Chapter Seven #2
“Frequented! Martin went for an hour or two, once or twice a—at most three times—and it’s a perfectly—he went to the private bar, not—Sometimes he’d tell me he had met Dr. Darlington there, and even the Rector of St. Nicholas’s occasionally—”
“I do not consider that a recommendation for either the place or the rector. Or the doctor come to that.”
The doctor must be talked to, Alec thought, and the rector, too, especially in view of the victim’s abandoned ambition to be ordained.
“Perfectly respectable,” Mrs. Devine responded to her sister. “And he never came home inebriated! But that’s where he had gone when he—” Once more, tears threatened.
Piper had had the forethought to bring the brandy bottle. He added a quarter-inch to her glass and she took an automatic sip.
Mrs. Webb glared at him. “These policemen seem intent on making you inebriated, Iris. Have a care!”
“Nonsense. I’m not at all inebriated.” Judging by the way she uttered the word, without stumbling or over-preciseness, she spoke the truth. “It just gives me a little courage. In any case, I have nothing to hide. If you’re going to be so—so negative, Lily, I wish you would go away.”
“I shall leave when Delphine arrives.”
“Delphine?” Alec asked.
“Iris’s daughter, Delphine Arbuthnot.”
Alec met Piper’s eyes and knew exactly what he was thinking: At least the poor woman wasn’t christened Delphinium!
“Delphine lives up north, in—She’s on her way, but she had to take the children to her in-laws’ before—Such little dears! I wish Martin would—had—”
“Have you any other children, Mrs. Devine?”
“Just my younger daughter, Christine. She and her husband went to Australia as soon as he was demobbed after the—I can never remember the name of the place—not Billabong, that’s from the song, but something like—I have the address in my book—”
“Never mind, I doubt if we’ll need to get in touch with her.
” Christine wasn’t likely to know anything useful about her brother, and unless the case dragged on endlessly, communication would take too long to help.
One couldn’t ask intimate questions by wireless telegraph.
“I’d be glad, though, if you’d ring up the local police station when Mrs. Arbuthnot arrives, just in case we should want a word with her. ”
“I will. I promise.”
“Then I believe that’s all for now.” There wasn’t enough left of Devine to require a relative to make a formal identification. “I’m afraid we may have to get back to you later.”
Mrs. Webb promptly rang the bell to summon a maid to show them out.
It didn’t seem to have crossed her mind that there might be questions for her, also.
Alec gave her a considering look and decided she probably knew little and understood less of her nephew.
And what she knew, she’d put the worst possible construction on, though she had said he wouldn’t harm a fly.
… Still, that was the sort of thing many people automatically said of murder victims. He wouldn’t attempt to question her unless and until he was desperate.
“Thank you very much for your cooperation, Mrs. Devine. Once again, I apologise for the intrusion.”
As Alec and Piper left the room, Mrs. Webb had already begun to pour a stream of words into her defenceless sister’s ears.
The parlourmaid closed the sitting-room door firmly behind them.
“Enough to try the patience of a saint!” she exclaimed.
“As if the mistress hadn’t got enough to bear!
Sergeant Tring said to tell you, sir, as he’s already left and he’ll be waiting for further instructions.
Ooh, he’s a one! Begging your pardon, sir. ”
Piper waited till the front door was shut and they were halfway down the garden path before he remarked, half-admiring, half-disapproving, “I dunno how the sarge does it!”
“Does what?”
“Loosens their tongues. That girl, I bet she doesn’t usually talk like that about Mrs. Devine and her sister, not to anyone but her fellow servants.”
“Perhaps she considers you and me on a level with her fellow servants. What I’d like to know, is how you got Mrs. Webb to shut up for long enough for me to ask Mrs. Devine a few questions!”
Piper grinned. “I just told her, when we went for the brandy, that she didn’t have to say anything, but it was my duty to write down everything she chose to say and it might be produced in evidence in a court of law.”
“Ernie, you didn’t! Talk about a stroke of genius. All right, we’ll go and pick up Mackinnon—he’s surely had long enough at Devine’s office. You and he can see the doctor. I’ll tackle the Rev.”
The rector, a tall, thin man in a High Church soutane, was a disappointment. When Alec asked whether Martin Devine had confided in him, he shook his head gravely.
“I’m afraid he rarely attended church services, and never took communion. On the rare occasions when he did come, Christmas and Easter for the most part, one had the impression that he did so to please his mother. Mrs. Devine is a regular communicant.”
“Did you know him before the War, sir?”
“No. I came to St. Nicholas’s during the War. Mrs. Devine told me Martin had once wanted to embrace a clerical life, but I put it down to the enthusiasm of youth. It rarely lasts long enough to bear fruit, alas.” He sighed.
“Mrs. Devine mentioned that Martin had occasionally encountered you at the Cricketers’ Arms.”
“Yes, indeed. I try to visit all the public houses in my parish now and then. You would be surprised what confidences may be shared over a modest half-pint. But not by Martin Devine. Of course, if he had, naturally I should be unable to pass on anything he said.”
“But you would pass on the fact that he had.”
The Rector inclined his head. “Certainly.” He hesitated, and Alec held his breath.
