Nest of Vipers

Chapter Four

Routine Enquiries

« ^ »

(1)

AS you have asked me to go on with my account, Dame Beatrice, I will write it as though you have not seen the newspapers or talked with my solicitor.

I suggested to Evans that, so long as we stuck together, there was no reason why we had to stay in the room with the dead woman. He seemed glad to agree to this, so we repaired to Miss Minnie’s little sitting-room.

Like all the sitting-rooms up at the house, that at the bungalow was furnished with an electric fire and had no open fireplace. It was a little surprising, therefore, to see a heavy old-fashioned brass poker lying on the hearthrug. Evans picked it up.

‘Wonder what she wanted with this?’ he said, swinging it to and fro.

‘Brought it with her from her old home, thinking there would be coal fires here, I expect,’ I said. ‘By the way, ought you to have handled it? Targe rather warned us, I thought, that nothing ought to be touched.’

‘Oh, he meant in the bedroom, of course,’ he said. He began to hum in a tuneless sort of way and continued to swing the poker. ‘I say, you do realise somebody must have murdered the old girl, don’t you? I mean, Targe was right.’

‘She may have drowned herself, but she hardly bashed her own face in,’ I said, ‘and for God’s sake stop swinging that poker about!’ My voice cracked. I could not control it.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Nerves.’

‘Well, put it down, man.’

But, although he stopped swinging it about, he retained his hold on it. I can see his reason now, of course. At the time I thought he was in the same upset state as I was and that the feel of the poker gave him confidence. I see now that he suspected me all along and was holding on to the poker as a means of defence in case I set about him and made my escape before the police turned up, and I see that his desire to return to the house was not to get away from the corpse but to get away from me! At the time, however, such a thought was far from my mind. I pulled myself together and tried to do some logical thinking, for the police would arrive at any moment and would be asking questions, no doubt, of all of us, but of me in particular as the owner of the bungalow and especially as the person who had summoned assistance in order to break into it. No use telling them I had no key to it, so far as I knew.

But, so far as I could see, there was no logic about the matter. So far as the rest of us were concerned, Miss Minnie had hardly existed. It was true that she had been a social misfit, an oddity, a recluse, a misplaced person in our little community. It was also true that she had claimed to be Mrs Dupont-Jacobson’s rightful heiress, and it was possible that she was a snooper, a pseudo-ghost and the probable writer of anonymous letters. It was obvious that she objected to innocent merrymaking, but, allowing for all this, I could see no reason for anybody’s having gone to the extreme length of murdering her.

I recalled the joke – it could have been nothing more – made by Billie Kennett that Miss Minnie must be a woman with a past and I remembered my own facetious observation and began to wonder whether the printer had been right and that indeed a true word had been spoken in jest and also that something or someone connected with Miss Minnie’s past had at last caught up with her.

On the other hand there were those anonymous letters. That they were libellous there was little doubt, but had one of them contained a dangerous amount of truth, I wondered? I looked at the brass poker dangling from Evesham Evans’s powerful, hairy fingers. I recalled the tough, he-man novels he wrote; his noisy, violent quarrels with his wife; the fact that I knew nothing of his background (although that was true of all of my tenants, now I had come to think of it); nor did I know whether he had received one of the letters.

My thoughts turned to little Mandrake Shard with his spy stories full of violence, torture, double-crossings, and his self-confessed history of alcoholism. I thought of Latimer Targe, steeped in stories of real-life violent crime and of Billie Kennett who reported it. Whoever had played that joke and sent the printers that notepaper-heading may have guessed more truly than he knew when he called my house Nest of Vipers.

My random thoughts, having taken this direction, became canalised. I eyed the poker again. It could have been the agent with which Miss M’s head had been battered. If so, and if he had done his homework, the murderer would have cleansed it of blood, hair and his own fingerprints before replacing it in the sitting-room.

Then, my shocked mind beginning to work overtime, I returned to wondering whether Evans was the murderer and, if so, whether perhaps he was deliberately re-imposing his fingerprints on the poker, holding me as witness that his prints were innocent ones.

‘Two can play at that game,’ I thought confusedly. You will understand, Dame Beatrice, that I was not myself at the time, or I would never have given way to such morbid imaginings. I spoke to him. ‘Damn cold in here,’ I said. ‘Why don’t we have the fire on?’ I stooped and pressed the switch. ‘Now I have some explicable fingerprints,’ I thought.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Ought to have thought of it for myself.’

