The Dreadful Hollow

  “Oh, do be careful, Bay!” her sister called out. “Don’t dig up my prize orange pansies!” Her voice was almost agonized; and when she turned to the Inspector again, her expression was more nearly flustered than Nigel could have imagined it. “Sorry, Mr. Randall, I’m a bit dotty about my flowers. You were saying?”

  “But look here, Inspector,” the vicar roughly interrupted. “What is the point of all this? Are you saying that Sir Archibald allowed someone to push him up to the quarry in this carriage? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Randall’s eyes rested upon him, with that unhurried, meditative gaze. “Not exactly that, sir. He was asleep, you see.”

  “Asleep? What on earth—”

  “Shortly before his death, he was given, or he took, a strong sleeping draught. So it’d be easy to wheel him up to the quarry in Miss Chantmerle’s conveyance—a good deal easier than carrying him. I’m told that the shed where you keep it is a little way from the house, ma’am, and seldom locked up.”

  “But I thought he’d gone home after he left here,” said Celandine.

  “He may not have reached home.”

  “But Stanford told us he did,” Mark Raynham expostulated.

  “What I’m interested in just now,” said the Inspector, “is this sleeping draught. He didn’t by any chance ask you to give him one, Miss Chantmerle, did he?”

  “No. Though he could certainly have done with a sedative. I say, did you drop a powder in his whisky before you brought it in, Bay darling?”

  Celandine’s laughter was like fountains in spring. Her sister, standing beside her now, muttered sullenly, “Don’t be so absurd, Dinny! Of course I didn’t.”

  “He is dead, Celandine, remember.” There was a touch of the gentlest rebuke in Mark Raynham’s voice.

  Celandine, throwing up her beautiful face and gazing straight into his eyes, replied, “Which is no reason why Bay or I should suddenly turn into hypocrites and pretend it’s a grievous affliction to us. We can safely leave that line to press and pulpit.”

  Mark’s sallow, haggard face flushed, and he compressed his mouth. Inspector Randall, very faintly smiling, gave them a ruminative look all round, then asked permission for his men to examine the electric carriage and the shed where it was kept at night. Celandine was transferred to a deck chair, and the Inspector wheeled the carriage away. He himself was returning to Moreford, to interview Charles Blick. Rosebay edged off a minute or two later, and did not return. Nigel and the vicar drew up deck chairs near Celandine, who stretched out a repentant hand to the latter.

  “I’m sorry, Mark. That was a horrid thing to say. But I cannot burst into tears over Sir Archibald—I can’t even feel his death as a reality. He was a completely unreal figure to me; probably distorted in my mind because of what he did to my father, but unreal.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Mark. “He had his good points, I dare say.”

  “A ghost can have good points, for all I know. But it’s still unreal. And Sir A. lived in a world I just don’t see as anything but a world of phantoms. What do you think, Nigel?”

  “A world of abstractions? Ye-es. High finance must be a rarefied atmosphere to live in.”

  “Oh, it’s more than that,” she said, with an intensity that reminded Nigel of her sister’s. “People like him see everything from such an extraordinary angle. Inhuman. Everything resolves itself into money, is translated into a code of money values. It’s not a matter just of being obsessed with the need for money; any small shopkeeper, or housewife struggling to make ends meet, has that obsession. But his sort of operations had about as much in common with ordinary money problems as the higher mathematics with simple addition sums. And he was insulated from reality by the nature of his operations, and their magnitude. All secretaries and telephone calls and bits of paper. He hadn’t the faintest idea of what ordinary people mean by personal relationships, any more than a chair-borne general at the base, living in a world of maps and strategy, knows what war means to the private soldier. Even bed had to be turned into an abstraction—all that nonsense about eugenics.”

  Celandine’s face burned with an extraordinary animation. The air of excitement, which Nigel had felt in her after the birthday party, she now emanated more strongly than ever.

  “He was absolutely set against Charles marrying your sister?” “Yes. It wasn’t a problem of two human beings for him—only a question of genes. I tried to talk him round, but it was like—like trying to break a hole in a safe with one’s bare hands. He as good as told me that Bay is mentally unbalanced. Horrible!” Celandine’s hands clenched tight in her lap, and her eyes grew darker.

