Murder of a Snob (20 page)

‘Confirmatory statement, independent, by Albert Saunders attached.

Querk, reflected Crisp, could hardly have suborned two local errand boys. Therefore his statement and that of Mrs. Cornboise were true. Therefore Querk's cultivation of the society of Mrs. Cornboise must be because he was attracted to Mrs. Cornboise. Which, as Claudia Lofting would say, was perfectly ridiculous.

On the following morning, as no communication was received from Ralph Cornboise, a description was sent to the
Gazette
for circulation to all stations.

The report from Watlington Lodge stated that it was possible to walk from the gates to the west side of the house without being observed from the terrace.

“Possible!” said Crisp. “But that doesn't prove that Ralph did in fact go back to the house. Still less does it prove that he killed Watlington by striking through that wig.”

“No, sir,” said Benscombe obediently. “Shall I prepare a message for broadcast?”

“Yes. But ask the B.B. C. not to say ‘the police are anxious to get in touch with'—just ‘missing from his home,' with that bit about losing his memory.”

The police message was broadcast at six and at nine, yielding no result. Next day, through the
Gazette
, information reached Scotland Yard, which was telephoned to the Chief Constable.

“At two o'clock on Monday, Ralph Cornboise sold his Reindert car for seven hundred pounds, paid in notes, after Cornboise had been identified by his branch bank manager. There is reason to believe that Cornboise at the same time drew some three hundred pounds in cash from his account.”

“That young fool is forcing our hands again,” grumbled Crisp, after dictating a note of the message to Benscombe. “By the book of the rules, I have to apply for a warrant now. Get statements signed and witnessed from those two boys and from Querk and Mrs. Cornboise. And if you
can't
contact Mrs. Cornboise today, it'll leave our hands free for another twenty-four hours.”

Benscombe loyally failed to contact Mrs. Cornboise. That night the evening papers took up the chase, and on the following morning two of the dailies carried a photo of Ralph, which the police had been unable to obtain.

“We can't hold up that warrant any longer,” said Crisp. “Come with me and take a statement from Mrs. Cornboise.”

They were at the flat in Kilburn by half past nine. The front door was open, while a teen-age maid polished the brasswork.

“Missis hasn't only jest started dressin' herself,” she explained. “P'raps you'd step back later.”

Benscombe bent down and spoke confidentially:

“Don't you think Mrs. Cornboise would like to ask the Colonel to wait in the sitting-room?” he suggested.

“I didn't know he was a Colonel!” Crisp, who was in plain clothes of doubtful fit, was subjected to a sceptical scrutiny. “P'raps it'll be all right. Pass right down the hall, please. I'll tell her, so's she can hurry up.”

It was a trim, modern block of lower middle class flats. In the sitting-room, Crisp had expected a certain physical fustiness, in line with the personality of the tenant. Instead, he found a mental fustiness which startled his imagination.

Facing him was a kitchen range, such as he had not seen since he was a small boy, with iron-doored ovens on either side of a fireplace. Along the opposite wall was a dresser, laden with willow pattern chinaware, with teacups hanging on hooks. In the centre was a white kitchen table with a wooden wheel-backed armchair at its head. A rocking chair, an upholstered wicker easy chair and three corner cabinets, crowded with photographs and knick-knacks, completed the compromise between kitchen and sitting-room of the late nineteenth century.

“Look at this, sir!” whispered Benscombe. A red fire glowed and flickered in the fireplace until he switched it off. “You couldn't so much as boil a kettle on that plant. The whole room is a stage set.”

“I've heard of a cook pretending to be a baroness,” muttered Crisp. “But I've never heard of it the other way round.”

“Pictures! An oleograph of Queen Victoria!” Benscombe passed on to the next. “This one strikes a new note.” Set in a large picture frame were some forty or fifty photographs of different shapes and sizes cut from newspapers.

“All of Watlington! In the pre-baronial era! Telling 'em the tale at Board meetings, banquets, flower shows!”

