It was getting dusk as we struck out along the lane indicated by the sign reading ‘TO THE HALL’. The wife was walking a little way ahead, and it seemed to me that she turned into the woods early.
‘Hold on,’ I called out.
She’d taken a woodland track we’d not seen before.
‘It’s this way,’ she said. ‘We’re going to the back of the house.’
‘That’s a bit out of it,’ I said. ‘We might as well be servants.’
After three minutes in the wood, we came to a tall gate, propped open.
‘Cap off,’ said the wife, as the Hall came into view.
The back of the house looked the same as the front but even handsomer, as I might have guessed, for the aristocracy would beat you all ends up. There was a stone pond immediately behind the house, and a very mathematical-looking garden had been made around this. Two stone staircases curled down from either side of this garden to reach the terrace, which was dramatic like a stage, except that it was sunken rather than high. Two wires were strung high across the terrace, and the paper lanterns hung from these. They held my attention, each like a little paper concertina: orange, red, green, and giving a beautiful soft glow, but one had got scorched and smoke was racing away from the top of it as the paper burned.
The lanterns were like toys, childish things, and yet the Chief stood underneath them. He was to the rear of the terrace and the sight of his clothes hit me like a station buffer.
The Chief wore an evening suit: trousers with braided seams, varnished shoes, white bow tie — and the hairs on his head were mustered into parallel lines and held down by Brilliantine. The perfection of the suit pointed up his natural imperfections, and I knew that I was for once seeing the Chief out of his element. The fellow he was speaking to, on the other hand, looked practically born to wear an evening suit, and he had one foot raised on a white iron garden chair which gave him a confident look. He was smoking a very white cigarette, and this made him seem to be pointing all the time, saying, ‘Now look here, it’s like this,’ while the Chief listened and looked as though he wanted to smoke but daren’t.
This second man was Captain Usher.
A couple also stood waiting on the terrace and these I knew must be the Chandlers: the brother-in-law of the murdered man and his wife. Robert Chandler was a bald man whose head went in slightly at the middle like a peanut shell; his wife was a round and pretty woman in a lilac dress with a train. They were both somewhere in the middle forties, which made them about of an age with Usher.
Of John Lambert there was no sign.
‘But they told us not to dress,’ the wife was saying, in a tone of voice I’d not heard from her before, for it seemed to hold real fear. We were approaching two avenues made by dark firs that had been cut into cones like witches’ hats. Which one to choose? Would there be a right one and a wrong one? You could bloody well bet there would be.
But before we reached the trees, an advance party approached us: a chambermaid and a manservant of some sort — two servants kept back from Scarborough. Both carried trays holding bottles and glasses. They closed on us and then divided, the parlourmaid making towards the wife, the manservant heading my way.
I realised that he was the servant I’d seen that morning, the amiable one who’d directed me to the gardener’s cottage. He no longer looked horsy, but like an expert on wines.
‘Hock or claret, sir?’ he said.
I took a claret because it was nearest. But I felt I moved too fast, because the man said, ‘Or there’s champagne at the table, sir?’
Looking over, I saw a small table covered by a white cloth, and over-crowded with bottles and ice buckets. I had the notion that the four people standing around it and waiting for us were all adults, and that the wife and I were children. Evidently the four had all eaten supper, and we had received an invitation of an inferior sort after all, and I knew this would go hard with the wife. I knew also that her nervousness and embarrassment on this account would far exceed in her any anxiety about any murderous doings.
We were not approaching the terrace by the two proper walkways, but had somehow ended up going haphazard over the grass. Having drunk off my claret, I found that I was now making towards the hosts with an already empty glass, which also didn’t seem quite etiquette. The wife, of course, carried no glass, since she was tee-total.
It was Chandler’s wife who was waiting to greet me at the margin of the terrace. Do not on any account say, ‘I see that you do yourselves pretty well here,’ I told myself. Do not say, ‘This is laying on luxury.’
She shook my hand, she might even have curtsied; she said something I didn’t quite catch and then, after a long beat of silence, I heard myself saying, ‘Lovely place you have here.’
Meanwhile Lydia was being greeted by the host, who said, ‘It is lovely to see you again,’ and the two ‘lovelys’ seemed to clash.
From the rear of the terrace, I heard a laugh from the Chief as he spoke to Usher, and it was not quite natural, not quite him. Had Usher got him under the gun? Had he bested him as he had bested me?
And where had the Chief got his bloody dinner suit from?
The hostess, who stood before me, was looking down at the ground. Beneath the folds of her dress, she moved one of her feet, as though testing the bricks beneath. She looked up again, and a ruby necklace rose on the slopes of her white bosom as she took a deep breath. I had the idea that she was at once very distant and very near, and that she was a little squiffed. She then spoke all in a flurry:
‘We had such a friendly talk earlier on at the village with your wife, Mr Stringer. She said she was absolutely just dying to see some Chinese lanterns, and — anything to oblige!’
She turned and smiled with arm outstretched, presenting the lanterns of which there was now one fewer, the scorched one having burnt right out. I looked from it towards the Chief, who had certainly noticed me, but had not yet given me any acknowledgement. Mrs Chandler, spotting the direction of my glance, said, ‘You won’t believe it but those two are talking about camels.’
As the manservant poured more claret for both of us, Mrs Chandler said something about how the two men had been in Africa, so what could you expect? There was practically nothing in Africa but camels. Then the host, Robert Chandler, came over with his arm in Lydia’s.
I looked at Lydia’s white-gloved hand, and there was a glass of champagne there, and the sight was so all- of-a-piece and so elegant that for a moment the shock did not register. As I looked on, she drained off the rest of the glass and shot me a look that clearly said, ‘You put away gallons of alcohol every week, so why shouldn’t I take a glass now and again?’ I understood straightaway that it was the shame of not being invited to the meal that had made her do it, but the sight of the glass so knocked me that I said to the host:
‘By the way, Mr Chandler, where is John Lambert?’
‘John?’ he said. ‘Well, we hope to see him here. But I think he is a little over-strained just at present.’
‘That’s what everyone says,’ I said.
‘Do they?’ said Mr Chandler, and he looked put out. ‘I was rather congratulating myself on my — y’know — insight. He’s not a very forward party exactly, and he’s been conferring with Captain Usher all day, so I expect he’s pretty worn out. Now that sounds as though I’m being rude about Usher when in fact he seems a perfectly pleasant chap who knows a very great deal about camels and horses and dogs and things like that. Tell me, do you know that fellow that runs The Angel? What’s wrong with him?’
It hardly mattered what I said in reply. I was becoming confident that Chandler — who at some stage after the arrival of my fourth glass of claret told me to call him Bobby and his wife Milly — did not really know Usher, and that he was out of the picture as far as any bad business was concerned. As he burbled on in his amiable way, he kept glancing over to Lydia, who was talking to Milly, while I heard the Chief say to Usher, ‘Strange that is, sir… I always took the General for a base wallah,’ at which they both laughed, but especially the Chief.
Of course, that would be how things stood between them. Chief inspector was a higher rank than captain, but Usher was an army captain, and it was the army that signified. The Chief had only been a sergeant major in his service days, so the Chief ‘sirred’ Usher just as I ‘sirred’ the Chief. Only that word sounded wrong on the lips of a man who’d seen as much as my governor.
Another glass of claret was presented to me by the footman, who seemed to have become a special ally of mine. I looked across to the Chief again, and Usher was watching me. Had he been forewarned that I’d been invited? His gaze was not over-friendly, and I was quite sure that if he’d had his way I would be nowhere near the Hall at this moment, but it seemed that he was a species of guest just as I was, and so caught between good
