‘Dead?’ Charles repeated incredulously. ‘Do you mean he’s had a stroke, or something?’
She began to cry again. ‘No, no, no! It’s much, much more dreadful. He’s been shot!’
‘Good God!’ said Charles blankly. ‘But –’
‘For heaven’s sake, girl!’ interrupted Miss Patterdale. ‘You say you think he’s dead. Surely you didn’t come here, leaving the unfortunate man alone, without making certain there was nothing you could do for him?’
Mavis covered her face with her hands. ‘I – I know he’s dead. I thought he was asleep, and it seemed so unlike him, somehow. I went up to him, and then I saw!’
‘You saw what?’ said Miss Patterdale, as Mavis broke off. ‘Try to pull yourself together!’
‘Yes. I’m sorry. It’s been such a shock. In the side of his head – just here –’ she pressed her left temple – ‘a – a hole! Oh, don’t ask me! And I heard it! I didn’t think anything about it at the time. I was just getting over the stile at the top of the lane, and I heard a gun fired. It made me jump, because it sounded quite close, but of course I only thought it was somebody shooting rabbits. And then I opened the garden-gate, and saw Uncle on the seat under the oak-tree…’
‘Gosh!’ uttered Abby, awed. ‘Who did it? Did you see anyone?’ Mavis shook her head, wiping her eyes. ‘No one hiding in the garden? Round the back? If you were in the lane they couldn’t have escaped that way, could they?’
Mavis looked at her in a bemused fashion. ‘I don’t know. I was so shocked I never thought of anything but that poor Uncle was dead.’
‘But didn’t you even look?’ insisted Abby. ‘I mean, it had only just happened, and whoever did it can’t possibly have managed to get away! Well, not far away, at all events!’
‘No, I suppose – But I didn’t think about that! I only thought of Uncle.’
‘Yes, well, all right!’ said Charles. ‘I suppose that’s fairly natural, but when you realised he was dead what did you do?’
She pushed her rather lank hair back from her brow. ‘I don’t know. I think I was sort of stunned for a few minutes. It seemed so impossible! My legs were shaking so that I could hardly stand, and I felt so sick! I managed to get to the house, and I’m afraid I was sick.’
‘Yes, that’s not what I mean,’ said Charles, trying not to speak impatiently. ‘Have you rung up the police? The doctor?’
She blinked. ‘No – oh, no! I knew it was no use sending for the doctor. I didn’t think about the police. Oh, need we do that? It seems to make it worse, somehow. I mean, Uncle would have hated it! Having an inquest, and everyone talking about it!’
‘Merciful heavens!’ ejaculated Miss Patterdale. ‘Have you no sense, Mavis? You know very well I’m not on the telephone, and you come running here before ever you’ve – now, don’t, for goodness’ sake begin to cry again! Charles, where are you going?’
‘Fox House, of course. I’ll ring up the police-station from there, and stand by till they arrive.’
‘Yes, that’s the best thing,’ she approved. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Better not, Aunt Miriam.’
‘Nonsense! There may be something we can do for the poor man. You don’t imagine I mean to be sick, do you?’
‘Oh, Aunt Miriam, couldn’t I go with Charles?’ begged Abby. ‘I know all about First Aid, and –’
‘Certainly not! You’ll stay here and look after Mavis.’
‘I can’t – I mean, you’d do it much better! Do let me be the one to go with Charles!’ Abby said, following them down the garden.
‘Absolutely not!’ said Charles, in a voice that admitted of no argument. ‘Hop in, Aunt Miriam!’
He slammed the car-door on Miss Patterdale, got into his own seat, and started the engine. As the car shot forward, he said: ‘Of all the damned, silly wet hens, that girl takes the biscuit! A child in arms would have had sense enough to have rung the police! Blithering idiot! I say, Aunt Miriam, what on earth do you think can have really happened?’
‘I have no idea. It sounds as though somebody was shooting rabbits. I’m not at all surprised. I’ve often thought it most dangerous to allow it on the common.’
