Murder of a Snob (29 page)

“Arthur! You'll make a fool of yourself all over again if you talk about it.”

“Excellent advice—
Mrs. Fenchurch!”
snapped Crisp.

“He had better keep his mouth shut until his solicitor tells him how far to open it.”

“By all the gods, Colonel, you've pulled it off again!” cried Fenchurch with boyish delight. “That's almost exactly what Watlington said!”

“Arthur!
Don't talk!”

“I must tell him this bit, dear. He was so frightfully sarcastic about my picking up an old envelope in case I might want to make a note on it. ‘Solicitor' is the key, Colonel. I don't possess a solicitor. I told Watlington I needed one who wasn't squeamish, and he gave me his own. The envelope had the name and address printed on it—yards of it. So I bagged the envelope.”

To Crisp, the explanation was no longer important. Everything would now depend upon how much he could frighten out of Querk. In the meantime, Fenchurch might conceivably provide another weapon, since he could never resist answering a question.

“It's stuffy in the house, Arthur. Let's wait in the garden.”

“One question before you go!” Crisp found himself addressing Claudia. “Were you two working with Querk in this scheme for a fake marriage to Ralph Cornboise?”

Fenchurch spun round, virile and aggressive.

“What the blue hell d' you mean, Colonel Crisp!”

“Arthur! Be quiet!” Claudia dragged at his arm. “There's no need to say anything. Come into the garden.”

“Garden my foot! Chief Constable or Lord Chief Justice, he's going to explain that offensive question—oh lord, darling, I see the explanation myself! He thinks—”

Claudia had thrust her hand over his mouth—the hand that was unexpectedly large and strong.

“Arthur, you
must not!
It's madness! What does it matter what he thinks!”

Fenchurch removed her hand, which was actually suffocating him—held her by both wrists as if he expected further assault.

“Sorry, darling, but I must!” he exclaimed. “It's no good my trying not to be a fool. I could never paint again if I let that pass. Rank sentimentalist, I know. Goodbye!” He kissed her violently. “Now get out!”

“No,” said Claudia. “I want to see whether he'll arrest you.”

“You want to cry over him. It's no good with his kind.”

Fenchurch turned his back on Claudia.

“Sorry I lost my temper, Colonel! Stand by for a spot of exhibitionism. Manly confession. I married Claudia bigamously. I lied to her. She didn't know my wife was alive, until she died. Then the ass of a doctor—who knew we'd been separated for years—sent a cable to Casa Flavia marked ‘urgent.' It was so phrased that I couldn't possibly explain it away to poor Claudia. Then she felt that, because I had pulled her leg, she couldn't stay with me. Tarranio doesn't know that. If you don‘t mind, don't tell him. Because after I've been to quod for bigamy, we shall probably get married and we might want to go back to Casa Flavia.”

“Listen to me—” began Crisp.

“No, you listen to me, Colonel! Watlington gave me some errand-boy stuff about her being a ‘kept woman'— the sort of thing you said just now in all innocence. I lost my temper and showed him the marriage certificate. I also showed him—dammit Claudia, I wish you had cleared out when I told you to—I showed him the letter Claudia wrote when she left me, because it carried complete conviction to any sane man, even Watlington, that she hadn't known it was bigamy.”

“But why did you tell Watlington?” demanded Crisp. “Did you
want
her to marry Ralph?”

“Don't be absurd, my dear fellow! I didn't
want
it. But I was naturally distressed that Claudia had found out I'd swindled her. She told me she was through with men like me, and that she was dedicating herself to this poor devil who needed her—which I thought rather ridiculous. But it was a wealthy marriage. And I felt I owed it to her to co-operate! So I made Watlington understand that she had thought herself legally married to me.

“By Watlington's odd code, she was promptly transformed from a trollop to an Innocent Girl. My hat, Claudia! Then he gave me fatherly advice on how not to go to quod for the bigamy—which, unfortunately, I've forgotten. Anyhow, part of the advice was not to tell anybody else.”

Claudia moved from behind Fenchurch and faced Crisp.

