CONTENTS

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Nicholas Blake

Dedication

Title Page

PART ONE

1. From Nigel Strangeways’ Journal

2. A Trunk Without a Label

3. Dead End

4. The Dark Backward

5. Head in Clay

6. Head in Air

PART TWO

7. Janet Seaton Confesses

8. Rennell Torrance Reveals

9. Finny Black Turns Up

10. Mara Torrance Remembers

11. Lionel Seaton Overhears

12. Nigel Strangeways Inquires

13. Robert Seaton Explains

PART THREE

14. Farewell to the Roses

15. From Nigel Strangeways’ Case-book

More from Vintage Classic Crime

Copyright

About the Book

Staying with a friend in Oxfordshire Nigel Strangeways pays a visit to Robert Seaton, a distinguished British poet whom Nigel greatly admires but whose reputation has been on the decline of late. Seaton proves to be an irascible, temperamental man, and his unconventional household, featuring a resentful daughter and mute dwarf servant, simmers with tension.

When a headless corpse is found floating in the river by the Seaton’s house just a few weeks later, the poet becomes the prime suspect. But whose body is it?

About the Author

Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.

During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.

Also by Nicholas Blake

A Question of Proof

Thou Shell of Death

There’s Trouble Brewing

The Beast Must Die

The Widow’s Cruise

Malice in Wonderland

The Case of the Abominable Snowman

The Smiler with the Knife

Minute for Murder

The Dreadful Hollow

The Whisper in the Gloom

End of Chapter

The Worm of Death

The Sad Variety

The Morning After Death

TO
HUGO AND SALLY

PART ONE

Chapter 1

From Nigel Strangeways’ Journal

6TH JUNE, 1948. Paul took me over to the Seatons’ for the day. ‘Bob Seaton’ll be in your line,’ he said firmly: ‘writes poetry, you know.’ I did know. I informed Paul that Robert Seaton was one of the most distinguished English poets of our time. ‘Delighted to hear it,’ he replied, unruffled: ‘he’s got a fine herd of Guernseys. Charming house, too. But you wait till you see his dairy.’ I said that, for me, the high-spot of the pilgrimage would be the poet Seaton, not a herd of cows, however well appointed. I asked what he was like. ‘Who? Old Bob?’—Paul was filling up one of those forms that farmers have to fill up, and couldn’t give me his undivided attention—‘Oh, he’s a good sort. Quiet little chap, you know.’

The pilgrimage was only to the next village, in fact. Paul’s farm is just outside Hinton Lacey. The Seatons’ house, Plash Meadow, is in Ferry Lacey, two miles away. Ferry Lacey: one of those messy Oxfordshire villages—picturesque rural slums mixed up with brash little red-brick bungalows and villas.

The first sight of Plash Meadow, at the far end of the village, took my breath away. A perfect Queen Anne house. Long, low; mellowed, old-rose brick; irregular but successful placing of the windows. A fifty-yard stretch of lawn, smooth and lustrous as green glass, between the house and a low wall which separates it from the road. Everywhere, on this wall, on the house, in the beds to its left, on the wall of the farm buildings behind, there were roses. Drifts and swirls and swags of them. A cataleptic trance of white and yellow roses. One was surprised not to see them romping all over the two Wellingtonias which spire up from the lawn, at either end of the house. ‘There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream.’ Only it’s the Thames, flowing past, hidden by trees, a few hundred yards beyond the house, which stands on a bluff above it.

‘It’s the end!’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘The road doesn’t go any farther. There’s a footbridge down there, though, where the ferry used to be, and you can cross the river and walk over the fields to Redcote.’

He had stopped the car for a minute outside the gate. I could hear a distant roaring, like the noise when you hold a shell to your ear, but deeper; a dying fall that never died; an immortal sigh. Was it from an infinite distance? or a delusion in my head, born of this place and its trance of roses?

Paul must have seen me listening. ‘It’s the weir,’ he said, ‘half a mile upstream.’

Well, it might have been worse. He might have said it was the mechanical milkers at work, I supposed.

‘You don’t milk cows at twelve-thirty in the afternoon,’ Paul replied, and drove in through the gate. We got out.

It was like getting out into a dream. Walking past the front of the house, glancing in at the drawing-room windows, one might have expected to see a group of brocaded figures arrested in courtiers’ attitudes around a Sleeping Beauty, the stems of roses twining through their ceremonious fingers.

The impression was sustained when the door opened. A dwarf stood there—a hideous creature in a green baize apron, grinning all over his face. Paul really might have warned me.

‘Hallo, Finny, how’s tricks?’ he said to this apparition, which replied with a series of adenoidal grunts and snuffles, then waddled in front of us to a door on the left of the hall.

