Give a Corpse a Bad Name (5 page)

‘And was his name Shelley?'

The sergeant gave a troubled shake of his head. ‘I can't remember as I ever heard his name. Folk always called'n by a kind of nickname—Bish, they called'n. Short for Bishop, I reckon, because a bishop was what he wasn't like.'

‘No,' said Toby, ‘I'm afraid not, Sam. That wasn't the reason. And I'm afraid his real name was Shelley.'

‘Think so?' The sergeant sighed again. ‘Not as it's anythin' to me, one way or the other, but 'tis the devil's own job when you've any o' these big people in on a case. Seem to think the law wasn't meant for them.' He swore wearily.

Toby Dyke thrust back the black lock that curved down into his eye. It immediately fell down again. ‘Have you got that check about you, Sam, the one that was found in the man's pocket?'

‘Why?' said the sergeant, but he produced it in the automatic way of a man who is worried and tired.

‘ “Mrs Milne, The Laurels, Chovey.” Mrs Milne—that's the woman who was in the bar, you say, the one in the blue dress. Must have been good-looking not so very many years ago—still is, if it comes to that. But tough—got a bit tough with the passing of time, eh, Sam? And who was the man who was with her?'

‘Major Maxwell.'

‘No, the other one—the young one who stayed behind.'

Yawning, the sergeant answered: ‘That was Mr Laws. Relative of the Maxwells.'

‘What does he do?'

‘Writes books.'

‘What kind of books?'

‘How should I know?'

Toby Dyke handed back the check. ‘Well, so far as I can see, Sam—this is my serious opinion—there's going to be a certain amount of fun in the neighbourhood during the next few days. Or, as you might say, drama. Perhaps George and I will stay to see a little of it. We're just taking a holiday, walking about and looking at things. George needs a holiday; he's been indoors a lot too much lately—got no colour in his cheeks. What's that you say, George?' For George had made his little coughing noise again.

Wringing his cap between his hands in a bashful fashion, George gave it as his opinion that it was time to go to bed.

Having told Tom Warren that he and his friend would like their breakfast at half-past eight, Toby Dyke came down to eat it at half-past eleven.

Even then he had not shaved. With bristles on his chin and an unfed irritability in his eye, his long, dark face looked truculent and dangerous. He made impatient gestures, opening and shutting the door of the coffee-room noisily and scraping his chair on the floor as he pulled it out from under the table, as if it were not he but the breakfast that was late. George was sitting on the window-seat, reading a newspaper.

The coffee-room was a genteel room with white tablecloths on small round tables and some potted palms. Each table had a thin glass vase at its centre, filled with twigs on to which had been wired large, rubbery-looking berries, like small oranges. Most of the tables had already been laid for luncheon; only Toby's had an anachronistic toast-rack and teacup.

He was without friendliness towards the fried egg that was brought to him. He was sour towards the tea. Towards George he appeared without emotions of any kind. George stayed behind his newspaper.

It was about half an hour later that the first remark came. ‘You know, George, you've got a nose.'

George flattened the palm of one hand against his face. ‘Yes,' he said doubtfully, ‘not a fine one like yours, Tobe.'

‘You smell things out, don't you, George?' Toby had pushed his chair back, stretched his legs out, and was smoking. ‘You realized the possibilities of that policeman picking primroses in the meadow. You went and helped him, and so found out what it was all about. Now I should merely have speculated and passed on.'

‘Well, I reckon you'd have made as good use of your speculating as I shall of my knowing.'

Toby nodded. ‘But the concrete mind comes in useful sometimes.'

‘I've even known the solid brick kind come in useful—sometimes,' said George.

Toby did not answer. Blowing smoke at the oranges, he gazed at them as through a veil. ‘We'll stay here a day or two,' he said presently.

George shrugged. ‘Only …' he began with a faint frown.

‘What?'

‘I've been wondering. You told that sergeant of yours you hadn't got a job on that paper any more.'

‘I haven't.'

‘But they print all you send 'em.'

Toby rose, stretched himself and grinned. George turned the pages of his newspaper. Toby said he would go and shave. A girl in a darned jumper and shapeless skirt came in and asked if she could clear away the breakfast now. Past the windows of the coffee-room of the Ring of Bells a large car drove slowly and stopped a little farther down the street outside the police station. George noticed it out of the corner of his eye, but he went on reading.