  “But I still don’t see how he thought he could stop it,” said Mark Raynham.

  “Sanctions. Cut off the money. You’ve no idea, Mark, how ruthless he could be.”

  “But surely Charles could get another job, if he really wants to marry Bay?”

  Celandine’s mouth was set in a bitter line. “Cut off Charles’s money, and ours. I suppose I’m madly unworldly. But I’d never suspected where our money came from. They told me, after my father’s death, they’d saved some money from the wreck. Sir Archibald enlightened me. We’d been living all these years on his charity—his money, rather, for I’ve no doubt the charity was Stanford’s, or Charles’s. If Bay didn’t give Charles up, he’d stop our supplies too. A very pretty ultimatum.”

  “Ultimatum!” exclaimed Mark hotly. “It was blackmail. What a vile thing to do!”

  “He is dead, Mark, remember,” she murmured ironically. “So Bay and I had a good motive, too, for wanting him out of the world, Nigel.”

  “Bay knew about this threat, did she?”

  Celandine looked a little disconcerted. She said quickly, “No. She wasn’t there, of course. I meant, if she’d known about his threat.”

  Nigel’s eyes rested for a moment on the clump of leaves in which Rosebay’s weeding fork was still stuck. He said: “It’s rather lucky your electric carriage was out of action last night.”

  “Lucky? Yes, I suppose so.”

  “You’re very fond of flowers. And particularly fond, I imagine, of the daffodils you planted up by the quarry?”

  “Why, yes. But I don’t see—”

  “I noticed that one clump had been run over by a wheel. Very recently. I’m sure you’d never drive over those flowers yourself, if you could help it.”

  “What are you getting at?” asked Mark.

  “Oh, it’s obvious,” Celandine said. “Either I did it accidentally, in the dark, or someone else was using the carriage. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Nigel nodded. “I’m telling you this because Randall has cottoned onto it already—the likelihood of the carriage having been used, I mean. And anyway, they’ve called in Scotland Yard, and an old friend of mine, Superintendent Blount, is coming down. And Blount very seldom misses anything.”

  There was a taut silence. Mark and Celandine noticeably avoided each other’s eyes. At last Mark said: “So there’s no doubt, then? It must have been murder? They wouldn’t send down a C.I.D. superintendent otherwise, would they?”

  “Blick was a very important man. The combination of Blick and murder calls for Scotland Yard’s best.”

  “Damn him,” said Celandine, her voice pure and hard. “I’m sorry, Mark, but now he’s going to ruin our lives for a second time. We were all so happy. Now everything’s a nightmare again. Unreality. We shall all start looking at each other—wondering.” . . .

  Nigel rose to go. The vicar, taking up his stick and black hat from the grass, said good-by also. His craggy face had the look of one enduring torture; and as if some twist of the rack had wrung it from his lips, he exclaimed, while they walked down the drive together: “God forgive me, but I could have killed him myself.”

  Nigel made sympathetic noises, and the vicar came out with it all, his voice harsh and uneven. Sir Archibald, the evening of his death, had turned up at the vicarage. It was his day for ultimatums. He threatened
to make trouble over Mark’s antiwar sermons and articles. The sanctions he proposed to apply, in Mark’s case, were very simple, deadly effective.

  “He’d discovered about my wife, you see. Oh, he didn’t threaten. That wasn’t his way.” The vicar’s face had gone white. “He just let it be understood that he’d feel it his duty to communicate his knowledge. I could have strangled him. But how the devil did he find out?”

  Nigel had little doubt about that. Sir Archibald had previously interviewed Daniel Durdle, who might well have tried to buy Blick’s good will and do a bad turn to his own religious rival.

  “So what did you say?”

  “Told him to publish and be damned. Threw him out of the house. Then I began to realize what I’d let myself in for. He couldn’t chuck me out of the living, but he could ruin my work here—make it impossible. I went up later to talk it over with Celandine.”

