Murder of a Snob (3 page)

“Smashing the brain?”

“Piercing the brain. That would account for the distortions of the body you noticed. The wig was, as far as I could see, undamaged.”

“How many blows?”

“By the appearance of the plate, only one.”

“Heavy blow required?” asked Crisp.

“N-no. I'm no metallurgist, but I should say an eight or ten pound blow would do it. A child of ten could certainly exert enough pressure to smash that plate—using a blunt instrument, of course.”

“A ten-pound wallop! Wouldn't that have damaged the wig?”

“It would indeed. All the same, he was not wearing the wig when he was struck. It's very unlikely that he himself had previously removed it—trepanned patients are always cautioned never to leave the head uncovered.”

“Then the murderer removed the wig, delivered his blow, then replaced the wig?” asked Crisp.

“I don't see how it could have been done otherwise,” answered Tredgold. “Anyhow, I can positively assure you that the blow was not struck through the wig.”

While Crisp pondered the doctor's statement, young Benscombe cut in:

“Could he possibly have done it himself, doctor?”

“Hardly!” The doctor smiled. “Anyhow, he couldn't have replaced the wig, because he'd have been dead.”

“How long has he been dead?” asked Crisp.

“About a couple of hours. I can't get nearer than that. Call it between five and five thirty.”

“Can you give us a lead as to the weapon?”

“I'm afraid not. The condition of the plate might help you there. It might have been any object in the room weighing a pound or two—or a fair-sized spanner carried in the pocket. If you don't want me any more at the moment, I'll go and get everything ready for conveyance to the mortuary. Awkward that all this should happen on a Saturday evening!”

“Thanks, doctor,” said Crisp after a short silence. “You might have that plate ready for us as soon as possible You've given us plenty to start on.”

When the doctor had gone, Crisp asked Benscombe:

“Who was it who spoke to you on the phone?”

“I don't know, sir. As I told you at the time, he cut off.”

“It was a man's voice, then?”

“I remember
supposing
it was a man.” Benscombe stared down at his feet while his face flushed. “But now—I can't swear it wasn't a woman with a lowish voice—or a man with a softish voice.”

As Crisp scowled, Benscombe added:

“I'm very sorry, sir. At the police college we had that very test, and no one ever got one hundred per cent.”

Crisp turned his back, looked out of the window.

“Come here a minute, Benscombe.”

Benscombe exclaimed as he stared at a grouping of three grotesque shapes, clipped out of the yew trees. A vaguely heraldic figure that might have been a two-headed serpent menaced a huge, impossible fowl, which was curtseying to a green octopus. The trees stood at an intersection of the avenues of yew hedges. Under the two-headed serpent, some fifty yards from the window, was a stout woman, unfashionably dressed and apparently elderly. She was sitting on a rustic bench, knitting.

“Shall I go and quizz her?”

“No. Keep an eye on her while I see what they're doing next door.”

In the library, the doctor was bending over the corpse, as if continuing his examination. The upper part was already covered. The photographers had completed their preliminary work and were waiting for the finger-print man.

“We've got a lot, sir,” said the latter. “All over the writing table, two or three on the window, and two on the sash outside.”

“Just a minute, Colonel!” The doctor seemed to have increased in stature. “I suggest that you try this signet ring for prints.” He paused to rivet Crisp's attention. “It was removed after death and replaced. I missed that point the first time.”

“
After
death? You're sure of that?”

“I oughtn't to say I'm sure, but I am. The ring is a very tight fit. He would probably have needed soap to coax it off himself. Soap was not used. A small knife was used—as a shoe-horn is used—possibly that little pearly knife on the table. The flesh is perceptibly cut in two places, but the incisions have not bled.”

The powder was applied, but with negative result. The ring had been wiped clean.

The table had been dealt with for finger prints. Across the blotting pad opposite the swivelled chair, covered with a maze of notes in pencil, was a sheet, torn from a writing pad, all four sides of which were dotted with embossments of a crest—a two-headed serpent.

“Have the notes on that blotting pad typed out,” ordered Crisp.

