Penhallow (37 page)

Inspector Logan had heard a great deal about Penhallow’s tyranny, but from never having encountered him, nor experienced life at Trevellin under his rule he did not arrive at any real understanding of the circumstances which had driven Faith and Vivian to distraction. From all he was told, he formed a picture of a jovial old ruffian, of autocratic temperament, casual morals, quick rages, and apparently boundless generosity. The very fact that so many of his children lived under the parental roof seemed to him to show that Penhallow could not have oppressed them very badly. It even appeared that he condoned the wild exploits of their riotous youth, and had always been ready to rescue them from the consequences of their lawlessness. His despotism seemed, in fact, to have been a benevolent one; and although the Inspector could readily imagine that his rages and his excesses might make him at times an awkward man to deal with, he could not perceive that there had been anything in his behaviour to drive even two such highly-strung women as Faith and Vivian to poison him.

His suspicions, then, pending the apprehension of Jimmy the Bastard, began to centre upon Raymond, and upon Loveday Trewithian, who, alone amongst the suspects, seemed to him to have had adequate motives for committing murder. The possibility that Bart might have had some hand in the affair he kept at the back of his mind, but did not consider very probable. He thought Bart’s grief at his father’s death was real enough, and hardly believed him to be the type of man who would murder anyone in cold blood, and by such means as poison. Loveday, on the other hand, had she decided to get rid of the only barrier to her marriage, might naturally have been expected to choose poison as her weapon, particularly since poison was ready to her hand. On the face of it, she seemed to be the most likely suspect, and might have absorbed all the Inspector’s attention had not Phineas Ottery paid a call on Penhallow on the day of his death, and had not Raymond denied having seen him upon that occasion.

It did not take the Inspector long to discover what had been the main cause of the quarrels which he knew had constantly cropped up between Raymond and his father. To one who was heir to the estate, Penhallow’s crazy extravagance must have been more than galling. Had Raymond not committed a violent assault upon his father on the very morning of the date of his death, the Inspector would have considered him the most obvious man to suspect of having poisoned Penhallow. But the two circumstances did not, in his experience, dovetail together. To start with, he thought, men who blatantly attempted to choke their victims did not resort to poison; to go on with, to poison a man having been prevented, earlier in the day from strangling him, would have been the act of a lunatic, and Raymond, so far from being a lunatic, bore all the appearance of being a level-headed man long past the age of youthful folly. It might be that the explanation given him of Phineas Ottery’s visit, and of Raymond’s denial of having seen him, was the true one. But every time the Inspector reached this point in his cogitations, his intuition stirred uneasily, and he could not rid himself of the feeling that there was something behind that episode which he had not so far discovered.

‘I’m not one to talk a lot of hot air about my instinct,’ he told Sergeant Plymstock, ‘but the further I go into this case, the more certain I am that there’s something being hidden from me that I can’t get hold of. What’s more, I’ve got a hunch it’s got something to do with Mr Ottery’s visit.’

‘Well, I don’t know, sir,’ said the Sergeant dubiously. ‘It don’t seem likely Mr Ottery could have had anything to do with the case, not on the evidence.’

‘What I’m telling you is that I haven’t got all the evidence. I wish I knew what it was that set Raymond Penhallow on to his father’s throat!’

‘They all seem to think it was the old trouble about the money Mr Penhallow got away with, don’t they, sir? That’s what he said himself.’

‘Oh, yes! He wouldn’t cash his father’s cheque, and all the rest of it! It might be true; I don’t say it wasn’t, but I do say I’m not satisfied.’

His conviction that a possibly vital clue was eluding him led him to interrogate still more closely the various members of the household, amongst them being Faith, who was, by that time, so obsessed by the fear that Clay, or Loveday, or one of her stepsons, or even Vivian, might be arrested for her crime, that she almost lost sight of her own danger, and consequently answered Logan’s questions in a manner far more calculated to allay any suspicions of her which he might have nourished than the most studied defence could have done. She perceived that the two persons whose activities most interested the Inspector were Raymond and Loveday, and she did her best to paint their characters in such colours as must convince him that neither would have so much as contemplated murdering Penhallow. She had never liked any of her stepchildren very much, but of them all Raymond and Bart had been the least inimical to her, Bart’s good nature having precluded his treating her with anything but careless kindness; and Raymond having generally refrained from criticising or condemning either her actions or her opinions. His attitude was largely one of indifference, but whereas the rest of the family more often than not behaved as though she did not exist, he had always accorded her a curt civility, and had more than once sternly checked attempts on the parts of Eugene, Conrad, and Aubrey to exercise their wits at her expense. Nor did he bully Clay; and while his habit of almost entirely ignoring his half-brother scarcely indicated any liking for him, Faith was grateful to him for not reducing Clay to that state of stammering nervousness which was usually the result of any intercourse with the rest of the family.

