Head of a Traveller Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  Dedication

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  1. From Nigel Strangeways’ Journal

  2. A Trunk Without a Label

  3. Dead End

  4. The Dark Backward

  5. Head in Clay

  6. Head in Air

  PART TWO

  7. Janet Seaton Confesses

  8. Rennell Torrance Reveals

  9. Finny Black Turns Up

  10. Mara Torrance Remembers

  11. Lionel Seaton Overhears

  12. Nigel Strangeways Inquires

  13. Robert Seaton Explains

  PART THREE

  14. Farewell to the Roses

  15. From Nigel Strangeways’ Case-book

  More from Vintage Classic Crime

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Staying with a friend in Oxfordshire Nigel Strangeways pays a visit to Robert Seaton, a distinguished British poet whom Nigel greatly admires but whose reputation has been on the decline of late. Seaton proves to be an irascible, temperamental man, and his unconventional household, featuring a resentful daughter and mute dwarf servant, simmers with tension.

  When a headless corpse is found floating in the river by the Seaton’s house just a few weeks later, the poet becomes the prime suspect. But whose body is it?

  About the Author

  Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.

  During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  A Question of Proof

  Thou Shell of Death

  There’s Trouble Brewing

  The Beast Must Die

  The Widow’s Cruise

  Malice in Wonderland

  The Case of the Abominable Snowman

  The Smiler with the Knife

  Minute for Murder

  The Dreadful Hollow

  The Whisper in the Gloom

  End of Chapter

  The Worm of Death

  The Sad Variety

  The Morning After Death

  TO

  HUGO AND SALLY

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  From Nigel Strangeways’ Journal

  6TH JUNE, 1948. Paul took me over to the Seatons’ for the day. ‘Bob Seaton’ll be in your line,’ he said firmly: ‘writes poetry, you know.’ I did know. I informed Paul that Robert Seaton was one of the most distinguished English poets of our time. ‘Delighted to hear it,’ he replied, unruffled: ‘he’s got a fine herd of Guernseys. Charming house, too. But you wait till you see his dairy.’ I said that, for me, the high-spot of the pilgrimage would be the poet Seaton, not a herd of cows, however well appointed. I asked what he was like. ‘Who? Old Bob?’—Paul was filling up one of those forms that farmers have to fill up, and couldn’t give me his undivided attention—‘Oh, he’s a good sort. Quiet little chap, you know.’

  The pilgrimage was only to the next village, in fact. Paul’s farm is just outside Hinton Lacey. The Seatons’ house, Plash Meadow, is in Ferry Lacey, two miles away. Ferry Lacey: one of those messy Oxfordshire villages—picturesque rural slums mixed up with brash little red-brick bungalows and villas.

  The first sight of Plash Meadow, at the far end of the village, took my breath away. A perfect Queen Anne house. Long, low; mellowed, old-rose brick; irregular but successful placing of the windows. A fifty-yard stretch of lawn, smooth and lustrous as green glass, between the house and a low wall which separates it from the road. Everywhere, on this wall, on the house, in the beds to its left, on the wall of the farm buildings behind, there were roses. Drifts and swirls and swags of them. A cataleptic trance of white and yellow roses. One was surprised not to see them romping all over the two Wellingtonias which spire up from the lawn, at either end of the house. ‘There’s a bower of roses by Bendemeer’s stream.’ Only it’s the Thames, flowing past, hidden by trees, a few hundred yards beyond the house, which stands on a bluff above it.

  ‘It’s the end!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘The road doesn’t go any farther. There’s a footbridge down there, though, where the ferry used to be, and you can cross the river and walk over the fields to Redcote.’

  He had stopped the car for a minute outside the gate. I could hear a distant roaring, like the noise when you hold a shell to your ear, but deeper; a dying fall that never died; an immortal sigh. Was it from an infinite distance? or a delusion in my head, born of this place and its trance of roses?

  Paul must have seen me listening. ‘It’s the weir,’ he said, ‘half a mile upstream.’

  Well, it might have been worse. He might have said it was the mechanical milkers at work, I supposed.

