Death Comes to Cambers (10 page)

‘The body was on its face,' he went on. ‘I turned it over. It was quite stiff. She must have been dead some time. I ran to Mr. Hardy's place and told them, and they came at once. We took the body to that shed of young Dene's. Hardy said he would tell the police and get a doctor – not that a doctor could do anything for her, poor soul. I went straight back home. I felt too upset and ill to be able to do any work. I rang up the office after a time to tell them what had happened and that I shouldn't be coming. But I think I'll go on now, if there's nothing I can do to help. There are several things I ought to attend to.'

The chief constable did not think there was anything Mr. Bowman could do just at present. Accordingly he departed, and Mr. Sterling was introduced.

He proved a good-looking young man, with a thin, dark face, about twenty-three or four years old, tall and of vigorous appearance. He, too, was in a nervous, agitated state. The news of his aunt's death had been a dreadful shock to him. He had heard of it at Hirlpool, where he had spent the night. Already everyone in Hirlpool was talking about it – the most sensational murder the district had ever known. He had started out from home the night before to visit his aunt, leaving his rooms on the outskirts of London, near his place of work, in quite good time. But the journey had been a series of misadventures. His motor-cycle had broken down repeatedly, and the more often he got it going the more certain it was to break down again. The ignition was all wrong. He began to enter into technical details that interested Bobby enormously, but that Colonel Lawson, who thought motor-cycles slightly vulgar, promptly checked. So Sterling apologized, and added that he had lost his way in the dark, and been caught in the rain, and had a skid and a tumble, and finally had reached Hirlpool somewhere in the small hours and then had knocked up a pub and secured shelter. It jolly well wouldn't have done, he explained, to disturb his aunt and her household at such an hour. Of course, if he had known what had been happening, he added moodily, it would have been different. But who could have dreamed of such a tragedy?

This was all Sterling had to say, so his examination did not last long. As he himself explained, he had only arrived on the scene that morning. But one point of importance did emerge at the end of the interview.

‘I think that's all we have to ask you at present,' Colonel Lawson had said, and then, remembering, added: ‘Oh, by the way, yes. I understand you are your aunt's heir?'

‘I don't know. She told me once she intended to make her will in my favour,' Sterling answered slowly. ‘I have no idea whether she did or not. Of course, even if she did, she might have altered it again.'

‘Had you any reason to think she might do that?' the chief constable asked.

‘Oh, I don't know; she rather seemed to think it gave her a right to tell me what I had to do. She got a bit shirty if you didn't do just what she thought you ought,' answered the young man. ‘Of course, it was awfully good of her, thinking of leaving me everything, and I was very grateful and all that, but I wasn't going to do the tame-lap-dog act all the same. There are limits.'

‘Was there any special point you disagreed upon?' Sterling hesitated, flushed, looked as if he would refuse to answer, changed his mind and said: ‘Oh, well, I suppose it was that she rather wanted to pick out a girl for me to marry, and I didn't see it. I dare say we both got a bit ratty.'

‘When was this?'

‘Oh, I don't know exactly. Quite recently. She was always bringing it up.'

‘Did she actually say anything about changing her will?'

‘No. Yes. Well, in a way. I thought once she was hinting she would, and I told her straight out when I married I should please myself. It wasn't only that. I knew jolly well she wanted Uncle Albert to come back. She was very bitter about him and very keen on him at the same time. I knew he only had to make it plain he was turning down the Bowman girl for good and all, and aunt would have jumped at the chance of making it up with him. Then, of course, she would have had to make her will over again. Well, that's all right, of course, but I didn't see her making me marry some bally girl I knew nothing about just so she could fix it up with Uncle Albert again.'

‘How? In what way? I don't follow that quite,' Lawson said.

