The next news was startling and bizarre. The possible time and day of Winters’s death was still not known, according to Hallicks, who had spoken to Innes, but it could have been as early as the Tuesday night of the quarrel. The body had been put in cold storage, probably in a large deep freeze, the pathologist thought. Even when the police dug it out of the punt it had not entirely thawed out.

  ‘Thank goodness a turkey is about the largest item our fridge will take,’ said Innes, ‘But, you know, Mike, even if Effie did the murder, she must have had help with the burial. By the way, my talk with Hallicks about the body was in the strictest confidence and very little of what he told me will come out at the inquest.’

  * * *

  chapter 10

  FARMER BREEDY

  « ^ »

  Well, once the news about the body in the punt gets around, I don’t envy the village of Lower Gushbrook. It will be absolutely swarming with newspapermen,’ said Innes, later. ‘The local reporters will have the time of their lives and the whole thing is sufficiently out of the ordinary to attract the big dailies, I shouldn’t wonder. I think we’ll keep away from Lower Gushbrook for a bit. What do you think, Dame Beatrice?’

  ‘Dame Beatrice will have to rely on the discretion of the police,’ said Mary, ‘and so shall we, too, because if the papers get to know that she discovered where the body was buried we shall have them round here, so avoiding Lower Gushbrook won’t be any help about that.’

  ‘I did not discover where the body was buried. That piece of deduction must be credited to Mr Michael,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘I should never have thought twice about the submerged punt but for his accurate observation and retentive memory.’

  I looked at Mary. She smiled.

  ‘There are things one does remember and things one doesn’t,’ I said. ‘It depends upon luck and the circumstances. If I had been with Innes, for example, I doubt whether I should have noticed the plants the first time and, that being the case, I should not have realised, when I looked at the punt the second time, that the plants had been changed.’

  ‘Well, I think I’ll tip the wink to Hallicks that a word with Chettle and Batcombe might be not a bad idea,’ said Innes.

  ‘I myself would like a word with Farmer Breedy before I see the sheikh’s son again,’ said Dame Beatrice. Innes looked surprised.

  ‘Breedy?’ he said. ‘But you don’t suspect him of knowing anything about the murder, do you?’

  ‘I want to know why his son attempted to commit suicide and I want to be sure that young Breedy and not young Hamid was on the wooden bridge when Mr Michael took his walk that morning.’

  ‘Hamid?’ I said, surprised in my turn.

  ‘You mentioned a swarthy young man, or so Innes informed me. Hamid is swarthy; Hamid was caught in the mantrap; Hamid does not want to talk to me; and somebody put a knife in Winters’s back. I am interested in these facts, that is all.’

  ‘If you go to see Breedy, either Mike or I will go with you,’ said Innes. ‘Breedy is an honest sort of chap, but he can be abusive or even violent.’

  ‘You said much the same thing about the youths I interviewed,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘but they were meekness itself.’

  ‘There is a very strong belief in witchcraft around these parts,’ said Innes, grinning. ‘You probably cast a spell on them — or they thought you did or could.’

  ‘I should hardly have thought the younger generation would have been so misled.’

  ‘I’d like to know what happened to that doll from the museum,’ said Mary. ‘Aren’t dolls tied up with some forms of witchcraft?’

  We soon knew what had happened to the doll. The police had found it when they dug up Winters’s body. It had been tied face-downwards across his chest and when they examined it they found a darning-needle stuck through it.

  Dame Beatrice made no objection to my escorting her to Breedy’s farm. She could do with a witness, she said. I warned her about Breedy’s Alsatians, but the warning left her unperturbed. We went in my car, for the farm had an entrance from the hilly road which skirted the church, a road I had avoided when I took my walk.

  The only dog about the place, when we approached the front door of the farmhouse, was a rough-coated retriever which I thought I recognised. He was lying across the doorstep as though on guard. I gave him my fingers to smell, upon which he got up and wagged his tail, so I stepped forward and rang the bell. A young girl, aged about seventeen, I thought, opened the door and looked at Dame Beatrice, who produced one of her useful official cards.