The distance between Fox Cottage and Fox House was very short, and they had already reached their goal. The house was set back from the lane, from which it was separated by a low hedge. It had no carriage sweep, a separate gate and straight gravel drive having been made beside the garden to enable Mr Warrenby to garage his car in a modern building erected a little to the rear of the house. Charles drew up outside the wicket-gate giving access to a footpath leading to the front-door, and switched off his engine. In another minute he and Miss Patterdale had entered the garden, and were bending over the lifeless form of Sampson Warrenby, slumped on a wooden seat set under an oak-tree, and at right angles to the lane.
Warrenby, a short, plump man, dressed in sponge-bag trousers, an alpaca coat, and morocco-leather slippers, was sitting with his head fallen forward, and one hand hanging limply over the arm of the seat.
Charles straightened himself after one look, and said, rather jerkily: ‘Who was his doctor?’
‘Dr Warcop, but it’s no use, Charles.’
‘No, I know, but probably we ought to send for him. I’m not familiar with the correct procedure on occasions like this, but I’m pretty sure there ought to be a doctor here as soon as possible. Do you know which room the telephone’s in?’
‘In the study. That one, on the right of the front-door.’
He strode away across the lawn to the house. It was built of mellow brick, in the form of an E, and the principal rooms faced across the garden to the lane, and the rising ground of the common beyond it. The long windows on the ground-floor stood open, and Charles stepped through one of these into Sampson Warrenby’s study. The telephone stood on the kneehole desk, which also bore a litter of papers and documents. Charles picked it up, and dialled Dr Warcop’s number.
When he rejoined Miss Patterdale, a few minutes later, that redoubtable lady was staring fixedly at a bed of snapdragons. ‘Well? Find Dr Warcop in?’ she said.
‘Yes. Surgery-hour. He’s coming at once. Also the police, from Bellingham.’
Miss Patterdale cleared her throat, and said in a fierce voice:
‘Well, Charles, there’s nothing you or I can do for the poor man. He’s dead, and that’s all there is to it.’
‘He’s dead all right,’ said Charles grimly. ‘But if you imagine that’s all there’s going to be to it, Aunt Miriam, you’d better think again!’
Four
Miss Patterdale let her monocle fall, and, picking it up as it swung on the end of its thin cord, began to polish it vigorously. ‘You don’t think it can have been an accident, Charles?’
‘How could it have been?’
She glanced rather vaguely round. ‘Don’t understand ballistics myself. People do go out with guns, though, after rabbits.’
‘But they don’t aim at rabbits in private gardens,’ said Charles. ‘What’s more, rabbits aren’t usually seen in the air!’
She looked fleetingly at the still figure on the seat. ‘He was sitting down,’ she pointed out, but without conviction.
‘Talk sense, Aunt Miriam!’ Charles begged her. ‘Any fool could see he’s been murdered! You don’t even have to have a giant intellect to realise where the murderer must have been standing.’ He nodded towards the rising commonland beyond the lane, where the gorse-bushes blazed deep yellow in the late sunshine. ‘Bet you anything he was lying up in those bushes! The only bit of bad luck he had was Mavis being in the lane at the time – and even that wasn’t really bad luck, because she was too dumb to do him any harm.’
‘Can’t be surprised the girl was too much shocked to think of looking for him,’ said Miss Patterdale fairmindedly. ‘It isn’t the sort of thing anyone would expect to happen! I suppose it wouldn’t be any use going to search those bushes?’
He could not help laughing. ‘No, Best of my
Aunts, it wouldn’t! I don’t know how long it took Mavis to assimilate the fact that Warrenby was dead, and to be sick, and to rush off in search of you, but it was quite long enough to give the unknown assassin ample time to make his getaway.’
She went on polishing her monocle, her attention apparently riveted to this task. Finally, screwing it into place again, she looked at Charles, and said abruptly: ‘I don’t like it. I’m not going to say who I think might have done it – or, at any rate, wanted to do it! – but I shouldn’t be surprised if it leads to a great deal of the sort of unpleasantness we don’t want!’
‘I do love you, Aunt Miriam!’ said Charles, putting an arm round her, and giving her the hug of the privileged. ‘A turn in yourself, that’s what you are! Don’t you worry! Abby and I are your alibis – same like you’re ours!’
