It was late when Frank Abbott returned—late Saturday afternoon. He came through Lenton, and saw Inspector Smith. The fingerprints collected from the Forester’s House were, as they expected, those of Mary Stokes and of a man so far unknown. Inspector Smith had, as a matter of fact, gone over on his bicycle to Tomlin’s Farm in order to obtain corroboration. Arriving there at two o’clock, he was informed that Mary had gone into Lenton. “Lunching with a friend,” Mrs. Stokes told him, “and going to the pictures afterwards… No, and I’m sure I can’t say when she’ll be home, Inspector. Girls don’t hurry themselves to get back from a jaunt, and that’s a fact. I’d be worrying myself about her coming home in the dark, for you can say what you like, it’s a lonely road, but she was meeting Joe Turnberry tea-time and he said he’d see her safe. Is there anything I can do for you?… Something she’s in the habit of handling? Well, I dunno. There’s that Picture Post— she was looking at it last night and no one’s touched it since. You’re welcome, I’m sure, though I don’t know what good it’ll do you.”
By the time Frank Abbott came into Lenton police station the proofs of Mary’s fingerprints were waiting for him. There were plenty of them all over the pages of the magazine, and they were identical with the prints from the Forester’s House.
“There’s just one of those that looks different.” Smith fished out a large, vague print. “See? It’s the side of a hand—right hand print—bit of the palm, little finger, and the one next to it, all too much smudged to be any use. That came off the panelling in the passage of the Forester’s House—five foot four from the ground and just above the smudge we thought might be blood, and blood it is. It looks to me as if it might be smeared from the cuff of a coat.”
Frank nodded.
“Well, there’s nothing else we can do tonight. The Yard are on to a man who is said to have been a pal of Louise Rogers. A little light at that end would be helpful. Meanwhile I can confront Mary Stokes with these prints and ask her what about it. It may get us somewhere, or it may not. I think we ought to go over every inch of that clearing—shift all the leaves. Some job! But if Louise was murdered there, there may be traces.”
He drove back in the dark with the feeling that looking for a needle in a haystack was going to be a joke compared to what lay ahead of them.
It was when they were all in the drawing-room after dinner that Mark Harlow rang up. Cicely came back from taking the call to announce that he was coming round to spend the evening.
“He says he’s got the blues. Mrs. Green and Lizzie are out. It’s their day, and they’ve gone to Lenton to the late house at the Rex. The poor lamb has had cold supper and is fed to the teeth. I told him we could at least give him hot coffee.”
Mark Harlow, duly arriving, appeared to be in the best of spirits. He drank three cups of Cicely’s coffee, and then sat down at the piano and rattled off a lot of brilliant fireworks which had the effect of driving Colonel Abbott to his study, where he could devote himself to the day’s cross-word puzzle in peace.
Cicely hung over the piano, talking, arguing, animated, in a house-coat the colour of rowan-berries. Presently Mark was playing one of his songs and she sang with him, making a duet of it, with nothing that could be called a voice but an odd effect of artistry.
Monica was doing embroidery, her lips rather tightly pressed together, the vexed colour high in her cheeks. Frank next to her, lazy and comfortable.
On the other side of the hearth Miss Silver, her knitting laid by, was engaged in reading the Reverend Augustus Grey’s privately printed Memoirs of Deeping and the Neighbourhood. The volume, handsomely bound in brown calf, was light enough to hold, but it must be confessed that she was finding its contents heavy. She looked up from them occasionally and allowed her gaze to rest upon the young people by the piano.
Mark Harlow was of a slimmer build than Grant Hathaway. He lacked perhaps an inch of Grant’s height, and without being dark was darker than Grant both as to hair and eyes. He had a much more mobile face, thinner eyebrows, a quick twist of the mouth when he laughed, a constant play of expression from grave to gay. There was no doubt that he had a great deal of charm, and that his playing was clever—oh, yes, very clever indeed, though according to her old-fashioned standards sadly lacking in melody. Catching her eyes upon him, he might have read her thoughts, for he laughed and broke suddenly into the “Blue Danube.”
