“Vairry interesting. Would you say they were on good terms? Confide in each other, normally?”
“About average, I think. Rosebay’s always been rather overshadowed, of course; but she doesn’t seem to resent it unduly. I just don’t know whether they confide. Why do you ask?”
“Because Reid tells me that, after we left, they hardly said a word about—well, what you’d expect. From what he could hear, the elder one began to rate her sister for making assignations with men late at night, and the younger said she’d only done it because she couldn’t wait to hear whether Charles Blick had won his father over or stood up to him. Miss Celandine then said something about how peculiar it was her sister should have gone to sleep when she’d been so anxious to see Charles. And Miss Rosebay replied, it was peculiar, but she supposed she’d been exhausted by everything that had happened. Then her sister said, ‘Obviously the police think one of us must have doped his whisky.’ ‘Oh, but that’s absurd, Dinny,’ Miss Rosebay said. And that was all. Just a lot of small talk and uneasy silences after. It’s no’ natural. It’s as if they suspected each other.”
“They probably suspected there was a flatfoot with his ear gummed to the keyhole. Has either of them tried to get in touch with Charles?”
“Not yet. And that’s another curious thing—if they’re both innocent.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Innocent people are apt to take fright and behave guiltily when they feel they’re under suspicion.”
Blount pounded along with his rolling gait for twenty yards or so in silence. Then he said: “You go in for too much of the mental fancy-work, Strangeways. What’s the point this case turns on?”
“The sleeping draught.”
“Quite so. Now answer me this: why would you give a man a strong, but not a lethal, dose of sleeping draught?”
“To send him to sleep, ducky.”
Blount ignored this. His face was grim. “I’ll tell you what’s in my mind. If either of the Chantmerle sisters had a male accomplice, why should she drug Archibald Blick? He was an old, wee fellow. Any man could kill him easily. And the drug in the stomach could only throw suspicion on the Chantmerles. But suppose a woman was to put him in the quarry. She’d want to have him groggy or asleep first.”
“What are you driving at?”
“The sleeping draught doesn’t make sense unless this was a woman’s crime. In all your fancy permutations and combinations, Strangeways, you’ve never included this—the two sisters having done the murder together. Celandine dopes the whisky; Rosebay drags the sleeping man out of doors, puts him in the electric carriage, dumps him in the quarry, leaves Charles Blick’s handkerchief to incriminate him, and—”
“But why make an assignation with Charles? And who was it the Hall cook saw?”
“It was Charles Blick she saw, returning from the appointment Rosebay had failed to keep. He’s the one who could most easily be mistaken for his father, And the assignation was made—just on the path Sir Archibald would return by, mark you now, but well away from the wood and the quarry—so that we’d think Sir Archibald ran into Charles there, as he was going home, made him go back to the Hall with him, started blowing off about Rosebay, quarreled, took a sleeping draught, was killed by Charles. The sisters couldn’t take into account that the Hall cook would wake up, look out of the window and see only one Blick returning. What about that?”
“If that’s what we were meant to think,” Nigel replied, “I can only say we’ve been singularly slow in the uptake. It’s a wonderful theory, Blount, wonderful. And it collapses into thin air on one point—Celandine was obviously knocked all of a heap to hear about Rosebay’s assignation with Charles.”
“You’re green yet, I doubt. You tell me Rosebay’s a natural actress. Hasn’t it occurred to you her sister is a better one still?”
Mrs. Durdle led them into the cheerless, poky parlor, saying that her son would be down in a minute. She was painfully ill at ease with them, twining and untwining her fingers in front of her bosom as she sat stiffly on the edge of a chair. Blount’s affabilities were received with little, harassed dippings of the head; the craggy face, the scraped-back hair, the angular figure—all was graceless and unyielding. And, even as Nigel was about to turn his eyes away from the unlovely spectacle, her face flushed red and she was leaning toward Blount, saying:
“You won’t do anything to my boy, will you, sir? He’s different from other boys, I know. But he’s always been real good to me. He wouldn’t harm anyone—not meaning to.”
