Bleeding Hooks Page 19

  He was interrupted by a shout which seemed to come from the next field, beyond the hedge which had sheltered them. They heard Mr. Winkley’s voice raised in anger, and Mr. Pindar’s pitched in a fearful key.

  “Don’t, Winkley! Leave me alone!”

  John glanced apprehensively at the doctor, and they both ran towards the hedge. When they had negotiated the low wall into the next field, they saw the two men struggling together at the far end. Before they had moved forward again, the familiar report of a gun echoed in the clear air, followed by a long cry, and when they reached the end of the field, they saw Mr. Pindar lying on the ground, with Mr. Winkley, gun in hand, standing over him.

  The doctor groaned as he forced himself to his stiff knees beside the fallen man.

  “I congratulate you, Mr. Winkley.” he remarked grimly. “It’s a good plan to take a doctor with you when you intend to commit a murder!”

  Chapter 31

  When Mr. Winkley next saw Mr. Pindar, the latter was lying in bed propped up by a snowy mountain of pillows. A maroon silk dressing-gown, adorned with golden horseshoes, was draped round him, practically hiding the voluminous bandages which covered his shoulders. He smiled a welcome at Mr. Winkley, and was as suddenly serious.

  “I don’t know what to say,” he began. “Of course you realize that you saved my life.”

  “So I wasn’t wrong.” Mr. Winkley sounded pleased with himself. “You really did intend to...” He broke off quickly, and glanced at Mrs. Pindar.

  She interpreted the glance correctly.

  “It’s quite all right. I know all about it,” she said. “How he could ever have done such a thing... If he had died, I...” Her lower lip trembled, and slow tears gathered in her eyes. “I shall never forget what you’ve done for us.”

  Mr. Pindar made a movement forward, winced with pain, and lay back again on the pillows.

  “Oh, I say!” exclaimed Mr. Winkley, feeling considerably embarrassed. “I’m sure you ought not to let him talk, Mrs. Pindar. He’s got quite an ordeal in front of him when he gets to the hospital for that X-ray. Wouldn’t it be better if he rested now?”

  “No, that’s okay, Winkley,” said Mr. Pindar. “The doctor filled me up with brandy, and the pain isn’t too bad if I remember not to move about. We both feel that we owe it to you to explain things a bit. We know that you won’t mention it outside this room. Isn’t that right, darling?”

  Mrs. Pindar nodded, seated herself gently on the side of the bed, and took his hand in hers.

  There was a pause, then Mr. Pindar said:

  “What would you say if I told you that we were not married?”

  Mr. Winkley smiled as if the statement afforded him no surprise.

  “I’d say it was just about time that you were,” he replied.

  “I knew you’d take it like that,” went on Mr. Pindar. “You’ll probably think me the world’s worst cad, but –”

  “But it’s all my fault,” put in Mrs. Pindar. “We’ve been crazy about each other for two years, and he’s asked me to marry him in every letter, and whenever he was on leave, but I always refused.”

  She paused for a moment.

  Mr. Winkley, who saw a great deal more below the surface of things than most people imagined, did not ask the obvious question. He looked instead at the golden sheen which the sunlight from the window reflected in the natural waves of her hair, and at her lovely skin and features, and thought that, in all probability, he would never see a more beautiful woman.

  “I refused,” she repeated, “because I am ten years older than Jack, and I knew it would never do. You don’t notice the difference in our ages now, and of course that scar of his makes him look older, but a woman who marries a man younger than herself loses her peace of mind. She is bound to envy younger women as the years go by, and will try to look younger than she really is. I could foresee a hectic round of beauty parlours in another ten years’ time, and myself running like a lost soul in search of my youth while I destroyed his. When he is forty, I shall be fifty. When he is fifty, I shall be –”

  “– still the most beautiful woman in the world,” finished Mr. Pindar.

