The Dreadful Hollow Read online

  Back in his club, Nigel ruminated on this astonishing interview. What chiefly emerged from it was the financier’s evident wish to keep Nigel’s mind fixed, by means more or less subtle, upon the general proposition that poison-pen writers are (a) mentally unbalanced and (b) women. Had Sir Archibald some candidate already in view? Rosebay Chantmerle, for instance, who was so “highly strung”?

  Nigel opened the file. Clipped to the inside cover were a first-class return ticket, a seat reservation, a slip of paper with the registration number of the taxi which would meet him, and a check for his first week’s salary and expenses. Sir Archibald’s staff work was good; no doubt it had better be. The file itself consisted of a large-scale map of the Prior’s Umborne area, a list of its leading residents, with addresses and telephone numbers, a few typewritten sheets, signed by the vicar, which gave a summary of the poison-pen campaign to date; and a sealed envelope containing, no doubt, the anonymous letters themselves.

  Running rapidly through the vicar’s statement, Nigel gleaned the following main facts: the poison-pen campaign had started—or, at any rate, the first letter to be publicly acknowledged by its recipient had been posted—ten days before, on April 6; the recipient was the vicar himself. The next day, one Daniel Durdle received a letter; he took it round to the vicar the same evening—a circumstance which evidently tickled the latter, since Daniel Durdle was a leading light of the Plymouth Brethren. The vicar was convinced that some of his parishioners had had anonymous letters too; he felt “an atmosphere of tension and suspicion” in the village; but, in spite of his appeal from the pulpit that Sunday, no one came forward. Late on the Monday evening Greta Smart, returning from a visit to her married sister in the next village, had found her brother John lying in their cottage with his throat cut and a razor beside him. This John Smart was a foreman in the Moreford machine-tool works. Under the body, Police Constable Clotworthy had discovered an anonymous letter. All three letters had been posted in the village. The police had impounded the originals and envelopes for John Smart’s inquest; but the vicar enclosed typewritten copies of them, with the information that the letters and the addresses on the envelopes—a cheap brand of stationery—were written in capitals, in ink. He added that, owing to the low standard of education among his adult parishioners, a good many of them wrote in capitals anyway.

  The vicar’s report, apart from its occasional flicker of amusement, was written in the driest, most banal communiqué style. It conveyed nothing of the man, except, perhaps, Nigel fancied, a sub-ironic comment upon the employer-employee relationship between Sir Archibald and himself, as the former envisaged it. Nigel thought he was going to like the vicar. He opened the envelope which contained copies of the anonymous letters. Over the first the vicar had scrawled “My own billet-doux.” It was short but not sweet:

  Get up in that pulpit, holy Joe, and tell them your wife was a whore.

  The letter which had been addressed to Daniel Durdle was equally outspoken:

  You hypocrite, I know about the strong liquors you swill privily.

  More cryptic, and still more economical, was the letter which had caused John Smart to kill himself:

  I’ll tell Blick about 1940.

  Thoughtfully, Nigel put the letters away. To the outsider, he reflected, there was always something comic, even unreal about such missives. It took a strong effort of imagination to feel them as the recipients would, to understand the real consternation and despair which these thrusts from the dark could cause. It was not the way they might reopen old wounds; a man who had lived for years with some guilty or tragic secret must have grown a pretty hard skin over it. No, the poison of the poison pen lay in its anonymity—in the victim’s sudden awareness of bitter hostility playing upon him from an unknown quarter, the sense of being pursued by a thing without a face.

  The letters ran true to type. They were directed against three men who held prominent positions in the life of the village, and they aimed to take these men down a peg. Envy, malice and uncharitableness were at work. If the letters contained any truth, they argued a surprising range of knowledge—surprising because of the widely different backgrounds of their recipients. They also suggested a certain artistic flair in the writer. The Plymouth Brother’s letter was couched in Chapel jargon; the vicar’s had a note of irrepressible sardonic humor. And poor John Smart? Whatever had happened in 1940, it must have been something which would lose him his job if it were revealed. Why else “tell Blick,” his employer? Something so grave that it made Smart reach for his razor. There was a line there, and no doubt the police would be following it up.

