The Case of the Abominable Snowman Page 8

  ‘So the household was all in bed by 11.30. Theoretically, the murder could have taken place any time between eleven and midnight, allowing the murderer ten minutes to rig up the suicide business. But he’d have to pass Andrew Restorick’s room to get to Elizabeth’s. He might possibly have done this while Andrew was still awake, but there’d have been a risk. He’d probably leave at least half an hour for Andrew to go to sleep. So he’d be in Elizabeth’s room any time from 11.30 till 12.10, when the Special Constable saw the light there put out.’

  ‘I agree, Mr Strangeways, the period from 11.0 to 12.10 is the one we’ve got to investigate most thoroughly. But we’ve no proof that the person who turned out the light at 12.10 is the murderer. She might have had a second visitor later.’

  ‘Yes, that’s possible, I suppose. It would imply she had two lovers in the house, though. Nobody else would be likely to visit her room at such an unearthly hour.’

  ‘The murderer need not have been a lover of hers, sir. Or he might have been a discarded one.’

  ‘You’ve been hearing about Mr Dykes?’

  The superintendent gave Nigel a shrewd, complacent glance.

  ‘Mr Dykes was engaged to marry her, they tell me. Then she –’

  ‘“They” tell you?’

  ‘Miss Ainsley was my informant, sir. Then Miss Restorick broke it off. She said she couldn’t go through with it. A possible motive, Mr Strangeways, particularly if Dykes believed it was someone staying in the house who had supplanted him.’

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s the sum total of our knowledge, till you get the findings of the post-mortem.’

  The superintendent beamed on him again, and rose to take his leave.

  Nigel spent the evening reading and playing piquet with Miss Cavendish: they were both of them a little distrait.

  Next morning, at eleven o’clock, a familiar voice greeted Nigel on the telephone. It was his old friend, Detective-Inspector Blount of the C.I.D. Scotland Yard had been called in.

  ‘Can you spare me half an hour or so, Strangeways?’ said the suave voice with its faint Scots inflexion. Blount never wasted time on preliminaries. ‘I’m up at the Manor.’

  ‘It’s a royal command. I wondered if they’d send you down. How d’you like this weather? Must make you feel quite at home.’

  ‘Oh, fine,’ replied Blount unenthusiastically. ‘The post-mortem results have just come in. The deceased was a drug-addict. Cocaine. You can be thinking that over on your way up.’

  ‘Cocaine? Yes, so I imagined. How long has –?’ But Blount had rung off.’

  As Nigel turned into the village street, the east wind drove at him, drilling into his bones, clamping round his head like an iron cap. It seemed to dry up the very juices of life with its searing breath. Just beyond the village, men were digging a car out of a drift; their breath steamed up into the air. A drug-addict, thought Nigel. Poor Betty. It was obvious enough, though. Everything he had been told of her recent behaviour pointed to it – the edginess, the alternations of exuberance and depression, the violence.

  And yet it was odd. It somehow didn’t quite fit in with the picture of Elizabeth Restorick that had been forming in his mind’s eye – the picture of a woman who retained a kind of innocence at the heart of her experience, who was wanton, yet not vicious. Such a priestess of the body’s rapture surely would not need the artificial excitement that drugs give.

  Arriving at Easterham Manor, Nigel was shown straight into the morning-room, which the police had taken over as their operational headquarters. In spite of the fire burning in its ample grate, the room looked bleak – too like the writing-room in a station hotel, Nigel thought, with its inadequate tables, sheaves of notepaper, and metal ash-trays. In spite of the fire, too, Inspector Blount was wearing his night-cap. It was an article of attire Nigel had never approved of. The Inspector, he pointed out, had not been formed by nature to represent either a pirate or a character out of the Rake’s Progress. But Blount insisted that, when you were bald as a coot, the head needed protection during cold weather, even indoors. ‘I have to use my head,’ he was accustomed to say, ‘I can’t afford to let it catch cold.’