  “Idiot! Mr. Winkley, I was sure that I was right to refuse to marry him, but because we love each other we came away together. I persuaded him that we had the right to do so, and I still feel that there is nothing wrong in it. For a week or two, it was heavenly, but lately, people have grown suspicious of us. I’ve been asked all kinds of intimate questions, and the deceit of it all has spoiled everything. Jack still wanted to marry me, but I refused again, and we decided to part. You know the rest. As soon as I heard that he’d gone out shooting, instead of fishing, as he’d said, I knew what he meant to do.”

  “So you’re going to marry him after all,” said Mr. Winkley benevolently.

  She raised her troubled eyes to his.

  “What else can I do?” she said. “I should never forgive myself if anything happened to him.”

  “It won’t be so bad, darling,” said Mr. Pindar, adoring her with his eyes. “I can always pretend that you’re my mother when I meet my school pals!” He drew her hand to his lips and kissed each separate finger. “Shameless hussy!” he teased.

  Mrs. Pindar bent over and kissed the puckered scar which ran from his temple to the corner of his mouth, then got up from the bed.

  “I must go and see what arrangements Dr. Roberts has made about getting you to the hospital,” she said. “You can have a heart-to-heart talk with Mr. Winkley,” and she moved, graceful and straight, towards the door, and closed it softly behind her.

  Mr. Winkley was not aware of his thoughts until Mr. Pindar put them into words.

  “It’s like the sunshine going out of the room, isn’t it?” he said. “Do you wonder that life doesn’t seem worth living for me without her? Look here, I’m terribly sorry to have dragged you into this, but if it hadn’t been for you –” He broke off in sudden embarrassment.

  “Never mind that,” replied Mr. Winkley. “But as I am in, I wonder if you’d mind clearing up one or two points for me. Not if it’s too painful to talk about, of course,” he went on in his most diffident manner. “You see, I so nearly didn’t save you from killing yourself. You left the gun in my hands, and yet you were still able to pull the trigger. I hadn’t time to point the muzzle right away from you, and that’s how you got shot in the shoulder. I shall worry about it for weeks if you don’t explain. I’ve got that kind of mind, you see.”

  Mr. Pindar drew his lower lip hard between his white, young teeth. The interview was already beginning to tire him, and his shoulder was throbbing steadily and painfully.

  “I was a damned fool!” he exclaimed savagely. “Of course I’ll tell you. I owe you that at least. It was an arrangement with a piece of string, and it seemed foolproof to me when I thought of it. You see, I thought it would make the whole affair look more accidental if I didn’t touch the trigger with my finger. My finger might have tightened on it when I – when I was dead, and it would have been bad for her.” He bit his lip again, and spoke with an effort. “I threaded the string through the trigger with a special slipknot that gives a double action. It pulls suddenly tight, and then springs apart. The idea being that when I pulled it, the string would tighten on the trigger, discharge the gun, and drop off on to the ground. No one would see the string, the gun would fall down with me on top of it, and everyone would think I’d tripped over it, and had forgotten to put the safety catch down.”

  “A piece of string,” said Winkley thoughtfully.

  “Well, it was really a piece I cut off my fishing line,” explained Mr. Pindar. “It’s green, and I thought it wouldn’t show up on the grass. I don’t know where it is now.”

  “In my pocket,” explained Mr. Winkley, pulling it out. “It’s strange that I’ve been looking for a piece like this. Number two Kingfisher, isn’t it? That your rod?”

  He indicated a two-piece greenheart rod standing, ready for use, in a corner of the
room. He walked towards it, and Mr. Pindar watched with interest as he compared the cut ends of the line.

  “Rather a heavy line to use with a light rod like this,” he remarked. “What kind of knot is it that you used?”

  “I don’t know what it’s called,” replied Mr. Pindar. “I picked it up from young Claude Weston when he did that sleight-of-hand show. You remember the trick with cords that you and I helped him with?”

  “I remember the trick,” said Mr. Winkley, “but I’m damned if I know how it was done.”

  Mr. Pindar puckered his brows in pain.

  “It isn’t easy,” he admitted, “but, you see, I’m used to tying all kinds of knots. They’re part of my job.”

  “R.N.?” queried Mr. Winkley.