  ‘You don’t milk cows at twelve-thirty in the afternoon,’ Paul replied, and drove in through the gate. We got out.

  It was like getting out into a dream. Walking past the front of the house, glancing in at the drawing-room windows, one might have expected to see a group of brocaded figures arrested in courtiers’ attitudes around a Sleeping Beauty, the stems of roses twining through their ceremonious fingers.

  The impression was sustained when the door opened. A dwarf stood there—a hideous creature in a green baize apron, grinning all over his face. Paul really might have warned me.

  ‘Hallo, Finny, how’s tricks?’ he said to this apparition, which replied with a series of adenoidal grunts and snuffles, then waddled in front of us to a door on the left of the hall.

  We were in the drawing-room. The spell persisted. A perfectly-shaped room, windows on two sides, green-panelled, Adam fireplace, rosewood and walnut pieces, curtains and carpet the faded magenta of Christmas roses, bowls of roses all over the place, a luscious Renoir above the mantelpiece—

  ‘I see you’re admiring my Renoir,’ says a deep voice from behind me. I turn round. Paul introduces me to our hostess. Mrs Seaton is very much en grande tenue: she receives me graciously, with the easy but practised air of a duchess receiving a bouquet. A large, dark, commanding woman; big bones; rather beaky nose; sallow complexion; eyes smallish beneath heavy brows: plenty of social manner, but no charm. In the late forties, I’d say. She’ll be a regular old battle-axe in twenty years’ time.

  I murmur polite and genuine admiration of the house. Her eyes light up, she positively looks ten years younger for a moment.

  ‘I am rather proud of it. Of course, we’ve lived here for centuries—long before this house was built, I mean.’

  ‘You carry your centuries very well, Janet,’ says Paul. Mrs Seaton flushes, unbecomingly, but not displeased: she is one who enjoys being mildly teased by a personable male.

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Paul. I was just going to tell Mr Strangeways that my family, the Laceys, gave their name to these two villages. Our a
ncestor, Francis de Lacey, received the Manor from William the Conqueror.’

  ‘And then you married your house and lived happily ever after,’ said Paul. This, to me, entirely cryptic remark did not go down so well with Janet Seaton. She turned away from him.

  ‘The Poet will join us for lunch: he always Works in the morning,’ she said to me in a different, throbbing kind of voice, heavily capitalising the key words. It could have been just funny; or it could have been cosy, in a period way: but for some reason I found the remark really blood-chilling. So much so that I rudely pushed the conversation back to the previous move.

  ‘So the house belongs to you?’ I asked.

  ‘It belongs to us both. Robert’s father bought it from my father, and then Robert inherited it. Old Mr Seaton renamed it Plash Meadow; but every one here still calls it Laceys. Are you interested in Battersea enamel, Mr Strangeways? There are some good pieces in this cabinet over here.’

  I said I was. Though the Seaton-Lacey transactions interested me far more. Mrs Seaton unlocked the cabinet and took out an exquisite powder-box. She held it a moment or two in her large, heavy-knuckled hands, then put it in mine. As I examined it, I felt her eyes upon me, like a physical pressure or a wave of heat from a furnace. I looked up. Caught a most peculiar expression on her face. Can I describe it now?—The fatuous self-satisfaction of a young mother looking at her first-born lying in a friend’s arm, plus a certain controlled panic (will he drop my baby?) plus something else, something indefinable, urgently appealing, almost pathetic. When I handed the Battersea piece back to her, she sighed, almost gasped, as if she’d been holding her breath.

  ‘Aha, the ruling passion again! Showing off your bric-à-brac!’ came a pleasant, quiet voice from the doorway. A young man was standing there, arm in arm with a ravishing, yellow-headed girl, smiling at us.

  ‘Now, Mr Strangeways, here are my two finest exhibits. Lionel and Vanessa. It’s her half-term holiday. Come and be shown off, children,’ said Mrs Seaton.