  Superintendent Phillips and a detective sergeant were also in the room when Nigel arrived. Blount, sitting at a writing-desk drawn near to the fire, took off his gold-rimmed pince-nez and motioned with them towards a chair. Nigel obediently took it. As usual, if one could overlook the incongruous and Hogarthian rakishness of the white night-cap, he resembled a bank manager about to interview a client on the subject of his overdraft.

  ‘So you’ve got yourself mixed up in something again, Strangeways,’ he said severely.

  Nigel hung his head.

  ‘You’d better tell me about it, in your own words.’

  ‘I am not accustomed to using other people’s words,’ replied Nigel with dignity, and gave Blount an account of the case from his own angle. The detective-sergeant scribbled industriously.

  ‘Hm,’ said Blount when he had finished. ‘There are some points of interest there. What – e’eh – interpretation do you put upon the cat incident?’

  ‘I’m inclined to think its milk was drugged. We’ve got to find out if there’s any drug that would have that effect. We know about cocaine jags, but I don’t think cocaine would work on animals in the same way. It might have been a practical joke, of course. But, now we know Miss Restorick was a drug addict, we can envisage some relation between the cat episode and the murder. Was it, perhaps, an attempt on someone’s part to convey that he knew she was an addict?’

  ‘The first hint of blackmail? Or a warning? But why couldn’t this person do it by word of mouth?’ asked Blount.

  ‘I can’t imagine. Unless, for some reason, he didn’t want her to know that he knew. A blackmailer would always prefer to remain anonymous.’

  ‘It’s all theoretical.’ Blount dismissed it with a brusque gesture. ‘Have you anyone in mind?’

  ‘Miss Cavendish – she’s the cousin of my wife’s we’re staying with – said that, during the cat’s exhibition, Andrew Restorick was watching his sister very attentively. She said it was like Hamlet. You know the scene where –’

  ‘I have attended performances of the play,’ said Blount dryly.

  ‘Suppose Andrew was not sure whether his sister was a drug addict. He might have been flying a kite in that direction.’

  ‘The assumption is hardly tenable, Strangeways. It presupposes first that the deceased would recognize the cat’s symptoms as caused by a drug, and second that Andrew – who we’re told was exceptionally fond of his sister – didn’t dare to mention the thing openly to her. No, we must do better than that. Ask Dr Bogan to step this way, please.’

  The sergeant went out. Blount reluctantly removed his night-cap and shifted to a chair farther from the fire, where he would have the light at his back. When the doctor entered, Blount was apparently absorbed in the papers upon his desk. After a considerable pause, which Dr Bogan spent in absently combing his fingers through his beard, Blount blotted a sheet of paper, looked up and said:

  ‘You were treating Miss Restorick for cocaine addiction.’

  ‘That is so.’ The doctor’s voice was neither startled nor resentful.

  ‘You realized this was bound to come out soon enough. I don’t understand why you held it back yesterday.’

  ‘I was doubtful of Mr Strangeways’ status, for one thing. And, being a friend of the family, I had personal as well as professional reasons for maintaining secrecy as long as possible.’ The doctor spoke with a dignity that impressed Nigel in his favour.

  ‘Your treatment was – e’eh – of a somewhat unconventional character.’

  Dr Bogan’s white teeth showed in a quick smile. ‘Some of my colleagues call me a quack. Pasteur suffered from the same suspicions.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Blount a little testily. ‘But hypnosis –’

  ‘Cocaine is a habit-forming drug. Habits take root in the unconscious mind. Hypnosis i
s, I believe, the most effective way of counter-attacking on that front.’ Dr Bogan shot a quizzical glance at the inspector. ‘I have, of course, a statement signed by Miss Restorick that she was willing to submit herself to such a treatment.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to see the statement in due course,’ said Blount woodenly. ‘Was the treatment successful?’

  ‘I believe we were on the road to success. Miss Restorick was by no means cured yet. But we had already experimented in stopping the doses of the drug altogether.’

  ‘Was any one else in this house aware of her addiction, would you say?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge. But the signs were there to read, for any one who was familiar with them.’

