Give a Corpse a Bad Name (9 page)

Toby said nothing. He sloped the teacup on his chest, tucked in his chin and drank a little tea. Suddenly he inquired: ‘Any inquiries being made in South Africa?'

Eggbear nodded.

‘And the steamship company?'

‘Yes, there was a third-class passenger called Maxwell on the
Kintyre Castle
last week. Why? Worryin' about that identification, Toby? The old lady's half cracked, that's all there is to that.'

‘I want to know more about those Maxwells,' said Toby, ‘and about that young man Laws.'

‘Just now and then,' muttered the sergeant, ‘I find myself wonderin' why you want to know. You're sure you aren't still employed by that newspaper, Toby?'

‘Shelley Maxwell,' said Toby ruminatively, ignoring him. ‘Shelley Maxwell. That tells you a good deal, doesn't it? His parents meant him to be one of those lucent spirits, shining with the white fire of idealistic—'

‘Tobe,' George interrupted, ‘if it
was
one of them emptied the flask, it was done before they knew who the dead chap was.'

‘Was it?' said Toby. Then: ‘
Was
it?' Sitting up with a jerk he slopped tea on to his trousers. He looked round him with a glazed kind of stare. ‘Please, please,' he rapped out suddenly at Mrs Eggbear, ‘tell me all the scandal you know about the Maxwells!'

‘You see, George,' said Toby, as the two of them walked back to the inn, ‘the major's cottage is only a few minutes walk away from that bit of road, and the house itself isn't so far away. Suppose that Shelley Maxwell wasn't going
to
the house, but coming away from it …'

George grunted. ‘Suppose,' he said, ‘we talked about something else for a while.'

Toby laughed. They were walking through a faint mist, blown in from the sea. It was saltily dank against their faces.

Toby laughed again. Then he started whistling, and, as it happened, they spoke no more until they reached the inn.

The next morning they called together on Mrs Milne.

Ruby was sullen when she admitted them. She shrugged a shoulder at them, strolled across the hall, opened the door of the drawing-room and spoke round it: ‘'Tis those two men from the police, Miss Daphne. Shall I trouble Mrs Milne about'n or not?'

A man's voice answered: ‘Oh, splendid! Show them in.' But he did not wait for them to be shown in. As Ruby withdrew a step from the door, pushing it farther open, Adrian Laws came out to meet them.

His copper-coloured hair was ruffled as if affectionate fingers had been wandering through it. He was flattening it with one hand and holding out the other. There were hearty handshakes, explanations that he'd been wishing he could meet them—had heard of Toby Dyke from Eggbear ages ago, felt he was one of those rare people who was really in contact with reality, not someone who, like himself, really did his living at second-hand …

‘Second-hand?' said Toby incredulously, looking straight past the young man and through the open door at the girl who was lying on the settee, both her head and feet supported by piles of cushions.

She sat up halfway and said: ‘Do come in. Have you had another anonymous letter?'

‘No,' said Toby, ‘but I've been having ideas about the last one.'

‘That'll please mother. Sit down. Have a cigarette.' There was not a trace of the shyness she had shown the day before. The stimulated look of her cheeks and of her lips—much redder than the lipstick she used had made them yesterday—suggested she had just been experiencing a fair amount of kissing.

But as soon as her eyes met Toby's she looked at nothing else. ‘Over there,' she said, pointing at the enamelled cigarette-box, but without her gaze following her pointing. Neither did she look away from the dark face with its big nose and rather tight-lipped smile as she said: ‘Adrian, put those records on the floor. There ought to be room to sit down. You know, Mr Dyke, mother was really awfully angry about that letter. She took it seriously. She said someone was trying to do her down. I think, if you manage to find out who sent it, she'll be tremendously grateful.'

Toby had sat down, as he had been told, had lit a cigarette, and was returning the girl's starry gaze with a brightening in his own which revealed that so far this visit was causing him nothing but pleasure.

‘Then she'll see us now?'

