“Look here, Fox,” he said.
Fox restrapped the rucksack and came over. He placed his great palms on his knees and regarded the stamp.
“That was a good bit of speculative thinking on your part,” he said. “It looks to me as if that large box we found in his room could have contained this one and left the trace in the rubble, all right. Funny, you know, there it’s lain all these years. I suppose Captain Carter stowed it there that evening. Before he was killed.”
“And may well have used some of the cement in the bag that’s still rotting quietly away in the corner. And marked the place on the plan in which this poor scoundrel showed such an interest.”
“He wouldn’t have tried to sell it in England, surely?”
“We’ve got to remember it was his by right. Being what he was he might have settled for a devious approach to a fanatic millionaire collector somewhere abroad whose zeal would get the better of his integrity.”
“Funny,” Fox mused. “A bit of paper not much bigger than your thumbnail. Not very pretty and flawed at that. And could be worth as much as its own size in a diamond. I don’t get it.”
“Collector’s passion? Not I. But it comes high in the list as an incentive to crime.”
“Where’ll we put it?”
“Lock the box and give it to me. If I’m knocked on the head again take charge of it yourself. I can’t wait till I get it safely stowed at the Yard. In the meantime—”
“We go in for the kill?” said Fox.
“That’s it. Unless it comes in of its own accord.”
“Now?”
“When we’ve cleared up, here.” He turned to Bailey and Thompson. They had finished with what was left of Claude Carter and were folding the ground-sheet neatly round him and tying him up with rope. They threaded the two shovels inside the rope to make hand-holds.
And everything else being ready they struck the tent, folded it and laid it with its frame across the body. Bailey, Thompson, McGuiness and the Yard man stood on either side. “Looks a bit less like a corpse,” said Thompson.
“You’ll have to go down the steps this time,” Alleyn told them. “Mr. Fox and I will bring the rest of the gear and light the way.”
They took their torches from their pockets. Twilight had closed in now. The after-smell of rain and the pleasant reek of a wood fire hung on the air. Somewhere down in the village a door banged and then the only sound was of water dripping from branches. Sybil’s grave looked as if it had never been disturbed.
“Quiet,” said one of the men. “Isn’t it?”
“Shall we move off, then?” Fox asked.
He stooped to pick up his load and the other four men groped for their hand-holds under the tent.
“Right?” said Bailey.
But Alleyn had lifted a hand. “No,” he whispered. “Not yet. Keep still. Listen.”
Fox was beside him. “Where?”
“Straight ahead. In the trees.”
He turned his light on the thicket. A cluster of autumnal leaves sprang up and quivered. One after another the torch-beams joined his. This time all the men heard the hidden sound.
They spread out to the left and right of Alleyn and moved forward. The light on the thicket was intensified and details of foliage appeared in uncanny precision, as if they carried some significance and must never be forgotten. A twig snapped and the head of a sapling jerked.
“Bloody Daft Artie, by God!” said Sergeant McGuiness.
“Shall we go in?” asked Fox.
“No,” said Alleyn and then, loudly: “Show yourself. You can’t run away from it this time. Call it a day and come out.”
The leaves parted but the face that shone whitely between them, blinking in the torchlight, was not Daft Artie’s.
“This is it, Bruce,” said Alleyn. “Come out.”
iv
Bruce Gardener sat bolt upright at the table with his arms folded. He still bore the insecure persona of his chosen role: red-gold beard, fresh mouth, fine torso, loud voice, pawky turn of speech: the straightforward Scottish soldier-man with a heart of gold. At first sight the pallor, the bloodshot eyes and the great earthy hands clenched hard on the upper arms were not conspicuous. To Alleyn, sitting opposite him, to Fox, impassive in the background and to the constable with a notebook in the corner, however, these were unmistakable signs,
Alleyn said: “Shorn of all other matters: motive, opportunity and all the rest of it, what do you say about this one circumstance? Who but you could have dug Sybil Foster’s grave four feet deeper than was necessary, killed Carter, buried his body there, covered it, trampled it down and placed the evergreen flooring? On your own statement and that of other witnesses you were there, digging the grave all that afternoon and well into the night. Why were you so long about it?”
Alleyn waited. Gardener stared at the opposite wall. Once or twice his beard twitched and the red mouth moved as if he was about to speak. But nothing came of it.
“Well?” Alleyn said at last and Bruce gave a parody of clearing his throat. “Clay,” he said loudly.
The constable wrote: “Ans. Clay,” and waited.
“So you told me. But there was no sign of clay in that mound of earth. The spoil is loamy and easy to shift. So that’s no good,” Alleyn said. “Is it?”
“I’ll no’ answer any questions till I have my solicitor present.”
“He’s on his way. You might, however, like to consider this. On that night after the funeral when we had an acetylene lamp like yours up there by the grave, you, from your sister’s window, saw the light and it worried you. You told us so. And it wasn’t Daft Artie who lay in the cubbyhole in the hedge, it was you. It wasn’t Daft Artie who heaved half a brick at me, it was you. You were so shaken by the thought of us opening the grave that you lost your head, came down the hill, hid in the hedge, chucked the brick and then set up a phoney hunt for an Artie who wasn’t there. Right?”
“No comment.”
“You’ll have to find some sort of comment, sooner or later, won’t you? However, your solicitor will advise you. But suppose Artie was in bed with a cold that evening, how would you feel about that?”
“Ans. No comment,” wrote the constable.
“Well,” Alleyn said, “there’s no point in plugging away at it. The case against you hangs on this one point. If you didn’t kill and bury Claude Carter, who did? I shall put it to you again when your solicitor comes and he no doubt will advise you to keep quiet. In the meantime I must tell you that not one piece of information about your actions can be raised to contradict the contention that you killed Mrs. Foster; that Carter, a man with a record of blackmail, knew it and exercised his knowledge on you that you, having arranged with him to pay the blackmail if he came to the churchyard that night, had the grave ready, killed him with the shovel you used to dig the grave and buried him there. Two victims in one grave. Is there still no comment?”
In the silence that followed, Alleyn saw, with extreme distaste, tears well up in Bruce’s china-blue, slightly squinting eyes and trickle into his beard.
“We were close taegither, her and me,” he said and his voice trembled. “From the worrrd go we understood each ither. She was more than an employer to me, she was a true friend. Aye. When I think of the plans we made for the beautifying of the property—” his voice broke convincingly.
“Did you plan those superfluous asparagus beds together and were the excavations in the mushroom shed your idea or hers?”
Bruce half-rose from his chair. Fox made a slight move and he sank back again.
“Or,” said Alleyn, “did Captain Carter, who, as you informed us, used to confide in you, tell you before he came down to Quintern on the last afternoon of his life that he proposed to bury the Black Alexander stamp somewhere on the premises? And forty years later when you found yourself there did you think it a good idea to have a look around on your own accord?”