Giles grinned. “My deplorable cousins. I'm really very sorry about it. It would be interesting to know what you make of them.”
“I haven't the least objection to telling you that I don't know what to make of them,” replied Hannasyde calmly. “On the face of it, things point young Vereker's way. The motive is there, the opportunity is there, and unless I'm very much mistaken in my reading of his character, the nerve is there, too.”
“I agree with you,” said Giles.
“Yes,” said Hannasyde, with a kind of grim humour. “I know you do. I'm perfectly well aware that you're as much in the dark over him as I am, and equally well aware that you think things look rather black for him. Well, they do, but I'll be quite frank with you: I wouldn't apply for a warrant for that young man's arrest until I had a cast-iron case against him. His story is the weakest I've ever had to listen to - and I wouldn't let him tell it to a jury for anything you could offer me. Which reminds me, by the way, that Mesurier came up to see me at the Yard this afternoon, with yet another weak story. But I daresay you know about that.”
“I believe I know the story, but I didn't know he'd been to see you.”
“Oh yes!” said Hannasyde. “He went down to that cottage to shoot Vereker, but found him already dead, so returned to town. What I should really welcome would be some suspicious character with a good, strong, probable alibi. I believe it would be easier to disprove. Hemingway fancies Mesurier more than I do. He will have it the man's a dago. I've set him to work on that car alibi, but I don't myself see a way round it. So leaving Mesurier out of it for the time being, we're left with a chauffeur whose alibi I don't altogether trust, as it's supplied by his wife, but whom I don't really think had sufficient motive to murder Vereker; with one unknown man who visited Vereker on Saturday, possibly with the idea of blackmail (and blackmailers don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs); and with Miss Vereker and her brother.” He stopped and drank some of the whisky-and-soda in his glass. “Taking Miss Vereker first,” he continued, “if I were to set the facts down on paper, and show them to any one man, I should think he'd wonder why I haven't had her arrested on suspicion long since. But so far I've nothing to show that she murdered her brother, and that particular kind of candour she treats me to, which looks at first glance to be so damning, is the sort of candour that would get her off with ninety-nine juries out of a hundred. Mesurier's type - trying to conceal facts he thinks might tell against him, contradicting himself, hedging - is easier to deal with. Ask him if he quarrelled with Vereker, and he says he would hardly call it a quarrel - with any number of people ready to swear that they heard him quarrelling. Ask Miss Vereker whether she got on with her half-brother, and she says she hated the sight of him. She doesn't appear to conceal a thing. It's the same with her brother: you don't know whether they're very clever, or completely innocent, or a pair of lunatics.”
“I can set your mind at rest on one point: they're quite sane,” said Giles. “And since you've been so frank with me - admitting what I've known from the start - I'll tell you in return that Miss Vereker, who knows her brother as well as anyone, is willing to bet her whole fortune that if he committed the murder it will never be proved against him.”
The Superintendent's eyes had twinkled appreciatively at one part of this speech, and he replied at once: “That piece of information ought to be very useful — to Miss Vereker, if not to me. But I'm too old a hand to accept it quite as you'd like me to.”
Giles got up to replenish both glasses. “As a matter of fact I didn't mean it like that at all,” he confessed. “Whatever I may or may not think about Kenneth, I am quite convinced in my own mind that his sister had nothing whatsoever to do with it.”
“That doesn't surprise me at all,” said Hannasyde dryly. “Moreover, I very much hope you're right - for both your sakes.”
Giles handed him his glass without comment. A slight flush had crept up under his tan, and the Superintendent, repenting, said with superb inappropriateness: “And why - perhaps the most important question of all - was the body placed in the stocks?”
Chapter Twelve
Giles Carrington, in the act of raising his glass to his lips, lowered it again, and looked down at the Superintendent with a startled frown. “Yes, of course, that's an important point,” he said. “Stupid of me, but I really don't think I've considered it. Does it mean anything, I wonder?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Hannasyde. “Without going to the length of searching for some obscure incident in Vereker's past which had a bearing on stocks, I imagine that there must have been some reason for putting the body there.”
“Unless it was the murderer's idea of humour,” said Giles, before he had time to stop himself.
“The two pairs of eyes met, Giles Carrington's quite limpid and expressionless, the Superintendent's full of a kind of amused comprehension.
“Quite so,” said Hannasyde. “I'd already thought of that. And now I'm going to be really frank. It's the kind of humour I can easily imagine young Vereker indulging in.”
Giles smoked for a moment in silence. Then he said: “No. I'm speaking now merely as one who - to a certain extent - knows Kenneth Vereker. It may be helpful to you. Kenneth would not place his half-brother's body in the stocks as a senseless practical joke. If he did it, it would be for some very good, and probably rather subtle reason. That is my honest opinion.”
The Superintendent nodded. “All right. But you'll admit you can visualise circumstances under which he might have done it.”
“Yes, I'll admit that. But you're assuming that the body was placed there after death.”
“At the moment I am, because it seems the most likely hypothesis.”
“No blood on the grass around the stocks,” Giles reminded him.
“There was very little external bleeding - and no signs of any struggle,” replied Hannasyde. “So that if you incline to the theory that Vereker was stabbed after his feet were put in the stocks, you must work on the assumption that he sat there quite willingly. Now the time was somewhere between eleven at night, or thereabouts, and two o'clock in the morning. We know from the medical evidence that Vereker can't have been drunk. Does it seem to you credible that he should choose that hour of night to try what sitting in the stocks felt like - when he could have done it any day he happened to be in the village?”
“No, I can't say it does,” admitted Giles. “Though I can conceive of situations where it might be entirely credible.”
“So can I,” agreed Hannasyde. “If he was motoring down with a gay party after the theatre, and they were all in a light-hearted mood. Or even if he was with one person alone, whom we'll assume to have been a woman. We know he had a puncture on the way down; suppose he picked it up at Ashleigh Green; and after changing the tyre sat down on the bench to admire the moonlight, or cool off, or anything else you like. I can picture him being induced to put his feet in the stocks, but what I can't picture is the woman then stabbing him. It can't have been Miss Vereker, for whatever I disbelieve about her I entirely believe that she was on the worst possible terms with her half-brother. Very well, then, was it some lady of easy virtue motoring down to spend the week-end with him at his cottage?”