Death Comes to Cambers (13 page)

‘Eddy flared up, same as his father does when you're least expecting it,' Mrs. Dene said, ‘and told vicar right out he would dig proof out of Frost Field to show all Bible was wrong, and vicar said the Lord would judge. Next week he excommunicated him.'

‘Who? Your son?' Bobby asked, and when Mrs. Dene nodded and looked more scared than ever at the recollection, he asked: ‘Did he care?'

‘He just laughed,' Mrs. Dene admitted. ‘He never was one for church. And some said vicar hadn't the right, only the Pope in Rome, and even he couldn't, not in England, only in foreign parts, so there was talk of writing to the bishop himself about it. But Eddy wouldn't hear of it; said it wasn't worth the stamp. But there was talk Lady Cambers was real upset for fear it might be her next time.'

‘To be excommunicated?'

‘Yes, and now she's dead, poor lady, and that's worse.' Bobby agreed that it was – more permanent, too. All this seemed to establish that the vicar had strongly objected to whatever work or aims Eddy Dene had in view, and that Lady Cambers's death had brought all that to an end. But it seemed impossible to suppose any casual connection between those two facts.

He glanced at his watch. Time was getting on, and still no sign of Eddy. He wondered if Eddy had in fact run for it, but thought that little likely. He asked one or two more questions, and learnt that Mr. Samuel Jones had made various small purchases in the shop, and had displayed a taste for conversation and thirst for information she and her husband had done their best not to gratify.

‘We didn't either of us like his looks or his ways, or his manner of asking and asking all the time,' Mrs. Dene explained. ‘If I was you, it's him I should be looking for, wanting to ask him questions that he was so fond of asking others.'

‘Oh, I expect we shall try to get in touch with him,' Bobby answered. ‘Early days yet, you know.'

In answer to another question, Mrs. Dene agreed at once that Eddy had possessed a very fine fountain-pen, mounted in gold, a present to him from Lady Cambers. He had been very pleased with it, and he always carried it with him. Quite certainly he would have it with him in his pocket now. Of that Mrs. Dene had no doubt. But she had no idea why Eddy had visited Lady Cambers the night before. He wouldn't be likely to say when he was going to see her, or why. He wasn't one to talk about his work, as even the gentlemen from Oxford had found out, and been proper vexed, too. But he not infrequently went to report progress to Lady Cambers, as was only natural since she was paying for all the excavations taking place. He had spent the whole day over his archaeological work, as was generally the case on Sundays, though this Lady Cambers was not supposed to know, as she disapproved of Sunday work, and after a late tea had gone out again without saying, as he rarely did say, where he was going, or why.

‘Would it be with the idea of seeing Miss Emmers that he went to Cambers House?' Bobby asked.

Mrs. Dene looked somewhat taken aback at the suggestion, and then agreed that it was a very likely one, but evidently did not really think so in the least. Bobby's impression that these had been no ardent lovers was strengthened, and he wondered if either of them was interested in anyone else, or whether it was just that they had come to take for granted an engagement that apparently dated from childhood.

‘It was always his fossils and stones and suchlike came first with him,' Mrs. Dene explained. ‘If it isn't one thing with a man, it's another, and better fossils than beer and betting, as many a time I've said to Amy.'

Bobby agreed, and went on to ask more questions about the visit to Cambers House. But Mrs. Dene knew nothing about it, except that Eddy had got wet through on his way home, and that it had brought on an attack of toothache, as almost always happened when he got a chill.

‘And then there's no speaking to him or going near him till it's over,' she added. ‘His father's just like that, too – if his rheumatism comes on, then he seems to think it's your fault, and it's best just to leave him to it.'

Of course, this time the rain had been exceptionally heavy – what the papers called a ‘cloud-burst' – and Eddy had arrived home soaked to the skin, through and through. He had gone straight to bed, and all his clothing – coat, trousers, under-garments, everything – she had put in the kitchen to dry, banking up the fire before she went to bed so that it would last as long as possible. In the morning she had been up early, to iron them out, and assure herself they were perfectly dry before he put them on again.