‘And so have put your seemingly innocent dabs on to something else you may have touched when you were here before,’ I thought; and such was my disordered state that I only just stopped myself saying it aloud.

I suppose we must have sat there for the best part of an hour before anybody turned up. I don’t know what Evans’s thoughts were, but I know now that we were both adding two and two together and totalling them into a conclusion that the other fellow was a murderer. Looking back, I can see that if my mind had not been temporarily disturbed I would never have dreamed of suspecting Evans, but under the influence of shock one seldom thinks clearly.

The first person to turn up was the local doctor. He was accompanied by Targe. Evans and I went together to the front door – Evans first putting down the poker – to let them in, but Targe did not cross the threshold.

‘So where is the body?’ asked the doctor, coming in in a business-like way. ‘Are you sure it is defunct?’

‘Yes, nobody, not even you, can do her any good,’ replied Evans in a phrase I suppose he had used to dramatic effect in one of his books. We took the doctor into the bedroom. He looked at the body on the bed.

‘Well, well! What’s all this?’ he said. ‘All right, you two need not stay. I can manage.’

‘We are witnesses,’ said Evans, ‘to a very nasty business. We leave nobody alone here until the police arrive.’

The doctor shrugged his shoulders, took off his overcoat, turned up his cuffs and began, I suppose, a preliminary examination of the body. He had finished and was washing his hands in the bathroom (to which Evans and I had followed him, although I saw no point whatever in doing so, but Evans had caught my sleeve and steered me along) when the police turned up.

They sent us over to the house and then I suppose they went through the usual routine of photographs, fingerprints, agreement or otherwise between the doctor Targe had summoned and the police surgeon, and then, of course, they came over to the house and began the inevitable questioning of myself and the others. As Miss Minnie’s landlord and one of the three who had found the body, I was interrogated first.

How long had I owned Weston Pipers?

For about two years and a half.

How long had the deceased been a tenant?

Ever since the alterations to the mansion had been completed.

How long ago was that?

Last May twelvemonth.

Why had the deceased rented the bungalow instead of taking an apartment in the house?

She was a recluse.

Could she have had an apartment instead of the bungalow if she had asked for one?

Yes, she could have had the choice of two, but she opted for the bungalow and would not consider anything else. My – I boggled a bit here, not knowing quite how to describe Niobe’s position in my scheme of things – my housekeeper, who had been responsible for all the lettings while I was in Paris, would confirm.

Had I any previous acquaintance with the deceased before she rented the bungalow?

I certainly had not.

How did the deceased get on with the other tenants?

So far as I knew, she had had nothing to do with them at all.

Thank you, sir, that would be all for the moment. Would I ask my housekeeper to spare them a few minutes? Oh, by the way, sir, they noticed that I had fitted anti-burglar devices to my downstair windows. Had I had any particular reason for doing that?

No, it had been a precautionary measure, that was all.

Yet the same precautions, they had noticed, had not been extended to the bungalow.

No, they had not.

Why not, sir? Surely it was more necessary for the bungalow of an old lady living alone to be so protected, rather than a house which (they consulted a list) contained five able-bodied men?

Well, we – that is, my housekeeper – suspected that Miss Minnie herself broke into the house at night, so there was no point in fortifying the bungalow.

Why would Miss Minnie break in?

She seemed to have some idea that there was a will somewhere in the house which made her Mrs Dupont-Jacobson’s heir and not myself.

Would I explain that, please.

So, of course, Dame Beatrice, I gave them the low-down on the whole business of how I had come by my inheritance and they made plenty out of it. It turned out that they had made enquiries and that the lawyers knew of no other will except the one which named me as the heir, but there was no doubt that Miss Minnie had been distantly related to my benefactress and the police did their best to make me admit that I had known this. I side-stepped them – quite truthfully – so then they began asking about the discovery of the body.

Why had I thought it necessary to have two witnesses with me when I broke into the bungalow?

Because I did not know whether Miss Minnie was ill or whether she was dead.

Why should I suppose she might be dead?

I didn’t really suppose it.

So if I thought she might have been taken ill, wouldn’t it have been more natural to have taken a woman – my housekeeper, for example – with me, rather than two men?