  “Did you indeed?”

  Shortly after ten o’clock last night, the vicar had walked to the Little Manor. Seeing no lights in front, he went round the house intending to tap at the French windows if he saw Celandine in the drawing room. She was there all right, but so was Archibald Blick.

  “So you went away again?”

  “Actually I didn’t. Not at once. I had a silly idea she might need my help. They hadn’t heard me—I was walking on the grass. So I stood there for a little, listening and pretending to myself I wasn’t listening—always the gentleman.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “Only bits of what they said. The French windows weren’t wide open. And Blick never shouted at people, least of all when he was in a fury. I could see him shaking, though. He said something I didn’t quite catch about Durdle; and then, ‘Charles marry into a family of poison-pen writers!’ Celandine was staring at him, as if he’d taken leave of his senses. ‘Are you daring to suggest that Bay—’ she began. And he said something I couldn’t make head or tail of: sounded like ‘Your brother has two sisters.’ Aeschylean stuff. Then he lowered his voice. Poor Celandine was looking so sick, I nearly rushed in. I suppose he was telling her about Durdle’s being her father’s illegitimate son. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Was that all you heard?”

  The vicar nodded. “I sheered off then. Felt I wouldn’t be able to control myself if I stayed any longer. I walked about for an hour or more, trying to calm down.”

  “Meet anyone?”

  “No. I’ve only the haziest idea where I went, either.” Mark Raynham grinned wryly. “So you see, I’ve a motive and no alibi.”

  Soon after this, the two parted company. Nigel decided to look for Rosebay, and the Hall seemed the likeliest place. He found his interest concentrating, after the vicar’s disclosure, upon the dead man’s visit to the Little Manor and his long session there with Celandine. Surely Rosebay, whose future depended upon that interview, must have listened in to some of it?

  The girl, however, roundly denied this. She had stayed in her own room, she declared, all the time Sir Archibald was with her sister, except when she had heard the drawing-room bell ring, and gone downstairs to see what Celandine wanted. Celandine asked her to bring the whisky decanter and two glasses. This, she said, was not long before Blick had left the house—about ten past eleven, she thought. She had returned with the tray, poured out drinks for the other two, then retired to her room again.

  Nigel studied her—the restless hands, the eyes that showed traces of recent tears, the voice which had that sandpaper timbre of the overdriven and exhausted. She kept glancing from him to Stanford Blick, who sat cross-legged on the sofa like some tutelary image, his face sleepy-looking yet alert.

  “Where’s Charles?” Nigel asked.

  “We’re expecting him back any moment. I believe old Randall is interviewing him at the works.”

  A blackbird let loose some bursts of melodious impromptu in the garden outside; then, like an artist perversely defacing his own work, ended with a chattering screech.

  “Superintendent Blount is going to be very interested in the matter of those field glasses,” said Nigel.

  Rosebay’s body, slouched on the window seat, grew suddenly tense.

  “They’ve nothing to do with the case,” Stanford sang in a vivacious baritone, “They’ve nothing to do with the case.”

  Rosebay was laughing, edgily, a bit too loud.

  “It would save a lot of trouble if you two admitted you’d sent them,” said Nigel.

  A gulf of silence opened in the room.

  “D’you really think I’d do that to my own sister? You must be mad!” exclaimed Rosebay, her green eyes flaring with anger. Stanford just sat there, beaming.

  “I’ve always told this girl she ought to go on the stage,” he remarked presently.

  “Don’t be a fool, Stanford. Do you realize Mr. Strangeways has accused us of—”

  “Of sending the field glasses. O.K. Accusation noted. Calm down, old top. Now perhaps the eminent sleuth will enlarge upon our motives for the alleged felony. We pause for a reply.”

  Stanford paused, his leprechaun face alive with interest. Before the reply was forthcoming, however, they heard the sound of a car approaching up the drive. Rosebay waved frantically through the open window.

  “It’s Charles!” she cried.

  “Relief of Mafeking,” murmured Stanford. “In the nick of time. Lone motorist saves ugly situation.”

