Frequent Hearses (19 page)

“That’s what I’ve been t-told,” said David with indifference. “T-tomb of the chap who m-made the M-Maze, oh, hundreds of y-years ago. F-funny idea, if you ask me.”

Judy drew a deep breath of pure pleasure.

“David, we
must
explore it. Promise you’ll take me.”

“Yes, all right.” He was quite honestly uninterested. “I d-don’t mind.”

And at this point Judy remembered, rather belatedly, that her suggestion of dining at Lanthorn House had not been received with any great enthusiasm, and that she must not be so discourteous as to forget that it was still a
re infecta.

“Oh, but look here,” she said contritely, “it isn’t really fair of me to intrude on your family when—well, with things as they are. Perhaps some other time…”

“N-no, please.” David seemed preoccupied with some species of inward calculation. “It’ll be quite all right. M-mother’ll be d-delighted to m-meet you. And p-perhaps it’d be as well if I w-wasn’t s-seen d-dining out. L-looks callous, you know.” He emerged from his abstraction and smiled. “G-good idea of yours, really.”

“Well, if you’re really sure…”

“Oh, yes. You see, I w-want M-Mother to m-meet you. I’m sure you’ll t-take to each other.”

Like a serialised Victorian novel, Judy reflected: the son, of good family, introduces to his termagant Mamma the poor but honest girl whom he loves and hopes to marry. Will she turn up in a frightful hat? Will she drop her aitches and eat peas with a knife? Will he be threatened with disinheritance if he persists in his suit? And which will prevail in him—his passion for that quite impossible She or his sense of class solidarity? (No, that wasn’t right:
unsullied family traditions.)
Read what happens in the next quarter’s issue of
Household Words…

Poor David, thought Judy, as she abandoned this fantasy, it’s a shame to take advantage of him when one’s feeling for him is so irremediably temperate… But such penitence as she felt was unfortunately quite inadequate to restrain her from taking advantage, and she therefore said:

“Yes, I’m sure we shall. I look forward to it.”

“I’ll d-drive you there, shall I? I b-borrowed Nick’s B-Bentley to c-come here this morning.”

“That sounds lovely. But what time are you likely to finish work? I may have to stay a bit later than usual.”

“Oh, I c-can w-wait for you.”

“No, don’t hang about.” Judy’s considerateness was partly conditioned by the fear that he might elect to do his waiting in her office. “You go on home as soon as you’ve finished, and I’ll borrow a car from Frank Griswold, or someone, and follow you on my own. I can be there by seven—it’s just outside Aylesbury, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. Once you g-get to Aylesbury anyone will d-direct you. But are you sure you d-don’t mind?”

“No, of course not.” Judy stood up. “That’s settled, then. And now I must go back and do some work. So
au revoir.”

For a moment he did not reply, and in his silence there was something of that obscurely unsettling, incalculable quality she had glimpsed earlier. But then he, too, got to his feet—his delay in performing this courtesy was also vaguely discomposing—and nodded and slowly smiled.

“Au
revoir,”
he said. “T-till this evening.”

The picture of Judy that emerges from the foregoing conversation is, I suppose, rather mixed and ambiguous, and more particularly where her motives in accepting David Crane’s invitation are concerned. But she was, as a matter of fact, a perfectly ordinary, straightforward young woman, and her predominant emotion, for the time being, was a perfectly ordinary, straightforward curiosity. Since Saturday the studios had been full of gossip about the Cranes—a tongue-wagging of epic scope which the
Mercury’s
revelations had enormously intensified; and the opportunity of studying the Cranes at close quarters was one which in consequence she found quite irresistible. Woman-like, she was a great deal more interested in people than in facts, and it cannot, therefore, be asserted that her reason for contriving the invitation to Lanthorn House stemmed from any very avid desire to solve the mystery of Maurice’s death and the attempted killing of Nicholas. But the Crane family were important, half-legendary figures in her world, and she was not intellectually sophisticated enough—or intellectually snobbish enough, if you prefer—to be convinced of their ultimate insignificance in the larger scheme of things. She wanted to stand at the very centre of the scandal and contemplate it from there; and David Crane’s infatuation was her only passport to that dubious privilege…

Vulgar curiosity, she told herself as she strolled back to the Music Department: that’s all it is.

And at this stage she did not recollect that it was curiosity, in the proverb, which killed the cat.

It was when she was on her way to get lunch at the studio Club—a preserve of the Upper Orders which she sometimes used in preference to the overcrowded canteens—that she encountered Gervase Fen, who was carrying an old raincoat and had on his extraordinary hat.

