Village Affairs Read online

  Gibbons glared at him.

  “You didn’t do any looking yourself, did you?” asked Carmichael suspiciously.

  “No, sir. Certainly not.”

  Carmichael nodded and was silent a little. “I see what you’re thinking,” he said at last. “The idea would have been to make it look like she came out here by herself and sat on the rock. Yes, I think we might have a look.”

  “I’ll run back to the house,” offered Bethancourt, “and rustle up some towels and blankets.”

  “Please do,” said Gibbons, eyeing the water resignedly. “I think, sir, if you don’t mind, it would be better if I stripped off.”

  “Of course,” said Carmichael. “I’m sorry to let you in for this, Gibbons, but there’s no denying I’m a bit past it for this sort of thing. And we do want to find out as quickly as possible if there’s anything to be investigated here or not. No, wait a minute, lad. We don’t want you catching cold. Wait ’til Bethancourt comes back with the towels.”

  Bethancourt was not long. When he appeared on the horizon, his arms full of towels and blankets, Gibbons shrugged out of his jacket and pulled his sweater over his head. He glanced longingly at the little rowboat, but he knew that it would have to be examined by a forensics team. By the time Bethancourt rejoined them, Gibbons was standing shivering in his underwear. The sun promptly went behind a cloud.

  He pushed through the grass on the far side of the boulder in order to avoid the footprints and tested the water with his toe. It was very cold. Behind him, he heard Carmichael asking Bethancourt what he had told them at the house.

  “Just that you had decided to have a look at the lake as a precaution, and that they should stay put. And I nabbed a bottle of brandy, too, Jack.”

  Gibbons grunted, wading cautiously out into the water. The bottom was muddy, and sloped off suddenly, landing him in water up to his waist. He gasped with the cold and took a moment to steady himself. Then he began to wade along, making for the water directly before the boulder, his feet catching in the weeds. The water was very murky; he could not see his lower legs, and there was an eerie sensation in feeling his way along, waiting for his toes to touch something other than mud and rocks.

  “All right, lad?” asked Carmichael from the bank.

  “Yes. It’s slow going.”

  He kept on, searching the lake bottom with his feet before taking another step. There were rocks here, covered with moss and slippery, but their rough touch could not possibly be mistaken for a body, not even by toes going numb with cold.

  He was coming up on the rope that moored the rowboat and he eyed it with disfavor. He was going to have to submerge to get under it.

  And then, all at once, his toes touched something soft. Sternly, he repressed an urge to clamber out of the water at once, and sought for a firm foothold. He bent, reaching down with his hands, and groped until his searching fingers closed on the soft thing, identifying it at once as the corner of some heavy material. His heart hammering, he reached out farther, touched the rough surface of a rock and then, beyond it, something cold and smooth and firm. He let go at once and stood up.

  “Are you all right, Jack?” came Bethancourt’s voice, concerned.

  “Yes,” croaked Gibbons. He turned and began to wade back as quickly as he could, anxious to be out of the water which held such horrors. “Yes, there’s something there.”

  He floundered a bit and then he was at the shore, scrambling in the mud while Bethancourt and Carmichael reached down for him, their hands warm on his cold skin. He felt the coarse grass beneath his feet, and Bethancourt flung a towel over his shoulders. He clutched it to him, shivering.

  “Here, lad,” said Carmichael, uncorking the brandy. “Have a swallow of this.”

  Gibbons took the bottle gratefully, feeling the liquor burn its way into his stomach. Bethancourt had got another towel and was vigorously drying his back.

  “Better get out of those wet pants,” he said.

  Gibbons, normally a modest man, made no protest. The material was cold and clammy and he felt as though his testicles had contracted to the size of two marbles. Bethancourt gave him a towel to put around his waist and rubbed his legs with another towel. He seemed to have brought the entire linen closet.

  “So you found her?” asked Carmichael, handing over the brandy again as Gibbons’s teeth began to chatter.

  “I found someone, sir,” he managed. “I didn’t bother ducking under to look since the water was so murky.”

