The Complete Tommy & Tuppence Collection (114 page)

“You deserve a medal—Especially for this doll business. How you get on to these things, I don't know!”

“She's the perfect terrier,” said Tommy. “Puts her nose down on the trail and off she goes.”

“You're not keeping me out of this party tonight,” said Tuppence suspiciously.

“Certainly not. A certain amount of things, you know, have been cleared up. I can't tell you how grateful I am to you two. We were getting
somewhere,
mind you, with this remarkably clever association of criminals who have been responsible for a stupendous amount of robberies over the last five or six years. As I told Tommy when he came to ask me if I knew anything about our clever legal gentleman, Mr. Eccles, we've had our suspicions of him for a long time but he's not the man you'll easily get evidence against. Too careful by far. He practises as a solicitor—an ordinary genuine business with perfectly genuine clients.

“As I told Tommy, one of the important points has been this chain of houses. Genuine respectable houses with quite genuine respectable people living in them, living there for a short time—then leaving.

“Now, thanks to you, Mrs. Tommy, and your investigation of chimneys and dead birds, we've found quite certainly one of those houses. The house where a particular amount of the spoil was concealed. It's been quite a clever system, you know, getting jewels or various things of that kind changed into packets of rough diamonds, hiding them, and then when the time comes they are flown abroad, or taken abroad in fishing boats, when all the hue and cry about one particular robbery has died down.”

“What about the Perrys? Are they—I hope they're not—mixed up in it?”

“One can't be sure,” said Mr. Smith. “No, one can't be sure. It seems likely to me that Mrs. Perry, at least, knows something, or certainly knew something once.”

“Do you mean she really is one of the criminals?”

“It mightn't be that. It might be, you know, that they had a hold on her.”

“What sort of hold?”

“Well, you'll keep this confidential, I know you can hold your tongue in these things, but the local police have always had the idea that the husband, Amos Perry, might just possibly have been the man who was responsible for a wave of child murders a good many years ago. He is not fully competent mentally. The medical opinion was that he
might
quite easily have had a compulsion to do away with children. There was never any direct evidence, but his wife was perhaps overanxious to provide him always with adequate alibis. If so, you see, that might give a gang of unscrupulous people a hold on her and they may have put her in as tenant of part of a house where they knew she'd keep her mouth shut. They may really have had some form of damaging evidence against her husband. You met them—what do you feel about them both, Mrs. Tommy?”

“I liked
her,
” said Tuppence. “I think she was—well, as I say I summed her up as a friendly witch, given to white magic but not black.”

“What about him?”

“I was frightened of him,” said Tuppence. “Not all the time. Just once or twice. He seemed suddenly to go big and terrifying. Just for a minute or two. I couldn't think what I was frightened of, but I was frightened. I suppose, as you say, I felt that he wasn't quite right in his head.”

“A lot of people are like that,” said Mr. Smith. “And very often they're not dangerous at all. But you can't tell, and you can't be sure.”

“What are we going to do at the vicarage tonight?”

“Ask some questions. See a few people. Find out things that may give us a little more of the information we need.”

“Will Major Waters be there? The man who wrote to the vicar about his child?”

“There doesn't seem to be any such person! There was a coffin buried where the old gravestone had been removed—a child's coffin, lead lined—And it was full of loot. Jewels and gold objects from a burglary near St. Albans. The letter to the vicar was with the object of finding out what had happened to the grave. The local lads' sabotage had messed things up.”

III

“I am so deeply sorry, my dear,” said the vicar, coming to meet Tuppence with both hands outstretched. “Yes, indeed, my dear, I have been so terribly upset that this should happen to you when you have been so kind. When you were doing this to help me. I really felt—yes, indeed I have, that it was all my fault. I shouldn't have let you go poking among gravestones, though really we had no reason to believe—no reason at all—that some band of young hooligans—”

“Now don't disturb yourself, Vicar,” said Miss Bligh, suddenly appearing at his elbow. “Mrs. Beresford knows, I'm sure, that it was nothing to do with
you.
It was indeed extremely kind of her to offer to help, but it's all over now, and she's quite well again. Aren't you, Mrs. Beresford?”