Miss Silver smiled, and Cicely clapped her hands.
“Come and dance it with me, Frank!”
He shook his head.
“Too lazy.”
There was scorn in her voice.
“Bone idle!”
She picked up her long, full skirts and began to waltz by herself, as light as a feather, as light as a leaf, as graceful as a birch tree in the wind. She might be a little brown thing, but she had her charm.
Her mother watched her for a moment or two, then dropped her eyes to her embroidery. This was how Cis used to look—this was how she was meant to look. But not for Mark Harlow. What was happening to her? Where was she going? Why couldn’t you keep your children safe and happy as you did in their nursery days? A sleepy head on your shoulder—God bless Mummy and Daddy and make me a good girl. The bright silks in her lap dazzled in a sudden mist. A verse which she had read somewhere came into her mind, very clear and distinct, as if she was reading it again:
“I bore you and I nursed you, you were flesh and blood
and bone of me.
I toiled for you and loved you, but you’ve gone from me
and grown from me.
Oh, once you were my little maid, but now you’ve
travelled far.
For it’s a grown woman, a grown woman, and a stranger
that you are.”
The tune came to an end. When it was over Monica looked relieved. Miss Silver went back to her book, emerging thankfully from a long-winded narrative about a supposed apparition in the churchyard which had in the event turned out to be no more than a strayed ewe. The Reverend Augustus was unsparingly diffuse. When at long last he had finished with the story he proceeded to moralize upon it. It was not until nearly ten o’clock that Miss Silver, turning a page, found her flagging attention revived. Mr. Grey wrote:
“My Excellent Neighbour Sir Humphrey Peel has permitteed me to transcribe the following interesting passage from his grandfather’s Day Book. In his capacity of Justice of the Peace, Sir Roger Peel was a most respected magistrate and a most kindly and benignant friend to the poor. It may have been in either of these capacities that he was approached by a certain widow of this parish whose name is given as Thamaris Ball. This name I conceive to be a mistake for Damaris…”
The Rector proceeded for some paragraphs to follow the Ball family in and out of the church register. Marriages, births, deaths, and tombstones—a very tedious performance.
Miss Silver dealt with it perseveringly, but returned with some relief to the transcription from the Day Book of Sir Roger Peel. She had just become a good deal interested in the fact that there was a mention of the Forester’s House farther down on the page, and was reading a sentence which began, “This Thamaris Ball said and deposed—” when the drawing-room door was opened and the house-parlourmaid, still in her outdoor clothes, came a step or two into the room. She was flushed, and her manner nervous.
Monica Abbott looked round in surprise.
“What is it, Ruth?”
Words came hurrying and stumbling.
“It’s Mr. Stokes—and could he see Mr. Frank for a minute? It’s about his niece—they don’t know what’s happened to her. He’s got Joe Turnberry with him. They caught us up in the Lane. Oh, Mrs. Abbott!”
Frank was out of his chair before she had finished her first sentence. As he shut the door behind him he heard Monica say, “Now pull yourself together!”
Josiah Stokes was waiting in the hall, square and ruddy in an old weatherbeaten coat, Joe Turnberry beyond him in his off-duty clothes, his big open face all puckered up like a frightened child. Frank took them into the dining-room and shut the door.
“What’s happened, Mr. Stokes?”
“Well, Mr. Frank, we don’t rightly know that anything’s happened, and it’s maybe I’m wasting your time and my own over nothing at all, and if it hadn’t been for the stories that’s been going round, and you being down here to look into them, I wouldn’t have troubled you. But my wife’s in a way about it.”
“Do you think you could begin at the beginning, Mr. Stokes?”
Josiah ran his hand through his hair, the thickest thatch in the parish. As yellow as corn when he was young, it curled up strongly still all over his head, but the grey in it gave it a flaxen look under the hanging light. He said in a simple, vexed voice,
“I’m all put about. The fact is she went off to Lenton and she hasn’t come back.”
Frank glanced across at the mantlepiece. The hands of a funeral marble clock stood at twenty to eleven.
“It’s not so late, you know.”
