Джорджетт Хейер - Detection Unlimited

“Oh, he did that all right!” said Harbottle. “But, if you were to ask me, I should say this man was morally his murderer.”

“Well, he said he drove him to it, didn't he? What have you found to put you into this taking?”

“It hasn't, strictly speaking, anything to do with this case,” said Harbottle, “but I brought it along with those papers you see there, thinking you might like to read it. You'll recall that I told you Warrenby was the Coroner: well, I came upon the letter that unfortunate man wrote when he killed himself. Here it is! Now, you listen to this, sir! It's dated May 25 thof the last year—that was the night he locked himself into his bedroom and gassed himself. "Dear Gavin, This is the last letter you'll receive from me, and I don't propose ever to set eyes on you again. You only want to come here for what you can get out of me, and to goad me into losing my temper with your damned tongue, and to be maddened by you on top of all I have to suffer is too much. I've reached the end of my tether. The place will be yours sooner than you think, and when you step into my shoes you can congratulate yourself on having done your bit towards finishing me off. You will, if I know you. Yours, Walter."' Harbottle laid the sheet of paper down. “And he was right, poor gentleman! He does congratulate himself!”

Hemingway picked up the letter, and glanced at it. “Yes, well, I don't like Plenmeller any more than you do, but I call it a damned mean thing to do, gas yourself and leave a letter like this behind you! Nice for his brother to have to listen to it being read out in court!”

“You'd have thought he'd have left the district,” said Harbottle.

“I wouldn't, because, for one thing, he'd find it hard to get a price for his property here; and for another, although he may be a cold-blooded devil, he's got plenty of nerve.”

“Nerve enough to have shot Warrenby is what I think!”

“Lord, yes!” agreed Hemingway. “Nerve enough to shoot half the village, if it suited his book to do it! But if you're trying to make me believe he shot Warrenby just because he didn't happen to like him, you're wasting your time, Horace! I've been telling the Chief Constable that I don't know what constitutes a motive for murder, or what doesn't, but that was putting it a bit too high. I do know that no one, barring a lunatic, kills a chap because he thinks he's a pushing bounder! I daresay that's what his highness would like me to think, so as he can sit back and watch me making a fool of myself, but if he wants me to treat him as a hot suspect he'll have to give me a sniff of a real motive—and stop being the life and soul of the party! Did you find anything else at Warrenby's office?”

Harbottle glanced disparagingly at the papers on the desk. “I brought that lot along for you to look at, but I wouldn't say they were likely to lead you anywhere. There's some correspondence with one of the Town Councillors, which looks as if they'd had a row; and there's a whole lot of stuff about a trust for sale, which I can't say I quite get the hang of. Seems Mr. Drybeck was the principal trustee, and had the handling of it. Warrenby was acting for someone he calls by a fancy name I never heard before.” Harbottle picked up one of the clips of documents, and searched through them. “Here you are, sir! A Cestui que trust,” he said, laying the letter before his chief, and pointing to the words.

“Lawyers!” ejaculated Hemingway disgustedly. “Go and see if there's a dictionary on the premises, for the lord's sake!”

The Inspector went away, returning a few minutes later with a well-thumbed volume in his hand. “It's a person entitled to the benefit of a trust,” he announced.

“Good!” said Hemingway, who was running through the letters. “That's about what it looks like, from all this. This client wants his share of the trust: that's clear enough; and apparently it's all in order to sell the thing, only, for some reason or other Drybeck's being coy about doing it.”

“Yes, but only because it's a bad time to sell,” Harbottle pointed out. “He says so in one of the letters, and it sounds reasonable enough. You'll see that Warrenby doesn't quarrel with that at all. Writes perfectly civilly, and says he appreciates the situation, but his client is anxious to receive his share of the sale without loss of time. I don't see what bearing any of it could have upon the murder, sir. In fact, I was in two minds about bringing it to you. The thing that made me wonder was that Mr. Drybeck came into the office this afternoon—nosing around, I thought, but he said he'd come to find out if there was anything he could do to help Coupland. He tried to get me to tell him if—I'd discovered anything—at least, that's the way I read his chat, but I wouldn't be prepared to swear it wasn't just inquisitiveness. I got rid of him of course, and it did enter my mind that perhaps he was worried about this correspondence with Warrenby. I found nothing else that was any concern of his.”

“Well, that's interesting,” said Hemingway. “There's no doubt that this client of Warrenby's was determined to have his share of the trust, and there's no doubt that Drybeck's stalling. Of course, it may be that he's just trying to do his best for the beneficiaries—pity we don't know what the others felt about an immediate sale!—and on the other hand it may be that he's got reasons of his own for not wanting to sell the trust.”

“Good gracious, Chief, do you mean you think he's been embezzling the funds?” exclaimed Harbottle.

“No, not embezzling them, but it wouldn't surprise me if he's made a muck of the thing through being fatheaded, or half asleep. And if that's so, then I'd bet my last farthing Warrenby had got wind of it. It'll bear looking into, anyway. Is there anything in this?” He picked up an address book as he spoke, and opened it at random.

“I haven't studied it, sir. I thought I'd better do so, though.”

Hemingway nodded, turning over the thin leaves in a cursory survey. “Yes, quite right. You never know what—” He broke off suddenly. “Well, I'm damned!”

“What have you found, sir?” demanded the Inspector, bending over him to see what was written on the page.

“Something I wasn't expecting, and didn't more than half believe in. Horace, let it be a lesson to you! Always pay attention to what people say to you, no matter how silly you may think it sounds!”

“You do,” said Harbottle.

“I didn't this time. I had a suspicion that your friend Plenmeller was trying to see whether he could get me to follow a red herring. He told me to look for someone called Nenthall—and here he is, my lad! Francis Aloysius Nenthall, Red Lodge, Braidhurst, Surrey. Damn! I wish I'd looked at this book before I rang the Superintendent up! I'll have to get on to him again first thing tomorrow.”

“What did Plenmeller say about this man?”

“He said that Warrenby once asked Lindale if the name conveyed anything to him, and that it obviously conveyed a lot more than he liked—though he denied it. Which may, or may not be true. What I'm sure of is that Ultima Unlikely was right when she said there was something fishy about the Lindale set-up. There is. She's scared white, and he's playing every ball sent down to him with a dead bat. They've got something they're desperately anxious I shan't find out. So has the Squire—but I think I know what that is. This is a nice case, Horace.”

“I don't see it, sir.”

“No, and you never will, because you're not interested in psychology.”

The Inspector, knowing his chief's foibles, looked at him with deep foreboding, but Hemingway did not pursue his favourite study. He said thoughtfully: “I don't know when I've had so many possibles to choose from. It's to be hoped I don't lose my bearings amongst them. There are three with motives that stand out a mile: the dead man's niece, who inherits his money; her glamour-boy, who says he never thought of marrying her, which I take to be a highly mendacious statement; and old Drybeck, who's been losing ground to Warrenby for years, and may—if my guess is correct—have been standing in danger of being discovered by him to have made a mess of some trust. Those are what you might call the hot suspects. After them I've got the questionables, headed by the Squire. I think he was being blackmailed by Warrenby.”