Give a Corpse a Bad Name (8 page)

‘You're doing an awful lot of walking, George.'

‘Yes,' said George. ‘Well, I came along here. Someone was doing a bit of gardening—that's to say, someone was making a bonfire. I smelt it.'

‘Well, what about it?'

George shrugged his shoulders. ‘Don't know. What about that flask? Why were you so sure it'd be empty this morning?'

‘Just a guess,' said Toby, ‘though I felt fairly sure that whoever sent that letter knew that the flask was empty. And since it
was
—George, there
is
something in all this. I don't know what it is, but it's there. If that flask had been full, or rather, if it'd been the same as our Albert left it on Tuesday, that letter wouldn't have meant a thing. But as it is …'

George heaved himself on to his feet. ‘Well, speaking for myself and myself alone,' he said, ‘I'd like my dinner. But I don't suppose that's in your reckoning yet.'

‘Why not?' said Toby. ‘I'm as hungry as you are. Come on, we'll be getting back.'

‘Eh?' said Geroge. ‘D'you mean to say you're going to let that chap's story go uncorroborated?'

Unwillingly Toby replied: ‘Well, I suppose while we're at it …'

‘That's right,' said George. ‘Here, we can get through the hedge. Albert's just gone in to dinner. You let me go ahead, then you won't tear your clothes.'

‘No,' said Mrs Milne's cook at the back door, ‘we don't want anything.'

But from behind her Ruby, the parlourmaid, had seen the two men.

‘Sh, Martha,' she said, ‘they'm the two gentlemen who come up with Sergeant Eggbear this mornin'.'

At once the hard, square face of the woman before them took on a look of eagerness. She was short, broad and vigorous, with thick, muscular arms and hands which, reddened, scrubbed and cracked, seemed to clench themselves into fists the moment they had nothing to do. Her age might be forty or forty-five. She had shrewd eyes and a confident mouth.

‘Ah,' she said, that eagerness on her face adding an intimidating quality to her grim features, ‘you want to know what I know. Well, I don't mind telling you. It's time someone spoke the truth. And you'll get nothing but the truth from me. Everyone knows that. I speak the truth and nothing but the truth—always, so help me God.'

‘Fine,' said Toby. ‘Now there's a question—'

‘Ask anyone you like, that's what they'll tell you,' she swept on before he could get any further. ‘Folk don't always like it—oh no, I know the sort of things they say of me when I'm not there. But it's not for their sakes I do it, but for the sake of the Grace Divine, which will encompass me if I have faith and walk in the way of righteousness—yea, even me, miserable sinner that I am. So you see, young man, you've come to the right place. No lies for me, no mincing matters. I'll tell you what I know about that woman, under whose roof I'd be shamed to have you find me if it weren't that I scorn to break a contract. No, I don't leave even such a house as this without giving full notice and working as well up to the last day as I did at the first. No one shall have cause to blame
me
for my conduct, and what's more—'

Toby spoke in a loud voice, trying to batter hers down: ‘There's just one specific question I want answered.'

She nodded curtly, and went straight on: ‘This is a house of corruption. There's no vice you won't find here—drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking, and all kinds of lewdness. Ah, it's time it was looked into, that it is. Her speech is blasphemous; she talks blasphemies aloud to herself even when there's no one there to hear her! And then that accident of hers! Says it wasn't her fault, says the man was drunk. You believe me, it was
her
who was drunk! Who'd ever believe her, I'd like to know, if she hadn't the money she's got?'

‘There's one specific—' Toby began again, but again it was lost.

‘Listen,' she said, ‘you can believe
me
. I'm not rich, I can't twist others to my purposes, I've nothing to gain or lose. I tell the truth fearlessly and face the consequences. You believe I tell the truth, don't you?'

‘Yes, if you like, but—'

‘Then I tell you, you can believe me, that woman's doing something—' Suddenly Martha's tense face reddened. She looked down at the ground and finished in a much less certain voice: ‘She's doing something she ought not.'

‘And that,' said Toby sternly, ‘is what you call not mincing matters.'

