‘Um, yes. You’d think he’d take that. Well, what about going along to her home? I don’t think it will help much, though. She lived with an aunt, whom I’ve already interviewed, but I expect you’d like to talk to her for yourself.’
The aunt was a gaunt, sallow woman in her sixties. She seemed less grieved than annoyed by her bereavement, Vardon thought.
‘And who’s to pay the rent, or where I’m to go, is more than I can fathom,’ she said at the end of half an hour’s conversation during which she had told them nothing of any value. ‘When I came here to be a companion to Lily I never thought of being left with the place on my hands like this. Naturally I expected to go first.’
‘How long have you lived here, Miss Faintley?’
‘Only since Lily joined the school. We couldn’t get anything cheaper, and she never much liked the idea of lodgings. Always used to her own home until it was blitzed and her mother died, my brother having died several years before, of course, and Lily her mother’s sole support except for the pension.’
‘Did they live in London, then?’
‘Yes. After the house was blitzed they were given a requisitioned one, but my sister-in-law was very hard to please and never liked it.’
‘Oh, she wasn’t killed when their home was destroyed?’
‘No, neither of them was hurt, except the shock. But Mattie never got over the loss of her furniture and that. She brooded. I used to get cross with her and tell her she owed it to Lily to brace herself up, but it seemed she couldn’t bring herself. She died the year before last, and Lily tried lodgings and didn’t like them, so she persuaded me to bring my bits of things and we set up here. She’d nothing of her own except a bookcase and her writing-desk and chair, and those precious botanical cases which I believe have been more than half the trouble. I gave up my little house to do her a favour, and I shall never be able to get it back with the shortage like it is. I don’t know what I shall do!’
‘How long did your niece expect to stay at Cromlech for her holiday this year?’
‘That’s what’s so strange. I don’t know what she was doing in Cromlech at all! I mean, what is there in a place like that? We had a very nice private hotel booked in Torbury, where there would at least have been a picture palace if it turned wet, and a theatre if you wanted to fill up your evenings! But Cromlech hasn’t even a pier… just the beach huts and the cliff-railway. I was to have joined her in Torbury next week, and I was looking forward to it very much, my life being what you see… this flat, and the shopping, and Lily’s meals, and the washing. So why she was staying at a hotel in Cromlech is more than I can fathom. If she’d been younger, or the flighty kind, I would have thought the worst, for she’s never been as open with me as you would have thought, living together as we did and me having nobody to talk to for hours on end, but one thing I did know about her, she had no use for men of any sort and at any time. She thought herself a cut above them… most of them, anyway.’
Darling was tempted to refer to the cases of Miss Camille Clifford and other ladies whom their friends would not have supposed capable of some of the erratic and inexplicable emotions which had led to their being murdered, but he held his peace, hoping that something would pop up in the aunt’s whining, complaining monologue which would give a clue to Miss Faintley’s murderer.
He was not nearly as certain as the aunt professed to be that there was not a love-affair at the bottom of the mystery. The fact, that, unknown to her aunt, Miss Faintley had purposed to stay in Cromlech when she was supposed to be staying in Torbury, was very significant, he thought. He glanced at Vardon. Vardon drummed on the table for a moment, and then asked:
‘Did you receive a letter from your niece after she left here?’
‘A postcard, not a letter. I would always like to know she’d arrived safely. Trains are such funny things nowadays, what with accidents and assaults and the drivers not stopping at the right stations and not troubling to look at the signal-boxes and always grumbling when they have to spend a night away from their wives. I never did think British Railways would work, and, of course, they don’t. I always used to like the old G.W.R. You could trust the G.W.R. as I always said.’
‘And have you kept the postcard?’ asked Vardon, damming the stream, or, possibly, blocking the track.
‘Oh, yes, I’ve got it. I shall always keep it now, of course, it being Lily’s last words. You won’t want to take it away with you, will you?’
‘I should just like to see it.’
‘It’s postmarked Torbury all right, if that’s what you mean. Think of the deceitfulness, if she was really at Cromlech!’
She brought the card. The postmark was indeed Torbury, so there was not much doubt but that Miss Faintley had not intended to allow her aunt to know that she had spent any nights in Cromlech. Still, that was not evidence of any criminal intention.
‘It wouldn’t do if our relatives had to know everything we got up to,’ said Vardon soothingly. ‘We’re all entitled to a bit of private life sometimes. Don’t mean there’s any harm in it, although, in this case, it’s turned out very distressing indeed. You said your niece was living somewhere else in Kindleford before you took over her housekeeping, didn’t you? I’d better have the address of those lodgings.’ He took it down. ‘How long was your niece there?’
‘A matter of three weeks. She didn’t like it there at all. No home comforts, and she had to eat with the family, which didn’t suit her ladyship at all.’
‘Looks like a job for the Yard if the young woman had London connexions,’ said Vardon when the two officers had returned to Kindleford police station. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll be able to tell us anything helpful at the school here.’
‘Trouble is that the schools are all on holiday. It’s hard to get hold of anybody, even if they could be of use. What about trying the Education Office?’
‘Better than nothing, but, all the same, a dead end, I expect.’
The Education Office proved to be an annexe to the Town Hall. The Education Officer was on holiday, but his deputy, an alert woman of about thirty, was able to assure the police that, so far as the Education Office was concerned, they knew nothing about Miss Faintley except the formal matters relating to her employment and could suggest nothing which would help an investigation into the circumstances of her sudden death.
Vardon went next to the lodgings which Miss Faintley had occupied. They were at a terrace house in one of the better streets of Kindleford, but were drab and depressing. The landlady, a tall female whose appearance was not improved by her dust-cap and overall, was prepared with two observations. She had never liked Miss Faintley from the first, and she had always said that those stuck-up ones came off the worst in the end.
Vardon, disregarding these remarks, which were prejudiced, he felt, by the fact that Miss Faintley had not remained longer in the lodgings, inquired concerning Miss Faintley’s friends and acquaintances.
‘Oh, she’d have one and another in to tea, and sometimes she went on a hike or to the pictures.’
‘Were the “one-and-another” men or women friends?’
‘Well, come to think of it, there has only ever been the one – a Miss Franks from the school. They seemed to be very thick, her and Miss Faintley did, though what they saw in each other —’
‘No men friends, so far as you know, then?’
‘There’s them that can get men friends of the right sort, which is the marrying kind, and them that can get ’em of the wrong sort, which is what I prefer not to name, and there’s some can’t get ’em of any sort, and that was Miss Faintley.’