Grave Mistake (28 page)

“Now?”

“When we’ve cleared up, here.” He turned to Bailey and Thompson. They had finished with what was left of Claude Carter and were folding the ground-sheet neatly round him and tying him up with rope. They threaded the two shovels inside the rope to make hand-holds.

And everything else being ready they struck the tent, folded it and laid it with its frame across the body. Bailey, Thompson, McGuiness and the Yard man stood on either side. “Looks a bit less like a corpse,” said Thompson.

“You’ll have to go down the steps this time,” Alleyn told them. “Mr. Fox and I will bring the rest of the gear and light the way.”

They took their torches from their pockets. Twilight had closed in now. The after-smell of rain and the pleasant reek of a wood fire hung on the air. Somewhere down in the village a door banged and then the only sound was of water dripping from branches. Sybil’s grave looked as if it had never been disturbed.

“Quiet,” said one of the men. “Isn’t it?”

“Shall we move off, then?” Fox asked.

He stooped to pick up his load and the other four men groped for their hand-holds under the tent.

“Right?” said Bailey.

But Alleyn had lifted a hand. “No,” he whispered. “Not yet. Keep still. Listen.”

Fox was beside him. “Where?”

“Straight ahead. In the trees.”

He turned his light on the thicket. A cluster of autumnal leaves sprang up and quivered. One after another the torch-beams joined his. This time all the men heard the hidden sound.

They spread out to the left and right of Alleyn and moved forward. The light on the thicket was intensified and details of foliage appeared in uncanny precision, as if they carried some significance and must never be forgotten. A twig snapped and the head of a sapling jerked.

“Bloody Daft Artie, by God!” said Sergeant McGuiness.

“Shall we go in?” asked Fox.

“No,” said Alleyn and then, loudly: “Show yourself. You can’t run away from it this time. Call it a day and come out.”

The leaves parted but the face that shone whitely between them, blinking in the torchlight, was not Daft Artie’s.

“This is it, Bruce,” said Alleyn. “Come out.”

iv

Bruce Gardener sat bolt upright at the table with his arms folded. He still bore the insecure
persona
of his chosen role: red-gold beard, fresh mouth, fine torso, loud voice, pawky turn of speech: the straightforward Scottish soldier-man with a heart of gold. At first sight the pallor, the bloodshot eyes and the great earthy hands clenched hard on the upper arms were not conspicuous. To Alleyn, sitting opposite him, to Fox, impassive in the background and to the constable with a notebook in the corner, however, these were unmistakable signs,

Alleyn said: “Shorn of all other matters: motive, opportunity and all the rest of it, what do you say about this one circumstance? Who but you could have dug Sybil Foster’s grave four feet deeper than was necessary, killed Carter, buried his body there, covered it, trampled it down and placed the evergreen flooring? On your own statement and that of other witnesses you were there, digging the grave all that afternoon and well into the night. Why were you so long about it?”

Alleyn waited. Gardener stared at the opposite wall. Once or twice his beard twitched and the red mouth moved as if he was about to speak. But nothing came of it.

“Well?” Alleyn said at last and Bruce gave a parody of clearing his throat. “Clay,” he said loudly.

The constable wrote: “
Ans. Clay
,” and waited.

“So you told me. But there was no sign of clay in that mound of earth. The spoil is loamy and easy to shift. So that’s no good,” Alleyn said. “Is it?”

“I’ll no’ answer any questions till I have my solicitor present.”

“He’s on his way. You might, however, like to consider this. On that night after the funeral when we had an acetylene lamp like yours up there by the grave, you, from your sister’s window, saw the light and it worried you. You told us so. And it wasn’t Daft Artie who lay in the cubbyhole in the hedge, it was you. It wasn’t Daft Artie who heaved half a brick at me, it was you. You were so shaken by the thought of us opening the grave that you lost your head, came down the hill, hid in the hedge, chucked the brick and then set up a phoney hunt for an Artie who wasn’t there. Right?”

“No comment.”

“You’ll have to find some sort of comment, sooner or later, won’t you? However, your solicitor will advise you. But suppose Artie was in bed with a cold that evening, how would you feel about that?”

“
Ans. No comment
,” wrote the constable.