  The girl read it and asked us in and, as we entered, a man’s voice shouted a question from somewhere upstairs.

  ‘You better come down, Gaffer,’ the girl called back. ‘Company to see you, and put your jacket on. There’s a lady present.’

  An elderly, but not an old, man came down the stairs. He held on to the banisters and was limping badly. As he reached the foot of the stairs the girl put a stout walking-stick into his hand. He looked us over, grunted and then said, ‘This way,’ and led us down the passage to a room which appeared to be the farmhouse parlour.

  Here he waved Dame Beatrice to an old-fashioned wooden armchair with an upholstered seat and then he limped across to it and thrust a cushion behind her spare, upright back. He seated himself opposite her and left me to fend for myself, so I took an upright chair at the table and laid out my notepaper and ballpoint. He grunted again at this and said, with ferocious humour,

  ‘Taken down in writing and given in evidence, then?’

  ‘Our intentions are honourable,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You will be asked to sign Mr Michael’s notes when he has transcribed his shorthand. We would like you to be certain that what he says you have said is simply that and nothing more or less.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘I’m a cautious man. I don’t say much and I’ve a good memory for what I’ve said. ’

  ‘And have Yorkshire forebears, although you yourself were born here in Dorset.’ She obviously surprised him by this remark and he asked,

  ‘How the devil do you know ours was a Yorkshire family?’

  ‘By your manners and by your blue eyes. Those eyes could only come from Yorkshire stock. This fact was brought to my notice years ago at a cocktail party by a drunken painter of seascapes.’

  The clamped muscles around Farmer Breedy’s obstinate mouth relaxed and he almost smiled.

  ‘Well, compliments and the reverse aside,’ he said, ‘what might you want with me?’

  ‘All that you know about man-traps and Mr Winters and dolls and Mr Hamid Aziz and, most of all, what you know about the fatal accident to a Mr Lorne, when the car in which he was a passenger collided with your lorry some months ago.’

  ‘Right.’ He looked across at me. ‘Got all that down, young fellow?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Breedy, but you flatter me. I am turned forty years old. How did you damage your foot? You were spry enough the other day when I met you and your dog.’

  ‘Put a fork through it, that’s what.’

  ‘I knew I had left out something,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘If it will not provoke a burst of profanity or even ordinary invective, may I ask why your son contemplated suicide on the morning you met Mr Michael?’

  The farmer stared at her, but not, I thought, belligerently. He cleared his throat, in fact, rather apologetically before he answered. Then he said,

  ‘Young Bob was afraid to tell me what had happened. Got a girl into trouble and said he couldn’t afford to marry. Only one way out of that. Old-fashioned but sensible. I made him put up the banns and they’ll be married come harvest. Cost me a packet to soften up her father, him being Okeford, the lawyer fellow, and not wanting my boy for a son-in-law, thinking his girl could do better when once she’d got rid of the baby.’

  ‘How badly did you want Winters killed?’

  He stared again.

  ‘What’s happened to him?’ he asked. ‘You mean he’s dead?’

  ‘His body, stabbed in the back, has been found at Lower Gushbrook,’ said Dame Beatrice, looking at him as I have been told a stoat looks at a rabbit or a snake looks at a bird. Breedy shook his head and continued to stare at her. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘You threatened him, did you not?’

  ‘My boy’s my boy. He may be a fool and lascivious with it, but he’s still my boy.’

  ‘Even the Devil looks after his own, which, considering what scoundrels his own are, is to his credit, I think,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘You’re muddling up my mind, mistress. What do you want me to tell you?’

  ‘Who killed Winters, of course.’

  ‘Nay, if I knew that, I’d shake his bloody hand.’

  ‘As Marcus Antonius did with Caesar’s murderers. Strange, you know, that when we speak of Caesar we are always understood to refer to Julius, yet there were many Caesars. Why should that one appear to have unique right to the title? Have you ever wondered why, Mr Breedy?’