We were in the drawing-room. The spell persisted. A perfectly-shaped room, windows on two sides, green-panelled, Adam fireplace, rosewood and walnut pieces, curtains and carpet the faded magenta of Christmas roses, bowls of roses all over the place, a luscious Renoir above the mantelpiece—

‘I see you’re admiring my Renoir,’ says a deep voice from behind me. I turn round. Paul introduces me to our hostess. Mrs Seaton is very much en grande tenue: she receives me graciously, with the easy but practised air of a duchess receiving a bouquet. A large, dark, commanding woman; big bones; rather beaky nose; sallow complexion; eyes smallish beneath heavy brows: plenty of social manner, but no charm. In the late forties, I’d say. She’ll be a regular old battle-axe in twenty years’ time.

I murmur polite and genuine admiration of the house. Her eyes light up, she positively looks ten years younger for a moment.

‘I am rather proud of it. Of course, we’ve lived here for centuries—long before this house was built, I mean.’

‘You carry your centuries very well, Janet,’ says Paul. Mrs Seaton flushes, unbecomingly, but not displeased: she is one who enjoys being mildly teased by a personable male.

‘Don’t be absurd, Paul. I was just going to tell Mr Strangeways that my family, the Laceys, gave their name to these two villages. Our ancestor, Francis de Lacey, received the Manor from William the Conqueror.’

‘And then you married your house and lived happily ever after,’ said Paul. This, to me, entirely cryptic remark did not go down so well with Janet Seaton. She turned away from him.

‘The Poet will join us for lunch: he always Works in the morning,’ she said to me in a different, throbbing kind of voice, heavily capitalising the key words. It could have been just funny; or it could have been cosy, in a period way: but for some reason I found the remark really blood-chilling. So much so that I rudely pushed the conversation back to the previous move.

‘So the house belongs to you?’ I asked.

‘It belongs to us both. Robert’s father bought it from my father, and then Robert inherited it. Old Mr Seaton renamed it Plash Meadow; but every one here still calls it Laceys. Are you interested in Battersea enamel, Mr Strangeways? There are some good pieces in this cabinet over here.’

I said I was. Though the Seaton-Lacey transactions interested me far more. Mrs Seaton unlocked the cabinet and took out an exquisite powder-box. She held it a moment or two in her large, heavy-knuckled hands, then put it in mine. As I examined it, I felt her eyes upon me, like a physical pressure or a wave of heat from a furnace. I looked up. Caught a most peculiar expression on her face. Can I describe it now?—The fatuous self-satisfaction of a young mother looking at her first-born lying in a friend’s arm, plus a certain controlled panic (will he drop my baby?) plus something else, something indefinable, urgently appealing, almost pathetic. When I handed the Battersea piece back to her, she sighed, almost gasped, as if she’d been holding her breath.

‘Aha, the ruling passion again! Showing off your bric-à-brac!’ came a pleasant, quiet voice from the doorway. A young man was standing there, arm in arm with a ravishing, yellow-headed girl, smiling at us.

‘Now, Mr Strangeways, here are my two finest exhibits. Lionel and Vanessa. It’s her half-term holiday. Come and be shown off, children,’ said Mrs Seaton.

General hand-shaking. Close up, Lionel Seaton looks older—older than his age, too. Paul tells me later he was in the war, one of the Arnhem survivors, and has quite a collection of medals. But where on earth do they get their looks from, I am wondering. Surely not from Janet Seaton.

‘We’ve been on the river,’ the girl says to me. ‘Lionel is absolutely mad. We tried to shoot a moorhen, with an air-pistol, from his rubber dinghy. Of course, what happened was that the moorhen’s intact and we’re dying of frozen bottoms.’

‘Vanessa!’ exclaims Mrs Seaton. ‘You must forgive these children their shocking manners, Mr Strangeways. They’re very badly brought up.’

She said it lightly; but a scowl appeared on Vanessa’s face, making her look quite plain and colourless for a moment, as if the sun had gone in.

‘We didn’t have the benefit of Janet’s bringing-up. She’s our stepmother, you know.’

It was an awkward little moment. But Lionel Seaton smoothed it over with an agreeably ponderous explanation of how the occupants of the rubber dinghy having to sit on the floor of the dinghy, and the floor of the dinghy being below the waterline, and the water being cold, inevitably the bottoms of the occupants of the dinghy, etc., etc. He added something about his good fortune in not having been one of those R.A.F. types, who had to spend considerable periods of the war paddling around the oceans in rubber dinghies.

He’s a good boy. Has the self-contained, somewhat poker-faced air one often finds in the children of parents with genius or ‘strong’ character.

Vanessa looks fourteen. Is actually younger? All-in hero worship of her brother, who finds her inextinguishably funny, is protective, affectionate to her, and sheds about ten years of his age in her company. The dear child is quite unaware she is healing her brother’s war wounds.

Presently Mrs Seaton held up a finger. The throbbing note—the note of a gong discreetly tapped by a perfect butler—entered her voice again.

