Fen Country Page 2

  “Neither,” said Fen promptly. “Have you a photograph of your aunt?”

  George shook his head, bewildered. “I haven’t, l’m afraid. But—”

  “Then we must rely,” Fen interposed, “on Dawkins—an ex-pupil of mine. For some years now Dawkins has been living and working in Nairobi. Also, he is an indefatigable diner-out. You can take it from me that there is no one more likely to be able to give me the facts about your aunt and Miss Preedy than Dawkins.”

  Fen rose. “The cablegram service is quick,” he observed, “so I think that if you were to come back in, say, a couple of hours—”

  And two hours later the reply had, in fact, arrived. “FANCY LOOMIS FAIRLY DEAF,” George read with astonishment, “PREEDY NOT DEAF AT ALL GREETINGS DAWKINS. But what does it mean, sir?” George demanded helplessly.

  Fen grunted. “We shall have to confirm it by wiring photographs to Kenya,” he said, “and I’ve already rung up the police, and they’ve agreed to that. But from what you’ve told me, l’ve no doubt about the result.”

  “I just don’t understand, sir.”

  “Oh, come, George. Surely even you realize by now that the person you thought was Miss Preedy is in fact your aunt; and the person you thought was your aunt was in fact Miss Preedy?

  “Nor,” Fen went on, “is there much difficulty about the motive. Here is your aunt, running out of money, with the life insurance her only possible resource. So what does she do? Answer: she comes with Miss Preedy to England, where they aren’t known, swaps roles, and commits murder with a view to inheriting half the life insurance.”

  Fen reached for a cigarette. “You were brought into it as legatee and as visitor to the cottage, in order to diffuse a suspicion which must otherwise have been fairly concentrated. And in case for any reason that failed, the burglary was faked to make a supplementary red herring.

  “How your aunt persuaded Miss Preedy to the substitution we shall probably never know. But to judge from your description, Miss Preedy was a very biddable person, very much under your aunt’s thumb. ‘I don’t know why she’s doing this.’ Poor creature, she had her suspicions, even so.”

  “But how did you know, sir?”

  “The radio, George,” said Fen. “The radio, of course. It was playing quietly, you remember. Your ‘aunt’ had a deaf-aid on, too.

  “Now, you were talking to her—to start with, anyway—in a low voice. If she was in fact deaf, then the deaf-aid must have been amplifying your voice considerably.

  “But in that case, it was also amplifying the radio. If the woman you were speaking to was genuinely deaf—genuinely using the deaf-aid—then the radio must all the time have sounded quite loud to her, even though it sounded quiet to you.

  “Can you conceive anyone so circumstanced speaking to you in a low voice, whispering to you? Do you naturally speak to people in a low voice, when you have the radio on loud?

  “So the answer was obvious: the woman you spoke to wasn’t deaf at all. And once I realized that a trick had been played, it didn’t take much inquiry to find out why.”

  Fen sighed. “Yes, I’m sorry, George; your Aunt Fancy is going to hang. And it’s The Merchant, after all, which has the last word.”

  “Shakespeare, sir?”

  “Shakespeare. Let us,” said Fen, “all ring Fancy’s knell ”

  The Hunchback Cat

  “We’re all superstitious,” said Fen. And from the assembled party, relaxing by the fire, rose loud cries of dissent. “But we are, you know,” Fen persisted, “whether we realize it or not. Let me give you a test.”

  “All right,” they said. “Do.”

  “Let me tell you about the Copping case.”

  “A crime,” they gloated. “Good.”

  “And if any of you,” said Fen, “can solve it unassisted, he (or she, of course) shall be held to be without stain.

  “The Copping family was an old one, and like most old families it had its traditions, the most important of these being, unfortunately, parricide. “This didn’t always take the form of actual murder. Sometimes it was accident, and sometimes it was neglect, and sometimes Copping parents were driven by the insufferable behavior of their offspring to open a vein in the bath. Nonetheless, there it was. As the toll mounted with the years, the Coppings inevitably became more and more prone to brood.