“Well,” Alleyn said, “there’s no point in plugging away at it. The case against you hangs on this one point. If you didn’t kill and bury Claude Carter, who did? I shall put it to you again when your solicitor comes and he no doubt will advise you to keep quiet. In the meantime I must tell you that not one piece of information about your actions can be raised to contradict the contention that you killed Mrs. Foster; that Carter, a man with a record of blackmail, knew it and exercised his knowledge on you that you, having arranged with him to pay the blackmail if he came to the churchyard that night, had the grave ready, killed him with the shovel you used to dig the grave and buried him there. Two victims in one grave. Is there still no comment?”

In the silence that followed, Alleyn saw, with extreme distaste, tears well up in Bruce’s china-blue, slightly squinting eyes and trickle into his beard.

“We were close taegither, her and me,” he said and his voice trembled. “From the worrrd go we understood each ither. She was more than an employer to me, she was a true friend. Aye. When I think of the plans we made for the beautifying of the property—” his voice broke convincingly.

“Did you plan those superfluous asparagus beds together and were the excavations in the mushroom shed your idea or hers?”

Bruce half-rose from his chair. Fox made a slight move and he sank back again.

“Or,” said Alleyn, “did Captain Carter, who, as you informed us, used to confide in you, tell you before he came down to Quintern on the last afternoon of his life that he proposed to bury the Black Alexander stamp somewhere on the premises? And forty years later when you found yourself there did you think it a good idea to have a look around on your own accord?”

“You can’t prove it on me,” he shouted without a trace of Scots. “And what about it if you could?”

“Nothing much, I confess. We’ve got more than enough without that. I merely wondered if you knew when you killed him that Claude Carter had the Black Alexander in his breast pocket. You gave it its second burial.”

Purple-red flooded up into Bruce’s face. He clenched his fists and beat them on the table.

“The bastard!” he shouted. “The bloody bastard. By Christ, he earned what he got.”

The station sergeant tapped on the door. Fox opened it.

“It’s his solicitor,” he said.

“Show him in,” said Fox.

v

Verity Preston weeded her long border and wondered where to look for a gardener. She chided herself for taking so personal a view. She remembered that there had been times when she and Bruce had seemed to understand each other over garden matters. It was monstrous to contemplate what they said he had done but she did not think it was untrue.

A shadow fell across the long border. She swivelled round on her knees and there was Alleyn.

“I hope I’m not making a nuisance of myself,” he said, “but I expect I am. There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

He squatted down beside her. “Have you got beastly couch-grass in your border?” he asked.

“That can hardly be what you wanted to ask but no, I haven’t. Only fat-hen, dandelions and wandering-willy.”

He picked up her handfork and began to use it. “I wanted to know whether the plan of Quintern Place with the spot marked X is still in Markos’s care or whether it’s been returned.”

“The former, I should imagine. Do you need it?”

“Counsel for the prosecution may.”

“Mrs. Jim might know. She’s here today, would you like to ask her?”

“In a minute or two, if I may,” he said shaking the soil off a root of fat-hen and throwing it into the wheelbarrow.

“I suppose,” he said, “you’ll be looking for a replacement”

“Just what I was thinking. Oh,” Verity exclaimed, “it’s all so flattening and awful. I suppose one will understand it when the trial’s over but to me, at present, it’s a muddle.”

“Which bits of it?”

“’Well, first of all, I suppose what happened at Greengages.”

“After you left?”

“Good Heavens, not before, I do trust.”

“I’ll tell you what we believe happened. Some of it we can prove: the rest follows from it. The prosecution will say it’s pure conjecture. In a way that doesn’t matter. Gardener will be charged with the murder of Claude Carter, not Sybil Foster. However, the one is consequent upon the other. We believe, then, that Gardener and Carter, severally, stayed behind at Greengages, each hoping to get access to Mrs. Foster’s room, Carter probably to sponge on her, Gardener, if the opportunity presented itself, to do away with her. It all begins from the time when young Markos went to Mrs. Foster’s room to retrieve his fiancée’s bag.”

“I hope,” Verity said indignantly, “you don’t attach—”

“Don’t jump the gun like that or we shall never finish. He reported Mrs. Foster alive and, it would be improper but I gather, appropriate, to add, kicking.”

“Against the engagement. Yes.”