  “Yes. Mrs. Mumsby guessed right, and it was damned queer because I’d never set eyes on her until we came to this hotel. That’s why we had to be so careful, and why the idea that anyone might guess we weren’t married scared us. Mavis has visions of a long and honoured career for me, and any suspicion of an affair like this would soon put an end to that. The Royal Navy doesn’t object to its officers making use of prostitutes, but to take a woman of your own class and not marry her – well, you know the old code. ‘The Navy whereon, under the good Providence of God, the wealth, safety and strength of the kingdom chiefly depend’ – that kind of thing, you know. They seem to think that the state of matrimony was instituted especially for the benefit of the Senior Service. All we use our swords for, nowadays, is for making archways at weddings –”

  “Do you think you could teach me how to tie that knot?” asked Mr. Winkley, who had been too busy with his own thoughts to pay much attention to what Mr. Pindar had been saying.

  “I’ll try, but it’s rather difficult to get it right. It’s like the evening ties with a tapered end; if you turn the end up at one particular point, instead of down, you get the whole thing wrong, and have to start again. With this confounded shoulder, I can’t do it for you.”

  Mr. Winkley seated himself in a low chair beside the bed, and took the length of fishing-line in his hand.

  “Left under right,” gasped the wounded man, now seriously much distressed. “Bring the two ends down. No, I’m sorry, up. Now take the left one over. No, that’s not it. I’m frightfully sorry. I’m afraid I can’t –”

  A light tap sounded on the panel of the door, and Mrs. Pindar walked into the room. She looked straight across at Mr. Pindar, sweating and gasping against the pillows, and held open the door.

  Mr. Winkley, perceiving in her eyes a look similar to that which he had seen in the eyes of a sheep collie bitch which resented the attention being paid to her puppy, rose hastily, murmuring apologies, and walked out into the corridor.

  Chapter 32

  “Now what have you been up to?”

  Pussy Partridge addressed Mr. Winkley in the tone of voice in which, at home, she was wont to reproach her two cats, Djinn and Ginger.

  She and Gunn had evidently made up their quarrel in a way known only to themselves, and were waiting, Mr. Winkley noted with some dismay, to waylay him in the hall as he descended from the Pindars’ bedroom.

  And just when I’m getting along so much better by myself, he reflected.

  “Well,” continued Pussy, “what’s all this we hear about you trying to murder Mr. Pindar?”

  “Oh no,” said Mr. Winkley, “that was all a mistake, I assure you. There was nothing like that at all. I only –”

  “You needn’t try that old-fashioned stuff on me, because it won’t work,” interrupted Pussy. “A bargain’s a bargain, and you promised to let us in on all your discoveries, or else! So cough it up, as the ghillie said to Mrs. Pindar when she felt seasick.”

  Mr. Winkley sighed, and wondered why he had ever considered Pussy’s blatant outspokenness an asset. However, he realized that he would have to give some explanation of the shooting sooner or later, and, hoping to point a moral to the two young people, he said, not quite truthfully, that the Pindars had quarrelled rather violently, and that Mr. Pindar, in his distress, had tried to commit suicide.

  But the reception accorded to this piece of information was disappointing.

  “The silly so-and-so!” exclaimed Pussy. “If you ever did a thing like that, Piggy –”

  “Who? Me?” asked Gunn. “Not bloody likely! Quotation. George Bernard Shaw, so it counts as literature. No woman’s worth killing one’s self for, in my opinion.”

  “Quite right,” agreed Pussy, “and no man either.”

  Mr. Winkley sighed again.

  He quite despaired of understanding these two. When they were on good terms, they agreed with each other about everything; when they quarrelled, they disagreed about the same things. He realized that he took them too seriously, but it was difficult for a bachelor, almost old enough to be their father, to do anything else. He wondered what kind of men and women they would become, and tried, ineffectually, to remember whether he had been quite so gauche, and yet so sophisticated, in his twenties. He decided that one good point in their favour was that they had so far treated his confidence with respect, and he wondered, for the hundredth time, whether they were quite as foolish as they appeared to be. He could not see that there was anything to be gained by making a mystery about the Pindars’ affair, so he proceeded to fill in the details, withholding only the fact that they were not married.