  The combination of Stanford Blick and this bizarre room, crowded with the memorials of his discarded hobbies and anomalous tastes, was a formidable one indeed. Nigel wondered what Blount would make of it—Blount, whose Pickwickian exterior camouflaged a mind as ruthlessly purposeful as a guided missile.

  Charles Blick looked surprised at the warmth of Rosebay’s reception. She flung herself into his arms when he entered the room, crying, “Oh, Charles, thank God you’re back at last!”

  He kissed her, rather abstractedly, then disengaged himself to go and pour out a drink.

  “Phew! Thought I was never going to get away from Randall.”

  “Not arrested you yet, Charlie-boy?” said Stanford.

  “Sorry you had to bear the brunt here, Stanford. When you rang up this morning and told me, we were starting to sort out a difficulty at the works. Took longer than I expected. Of course if I’d realized father had been—I mean, I assumed it was an accident. Look here, is nobody else drinking?”

  It was evident to Nigel that Charles Blick had come perilously near the limit of endurance. The hand holding the glass, which he had refilled with a second shot of neat spirits, was trembling violently; there was an intermittent tic in his left eyelid; and his voice had the same roughened quality as Rosebay’s. He kept glancing at the girl, and glancing away, with an expression both puzzled and impatient, as if he could not wait to get her alone so that he might ask some question of which only she had the answer.

  “Well, what did the police say to you?”

  “Oh, what you’d expect, Bay. Where was I last night between ten and twelve? Had I heard father return? Did he come up to my room? Had he previously discussed my marrying you? Did we keep sleeping drugs? Look here, Strangeways, is it really true? He was murdered?”

  “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  Charles Blick put his shaking hands over his face. “It’s too much. On top of everything. I can’t take it. I’m at the end of my tether,” he said, almost inaudibly.

  Rosebay was at his side in one swift movement, clasping his face strongly in to her shoulder, almost as if to smother the quivering lips.

  “There, darling,” she whispered passionately. “It’s all right. I’m here. Don’t worry. Don’t talk any more. It’s all over.”

  Stanford, with a little grimace at Nigel, slid out of the room. Nigel followed him, after a moment’s hesitation. Turning round at the door, he saw Charles’s head straining back against the girl’s arms, the bewildered expression on his face again as he stared up at her, and caught Charles’s low-voiced words: “What happened
to you last night, Bay? Why didn’t you come?”

  Her eyes widened for an instant with a look of pure, numb terror, so it seemed to Nigel. Then she hugged Charles’s head convulsively to her breast again, saying: “Hadn’t you better go, Mr. Strangeways?”

  Nigel went.

  12 Villainy Somewhere! Whose?

  WHEN NIGEL GOT back at 8:30 to The Sweet Drop, he found Superintendent Blount and Inspector Randall in the bar, discussing, to the mingled edification and exasperation of the locals, dryfly fishing. Randall gave Nigel a wink; Blount offered him a hard, regulation stare and a harder hand grip.

  “Pleasure to meet you again, Strangeways,” Blount could be deliciously, terrifyingly formal on occasion.

  “Hard at it, I see,” said Nigel.

  But you might as well try to pull the leg of the Colossus of Rhodes. Blount’s moonlike face remained imperturbable.

  “I was—e-eh—just asking Mr. Randall if there were any good waters round here he could recommend for my next holiday.”

  “We have plenty of troubled waters,” Nigel remarked.

  “So I gather. I’ve sent young Henry out fishing this evening. He’s not a bad hand with the coarser fish”

  Detective Sergeant Henry Reid would no doubt have been gratified by this tribute to his powers of investigation. Blount gave praise, as he took snuff, in very small pinches. Randall soon departed, and presently Joe Summers leaned over, whispering confidentially to the Superintendent, “A lot of gents in the private bar looking for you, sir. Journalists, I reckon. Shall I tell them to bug—”

  “Tell them I’ll see them tomorrow, when I’ve got something to give them. Say I’m having dinner.”

  “Very good, sir. And your dinners are ready, gentlemen.”