“Hello,” she greeted him. “Are you detecting?”

He shook his head. “Unluckily no. I’ve just come away from an
Unfortunate Lady
conference.”

“Good Lord, are they still going on? I thought Saturday’s was the last.”

“So did we all. But Leiper didn’t concur with the particular brand of nonsense we agreed on, and convened us again this morning.”

“But the Cranes…”

“The Cranes were unanimous in staying away. Everyone else was there. A certain gloom was perceptible, I thought. I’m, surprised, myself, that Leiper’s going on with it.”

“So am I. What on earth does he imagine is going to happen about Nicholas and Madge?”

“From what I heard him say to Stafford, he believes the whole affair to be a conscienceless newspaper stunt having no basis in fact whatever.”

“Do you really mean to say he’s so stupid as to think it’s all lies?”

“Just that. And no one seems to have the nerve to disillusion him. I find it all,” said Fen comfortably, “very pathetic… By the way, you remember I asked you on Saturday what attitude the Crane family adopted towards Gloria Scott?”

“Yes.”

“You said that about Nicholas you didn’t know. Do you know now?”

“Yes. After all the talk there’s been I can hardly avoid knowing. It seems he was always exceedingly nice to her—and not at all because she was bedworthy, or anything of that kind. Just pure altruism.”

“So that people were a good deal surprised when the letter was published?”

“Lord, yes. Bowled over…I say, is this important?”

“God knows,” said Fen. “I’ll tell you what it is, Miss Flecker,” he went on rather balefully. “Humbleby is getting above himself. He’s not keeping me
au fait
with the case. All he’s done so far is to telephone me at some ungodly hour last night, gabble a few incoherent words at me, and then ring off before I had time to extract a single solid piece of information from him. Did
you
know that someone has tried to poison Nicholas?”

“Yes. I heard this morning. David told me.”

“David…? Oh, that’s the dim brother, of course. I haven’t met him yet.”

Judy hesitated. “Professor Fen, you—you don’t think
he
could possibly be the murderer?”

“My dear girl,” said Fen kindly, “for the moment I know of no cogent reason for eliminating any human being who is at present walking the earth. Why do you ask?”

“Well, he’s invited me to his mother’s house for dinner this evening, and I thought you might know if he was under suspicion, and if he had been I would have kept my eyes open, that’s all.”

“To dinner? At his mother’s house?” Fen shook his head. ‘“Tis ill pudling in the cockatrice’ den,” he murmured, “and they must walk warily that hunt the wild boar.”

“This excursion into Bunyan signifying what?”

“Keep your eyes open in any case… And now I must catch my bus. Good-bye. And look after yourself.” He was gone.

Tea-time found Judy exceptionally busy, and she was not pleased to be interrupted by David Crane. On this occasion, however, he stated the pretext for his visit with unusual directness.

“I s-say, Miss Flecker, it’s my c-car,” he said. “N-Nick’s car, I m-mean.”

Judy said patiently:

“What’s the trouble? Won’t it go?”

“S-someone’s s-smashed up the engine.”

“What?”

“W-with an iron b-bar.”

Judy stared at him. “David, are you sure you’re not dreaming?”

“N-no, of course n-not. L-look for yourself if you d-don’t b-believe me.” He seemed quite distraught. “I t-tried to s-start her, and she w-wouldn’t g-go, and then I l-looked to see if I could s-spot what was wrong, and—and there it w-was.”

“It was all right when you arrived, though, wasn’t it?” said Judy not very intelligently. “I mean—”

“Oh, yes. It w-was all right then.”

“But in broad daylight, David! I don’t understand how anyone can have
dared…”

“It was in Nick’s l-lock-up,” he explained. “Only, of course, n-no one ever actually l-locks them, and I didn’t. So you s-see…”

Judy did see. Adjoining the carpenters’ workshop there was a row of lock-up garages (whose doors, as David had rightly observed, nobody ever bothered to secure) reserved for the use of the studio’s Upper Twenty. And since from morning to night the carpenters’ shop yielded an unintermittent uproar of hammering and mechanical saws, the noisy act of vandalism which David had reported could have been carried through, behind the garage’s closed door, in reasonable safety… Vandalism. Judy’s heart sank. The car was Nicholas’, not David’s, and she knew that in certain quarters the feeling against Nicholas was running high…

But this explanation had apparently not occurred to David; he seemed completely perplexed. “I d-don’t understand it,” he muttered haplessly. “I just d-don’t understand it at all.”

