“No need to ask the rector,” said a voice behind them. It was Miss Hart. She must have come soundlessly across the soft turf. Her air was truculent. “Though why,” she said, “it should be of interest, I’m sure I don’t know. Ruth Wall died on August thirteenth, 1921. It was a Saturday.”
“You’ve a remarkable memory,” Alleyn observed.
“Not as good as it sounds. That Saturday afternoon I came to do the flowers in the church. I found her and I’m not likely ever to forget it. Young Castle went the same way almost a month later. September twelfth. In my opinion there was never a more glaring case of suicide. I believe,” Miss Hart said harshly, “in facing facts.”
“She was a beautiful girl, wasn’t she?”
“I’m no judge of beauty. She set the men by the ears. He was a fine-looking young fellow. Fanny Wagstaff did her best to get him.”
“Had Ruth Wall,” Alleyn asked, “other admirers?”
Miss Hart didn’t answer and he turned to her. Her face was blotted with an unlovely flush. “She ruined two men’s lives, if you want to know. Castle and Richard De’ath,” said Miss Hart. She turned on her heel and without another word marched away.
“September twelfth,” Alleyn murmured. “That would be a Monday, Br’er Fox.”
“So it would,” Fox agreed, after a short calculation, “so it would. Quite a coincidence.”
“Or not, as the case may be. I’m going to take a gamble on this one. Come on.”
They left the churchyard and walked down the lane, overtaking Edward Pilbrow on the way. He was wearing his town crier’s coat and hat and carrying his bell by the clapper. He manifested great excitement when he saw them.
“Hey!” he shouted, “what’s this I hear? Murder’s the game, is it? What a go! Come on, gents, let’s have it. Did ’e fall or was ’e pushed? Hor, hor, hor! Come on.”
“Not until after the inquest,” Alleyn shouted.
“Do we get a look at the body?”
“Shut up,” Mr. Fox bellowed suddenly.
“I got to know, haven’t I? It’ll be the smartest bit of crying I ever done, this will! I reckon I might get on the telly with this. ‘Town crier tells old-world village death stalks the churchyard.’ Hor, hor, hor!”
“Let us,” Alleyn whispered, “leave this horrible old man.”
They quickened their stride and arrived at the pub, to be met with covert glances and dead silence.
The smoking room was crowded for the inquest. Everybody was there, including Mrs. Simpson who sat in the back row with her candies and her crossword puzzle. It went through very quickly. The rector deposed to finding the body. Richard De’ath, sober and less truculent than usual, was questioned as to his sojourn outside the churchyard and said he’d noticed nothing unusual apart from hearing a disturbance among the pigeons roosting in the balcony. From where he stood, he said, he couldn’t see the face of the tower.
An open verdict was recorded.
Alleyn had invited the rector, Miss Hart, Mrs. Simpson, Richard De’ath, and, reluctantly, Edward Pilbrow, to join him in the Bar-Parlor and had arranged with the landlord that nobody else would be admitted. The Public Bar, as a result, drove a roaring trade.
When they had all been served and the hatch closed, Alleyn walked into the middle of the room and raised his hand. It was the slightest of gestures but it secured their attention.
He said, “I think you must all realize that we are not satisfied this was an accident. The evidence against accident has been collected piecemeal from the persons in this room and I am going to put it before you. If I go wrong I want you to correct me. I ask you to do this with absolute frankness, even if you are obliged to implicate someone who you would say was the last person in the world to be capable of a crime of violence.”
He waited. Pilbrow, who had come very close, had his ear cupped in his hand. The rector looked vaguely horrified. Richard De’ath suddenly gulped down his double whiskey. Miss Hart coughed over her lemonade and Mrs. Simpson avidly popped a peppermint cream in her mouth and took a swig of her port-and-raspberry.
Alleyn nodded to Fox, who laid Mr. Bates’s Bible, open at the flyleaf, on the table before him.
“The case,” Alleyn said, “hinges on this book. You have all seen the entries. I remind you of the recorded deaths in 1779 of the three Hadets—Stewart Shakespeare, Naomi Balbus, and Peter Rook. To each of these is attached a biblical text suggesting that they met their death by violence. There have never been any Hadets in this village and the days of the week are wrong for the given dates. They are right, however, for the year 1921 and they fit the deaths, all by falling from a height, of William Wagstaff, Ruth Wall, and Simon Castle.
“By analogy the Christian names agree. William suggests Shakespeare. Naomi—Ruth; Balbus—a wall. Simon —Peter; and a Rook is a Castle in chess. And Hadet,” Alleyn said without emphasis, “is an anagram of Death.”
“Balderdash!” Miss Hart cried out in an unrecognizable voice.
“No, it’s not,” said Mrs. Simpson. “It’s jolly good crossword stuff.”
“Wicked balderdash. Richard!”
De’ath said, “Be quiet. Let him go on.”
“We believe,” Alleyn said, “that these three people met their deaths by one hand. Motive is a secondary consideration, but it is present in several instances, predominantly in one. Who had cause to wish the death of these three people? Someone whom old Wagstaff had bullied and to whom he had left his money and who killed him for it. Someone who was infatuated with Simon Castle and bitterly jealous of Ruth Wall. Someone who hoped, as an heiress, to win Castle for herself and who, failing, was determined nobody else should have him. Wagstaff’s orphaned niece—Fanny Wagstaff.”
There were cries of relief from all but one of his hearers. He went on. “Fanny Wagstaff sold everything, disappeared, and was never heard of again in the village. But twenty-four years later she returned, and has remained here ever since.”
A glass crashed to the floor and a chair overturned as the vast bulk of the postmistress rose to confront him.
“Lies! Lies!” screamed Mrs. Simpson.
“Did you sell everything again, before leaving New Zealand?” he asked as Fox moved forward. “Including the Bible, Miss Wagstaff?”
“But,” Troy said, “how could you be so sure?”
“She was the only one who could leave her place in the church unobserved. She was the only one fat enough to rub her hips against the narrow door jambs. She uses an indelible pencil. We presume she arranged to meet Bates on the balcony, giving a cock-and-bull promise to tell him something nobody else knew about the Hadets. She indicated the text with her pencil, gave the Bible a shove, and, as he leaned out to grab it, tipped him over the edge.
“In talking about 1921 she forgot herself and described the events as if she had been there. She called Bates a typical New Zealander but gave herself out to be a Londoner. She said whitebait are only a quarter of the size of sprats. New Zealand whitebait are—English whitebait are about the same size.
“And as we’ve now discovered, she didn’t send my cables. Of course she thought poor little Bates was hot on her tracks, especially when she learned that he’d come here to see me. She’s got the kind of crossword-puzzle mind that would think up the biblical clues, and would get no end of a kick in writing them in. She’s overwhelmingly conceited and vindictive.”
“Still—”