Too Many Cousins, page 9
The bungalow on the Leatherhead road had been left untouched since its mistress’s death, her brother having as yet had no time to dispose of her effects. Inspector Vance’s visit there, however, had negative results. Leaving an officer of the Surrey Constabulary to continue researches on the spot, Mr. Vance and his colleague again returned to London. Here, the next morning, that of the 23rd, they began work at the other end, on the movements on or about the essential dates of the interested persons so far known to them. Mile Boulanger and Miss Ardmore were interviewed. Information received, both from these ladies and from Mr. Tuke, having dragged Messrs. Gartside and Mainward into the orbit of the case, the inspector continued to move in official circles, for while Charles Gartside was at the Ministry of Information, Mr. Mainward was in the Foreign Office. And the afternoon found Mr. Vance at Bedford, calling on Mortimer Shearsby at the laboratories of Imperial Sansil (almost another government department), and on Mrs. Shearsby at ‘Aylwynstowe’.
All three cousins had shown signs of strain at these interviews, but this was to be expected, for police inquiries into deaths by which other persons benefit do not inspire the latter, howsoever innocent, with ease and gaiety. Mile Boulanger was defensive and aggrieved, Miss Ardmore on her dignity and rather snappy, and Mortimer Shearsby alternately twittery and bellicose. Asked why, at the inquest on his sister, he had remained silent about the previous case of sodium nitrite poisoning, the chemist got on his high horse and lectured Inspector Vance about moral sabotage, on the lines of his apologia to Mr. Tuke. If the inspector said, ‘Poppycock’ to himself, for the time being he left it at that.
As for Lilian Shearsby and the two young men, the lady had been a little hoity-toity, and revealed plainly her animus against Miss Ardmore, though having perhaps taken her husband’s warnings to heart, she also left it at that. Mr. Gartside had looked at the inspector as though he were some noxious species of insect, and Guy Mainward appeared to be doing his best to be helpful.
The outcome of routine questions about dates and times and movements was as inconclusive as such preliminary probings commonly are. These questions were put to all six concerned; for while the two civil servants supplied certain alibis for Miss Ardmore and Mile Boulanger, Charles Gartside had also an established interest in Vivien’s finances, and Guy Mainward, to all appearance, as good as one in Gecile’s. And Lilian Shearsby was even more directly a beneficiary by the deaths of her cousins by marriage.
Going back to April the 10th, though Gecile might have cause to remember that she was all but run over by a lorry at approximately 9.10 p.m., the inspector hardly hoped that any of the other five would pretend to remember their movements on a particular evening four months ago. And so it proved. Miss Ardmore and the civil servants were admittedly in London, and the Mortimer Shearsbys could easily have got there. The last train back to Bedford did not leave St. Pancras till 9.50. In the interim report on all these proceedings which Mr. Vance drew up, he noted that Mile Boulanger’s own story required confirmation.
Coming to the 28th of July, when Raymond Shearsby met his death, memories began to improve. The chemist said he was no doubt in his garden—during the summer months he was seldom out of it in his spare time—from 6.15 until his wife returned late from a day in Cambridge. Miss Ardmore spent the whole evening with her fiance, while Cecile went to a lecture at the Institut Frangais and then returned to her lodgings in Pimlico. Lilian Shearsby attended a W.V.S. conference at Cambridge, where she also shopped and dined, leaving at 9 o’clock by bus for Hitchen, where she changed buses, arriving home at 10.45. Charles Gartside was with his Vivien from 6 o’clock onwards, and Mr. Mainward passed the evening in his flat, communing^ as he put it, with his Muse. It appeared that he was something of a poet.
Inspector Vance now came to the Bank Holiday weekend, which provided chunks of evidence of a peculiarly baffling sort. He provisionally accepted Mrs. Steptoe’s story that the caster in the kitchen of the bungalow contained ordinary cooking salt as late as the evening of Friday, the 4th of August, when she prepared a meal there. On the medical evidence this gave two whole days, the Saturday and Sunday, during which the substitution of sodium nitrite for the salt must have been effected. It was not known whether Mrs. Porteous had used the caster on the Saturday, and she was believed to have spent most of the Sunday in London, though where or with whom remained to be discovered. The movements of the six persons involved required accordingly to be traced throughout both those days. All six partook at least in part of the general holiday. Even if the schoolteacher was at home on the Saturday afternoon (which was in doubt) any one of them might have called on her; and as for the Bank Holiday Sunday the whole world could have walked in. When Blanche Porteous was out she left her clumsy front door key, after the casual fashion of the country, on a ledge above the door. To make things a little more difficult, the bungalow was two hundred yards from the nearest house, and screened by trees and a bend of the road.
Mortimer Shearsby’s weekend, by his own account, was spent as to the Saturday alone in his garden, while on Sunday he took his bicycle and some food and rode to Lilly Hoo, above Hitchen. Leaving the bicycle padlocked under a hedge, he walked about the hills until late in the evening. He did not call anywhere, even for a drink. His tone implied that such was not his habit.
