Death Comes to Cambers (4 page)

‘If I never touched tobacco,' he would explain, ‘I should never miss it. I encourage the habit till it thinks it has a complete hold, and then I break off short. Then I know I am master, and I know I am depriving myself of something I really miss.'

It was with interest, then, that Bobby watched the quaint, ungainly figure running towards them – the long arms flapping, as it were, in the air; the long shambling legs, equally out of proportion to the short squat body; the big hairless face and head thrust forward on a long thin neck. Bobby found himself oddly reminded of a vulture flapping its way along the ground, and half expected to see the priest soar into the air in sudden flight. As they drew nearer to each other he was able to note, too, how little fleshiness that round face showed, how tightly drawn was the skin over the bony framework, how brightly shone and glittered the prominent eyes. To Ray Bobby said, as they slackened pace to allow the new-comer to overtake them: ‘A judgement? Why a judgement? What for?'

‘It was in his sermon,' Ray explained. ‘He thought Eddy Dene was trying to prove the Bible wrong, and that was blasphemy and suchlike. He's preached about it before, only not so strong; and Lady Cambers was there, and sat all through, just listening. A judgement he said, and looked straight at her, and she just listened, quiet as you like.'

The vicar was close to them now, those long shambling legs of his carrying him over the ground at an astonishing rate. In one hand he held a small leather case. He made no pause as he overtook them, but rushed whirling by, calling out, but without waiting for an answer, as he fled past: ‘Is there time still?'

‘What's he mean?' Bobby asked, and Ray explained: ‘Holy Communion. He's got it with him; he always has it ready in case. Anything he'll do rather than let you die without. One winter he ran miles through the snow, when it was too deep for a car, so he could get to Hicks's, just because he heard Mrs. Hicks was dying – and she wasn't neither, only just the flu and a drop more gin than usual. Eddy Dene says he's cracked. Eddy Dene says truth's truth, and if truth and the Bible don't hit it, so much the worse for the Bible. So vicar – he excommunicated him.' Ray chuckled. ‘A fat lot Eddy cared, never having been near church since they christened him – and then he squalled his hardest all the time. But some said vicar meant to excommunicate Lady Cambers too, and she was fair upset about it.'

Bobby made no comment. He had heard before, in a vague, confused sort of way, that the archaeological investigations being carried out by young Eddy Dene, with the encouragement and under the patronage of Lady Cambers, had much disturbed the worthy vicar, and had been roundly denounced by him from the pulpit. He wondered if by any bizarre possibility this dispute was connected with the terrible tragedy that had just occurred.

They had reached the shed now. At the door stood Jordan, the local sergeant of police, his uniform evidently somewhat hastily assumed, using all his endeavour for the moment to keep people from crowding into the shed. But his deference to local notabilities, the frequent distracting calls on his attention, his own state of general bewilderment and confusion, so that even yet he could hardly believe what had happened, prevented this endeavour from being very successful. The interior of the shed was, indeed, crowded almost to suffocation with people who had little other excuse than curiosity for their presence.

The latest addition to the group was Mr. Andrews, for Sergeant Jordan, who had sung in a choir, man and boy, for thirty years, would never have dreamed of trying to exclude the vicar of the parish. Now Jordan was endeavouring to make up for what he felt had been a certain laxity by vehemently exhorting those still without to take forthwith their departure.

‘What do you want?' he was demanding. ‘None of you got any work to do to-day? Trespassers, you are, all of you – trespassing and trapesing. Now then, be off, all of you.'

But no one took much notice, and Bobby, pushing through the little crowd of spectators, said to him: ‘I've been staying the week-end at Lady Cambers's place. They've only just found out she wasn't in her room. Her bed's not been slept in.' He added: ‘My name's Owen. I'm a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, attached to the C.I.D., Scotland Yard.'

He offered his card as he spoke, and Jordan studied it with interest, still more bewildered at finding that one of the guests at the big house he had from earliest youth regarded with deepest awe and reverence and respect was also a brother-sergeant of police. A confusing world it had become, he reflected sadly; and aloud he said: ‘Well, now then, pleased to meet you, I'm sure. I've sent for Colonel Lawson and doctor, too, but they aren't here yet, either of 'em.'

