Head of a Traveller Read online

  We walked across the court, round the end of the farm buildings, into a walled orchard. In the near corner of it, a dozen yards or so wired off for poultry. The poet stood gazing intently at his hens for a minute: I waited respectfully: at last he said, with a curious little sideways glance at me, half quizzical, half abstracted:

  ‘Hens always do look so much at a loose end, don’t they?’ His fine, deep voice brought it out so seriously, I couldn’t help smiling. Well, no doubt it was just Keats over again with his sparrow picking about in the gravel. I asked if he looked after them and the cows himself. He said he used to, but he’d lost interest in them: he had a cowman and a gardener again now: he milked the cows sometimes still—found it ‘soothing.’

  Over the orchard, through a finely-wrought iron gate in the brick wall, into the meadow beyond. The famous Guernseys were grazing there, looking like Noah’s Ark cows. Away on our left, a thick wood; on our right, below the pastures, the Thames. All wonderfully peaceful and well laid out for the eye.

  ‘I thought of writing an English Georgics when I came back here. But I’m no farmer really, and Nature rather bores me qua Nature.’

  ‘When you came back?’

  ‘Yes. After my father and elder brother died, I came in for the place. And the money. Very handy. Poets don’t enjoy short commons any more than any one else. Only it was too late. That’s where we bathe, just down there. I’ll show you.’

  I forbore from asking any of the questions which this last speech of his stirred up in my mind. He hadn’t really been speaking to me at all. We sauntered down to the river; saw the place where the bank shelved gradually down into a natural bathing pool; climbed up the bluff a bit farther on, Seaton pointing out the vestiges of the terraced garden of the Elizabethan manor house, which had stood at the top of the bluff. Then we were in the great courtyard again. Boughs of the chestnut were being violently agitated. An idiot face mopped and mowed at us from between the candelabra of blossom.

  ‘Finny’s always climbing that tree,’ said Robert Seaton. ‘Climbs like a monkey. Extraordinarily powerful forearms: I dare say you noticed it when he was waiting at table.’

  The appropriate comment failing me, I asked to see the dairy. It stands at the end of the row of farm buildings nearest the old barn. Obviously no expense spared. Separator, pasteurizer, refrigerator, cheese moulds, butter dryer and the rest of it, all very bright and hygienic. Windows high up, floor and walls tiled, with good drainage so that the place can be sluiced down by hose. Robert Seaton points out all the advantages, in a burst of animation; then relapses into his companionable but abstracted mood. Can’t keep his mind away from the epic of the Great War for long, I suppose: though I must say it’s an odd object for Robert Seaton.

  We potter about a little longer. He shows me a well-equipped workshop and some unfinished articles of furniture he’d been making. I notice the dust is thick on them. Here too I get the impression of an only child of rich parents, given every toy that money can buy, and bored with the whole lot of them. I see a remarkably fine piece of wood-carving lying on a bench, ask him if it’s his work.

  ‘No, Mara Torrance did that. She’s got a gift, hasn’t she?’

  Peering closer at the object, I get a shock: in the midst of the leaves and fruits carved out on the wood, intertwined with and fluently continuing their pattern, a nakedly priapic scene hit my eye. And—what shook me most—the bearded face of the satyr in it, tiny though it was, somehow conveyed an uncanny resemblance to no less a person than the poet, Robert Seaton. Involuntarily I glanced up at him. He met my eye firmly. The look of profound sadness, which always seems lurking just behind his features, ready to spring out and possess them, reappeared. He said:

  ‘It’s by way of being auto-therapy, you know.’

  I didn’t know, of course. But there is a certain delicate dignity about Seaton, I find, which discourages even my inordinate curiosity from probing into his affairs.

  Presently he leaves me to my own devices. I decide to look at the flower garden before rejoining the rest of the party. Walk past the barn, along a grass path lined with Irish yews and standard roses alternately, towards a summer house at its far end. One of those revolving ones: its back has been turned to the path. I hear voices from inside. Been repressing my inquisitiveness too long: can’t help listening. Lionel Seaton’s voice, and one I do not recognise; a female voice, cool, husky and—no other word for it—gloating. As follows:

  Unknown Female: ‘So you’d do anything for me, would you, darling Lionel? Anything? I wonder do you really mean that?’

  Lionel Seaton: ‘You know what I want to do.’

  U.F.: ‘Oh yes. I’m to be—reclaimed. As if I was a marsh, or something. But suppose I don’t want to be reclaimed?’

