The Case of the Late Pig (2 page)

Meanwhile there was the sound of heavy breathing in the outer room and Lugg put his head round the door.

‘Cock,’ he said in a tone of diffident friendliness which showed that all was forgiven, ‘I’ve had a squint at the map. See where Tethering is? Two miles west of Kepesake. Going down?’

I suppose it was that which decided me. At Highwaters, in the parish of Kepesake, there lives Colonel Sir Leo Pursuivant, Chief Constable of the county and an extremely nice old boy. He has a daughter, Janet Pursuivant, whom I like still in spite of everything.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll drop in at Highwaters on our way back.’

Lugg was in complete agreement. They had a nice piece of home-cured last time he was there, he said.

We went down in state. Lugg wore his flattest bowler, which makes him look like a thug disguised as a plain-clothes man, and I was remarkably neat myself.

Tethering was hardly
en fête
. If you consider three square miles of osier swamp surrounding a ploughed hill on which five cottages, a largish house, and an ancient church crowd on each other’s toes in order to keep out of a river’s uncertain bed you have Tethering pretty accurately in your mind.

The churchyard is overgrown and pathetic and when we saw it in late winter it was a sodden mass of dead cow-parsley. It was difficult not to feel sorry for Pig. He always had grand ideas, I remember, but there was nothing of pomp in his obsequies.

We arrived late – it is eighty miles from Town – and I felt a trifle loutish as I pushed open the mouldering lich-gate and, followed by Lugg, stumbled over the ragged grass towards the little group by the grave.

The parson was old and I suspected that he had come on the bicycle I had seen outside the gate, for the skirts of his cassock were muddy.

The sexton was in corduroys and the bearers in dungarees.

The other members of the group I did not notice until afterwards. A funeral is an impressive business even among the marble angels and broken columns of civilization. Here, out of the world in the rain-soaked silence of a forgotten hillside, it was both grim and sad.

As we stood there in the light shower the letter I had received that morning faded out of my mind. Peters had been an ordinary unlovable sort of twirp, I supposed, and he was being buried in an ordinary unloved way. There was really nothing curious about it.

As the parson breathed the last words of the service, however, an odd thing happened. It startled me so much that I stepped back on Lugg and almost upset him.

Even at twelve and a half Pig had had several revolting personal habits and one of them was a particularly vicious way of clearing his throat. It was a sort of hoarse rasping noise in the larynx, followed by a subdued whoop and a puff. I cannot describe it any more clearly but it was a distinctive sort of row and one I never heard made by anyone else. I had completely forgotten it, but just as we were turning away from the yawning grave into which the coffin had been lowered I heard it distinctly after what must have been twenty years. I brought Pig back to my mind with a vividness which was unnerving and I gaped round at the rest of us with my scalp rising.

Apart from the bearers, the parson, the sexton, Lugg, and myself there were only four other people present and they all looked completely innocent.

There was a pleasant solid-looking person on my left and a girl in rather flashy black beyond him. She was more sulky than tearful and appeared to be alone. She caught my eye and smiled at me as I glanced at her and I looked on past her at the old man in the topper who stood in a conventional attitude of grief which was rather horrible because it was so unconvincing. I don’t know when I took such a dislike to a fellow. He had little grey curly moustaches which glittered in the rain.

My attention was distracted from him almost at once by the discovery that the fourth unaccountable was Gilbert Whippet. He had been standing at my elbow for ten minutes and I had not seen him, which was typical of him.

Whippet was my junior at Botolph’s Abbey and he followed me to the same school. I had not seen him for twelve or fourteen years, but, save that he had grown, of course, he was unchanged.

It is about as easy to describe Whippet as it is to describe water or a sound in the night. Vagueness is not so much his
characteristic
as his entity. I don’t know what he looks like, except that presumably he has a face, since it would be an omission that I should have been certain to observe. He had on some sort of grey-brown coat which merged with the dead cow-parsley and he looked at me with that vacancy which is yet recognition.

