The Dreadful Hollow Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Nicholas Blake

  Title Page

  PART ONE

  1. The Financier’s Interests

  2. The Vicar’s Troubles

  3. The Innkeeper’s Story

  4. The Squire’s Hobbies

  5. The Plymouth Brother’s Father

  6. The Beauty’s Birthday

  7. The Manager’s Misgivings

  8. The Poison Pen’s Mistakes

  9. The Sister’s Discovery

  PART TWO

  10. There in the Ghastly Pit

  11. A Gray Old Wolf, and a Lean

  12. Villainy Somewhere! Whose?

  13. All This Dead Body of Hate

  14. A Wounded Thing with a Rancorous Cry

  15. A Shuffled Step … A Dead Weight Trail’d

  16. O Father! O God! Was It Well?

  17. The Fault Was Mine, The Fault Was Mine

  18. I Hate the Dreadful Hollow

  More from Vintage Classic Crime

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Someone is sending poison pen letters in the small village of Prior’s Umborne, and they have already driven one of the inhabitants to suicide.

  Private detective Nigel Strangeways is commissioned to find the source of the letters by arrogant financier Sir Archibald Blick, whose two sons live in the village, only for Sir Archibald to meet an untimely end at the bottom of the dreadful hollow...

  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

  Head of a Traveller

  The Whisper in the Gloom

  End of Chapter

  The Worm of Death

  The Sad Variety

  The Morning After Death

  NICHOLAS BLAKE

  The Dreadful Hollow

  Part One

  1 The Financier’s Interests

  THE LIFT, MOVING like greased lightning, whisked Nigel Strangeways up to Sir Archibald Blick’s private apartments at the top of the immense postwar building. “Facilis ascensus Averno,” Nigel found himself muttering to the lift boy. A strangely prophetic misquotation, it was to turn out, though at the time it seemed sufficiently irrelevant to an appointment with a famous financier: the lift boy, who believed he had been given a red-hot tip from the stables, was quite visibly racking his brain to remember what race this outlandishly-named horse had been entered for.

  Nigel was shown into a room so anonymous, so impersonal that he felt himself changing on the spot into a cipher. It was the kind of room for which the word “functional” might have been invented, except that one could not imagine what function it possibly served; unless it was just this—to reduce the visitor to a mere statistical unit. A desk, with a clutch of telephones and a positive control board of colored buttons to push. Walls paneled with some shiny, ox-blood, Australian wood. A long board table, of the same wood, in the center; neat, new, businesslike chairs set around it. In spite of the panoramic view southward over the Thames which the windows offered, the room afflicted one with claustrophobia. It was like the inside of some monstrous lift, or a cabin on a luxury line. He had only to push a handful of those colored buttons, thought Nigel, and beds would emerge soundlessly from the walls, a cocktail cabinet from the floor; a radio would start playing; valets, manicurists, waiters, secretaries would stream through the door. At present, no indication of the private life was to be seen—not a book, not a picture, not an ornament, not even a copy of the Financial Times on the desk.

  Wait a moment, though. As Nigel prowled round to the other side of the desk, he saw that what he had taken for the back of a large calendar was really the back of a photograph: a studio photograph, expensively framed, of a beautiful young lady. She sat upright, one leg crossed over the other, gazing at Nigel with all the unenthusiasm of Knightsbridge. She was evidently made for pearls and a twin set; but unaccountably she had omitted to put on the uniform of her tribe. The young lady was, in fact, stark naked. So powerful, however, was the room’s impersonality that the fair sitter set up no vibrations at all; she neither allured nor shocked; her total nakedness might have been an advertisement for a skin tonic or some course of mental hygiene. To Sir Archibald Blick, she seemed to be saying, figures are facts—no more, no less.

  Nigel was still studying this anomalous creature when, a minute later, Sir Archibald entered the room. Thin, small, dapperly dressed, wearing an old Etonian tie and a thick black ribbon attached to his pince-nez, his face a map of wrinkles, he looked at first sight like a dandified, haggard baby or a certain type of art connoisseur. He walked stiffly up to Nigel, with what in a less distinguished man would have been called a strut, touched his hand, gave him a keen, assessing glance, and motioned him to a seat at the board table.

  “Glad you could come along. I’ve a proposition to lay before you.” Sir Archibald meticulously straightened out a writing pad on the table in front of him. “What do you know about anonymous letters?”

  “Have you been getting some?” asked Nigel, making an effort to prevent his eyes wandering toward the Knightsbridge nude. Sir Archibald ignored the question.

  “You’ve had experience in dealing with them?”

  “A certain amount. But the police are much more—”

  The eminent financier brushed this aside too. “What is your theory about them? How would you set about tracing the writer of anonymous letters, in—let us say—a country village?”