  To speculate further was futile. Nigel walked round, at a venture, to the London Library and looked up the name Chantmerle. He was rewarded by three volumes, with which he settled down in the reading room. Putting aside, after a glance, an austere monograph by Edric Chantmerle, F.R.S., On Some Variations in Sub-Arctic Flora, he dipped into the author’s two earlier, less exacting works, Sunny Woodlands and Come Out to Ramble. These turned out to be far more distinguished than their titles. Written in the Edwardian period—the golden evening of belles lettres, as of so much else—they were leisurely essays about the flowers, trees, landscapes, topography, etc., of Dorset, at once charming and scholarly. The style was sensitive, humorous, supple, a delicate phthisic flush substituting for the purple patches normally found in such works. What chiefly emerged for Nigel, though it was never underlined, was the author’s passionate attachment to his county. How deep the roots went could be seen in the essay, “On Prior’s Umborne,” from which Nigel learned that the Chantmerle family had lived there since the Conquest. In James the Second’s reign they had built the Hall; but toward the end of the nineteenth century, their fortunes presumably having dwindled, they had moved in to the Little Manor, once the Dower House, and the Hall was let. Some of Edric Chantmerle’s most lyrical writing was evoked by this Little Manor, the house in which he had been born, and the countryside around it.

  Steeped in the vicarious nostalgia which Edric Chantmerle’s essays had induced, Nigel returned to his club. Their idyllic tone clashed horribly with the idea of poison-pen letters. No doubt the place had changed a lot in the last thirty years. No doubt, for the matter of that, a great deal had gone on at Prior’s Umborne, beneath Edric Chantmerle’s fastidious nose, of which he had been unaware. No, he’s too good to be true, thought Nigel impatiently.

  Yet he could not shake off this phantom from the past, irrelevant though it must be to the case upon which he was embarked. One of the amenities of Nigel’s club was that it offered a human reference library, including in its membership experts upon almost every branch of knowledge under the sun, most of them all too willing to hold forth upon their subjects. This evening, before dinner, he tracked down to his lair beside the bar an ancient and tortoiselike gentleman.

  “Hallo, Flumps, how are you? What’ll you drink?”

  “Very ill. A double whisky,” replied Sir Henry Flumpington, whose book on plants in English folklore is unlikely to be superseded.

  “Did you ever come across a chap called Chantmerle? Edric Chantmerle?”

  “Young Chantmerle? Yes, we corresponded. Never met him actually. I put him right on a Clare reference. What was the damned thing now?” Sir Henry waved his flippers feebly, like an overturned turtle. “Anyway, there’s a flower mentioned in one of Clare’s poems. Chantmerle said it couldn’t ever have been found up there. Actually, there’s one place in the country where it still grows; you can read about it in Druce’s Flora of Northants. Bit of a dilettante, but not bad. Has he murdered someone?”

  “He died. A long time ago.”

  “I know Clare died a long time ago,” replied the octogenarian with some heat. “I’m talking about this Chantmerle of yours.”

  “So am I. He died about 1930. Killed himself, I understand.”

  “So he did. So he did. You’re perfectly right. Yes. Lost his money in the slump, they said. Don’t you believe it.”

 
; “I’ve heard he was a bit unbalanced mentally. You think it was just that?”

  Sir Henry’s beady eyes kindled. “All experts are unbalanced. Look at me. Monomaniac. Mad as a hatter. No, what I’m telling you is that he couldn’t have lost his money.”

  “Why not? Lots of people did.”

  “Lots of people didn’t have first-rate financial advice. Now I happen to remember Snippy telling me—and Snippy knows about these things—that your Chantmerle’s affairs were handled by that awful fella what’s his name.” The flippers waved convulsively. “You know. A stinker if ever there was one. But he’s got the Midas touch. Couldn’t lose money if he tried. Just a minute now. Don’t fuss me. Ah, I’ve got it!” Sir Henry clawed the name triumphantly out of thin air. “Black.”

  “Blick, d’you mean? Archibald Blick?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Blick. That’s what I said. Blick.”

  2 The Vicar’s Troubles

  “YOU’RE QUITE SURE you’d rather stay at the pub?” asked the vicar.