  General hand-shaking. Close up, Lionel Seaton looks older—older than his age, too. Paul tells me later he was in the war, one of the Arnhem survivors, and has quite a collection of medals. But where on earth do they get their looks from, I am wondering. Surely not from Janet Seaton.

  ‘We’ve been on the river,’ the girl says to me. ‘Lionel is absolutely mad. We tried to shoot a moorhen, with an air-pistol, from his rubber dinghy. Of course, what happened was that the moorhen’s intact and we’re dying of frozen bottoms.’

  ‘Vanessa!’ exclaims Mrs Seaton. ‘You must forgive these children their shocking manners, Mr Strangeways. They’re very badly brought up.’

  She said it lightly; but a scowl appeared on Vanessa’s face, making her look quite plain and colourless for a moment, as if the sun had gone in.

  ‘We didn’t have the benefit of Janet’s bringing-up. She’s our stepmother, you know.’

  It was an awkward little moment. But Lionel Seaton smoothed it over with an agreeably ponderous explanation of how the occupants of the rubber dinghy having to sit on the floor of the dinghy, and the floor of the dinghy being below the waterline, and the water being cold, inevitably the bottoms of the occupants of the dinghy, etc., etc. He added something about his good fortune in not having been one of those R.A.F. types, who had to spend considerable periods of the war paddling around the oceans in rubber dinghies.

  He’s a good boy. Has the self-contained, somewhat poker-faced air one often finds in the children of parents with genius or ‘strong’ character.

  Vanessa looks fourteen. Is actually younger? All-in hero worship of her brother, who finds her inextinguishably funny, is protective, affectionate to her, and sheds about ten years of his age in her company. The dear child is quite unaware she is healing her brother’s war wounds.

  Presently Mrs Seaton held up a finger. The throbbing note—the note of a gong discreetly tapped by a perfect butler—entered her voice again.

  ‘I think I hear the Poet coming downstairs. Yes, here he is.’

  And then—oh dear, it was like one of those Great Occasions, the street lined with bunting, the band ready to play, the guard of honour presenting arms, the crowds all agog, when round the corner comes, not Royalty, but a stray dog, or maybe an errand boy on a bicycle, and scuttles away down the ceremonial avenue.

  Robert Seaton trotted into the room, smiling vaguely at no one in particular, a nondescript little man wearing a crumpled blue suit, which looked as if he’d slept in it.

  He seemed about to shake hands with his own son and daughter; but Janet Seaton diverted him towards myself. As we shook hands, the dazed expression went out of his eyes, and his quality began to appear. A quality—I think I can put my finger on it now—of almost supernatural attentiveness. I had nervously begun to sketch out my fantasy, inspired by his roses, on the Sleeping Beauty theme. He listened to me, or so I felt, not with his ears only, but with his nerves, his whole slight body, and with an inward ear (his eyes looking downwards as if he strove to catch the echoes of my voice in his own soul). When I had finished, he glanced up, straight into my eyes for a moment: an impaling glance.

  ‘The Sleeping Beauty. Yes,’ he said musingly. ‘And the thicket of thorns. Yes. But have you thought’—he seemed to be burrowing out of sight, like a mole, towards some deeper meaning of his own—‘have you thought what really kept her there? Not the thorns, but the roses. She was the prisoner of her own beauty, of her parents’ determination that she should be invulnerable and never allowed to meet her fate. The Queen took away all the spinning-wheels, you remember. Yes, it was all the Queen’s fault. I don’t believe in that Wicked Fairy. The poor girl had nothing to do but moon about and admire her own reflection in the roses. So presently she went to sleep out of sheer boredom. I don’t believe the part about pricking her finger on a spindle. And what’s more,’ he added confidentially, ‘I don’t believe in that Prince. He’d never have got through the thorns. It’d take the Beast to do that. “Some rough beast.”’

  ‘You have got your fairy-tales mixed up, Robert,’ said his wife, who was now standing beside us. ‘Let’s go in to lunch, shall we?’

