Murder has a Motive Read online

  Mordecai Tremaine sat silently enthralled in the back of the saloon, avidly drinking in the scene as though he was fearful of missing some portion of its loveliness if he moved or spoke, his sentimental, romantic soul reaching towards an understanding of how it was that poets and artists throughout the centuries had been constrained to express such magic in words or in colour so that something of it should always remain.

  Bordering the road on the left he saw a long, red-brick building with a low, thatched roof. There was a notice-board outside it, and Tremaine caught a glimpse of a printed poster as they passed. It was enough, brief though it was, for him to read the bolder lettering.

  MURDER HAS A MOTIVE

  A Play in Three Acts

  By

  ALEXIS KENT

  ‘I see you go in for drama in Dalmering,’ he remarked with a smile.

  ‘Yes,’ returned Russell, ‘we do.’

  Once again that odd note seemed to be in his voice, but he did not offer to elaborate upon what he had said.

  They turned a corner in that moment and came within sight of the village itself. It lay in a hollow a little below them, and in the brief instant in which the car was on the crest of the road before beginning the gentle run down, Tremaine thought that he had never looked upon a view so lovely.

  The light summer haze gave an unreal appearance to the land. The contrasting greens of grass and trees, the pleasantly uneven common land with its winding stream and rustic bridge and with half-hidden cottages and houses spaced around it, all seemed to merge into a picture possessed of an enchantingly insubstantial air. Tremaine felt momentarily like a man who gazes into an image framed in the depths of a pool which is still and yet not quite still and who is afraid even to breathe lest he should disturb the surface of the water and destroy the vision.

  The car coasted down the slope and reached the level road again. They ran through the deserted ‘square’ which was the local shopping centre, and in a moment or two were passing a copse lining the roadway which temporarily hid the common from view.

  Tremaine drew a deep, sighing breath, as though reassured that now he could do so without disturbing the peace and tranquillity which lay almost tangibly about him.

  ‘It’s a beautiful spot,’ he said, his heart in his voice.

  The doctor spoke over his shoulder, without taking his attention from the wheel.

  ‘It’s where they found the body,’ he remarked quietly.

  So quietly that Mordecai Tremaine was not at first certain that he had heard him correctly.

  ‘The body?’ he echoed, a little stupidly.

  ‘The body,’ repeated Russell. ‘The body of Lydia Dare. She was found stabbed to death in the early hours of this morning on the path through the copse we’ve just passed.’

  Tremaine looked blankly from one to the other of his friends.

  ‘Not—murder?’

  ‘Murder,’ said Jean Russell, and the hardness in her voice gave the word a flat, ominous sound which seemed to shatter the illusion of tranquillity like a steel hammer disintegrating a flawless sheet of glass into splintered fragments.

  She turned in her seat so that now she was facing him from the front of the little car.

  ‘Lydia was a friend of ours—a dear friend. That’s why we want to do something—why we feel, Paul and I, that we must do something. That’s why we didn’t wire you not to come today although we knew that it wasn’t likely to be a holiday for you since it’s obvious that Dalmering will be full of police and newspaper reporters.’

  Mordecai Tremaine tried to imagine dark, brutal murder, with all its inevitable camp-followers of endless publicity and enquiries, of screaming newspaper headlines and remorseless police investigations, of relentless, sometimes sordid, searchings for news and clues, and found that his mind refused to measure up to the task of connecting those things with Dalmering. They seemed so utterly opposed, so completely incompatible.

  But it was quite clear that Jean and Paul Russell were grimly serious. He knew them too well to have any doubts as to their sincerity.

  And he thought he knew, also, what had been in Jean Russell’s mind when she had told him that she had deliberately refrained from advising him not to pay his projected visit to Dalmering in view of what had happened.

  He waited, not quite certain whether or not to assume his conjecture to be the right one, and the problem was solved for him.