Cecile Boulanger was at work or with friends all the Saturday. On Sunday she took a sandwich lunch and went for a long walk in the Hampton and Kingston district/ returning home about six in time to spend the evening with Mr. Mainward. Vivien Ardmore could also claim some sort of an alibi for Saturday, when both she and Mr. Gartside had the day to themselves and went together to Kew Gardens and Richmond. On the Sunday she took herself off alone, like her cousin Cecile, and tramped over the country about Windsor, returning to Falcon Mews East at nine o’clock.
Of the three secondary characters, Lilian Shearsby went to London on the Saturday morning, shopped there, saw a film, dined (at a Corner House, with several thousand other people), and caught the 8.5 train home. The Sunday she spent mostly with the gnomes and frogs in the garden of ‘ Aylwynstowe’, while her husband roamed the hills. Charles Gartside’s Saturday stood or fell with Miss Ardmore’s, but his Sunday was one long alibi, for he was on duty at the Ministry of Information until a late hour. With Mr. Mainward conversely, the Foreign Office in the morning, a friend in the afternoon, and a Home Guard picquet at the F.O. again from 6 p.m. onwards, carried him happily through the first half of the period; but after his picquet was relieved at 6 a.m. on Sunday his later movements actually brought him within a few miles of Guildford. He had lunch and tea with relatives at Godaiming, returning to London just in time to meet Mile Boulanger in the evening.
All this the Metropolitan police and the constabularies of four counties were endeavouring to check. The Ministry of War Transport and all haulage concerns were asked for news of a convoy routed down Warwick Way on the night of the 10th of April; and in London and Guildford and Bedford, at Cambridge and Stocking, patient inquiries were covering the 28th of July and the Bank Holiday weekend. There was only too little corroboration of the six statements, and of this little much was suspect. With one married couple, one engaged, and a third apparently verging on betrothal, the possibility of collusion was always in Inspector Vance’s mind.
That mind was a tidy one, which liked tangible facts to work on; and so far it was dealing with known people, people who could be interrogated and watched and described. But during the last two days of this routine it had been nagged by the thought of the new and nebulous factor injected into the case. The mystery of Martin Dresser would have to be solved. If alive, he had the same incentive as the younger generation to remove a cousin or two. And there was a suggestive shadow on his past from which theirs was free.
Raymond Shearsby’s statement to Rockley Payne, a casual remark to the Vicar of Stocking, and the evidence of the cancelled story, formed the meagre support for the case of survival. They were enough, however, to compel respect, especially the story, since, good feeling apart, the sacrifice of twenty-five guineas must have been a consideration to an impoverished writer. Raymond had undoubtedly met someone whom he believed to be his cousin Martin. That meeting, vide the Vicar of Stocking, took place in London, and not earlier than the 15th of July, when the proofs of Too Many Cousins were despatched from the office of The Ludgate Magazine. Somewhere, then, among London’s eight millions, there must be sought a man of fifty-seven, of whom no recent description or portrait was extant, who had in all probability changed his name, and whose occupation was unknown. And the first two days’ work on the trail had produced not one further whiff of a scent, even of proof that Martin was alive.
It was scarcely credible that Sydney Dresser had not known of his father’s return to England. But he had kept the secret well, and not only from his cousins. His personal papers, which had been handed to Mile Boulanger, who said she had not yet looked through them, were searched in vain for any allusion to Martin. Those of Raymond, less manuscripts and printed matter, were collected from ‘ Aylwynstowe ’, to prove equally unhelpful, as was the untidy accumulation of documents in the bungalow at Guildford. Letters might have been abstracted, but why? A guilty conscience would have seen the value of this red herring from the past. Another blank was drawn with Captain Dresser’s bank books. There were no untraceable payments, and no large sums had been drawn in cash.
The old story of Martin’s defalcations, his old friends in Chelmsford, literary coteries where Raymond might have talked (but where he was almost unknown), the latter’s literary agent and one or two acquaintances met since his return from France, even Miss Wicksteed, the companion of the second Mrs. Rutland Shearsby, slowly dying in her flat in Chelsea—these were among further avenues explored which proved to be dead ends. Non est inventus Martin Dresser remained.
CHAPTER XI
AND not only Martin Dresser. The police, like archaeologists, never know what they may dig up; and though patient spadework had so far unearthed little of apparent value, it had casually cast upon the scene two new and nameless actors. It was doubtful whether their entry had any bearing upon the case, but as a coincidence it called for explanation. Unfortunately, after brief and mysterious posturings, the pair had vanished again into the unknown from which they had emerged.
Inspector Vance inserted in his report some notes on railways, omnibuses, road-mileages and routes. He remarked on the hopelessness (lacking a stroke of luck) of tracing individuals on the numerous and densely crowded trains running between London and Guildford; nor were those on the London-Bedford line much more promising. Country omnibuses were better, and a fairly frequent service of these over the triangle Bedford-Hitchen-Cambridge included some which passed Stocking Corner, two miles north of the village. Finally, two miles south of it, was Whipstead station, on the King’s Cross and Cambridge line.