  “By 1948, however, there were only two Coppings in the direct line left alive—Clifford Copping, a widower, and his daughter Isobel. Isobel, moreover, was married, and consequently no longer lived in the family mansion near Wantage. In August of 1948, however, she and her husband went to Wantage for a short visit. And that was when the thing happened.

  “As for me, I was making a detour through Wantage, on my way back from Bath to Oxford, so as to be able to have dinner at the White Hart. And it was in the bar of the White Hart, at shortly after six in the evening, that I got into conversation with Isobel’s husband, Peter Doyle. He was drinking a fair amount. And by a quarter to eight he had reached the stage of insisting that I return with him to the Copping house for a meal.

  “I didn’t at all want to do that, but as he already knew that I’d been proposing to dine at the pub, alone, it was difficult to refuse. So in the end I gave in, and we set out to walk to the house by way of the fields.

  “It was a beautiful evening: I enjoyed the walk thoroughly. There was a cat, a handsome little high-stepping tortoiseshell cat, which adopted us, following us the whole way. ‘She seems to want to come in,’ I said when we arrived at the front door. And, ‘That’s all right,’ said Doyle vaguely. ‘Isobel and my father-in-law are both fond of cats.’ So she did come in, and she and I were introduced to Isobel together.

  “I quite liked Isobel. But it was clear from the first that relations between her and her husband were very strained. We all talked commonplaces for a while, and then Doyle suggested that as there was still a little time to use up before dinner, he should take me to meet his father-in-law, who would probably not be joining us for the meal.

  “‘He hasn’t been too well recently,’ Doyle explained. ‘You know, broody a bit… But he’d never forgive me if I let you go away without his meeting you.’

  ‘Well, of course I mumbled the usual things about not wanting to be a nuisance and so forth. And I can tell you, I should have been a good deal more emphatic about them if I’d known then what the inquest subsequently brought out: that for a long time now Clifford Copping had been seriously neurotic, with suicidal tendencies… However, I didn’t know, so I allowed myself to be overruled. Her father was in the top room of the tower, Isobel said. So to the tower, still accompanied by our faithful cat, Doyle and I duly went.

  “It stood apart from the rest of the house, 50 feet high or more, with smooth sheer walls and narrow slits for windows; date about 1450, I should think. I expected it to be fairly ruinous inside, but surprisingly, it wasn’t. On the top landing Doyle paused in front of a certain door. I was a little way behind him, still negotiating the last flight of stairs.

  “If you don’t mind waiting a moment, I’ll just go in and warn him that you’re here,’ he said—a proposal which didn’t seem to me to march very well with his assurance, earlier on, that his father-in-law would never forgive him if I left without being introduced. However, of course, I agreed—whereupon he produced from his pocket a key which I’d seen Isobel give him, and proceeded to unlock (yes, definitely it was locked) and to half-open the door. He looked back at me then, saying in a low voice:

  “‘I expect you’ll think it’s odd, but my father-in-law does like to be locked in here from time to time, so long as it’s Isobel who keeps the tey: he trusts Isobel completely. Being shut in, and having these tremendously thick walls all around him—it gives him a feeling of security. Of course, locking himself in is what he’d really like best, but the doctor won’t allow that. That’s why all the bolts have been taken away.’

  “‘Ah,’ I said. And something of what I felt must have showed in my face, becaus
e Doyle added:

  “‘He’s all right, you know… But naturally, if you—I mean, would you rather we didn’t?’

  “‘Yes, I’d very much rather,’ would have been the truthful answer to that. But Doyle’s question was plainly of a piece with the Latin Num?: it expected a negative—and got one. So then we stopped talking, and, while I waited nervously on the stair, Doyle entered the room. And found the body.

  “Actually, to be just and exact about it, it was the cat which saw the body first. While we’d been talking the cat had been looking into the room, and not at all liking what was in there. You know how they arch their backs, and the hair stands up all over the spine…? Well, after about a minute and a half, or perhaps as much as two minutes, Doyle came out again, very slow and white and shaken, and sat down on the top stair with his head in his hands. I could have asked him questions, but I didn’t. I went past him into the room and saw for myself.

