The Case of the Late Pig (3 page)

‘Damn nearly right, my boy,’ he said with comforting enthusiasm. ‘Remarkable thing. Don’t mind admitting don’t follow this deducin’ business myself, but substitute an urn for a cart-horse and you’re absolutely right. Remind me to tell Janet.’

‘An urn?’

‘Geranium urn, stone,’ he explained airily. ‘Big so-called ornamental thing. Must have seen ’em, Campion. Sometimes have cherry pie in ’em. Madness to keep ’em on the parapet. Said so myself more than once.’

I was gradually getting the thing straight. Apparently Pig’s second demise had been occasioned by a blow from a stone flower-pot falling on him from a parapet. It seemed pretty final this time.

I looked at Leo. We were both being very decent and non-committal, I thought.

‘Any suggestion of foul play, sir?’ I asked.

He hunched his shoulders and became very despondent.

‘’Fraid so, my boy,’ he said at last. ‘No way out of it. Urn was one of several set all along the parapet. Been up to inspect ’em myself. All firm as the Rock of Gibraltar. Been there for years. Harris’s urn couldn’t have hopped off the ledge all by itself, don’t you know. Must have been pushed by – er – human hands. Devilish situation in view of everything. Got to face it.’

I covered Pig’s body. I was sorry for him in a way, of course, but he seemed to have retained his early propensities for making trouble.

Leo sighed. ‘Thought you’d have to agree with me,’ he said.

I hesitated. Leo is not one of the great brains of the earth, but I could hardly believe that he had dragged me down from London to confirm his suspicion that Pig had died from a bang on the head. I took it that there was more to come – and there was, of course; no end of it, as it turned out.

Leo stubbed a bony forefinger into my shoulder.

‘Like to have a talk with you, my boy,’ he said. ‘One or two private matters to discuss. Have to come out some time. We ought to go down to Halt Knights and have a look at things.’

The light began to filter in.

‘Was P – was Harris killed at Halt Knights?’

Leo nodded. ‘Poor Poppy! Decent little woman, you know, Campion. Never a suspicion of – er – anything of this sort before.’

‘I should hope not,’ I said, scandalized, and he frowned at me.

‘Some of these country clubs –’ he began darkly.

‘Not murder,’ I said firmly and he relapsed into despondency.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he agreed. ‘Let’s go down there. Drop in for a drink before dinner.’

As we went out to the car I considered the business. To understand Halt Knights is to know Kepesake, and Kepesake is a sort of county paradise. It is a big village, just far enough from a town and a main road to remain exclusive without having to be silly about it. It has a Norman church, a village cricket green with elms, three magnificent pubs, and a population of genuine country folk of proper independent views. It lies in a gentle valley on the shores of an estuary and is protected by a ring of modest little estates all owned by dear good fellers, so Leo says. The largest of these estates is Halt Knights.

At one period there was a nobleman at the Knights who owned the whole village, which had been left him by an ancestress who had had it, so the name would suggest, from a boy-friend off to the Crusades. Changing times and incomes drove out the nobleman and his heirs; hence the smaller estates.

The house and some nine hundred acres of meadow and salting remained a millstone round somebody’s neck until Poppy Bellew retired from the stage and, buying it up, transformed that part of it which had not collapsed into the finest hotel and country pub in the kingdom.

Being a naturally expansive person of untiring energy, she did not let the nine hundred acres worry her but laid down an eighteen hole golf course and reserved the rest for anything anyone might think of. It occurred to some intelligent person that there was a very fine point-to-point course there somewhere and at the time Pig got the urn on his head there had been four meetings there in each of five consecutive springs.

It was all very lazy and homely and comfortable. If anyone who looked as if he might spoil the atmosphere came along somehow Poppy lost him. It was really very simple. She wanted to keep open house and the people round about were willing to pay their own expenses, or that was how it seemed to work out.

Leo’s story was interesting. I could understand Pig getting himself killed at Halt Knights, but not how he managed to stay there long enough for it to happen.

Meanwhile Leo had reached the car and was looking at Lugg with mistrust. Leo’s ideas of discipline are military and Lugg’s are not. I foresaw an impasse.