This station stood isolated, half a mile from Whipstead village. Less than a dozen trains stopped there during the day. It was the sort of place the coy criminal would be expected to avoid, but criminals make mistakes and are tied by circumstances; and inquiries were made at Whipstead as a matter of course. They were fruitful only in the unexpected, for they turned up the two incogniti.
On the 28th of July, the evening of Raymond Shearsby’s death, the 5.10 from Cambridge to London, stopping at Whipstead at 5.31, emitted about a dozen passengers, all, with one exception, local residents well known to the station staff, which consisted of the stationmaster and a youthful porter. The exception was a young man carrying a suitcase. He had a third class return from Cambridge. The stationmaster, retiring to the ticket office, saw no more of him at that time; but the porter watched him take the road to Whipstead village. Both officials were certain that they had never seen this stranger before. They described him as having a fresh colour and a small-featured, boyish face. He was wearing a neat but by no means new suit of blue serge, with a large cloth cap pulled over his eyes.
Between the infrequent trains the station staff usually dispersed—the stationmaster to his house near by, the porter to his home in Whipstead. The next stopping train after the 5.31 was the 6.43 from King’s Cross, on its way to Cambridge. The porter returned to the station soon after half-past six, and while wheeling milk-churns down the platform saw a figure leaning on the parapet of the road bridge which crossed the line just beyond the platform ramp. It was the strange young man in the blue serge suit: the porter recognized him by his large cloth cap. From the high bridge one obtained an extensive view northward over the flat country about Stocking, and the stranger was gazing over this landscape. On hearing the rattle of the milk churns he looked down at the platform and withdrew out of sight.
The 6.43 discharged quite a crowd of local people who had been to London for the day. Among them was a second stranger—a tall, greyhaired man of gentlemanlike appearance, dressed in a grey tweed suit and a grey felt hat. He carried an attache-case. The stationmaster, who took his ticket—a third class single from King’s Gross—thought he had a vaguely ecclesiastical air, but could not explain more precisely what he meant. This newcomer seemed to know his way about, for though he made no inquiry he was seen by the stationmaster, from the ticket office window, strolling at the tail of a little procession taking the footpath which cut across the chord of the loop made by the road from Stocking. Except in very miry weather this path was always used by people walking between that village and the station.
There was an interval of just over an hour before the next train pulled in. This was the 7.48 from Cambridge, which set down some more local residents and provided no surprises. It was followed, at 8.5, by the last stopping train of the day. On the down line, it was due in at Cambridge at 8.27.
This train, like the others, was almost on time. It was signalled, and its smoke could be seen, when the young man in the blue suit hurried into the station. The porter, who clipped his return ticket, said he was a little breathless. He was still carrying his suitcase. The train discharged a further body of passengers: pushing his way through them, the young man boarded it and was conveyed from the scene.
The countryman’s passionate interest in strangers having supplied not only news, but quite good descriptions, of these two travellers, Sergeant Oake continued, as a matter of routine, to follow up the clues thus provided. He did not really expect them to lead anywhere: the travellers bore no resemblance to any of the dramatis personae of whom he had information, and they had no doubt come to Whipstead station for legitimate reasons, which would soon appear. But now came the perplexing part of this piece of by-play. No such reasons were discoverable. The two strangers had come to this isolated station, from opposite directions, without any apparent object.
The young man in blue had been seen in the outskirts of Whipstead, carrying his suitcase, at about half-past five. He had then gone down a lane which led nowhere in particular, reappearing in the village an hour later on his way back to the station. In Whipstead he called nowhere and spoke to nobody, and he was quite unknown in the place. He was lost to view again between 6.30, when the porter saw him on the bridge, and his return to the station to catch the 8.5. He had not gone back to Whipstead, nor on to Stocking. In short, he seemed to have come from Cambridge for the pleasure of walking about with his luggage for three hours.
As for the tall elderly man in grey, last seen strolling up the path to Stocking, that village had not glimpsed hide or hair of him. A quarter of a mile from the station the path ran beside a loop of the Cat Ditch, here screened by willows and other shrubs. At this point a second path forked off to the west, crossing the stream by a plank bridge, and continuing over the fields came out in the lane in which Raymond Shearsby’s cottage stood, between that cottage and the bridge beneath which the writer’s body was found. The man in grey must have taken this route, but where he was bound there was no showing. He should have been near the cottage before half-past seven. By that time Raymond Shearsby could have returned from his visit to the inn.
Here, then, after all, were puzzles which must be cleared up. Sergeant Oake, aided by the constables who lived in the two villages, began a thorough raking of the countryside for news of the two strangers. But up to the hour when Inspector Vance completed his interim report, no such news had come in.
CHAPTER XII
“THEY’RE all possibles,” Wray said.
It was the morning of Thursday, the 24th, and Inspector Vance’s summary of the first three days’ work on the case was under discussion. The Assistant Commissioner’s appointment with Sir Bruton Karnes was about other matters, but the Director, pronouncing them damned dull, demanded what he called a bit of jam. He instanced the affair of the cousins, in which he now seemed to take an interest. Mr. Tuke, meeting him in the interim at the Senior Universities, needed no persuasion to give up another hour of his holiday in the same cause.
