Hobby of Murder (16 page)

Ian gave a slight shake of his head. ‘Mollie’s never been able to keep anything to herself. Almost as soon as she and Brian met I could see there was something between them, and just in the way she assured me there was nothing, it was obvious that there was. It’s been like the way she’s talked as if this house is perfection and the house she’s always wanted, I could tell she was overdoing it and was longing to get away.’

‘That struck me too,’ Andrew said.

‘The only perfection about it was that by coming here she met Brian.’ For the first time there was some bitterness in Ian’s voice. ‘But she tried hard to make it work, I’ll give her that.’

‘You’ve been trying, too.’

‘Well, I suppose I’ve felt responsible for things going wrong. I ought never to have married her. I didn’t give her the kind of love she wanted. I’m too old for her, for one thing.’

‘She didn’t have to marry you.’

‘I think she felt she did. She’d seen what I went through when Vera died, how lonely and helpless I was, and I think she felt she’d got to look after me. And she wanted to be married to someone. She wasn’t young any more, and though she’d had her affairs before, they’d none of them lasted and I was offering her security and a change in her whole way of living. Must be pretty boring, being a secretary in an accountant’s office. She didn’t think about the fact that there are all sorts of ways of being bored. As she didn’t think that after she was safely married she might meet with Brian Singleton.’

‘Ian, I’ve got a feeling that you’re experiencing a kind of relief at what’s happened this morning,’ Andrew said.

Ian swirled round the remains of the whisky in his glass,
looking into it as if he might find some truth lurking in its depths.

‘Well, perhaps I do,’ he said. ‘It’s as if I’ve shed a load I didn’t even know I was carrying. We’re very fond of each other, you see. We’ve a lot of real affection for one another. And we’ve neither of us wanted to hurt the other. Now I can stop trying to have feelings I haven’t got. I expect I sound a pretty cold-blooded fish to you.’

‘No, only someone who set himself standards he couldn’t possibly live up to. This not wanting to hurt each other, the truth is it’s probably what you’ve both been wanting to do more than anything else ever since the affair with Brian started. The affection may be real, but so’s a lot of hate and anger.’

‘I don’t hate Brian,’ Ian said. ‘I’m not even angry with him.’

Andrew looked sceptical.

‘I’m quite glad he’s going to take Mollie off my hands,’ Ian insisted.

‘You’re sure he will?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘When she spoke to me about it, she didn’t seem really certain what his feelings were.’

‘I don’t think she need have any worries about it now that he’s going to have plenty of money.’

‘I’d never have thought she was mercenary.’

‘I don’t think she is. But Brian wouldn’t care for going through with a divorce, however peaceful, while he’s in his present job, and Mollie might not like going on living here through it and remarrying and trying to fit in with the wives of his colleagues. Not that they’d have much difficulty about all that nowadays, but they’d probably prefer to get away. It isn’t as if the job’s anything specially distinguished or that Brian’s particularly talented. I don’t believe he is.
My guess is they’ll look for something abroad. Anyway, money always makes everything easier.’

‘You’re lucky you haven’t any children.’

‘Thank God, yes!’

‘She told me she wished you’d find another woman for yourself.’

‘I think that’s something I can do without.’

‘What will you do? Stay on here?’

Ian looked vacantly at the empty fireplace. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t thought. I haven’t even begun to think what it’s going to mean. I’ve just got this feeling something’s settled and on the whole I’m thankful for it. You never went through anything like this, did you, Andrew?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve a feeling you think my attitude’s all wrong. I oughtn’t to be taking it all so calmly.’

‘Indeed I don’t, Ian. I think it’s very fortunate you can feel as you do. Whether you’ll still be feeling quite so calm when the shock’s worn off I wouldn’t like to prophesy.’

‘I think I’ll probably move back to London,’ Ian said. ‘I might find something in your neighbourhood. Have you anything against that?’

‘Of course not. But you’ll find it pretty expensive these days. When Nell and I bought our flat there it was going for a song, but prices have gone as mad there as everywhere else.’

‘Luckily, money isn’t one of the things I’ve got to worry about.’

‘But what about your birds? You won’t be able to do much bird-watching in London.’