For a moment Nigel could hardly believe his eyes or his ears. The intensity of her voice almost scorched him. In her tone and expression he suddenly felt the embers of a passionate young girl—the girl who had loved Edric Chantmerle thirty years ago. Yes, only a creature of strong will and passion could have tempted the refined, subtle, romantic, aging Edric. Her simplicity would intrigue him, her fire consume him. And then, in a moment, it was over: the flame went out, leaving behind a coarse, violent village girl, and a man appalled by what he had done, ready to twist and turn any way to avoid its consequences: a bit of a worm, in fact.
“I guessed about those letters, and spoke to him,” she was saying. “Oh, it was downright wicked, and I told him so. But it’s my fault, sir. He was all I had, and I spoiled him. Can’t you lock me up, instead? He’d never do it again, I swear to you. He’s brooded so long over what he thinks his rights—you understand me, sir?—he gets mazed at times. He wrote them to rebuke sin, so he told me. I’m a religious woman myself, but I don’t hold with making trouble like that. He’d never do anything real bad, though. Not—not what was done to Sir Archibald.”
Glancing at Blount, Nigel saw that he was genuinely moved. It was tragic, the woman’s love for that unlovable creature upstairs.
“I must do my duty, ma’am,” said Blount. “But if there are—e-eh—extenuating circumstances, you can be sure they’ll be taken into account. Hrr’m. Medical opinion. Testimonials to character. Unfortunate history. Hrr’m. Must remember, though, damage done by letters. Suicide. Attempted suicide. Feeling in village. Full severity of law.”
As always on the rare occasions he was moved, Blount had fallen into the idiom of Mr. Jingle.
“Fully sympathetic with your position, ma’am. Do all we can to make things easy for you.”
“It’s not for myself I’m asking, sir. I’ve had trouble before and lived it down. My age, you don’t worry so about what people say.” Her plain, harsh face lifted proudly. There was a kind of beauty in it now. They heard footsteps on the stairs.
“My mother has been entertaining you, gentlemen?”
“You have a better mother than you deserve,” said Blount, not unimpressively.
“We all have, praise the Lord. A little refreshment for you?”
“Thank you, no.”
Mrs. Durdle, with a backward glance at her son, slipped out of the room.
“And what can I do for you?”
“I was told you wished to see me.”
Durdle’s head wriggled on the long neck. He gave a sickly ingratiating smile, and began to speak. The enormity of what he proposed soon began to show through his veiled language; he was offering to trade some vital information about the murder in return for immunity over the anonymous letters. Not that he ever admitted in so many words that he had been responsible for them: he had the sea lawyer’s tongue and the peasant’s slyness, overlaid with an oleaginous religiosity which made Nigel feel nauseated. Blount soon cut short these overtures.
“If you know anything relevant to the murder of Sir Archibald Blick, it is your duty to inform me of it, and failure to do so will get you into serious trouble. Worse trouble than you’re in already. I’m not bargaining with you, my lad. And I’m a busy man. So get on with it, if you’ve anything to say.”
Durdle’s thick spectacles flashed malevolently at them. For a moment, Nigel thought Blount’s treatment had been too drastic; but Durdle was the kind of man whose rancor increased in proport
ion to the size of the audience before whom he was humiliated. And now, as soon became apparent, vindictiveness was stronger in him than wounded vanity.
His previous story—that, after leaving the New Inn on the night of the crime, he had fallen asleep in a ditch—was amended. He had fallen into a ditch, the worse for drink, but not gone to sleep. He was brooding over his recent interview with Sir Archibald. In spite of his having been useful to that gentleman—
“You told him a piece of scandalous filth about the late Mrs. Raynham, eh?” Blount interjected. “What else?”
Durdle’s mouth hardened, while his head swiveled as if he was turning the other cheek.
“I told him who my father was.”
So Durdle had given Sir Archibald this powerful weapon against Celandine, Nigel ruminated. He could imagine the eminent financier stressing his objections to his son marrying into a family which had produced, not only the erratic Rosebay, but this ill-favored, schizophrenic creature.