“Well, it is, and it isn’t. I got off on the wrong foot. Mary, she went off to meet her girl friend in Lenton and have a bit of lunch with her, and Joe here, he met them afterwards and they went to the pictures. Well, they came back by the seven-thirty bus from Lenton that gets in here at ten minutes to eight, and Joe, he sees her back to the farm.”
“Then—”
“Just a minute, Mr. Frank. Joe, you tell him how long it took you.”
Joe Turnberry blushed.
“A matter of twenty minutes, or maybe twenty-five.”
“Well, go on then, can’t you! That’s what I brought you here for, isn’t it? Haven’t you got a tongue in your head? You carry on and tell Mr. Frank what you’ve been telling me!”
Joe’s colour deepened.
“I took her back to the farm same as I told Mr. Stokes, and she said goodnight and went in and shut the door, and I come along home to Mrs. Gossett’s where I lodge.”
“That’s right,” said Josiah Stokes. “We heard the door, Mother and I did, and the kitchen clock made it twenty past eight— about five minutes fast it runs run mostly. My wife, she calls out, ‘Mary, is that you?’ but there isn’t any answer. The dog gets up and walks across the door, but he doesn’t bark. He’d bark fast enough for a stranger, but he wouldn’t for Mary, nor yet for Joe here. My wife says, ‘Well, she’ll be through for a cup of tea,’ but she doesn’t come. After about a quarter of an hour or so my wife goes through and calls up the stair, but there isn’t any answer. She leaves it a bit longer, and then she goes up to see what the girl is at. And Mary isn’t there. She comes down all of a fluster, and we go through the house, but she isn’t there. Then I take a lantern and go out round the house calling, but there’s no one there either, so we make up our minds we’re mistook. There was something shut, but it couldn’t have been the front door. Must have been door or window shutting itself—happens that way sometimes in an old house. I tell my wife the girl’ll be along by the next bus. Well, next bus gets in ten minutes to nine. When it comes to half past nine I walk down to the village to Mrs. Gossett’s, and there’s Joe Turnberry sitting in the kitchen listening to the wireless, and he tells me he brought Mary home by a quarter past eight. Well, then I think, ‘She slipped out again, that’s what she done, and as like as not she’ll be back before I am.’ So I go back and Joe comes along, but Mary isn’t there. We wait about a bit, and then my wife says, ‘You take and go down to Abbottsleigh and tell Mr. Frank. I don’t like it,’ she says, ‘and I’m not going to have it on my conscience that we didn’t do everything we ought.’ So we come along, and we meet the maids from Abbottsleigh in the Lane, coming up from the late bus.”
Frank said quickly,
“Are you on the telephone at the farm?”
“Well, yes, we are. I had it put in after the war.”
“Then I think we’ll give Mrs. Stokes a ring and find out if your niece has come in. There’s an extension in here.”
Maggie Bell heard the tinkling sound of the signal which brought Mrs. Stokes running out of the kitchen, where she had been sitting with the door open and the dog for company. On the party line everyone knew when anyone else was being rung up. Maggie’s sofa by day was her bed by night. She slept badly, and burned her light till midnight or even later, though there would be no telephoning after eleven o’clock. She had only to stretch out her hand and lift the receiver to hear Mr. Stokes say,
“That you, Mother? Is Mary home?”
Mrs. Stokes’ answer came all in a hurry.
“Oh, no, she isn’t. What can be keeping her?”
Mr. Stokes said, “I don’t know,” and hung up.
The click came to Maggie along the line. She hung up too. Not much to be made of that, not even in the way of scandal. Quarter to eleven wasn’t all that late. There was a first-class picture on at the Rex in Lenton—ever so many people had gone over to see it from the village. All the maids in the houses round had Saturday for their day out, because of the late bus. It didn’t run other nights, only Saturdays, and what’s the good of a half day if you’ve got to be in before nine? Maggie wondered why on earth the Stokeses were putting themselves in a fuss about Mary. If there was ever a girl for the last bus home, it was Mary Stokes. You wouldn’t see her coming home in a hurry if she was out with a young man. Maggie didn’t blame her for that. Fusses, that’s what the Stokeses were, and old-fashioned enough to have come out of the ark. Came from not having any young people about. Pity about them losing those two sons in the war. And the one that was left didn’t care for farming. Mad about aeroplanes, and doing well at the job. Nice-looking too. Might have livened things up a bit if he’d stayed on the farm. That stuck-up Mary wasn’t any good to anyone. They’d no call to fuss about her—she’d be back all right. Let her alone and she’ll come home, and bring her tail behind her, like it said in the nursery rhyme.