“At some time before nine o’clock Claude appeared at the reception desk and, representing himself to be an electrician come to mend Mrs. Foster’s lamp, collected the lilies left at the desk by Bruce and took them upstairs. When he was in the passage something moved him to hide in an alcove opposite her door leaving footprints and a lily head behind him. We believe he had seen Bruce approaching and that when Bruce left the room after a considerable time, Carter tapped on the door and walked in. He found her dead.

“He dumped the lilies in the bathroom basin. While he was in there, probably with the door ajar, Sister Jackson paid a very brief visit to the room.”

“That large lady who gave evidence? But she didn’t say—”

“She did, later on. We’ll stick to the main line. Well. Claude took thought. It suited him very well that she was dead: he now collected a much bigger inheritance. He also had, ready-made, an instrument for blackmail and Gardener would have the wherewithal to stump up. Luckily for us he also decided by means of an anonymous letter and a telephone call to have a go at Sister Jackson, who had enough sense to report it to us.”

“I suppose you know he went to prison for blackmail?”

“Yes. So much for Greengages. Now for Claude, the Black Alexander and the famous plan.”

Verity listened with her head between her hands, making no further interruptions and with the strangest sense of hearing an account of events that had taken place a very, very long time ago.

“—so Claude’s plan matured,” Alleyn was saying. “He decided to go abroad until things had settled down. Having come to this decision, we think, he set about blackmailing Gardener. Gardener appeared to fall for it. No doubt he told Claude he needed time to raise the money and put him off until the day before the funeral. He then said he would have it by that evening and Claude could collect it in the churchyard. And I think,” said Alleyn, “you can guess the rest”

“As far as Claude is concerned — yes, I suppose I can. But — Bruce Gardener and Sybil — that’s much the worst. That’s so — disgusting. All those professions of attachment, all that slop and sorrow act — no, it’s beyond everything.”

“You did have your reservations about him, didn’t you?”

“They didn’t run along homicidal lines,” Verity snapped.

“Not an unusual reaction. You’d be surprised how it crops up after quite appalling cases. Heath, for instance. Some of his acquaintances couldn’t believe such a nice chap would behave like that.”

“With Bruce, though, it was simply for cash and comfort?”

“Just that. Twenty-five thousand and a very nice little house which he could let until he retired.”

“But he’d have got them anyway in the long run.”

“They were about the same age. She might well have outlived him.”

“Even so—. Yes, all right. So he knew the terms of the Will?”

“Oh, yes. He handed it over to Mrs. Jim, who noticed that the envelope was groggily gummed up. Mrs. Jim knew Mrs. Foster was given to afterthoughts: reopening and inefficiently resealing her correspondence and thought nothing of it. And there were only the Rattisbon and Prunella prints on the Will. Who do you think had removed Mrs. Foster’s and Johnson’s and Marleena Briggs’s? And his own.”

“Still,” Verity said. “He’d have been sitting pretty at Quintern if Sybil had lived.”

“Not if Dr. Schramm knew anything about it. They had a row and he intimated to Gardener, almost in so many words, that he’d get the sack.”

After a long pause, Verity said: “What about the stamp?”

“The Black Alexander? He knew about it. Captain Carter had talked about it. Bruce Gardener,” said Alleyn, “is in some ways the most accomplished villain I’ve come across. He’s never told me a lie when it wasn’t necessary. Over a long, long span, probably from his boyhood, he’s developed the
persona
that has served him best: the honest, downright chap; winning, plausible, a bit of a character with the added slightly phoney touch of the pawky Scot. By and large,” said Alleyn, “a loss to the Stage. I can see him stealing the show in superior soap.”

“The stamp?”

“Ah, yes. He hasn’t admitted it but I’ve no doubt he knew perfectly well that his sister lived in his captain’s village and that the stamp had never been found. Hence the multiplicity of asparagus and mushroom beds.”

“And then — Claude?”

“Yes. And along comes Claude and Claude’s found a map with a point marked X and while heart-stricken Bruce is digging his kind and generous lady’s grave Claude has a go in the fireplace and strikes it rich.”

“Oh, well!” said Verity and gave it up. And then, with great difficulty, she said: “I would be glad to know — Basil Smythe wasn’t in any way involved, was he? I mean — as her doctor he couldn’t be held to have been irresponsible or anything?”