‘Ah, Lugg,’ I said with forced heartiness, ‘I’m going to drive Sir Leo on to Halt Knights. You’d better go back to Highwaters. Take a bus or something.’

Lugg stared at me and I saw rebellion in his eyes. His feet have been a constant source of conversation with him of late.

‘A bus?’ he echoed, adding ‘sir’ as a belated afterthought as Leo’s eyes fell upon him.

‘Yes,’ I said foolishly. ‘One of those big green things. You must have seen them about.’

He got out of the car heavily and with dignity and so far demeaned himself as to hold the door open for Leo, but me he regarded under fat white eyelids with a secret, contemplative expression.

‘Extraordinary feller, your man,’ said Leo as we drove off. ‘Keep an eye on him, my dear boy. Save your life in the war?’

‘Dear me, no!’ I said in some astonishment. ‘Why?’

He blew his nose. ‘I don’t know. Thought just crossed my mind. Now to this business, Campion. It’s pretty serious and I’ll tell you why.’ He paused and added so soberly that I started: ‘There are at least half a dozen good fellers,
including
myself, who were in more than half a mind to put that feller out of the way last night. One of us must have lost his head, don’t you know. I’m being very frank with you, of course.’

I pulled the car up by the side of the road. We were on the long straight stretch above the ‘Dog and Fowl’.

‘I’d like to hear about it,’ I said.

He came out with it quietly and damningly in his pleasant worried voice. It was an enlightening tale in view of the circumstances.

Two of the estates nearby had become vacant in the past year and each had been bought anonymously through a firm of London solicitors. No one thought much of it at the time but the blow had fallen about a week before our present conversation. Leo, going down to Halt Knights for a game of bridge and a drink, also had found the place in an uproar and Pig, of all people, installed. He was throwing his weight about and detailing his plans for the future of Kepesake, which included a hydro, a dog-racing track, and a cinema-dance-hall with special attractions to catch motorists from the none too far distant industrial town.

Taken on one side, Poppy had broken down and made a confession. Country ease and country hospitality had proven expensive, and she, not wishing to depress her clients, who were also her nearest and dearest friends, had accepted the generous mortgage terms which a delightful gentleman from London had arranged, only to find that his charming personality had been but the mask to cloak the odious Pig, who had decided to foreclose at the precise moment when a few outstanding bills had been paid with the greater part of the loan.

Leo, who justified his name if ever man did, had padded forth gallantly to the rescue. He roared round the district, collected a few good souls of his own kidney, held a meeting,
formed
a syndicate, and approached the entrenched Pig armed with money and scrupulously fair words.

From that point, however, he had met defeat. Pig was adamant. Pig had all the money he required. Pig wanted Kepesake – and a fine old silver sty he was going to make of it.

Leo’s solicitor, summoned from Norwich, had confirmed his client’s worst fears. Poppy had trusted the charming gentleman too well. Pig had an option to purchase.

Realizing that with money, Halt Knights, and the two adjoining estates Pig could lay waste Kepesake, and their hearts with it, Leo and his friends had tried other methods. As Leo pointed out, men will fight for their homes. There is a primitive love inspired by tree and field which can fire the most correct heart to flaming passion.

Two or three of Halt Knights’ oldest guests were asked by Pig to leave. Leo and most of the others stolidly sat their ground, however, and talk was high but quiet, while plots abounded.

‘And then this morning, don’t you know,’ Leo finished mildly, ‘one of the urns on the parapet crashed down on the feller as he sat sleepin’ in a deck-chair under the lounge window. Devilish awkward, Campion.’

I let in the clutch and drove on without speaking. I thought of Kepesake and its gracious shadowy trees, its sweet meadows and clear waters, and thought what a howling shame it was. It belonged to these old boys and their children. It was their sanctuary, their little place of peace. If Pig wanted to make more money, why in heaven’s name should he rot up Kepesake to do it? There are ten thousand other villages in England. Well, they’d saved it from Pig at any rate, or at least one of them had. So much looked painfully apparent.

Neither of us spoke until we turned in under the red
Norman
arch which is the main drive gate to the Knights. There Leo snorted.