  “Yes. Thanks very much. It’s better that I shouldn’t become identified with either of the warring factions in your village.”

  “I understand. Though staying at a pub won’t commend you to the Plyms.”

  “They do their drinking at home, do they?” asked Nigel, remembering the letter which Daniel Durdle had received.

  “Only cider. Though why they make an exception of that, I’ve never fathomed. The local rough cider is diabolically strong stuff.” Mark Raynham paused, and an impish gleam showed in his fine, wild eyes. “Also, I dare say you don’t want to be taking my bread and salt when it might be me who’s writing these letters?”

  “It might be you,” Nigel echoed, looking straight at the vicar’s face—a craggy, tortured face, older than his years, with a strong nose and deep furrows running from it to the sides of his mouth.

  Mark Raynham’s laugh rang out over the hillside they were climbing. It was a strenuous laugh, nervous yet uninhibited, matching the spring growth and sunshine all about them along the old trackway. At lunch he had postponed discussion of the anonymous letters, telling Nigel that he always preferred to take his problems out of doors. Now the cue had come; but Raynham seemed unwilling at first to take it. The track was steep and rough, and the vicar prodded himself up it with a stick, limping quite heavily. Presently, before they reached the summit, he turned off into a field on their left, led the way to the brow of the hill, and sat down.

  “There you are,” he said, waving his stick at the view before them.

  Prior’s Umborne lay below, a cruciform village straggling along the main road southward to Moreford, and a secondary road which crossed it at right angles. Near the crossroads were grouped the post office and the inn where Nigel was to stay—The Sweet Drop. A hundred yards to the west of the crossroads stood the church and vicarage; and beyond them again a drive led from the secondary road to the Hall, which was sheltered from the north by a plantation of beeches. Immediately below the hill brow where they sat was a group of stone buildings, the largest farm in Prior’s Umborne, and a small road wandered westward past this farm up toward the Little Manor, concealed from them at present by a fold of ground. Where this road joined the main road at the northern end of the village stood a smaller pub, the New Inn. Prior’s Umborne itself lay in a narrow troughlike valley, which opened out beyond it into a broad vale, pastoral and well timbered, with Moreford visible on its far side; farther away, a line of downland hid the sea.

  “Lovely, isn’t it?” said Mark Raynham.

  “What I can see of it, yes. I’m rather shortsighted. But Sir Archibald Blick provided me with a map, so I know more or less where to look for everything.”

  “He would,” commented the vicar dryly. He stabbed at the foreground with his stick. “‘Below me, there, is the village, and looks how quiet and small! And yet bubbles o’er like a city, with gossip, scandal, and spite.’”

  “That’s Maud, isn’t it?” Deep down in Nigel’s mind something twitched, and was still again, like a premonition. “Things are getting worse?”

  “Yes. I suppose so.” The vicar sighed, giving Nigel a strange look, friendly yet watchful. “Yesterday I was to marry a young chap called Ottery; works for Templeton, down there.” He pointed at the big farm below them. “They found him with his head in a bucket. Just after breakfast. He’d tried to drown himself.”

  “What? In a bucket of water? But—”

  “I know, I know. It’s grotesque, macabre—any of those words you like. But it’s what happened. Luckily, his best man, who found him, learned artificial respiration in the navy. Just managed to pull him round. If he’d arrived a few minutes later—”

  “But I shouldn’t have thought it was possible to drown oneself like that. Surely, in the death agony, the thing’d get tipped over? Involuntarily?”

  “Well, nobody held his head down in the bucket, if that’s what you’re thinking. There were no signs of a struggle at all. His mother, who lives with him, heard nothing. She says he got a letter after breakfast—Templeton had given him the day off—and went out of the cottage without a word to her, in his decent black wedding suit. She heard him filling a bucket. He took it round behind the outdoor earth closet, out of sight. He removed his coat, folded it up tidily and laid it on the ground beside him. Then he knelt down in front of the bucket, put his head in it, and held it there. Oh yes, and he’d taken the flower out of his buttonhole—torn it up into shreds—scattered them round him.” The vicar’s voice shook a little, and he combed his right hand fiercely through his hair.

