Ngaio Marsh - Grave Mistake

“To the nearest telephone,” Alleyn said. “We’ll use the one at Quintern Place. We’ve got to lay on surveillance and be quick about it. The local branch’ll have to spare a copper. Send him up to Quintern as a labourer. He’s to dig up the fireplace and hearth and dig deep and anything he finds that’s not rubble, keep it. And when he’s finished tell him to board up the room and seal it. If anyone asks what he’s up to he’ll have to say he’s under police orders. But I hope no one will ask.”

“What about Gardener?”

“Gardener’s digging the grave.”

“Fair enough,” said Fox.

“Claude Carter may be there though.”

“Oh,” said Fox. “Aha. Him.”

But before they reached Quintern they met Mrs. Jim on her way to do flowers in the church. She said Claude Carter had gone out that morning. “To see a man about a car,” he had told her and he said he would ba away all day.

“Mrs. Jim,” Alleyn said. “We want a telephone and we want to take a look inside the house. Miss Foster’s out. Could you help us? Do you have a key?”

She looked fixedly at him. Her workaday hands moved uneasily.

“I don’t know as I have the right,” she said. “It’s not my business.”

“I know. But it is, I promise you, very important. An urgent call. Look, come with us, let us in, follow us about if you like or we’ll drive you back to the church at once. Will you do that? Please?”

There was another and a longer pause. “All right,” said Mrs. Jim and got into the car.

They arrived at Quintern and were admitted by Mrs. Jim’s key, which she kept under a stone in the coal house.

While Fox rang the Upper Quintern police station from the staff sitting-room telephone. Alleyn went out to the stable yard. Bruce’s mushroom beds were of course in the same shape as they had been earlier in the afternoon when he left them, taking his shovel with him. The ramshackle door into the deserted room was shut. Alleyn dragged it open and stood on the threshold. At first glance it looked and smelt as it had on his earlier visit. The westering sun shone through the dirty window and showed traces of his own and Carter’s footprints on the dusty floorboards. Nobody else’s, he thought, but more of Carter’s than his own. The litter of rubbish lay undisturbed in the corner. With a dry-mouthed sensation of foreboding he turned to the fireplace.

Alleyn began to swear softly and prolifically, an exercise in which he did not often indulge.

He was squatting over the fireplace when Fox appeared at the window, saw him and looked in at the yard door.

“They’re sending up a chap at once,” he said.

“Like hell, they are,” said Alleyn. “Look here.”

“Had I better walk in?”

“The point’s academic.”

Fox took four giant strides on tiptoe and stooped over the hearth. “Broken up, eh?” he said. “Fancy that, eh?”

“As you say. But look at this.” He pointed a long finger. “Do you see what I see?”

“Remains of a square hole. Something regular in shape like a box or tin’s been dug out. Right?”

“I think so. And take a look here. And here. And in the rubble.”

“Crepe soles, by gum.”

“So what do you say now to the point marked bloody X?”

“I’d say the name of the game is Carter. But why? What’s he up to?”

“I’ll tell you this, Br’er Fox. When I looked in here before this hearth was as it had been for Lord knows how long.”

“Gardener left when we left,” Fox mused.

“And is digging a grave and should continue to do so for some considerable time.”

“Anybody up here since then?”

“Not Mrs. Jim, at all events.”

“So we’re left—” Fox said.

“—with the elusive Claude. We’ll have to put Bailey and Thompson in but I bet you that’s going to be the story.”

“Yes. And he’s seeing a man about a car,” said Fox bitterly. “It might as well be a dog.”

“And we might as well continue in our futile ways by seeing if there’s a pick and shovel on the premises. After all, he couldn’t have rootled up the hearth with his fingernails. Where’s the gardener’s shed?”

It was near at hand, hard by the asparagus beds. They stood in the doorway and if they had entered would have fallen over a pick that lay on the floor, an untidy note in an impeccably tidy interior. Bruce kept his tools as they should be kept, polished, sharpened and in racks. Beside the pick, leaning against a bench was a lightweight shovel and, nearby, a crowbar.

They all bore signs of recent and hard usage.

Alleyn stooped down and without touching, examined them.

“Scratches,” he said. “Blunted. Chucked in here in a hurry. And take a look — crepe-soled prints on the path.”

“Is Bob your uncle, then?” said Fox.

“If you’re asking whether Claude Carter came down to the stable yard as soon as Bruce Gardener and you and I left it, dug up the hearth and returned the tools to this shed, I suppose he is . But if you’re asking whether this means that Claude Carter murdered his stepmother I can’t say it follows as the night the day.”

Alleyn reached inside the door and took a key from a nail. He shut and locked the door and put the key in his pocket.

“Bailey and Thompson can pick it up from the nick,” he said. “They’d better get here as soon as possible.”

He led the way back to the car. Halfway there he stopped. “I tell you what, Br’er Fox,” he said. “I’ve got a strong feeling of being just a couple of lengths behind and being beaten to the post.”

“What,” said Fox, pursuing his own line of thought, “would it be? What was it? That’s what I ask myself.”

“And how do you answer?”

“I don’t. I can’t. Can you?”

“One can always make wild guesses, of course. Mr. Markos was facetious about buried treasure. He might turn out to be right.”

“Buried treasure,” Fox echoed disgustedly. “What sort of buried treasure?”

“How do you fancy a Black Alexander stamp?” said Alleyn.

i

Mr. Markos had stayed at Keys for only a short time after Alleyn had gone. He had quietened down quite a lot and Verity wondered if she had turned into one of those dreadful spinsters of an all too certain age who imagine that any man who shows them the smallest civility is making a pass.

He had said goodbye with a preoccupied air. His black liquid gaze was turned upon her as if in speculation. He seemed to be on the edge of asking her something but, instead, thanked her for “suffering” him to invite himself, took her hand, kissed his own thumb and left her.

Verity cut roses and stood them in scalding water for half an hour. Then she tidied herself up and drove down to St. Crispin’s.

It was quite late in the afternoon when she got there. Lengthening shadows stretched out toward gravestones lolling this way and that, in and out of the sunshine. A smell, humid yet earthy, hung on the air and so did the sound of bees.

As Verity, carrying roses, climbed the steps, she heard the rhythmic, purposeful squelch of a shovel at work. It came from beyond the church and of course she knew what it was: Bruce at his task. Suddenly she was filled with a liking for Bruce: for the direct way he thought about Sybil’s death and his wish to perform the only service he could provide. It no longer seemed to matter that he so readily took to sentimental manifestations and she was sorry she had made mock of them. She thought that of all Sybil’s associates, even including Prunella, he was probably the only one who honestly mourned her. I won’t shy off, she thought. When I’ve done the flowers, little as I like graves, I’ll go and talk to him.