The Case of the Late Pig (15 page)

And then, quite suddenly, it swung back. I was so beside myself that I should have charged in and taken what was coming to me, but it was Whippet who kept his head. He pulled me back and we waited.

Through the open door I could see a bed, and on it there was a large, familiar form. The face was uncovered, and as far as I could see the colour was natural. But as I stared at it I saw the thing that sent the blood racing into my face and turned my body cold with the realization of the thing I had not dreamed.

The faded grey-black fluff which surrounds Lugg’s bald patch was as red as henna would make it. I saw the truth, the body of one fat man is much like the body of another once the features are obliterated, and what time can do can be done by other agencies. Kingston was going to have a body for his ‘jolly’ exhumation after all.

I dropped on my hands and knees. Ducking under the blow he aimed at me from his place of vantage behind the door, I caught him by the ankles. I was on his chest with my hands round his throat when I heard the second car pull up and Leo’s voice on the stairs.

CHAPTER 17

Late Final

IT TOOK THREE
policemen to get Kingston into the car, and when he came up before the magistrates there was an unprecedented scene in the court. At the Assizes his counsel pleaded insanity, a defence which failed, and I think justifiably; but that was later.

My own concern at the time was Lugg. Whippet and I worked upon him until Pussey got us a doctor from a neighbouring village, who saved him after an uncomfortably stiff fight. It was chloral hydrate again, of course. Kingston was not mad enough not to know what he was doing. He did not want any wound showing in his exhibition corpse. What his ‘finishing’ process was to be, I can only guess, and I do not like to think of it even now.

Lugg told us his story as soon as we got him round. It was elementary. Kingston had simply phoned up Highwaters, made sure from Pepper that I was down in the village, and had then asked for Lugg. To him he gave a message purporting to come from me. According to this, I had work for him to do in town, but I wanted to see him first up at Tethering churchyard, where, Kingston hinted, I had discovered something. Lugg was to pack his bag and nip down the field path to the road to meet Kingston in the car. The pound note was to be left for Pepper in case I could not return. That was all. Lugg fell for the story, Kingston did meet him, and the reason they had not been seen was that the doctor’s car was far too well known for anybody to notice it.

On arrival at Tethering, Lugg was left in the dining-room, where he was given beer and told to wait. He drank the beer
and
the chloral which was in it and mercifully remembered no more.

Kingston must have got him upstairs alone and have just completed the hairdressing process when I phoned.

It was a pretty little trap, and Lugg’s comments on it when he considered it are not reportable.

‘You done it,’ he said reproachfully. ‘How was I to know you was leadin’ the bloke up the garden with your ‘come-and-’old-me-’and every five minutes? You stuffed him full of the exhumation, thinking ’e’d go for you, I suppose? Never thought o’ me. Isn’t that you all over?’

I apologized. ‘Let’s be thankful you’re alive to tell the tale,’ I ventured.

He scowled at me. ‘I am. Got to shave me ’ead now. What are my London friends goin’ to think about that? ’Oliday in the country – Oh, yes, very likely!’

When we reached this point I thought it best to let him sleep, for there was still much to be done.

During the next twenty-four hours we worked incessantly, and at the end of it the case against Kingston was complete.

It was on the evening of the day on which the exhumation had taken place, that Leo and I went down with Janet to Halt Knights. Leo was still simmering from the effects of that grimly farcical ceremony which had welded the final link in our chain of evidence.

‘Bricks!’ he said explosively. ‘Yellow bricks wrapped up in a blanket and nailed down in a coffin.… ’Pon my soul, Campion, the fellow was an impious blackguard as well as a murderer. Even now, I don’t see how he did it alone.’

‘He wasn’t alone,’ I pointed out mildly. ‘He had Peters to help him, to say nothing of that fellow who worked for him – the builder’s son. In country places the builder is usually the undertaker, too, isn’t he?’

‘Royle!’ Leo was excited. ‘Young Royle … that explains
the
key of the mortuary. Was the boy in it, do you think?’

‘Hardly,’ I murmured. ‘I imagine Kingston simply managed him. He says his master offered to measure up the body while he did a repair job in the house. The nurse must have been an accomplice, of course, but we shall never get her. She and Kingston got the death certificate between them.’

‘You’re terribly confusing,’ Janet cut in from the back of the car. ‘How many brothers were there?’