  “You did well. All right, I’ll call a forensics team out and call off the search. You get dressed as quick as you can. I’ll send one of the local boys down to stand guard so you can get into the house and warm up.”

  “That’s it, then,” said Bethancourt as Carmichael strode away. “I was so hoping I was wrong.”

  Gibbons was struggling into his trousers. “It might still be an accident,” he said. “As murder, it doesn’t fit very well with the rest of what we’ve got.”

  Bethancourt merely snorted. He lit a cigarette and glanced at his friend. “You’re still shivering, Jack,” he said. “Get your shoes on so we can get back to the house.”

  “We have to wait for one of the constables to come,” pointed out Gibbons, sitting on the grass to don his shoes and socks. “Here, give me another swig of that brandy.”

  Bethancourt handed him the bottle. “Here,” he said, “have this blanket around you.”

  “Thanks.” Gibbons took a deep swallow and rose, pacing in an effort to warm up. “Where’s Cerberus?” he asked suddenly.

  “I left him at Stutely Manor,” said Bethancourt, “not knowing what I’d find here. I’m glad I did; he would almost certainly have found those footprints before I did and walked all over them.”

  “Yes, the chief inspector would have been annoyed about that.”

  “I didn’t find out when the Bensons and Mrs. Potts went to bed last night,” said Bethancourt. “It might have been one of them—easy to suggest a walk.”

  “You forget,” said Gibbons, turning and pacing back, “all three of them have alibis for Bingham’s murder.”

  “Yes, isn’t that suspicious?”

  Gibbons laughed.

  “Well,” said Bethancourt, a trifle impatiently, “what do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Gibbons. He rubbed his arms in an effort to stop shivering, and walked briskly in a circle. “We haven’t enough information to base any kind of hypothesis on yet. We don’t even know for certain that the corpse is Joan Bonnar.”

  “Oh, really,” said Bethancourt. “The Cotswolds are hardly burgeoning with corpses. Who else could it be?”

  “Derek Towser, for instance,” said Gibbons. “He might have been out late last night and happened on Miss Bonnar making an escape.”

  Bethancourt snorted again.

  “Or,” added Gibbons, turning to walk widdershins about his friend, “granting that it is Joan Bonnar, it might be suicide. She must certainly have been feeling very low if she was innocent. And even if she was guilty, she might have bitterly regretted what she’d done.”

  “If it were suicide, I should have expected her to do it at Bingham’s cottage.”

  “This place may have had significance you don’t know about,” said Gibbons. “He could have proposed to her here, for example.”

  “That’s true,” said Bethancourt. “Jack, you’re making me dizzy. Can’t you stand still?”

  “I’m still cold,” retorted Gibbons, continuing to pace. “The feeling is only just coming back to my toes.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, let’s just walk up and back. This circling is making me nauseous.”

  “There’s another possibility,” said Gibbons, obligingly veering into a straight path. “It could be that Joan did come out for a walk, and met the murderer. There might have been a struggle.”

  “A struggle?”

  “Yes, and the murderer slipped, striking his head on that rock. Joan saw he was dead and p
anicked, knowing she’s already suspected of Bingham’s murder. So she tips him into the lake and flees. How’s that for a hypothesis?” He grinned up at his friend.

  Bethancourt regarded him pityingly. “That brandy has gone straight to your head,” he said.

  Gibbons started to reply and then checked himself. “Look,” he said, “here comes the constable with some scene-of-the-crime tape. Let’s head back.”

  When they arrived at the house, they found Astley-Cooper sitting alone in the kitchen.

  “I thought I’d better take myself off,” he explained. “It didn’t seem the thing, somehow, to stay on once I’d said how sorry I was. Besides, Chief Inspector Carmichael came in and clearly wanted me out of it.”

  “Is he with the Bensons and Mrs. Potts now?” asked Gibbons.

  “That’s right.” Astley-Cooper shot him a concerned look. “You look chilled to the bone, Jack.”

  “He had to go into the lake,” said Bethancourt, while Gibbons drew a chair up before the electric fire set in the hearth and turned on all four bars.

