a square hole. Something regular in shape like a box or tin’s been dug out. Right?”

“I think so. And take a look here. And here. And in the rubble.”

“Crepe soles, by gum.”

“So what do you say now to the point marked bloody X?”

“I’d say the name of the game is Carter. But why? What’s he up to?”

“I’ll tell you this, Br’er Fox. When I looked in here before this hearth was as it had been for Lord knows how long.”

“Gardener left when we left,” Fox mused.

“And is digging a grave and should continue to do so for some considerable time.”

“Anybody up here since then?”

“Not Mrs. Jim, at all events.”

“So we’re left—” Fox said.

“—with the elusive Claude. We’ll have to put Bailey and Thompson in but I bet you that’s going to be the story.”

“Yes. And he’s seeing a man about a car,” said Fox bitterly. “It might as well be a dog.”

“And we might as well continue in our futile ways by seeing if there’s a pick and shovel on the premises. After all, he couldn’t have rootled up the hearth with his fingernails. Where’s the gardener’s shed?”

It was near at hand, hard by the asparagus beds. They stood in the doorway and if they had entered would have fallen over a pick that lay on the floor, an untidy note in an impeccably tidy interior. Bruce kept his tools as they should be kept, polished, sharpened and in racks. Beside the pick, leaning against a bench was a lightweight shovel and, nearby, a crowbar.

They all bore signs of recent and hard usage.

Alleyn stooped down and without touching, examined them.

“Scratches,” he said. “Blunted. Chucked in here in a hurry. And take a look — crepe-soled prints on the path.”

“Is Bob your uncle, then?” said Fox.

“If you’re asking whether Claude Carter came down to the stable yard as soon as Bruce Gardener and you and I left it, dug up the hearth and returned the tools to this shed, I suppose he
is
. But if you’re asking whether this means that Claude Carter murdered his stepmother I can’t say it follows as the night the day.”

Alleyn reached inside the door and took a key from a nail. He shut and locked the door and put the key in his pocket.

“Bailey and Thompson can pick it up from the nick,” he said. “They’d better get here as soon as possible.”

He led the way back to the car. Halfway there he stopped. “I tell you what, Br’er Fox,” he said. “I’ve got a strong feeling of being just a couple of lengths behind and being beaten to the post.”

“What,” said Fox, pursuing his own line of thought, “would it be? What was it? That’s what I ask myself.”

“And how do you answer?”

“I don’t. I can’t. Can you?”

“One can always make wild guesses, of course. Mr. Markos was facetious about buried treasure. He might turn out to be right.”

“Buried treasure,” Fox echoed disgustedly. “What sort of buried treasure?”

“How do you fancy a Black Alexander stamp?” said Alleyn.

i

Mr. Markos had stayed at Keys for only a short time after Alleyn had gone. He had quietened down quite a lot and Verity wondered if she had turned into one of those dreadful spinsters of an all too certain age who imagine that any man who shows them the smallest civility is making a pass.

He had said goodbye with a preoccupied air. His black liquid gaze was turned upon her as if in speculation. He seemed to be on the edge of asking her something but, instead, thanked her for “suffering” him to invite himself, took her hand, kissed his own thumb and left her.

Verity cut roses and stood them in scalding water for half an hour. Then she tidied herself up and drove down to St. Crispin’s.

It was quite late in the afternoon when she got there. Lengthening shadows stretched out toward gravestones lolling this way and that, in and out of the sunshine. A smell, humid yet earthy, hung on the air and so did the sound of bees.

As Verity, carrying roses, climbed the steps, she heard the rhythmic, purposeful squelch of a shovel at work. It came from beyond the church and of course she knew what it was: Bruce at his task. Suddenly she was filled with a liking for Bruce: for the direct way he thought about Sybil’s death and his wish to perform the only service he could provide. It no longer seemed to matter that he so readily took to sentimental manifestations and she was sorry she had made mock of them. She thought that of all Sybil’s associates, even including Prunella, he was probably the only one who honestly mourned her. I won’t shy off, she thought. When I’ve done the flowers, little as I like graves, I’ll go and talk to him.

The Vicar’s wife and Mrs. Field-Innis and the Ladies Guild, including Mrs. Jim, were in the church and well advanced with their flowers and brass vases. Verity joined Mrs. Jim, who was in charge of Bruce’s lilies from Quintern and was being bossily advised by Mrs. Field-Innis what to do with them.

An unoccupied black trestle stood in the transept: waiting for Sybil. The Ladies Guild, going to and fro with jugs of water, gave it a wide berth as if, thought Verity, they were cutting it dead. They greeted Verity and spoke in special voices.

“Come on, Mrs. Jim,” said Verity cheerfully, “let’s do ours together.” So they put their lilies and red roses in two big jars on either side of the chancel steps, flanking the trestle. “They’ll be gay and hopeful there,” said Verity. Some of the ladies looked as if they thought she had chosen the wrong adjectives.

When Mrs. Jim had fixed the final lily in its vase, she and Verity replaced the water jugs in their cupboard.