Crisp's attention was on one of the upright cabinets where a buxom wench sat hand in hand with a flamboyant young man against a Johannesburg photographer's back-cloth. On a lower deck of the cabinet was another framed cutting, with the fragment of a letter pasted beside it.

The photograph was of a public house: the printed underline read:
‘The Goat-in-Flames Tavern, North London, now offered for sale after passing from father to son for five generations.'

With difficulty Crisp deciphered the faded handwriting:
‘We lived in a slum behind this. My brother became head potman. Makes you think.'

It made Crisp think that, if ever a woman lived in her past, that woman was Mrs. Cornboise. As a cook she had met and been loved by Cornboise. The kitchen became a psychological bridge to the happiness she had lost. After thirty years of it, she still wanted him enough to go uninvited to his garden—

“Good morning! I'm sorry you've had to wait. Mr. Querk told me you might call, but I must say I didn't expect you as early as this!”

Mrs. Cornboise had adorned herself in a dress of black satin. While Crisp assured her that he had not been inconvenienced, she sat in the wheelback chair.

“Please be seated, both,” she invited. From her manner it was plain that she had lost any sense she might have had of the room being unusual. “Mr. Querk said you'd want to talk about what I told him about Mr. Ralph's motor car. Only, I can't see why you've bothered if he's told you already.”

Thus she shattered Crisp's plan for approaching the subject. “He didn't tell me much, Mrs. Cornboise, but it seemed to be not quite the same as you told me.”

“Well, I didn't tell you I
thought
I heard the car coming back, because it didn't come back. If I'd told you all I thought we'd never have finished. I wish now I'd never mentioned it. No one is sorrier than Mr. Querk that it's kicked up all this dust. It all came of him saying to me: ‘Now, Mrs. Cornboise, I want you to close your eyes and listen to that car again.' Then I remembered how it had stopped instead of fading away. It makes a mingy sort of noise, that car—sets your teeth on edge. So I noticed it when it started up again. And now you know as much as I do.”

“How long afterwards did you hear it start up again?”

“That's what Mr. Querk wanted to know and I couldn't tell him. It may have been ten minutes or it may have been a bit more. But you won't be able to make bother out of that,” she added. “It's my belief that, when he got to the gate, he remembered he was short of petrol and took some out of his spare can.”

“Ten minutes or more would be a very long time for a job like that,” suggested Crisp.

“Not if he'd never done it before and didn't know how the screws worked that held the spare can. I know. Because it happened once with a gentleman who was giving me a lift. In the end, I could have done better in a bus.”

“Let's see if I've got it right,” said Crisp. “Shortly after five fifteen, you saw Ralph Cornboise drive out of the garage. The car stopped—as you suppose—at the end of the drive. Did you see Ralph Cornboise again?”

“No—else I'd have told you in the first place. Wait a minute! Mr. Querk told me something to say if you talked like that. Oh yes! ‘I have nothing to add to my previous statement covering the events observed by me!' That's right—I haven't!”

Unaware of any inconsistency, she went on:

“And there's something else I'll tell you—with you hounding that poor boy when he's innocent! He's not run away for what you think he has—asking me questions about his petrol can taking too long! If you want to know, he's running away from that Miss Whatsername. She'd got her claws in, so's she was going to marry him next Monday. P'raps you didn't know that. And what's more, it's no use that young man you've brought with you looking as if he didn't believe me. You ask at the district registrar's and they'll tell you.”

“Really?”. Crisp was treading carefully. “Have you seen the notice on the registrar's board. then?”

“I don't say that I've seen it with my own eyes, but you'll find it's true, all the same.”

Someone had told her. Not Querk. There was only one other likely source.

He waited while Benscombe finished typing the statement about Ralph Cornboise's car. Mrs. Cornboise, forewarned by Querk that this would be required of her, signed without protest.

“Now, Mrs. Cornboise. You have seen Ralph Cornboise since he disappeared from Watlington Lodge.”

Mrs. Cornboise showed neither surprise nor alarm.

“Why shouldn't I!” she challenged. “It's a free country, who you speak to. Or it would be if it wasn't for the police.”

