Chapter 20

The day after the inquest I went to see Major Phillpot and I told him point-blank that I wanted his opinion. Someone whom the old peat-cutting man had taken to be Mrs Esther Lee had been seen going up towards the woods that morning.

‘You know the old woman,’ I said. ‘Do you actually think that she would have been capable of causing an accident by deliberate malice?’

‘I can’t really believe so, Mike,’ he said. ‘To do a thing like that you need a very strong motive. Revenge for some personal injury caused to you. Something like that. And what had Ellie ever done to her? Nothing.’

‘It seems crazy, I know. Why was she constantly appearing in that queer way, threatening Ellie, telling her to go away? She seemed to have a grudge against her, but how could she have had a grudge? She’d never met Ellie or seen her before. What was Ellie to her but a perfectly strange American? There’s no past history, no link between them.’

‘I know, I know,’ said Phillpot. ‘I can’t help feeling, Mike, that there’s something here that we don’t understand. I don’t know how much your wife was over in England previous to her marriage. Did she ever live in this part of the world for any length of time?’

‘No, I’m sure of that. It’s all so difficult. I don’t really know anything about Ellie. I mean, who she knew, where she went. We just – met.’ I checked myself and looked at him. I said, ‘You don’t know how we came to meet, do you? No,’ I went on, ‘you wouldn’t guess in a hundred years how we met.’ And suddenly, in spite of myself, I began to laugh. Then I pulled myself together. I could feel that I was very near hysteria.

I could see his kind patient face just waiting till I was myself again. He was a helpful man. There was no doubt about that.

‘We met here,’ I said. ‘Here at Gipsy’s Acre. I had been reading the notice board of the sale of The Towers and I walked up the road, up the hill because I was curious about this place. And that’s how I first saw her. She was standing there under a tree. I startled her – or perhaps it was she who startled me. Anyway, that’s how it all began. That’s how we came to live here in this damned, cursed, unlucky place.’

‘Have you felt that all along? That it would be unlucky?’

‘No. Yes. No, I don’t know really. I’ve never admitted it. I’ve never wanted to admit it. But I think she knew. I think she’s been frightened all along.’ Then I said slowly, ‘I think somebody deliberately wanted to frighten her.’

He said rather sharply, ‘What do you mean by that? Who wanted to frighten her?’

‘Presumably the gipsy woman. But somehow I’m not quite sure about it… She used to lie in wait for Ellie, you know, tell her this place would bring her bad luck. Tell her she ought to go away from it.’

‘Tcha!’ He spoke angrily. ‘I wish I’d been told more about that. I’d have spoken to old Esther. Told her she couldn’t do things like that.’

‘Why did she?’ I asked. ‘What made her?’

‘Like so many people,’ said Phillpot, ‘she likes to make herself important. She likes either to give people warnings or else tell their fortunes and prophesy happy lives for them. She likes to pretend she knows the future.’

‘Supposing,’ I said slowly, ‘somebody gave her money. I’ve been told she’s fond of money.’

‘Yes, she was very fond of money. If someone paid her – that’s what you’re suggesting – what put that idea into your head?’

‘Sergeant Keene,’ I said. ‘I should never have thought of it myself.’

‘I see.’ He shook his head doubtfully.

‘I can’t believe,’ he said, ‘that she would deliberately try to frighten your wife to the extent of causing an accident.’

‘She mayn’t have counted on a fatal accident. She might have done something to frighten the horse,’ I said. ‘Let off a squib or flapped a sheet of white paper or something. Sometimes, you know, I did feel that she had some entirely personal grudge against Ellie, a grudge for some reason that I don’t know about.’

‘That sounds very far-fetched.’

‘This place never belonged to her?’ I asked. ‘The land, I mean.’

‘No. Gipsies may have been warned off this property, probably more than once. Gipsies are always getting turned off places, but I doubt if they keep up a life-long resentment about it.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘that would be far-fetched. But I do wonder if for some reason that we don’t know about – she was paid —’

‘A reason we don’t know about – what reason?’

I reflected a moment or two.

‘Everything I say will just sound fantastic. Let’s say that, as Keene suggested, someone paid her to do the things she did. What did that someone want? Say they wanted to make us both go away from here. They concentrated on Ellie, not on me, because I wouldn’t be scared in the way Ellie would be. They frightened her to get her – and through her both of us – to leave here. If so, there must be some reason for wanting the land to come on the market again. Somebody, shall we say, for some reason wants our land.’ I stopped.

‘It’s a logical suggestion,’ Phillpot said, ‘but I know of no reason why anyone should.’

‘Some important mineral deposit,’ I suggested, ‘that nobody knows about.’

‘Hm, I doubt it.’

‘Something like buried treasure. Oh, I know it sounds absurd. Or – well, say the proceeds of some big bank robbery.’

Phillpot was still shaking his head but rather less vehemently now.

‘The only other proposition,’ I said, ‘is to go one step farther back as you did just now. Behind Mrs Lee to the person who paid Mrs Lee. That might be some unknown enemy of Ellie’s.’

‘But you can’t think of anyone it would be likely to be?’

