Henry sighed. “Forget it,” he said. “Tell me about Raymond Mason and why you had such a strong motive for wanting to kill him.”
“It may not sound like a very strong motive to you, Inspector,” said Manciple, “but the fact is, the man was persecuting me. Trying to turn me out of my own house.”
“Turn you out?”
“I can’t prove it, of course, but it was obvious enough. He started off perfectly civilly, answering my advertisement about the Lodge. I thought he seemed a decent enough fellow. Helped him to get the Lodge fitted up, and so forth. Then, out of the blue, about a year ago, he came to see me and said he wanted to buy this house. Made me a very substantial offer for it in fact. When I turned him down he wouldn’t take no for an answer. Just kept on putting up his offer. I told him over and over again that it wasn’t a question of money. I wasn’t prepared to sell at any price. Finally he turned nasty. Made insulting remarks about my not being able to afford to keep the place up and so on. We had an unpleasant scene, I’m afraid.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” said Henry, “why were you so adamant about not selling? If he offered you such a good price…”
“Sell this house? Sell this house?” Major Manciple bristled. “Couldn’t consider it. Never would consider it. I’d starve first — and so would Violet.” Seeing Henry’s slightly skeptical expression he continued. “Perhaps I’d better explain. It means going back quite a bit.”
“That,” said Henry, “is just what I would like you to do.”
CHAPTER FOUR
GEORGE MANCIPLE CONSIDERED. “Hardly know where to start. With my grandfather, I suppose, the Head’s father. He was the first Manciple to come over from the Old Country. Fell on bad times, got involved in religious squabbles, had to sell up the family home in Killarney, and came to England to make his fortune. Funnily enough, he succeeded. By the time my grandfather died, he was a wealthy man; and my father inherited a very substantial estate. When I say estate I mean money, of course. No house or land. My father always had a great urge to establish a family seat here in England, but he had no possible reason for doing so. He was a bachelor, and by the time he inherited, he was already Headmaster of Kingsmarsh School, where a perfectly adequate house was provided for him.”
“You say he was a bachelor when his father died?” Henry asked.
“Yes indeed. And considered a confirmed one, by most people. Like most confirmed bachelors, when he did fall, he fell hard. When he was in his late forties he went over to Ireland for his summer holiday, as usual — and came back with a bride less than half his age. A beautiful girl from a small village in Mallow. My mother.” There was a pause. Major Manciple lit his pipe. Then he pulled open a drawer in the desk and brought out a sepia-tinted photograph. He pushed it across to Henry with the diffident pride of a father exhibiting a snapshot of his firstborn.
Henry took the photograph. It showed a young woman standing self-consciously beside a large aspidistra. She was wasp-waisted and wore her fair hair piled on the top of her head. Her elaborate silk dress sported a small bustle and a low neckline filled in with a lace fichu which rose to form a choker around her slender neck. Over this fichu she wore an elaborate, sparkling necklace composed of fern-shaped fronds, which matched her earrings. She was outstandingly pretty, with a bold, almost flirtatious smile on her generous mouth. A marked contrast, Henry thought, to the austere good looks of Augustus Manciple.
George Manciple seemed to follow Henry’s train of thought. He said. “A strange marriage it was in some ways, I suppose, but happy. Ideally happy, for as long as it lasted. I’m afraid the Head spoiled his wife outrageously. He delighted in buying things for her and giving her lavish presents — and since he could well afford it, where was the harm?” Manciple looked at Henry aggressively, as though the latter had criticized his father’s generosity.
Henry said, “No harm at all that I can see.”
“None, none at all,” agreed Manciple, mollified. “Well now, first of all he bought this house for her. The Head had to live in school himself during the term time, of course, so Mother used to divide her time between here and Kingsmarsh. It’s only a few miles away, as you probably know. We children lived here all the year around with a procession of nannies and housekeepers and what-have-you. In the holidays we were all here together. My father loved this house. Next to his family, it meant more to him than anything in the world.
“A couple of years after my parents married, Edwin was born. I came next, barely eighteen months later. Then there was a gap of six years before young Claud made his appearance. My mother had developed a passion for jewelry, and each new baby was the excuse for a really slap-up present from the Head. Not that he was short of pretexts when it came to buying jewels for her. Christmases and wedding anniversaries were almost as good as babies. But the really splendid pieces — the ruby and diamond parure, the three-strand matched pearl necklace, the fern-pattern diamonds you saw in the photograph — they were all birthday presents. Our birthdays, that is. I suppose altogether the Head must have spent more than twenty thousand pounds on jewelry. And sixty years ago that was a lot of money.”
“It still is,” said Henry. He was by now considerably intrigued to know what had become of these treasures. Was it possible that Major Manciple, in spite of his precarious financial situation, still refused to sell his mother’s jewels on sentimental grounds? Or had they been sold long ago and the money spent?
Manciple went on. “Two years after Claud was born — when I was eight and Edwin nearly ten — there was great excitement in the family. I can remember it well. We children were packed off to stay with Aunt Dora at Bexhill for six weeks, and we were promised that when we got home we’d find a new little brother or sister waiting for us.
“I don’t know what went wrong. The Head would never speak about it. All I do know is that the baby arrived prematurely, stillborn. And my mother died. My father never got over it. Before his marriage he had been rather a withdrawn man, not given to easy friendships. With marriage he had blossomed, become sociable and almost gay. When Mother died, he went right back into his shell. Worse than that, he began to distrust everybody outside his immediate family circle. It began with the doctors, whom he blamed for my mother’s death. Then it spread to include his colleagues at the school, his servants at home, and eventually his friends and neighbors.
“Of course, it was a gradual process and we children were too young to be aware of it at the time. Aunt Dora sold her cottage and came to live here, to run the house. I can just remember my mother and our life when she was alive. It’s a golden haze in my memory, like a long, glorious summer’s afternoon. And then everything changed.
“Not that we were unhappy, don’t think that. Aunt Dora couldn’t have been kinder, and as for the Head — well — we idolized him, even if we were a little scared of him. And he loved us dearly. But — he tended to cut himself off more and more from the world outside this house… Which meant that we were cut off from it, too, and that’s not a good thing for growing boys. As soon as we were old enough we all made our way out into the world, away from Cregwell, but we were constantly aware of it. Wherever we might go in life Cregwell was always our home.
“Now, the Head retired not long after Mother’s death. I told you that he was finding it difficult to get on with his colleagues. He lived here with Aunt Dora, and as he grew older, he became more and more distrustful of outsiders. He imagined that his stockbrokers were ruining him, that the tradesmen were cheating him, that his doctor was lying to him — you know the sort of thing. In the end the only friend he had left was his solicitor, old Arthur Pringle. They’d known each other since college days. The only honest man in England, my father called Pringle.”