Head of a Traveller

  It was a naïve idea, and a childish plan, as Mara now admitted. However, he had egged her on to play a part in it; not that she required much persuasion—their new-found love made everything they did together seem like a wild, innocent game. Mara would have preferred to follow it out with Lionel to the end, sleeping with him in ditches or haystacks, sharing the risks and the gipsy delights of two lovers on the run. But Lionel had been determined that they should separate; it would give him much greater freedom of action, and therefore gain all the more time for Robert. So it was arranged that, if they did make their get-away, they should lie up for one night in Foxhole wood, and Mara should make her way on foot to Hinton Lacey, before daylight, and ask Paul Willingham to hide her. If he refused to do so, or her presence at the farm was soon discovered, Lionel would still be at large and no great harm done.

  Lionel had been in a state of irresponsible excitement, careless of the consequences both to Mara and himself, and to Paul. But Mara was more level-headed. When she got to the farm, she spun a tale for Paul Willingham’s benefit, saying that her father had threatened her with violence when she told him she was going to marry Lionel, and would have kept her locked up in the Old Barn: she had escaped, and implored Paul to hide her until Lionel returned with a special licence. Whether or no Paul really believed this romantic tale, it would at least provide him with some sort of defence if the police discovered Mara’s presence at the farm. He had, in fact, been out when Inspector Gates called there to inquire about Mara: and the housekeeper, who did not sleep in and had no idea even now—the spare room being kept locked during the day—that Mara was there, had told Gates in all good faith that she had not seen the girl.

  After hearing Mara’s story, Nigel went downstairs. Blount was about to depart and asked Nigel to drive back to Hinton Lacey with him. Sergeant Bower was left to keep an eye on the inmates of Plash Meadow. The Superintendent was very taciturn on the drive. He stopped at the public call-box, and spoke for some minutes. At last they were alone in Blount’s room at the Lacey Arms.

  ‘Well?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘I’ve asked Gates to relieve Bower as soon as possible. And he’s going to tell the newspapers that the police expect to make an arrest very shortly.’

  ‘You can’t arrest Robert Seaton on your present evidence. It simply isn’t good enough.’

  Blount gave his friend a meditative look. ‘He’d by far the strongest motive for it, you can’t deny that.’

  ‘Robert had a very strong motive for murdering Oswald,’ said Nigel slowly, ‘but he had even stronger one for not murdering him.’

  ‘Och, I’m too old to be impressed by these paradoxes of yours,’ said Blount after a pause, since Nigel did not seem disposed to enlarge upon the statement. ‘No. But I fancy young Seaton will make a move when he sees in tomorrow’s papers that an arrest is imminent.’

  ‘He’ll come tearing back here. That’s what he’ll do.’

  ‘Aye. Imph’m. Just so.’

  Something in Blount’s tone made Nigel look at him sharply. ‘When you start talking your hideous native lingo, I always know you’ve got something up your sleeve. Out with it!’

  ‘E-eh, well perhaps we lay our hands on young Lionel. That’s something, isn’t it? Gates is going to draw a mighty fine mesh round Plash Meadow.’

  ‘And you arrest Lionel for carrying arms, for intimidating a witness, for obstructing the police, and what have you. But all that won’t find you the murderer of Oswald Seaton.’

  ‘Maybe no. Maybe it will. It depends whether Lionel does come back. If he does, it will be to rally round his father. If he doesn’t—’ Blount vigorously massaged his bald head—‘if he doesn’t, then he’s our man.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

  ‘Rennell Torrance has come clean at last. He has just told me that he saw Lionel Seaton, round about two o’clock that night, skulking along beside the dairy.’

  ‘Crikey!’ Nigel was thoroughly startled. ‘D’you believe him?’

  ‘I don’t know why he should make it up. Or why, if he was making it up, he should wait till now to let it out.’

