Murder of a Snob (16 page)

After the court had risen, Crisp had an informal chat with the coroner then returned to the office, to find Benscombe waiting to report on his interview with Glenda.

“Good! The Glenda sequence is buttoned up and we can forget her,” approved Crisp. “It adds up to corroboration of the existence of those letters.”

“What about Fenchurch, sir?”

“Not much there about him, if you analyse it. He told her he was going to Watlington Lodge. He may or may not have gone there. Bullying her into denying what he'd said could be attributed to reasonable anxiety on his part.”

“But the pencil, sir?”

“Yes—if you like. As it stands, it only means that she noticed the pencil at one time and not at another. He might have been carrying that pencil around since his last call on Watlington some ten days ago. Still, when you've time it wouldn't do any harm to drop in on him and, if you find the pencil, see what lies he tells you.”

Benscombe felt that he had failed to put his case over. The Chief was talking about Ralph Cornboise.

“It might rattle him less if you were to see him without any formality. Find out why he took more than twenty minutes to get to the Three Witches. He's knocking about the town. You might spot him before he goes back.”

“Very good, sir. Querk is in the waiting-room. He's in a bit of a lather. Says he fears he unconsciously misled you. I got two or three minutes of his fears. Shall I stall him?”

“No. Never stall Querk. Let him pour it all over you every time. Send him in as you go out to find Ralph Cornboise.”

Querk came in, bringing, as ever, the sense of occasion.

“Ah, my dear Colonel, I am fortunate to catch you with a minute to spare. For my part, I have not been idle since our last meeting.” He bowed himself into a chair. “I have, in fact, had an important—a most important—conversation with Mrs. Cornboise.”

“Indeed!” Crisp was annoyed. If the infernal fellow was going to tamper with witnesses there would be trouble.

“Let me guess what is in your mind!” mouthed Querk. “You wish to remind me that a co-operator—if I may presume so to style myself—is by no means the same as a colleague. Had I the privilege of being your colleague you would have told me—as soon as I mentioned the existence of poor Lord Watlington's wife—that you had already encountered her and obtained from her what appeared to be important evidence.”

Confound the fellow, what did he mean by ‘appeared to be' important—when it
was
important!

“It is perhaps not you but I, my dear Colonel, who should apologise. I had the presumption to examine that evidence somewhat more closely. Mrs. Cornboise—as she prefers to be called—was most helpful. She reacted to my little tests—particularly in regard to the movements of Ralph's car. The Reindert! With its highly tuned engine, if you remember.”

“You don't tell me that Mrs. Cornboise knows anything about the tuning of engines?”

“Ah! I fear that I seriously misled you as to Mrs. Cornboise's nature. I represented her—I regret to say—as ungrateful and embittered. I have since discovered that she has a mature mind and a generous temperament. If she suffers the pangs of loneliness, that should have evoked my pity, not my criticism. I blame myself and shall do all in my power to make amends.”

Crisp's curiosity overcame his impatience. He had grasped Querk's technique of throwing a net of platitudes over his opponent and striking through the net. And he had begun to suspect that Querk never wasted a platitude.

“I am all attention, Mr. Querk.” Crisp scowled as he said it. Querk's manner was catching.

“You are most kind, Colonel. I have to remind myself that you have a great many calls on your time. So I must not weary you with the details of my amateur investigation. Instead, I will give you my conclusion. As my poor dear friend, Lord Watlington, used to say so often—‘it's the totals that count.' My conclusion, Chief Constable, is that Ralph—in a state of dementia, of course, poor fellow!—in all probability killed his uncle at approximately five-thirty—that is, after I had left the library.”

This, from Querk, was startling. In an intuitive flash there came to Crisp the conviction that opposite him, in the guise of a fatuous busybody, sat a formidable antagonist—the more dangerous because his objective was a complete mystery. In future, he would double his precautions in dealing with Querk.

“You have changed your opinion of Ralph, Mr. Querk?”