‘No. She didn’t know anyone down here. That I’m sure of. She had no links with this place.’ I got up. ‘Thank you for listening to me,’ I said.

‘I wish I could have been more helpful.’

I went out of the door, fingering the thing that I was carrying in my pocket. Then, taking a sudden decision, I turned on my heels and went back into the room.

‘There’s something I’d like to show you,’ I said. ‘Actually, I was going to take it down to show Sergeant Keene and see what he could make of it.’

I dived into my pocket and brought out a stone round which was wrapped a crumpled bit of paper with printed writing on it.

‘This was thrown through our breakfast window this morning,’ I said. ‘I heard the crash of the glass as I came down the stairs. А stone was thrown through the window once before when we first came here. I don’t know if this is the same person or not.’

I took off the wrapping paper and held it out for him. It was a dirty, coarse bit of paper. There was some printing on it in rather faint ink. Phillpot put on his spectacles and bent over the piece of paper. The message on it was quite short. All it said was, ‘It was a woman who killed your wife!

Phillpot’s eyebrows went up.

‘Extraordinary,’ he said. ‘Was the first message you got printed?’

‘I can’t remember now. It was just a warning to go away from here. I can’t even remember the exact wording of it now. Anyway, it seems pretty certain that that was hooligans. This doesn’t seem quite the same.’

‘Do you think it was thrown in by someone who knew something?’

‘Probably just a bit of silly cruel malice in the anonymous letter class. You get it, you know, a good deal in villages.’

He handed it back to me.

‘But I think your instinct was right,’ he said, ‘to take it to Sergeant Keene. He’ll know more about these anonymous things than I should.’

I found Sergeant Keene at the police station and he was definitely interested.

‘There’s queer things going on here,’ he said.

‘What do you think it means?’ I asked.

‘Hard to say. Might be just malice leading up to accusing some particular person.’

‘It might be just accusing Mrs Lee, I suppose?’

‘No, I don’t think it would have been put that way. It might be – I’d like to think it was – it might be that someone saw or heard something. Heard a noise or a cry or the horse bolted right past someone, and they saw or met a woman soon afterwards. But it sounds as though it was a different woman from the gipsy, because everyone thinks the gipsy’s mixed up in this anyway. So this sounds as though another, an entirely different woman was meant.’

‘What about the gipsy?’ I said. ‘Have you had news of her, found her?’

He shook his head slowly.

‘We know some of the places she used to go when she left here. East Anglia, that way. She’d friends there among the gipsy clan. She’s not been there, they say, but they’d say that anyway. They clam up, you know. She’s fairly well known by sight in those parts but nobody’s seen her. All the same, I don’t think she’s as far away as East Anglia.’

There was something peculiar about the way he said the words.

‘I don’t quite understand,’ I said.

‘Look at it this way, she’s scared. She’s got good reason to be. She’s been threatening your wife, frightening her, and now, say, she caused an accident and your wife died. The police’ll be after her. She knows that, so she’ll go to earth, as you might say. She’ll put as big a distance between herself and us as she possibly can. But she won’t want to show herself. She’d be afraid of public transport.’

‘But you’ll find her? She’s a woman of striking appearance.’

‘Ah yes, we shall find her eventually. These things take a little time. That is, if it was that way.’

‘But you think it was some other way.’

‘Well, you know what I’ve wondered all along. Whether somebody was paying her to say the things she did?’

‘Then she might be even more anxious to get away,’ I pointed out.

‘But somebody else would be anxious too. You’ve got to think of that, Mr Rogers.’

‘You mean,’ I said slowly, ‘the person who paid her.’

‘Yes.’

‘Supposing it was a – a woman who paid her.’

‘And supposing somebody else has some idea of that. And so they start sending anonymous messages. The woman would be scared too. She needn’t have meant this to happen, you know. However much she got that gipsy woman to frighten your wife away from this place she wouldn’t have meant it to result in Mrs Rogers’ death.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Death wasn’t meant. It was just to frighten us. To frighten my wife and to frighten me into leaving here.’ ‘And now who’s going to be frightened? The woman who caused the accident. And that’s Mrs Esther Lee. And so she’s going to come clean, isn’t she? Say it wasn’t really her doing. She’ll admit even that she was paid money to do it. And she’ll mention a name. She’ll say who paid her. And somebody wouldn’t like that would they, Mr Rogers?’

‘You mean this unknown woman that we’ve more or less postulated without even knowing there’s any such person?’

‘Man or woman, say someone paid her. Well, that someone would want her silenced pretty quickly, wouldn’t they?’

‘You’re thinking she might be dead?’

‘It’s a possibility, isn’t it?’ said Keene. Then he made what seemed quite an abrupt change of subject. ‘You know that kind of Folly place, Mr Rogers, that you’ve got up at the top of your woods?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘what of it? My wife and I had it repaired and fixed up a bit. We used to go up there occasionally but not very often. Not lately certainly. Why?’

‘Well, we’ve been hunting about, you know. We looked into this Folly. It wasn’t locked.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘we never bothered to lock it. There was nothing of value in there, just a few odd bits of furniture.’