  The farmer looked appealingly at me, but all I could do was to look commiseratingly back at him. He sighed and said,

  ‘What’s all this about, anyway?’

  ‘Murder,’ said Dame Beatrice briskly, ‘as I thought we were agreed. You say you do not know who murdered Winters. From what I hear and from what I deduce from what I hear, there could be several suspects. Let us leave the subject and talk about man-traps.’

  ‘One thing I know about them. If things were taken out of the museum, there is only one lad that took ’em, and that’s young Peter Chettle. Nobody else would have had the opportunity.’

  ‘Would he have set the man-trap after he had stolen it?’

  ‘Could have done, I reckon. He’s wicked enough.’

  ‘What about dolls?’

  ‘Can’t think why he should have taken a doll. Toys for little girls, they be. Still, young Chettle’s daffy.’

  ‘The doll was found buried with Winters’s body.’

  ‘That’s witchcraft, then. Ay, I’ve heard of that.’

  ‘Who in this neighbourhood, apart from yourself, is likely to have heard that dolls are connected with black magic?’

  ‘You, for one,’ said Breedy, with, to my surprise, a chuckle. ‘Oh, well, it would likely be a woman, anyway. Women go for old wives’ tales, don’t ’em? That Mrs Lorne, now, always busybodying about. I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew something of dolls with pins stuck in ’em. When her husband was killed she went very strange for a bit until the Reverend took her to task and talked her out of it. Had it in for me properly, she did. Blamed my lorry for Lorne’s death. Strange, that.’

  I thought that, little as I knew of her, there certainly seemed nothing strange about Martha Lorne except, of course, the very strange fact that she had never mentioned the death of her husband to Innes and Mary. However, I realised that Dame Beatrice had now reached the subject she really wanted Breedy to talk about. She caught my eye and nodded to me to apply myself to my shorthand.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Lorne went very strange for a time,’ repeated Breedy. ‘Shut herself away and burnt candles instead of using the electric light, and at nights, the neighbours said, she used to go down to the little stream that flows past the houses at that end of the town before it diverts away across the meadow, and she would step into it with her shoes on and say her prayers standing up in it and then she would laugh and laugh. Got folk real worried, she did, and there was talk of calling in the doctors and having her put away before she could do harm to herself, but the Reverend was against it. He said he would have a try first, because she had had a very bad shock with her husband getting killed so providential, and that would account for her acting daffy.’

  ‘How do you mean? Providential? Why?’ asked Dame Beatrice. ‘I thought you said she was angry about his death.’

  ‘In debt for miles around, Mrs Lorne were, but the insurances she’d taken out on Lorne paid up very handsome and cleared up everything. She paid every penny that was owing, and got shut of him into the bargain.’

  ‘It was not a happy marriage?’

  ‘God knows. There was talk about somebody tampering with the brakes of the car, but nothing came of it.’

  ‘Whose car was it?’

  ‘Lorne’s own car.’

  ‘But Winters was driving it, I understand. Why was that?’

  ‘On account Lorne was trying to flog it to him.’

  ‘And the accident took place on your land?’

  ‘Not in hell it didn’t! My lorry was parked halfway down Napper Hill with a load of gravel I’d ordered for a front path me and my son were going to put down when we had time. The car came belting down the hill, which has a nasty bend in it. The horn was blaring all the time, so the driver, Winters, must have known the brakes were faulty. Even so, I reckon he could have saved an accident if he’d kept his head, but he didn’t. Whether the car got right out of his control, or whether he had some daffy idea as it was better to smash into my lorry than to go on and risk the steepest part of the hill, I don’t know. He took the lorry kind of sideways on. Lorne, who was sitting next Winters, was killed outright, being on the side next the lorry, and Halstock and his boy were hurt pretty serious, them being at the back, which took a lot of the impact as the car slewed round.’

  ‘Were you with your lorry?’

  ‘No. One of my chaps was in charge of it. He was in the pub. That’s why the lorry was parked where it was. He heard the row Winters’s horn was making, but by the time he got outside the damage was done.’