  Nigel Strangeways was too old to get onto a high horse at this kind of viva. If Sir Archibald proposed to interview him like a candidate for some junior post, he was quite prepared to accept the role; much of his success as a private investigator had been due to a deceptive air of docility, and to the passionate interest in human nature which precluded any taking offense at its more offensive manifestations. Besides, as an old Oxford man of a vintage 1920 generation, Nigel could never be averse to a bit of theorizing.

  “Anonymous letter writing is generally taken to be a symptom of mental disease. You look for someone with sexual repressions—it depends, of course, upon the tone of the letters. Sexually unsatisfied women, particularly at the change of life, are often the culprits; there have even been cases of such women writing obscene letters to themselves. It is sometimes linked up with a certain type of so-called ‘religious mania.’ These are the stock explanations.” Nigel’s pale-blue eyes gazed abstractedly upon Sir Ar
chibald’s wrinkled, pink, baby face, with its petulant mouth and frosty expression. “I myself prefer to state it in rather different terms. Sexual inhibition is at once too narrow and too loose a way of defining such aberrations. For example, it does not cover satisfactorily the cases where parents, whose child has met with a fatal accident through no fault of their own, receive malicious letters accusing them of neglect or murder. I believe there is such a thing as pure, irresponsible malice in human nature. But generally I’d look for the source in some failure of personal relations: the writer wants to take it out of someone else for something in which he himself has failed or feels guilty.” Nigel held up his hand, like a lecturer anticipating an objection. “All this boils down to the question of power. Nearly all of us, from the village busybody to the great financier, need the feeling of power over other people’s lives. If we cannot satisfy this need through our work or our human relationships, we may be driven to some substitute activity: we may keep lap dogs or write anonymous letters. I would always look for someone who has been denied power, or lost it—someone in whom the springs of love have found no outlet and turned brackish.”

  “So you equate love and power?”

  “Not by any means. It’s a matter of—”

  Sir Archibald pursued his own line of thought. “So women, being more possessive than men in personal relations, are more profoundly affected by a failure of love or power, and will be more likely to take up lap dogs or anonymous-letter writing.”

  He nodded to himself briskly, as if some view of his own had been confirmed, took a small silver matchbox from his waistcoat pocket, and began fiddling with it.

  “At any rate,” he went on, with a sharp glance at Nigel, “you’d say there is always an element of—er—mental abnormality at work? The anonymous-letter writer is never quite sane?”

  “Which of us is?”

  “Nonsense, my boy. That’s modernistic cant. For all practical purposes, most people are sane. Stupid, if you like, but—”

  “Leaving that aside,” Nigel broke in, “poison-pen letters could well be written for quite different, objective reasons—to damage a man’s business, for instance, or to break up his home—as a move in some criminal conspiracy. That would be sane enough, according to some definitions of sanity.”

  Sir Archibald perceptibly froze at this ironic comment on his own words. He was unused to such treatment. Removing his pince-nez on their broad black ribbon, he directed at Nigel the glare which had petrified high officials of the Treasury. Nigel gazed back at him mildly, innocently. The great man tried another method of putting him in his place. Walking over to the desk he pressed a button and spoke into the house telephone.

  “Jameson, bring up the Prior’s Umborne file.”

  He sat down again, at the far end of the board table from Nigel now—the employer-applicant relationship was to be underlined—and waited in silence for his secretary to appear. A smooth, horn-rimmed, higher-executive type slid into the room, as if on skates, laid a file before Sir Archibald, and stood back a pace.

  “You have obtained Mr. Strangeways’ ticket and reservation for tomorrow?”

  “They are in the file, sir. A taxi will be awaiting him at Moreford. Mr. Raynham will expect him for lunch.”

  Sir Archibald lifted a little finger, and the secretary skated out. Nigel smiled faintly at the act which had been put on to impress him; the vanity of the great could be so naïve as to be almost pathetic.

  “I make it my business to employ the best men. I’ve had good reports about you. I want you to go down to Prior’s Umborne, in Dorset, and sort out some trouble there. They’ve had an outbreak of anonymous letters recently, and it’s got to be stopped. You’ll find full details in this file, together with three of the letters which Raynham—he’s the vicar—has passed on to me.”

  Sir Archibald stood up, to terminate the interview. Nigel did not.

  “There are a few things—” he began.

  “What? Isn’t the fee I have offered big enough? Didn’t you say, in reply to my first letter, that you were free to take the job any moment?”

  “Oh, yes. That’s all quite satisfactory, thank you. But I like to know what I’m letting myself in for.”

  “I didn’t realize that people in your profession could be fastidious,” snapped the financier.

  “We don’t mind rolling in other people’s mud. We just like to be told the reasons why. For example”—Nigel had been flicking over the papers in the file—“does this tell me why Sir Archibald Blick should concern himself with unpleasantness in a remote Dorset village?”

  The small black eyes stared unwaveringly at Nigel.

  “I have interests there.”

  “Financial interests?”

