Джорджетт Хейер - Envious Casca

"I know I shall die if I have to answer any more questions! That policeman yesterday was utterly brutal, and this one's bound to be worse!" said Valerie fatalistically.

JHer bugbear, at this moment, was taking stock of oseph and of Stephen, both of whom had emerged from the billiard-room to receive him. Joseph had a piece of tinsel in his hand, and explained that he was engaged in dismantling the Christmas tree. "We have no heart for it now!" he said.

"You ought to send it to your local hospital," said Hemingway helpfully. "They'd very likely be glad of it."

"There!" cried Joseph. "Why didn't I think of that? It's just what my brother would have wished, too! It shall be done! What say you, Stephen?"

"Do what you like with the damned thing!" said Stephen shortly.

The Inspector looked at him with quick interest. "Mr. Stephen Herriard?" he asked.

Stephen nodded. "Yes. What do you want to do? Visit the scene of the crime, or interrogate us all again?"

"If it's all the same to you, sir, I'd like to visit the scene of the crime first. Perhaps you'd take me up? I understand it was you who discovered Mr. Herriard's body?"

"Go with my uncle," said Stephen. "He discovered it too, and can tell you quite as much as I can."

"Stephen!" begged Joseph.

"Oh, that's all right with me, sir!" said Hemingway cheerfully. "Very understandable that the gentleman shouldn't wish to go into the room again."

Joseph sighed. "Very well, Inspector, I'll take you."

Joseph followed him to the staircase. He cast a knowledgeable eye over this noble erection, and remarked that he didn't know when he'd seen a finer one.

"No; it is supposed to, be a perfect example of the Cromwellian," said Joseph, with an effort. "I'm afraid I'm a vandal in these matters. My brother was very proud of the house."

"Went in for antiques, did he?"

"Yes, it was quite a hobby of his." Joseph glanced over his shoulder, summoning up a brave smile. "I used to tease him about it! And now this has happened!"

"I daresay you feel it more than most," sympathised the Inspector.

"Perhaps I do. One doesn't like to be egotistical, but the younger generation have all their lives before them. I feel very much alone now."

They had mounted the stairs by now, and while the constable who had been left in charge at the Manor cut the tapes that sealed the door of Nathaniel's room, the Inspector took stock of his surroundings. He wanted to know who occupied the various rooms opening on to the main hall, and he asked to be shown the backstairs and the sewing-room. By the time he had looked at these, the door into Nathaniel's room had been opened, and the constable was waiting for him to enter.

The room had not been touched since the removal of Nathaniel's body, and Joseph winced perceptibly at the sight of his dress-clothes, still laid out upon a chair. He turned away, shading his eyes with his hand, while the Inspector's trained gaze absorbed every detail of the room.

The Inspector had studied the photographs taken of the corpse, but when Joseph seemed to have recovered a little from his emotion, he asked him to describe the position in which he had found his brother. He asked more questions, and Joseph soon warmed to his narrative, and might even, by unkind persons, have been thought to have been enjoying himself considerably. His own and Stephen's shock lost nothing in the telling; he had a good memory, and was able with very little prompting to reconstruct the scene of the crime for Hemingway. He even presented him with two separate theories to account for the position in which Stephen's cigarette-case had been found, which, as Hemingway afterwards remarked to his Sergeant, was excessive.

"Nice old chap," said the Sergeant.

"He's nice enough, but he'll very likely drive me mad before I'm through with this," returned Hemingway. "If I get a line on any of his blessed relatives, he'll lie awake all night, thinking up a set of highly unconvincing reasons to account for their doings. Anything strike you about this case?"

The Sergeant stroked his chin. "I'd say it was a fair stinker," he volunteered.

"Stinker!" ejaculated Hemingway. "It couldn't have happened!"

"But it did happen," the Sergeant pointed out.

"Yes, that's what makes me wish I'd never joined the Force," said Hemingway. He walked into the bathroom, and gazed up at the ventilator. "If that was the only thing open, and they're all agreed it was, it looks as though it has a very important bearing on the case. Hand me that stool, will you?"

The Sergeant brought the cork-topped stool to him, and he climbed on+to it, to inspect the ventilator more closely.

"If anyone got in that way, he'd have had to be a small man," said Ware. "The young fellow we saw downstairs couldn't have done it."

"No one could have got in without scratching the paint with his shoes."

"Rubber soles," suggested the Sergeant.

"You may be right. Assume someone did get in this way. How?"

"I was thinking he might have climbed up by a ladder.

There's bound to be one in the gardener's shed, for pruning the fruit trees."

"That doesn't interest me. What I want to know is, how did he set about oozing through this highly improbable aperture once he had climbed up the ladder?"

The Sergeant considered the ventilator, and sighed. "I see what you mean, sir."

"Well, that's something, anyway. Head first, that's how he must have got in, and nothing to catch hold of inside. The inference is he squirmed in, dropped on to his head on the floor, picked himself up, not a penny the worse for wear, and walked in to murder the old man, who hadn't heard a sound."

"The door may have been shut. He may have been deaf."

"He'd need to be stone-deaf. Talk sense!"

"I don't see how anyone got in by that ventilator, sir," said the Sergeant, after thinking it over. "Looks as though he must have come in through the door after all."

Hemingway got down from the stool, and returned to the bedroom. "Very well. We'll take it that he did. For what it's worth, the body was found lying with its back to the door."

The Sergeant frowned. "Well, sir, what is it worth?"

"Nothing at all," replied Hemingway. "You can say that someone stole into Nathaniel's room without his knowing it, and stabbed him in the back; and you can just as easily say that he was facing the other way when he was stabbed, and staggered round before collapsing. May have been trying to get to that bell by the fireplace. I had a talk with the police-surgeon, and he tells me that a stab to the right of the spine, in the lumbar region, wouldn't kill a man instantaneously. So the position of the body doesn't help us much."

"Was the door locked before the murder, sir?"

"Nobody knows, seeing that nobody knows when he was murdered. If I was one to let my imagination run away with me, which I'm not, I should say Nathaniel locked the door himself."

"Why, sir?"

"On the evidence. You should always listen to evidence. Half the time it's a pack of lies, but you never know. In this case, all the witnesses say that Nathaniel was in a raging temper; and Brother Joseph admits that he was trying to smooth the old boy down, and getting ticked off for his pains. Followed him half-way up the stairs, he did. Now, if you were Nathaniel in a temper, being followed about by Joseph, what would you do?"

"I don't rightly know," said the Sergeant, staring.

"Then all I can say is you've taken more of a fancy to Joseph than I have. If I had a wind-bag like that on my tail, I'd lock my door, and very likely shove a heavy piece of furniture against it as well."

The Sergeant smiled, but ventured to say: "That's guess-work, sir."

"It is, which is why we won't treat it as more than a possibility," responded Hemingway, moving over to the door. "If I'm right, and Nathaniel locked this door himself, we haven't got to consider whether the murderer used a pencil and a bit of string to lock the door behind him, because he couldn't have unlocked it that way. What's more, they did have the sense to examine the door for signs of rubbing."