  ‘Was your lorry parked in such a way as to cause a hazard, do you think?’

  ‘No, of course it wasn’t. It was right off the road in the forecourt of the pub. It was damaged, of course, by the impact.’

  ‘How much truth was there in the rumour that the brakes of the car had been tampered with?’

  ‘The car was too badly smashed up for anybody to be able to swear to that. It was Winters’s story and Lorne couldn’t support it or otherwise, being dead; nor could Martha, her being away on a visit when the crash happened.’

  ‘I don’t suppose the other two passengers knew much about it,’ I said.

  ‘Both knocked unconscious,’ he agreed, ‘and come to only to find themselves in hospital.’

  ‘Did Halstock senior ever utter any threats?’ Dame Beatrice asked.

  ‘There was a court case, as I say, and that’s all I know. My chap had to attend, but him and my lorry were completely exonerated and anyway he got outside too late for his statement to be any help, so they accepted Winters’s story about faulty brakes.’

  ‘Was young Walter Halstock called upon to give evidence?’

  ‘No. He and his dad were still in hospital. There was only Winters to speak to what happened, so they had to take his word for it about the brakes.’

  ‘How did Halstock and his son come to be in the car? Were they also possible customers for it?’

  ‘Not they. No, it was just that they were at Lorne’s place and Winters said Lorne told him to give them a lift.’

  ‘Were you in court to hear the evidence?’

  ‘Yes, and at the inquest, too. My chap with the lorry wanted me to be there.’

  ‘But he must have known that no blame could be attached to him if the lorry was stationary and he was inside the public house when the crash occurred.’

  ‘Been fined once before for drunken driving and it made him nervous as he had to allow he was in a pub, you see.’

  ‘I wonder you kept him on in your employment after he had been fined for drunken driving.’

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t one of my vehicles he was driving. Poor chap had just lost his wife, so I reckon he was entitled to drown his sorrows. I spoke up for him as best I could.’

  ‘And paid the fine,’ said Dame Beatrice.

  ‘What if I did? He had enough expense burying his good lady. Funerals don’t come cheap.’

  ‘Nor the funeral bakemeats after the interment. Do you possess a deep freeze, Mr. Breedy?’

  Breedy stared at her again. ’

  ‘Only for my own use,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘The thought of funeral bakemeats put the thought into my head, I suppose.’

  ‘Women’s heads be always inside the larder,’ said the farmer, accepting this explanation. ‘Yes, I have a deep freeze. Got half a pig and a leg of beef in it and half-a-dozen fowls and a duck or two.’

  ‘There cannot be many people in these parts with this useful receptacle, I fancy.’

  ‘Other farmers maybe, and the big houses and the hotel. You got one?’

  ‘No. I have an ordinary refrigerator, that is all. My household is small.’

  ‘Oh, ah.’ He looked at her card which he had placed on the arm of his chair. ‘Home Office, eh? What’s your game in these parts, then?’

  ‘I am often called in when cases of murder appear to hinge on the mental state of a suspect.’

  ‘You don’t need to worry about young Wally Halstock. Harmless as a baby.’

  ‘And his father?’

  ‘Took the loss of his arm very hard, as who wouldn’t? I don’t see him accepting any more lifts in cars.’

  ‘I hear he used to be Lord Maumbury’s gardener.’

  ‘Ah, that’s right.’

  ‘How about Mrs Lorne? Did she know her husband was trying to sell the car to Winters?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. At the inquest she told the coroner she had been away visiting her mother.’

  ‘And Effie Winters was away from home at what may well have been the day of her brother’s death, and in both cases insurance policies appear to have been involved. These coincidences are very strange and may even be significant,’ said Dame Beatrice. Breedy looked as though he was about to make a remark, but apparently he changed his mind, for all he did was to spit into the open fire and then lean back in his chair. Dame Beatrice, who had paused to give him a chance to speak, continued: ‘How did the Halstocks come to be in the car?’

 

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