Ian gave a little sigh. ‘I’ll miss it, but recently, you know, it’s become a bit of a substitute for marriage. And I can still go to Kenya or the Gambia with the RSPB chaps, not only this year, but as long as I feel up to going. For some
years, I hope. But I’ll have to find something to occupy me in between whiles. Have you any suggestions?’

Andrew shook his head. ‘It’s hard enough for me to find the right thing to do myself, now that Robert Hooke’s off my hands. I ought never to have finished that book, you know. Working on it kept me pretty contented. But the idea of seeing it in print became a fatal temptation. I had an absurd sort of idea after meeting Eleanor Clancy that I might settle down to writing a life of her great-grandfather. I was going to ask her to let me take a look at his letters, to see if there was enough in them for me to be able to make something interesting of them. The illustrations, I thought, were all to be found in those quarter-plate negatives she’d kept so carefully. Beautiful things, I was ready to believe. But now just a heap of broken glass. There’s a madman loose in this village, Ian, or else someone exceptionally cunning.’

‘What could be cunning about smashing those negatives?’ Ian asked.

‘Perhaps to make us say what I’ve just said, that there’s a madman on the loose.’

‘You don’t believe there is?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Isn’t there always an element of madness in murder? And with two murders that’s something to think about.’

‘Do you think Eleanor really knew who killed Luke Singleton and was blackmailing him for it, and that’s why she was killed?’

‘That’s how it looks, doesn’t it?’

Andrew leant back in his chair, stretching his long legs out before him. He wished that he knew what Ian really wanted now, to have someone to talk to, or to be left to himself, to brood on his own personal problems in quiet. Andrew felt fairly sure that he himself would have wanted to be alone. Not that he had ever experienced anything
remotely like what Ian was having to face now. Particularly in Andrew’s early days with Nell, he and she had quarrelled from time to time. Not very often and not at all fiercely. The deeper things in their marriage had never felt threatened. But he had other friends whose marriages, for one reason or another, had gone on the rocks and he had several times found himself the recipient of confidences which embarrassed him because he felt so little able to help. All he could do was listen, something at which he was fairly accomplished, and wait for some sign that would give him a hint of what he ought to do. For the moment he felt that talk of murder and blackmail was a fairly useful distraction.

‘She went out on to the common to meet someone who gave her a thousand pounds and then killed her,’ he said. ‘And someone must be feeling very annoyed with himself that in the struggle that I suppose there was, she flung her handbag out into the lake. He’s a thousand pounds the poorer. Why he gave her the money in the first place, I don’t pretend to understand.’

‘What strikes me about that thousand pounds,’ Ian said, ‘is that it’s really rather a small sum to find you’ve got to pay if you’ve been detected in a murder. I’d have expected it to be twenty or thirty times that amount at least.’

‘It might have been just a first instalment,’ Andrew said. ‘As much as the victim could lay his hands on in a hurry.’

‘Or perhaps Eleanor wasn’t a very experienced blackmailer and didn’t know the value of her knowledge,’ Ian suggested.

‘Mollie didn’t believe she was a blackmailer at all.’

‘And she probably doesn’t believe Brian’s a murderer.’

‘But you do?’

‘Actually, I find it very hard to believe,’ Ian said. ‘Not because of his character. That’s something I prefer not to think about too much at the moment. But the idea that when he pulled out that flower to give to Mollie he actually
managed to flick a pellet of poison into his brother’s cup across the table would mean he’s a cleverer conjuror than I believe he is. But I don’t say it’s impossible. And the only other people who could have done it are Inspector Roland and Felicity. I believe they could have done it fairly easily, sitting either side of Singleton as they were. And Eleanor was so close to them that she might have seen one of them do it. But then there’s the problem of that meeting on the common. I can’t believe Eleanor would ever have gone up there all alone to meet Roland. She’d have been too scared of him. She might have agreed to meet Felicity. Eleanor was the taller and could have thought she was the stronger of the two, but Felicity could have taken her by surprise somehow. And about Eleanor having been given the thousand pounds before she was killed …’ Ian paused, his forehead wrinkled in thought.

‘Yes?’ Andrew said.