“I can only say, since no words on the subject were ever uttered, that he presented a cheerful and contented facade, but I sensed in him—read in his eyes, perhaps—a deep bewilderment, verging on unhappiness. A troubled soul. I cannot express it otherwise. But such is of no use to a policeman, I suppose.”
“On the contrary, sir. I dare say you’d be surprised at how much we rely on our impressions of people and on the obscure workings of intuition. I shan’t lightly dismiss the insight of a clergyman. Thank you for your time.”
Alec met the others at the Cricketers. Tom had already arranged with the landlord for the use of his snuggery, a tiny room with a desk where he did up his accounts. Two extra chairs had been squeezed in.
Entering last, Tom was barely able to close the door behind his huge bulk.
He took out a large white handkerchief and wiped his endless forehead—merging as it did with the bald dome of his head, Daisy had once described it as continuing to the nape of his neck.
“Won’t that window open any wider, laddie?
” he said to Piper, gesturing at the small square of glass high on the wall. “We’ll all suffocate.”
“I’ll try.” By main force, Ernie opened the stiff casement another two inches. The air that wafted in was distinctly warmer, but at least it was also fresher.
He was at the small desk, as he had to take notes whereas the others had only to report.
Alec took the sagging armchair, while Tom and Mackinnon had the wooden chairs brought in from the bar.
Four plates of limp-looking sandwiches, each adorned with a single gherkin, were spread out on the desk along with Ernie’s papers.
“Don’t know how the landlord can stand to do his bookkeeping in here,” Tom grumbled, wiping his neck. “And he does plenty, he says, this being a free house. It’s easier to run a pub owned by a brewery, but they’re looking over your shoulder all the time. He likes his freedom.”
“You said in your report, Sarge, the pub in Ayot St. Paul was a free house, too,” Ernie mentioned.
“He seeks them here, he seeks them there, he seeks connections everywhere,” said Alec, in parody of The Scarlet Pimpernel.
“You never know,” Ernie insisted.
“Very true. Right, you go first, Mackinnon.”
“I talked to everybody at Devine’s office, sir, from the senior partner, who was his uncle by marriage, down to the office boy. Hard-working, good tempered, polite—he sounds like a nice chap. That’s what it all amounts to, though yon Mr. Webb put it in fifty words when ane would hae sufficed.”
“Not really? The senior partner? The uncle?”
“Aye. I wonder that any of his clients ever manages to explain his business.”
Alec and Ernie exchanged a glance and laughed.
“We had the dubious pleasure of meeting Mrs. Webb,” Alec explained. “Ernie had to resort to underhanded methods to get her to shut up so that I could talk to her sister. How on earth do they manage at home?”
“Either one of ’em talks a lot elsewhere,” Tom suggested, “because he or she can’t get a word in edgewise at home, or else neither listens to t’other. Wasn’t there any grain among the chaff, Mr. Mackinnon?”
“Plenty of names. Everyone he ever knew Devine to associate with. I kept a separate list, which I’ve already gi’en to Piper.”
“A lot of ’em Mrs. Devine told us, too.”
“How many total, Ernie?” Alec asked with deep misgiving.
“Maybe fifty, Chief.”
An upheaval beneath Tom’s moustache indicated a broad grin. “I can add a couple of dozen from the landlord, though some may be the same. No strangers about that evening.”
Alec groaned. “Now how are we going to work out which of his acquaintances are significant and worth interviewing? Well, that can wait. We can’t spend a lot more time here or we’ll never make it to Tunbridge Wells today. Any lady friends, Mackinnon?”
“Plenty of ladies he played tennis or bridge with, and a few clients, but none he squired about, sir.”
“The Devines’ servants didn’t know of any, either, Chief,” said Tom.
“Hmm. We’ll get to the servants in a minute. If that’s the lot for the office, Mackinnon, did you have any better luck with the doctor?”
“Just a wee scrap. I’d say the guid doctor puts away a fair bit and wouldn’t likely have noticed if Devine had bared his soul. Devine was never ill, but he did once ask for a prescription for sleeping powders.”
“Ah!” said Tom, stroking his moustache.
“Tom?”
“The live-in servants, two maids and the cook, say Devine occasionally suffered from nightmares. They’d hear him crying out in his sleep. Mrs. Devine always wears earplugs because the least little sound wakes her, so she wouldn’t know.”
“The third man?” Alec wondered.
“Devine was the second,” said Ernie with his usual precision.
“No, you missed that bit when you went to get the brandy for Mrs. Devine. The third man was the one Devine killed in the War, or may have killed. She thought it was what made him resolve not to become a clergyman. We’ll never know for sure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what gave him nightmares.
I don’t suppose anyone found out which regiment or brigade of the Territorials he was in? Or the regular army?”
They all shook their heads.
“Colonel Pelham was in the Territorials,” Ernie reminded him, “but I don’t know which regiment. We should be able to find out this afternoon, and then we can go to their records and find out if Devine was in the same branch. D’you reckon it could be an important link, Chief?”
Alec sighed. “Who knows? But Daisy suggested it might be,” he confessed.