‘Don’t be silly!’ she said, pushing him away. ‘You know what I mean!’ She cast another glance at the corpse, and said with some asperity: ‘I shall be glad when someone comes to relieve us! If there were anything one could do! But there isn’t. In fact, I imagine that the less we do the better it will be. Standing about to keep watch over a dead man! It’s all very well for you to laugh, but I wasn’t brought up to this sort of thing.’
However, when Charles suggested that she might as well return to her home, she gave a scornful snort, and resumed her scrutiny of the flower-beds. Fortunately, they had not long to wait before relief came in the substantial form of Police-Constable Hobkirk, a stout and middle-aged man who inhabited a cottage in the High Street, and devoted as much of his time as could be spared from his not very arduous police-duties to the cultivation of tomatoes, vegetable-marrows and flowers which almost invariably won the first prizes at all the local shows.
He came up the lane on his bicycle, very hot, for he had been pedalling as vigorously as was suitable for a man of his girth, and a little out of breath. Alighting ponderously from his machine, he propped it against the hedge, and, before entering the garden, removed his cap, and mopped his face and neck with a large handkerchief.
‘Good lord! I forgot all about Hobkirk!’ exclaimed Charles, conscience-stricken. ‘I expect I ought to have notified him, not Bellingham. He looks a bit disgruntled, doesn’t he? Hallo, Hobkirk! I’m glad you’ve turned up. Bad business, this.’
‘’Evening, sir. ’Evening, miss,’ said Hobkirk, a note of formality in his voice. ‘Now, just how did this happen?’
‘Good lord, I don’t know!’ replied Charles. ‘Miss Patterdale doesn’t either. We weren’t here. Miss Warrenby found the body, just as you see it, and came to Fox Cottage for help.’
‘Oh!’ said Hobkirk noncommittally. He produced a small notebook from his pocket, and the stub of a pencil. ‘At what time would that have been?’ he asked.
Charles looked at Miss Patterdale. ‘Do you know? I’m hanged if I do!’
‘Come, come, sir!’ said Hobkirk.
‘It’s no use saying come, come, in that reproving way. No doubt, if Miss Warrenby had rushed in to tell you her uncle had been shot, you’d have taken note of the time: you’re a policeman. The trouble is I’m not, and I didn’t.’
‘Ah!’ said Hobkirk, pleased with this tribute to his superior ability. ‘That’s where it comes in, doesn’t it? It’ll have to be established, you know, because it’s a very important circumstance.’
‘Well, I daresay we can work it out,’ said Miss Patterdale, pulling an old-fashioned gold watch out of her waistband, and consulting it. ‘It’s ten past eight now – and I know that’s right, because I set my watch by the wireless only this morning – and I should think we must have been here at least half an hour.’
‘Twenty minutes at the outside,’ interpolated Charles.
‘It seems longer, but you may be right. When did Mavis reach us?’
‘I haven’t the ghost of an idea,’ said Charles frankly. ‘I should make a rotten witness, shouldn’t I? What a good job it is that I shan’t be expected to know when the murder was committed!’
‘I wouldn’t say that, sir,’ said Hobkirk darkly. ‘And when you found him, the deceased was sitting like he is now?’
‘Hasn’t moved an inch,’ said Charles.
‘Charles!’ said Miss Patterdale. ‘This is not a moment for flippancy!’
‘Sorry, Aunt Miriam! The worst is being roused in me.’
‘Then overcome it!’ said Miss Patterdale severely. ‘Neither Mr Haswell nor I have touched the body, Hobkirk, if that, as I suppose, is what you want to know. Miss Warrenby may have touched it, though I should doubt it.’
‘I don’t have to tell you, miss, that it is very highly improper for anyone to go touching anything on the scene of the crime.’ The constable’s slow-moving gaze travelled to a sheaf of type-written papers, clipped together at one corner, and lying on the grass beside the corpse’s right foot. ‘Those papers, now: I take it they was there, laying on the ground?’
‘Yes, and do you know what I think?’ said Charles irrepressibly. ‘I believe the deceased must have been reading them – no, I mean perusing them, at the time he was shot.’
‘That’s as may be, sir,’ replied Hobkirk, with dignity. ‘I don’t say it wasn’t so, but things aren’t always what they seem, not by any means they aren’t.’
‘No, and life is not an empty dream, either. Are you supposed to be in charge of this investigation?’