When, about half an hour later, Toby and George emerged together into the street, the car was still there. But as they strolled towards the police station a man came out and got hastily into the car. Sergeant Eggbear had followed him out; there was respect in the sergeant's attitude, also gravity and concern. The car was driven away by a uniformed chauffeur at a rate of about fifteen miles an hour.

The man of whom Toby and George had caught this glimpse was tall, extremely thin and bearded. His face was yellowish. He looked an old man, but the beard was not yet grey, and he had crossed the pavement in one spidery stride.

‘Well, that's that,' the sergeant greeted them.

‘And that,' said Toby, with a nod after the car, ‘was old man Maxwell?'

‘That's right.' The sergeant retreated into the station and the other two followed him. ‘We've cleared it up. It's his son—he says so. Not been seen or heard of for ten years, comes home and gets done in before he's seen any of his folks. Poor devil.'

‘Has it cut the old man up?'

‘You couldn't tell with him.' Eggbear pointed at a small pile of papers on his table. ‘Those are his. Here's his passport. We had the landlady over from Wallaford this morning and she identified him as the man who stayed at her place.'

‘What about the suitcase?' Toby had taken the passport and was looking at the photograph inside. It was faintly familiar, a flattish face with high cheekbones and a smooth, oval outline. But it was the kind of photograph that is obviously a bad photograph, a mere record of a set of features. ‘Same type as his young cousin Laws,' Toby remarked.

‘Yes, to look at.'

‘Not otherwise?'

‘No, Mr Laws is a quiet sort of chap. But folk still grin and start tellin' you yarns if you talk about Bish Maxwell. Well, 'tis an end o' the grinnin' now, I allow.'

‘Er,' said George tentatively from somewhere behind Toby, ‘the suitcase …'

‘Ah,' said Eggbear, ‘us haven't found'n yet.'

‘Tried the railway cloakroom?' Toby inquired. He had put the passport down and was looking through the other papers. They were of the usual type that collect in a man's pocket, bills, receipts, a pamphlet of the kind that gets given away in the street and thrust into a pocket without being read.

There was a slight stiffness in the sergeant's answer: ‘That did happen to have occurred to me meself. But as Mrs Quantick in to Wallaford had only just been and gone when Sir Joseph blows in, and as Sir Joseph had only just been and gone when you blows in …'

‘Yes, yes,' said Toby.

‘I'm goin' to do some phonin' about it now,' said the sergeant.

‘There's the steamship company too,' said Toby. ‘You might make sure that …' But he was stopped by the look of stern reproach on Eggbear's face.

While the sergeant, pulling the telephone squarely in front of him, entered into conversation with the police in Wallaford, Toby picked up the navy blue jacket that was hanging over the back of a chair and started looking idly through its pockets. He found nothing but a handkerchief and a stub of pencil, but he interrupted the sergeant to ask which pocket it was that had contained the bundle of papers. Eggbear told him that they had been folded up inside the passport in the inside pocket.

‘No, Jim,' he went on into the telephone again, ‘that was to a bloke this end. 'Tis a suitcase, accordin' to the description we have, a leather suitcase, good but pretty old, and probably deposited—'

But where that suitcase had probably been deposited was not at that moment imparted to the sergeant in Wallaford. For it was just then that a woman's voice, soft, cold, precise, broke into the conversation.

‘It is not true,' it said.

Startled, the sergeant looked up. Toby turned round. George, who had sat down on a chair in a far corner, rose to his feet with diffident courtesy. In the doorway stood a very small old woman. She wore an old-fashioned seal-skin coat and a felt hat that looked as if she generally kept one rolled up in a pocket and only put it on in the rain. Blue eyes burnt out of a deeply wrinkled but delicate face.

‘It is not true,' she said. ‘Show him to me. I know it is not true.'

Quietly Toby stepped back beside George. The sergeant stood up, hanging up the receiver blunderingly so that it made a noisy tinkling.

‘I'm sorry, your ladyship …'

‘No, no, it's my husband who should be sorry. You are not at all to blame, Eggbear—why should you be? It happens that I know it cannot be true. But I wish to see him and to assure you, looking at him, that this poor man is not my son. You would not doubt me in those circumstances?'