‘Suppose it
was
Felicity she met,’ Ian said hesitantly. He was thinking something out as he went along. ‘Eleanor wouldn’t have been afraid of her and might have agreed to meet her on the common. And Felicity gave her the money as a sort of bait and then in the friendliest way possible, drew her, chatting, towards the bridge. She wanted to do the job there, because she wanted to knock her into the water, to make it harder for the exact time of the murder to be fixed. But it was Felicity’s bad luck that the handbag with the money in it went into the water too. She’d have been very angry. I don’t believe Felicity could spare a thousand pounds very easily.’

‘But what had Felicity against Luke Singleton?’ Andrew asked. ‘I’ll grant you all the rest is possible. But why did she do that first murder?’

Ian gave an ironic little laugh.

‘I’m not serious, you know. I don’t believe for a moment Felicity did it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, it’s true I know very little about her private life. I’m quite sure there’ve been men in it, and she could probably have been married several times over if she’d wanted it. But she likes her work and I suppose she doesn’t want children. You said just now how lucky Mollie and I are that we haven’t got children, and I agree with you. If we had, I’d feel we’d got to make our marriage stick together somehow. But unless you want children, what’s the point of marrying? Why did I marry Mollie?’

Ian’s voice had changed. A harsher note had come into it. Andrew began to feel fairly sure that the time had come for him to find some reason for going up to his room. The danger that if he remained where he was he might find himself forced into taking sides seemed a very good reason for leaving. He stood up.

‘Well, I’m terribly sorry things have turned out as they have,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad you seem to feel it’ll be all for the best in the end. But I know you’ll both go through a bad time before you can finally put it all behind you. I imagine you’d sooner I went home tomorrow.’

‘Go or stay, as you like,’ Ian answered in a tone of indifference. ‘That man Roland will probably want you to stay.’

Andrew was afraid that that was probably true, though he thought that by next day Ian might be only too glad to be rid of him. However, that need not be settled now. He left the room, climbed the stairs to his bedroom, kicked off his shoes and flung himself, clothed, on the bed. All of a sudden he felt an almost unbearable sense of fatigue. That was one of the great disadvantages of being as old as he was, he thought. Fatigue could overpower you all in a moment and turn you into a useless, thoughtless hulk. It was true that he had every reason for feeling tired. The strain of the last few days might have bowled over a very much younger man. But as long as he had been talking to
Ian, he had somehow managed to keep his need for rest at bay, in fact, almost to be unaware of it. Presently, to his great annoyance, his mind, which had felt quite empty, was filled with the rhyme that had troubled him off and on for the last day or two.

Blighted affection! He had been hearing enough about that since coming to Lower Milfrey. Ian and Mollie. Ernest Audley and his lost wife. And possibly Felicity Mace and Luke Singleton. Not that that last had ever been stated plainly. There had merely been hints that some feeling between them might once have had some existence. Of the people whom Andrew had been meeting since arriving here only the Waldrons appeared to be a reasonably contented couple, and what did he know about them, after all?

There was a time when he thought that he heard voices downstairs, and he wondered if after all Mollie had come home. But when at last he made himself go downstairs, he found Ian alone, preparing a lunch of ham and salad.

‘So she’s gone, has she?’ Andrew said. ‘She didn’t change her mind while she was out shopping?’

‘No, and taken the car, says she’ll bring it back when she and Brian have sorted things out, so now I’ve got to manage without it. The one thing I’m scared of now is that she and the car will come back together, because I don’t honestly believe she’ll be happy living with a murderer. And he’s got to be the murderer, hasn’t he? God knows how he did it, but no one else had the chance. And I think she knows it, knows how it was done and all. Well, it’s her
choice. If she can live with a murderer, who am I to stop her?’

The rest of the day passed quietly, except for two or three visits from the press, and both Ian and Andrew went to bed early. Next morning they had a silent breakfast in the kitchen, then Ian settled down with his bird photographs, mounting them in an album, whistling under his breath while he did it. Andrew sat in a chair by the window with
The Times
. He read an account of the murder of Eleanor Clancy, and that the police were considering the possibility that it was linked to that of Luke Singleton, but that there was so far no proof of this. There was an article devoted to the work of Luke Singleton, which was somewhat patronizing in tone, though it gave full marks to him for the money that he had made. So if what everyone had been assuming was correct and all that money had been left to his brother, then Mollie Davidge had gone from mere comfort and security to riches.