Bobby thought it a pity Eddy's Sunday suit had been spoiled, as he supposed it must have been by such a drenching, and Mrs. Dene explained with simple, heartfelt gratitude that Eddy had been wearing his weekday things. Apart from his working clothes he had only two suits; one, his very best, kept for extra-special occasions, and preserved by Mrs. Dene in the company of many camphor-balls in the big chest in her own room, and his weekday suit. His working clothes it was a part of Mrs. Dene's regular Sunday task to patch, mend, and renovate for the trials of the following week. This time a torn elbow and a gaping knee had required prolonged treatment, and she had, in fact, only completed the task that morning.

There was not here, of course, a complete alibi, but certainly his mother's story did seem to indicate that Eddy had been in his room at the time of the commission of the murder, and that none of his clothing was available, one suit being before the kitchen fire to dry, one put away in another room, and his working clothes under repair. Much the same seemed to apply to his under-garments, either drying in the kitchen or under repair or put safely away, and of one thing Bobby found himself convinced – that Mrs. Dene was quite incapable of imagining or inventing anything. She might perhaps, like other people, lie at a pinch and for good reason, but her lies would be easy to detect.

Plainly with little idea that what she was saying was of any special importance, Mrs. Dene went on to talk about the attack of toothache Eddy's drenching in the rain had brought on. Nearly all night long she had heard him shuffling about the room in his old carpet-slippers. She had even ventured, in spite of her knowledge and experience of his general temper in toothache, to knock at his door and ask if he wouldn't let her apply a hot fomentation. But though the weary shuffling of the carpet-slippers up and down the floor had ceased, he had not even answered. Not until much later, in reply to another timid inquiry, had he replied, through the door, that he was all right now, and didn't want to be bothered with hot fomentations or anything else. But, said Mrs. Dene, the way his poor face was swollen in the morning, and the state of his temper, too!

‘It always takes him that way, just as it does with father,' she explained again. ‘Nearly bit Mrs. Unwin's head off when she mentioned his face just casual like.'

Mrs. Unwin was apparently a woman who came every day to help with the house-work, and even in the shop at moments of special emergency, and Mrs. Dene agreed there was no reason why the gentleman should not see Eddy's room, if he wished to.

It was a very ordinary apartment, very small and cramped, holding little beyond a truckle-bed, a chair, a table, and, against the walls, several home-made shelves laden with books, chiefly standard works on archaeology and on the descent and antiquity of man. Bobby noticed that those by Sir Arthur Keith seemed special favourites. There was no washstand – the pump in the yard took its place in summer and the scullery in winter – and no chest-of-drawers or any wardrobe. Apparently all Eddy's stock of clothing Mrs. Dene kept in her own charge. Curtains, furniture, bed-clothes, all looked neat and clean, but very old and worn, though in odd contrast the linoleum covering the floor was of good quality, brand-new, and polished to perfection.

Mrs. Dene, noticing that Bobby was looking at it and admiring a shine and polish in which you could almost see yourself reflected, explained that Eddy had bought it himself only a little time ago – almost the first time his astonished mother had ever known him buy anything not absolutely necessary and not required for his archaeological researches. But now he had bought something for the house, Mrs. Dene hoped he would continue, and what did Bobby think of the way he kept it polished so you could almost skate on it?

‘I brought our Amy up to see it,' the good woman explained, with pride, ‘just to show her Eddy could be house-proud, too, just like another, for all his brains and learning.'

Bobby agreed that the polishing of that linoleum was veritably a work of art. Glancing round, he noticed that the primitive night-shirt still held its own in the Dene household, and he observed, further, that the carpet-slippers Mrs. Dene had mentioned were lying one at one end of the room and one at the other, as if in a spasm of the toothache they had been kicked as far apart as possible. On one of them was lying, having apparently fallen from the shelf above, where two or three others were piled up, a mouse-trap of the old-fashioned kind that caught its victim alive.