Laid on an oilskin cloth and ticketted were the contents of the deceased's pockets. A gold cigar case, a slim wallet containing notes, a toothpick, several pencils, a bunch of keys, a gold watch and chain, with a key on the end of the chain.

Crisp glanced from the key to the wall safe, then picked up watch and chain and applied the key to the safe, hoping to find a significant document.

He at once found what he sought—indeed, the safe contained nothing but a long envelope with a printed address to a firm of solicitors. He picked it up, found that it had been lying on a similar envelope, empty, with the same printed address. On the back of the topmost envelope was a liberal blob of red sealing wax.

Crisp took the sealed envelope by the edges.

“Try this for a finger print.”

This time the powder gave a clear result. The prints were immediately photographed.

Next, Crisp examined the sealing wax on the envelope. Imprinted was the crest of the two-headed serpent. To make sure, he dropped wax on a writing pad and applied the signet ring. The imprints were identical.

He ran his fingers the length of the envelope. It certainly was very slim—if indeed it was a significant document.

It seemed to contain a single folded sheet.

Inspector Sanson, who was superintending measurements, approached Crisp.

“We've taken the prints of Harridge's waiters and of the three resident servants,” he reported. “There's a lady and two gentlemen staying in the house—”

“Take those, too,” ordered Crisp, and added: “As soon as your log is ready bring it to me in the little room behind this.”

Crisp strode on to the terrace. Benscombe was at the west end.

“The old girl is still knitting,” he reported. “I think she's watching points, sir. That bench is at the crossing of four avenues. She doesn't catch the eye herself, but she can see this terrace and the side of the house. By the way the hedges run, she could probably see anyone coming to the house from the garden.”

“Right! I'll tackle her myself.”

As he crossed the strip of lawn and entered the nearest avenue, the woman placed her knitting in a large canvas handbag. Crisp noted that she was probably about sixty, that her dress, though dowdy, was by no means shoddy. She was a big woman and even stouter than she had appeared to be when seen from the window of the morning-room. Yet her face was thin and boney, her skin excessively wrinkled, so that her large, well-shaped eyes created the eerie effect of having been filched from a younger woman.

“Good evening,” she said in the tone of one who has been kept waiting. She shifted her position on the bench, to make room for him.

Crisp echoed her greeting and sat beside her. Unexpectedly, she opened the canvas bag and took out the knitting she had just put away.

“D'you mind telling me,” he asked, “what you are doing here?”

“I guessed you'd want to know. That's why I waited until you came.”

Her words were well formed, but the intonation was unmistakably Cockney. Her voice might once have been a pleasing contralto, but with the years it had dropped almost to tenor. “I told myself it doesn't matter talking to the police because they don't tell the newspapers anything they don't have to. And it wouldn't be fair to him—” she nodded in the direction of the house “——to put me in the papers. And fair's fair, whatever a man has done!”

“Quite so!” agreed Crisp. In her conversational stance he recognised the recluse. She was not talking directly to him. She was talking to herself and allowing him to listen. “Will you begin with your name, please?”

“I had better begin with my name.” Crisp observed that even his question registered as her own thought. “I'm a married woman. Agnes Julia Cornboise.” She added her address.

“Cornboise,” repeated Crisp. “Are you related to that young man staying in the house?”

“So that's his name is it!” The old lady seemed deeply impressed. “Well, I never! He must be that nephew of his he's told me so much about. Then, of course, I'm his aunt by marriage, though there's no need for him to know that.” Again she nodded at the house. “I'm his wife, though we're separated these thirty years or more.”

“D'you mean that you're Lord Watlington's wife—that you're Lady Watlington?” For a moment, Crisp suspected her mental balance.

“Oh, I don't take any notice of all that! And it certainly wasn't why I came and sat in his garden.” She was amused. “Me setting up as a ladyship at my time o' life and living in Kilburn—I'd never hear the last of it!” She became abstracted. Crisp gave her time. “Did I say thirty years? It's thirty-two years, come next October, since we parted, because he wanted to. He never told me why, though I guessed. It wasn't another woman. Though it's wrong to say so, I wish it had been, because he'd have got tired of anybody but me. He never did get tired of me. Why in thirty years, I've got more than twenty big bundles of his letters—the nice ones, I mean: I didn't keep the other sort.

