Breedy made no attempt to come towards us. She joined him, climbed into the Rolls Royce and off they went. Making nothing of this (except that I felt a certain amount of surprise to be a witness to a meeting between such unlikely friends), I turned my car, thankful that there was no waiting about in Ropewalk to be done, and drove back to Strode Hillary.

  Here I had lunch at the Stag, as I had planned, and then went to Innes’s house to jot down my notes. It was still short of three o’clock, so I debated whether to use the afternoon for further exploration or whether to draft a first chapter, always a pleasant exercise because it begins a new enterprise and has none of the complications which invariably crop up later, no matter how carefully one thinks one has plotted the book.

  In the end, after making myself coffee — that which the Stag supplied had proved to be undrinkable — I decided that a fine Spring afternoon would be wasted indoors, and that while I was on my own without the distraction of Mary’s society (for I had no illusions about the extent to which she both attracted and distracted me) I ought to collect as much background material as I could while I had such a splendid opportunity.

  I went up to Innes’s library where he had an up-to-date collection of Ordnance maps, and decided, after a quarter of an hour’s browsing, upon two villages to the south, both of which were on the coast.

  There could not have been a greater contrast between two places so few miles apart. I went first to Sandbay. It had once been the port for Ropewalk, and still possessed a tidy little harbour, but this was chiefly taken up now by small yachts and cabin cruisers and there was talk, I had heard, of building a marina there.

  For the rest, the place looked both brash and unfinished. Holiday flats; some more permanent residences; a hotel with a broad terrace looking over the open sea; a concreted broad-walk along the sea front; and an outbreak of ice-cream kiosks, stalls selling postcards and toys, a hot-dog stand, and a booth which sold newspapers and periodicals, combined to take attention away from any attractions which the coastal scenery might have to offer.

  However, at that time of year there was ample parking space along the front. I locked the car and left it, took a brisk walk — for the air was extremely fresh — and on my return I took another look at the harbour before I drove off for the village of Compton Bewley.

  Here I found a place to leave the car, and then I walked the narrow streets and delighted in their unexpected charm. There were thatched cottages with gardens full of daffodils, stone-built houses with mullioned windows, Georgian residences of austere façade and beautifully proportioned doorways. Everywhere (with the children all in school) there was a tranquil air as though the place had gone to sleep at the turn of the century and had let the troublous years of wars and industrial disputes, the era of the aeroplane and of space travel, motorways and the Common Market go by without the village knowing or caring anything about these changes.

  I finished my walkabout at a road bridge which crossed a pleasant little stream. It ran past the school and the church and on the opposite side of the road it skirted the gardens of some of the houses. I leaned on a wooden rail and could see weeping willows and a beautiful, flowering magnolia tree. As I stood there someone joined me. Knowing that I had no acquaintances in the place, I took no notice until he spoke. It was Hallicks.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Lockerbie. Pretty little place, isn’t it? I always reckon that this ranks with Cerne Abbas and Corfe Castle as one of the nicest little spots in the county. I used to live here as a boy, so when I can squeeze a free couple of hours, I come back.’

  ‘Any more luck with Chettle and Batcombe?’ I asked.

  ‘Pulled them in, sir. They’ll have to come up before the Bench. Can’t overlook the fact that, apart from the actual man-trap, one of them, and I put my money on Chettle, tried to finish off the Arab boy. A real nasty little bit of work is our Master Chettle.’

  ‘Nothing further come to light in the case of Winters, I suppose?’

  ‘Nothing I can act on, no, sir. My mind runs on Breedy, though why it should I don’t know, except that there’s pub talk as Winters had the drop on Breedy’s son Bob, but you’ll have heard about that.’

  ‘Talking of Breedy,’ I said, ‘I didn’t know that he and Mrs Lorne were close friends.’

  ‘Close friends? Where did you get that one from, sir?’

  I described how Martha had thumbed me for a lift that midday and of my surprise when she met Breedy in a side street in Ropewalk and got into a car with him.