‘I think I hear the Poet coming downstairs. Yes, here he is.’

And then—oh dear, it was like one of those Great Occasions, the street lined with bunting, the band ready to play, the guard of honour presenting arms, the crowds all agog, when round the corner comes, not Royalty, but a stray dog, or maybe an errand boy on a bicycle, and scuttles away down the ceremonial avenue.

Robert Seaton trotted into the room, smiling vaguely at no one in particular, a nondescript little man wearing a crumpled blue suit, which looked as if he’d slept in it.

He seemed about to shake hands with his own son and daughter; but Janet Seaton diverted him towards myself. As we shook hands, the dazed expression went out of his eyes, and his quality began to appear. A quality—I think I can put my finger on it now—of almost supernatural attentiveness. I had nervously begun to sketch out my fantasy, inspired by his roses, on the Sleeping Beauty theme. He listened to me, or so I felt, not with his ears only, but with his nerves, his whole slight body, and with an inward ear (his eyes looking downwards as if he strove to catch the echoes of my voice in his own soul). When I had finished, he glanced up, straight into my eyes for a moment: an impaling glance.

‘The Sleeping Beauty. Yes,’ he said musingly. ‘And the thicket of thorns. Yes. But have you thought’—he seemed to be burrowing out of sight, like a mole, towards some deeper meaning of his own—‘have you thought what really kept her there? Not the thorns, but the roses. She was the prisoner of her own beauty, of her parents’ determination that she should be invulnerable and never allowed to meet her fate. The Queen took away all the spinning-wheels, you remember. Yes, it was all the Queen’s fault. I don’t believe in that Wicked Fairy. The poor girl had nothing to do but moon about and admire her own reflection in the roses. So presently she went to sleep out of sheer boredom. I don’t believe the part about pricking her finger on a spindle. And what’s more,’ he added confidentially, ‘I don’t believe in that Prince. He’d never have got through the thorns. It’d take the Beast to do that. “Some rough beast.”’

‘You have got your fairy-tales mixed up, Robert,’ said his wife, who was now standing beside us. ‘Let’s go in to lunch, shall we?’

The dining-room. Dark, glowing, rich; not sombre. A sheen on every surface—table, sideboard: two centuries of elbow-grease and love. Empire chairs, candlesticks. Above the mantelpiece a portrait of the Lacey who built this house, after the Elizabethan manor, itself replacing an earlier construction, had been destroyed by fire. White roses nodding outside the window. Delicious food. The dwarf, Finny Black, serves at table: deft and quick, but it’s disconcerting to have a servant peering up at you as he hands the vegetables. While he’s out of the room for a minute, Mrs Seaton says to me:

‘Finny’s a great character. An authentic Fool.’

‘Shakespearean, you mean?’ Luckily I have caught the capital letter.

‘Yes. He says the wisest things, doesn’t he, Robert? Visitors always make him shy at first, though.’

‘He has persisted in his folly, then?’ I venture. Mrs S. looks blank at me, but her husband comes to the rescue.

‘Mr Strangeways is quoting from Blake—“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”’

‘I think that’s absolute rot,’ says Vanessa. ‘He’d just become a bigger fool. Which is what Finny has done.’

‘Oh, Vanessa, you know how that horrible chemical lemonade of yours takes the polish off the table! Wipe it up quickly!’ Mrs S. speaks in a voice of controlled exasperation. Vanessa polishes away with her napkin where she has spilt a little lemonade on the table, murmuring, ‘Out, damned spot!’ She looks mutinous.

I ask Robert Seaton what he’s working on just now. Before he can reply, his wife interposes: ‘Robert is writing his masterpiece’—her voice is throbbing again—‘an epic poem on the Great War—the 1914 war, I mean. Something in the nature of The Dynasts.’

Expression of blank misery on Robert’s face for a moment. Writers hate having their current work talked about, of course. Good ones, at any rate. I murmur polite interest: say we’ve waited a long time for a new book of his (it must be nearly ten years, in fact). I tell him how his early work, his Lyrical Interludes in particular, was the first thing that gave me a feeling for poetry, when I read it at school. Paul, who has been concentrating on his food, looks up and says unexpectedly:

‘Yes, but the best thing you’ve ever done is your Elegy for a Dead Wife.’ He proceeds, after a sly glance in my direction, which says, plainly as words could speak, “Oh yes, Nigel, even ex-R.A.F. types can read,” to make a number of extremely sensible and sensitive remarks about this poem. Robert Seaton glows visibly. His rather ordinary, plain, worried little face becomes suffused, as it were from within, by a beautiful tenderness. Extraordinary transfiguration.

‘It’s a very painful poem,’ says Janet Seaton; then compresses her lips, then adds, as if the words forced their way through her lips willy-nilly, ‘For me, at any rate.’

