Seeing is Believing (7 page)

‘I don't know. Perhaps he would.’ Her thoughts seemed to be a long way off.

‘What were the relations between your husband and Dyer?’ Brian asked.

‘Relations?’ she said. ‘There weren't any that I know of. I mean, when Fred came here to work in the garden or do odd jobs for us, it was always I who coped with him. I told him what we wanted done and paid him.’

‘Did he know that you were going to London today?’ Brian went on.

‘I don't know. Perhaps. Yes. I think he did. I think I told him when he was working here yesterday that I was going to London to meet my cousin, Lynne Denison. I've been telling everybody. I'm such a fool. And he knew who she was, and he was thrilled about it. He asked if she'd be coming here and if she did, would he have a chance to see her. I told him I didn't know.’

‘You're thinking he knew Peter would be here alone,’ Malcolm said to Brian.

‘Well, that might be important, mightn't it?’ Brian answered.

‘But why should he come when he was almost certain to run into Mrs Henderson?’ Malcolm asked. ‘He must have known the ways of the house, that she'd be leaving at twelve. He'd only to wait ten minutes and she wouldn't have seen him. As it is, she'll be able to corroborate Frances's story.’

‘Be quiet, be quiet!’ Avril suddenly shouted at him. ‘Can't you see you're driving me mad?’ And gulping down her brandy, she broke into violent sobbing. Her whole body shook as her voice went up almost into a shriek.

The two men looked a little ashamed of themselves, as if they had only just recognized what a strain she was under. As if the dogs could hear her and were scared and
angry at what was happening, they began to bark. I put my arms round Avril and she clung to me like a child.

‘We'd better stop this,’ Malcolm muttered. ‘It's not our job to try to work things out.’

With her head against my breast, Avril spoke in a voice thick with her sobs. ‘Fred didn't do it. Why should he?’

‘Yes, why?’ Brian said. ‘And why is he here in Ranes-wood? And where did that gun come from?’

‘Let's leave all that to the police,’ Malcolm said, drinking up his brandy. ‘They won't thank us for interfering.’

This turned out to be true. When the police arrived, they seemed only to want us to get out of the way. As Detective Inspector Holroyd, to whom Malcolm had spoken on the telephone, asked where we had come from and how it happened that we were there on the spot, and when we told him that we lived next door and that Mrs Loxley had come to us for help, he asked us to return to our home and wait for him there. He would be over soon and would have a great many questions to ask us, but for the present he would like a chance to view the scene of the crime without our company.

He was a tall, burly man with a square, heavy face in which a pair of small, very bright brown eyes were sunk deep under brows that tilted at their ends in a way that gave him an oddly pixie-like look. Indeed, if he could have been shrunk down to a foot or so, instead of being the six foot two that he certainly was, he would not have been unlike a garden gnome. Although he could not have been much over forty, his thick hair was almost white, merely streaked with tufts of grey. He was courteous and calm, taking murder, or, as he pointed out, perhaps suicide or misadventure — it was too early to come to any conclusion — as something about which he was not inclined to make too much of a fuss.

‘And perhaps you'd better take the dogs with you,’ he said to Avril, once he had discovered to whom they
belonged. ‘Natural they shouldn't care for all of us tramping around.’

By then there were a number of men in the house, and several cars in the lane.

Avril, who had grown oddly calm with their coming, collected the dogs and the four of us left the house and went along the lane and in at our gate.

It was dark by then. When we entered the house, the first thing that had to be done was to deal with the dogs. Avril had put them all on leads, and though the unfamiliar men and cars as we walked along the lane had made them nervous, they seemed tired and ready to settle down anywhere that was sufficiently comfortable. The retriever stretched himself out on our sofa, the Labrador in an easy-chair and the Belgian shepherd on the hearthrug. Avril seemed inclined to make the ones that had annexed our chairs get out of them, but Malcolm told her not to bother, and to leave them in peace. In a few minutes, the retriever was snoring.

It was Avril who suddenly said, ‘The rehearsal!’

‘Yes,’ Malcolm said, ‘we'll have to put it off. We'll have to phone round and tell people not to come.’ He looked at me. ‘Could you do that?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said, ‘but what do we tell them? I don't feel like breaking the news a dozen times or so that we've had a murder.’