‘None,’ I said, ‘as the clever young man from London suspected after he’d had it thrust well under his nose, poor chap. There was only the one inimitable Pig.’

Janet will forgive me, I feel sure, if I say here that she is not a clever girl. On this occasion she was obtuse.

‘Why go to all the trouble of pretending he died in January?’

‘Because,’ I said sadly, ‘of the insurance, my poppet. Twenty thousands pounds.… He and Kingston were going to do a deal. Tie up with your medical man and let the Mutual Ordered Life settle your money troubles. Kingston met Pig in town and they hatched the whole swindle up between them. Pig invented a wicked brother and laid the foundations by hoodwinking his own solicitors, who were a stuffy old firm at once reputable enough to impress the insurance company and sufficiently moribund to let Pig get away with his hole-and-corner death.’

‘Neat,’ said Janet judicially, and added with that practicalness so essentially feminine, ‘Why didn’t it work?’

‘Because of the fundamental dishonesty of the man Pig. He wouldn’t pay up. Once he had collected, he knew he had Kingston by the short hairs and, besides, by then the idea of developing this place had bitten him. I fancy he kept his doctor pal on a string, promising him and promising and then laughing at him. What he did not consider was the sort of
fellow
he had to deal with. Kingston is a conceited chap. He has a sort of blind courage coupled with no sense of proportion. Only a man with that type of mentality could have pulled off his share in the original swindle. The fact that he had been cheated by Pig wounded his pride unbearably, and then, of course, he found the man untrustworthy.’

‘Untrustworthy?’ Leo grunted.

‘Well, he began to get drunk, didn’t he?’ I said. ‘Think of Kingston’s position. He saw himself cheated out of the share of the profits and at the same time at the complete mercy of a man who was in danger of getting too big for his boots, drinking too much, and blowing the gaff. Admittedly, Pig could not give Kingston away without exposing his own guilt, but a man who gets very drunk may be careless. Then there was Hayhoe. The wicked uncle finds the wicked nephew in clover and wishes to browse also. He even instals a telescope on a neighbouring hill-side in the hope of keeping an eye on developments at Highwaters. There is another danger for Kingston. I think the whole ingenious business came to him in a flash, and he acted on impulse moved by fury, gingered up by fear.’

Leo made an expressive sound. ‘Terrible feller,’ he said. ‘Heigh-ho blackmailed him, I suppose, after guessin’ the truth?’

‘Uncle Hayhoe was bent on selling his discretion, certainly,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think even he guessed Kingston had killed Pig. All he knew was that there was something infernally fishy about the first funeral. He made an appointment with Kingston to talk it over and they chose the empty villa to discuss terms. Kingston killed him there and later on carried him to the cornfield where we found him. He left the knife in the wound until he got him
in situ
, as it were; that’s how he avoided a great deal of the blood.’

Janet shuddered. ‘He deceived us all very well,’ she said. ‘I never dreamed –’

Leo coughed noisily. ‘Utterly deceived,’ he echoed. ‘Seemed a decent enough feller.’

‘He was amazing,’ I agreed. ‘My arrival at dinner that evening must have shaken him up a bit in all conscience, since he’d seen me at the funeral, but he came out with the brother story immediately, and made it sound convincing. The only mistake he made was in moving the body to the river when I said I was going to examine it. He acted on impulse there, you see; he saw his way and went straight for it every time.’

Janet drew back. ‘You ought not to have walked into that last trap he set for you,’ she said.

‘My dear girl,’ I said, anxious to defend myself, ‘we had to have proof of murder or attempted murder, for as far as proof was concerned he’d got clean away with his first two efforts. All the same, I don’t think I’d have been so foolhardy if it hadn’t been for Lugg.’

‘You’d have looked pretty green if it hadn’t been for Gilbert,’ she said.

I looked at her sharply, and saw that she was blushing.

‘Whippet and I had a word or two on the phone after Kingston had agreed to pick me up at Highwaters,’ I admitted. ‘He spotted the empty villa and put me on to it. We guessed if there was to be an attempt on me Kingston would take me there. I shouldn’t have been so brave without him. Master-mind is fond of life.’

Janet dimpled. She is very pretty when her cheeks go pink.

‘Then you know about Gilbert?’ she said.