  The dining-room. Dark, glowing, rich; not sombre. A sheen on every surface—table, sideboard: two centuries of elbow-grease and love. Empire chairs, candlesticks. Above the mantelpiece a portrait of the Lacey who built this house, after the Elizabethan manor, itself replacing an earlier construction, had been destroyed by fire. White roses nodding outside the window. Delicious food. The dwarf, Finny Black, serves at table: deft and quick, but it’s disconcerting to have a servant peering up at you as he hands the vegetables. While he’s out of the room for a minute, Mrs Seaton says to me:

  ‘Finny’s a great character. An authentic Fool.’

  ‘Shakespearean, you mean?’ Luckily I have caught the capital letter.

  ‘Yes. He says the wisest things, doesn’t he, Robert? Visitors always make him shy at first, though.’

  ‘He has persisted in his folly, then?’ I venture. Mrs S. looks blank at me, but her husband comes to the rescue.

  ‘Mr Strangeways is quoting from Blake—“If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.”’

  ‘I think that’s absolute rot,’ says Vanessa. ‘He’d just become a bigger fool. Which is what Finny has done.’

  ‘Oh, Vanessa, you know how that horrible chemical lemonade of yours takes the polish off the table! Wipe it up quickly!’ Mrs S. speaks in a voice of controlled exasperation. Vanessa polishes away with her napkin where she has spilt a little lemonade on the table, murmuring, ‘Out, damned spot!’ She looks mutinous.

  I ask Robert Seaton what he’s working on just now. Before he can reply, his wife interposes: ‘Robert is writing his masterpiece’—her voice is throbbing again—‘an epic poem on the Great War—the 1914 war, I mean. Something in the nature of The Dynasts.’

  Expression of blank misery on Robert’s face for a moment. Writers hate having their current work talked about, of
course. Good ones, at any rate. I murmur polite interest: say we’ve waited a long time for a new book of his (it must be nearly ten years, in fact). I tell him how his early work, his Lyrical Interludes in particular, was the first thing that gave me a feeling for poetry, when I read it at school. Paul, who has been concentrating on his food, looks up and says unexpectedly:

  ‘Yes, but the best thing you’ve ever done is your Elegy for a Dead Wife.’ He proceeds, after a sly glance in my direction, which says, plainly as words could speak, “Oh yes, Nigel, even ex-R.A.F. types can read,” to make a number of extremely sensible and sensitive remarks about this poem. Robert Seaton glows visibly. His rather ordinary, plain, worried little face becomes suffused, as it were from within, by a beautiful tenderness. Extraordinary transfiguration.

  ‘It’s a very painful poem,’ says Janet Seaton; then compresses her lips, then adds, as if the words forced their way through her lips willy-nilly, ‘For me, at any rate.’

  An exceedingly embarrassing silence. The ‘dead wife’ of the Elegy, Lionel’s and Vanessa’s mother, still has power to haunt, then. I am suddenly consumed by curiosity to know all about her. Lionel breaks the silence:

  ‘I say, d’you remember that Irish poet who came to stay, just before the war? You know, Dad—Peadar Mayo. “Will I tell ya what’s wrong with yer pooums, Seaton? They’re not bad pooums, mind ya. But ya don’t do what I do in my pooutry—ya don’t tear yer heart out and lay it, raw and bleedin’, on the page before ya. All this bejooled reticence of yours—ta hell with it, I say.”’

  Robert Seaton chuckled. ‘Ah, yes, he was a wild man. And then he went on to recite my Elegy to me, with tears pouring down his cheeks.’

  After lunch, he took me round the garden, etc. At the back of the house, which is L-shaped, the kitchen and servants’ quarters occupying the horizontal stroke of the L, there’s a large grassed court, with a whacking great chestnut tree in the middle. Beyond the courtyard a row of farm buildings—loose-boxes, cow-stalls, cart-shed, the dairy, all under a long, lichened tile roof which has weathered to a Donegal tweed pattern. On the left of the courtyard, facing the servants’ quarters across the width of it, but detached from the house, a magnificent tithe-barn. Seaton told me he’d turned it into a cottage and rented it to some friends called Torrance—a painter and his daughter: they were coming in to tea later.