  “Financial, and personal. My elder son lives in the Hall there—our family home. I have installed my younger son as manager of a new machine-tool factory in Moreford. I’m behind the firm which started this factory. One of the foremen committed suicide last week, after receiving an anonymous letter—quite a number of the factory employees come from Prior’s Umborne, I should tell you, and efficiency is suffering.”

  “I see. Curious place to start a machine-tool factory—an old market town like Moreford. Policy of dispersal in case of war, I suppose. You certainly wouldn’t want the work held up just now.”

  Sir Archibald glanced at Nigel with something like respect. “You’re right. But don’t go chasing red herrings. Too many people in this country nowadays jumping at their own shadows. I don’t believe these anonymous letters are part of the Russians’ policy to impede our rearmament program.”

  “Well, then, on the personal side—whom do you recommend I should get in touch with? Apart from the vicar? Who would know most about the place? You say your elder son lives there?”

  “You won’t get much out of Stanford. He’s a recluse. Bit of a genius in his way, but a born dabbler, I’m afraid—never settled down to anything except his damn-fool hobbies. There’s Charles, of course; but he’s got his hands full with the factory.”

  Sir Archibald Blick was a transparent man in some ways, thought Nigel. The shadow of impatience that passed over his face when he mentioned the industrious Charles, the indulgent twitch at one corner of the mouth when he spoke about the unsatisfactory Stanford—these told their tale. A buzzer sounded on the desk. Sir Archibald pressed a switch, and a dim voice crackled.

  “Mr. Danvers to see you, sir.”

  “Tell him to wait.”

  The voice crackled an obsequious protest. Mr. Danvers was evidently an important man, in a hurry.

  “If he can’t wait quarter of an hour, he must make another appointment. Give him a drink. And bring some up here.” Sir Archibald turned to Nigel. “These Ministry officials—the plague of my life. Well, now, the best person for you to concentrate on is Miss Chantmerle—Celandine Chantmerle. A very gifted woman. Lived at Prior’s Umborne all her life. Her father was an old friend of mine. She doesn’t like me much, but that’s by the way. She’s idolized in the village, and what she doesn’t know about it isn’t worth knowing. Yes, a remarkable woman. Anyone else would have gone sour after being a cripple all these years. Then there’s her sister, Rosebay: much younger, a difficult girl; you won’t get much out of her, unless”—Sir Archibald’s voice suddenly took on a note of shocking brutality—“unless she makes you fall in love with her. . . . Here are the drinks. What’ll you have?”

  Over a gin and tonic Nigel gave Sir Archibald a noncommittal look. There were wheels within wheels here, but the mechanism seemed to have come to a stop. Nigel gave it a nudge.

  “Unusual name, Rosebay.”

  “The father was a botanist. Distinguished fellow, but a bit unbalanced, you know. Killed himself, actually. Thirty years ago. The elder daughter inherited his brains: the younger, I’m afraid—”

  “She’s mad, you mean?”

  Sir Archibald frowned, pursing up his small, petulant mouth. “Rosebay is very highly strung.”

 
There was a marked pause. Sir Archibald played with his matchbox again.

  “And the vicar?” asked Nigel.

  “Mark Raynham? A disappointment. I put him there. I have the gift of the living. He got knocked about in the war. Not altogether reliable—politically, I mean. Rather a firebrand. He’s quite popular, I believe, with some sections of the village; but there’s a strong Plymouth Brethren element there too, and when zealot meets zealot—”

  “I presume the police have been called in.”

  “The village constable is an individual named Clotworthy. A perfect illustration of the results of in-breeding in these remote country districts. Well, our works at Moreford will remedy that, as time goes on.”

  A glint came into Sir Archibald’s cold eyes. One of his “interests,” Nigel remembered, was the Society for Practical Eugenics. Scratch anyone in the right place and you find the fanatic: it was charming to view the machine-tool factory at Moreford as an instrument for improving the Prior’s Umborne stock. Nigel’s eye turned involuntarily for a moment to the photograph on the desk.

  Sir Archibald could be disconcerting in his shrewdness. “I noticed you looking at that when I came in. Put me down as a dirty old man, I dare say.” He gave a little, rusty laugh, disagreeable in its false gaiety. Rising from his chair, a slim, brittle figure which showed his age in its stiff movements, he took up the photograph.

  “I’m interested in eugenics, as you have gathered. This is the winner of our Potential Motherhood Award for 1950. We go by more than a photograph, of course: medical history of family is investigated, and so on. We’re a practical society. The winner gets a monetary award, which we increase by weekly payments if she marries one of several mates selected by ourselves. A good type, this, physically and mentally.”

  Sir Archibald seemed about to enlarge on her points, like the judge at a cattle show, when the buzzer sounded again.

  “All right, all right, send him up. . . . I’ve got to see this Danvers fellow now. Good-by, Strangeways. Keep in touch. I’ll expect a report from you in a week.”