  Blount proceeded to outline the case against Lionel Seaton. First, he had claimed to have slept through the thunderstorms of the fatal night; yet he had been awakened by Nigel’s shout for help on a subsequent night: and Torrance had seen him ‘skulking along beside the dairy’ at the time of Oswald’s murder. Lionel had therefore lied. Had he lied to protect himself, or someone else? Up to this point, there had been a too facile assumption (thought Blount) that all Lionel’s actions could be explained as part of a design to protect his father. But suppose the exact opposite were true? Suppose that Robert had seen Lionel—as well he might, having been twice across the courtyard that night—behaving in a suspicious manner, had caught him, perhaps, actually disposing of the corpse? Could not all Robert’s subsequent behaviour, the hiding and supplying of Finny Black, for instance, be explained by an intention to conceal his son’s guilt?

  Nigel agreed that it could.

  Second, the simplest solution of Lionel’s ‘escapade’ in the Old Barn was that he had been genuinely afraid lest Rennell Torrance might disclose some incriminating evidence against him. He had therefore threatened Rennell with his pistol: and not unsuccessfully, for Rennell had, in fact, kept silence till this morning. It was a desperate thing to do, certainly. But Lionel may have been a desperate man by then; and he might also have been clever enough to perceive that such a public exhibition of violence would draw suspicion away from him, as indeed it did—would look like the action of a quixotic young man trying to protect somebody else. His later actions—the deliberate brush with the policeman in the market town, for example—would lend colour to this picture.

  Third, and this was perhaps the strongest point in Blount’s theory, Lionel was the most likely of all the suspects from the physical point of view. He was young; he had been trained in the ruthless combat technique of the Airborne troops; only a strong, cunning and ruthless man could have done everything which was done to Oswald Seaton that night. It was difficult to imagine the pudgy Torrance, or the slightly-built Robert, let alone Janet, cutting the throat of a man who would certainly be on his guard, then severing the head, then carrying the body to the river and towing it downstream.

  Fourth, the motive. This hinged on the question whether Lionel knew what Oswald had done to Mara ten years before. Mara herself, and Robert, had said that Lionel was ignorant of this: but they might well have done so to protect Lionel. If Lionel did know about it, on the other hand, he had a most compelling motive—his love for Mara and his experience of the hideous psychological damage which Oswald had inflicted upon her, to say nothing of the further harm that might be done if Oswald appeared in her life again.

  Fifth, opportunity. This was the weakest point of Blount’s case, as he freely admitted. To suppose that Lionel had run into Oswald that night, before the latter could make contact with Robert, was to postulate a thumping coincidence.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Nigel said.

  ‘But he couldn’t possibly, if Robert’s evidence just now is to be believed, have known that Oswald was coming to Plash Meadow—couldn’t know he was alive, even.’

  ‘You’re forgetting Robert’s Stylograph. And the thin block-paper he used for writing to his brother. Paul Willingham told me the other day that a Stylograph leaves a visible impression on the sheet below the one you’re writing on. I tried the experiment later myself, and it’s quite true. It’s quite possible for Lionel to have gone into his father’s study, soon after he’d written it, and seen a facsimile of the letter on the pad.’

  ‘So that’s what you were after! Well, the murder may have been premeditated, then. At an rate, Lionel might have been on the wait for Oswald, to head him off. But now we come to the next snag. How could he get hold of Oswald’s razor? And where is that damned razor? We’ve pretty well taken the house, the dairy, the outbuildings and the Old Barn to pieces, looking for i
t. And why should the murderer have been at such pains to conceal it? He’d only to wipe his fingerprints off, and being Oswald’s razor, it wouldn’t incriminate him more than any one else.’

  ‘Don’t ask me. I haven’t the faintest idea. But, going back to the premeditation or the reverse—’ Nigel looked strangely at Blount. ‘No, we’ll leave that for a moment. Let’s go further back still. To Robert’s poetry. I’m convinced that his poetry is at the very roots of this case. Now, you suggested that Robert’s actions have been dictated by a wish to protect his son, whom he knows or gravely suspects is the murderer. Yet, since the murder, Robert has written a great poetic sequence. Poets can be pretty heartless, inhuman almost, when their work is in question. But I can’t see Robert writing merrily away with the knowledge that his son, whom he loves, is a murderer.’