But when Mary Stokes came home it was feet first on a hurdle.
They found her in the morning, under a pile of hay in a disused stable across the yard, with her neck broken.
Maggie Bell had a very interesting morning listening to the messages that went to and fro. A call to the Superintendent at Lenton—that was the first she heard of it. Inspector Smith, that was—very short and sharp, and no wonder either. Maggie went cold right down to the tips of her fingers as she listened to the curt sentences. Then there was Mr. Frank Abbott on a London call— Scotland Yard, to speak to Chief Detective Inspector Lamb.
Maggie never let go of the receiver, and before long the Chief Detective Inspector was on the line, and Mr. Frank’s voice answering him from Tomlin’s Farm. Sergeant Abbott he might be up in London, but down here he was Mr. Frank and wouldn’t ever be anything else. She listened entranced to the conversation.
“Abbott speaking, sir. I thought you’d want to know at once— that girl’s been murdered.”
There was a grunt from the other end of the line.
“The girl who told the tale?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Done to shut her mouth?”
“Might be—might be just coincidence.”
“You do get them—sometimes. Pretty funny business. Think I’ll come down. You can meet a morning train at Lenton. I’ll give you a ring when we’ve looked it up.”
Out at Tomlin’s Farm the routine that waits on murder held its way. Doctor, photographer, fingerprint man came and went. The ambulance last of all. If the dead girl had found it dull at Tomlin’s Farm, at least she was leaving it in a burst of notoriety.
In the kitchen Mrs. Stokes, her eyes red and swollen with weeping, made tea for everyone and cut large slices of homemade cake. Not battle, murder, nor sudden death could break the bonds of hospitality. Josiah came and went, grimly shepherding the official flock. Every time she was alone with him the tears ran down her cheeks and she said the same thing.
“I couldn’t have believed it of Joe Turnberry.”
Josiah’s response never varied. He rumpled his hair with a vigorous thrust of blunt fingers and growled out,
“Who says it was Joe?”
“Seems like it must ha’ been. Dog never barked. Wouldn’t he have barked if there had been a stranger about?”
Josiah tugged at his hair.
“Mightn’t have been a stranger, Mother. Needn’t be Joe.”
A big sob came up in Mrs. Stokes’ throat.
“I went to school with his mother,” she said, and turned away to fill the kettle again.
Well before noon everyone in Deeping had his or her own version of the murder. A good deal more than half of their neighbours were quite ready to believe that Mary Stokes had pushed Joe Turnberry too far, and that he had done her in. Mrs. Mayhew, the matronly cook at Abbottsleigh, held forth on the subject to Ruth and her sister Gwen.
“The way you girls carry on I wonder there isn’t more of you get yourselves murdered. A young man’ll stand just so much and no more. That’s what I told my Emmy when she had Charlie coming after her. ‘You make up your mind, my girl,’ I said, ‘if you’re going to take him, take him, and if you’re going to give him the go-by, you tell him straight. You’re getting him all worked up,’ I said, ‘and that’s when things happen. So don’t say you haven’t been warned.’ ”
Ruth looked scared, but Gwen giggled and flounced. She’d got a young man in Lenton, and she didn’t mind if she did work him up—only not as far as murder, that went without saying.
The morning wore on. Frank Abbott met his Chief by the 10.45 at Lenton. Miss Silver finished the meanderings of the Reverend Augustus Grey. Cicely played the organ at the morning service.
Eight days since Mary Stokes had run screaming down the track from Dead Man’s Copse. A great deal can happen in eight days.