  ‘You know what we’re trying to suggest, don’t you, Mordecai?’ said Jean, her eyes searching his face.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, deliberately dull.

  ‘We want you to find the murderer,’ she told him bluntly.

  He still fenced, although it was the reply he had expected.

  ‘But surely it’s a matter for the police? They don’t like amateurs getting themselves involved in these things.’

  ‘You’re not an amateur now,’ she persisted. ‘You can’t offer that excuse—not after all the nice things your friend Inspector Boyce said about you after the Queen’s Newbridge Murder.’

  Mordecai Tremaine tried to overcome the feeling of complacency which was struggling to creep over him and endeavoured to look unimpressed.

  Inspector Boyce (of Scotland Yard) had had no direct connection with the murder which had thrust the little West country village of Queen’s Newbridge into the limelight of publicity. Officially the crime had been solved by Inspector Rich of the Westport and District Constabulary. But Rich, being an honest man and knowing that Mordecai Euripides Tremaine was acquainted with Boyce, had written privately to his colleague at the Yard and had given him a full account of the part Tremaine had played in the solution of the mystery.

  ‘Suppose you tell me all about it when we reach the house,’ he temporized. ‘It’s a complete surprise to me. The murder must have been reported too late to be in the newspapers. I didn’t read anything about it in the Gazette.’

  They had almost reached their destination by now—it was one of the smaller of the modern houses, although set, like its neighbours, in its own well-tended garden—and the doctor slowed down in order to swing over the road and drive through the gateway into the brick-built garage which was just beyond the house itself and pleasantly concealed by a rustic archway in which the roses were just beginning to appear. As he cleared the gate, with an expert certainty born of much practice, he nodded in recognition to a woman who had halted to allow him to pass.

  Tremaine did not see her features clearly, for she was wearing sun glasses which created a partial effect of disguise, but she carried herself gracefully, and her superb figure was emphasized by the lines—plain but not forbiddingly severe—of the white summer frock she wore. Her hair, shoulder length, was silkily blonde to a degree which caught the attention, framing as it did a clear-featured face which was healthily suntanned. Her eyes, Mordecai Tremaine told himself, his sentimental soul in full command, would almost certainly be blue.

  He realized a little guiltily that he had been openly staring, and that Jean Russell’s eyes were upon him with a quizzical air.

  ‘Karen Hammond,’ she told him, anticipating his question, and added, wickedly:

  ‘I’m afraid she’s married.’

  They had come to a halt outside the garage, and Tremaine made use of the few moments it took him to climb from the car to recover his self-possession.

  ‘Is she one of the regulars or one of the week-enders?’ he asked, with a carelessness as assumed as he could make it.

  ‘Both,’ returned Jean. ‘She’s here quite a lot, but her husband is more of a bird of passage. His work appears to keep him busy in town. Sometimes we see him down here at weekends and sometimes he seems to manage to get down during the week, but he’s very erratic. You never quite know whether he’s here or not.’

  ‘What does he do?’ asked Tremaine, and Jean Russell smiled.

  ‘You’re the detective,’ she told him. ‘All that we know is that he’s something in the city—which isn’t very helpful.’
/>   Tremaine was in the act of framing another question when they heard a step on the gravel path and a figure came from the direction of the garden at the rear of the house.

  ‘Hullo, Paul,’ said a new voice. ‘I just looked in to ask Jean if she—’ The voice broke off as its owner became aware of the presence of a stranger. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you had visitors.’

  ‘That’s all right, Sandy,’ said Russell’s cheerful tones. ‘Come along and be introduced. We want Mordecai here to get to know Dalmering, and of all the people in the neighbourhood you’re one of the first we’d like him to meet. After all, you’re something of an institution!’

  He ushered his visitor forward so that Tremaine and the new arrival were face to face.

  ‘Mordecai, this is Sandra Borne, one of our near neighbours. Most of us call her Sandy—she prefers it. Sandy—meet Mordecai Tremaine, an old friend of ours.’

