There was a belt of shrubbery, not very thick-light leafless tracery of lilac and syringa, with a dense blackness here and there of holly and yew, a path threading it to come out upon a small paved court at the side of the house. Huddled on the paving stones, Leonard Carroll lying crookedly with the back of his head smashed in.
Martin Oakley said, “He’s dead. I didn’t touch him.”
“Somebody did,” said Frank Abbott coolly.
He stepped forward, felt the dead man’s wrist, and found it warm. He stepped back again. Then he sent the beam of the torch travelling here and there. The flags lay damp and furred with moss. Where they met the wall of the house there was a withered growth of fern, the old fronds brown and broken, the new ones curled hard upon themselves like fossils, sheltering against the January frosts. There was no sign of a weapon. The beam slid up the walls and showed rows of casement windows closed and curtained. On the ground floor all the windows shut. No light anywhere to answer the wandering beam.
Abbott said sharply, “Who sleeps this side?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Then how did you come here?”
“I came to see him.”
“But why here? What brought you here?”
Oakley fetched one of those hard breaths.
“My God, Abbott-you can’t put it on me! I tell you I was coming to see him.”
“What brought you here-round to the side of the house?”
“I came up to the front door. It was only just after ten when he telephoned. I made up my mind to see him, to find out what he meant. I came up to the front door. I thought I heard voices away over here on the left. The front of the house was all dark. I stepped back to listen. I thought I heard my own name. I came this way. My feet made a noise on the gravel. I suppose that’s why I didn’t hear any more. I had a torch. I did stop to listen once. I thought I heard someone. I called out, ‘Carroll, is that you?’ There wasn’t any answer. I went on, and found him lying here the way he is now. I didn’t touch him-I swear I didn’t!”
“You didn’t think of giving the alarm?”
“I only thought about getting away. I’m afraid I lost my head a bit. I’d come over to see him, and there he was-dead. My one idea was to get away. I started to run, but when I got on to the gravel I realized what a row I was making and stopped. I tried not to make any more noise. Then I bumped into you. That’s the absolute truth.”
Frank Abbott wondered. He said,
“We’d better go up to the house.”
Chapter XXXII
The telephone had been busy. Martin Oakley had repeated his story to Chief Inspector Lamb, haled from the borderland of slumber to preside over another investigation and a new murder. Flashlight photographs were being taken of the moss-grown courtyard, and of Leonard Carroll lying there-positively his last appearance on any stage.
Lamb sat beneath the overhead light, his coarse, curly black hair a little rumpled. It was still thick and abundant except just on the crown, and showed only a few grey threads at the temples. Under this strong dark thatch his ruddy, weather-tanned face had no more expression than a piece of wood. The brown eyes with their slight tendency to bulge remained fixed upon Mr. Oakley’s face, a habit very disconcerting to even the most innocent witness. Martin Oakley could by no means flatter himself that there was any disposition to regard him in this light. His mind, at first possessed by a frantic sense of incredulity, had now to struggle against the feeling that he was being rushed towards a precipice at a speed which precluded intelligent thought. He had expressed his willingness to make a statement, and was now regretting it. He had been cautioned, but could not resist the temptation to explain his actions.
Lamb’s voice struck robustly on his ear.
“Pearson’s account of your telephone conversation with Mr. Carroll is substantially correct?”
“I think so.”
“Would you like to look at it again?”
“No-it’s all right-that’s what he said.”
“Well now, how long was it before you made up your mind to come and see him?”
“Oh, almost at once.”
“Who rang off-you or Carroll?”
“He did. He banged down the receiver. I only hung up my end for long enough to get the exchange again.”
This was something new. Frank Abbott looked up from his notes, Miss Silver from her knitting, which had for the moment required a somewhat closer attention than she usually gave it
Lamb’s “What did you want the exchange for?” rang sharply.
“I wanted to get on to Carroll to tell him I was coming over.”
“Did you get him?”
“Yes.”
“He knew you were coming over?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I said, ‘Look here, you can’t leave it like that. If you think you saw anything you’ll have to tell me what it was. I’m coming over.’ ”
“What did he say?”
“He laughed, and I hung up.” The urge to explain drove him. “That’s why I went round to the side of the house-I thought he was calling me-I thought I heard my name. I came up to the front door. He was expecting me-I thought perhaps he’d be there to let me in. But when I heard my name-”
Miss Silver gave the slight cough with which she was wont to demand attention.
“Mr. Oakley, are you sure you heard your name?”
He turned a ravaged face on her.
“I’m not sure about anything. I thought I heard it. That’s what took me round to the side of the house. Don’t you see I must have had some reason for going there?”
The Chief Inspector said without any expression at all,
“We don’t know what reason Mr. Carroll had for going there. But he did go there. The person who murdered him would have that motive for following or accompanying him.”
There was a pause during which, and not for the first time, Mr. Oakley became convinced that he would have done better to hold his tongue. He was dismissed to the company of the other guests assembled in the drawing-room under the solemn gaze of a large local constable. If this young man had had any thoughts to spare from his job he might have reflected that the company presented some strange contrasts, but beyond concluding that it was a rum start he was conscious of little else than that this was a murder case, and that one of these people was probably a murderer. That being so, it did not matter to him that Mr. Tote was wearing blue serge trousers and a tweed overcoat; that Mrs. Tote had got back into the tight black cloth dress which she had worn for dinner, a garment rather ostentatiously smart in the hand but reduced by her to a sort of limp dowdiness; or that the other elderly lady had come down in a thick, old-fashioned grey dressing-gown, in spite of which she sat there shivering and looking as if she would never be warm again. Of the two young ladies, Miss Brown was in a tweed skirt and jumper, and Miss Lane in a very fancy dressing-gown, poppy-red and as flimsy as they come. Mr. Masterman was in a dressing-gown too, a very handsome garment and quite new.
Well, there they all were, and there they sat, not one of them with a word to throw to anyone else. And time went on.
In the study Lamb said,
“He was struck on the head with something that broke his skull. There’s no sign of the weapon. It’s got to be somewhere. There’s no sign of it in the house. I don’t say it couldn’t have been cleaned and put back wherever it came from, because it could. There’s fire-irons, flat irons, golf-clubs, and all manner of things, but getting things clean and putting them back takes time, and there was precious little time. The man could have been no more than just dead when Frank got here. Take it any way you like, that telephone conversation was over by a quarter past ten, because that’s when Pearson finished locking up and saw Carroll go upstairs. At five-and-twenty past Miss Silver is ringing the Ram. Frank gets going by the half hour, and bumps into Oakley six or seven minutes later. Now if Oakley left the Mill House after his second telephone call he wouldn’t get here before half past-not walking in the dark-I don’t see how he could. If he killed Carroll he had about six minutes to do it in and get back down the drive to where Frank met him. I don’t say it couldn’t be done, because of course it could, but he’d got to meet Carroll who was quite probably looking out for him, induce him to go round to the side of the house-why?-quarrel with him to the point of murder, hit him over the head, and make off down the drive. If it was Mr. Oakley, he may have brought the weapon with him, or he may have picked up something on his way. A big stone would have done it, or a brickbat, in which case he must have thrown it away as he ran, and we shall find it when we can make a thorough search by daylight. He won’t, of course, have been able to do anything about cleaning it up, so unless there’s something very heavy in the way of rain we shall be able to identify it all right. What puzzles me is why either Carroll or the murderer should have been where the body was found.”