As soon as she realised that she had unwittingly placed Raymond in a position of considerable danger, Faith began insensibly to exaggerate these somewhat negative qualities, and to see in him the only one of her stepsons who had ever been kind to her, or had sympathised (tacitly, of course) with her misfortunes. She saw that he was looking more than ordinarily grim, and her conscience reproached her painfully. She had never meant to place him — nor indeed anyone else — in so dreadful a situation; she had thought that in hastening Penhallows end she would be bringing peace to his whole family. Instead of this, and by what she could not but believe to have been the mischance of Doctor Lifton’s indisposition, the consequences of her action were as appalling as they had been unforeseen. When she saw the frown in Raymond’s eyes, and knew that he was being harried by the Inspector; when she became aware of Ingram’s barely disguised hope; when she realised that Clara and Bart had loved Penhallow, and bitterly mourned him; and most of all when she saw the growing suspicion of one another in the faces of her stepsons, she regretted her mad deed as she had never thought it possible that she could. If she could have called Penhallow back to life, she would have done it. He had epitomised for her all that she most hated at Trevellin, but without him chaos, uneasy tension, and dissensions far more serious than the cheerful quarrels which had flared up under his auspices made the house gloomy as it had never been in his lifetime. She had loathed the noisy gatherings in his bedroom, but the silence that now reigned in the room seemed to her more unendurable than the noisiest gathering had been, and she could almost have wished to hear his loud, bullying voice accost her from the great bed.

She clung desperately to the hope that the police would not succeed in finding Jimmy the Bastard, that they would be forced through lack of evidence to abandon the case; for it seemed to her that if only the menace of their presence could be removed from Trevellin, some part at least of the horror now lurking in every corner of the old house would vanish. But on the third day the police found Jimmy the Bastard.

Chapter Twenty-one

Jimmy had been arrested in Bristol, whither he had made his way, with the intention of working his passage out to America. Upon reading the news Penhallow’s death in one of the cheaper newspapers, panic had not unnaturally seized him. He had abandoned his plan of signing on as one of a ship’s crew, and had made up his mind to stow away instead.

The paths down which this information travelled to Trevellin were varied and circuitous, but the Penhallows had heard several versions of it by the time they were formally told it by Inspector Logan, who came up to Trevellin to report to the head of the family that most of the stolen money had been discovered upon Jimmy’s person.

There were present at this brief interview not only Raymond, but Faith, and Charmian, and Ingram as well. Having already heard the news, none of them betrayed any emotion when the Inspector made his announcement. Faith, the only member of the family to go into mourning, sat by the window, looking like a ghost in her unrelieved black dress. One of her thin hands grasped the arm of her chair, the other fidgeted incessantly the folds of her skirt; her over-large eyes fixed themselves with an expression in them of painful anxiety on the face of whichever of the four other persons in the room happened to be speaking. Charmian straddled as usual in front of the empty hearth, a cigarette between her lips. Ingram, whose stiff leg had been troubling him, sat with it stretched out before him. Raymond, to whom the Inspector addressed himself, stood in the middle of the room, one hand in the pocket of his breeches, the other resting on the back of a Hepplewhite chair. He merely nodded when the Inspector reported the finding of the three hundred pounds in Jimmy’s possession. It was Charmian who at once took command of the situation. Removing the cigarette from between her lips, and flicking the ash on to the carpet, she said: ‘Yes, we’ve already heard various accounts of Jimmy’s arrest. Very nice work, Inspector. What I should like to know is whether it’s true that he told the men who took him in custody that he had a most important statement to make?’

Raymond stood like a graven image, his countenance impassive. The ground beneath his feet was cracking; he could see the whole structure of his life beginning to totter; and knew himself powerless to prevent it crashing to earth, and leaving him stripped of everything he had worked and lived for amongst the ruins. He could scarcely have moved, for he felt as though animation had been suspended in his body. He was aware with some dispassionate portion of his brain that Ingram was watching him covertly, but he lacked the volition to move and hardly cared if he should betray himself.