  Tremaine found himself shaking hands with a bright-eyed little woman over whom he appeared to tower although his own height was no more than average. He estimated Sandra Borne’s age as something near forty, but he was aware that when it came to guessing how old any woman was he was on dangerous ground, and he refrained from setting his mind upon any definite figure.

  She was not by any means good-looking but there was a certain attractive vitality about her. She had the air of a capable, intensely ‘busy’ person, the kind of hard-working enthusiast who is responsible for organizing fêtes and pageants and all the numerous social activities of village life.

  Her forehead was wide, and its breadth was further accentuated by the piled-up dark hair, streaked with grey, which surmounted it, so that her head seemed a little too large for her short body. A small, straight nose with flared nostrils, a wide, mobile mouth, a rounded but firm-looking chin, and brown eyes which appeared to possess just the faintest suggestion of green but which he could not assess definitely because of the horn-rimmed spectacles she wore, completed the overall impression Tremaine received in the first moments of greeting.

  When the introductions had been made he had an opportunity of studying her more closely, and he saw then that her appearance of vitality was an artificial one; that she was struggling to maintain it, as though she felt it to be expected of her, but that it required a constant effort to keep up the pose.

  Her eyes were not as bright as he had at first imagined them to be; there was in their depths a mixture of strain, anxiety and other emotions he could not read, and they were faintly ringed with shadows. When she was off her guard her smile took on a fixed, mechanical quality, and underneath it the lines of distress were visible.

  The reason was soon made clear to him.

  ‘Sandy and Lydia Dare shared a cottage,’ said Paul Russell.

  He gave the information almost casually—with what was, Tremaine realized a little belatedly, a deliberately assumed air of unconcern. Sandra Borne’s reaction was much swifter than his own. She glanced quickly at the mild-looking man with the old-fashioned pince-nez to whom she had just been introduced, and then back to the doctor.

  ‘He knows—about Lydia?’

  ‘Yes, he knows,’ agreed Paul Russell.

  ‘They’ve just told me,’ interjected Tremaine, finding his voice at last. ‘I only arrived from London a few minutes ago. There was nothing in the newspapers before I left. I take it that Miss Dare—it was Miss?’ he added, turning to Russell. The other nodded and he went on: ‘I take it that Miss Dare and yourself were very close friends? It must have been a great shock for you.’

  ‘It was,’ said Sandra Borne in a low voice.

  It was clear from her face that discussion was painful to her and that it was taxing her self control to endeavour to remain unmoved. She turned to the other woman as if feeling the need for support from her own sex.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to fly, Jean. ‘There’s a—there’s a lot to be done.’

  ‘We understand,’ said Jean Russell quietly. ‘If there’s anything we can do to help you mustn’t be afraid to let us know.’

  ‘That’s an order, Sandy,’ said her husband.

  Sandra Borne’s eyes were a little misty.

  ‘You’re both awfully good,’ she said.

  Her voice trembled dangerously. Abruptly she turned and went down the path as though she dared not linger in case her emotion betrayed her. They watched her slight figure as she instinctively straightened as she reached the gate, determined to show a brave face to the world.

  ‘I think,’ said Mordecai Tremaine thoughtfully, ‘I’d like to know the whole story.’

  Jean Russell glanced significantly at her husband.

  ‘Whilst I’m getting a cup of tea ready,’ she observed, ‘you two men can talk.’

  The doctor led the way into the cool drawing-room, its half-drawn blinds toning down the heat of the sun and transforming its glare into a soothing twilight, and settled his guest into a comfortable lounge chair.

  ‘I’ll do my best to be as dispassionate as possible,’ he said, seating himself opposite Tremaine, ‘but as I told you, I knew Lydia—and I was called in when they found her this morning. So you’ll have to make allowances if I seem to be showing too much heat.’