  L.S.: ‘Quite happy as you are, eh?’

  U.F.: ‘I have my moments. What more can any one expect?’

  L.S.: ‘A great deal, my dear girl. And you know it. Love: marriage: children. A normal ordinary life.’

  U.F.: ‘Oh, how dull you make it sound!’

  L.S.: ‘I’ve had enough drama the last five years. Give me the bowler-hat, the eight-thirty and the slippers by the fire.’

  U.F.: ‘You can have them. But I’m not interested. You and your dreary domesticity! No, I’m going to make a splash before I’m dead. I’ll —’

  L.S.: ‘A splash! Out of a bottle. That’s all you . . . No you don’t, my girl! I’m rather good at unarmed combat, so you can just sheathe those long red nails of yours again.’

  U.F.: ‘No, you’re not so dull now . . . Well, go on. Start reclaiming me . . . Come on, my little Arnhem hero, don’t be frightened!’

  I judge it time to retire. Well, well. The lady is a holy terror, as my dear Superintendent Blount would say. But I fancy she has met her match.

  At tea, an hour later, I meet her. She walks across the lawn to where we are sitting in the shade of one of the enormous trees, a big, lumpish, rather dirty-looking man with her. I am introduced to Rennell Torrance and his daughter, Mara. Recognise the voice in the summer house as soon as she speaks. Dark, lank hair (why do all females connected with Art look as if they’d poured a bucket of varnish over their heads and forgotten to use a comb?): thick, magnolia-white skin: restless fingers: chain-smoker? A bit of a dipso?

  She holds me with a long, long stare from her slightly protuberant eyes. I can feel them on my face after I’ve turned my own away. During tea, she and Lionel pointedly refrain from mutual glances. Mrs Seaton, I notice, keeps a weather eye lifting on them. Faintly uneasy atmosphere all round. Rennell Torrance holds the floor with a long diatribe against the ‘fashionable’ English painters of the day—Matthew Smith, Sutherland, Hichens, Christopher Wood, Frances Hodgkin, all come under the hammer, regardless of age and sex. We’ve got to throw off the French influence and go back to Samuel Palmer. A disgruntled man, this Torrance, and presumably a failure himself as a painter. But he has a certain panache in his talk. After he’d blown off for ten minutes or so, he noticed my presence and asked what I was interested in.

  ‘Crime,’ I said.

  The man’s eyes flickered towards his daughter, then back to me. His face had taken on a different expression—wary? stupid?

  ‘What? You mean you read detective novels?’

  ‘No, he lives them,’ said Paul. ‘He’s hand in glove with Scotland Yard. So watch your step, all of you.’

  Vanessa Seaton clapped her hands gaily. ‘I say, that’s wizard! When Torrance bumps off his rival painters, Mr Strangeways will track him down.’

  ‘They’re dead, most of ’em, already. And stinking,’ said Torrance.

  Mara, staring hard at me again, asked me if I specialised in any particular branch of crime. Mrs Seaton said, very quickly, she was sure I didn’t want to talk shop.

  ‘But I’m interested,’ said Mara, in a whining, little-girl sort of voice.

  ‘Well, I’ve helped in a number of murder investigations.’

  The extraordinary t
ension, which seemed to have come into the air at Mara Torrance’s last remarks, relaxed a little. Robert Seaton, very wide-awake now, almost quivering with interest, like a terrier at a rat-hole, said:

  ‘It must be fascinating. The detonating point, I mean. The point at which a given man or woman bursts into flame. I suppose it varies enormously.’

  ‘I’d like to see Lionel burst into flames,’ said Vanessa, giggling. ‘He’d burn with a beautiful orange glow.’

  ‘A pure white radiance,’ murmured Miss Torrance with a rather disagreeable emphasis on ‘pure.’

  Lionel threw a cushion at his sister. ‘But most murders are premeditated, not sudden outbreaks of passion, aren’t they?’

  ‘This is a very morbid conversation, children,’ said Mrs Seaton. Her husband did not take the hint.

  ‘That’s not what I mean, Lionel,’ he pursued. ‘Every murder is an act of violence, of passion, however long it’s been premeditated. No, I’m talking about the flash-point in every human being. Look—you may wish to get rid of someone, some intolerable situation: you lay your plans in phantasy; you’re not serious about it, or you think you aren’t: you imagine your weapon, your opportunity, your alibi, and so on: but all the time you’re laying a train in reality. And then a moment comes when you find the train has been lit, the spark is creeping up it, you can’t stop the explosion now. You’re doomed to act what you have dreamed.’

