Josephine Tey - To Love and Be Wise

Even his future wife thought him a pushee, Grant observed.

'Don't be misled by that glove, either. Inspector. Do please believe that the most probable explanation is that Leslie picked it up and put it into his pocket meaning to give it back to me. I have looked for the other one of the pair in the car pocket and it isn't there, so the most likely explanation is that they fell out, and Leslie found one and picked it up.

'Why didn't he put it back in the car pocket?

'I don't know. Why does one do anything? Putting something in one's pocket is almost a reflex. The point is that he wouldn't have kept it for the sake of keeping it. Leslie didn't feel about me like that at all.

The point, Grant thought to himself, wasn't whether Leslie was in love with Liz, but whether Walter believed Liz to be in love with Leslie.

He longed to ask Liz what happens to a girl when she is engaged to a pushee and along comes a left-over from Eden, an escapee from Atlantis, a demon in plain clothes. But the question, though pertinent, would certainly be unproductive. Instead, he asked her if Searle had ever received letters during his stay at Trimmings and she said that as far as she knew he had had none. Then she went away downstairs, and he went into the tower room. The tidy room where Searle had left everything except his personality.

He had not seen it in daylight before, and he spent a few moments having a look at the garden and the valley from the three huge windows. There was one advantage in not caring what your house looked like when it was finished; you could have your windows where they were likely to do most good. Then he turned once more to the task of going through Searle's belongings. Patiently, garment by garment, article by article, he went through them, vainly hoping for some sign, some revelation. He sat in a low chair with the photographic box open on the floor between his feet, and accounted for everything that a photographer might conceivably use. He could think of nothing-neither chemical nor gadget-that was missing from the collection. The box had not been moved since last he saw it, and the empty space still held the outline of what had been abstracted.

It was an innocent space. Articles are abstracted every day from packed cases, leaving the outline of their presence. There was no reason whatever to suppose that what had been taken out was of any significance. But why, in heaven's name, couldn't anyone suggest what that thing might have been?

Once more he tried the small cameras in the space, knowing quite well that they would not fit. He even clapped a pair of Searle's shoes together and tried to fit them into the space. They were half an inch too long and the soles protruded above the general level so that the tray would not fit home and the lid was prevented from shutting. Anyhow, why carry clothing in a photographic box when you had ample room in the appropriate cases? Whatever had occupied the space had not been put in at random or in haste. It had been a neat and methodical packing.

Which suggested that the thing was put there because only Searle himself would have the unpacking of it.

Well, this, in the elegant phrase, was where he got off.

He put everything neatly back as he had found it; took another look at the Rushmere valley, and decided that he had had enough of it; and closed the door on the room where Leslie Searle had left everything but his personality.

It was grey in town, but it was a friendly grey and comforting after the rainy levels of the Rushmere. And the young green of the trees in Westminster was vivid as fire against the dark background. It was nice to be among his own kind again; to get into that mental undress that one wears among one's colleagues; to talk the allusive unexplanatory talk that constituted Headquarters' 'shop'.

But it was not so nice to think of the coming interview with Bryce. Would it be one of Bryce's good days or one of his 'off' ones? The Superintendent's average was one off day to three good ones, so the odds were three to one in his favour. On the other hand it was damp weather and the Superintendent's rheumatism was always worst in damp weather.

Bryce was smoking a pipe. So it was one of his good days. (On his off days he lit cigarettes and extinguished them in the ashtray five seconds after he had extinguished the match.)

Grant wondered how to begin. He couldn't very well say: Four days ago you handed over a situation to me, and the situation as far as I'm concerned is in all essentials exactly what it was four days ago. But that, put brutally, was how the case stood.

It was Bryce who saved him. Bryce examined him with his small shrewd eyes, and said: 'If ever I saw "Please, sir, it wasn't me" written on a man's face, it is on yours now, and Grant laughed.

'Yes, sir. It's a mess. He laid his notebooks on the table and took the chair at the other side of the table that was known in the office as the Suspect's Seat.

'You don't think that Bunny-Boy Whitmore did it, then?

'No, sir. I think it's unlikely to the point of absurdity.

'Accident?

'Bunny-Boy doesn't think so, Grant said with a grin.

' Doesn't he, indeed. Hasn't he even enough sense to come in out of the rain?

'He's a simple sort of creature, in some ways. He just doesn't believe that it was accident, and says so. The fact that it would be to his advantage to have it proved an accident is irrelevant in his view, apparently. He is wildly puzzled and troubled about the disappearance. I am quite sure he had nothing to do with it.

'Any alternative suggestion?

'Well, there is someone who had the opportunity, the motive, and the means.

'What are we waiting for? Bryce said, flippant.

'Unfortunately the fourth ingredient is missing.

'No evidence.

'Not one sliver of a tittle.

'Who is it?

'The mother of Walter Whitmore's fiancee. Stepmother actually. She brought Liz Garrowby up from babyhood and is fanatically maternal about her. I don't mean possessive, but —

'All the best for our Liz.

'Yes. She was enormously pleased about her stepdaughter marrying her nephew, and keeping everything in the family, and I think Searle looked like upsetting the apple-cart. That is a possible motive. She has no alibi for the night in question, and she could have reached the place where they were camped quite easily. She knew where it was because each evening the men telephoned Trimmings, the Fitch place, to report progress, and on Wednesday night they described the place where they were going to bivouac.

'But she couldn't know that the men would quarrel and go back to the river separately. How was she going to work it?

'Well, there's an odd thing about that quarrel. Searle from all accounts was a markedly equable person, but it was he who provoked that quarrel. At least Whitmore says so, and I have no reason to doubt him. He twitted Whitmore about not being good enough for Liz Garrowby and boasted that he could take her from him in a week. He was quite sober, so anything so completely out of character must have had an ulterior motive.

'You think he manufactured a parting with Searle that evening? Why?

'It could have been because he hoped to meet Liz Garrowby somewhere. The Garrowby girl was not at home that evening when the two men telephoned, so Mrs Garrowby did proxy. I suggest that she might also have done proxy in a more serious way.

'"Liz says will you meet her at the third oak past the old mill".

'Something like that.

'And then raging mother waits for him with a blunt instrument and tips the body into the river. I wish to heaven you had been able to recover that body.

'You don't wish it as badly as I do, sir. Without a corpse where are we?

'Even with a corpse you have no case.