“Police again,” Mrs. Jim muttered with characteristic abruptness. “Same two, twice today. Give me a lift up there. Got me to let them in, and the big one drove me back. I’ll have to tell Miss Prunella, won’t I?”

“Yes, I expect you must.”

They went out into the westering sunlight, golden now and shining full in their faces.

“I’m going round to have a word with Bruce,” said Verity. “Are you coming?”

“I seen him before. I’m not overly keen on graves. Gives me the creeps,” said Mrs. Jim. “He’s making a nice job of it, though. Jim’ll be pleased. He’s still doubled up and crabby with it. We don’t reckon he’ll make it to the funeral but you never know with lumbago. I’ll be getting along, then.”

The Passcoigne plot was a sunny clearing in the trees. There was quite a company of headstones there, some so old that the inscriptions were hard to make out. They stood in grass that was kept scythed but were not formally tended. Verity preferred them like that. One day the last of them would crumble and fall. Earth to earth.

Bruce had got some way with Sybil’s grave and now sat on the edge of it with his red handkerchief on his knee and his bread and cheese and bottle of beer beside him. To Verity he looked like a timeless figure and the grave-digger’s half-forgotten doggerel came into her head.

His shovel was stuck in the heap of earth he had built up and behind him was a neat pile of small sticky pine branches, sharpened at the ends. Their resinous scent hung on the air.

“You’ve been hard at work, Bruce.”

“I have so. There’s a vein of clay runs through the soil here and that makes heavy going of it. I’ve broken off to eat my piece and wet my whistle and then I’ll set to again. It’ll tak’ me all my time to get done before nightfall and there’s the pine branches foreby to line it.”

“That’s a nice thing to do. How good they smell.”

“They do that. She’d be well enough pleased, I daresay.”

“I’m sure of it,” said Verity. She hesitated for a moment and then said: “I’ve just heard about your link with Captain Carter. It must have been quite a shock for you — finding out after all these years.”

“You may weel ca’ it that,” he said heavily. “And to tell you the truth, it gets to be more of a shock, the more I think aboot it. Ou aye, it does so. It’s unco queer news for a body to absorb. I don’t seem,” said Bruce, scratching his head, “to be able to sort it out. He was a fine man and a fine officer, was the Captain.”

“I’m sure he was.”

“Aweel,” he said, “I’d best get on for I’ve a long way to go.”

He stood up, spat on his hands and pulled his shovel out of the heap of soil.

She left him hard at work and drove herself home.

Bruce dug through sunset and twilight and when it grew dark lit an acetylene lamp. His wildly distorted shadow leapt and gesticulated among the trees. He had almost completed his task when the east window, representing the Last Supper, came to life and glowed like a miraculous apparition, above his head. He heard the sound of a motor drawing up. The Vicar came round the corner of the church using a torch.

“They’ve arrived, Gardener,” he said: “I thought you would like to know.”

Bruce put on his coat. Together they walked round to the front of the church.

Sybil, in her coffin, was being carried up the steps. The doors were open and light from the interior flooded the entrances. Even outside, the scent of roses and lilies was heavily noticeable. The Vicar in his cassock welcomed his guest for the night and walked before her into her hostelry. When he came away, locking the door behind him, he left the light on in the sanctuary. From outside the church glowed faintly.

Bruce went back to her grave.

A general police search for Claude Carter had been set up.

In his room up at Quintern, Alleyn and Fox had completed an extremely professional exploration. The room, slapped up twice a week by Mrs. Jim, was drearily disordered and smelt of cigarette smoke and of an indefinable and more personal staleness. They had come at last upon a japanned tin box at the bottom of a rucksack shoved away at the top of the wardrobe. It was wrapped in a sweater and submerged in a shirt, three pairs of unwashed socks and a wind-jacket. The lock presented no difficulties to Mr. Fox.

Inside the box was a notebook and several papers.

And among these a rough copy of the plan of the room in the stable yard, the mushroom shed and the point marked X.

ii

“Earth to earth,” said the Vicar, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust. In sure and certain hope…”

To Alleyn, standing a little apart from them, the people around the grave composed themselves into a group that might well have been chosen by the Douanier Rousseau: simplified persons of whom the most prominent were clothed in black. Almost, they looked as if they had been cut out of cardboard, painted and then endowed with a precarious animation. One expected their movements, involving the lowering of the coffin and the ritual handful of earth, to be jerky.

There they all were and he wondered how many of them had Sybil Foster in their thoughts. Her daughter, supported on either side by the two men now become her guardians-in-chief? Verity Preston, who stood nearby and to whom Prunella had turned when the commitment began? Bruce Gardener, in his Harris tweed suit, black arm-band and tie, decently performing his job as stand-in sexton with his gigantic wee laddie in support? Young Mr. Rattisbon, decorous and perhaps a little tired from standing for so long? Mrs. Jim Jobbin among the representatives of the Ladies Guild, bright-eyed and wooden-faced? Sundry friends in the county. And finally, taller than the rest, a little apart from them, impeccably turned out and so handsome that he looked as if he had been type-cast for the role of distinguished medico — Dr. Basil Schramm, the presumably stricken but undisclosed fiancé of the deceased and her principal heir.