‘Say that Peter's been taken ill and it's no use our trying to go ahead without Mercutio.’

‘Anyway, the news will be all round the place almost at once,’ Brian said. ‘All those police cars in the lane won't have gone unnoticed.’

‘I imagine we're going to cancel the whole thing,’ I said. ‘I can't see our going ahead with it in the circumstances.’

‘Oh, you mustn't do that!’ Avril cried. ‘Peter wouldn't have wanted it. But of course, I'll step out of it and you
can get someone else to take my part. Jane Kerwood, for instance.’

‘No, I think everyone will want to call it off,’ Malcolm said. ‘It would be difficult to put on a cheerful sort of show when one of the cast has only recently been killed.’

‘But
Romeo and Juliet
isn't a cheerful sort of show,’ Avril protested. ‘It's very tragic.’

‘Of course, of course, but in our hands, at the best of times, the tragedy might not have been too successful. And we don't want to find ourselves playing to an audience that's come mostly out of morbid curiosity.’

‘But Lynne said she'd come,’ Avril said. ‘I told her all about it, and she was quite interested, and she promised to come down sometime soon to see if she could help us. And I'm sure she meant it. And everyone will be so disappointed if we put her off.’

‘She can come if she wants to, even if we aren't going ahead with our play.’ Malcolm turned to me. ‘What about that telephoning?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I'm just thinking that we must arrange what Avril's going to do tonight. She can't go back to that house. You'll stay here with us, won't you, Avril?’

‘That's very good of you,’ she said. ‘It's true that nothing would make me spend the night over there, but I could go to the Green Man. I don't want to put you out.’

‘It won't be putting us out at all,’ I said. ‘That's settled, you're staying here. One of us can go over later and fetch the things you'll need, if you'll tell us where they are, or you can borrow from me if those men are still there and don't want to let anyone in to take anything away.’

‘Have we got the numbers of all the people you'll have to phone?’ Malcolm asked.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I've got the numbers of everyone in the society.’

‘Then let's get ahead with the job.’

Our telephone was on a table in the hall, with a chair beside it, and a book on the table that contained all the
numbers that we most frequently used. I had just sat down in the chair and opened the book when the telephone rang.

I picked it up and said, ‘Frances Chance speaking.’

‘This is Hugh,’ he said, which was unnecessary, as I knew his voice. ‘Frances, what's happened? All those police cars at the Loxleys’ house and the ambulance and all the men! Has there been an accident or something?’

‘It looks as if it's something worse than an accident,’ I said. I thought that his call was only the first that we should be having. The other people who lived along the lane must have seen what he had, and I saw no point in telling him anything but the truth. ‘Peter's dead,’ I said. ‘He's been shot and it's almost certainly murder. Incidentally, I was just going to ring you up to tell you that we've decided the rehearsal will have to be cancelled.’

‘Of course it will. Dead? Murdered? Do you mean it? Frances, how terrible. Have they any idea who could have done such a thing?’

‘It's too early to say,’ I said.

‘Can I help in any way? Is there anything I can do? I suppose you were going to phone round all the people who should have been at the rehearsal. Can I do that for you?’

‘Oh, would you do that, Hugh? I'd be so grateful.’

‘Telling them about the murder?’

‘We were going to say that Peter's been taken ill, but if you feel like telling them the truth, I don't see anything against it.’

In fact, I thought it the best thing to do, as long as it was not I who had to do it.

‘Only I don't know anything about it,’ Hugh said. ‘What actually happened?’

‘You could say it looks as if someone broke into the house and killed Peter when he caught him. That's as much as anyone knows at the moment.’

‘All right, I'll go ahead with it. And if there's anything else I can do, let me know. How's Avril?’

‘In a state of shock, I think. She seems confused about what is and what isn't important. But we're looking after her. She's going to spend the night here.’

‘Good, good.’

He rang off. I put the telephone down and returned to the sitting room.

‘That was Hugh,’ I said. ‘He's going to do the phoning for us.’

‘And now what about a bit of supper?’ Malcolm said. ‘There's no point in waiting for the police. They may not come round for hours.’