‘If there's anything I can do to help,' Bobby suggested, ‘I'd be only too glad.' 

‘Better wait till the Colonel gets here, and then you could ask him,' Jordan answered, and Bobby nodded and said that would be best no doubt, and walked past into the shed with such an air of being, so to say, one of the force, that Jordan never even thought of trying to stop him, but resumed instead his ineffective exhortations to the rapidly swelling crowd outside to be gone about their own affairs they all thought so much less interesting than what was happening here.

Within the shed the body of the murdered woman lay on a table in the middle of the room. Someone, with some idea of doing it reverence, had covered it with a large cloth that had been lying about. A collection of what Bobby recognized as flint implements of the early Stone Age had been hurriedly tumbled from the table, on which they had been carefully ranged in ordered sequence, to the floor to make room for the body. Mingled with them, in the same untidy heap, were a number of fossils, all pushed together out of the way. The only other furniture of the room, besides this table, consisted of a small oil stove, a couple of chairs, one or two packing-cases, some rough shelving round the walls. On these shelves stood, not too tidily, a few pieces of crockery, various tools, a camera and other photographic apparatus, and a few similar objects. Evidently a workroom, Bobby told himself. Lying on one of the packing-cases was Lady Cambers's hand-bag, which he recognized at once. It had been picked up near her body, and contained her handkerchief, glasses, a pencil, a small mirror, and various other trifling objects of everyday use, including a few shillings in small change. On the same packing-case lay a small suit-case that Bobby recognized as also her property. It had her initials on it, and Bobby wondered why she should have taken it with her on this strange midnight expedition that had ended so tragically. He went across to it, and saw that it was quite empty, and again he wondered what object it had been meant to serve. One of the bystanders, seeing him looking at it, said: ‘It was just by her – empty like that.'

‘Wasn't there anything in it?' asked another bystander, either for confirmation or for want of something to say.

‘Empty just as it is now,' repeated the other.

Near-by, bending over the confused heap of fossils, flints, and so on that had been tumbled so unceremoniously from the table, was a smooth-faced youngster, apparently about twenty-two or three. He said ruefully: ‘It's going to be a job to get them straight again.'

From the other side of the room someone said loudly: ‘You've no call to be thinking of that, Eddy Dene, with her ladyship lying there and all.'

The vicar, who had been engaged in silent devotion over the dead body, took up the rebuke.

‘No, indeed, Dene,' he said sharply, ‘this is no time to be thinking of such things.'

Dene straightened himself, and from half-shut eyes looked round with a gentle, deprecatory smile. He was not a good-looking lad, for his features were irregular and even insignificant, though he had a fine lofty forehead, and against a fair complexion, with little trace as yet of beard or moustache, and under fair eyebrows, a pair of dark and flashing eyes glowed with unexpected and unusual fire. There was a certain chubbiness, too, about his features, a suggestion of youthfulness and inexperience, that again made curious contrast with the haughty and dominating gaze now veiled beneath his half-closed eyes. In height he was below the average, but of a strong, sturdy build, with long arms terminating in somewhat disproportionately small hands that had slender, sensitive-looking fingers. Looking at the lower part of his face, one might have been inclined to dismiss him as a commonplace, rather spoilt, and petulant youth. That broad forehead and those darkly brilliant eyes suggested another and a different personality. He said to Mr. Andrews, a little in the manner of one offering excuses though not much used to such an exercise: ‘Oh, well, it's my work, you know. I've got to think of my work, and thinking of it won't hurt her now, poor soul, will it?'

‘Your work, as you call it, had an evil aim – a blasphemous aim,' the vicar retorted, loudly and harshly, so that the low murmur of other voices in the shed was hushed. ‘A judgement has been given.' The priest's eyes lighted up fiercely, the intense emotion of the man, his enormous conviction, lent to them fire, and to his voice a vibrant, penetrating quality. ‘It was a blasphemy you planned,' he said, ‘and here's the end.'