“Superficially, yes. Substantially, no. From the first, I suspected that the hallucination was too sharp in outline to be wholly without some foundation in fact. Both you and I were a little bemused, if I may say so, by the crushing weight of my own evidence. It made the poor boy seem to be raving like a madman. Yet the only impossible element in his self-accusation was the element of time. The position of the hands of the clock when he murdered his uncle.”

Querk was wrong there, reflected Crisp. Ralph said he had struck through the wig. If he remembered the murder at all, he would remember removing the wig and replacing it—
if
he committed the murder.

“Let's get it clear,” said Crisp. “In the hallucination, he went once to the library—about five-fifteen. You are suggesting that, in fact, he went twice?”

“Tentatively suggesting!” amended Querk. “The unhappy conclusion to which I have been driven requires confirmation. ‘Check-up' is, I believe, the technical term. Would it be possible for your staff to find out from the Three Witches—the road-house of that name—what time he arrived there in his car?”

Crisp nodded. He was willing to believe now that Querk had worked with his own county Chief Constable—willing to believe anything Querk said, because the man was too clever to tell any lie that could be exposed.

“You were going to say something about that car, weren't you—something about a test with Mrs. Cornboise?”

“You have again put your finger on the exact spot! Now, you will remember that I told you that I myself heard Ralph's car leaving the garage and passing down the drive while I was talking to Lord Watlington at, say, between five-fifteen and five-twenty. I stressed, I think, the high-pitched, whining note of the engine.

“Re-enacting those painful incidents in my mind as I lay seeking sleep, I became conscious of a break in the logical sequence of events. The whining note of that engine! It did not fade away. It
stopped
. I imagine, at the Lodge gates.”

“Or your consciousness of it stopped?” put in Crisp.

“
And
the consciousness of Mrs. Cornboise? Without revealing my purpose—without her being aware of what I was doing—I induced her to reconstruct her memory on that point. She came to precisely the same conclusion. She was able to go further than myself. She was able to remember that, some five minutes later, she again heard that very individual note of the engine and thought that the car must be coming back to the garage. In her quaint phrase she said the engine made a ‘mingy sort of noise'.”

The amateur investigator and the man who remembers things afterwards, twin nuisances to the police, were combined in the person of Querk—who obviously never forgot anything he intended to remember!

“If there is anything in your theory, Mr. Querk, it hardly leaves room for the hallucination, does it?”

“The hallucination—as I think Sir William Turvey will tell us—would lie in the fusing of the two mental images so that the poor fellow honestly believes that he went to the study only once.”

And a separate hallucination that he had struck through the wig, thought Crisp to himself.

Aloud, he thanked Querk for his help, listened to Querk's protestations of his own pain in giving testimony against Ralph, and got rid of him.

When Crisp was leaving for lunch, Benscombe reported.

“I haven't contacted Ralph yet, sir. He's gone off by himself in his car. Claudia says she expects him back at the Lodge for lunch.”

Claudia's Expectation that Ralph would be back for lunch was falsified, as Benscombe found out by telephone. He spent the bulk of the afternoon on deskwork for the Chief Constable, and at about five drove over to Watlington Lodge. When the constable informed him that Ralph was still absent, he sent Bessie to find Claudia.

She came running down the stairs.

“If he's had an accident tell me quickly, please,” she said.

“We've no information. I've come to ask you how I can get at him. The Chief wants me to check-up.”

“There's no reason why he should have had an accident,” said Claudia, half to herself. “He's a competent, steady driver. And he was in good fettle this morning after a long sleep. Can I give you the check-up you want?”

“Afraid not, thanks! It wasn't exactly urgent, but we'd like to know where he is.”

“I wish I could tell you. This morning he said he would take the car to a garage to get the windscreen wiper adjusted, and that as he felt he wanted some air he would go and see a mutual friend, if there was time before lunch. I'll ring and see if he went there.”

She turned the extension switch and spoke on the instrument under the staircase. From her half of the dialogue, Benscombe could tell that Ralph had not called on the friend.