In fact, they came about half an hour later. Detective Inspector Holroyd, I thought, looked even more like an outsize garden gnome than I remembered, and he had a sergeant with him, a slim, trim-looking, wide-shouldered young man, with a fresh pink face which he took care to keep expressionless. They interviewed us one by one in the dining room, beginning with Avril and ending with me. The sergeant took copious notes in a notebook. By the time that my turn came, the notebook looked pretty well filled. They were both sitting at the table and the inspector gestured to me to take a seat facing them.

‘Your husband told us you have something of interest to tell us,’ he said.

‘Didn't he tell you himself what it was?’ I asked.

‘He told us one or two things, but I'd be grateful if you would tell us about it yourself. Something about hearing a shot, and seeing a man at the Loxleys’ gate. Can you describe him to us?’

‘I can do more than that,’ I said. ‘I can tell you who he was.’

‘Ah, that's something your husband didn't tell us. He said he preferred to leave it to you to tell us. Quite correct, too. Can you name him then?’

‘He's called Fred Dyer, and he lives with a girl called
Sharon Sawyer in a flat in the old vicarage. He turned up in Raneswood a few months ago and seems to make a living of a sort doing odd jobs about the village.’

‘And you saw him at the Loxleys’ gate as you came home from shopping?’

‘Yes, and I think the time was just about twelve o'clock, because Mrs Henderson, who does the cleaning for the Loxleys, was just coming out of the house, and she always leaves the house exactly at twelve o'clock. She'll corroborate what I can tell you.’

‘And you're sure this man you saw was Fred Dyer?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You couldn't possibly be mistaken about that?’

‘No, why should I be?’

‘You know him quite well?’

‘Yes, he's worked for us from time to time.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘Only to say hello in passing.’

‘But there's no possibility you could be mistaken about who it was?’

‘Well, as a matter of fact…’ I hesitated. ‘No, it's just a sort of an idea I had, it doesn't mean anything.’ But something had been worrying me and I was half inclined to tell him about it, though I felt it would only sound ridiculous. ‘It's just that there was something unusual about the way he behaved, but I suppose that was only to be expected if he was intending to commit a murder.’

‘Yes?’ he prompted me.

‘Well, he didn't look at me, but sort of turned away as I came by, and he did the same with Mrs Henderson,’ I said. ‘And he'd come on foot instead of in the van he usually uses.’

‘But you're sure all the same it was Benyon — I mean — Dyer, whom you saw?’

I felt that he had deliberately made the mistake to see how I would react to it.

‘Oh, Mr Hewlett's been telling you that he thinks Dyer
is a man he knew in Edgewater called Benyon,’ I said, without sounding too interested. ‘I don't know anything about that, except that when Dyer saw Mr Hewlett when we were bringing him home from the station, he looked very startled, as if he recognized him. But that could have been a mistake.’

‘Quite so, except that we've been keeping an eye on Dyer since he came here. The Edgewater people tipped us off. They knew where he went when he left Edgewater. In fact, I think he told them himself where he was going. He told them he couldn't stand the atmosphere of suspicion that had developed around him in Edgewater, and that he was going to change his name. But you understand why I'm anxious to know if your identification of him as the man at the gate is absolutely positive, because it looks as if he was the victim of one false identification a little while ago. Not that we're absolutely certain it was false. He may have been the Edgewater murderer, though I've believed all along that he was innocent. He's a too normal sort of man to go in for the kind of murders that happened there.’

‘But not too normal to do some straightforward shooting?’ I said.

‘It would be a curious change in MO, if he was guilty of both kinds of killing,’ he said. ‘However, it isn't impossible that he was. To return to what we were saying, you're absolutely certain it was Dyer you saw at the gate?’

Each time he asked me that, I felt less certain. The uneasiness that I had felt from the start about that meeting had developed into a definite doubt.

‘I suppose I just could be mistaken,’ I said uncertainly. ‘He did keep his face turned away. But he's a distinctive looking man. That red hair of his and his build — he's tall and very well-made — it wouldn't be easy for anyone to disguise himself as Dyer.’

‘But not impossible?’

‘All right, I'll say it's not impossible, but I don't believe it.’