An exceedingly embarrassing silence. The ‘dead wife’ of the Elegy, Lionel’s and Vanessa’s mother, still has power to haunt, then. I am suddenly consumed by curiosity to know all about her. Lionel breaks the silence:

‘I say, d’you remember that Irish poet who came to stay, just before the war? You know, Dad—Peadar Mayo. “Will I tell ya what’s wrong with yer pooums, Seaton? They’re not bad pooums, mind ya. But ya don’t do what I do in my pooutry—ya don’t tear yer heart out and lay it, raw and bleedin’, on the page before ya. All this bejooled reticence of yours—ta hell with it, I say.”’

Robert Seaton chuckled. ‘Ah, yes, he was a wild man. And then he went on to recite my Elegy to me, with tears pouring down his cheeks.’

After lunch, he took me round the garden, etc. At the back of the house, which is L-shaped, the kitchen and servants’ quarters occupying the horizontal stroke of the L, there’s a large grassed court, with a whacking great chestnut tree in the middle. Beyond the courtyard a row of farm buildings—loose-boxes, cow-stalls, cart-shed, the dairy, all under a long, lichened tile roof which has weathered to a Donegal tweed pattern. On the left of the courtyard, facing the servants’ quarters across the width of it, but detached from the house, a magnificent tithe-barn. Seaton told me he’d turned it into a cottage and rented it to some friends called Torrance—a painter and his daughter: they were coming in to tea later.

We walked across the court, round the end of the farm buildings, into a walled orchard. In the near corner of it, a dozen yards or so wired off for poultry. The poet stood gazing intently at his hens for a minute: I waited respectfully: at last he said, with a curious little sideways glance at me, half quizzical, half abstracted:

‘Hens always do look so much at a loose end, don’t they?’ His fine, deep voice brought it out so seriously, I couldn’t help smiling. Well, no doubt it was just Keats over again with his sparrow picking about in the gravel. I asked if he looked after them and the cows himself. He said he used to, but he’d lost interest in them: he had a cowman and a gardener again now: he milked the cows sometimes still—found it ‘soothing.’

Over the orchard, through a finely-wrought iron gate in the brick wall, into the meadow beyond. The famous Guernseys were grazing there, looking like Noah’s Ark cows. Away on our left, a thick wood; on our right, below the pastures, the Thames. All wonderfully peaceful and well laid out for the eye.

‘I thought of writing an English Georgics when I came back here. But I’m no farmer really, and Nature rather bores me qua Nature.’

‘When you came back?’

‘Yes. After my father and elder brother died, I came in for the place. And the money. Very handy. Poets don’t enjoy short commons any more than any one else. Only it was too late. That’s where we bathe, just down there. I’ll show you.’

I forbore from asking any of the questions which this last speech of his stirred up in my mind. He hadn’t really been speaking to me at all. We sauntered down to the river; saw the place where the bank shelved gradually down into a natural bathing pool; climbed up the bluff a bit farther on, Seaton pointing out the vestiges of the terraced garden of the Elizabethan manor house, which had stood at the top of the bluff. Then we were in the great courtyard again. Boughs of the chestnut were being violently agitated. An idiot face mopped and mowed at us from between the candelabra of blossom.

‘Finny’s always climbing that tree,’ said Robert Seaton. ‘Climbs like a monkey. Extraordinarily powerful forearms: I dare say you noticed it when he was waiting at table.’

The appropriate comment failing me, I asked to see the dairy. It stands at the end of the row of farm buildings nearest the old barn. Obviously no expense spared. Separator, pasteurizer, refrigerator, cheese moulds, butter dryer and the rest of it, all very bright and hygienic. Windows high up, floor and walls tiled, with good drainage so that the place can be sluiced down by hose. Robert Seaton points out all the advantages, in a burst of animation; then relapses into his companionable but abstracted mood. Can’t keep his mind away from the epic of the Great War for long, I suppose: though I must say it’s an odd object for Robert Seaton.

We potter about a little longer. He shows me a well-equipped workshop and some unfinished articles of furniture he’d been making. I notice the dust is thick on them. Here too I get the impression of an only child of rich parents, given every toy that money can buy, and bored with the whole lot of them. I see a remarkably fine piece of wood-carving lying on a bench, ask him if it’s his work.

‘No, Mara Torrance did that. She’s got a gift, hasn’t she?’

Peering closer at the object, I get a shock: in the midst of the leaves and fruits carved out on the wood, intertwined with and fluently continuing their pattern, a nakedly priapic scene hit my eye. And—what shook me most—the bearded face of the satyr in it, tiny though it was, somehow conveyed an uncanny resemblance to no less a person than the poet, Robert Seaton. Involuntarily I glanced up at him. He met my eye firmly. The look of profound sadness, which always seems lurking just behind his features, ready to spring out and possess them, reappeared. He said:

‘It’s by way of being auto-therapy, you know.’

I didn’t know, of course. But there is a certain delicate dignity about Seaton, I find, which discourages even my inordinate curiosity from probing into his affairs.

