Faintley Speaking (Mrs. Bradley), page 15
“Blasphemy!” said Celestine sourly. She took in the coffee and set it down gently on a table at Mrs. Bradley’s right elbow. “Madame is served!”
“And, in return, will give you a reliable recipe for poisoning Henri,” said her employer. Celestine tossed her head, as usual.
“Although a pig and a louse, he is still the husband my good parents found for me,” she said austerely. “The good offices of madame are wasted on such as he!”
“Is she really such a tartar?” asked Bannister, who found himself at home in the household. Laura laughed.
“You’d be surprised,” she said. “Now, Mrs. Croc. let’s pump him.”
Mrs. Bradley regarded Bannister benevolently. She saw a tall, angular, dark-faced man, obviously shy but with honest eyes and a mouth which she thought could be grim.
“I hope you won’t need to pump me,” he said. “What about?”
“About the late Faintley, of course,” said Laura encouragingly. “You can’t tell us too much about her.”
“As for that,” said Bannister. He stopped, and looked to Mrs. Bradley for guidance. “As for that,” he repeated, “well, I didn’t really know much about her.”
“Perhaps not, but you were good enough to warn my secretary, Laura here, against picking up parcels at Hagford railway junction,” Mrs. Bradley observed.
“I know,” said Bannister. “The point is that…oh, well, I expect Miss Menzies has told you.”
“Whatever Miss Menzies has told me would be more valuable if I could have it at first hand…and that is all you can do to help us?” Mrs. Bradley added, when Bannister had repeated his story of having seen Miss Faintley enter Tomson’s shop, and of what he had witnessed there.
“I think so,” he replied, but he seemed uncertain.
“Then, in that case,” said Mrs. Bradley, “let us change the subject of conversation.” Bannister looked surprised at the abrupt alteration of her tone. “Tell us about your potholing, and what you think of the prehistoric cave-paintings at Lascaux,” she suggested.
“Lascaux?…Oh, I suppose that young devil Street told you. He said he’d spent part of his holidays at Miss Menzies’ hotel, and I knew from the papers that Miss Menzies had found Miss Faintley’s body.” He stopped short; then he added, “But you mean something deeper than that.”
“I’ve been to Lascaux myself,” Mrs. Bradley assured him. “You are remembered in the district.”
Bannister grimaced, but made no comment. Mrs. Bradley pressed the point by remaining absolutely silent and nodding her head very slowly, as though she had discovered something which gave her satisfaction. Bannister suddenly laughed.
“I’m awfully sorry, but I’ve been tested for nerves, you know. The Gestapo technique was, if I may say so, bloodily more effective than yours. Still, I’ll give this much away: Faintley, whether innocently or not, was mixed up with something no good, but it wasn’t political, exactly. I’m pretty certain about that. I know all the symptoms, I think. And now…why did you ask me to come here?”
Mrs. Bradley told him of Mandsell’s telephone call, and Laura added:
“So far as we know, you and Mr. Tench were the only men members of the staff who didn’t turn up at all at that end-of-term dance. The man who had to answer the telephone call that night walked away in front of Mandsell and, from what we’ve already deduced, it seems likely that he was either you or Tench. I don’t think it was you because…well, because I just don’t think it was. Have you an alibi, by the way?”
“As a matter of fact, I suppose I have. I was fiddling about with my landlady’s television set most of the evening. You could check that if you wanted to. She and her husband were with me most of the time, and once I’d got home from school I didn’t go out any more until almost ten. I went down to the Lion then for a beer, and stayed until closing time.”
“Before which the telephone call must have been made. That brings us to Mr. Tench, then. What sort of man is he? I’ve met him in the staff-room, of course, but I haven’t gathered yet what he’s really like.”
“And you won’t. He’s a bit of an homme incompris. Nobody knows much about him. He’s all right at his job, but his wife’s a chronic invalid and he seems to spend most of his time out of school in waiting upon the sick-bed. Trouble is, I gather, that he married above him, and hasn’t ever been able to live it down. I don’t think the wife is bitchy, but now she’s ill he feels he must try and make up to her for a disappointing sort of life. Odd bloke. Might be quite decent but for this rotten fixation.”