‘Oh, well, it's like this. The girl she wanted me to marry is one of the Cambers family, only another branch. Had the same ancestor somewhere about the Wars of the Roses or thereabouts. Uncle Albert had some sort of sentimental idea of perpetuating the family name by passing on the estate here to these other Cambers. Aunt thought she could kill several birds with the same stone: work a reconciliation with Uncle Albert, get me safely married, settle the destination of both the family estates and her own private money, all together. I did see the girl once. Quite a kid. We bored each other stiff at first sight. I told my aunt right out I wasn't having any.'

‘Was that what you had come to see her about?'

‘Oh, no. I was just running down to see how she was and all that.'

Colonel Lawson consulted his notes, asked one or two more quite unimportant questions, and then the young man was allowed to depart. But he was asked to remain in the vicinity for the present, and at any rate not to leave without letting his intention to do so be known.

‘What about this young Dene?' the chief constable asked next, but had to be told that all efforts to find him had proved unavailing so far.

Apparently he was neither at his father's shop nor anywhere else in the village. No one had seen him, and the chief constable scowled and frowned very much on receiving this information. Then Farman appeared, to report that Sir Albert Cambers had rung through to say he was on the way and would arrive shortly. The news of the tragedy had reached him while he was in bed with an attack of influenza, but he got up at once and would have started before, only that he had been obliged to wait so long for the car he had ordered from the Jubilee Garage. Then, too, a message had been received from Scotland Yard agreeing to Detective-Sergeant Owen's services being placed for the time at the disposal of Chief Constable Lawson, in accordance with the request made. Colonel Lawson was very pleased on receiving this message, and beamed approval on Bobby. No one now could blame him for not calling in the help of Scotland Yard and yet the direction of the case would remain entirely in his own – as he felt – very capable hands: because to Colonel Lawson a sergeant was a person who stood to attention and waited for orders, not moving an inch till he got them.

‘Better make a fair copy of your notes, sergeant,' he said to Bobby.

‘Very good, sir,' said Bobby. ‘I was wondering, sir,' he added carelessly, ‘if I might potter about the village a little first and see if I can pick up any gossip. They all know I was staying here, so they'll think it natural enough, and they may talk more freely to me than they would to you, sir, or to Mr. Moulland.'

‘Oh, by all means,' agreed Colonel Lawson, thinking no harm of ‘pottering', ‘and see if you can get any hint of what's likely to have become of that young Dene fellow. I dare say there's no connection, but it seems curious that two people should vanish immediately like this – Dene and the man reported as having roused suspicions by asking questions in the village.' He paused, hesitated, and added: ‘There's one thing perhaps you ought to know, but you understand it is for information solely; it is not to be taken into account or allowed to prejudice the inquiry in any way.'

‘Yes, sir; no, sir,' said Bobby, wondering what this meant.

Instead of speaking, the chief constable glanced at his superintendent, who cleared his throat and said: ‘We have it on record that Farman served three years' penal servitude for robbing his employer just before the war. He was in prison when the war broke out, was released earlier than usual in order to join up, served till the armistice, and has had a good character ever since.'

‘I understand, sir,' said Bobby. ‘I won't let it influence me in any way.' And, indeed, it hardly seemed likely to him that this twenty-year-old story was of any importance.

He departed, therefore, and when he had gone the chief constable added to Moulland: ‘What's the betting young Dene's bolted?'

‘You think he's guilty, sir?' Moulland asked.

‘Looks like it. Great mistake to take up a young fellow of that class. Gives them ideas. Puts notions in their heads. Did you notice that, after the butler let Dene out, no one seems to have seen Lady Cambers alive? What about this for a working theory? Dene knows all about the jewellery. He strangles the poor woman, opens the safe with her keys he takes from her hand-bag, where he knows she keeps them, pushes the body through the window in order to conceal it later, and fills his pockets with the jewellery. He himself rings the bell for the butler to let him out, goes off without any suspicion being raised, and, instead of going home, slips round the house to recover the body. He carries it as far as where it was found, but then it gets too much for him and he abandons it there. He drops his pen by accident at the same time; he hides the jewellery and goes off to recover his nerve and wait for the discovery to be made. That accounts for all doors and windows being found fast in the morning, as they were apparently.'