  ‘Oo-er,’ exclaimed Vanessa. ‘You are creepy, Daddy!’

  I said something to the effect that the flash-point would depend on whether the murder you planned in imagination was consistent with your own personality. If you planned a murder from the wrong motive, i.e., a motive unconnected with the strongest element of your personality, with your ruling passion, the train would never be lit.

  ‘But nobody would contemplate a murder unless what you call his ruling passion was involved,’ said Paul, very sensibly.

  ‘This begins to get interesting,’ Mara Torrance drawled. ‘Tell us what motive you think each of us would have, strong enough to push us over the edge.’

  I said I didn’t know any of them well enough. The young woman made an eeny-meeny-meiny-mo movement with her cigarette. It pointed at Mrs Seaton.

  ‘Come on, Janet. Mr Strangeways doesn’t know us well enough. So we’ll tell him. You start.’

  ‘My dear Mara, I don’t like these truth games. They always end in tears.’

  ‘Well, I’ll speak for you, then. It’s easy. Janet’s ruling passion is Plash Meadow and all that therein is. She’d kill any one to protect it. You next, Paul.’

  ‘I’m the purely altruistic type. I’d murder for the good of humanity. I’d like to get the leading politicians of the Great Powers into a room, and point a tommy gun at them, and tell them that, if they didn’t come to an agreement within three hours to abolish the atom bomb, they’d have had it.’

  ‘Good enough. What about you, Father?’

  Rennell Torrance mopped his lard-coloured face. ‘I’m an Artist. I should only be interested in murder as an acte gratuit. I’d—’

  ‘Hmph. Or if someone came between you and your creature comforts,’ interrupted his daughter, with a sort of humouring contempt. ‘You’d kill out of panic. Or perhaps for gain, if it seemed fairly safe, and there was really enough to be gained. Now Robert would kill for his art, wouldn’t you, Robert?’

  ‘You’re probably right, my dear,’ said the poet mildly. ‘Only I could never bring myself to facing my victim. It’d have to be one of those long-range murders—you know, the cyanide pill inserted in the bottle of aspirin tablets.’

  Vanessa, who had been brooding in a cloud of tawny hair, remarked meditatively. ‘I would like to poison Miss Grubb, our chemistry mistress. Some very slow poison. I would like to see her writhing at my feet—’

  ‘Vanessa—!’

  ‘—and just as she was about to expire, I’d give her an antidote. Or the stomach pump. How exactly does a stomach pump work, Mr Strangeways?’

  ‘You could use one on your own tum to advantage,’ said Lionel, prodding his sister’s stomach. ‘It’s really revolting, the way you swell up after every meal.’

  ‘Oh, do shut up, Lionel, you’re horrible! And I’m not greedy.’

  ‘So we’re left with Lionel,’ said Mara. ‘What would the chevalier sans peur et sans reproche do murder for?’

  ‘Well, I might wring your neck one day, when you’re in a specially exasperating mood.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Crime of passion. That’s got you taped,’ she replied with a shamelessly long, deep look at him.

  There was a silence on the lawn. Wood pigeons cooed up above. I could hear the ground bass of the weir.

  ‘Nobody has asked me what I’d do murder for,’ said Mara Torrance.

  Nobody offered to, even now.

  ‘Revenge,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, goody,’ said Vanessa. ‘Like me and Miss Glubb.’

  Finny Black came trotting up to remove the tea-things.

  ‘And what about our Finny?’ drawled Mara.

  Mrs Seaton turned upon her formidably. ‘Mara, I absolutely forbid you—you know Finny’s not—’

  ‘All right, all right. Finny’s a piece of Plash Meadow, and mustn’t be disturbed. I know. Aren’t you, Finny?’

  The dwarf clucked and beamed at Mara Torrance. When he’d gone back into the house, Robert Seaton turned to me and said:

  ‘It’s quite an interesting point. Finny will copy any action he has seen. That’s how my wife trained him.’

  ‘You mean,’ said I, ‘if he actually saw a murder committed, he might go and commit an identical one on another victim?’

  Robert Seaton nodded. His wife got a firm grip on the conversation and turned it in another direction. It was very amiable, carefree, placid, from now on. An hour later Paul and I left. They stood on the drive, waving farewell: the good poet, embowered in his roses, embosomed in his charming family group. How proper, and how rare, that a true creator should have so beautiful, so calm a setting to work in. As we turned out of the drive into the road, the roses seemed to close in upon him with a gentle, genial familiarity, and enfold him. Such graciousness. Such peace. . . .

