* * *
Again I went over my notes. Then I turned up Mrs Kempson's letters to me, and there it all was. The voice she had heard before; the discussion she had had with Nigel and they agreed that Mr Ward should receive thirty thousand pounds at her death in consideration of his abandoning all claim to the estate; the substitution of another Mr Ward as Mrs Landgrave's lodger, since Nigel himself had a lucrative position and had to be in London most of his time; his mother an actress and his father possibly an actor, so that he was able to play the part of the first Mr Ward without arousing more than the dimmest of doubts in Mrs Kempson's mind; the untidy moustache; the pince-nez; most of all, the gloves.
This all seemed obvious enough, but it still did not account for the two murders. A prime factor, I decided, was the mental deterioration of the second Mr Ward. Nigel must have wondered whether there would come a point when this individual (probably an ex-criminal whom Nigel had promised to help) would give the game away. There was also a possibility that he had been in no wise as crazy as his conduct would suggest, but had tried his hand at a little mild blackmail, for, to some extent, Nigel must have been obliged to take him into his confidence.
This could explain the first murder, but it still did not account for the death of Merle Patterson. The reason for that remained speculative, but I thought I knew the answer.
The police were certain that the girl had not been killed down by the sheepwash where her body was found. Neither they nor I had ever really believed that, dressed as she was, she would have strayed so far from the house. There was, however, the distinct possibility that, believing Doctor Tassall to have been called away on a genuine case, she had gone as far as the lodge gates to meet him on his return.
There somebody had dragged her inside the deserted lodge and killed her. My theory was that this was because she had come upon Nigel humping the body of the second Mr Ward out of the lodge where he had hidden it after he had killed his understudy on the previous day, having first enticed him up to the house, on what pretext I cannot say.
Of course, all this was mere speculation, and the only way or proving it, it seemed to me, was to confront Nigel with such evidence as we had, accuse him to his face and find out whether he could refute the accusation. The reason for his lengthy absence from the birthday party was a factor to take into account. He had two dead bodies to dispose of. He transported both by car, I think. He was to have picked up the photographer in a car, you will remember. I think he drove first straight down Lovers' Lane and put the girl's body, with the fancy costume torn to pieces, beside the sheepwash in the hope that the gypsies would be credited with the crime, as, at the very beginning, one of them was-and indeed he might well have been convicted-but for the intervention of the two children and the evidence supplied by their uncle.
Then Nigel returned for Mr Ward's body. He knew where to hide it, for young Lionel Kempson-Conyers who, according to the Clifton children, 'always blabbed', could have told him about the grave-like hole in the floor of the ruined cottage. It was sheer bad luck-if one can call it bad luck when a murderer is hoist, so to speak, with his own petard-that the children should have had sufficient curiosity regarding the filled-in hole to get the poor village idiot to dig it out for them, and that Mrs Winter knew the sound of his car.
You may ask why, having, in his capacity as the first Mr Ward, assured himself of thirty thousand pounds under the terms of Mrs Kempson's will, Nigel did not add her murder to his tally. I think he had genuine feeling for her and was willing to wait for her death from natural causes. Because of the difference in their ages he probably thought that he would not have to wait very long. Like other murderers I have met, he was by no means altogether bad.
Of course, sooner or later he would still have had to dispose of the second Mr Ward had that unfortunate man remained sane, but I think he had planned to do that after Mrs Kempson's death. Then he would have presented himself to the lawyers in his disguise as the first Mr Ward and claimed his thirty thousand pounds.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MARGARET AND KENNETH
So it was poor Nigel Kempson after all, although I do not know why I still think of him with compassion. He was a double murderer and he had killed an entirely innocent, although I think a very silly, lovesick young girl as well as the madman we knew as Mr Ward.
Mrs Lestrange Bradley (Dame Beatrice as she became later on) got our address from Aunt Kirstie and came to see us in our London home to tell us all about it. She said that our discovery of Mr Ward's body when Kenneth thought we were getting Peachy to dig for buried treasure had been of great help to the police, but that did not comfort us very much. The only good thing about it all, so far as I could see, was that they did not hang Nigel. He went shooting rabbits on Lye Hill and accidentally or purposely shot himself before he could be arrested. I think he realised that Mrs Bradley was getting at the truth.
I suppose thirty thousand pounds is a great deal of money, especially if you compare it with the five thousand which was all that Nigel stood to obtain in his own name under Mrs Kempson's will, but, on thinking it over, I do not really believe that the late Mr Kempson had made any stipulation as to how his wife was to leave the money when she died.
I think she believed that Nigel was Mr Kempson's own illegitimate son whom he had never had the courage to acknowledge and, although she loved Nigel in her possessive way, largely because she was so lonely with her husband dead and her only daughter abroad most of the time, I imagine that she resented and never forgave her husband's infidelity (if unfaithful he had been) and for that reason she refused to have Nigel legally adopted, which might have given him a title to the estate or, at any rate, a substantial share in the late Mr Kempson's fortune. Instead, he was to be left a beggarly five thousand pounds instead of the sum which no doubt he felt he had a right to expect.
For how long he had planned to impersonate Mrs Kempson's brother Ward it is impossible to say, but, of course, it could not have been before Mrs Kempson received the news of Ward's death.
So what Mrs Bradley calls 'the first Mr Ward' made his appearance and (possibly again to vent her spite against her dead husband, so strangely are people constituted) Mrs Kempson told Nigel that she was leaving her 'brother' thirty thousand pounds, little knowing that her beneficiary was the other party to the agreement.
It was the last holiday we ever spent in Hill village, for our grandfather died that winter, all the property was sold up and the aunts and Uncle Arthur moved away. However, we were given bicycles the following summer and father cycled with us to visit his relations in another part of Oxfordshire.
One day we decided to cycle to Hill on our own, but when we came to the culvert which led on to The Marsh, Kenneth said:
'I don't believe I want to go any further.'
'Well, let's spend our money at Mother Honour's,' I said, 'and then go back. Other people will be in Aunt Kirstie's and grandfather's, so it wouldn't be fun. Even the hermit's cottage isn't there any more. Look! Do you see? They've pulled it down. Do you believe there was ever any treasure hidden in it?'
'I did when I was younger,' said Kenneth.
END