“Nice letters,” she repeated. “You'd think we'd gone on living together and only parted a week or two before they were written. I suppose I ought to have known better at the time than to marry him. But there it is! What's done can't be undone. At least, it oughtn't to be, when it's marriage.”

She showed signs of drying up. She began to knit, somewhat clumsily. Crisp had already winnowed two small points and wanted more.

“And you wrote nice letters back to him?” he prompted.

“I never wrote to him at all. Only picture post-cards, saying I'd got the letters. He'd write when the mood was on him, sometimes three letters in a week and sometimes none for a couple of months. Used to write about me as if I was still a young woman.”

“That's very unusual,” said Crisp. “Why did he desert you?”

“
Who
said he deserted me!” She was indignant. “If I said anything to make you think that, I did wrong. Fair's fair, whatever I've suffered. He always sent me the money he said he would. And lots of extra, sometimes. But the extra was because he wanted to bribe me into going against my principles and have a divorce. Those were the letters I didn't keep. And now you've made me forget what I was saying.”

“You were telling me why you are here in this garden, said Crisp. His eye was caught by the van from the mortuary, which was drawing up at the front door. He added: “We—er—began with your marriage some thirty years ago.”

“That's right!” she applauded. “In Jo'burg, as they call it, meaning Johannesburg. In South Africa, y'know.” She mentioned a politician who was once well known in Empire politics. “He had a delicate stomach—died of it in the end—and when he had to go to Africa for the Government he took his cook with him. The cook was me.

“Samuel was just finishing being a miner then. I don't remember what he was at the time. In the fifteen months we lived together he must have had half a dozen different kinds of job, but he always brought home good money. That was the ruin of him, if you ask me.”

She was looking towards the front door. Without change of tone, she went on: “They might have used some sort of makeshift coffin, just to take him away in.”

“Mrs. Cornboise! Who told you Lord Watlington was dead?”

“Nobody told me. Where did I get to?—oh yes!—when we were walking out, he told me he could see I was of good family—mind you, there's nothing wrong with my family—better than his, come to that—only it wasn't what
he
meant by a good family—and it came out that he thought I was a sort of paid companion, or something, to her ladyship. And I didn't let on I was only the cook. Maybe I did wrong, but I was in love with Sam and I was twenty-eight and hadn't had many chances, so though I didn't tell him a single untruth I let him think what he liked and we got married almost right away.” She looked wistfully at the mortuary van. “And now it's all ended like
that!
There you go, then, Sam! It seems hardly decent.”

She watched the van turn the bend in the drive, then resumed:

“We had a little boy, but he died almost before he was born. I believe that broke Sam's heart. Not that men are often fond of babies at that stage. But he said something about losing his heir—talking as if he was Henry VIII! It was to do with his talk about good families and the rest of it. It turned him against me. He said he still loved me and always would, but he wanted a divorce—which, of course, I wouldn't agree to. There wasn't any quarrel—he just sort of asked me to go.

“So back I came to England, all alone. I've been alone ever since, in a manner of speaking, and I've never really got used to it. I took to knitting about ten years ago—undervests for Sam, as he has to have wool next the skin. I must've sent him fifty or sixty. And he's never once mentioned them in his letters—not even to say ‘thank you.'

“What I was saying was, the money didn't really help at all, when you wanted company. When I heard he'd had to have the top of his head sliced off, I went to Johannesburg, thinking they might have cut out his senses and he'd need me to look after him. But he wouldn't even see me. And after I'd been back in London a couple of years, he wrote to say he was making a lot of money and he was sending a gentleman called Mr. Querk—I think I saw him this evening, over there with the others—he took me to an insurance office. Something was signed, which meant I was to have a nice little income all my life, whether Sam lived or died, or whatever happened to him, provided I didn't molest him.”