‘Of
course
,' said Daphne Milne. ‘She'll be grateful, I tell you. Anyway, she ought to be. If it was just old Eggbear I know nothing'd happen—though I suppose if it goes on, if there's a poison pen in the village and all that sort of thing, Scotland Yard would get called in, wouldn't they? I know I've read in the papers about Scotland Yard detectives disguising themselves as social workers or American tourists or something, and being put on to watch awfully respectable old women who are sending nasty letters all round to comfort their inhibitions. Only of course it'd be much more thrilling if
you
solved it, Mr Dyke. You're trying to, aren't you?' She spoke very fast, and when she finished her mouth hung open a little as if in an eager breathlessness.

Also enthusiastically, but in a soft, even voice, Adrian Laws said: ‘Do tell us what you're doing. Have you tested the letter for fingerprints? Are the letter-boxes being watched? Why d'you want to see Mrs Milne?'

Toby looked round at the young man for a moment. Off-hand in voice and manner, he replied: ‘Oh, I just want to ask her about one or two things.'

‘As a matter of fact,' said George suddenly—he was sitting in uncomfortable uprightness on the piano-stool—‘we want to ask the lady if she'd take us up to see Sir Joseph and Lady Maxwell.'

Daphne frowned in bewilderment, Toby frowned in surprised annoyance, Adrian looked pleased and interested, and Mrs Milne, at that moment, entered.

She appeared extraordinarily tired. It was noticeable at once; her skin sagged, her mouth was pinched, her eyes were dull and peevish. Yet she came in briskly, though there was neither a smile nor any welcome on her face. It might have been some routine interview she was attending.

She ignored both her daughter and Adrian completely. In the glance that the two of them exchanged when they saw this there was understanding and faintly malicious amusement. She apologized to Toby, saying she had been writing letters. Sitting down, she reached with a hurried gesture for a cigarette from the enamelled box.

‘Not another letter?' she said, making the same guess as Daphne had made before her.

‘No,' said Toby, ‘we've come to ask a favour. It's in connection with the letter, though you may not find the connection obvious. I wondered if you could take us to see Sir Joseph and Lady Maxwell.'

She gave them a hard stare. ‘In connection with that letter, you say? What an extraordinary idea.' Her short laugh had a contemptuous edge to it. She took quick, nervous puffs at her cigarette.

‘I told you,' said Toby, ‘the connection isn't obvious—although, of course, it was their son who was killed.'

‘Aren't you forgetting,' she said, ‘that it was I who killed him?'

‘They're refusing to see you?'

Daphne began: ‘Mother, they aren't! Mother, you could—'

But Mrs Milne cut across her: ‘I haven't given them the opportunity yet. And I think, for the present, that that's the way I'll continue.'

Daphne began again: ‘Oh, you
are
mean. Mr Dyke is—'

But this time Adrian made a face at her from across the room and stopped her.

Toby said: ‘I wish I could make you change your mind. I'm not asking this in an idle spirit. I've got quite serious reasons.'

‘I don't doubt it,' she said, ‘but I have my serious reasons for refusing.'

‘You realize these letters may continue, may become more annoying and menacing?'

She nodded. ‘And it isn't that I want to be obstructive or unappreciative, Mr Dyke, but I know there's no way in which either of the Maxwells could be connected with this business.'

‘You know?'

She laughed, flicking ash on to a glass ash tray. ‘At least,' she said, ‘I know quite a lot about the Maxwells, and I don't believe, Mr Dyke, that you do. In fact, you don't know much about Chovey. Villages are curious places, they take a great deal of penetrating. But if you believe that Sir Joseph or Lady Maxwell would be capable of anything that hadn't a most strictly moral origin—'

‘But it's just people like that,' cried Daphne eagerly, ‘who do things like writing anonymous letters. It is really. It's their inhibitions. It's their way of revealing all their repressed desires. It's a regression to infantility.'

‘I wish,' said her mother in an indifferent voice, ‘you wouldn't make a complete fool of yourself, Daphne.'

A jerk of the shoulders, a vivid flush, and Daphne was on her feet, glaring at her mother with angrily darkened eyes. Then she banged from the room. Mrs Milne continued in the same flat tone: ‘That's what she makes of the sort of things you tell her, Adrian.'

The young man smiled. It was the understanding and malicious smile that had flitted across his face a few minutes earlier. He stood up and lounged out after the girl. Mrs Milne stubbed out a half-smoked cigarette and reached for another. She remarked: ‘A daughter, Mr Dyke, is an awkward responsibility.'

