Death in the Stocks: Merely Murder Read online

  Giles handed him his glass without comment. A slight flush had crept up under his tan, and the Superintendent, repenting, said with superb inappropriateness: ‘And why – perhaps the most important question of all – was the body placed in the stocks?’

  Twelve

  Giles Carrington, in the act of raising his glass to his lips, lowered it again, and looked down at the Superintendent with a startled frown. ‘Yes, of course, that’s an important point,’ he said. ‘Stupid of me, but I really don’t think I’ve considered it. Does it mean anything, I wonder?’

  ‘Yes, I think so,’ said Hannasyde. ‘Without going to the length of searching for some obscure incident in Vereker’s past which had a bearing on stocks, I imagine that there must have been some reason for putting the body there.’

  ‘Unless it was the murderer’s idea of humour,’ said Giles, before he had time to stop himself.

  The two pairs of eyes met, Giles Carrington’s quite limpid and expressionless, the Superintendent’s full of a kind of amused comprehension.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Hannasyde. ‘I’d already thought of that. And now I’m going to be really frank. It’s the kind of humour I can easily imagine young Vereker indulging in.’

  Giles smoked for a moment in silence. Then he said: ‘No. I’m speaking now merely as one who – to a certain extent – knows Kenneth Vereker. It may be helpful to you. Kenneth would not place his half-brother’s body in the stocks as a senseless practical joke. If he did it, it would be for some very good, and probably rather subtle reason. That is my honest opinion.’

  The Superintendent nodded. ‘All right. But you’ll admit you can visualise circumstances under which he might have done it.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll admit that. But you’re assuming that the body was placed there after death.’

  ‘At the moment I am, because it seems the most likely hypothesis.’

  ‘No blood on the grass around the stocks,’ Giles reminded him.

  ‘There was very little external bleeding – and no signs of any struggle,’ replied Hannasyde. ‘So that if you incline to the theory that Vereker was stabbed after his feet were put in the stocks, you must work on the assumption that he sat there quite willingly. Now the time was somewhere between eleven at night, or thereabouts, and two o’clock in the morning. We know from the medical evidence that Vereker can’t have been drunk. Does it seem to you credible that he should choose that hour of night to try what sitting in the stocks felt like – when he could have done it any day he happened to be in the village?’

  ‘No, I can’t say it does,’ admitted Giles. ‘Though I can conceive of situations where it might be entirely credible.’

  ‘So can I,’ agreed Hannasyde. ‘If he was motoring down with a gay party after the theatre, and they were all in a light-hearted mood. Or even if he was with one person alone, whom we’ll assume to have been a woman. We know he had a puncture on the way down; suppose he picked it up at Ashleigh Green; and after changing the tyre sat down on the bench to admire the moonlight, or cool off, or anything else you like. I can picture him being induced to put his feet in the stocks, but what I can’t picture is the woman then stabbing him. It can’t have been Miss Vereker, for whatever I disbelieve about her I entirely believe that she was on the worst possible terms with her half-brother. Very well, then, was it some lady of easy virtue motoring down to spend the week-end with him at his cottage?’

  ‘Quite likely,’ Giles said. ‘I see what’s coming, though, and I confess I can’t offer a solution.’

  ‘Of course you see it. What should induce any such woman to murder him? You’ve seen the knife. It’s a curious sort of dagger – might have come from Spain, or South America. Not the sort of thing you carry about with you in the normal course of events. That proves the murder was premeditated.’

  ‘Some woman who had a grudge against him,’ suggested Giles.

  ‘Must have been a pretty large size in grudges,’ said Hannasyde. ‘And one, moreover, that Vereker didn’t set much store by. If he’d done any woman an injury big enough to give her a motive for cold-blooded murder, do you suppose he would quite unsuspectingly have put himself into a helpless position at her instigation?’

  ‘No. On the whole he had rather a suspicious nature,’ replied Giles. ‘And in justice to a somewhat maligned man I’m bound to say that I don’t think he would have done a woman any serious injury. He was amorous, but not ungenerous to his fancies, and not unkindly.’

  ‘That’s rather the impression I gathered,’ said Hannasyde. ‘I don’t rule out the possibility of an unknown woman in the case – but my department hasn’t been idle, you know, and so far we can’t discover any woman who had the least reason for wanting to murder Vereker. I don’t mind telling you that we checked up on several, too. That shabby stranger the butler described to us made me think there might be some woman who’d been got into trouble, because there’s a smell of blackmail about that odd visit. But I haven’t discovered anything of the kind. On the contrary, Vereker seems to have been pretty decent, and his women were the sort who can look after themselves.’

  Giles sat on the arm of his chair. ‘Yes, I should think they were. Arnold was no fool. And I’m ready to admit that you’ve made it seem highly improbable that the murder was done after Arnold was in the stocks. But do you mind looking at the other side of the picture? Does it seem to you probable that having stabbed a man to death the murderer conveyed his body to the stocks – the most conspicuous place he could well think of – and arrange it most carefully in a natural position there, which I imagine must have been not only a gruesome, but also a somewhat difficult task? Impossible for Miss Vereker to have done it; too macabre for Mesurier; too senseless for Kenneth.’

  ‘It may not have been senseless,’ said Hannasyde. He glanced at his wrist-watch, and got up. ‘That’s what I’ve got to try and find out – amongst other things. By the way, we’ve been trying to trace those notes Vereker had on him the day he was killed. You remember we found the counterfoil of a cheque for a hundred pounds drawn to self, and only thirty pounds in his pocket? Well, only one of these has come in, to date, and that one is a ten-pound note which a man in a blue suit handed to a waiter at the Trocadero Grill in payment of his bill for dinner on Saturday evening. The suit might have been a dark grey, I may mention, and the waiter really couldn’t call the gentleman’s face to mind, because there were a lot of people dining that night. You can’t say we policemen get much help! Look here, I must be going! Many thanks for by far the most pleasant hours I’ve spent on this case yet.’

  Giles laughed. ‘Well, I hope they’ll prove to have been profitable ones.’

  ‘You never know,’ said Hannasyde. ‘It’s always good to get another point of view.’

  Mr Charles Carrington, hearing something of the visit next day from his son, paused in his search for the pencil he distinctly remembered placing on his desk not five minutes earlier, and said: ‘Absurd! You can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, or if you can you shouldn’t. An Eversharp pencil – you must have seen me use it hundreds of times! Use your eyes, Giles! Use your eyes! So Superintendent Hannasyde doesn’t know what to make of those Vereker brats! Now I come to think of it the boy baffled me too. More in him than I thought. God bless my soul, a pencil can’t walk away!’

  Kenneth, getting wind of Hannasyde’s visit, loudly endorsed his uncle’s verdict, adding a rider to the effect that if there was any double-crossing going on he should immediately change his solicitor. When Giles gave every evidence of regarding such a happening in the light of a Utopian dream, he forgot his original complaint in pointing out his own virtues as a client. He was in one of his more incalculable moods at the time, and his cousin’s somewhat unwise rejoinder that the vaunted virtues had escaped his notice provoked him to give a trenchant résumé of his own case. He walked up and down the studio, with his eyes very bright, and with what Antonia called his elf-smile on his lips, and held his cousin partly in dismay, partly i