I stared at her. ‘How much do you know?’

‘A little,’ she murmured.

‘My hat!’ I said.

Leo was on the point of demanding an explanation when we pulled up at the Knights. We found Poppy, Pussey, and Whippet waiting for us in the lounge, and when we were all sitting round with the ice cubes clinking in our tall glasses, Poppy suddenly turned on me.

‘I’m sure you’ve made a mistake, Albert,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be unkind, dear, and I do think you’re very clever. But how could Doctor Kingston have killed Harris, or Peters as you call him, when he was in this room playing poker with Leo when the vase fell upon him? You said yourself it couldn’t have slipped off by accident.’

The time had come for me to do my parlour trick, and I did my best to perform it in the ancient tradition.

‘Poppy,’ I said, ‘do you remember Kingston coming to see your little maid on the morning of the murder? You took him up yourself, I suppose, and you both had a look at the kid? There was some ice in the water jug by her bed, wasn’t there?’

She considered. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He came down, and I gave him a drink with ice in it. That was after I’d turned him into the bathroom to wash his hands. I came down here, and he followed me, and after he’d had his drink he took some tablets up to Flossie that he’d forgotten.’

‘Ah!’ I said impressively. ‘Was he long following you down?’

She looked up with interest. ‘Why, yes, he was,’ she said. ‘Quite a while, now I think of it.’

Having located my rabbit, as it were, I proceeded to produce it with a flourish.

‘Kingston told us he met Harris, alias Pig, on the stairs, and that Pig had a hangover,’ I began. ‘The first wasn’t true, the second was. Pig was in his bedroom when Kingston slipped in to see him, having first got rid of you. Pig was dressed, but he wanted a corpse-reviver and he trusted
Kingston,
never dreaming that he’d goaded the man too far. After all, people don’t go about expecting to be murdered. In his doctor’s bag Kingston had some chloral, which is a reputable narcotic when used in moderation. He saw his opportunity. He administered a tidy dose, and sent Pig to sit out on the lawn. He followed him downstairs, and through the lounge windows saw him settle down. I think his original intention was to let him die, and to trust the coroner to suspect a chronic case of dope. But this was risky, and the position of the chair, which was directly beneath the window, put the other idea into his head. If you notice, the windows on each floor in this house are directly above those on the last, and no one who knows the place can have missed the stone urns. They were originally intended to obscure the attic windows from the outside. It was while Kingston was drinking his highball that he had his brainwave. There were two or three solid rectangles of ice in his glass, and he pocketed two of them. Then he told you some story about forgotten tablets and went up to the top floor again, which was deserted at that time of the morning. There he discovered that, as he had suspected, Pig was sitting directly beneath the box-room urn. He knew he was unconscious already, and would remain so. The rest was easy. He took the urn out of its socket and balanced it on its peg half over the ledge. Then he blocked it into position with the two pieces of ice, and went quietly downstairs. The ledge is just below the level of the window-sill, so the chance of anyone who passed the box-room door noticing that the urn was an inch or so out of place was remote. All he had to do, then. was to wait.’

Poppy sat staring at me, her face pale.

‘Until the ice melted and the urn fell?’ she said. ‘How – how ghastly!’

Pussey wagged his head. ‘Powerful smart,’ he said. ‘
Powerful
smart. If I might ask you, sir, how did you come to think of that?’

‘The moss on the ledge was damp when I arrived,’ I said. ‘The inference did not dawn on me at first, but when I had a highball here the other day I saw the ice and suddenly realized what it meant.’

‘Wonderful!’ said Whippet, without malice. ‘I was after the same fellow, of course, but the alibi put me out.’

Leo stared at him as if he had only just become aware of his existence.

‘Mr – er – Whippet,’ he said, ‘very pleased to have you here, of course, my boy. But where do you fit into this extraordinary story? What are you doin’ here?’

There was a pause, and they all looked at me as though I was responsible for him. I looked at Whippet.

‘His little hands are sore and his snout bleedeth,’ I said. ‘This is Gilbert Whippet, Junior, son of Q. Gilbert Whippet, of the Mutual Ordered Life Endowment Company, sometimes called the M.O.L.E. It didn’t occur to me until that day at “The Feathers”, and then I could have kicked myself for missing it. You always were a lazy beast, Whippet.’