The Killing of Katie Steelstock (11 page)

“I can’t tell you much more than I put down on that paper,” he said. “My wife and I left at about eleven o’clock. A lot of people seem to have seen us go. My wife doesn’t like to be up late. She sleeps badly. She went to bed immediately we got home.”

“That young personage who let me in. Does she live here?”

“Polly? No. You can’t get residential staff nowadays. Not in West Hannington anyway.”

“Difficult enough in London,” agreed the Superintendent.

“She’s willing, under protest, to stop in while we’re out at night. In return for suitable reimbursement. She was sitting in for us on Friday night.”

“But she took off as soon as you got back?”

“As soon as she heard our car in the drive. The young haven’t much sense of duty these days.”

“They like to live their own lives,” said Knott. The making of trite remarks like this enabled him to divorce his mind from the conversation and devote it to taking in impressions. Impressions of his surroundings, of the man he was talking to, of tension or relaxation. Mariner seemed to be easy enough. A cock on his own dunghill.

“So what did you do then?”

Mariner looked surprised and said, “Well, I didn’t go to bed at once. I had a whisky and soda. In here, actually. Which reminds me—”

“Not at the moment, thank you.”

“I finished reading the local papers. Put out the dog. Locked up the house. I expect it would have been midnight before I went up.”

“I imagine that one of your reasons for hanging about would be to allow your wife to get off to sleep?”

“Actually we sleep in different rooms.”

Knott said, so casually that the thought might only just have occurred to him, “I meant to ask you. What did you think of Kate? You knew her quite well, I imagine.”

“Not particularly well.” Mariner thought about it. “She was a nice unspoiled kid. When she made such a success of her television career, it might have turned her head. Perhaps it did, a little. But not nearly as much as you might have expected. Mind you, we only saw the Hannington side of her.”

“And the outside of the London side.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“The side that came over on the television screen.”

“Oh yes. Well, my wife and I aren’t great television watchers.”

“But you have a set,” Knott said with a smile. “The great detective demonstrates his methods. I saw the aerial.”

Mariner said, “Yes, we have a set. It’s kept in the kitchen. We have it brought in here if there’s something we particularly want to watch. Wimbledon or a test match.”

“I imagine she didn’t lack for admirers,” said Knott. He had often found this simple technique surprisingly useful. Let the conversation drift, then pull it back with a jerk. On this occasion the result was surprising. Mariner flushed, started to say something, changed his mind and then grunted out, “Of course she had. Dozens of them. Round her like flies.”

“Anyone in particular?”

Mariner was recovering himself. He said in a more normal voice, “Her accepted squire was young Tony Windle, but I don’t think he meant anything more to her than a free taxi service.”

“But there’s someone else?”

“There
was
someone else. Until about a month ago. The general impression was that the only serious proposition was Jonathan Limbery.”

“And what happened to Jonathan?”

“Katie and he had a flaming row. In public. In the Tennis Club bar.”

“I’d like to hear about that.”

Mariner thought about it. Knott was watching his face. He said to himself, even if I hadn’t asked him, he was going to tell me about it. There’s some sort of personal involvement here. Either he dislikes Limbery, or maybe he was after the girl himself. You can never tell with these middle-aged men.

Mariner said, “It was early in the evening. There were only five of us there. Kate and her brother Walter. They’d been playing in a foursome against Noel and Georgie Vigors. I’d looked in on my way back from our Reading office. Hoist and Mariner. I retired last year, but I still go in occasionally. As I was saying, I dropped by as the game was finishing and we all went in together for a drink. I gathered that Katie had intended to play with Jonathan, but he’d let her down at the last moment, and Walter had stepped into the breach. She was still annoyed about it. She didn’t like people letting her down. And Walter isn’t much of a hand at tennis, so they’d lost the game badly, which didn’t improve her temper.”

“She had a temper?”

“Oh yes.
De mortuis
and all that sort of thing. But she certainly had a temper.”

“Please go on.”