“Don't worry,” he said as she returned. “If he had a smash, we should know at headquarters. I expect he just felt he must have a bit of time away from this place. It must be rather depressing.”

“It's certainly been grim since Saturday evening!” She added: “I've arranged with the trustees to stay on here until we are married.”

At her last words, he caught her eye. He was thinking that she was marrying a man she thought a poor fish.

“You see him at a great disadvantage,” she said, startling him by interpreting his thoughts.

“I was thinking it was rotten for you—for both of you—starting up in these conditions.”

“Thank you!” she said. He was still in plain clothes, and looked like any young man of her acquaintance. “When we're married, I hope you'll come and see us. And it won't be in this nightmarish place.”

She left him elated by her friendliness. The Chief Constable's belief that one sought an affair with every girl one liked the look of, was, he decided, old-fashioned and absurd. There were lots of ways of liking attractive women. Lots of ways of admiring them. It was character that fascinated you. When a girl possessed enormous potentialities of good and evil all mixed up together—

‘O madre mia!'

He put the damper on his imagination and drove to Fenchurch's flat. He knocked and rang without result. He would have to go back to the Chief and say: ‘I couldn't find Ralph, and I couldn't find Fenchurch either'—and grin like an imbecile.

After the third attempt on the door knocker, Benscombe was compelled to remind himself that Regulations were extremely clear on the subject of forcing an entry—equally clear in the matter of searching private premises without the owner's consent.

On the other hand, suppose one had a sort of open invitation from the owner? Suppose the owner had offered—as in fact Fenchurch had offered—to provide one with a latchkey. True, the offer had been in the nature of a bluff—but if the bluff had been called, Fenchurch would have handed over the latchkey, to save his face. It was, in a sense, a mere accident that the bluff had not been called, that the latchkey was not in his pocket—an accident whose effect could easily be neutralised.

The police college, strangely enough, had provided instruction covering the next step.

Inside the flat, Benscombe shut the front door and called Fenchurch by name. He repeated the call as he tapped on each door except the door of the owner's bedroom, which was open.

Having been brave enough to take the risk of a substantial setback to his career, he found that Fortune favoured him with almost suspicious alacrity. In a few minutes, evidence was positively shovelled upon him—evidence that was important enough to be unnerving. At the lowest assessment, it would save him from disciplinary action.

On Fenchurch's telephone he reported in detail to the Chief Constable.

“You've destroyed the value of the evidence by forcing an entry.” Crisp's voice was wintry. “Stay where you are. Put everything back where it was. I'll be there in about twenty minutes.”

That, Benscombe thought, was a needless risk. He was wondering how to pass the twenty minutes, when Fenchurch himself walked into the studio.

“Hul-lo! How perfectly splendid!” exclaimed Fenchurch. “But why did you dump your uniform?”

“I had to go up to Town—”

“It won't really matter for the first sitting. It's frightfully good of you to come. The light's right for colour. If you'll hop on the dais and get comfortable, I'll have everything fixed in a few seconds.”

Fenchurch flung off his coat, dropping it on the floor. There came a whirr and a rattle as the electric motor rolled and unrolled screens in the glass roof.

“Look straight at my finger, will you … Chin the tiniest bit up. Good!”

Benscombe had promised to sit for Fenchurch as lightly as Fenchurch had offered a latchkey. Yet the artist's urgency now impacted upon him—almost banished memory of the Chief's impending arrival.

Benscombe could even feel a sitter's self-consciousness.

“My dear fellow, please don't cook up an expression. Forget the easel and what I'm doing. Think of the murder. Finger prints! Clues! Flying Squad! Good! Hold the thought and the pose will hold itself. Keep as still as you can for a few minutes. Then we'll have a short rest, if you feel you want it.”

They had a rest of one minute. Benscombe was feeling that another was about due when he heard the door bell, followed by a knock that was indubitably Crisp's.

Fenchurch took not the slightest notice. The knocking was repeated.