While they were choosing what I was to buy for them, I entered into conversation with the shopkeeper and postmistress concerning the stamps I should require to send a letter to America. Having settled this matter, I then purchased envelopes and notepaper and asked whether she did not think that the American police were more efficient than our own.
As I had hoped and anticipated, this proved to be an effective ploy, for she replied that, if they were not, she hardly supposed they would catch any criminals at all. I agreed with her and suggested that it was disgraceful that a woman like herself, living alone-that was a shot in the dark, but it found its mark-should be without police protection. She agreed and immediately confessed that she now felt extremely nervous at nights, since she knew that there was a fiend in human shape roaming about the village. She added that no one was safe.
'Must be a madman,' she said. 'Who with any sense in their head would kill first an innocent young lady who was not even known in the place, and then a nice, quiet gentleman like Mr Ward?'
'Oh, was he nice and quiet?' I asked. She assured me that he was and that he called regularly at her shop to buy snuff, for she had a licence to sell tobacco. He also used the post-office counter, she added, but only once a month.
'I suppose you cannot see from behind your counter which children or other people might ever have gone into the cottage where Mr Ward's body was found,' I remarked. She said that the police had asked her that, but she could tell them nothing except that some rude children occasionally came and shouted in at her doorway so that she was obliged to chase them away.
'The last lot ran into the cottage to get away from me, but that was weeks ago,' she said. 'I've seen nothing since.'
So the young Cliftons made their modest purchases, thanked me quite unnecessarily and we made our way up the slope to the house where they were staying. Having franked myself, so to speak, by purchasing their confectionery for them, I said that I should be interested to meet their aunt.
She proved to be a buxom, kindly woman, very different from the elderly and (I suspect) shrewish Mrs Honour, and when the children introduced me as a friend of Mrs Kempson-they had insisted upon taking me up the steps to the front door, although I am sure their usual entrance was by the sideway and the kitchen-Mrs Landgrave took me into the parlour and insisted upon giving me refreshment. We then got rid of the children and settled down to conversation about Mr Ward.
Yes, she said, he had been quiet enough and gave no trouble. She knew he spent time at the village public house, but declared that she had never seen him what she called 'the worse'. On the other hand, during the week or two before his death she had become increasingly worried about his idiosyncrasies. He had dug up their garden and her father's chicken-run and one day she had seen him come into the kitchen just as she had put the children's mid-day dinner on the table and had noticed that he was soaking wet up to his waistcoat and had great splashes of mud on his face.
Subsequently, although they had tried to hide the fact, she found that Kenneth's shorts and Margaret's cotton frock were also wet and muddy. When she discovered this and challenged them about it, they reported that they had seen Mr Ward standing in the sheepwash wielding a pickaxe. They had been alarmed and had hidden partly in the brook when he abandoned his strange occupation and appeared to be coming their way.
I had heard something of Mr Ward's pickaxe and spadework from Mrs Kempson, who had had it from Mrs Landgrave, but I was glad to get it at first hand from the same (I thought) reliable source.
'Do you think,' I asked, 'that Mr Ward attacked somebody with either spade or pickaxe and was killed by that person in self-defence and subsequently buried in the hope that his death could be kept from the police?'
'I can't see him going for anybody,' she said, 'not unless he had gone out of his mind. He was always quiet and decent when he was here.'
'Yet you were sufficiently anxious about the state of his mind to contact Mrs Kempson,' I said. She explained that it was the children of whom she had been thinking.
'It isn't nice to have anybody that's a bit touched when you have children around,' she said. 'Besides, we thought Mrs Kempson ought to know.'
'Did you think it strange,' I asked, 'that Mrs Kempson did not accommodate him at the manor house? Surely she had plenty of room up there?'
But Mrs Landgrave refused, very properly, of course, to commit herself on either of these points, protesting that she had never thought about it and that she had been glad of the money which Mrs Kempson paid. This seemed to lead us to a dead end and I was about to thank her for the refreshment she had provided-a glass of very good cowslip wine and a biscuit-when a thought recurred to me. I say 'recurred', my dear Sir Walter, because in an earlier idle moment it had occurred to me one day when Mrs Kempson was describing her first meeting (after his lengthy absence) with Mr Ward. This thought was that it was difficult to reconcile the cool, hard-headed, somewhat cynical ex-convict which she had described to me, with the mentally deranged individual of quiet, inoffensive habits but eccentric behaviour pictured to me by Mrs Landgrave.
Are you a suggestible person?' I asked her. 'I mean by that,' I explained, for I could see that she did not understand me, 'the kind of person who is apt to be influenced by the last speaker, for example.'
I was sure she would deny this, and she did. (People always do.)
'You're thinking of my sister Lally, the children's other auntie,' she informed me. 'I don't think anybody could make me change my mind once I'd made it up, except that sometimes, when I'm cross with the children, they can get round me, especially Ken, who is the most lovable little boy.'
'They are charming children,' I said. 'Well, then, Mrs Landgrave, if you are not suggestible, I would like to put a plain question to you and will wait while you consider your answer.'
'Oh, dear! You sound like that policeman,' she said. 'All right, then, you ask and either I'll answer truthfully or not at all.'
'Fair enough,' I agreed. 'Now Mr Ward was with you for just over five years, I believe. Did you ever wonder whether the man whom Mrs Kempson sent to you was the Mr Ward who carried out all that extraordinary delving?'
She stared at me, then she closed her eyes. She certainly took her time before she opened them again. Then she shook her head firmly.
'No,' she said decisively. 'He may have gone a bit wrong in his head, poor man, but it was the same