  ‘Well, well!’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t mind knowing what that was in aid of. I always thought — everybody thought — she blamed Breedy and his lorry for her husband’s death. Well, that which you’ve told me is certainly a turn up for the book so far as I’m concerned. Glad you mentioned it, not that it solves any problems. Ah, well, I must be off. Here on your own, sir, I take it.’

  ‘Yes. The other two were invited out and Dame Beatrice has gone home for the day to attend to correspondence or some such. I daresay she’ll stay the night, but we’re expecting her back quite shortly.’

  He walked with me to where I had left my car. His own was close by. We passed a double-fronted house with mullioned windows and subsidiary stone transoms. It was a dignified and beautiful house dating, I thought, from the fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Hallicks, however, saw it with other eyes. It had a very narrow front garden, unfenced and abutting on to the street, and this patch of ground, which ran the whole length of the frontage, was a dense conglomeration of brilliant yellow, a mass of celandines. I liked the effect against the grey stonework, but it did not please Hallicks at all.

  ‘Pity to see a nice old place neglected like that,’ he said. ‘In my time the Beckwiths had it. You wouldn’t have seen weeds like that in their time.’

  We got into our respective cars and I gave him the road, since presumably he had less time to spare than I had. I was in no hurry to get back to an empty house. I drove out to Lyme Regis, had my tea there and then cruised around by way of Axminster and Crewkerne and so back to Strode Hillary, where I dined at the Stag.

  By the time I got indoors Mary and Innes were home again. Innes was cutting sandwiches, for they had not stayed for the birthday dinner at their friends’ house.

  ‘The party was really for the child and she wasn’t going to be allowed to stay up for dinner,’ said Mary, ‘so we made that an excuse to come away. There was a children’s party with twenty-four young guests and all their fathers coming to collect them at the end and have drinks with Ian, so we were quite glad to slip away. Children are very sweet, I suppose, but—’

  ‘But definitely fatiguing,’ said Innes. ‘Are you cutting in on these sandwiches, Mike?’

  ‘No. I’ve dined, thanks.’

  ‘Then I think I’ve made enough. What I really need is a drink.’

  ‘Well, any news?’ asked Mary, when we had settled down. I described my day. My encounter with Martha Lorne was greeted with disbelief. Mary accused me of making the whole thing up. By this she referred to my transporting of Martha Lorne to Ropewalk and especially of her fraternisation with Farmer Breedy. Innes closed one eye and blew his cheeks out. Then he asked whether I could not think of a better leg-pull and stated that I was losing my grip.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Have it your own way. I may have been dreaming. The weather was fine. The Dorset hills and the brilliant green of the pasture and the hawthorn hedges, the beauty of the primroses, the wild daffodils, and the lesser celandines, the sound of the brook babbling over its stones and nourishing its wild cresses, and the lambs with their dams, and all that, may have addled my mind and hallucination may have set in, so have it your own way.’

  ‘I believe he’s serious,’ said Mary, ‘but why would Martha need to thumb a lift? She’s on the phone and she’s not so poor that she can’t afford a taxi into Ropewalk.’

  ‘It was booked up,’ I said, ‘as she explained. She indicated that her errand was urgent.’

  ‘But she detests Breedy. She’s often said so.’

  ‘I thought she had never mentioned her husband’s death to you.’

  ‘She hadn’t, but she did sometimes mention Breedy. We assumed he’d done her down over some deal or other,’ said Innes.

  ‘Well, if you ask me,’ I said, ‘the whole thing was reminiscent of a blushing and marvellously togged-up lady off with her cavalier to the registrar’s office and the wedding breakfast.’

  * * *

  chapter 14

  A SHEIKH AND A SCHOOL

  « ^ »

  It turned out that Hallicks had arrested Chettle on another charge as well as for being concerned in the man-trap affair and for the strong suspicion that he had tried to kill Hamid. This was that he was the third man guilty of the local robberies. It was the caretaker at Fell Hall, who was still remanded awaiting (at his own request) trial before a Crown Court, who reported this. Apparently he was still trying to cover himself. He contended that his crime was a venial one, since all the valuables he had helped to steal had been recovered.

