Faintley Speaking

‘Well, she’d let us take anything we liked, I suppose, but ferns and things were her favourites. Old Bewston nearly broke his neck climbing down an old quarry one Saturday. It wasn’t bad fun when that sort of thing happened, of course, but mostly it was just punk, and we used to chase the girls with toads to get a bit of life into things.’

‘What’s the name of the headmaster, Mark?’

‘It isn’t. It’s a her.’

‘Woman head of a mixed school, eh?’ said the Inspector. He wrote it down. ‘What’s she like? A man- eater?’

‘She’s all right,’ muttered Mark.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Miss Golightly.’

‘And does she?’

Mark, who related flippancy with sarcasm and therefore distrusted it, made no reply. He stared at the pattern on the rug, then raised his eyes and asked abruptly: ‘Do you know yet who murdered Miss Faintley?’

‘Not yet,’ the Inspector replied, ‘but it’s only a question of time, laddie. You didn’t, I suppose, see anybody up at that house?’

‘I didn’t go to the house,’ said Mark regretfully. ‘And your police won’t have me up there, because I’ve tried.’

The house, it seemed, was an enigma. Inquiry showed that it had been built by a certain Colonel Arden who, at one time – about 1901 the savants thought – had occupied it in company with his wife and two daughters. After his death it had remained empty for several years and had been up for sale. Then, in 1914, the Army had had it, and when that war was over it had been bought by a private school but was found unsuitably dangerous for small boys because of its position on the top of the cliff. It had been put up for sale again without success. The police interviewed the owner and his agents, but could gain no further information.

‘And that’s as far as we can get,’ said Inspector Vardon when he had journeyed to the town of Kindleford, where Miss Faintley had lived. He was speaking to his opposite number at the Kindleford police station. ‘What can you tell us about this woman Faintley?’

‘Nothing much,’ replied Inspector Darling. ‘I’ve recently heard that she had some connexion with a small tradesman in one of the back streets here, a fellow we’ve never caught out, but have had our eye on for some time. We’ve an idea he’s a fence, but we’ve never been able to prove anything. Of course, she may have been coshed and robbed. You can’t rule that out in these days.’

‘It wasn’t robbery,’ said Vardon. ‘Her handbag was near the body and contained three pounds and some silver and coppers. The rest of her money she had given in at the hotel office for safe keeping.’

‘The murderer may have been disappointed with his haul and clocked her in a fit of temper.’

‘Could be, but she was wearing a pretty good wrist-watch on a wide gold bracelet. Must be worth every bit of thirty or forty pounds.’

‘Um, yes. You’d think he’d take that. Well, what about going along to her home? I don’t think it will help much, though. She lived with an aunt, whom I’ve already interviewed, but I expect you’d like to talk to her for yourself.’

The aunt was a gaunt, sallow woman in her sixties. She seemed less grieved than annoyed by her bereavement, Vardon thought.

‘And who’s to pay the rent, or where I’m to go, is more than I can fathom,’ she said at the end of half an hour’s conversation during which she had told them nothing of any value. ‘When I came here to be a companion to Lily I never thought of being left with the place on my hands like this. Naturally I expected to go first.’

‘How long have you lived here, Miss Faintley?’

‘Only since Lily joined the school. We couldn’t get anything cheaper, and she never much liked the idea of lodgings. Always used to her own home until it was blitzed and her mother died, my brother having died several years before, of course, and Lily her mother’s sole support except for the pension.’

‘Did they live in London, then?’

‘Yes. After the house was blitzed they were given a requisitioned one, but my sister-in-law was very hard to please and never liked it.’

‘Oh, she wasn’t killed when their home was destroyed?’

‘No, neither of them was hurt, except the shock. But Mattie never got over the loss of her furniture and that. She brooded. I used to get cross with her and tell her she owed it to Lily to brace herself up, but it seemed she couldn’t bring herself. She died the year before last, and Lily tried lodgings and didn’t like them, so she persuaded me to bring my bits of things and we set up here. She’d nothing of her own except a bookcase and her writing-desk and chair, and those precious botanical cases which I believe have been more than half the trouble. I gave up my little house to do her a favour, and I shall never be able to get it back with the shortage like it is. I don’t know what I shall do!’

‘How long did your niece expect to stay at Cromlech for her holiday this year?’

‘That’s what’s so strange. I don’t know what she was doing in Cromlech at all! I mean, what is there in a place like that? We had a very nice private hotel booked in Torbury, where there would at least have been a picture palace if it turned wet, and a theatre if you wanted to fill up your evenings! But Cromlech hasn’t even a pier… just the beach huts and the cliff-railway. I was to have joined her in Torbury next week, and I was looking forward to it very much, my life being what you see… this flat, and the shopping, and Lily’s meals, and the washing. So why she was staying at a hotel in Cromlech is more than I can fathom. If she’d been younger, or the flighty kind, I would have thought the worst, for she’s never been as open with me as you would have thought, living together as we did and me having nobody to talk to for hours on end, but one thing I did know about her, she had no use for men of any sort and at any time. She thought herself a cut above them… most of them, anyway.’