Presently he leaves me to my own devices. I decide to look at the flower garden before rejoining the rest of the party. Walk past the barn, along a grass path lined with Irish yews and standard roses alternately, towards a summer house at its far end. One of those revolving ones: its back has been turned to the path. I hear voices from inside. Been repressing my inquisitiveness too long: can’t help listening. Lionel Seaton’s voice, and one I do not recognise; a female voice, cool, husky and—no other word for it—gloating. As follows:

Unknown Female: ‘So you’d do anything for me, would you, darling Lionel? Anything? I wonder do you really mean that?’

Lionel Seaton: ‘You know what I want to do.’

U.F.: ‘Oh yes. I’m to be—reclaimed. As if I was a marsh, or something. But suppose I don’t want to be reclaimed?’

L.S.: ‘Quite happy as you are, eh?’

U.F.: ‘I have my moments. What more can any one expect?’

L.S.: ‘A great deal, my dear girl. And you know it. Love: marriage: children. A normal ordinary life.’

U.F.: ‘Oh, how dull you make it sound!’

L.S.: ‘I’ve had enough drama the last five years. Give me the bowler-hat, the eight-thirty and the slippers by the fire.’

U.F.: ‘You can have them. But I’m not interested. You and your dreary domesticity! No, I’m going to make a splash before I’m dead. I’ll —’

L.S.: ‘A splash! Out of a bottle. That’s all you . . . No you don’t, my girl! I’m rather good at unarmed combat, so you can just sheathe those long red nails of yours again.’

U.F.: ‘No, you’re not so dull now . . . Well, go on. Start reclaiming me . . . Come on, my little Arnhem hero, don’t be frightened!’

I judge it time to retire. Well, well. The lady is a holy terror, as my dear Superintendent Blount would say. But I fancy she has met her match.

At tea, an hour later, I meet her. She walks across the lawn to where we are sitting in the shade of one of the enormous trees, a big, lumpish, rather dirty-looking man with her. I am introduced to Rennell Torrance and his daughter, Mara. Recognise the voice in the summer house as soon as she speaks. Dark, lank hair (why do all females connected with Art look as if they’d poured a bucket of varnish over their heads and forgotten to use a comb?): thick, magnolia-white skin: restless fingers: chain-smoker? A bit of a dipso?

She holds me with a long, long stare from her slightly protuberant eyes. I can feel them on my face after I’ve turned my own away. During tea, she and Lionel pointedly refrain from mutual glances. Mrs Seaton, I notice, keeps a weather eye lifting on them. Faintly uneasy atmosphere all round. Rennell Torrance holds the floor with a long diatribe against the ‘fashionable’ English painters of the day—Matthew Smith, Sutherland, Hichens, Christopher Wood, Frances Hodgkin, all come under the hammer, regardless of age and sex. We’ve got to throw off the French influence and go back to Samuel Palmer. A disgruntled man, this Torrance, and presumably a failure himself as a painter. But he has a certain panache in his talk. After he’d blown off for ten minutes or so, he noticed my presence and asked what I was interested in.

‘Crime,’ I said.

The man’s eyes flickered towards his daughter, then back to me. His face had taken on a different expression—wary? stupid?

‘What? You mean you read detective novels?’

‘No, he lives them,’ said Paul. ‘He’s hand in glove with Scotland Yard. So watch your step, all of you.’

Vanessa Seaton clapped her hands gaily. ‘I say, that’s wizard! When Torrance bumps off his rival painters, Mr Strangeways will track him down.’

‘They’re dead, most of ’em, already. And stinking,’ said Torrance.

Mara, staring hard at me again, asked me if I specialised in any particular branch of crime. Mrs Seaton said, very quickly, she was sure I didn’t want to talk shop.

‘But I’m interested,’ said Mara, in a whining, little-girl sort of voice.

‘Well, I’ve helped in a number of murder investigations.’

The extraordinary tension, which seemed to have come into the air at Mara Torrance’s last remarks, relaxed a little. Robert Seaton, very wide-awake now, almost quivering with interest, like a terrier at a rat-hole, said:

‘It must be fascinating. The detonating point, I mean. The point at which a given man or woman bursts into flame. I suppose it varies enormously.’

‘I’d like to see Lionel burst into flames,’ said Vanessa, giggling. ‘He’d burn with a beautiful orange glow.’

‘A pure white radiance,’ murmured Miss Torrance with a rather disagreeable emphasis on ‘pure.’

Lionel threw a cushion at his sister. ‘But most murders are premeditated, not sudden outbreaks of passion, aren’t they?’

‘This is a very morbid conversation, children,’ said Mrs Seaton. Her husband did not take the hint.