She glanced up at him with an almost abashed expression. One of her fists unclenched themselves; her fingers started tweaking the edge of her apron. ‘I can't bring myself to say it,' she said. ‘I'm not used to speaking such words. I meant to denounce her to the law, but I can't take such vileness on my tongue. I can't—' She stopped abruptly, gaping at him in a strained and foolish way, almost as if she might burst into tears, turned from him and stumbled back into the kitchen.

Ruby came quickly to the door, meaning to shut them out.

Toby put a hand on her wrist.

‘Come out here a moment,' he said, and drew her out on to the doorstep. ‘I want a question answered. Did Albert, the gardener, bring a flask to you this morning to be filled up?'

Her chin hanging, her eyes bulging, Ruby nodded.

‘Was it empty, half-empty, or what?'

‘Not a drop in it!' Ruby gasped at him.

He let her go. But then he stopped her again. ‘You couldn't take that particular vileness on your own tongue, I suppose, and tell me what cook thinks our Mrs Milne has been up to?'

‘I don't know, indeed I don't. She always talks that way,' said Ruby. ‘She never says straight out what 'tis.'

‘Can't you guess?' said Toby.

Ruby shook her head with a kind of desperation.

‘Hm, can't you! Look here, how long ago did it start?'

‘What?' bleated Ruby.

‘This nameless evil. When did cook start slinging the mud in that particular direction?'

‘I don't know, oh, I don't know … Yes, I do, though. 'Twas the evening Martha's sister was here—Martha's sister in to Purbrook, Mrs Langman. She come to spend the day here with Martha, and the same evening Martha give in her notice. So maybe 'twas something Mrs Langman told her.'

Toby brought an old envelope and a stub of pencil out of his pocket. ‘I think I'll have Mrs Langman's address. D'you know it?'

Ruby nodded, but said: ‘Maybe I don't belong to give it you. Maybe Martha wouldn't like it.'

‘Come on,' said Toby, ‘you give it me. Mrs Langman …?' He wrote that much and waited.

But Ruby only stared at him with apprehension on her round face.

‘Martha don't mean any harm,' she said.

‘I know, I know; someone put her in a dark cupboard when she was young. But if you start up slanders you must expect to have them substantiated. Mrs Langman …?'

This time, with a nervous glance behind her, Ruby gave the address. Toby wrote, and returned envelope and pencil to his pocket. He thanked Ruby, and Ruby, with an ear still for any sounds from within, muttered thanks for his shilling. He set off across the kitchen garden by the way that he and George had come.

In the road, on their way back to Chovey, George said to him: ‘How did you know, Tobe?'

Toby was striding fast, his dark face grim with ideas.

‘What?' he asked, but the word had an inattentive sound.

‘About her having been put in a dark cupboard.'

Toby snorted and strode on.

Forced into trotting, George continued: ‘Well, what do you think it is?'

‘What?' Toby repeated with irritation.

‘This sin.'

‘Sexual, of course.'

‘Yes, I thought so too,' said George.

‘Brilliant of you.'

‘Well, who d'you think it is?'

‘Who what is? For the Lord's sake, say it all in one!'

‘Her lover, of course.'

‘The most probable on the scene is Maxwell, isn't it?'

‘What, the chap she done in?'

‘Oh, my God—no, the major.'

‘Oh,' said George, and seeming to have no other questions to ask, no longer troubled to keep up.

Toby, forging ahead, was seated at his table in the coffee-room of the Ring of Bells before George was even in sight of the inn.

It was when they were both sitting in a fully occupied silence over the Irish stew that had been warmed up for them by an even-tempered cook, that Toby remarked: ‘You know, George, it might have been the Milne girl.'

‘Eh?' said George.

‘The one who was gardening on Thursday afternoon. The one who lit the bonfire.'

George shook his head. ‘Notice her hands? Never done a tougher job than a manicure. No,' he went on as Toby frowned at him doubtingly, ‘you needn't put it on, Tobe; I know you didn't notice them. She took darn good care that you'd only notice her eyes.'

Chovey is built mostly along one straight road. It swells slightly about the middle, where the church, the eighteenth-century almshouses, the school and a number of old cottages cluster together. It has, in fact, somewhat the formation of a breeding worm.