  Chapter 2

  A Trunk Without a Label

  TWO MONTHS AFTER his visit to the Seatons’ home, Nigel Strangeways received a telegram:

  STRANGEWAYS: WELBECK CLUB, LONDON, W.1. BODY IN THAMES 1½ MILES UPSTREAM FROM HINTON LACEY STOP ARE YOU INTERESTED QUESTION-MARK. PAUL.

  To which Nigel replied:

  WILLINGHAM: ROBB FARM, HINTON LACEY, OXFORDSHIRE. NO WHY SHOULD I BE STOP FISH IT OUT IF IT WORRIES YOU STOP VERY BUSY. NIGEL.

  Two days later, while he was working at his monograph on the subject of graphology in relation to the manuscripts of certain Twentieth-century poets, a second telegram arrived:

  STRANGEWAYS: WELBECK CLUB, LONDON, W.1. POLICE BESIEGING PLASH MEADOW STOP JANET SEATON IN GREAT FORM O/C THE DEFENCE STOP HAS ALREADY CLONKED INSPECTOR STOP ARE YOU INTERESTED NOW YOU OLD VULTURE QUESTION-MARK. PAUL.

  Nigel did not reply. Paul Willingham never wrote letters and refused to have a telephone in his house, on the score that he had done quite enough talking over the inter-com during the war: so there was nothing for it but to go down and ask him to explain his rigmarole. But Nigel first rang up his old friend, Superintendent Blount, at New Scotland Yard: he had no intention of interrupting his work merely on the strength of a flippant telegram from Paul. At the same time, it could not be ignored that a body found in the Thames one and a half miles upstream from Hinton Lacey was a body found in the Thames half a mile downstream from Ferry Lacey; and presumably the police would not visit Plash Meadow just to admire the roses.

  ‘Blount? Strangeways here. Sorry to bother you, but do you know anything about a body found in the Thames two or three days ago—in Oxfordshire, near a place called Ferry Lacey?’

  ‘E-eh, why, good Lord, the Assistant Commissioner’s just been talking to me about it this forenoon. No
w isn’t that a vairy strange coincidence. The Oxfordshire chaps have asked for our help.’

  ‘What is it? Suicide? Murder?’

  ‘Och, it’s murder all right. Don’t you ever read the newspapers?’

  ‘Only the News of the World. And it’s not Sunday yet. Who’s the victim?’

  ‘That’s what we’ve got to find out,’ said Superintendent Blount, with a grim chuckle. ‘But how d’you know about it if you haven’t read the papers?’

  ‘Well, I’ve met the Seatons, who live—’

  ‘The devil you have! Are you free this evening? I’d like to have a chat with you after I’ve seen Inspector Gates—he’s the local chap in charge of the investigation.’

  ‘The one Mrs Seaton clonked?’

  ‘Eh, what’s that? Oh yes, the lady appears to be something of a tartar. Now, would you be free about ten p.m.?’

  Nigel decided not to look up the last few days’ newspapers, but to wait till Blount gave him the story, ungarbled. Shortly after ten that night, the two of them were sitting in Nigel’s room with a bottle of whisky between them.

  ‘A vairy sweet dram,’ said Blount, smacking his lips. ‘Where d’you get the stuff? Are you in the Black Market? Well, good luck to you. Now, about this body of yours . . .’

  The facts, as related by Blount, were as follows. On the previous Sunday, at nine-twenty in the evening, a young couple on holiday had pushed their punt into a reed-bed by the south bank of the Thames, intending to moor there for the night. Thrusting his pole down into the mud, the young man felt an obstruction. He fished with the boat-hook, and pulled up the body of a man which had been caught in the reeds underwater. The girl disembarked and went for help to the nearest farm, while the man remained by the body. In due course the police arrived, and the body was taken to the mortuary. Post-mortem examination revealed no signs of asphyxia: therefore (‘apart from other evidence,’ said Blount grimly) death had not been caused by drowning. Rigor mortis had passed off: the palms of the hands and soles of the feet presented a bleached appearance, and there was brownish discoloration of the surface veins of the body, but not yet the green hue in the abdominal region which comes as the second stage of colliquative putrefaction. These signs gave the time of death within approximate limits of 36 hours to 3–5 days before the discovery of the corpse.