  ‘But if he thinks a judge is likely to take a more lenient view than the local Bench would do, he’s got another think coming,’ said Hallicks. ‘He was the receiver, as well as one of the burglars. In any case, the beaks would have sent him for trial if he had come up in front of them. They would have had no option. Still, he’s doing the best he can for himself by shopping his mates right and left. We knew there must have been a third man involved.’

  ‘I remember it was mentioned,’ said Mary, when Innes recounted his conversation with Hallicks on the matter, ‘but how could the police be sure?’

  ‘Simple,’ I said. ‘I spotted two men in that car which passed me when I was coming away from Fell Hall. The third chap was the one in your kitchen when I got home. If that third man had been Chettle, I would have recognised him when Dame Beatrice interviewed those lads. I didn’t recognise him, therefore he was not Chettle, so if Chettle was one of the burglars he was one of the chaps I saw in the car.’

  ‘Simple indeed, when you know,’ she said. ‘Only one thing sticks in my mind, though. If the third man was Winters, as the caretaker claims, your description of the man in our kitchen doesn’t tally.’ She went on, ‘Dame B. must have got up early this morning. I wanted to give her a second breakfast when she arrived from the Stone House at nine, but she wouldn’t have any.’

  ‘Oh, where is she, then?’ I asked.

  ‘At Bourne Farley, presumably. The sheikh’s invitation came about twenty minutes before you came downstairs, you lazy man, and she went straight off in the biggest and most luxurious car that even the sheikh, I suppose, can supply. It appears that the hospital allowed Hamid to go home yesterday while we were all out, and I suppose Abdul wants a confrontation between my godmother and his son.’

  ‘With himself as both touch-judge and referee,’ said Innes. ‘Anyway, she is invited to lunch there. Sheep’s eyes, chunks of mutton, cushions on the floor, tear off the meat you fancy and eat with your fingers, I suppose.’

  ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ said Mary. ‘The sheikh sits up to table like every other civilised person.’

  ‘Henry the Eighth sat up to table, but I wouldn’t call his eating habits all that civilised,’ retorted Innes.

  ‘You’ve been seeing too many films, darling. What do you want to do today, Mike?’

  ‘Go and ask questions at Lower Gushbrook Primary School,’ I answered. ‘I still regard that submerged punt as my prize item in the saga of dirty deeds in Dorset and I yearn to find out who did the initial gardening on it.’

  ‘I thought we agreed that it was done when the murderer and his accomplice — whoever that turns out to be — buried Winters,’ said Innes.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that, and about all that muck that was piled on top of the punt afterwards. We thought at first that whoever did that was trying to draw attention to the punt. We thought it was done by somebody who knew the body was there, but who wasn’t prepared to go to the police and tell them so. That idea seemed all right at the time, but before Dame Beatrice and I got there that day with our trowels, she had already decided that the punt was a grave. The coal-dust and rubbish only confirmed her in that view.’

  ‘She was suspicious when she saw Chettle and his pal fooling about there on the morning of Bounds Sunday,’ said Mary. ‘She suspected Chettle almost from the beginning of being concerned in the man-trap business. But what has made you doubtful about the plants in the punt, Mike? You’ve always been so pleased with yourself for spotting that they’d been changed.’

  ‘I’m still pleased about it,’ I said stoutly. ‘I consider that I showed powers of observation and of memory far beyond the ordinary.’

  Mary said, ‘You clever boy! Take a bouquet!’ She took the spring flowers from a vase and thrust them, dripping, into the open neck of my shirt. I grabbed her and held her and kissed her on the mouth. Innes took this better than I would have expected. All he said was:

  ‘Unhand that woman and tell us why you’ve changed your mind about the punt. Why do you think now that the schoolchildren did the gardening?’

