‘As a matter of fact, I suppose I have. I was fiddling about with my landlady’s television set most of the evening. You could check that if you wanted to. She and her husband were with me most of the time, and once I’d got home from school I didn’t go out any more until almost ten. I went down to the Lion then for a beer, and stayed until closing time.’
‘Before which the telephone call must have been made. That brings us to Mr Trench, then. What sort of man is he? I’ve met him in the staff-room, of course, but I haven’t gathered yet what he’s really like.’
‘And you won’t. He’s a bit of an homme incompris. Nobody knows much about him. He’s all right at his job, but his wife’s a chronic invalid and he seems to spend most of his time out of school in waiting upon the sick-bed. Trouble is, I gather, that he married above him, and hasn’t ever been able to live it down. I don’t think the wife is bitchy, but now she’s ill he feels he must try to make up to her for a disappointing sort of life. Odd bloke. Might be quite decent but for this rotten fixation.’
‘A man, in fact, who would be glad of a little extra dough?’
‘I should say so. Chickens and invalid diet and fairly exotic fruit and flowers, and a hefty library subscription, and taxi fares if she ventures out, can run into money, of course, and nothing’s too good for the lady – or so we gather. None of us has been permitted to meet her, by the way. Her blue blood, apart from her illness, has to be respected, and I imagine that our staff don’t measure up.’
‘Oh, I see!’ said Laura, enlightened. ‘Do you think he’s really an impartial witness?’ she asked Mrs Bradley next morning before Bannister had appeared downstairs for breakfast.
‘I think he’s sufficiently impartial for our purposes,’ Mrs Bradley replied, ‘but there is one point on which he is misinformed, I think.’
‘About Trench?’
‘About Mrs Trench… but we shall see! And, of course, he made a splendid Freudian slip of the tongue, did he not?’
As soon as breakfast was over Mrs Bradley sent Bannister and Laura out for a long walk and caused George to drive into Kindleford, where she herself picked up Mandsell, and, luring him from his new novel with the promise of luxurious food and the car to return him to the Deaks’ house immediately dinner was over, took him back with her to the Stone House at Wandles Parva.
‘There is only one thing I am going to ask you to do,’ she told him before they arrived. ‘I am entertaining a guest who might or might not be the individual you saw walking away from the telephone-box in Park Road.’
‘And you want to find out whether there’s any chance I can say yea or nay, I suppose? Well, there’s not much chance, I ought to tell you. You see, it was pretty gloomy, what with the evening and the rain and all that, and I only saw his back view, and not very close to, either. Still, I’ll do my best, of course. But if I’m not absolutely sure (and I don’t see how I can be) I’m not going to let the bloke in for trouble with the police.’
‘Fair enough, child, and I shall give you no prompting. I think myself that it is very unlikely that you will be able to commit yourself to any definite statement on the matter, but I feel compelled to try the experiment. Incidentally, this man is not suspected of having been Miss Faintley’s murderer. You need have no scruples about meeting him.’
‘I’m disappointed to hear that! I’ve never met a murderer except in wax, at Madame Tussaud’s, and I’d rather like to!’
They got back to the Stone House in plenty of time for lunch, and by the time the poverty-stricken young author had finished his meal and remembered that, on the same luxurious lines, there was dinner still to come, there was almost nothing he would not have done for his hostess. He eyed Bannister with cautious curiosity, and, as soon as opportunity offered (which was when Laura took Bannister off to look at Mrs Bradley’s pigs… her Oxfordshire nephew having insisted upon presenting her that year with a litter of Large Whites so that she need not eat ewe mutton unless she wanted to) he shook his head and said:
‘It’s all right. I’m absolutely positive. He’s far too tall. The fellow I saw was about my own height… certainly not more. Besides, this man’s got an entirely different walk. Even with his blazer collar turned up, as he’s got it now, and slouching along with his head forward and his hands in his pockets, he doesn’t look in the least like my bloke, who was walking with his coat collar up, too, because of the rain.’
‘You are positive?’
‘Positive. You see, my job makes me sort of register things, especially sensory impressions. Oh, no, this isn’t the telephone chap. It couldn’t possibly be. I’m certain enough to take my oath on it.’
‘Pass, Mr Bannister, and all’s well… so far,’ said Mrs Bradley to Laura, while the two men were having their after-dinner port before Mandsell was taken back to Kindleford.
‘So far?’ echoed Laura.
‘Yes. I am inclined to share his view that the activities of the Faintley gang are not political, and it certainly seems, from Mr Mandsell’s evidence, that it was not Mr Bannister who had agreed to take that call. All the same…’ she paused and meditated.
‘What was that crack of yours about a Freudian error?’ Laura inquired, at the end of a dutiful period of silence.
‘He called Mr Trench an homme incompris. But that is what he himself had to be during the war. He was known to the guardians at Lascaux, and the Germans undoubtedly knew of him. So much I think he made clear. When all this is over, we must ask him for the story of his adventures. They were probably fantastic.’
‘And a man like that settles down to teach elementary mathematics to kids,’ said Laura. ‘Not bad at it, either, let me tell you.’
‘And how good a teacher is Mr Trench?’
‘You’d better ask him,’ said Laura. ‘I don’t know the first thing about the woodwork and metal work centre,’
‘Mr Bannister must be our informant, then. I want to know as much about Mr Trench as he will tell you.’
‘Bannister?’
‘Mr Bannister in person. You had better warn him that anything he says may be taken down and used in evidence.’
‘You don’t want me, then. You want Vardon, I should say.’
‘Mr Bannister would not like to confide in Detective-Inspector Vardon. I suggest that he would like to confide in one of us, and, of the two of us, you would be the more likely to gain the truth from him.’
‘So that I can spill it to you?’
‘Mr Bannister will be more than agreeable to that course of procedure, dear child. He is anxious to confide in someone.’
‘All right, but I shall ask him first, you know, whether that’s really what he wants.’
‘To use your own fearsome idiom, I couldn’t agree more.’
‘Oh, you couldn’t?’ said Laura, uneasily. She was still inexperienced enough to share young Mark Street’s schoolboy instinct that when the grown-ups agreed with you you had better watch out. Laura had not quite outgrown her terror of the goblins. Demoniacal possession, she sensed (wrongly) to be the prerogative of the adult world. Mrs Bradley realized this, and cackled. Laura looked reproachful.
‘Look here,’ she said to Bannister, when they were together in the garden after Mandsell had gone home that night, ‘Mrs Croc. has her optics on you. What was all that about you and the caves at Lascaux? And the Gestapo, and so forth?’
‘Yes,’ replied Bannister absently. ‘I know what she meant. I was in the Resistance, of course. One of the lucky ones, on the whole. Parachuted in, and my mother was French, so I had the gab and knew the country. We used to hide blokes… our own and others. Not in Lascaux itself… it was too well known… but there are lots of caves in that part of France. We winkled chaps out of occupied France and sometimes out of Italy, and smuggled them away through… well, I’d better not tell you. It might be needed again, and the higher the fewer, so to speak.’