“A man, in fact, who would be glad of a little extra dough?”
“I should say so. Chickens and invalid diet and fairly exotic fruit and flowers, and a hefty library subscription, and taxi fares if she ventures out, can run into money, of course, and nothing’s too good for the lady—or so we gather. None of us has been permitted to meet her, by the way. Her blue blood, apart from her illness, has to be respected, and I imagine that our staff don’t measure up.”
“Oh, I see!” said Laura, enlightened. “Do you think he’s really an impartial witness?” he asked Mrs. Bradley next morning before Bannister had appeared downstairs for breakfast.
“I think he’s sufficiently impartial for our purposes,” Mrs. Bradley replied, “but there is one point on which he is misinformed, I think.”
“About Trench?”
“About Mrs. Trench…but we shall see! And, of course, he made a splendid Freudian slip of the tongue, did he not?”
As soon as breakfast was over Mrs. Bradley sent Bannister and Laura out for a long walk and caused George to drive in to Kindleford, where she herself picked up Mandsell and, luring him from his new novel with the promise of luxurious food and the car to return him to the Deaks’ house immediately dinner was over, took him back with her to the Stone House at Wandles Parva.
“There is only one thing I am going to ask you to do,” she told him before they arrived. “I am entertaining a guest who might or might not be the individual you saw walking away from the telephone-box in Park Road.”
“And you want to find out whether there’s any chance I can say yea or nay, I suppose? Well, there’s not much chance, I ought to tell you. You see, it was pretty gloomy, what with the evening and the rain and all that, and I only saw his back view, and not very close to, either. Still, I’ll do my best, of course. But if I’m not absolutely sure (and I don’t see how I can be) I’m not going to let the bloke in for trouble with the police.”
“Fair enough, child, and I shall give you no prompting. I think myself that it is very unlikely that you will be able to commit yourself to any definite statement on the matter, but I feel compelled to try the experiment. Incidentally, this man is not suspected of having been Miss Faintley’s murderer. You need have no scruples about meeting him.”
“I’m disappointed to hear that! I’ve never met a murderer except in wax, at Madame Tussaud’s, and I’d rather like to!”
They got back to the Stone House in plenty of time for lunch, and by the time the poverty-stricken young author had finished his meal and remembered that, on the same luxurious lines, there was dinner still to come, there was almost nothing he would not have done for his hostess. He eyed Bannister with cautious curiosity, and, as soon as opportunity offered (which was when Laura took Bannister off to look at Mrs. Bradley’s pigs…her Oxfordshire nephew having insisted upon presenting her that year with a litter of Large Whites so that she need not eat ewe mutton unless she wanted to) he shook his head and said:
“It’s all right. I’m absolutely positive. He’s far too tall. The fellow I saw was about my own height…certainly not more. Besides, this man’s got an entirely different walk. Even with his blazer collar turned up, as he’s got it now, and slouching along with his head forward and his hands in his pockets, he doesn’t look in the least like my bloke, who was walking with his coat collar up, too, because of the rain.”
“You are positive?”
“Positive. You see, my job makes me sort of register things, especially sensory impressions. Oh, no, this isn’t the telephone chap. It couldn’t possibly be. I’m certain enough to take my oath on it.”
“Pass, Mr. Bannister, and all’s well…so far,” said Mrs. Bradley to Laura, while the two men were having their after-dinner port before Mandsell was taken back to Kindleford.
“So far?” echoed Laura.
“Yes. I am inclined to share his view that the activities of the Faintley gang are not political, and it certainly seems, from Mr. Mandsell’s evidence, that it was not Mr. Bannister who had agreed to take that call. All the same…” she paused and meditated.
“What was that crack of yours about a Freudian error?” Laura enquired, at the end of a dutiful period of silence.
“He called Mr. Trench an homme incompris. But that is what he himself had to be during the war. He was known to the guardians at Lascaux, and the Germans undoubtedly knew of him. So much I think he made clear. When all this is over, we must ask him for the story of his adventures. They were probably fantastic.”
“And a man like that settles to teach elementary mathematics to kids,” said Laura. “Not bad at it, either, let me tell you.”