“Certainly,” said Tuppence, faintly annoyed, however, that Miss Bligh should answer for her health so confidently.

“Come and sit down here and have a cushion behind your back,” said Miss Bligh.

“I don't need a cushion,” said Tuppence, refusing to accept the chair that Miss Bligh was officiously pulling forward. Instead, she sat down in an upright and exceedingly uncomfortable chair on the other side of the fireplace.

There was a sharp rap on the front door and everyone in the room jumped. Miss Bligh hurried out.

“Don't worry, Vicar,” she said. “I'll go.”

“Please, if you will be so kind.”

There were low voices outside in the hall, then Miss Bligh came back shepherding a big woman in a brocade shift, and behind her a very tall thin man, a man of cadaverous appearance. Tuppence stared at him. A black cloak was round his shoulders, and his thin gaunt face was like the face from another century. He might have come, Tuppence thought, straight out of an El Greco canvas.

“I'm very pleased to see you,” said the vicar, and turned. “May I introduce Sir Philip Starke, Mr. and Mrs. Beresford. Mr. Ivor Smith. Ah! Mrs. Boscowan. I've not seen you for many, many years—Mr. and Mrs. Beresford.”

“I've met Mr. Beresford,” said Mrs. Boscowan. She looked at Tuppence. “How do you do,” she said. “I'm glad to meet you. I heard you'd had an accident.”

“Yes. I'm all right again now.”

The introductions completed, Tuppence sat back in her chair. Tiredness swept over her as it seemed to do rather more frequently than formerly, which she said to herself was possibly a result of concussion. Sitting quietly, her eyes half closed, she was nevertheless scrutinizing everyone in the room with close attention. She was not listening to the conversation, she was only looking. She had a feeling that a few of the characters in the drama—the drama in which she had unwittingly involved herself—were assembled here as they might be in a dramatic scene. Things were drawing together, forming themselves into a compact nucleus. With the coming of Sir Philip Starke and Mrs. Boscowan it was as though two hitherto unrevealed characters were suddenly presenting themselves. They had been there all along, as it were, outside the circle, but now they had come inside. They were somehow concerned, implicated. They had come here this evening—why, she wondered? Had someone summoned them? Ivor Smith? Had he commanded their presence, or only gently demanded it? Or were they perhaps as strange to him as they were to her? She thought to herself: “It all began in Sunny Ridge, but Sunny Ridge isn't the real heart of the matter. That was, had always been, here, in Sutton Chancellor. Things had happened here. Not very lately, almost certainly not lately. Long ago. Things which had nothing to do with Mrs. Lancaster—but Mrs. Lancaster had become unknowingly involved. So where was Mrs. Lancaster now?”

A little cold shiver passed over Tuppence.

“I think,” thought Tuppence, “I think perhaps she's
dead
. . . .”

If so, Tuppence felt, she herself had failed. She had set out on her quest worried about Mrs. Lancaster, feeling that Mrs. Lancaster was threatened with some danger and she had resolved to find Mrs. Lancaster, protect her.

“And if she isn't dead,” thought Tuppence, “I'll still do it!”

Sutton Chancellor . . . That was where the beginning of something meaningful and dangerous had happened. The house with the canal was part of it. Perhaps it was the centre of it all, or was it Sutton Chancellor itself? A place where people had lived, had come to, had left, had run away, had vanished, had disappeared and reappeared. Like Sir Philip Starke.

Without turning her head Tuppence's eyes went to Sir Philip Starke. She knew nothing about him except what Mrs. Copleigh had poured out in the course of her monologue on the general inhabitants. A quiet man, a learned man, a botanist, an industrialist, or at least one who owned a big stake in industry. Therefore a rich man—and a man who loved children. There she was, back at it. Children again. The house by the canal and the bird in the chimney, and out of the chimney had fallen a child's doll, shoved up there by someone. A child's doll that held within its skin a handful of diamonds—the proceeds of crime. This was one of the headquarters of a big criminal undertaking. But there had been crimes more sinister than robberies. Mrs. Copleigh had said “I always fancied myself as
he
might have done it.”