The Inspector looked annoyed. He said repressively that he did not know how such tales got about, to which Charmian replied that if that were so he was strangely ignorant of the peculiarities of English town and country life.

‘I have no information to give you on that subject miss,’ said the Inspector, taking refuge in officialdom.

‘Come, my good man, you needn’t be so damn, indiscreet!’ said Ingram impatiently. ‘We’ve already had it from more than one source that Jimmy said when he was arrested that he could tell the police something that would change the whole complexion of the case, or words to that effect.’

‘Indeed, sir? No doubt I shall have more information  on what the young man has to say for himself when I have seen him. My object in coming here today was merely to apprise you of the missing notes having been found.’ He glanced at Raymond. ‘The question of prosecution arises, sir. In the circumstances ‘

‘I shan’t proceed against him.’

The words, uttered in a heavy tone, at once roused a small storm of condemnation. The Inspector, finding that his measured explanation of the intricacies of the situation was rendered inaudible by Ingram’s and Charmian’s far more penetrating voices, relapsed into attentive silence, his keen gaze intent upon Raymond’s face.

‘The hell you won’t!’ Ingram exploded. ‘I suppose he’s to be allowed to get away with three hundred pounds with your blessing?’

‘Plus the hundred Father left him in his will!’ added Charmian. ‘If you’re thinking of the scandal, you needn’t. We’re chest-deep in scandal already. Of course, I don’t pretend that it will be pleasant to have Jimmy’s relationship to us blazoned all over the county, which I expect is what will happen, but-’

‘Good lord, Char, everyone knows it!’ exclaimed Ingram scornfully. ‘Who cares a damn for it, anyway? Father’s bastards fairly litter the place! It’s something new for you to be so nice all of a sudden, Ray! Why shouldn’t you prosecute the little beast? Developed a liking for him? Bit of a change, isn’t it? I was under the impression that you hated his guts!’

‘Of course, we’re assuming that the creature isn’t facing a charge of murder,’ said Charmian, her voice over-riding Ingram’s. ‘My view has always been that he had nothing to gain by murdering Father. As for what he said to the police who arrested him, I don’t know that I set much store by it. It sounds to me very much the sort of wild statement a badly frightened man might be expected to make. Naturally, it will have to be investigated—’

‘Thank you, miss,’ put in the Inspector, unable to control himself. ‘Is there any other suggestion you would like to make?’

Ingram interrupted, ignoring this piece of sarcasm.

‘You may not set any store by what he said, Char, but there are some of us who’d give a good deal to know just what Jimmy the Bastard knows that we don’t!’

Faith found her voice. ‘Ingram! Please!’

‘Yes, it’s all very well for you to object to a little plain speaking, Faith, but in your anxiety to shield everyone who might be suspected of having committed the crime, you’re rather losing sight of the fact that it’s Father who was murdered! I should have thought you’d be more anxious to bring the filthy swine who killed him to justice than to spend your time trying to hush it up! Damn it, he was your husband, little though you may have cared for him!’

‘Shut up! Leave Faith alone!’ said Charmian. ‘It’s in good expecting her to look at the thing in a rational light, you know perfectly well that she’s incapable of reasoned thought. I flatter myself I can look at the whole question dispassionately, and I’m bound to say that I’m not wholly out of sympathy with Faith. There is such a thing as loyalty, after all."

‘Yes!’ retorted Ingram. ‘And my loyalty was to Father, and it still is! I’m fed-up with all the hush-hush business going on in this house! I want Father’s murderer brought to book, and I don’t care who it is! An eye for an eye is my motto! When I think of the old man’s being done-in like that, my blood fairly boils!’

Raymond smiled contemptuously. ‘Why not say openly that you believe I murdered Father?’

‘If the cap fits!’ Ingram barked.

‘Don’t answer him, Raymond!’ Faith begged, crushing her handkerchief into a ball. ‘I know you didn’t — didn’t murder your father! Everyone who knows you realises that you wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing!’

‘That would come better if we hadn’t already had ample proof that Ray was perfectly capable of murdering him!’ Ingram said, with an ugly little laugh. ‘I’ve mentioned no names, but this I will say — I’d like to know just what it was that made you try to strangle the old man! And from all I’ve heard it seems to me that the one man who may be able to answer that question is Jimmy the Bastard!’