  “There was a kitchen knife and a severed throat and an almost inconceivable mess of blood. When I’d satisfied myself that no one was hidden there (and also that not even a child could possibly have escaped through the tiny windows) I felt Copping’s skin and looked at the blood and concluded (correctly, as it turned out) that the wretched man had been dead at least an hour (it was then 8:24 exactly). Then I locked the room again and gave the key back to Doyle, and together we returned to the house, where he telephoned the police and a doctor while I went off on my own and—well, you can guess what I did, can’t you?

  “The rest is easily told. Copping had last been seen alive at 6:15, by Isobel when she locked him into the tower room; also he’d been seen not more than five minutes before that by two of the servants—so if there was any question of murder, at least it was certain that Doyle hadn’t done it…

  “And fortunately there was some question of murder—very much so. True, there were no prints except Copping’s own on the knife. But low down on one of the panels of the room you could see traces of the blood, as if a splashed skirt-hem, say, had brushed against it… That wasn’t done by Doyle or myself; there was no blood on either of us, anywhere. And it wasn’t done by Copping in his death-agony—for the simple reason that between the body and the panel a considerable area of floor was innocent of blood-spots.

  “All of which meant Isobel.

  “Isobel who had had the key of that virtually impregnable room. Isobel who would inherit the whole of her father’s estate. Isobel in whose wardrobe, hastily hidden away, the police found a stained mackintosh…

  “That’s really the lot. I told the CID my story, just as I’ve told it to you. And do you know, at the end of it, they were still proposing to arrest Isabel… Sheer superstition.’ Fen got to his feet. “Well, it’s been a delightful evening, but I think I’d better be getting along now…”

  The resultant howl nearly deafened him. He shook his head at them mock-mournfully. “No true rationalists? Really none? But unless you happen to be superstitious, it’s simple. Doyle’s wife was preparing to divorce him, you see, thereby depriving him of his chance of a share in all that lovely inheritance. He hated her bitterly for that, and in his father-in-law’s death he saw a chance of revenge. It was he, of course, who planted the stained mackintosh in the interim before the arrival of the police: I know that much because by then I’d realized what he was up to, and quite simply followed and watched him, without his being aware of it…”

  “But, Gervase, you haven’t explained anything,” wailed a fair-haired girl plaintively. “What we want to know is what made you suspicious of him in the first place.’

  Fen laughed. “Oh, come now. You’re none of you superstitious, you’ve assured me of that. And not being superstitious, you ought to be aware that it’s only in melodramas and ghost stories that little tortoiseshell cats react violently to the sight of corpses. In real life I’m afraid it isn’t so. For a cat to get into that alarming state there has to be some much livelier stimulus. A dog was one possibility; but a dog would have made itself heard. So how about another cat? The family were fond of cats, I’d heard, so very likely they owned one. And it wouldn’t have been difficult for Doyle to stuff the wretched creature through one of the little windows… He’d noticed the blood on the panel, you see—which of course had been smeared there by the cat—and worked it out that if the cat were disposed of, that panel could be made the foundation for a murder charge.

  “Naturally, he’d have buried the cat later. But while he was telephoning the police, I was out looking for the poor thing, which eventually I found in the bushes, near the foot of the tower, where it had crawled to die. A white Siamese it was: no blood on its paws, but a big splotch, acquired obviously at the very moment of Copping’s death, on its flank.”

  “So Copping did it himself,” said the fair-haired girl who had spoken before. “What a sell…” She hesitated, and then suddenly her eyes grew shrewd. “Or did he? The fact that this man Doyle tried to incriminate his wife doesn’t necessarily mean that she wasn’t guilty, does it?”

  “Clever girl.” Fen smiled at her. “Actually, it wasn’t until twelve weeks later that the servant the police had suborned caught Isobel burning the blood-stained frock she’d worn to kill her father… But better late than never. And it makes a good ending, don’t you think? Nice to know that these old family traditions die so hard.”