Eddy Dene moved forward. He looked quite good-humoured still, his easy assurance an odd contrast to the other's intense, emotional fervour. As well as the crowded condition of the room permitted, the rest of those present drew back, so as to allow the chubby-faced Eddy Dene, the emaciated priest, to face each, other. Dene said slowly, his broad brow puckered now as with a certain anxiety: ‘I dare say that's right about this being the end. I don't know where the money's to come from now. That may put a stopper to the whole show. Only, why a judgement? Judgement? Why? Whose judgement?' he asked with a sudden, unexpected emphasis that was in curious contrast to his former easy assurance.

Into Bobby's mind there flashed the thought that the tone and phrasing were almost those of an accusation, and he even had the impression that to others in the room the same idea had occurred. Surely it could not be possible that Dene suspected the vicar of this atrocious and apparently purposeless murder? Yet it was almost in an attitude, and with an air, of mutual accusation that the two men faced each other. And then Bobby told himself that that was absurd, that it was only their mutual dislike and suspicion breaking out: the age-long conflict of the priest and the scientist, both right and both wrong, the one mistrusting too much reason, and daring to doubt where truth may lead, the other mistrusting too much faith, and daring to doubt where love might go; both so tremendously right, so presumptuously wrong.

But then Eddy's expression changed. He shrugged his shoulders as if dismissing an idea that had indeed crossed his mind for an instant, but that he now clearly saw to be merely foolish.

‘Oh, well,' he said, ‘that sermon of yours has turned out quite prophetic, and, if it is a judgement, it's done for me all right. Looks like the end of my job here.'

‘Hard luck, Eddy,' someone called.

‘I hoped a lot from it,' Eddy said musingly. ‘It might have meant a lot if I could have gone through with it. And now I shan't even stand a show with the American bloke, either – done in all round, I am.' He looked again at the stern-faced vicar. ‘Oh, it's a judgement all right,' he said, ‘but don't go saying it was one on her – that's a dirty thing to say.'

‘In the presence of the dead, cut off without warning,' began the vicar, ‘it is not seemly...'

But then the door opened, and a tall military-looking man came in, followed by two or three others. Though he had never seen him before, Bobby guessed at once that this new-comer was Colonel Lawson, head of the county police.

‘What are all these people doing here?' demanded the colonel angrily. ‘Good Lord, it might be a public meeting. Sergeant, don't you know better than to let this crowd in? Clear everyone out immediately.'

The authoritative manner, the emphatic voice, of Colonel Lawson had immediate effect, and those who had a little before crowded so eagerly into the shed began now almost as eagerly to file out again, sternly watched by Sergeant Jordan, who tried to atone for his previous laxity by endeavouring to look as fierce as the colonel and by calling loudly, in the best imitation of the military voice he could manage: ‘Pass along there, please. Pass along now.'

The vicar seemed at first inclined to linger. There were duties he thought should be performed, rites to be carried out. But Colonel Lawson, though careful to show the punctilious respect due from one official force to another, soon got rid of him, and then turned sharply upon Eddy Dene, who had again become absorbed in his collection of stone implements and fossils in their confusion on the floor.

‘Now, you, sir,' the colonel rasped out. ‘You heard what I said?'

Eddy looked up mildly.

‘Well, it's my shed, you know,' he remarked. ‘They've made hay of my stuff, as it is.'

‘Your shed? I thought this was Mr. Hardy's land?' the colonel said sharply.

‘But my shed,' Eddy answered. ‘Lady Cambers got a lease of it in my name so we shouldn't run any risk of being disturbed. Lord knows what'll happen now, or where any more money for research is to come from!' He added: ‘It'll be a week's work at least to get my stuff straight again.'

‘You're young Dene, then?' the colonel asked. ‘I've heard about you. Your father's the grocer here, isn't he?'

‘Yes, that's right,' Eddy answered, and, Bobby fancied, with a touch of resentment in his tone and manner as if he had not much appreciated this loud-voiced reference to the paternal shop. Not that there had been anything offensive or patronizing in the colonel's tone, he had merely made the observation as stating a fact that helped to establish name, place, and residence. He went on: ‘Well, Dene, I'm sorry, but you'll have to let us take possession for a time. We won't interfere with your things any more than we can help. If there's any information I want from you at any time, I will let you know, Sergeant.'