“That was why Watlington changed his attitude to me so suddenly and so completely,” she said. “Poor Ralph knew, because Arthur had told him. Ralph wanted me to tell his uncle when we were having that scene in the library. But I was afraid Arthur might go to prison.”

“So am I!” said Crisp.

He had got a weapon from Fenchurch—that Querk had lied in describing his conversation with Watlington about Claudia.

“What's the next move, Colonel? Can I have bail, or something? It would be a pity not to finish Benscombe's head before we start the quod programme.”

Crisp turned to Claudia.

“I understand that the mayor of Casa Flavia warned you against marrying this man,” he said. “I echo that warning. Why, he hasn't even the sense to tell me that he thought his legal wife was dead, so as to give me a colourable excuse for not running him in! Take him into the garden—take him anywhere—before I remember my duty.”

“By the window—before you say another word!” cried Claudia. She pushed him out and shut the window after him. When she turned round and faced Crisp, he had the illusion that she had grown older.

“Thank you,” she said. “And—and I congratulate you. Prison would turn him into a very dangerous criminal.”

He looked at her with detachment, his mind on Querk. In all his encounters with her she had never lost her dignity.

“You are a very strange woman,” he said.

“Because I can love two men?”

“Lots of women can do that. But you manage to make it seem decent. Anyway, love doesn't interest me.”

“But it often explains people's queer behaviour!”

A car purred in the drive, presumably Querk's. Crisp looked out of the window, saw Fenchurch sitting on his haunches, sketch-book in hand.

“Fenchurch may have genius. But he's a lame dog, like the other one.”

“Yes. But he has the charm of not knowing it. He's too conceited ever to find me out, as Ralph did. Here's Mr. Querk!”

Querk paused in the doorway, the more effectively to confer his presence.

“Ah! Chief Constable. At last I've run you to earth. I tried to find you at headquarters. Don't go, I beg, Miss Lofting—stay and hear me abase myself. On the telephone this morning, Chief Constable, my secretary informed me of your call at my office yesterday. How can I ever apologise for giving you all that trouble! The matter had passed completely out of my mind. I'm talking about that registered parcel, Miss Lofting. Can you believe that it was dispatched by my secretary acting on my instructions! And it contained—” he finished in an arch whisper “—a new wig for poor Lord Watlington!”

Querk, Crisp reminded himself, had not been present in court, and so had not heard counsel's reference to the wig and the signet ring—he could have no suspicion of their importance.

Claudia was slipping past Querk to the door.

“And now,” said Querk, “if the Chief Constable will accept my heartfelt apology, I must fly to keep a personal appointment before lunch—”

“Mr. Querk!” said Crisp. “I came here to see you.”

“Indeed? Of course, if it is important—?”

“It is.” Because Querk looked elaborately surprised, Crisp added: “I am investigating the murder of Lord Watlington.”

Querk sighed heavily. He removed his glasses and polished them. His response was interrupted by the appearance of Bessie.

“Can you gentlemen let me have the room now, so's I can lay for lunch?”

Following Querk to the morning-room, Crisp was halfway across the hall when for an instant he stopped. In that instant he grasped the full significance of Fenchurch's statement a few minutes ago. It came to him that the statement was true in every detail.

Fenchurch had become a background against which Crisp could see the movements of every person in the orbit of the murder.

“I think the library would be better, Mr. Querk,” said Crisp.

Normally Querk would have waited, bowing in the doorway for Crisp to precede him. Instead, he walked abstractedly into the library and sat in an upright chair at the table, facing the wall safe and the empty swivel chair.

Crisp shut the door, then locked it noisily.

“Would you like me to begin, Mr. Querk?”

“If you please!” Querk inclined his head in a bow. “I am so glad you locked the door. Perhaps it would even be wise to shut the window.”

Crisp went to the window. While he was shutting it, his eye strayed over the border of lawn to the yew trees. He stared with a sense of shock. At the intersection, under the green octopus and the preposterous fowl, Mrs. Cornboise was sitting, as she had been sitting when he and Benscombe had first seen her through the adjacent window of the morning-room. It was as if she had never moved. But now she was not knitting, and the voluminous bag was missing. He knew it was his own fancy that gave her the appearance of mocking him.