‘We thought it possible old Mrs Lee had been using it but we found no traces of her. We did find this, though. I was going to show it to you anyway.’ He opened a drawer and took out a small delicate gold-chased lighter. It was a woman’s lighter and it had an initial on it in diamonds. The letter C. ‘It wouldn’t be your wife’s, would it?’

‘Not with the initial C. No, it’s not Ellie’s,’ I said. ‘She hadn’t anything of that kind. And it’s not Miss Andersen’s either. Her name is Greta.’

‘It was up there where somebody had dropped it. It’s a classy bit of goods – cost money.’

‘C,’ I said, repeating the initial thoughtfully. ‘I can’t think of anyone who’s been with us whose initial is C except Cora,’ I said. ‘That’s my wife’s stepmother. Mrs van Stuyvesant, but I really can’t see her scrambling up to the Folly along that overgrown path. And anyway she hasn’t been staying with us for quite a long time. About a month. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her using this lighter. Perhaps I wouldn’t notice anyway,’ I said. ‘Miss Andersen might know.’

‘Well, take it up with you and show it to her.’

‘I will. But if so, if it’s Cora’s, it seems odd that we’ve never seen it when we’ve been in the Folly lately. There’s not much stuff there. You’d notice something like this lying on the floor – it was on the floor?’

‘Yes, quite near the divan. Of course anybody might use that Folly. It’s a handy place, you know, for a couple of lovers to meet any time. The locals I’m talking about. But they wouldn’t be likely to have an expensive thing of this kind.’

‘There’s Claudia Hardcastle,’ I said, ‘but I doubt if she’d have anything as fancy as this. And what would she be doing in the Folly?’

‘She was quite a friend of your wife’s, wasn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I think she was Ellie’s best friend down here. And she’d know we wouldn’t mind her using the Folly any time.’

‘Ah,’ said Sergeant Keene.

I looked at him rather hard. ‘You don’t think Claudia Hardcastle was a – an enemy of Ellie’s do you? That would be absurd.’

‘Doesn’t seem any reason why she should be, I agree, but you never know with ladies.’

‘I suppose —’ I began and then stopped because what I was going to say would seem perhaps rather odd.

‘Yes, Mr Rogers?’

‘I believe that Claudia Hardcastle was originally married to an American – an American named Lloyd. Actually – the name of my wife’s principal trustee in America is Stanford Lloyd. But there must be hundreds of Lloyds and anyway it would only be a coincidence if it was the same person. And what would it have to do with all this?’

‘It doesn’t seem likely. But then —’ he stopped.

‘The funny thing is that I thought I saw Stanford Lloyd down here on the day of the – the accident – Having lunch in the George at Bartington —’

‘He didn’t come to see you?’

I shook my head.

‘He was with someone who looked rather like Miss Hardcastle. But probably it was just a mistake on my part. You know, I suppose, that it was her brother who built our house?’

‘Does she take an interest in the house?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think she likes her brother’s type of architecture.’ Then I got up. ‘Well, I won’t take any more of your time. Try and find the gipsy.’

‘We shan’t stop looking, I can tell you that. Coroner wants her too.’

I said goodbye and went out of the police station. In the queer way that so often happens when you suddenly meet someone you’ve been talking about, Claudia Hardcastle came out of the post office just as I was passing it. We both stopped. She said with that slight embarrassment that you have when you meet someone that’s been recently bereaved:

‘I’m so terribly sorry, Mike, about Ellie. I won’t say any more. It’s beastly when people say things to you. But I have just – just to say that.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘You were very nice to Ellie. You made her feel at home here. I’ve been grateful.’

‘There was one thing I wanted to ask you and I thought perhaps I’d better do it now before you go to America. I hear you’re going quite soon.’

‘As soon as I can. I’ve got a lot to see to there.’

‘It was only – if you were putting your house on the market I thought it might be a thing you’d set in motion before you went away… And if so – if so, I’d rather like to have the first refusal of it.’

I stared at her. This really did surprise me. It was the last thing I’d expected.

‘You mean you’d like to buy it? I thought you didn’t even care for that type of architecture?’

‘My brother Rudolf said to me that it was the best thing he’d done. I dare say he knows. I expect you’ll want a very large price for it but I could pay it. Yes, I’d like to have it.’

I couldn’t help thinking it was odd. She’d never shown the faintest appreciation of our house when she’d come to it. I wondered as I’d wondered once or twice before what her links with her half-brother really were. Had she really a great devotion to him? Sometimes I’d almost thought that she disliked him, perhaps hated him. She spoke of him certainly in a very odd way. But whatever her actual emotions were, he meant something to her. Meant something important. I shook my head slowly.

‘I can see that you might think I’d want to sell the place and leave here because of Ellie’s death,’ I said. ‘But actually that’s not so at all. We lived here and were happy and this is the place I shall remember her best. I shan’t sell Gipsy’s Acre – not for any consideration! You can be quite sure of that.’

Our eyes met. It was like a kind of tussle between us. Then hers dropped.

I took my courage in both hands and spoke.

‘It’s no business of mine, but you were married once. Was the name of your husband Stanford Lloyd?’

She looked at me for a moment without speaking. Then she said abruptly:

‘Yes,’ and turned away.