  The Lion’s Tooth

  It lay embedded in crudely wrought silver, with a surround of big lusterless semiprecious stones; graven on the reverse of the silver was an outline which Fen recognized as the ichthys, pass-sign of primitive Christianity.

  “Naturally, one thinks of Androcles,” said the reverend mother. “Or if not of him specially, then of the many other early Christians who faced the lions in the arena.” She paused, then added; ‘This, you know, is the convent’s only relic. Apparently it is also our only clue.’

  She stooped to replace it in the sacristy cupboard; and Fen, while he waited, thought of frail old Sister St. Jude, whose only intelligible words since they had found her had been “The tooth of a lion!,” and again—urgently, repeatedly—“The tooth of a lion!”

  He thought, too, of the eleven-year-old girl who had been kidnapped and of her father, who had obstinately refused to divulge to the police the medium through which the ransom was to be paid, for fear that in trying to catch the kidnapper they would blunder and bring about the death of his only child. He would rather pay, he had said; and from this decision he was in no way to be moved…

  It had been the reverend mother who had insisted on consulting Fen; but following her now, as she led the way back to her office, he doubted if there was much he could do. The available facts were altogether too arid and too few. Thus: Francis Merrill was middle-aged, a widower and a wealthy businessman. Two weeks ago, immediately after Christmas, he had gone off to the Continent, leaving his daughter Mary, at her own special request, to the care of the sisters. During the mornings Mary had helped the sisters with their chores. But in the afternoons, with the reverend mother’s encouragement, she would usually go out and ramble round the countryside.

  On most of these outings Mary Merrill was accompanied, for a short distance, by Sister St. Jude. Sister St. Jude was ailing; the doctors, however, had decreed that she must get plenty of fresh air, so even through the recent long weeks of frost and ice she had continued to issue forth, well wrapped up, and spend an hour or two each afternoon on a sheltered seat near the summit of the small hill at the convent’s back. It had been Mary Merrill’s habit to see her settled there and then to wander off on her own.

  Until, this last Tuesday, a search-party of the sisters had come upon Sister St. Jude sprawled near her accustomed seat with concussion of the brain.

  Mary Merrill had not come home that night. The reverend mother had, of course, immediately notified the police; and Francis Merrill, hastening back from Italy, had found a ransom note awaiting him.

  To all intents and purposes, that was all; the police, it seemed, had so far achi
eved precisely nothing. If only—Fen reflected—if only one knew more about the girl herself: for instance, where she was likely to have gone, and what she was likely to have done, on these rambles of hers. But Francis Merrill had refused even to meet Fen; and the reverend mother had been unable to produce any information about Mary more specific and instructive than the statement that she had been a friendly, trusting, ordinary sort of child…

  “I suppose,” said Fen, collapsing into a chair, “that it’s quite certain Sister St. Jude has never said anything comprehensible other than this phrase about the lion’s tooth?”

  “Absolutely certain, I am afraid,” the reverend mother replied. “Apart from a few—a few sounds which may conceivably have been French words, she has not yet been able—”

  “French words?”

  “Yes. I should have mentioned, perhaps, that Sister St. Jude is a Frenchwoman.”

  ‘I see,” said Fen slowly. “I see… tell me, did she—does she, I mean—speak English at all fluently?”

  “Not very fluently, no. She has only been over here a matter of nine months or so. Her vocabulary, for instance, is still rather limited…” The reverend mother hesitated. “Perhaps you are thinking that the phrase about the lion’s tooth may have been misheard. But she has used it many times, in the presence of many of us—including Sister Bartholomew, who is another Frenchwoman—and we have none of us ever had the least doubt about what the words were.”

  “Not misheard,” said Fen pensively. “But misinterpreted, perhaps…” Looking up, the reverend mother saw that he was on his feet again. “Reverend Mother, I have an idea,’ he went on. “Or an inkling, rather. At present I don’t at all see how it applies. But nonetheless, I think that if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go now and take a look at the place where Sister St. Jude was attacked. There’s a certain object to be looked for there, which the police may well have found, but decided to ignore.”