  ‘Quite so. Ye-es.’ Blount slapped his bald pate vigorously several times. ‘I would like you to tell us the case-history now.’

  According to Dr Bogan’s account, Elizabeth Restorick had put herself in his hands six months ago. He had met her first some weeks before this, at a party in London. She had begun to take cocaine not long before this first meeting. For the initial stages of the treatment, she had gone to Doctor Bogan’s own nursing-home; after a month there, she had been released and kept under observation, the treatment being continued in a less drastic form. She had always refused to tell him who had introduced her to the habit and kept her supplied, and it was not his province to inquire stringently into this. As far as he could tell, she had received no supplies of the drug after his treatment had begun, apart from the diminishing doses he had allowed her. These had been stopped altogether a fortnight ago. It was their cessation which accounted for the patient’s recent indisposition.

  ‘Have you any idea why she wished to break herself of the habit? Just when she did, I mean?’ asked Nigel when the doctor had finished.

  ‘I have no proof about that. It is possible that her engagement to Mr Dykes had something to do with it. If she was in love with him –’

  ‘“If”?’

  ‘Well, he’s not exactly the kind of person one would expect her to fall in love with. He’s so different from the folks in her own set.’

  ‘Perhaps that was why,’ said Nigel.

  There was a pause. The doctor had sounded vaguely embarrassed by Nigel’s last question. Still, thought Nigel, his account seemed quite natural and above-board, it can all be verified, and he impresses one favourably – a striking personality.

  Blount evidently thought the same. ‘I expect you’ll be wanting to get back to your practice to-morrow,’ he said. ‘We’ll just keep in touch with you – we’ve got your address. Your evidence will be required at the inquest.’

  As Dr Bogan rose, Superintendent Phillips, who had been called out of the room during this conversation, returned and whispered in Blount’s ear. Blount raised a detaining hand.

  ‘Just a minute, Doctor.’ His voice had, beneath its suavity, the faint rasp which Nigel knew of old. ‘Will you kindly tell us about the papers you burnt in your grate this morning?’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘A little snow, tumbled about,

  Anon becomes a mountain.’

  SHAKESPEARE

  THERE ARE MOMENTS when time, as they say, stands still. There are also moments when, as though another gear has been silently engaged, time leaps effortlessly ahead or checks to a crawl. It was this last manifestation which Blount’s question brought about. For Nigel, everything seemed suddenly to take on the dream-like quality of a slow-motion picture. A kind of deadly deliberation came over the movements of his companions in the room: it was almost as if they had reached the moment in the stalk when the quarry has been sighted, or had at last come to the edge of a skyline swept by the enemy’s fire.

  If Dr Bogan was the quarry, however, he didn’t seem aware of it. A little frown of puzzlement came and went instantaneously upon his forehead. The sallow face seemed to grow a little darker. The piercing eyes lifted themselves deliberately to Blount’s, then played that strange trick of losing focus which Nigel had noticed before. His voice was firm, however, as he said:

  ‘The kind of treatment I was giving Miss Restorick has its difficulties. You are aware, probably, of what is called “transference” between a psycho-analyst and a patient. With hypnosis the same danger sometimes arises. To put it bluntly, the patient falls in love with the doctor.’

  ‘You are suggesting,’ said Blount, ‘that the papers you burnt were – e’eh – love letters from the deceased?’

  Bogan’s eyes focused again, and shone with peculiar intelligence.

  ‘That you will no doubt discover soon enough for yourselves: I am told that your modern scientific methods can reconstruct burnt paper and bring out the writing on it.’

  His remark was made conversationally, to the room at large. Superintendent Phillips blurted out:

  ‘No good. The ashes were swept –’

  There was a crack which startled like a pistol-shot. It was the pencil in Blount’s hand, snapped in two, and that was the only sign he gave of his anger at Phillips’ intervention. Nigel glanced at Bogan with new respect. Was it by accident he had thus neatly elicited the information that the papers were illegible?