The sergeant had reddened. He came round from behind his table. ‘But, your ladyship, Sir Joseph—'

‘I've been speaking to Sir Joseph.' She smiled. She sat down on the chair that the sergeant placed for her, and unbuttoned her seal-skin coat. The dress she was wearing inside it was of a green, coarsely handwoven material, with odd little pieces of embroidery that looked as if they had been saved off a dozen different dresses stitched on to it. She wore a silver chain from which hung various pieces of cornelian, moss-agate, topaz and amber, which suggested that she collected her jewellery by walking round our shores.

‘I met Sir Joseph at the end of the village.' Her voice, though quiet and gentle had still that cold, even sound. There was a remoteness, too, about the sweet smile with which she went on looking at the sergeant. She seemed to form both smile and words with a deliberateness that made them strangely unliving. ‘I had followed him, you see, as soon as I learnt what it was that had brought him so suddenly to Chovey. He didn't wish me to know, of course, but as he always refuses to answer a telephone himself—I don't blame him for that, you know, I feel just the same way about it—anyway, it meant, you see, that Harvey, who's really
very
good with the telephone, really very clever with it indeed, Harvey was able to tell me why Sir Joseph had suddenly ordered out the car to go into Chovey. So I followed immediately. Harvey drove me—he's such a capable man, though Sir Joseph says he drives recklessly, but there I don't agree with him; I always feel quite safe with Harvey. Well, at the end of the village we met the other car, and my husband told me that he had just been telling you that this poor dead man is our son Shelley. Oh, Eggbear, I feel so ashamed of his having done such a thing, putting you in this
dreadfully
awkward position. I don't know how he
could
.'

‘But, your ladyship,' said Eggbear confusedly, ‘here's his passport, found in the jacket he left—'

She scarcely looked at it. Her soft voice went on: ‘Of course it may have been a genuine mistake. I understand the man's face has been very much damaged. But it isn't only by his face that one recognizes one's son. Indeed no.'

‘But here's his photograph, and even I can recognize that,' the sergeant was expostulating, but again the gentle voice defeated him:

‘My husband is a strange man, Eggbear. An earnest and sincere man in many ways, but in this matter I think you would be wise to trust me rather than him. Now please will you take me to where I can look at this poor, poor fellow. You mustn't think it'll upset me just because I'm a woman. I'm not that sort of person; I shall be just as strong as my husband. And what I tell you will undoubtedly be more reliable.'

The sergeant made a slight, helpless gesture. His eyes, meeting Toby's for a moment, signalled bewildered resignation. He led Lady Maxwell out.

It was as she was going that she seemed, for the first time to notice Toby. She smiled at him and bowed. There was the graciousness about her of one who, accustomed to being recognized wherever she goes, is anxious to avoid offending anyone by her lack of recognition.

Toby hesitated for an instant, looking about her. Then, with swift steps, he followed. George loitered along after him.

The body was in an outhouse at the back of the police station. With small, pattering steps, Lady Maxwell advanced. There was a glitter in her eyes and her head was poked forward in curious, eager interest; only her lips, the sunken lips of age, worked against one another nervously.

For a full minute she stood there, saying nothing. She had coughed faintly on entering, as if she were drawing the attention of the dead man to her intrusion. Now she murmured: ‘How could he, oh, how could he?'

Eggbear looked round at Toby and gave a surreptitious tap on his forehead. But Toby was absorbed in watching Lady Maxwell.

Taking a step forward, she touched one of the dead man's hands.

‘Of course,' she said, ‘I knew it couldn't be, but Joseph having made this ridiculous mistake, I had to come here and
show
you. You'll believe, won't you, that a mother couldn't be mistaken about her son?'

The sergeant replied with an unintelligible monosyllable.

‘I've been feeling so sorry for poor Mrs Milne,' she went on. ‘I admire Mrs Milne very much. So independent, so—so indomitable, I feel. And I'm so sorry for this poor fellow and for his friends or relatives, whoever they turn out to be. So sad and so unnecessary, a death of this kind. Well, thank you, Eggbear, I think I'll go home now.'