Hobkirk, in his unofficial moments, rather liked young Mr Haswell, whom he considered a well-set-up young gentleman, with friendly manners, and one, moreover, who could be relied upon to do great execution, with his inswingers, amongst the batsmen of neighbouring villages; but he now detected in him a certain lack of respect, combined with a deplorable levity, and he answered with quelling coldness: ‘I’m here, sir, to take charge of things till relieved. Properly speaking, you had ought to have notified me of this occurrence, when I should, in accordance with the regulations, have reported same to my headquarters in Bellingham.’
‘At the end of which exercise we should have been precisely where we are now,’ said Charles. ‘Still, I’m sorry you aren’t going to remain in charge! I say, Aunt Miriam, is it really past eight? I’d better go and give my Mama a ring: we dine at eight, and she always pictures me in the local hospital, with every bone in my body fractured, if I don’t show up when I said I would.’
He strode off towards the house. Hobkirk watched him go, his countenance betraying some uncertainty of mind. In all the uneventful years of his service no case of murder had previously come his way, so that he had only a half-forgotten memory of text-book procedure to act upon. He felt vaguely that young Mr Haswell should not be allowed to make use of the telephone belonging to the deceased. But as he had already made use of it, to summon the police, it was difficult to know on what grounds he could now be restrained. Constable Hobkirk held his peace therefore, and was secretly glad of the diversion afforded by the arrival at that moment of Dr Warcop, in his aged but still reliable car.
Dr Edmund Warcop, who resided in a comfortable Victorian house, inherited, like his practice, from his long-dead father, and situated on the outskirts of Bellingham, on the Trindale road, was sixty years of age and as unaccustomed as Constable Hobkirk to dealing with cases of murder. His professional methods, which were old-fashioned, might be the despair of younger and more progressive colleagues, but he enjoyed a very respectable practice, his simpler patients being as conservative as he was himself, and thinking it scarcely possible that they could be born or die without a Warcop to attend them; and the more sophisticated believing that they must be safe in the hands of a man who rode so well to hounds, and who had been established in the district for as long as most of them could remember. He held himself in high esteem, rarely called in a second opinion, and had never been known to admit himself to have been at fault. No one, observing his demeanour as he walked across the lawn towards the oak-tree, would have guessed that this was the first case of its kind which he had attended. A stranger would more readily have
supposed that he was a police-surgeon of extensive experience. He nodded to Hobkirk, but favoured Miss Patterdale with a civil good-evening, and a handshake, for she was one of his patients. ‘I’m sorry you should have been brought into this,’ he said. ‘Shocking business! I could scarcely believe it, when young Haswell told me what had happened. Almost under the eyes of Miss Warrenby, I understand.’
He then bent over the corpse, while Miss Patterdale walked away to inspect yet another flower-bed, and the constable respectfully watched him. He glanced up after a brief examination, and said: ‘Nothing for me to do here. Instantaneous, of course. Poor fellow!’
‘Yes, sir. How long would you say he’s been dead?’
‘Impossible to say with any certainty. More than a quarter of an hour, and not more than an hour. We must bear in mind that the body has been all the time in hot sunshine.’
These remarks he repeated five minutes later, when a police-car set down at Fox House, Detective-Sergeant Carsethorn, accompanied by a uniformed constable, and two men in plain clothes. The Sergeant asked him whether there was anything else he could tell them about the murder, adding, but without malice, that Dr Rotherhope, who, besides constituting Dr Warcop’s chief rival in Bellingham was also the police-surgeon, had been called out to a confinement, and was thus not immediately available.
Beyond informing the Sergeant that the bullet had entered the skull through the temporal bone, and would be found lodged in the brain, Dr Warcop had nothing more to tell him. It was the Sergeant himself who observed that the shot had not been fired at very close quarters, no powder-burns being discernible.
By this time Charles had rejoined the group on the lawn. When he saw the Sergeant he was surprised, and said: ‘Hallo! You’re not the chap who dealt with that pilfering we had at the office. What’s become of him?’
‘Detective-Inspector Thropton, sir. He’s away, sick.’
‘He will be fed-up!’ remarked Charles. ‘Mama says I’m to bring Mavis home with me, Aunt Miriam, for the night.’