‘That’s not what I mean, Lionel,’ he pursued. ‘Every murder is an act of violence, of passion, however long it’s been premeditated. No, I’m talking about the flash-point in every human being. Look—you may wish to get rid of someone, some intolerable situation: you lay your plans in phantasy; you’re not serious about it, or you think you aren’t: you imagine your weapon, your opportunity, your alibi, and so on: but all the time you’re laying a train in reality. And then a moment comes when you find the train has been lit, the spark is creeping up it, you can’t stop the explosion now. You’re doomed to act what you have dreamed.’

‘Oo-er,’ exclaimed Vanessa. ‘You are creepy, Daddy!’

I said something to the effect that the flash-point would depend on whether the murder you planned in imagination was consistent with your own personality. If you planned a murder from the wrong motive, i.e., a motive unconnected with the strongest element of your personality, with your ruling passion, the train would never be lit.

‘But nobody would contemplate a murder unless what you call his ruling passion was involved,’ said Paul, very sensibly.

‘This begins to get interesting,’ Mara Torrance drawled. ‘Tell us what motive you think each of us would have, strong enough to push us over the edge.’

I said I didn’t know any of them well enough. The young woman made an eeny-meeny-meiny-mo movement with her cigarette. It pointed at Mrs Seaton.

‘Come on, Janet. Mr Strangeways doesn’t know us well enough. So we’ll tell him. You start.’

‘My dear Mara, I don’t like these truth games. They always end in tears.’

‘Well, I’ll speak for you, then. It’s easy. Janet’s ruling passion is Plash Meadow and all that therein is. She’d kill any one to protect it. You next, Paul.’

‘I’m the purely altruistic type. I’d murder for the good of humanity. I’d like to get the leading politicians of the Great Powers into a room, and point a tommy gun at them, and tell them that, if they didn’t come to an agreement within three hours to abolish the atom bomb, they’d have had it.’

‘Good enough. What about you, Father?’

Rennell Torrance mopped his lard-coloured face. ‘I’m an Artist. I should only be interested in murder as an acte gratuit. I’d—’

‘Hmph. Or if someone came between you and your creature comforts,’ interrupted his daughter, with a sort of humouring contempt. ‘You’d kill out of panic. Or perhaps for gain, if it seemed fairly safe, and there was really enough to be gained. Now Robert would kill for his art, wouldn’t you, Robert?’

‘You’re probably right, my dear,’ said the poet mildly. ‘Only I could never bring myself to facing my victim. It’d have to be one of those long-range murders—you know, the cyanide pill inserted in the bottle of aspirin tablets.’

Vanessa, who had been brooding in a cloud of tawny hair, remarked meditatively. ‘I would like to poison Miss Grubb, our chemistry mistress. Some very slow poison. I would like to see her writhing at my feet—’

‘Vanessa—!’

‘—and just as she was about to expire, I’d give her an antidote. Or the stomach pump. How exactly does a stomach pump work, Mr Strangeways?’

‘You could use one on your own tum to advantage,’ said Lionel, prodding his sister’s stomach. ‘It’s really revolting, the way you swell up after every meal.’

‘Oh, do shut up, Lionel, you’re horrible! And I’m not greedy.’

‘So we’re left with Lionel,’ said Mara. ‘What would the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche do murder for?’

‘Well, I might wring your neck one day, when you’re in a specially exasperating mood.’

‘Ah, yes. Crime of passion. That’s got you taped,’ she replied with a shamelessly long, deep look at him.

There was a silence on the lawn. Wood pigeons cooed up above. I could hear the ground bass of the weir.

‘Nobody has asked me what I’d do murder for,’ said Mara Torrance.

Nobody offered to, even now.

‘Revenge,’ she said.

‘Oh, goody,’ said Vanessa. ‘Like me and Miss Glubb.’

Finny Black came trotting up to remove the tea-things.

‘And what about our Finny?’ drawled Mara.

Mrs Seaton turned upon her formidably. ‘Mara, I absolutely forbid you—you know Finny’s not—’

‘All right, all right. Finny’s a piece of Plash Meadow, and mustn’t be disturbed. I know. Aren’t you, Finny?’

The dwarf clucked and beamed at Mara Torrance. When he’d gone back into the house, Robert Seaton turned to me and said:

‘It’s quite an interesting point. Finny will copy any action he has seen. That’s how my wife trained him.’

‘You mean,’ said I, ‘if he actually saw a murder committed, he might go and commit an identical one on another victim?’

Robert Seaton nodded. His wife got a firm grip on the conversation and turned it in another direction. It was very amiable, carefree, placid, from now on. An hour later Paul and I left. They stood on the drive, waving farewell: the good poet, embowered in his roses, embosomed in his charming family group. How proper, and how rare, that a true creator should have so beautiful, so calm a setting to work in. As we turned out of the drive into the road, the roses seemed to close in upon him with a gentle, genial familiarity, and enfold him. Such graciousness. Such peace. . . .