  “I’m not sure that you’re telling the whole truth and nothing but, s’welp-me-bob,” remarked Pussy, regarding him with quizzical eyes, “but it seems to clear them of Mrs. Mumsby’s murder.”

  “I don’t know so much about that,” replied Gunn. “They might have murdered her, realized that we were suspicious, and planned today’s performance to put us off the scent. That piece he cut off his fishing-line may have been the very piece he used to try and strangle you. He thought we had tumbled to that knot, and hoped to lull out suspicions by coining dean. He may even have pointed that gun at his shoulder to ensure Mr. Winkley hitting him, just to make it more realistic.”

  “Rather far-fetched,” replied Mr. Winkley. “Besides, why did he kill the monkey?”

  “He didn’t. Or, if he did, it was a red herring,” replied Pussy with her usual high disregard for metaphor.

  Mr. Winkley shook his head.

  “I don’t agree,” he said. “There must be some connection between all these events involving Mrs. Mumsby, the salmon fly, the monkey, and your midnight visitor. There were other incidental coincidences as well, but those four things are in the main line of deduction.”

  “Says which?” gasped Pussy.

  Gunn explained patiently.

  “He means that we’ve collected a lot of facts together and that some of them don’t mean a thing, but that some of them are connected with the murder, and these are the salmon fly, the monkey, and you.”

  “Cheribi for da organ, da monkey, an’ me,” sang Pussy in a highly unmusical voice. “But if he knows that, my darling Pig, he must know who done it.”

  “I’ve a pretty good idea,” said Mr. Winkley. “When I get some information from the Yard, I shall be sure.”

  “You think it’s Claude, I know you do!” cried Pussy. “Oh, why did he lose a fly, or have a monkey, or tie that knot!”

  “Shut up, Pussy,” said Gunn. “You know, Mr. Winkley,” he went on, “I can’t help thinking that we’ve been taking this murder from the wrong end. You know that American criminal lawyer, Perry Mason...?”

  “That gas-bag!” exclaimed Mr. Winkley.

  “Maybe he is, but he’s clever all the same. He says – I wrote it down in my pocket-book – yes, here it is – ‘In the long run, the essence of all successful detective work lies in reconstructing the life of the victim. That gives motivation and motivation makes murder.’ Has it occurred to you how little we really know about Mrs. Mumsby? No one here ever met her husband when he was alive, and she seems to have no friends or relations.”

  “It was partly because it had occurred to me
that I went up to London.” replied Mr. Winkley. “But while I’m waiting for results, it might be a good plan to clear up some of these conflicting side-lines which you both seem to have collected so easily. We’ve cleared the Pindars, or we may assume that we have for the moment. What about yourselves?”

  Pussy and Gunn grinned at each other, but neither of them spoke.

  “Perhaps it may simplify things if I tell you what I’ve found out about you for myself,” went on Mr. Winkley. “You have no alibi for the time of the murder. You went up to the small lake with no intention of staying there, and Mr. Gunn caught a decent-sized trout within the first twenty minutes, so your reason could not have been that the fishing was bad, and you felt bored. You came into the hotel before luncheon, but you didn’t have a meal in the dining-room, yet no one noticed you going out again. You may be interested to know, Miss Partridge, that your chambermaid went to take your laundry into your bedroom at about one-thirty but found the door locked. Of course, if you could prove that you were inside between then and two o’clock, that would clear you of suspicion, but I’m afraid you can’t.”

  “Did you try the door for yourself?” asked Pussy. “There’s a little piece of linoleum which sticks up inside, and you have to force the door to open it.”

  “I did try the door,” agreed Mr. Winkley, “and I found that a piece of linoleum had recently been cut to look as if it jammed the door, in case anyone started to ask awkward questions. But it only acts as a wedge if someone is inside the bedroom to arrange it.”

  “We give you full marks,” said Gunn. “You really deserve to be told all about it, though, as it happens, Pussy and I had already decided that you ought to know. You see –”

  “Let me tell him,” said Pussy. “It will sound better. He might have old-fashioned ideas about these things. In fact, I’m sure he has.”