  ‘Let yourself go, Paul,’ observed Tremaine, ‘and don’t be afraid of saying what you feel as well as what you know.’

  The other nodded, but he did not begin his story immediately. A hesitant look had come into his face now.

  ‘Knowing that you were coming down,’ he said haltingly, ‘Jean and I have been wanting to talk to you about it all day. And now that you’re here I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Try the beginning,’ said his friend. ‘Murder begins a lot farther back than the actual crime—at least, it does in most cases. How long had Lydia Dare lived in Dalmering?’

  ‘About eight or nine years. I believe her people live in Yorkshire—she used to go up to visit them several times a year.’

  ‘So that she was quite an old inhabitant? Most of the houses round about seem to have been built fairly recently.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose she’d be what you might call one of the oldest of the new crowd. Her cottage—hers and Sandy’s—was put up before the main estate was developed. Most of the houses were built about six years ago—it was a commercial scheme run by a private company.’

  Having found a point at which to embark upon his narrative, the doctor soon began to develop his theme, and Mordecai Tremaine—interjecting an occasional question—listened intently while Paul Russell told him what he knew of Lydia Dare and her way of life and of her last hours upon earth. And as he listened, he knew with a growing certainty that somehow, with the police or in spite of them, he would have to do what he could to find the assassin whose vicious hand and twisted mind had been responsible for the horror which had overtaken Lydia Dare in the darkness of that lonely path. For the murder seemed so utterly without reason, so utterly a deed of foul, useless and bloody villainy.

  Possibly he did not fully realize it even himself, but it was the fact that she had been engaged to be married and that her death had been encompassed almost upon the eve of what was to have been her wedding that weighed with him most. It was that which revolted and horrified his sentimental soul.

  A bachelor himself, Mordecai Tremaine’s sympathies were yet on the side of romance. He was the sworn friend of lovers. One of his chief delights was the reading of the admittedly highly coloured but at least refreshingly idealistic fiction offered by Romantic Stories. It was a trait which had more than once rendered him an object of suspicion to cynical chambermaids who had discovered copies of that magazine in his room, but he was a romanticist unashamed.

  To strike at the happiness of those who were patently in love was to arouse him to wrath. It awoke all the smouldering, deep-seated chivalry of the Galahad who dwelt within him. And hearing now of the pitiless, swift destruction of all the hopes which must have flamed so brightly in the hearts of Lydia Dare and the man she was to have married, and of
how the chill darkness of a shroud had so ruthlessly replaced the clinging warmth of a bridal gown, he was conscious of a deep and terrible anger.

  He hardly knew that he was drinking the tea which Jean had brought in to them. He replaced the cup mechanically on the tray on the trolley at his side and looked across at his hostess who had joined her husband and himself.

  ‘Do you mind if I slip out for half an hour or so, Jean?’ he asked diffidently. ‘I’d like to have a look around.’

  ‘Of course not,’ she told him. ‘Would you like Paul to go with you?’

  ‘No, don’t bother, Paul,’ he said, turning to the doctor. ‘You’ll probably have to attend to your surgery very shortly anyway, and I’d prefer to wander along on my own for a little while. I’d like to straighten things out in my mind.’

  There was no hesitation in his manner as he turned out of the gateway and walked down the roadway in the direction of the village and the copse in which Lydia Dare’s murdered body had been found. He walked like a man whose mind was unclouded by doubts, but it would have surprised—and possibly dismayed—his friends to realize that he had in fact no clear plan of action. There was only a somewhat nebulous idea within him that he must see the place where the murder had been committed as his first step.

  He had walked about two hundred yards when a dismaying thought came thrusting an imperative way into his mind with the same chill effect as an immersion in cold water.

  He halted involuntarily. Murder had been done. He was on his way to examine the scene of the crime. The police, of course, would have no comment to make. They would calmly allow a stranger to the village, a stray visitor with no official status, to wander at will about the spot marked X without uttering a word of protest.

  Or would they?