‘To return to the Maxwells …' said Toby.

But still she was firm in refusing to take them to Chovey Place, and after a few minutes George and Toby departed.

Out on the drive, walking towards the gate, Toby said: ‘Why the hell d'you want to go and blurt out like that what it was we wanted her to do? I was going to say it was an important and private matter, and ask to speak to her alone. I'd have managed her far better without the girl and the not-so-popular lover there. But once you'd given away what it was we wanted, I couldn't very well go on with that.'

George pushed back his cap and scratched the top of his head. ‘Matter of fact, I didn't think you'd stand much chance with her anyway, and I thought—' He paused. There were footsteps on the gravel behind them. They both looked round. Adrian Laws was hurrying after them. ‘There,' said George, looking modestly at the ground, ‘that's what I thought, Tobe.'

Adrian Laws came up to them and started walking between them. ‘Look here,' he said, ‘I'm awfully sorry she was like that. So's Daphne. She can be damn difficult sometimes. But if you like I'll take you up to the Maxwells. I suppose, actually, it may be a bit awkward for her, though I'm sure Aunt Emmeline wouldn't turn nasty—not really my aunt, by the way; sort of a cousin. But old Joe might be able to find some totally virtuous reason for behaving brutally.'

‘Thanks,' said Toby, ‘very good of you. Er … do we walk there?'

Laws grinned. ‘Got my three-wheeler at the gate. Hope you'll be able to pack into it.'

For the first quarter of a mile in the three-wheeler Toby tried to talk. After that he sang. The twelve-year-old, air-cooled engine and rattling mudguards were kinder to his singing than they were to his talk; they drowned no more than was welcome. He sang one of the more cheerful psalms, lifting up his eyes to the brown hills of Dartmoor, five or six miles ahead.

Adrian Laws, coping with direct steering, crouched at the wheel with a tense and furtive concentration, as if he were stalking an enemy. He did not treat his roaring, shaking little car with the proud tenderness that such possessions usually win from their owners; there was a savage if fatalistic dislike in his handling of it, an all too obvious lack of respect for antiquity and cheapness.

‘We'll leave it here and walk the rest, if you don't mind,' he said, when they reached the gates of Chovey Place. ‘Old Joe won't have it inside the grounds—says the noise scares the wild birds.'

‘Pheasants?' asked Toby.

‘Oh, dear me, no—no blood-sports hereabouts. Think of every worthy cause you've ever heard of, anti-vivisection, vegetarianism, propagation of the knowledge of the Higher Life—one or other of my dear relatives sends in a regular subscription. Not both of them, not by any means—that's where the fun comes in. There's lots of quiet fun in that household, unlikely as that may seem to you, taking a casual look at the place.'

The casual look they were taking through the tall, wrought-iron gates showed them gloomy, Victorian battlements about half a mile away.

‘Is that where you live yourself?' said Toby.

‘Good Lord, no! I've a cottage on the edge of the moor—well, you can call it a cottage if you've a civil disposition. It's a converted cowhouse, rapidly reverting to its original beliefs.'

‘Lived there long?'

‘Since last spring. Thought—' his voice put ironic quotation marks round the words—‘my spirit needed the refreshment of solitude. Damn fool idea. Don't know why I've stayed so long.'

Toby looked amused. He remarked: ‘Not much love lost between that mother and daughter, is there?'

Adrian shrugged. ‘I'd put it the other way round, myself. Too much love lost—possessive, domineering love.' He pushed open the gate, and the three of them passed through. ‘You've no idea the trouble I'm having, getting Daphne to fight that woman's influence.'

Toby was setting a pretty slow pace towards those grey, stucco battlements.

‘Got a good deal of money, hasn't she?' he said.

‘Mrs Milne? Should think she must have.'

‘Where's it come from?'

Adrian gave a sudden, sharp laugh. Toby echoed it. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘I know I'm pumping you. Got to pump somebody.'

‘Yes,' said Adrian thoughtfully. There was still amusement on his face, but it looked like a calculating amusement, secret, derisive. ‘Yes, if you like,' he said, his voice taking on its softer, smoother tone, ‘but hasn't anyone mentioned to you yet that when it comes to matters of fact I'm not noticeably reliable?'