Give a Corpse a Bad Name (12 page)

‘Very lonely,' the major repeated. ‘Poor Emmie. Poor old Emmie. Lovely girl once, now just a lonely old woman. I'm very sorry for her. And I'm sorry I spoke to you like I did, Dyke. Hope you'll forgive me. Lonely myself, that's the trouble. You lose your sense of balance when you're lonely, you know. Have another drink.' He filled his own glass again.

Toby slid back into the depths of the chair. The dog jumped up on to Maxwell's knees again. Maxwell stroked the rough fur and sighed. ‘I've got Staggers here,' he said, ‘no one but Staggers.'

‘D'you know,' said Toby, ‘I shouldn't mind seeing that brother of yours sometime?'

A broad smile suddenly replaced the melancholy on the major's face. It was pretty flushed by now; the eyes had an oily look. ‘You wouldn't like him,' he said. ‘Not your type at all. Don't like him myself. Can't stand him. Hate him. Ha, ha, don't believe I've ever told anyone that before. Hate him, ha, ha! That's good, isn't it? Now I'll tell you something, Dyke. D'you know why I went into the army? So's to be different from Joe. Absolutely my only reason for it, ab-ss-solutely.'

‘And yet,' said Toby, ‘you believe him rather than his wife.'

‘Well, I mean to say, Dyke, look at the circumstances. That's it, look at the circumstances. Look at the circumstances. That's all you have to do. Poor lonely old woman, can't believe her son's dead. Can't believe it myself, but that's different. Young Shelley dead! “Oh, weep for Adonais, he is dead—” No, that was Keats, wasn't it? I'm a little mixed up this morning. Tired. Haven't been sleeping. Things go round and round in here.' He bored with his finger at his temple, and drank.

‘Yes,' said Toby, ‘round and round. Suspicions, for instance.'

‘All sorts of things,' said the major. ‘There was a Boche in the war. Stone dead. Magnificent fellow, long as this room. Stretched out flat, stone dead. My batman started going through his pockets. “You can't do that,” I said, “it's robbing the dead.” Fellow went on doing it. Hadn't time to stop him. That goes round in here.' Again he made that boring motion with his finger against his temple. It was an agonized gesture. ‘Magnificent,' he muttered, ‘long as this room—robbing the dead. Joe's fault I went into the army. Joe's fault I didn't marry Iris. Joe's fault if I don't—' Suddenly he pulled himself up and sat staring at Toby with a look of distraction.

‘Yes?' said Toby.

‘I'm a little drunk, Dyke. Sorry. Hope it doesn't annoy you. Haven't been sleeping, you see—makes one lose hold of oneself. I wouldn't be talking to you like this if I weren't drunk. But I like you, you're a good chap. I'll tell you about Iris—'

‘And about Anna too,' Toby suggested.

‘No, no, Iris,' said the major with swift irritation. ‘Don't want to talk about Anna to anyone. Mustn't talk, you know, wouldn't be right. But Iris is long ago. She was the most beautiful girl. Lovely eyes. Beautiful. She was Irish and Italian, mixed—
mélange, en français
—beautiful. Joe's fault …' His chin had sunk forward on his chest, his hand lay inert and heavy on the dog's head. ‘But you can believe him, you know, Dyke. Joe'd never tell a lie. Too holy for that, damn him, damn him, damn him …'

‘Well, George,' said Toby, out in the sharp, midday air once more, ‘it looked like a good idea making him drunk, but what d'you think you got out of it?'

George shook his head dubiously. ‘It just came to me as the natural thing, Tobe.'

‘There was something I wanted to get out of him sober,' said Toby. ‘I wanted to find out
why
everyone believes this Holy Joe.'

‘Don't you?' said George.

They were walking down the path towards the stile that would take them on to the Purbrook road close to where the accident had happened.

‘I don't know if I do or I don't,' said Toby. ‘Strikes me he's just as liable to make a mistake as the old woman is—meaning an honest mistake—and just as liable to be wrong by mistake on purpose, if you get me. If she's in a state of not being able to believe her son's dead, I shouldn't wonder if he's been wanting that son dead for a long time, and got himself into a state where he could easily fancy himself into certainty about any conveniently unrecognizable corpse. No, George, I'm not going to swallow Joe's word just because it's Joe's word. He could have a nice, psychological motive for his belief just as well as his wife could for hers. And then, leaving out the sentiment, mothers generally do know something about their sons' bodies.'

