Death in the Stocks: Merely Murder Read online

  ‘Premonition!’ snorted the Superintendent. ‘A very safe bet! Of course something’s going to turn up. All I hope is that it’ll have an alibi I can check up on, and won’t have spent the night walking to Richmond, or in bed with a headache, or alone in somebody else’s house!’

  Giles’s eyes were alight. ‘I’m afraid you’re feeling ruffled, Superintendent.’

  Hannasyde laughed and held out his hand. ‘Can you wonder at it? I must be getting along now. That minx of a client of yours! The idea of saying “Oh, hullo!” to me in Court! Did she tell you we parted yesterday not on the best of terms? You can warn that young brother of hers, if you like, that it isn’t always wise to be too clever with the police. Good-bye!’

  They shook hands. ‘Come to my chambers, and smoke a cigar this evening, and talk it over,’ invited Giles. ‘Without prejudice, you know.’

  ‘Without prejudice I will, gladly,’ replied Hannasyde. ‘Thanks!’

  On this they parted, Hannasyde and the Sergeant to catch a train, Giles to extricate his cousin from the Police Station, and take her to have lunch before motoring back to town.

  She was in a cheerful mood, and appeared to consider herself safely out of the wood. Giles disillusioned her, and she at once declared that to arrest her now would be an extremely dirty trick, and one of which she did not believe Superintendent Hannasyde capable.

  ‘Except for an occasional brush we don’t get on at all badly,’ she said. ‘In fact, I think he quite likes me.’

  ‘That won’t stop him doing what he believes to be his duty.’

  ‘No, but I don’t think I’m really one of his suspects,’ said Antonia. ‘He’s got his eye more on Kenneth, or, rather, he had till Rudolph cropped up. I wish I could make my mind up about Rudolph, by the way.’

  ‘Whether to marry him or not? Let me help you.’

  ‘Oh no, not that! As a matter of fact,’ she added candidly, ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he called the engagement off. He was considerably peeved last night, you know. What I meant was, did he do it, or not?’

  ‘You know him better than I do, Tony. It doesn’t look as though he did.’

  ‘No, but I’m not so sure. I didn’t think he’d be so rattled, somehow. Because the only time I’ve ever seen him in a tight corner, which was when a motor lorry shot out of a side-turning one day, he was as cool as a cucumber, and completely and utterly efficient. That was partly why I fell for him. The ordinary person would have jammed on the brakes, and we’d have been smashed into, but he just trod on the accelerator, and sort of skimmed by in a huge semicircle, and then went on with what he’d been saying before it happened.’

  Giles was unimpressed. ‘The biggest ass of my acquaintance is an expert driver,’ he said. ‘It’s one thing to keep your head at the wheel of a car, and quite another to keep it when confronted by the shadows of the gallows, so to speak. My own impression of your elegant young man is that he wouldn’t – to put it vulgarly – have had the guts to do it.’

  ‘That’s what I’m not sure about,’ said Antonia, quite unresentful of this slur upon her betrothed’s character. ‘His mother was foreign – at least, half, because she had an Italian father or mother or something – and occasionally Rudolph reverts a bit. He has white rages. You never know with people like that. They might do anything. Of course, that story he told might have been true, though I admit it sounded thin, but, on the other hand, it might be a masterpiece of low cunning. Same as me now. For all you know I’m being cunning talking like this.’

  ‘Yes, that had occurred to me,’ agreed Giles.

  ‘Kenneth, too,’ pursued his cousin. ‘Kenneth won’t say one way or the other, because partly, I think, he’s enjoying himself, and partly he holds that it’s no use saying he didn’t do it, because naturally he’d be bound to say that. But I’ll tell you one thing, Giles.’ She paused, frowning, and when he looked inquiringly at her, said in a serious tone: ‘If it was Kenneth I’ll bet every penny I’ve got no one’ll ever find out.’

  ‘I shouldn’t, Tony.’

  ‘Well, I would. Because generally murderers get found out because they did something silly, or left some important detail to chance. Kenneth never does.’

  ‘My dear girl, Kenneth is hopelessly casual.’

  ‘Oh no, he’s not! About things that he doesn’t think matter he may be, but when he gets interested in anything, or thinks something worth while, he concentrates on it in a dark and secret way which Murgatroyd says is like our grandfather – not the Vereker one, but the other. By the way, ought he to go to the funeral?’

  ‘Yes, of course. He must.’

  ‘Well, that’s what Murgatroyd and Violet say. It’s about the only thing they’ve ever agreed on. But Kenneth says no. He says it would be artistically wrong. However, I’ll tell him what you think.’

  Her method of conveying this information was characteristic, and wholly lacking in tact. Set down at the entrance to the mews shortly before four o’clock, she ran up the outside stairway to the front door, let herself into the flat, and went at once to the studio. Undeterred by the presence not only of Violet Williams, but of Leslie Rivers, who was curled up on the divan, watching Kenneth at work, and of a tall, fair man in the early thirties, who was smoking a cigarette in the window-embrasure, she said: ‘It was a rotten Inquest, so you didn’t miss anything. But Giles says of course you must show up at the funeral, Kenneth. Hullo, Leslie! Hullo, Philip, I didn’t see you. Has anyone taken the dogs out?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said Leslie, in her slow, serious way. ‘You asked me to.’

  ‘Well, thanks. Giles says you can hire the proper clothes.’

  ‘I daresay, but I won’t,’ replied Kenneth, somewhat inarticulately, because he was holding a paint-brush between his lips. ‘Get rid of these people, will you? They think they’ve come to tea.’

  ‘They may as well stay, then,’ said Antonia.

  ‘Is that a vague instinct of hospitality, or mere supineness?’ inquired Philip Courtenay.

  ‘Supineness. What have you come for, anyway?’

  ‘Curiosity. Moreover, my dear, I’ve been interviewed by a bird-like policeman in plain clothes who asked me the most embarrassing questions about Arnold’s private affairs. I can’t be too thankful I relinquished the post of secretary when I did.’

  ‘Well, at least, Eaton Place was more or less bearable when you were there,’ said Antonia. ‘How’s Maud? And the baby?’

  ‘Both very fit, thanks. Maud sent her love.’

  Violet said: ‘But do tell us! What did the detective want to know?’

  ‘Hidden scandals. I hinted that subsequent secretaries might be of more use to him, but it transpired that the longest tenure of office since my departure had been five weeks, so that wasn’t much use.’

  Kenneth removed the brush from his mouth. ‘Subsequent secretaries is good,’ he remarked. ‘Had Arnold got a mie?’

  ‘Dozens, I believe, but out of my ken. I wasn’t as private as that.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ Violet said, fixing her eyes on his face. ‘Do the police suspect a crime passionnel?’

  ‘“He done her wrong” motif,’ said Kenneth, screwing up his eyes at the canvas before him. ‘What sordid minds policemen have!’

  ‘Blackmail,’ said Courtenay, looking round for an ashtray, and finally throwing the stub of his cigarette out of the window. ‘Seventy pounds and a seedy stranger were the main subjects of my policeman’s discourse. I was regretfully unable to throw light.’

  ‘I object!’ Kenneth said. ‘I won’t have seedy strangers butting in on a family crime. It lowers the whole tone of the thing, which has, up to now, been highly artistic, and in some ways even precious. Go away, Murgatroyd: no one wants any tea.’

  ‘You speak for yourself, Master Kenneth, and let others do likewise,’ replied Murgatroyd, who had come into the studio with her usual purposeful tread, and was ruthlessly clearing the table of its load of impedimenta. ‘Well, Miss Tony, so you’