‘Eh, the worry mice are here,' Mrs. Dene observed, seeing Bobby had picked up one of these traps from the shelf and was looking at it. ‘Sometimes I say they'll have us out of our beds. It's the sugar and the flour and suchlike brings them. We have to use bins with tin linings.'

Privately Bobby hoped that that was so, and that the ‘tin linings' were kept in good repair. Mrs. Dene went on to explain that the traps were put there for boiling – they had to be boiled after use, or else the mice would not go near them again. Bobby listened absently, making no comment, but staring round the room and trying, as Superintendent Mitchell had taught him, to let the full meaning of all he saw sink into his mind. He walked over to the window and looked out. As he had more than half expected, the roof of an outhouse was close below, and exit and entry would be easy enough for any active young man. But of such exit or entry he could see no trace, nor was the rough surface of the window-sill, or the roof – a leaden one – of the outhouse, very likely to have preserved such traces.

‘Oh, well,' he said at last, ‘I must be getting on. I hope your son will be back soon. His keeping out of the way like this is making people begin to talk.'

‘People never begin, because they never stop,' retorted Mrs. Dene.

Frost Field, where Eddy Dene was carrying out his archaeological researches, was some distance from the village, on the other side of Cambers House, and Bobby, who had had so long a morning, was feeling more than a little tired. But in such an investigation a detective has little time to rest; indefatigable legs are even more important than high intelligence, since a member of the C.I.D. has to seek not merely knowledge for himself, but facts that he may, so to say, slam down before an anxious jury leaving them no alternative of interpretation.

So to Frost Field now Bobby turned his steps, for he was eager to have another look at the scene of these archaeological researches that appeared to have a certain bearing on this recent tangle of circumstance and character of which the outcome had been so grim a tragedy. But where the long village street faded into the open country he found he was not sure which path to continue by. An old labourer who was passing directed him, and, plainly aware of his identity, wanted to know if they had found out yet ‘who done it'. Bobby shook his head, and said it was early days yet, and the old man expressed a strong opinion that Mr. Jones, the stranger from London, probably knew something about it, or what did he want to ask such a mort of questions for? Londoners were a queer lot at the best, and Mr. Jones no better than the worst, besides having a knack at throwing darts that was most unfair. It seemed he had not only won sixpence from the old gentleman, but had also taken care to collect it, nor returned any in the shape of a round of beer. The incident rankled, and a glimpse of Mr. Sterling near Cambers House the previous evening, just before the rain came down, had induced a hope that Mr. Sterling had arrived from London ‘to see about it'.

Bobby, who, slightly impatient, had been making efforts to get away, grew suddenly interested. If Sterling had been seen in the vicinity of Cambers House at that time, how did that agree with his own statement that he had been delayed by losing his way, by breakdowns of his motorcycle, by other accidents to such an extent that he had been forced to put up at the inn of which he had given the address, and at which he had admittedly arrived in the small hours of Monday morning, long after the commission of the murder?

It began to look as though young Sterling might be the unknown visitor who had been given, that night, late refreshment in Lady Cambers's sitting-room. She might have been willing to admit her nephew, if somehow he had managed to let her know of his arrival, whereas, of course, in the case of a stranger such a possibility hardly existed. And Sterling might have invented some plausible story to induce her to accompany him to Frost Field. Perhaps that her husband was waiting there for her! But her obvious retort would have been that Sir Albert could come to the house if he wanted to see her. Indeed the whole train of thought seemed far removed from probability; but still, if Sterling had been seen in the neighbourhood at a time when his own story denied his presence there, then that was certainly a point that badly required clearing up.

Further questioning showed that the old labourer was none too certain of his identification. He had had merely a passing glimpse of someone on a motor-cycle, and as he associated motor-cycles with young Mr. Sterling, and he had the impression that the rider resembled Mr. Sterling but no one else he could think of, he had concluded that Mr. Sterling it was. No, he had not mentioned the incident to anyone else, and if the police gentleman didn't wish him to, and if that wish were fortified by half a crown, why, then, he would promise to hold his tongue about it until further orders.