  “Well, luckily I’ve got water on the boil,” said Astley-Cooper cheerfully. “I was going to make some tea and I filled the kettle in case anyone else should want some. Here, take off your shoes.”

  Gibbons stared at him. “You must be mad,” he said. “I’ve only just got the feeling back in my feet.”

  But Astley-Cooper was bustling around the kitchen. Out of the pantry he hauled a large basin and dropped it on the floor at Gibbons’s feet. “Put your feet in that,” he ordered. “I know what I’m doing—there’s only one way to take the chill off.”

  While Gibbons reluctantly divested himself of his shoes and socks, Astley-Cooper poured boiling water into the basin and added a judicious amount of cool water from the tap. “Stick ’em in there,” he said. “I’ll have the tea ready in a moment, and you drink it as hot as you can.”

  Bethancourt sat at the table and watched the proceedings with some amusement. It worked, as Astley-Cooper had said it would; in a few minutes Gibbons had thrown off the blanket he had kept wrapped about his shoulders and declared he was feeling positively overheated.

  While his subordinate was warming up, Carmichael was finding out what he could from the family. The Bensons were subdued and pale, Mrs. Potts much more volubly aghast. Carmichael took them carefully through their movements on the evening before, mentally comparing what they told him with what Bethancourt had reported them saying earlier. There was, so far as he could see, no divergence.

  After some discussion, they agreed that their game of Scrabble had finished at about ten thirty. The Bensons had put the game away while Mrs. Potts went to the kitchen to wash up. The twins had joined her there, and James had made cocoa, which they had drank when Mrs. Potts was done with the dishes. It had been about eleven thirty when they had gone up to bed.

  “A rather late evening, wasn’t it?” asked Carmichael.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Potts. “We usually eat earlier, but Miss Bonnar doesn’t like to dine before eight, so when she’s here, things get a little late.”

  “All the same,” said Julie, “we usually turn in by ten. But what with Charlie’s funeral yesterday, we were all feeling a little restless.”

  “Funerals often have that effect,” agreed Carmichael. “When you went up, you noticed nothing amiss upstairs? Was your mother’s door closed?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Potts. “And it still was this morning.”

  “You didn’t hear her moving about or anything?”

  They all shook their heads.

  “All right. So you were in here, and then went to the kitchen. None of you left the house?”

  “Oh,” said Julie, looking abashed. “I did. I forgot. I went over to the stables to check on the horses—I always do.”

  “When would that have been?” asked Carmichael.

  “When James and I went to the kitchen, so it must have been about ten forty-five.”

  “And you would have returned by what time?”

  “Oh, before eleven,” she answered. “It doesn’t take long. I just ran across and back, and found James making cocoa when I came in.”

  “I see. Now then, I’d like to ask you about Miss Bonnar’s mood last night. How did she seem to you?”

  Mrs. Potts answered, looking at him suspiciously, as if this might be a trick question. “She was depressed and unhappy. I mean, she’d just been to her fiancé’s funeral.”

  “Of course,” said Carmichael soothingly. “I was looking for something beyond that. Did she say anything, for instance, about her future plans? Or make reference to any particular person?”

  They were all silent for a moment, thinking. Then Mrs. Potts said, “Really, she was very quiet. Unusually so. I can’t remember that she said much more than “Pass the salt,” at supper.”

  “That’s right,” said Julie. “We spoke about the funeral I remember—you know, what a nice epitaph the vicar had given and such like—but she hardly said anything at all.”

  Carmichael nodded. “Do you think it possible,” he asked, “that she had anything on her mind besides Mr. Bingham’s death?”

  They glanced at each other, unsure.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Potts, shrugging, “there’s really no way of telling, is there? We expected her to be feeling down, and she was. I didn’t think further, myself.”

  With this Carmichael had to be content. If Joan Bonnar had been contemplating either suicide or a meeting with a murderer, she had given no clear indication of it to her family. He thanked them and rose.

  “I’ll just collect my sergeant and have a look at her bedroom,” he said. “I’ll be back after my team gets here and recovers the body.”