I discovered that we should have to break a window and climb in and men are better at that sort of thing than women.

Was there no spare key to the bungalow?

I had no idea. The tenants were supplied with keys to their rooms, although no longer to the front door to the house. We assumed there was always somebody about to let people in and my housekeeper was nervous about front door keys which might get lost, so we had collected them and locked them away. At this they returned to my breaking the window.

Had I no key to the bungalow?

Not that I knew of.

Miss Nutley was almost sure she had given me a spare key.

Well, of course, Dame Beatrice, all that was only the beginning of it. All the others were interrogated, but, according to the accounts they gave me of the interviews (at a mass meeting which Targe, who ghoulishly appeared to be in his element at the prospect of being mixed up in one of the real-life crimes which furnished him with the material for his books, insisted upon calling and which took place in my sitting-room), nobody could tell the police anything of importance.

We were all on tenterhooks for the next few days. An inquest was held and a verdict brought in of murder by person or persons unknown. Miss Minnie (identified by a smooth-faced, soft-voiced gentleman who announced himself as the proprietor of the quasi-religious journal of which Miss Minnie was editor) was buried at the journal’s expense against the ultimate winding-up of her estate, floral tributes were sent by everybody in the house and, as the police made no reappearance at Weston Pipers for just over a fortnight, the reporters gave up pestering us and we went on much as usual.

If this seems a heartless and ill-conceived proceeding under the circumstances, it must be remembered that none of us had ever really known Miss Minnie and that, in any case, she had dissociated herself entirely from any of our activities. Soon, however, we were in the thick of the police enquiry once more.

It came as a surprise to all of us, I think. It certainly came as a shock to me. I suppose when all one asks for is a quiet life with no major upheavals, one is easily lured (as they say) into a false sense of security, so when Mrs Smith, who had been ‘doing the hall’ when they knocked, came to my sitting-room to tell me of their arrival, I felt the sense of panic I used to experience at school when an interview with the headmaster was pending.

‘Well, show them in here,’ I said.

‘Which I have told them to wipe their boots before doing so, sir, the drive being that mucky you would not credit.’

‘They can’t have walked up the drive. They come in cars,’ I said.

‘Which they have walked over to The Lodge and back, as I have seen with my own eyes out of the hall windows, being as how I was polishing the table for the letters when I heard the car drive up.’

The Detective Chief Superintendent was affability itself.

‘Sorry to trouble you again, sir, but there are one or two little matters.’

I invited him and his sergeant to sit down and offered them drinks.

‘Not just at the moment, thank you, sir. We won’t keep you long, but we think you may be able to help us to clear up a point or so.’

‘Glad to do anything I can, of course,’ I said; but I was far from happy. His manner was much too smooth.

‘Thank you, sir. When you first saw the body, did you notice anything unusual about it?’

‘I thought it was altogether unusual, Chief Superintendent. The last thing one expects to find on one’s property is a dead body, let alone one with – with—’ I had a sickening recollection of Miss Minnie’s smashed-up face. At the inquest the medical evidence had given drowning as the cause of death, so the head injuries inflicted after death could only have been the act of a sadistic lunatic, I felt, and I was still trying to fight a queasy feeling in my stomach when he spoke again.

‘There was something on the body, sir, which I thought you might have noticed.’

‘I noticed as little as I could,’ I said. ‘One glance was enough for me. I had a job not to be sick.’

‘Strange you did not notice this, sir. The other gentlemen, Mr Targe and Mr Evans, both noticed it and mentioned it to me before I even asked them about it.’ He took an envelope from his pocket, opened it and drew out a bit of seaweed. It was a piece of the dark red, rather pretty, fernlike kind. Most of our local seaweed was either that brilliant green mossy-looking sort which grows on flat rocks which are covered at high tide, or else the glutinous long strands with little dark-brown bladders on them – horrible, slimy stuff, I always thought it. I had seen a few bits of the kind he showed me, but it was not all that common in our bay.

‘Well, I may have seen it unconsciously,’ I said, ‘but I was too horrified to notice any details that I can remember.’

‘I see, sir. I believe you were the manager of a swimming pool before you went over to Paris.’

‘That’s right, yes.’

