‘Is that you, Miss Menzies?’ came over the line, ‘This is Battle. I say, never mind anything else, but could you sit to me again?’
‘What’s gone wrong?’ enquired Laura.
‘Nothing. Your portrait’s finished. I want to paint you again.’
‘Eh? Why?’
‘I want to. Will you come? I want—I’m sure you won’t disappoint me—I want.to paint you this time. Not just your face and hands and clothes.’
‘What, in the so-and-so?’ said Laura thoughtfully. ‘My young man would have a fit.’ She took the instrument from her ear and stood entranced awhile at this prospect. ‘What do you say?’ she enquired, becoming aware that the telephone was still bleating.
‘I said you must let me. I’m going to call it Atalanta or else Hippolyta. I don’t know yet. You’ve got to come.’
‘Only correctly chaperoned, then,’ said Laura. ’And by somebody with a gun,‘ she added darkly to herself, remembering that he was the son of Toro’s murderer.
‘What? Chaperoned? Oh, any darn thing you like. When can you come?’
‘I’ll ring up and let you know,’ said Laura, with a degree of caution to which ordinarily she was a stranger.
‘And, I say! You wouldn’t marry me, I suppose? I feel I could do great things with you beside me, urging me on, and— ’
‘Waiting until you’ve served your seven years’ stretch!’ said Laura derisively. ‘You forget what’s coming to you, my lad, for defrauding the art-loving public! Well, I’ll let you know about the rudery. I’m not promising, mind! I don’t want the sack from Mrs. B.’
She hung up and went to find her employer. Mrs. Bradley, however, was no longer in the hotel. She had gone to confer with the Chief Constable on matters of public importance, and, to his annoyance, she arrived in time to prevent his enjoyment of his Saturday afternoon golf.
‘Good heavens, Adela!’ he protested. ‘Can’t you choose some more reasonable time?’
‘I thought you might like to know that the dead man is almost certainly Allwright, and that you could learn a good deal about him by circulating a description of him to the banks in Cuchester. He’d become a blackmailer, and has probably paid in a good deal of money somewhere—always in cash, I should imagine. You could also gain something from an examination into the private affairs of Mr. Cassius Concaverty.’
‘We’ve got that in hand. From the account in the name of Concaverty, about fifteen thousand pounds have been withdrawn since the beginning of December, 1946.’
‘Ah! That fits nicely, doesn’t it?’
‘Fits with what?’
‘With the medical theory that the arm in the iron coffin was injured about four years ago. Allwright would have pleaded with and begged from his employers for a bit, and then, when the war was over, he would have begun to blackmail them.’
‘Yes, that all sounds feasible, doesn’t it?’ Sir Crimmond agreed. ‘But, look here, Adela, it will keep until Monday, dash it! Fielding is in charge of the case, and he’s a thoroughly competent fellow. Dash it, I want to play golf!’
‘Well, you can’t, unless I come with you. And if I do, I shall walk round with you and tell you all about the older Battle, and you know how you dislike to carry on conversations on the greens.’
‘You’re a blasted nuisance!’ said the Chief Constable, glumly. ‘All right. Come into the house. I shall have to telephone and put Beauchamp off.’
‘You see,’ said Mrs. Bradley, when this was settled, ‘the trouble is that even if you do catch Battle, and charge him with murder— ’
‘But we can’t! We haven’t a ha’porth of proof! Dash it, the fellow’s laughing at us!’
‘I know. That is why, as I am trying to tell you, you must find some from somewhere. Somebody murdered Allwright, and you won’t get any more out of Cassius. When it comes to the point, and you get the American side of it, he may talk about pictures, but he certainly won’t talk about murder.’
‘I know all that.’
‘Of course you do. I have a fatal habit of recapitulation due to having to lecture to people who won’t read books but have been brought up on a diet of films and the wireless. Well, all that I was going to suggest is this: at Cottam’s there is an old man, very simple, employed on odd jobs in the garden. Why don’t you get him to describe Allwright and Battle? Then, when you arrest Battle, the old man could be brought along to identify him.’
‘That won’t help. It isn’t getting Battle identified that’s going to be the trouble. It’s getting young O’Hara to swear to him. O’Hara is our only reliable witness to what happened at the farm, and— ’
‘I know. But what you don’t know is that— ’
‘Nobody is going to believe—no juryman at any rate—that O’Hara can identify with certainty a man he saw only at night by the light of an electric torch.’
‘He heard his voice, remember. Oh, I agree about the jury, but I was just going to tell you— ’
Before the Chief Constable could hear the rest of the sentence, the telephone rang.
‘It’s Inspector Fielding, dear,’ said his wife, who had taken the call. ‘Will you take it in here?’
‘No, no. I’ll come into the lounge. You stay here and look after Adela. I daresay she’d like a cup of tea. I expect Beauchamp to ring up about a foursome to-morrow. He said, when I put him off to-day, that he’d try to fix something for to-morrow.’
‘Well, how are the patients?’ enquired the hostess, when she and Mrs. Bradley were left alone. ‘I hear you’ve been spending your summer holiday getting my poor old Crimmie’s goat?’
Sir Crimmond’s wife was a bright-eyed woman of thirty; his second wife, in fact, and the apple of his choleric eye. Mrs. Bradley denied indignantly, first, that she had had a summer holiday, since coming to see one’s grandchild christened could scarcely be called that; she added, that, until the birth of the baby, she had been lecturing in Denmark; secondly, she denied that she would ever be wicked enough to get Sir Crimmond’s goat under any circumstances whatsoever unless he turned into a wife-beater.
At this point Sir Crimmond reappeared. He was red in the face and very angry.
‘Damn it, Adela! Do you know what’s happened now?’ he demanded. ‘Those confounded nit-wits have allowed another murder—another murder!—to be committed within my boundaries! A man called Firman has been found shot through the right eye—death instantaneous—in a wood about three miles from Beauchamp’s own place, the Towers, at Little Beddlehampton! The county’s becoming a shambles! Really it is! I’ve got to go and see to it, of course. You’d better come with me. You can give me your views as we go.’
‘I haven’t any views until we have seen the body, and until I am sure those two boys are safe,’ said Mrs. Bradley. ‘Mr. O’Hara and his cousin, Mr. Gascoigne, were out with this man Firman in an endeavour to extract information with regard to the other murder.’
‘Upon my soul! So the two things are connected! You’d better—Oh, no, I remember. Yes, of course. Oh, Lord! I hope young O’Hara’s all right. An intelligent boy. His great grandfather was the young Tim O’Hara who said to Queen Victoria— ’
A long reminiscence followed to which Mrs. Bradley, accustomed to improbable stories about Queen Victoria, scarcely listened. At the end of the narrative, she said :
‘I was going to tell you, just before the telephone rang, that I don’t think Michael O’Hara is in any more danger now than his cousin or Laura or myself or even Denis, and, possibly, George.’