Chapter 2

A Trunk Without a Label

TWO MONTHS AFTER his visit to the Seatons’ home, Nigel Strangeways received a telegram:

STRANGEWAYS: WELBECK CLUB, LONDON, W.1. BODY IN THAMES 1½ MILES UPSTREAM FROM HINTON LACEY STOP ARE YOU INTERESTED QUESTION-MARK. PAUL.

To which Nigel replied:

WILLINGHAM: ROBB FARM, HINTON LACEY, OXFORDSHIRE. NO WHY SHOULD I BE STOP FISH IT OUT IF IT WORRIES YOU STOP VERY BUSY. NIGEL.

Two days later, while he was working at his monograph on the subject of graphology in relation to the manuscripts of certain Twentieth-century poets, a second telegram arrived:

STRANGEWAYS: WELBECK CLUB, LONDON, W.1. POLICE BESIEGING PLASH MEADOW STOP JANET SEATON IN GREAT FORM O/C THE DEFENCE STOP HAS ALREADY CLONKED INSPECTOR STOP ARE YOU INTERESTED NOW YOU OLD VULTURE QUESTION-MARK. PAUL.

Nigel did not reply. Paul Willingham never wrote letters and refused to have a telephone in his house, on the score that he had done quite enough talking over the inter-com during the war: so there was nothing for it but to go down and ask him to explain his rigmarole. But Nigel first rang up his old friend, Superintendent Blount, at New Scotland Yard: he had no intention of interrupting his work merely on the strength of a flippant telegram from Paul. At the same time, it could not be ignored that a body found in the Thames one and a half miles upstream from Hinton Lacey was a body found in the Thames half a mile downstream from Ferry Lacey; and presumably the police would not visit Plash Meadow just to admire the roses.

‘Blount? Strangeways here. Sorry to bother you, but do you know anything about a body found in the Thames two or three days ago—in Oxfordshire, near a place called Ferry Lacey?’

‘E-eh, why, good Lord, the Assistant Commissioner’s just been talking to me about it this forenoon. Now isn’t that a vairy strange coincidence. The Oxfordshire chaps have asked for our help.’

‘What is it? Suicide? Murder?’

‘Och, it’s murder all right. Don’t you ever read the newspapers?’

‘Only the News of the World. And it’s not Sunday yet. Who’s the victim?’

‘That’s what we’ve got to find out,’ said Superintendent Blount, with a grim chuckle. ‘But how d’you know about it if you haven’t read the papers?’

‘Well, I’ve met the Seatons, who live—’

‘The devil you have! Are you free this evening? I’d like to have a chat with you after I’ve seen Inspector Gates—he’s the local chap in charge of the investigation.’

‘The one Mrs Seaton clonked?’

‘Eh, what’s that? Oh yes, the lady appears to be something of a tartar. Now, would you be free about ten p.m.?’

Nigel decided not to look up the last few days’ newspapers, but to wait till Blount gave him the story, ungarbled. Shortly after ten that night, the two of them were sitting in Nigel’s room with a bottle of whisky between them.

‘A vairy sweet dram,’ said Blount, smacking his lips. ‘Where d’you get the stuff? Are you in the Black Market? Well, good luck to you. Now, about this body of yours . . .’

The facts, as related by Blount, were as follows. On the previous Sunday, at nine-twenty in the evening, a young couple on holiday had pushed their punt into a reed-bed by the south bank of the Thames, intending to moor there for the night. Thrusting his pole down into the mud, the young man felt an obstruction. He fished with the boat-hook, and pulled up the body of a man which had been caught in the reeds underwater. The girl disembarked and went for help to the nearest farm, while the man remained by the body. In due course the police arrived, and the body was taken to the mortuary. Post-mortem examination revealed no signs of asphyxia: therefore (‘apart from other evidence,’ said Blount grimly) death had not been caused by drowning. Rigor mortis had passed off: the palms of the hands and soles of the feet presented a bleached appearance, and there was brownish discoloration of the surface veins of the body, but not yet the green hue in the abdominal region which comes as the second stage of colliquative putrefaction. These signs gave the time of death within approximate limits of 36 hours to 3–5 days before the discovery of the corpse.

Since dead bodies do not come to the surface and float in less than 8–10 days from the time of death, the victim must have been put into the river at or near the spot where he was found. Because of the weir not far upstream, there was a strongish current, which might conceivably have rolled the body some little distance along the river-bed: the police might conduct experiments with a dummy to test this. But, to sum it up, everything pointed to the body having been put into the river not later than the night of Friday–Saturday, or earlier than the previous Tuesday, at some point between Ferry Lacey and the reed-bed where it was found, if it was not actually placed in the reeds. No attempt had been made to weigh the body down, which was unusual in cases of this sort. Search of the river banks for traces of the corpse’s disposal had been rendered almost hopeless by the trampling and debris of the members of a London Angling Club, who had been fishing this reach all Sunday. But the local police had found no suspicious marks on the section of the bank nearest the reed bed. The possibility that the corpse had been conveyed to this point by boat, and dumped into the water, was likely enough; inquiries were being made on these lines too.