‘Another bounder!’ he said explosively.

I looked at the little figure mincing down the drive towards us and all but let the car swerve on to the turf. I recognized him immediately, principally by the extraordinary sensation of dislike he aroused in me. He was a thoroughly unpleasant old fellow, affected and conceited, and the last time I had seen him he had been weeping ostentatiously into a handkerchief with an inch-wide black border at Pig’s first funeral. Now he was trotting out of Halt Knights as if he knew the place and was very much at home there.

CHAPTER 3

‘
That’s where he Died
’

HE LOOKED AT
me with interest and I think he placed me, for I was aware of two beady bright eyes peering at me from beneath Cairn eyebrows.

Leo, on the other hand, received a full salute from him, a wave of the panama delivered with one of those shrugs which attempt old-world grace and achieve the slightly sissy.

Leo gobbled and tugged perfunctorily at his own green tweed.

‘More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows,’ he confided to me in an embarrassed rumble and hurried on so quickly that I took it he did not want the man discussed, which was curious.

‘I want you to be careful with Poppy,’ he said. ‘Charmin’ little woman. Had a lot to put up with the last day or two. Wouldn’t like to see her browbeaten. Kid gloves, Campion. Kid gloves all the way.’

I was naturally aggrieved. I have never been considered brutal, having if anything a mild and affable temperament.

‘It’s ten years since I beat a woman, sir,’ I said.

Leo cocked an eye at me. Facetiae are not his line.

‘Hope you never have,’ he said severely. ‘Your mother – dear sweet lady – wouldn’t have bred a son who could. I’m worried about Poppy, Campion. Poor charmin’ little woman.’

I felt my eyebrows rise. The man who could visualize Poppy as a poor little woman must also, I felt, be able to think of her being actually ill-treated. I like Poppy. Charming she certainly is, but little – no. Leo was confusing the ideal with the conventional, and I might have told him so
and
mortally offended him had we not come through the trees at that moment to see the house awaiting us.

No English country house is worthy of the name if it is not breathtaking at half past six on a June evening, but Halt Knights is in a street by itself. It is long and low, with fine windows. Built of crushed strawberry brick, the Georgian front does not look out of place against the Norman ruins which rise up behind it and melt into the high chestnuts massed at the back.

As in many East Anglian houses the front door is at the side, so that the lawn can come right up to the house in front.

As we pulled up I was glad to see that the door was open as usual, though the place seemed deserted save for the embarrassed bobby in bicycle clips who stood on guard by the lintel.

I could not understand his acute discomfort until I caught the gleam of a pewter tankard among the candytuft at his feet. Poppy has a great understanding of the creature man.

I touched Leo on the shoulder and made a suggestion and he blinked at me.

‘Oh all right, my boy. Make the examination first if you want to, by all means. This is where the feller was sittin’.’

He led me round to the front of the house where the deck-chairs, looking flimsy and oddly Japanese in their bright colours, straggled along under the windows.

‘The urn,’ he said.

I bent down and pulled aside the couple of sacks which had been spread over the exhibit. As soon as I saw it I understood his depression. It was a large stone basin about two and a half feet high and two feet across and was decorated with amorelli and pineapples. It must have weighed the best part of three hundredweight with the earth it contained, and while I could understand it killing Pig I
was
amazed that it had not smashed him to pulp. I said so to Leo and he explained.

‘Would have done – would have done, my boy, but only the edge of the rim struck his head where it jutted over the back of the chair. He had a hat on, you know. There’s the chair – nothing much to see.’

He kicked aside another sack and we looked down at a pathetic heap of splintered framework and torn canvas. Leo shrugged his shoulders helplessly.

I walked a little way down the lawn and looked up at the parapet. It is one of those long strips of plastered stone which finish off the flat fronts of Georgian houses and always remind me of the topping of marzipan icing on a very good fruit cake. The little windows of the second floor sit behind it in the sugarloaf roof.

There were seven other urns set along the parapet at equal distances, and one significant gap. There was obviously nothing dangerous about them; they looked as if they had been there for ever.

We went towards the house.