‘Whippet!’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’

He did not answer and unconsciously I raised my hand to clip him. He never did answer until he was clipped and the force of habit was too much for me. Fortunately I restrained myself in time, recollecting that the years which had elapsed between our meeting had presumably given him ordinary rights of citizenship. All the same I felt unreasonably angry with him and I spoke sharply.

‘Whippet, why did you come to Pig’s funeral?’ I said.

He blinked at me and I was aware of round pale grey eyes.

‘I – er – I was invited, I think,’ he said in the husky diffident voice I remembered so well and which conveyed that he was not at all sure what he was talking about. ‘I – I – had one this – this morning, don’t you know …’

He fumbled in his coat and produced a sheet of paper. Before I read it I knew what it was. Its fellow was in my pocket.

‘Odd,’ said Whippet, ‘about the mole, you know. Informal invitation. I – er – I came.’

His voice trailed away, as I knew it would, and he wandered off, not rudely but carelessly, as though there was nothing to keep him in place. He left the note in my hand by mistake, I was convinced.

I came out of the churchyard at the end of the straggling procession. As we emerged into the lane the stolid, pleasant-looking person I had noticed glanced at me with enquiry in his eyes and I went over to him. The question in my mind
was
not an easy one and I was feeling around for some fairly inoffensive way of putting it when he helped me out.

‘A sad business,’ he said. ‘Quite young. Did you know him well?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, looking like an idiot, while he stared at me, his eyes twinkling.

He was a big chap, just over forty, with a square capable face.

‘I mean,’ I said, ‘I was at school with an R. I. Peters and when I saw
The Times
this morning I realized I was coming down this way and I thought I might look in, don’t you know.’

He remained smiling kindly at me as if he thought I was mental and I floundered on.

‘When I got here I felt I couldn’t have come to the right – I mean I felt it must be some other Peters,’ I said.

‘He was a big heavy man,’ he observed thoughtfully. Deep-set eyes, too fat, light lashes, thirty-seven years old, went to a prep. school at Sheepsgate and then on to Totham.’

I was shocked. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s the man I knew.’

He nodded gloomily. ‘A sad business,’ he repeated. ‘He came to me after an appendix operation. Shouldn’t have had it: heart wouldn’t stand it. Picked up a touch of pneumonia on the way down and –’ he shrugged his shoulders, ‘– couldn’t save him, poor chap. None of his people here.’

I was silent. There was very little to say.

‘That’s my place,’ he remarked suddenly, nodding towards the one big house. ‘I take a few convalescents. Never had a death there before. I’m in practice here.’

I could sympathize with him and I did. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him if Peters had let him in for a spot of cash. He had not hinted it but I guessed there was some such matter in his thoughts. However, I refrained; there seemed no point in it.

We stood there chatting aimlessly for some moments, as one does on these occasions, and then I went back to Town. I did not call in at Highwaters after all, much to Lugg’s disgust. It was not that I did not want to see Leo or Janet, but I was inexplicably rattled by Pig’s funeral and by the discovery that it actually was Pig’s. It had been a melancholy little ceremony which had left a sort of ‘half heard’ echo in my ears.

The two letters were identical. I compared them when I got in. I supposed Whippet had seen
The Times
as I had. Still it was queer he should have put two and two together. And there had been that extraordinary cough and the revolting old fellow in the topper, not to mention the sly-eyed girl.

The worst thing about it was that the incident had recalled Pig to my mind. I turned up some old football groups and had a good look at him. He had a distinctive face. One could see even then what he was going to turn into.

I tried to put him out of my head. After all, I had nothing to get excited about. He was dead. I shouldn’t see him again.

All this happened in January. By June I had forgotten the fellow. I had just come in from a session with Stanislaus Oates at the Yard, where we had been congratulating each other over the evidence in the Kingford shooting business which had just flowered into a choice bloom for the Judge’s bouquet, when Janet rang up.

I had never known her hysterical before and it surprised me a little to hear her twittering away on the phone like a nest of sparrows.

‘It’s too filthy,’ she said. ‘Leo says you’re to come at once. No, my dear, I can’t say it over the phone, but Leo is afraid it’s – Listen, Albert, it’s M for mother, U for unicorn, R for rabbit, D for darling, E for – for egg, R for –’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll come.’