‘Yes, sir,' agreed Moulland dutifully but a trifle doubtfully. ‘The maid says she was with Lady Cambers in her bedroom after Dene left.'

‘She's Dene's sweetheart,' the chief constable pointed out. ‘If a girl's in love with a man she'll say anything to save him. She may have been in it from the first, for that matter. There's something I don't understand about that girl, and that I don't like.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Moulland, who, indeed, had reached his present eminence in the county police force chiefly through the zeal, fervour, and frequency with which, all through his career, he had said, ‘Yes, sir.'

But Bobby, well on his way by now to the village, was considering many other theories and possibilities, and presently, perched on a five-barred gate, he produced his pocket-book and began to make a list of the points that seemed to him to require special attention.

There was Mr. Bowman, for instance, to begin with.

Was there anything in the various hints and rumours that his sister was the cause, knowing or unknowing, of the recent breach between Lady Cambers and her husband? At any rate, it would be interesting to find out, if possible, how far Sir Albert was seriously entangled with Miss Bowman. A man infatuated with a girl might do strange things to rid himself of the wife who stood between.

What was Mr. Bowman's financial position? (He had recently sold his car and had not bought a new one.)

Was there anything about his discovery of the body to suggest he had seen it because he knew already it was there? (There was a high hedge, and the field sloped, and young Ray Hardy had apparently gone close-by without noticing anything. But, then, he might have been more absorbed with his own affairs and Mr. Bowman might have sharp eyes.)

Was his apparent nervous collapse after the discovery genuine or assumed? It had been so marked that he had felt able neither to stay on the spot nor go on to business, but had been obliged to return straight home. If it was genuine, was it a result of guilty knowledge? If it was assumed, why?

‘Plenty there to keep a fellow busy,' Bobby told himself.

Then there was Eddy Dene.

How did his pen come to be on the scene of the murder?

An obvious clue, certainly, but perhaps a little too obvious. Still, obvious clues were sometimes good clues, too. There was that case in Chicago, for instance, where two young degenerates planned the perfect crime, and then one of them proceeded to leave his spectacle-case on the scene of the murder.

Was it significant that Dene had had so prolonged an interview with Lady Cambers so short a time before the murder? But, then, she was his friend and patron on whom apparently he depended for obtaining the money for carrying on his archaeological researches – and there had been something about an American millionaire, an introduction to whom she had apparently promised. One does not usually kick down the ladder by which one is climbing upwards.

And then the girl he was engaged to – Lady Cambers's maid, Amy Emmers – who had explained away with such gentle assurance the story of the quarrel with her mistress. Certainly there was something about her that was hard to understand, and one of the deepest instincts of human nature is to regard with marked suspicion all that is not easily understood. Then, of course, she had every opportunity of securing the missing jewellery, so far as that went. How suavely and easily, too, she had explained the washing-up of the glass and plate whereon such valuable finger-prints might have been found – or might not. After all, the girl's action could easily have been quite innocent, and in that morning's excited, overwrought, slightly hysterical atmosphere it was conceivable she had found it a relief to perform an ordinary piece of commonplace household routine.

His thoughts turned to the vicar of the parish, Mr. Andrews. Far-fetched, perhaps, to suspect him, a clergyman of blameless life; but Bobby had seen his eyes of the fanatic, and he had threatened judgement and judgement had arrived. Bobby found himself reflecting that prophets have been known occasionally to take steps to make their prophecies come true.

Perhaps, of all those concerned, young Tim Sterling had the most obvious motive. He inherited his aunt's fortune, which by common rumour was substantial, and he was aware that the will whereby he benefited was subject to alteration at any moment. Then, too, pressure he evidently strongly resented was being brought on him to marry where his inclinations did not lie; and what had brought him down so late this Sunday night to visit his aunt? A week-end visit would have been more easily comprehensible than this dash down from town late on Sunday, complicated by his failure to reach his destination and the spending of the night at a Hirlpool inn.