“And how good a teacher is Mr. Trench?”
“You’d better ask him,” said Laura. “I don’t know the first thing about the woodwork and metalwork centre.”
“Mr. Bannister must be our informant, then. I want to know as much about Mr. Trench as he will tell you.”
“Bannister?”
“Mr. Bannister in person. You had better warn him that anything he says may be taken down and used in evidence.”
“You don’t want me, then. You want Vardon, I should say.”
“Mr. Bannister would not like to confide in Detective-Inspector Vardon. I suggest that he would like to confide in one of us, and, of the two of us, you would be the more likely to gain the truth from him.”
“So that I can spill it to you?”
“Mr. Bannister will be more than agreeable to that course of procedure, dear child. He is anxious to confide in someone.”
“All right, but I shall ask him first, you know, whether that’s really what he wants.”
“To use your own fearsome idiom, I couldn’t agree more.”
“Oh, you couldn’t?” said Laura, uneasily. She was still inexperienced enough to share young Mark Street’s schoolboy instinct that when grown-ups agreed with you, you had better watch out. Laura had not quite outgrown her terror of the goblins. Demoniacal possession, she sensed (wrongly) to be the prerogative of the adult world. Mrs. Bradley realized this, and cackled. Laura looked reproachful.
“Look here,” she said to Bannister when they were together in the garden after Mandsell had gone home that night, “Mrs. Croc. has her optics on you. What was all that about you and the caves at Lascaux? And the Gestapo, and so forth?”
“Yes,” replied Bannister absently. “I know what she meant. I was in the Resistance, of course. One of the lucky ones, on the whole. Parachuted in, and my mother was French, so I had the gab and knew the country. We used to hide blokes…our own and others. Not in Lascaux itself…it was too well known…but there are lots of caves in that part of France. We winkled chaps out of occupied France and sometimes out of Italy, and smuggled them away through…well, I’d better not tell you. It might be needed again, and the higher and fewer, so to speak.”
“Well, what about Trench? I’ve been told to pump you about him. What can you tell us?”
“Nothing at all. He wasn’t mixed up with my push, if that’s what you mean. I met him for the first time on the school staff. Why? What has he got to do with it?…No, I won’t ask you that. I see the issue quite plainly. Your boss thinks that either Trench or I did in Faintley because one of us was scheduled to take that telephone call, and we were the only men not at school that night. I don’t see Trench as a murderer. I’m sure he is more or less all right in himself. Trouble is, he’s Red, and, not only that, but like lots of chaps who happen to be under the weather, he’s become fanatical—you know, agin the Government, and all that—but that doesn’t mean he’d do any harm. Of course, it’s obvious that, saddled with that wife of his who’s always being ill, he must be pretty badly stuck for money, and it’s true he never seems to be all that short. Beyond that, I can tell you nothing.”
“But you don’t think he’d commit murder?”
“It depends upon what you call murder, you know. After all, we murder people when we hang them.”
Laura had heard this view expressed by her employer.
“That’s what Mrs. Croc. says,” she answered. “Well, we’d better go in. It’s getting a bit chilly out here.”
“Ah, Mr. Bannister,” said Mrs. Bradley, when they re-entered the Stone House. “I’ve been thinking about the caves at Lascaux while you two have been out in the garden. Why is it that I seemed to sense a difference between the atmosphere of the Lateral Passage and that of, say, the Hall or the Nave?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” replied Bannister, frankly and immediately. “I expect you mean that the Lateral Passage is slightly damp in places. There’s a peculiar kind of ancient mould or fungus growing on parts of the walls.”
Early on the following morning Mrs. Bradley telephoned to Detective-Inspector Darling that she proposed to interview Mr. and Mrs. Trench.
CHAPTER 11
Mr. Trench
“…by fines so heavy that for some time afterwards a Castilian would take off his hat at the sight of a piece of gold.”
Helen Simpson—The Spanish Marriage
Early on Monday morning Mrs. Bradley went in person to Miss Golightly to ask for Trench’s address. Miss Golightly had to be persuaded into giving it. She could not imagine, she said, that Mr. Trench was involved in Miss Faintley’s affairs. He was a most reliable and unassuming man.