‘You must have been pleased when you found you had a natural bathing-place at the bottom of your lawn.’

‘Yes, of course, but one hardly uses it at this time of year.’

‘Not even an experienced swimmer such as yourself?’

‘I’m not keen enough to want to catch pneumonia.’

His questions, no doubt, would have alarmed a guilty man even more than they alarmed me, but they made me very uneasy.

‘Do you never go swimming in the winter, sir?’

‘Yes, in an indoor swimming pool where they warm the water, and there is nothing of the sort in these parts.’

‘But you never swim in the open sea?’

‘Not in the winter, no.’

‘You attended the inquest on the body?’

‘Of course. Besides, I was one of the witnesses.’

‘Quite so. There was one item of information which we asked the coroner not to mention. You will recollect that the medical evidence was of death by drowning.’

‘Well?’

‘Well, sir, haven’t you something you would like to tell me about that?’

‘There is nothing I can tell you about it. We thought she had attempted to drown herself, thought better of it, got as far as her bed and then collapsed.’

‘And the state of her head, sir? How do you account for that?’

‘I don’t have to account for it. I suppose a burglar broke in and hit her in case she wasn’t quite dead. It doesn’t sound likely, but it’s the only conclusion we could reach.’

‘You used to swim in your little cove in the summer, of course?’

‘Oh, yes, frequently, but the water was warm in the summer.’

‘Did any of your tenants do the same?’

‘They may have done. The bathing here is free. I don’t keep track of everything my tenants do.’

‘Did you ever know Miss Minnie to do anything of the sort? – to go bathing in the sea?’

‘I knew almost nothing about her. In any case, the answer to that is the same as I have given you in connection with the other tenants. I had neither the time nor the inclination to keep tabs on their activities.’

‘Your housekeeper has mentioned some obnoxious letters which came for you.’

‘Not only for me. She herself had a couple and so did two of my tenants, two girls. There may have been others.’

‘Two girls? Who would they be, sir?’

‘A Miss Kennett and a Miss Barnes. They moved out a few weeks ago. I think the letters were the cause of their leaving.’

‘Can you give me their present address, sir?’

‘Sorry, but no. They didn’t tell us where they were going to live. No doubt the Post Office would have an address for forwarding letters.’

‘No doubt, sir. About the window-fastenings: you said, I think, that they were only a precautionary measure.’

‘That’s right.’

‘But not entirely true, sir. I understood that you suspected the deceased of breaking into the house at night and prowling about in the other tenants’ rooms.’

‘I think that was other people’s idea, not mine. I saw nobody prowling around, but I had the fastenings put on as a precautionary measure, just as I said.’

‘Quite so, sir. You will forgive a very personal question, I hope? How did you come into possession of this property and the money to repair and convert it?’

‘I told you that, the last time you were here. I was left the money and the estate by a Mrs Dupont-Jacobson who entertained the remarkable theory that I had saved her from drowning.’

‘In the sea, sir?’

‘Yes, off Funchal, Madeira.’

‘We know that the deceased claimed to be Mrs Dupont-Jacobson’s next of kin. Are you sure she proposed to contest the will?’

‘So I was informed. I was never approached personally in the matter.’

‘But you were sufficiently impressed by what you had heard to go to your solicitors about it.’

‘Merely another precautionary measure, Chief Superintendent. I was assured that there was no substance in the claim.’

‘That must have gratified you, sir.’

‘Not particularly. If the claim had been a valid one, the time to have made it was when the will was proved, not more than two years afterwards.’

‘Two years, sir?’

‘More than. Nearer three. I was a year in Paris while the renovations and some structural alterations were carried out, and my tenants, as I told you, have been in residence since May twelvemonth.’

‘Thank you for your help, sir. I wonder whether you can place a room at the disposal of my sergeant and myself?’

‘Do you mean you want an interview room? I thought you saw everybody on your first visit.’

‘Mr Evans and Mr Targe, who were with you when you broke into the bungalow, may be able to help us.’

‘Well, I expect my housekeeper will be prepared to give up her office to you for an hour or so.’

He and the sergeant remained for the rest of the morning. When they had gone, little Shard came to see me. The tenants wanted another mass meeting. Evans was to take the chair and they hoped very much that Niobe and I would be present.