“All things considered, it was a bit unfortunate that Jonathan should have turned up at this moment, and not only turned up but turned up wearing flannels and looking as hot as if he’d been playing tennis himself. Katie said something like ‘What’s all this? I thought you were so busy putting your paper to bed that you couldn’t play tennis,’ and Jonathan said, ‘That’s right. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would,’ and Katie said, ‘Wouldn’t she cooperate?’ and when Jonathan looked a bit blank she said, ‘Your paper, I mean. When you put her to bed.’ Everyone thought this funny, except Jonathan. He’s not a young man who likes being laughed at. He said something fairly rude. I can’t remember exactly what it was. Then they went at it hammer and tongs. It ended with Katie saying to Walter, ‘You might run me home. I don’t think I can stand much more of this ill-bred lout.’ That broke the party up. We were all feeling pretty embarrassed, actually.”

Knott seemed to be visualising the scene, turning it over, shaking out any possible implications. He said, “Can you remember anything specific that was said when they were slanging each other? It might be important. You often get a lot of truth out of people when they’re angry.”

“I can’t remember anything that was actually said.”

“Who was angrier?”

“They were both angry, but Kate was definitely more in control of herself. She was able to pick her words and make them sting. Jonathan was out of control altogether.”

“He sounds an unusual type.”

Mariner drew a deep breath. O.K., here it comes, thought Knott.

Mariner said, “In my opinion, Limbery is a dangerous and unpleasant young man. You heard about the scene he made in church this morning?” Knott nodded. “That was absolutely typical. He has no control over his temper and very little sense of what is right and wrong. If you want an example of his outlook on life and morals I advise you to read some of the drivel he produces for his local rag. I’ve got some back numbers here. To me they’re futile nonsense, although I suppose very young and immature people might be taken in by them, in which case I suppose they might be dangerous. Anyone with any sense just laughs at them.” But Mariner wasn’t amused, Knott noted. He was angry.

He said, “If you’d lend them to me I’ll look through them. Do you think his violence is confined to words? Could it come out in actions as well?”

“Certainly it could. Last Christmas at a local dance Tony Windle was pulling his leg about one of those effusions of his and he took a swing at him. He picked the wrong man there. Tony’s twice as quick as him and a bit of a boxer, too. He put him on his back.”

“So what happened?”

“He scrambled up shrieking out a lot of filth and went for him again, quite unscientifically. But a lot of people had rallied round by then and he was pulled off and told not to be a bloody fool. I believe he apologised next morning. On the face of it, he and Tony are quite good friends. But I’ve noticed that Limbery hasn’t graced any of our social gatherings since then – and thank goodness for it.”

“He wasn’t at the dance on Friday, I believe.”

“That’s right. Something about an article he had to finish. Though why there should have been any hurry for it I can’t imagine. The Hannington
Gazette’s
a weekly rag, and comes out on Thursdays.”

Knott said, “You don’t like him very much, do you?”

“I don’t like him at all,” said Mariner. “There’s no secret about that.”

“So it’s fair to assume that he doesn’t like you.”

“He dislikes everybody who’s older than he is, or better off.”

“Quite so. I wondered whether he might have been responsible for those stupid practical jokes I was hearing about. Letting down tyres and emptying radiators and so on.”

“Now that you mention it,” said Mariner, “it’s quite on the cards. When it started, we assumed it was kids playing jokes. But it could have been Limbery. That’s his mental age.”

“And one of his victims was Tony Windle.”

“That’s right,” said Mariner thoughtfully. “So he was.”

Old Mr. Beaumorris had once laid it down that, of all unnatural associations, the one to be most avoided was association between a parent and his married children. Since Mr. Beaumorris rarely made any statement without a personal angle to it, it was assumed that he was talking about the household at Limpsfield, the ugly red brick house next door to the Croft, shared by the widowed sixty-one-year-old Vernon Vigors and his married son, Noel.

The house had been informally divided. Mr. Vigors Senior regarded the rooms on the left of the front door as his private domain. He had furnished them to bursting point with pieces from a much larger house. The shelves were full of leather-bound books, and every available flat space held photographs and mementos of married life.