Mrs. Bradley explained that if anyone on the school staff was involved it had seemed likely that it must be either Mr. Trench or Mr. Bannister. She added that she had had Mr. Bannister to her country house for the week-end and had questioned him. Now it was Mr. Trench’s turn, and she proposed to interview not only Mr. Trench but his wife.
“I understand that she is an invalid,” she added, “but as I am a doctor you need have no fear that I shall upset her if she really appears to be ill. And do you mind not telling Mr. Trench that I am going to see his wife? What is she like, by the way?”
“I have never met her,” Miss Golightly replied. Then she gave the address, and added, “How I do hate all this! It seems dreadful to go behind the backs of my staff. I’ve never done it before.”
“You haven’t had one of them murdered before,” Mrs. Bradley pointed out in mild tones. “By the way, I have sent Miss Menzies to you this morning, but her fortnight was up on Friday, and I should be grateful if you would release her before the end of the week. I want to get back to Cromlech. There is not a great deal more we can do here at present, when once I have interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Trench.”
“I see. Perhaps you would like me to release Miss Menzies after the end of to-morrow.”
“If that would not inconvenience you too much.”
“No, no. I think that will be all right. The Office have now promised me a Supply. I will ring them immediately.”
Laura, informed during the course of the morning of her impending release, was duly grateful.
“I don’t mean I haven’t enjoyed it,” she said. “It’s been fun in a way. But…well, you know how it is!”
Miss Golightly agreed that she did, and added thoughtfully that she imagined nature study and botany were not favourite subjects with Miss Menzies. Miss Menzies, grinning wryly, replied that she preferred English, and added Miss Topas’ famous rider to text-books on botany that she knew only one Natural Order—that of Fools! Miss Topas, she added, was a genius, and had lectured at College in history.
So Laura and her headmistress parted on terms of mutual and undisguised friendship and relief, and Laura, at lunchtime, broke the news to Miss Cardillon that on Wednesday the school was due for a change on the staff.
Mrs. Bradley, meanwhile, had parked her car some distance from Trench’s house, and had gone on foot to interview his wife.
The door was answered by a middle-aged woman wearing a soiled dressing-gown. Her hair was untidy and last night’s make-up was still on her face. Her eyes were hooded under deeply purple lids and her speech was thick and slurred.
“Yes, dear?” she asked, holding on to the door for support. “If it’s Trench, he isn’t at home.”
“It isn’t your husband I want to see. It’s you.”
She wondered, however, whether much was to be gained from a woman who was so obviously drunk. In vino veritas, no doubt, but that did not necessarily imply giving correct and intelligent answers which could help an enquiry into a case of wilful murder.
“Me? What about? I don’t know you, do I? I don’t remember meeting you before. But I get muddled, you know, dear. It’s my head. You wouldn’t believe the headaches I get. Something cruel.”
She swayed a little.
“No, you haven’t met me before,” Mrs. Bradley assured her. “I am connected with the police.”
“I’ve haven’t done nothing that I know of.” She looked alarmed, and straightened up a little. “I’ve paid my way, so far as I remember. I may be D.,” she added, with a pathetic attempt at a propitiatory smile, “but I’ve never been D. and D., dear, not to be a nuisance outside, that is. Unless I’ve forgot. I do forget sometimes. I never had much of a memory, even as a girl at school.”
“School? Ah, yes. Your husband’s a schoolmaster, I believe.”
“He doesn’t schoolmaster it here,” said Mrs. Trench austerely, with a dignity which was somewhat marred by a slight belch. “Pardon. If we’re going to talk about Boffin, you’d better come in. My neighbours is all ears, as you’d imagine.”
She led the way along a smelly passage into a littered room. Bread, cheese, a half-empty bottle of brandy, some unwashed cups, a piece of knitting, a novelette, a scattered pack of cards and a book on fortune-telling were on the table, and dust was thick on mantelpiece, sideboard and the wooden arms of chairs. The curtains were drawn across the windows and the electric light was on. Crumbs and cigarette ash covered most of the hearthrug, and a couple of empty brandy bottles were standing in the alcove next to the fireplace. The room was airless and stank of drink and stale tobacco.
