The Key

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE NEXT FEW hours saw a good deal of activity on the part of a number of people. Garth walked to Perry’s Halt and from there took the train to Marbury, from which sizeable town he judged that he could without indiscretion ring up Sir George Rendal. As a result of this conversation strings were pulled, a Chief Constable was tactfully approached and prevailed upon to request that the Harsch case should be taken over by Scotland Yard.

Garth, having finished with the telephone, partook of a horrible and very expensive meal at the Station Hotel and made his way back by the late slow local, wondering what hotel crooks did to food to make it so repulsive.

As he walked across the dark fields from Perry’s Halt he was wondering about other things. Madoc – why should Madoc have murdered Harsch? Jealousy over Medora Brown? A good stock answer out of all the melodramas that had ever been written. It did seem extraordinarily unlikely. But then people did do very unlikely things, and melodrama was a most constant factor in human affairs. Every day the snappier papers produced the most lunatic stories of human behaviour. Medora wasn’t his cup of tea, but she might be Madoc’s. She might even have been Michael Harsch’s. She was quite a handsome woman in her way. She could have sat or stood for almost any one of the darker heroines of Greek tragedy. A little old perhaps for Cassandra, but quite a possible Electra, who could never have been young, and a very credible Clytemnestra. Or Medusa. Yes, Medusa had it – a Medusa who had seen something which had turned her to stone. The legend in reverse.

Well, Madoc was bound to be arrested unless he had a very good explanation to hand about the key. He found himself wondering how Madoc would take arrest. These men who got angry about trifles sometimes found control in an emergency. He wondered, and wondered again, why Madoc should have shot Michael Harsch. There was the obvious melodramatic motive of jealousy. There was the impossible-possible twisted motive of the pacifist who sees himself rescuing the world from the latest perversion of science. It might be either of these, or a tangled mixture of both. He thought the police might have their work cut out to get a case that would hold water. A jury wasn’t going to like hanging a man on the unsupported evidence of a boy of twelve. He was glad the thing was off his shoulders anyway. He had made the report he was bound to make, and that finished it as far as he was concerned.

It felt like the middle of the night, but it was actually no more than eleven o’clock when he got back to the Rectory, where he discovered Miss Sophy in a woollen dressing-gown sitting up for him with hot coffee and sandwiches, over which she became very chatty but most admirably abstained from asking any questions. In her generation the men of the family came and went, and you never dreamed of asking them where they had been. It simply wasn’t done.

She talked instead about Miss Brown.

‘I am afraid Mr Harsch’s death has been a very severe shock. I would not let her sit up – she is, really not at all herself – but I hope perhaps in the morning, with the inquest behind her, she will be feeling better.’

Garth had his doubts. He felt concerned and embarrassed, and made haste to talk about Miss Doncaster. He had heard Aunt Sophy become quite animated on the subject before now, but tonight she merely sighed and said, ‘You know, my dear, I am sorry for her. She and Mary Anne had a very difficult time when they were young. Their father was a most peculiar man. He didn’t like people coming to the house, and they never had any opportunities even when they were abroad. I think they would have liked to marry, but they never met anyone. Mr Doncaster was really so very reserved, and he lived till they were both past middle age. And now Mary Anne is a complete invalid, so I feel sorry for Lucy Ellen, though sometimes she does make me lose my temper.’

Garth felt very warmly towards his Aunt Sophy as he said good-night.

At a little after ten o’clock next morning a very empty train approached Perry’s Halt containing two officers sent down from Scotland Yard. They were Chief Detective Inspector Lamb, a large imperturbable person with a sanguine complexion and strong black hair wearing a little thin upon the top, and Detective Sergeant Abbott, between whom no greater contrast could be imagined. They might, in fact, have furnished material for a cartoon entitled ‘The Police Officer, Old and New’ – Abbott being an extremely elegant young man who had arrived at his present position by way of a public school and the Police College. His fair hair was slicked back from rather a high brow. His clothes were of the most admirable cut. His expression as he sat opposite his superior officer was one of boredom verging on gloom. He had, as a matter of fact, just had his fourth application to be allowed to join the RAF refused, and refused with what could only be described as an official raspberry. To his Chief Inspector’s well meant recommendation to look upon the bright side he replied bitterly that there wasn’t one.

Lamb looked at him reprovingly.

‘No call to say things like that, Frank. I can feel for you all right, because the same thing happened to me in nineteen-fifteen. Downright put out about it I was, but I’ve come to see things different, and so will you.’

There was a faint insubordinate gleam in Sergeant Abbott’s pale blue eyes as he passed in review the shoulders, the girth, the very considerable avoirdupois of his superior, the reproof of whose glance became intensified.

‘Now you listen to me! I don’t mind betting – not that I’m a betting man or ever have been, but that’s just a manner of speaking – well, I don’t mind betting that you’ve been thinking, “What’s it matter whether an odd professor gets murdered, when there’s thousands blowing each other to bits all over the world?” ’

Abbott’s lips framed inaudibly the words, ‘Archibald the All-right’, and then passed rapidly to a bowdlerised version.

‘You’re always right, sir. That is exactly what I was thinking.’

‘Then you stop it and listen to me! What’s at the bottom of this and every other war that’s ever started? Contempt for the law, just the same as any other crime. Someone wants something, and he goes to grab it. If anyone gets in his way they get hurt, and he doesn’t care. Pity of it is, when it’s nations there isn’t anything strong enough to stop them. But when it’s what you might call private crime there’s the law and there’s us. Every time we lay a criminal by the heels we’re making people see that the law is there to protect them and to be respected. That’s the way you get a law-abiding people. And when you’ve got that, you’ve got people with a respect for other people’s law – what you might call International Law. You can’t keep things like that for yourself unless you’re willing for other people to have ’em too – not when it’s law anyway. That’s what’s gone wrong with the Germans – they’ve stopped respecting the law – other people’s first, and then their own. Well, that’s not going to happen over here. But the law’s got to be served, and that’s where we come in. Servants of the law – that’s you and me, and it don’t matter whether we’re flying, or driving a tank, or hunting a murderer, we’ve got to do our job. Well, here we are. There’s the local man on the platform, and I hope he’s got a car.’

He had, and they were driven in it to the police station at Bourne, where they interviewed a cocksure and uplifted Cyril Bond and took his statement. Questioned upon it, he gave definite and very clear replies, and was dismissed with an injunction to keep his mouth shut. After which Lamb announced that they would walk to the Rectory if someone would show them the way, but they would like to see the church first.