Knott had not found the old man informative. Forty years of solicitordom had accustomed him to asking questions, not to answering them. He agreed that he had left the dance at a quarter past eleven. He had driven straight home and had gone to bed. He had been practically asleep before his son and daughter-in-law had got home. He had no particular views about Katie. He thought she was a nice girl and failed to understand how anyone could have done such a thing to her, but supposed that they had to resign themselves to the fact that they lived in a violent age.

After twenty minutes of this sort of thing, Knott crossed the hallway to talk to the younger generation. The distance between them and the old man was three yards and thirty years. He found Noel and Georgie sitting together on the sofa in front of the open French windows which gave onto a small tidy garden. Since they had not left the dance until after half past eleven and could neither of them have had anything to do with the crime, he decided to question them together. In that way they would be able to supplement each other’s impressions. He was particularly interested in the quarrel at the Tennis Club.

“I’ve been told how it started,” he said. “Katie thought Limbery had stood her up. No girl likes that. But it doesn’t sound like a reason for a public row. Particularly with someone you’d been rather attached to.”

Noel and Georgie looked at each other. They could sense without difficulty the implications of what the Superintendent was saying.

Georgie said, “Jonathan never minds his rows being conducted in public. It adds spice to them.”

Noel said, “I think the heat was self-generating. One said one thing and that provoked a sharp answer. Both of them had saw-edged tongues, when they chose to use them.”

“Can you remember what they did say? I don’t mean the actual words. What line did they take?”

Noel said doubtfully, “It was a month ago—”

Georgie said, “Come on, Noel. You can do better than that. I remember perfectly well. When Katie got down to brass tacks, towards the end, she kept accusing Jonathan of being a schoolmaster manqué. A man among boys, a boy among men. That sort of thing. Immature. Trying to impress the kids but making a laughingstock of himself in the eyes of anyone who was adult. She said, ‘You ought to rename that rag you run
Beezer
or
Tiger Tim’s Weekly.’”

“Yes. That’s right. And he said that just because she couldn’t understand anything more than the leading article in
Peg’s Weekly
it didn’t give her the right to sneer at
his
work.”

“Something you said a moment ago, Mrs. Vigors. Schoolmaster manqué. Meaning he’d have liked to be a schoolmaster? Or that he’d tried it and failed?”

“Actually he did teach for a few terms at Coverdales. That was soon after he left school himself.”

“Do you know why he stopped?”

Before Georgie could answer, Noel said, “Not really. No.” He said it very firmly.

Knott’s mind seemed to be running on schools. He said, “Coverdales. That’s at Caversham, isn’t it? Just outside Reading. Boys and girls? Or boys only?”

“It was boys only when I went there,” said Noel. “Now they take girls in the sixth form, for ‘A’ level subjects.”

“Did Katie go there?”

“Good heavens, no,” said Georgie. “That wouldn’t have been nearly grand enough for the Steelstocks. She went to—what’s the name of it? Princess Anne went there.”

“Benenden.”

“Right. I expect that’s where she made a few friends who were useful to her when she got up to London.”

“Friends are always useful,” said the Superintendent.

While this was going on, Detective Sergeant Shilling was making an examination of the boathouse. The exterior of the doors had been dusted and had produced the expected number of fingerprints. The legible ones had been photographed. There was no reason to suppose that the murderer had touched the doors, but it was the taking of routine precautions, unnecessary in nineteen cases out of twenty, that characterised good police work.

The boathouse, he noticed, was built in two pieces. There was the main part, which housed boats and gear, a roomy single-storey construction with an open penthouse at the back. On the west side, looking as though it might have been added as an afterthought, was a two-storey annexe. The big sliding doors which gave onto the ramp in front of the main section were padlocked, but there was a smaller door cut into the left-hand sliding door. It was in this that one of the panes had been broken. The jagged pieces had been carefully removed, and it was not easy at first glance to realise that the glass was missing.

Shilling put his hand through, reached downward and found the catch of the spring lock. He could just touch it with his fingers. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeve and inserted his bare arm. This time the catch was in reach. He turned it gently and the door opened inward.