Sir Philip Starke. A murderer? Behind her half-closed eyelids, Tuppence studied him with the knowledge clearly in her mind that she was studying him to find out if he fitted in any way with her conception of a murderer—and a child murderer at that.

How old was he, she wondered. Seventy at least, perhaps older. A worn ascetic face. Yes, definitely ascetic. Very definitely a tortured face. Those large dark eyes. El Greco eyes. The emaciated body.

He had come here this evening, why, she wondered? Her eyes went on to Miss Bligh. Sitting a little restlessly in her chair, occasionally moving to push a table nearer someone, to offer a cushion, to move the position of the cigarette box or matches. Restless, ill at ease. She was looking at Philip Starke. Every time she relaxed, her eyes went to him.

“Doglike devotion,” thought Tuppence. “I think she must have been in love with him once. I think in a way perhaps she still is. You don't stop being in love with anyone because you get old. People like Derek and Deborah think you do. They can't imagine anyone who isn't young being in love. But I think she—I think she is still in love with him, hopelessly, devotedly in love. Didn't someone say—was it Mrs. Copleigh or the vicar who had said, that Miss Bligh had been his secretary as a young woman, that she still looked after his affairs here?

“Well,” thought Tuppence, “it's natural enough. Secretaries often fall in love with their bosses. So say Gertrude Bligh had loved Philip Starke. Was that a useful fact at all? Had Miss Bligh known or suspected that behind Philip Starke's calm ascetic personality there ran a horrifying thread of madness?
So fond of children always.
”

“Too fond of children, I thought,” Mrs. Copleigh had said.

Things did take you like that. Perhaps that was a reason for his looking so tortured.

“Unless one is a pathologist or a psychiatrist or something, one doesn't know anything about mad murderers,” thought Tuppence. “
Why
do they want to kill children? What gives them that urge? Are they sorry about it afterwards? Are they disgusted, are they desperately unhappy, are they terrified?”

At that moment she noticed that his gaze had fallen on her. His eyes met hers and seemed to leave some message.

“You are thinking about me,” those eyes said. “Yes, it's true what you are thinking. I am a haunted man.”

Yes, that described him exactly—He was a haunted man.

She wrenched her eyes away. Her gaze went to the vicar. She liked the vicar. He was a dear. Did he know anything? He might, Tuppence thought, or he might be living in the middle of some evil tangle that he never even suspected. Things happened all round him, perhaps, but he wouldn't know about them, because he had that rather disturbing quality of innocence.

Mrs. Boscowan? But Mrs. Boscowan was difficult to know anything about. A middle-aged woman, a personality, as Tommy had said, but that didn't express enough. As though Tuppence had summoned her, Mrs. Boscowan rose suddenly to her feet.

“Do you mind if I go upstairs and have a wash?” she said.

“Oh! of course.” Miss Bligh jumped to her feet. “I'll take you up, shall I, Vicar?”

“I know my way perfectly,” said Mrs. Boscowan. “Don't bother—Mrs. Beresford?”

Tuppence jumped slightly.

“I'll show you,” said Mrs. Boscowan, “where things are. Come with me.”

Tuppence got up as obediently as a child. She did not describe it so to herself. But she knew that she had been summoned and when Mrs. Boscowan summoned, you obeyed.

By then Mrs. Boscowan was through the door to the hall and Tuppence had followed her. Mrs. Boscowan started up the stairs—Tuppence came up behind her.

“The spare room is at the top of the stairs,” said Mrs. Boscowan. “It's always kept ready. It has a bathroom leading out of it.”

She opened the door at the top of the stairs, went through, switched on the light and Tuppence followed her in.

“I'm very glad to have found you here,” said Mrs. Boscowan. “I hoped I should. I was worried about you. Did your husband tell you?”

“I gathered you'd said something,” said Tuppence.

“Yes, I was worried.” She closed the door behind them, shutting them, as it were, into a private place of private consultation. “Have you felt at all,” said Emma Boscowan, “that Sutton Chancellor is a dangerous place?”

“It's been dangerous for me,” said Tuppence.

“Yes, I know. It's lucky it wasn't worse, but then—yes, I think I can understand that.”

“You know something,” said Tuppence. “You know something about all this, don't you?”