He strode from the window, dropped into the swivel chair, in which Watlington had sat. His confidence was at an ebb as he faced Querk. He rallied, decided that his best chance lay in surprise.

“When you removed the signet ring with Claudia's penknife, you cut the skin. Did you know that?”

“I did not know it. But now that you mention it, I am not wholly surprised. Throughout this very unhappy business I have had to combat a certain physical clumsiness. Let me see now! The absence of blood enables you to infer that the ring was moved after death.”

Querk had the air of a man lost in his own thoughts. Crisp waited. Presently the other looked up at him with a little start of surprise.

“Forgive me! I was wool gathering, I fear. Well now, as you are obviously inclined to discuss this in a friendly manner, you will not, my dear Chief Constable, find me lacking in responsiveness. Tell me what else you have discovered, and then we will see if we can jointly put two and two together.”

Crisp felt a grudging respect for the man who could sustain his technique when he knew he was in deadly peril. The sword might yet be caught in the net of platitudes.

“Your conversation with Watlington in which you persuaded him to approve of Claudia did not take place. You invented it on the supposition that Ralph Cornboise had taken the letters from the safe. You did not find out until too late that Watlington had given them to Fenchurch.”

“Correct!” said Querk encouragingly. “Pray continue.”

The frankness of the avowal disconcerted Crisp. He was lolling in the swivel chair. The handcuffs in his hip pocket hurt him and he sat upright.

“Before I go any further,” said Crisp. “I intend to guard myself against the accusation of tricking you into making admissions. You are well aware that on this conversation will depend whether a charge is made. I will therefore warn you well in advance that anything you say may be used in evidence.”

“My dear Colonel! Your intention is most friendly and, believe me, I appreciate it. But—come now!—what charge do you think you could possibly make? That of being accessory to the murder of my poor old friend?”

Crisp evaded the question.

“In dealing with persons like yourself, Cornboise, Fenchurch,” he said, “it would be absurd to adopt the procedure followed with the uneducated criminal. I am going to tell you what I know about your actions, and how I know it. As you are aware, I don't know everything, or I would have arrested you without talking about it.

“My starting point is the moment in which Watlington handed those letters to Fenchurch. That fact was unknown to the murderer and his associate, if any. Their ignorance of that fact vitally affects the logic of the murder. The murderer enters, strikes, and goes to the safe intending to destroy the letters. But the letters have already gone.

“Now, Ralph confessed to the murder. Whether he had an hallucination or not about the murder, he certainly had no hallucination about the letters. He was surprised when I handed him the sealed envelope containing the Will, because he detected that the letters were not inside. Further, in a conversation which we eavesdropped, he revealed that he was himself hopelessly puzzled as to what had become of the letters, fearing at that time that Claudia had taken them. So I was able to infer that Ralph was not the one who removed the seal from the dead man. If Ralph did not, I asked myself, who did?

“Now, removing that seal and re-sealing the Will had one purpose only—to convey to an innocent person, present in the library with Watlington after lunch, that Watlington had re-sealed the Will himself after destroying the letters.

“Claudia did not remove the seal. It would have been a senseless action on her part, because Watlington had already given her his blessing. That meant that only you could have removed the seal. From which it is a safe inference that you are either the murderer or an accessory of the murderer.”

“Not the murderer, my dear Colonel! Are you not forgetting the wig? That surely was the device of an accessory, not a principal!”

Crisp was momentarily immobilised. He was groping for the technique concealed in this apparently foolish tactic of making unnecessary admissions.

“The wig must have given you the clue to much that originally mystified you,” continued Querk, his tone suggesting that he was encouraging a promising youngster. “Now,
I
will tell you what I actually did and
you
shall tell me how near you came to solving the puzzle without my help! Well, when I reached the library, I saw Lord Watlington crumpled up in his chair, the sides of his wig protruding from behind his ears, like—like a bat's wings. I mustn't pass off that very expressive phrase as my own. I am plagiarising Miss Lofting. Ralph, in one of his semi-delirious moods had, by lifting her hair behind her ears, shown exactly how the wig appeared. The outline was very vividly impressed on the poor boy's memory and I confirm that his recollection is correct.