In spite of that, Durdle was saying, he had distrusted Sir Archibald’s promise to reconsider his intention of expelling him and his mother from the village. So he decided to go up to the Little Manor and confront Miss Chantmerle herself with the truth. It was the sort of resolution a cowardly man, unaccustomedly flown with liquor, might well take, Nigel reflected. Daniel’s intention, wrapped up now in somewhat evasive terms, had clearly been to blackmail his elder sister: if she did not intercede for him with Sir Archibald, or consent to give him “his portion,” he would “publish her father’s iniquity abroad, yea, that I am the seed of his chambering and wantonness,” as Daniel, with a brief return to his Chapel manner, expressed it.
He had walked up to the Little Manor, found the front in darkness, gone round to the garden at the back. There, to his surprise, he saw Celandine talking to Sir Archibald. He decided to wait for a little, in case her visitor left.
“What time was this?”
“I heard the church clock strike half past ten soon after I arrived.”
“I see. So you stood there a while, in the dark, spying upon them.”
“‘But Joshua had said unto the two men that had spied out the country, Go into the Harlot’s house.’”
“None of that now,” said Blount, looking extremely shocked. “Get on with it.”
Durdle testified that Blick had been “exceeding wroth against the woman Celandine,” though he could not hear what was being said. Shortly after the half hour had struck, Blount’s questions elicited, Rosebay came in, went out again, and returned with a tray.
“And they filled themselves with strong drink,” Durdle sanctimoniously added.
“Who filled themselves?”
According to Durdle, Sir Archibald had drunk one glass poured out by Rosebay, and almost immediately poured himself another. Celandine had taken a few sips from hers, also mixed by Rosebay, then given it to her sister, who drank it off before retiring.
“Did you then, or any time later, observe any tampering with the drinks?”
Daniel looked surprised. But it was still not generally known, since the inquest had not yet been held and Blount had succeeded in keeping it from the press so far, that the dead man had had a sleeping draught: Blount’s most pertinacious questioning, however, gained nothing here. From the position where Durdle had been standing, he could not see the drink tray. All he could say was that Sir Archibald had been pacing about the room a good deal, and it would have been quite possible for Rosebay, or later Celandine, to have doped his drink without his noticing it. Daniel gave this evidence with an ill-concealed, mounting relish; its implications were not lost on him.
After twenty minutes or so, he had lost interest in the scene. Sir Archibald showed no signs of going, and Celandine would probably be off to bed as soon as he did leave. So Durdle had wandered away, with an idea in his fuddled mind of intercepting Sir Archibald on his return home and having it out with him again. He went out through the garden gate, toward the upper meadow across which Sir Archibald would walk home by the short cut to the Hall. But, before he had crossed the road into the meadow, he became aware that “one was lying in wait there.”
“Lying in wait? Why did you think that? It might have been a couple spooning, mightn’t it?”
Durdle shuddered, almost imperceptibly. His lank, red hair showed a line of sweat beads where it met his forehead.
“I heard no sounds of lewdness. There was a smell of tobacco smoke. It was the woman Rosebay’s paramour, concealing himself privily to—”
“How do you know that? It was quite dark.”
“He lit a cigarette. By the light of the match, I recognized the face of Charles Blick.”
Durdle had at once moved away. He wandered aimlessly round to the west of the Little Manor, toward the wood. He’d been feeling sick, he said, and it was better if he kept moving.
“What time was this?”
“The clock struck eleven a few minutes after I turned back.”
According to Daniel Durdle’s account of his movements, which Blount was marking on a large-scale ordnance map, he had stood for some time in a field to the west of the Little Manor and the wood, at a point equidistant about a hundred yards from them both, waiting.
“Waiting for what?”
The man’s head went up; the nostrils of the long thin nose distended. “I smelled evil in the air,” he said.
“You thought Miss Rosebay might be coming out, and you wanted to play Peeping Tom, eh? Wasn’t that it?”
“She, or her sister,” Durdle snarled viciously. “They are both rotten with the appetites of the flesh, corrupted by the pride of the eye, going to and fro in fine raiment—”
“Shut up!” roared Blount. “Answer my questions, and spare us this canting talk! How long did you wait there?”