  ‘You have not answered my question, Dr Bogan,’ said Blount. ‘You tell us it was love-letters you burnt?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m as interested as you are in the contents of the papers. For, you see, I haven’t burnt anything in my grate for days.’

  The detective-sergeant goggled. Phillips let out a gasp. But Blount continued imperturbably.

  ‘I see. Can you tell us when you were absent from your bedroom, then?’

  ‘Yesterday or to-day? When were the papers found?’

  Blount’s eye, flickering, confessed the failure of his little trap.

  ‘The morning of the murder.’

  ‘I came down for breakfast at 8.45. We were still at breakfast when the maid found Miss Restorick’s body. Mrs Restorick, her husband and her brother went upstairs at once, leaving Dykes and myself at the table. Miss Ainsley hadn’t appeared yet. About five minutes later – say five past nine – they sent for me upstairs. I examined the body. Then I came down again. To the best of my recollection I didn’t go into my bedroom again till midday.’

  Blount pressed him further. Bogan was sure there had been no burnt paper in the grate before he came down to breakfast. Charlotte and Hereward were already in the dining-room, Andrew and Dykes turned up a moment later. When he returned from examining the body, Dykes was still at the breakfast table and Eunice Ainsley had joined them: this was roughly 9.20. The three of them had sat on at table till quarter to ten.

  ‘We now have evidence from the housemaid who cleans your room that she went up there just before nine o’clock and brushed up a quantity of burnt paper from the grate,’ said Blount. ‘In the general to-do, she forgot all about this. The paper was put into an ash-bin, and the contents of this were scattered over the rubbish heap later in the day. So the paper ash is dispersed. But it would appear that it must have been planted in your grate between 8.45 and 9 o’clock yesterday morning.’

  ‘I am relieved that you accept my version of the affair,’ said Dr Bogan, with the flashing smile which reminded Nigel of his Italian blood.

  ‘We shall go into all that,’ replied Blount unresponsively, ‘I think that is all for the present, Dr Bogan.’ He paused, as though expecting the doctor to say something more, but Bogan just rose and left the room.

  ‘A lot of time on his hands for an eminent specialist,’ murmured Nigel.

  ‘Yes. I was expecting him to ask when he could get back to London. Still, the week-end isn’t over – if he’s the kind that takes long week-ends.’

  Blount proceeded to inform Nigel of other matters. Material evidence put the time of death as between ten p.m. and two a.m. The post-mortem had failed to reveal whether Elizabeth was throttled before her neck had been put in the noose. The double coil of rope round her neck had superimposed its own marks on any bruises that might have been made already. The body showed no ot
her signs of violence. But the rope, microscopically examined, proved quite clearly that the body had been hauled up to the position in which they found it.

  ‘So that disposes finally of the idea of suicide,’ said Nigel. ‘No marks of violence on the body, though?’

  ‘Which tells us something. Only a person intimate with the deceased could have entered her room in the middle of the night, and put his fingers round her neck, without her raising an alarm and struggling. She was a light sleeper. Besides, we have good reason to think she was expecting someone.’

  ‘Still, one might have expected her to have left some marks on her assailant. None of the people in the house seems to be scratched, as far as I’ve noticed.’

  ‘If she was throttled from behind, or smothered by a pillow first, her assailant might have been unscathed. You’d expect to find scratches on his hands and wrists, perhaps. But remember, no fingerprints on the light switches, he was maybe wearing gloves.’

  ‘Surely her lover – if that’s who you think it was – wouldn’t come to her bed in gloves.’

  ‘No. But he could pretend to leave her, put them on, and move back to the bed. All this is petty detail, Strangeways. The important thing is that no one but the woman’s lover answers all our requirements.’

  ‘Narrowing it down to Dykes or Bogan, or some unknown X who got into the house that night? It seems reasonable. But there’s a bad flaw in your argument.’

  ‘A flaw? I don’t see it.’

  ‘A logical flaw. Or a logical-emotional flaw, to be precise. Have you interviewed Dykes yet?’

  ‘No. He’s coming next.’

  ‘May I have a quarter of an hour with him first? Alone?’