‘Don't that soldier-man hate the old boy?' said George. ‘Anyway, you'd never have found that out with him sober.'

Toby nodded thoughtfully. ‘And he's a peculiar man, is Major Maxwell. There's his temper, the cold, ugly sort of temper of a man who's never given in to his emotions, but hasn't managed to annihilate them either. Then there's his insomnia—recent, I gathered from what his sister-in-law said to him. What keeps a man awake o' nights, George?'

‘Women,' said George, ‘or lack of same.'

‘Or indigestion, of lack of exercise, or an uneasy conscience. You know, I could go on talking quite a long time about that major. He's intelligent, he's imaginative, he's emotional, he's—'

‘He tells lies,' said George.

They had reached the end of the field path, and George had already climbed the stile and was standing on the road.

Toby, one leg swung over the stile, paused. ‘What?'

‘You come here and look,' said George.

Toby came to his side and stood looking along the road towards Purbrook. It ran level and straight to the point where the main road to Plymouth crossed it, but almost immediately beyond the crossing it rose over another of the humpbacked bridges so common hereabouts. A fairly steady stream of cars was passing along the main road.

‘I don't get it,' said Toby.

‘Remember when Eggbear was telling us the whole business?' said George. ‘Well, he told us how he sent one of his coppers out to ask Maxwell if he'd noticed anyone around when Mrs Milne dropped him at this stile, and—'

‘Hey,' Toby broke in, his eyes eager, ‘she didn't drop him at any stile. She dropped him up there at the crossroads. Obviously. She was going on to drop a Miss Someone-or-other somewhere down the main road. Well, she wouldn't have driven down this little bit and then driven back; she'd have stopped at the corner and Maxwell would have got out and walked to the stile. Only …' He stopped and looked at George with sudden wariness. ‘Is this news to you, George, or have you got it all worked out for yourself?'

‘More or less news to me,' George reassured him. ‘Go on, tell me.'

Toby looked relieved. He pointed down at their feet. ‘Well, d'you see that drip of oil?'

‘Oh, that. I'd seen that,' said George. ‘If it was Mrs Milne's car—and, matter of fact, it'd got a pretty good drip, I noticed that in the garage—well, if it was her car, of course it means she stopped here on her way back after she'd dropped the other woman, and probably had a chat with Maxwell, who hadn't gone straight home, like he said, but had been waiting for her. That's
if
it was her car. But it's several days ago, Tobe, and all sorts of people stop their cars near stiles, don't they, especially if the stiles have got good hedges each side.'

‘All right,' grunted Toby disgustedly, ‘forget about it. Go on about the major's lies.'

‘Well,' said George, ‘when Maxwell was questioned about whether he'd seen anyone coming down the road from Purbrook after he'd been dropped here, he didn't just say no he didn't think so, like you or I would've done. He said no he knew he hadn't seen anyone. And how did he know? He said he'd looked down the road and seen a car's headlights a good way off, so that if anyone had been coming along he'd have been sure to see him against them. But if the car was a good way off he couldn't have seen anyone against the headlights until the person had come over that bridge. Don't know how you feel about it, Tobe, but I'm inclined to think myself that there's a sort of phoney smell about that little bit of evidence.'

Toby nodded. ‘And even if cars do stop for other purposes, I'm inclined to think that drip of oil … But we've a hell of a walk back to Chovey. We ought to have gone back by the house and picked up Laws and his three-wheeler.'

They started their walk. After about a quarter of an hour Toby said that when they got back to the inn he was going to ask Tom Warren where they could hire a car for the next few days. He said little else. The look of concentration on his face made it savage. George did not try to keep up.

However, when he saw Toby walk straight past the Ring of Bells and make for the police station, he sprinted for thirty yards or so and asked him what he thought he was at.

‘I want one more look at Shelley Maxwell before they put him away for good,' said Toby. ‘I want to verify whether or not there was a cut on his hand.'

‘Going to tell Eggbear about this morning?'

‘Not at the moment,' said Toby.