The Superintendent reeled off these particulars, then stopped short and applied himself to his whisky with a somewhat leery look at Nigel.

‘So how was he murdered?’ Nigel asked.

‘There were no marks of violence—e-eh—on the body.’

‘Poison?’

‘No trace of poison in the organs,’ replied Blount, evidently enjoying Nigel’s mystified expression.

‘He wasn’t drowned. He wasn’t poisoned. He wasn’t shot, stabbed, or beaten up. What sort of a corpse is this?’

‘He was wearing a mackintosh—no other clothes at all. Faint traces of bloodstains were found on it, in spite of the immersion,’ continued Blount with stolid complacence.

‘But how the devil—?’

‘Mostly on the outside of the mackintosh. The deceased was judged to be about five feet, eight inches in height.’

‘What d’you mean, “judged to be”? Haven’t the Oxfordshire police got a tape-measure?’

Blount’s climax, for which he’d certainly worked hard enough, now arrived. He said:

‘Well, e-eh, ye’ll no’ judge precisely of a man’s height when his head is missing.’

The Superintendent sat back and savoured Nigel’s amazement.

‘Just so,’ he went on, after a pause. ‘The head had been hacked off the neck, verra clumsily; amateurish work—’

‘T’ck, t’ck, t’ck.’

‘—and they can’t find it anywhere, what’s more. Inspector Gates has had the river dragged for a mile either way, and—’

‘But if the body was brought by boat, the chap might have been murdered and his head disposed of hundreds of miles away.’

‘Aye, just so. But there was a tear in the mackintosh, and the wee piece of stuff torn from it was found on a barbed-wire hedge on the edge of Foxhole wood, about a mile from the footbridge at Ferry Lacey.’

‘Well, what’s your trouble, then? The chap must have been a local. Who’s missing in the neighbourhood?’

‘Nobody’s missing,’ replied Blount. ‘And what’s more, my boy, we’ve had men working through the list of missing males for the whole of Great Britain, and so far the body does not answer satisfactorily to any of the descriptions given.’

‘Then why was his head cut off?’

‘Exactly, Strangeways! You’ve put your finger right on the spot,’ exclaimed Blount, with as near an approach to excitement as Nigel had ever seen in him. ‘You cut off a man’s head, or batter his features, to prevent your victim being recognised. You remove his clothes so that tailor’s labels and laundry-marks shall not be identified—the mackintosh was a cheap one, by the way, from the Universal Tailors—could have been bought at any of several hundred branches—we’re trying to trace it, but—’ the Superintendent shrugged. ‘Now, why should the murderer go to all this trouble, if the victim was an absolute unknown anyway? Of course, it’s early days yet. But this body seems to have turned up simply out of the blue. It just doesn’t correspond with any of the descriptions of missing persons. I tell you, it’s no’ canny. Well now, what do you make of it?’

‘Perhaps he did. Turn up out of the blue, I mean,’ said Nigel meditatively. ‘From a far country. Was he wearing leather boots?’

‘Leather boots? I’ve just told you that, except for a mackintosh—’

‘Yes, of course,’ murmured Nigel. ‘But—’ he began to quote:

‘“O suitably-attired-in-leather boots

Head of a traveller, wherefore, seeking whom,

Whence, by what way, how purposed art thou come

To this well-nightingaled vicinity?”’

‘What is all this tommy-rot?’

‘First lines of Housman’s parody of a Greek tragedy. Very apt. Asks all the questions we’ve got to answer. Ferry Lacey’s a quiet, peaceful place; a dead end. You wouldn’t go there on your way to anywhere else. Small population—two or three hundred perhaps. If a stranger turned up there, he’d stand out like a black sheep on a snowfield. The whole village would be talking about him.’

‘We’ve had no reports of any stranger being seen in the village last week.’

‘Which implies that he didn’t want to be seen. Arrived at night, perhaps. And why was he walking through that wood where he got caught up by the barbed wire? Perhaps because he had a rendezvous there: perhaps because he wished to avoid the roads. Both explanations involve secrecy. You know, Blount, there’s one class of missing persons your lists won’t altogether cover. Deserters from H.M. Forces. Add in returned prisoners, displaced persons, all the flotsam and jetsam of war.’

‘Is that all?’ said Blount dryly.

‘A little tactful gossiping in the neighbourhood should discover whether there are any families with dubious relatives—any skeletons in cupboards or black sheep or prodigal sons. How old was this corpse of yours?’

‘Fifty-five to sixty, the doctors reckon.’

‘Not a deserter, then. But—’

‘Rather ill-nourished. But tough and sinewy for his age; had done hard manual work recently: also been living some time in the East—pigmentation of the skin,’ Blount went on, poker faced.