Ngaio Marsh - Grave Mistake

Alleyn waited. Gardener stared at the opposite wall. Once or twice his beard twitched and the red mouth moved as if he was about to speak. But nothing came of it.

“Well?” Alleyn said at last and Bruce gave a parody of clearing his throat. “Clay,” he said loudly.

The constable wrote: “ Ans. Clay ,” and waited.

“So you told me. But there was no sign of clay in that mound of earth. The spoil is loamy and easy to shift. So that’s no good,” Alleyn said. “Is it?”

“I’ll no’ answer any questions till I have my solicitor present.”

“He’s on his way. You might, however, like to consider this. On that night after the funeral when we had an acetylene lamp like yours up there by the grave, you, from your sister’s window, saw the light and it worried you. You told us so. And it wasn’t Daft Artie who lay in the cubbyhole in the hedge, it was you. It wasn’t Daft Artie who heaved half a brick at me, it was you. You were so shaken by the thought of us opening the grave that you lost your head, came down the hill, hid in the hedge, chucked the brick and then set up a phoney hunt for an Artie who wasn’t there. Right?”

“No comment.”

“You’ll have to find some sort of comment, sooner or later, won’t you? However, your solicitor will advise you. But suppose Artie was in bed with a cold that evening, how would you feel about that?”

“ Ans. No comment ,” wrote the constable.

“Well,” Alleyn said, “there’s no point in plugging away at it. The case against you hangs on this one point. If you didn’t kill and bury Claude Carter, who did? I shall put it to you again when your solicitor comes and he no doubt will advise you to keep quiet. In the meantime I must tell you that not one piece of information about your actions can be raised to contradict the contention that you killed Mrs. Foster; that Carter, a man with a record of blackmail, knew it and exercised his knowledge on you that you, having arranged with him to pay the blackmail if he came to the churchyard that night, had the grave ready, killed him with the shovel you used to dig the grave and buried him there. Two victims in one grave. Is there still no comment?”

In the silence that followed, Alleyn saw, with extreme distaste, tears well up in Bruce’s china-blue, slightly squinting eyes and trickle into his beard.

“We were close taegither, her and me,” he said and his voice trembled. “From the worrrd go we understood each ither. She was more than an employer to me, she was a true friend. Aye. When I think of the plans we made for the beautifying of the property—” his voice broke convincingly.

“Did you plan those superfluous asparagus beds together and were the excavations in the mushroom shed your idea or hers?”

Bruce half-rose from his chair. Fox made a slight move and he sank back again.

“Or,” said Alleyn, “did Captain Carter, who, as you informed us, used to confide in you, tell you before he came down to Quintern on the last afternoon of his life that he proposed to bury the Black Alexander stamp somewhere on the premises? And forty years later when you found yourself there did you think it a good idea to have a look around on your own accord?”

“You can’t prove it on me,” he shouted without a trace of Scots. “And what about it if you could?”

“Nothing much, I confess. We’ve got more than enough without that. I merely wondered if you knew when you killed him that Claude Carter had the Black Alexander in his breast pocket. You gave it its second burial.”

Purple-red flooded up into Bruce’s face. He clenched his fists and beat them on the table.

“The bastard!” he shouted. “The bloody bastard. By Christ, he earned what he got.”

The station sergeant tapped on the door. Fox opened it.

“It’s his solicitor,” he said.

“Show him in,” said Fox.

v

Verity Preston weeded her long border and wondered where to look for a gardener. She chided herself for taking so personal a view. She remembered that there had been times when she and Bruce had seemed to understand each other over garden matters. It was monstrous to contemplate what they said he had done but she did not think it was untrue.

A shadow fell across the long border. She swivelled round on her knees and there was Alleyn.

“I hope I’m not making a nuisance of myself,” he said, “but I expect I am. There’s something I wanted to ask you.”

He squatted down beside her. “Have you got beastly couch-grass in your border?” he asked.

“That can hardly be what you wanted to ask but no, I haven’t. Only fat-hen, dandelions and wandering-willy.”

He picked up her handfork and began to use it. “I wanted to know whether the plan of Quintern Place with the spot marked X is still in Markos’s care or whether it’s been returned.”

“The former, I should imagine. Do you need it?”

“Counsel for the prosecution may.”

“Mrs. Jim might know. She’s here today, would you like to ask her?”

“In a minute or two, if I may,” he said shaking the soil off a root of fat-hen and throwing it into the wheelbarrow.

“I suppose,” he said, “you’ll be looking for a replacement”

“Just what I was thinking. Oh,” Verity exclaimed, “it’s all so flattening and awful. I suppose one will understand it when the trial’s over but to me, at present, it’s a muddle.”

“Which bits of it?”

“’Well, first of all, I suppose what happened at Greengages.”

“After you left?”

“Good Heavens, not before, I do trust.”

“I’ll tell you what we believe happened. Some of it we can prove: the rest follows from it. The prosecution will say it’s pure conjecture. In a way that doesn’t matter. Gardener will be charged with the murder of Claude Carter, not Sybil Foster. However, the one is consequent upon the other. We believe, then, that Gardener and Carter, severally, stayed behind at Greengages, each hoping to get access to Mrs. Foster’s room, Carter probably to sponge on her, Gardener, if the opportunity presented itself, to do away with her. It all begins from the time when young Markos went to Mrs. Foster’s room to retrieve his fiancée’s bag.”

“I hope,” Verity said indignantly, “you don’t attach—”

“Don’t jump the gun like that or we shall never finish. He reported Mrs. Foster alive and, it would be improper but I gather, appropriate, to add, kicking.”

“Against the engagement. Yes.”

“At some time before nine o’clock Claude appeared at the reception desk and, representing himself to be an electrician come to mend Mrs. Foster’s lamp, collected the lilies left at the desk by Bruce and took them upstairs. When he was in the passage something moved him to hide in an alcove opposite her door leaving footprints and a lily head behind him. We believe he had seen Bruce approaching and that when Bruce left the room after a considerable time, Carter tapped on the door and walked in. He found her dead.

“He dumped the lilies in the bathroom basin. While he was in there, probably with the door ajar, Sister Jackson paid a very brief visit to the room.”

“That large lady who gave evidence? But she didn’t say—”

“She did, later on. We’ll stick to the main line. Well. Claude took thought. It suited him very well that she was dead: he now collected a much bigger inheritance. He also had, ready-made, an instrument for blackmail and Gardener would have the wherewithal to stump up. Luckily for us he also decided by means of an anonymous letter and a telephone call to have a go at Sister Jackson, who had enough sense to report it to us.”

“I suppose you know he went to prison for blackmail?”