Faith rose from her chair, trembling so much that she was obliged to rest her hand on the back of it to steady herself. She was very white, but she managed to speak with a good deal of dignity, though in a husky, rather halting voice. ‘Ingram, you forget that I’m — that I’m still mistress here. I won’t have such things said. You’re jealous of Ray. You’ve always been jealous of him. Ever since it — since it happened, you’ve come here day after day making trouble, trying to put the blame on to Ray because you want to be Penhallow of Trevellin. But I won’t have it. Please go! You have no business here, and you — upset me very much.’

‘Well, I’m damned!’ said Charmian, in an astonished tone. ‘Talk about worms turning! Well played, Faith! You’re about right, too.’

Ingram, at first thunderstruck by this unexpected attack, recovered himself, and said: ‘Of course, if I’m not welcome in my own home ‘

‘You’re not,’ Raymond interrupted. ‘You’ve had your marching orders! Get out!’

Ingram rose, very red in the face. ‘By God, Ray—’

‘I’ll be getting along myself, sir,’ interposed the Inspector tactfully.

Raymond turned towards him. ‘As you please. In view of the fact that Jimmy at least shares with me the distinction of being suspected of murdering my father, I should be glad to hear from you as soon as you have seen him. I take it that you will be seeing him immediately?’

‘Yes, sir. I expect to see him today,’ replied the Inspector.

Raymond nodded, and moved across to the door, and opened it. The Inspector stood aside for Ingram to precede him out of the room, and after a moments hesitation Ingram shrugged, and limped out. Raymond  followed them both, and shut the door behind him.

Charmian stubbed out the end of her cigarette." I never knew you had it in you, Faith!’ she remarked. ‘ If you’ll allow me to say so, it’s a pity you didn’t assert yourself more long before this. There’s nothing to look scared about: Ingram is all bluster, and precious little bite. He won’t bear you any malice.’

‘It doesn’t matter to me what he does,’ Faith said clinging to the chair-back.

‘No, I suppose not. I take it you don’t mean to stay here, once we get things settled?’

‘Oh, no! I couldn’t! If only I could go now! I can’t bear any more. It’s driving me mad!’

‘It’s a great mistake to allow things to get on one nerves,’ said Charmian oracularly. ‘Personally, I try to look at the whole affair as dispassionately as possible.’

Faith’s face twisted. She said wildly: ‘Dispassionately! How can you talk like that? Haven’t you any feeling? Oh, no, no! You never had! You were always hard and cold! Oh, don’t talk to me! You wouldn’t understand! You’ve never understood anything!’

‘If you mean, my dear Faith, that I lack your faculty of persuading yourself into a state of exaggerated emotion, you are quite right,’ replied Charmian dryly.

Faith gave a sob, and made blindly for the door.

Meanwhile, Raymond, having seen his brother and the Inspector off the premises, had walked down the long corridor to his office at the end of it. There were several letters on his desk, and he sat down behind it, and rather mechanically read them, placing them when he had finished them in one of the trays in front of him. The matter in them was not of immediate importance. He reflected coldly that Ingram would no doubt deal with them at some later date. He opened one of the drawers in his desk, and began methodically to go through the contents, destroying one or two papers, slipping rubber-bands round some others, and writing neat slips describing their nature. In that moment when he had so clearly seen the framework of his life crumbling, he had quite suddenly realised what the end to all the mental torment he was undergoing must be. Before many hours had elapsed, the police would be in possession of the story of his birth, for he could not doubt that Jimmy had overheard his last quarrel with Penhallow. He did not suppose that the police would wantonly publish such a disclosure, but he perceived that it must appear to them as a sufficient motive for the murder of Penhallow, and that they would be obliged to follow it up strictly. Sooner or later the truth would become known, and he thought that since there would be nothing left then worth living for it would be better to die now, while he was still, in the world’s eyes, if not in his own, Penhallow of Trevellin. He was not in the least afraid of being convicted of murder, his father’s death seeming to him so secondary a matter that he scarcely wasted a thought upon it. But he knew that he could neither face the scandal that would attend upon the publication of his illegitimacy, nor endure to see Ingram stepping into his place. Ingram would triumph; some others might pity him, and the pity would be as hard to bear as the triumph. He was not imaginative, but he was able to visualise with terrible clarity all the humiliations that lay before him, if he should choose to live.