  ‘Well, maybe not. But—’

  ‘No, wait a minute. I’m going to spring a mine under you, so hold tight. It’s a variant of your own theory. Suppose that Janet, not Lionel, read the impression of Robert’s letter: she’d be more likely to, because Robert told us that no one but Janet was normally allowed into his study. She now knows what date and approximate time Oswald will turn up at Plash Meadow. She intends, perhaps, only to gate-crash on the meeting between Oswald and Robert: Oswald won’t get the estate back if she has any say in the matter. But, at zero hour, the wretched Robert is missing; out for a walk. Janet hears the courtyard door open. That was her own admission. But she doesn’t, as she pretended to me, call out “Robert”: she suspects the visitor is Oswald, she goes down the passage—and Oswald it is! What is she to do? Her instinctive reaction, I suggest, would be to get him out of the house—her house. Under some pretext, she persuades him to walk across to the dairy with her.’

  Blount slapped his head. ‘Good lord, man! You mean it was he—’

  ‘Yes, the man Mara saw crossing the courtyard with Janet could have been Oswald. I asked her just now, and she agreed. She assumed at the time that it was Robert, quite naturally. But the man was on the far side of Janet, and Mara had only one lightning-flash to glimpse him by; and anyway, Robert and Oswald are about the same build, and not unlike one another in feature. This would explain how the expectant father was able to see Robert, about a quarter of an hour later, walking down the lane towards Plash Meadow. Well, then—’

  ‘By the Lord, Strangeways, I believe you’ve got it!’ exclaimed Blount. ‘She’d lock Oswald into the dairy, or tell him to wait there till Robert turned up. Then she’d get a scunner, maybe, at the idea of a deadly wee fellow like Oswald being about the place. She’s lose her nerve suddenly, and want protection. But Robert was away somewhere, walking. So her natural impulse would be to run along to Lionel’s bedroom, and wake him, and tell him what had happened. Lionel gets up and goes across to the dairy alone. Maybe he knows about Oswald and Mara, maybe not. But Oswald draws his razor on the lad, and Lionel wrests it from him, and Oswald gets his throat cut. Aye, it all fits in. And this would explain why Robert was able to write his vairses. He didn’t know what had happened at Plash Meadow while he was away. It was Janet who’s been protecting Lionel. It was she who persuaded Robert to conceal Finny Black—aye, it’d explain all her actions too—and it’s possible that Robert may have been thinking all this time it was Janet who’d killed Oswald—that would account for his; but it’d no’ interfere with his poetry writing, because he does not care for Janet—not as he does for Lionel and Vanessa.’

  ‘Ah, you’ve noticed that too, have you?’

  ‘It’s written on his face; and on hers, forby.’

  ‘So now, what?’

  ‘We wait for Lionel to come back. If he doesn’t, we’ll go out after him.’

  ‘Lionel. Yes. What a homecoming!’ said Nigel, with unusual emotion. ‘You’ll not be able to charge him with the murder, of course.’

  ‘Not yet. Not on the evidence we’ve got, I agree. There should have been clothes of his with bloodstains on them. And there are other little snags. But I’ll sort it, when we’ve got him. It’s the most convincing theory of the crime, Strangeways.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a beautiful theory,’ Nigel wearily replied. ‘On paper.’ . . .

  Dinner at Plash Meadow that evening was a sombre, uneasy affair. Even Finny Black seemed to feel the weighted atmosphere: he came in and out with the dishes, dragging his steps like a sick dog. Vanessa was obviously hard put to it to swallow her helping of chicken. After dinner, in the drawing-room, she suddenly moved across to her father, who sat with his hand shading his eyes, and ran her fingers gently through his hair—a mature, maternal gesture.

  ‘I’ll sing to you,’ she said. ‘Poor old Saul. David will sing to him. I wish I could play the harp too.’

  She went to the piano, and accompanying herself in a wooden way that strangely consorted with the pure, small, wavering tone of her voice, sang The Queen’s Maries, and Lord Randal, My Son. Then she sang Will Ye No’ Come Back Again? Janet Seaton’s face was like stone. Tears trickled through Robert’s fingers.