But neither did he tell George, ten minutes later, what he made of the fact that the dead man who lay in the shed behind the police station had indeed no scar on his right hand. He hurried on to his lunch in the same frowning absent-mindedness. George had to draw his attention to the two letters addressed to him that were stuck behind the tapes of the letter-board.

As he looked, Toby came out of his brooding with a shout. He tore the first envelope open. Letters cut out of a newspaper and pasted on to a sheet of cheap, thin paper spelled the message:
‘BONFIRES ARE FOR BURNING THINGS AREN'T THEY? WELL WHAT ABOUT A PAIR OF TROUSERS?'

The second letter Toby scarcely glanced at. It had not come by post, but must have been delivered by hand during the morning. It ran:

‘Dear Mr Dyke,

‘I realize I was abrupt and unfriendly this morning. I am sorry. I have a number of things on my mind and am a good deal worried. You will understand, too that at the moment I am not at all sure of my relations with the Maxwells, and prefer to wait until they have shown their attitude towards me. I wish, however, that I had been less ungracious. I do not want to seem ungrateful for your attempts to discover the source of this annoying letter. I hope you will forgive me.

‘Yours sincerely,

‘Anna Milne.'

‘We'll think about that later,' said Toby, putting it on one side. ‘And personally I'm not thinking much about the other either till I've got some food into me. Country air and walking's good for the appetite, isn't it, George?'

‘Maybe,' said George, ‘but this is an unhealthy neighbourhood.'

‘I wouldn't argue the point,' said Toby in a tone of satisfaction.

George made a sound of disgust, and Toby, staring at the anonymous letter which he had propped up against the flower-vase on the table, grinned with a kind of wolfishness.

About an hour later, in the warm and quiet coffee-room, Toby suddenly sat up on the couch by the fire on which he had been stretched in apparent sleep, and said: ‘Come on, George, we're seeing about that car. I'm getting tired of being taken to places and dropped there. I want some horse-power, or I'll never get anywhere in this business.'

‘Why,' said George, ‘where've you got to go to now?'

‘Paying some more calls. And if you run into Eggbear, don't mention it. I want to work this my own way. Come on.' And he strode through to the office. There, at an untidy desk, Tom Warren was dozing.

‘Where can I hire a car?' said Toby.

Tom Warren rubbed heavy eyes and lit a cigarette.

‘Bowdens have a car they hire out sometimes—Bowdens' Garage, just past the school. 'Tis a 1921 Sunbeam. That do you? There was a commercial gent who—'

‘Thanks,' said Toby, and left.

‘Here, Tobe,' said George, trotting after him, ‘where you going to? For the Lord's sake, why can't you settle down a bit?'

‘Bowdens' Garage,' said Toby, ‘just past the school. That'll be over there. Come on. I only like walking for pleasure, for business I want wheels.'

He crossed the village street, and, by ignoring most of what the Bowden who attended to him said about the weather, the accident, his garden and a burst pipe, succeeded in securing the use of a spacious and venerable Sunbeam in little over a quarter of an hour.

‘All right, all right,' said George, taking his seat beside Toby in the car, ‘it don't matter that there was a perfectly good Edgar Wallace in the hotel, don't matter about antagonizing the locals by obstructing their natural desires for friendly conversation, it don't matter that I personally am in need of a rest. But where are we going?'

‘Back to The Laurels.'

‘And after that?'

‘Just try a little guessing,' said Toby.

When they were about halfway to the house they passed a girl walking towards the village. She was walking almost in the middle of the road, her head bent, her hands deep in the pockets of her loose, tweed coat. Absently, without looking up, she got out of the way of their car. Her head was bare and her hair was brightly fair in the sloping afternoon sunlight. Her walk was slow and listless.

‘So it isn't her you're going to see,' said George, as Toby did not even slow down.

‘No, it's the mother again.'

‘Well, that's something.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't like the way the girl looks at you,' said George, ‘it's kind of embarrassing.'

‘Too few men around, that's all,' said Toby. ‘Now get this, George. I'm letting you come in with me, but you're not going to start anything this time. You're not going to say any of the bright things that come into your head. You're not going to get anyone drunk. You're just going to be there in the background, like a perfect little gentleman. I know the way I want to work things. Understand? Or do I have to shut you out on the doorstep?'