Claude Carter, however, was missing.

Alleyn had looked for him in church. At both sittings of the inquest Claude had contrived to get himself into an inconspicuous place and might have been supposed to lurk behind a pillar or in a sort of no-man’s-land near the organ but out here in the sunny graveyard he was nowhere to be seen. There was one large Victorian angel, slightly lopsided on its massive base but pointing, like Agnes in
David Copperfield
, upward. Alleyn trifled with the notion that Claude might be behind it and would come sidling out when all was over, but no, there was no sign of him. This was not consistent. One would have expected him to put in a token appearance. Alleyn wondered if by any chance something further had cropped up about Claude’s suspected drug-smuggling activities and he was making himself scarce accordingly. But if anything of that sort had occurred Alleyn would have been informed.

It was all over. Bruce Gardener began to fill in the grave. He was assisted by the wee lad, the six-foot adolescent known to the village as Daft Artie, he being, as was widely acknowledged, no more than fifty p. in the pound.

Alleyn, who had kept in the background, withdrew still further and waited.

People now came up to Prunella, said what they could find to say and walked away, not too fast but with the sense of release and buoyancy that follows the final disposal of (however deeply loved) the dead. Prunella shook hands, kissed, thanked. The Markos pair stood behind her and Verity a little farther off.

The last to come was Dr. Schramm. Alleyn saw the fractional pause before Prunella touched his offered hand. He heard her say: “Thank you for the beautiful flowers,” loudly and quickly and Schramm murmur something inaudible. It was to Verity that Prunella turned when he had gone.

Alleyn had moved further along the pathway from the grave to the church. It was flanked by flowers lying in rows on the grass, some in cellophane wrappings, some picked in local gardens and one enormous professional bouquet of red roses and carnations. Alleyn read the card.

“From B.S. with love.”

“Mr. Alleyn?” said Prunella, coming up behind him. He turned quickly. “It was kind of you to come,” she said. “Thank you.”

“What nice manners you have,” Alleyn said gently. “Your mama must have brought you up beautifully.”

She gave him a surprised look and a smile.

“Did you hear that, Godma V?” she said and she and her three supporters went down the steps and drove away.

When the Vicar had gone into the vestry to take his surplice off and there was nobody left in the churchyard, Alleyn went to the grave. Bruce said: “She’s laid to her rest, then, Superintendent, and whatever brought her to it, there’s no disturbing her in the latter end.”

He spat on his hands. “Come on, lad,” he said. “What are you gawping at?”

Impossible to say how old Daft Artie was — somewhere between puberty and manhood — with an incipient beard and a feral look as if he would have little difficulty in melting into the landscape and was prepared to do so at a moment’s alarm.

He set to, with excessive, almost frantic energy. With a slurp and a flump, shovelfuls of dark, friable soil fell rhythmically into Sybil Foster’s grave.

“Do you happen,” Alleyn asked Bruce, “to have seen Mr. Claude Carter this morning?”

Bruce shot a brief glance at him. “Na, na,” he said, plying his shovel, “I have not but there’s nothing out of the ordinary in that circumstance. Him and me don’t hit it off. And foreby I don’t fancy he’s been just all that comfortable within himself. Nevertheless it’s a disgrace on his head not to pay his last respects. Aye, I’ll say that for him: a black disgrace,” said Bruce, with relish.

“When
did
you last see him?”

“Ou now — when? I couldna say with any precision. My engagements take me round the district, ye ken. I’m sleeping up at Quintern but I’m up and awa’ before eight o’clock, I take my dinner with my widowed sister, Mrs. Black, puir soul up in yon cottage on the hill there, and return to Quintern in time for supper and my bed, which is in the chauffeur’s old room above the garage. Not all that far,” said Bruce, pointedly, “from where you unearthed him, so to speak.”

“Ah yes, by the way,” said Alleyn, “we’re keeping observation on those premises. For the time being.”

“You are! For what purpose! Och!” said Bruce irritably. “The Lord knows and you, no doubt, won’t let on.”

“Oh,” said Alleyn airily. “It’s a formality, really. Pure routine. I fancy Miss Foster hasn’t forgotten that her mother was thinking of turning part of the buildings into a flat for you?”

“Has she not? I wouldna mind and that’s a fact. I wouldna say no for I’m crampit up like a hen in a wee coopie where I am and God forgive me, I’m sick and tired of listening to the praises of the recently deceased.”

“The recently deceased!” Alleyn exclaimed. “Do you mean Mrs. Foster?”

Bruce grounded his shovel and glared at him. “I am shocked,” he said at last, pursing up his mouth to show how shocked he was and using his primmest tones, “that you should entertain such a notion. It comes little short of an insult. I referred to the fact that my sister, Mrs. Black, is recently widowed.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Och, well. It was an excusable misunderstanding. So there’s some idea still of fixing the flat?” He paused and stared at Alleyn. “That’s not what you’d call a reason for having the premises policed, however,” he said dryly.

“Bruce,” Alleyn said. “Do you know what Mr. Carter was doing in that room on the morning I first visited you?”