From the grey, stone solidity of The Laurels at one end to a nine months old bungalow at the other, it stretches about three quarters of a mile. There are several hundred yards of bungalows. They are all built of a hard-looking, white brick that never mellows, have two rooms, kitchen, bathroom and indoor sanitation, and steeply pitched roofs of pink asbestos tiles. In one of these, in pride and moderate comfort, lived Sergeant and Mrs Eggbear.

That evening Toby and George ate their supper in its sitting-room. They ate cold chicken, apple pie and Devonshire cream, trifle with almonds and more Devonshire cream on top, and biscuits and cheese. Mrs Eggbear apologized; she said that Friday was her day for visiting her mother in Purbrook, so she had not had time to get them a proper meal.

When she had cleared away the supper she brought in tea.

Toby, full of food and stretched out almost at full length in a cretonne-covered chair, his cup and saucer resting against his chest, remarked presently, ‘Somebody is trying to pull me into stirring up some local slime, Sam. Who is it?'

The sergeant dropped another lump of sugar into his tea. ‘There's nothin' to go on,' he said. ‘You take my word for it, you won't find out anythin'. You won't find out anythin' unless some more letters come. Then maybe you'll be able to add one thing and another and get an answer. But that letter on its own don't give anythin' away.'

‘It gives away one thing,' said Toby, sipping tea, ‘no, two.'

‘What's that?' said Eggbear.

‘One: the writer's someone who knew the flask was there—'

‘Might be almost anyone. The time of the big accident there was a whole crowd saw Mrs Milne give a drink to the man who'd passed out.'

‘Well then, two: the writer's someone who knew that the flask was empty on Tuesday night—or at least some time between Tuesday and today.'

‘Yes, well?' said Eggbear.

‘How many people are there,' said Toby, ‘who stand a chance of being able to get a look inside Mrs Milne's car?'

The sergeant did a little meditative nodding to show that he had comprehended.

Mrs Eggbear suggested: ‘Would you like a pencil and paper?'

‘I think I've got most of them in my head already,' said Toby. ‘There's Mrs Milne herself and her daughter. There's the cook, and the maid, and the gardener. There's that young chap, Laws. There's the major. Those two—Laws and Maxwell, I mean—came down to the Ring of Bells on Wednesday evening in Mrs Milne's car. They may actually never have had a moment to themselves in the car, still, one's got to count them in. And then there are the two old Maxwells.'

‘Eh?' said Eggbear.

‘The other three had been up to Chovey Place for dinner, hadn't they? The car must have been standing about somewhere up there—outside the door, or in a garage. And it probably wasn't locked. Or would one lock one's car when one went to visit the Maxwells?'

Mrs Eggbear tittered.

George observed: ‘But at that rate, Tobe, you'll have to count in all the Maxwell servants.'

An impatient frown gathered above Toby's beak of a nose. But the sergeant looked round at George. Pink in the face from the heat of the fire, he was sitting on a sort of tuffet of coloured leather and beads.

‘That's right!' said Eggbear, and on a note of rising enthusiasm: ‘That's right! I believe you've hit somethin', Mr—excuse me, but what
is
your name? Reckon I've never heard it.'

‘Posslethwaite,' said George.

‘Mr Posslethwaite. 'Twas this way, I'll be ready to bet. One of the servants—the chauffeur, or Harvey, or any o' they—they knew, from the stories goin' round after the big accident, that Mrs Milne had that flask in her car, and took a swig on the quiet like—'

‘A swig,' said Toby, ‘that completely emptied a full flask. People taking swigs on the quiet like, Sam, don't usually do anything to give themselves away so badly.'

‘Maybe there was more than one o' them in it. And the last one wouldn't know as the flask was full at the beginnin'.'

Toby chuckled. ‘Procession to the drinking well—a sweet picture.'

‘Well, Maxwells don't keep no drink of their own in the house, I can tell you that,' said Eggbear. ‘And the last one, he'd know the flask was empty, wouldn't he? And then, when it comes out at the inquest as there must be a flask or bottle somewhere around, he sees a chance of makin' trouble—'

‘Assuming,' said Toby, ‘he's someone with a particular grudge against Mrs Milne. D'you know of anyone?'

‘Maybe 'tisn't a particular grudge at all,' said Eggbear, ‘but just a grudge against society like, or maybe—' and his face lit up—‘he's got a perverted psychology.'