  ‘That was beautiful, my dearest,’ he said when she had finished. ‘Thank you. It used to be your mo—it’s one of my favourite songs.’

  ‘I know what you were going to say,’ she breathed into his ear as she kissed him goodnight.

  Janet Seaton sat stiffly, like a stranger in the room, containing her agony. She offered her cheek to Vanessa: then, a few seconds after, blindly stretched out her hand; but the door was already closed behind the girl.

  ‘How much longer is this going on?’ asked Robert presently.

  Nigel said, ‘I think Lionel will turn up again soon.’

  ‘Lionel? But—are the police waiting for that?’ Janet’s voice was low and harsh.

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘I suppose they’re bound to take a serious view of this escapade of his?’ said Robert.

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. It might be very serious. If there was a question of his being an accomplice after the fact. Or—’

  ‘Or what?’ asked Janet sharply.

  ‘I must tell you that he’s under grave suspicion for the actual murder.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s ridiculous!’ Robert’s face had the placatory, groping expression of a deaf man who sees others laughing at a joke he has not quite caught.

  Janet Seaton’s breath came in a shuddering sigh. She left the room abruptly, the keys jangling in her black chatelaine bag.

  ‘I oughtn’t to be staying here any longer,’ said Nigel. ‘It’s not fair to you.’

  Robert Seaton gazed at him with a pure intensity which Nigel found difficult to meet: it was as if a last veil had dropped from the poet’s eyes.

  ‘Do you know who killed my brother?’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I think I know everything now.’

  ‘Well, don’t go yet. Stay on just a little longer, and see us—see us all through it. Will you do that, my dear fellow?’ . . .

  Nigel did not, in fact, have to wait very long. The following day and night mounted in a crescendo of suspense such as he had never experienced before—and one which he could never afterwards look back upon except with pain and dismay.

  At breakfast the newspapers announced that an arrest was imminent in the Ferry Lacey case. Robert quietly passed his News Chronicle to Janet, his finger marking the paragraph. Then he glanced at Nigel, who at once left the table and put through a call to the inn at Hinton Lacey. The landlord sent one of his children to fetch Paul Willingham.

  ‘Have they arrested you yet, Paul?’ asked Nigel.

  ‘As it so happens, not. I suppose there’ll be trouble over young Mara. Your Superintendent gave me a rocket yesterday about “harbouring her,” as he put it. But I stuck to my story—or rather, her story—’

  ‘Never mind about that. You’ve got to harbour another female now. We’re sending Vanessa to stay with you for a few nights.’

  ‘Oh, it’s like that, is it? I’m sorry. Damn this bloody business! I’ll invite my young cousin, Priscilla, to keep her compa
ny.’

  A very subdued Vanessa sat beside Nigel in the Seatons’ car, half an hour later. She had shown signs of mutiny at first; but her father had gently persuaded her that she must go—the house would be full of policemen for a day or two, he said, and they wouldn’t want her getting in amongst their large feet.

  ‘Bye-bye, love,’ he said, as the car was about to depart. ‘See you soon. Be a good girl, and don’t ride Paul’s pony too hard.’ Robert’s voice was cheerful and matter-of-fact. He kissed his daughter, waved once, walked steadily away into the house. Nigel felt, looking back on it afterwards, that he had never seen a more heroic action.

  ‘It’s all wrong!’ Vanessa burst out, as the car drove through the gateway. ‘It’s all wrong! I know there’s something wrong!’ And that was all she said till they arrived at Paul Willingham’s farm.

  On his return, Nigel was met by Robert Seaton, who handed him a telegram.

  EXPECT ME BACK ABOUT ELEVEN TONIGHT. LIONEL.

  ‘It’s just come,’ said Robert. ‘I suppose your Superintendent has to be told about this?’

  ‘I expect he knows already. They’ve been keeping a watch on all communications for Plash Meadow.’

  ‘Ah, well. I hope Vanessa didn’t take it too hard?’

  ‘She’ll be all right.’

  ‘Good. I’m sure she will. If you’ll forgive me, I must go and do a bit of writing now.’ The poet walked briskly upstairs again . . .