  “And the letter?” Nigel prompted.

  “Said some nasty things about his girl. Things I happen to know are true. Gave chapter and verse. She’s a flighty creature—or rather she used to be. I suppose young Ottery had suspected it, brooded about it, never talked to anyone. You know how reticent village lads are in that way. The tragedy is that Flora had gone straight since they started walking out; she’s thoroughly in love with him. Perhaps it’ll turn out a good thing in the end.”

  Mark Raynham shook himself, like a dog coming out of water.

  “D’you know the West Country?” he asked abruptly.

  “I used to live not so far from here, before the war, when my wife was alive.”

  “Then you’ll know what the people are like. Genial and gentle, obstinate and a bit shy underneath; suspicious and fatalistic. The real peasants. Slow to catch fire, and hard to put out. Passions don’t run high, but they run devilish deep. You’d be surprised.”

  Mark Raynham touched with his little finger an early cowslip which stood modestly in the grass beside him.

  “I’m afraid of what’ll happen if they find out who’s been writing these letters. They’ll lynch him. Or her.”

  There was silence between them. A lark trilled endlessly overhead. A car hooted at the village crossroads. Turkeys, ducks, hens and dogs in Templeton’s farmyard suddenly started a pandemonium of noise, like an orchestra tuning up.

  “Why did you say, ‘I suppose so,’ when I asked if things were getting worse here?” said Nigel.

  The vicar gave his hearty, apologetic laugh. “Oh, I dunno. Silly thing to say, really. But I’d sometimes wondered if these people wouldn’t be the better for a good stirring up. And now they’re getting it.”

  “Yourself included.”

  “Ah, yes. Now we’re coming to it.” The vicar jerked up his head, as if to take a blow full in the face. He was gazing straight at Nigel, but he didn’t seem to be seeing him. “You want to know about that letter. My wife ran away with another man while I was at the war. The old, old story.” As if rebuking himself for his bitterness, he said gently: “Poor girl, it was too difficult for her. I’d been reported missing, in the Western Desert. She was a beautiful woman.”

  “Was?”

  “She got killed later, by a flying bomb.” For a moment Mark Raynham’s face had an utterly ravaged look—a look of scorched earth. “You know, I thought I’d got over it all
very nicely. But when this letter came—well, it made me realize I loved her still. That was the awful part of it; not what the writer called her, and not the fact that it was true. Yes, I’m afraid it was. She did have other men, afterward. It all came out.” The vicar added, with a sort of shy pedantry, like a child pronouncing a new, difficult word, “She was very highly sexed, you see.”

  “‘It all came out’? Do you mean it was in the papers?”

  “Oh, no. But when I got back to England, out of the prison camp, I came into possession of her letters, among other things—letters these men had written her. I spent a happy afternoon reading them, I remember: couldn’t stop myself: human nature is really very queer.”

  “Then you destroyed them, I imagine?”

  Mark Raynham nodded.

  “Have you ever told anyone else about this? We must try to discover how the information could have got to Prior’s Umborne.”

  “Only one person. An old friend of mine. I wrote to him in strict confidence soon after I’d come down here to work, in 1946.”

  “Who knows about the anonymous letter itself?”

  “Only the Moreford police know what it said—unless they told our village bobby, and I’m sure they didn’t. The Inspector is a sympathetic chap.”

  “And there’s nobody in the village you could possibly connect with—”

  “No, my wife was in London when all this happened. Hardly any of our villagers have so much as been in London.”

  “What about the gentry? The Blicks? The Chantmerles?”

  Mark Raynham looked genuinely shocked. “My dear chap, you surely can’t suspect people like them! I don’t mean they’re all saints; but they’ve got better things to do than—”

  “I suspect nobody, and everybody. Celandine Chantmerle, for instance. She’s a cripple, I’m told. Plenty of time on her hands. Plenty of reason to turn sour on humanity.”

  The vicar’s Homeric laugh rang out again. “Wait till you meet her, then you’ll see why I can’t help laughing. She’s a heart of gold. Wonderfully sympathetic. Of course she’s difficult at times—a bit imperious—every beautiful woman is, if she has brains and temperament. But everyone adores her and—”