This sounded ominous. Niobe thought so, too. She said she did not like it. They must have been putting their heads together. She hoped that the mass meeting was not to herald a mass walkout.

‘Well, I suppose you couldn’t blame them,’ I said. ‘Nobody likes being mixed up with the police, especially in a case of murder.’

The mass meeting took place in Evans’s large sitting-room immediately after lunch and Niobe’s pious hopes were soon dashed. It was clear that, as soon as the police would allow it, a mass walk-out was planned.

Evans, as one would expect, proved a competent, business-like chairman. He was hospitable, too. Coffee and an assortment of liqueurs were dispensed by Constance. The armchairs, some indigenous, some borrowed, were extremely comfortable. The tenants settled down ghoulishly.

‘I want to make it clear,’ said Evans, ‘that no personal feelings are involved. I’m sure we have all been very happy at Weston Pipers and the last thing we would have wanted is to leave.’

Here Niobe spoke up with some abruptness.

‘I hope you remember that you have all signed a three-year agreement,’ she said.

‘So had Billie and Elysée,’ Constance Kent pointed out, ‘but they went and so shall we.’

‘Please! No arguments at this stage,’ said her husband, ‘although circumstances do alter cases. The point is, Chelion, that whereas the fact of a murder wouldn’t do some of us any harm because of the nature of our work, it must have its effect on others of us. Besides, all this police questioning and probing is a confounded waste of our time and it also saps our concentration. I need all my energies for a damned Chapter Eight which is refusing to come right. I am not willing to expend them answering questions from the Chief Superintendent about matters which are no concern of mine.’

‘But you would still be subject to questioning, even if you left today,’ said Niobe.

‘Granted, and I have no doubt I could survive it, but there are others, as I say.’

‘Including me,’ said the soldierly Constance. ‘The publicity over this business will be the ruin of my books. You can write pulsating stories of star-crossed lovers, or you can get yourself mixed up in a sordid case of the murder of a defenceless, grey-haired old woman, but you can’t do both.’

‘Oh, there I think you exaggerate, Constance,’ said Targe.

‘No, I don’t. Maybe your own work won’t suffer at all. You may even be able to make capital out of this awful business, as will Mandrake and even Cassie.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Cassie McHaig. ‘My paper is very finicky about its reporters getting mixed up with the police. I’m supposed to champion the cause of the downtrodden, not to get myself a bit of notoriety by being questioned about the brutal murder of an old lady.’

‘Before we go any further,’ said Targe, ‘there is something I think Chelion ought to know. I’ve told the others, Chelion, and, to put our cards on the table, it is the real reason for our wanting to leave.’

‘I’m not sure this is the time,’ began Evans.

‘It’s got to be said, ’said Polly Hempseed. ‘Personally, unless I can get the reporters to mention me under my real name which, as most of you know, is Conway, I’m in the same boat as Constance. You can’t write letters of sob-stuff advice to the lovelorn in a woman’s paper and at the same time get yourself tied up in an unsavoury case like this one. I’m with Cassie all the way.’

‘Then why don’t you marry her?’ said Niobe. Everybody looked astounded at the boldness of this uncompromising question.

‘Aren’t you married?’ asked Constance.

Latimer Targe tried again.

‘With all respect to the chair,’ he said, ‘I feel I must speak. It is true, Chelion, that poor Miss Minnie did have a claim to this estate and her cousin’s money, isn’t it?’

I said, ‘She had no legal claim, Targe.’

‘You rat!’ said Niobe to Targe. She began to cry.

‘You told us you knew, but you didn’t tell us how you found out,’ said Cassie. (This was all news to me, Dame Beatrice. A nest of vipers was beginning to hatch out.)

‘Oh, well, I ferret around, you know,’ said Targe, in the apologetic voice he had used in addressing me. ‘I thought Miss Minnie was an interesting old lady and might have something in her past which would make a story if I changed the names of people and places, you know. Miss Kennett did say that she thought Miss Minnie must have had a past, and as Miss Kennett was a newspaper woman and reported crime and so forth, I thought perhaps she knew something and that I could track it down. I was rather stuck for material for another book, you see – one is, sometimes – so I poked around and kind of dug up the dirt, you know. Well, that’s the way it goes, isn’t it?’

‘You rat!’ said Niobe for the second time. ‘Just be quiet! Nobody wants to know.’