  ‘It was always a possibility. It got mentioned, if you remember.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Later we heard that Winters’s body had been put into somebody’s deep freeze. They wouldn’t have done that if the burial had been carried out before I noticed that the plants had been changed. For some reason which, at present, we don’t know, the murderer couldn’t bury the body in the punt straight away, and my guess is that that was because the punt was under observation or else that somebody else was fooling about with it or had commandeered it for some reason.’

  ‘The schoolchildren, you think?’

  ‘I think it might be worth finding out,’ I said. Mary had gone into the kitchen. She came back at this point and said,

  ‘If you’re going over to Lower Gushbrook, Mike, we’d better have lunch early. Those young children are probably dismissed at half-past three or a quarter to four, so you haven’t got an awful lot of time.’

  It is all very well to make up one’s mind to invade other people’s premises in the interests of a little amateur detective work, but I had realised that I should need some reasonable excuse for troubling whoever was in charge of the school, so I had given thought to this. I decided to tell some part of the truth but not, of course, to mention anything connected with the murder unless whoever I spoke to at the school mentioned it first.

  I had on me the membership card of one of the literary societies to which I belong, so, when I pulled up at the school entrance, I wrote on the back of the card under my signature: Author doing local survey.

  It seemed that I had arrived at the end of the mid-afternoon playtime break, for lines of young children, officered by a man and two women teachers, were walking into the building. I waited at the gate and, as the last file was disappearing, the man approached me and asked whether he could help me.

  ‘I am hoping to talk with the headmaster,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you a parent?’

  ‘No.’ I produced my card. He studied it.

  ‘I thought you weren’t a parent. I believe I know them all,’ he said pleasantly. ‘It’s a headmistress, actually. Come this way. I’ll find her for you.’

  We went in by way of a little porch rather like the entrance to a village church. This led into a vestibule which appeared to be the children’s washroom, for there were half a dozen washbasins, a receptacle from which paper towels could be pulled, and a large wire bin already more than half full of discarded towels. The teacher excused himself and left me, returning in a short time with a rather attractive-looking, brown-haired woman wearing a flowered overall. He went off, murmuring something about a craft lesson and left me with the girl.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she said. ‘Mrs Comyns is with a publisher’s representative, so she wondered whether I could help as I’m free this period. You’d like this back, I expect.’ She returned my membership card. ‘I’ve sent for a couple of chairs. We don’t run to a staff-room, I’m afraid. It’s just as well. Our free periods are few and far between!’

  Two small boys came through the doorway which obviously led into a classroom, each carrying a chair. These they put down and we seated ourselves, but scarcely had we done so when a stream of five small children, each carrying a glass pot of the kind which usually holds fishpaste, came trooping up to the washbasins to empty out coloured water, rinse the pots and refill them from the taps.

  ‘Oh, dear!’ said the girl beside me. ‘I’m afraid it will be like this for the next half-hour. Miss Prickett has got art.’ (It sounded like a disease and possibly, with a class of young children, that is what it was!)

  ‘I suppose we couldn’t go and sit in my car?’ I suggested. She gave me an appraising look and then she went over to one of the children and told her to tell Miss Prickett that Miss Seldon had had to go out for a few minutes and would Miss Prickett let Mrs Comyns know as soon as the gentleman in Mrs Comyns’ room had gone.

  These apparently important preliminaries completed, we went out to my car.

  ‘You see, we’re not supposed to leave the building during lesson times,’ she said, ‘unless we’re taking P.E. or going out to Games.’

  I unlocked, handed her in and we opened the windows.

  ‘Well, now,’ I said, taking out my notebook, ‘I am preparing to make a local survey as a background to my next novel. I have been in the village more than once, and should like to use it as a setting.’

  ‘Yes, it is pretty. I saw that your name is Lockerbie. Is that the name you write under?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘I must see whether the County Library has got any of your books. I’ve never met an author before.’

  As it was obvious that she had never heard of me before, either, I passed this over and settled down to business, for I realised that time was short. We exchanged some remarks and opinions about the village and the landscape and then I mentioned the punt.

 

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