15
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Ironically enough it was Harold Cartwright who turned up first. At the Police Station. Crosby led him into Sloan’s room.
“You’ve had another death,” he said abruptly.
“I fear so.”
“Where is this all going to end, Inspector?”
“I wish I knew, sir.”
“First my cousin Josephine and now this student. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Murder doesn’t always. Not to begin with.”
“This boy—did my cousin know him?”
Usually it was Sloan who asked the questions, other people who answered them. Clearly Harold Cartwright, too, was in the habit of asking the questions that other people answered. Sloan let him go on that way. Questions revealed quite as much as answers; especially the ones that didn’t get asked.
“William Tewn? No, sir, we have no reason to suppose that Sister Anne knew him. Have you?”
“Me, Inspector? I told you I haven’t had sight nor sound of Josephine in twenty years.”
“So you did, sir. I was forgetting.”
Cartwright looked at him suspiciously. “And it’s true.”
“Yes, sir. We know that. Visitors and letters are both rationed in a convent.”
“Like a prison,” said Cartwright mordantly. “Poor Josephine.”
Sloan pushed a blotter away. Not tonight, Josephine. Nor any night, Josephine. Poor Josephine.
“And yet,” went on Cartwright, “Josephine and this young man Tewn have both been killed this week.”
“That is so,” acknowledged Sloan.
“Tewn saw something that gave him a lead on Josephine’s murder?”
“That’s the obvious conclusion, isn’t it, sir? We’re working on that now.” So obvious that even the police couldn’t miss it?
“So someone kills Tewn, too, to stop him talking?”
“Just so,” said Sloan. It could even be that way.
“This is Saturday. How did—er—whoever did it— know that Tewn hadn’t talked about what he saw?”
“There are at least three answers to that, sir, aren’t there?” Sloan was at his most judicial. “One is that he didn’t know if Tewn had talked or not, another is that Tewn saw something all right on Wednesday but that it didn’t register as important until he heard that a nun had died that night…”
“And the third?”
“The third is that whoever killed Tewn might not have known until yesterday the name of the student who went inside the Convent. He might not have known who it was he had to kill, just as we didn’t know ourselves until yesterday evening. Just as you didn’t know who it was either, sir.”
“But I did,” Cartwright said unexpectedly.
“You did? Who told you?” Sloan snapped into life.
“He did himself. At least I take it it was the same lad.”
“When?”
“On Thursday night at the fire. They were all standing round watching—like you do with a bonfire— waiting for the guy to catch alight. It was before you came along and did your brand-snatched-from-the-burning act.”
“Well?”
“I was standing with a bunch of ’em when I realised they’d got a nun up top as a guy. I made some damn silly remark about that being a path not leading to Rome and how had they managed to get the full rig. One of them said he and another chap had done it and it had been dead easy.”
“The vocabulary rings true,” said Sloan, leaning forward. “Now what else did he say? Think very carefully, sir, this may be important.”
Cartwright frowned. “Blessed if I can remember. No, wait a minute. There was something. The other chap with him made some sort of remark… ‘Easy as stealing milk from blind babies.’ That was it, and the first chap—the one who told me he’d got the habit…”
“Tewn.”
“He laughed and said he reckoned it was all a matter of getting the milk warm enough—if you did that everything else was all right.”
“Do you know what he meant?”
“No, Inspector, but the others all laughed at that. It sounded like some sort of Institute joke. Or even an agricultural one.”
Sloan made a quick note. “Now, about the fire, sir. You did tell me how it was you came to be there, didn’t you?”
“I did, Inspector,” he said without rancour, “but I will tell you again if you wish.”
Sloan inclined his head; and then regretted it. The eternal politeness of the nuns was quite infectious. He, a hardened Police Officer, would have to watch it.
“I was sitting in the bar of The Bull,” said Cartwright, “on Thursday evening at something of a loose end. It is very unusual for me to have any free time, you understand. Also, I had only a few hours before been told by you of my cousin’s premature death and I was not quite sure what was to be done about it. I meant to go out for a walk round the village to clear my thoughts a bit in any case, but when I heard some old man in a corner of the bar talking about a big bonfire at the Institute I thought I might walk that way.”
“Substitute ‘dirty’ for ‘old,’ ” said Sloan, “and you could be talking about a man I want to see.”
“Hobbett was the name,” said Cartwright. “I found that out afterwards. Contentious fellow. He was sitting there dropping hints about fun and games at the Institute. Apparently last year on Bonfire Night the students —”
“I know all about that,” said Sloan wearily.
“This man was saying more-or-less that for the price of a drink he could tell a tale, and I decided to take my walk.”
Sloan nodded. You could see why Cartwright was a captain of industry. He didn’t waste words and he stuck to the point. He was giving just the right impression of anxious helpfulness, too, and so far had told Sloan just one thing that he didn’t know already. Sloan eyed his visitor’s figure. Business luncheons hadn’t left too much of a mark there. He was only medium tall but strong enough to swing a weapon (somewhere between a paper-weight and a cannon-ball) down on the head of an unsuspecting woman. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but then not everyone could run one of the largest private companies in the land either. You couldn’t begin to work out where scruple and resolution came in—perhaps not too much of one and plenty of the other for both. He didn’t know. He was only a policeman.
“But it really comes down,” Cartwright was saying, “to asking who could possibly have wanted to kill my cousin Josephine.”
“Just you,” said Sloan pleasantly.
There was no spluttering expostulation. “I didn’t kill her,” said Harold Cartwright.
“Perhaps not,” said Sloan. “But it’s saved you a lot of trouble, hasn’t it?”
The man eyed him thoughtfully. “I’m not sure, yet. That’s why I’ve come to see you. To ask for something.”
“You don’t want,” said Sloan gently, “the chairman of Cartwright’s Consolidated Carbons to be publicly connected with the late Sister Anne of the Convent of St. Anselm at Cullingoak who died in dubious circumstances on Wednesday—which is why you have stayed here in this village holding yourself ready for questioning rather than gone back to London where we should have had to come to see you.”
“Inspector, should you ever leave the police and want a job, come to see me.”
“Thank you, sir, but I feel I’ve earned my pension. And I’m going to enjoy it. This request for no publicity —I take it that you would like it to hold good until after one minute past ten on Thursday morning?”