  Mrs. Potts made a little sound and put her hand over her mouth. Julie and James just looked depressed.

  Bethancourt would have liked to see the dead woman’s bedroom, but felt he could hardly leave Astley-Cooper alone in the kitchen. After all, if he was horning in on the detectives’ turf, there was no obvious reason that Astley-Cooper should not do the same. So he stayed behind, settling in with a cigarette and a cup of tea, and told his eager host all about the discovery of the body.

  In time, the detectives returned, carrying an empty whisky glass, a half-empty bottle, and a container of prescription tablets, all encased in evidence bags. These they stored in the boot of the police Rover, and then hung about outside, awaiting the arrival of forensics.

  They appeared in due course, accompanied by a medical team and a diver, and everyone trooped back out to the lake. Bethancourt and Astley-Cooper hovered on the fringes of the activity while the men set to work collecting evidence, and the diver went in to examine the body while the doctor waited impatiently on the shore. Some of the men donned wading boots and entered the water at a little distance from the boulder in order to bring up the corpse. They went carefully and slowly, spreading the water with their hands, while the diver, having shot several pictures with an underwater camera, waited for them to make their way over to him.

  “She’s right here,” he said, stooping.

  “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Feel for it.”

  “You get ’round that end, Jeff.”

  One man slipped and fell with a splash, cursing.

  “Clumsy lout.”

  “Damned rocks are slippery.”

  “Yes, and the water’s cold. All right, now, better take her out this way.”

  “Everybody stand firm and pass her along. We’ll do better that way.”

  “Here she comes.”

  “Don’t lift her so high—let the water float her.”

  A sodden patch of black cashmere broke from the surface and was eased along, past the boulder and toward the grass. The men, wet and shivering now, moved carefully, easing the corpse along. Two of them scrambled out onto the shore and crouched down at the ready, the water streaming off them and soaking the earth.

  “All right. Easy now. Lift all together.”

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nbsp; The black cloth rose again, molding itself to a woman’s form, crowned with golden hair which was darkened to brown by the wet. With a slow, sucking sound the lake gave up its prize.

  “Gently now.”

  “Roll her this way a little.”

  “Have you got her, Dan?”

  “Yes, it’s all right. Just push a bit.”

  “There!”

  The men on the shore drew back, breathing harshly. Those in the water began to climb out, one of them lingering long enough to heave up the trailing end of the black coat and throw it over the body. It landed with a loud splat.

  The body lay facedown on the shore, shrouded in soaked black cashmere, the white legs curving lifelessly from beneath the fabric. The doctor bent to examine the head, searching expertly with his fingertips amid the wet locks of hair. He muttered to himself and then, with the ease of long practice, grasped a shoulder and flipped the body onto its back. He examined the forehead and temple and then felt down the length of the corpse.

  “Well?” asked Carmichael, standing over him.

  “Looks like she drowned,” said the doctor, still on his knees. “I won’t know for sure, of course, until I get her back. No other obvious injury. Do you want to get her fingerprints before I take her?”

  “Yes, that and the shoes,” answered Carmichael, beckoning to one of the forensics team.

  “Shoes?” said the doctor. “Oh, I see. Footprints.”

  His hands already encased in rubber gloves, Carmichael himself carefully worked the shoes off. They were flat, leather shoes, olivecolored like the weeds in the water. Carmichael dropped the first one into a plastic bag produced by Gibbons; the left shoe, however, he held flat on his outstretched palm.

  “Let’s have a little confirmation,” he said.

  He moved to the other side of the boulder and bent over the clear footprint in the earth there. The shoe in his hand fit into it perfectly. He looked up at Gibbons.

  “That’s it then,” he said. “She walked here herself.”

  It was late afternoon by the time they were ready to leave the farmhouse. Carmichael paused as they emerged from the house, marshalling his thoughts.

  “We’d best see what our other suspects were doing last night,” he told Gibbons. “Though it could all be for naught—this might turn out to be suicide, or even an accident, in the end.”