Leo was standing on the steps of Highwaters when Lugg and I drove up. The great white pillars of the house, which was built by an architect who had seen the B.M. and never forgotten it, rose up behind him. He looked magnificent in his ancient shootin’ suit and green tweed flowerpot hat – a fine specimen for anybody’s album.

He came steadily down the steps and grasped my hand.

‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘not a word … not a word.’ He climbed in beside me and waved a hand towards the village. ‘Police station,’ he said. ‘First thing.’

I’ve known Leo for some years and I know that the singleness of purpose which is the chief characteristic in a delightful personality is not to be diverted by anything less than a covey of Mad Mullahs. Leo had one thing in his mind and one thing only. He had been planning his campaign ever since he had heard that I was on my way, and, since I was part of that campaign, my only hope was to comply.

He would not open his mouth save to utter road directions until we stood together on the threshold of the shed behind the police station. First he dismissed the excited bobbies in charge and then paused and took me firmly by the lapel.

‘Now, my boy,’ he said, ‘I want your opinion because I trust you. I haven’t put a thought in your mind, I haven’t told you a particle of the circumstances, I haven’t influenced you in any way, have I?’

‘No, sir,’ I said truthfully.

He seemed satisfied, I thought, because he grunted.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, come in here.’

He led me into a room, bare save for the trestle table in the centre, and drew back the sheet from the face of the thing that lay upon it.

‘Now,’ he said triumphantly, ‘now, Campion, what d’you think of this?’

I said nothing at all. Lying on the table was the body of Pig Peters, Pig Peters unmistakable as Leo himself, and I knew without touching his limp, podgy hand that he could not have been dead more than twelve hours at the outside.

Yet in January … and this was June.

CHAPTER 2

Decent Murder

NOT UNNATURALLY THE
whole thing was something of a shock to me and I suppose I stood staring at the corpse as though it were a beautiful view for some considerable time.

At last Leo grunted and cleared his throat.

‘Dead, of course,’ he said, no doubt to recall my attention. ‘Poor feller. Damnable cad, though. Ought not to say it of a dead man, perhaps, but there you are. Truth must out.’

Leo really talks like this. I have often thought that his conversation, taken down verbatim, might be worth looking at. Just then I was more concerned with the matter than the form, however, and I said, ‘You knew him, then?’

Leo grew red round the jawbone and his white moustache pricked up.

‘I’d met the feller,’ he murmured, conveying that he thought it a shameful admission. ‘Had a most unpleasant interview with him only last night, I don’t mind telling you. Extremely awkward in the circumstances. Still, can’t be helped. There it is.’

Since there was a considerable spot of mystery in the business already I saw no point in overburdening Leo’s mind by adding my little contribution to it just then.

‘What was he calling himself?’ I inquired with considerable guile.

Leo had very bright blue eyes which, like most soldiers’, are of an almost startling innocence of expression.

‘Masqueradin’, eh?’ he said. ‘Upon my soul, very likely! Never thought of it. Untrustworthy customer.’

‘I don’t know anything,’ I said hastily. ‘Who is he, anyway?’

‘Harris,’ he said unexpectedly and with contempt. ‘Oswald Harris. More money than was good for him and the manners of an enemy non-commissioned officer. Can’t put it too strongly. Terrible feller.’

I looked at the dead man again. Of course it was Pig all right: I should have known him anywhere – and it struck me then as odd that the boy should really be so very much the father of the man. It’s a serious thought when you look at some children.

Still, there was Pig and he was dead again, five months after his funeral, and Leo was growing impatient.

‘See the wound?’ he demanded.

He has a gift for the obvious. The top of the carrotty head was stove in, sickeningly, like a broken soccer ball, and the fact that the skin was practically unbroken made it somehow even more distressing. It was such a terrific smash that it seemed incredible that any human arm could have delivered the blow. It looked to me as if he had been kicked through a felt hat by a cart-horse and I said so to Leo.

He was gratified.