“It's no use talking to us like that, Mrs. Cornboise.” Crisp was in some doubt as to how to proceed. “You don't seem to understand that if Ralph Cornboise were charged with the murder of Lord Watlington—as he well may be—you would be in a very awkward and humiliating position. What you have done is called harbouring and succouring—”

“Well, it didn't ought to be! I never did any such thing! And I'm surprised at your saying it!” She glared at him, scandalised and indignant.

“It's only law language,” cut in Benscombe. “It means you might be put in prison for being friendly with a man who is hiding from the police.”

“Oh well! It's a pity that wasn't made clear in the first place.” Mrs. Cornboise was mollified. “He isn't hiding from the police. He's hiding from that girl. And I promised I wouldn't do anything to help her find him.”

“If he is not hiding from us, there is no harm in our knowing where he is,” pleaded Crisp.

“That girl would worm it out of you and I'd never forgive myself.” Mrs. Cornboise was weakening. “Besides, you're bound to find him as soon as they listen to the wireless. And with his photo in the papers and all. If you hadn't said that about his wandering and losing his memory they'd have seen it was him before now.”

“If you feel you can't tell us,” said Crisp, “we shall have to see whether Mr. Querk will.”

“I don't want him dragged into it. Apart from that, he doesn't know.” The threat was effective—Mrs. Cornboise betrayed anxiety. “If I tell you, I don't suppose you'll believe me unless I tell you how I found him. Well, if you must know, it was like this. I asked myself what you do when you're worried and unhappy.” She paused and looked round her own room. “You go back to where you started from! I reckoned, if he was like me, he'd go back to where he was before Samuel started him on all that nonsense of being gentry. I happened to know where his father used to work and where the family lived. His father was potman at the Goat-in-Flames—”

“And Ralph Cornboise is there?” interrupted Crisp.

“He's got the best bedroom in the hotel where his father used to be potman. There's only four bedrooms, it being a commercial connection. And if you're going there to see him, you might mention that it's as well to be careful with the drink, though he wouldn't have told me about the girl if he hadn't had a drop too much.”

The lift was out of order. As they walked down the stairs Crisp said informally:

“Funny old girl. What did you think of her?”

“All on the surface, I should say, sir.”

“Hm! P'raps you're right. Remember Fenchurch's little yarn about a lunatic woman swinging a stocking? Here, put this in your pocket, will you. Can't get it into mine—they're full.”

Benscombe received from the Chief Constable a large earthenware duck's egg.

“If you charge her with murder,” said Benscombe, “she'll only say: ‘Why shouldn't I? He did me wrong!'”

“A jest that contains a truth, boy.” Crisp blinked. “Is that a bit of Shakespeare?”

“No, sir. A bit of Querk.”

“So it is! Hm! Dangerous man, Querk. If we find young Cornboise waiting for us, we'll have a smack at that hallucination of his before we do anything drastic.”

They arrived at the Goat-in-Flames substantially before opening time. At an apologetic side door labelled ‘Hotel Entrance,' Crisp spoke to a potman in shirt-sleeves, disturbed at his work of cleaning the bar.

“There's a young man staying here—I've forgotten his name—”

“That'll be Mr. Carr. There's only one room booked.”

“Take me to him, please.”

“I'll have to ask—” The potman took another look at Crisp. “This way, sir.” On the first floor he thumped a door and shouted:

“Couple o' gentlemen to see you, Mr. Carr.”

The potman hurried back to his work. Crisp was about to try the door when it was opened by Ralph Cornboise.

“I guessed it must be you.”

With something approaching pride, Ralph invited them into a large bed-sitting room. He fussed them, like a houseproud host, until Crisp was settled in a saddlebag armchair and Benscombe on a horsehair sofa.

“Would you fellers like a drink?”

“A bit too early, thanks!” answered Crisp. “We've brought a spot of news. About those letters!”

Crisp went through the business of lighting a cigarette while he watched the effect of the last words. Ralph sat down very slowly on the edge of the bed and waited. Crisp waited the longer.

“You were about to tell me something about some letters?” prompted Ralph. “What letters?”