“What are you going to do?” Judy demanded; it could serve no useful purpose, she felt, to blurt out the theory she had just formulated.

“Oh, I’ll hire a c-car in the v-village to t-take me home. That p-part’s all right. B-but I w-wish I knew
why.
It seems so p-pointless, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Judy agreed. “Yes, it does.”

“I know I oughtn’t to be b-bothering you about it, n-not when you’re w-working. B-but I just had to t-tell someone.”

“You’ll see the police about it, I suppose?”

“Yes. C-certainly I shall. Filthy rotten t-trick,” said David miserably. “Must catch the b-bounder who did it.” He stood there shifting uneasily from one foot to the other, and now his self-consciousness, which the outrage had sent temporarily into abeyance, began to seep back. “Well. As I s-say. Thought I’d just t-tell you about it.”

“I’d go to the police straight away if I were you.”

David squared his shoulders. “Quite right. G-get it over and done with. Thanks for l-listening, Miss F-Flecker.”

“Why not Judy?”

He made a gesture so preposterously bashful that she had the utmost difficulty in suppressing a gust of ribald and unseemly mirth.

“Thanks, Judy,” he said. “I’ll g-get along now. See you l-later.”

And “Heavens!” thought Judy as the door closed behind him, “what have I let myself in for? Fathomless abysses of
nescier faire…”

“But it’s damned queer,” she murmured aloud, “about that car. I wonder…”

And after a moment’s cogitation she reached for the telephone, put a call through to the College of St. Christopher in Oxford, and asked for Professor Fen.

Professor Fen was there. His voice sounded as if the telephone had awakened him from a particularly deep and agreeable bout of slumber; which in fact it had. What, he enquired rather surlily, was the matter?

But on hearing Judy’s story he became audibly more complaisant and alert. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” Judy said in conclusion, “but I thought it just possibly
might
have something to do with the case, and so…”

“Yes, you may very well be right. Will you do something for me?”

“What?”

“The car’s still there, is it? It hasn’t been towed away?”

“No, it’s still here.”

“Well, then, get a garage-man up from the village—or else someone at the studios who knows about cars—and have him look at the steering-gear.”

“The
steering-gear?
But why—wait, though: I think I see what you’re getting at. Only—”

“Don’t theorise, please. Act. And ring me back, will you? as soon as you’ve found out.”

This proved to be about an hour later.

“Well?” Fen enquired.

“You were right. Something essential in the steering had been filed almost completely through—I’m afraid I’m stupid about these things, so I can’t tell you exactly what it was, but the man said it was a murderous trick, because if it snapped when the car was moving fast, there’d be an appalling smash.”

“Quite so. Well, I continue to guess quite nicely, even if I don’t actually deduce very much. Has David Crane told the police?”

“Yes. The local bobby came along and scratched his head over it. I told him he ought to get in touch with Inspector Humbleby and tell him about it. Was that right?”

“Perfectly.”

“And
was
it meant for Nicholas?”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“And then, I suppose, the person who’d done it found out
David
was driving the car, and didn’t want to kill him, and put the engine out of action because that was the best way he could think up of cancelling what he’d done.”

“Yes. Quite a plausible hypothesis, in the circumstances. Of course, there’s one other possibility.”

“I know what you mean: David did the whole thing himself, after he arrived here, so as to create a—a red herring.”

“You have a good, lively, sceptical brain,” Fen commented. “But don’t let it make you careless when you go to Lanthorn House this evening. Remember, we’ve none of us any idea what face this particular cockatrice is wearing… Good-bye.”

It was five past six, and the air was full of a slow, depressing drizzle, when Judy left the studios and set off for Aylesbury.

She had borrowed Griswold’s car—a large, rather antiquated Humber saloon badly scarred by the destructive proclivities of its owner’s innumerable children. Judy had commandeered it before, and it was not, in her experience, at all a reliable machine; but it was better than a sequence of buses, or the inordinate expense of hiring a taxi. It had the peculiarity, which Griswold freely admitted no one had ever been able to explain, of seeming on the point of petering out and then, at the last possible moment and quite without human intervention, suddenly revving itself up until the bonnet rattled, the cheeks of the passengers quivered as with an ague and an efflux of pastel-blue smoke shrouded it like dense fog. Griswold was accustomed to maintain (though not with much confidence) that this had something to do with the hand throttle’s being caught up with the clutch, and in the course of time he had become inured to it, but it never failed to unnerve strangers, and it was with a good deal of wariness that Judy edged the eccentric vehicle out on to the road.