Durdle thought it might have been ten minutes. Then he had heard faint sounds from the direction of the house—he could not describe them; they were not voices, more like footsteps, but very slow and irregular. He hung about for another ten minutes or so, then decided to go home across the upper meadow. He was just in time to hear the footsteps of someone crossing the road into the meadow; it was too dark, apart from his bad eyesight, for him to see who it was. It could not have been Rosebay, he thought at first, for no voices came from the place of assignation; and when Durdle presently went into the field, there was no trace of Charles Blick either. Durdle had next walked cautiously round the edges of the field, ending up at a haystack near which he listened a while in case Charles and Rosebay might be disporting themselves there. But again he drew a blank. As he stood there, he heard somebody coming up along the field path from the direction of the Hall. He reckoned this was some ten or twelve minutes from the time he had heard footsteps cross the road. It was a sort of quick, shuffling, dragging sound; and one moment, when the person paused, he heard hard breathing, in the stillness of the night.
“Had you heard the dogs barking at the Hall?”
“Yes, a few minutes before.”
“And this next sound you heard. What did you think it was, at the time?”
Durdle’s spectacles glinted. “Might have been someone carrying or dragging a heavy sack. But not at that time of night. I couldn’t make it out.”
The man was silent for a minute, his thin white fingers twisting like worms on the sofa where he sat. Then he burst out uncontrollably, shockingly, almost incoherent with the hatred that had fermented in him all these years. Sin had stalked abroad that night like the Adversary. . . . The woman Rosebay, slinking up from the Hall covert, panting and exhausted after . . . Filth, adulteresses, murderesses . . . Flaunting their fornications; running about the city like dogs, and grinning . . . The woman Celandine—she had flouted the Elect, clothed herself in gold and fine raiment, left the hungry to beg their bread. . . . Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. . . . Her iniquities would find her out, though she fled even unto the ends of the earth.
Blount let him rave for a while. Then, signing to Nigel and Reid, he got up
and walked out.
15 A Shuffled Step . . . a Dead Weight Trail’d
DANIEL DURDLE’S EVIDENCE had at once thrown light and confusion upon the whole case. Although Durdle had been fuddled with drink on the night in question, and although his mind was warped with hatred and religious mania, Nigel was inclined to consider seriously the facts which emerged from his statement. In making it, Durdle had revealed his presence near the scene of the crime at the relevant hour. He was so evilly disposed toward the Chantmerles that he had been willing to take this risk of putting himself under suspicion; yet, if he had been merely telling lies to incriminate them, it was surprising he had not gone much further.
Sitting alone in The Sweet Drop after lunch, Nigel worked out a timetable:
Several points emerged from this tabulation. First, Rosebay must have either lied or been mistaken about the time when she brought in the drinks. Both Charity’s evidence and Durdle’s put it shortly after 10:30: Celandine’s was vague—“thought it had been later.” Second, Charles had lied; said he and his brother went to bed soon after 10:30: but Rosebay had made an assignation to meet him some time after 11:00, and Durdle had found him at the rendezvous a little before the appointed time. Third, the person Durdle heard crossing the road was presumably the person whom the Hall cook saw five minutes later; therefore it was either Sir Archibald or an impersonator. The times Durdle had given, after his hearing the clock strike 11:00, could not be very accurate, but they fitted well enough. It seemed probable, but was by no means certain, that the person he had heard coming up the field path from the Hall was the same one as he had heard going down toward the Hall ten minutes earlier; and if so, it much have been an impersonator—why should Sir Archibald have walked home, and then straight back to the Little Manor again?
If Durdle was telling the truth, and his times were reasonably accurate, Sir Archibald could hardly have been attacked at the Hall. Even if he had been knocked on the head immediately after his return, how could the attacker have done this and got the insensible body as far as halfway across the upper meadow in five minutes? Yet there was Durdle’s curious remark that “it might have been someone carrying or dragging a heavy sack.” It was possible, of course, that Sir Archibald had started back for the Hall earlier than 11:20; but only if Celandine and Rosebay were lying or mistaken about the time he left: and besides, if this had happened, what sense could be made of the Hall cook’s evidence, and who was it Durdle had heard crossing the road at 11:25?