Murder Fantastical Read online

“You say he was a bachelor when his father died?” Henry asked.

  “Yes indeed. And considered a confirmed one, by most people. Like most confirmed bachelors, when he did fall, he fell hard. When he was in his late forties he went over to Ireland for his summer holiday, as usual—and came back with a bride less than half his age. A beautiful girl from a small village in Mallow. My mother.” There was a pause. Major Manciple lit his pipe. Then he pulled open a drawer in the desk and brought out a sepia-tinted photograph. He pushed it across to Henry with the diffident pride of a father exhibiting a snapshot of his firstborn.

  Henry took the photograph. It showed a young woman standing self-consciously beside a large aspidistra. She was wasp-waisted and wore her fair hair piled on the top of her head. Her elaborate silk dress sported a small bustle and a low neckline filled in with a lace fichu which rose to form a choker around her slender neck. Over this fichu she wore an elaborate, sparkling necklace composed of fern-shaped fronds, which matched her earrings. She was outstandingly pretty, with a bold, almost flirtatious smile on her generous mouth. A marked contrast, Henry thought, to the austere good looks of Augustus Manciple.

  George Manciple seemed to follow Henry’s train of thought. He said. “A strange marriage it was in some ways, I suppose, but happy. Ideally happy, for as long as it lasted. I’m afraid the Head spoiled his wife outrageously. He delighted in buying things for her and giving her lavish presents—and since he could well afford it, where was the harm?” Manciple looked at Henry aggressively, as though the latter had criticized his father’s generosity.

  Henry said, “No harm at all that I can see.”

  “None, none at all,” agreed Manciple, mollified. “Well now, first of all he bought this house for her. The Head had to live in school himself during the term time, of course, so Mother used to divide her time between here and Kingsmarsh. It’s only a few miles away, as you probably know. We children lived here all the year around with a procession of nannies and housekeepers and what-have-you. In the holidays we were all here together. My father loved this house. Next to his family, it meant more to him than anything in the world.

  “A couple of years after my parents married, Edwin was born. I came next, barely eighteen months later. Then there was a gap of six years before young Claud made his appearance. My mother had developed a passion for jewelry, and each new baby was the excuse for a really slap-up present from the Head. Not that he was short of pretexts when it came to buying jewels for her. Christmases and wedding anniversaries were almost as good as babies. But the really splendid pieces—the ruby and diamond parure, the three-strand matched pearl necklace, the fern-pattern diamonds you saw in the photograph—they were all birthday presents. Our birthdays, that is. I suppose altogether the Head must have spent more than twenty thousand pounds on jewelry. And sixty years ago that was a lot of money.”

  “It still is,” said Henry. He was by now considerably intrigued to know what had become of these treasures. Was it possible that Major Manciple, in spite of his precarious financial situation, still refused to sell his mother’s jewels on sentimental grounds? Or had they been sold long ago and the money spent?

  Manciple went on. “Two years after Claud was born—when I was eight and Edwin nearly ten—there was great excitement in the family. I can remember it well. We children were packed off to stay with Aunt Dora at Bexhill for six weeks, and we were promised that when we got home we’d find a new little brother or sister waiting for us.

  “I don’t know what went wrong. The Head would never speak about it. All I do know is that the baby arrived prematurely, stillborn. And my mother died. My father never got over it. Before his marriage he had been rather a withdrawn man, not given to easy friendships. With marriage he had blossomed, become sociable and almost gay. When Mother died, he went right back into his shell. Worse than that, he began to distrust everybody outside his immediate family circle. It began with the doctors, whom he blamed for my mother’s death. Then it spread to include his colleagues at the school, his servants at home, and eventually his friends and neighbors.

  “Of course, it was a gradual process and we children were too young to be aware of it at the time. Aunt Dora sold her cottage and came to live here, to run the house. I can just remember my mother and our life when she was alive. It’s a golden haze in my memory, like a long, glorious summer’s afternoon. And then everything changed.

  “Not that we were unhappy, don’t think that. Aunt Dora couldn’t have been kinder, and as for the Head—well—we idolized him, even if we were a little scared of him. And he loved us dearly. But—he tended to cut himself off more and more from the world outside this house… Which meant that we were cut off from it, too, and that’s not a good thing for growing boys. As soon as we were old enough we all made our way out into the world, away from Cregwell, but we were constantly aware of it. Wherever we might go in life Cregwell was always our home.

  “Now, the Head retired not long after Mother’s death. I told you that he was finding it difficult to get on with his colleagues. He lived here with Aunt Dora, and as he grew older, he became more and more distrustful of outsiders. He imagined that his stockbrokers were ruining him, that the tradesmen were cheating him, that his doctor was lying to him—you know the sort of thing. In the end the only friend he had left was his solicitor, old Arthur Pringle. They’d known each other since college days. The only honest man in England, my father called Pringle.”

  “And then they both died in the same car smash,” said Henry.

  “Oh, you know about that, do you?”

  “Your brother told me.”

  “Yes—the Head and poor old Pringle did each other in, in the end. Ironic, wasn’t it? Unfortunately, I was abroad at the time; in fact, we all were. I was in the Far East with my regiment; Edwin was in Bugolaland, and Claud in New York. As soon as I heard the news I resigned my commission and hurried home.”

  “Resigned your commission?” Henry repeated, surprised.

  “Oh, yes. That was the whole idea you see.” Manciple paused. “I’d better explain. You must realize that from an early age it was clear that Edwin and Claud had inherited the Manciple brain. The Head was one of the greatest classical scholars of his day, you know. His commentaries on the later Roman poets are now considered definitive. To his sorrow, none of us followed in his academic footsteps. Edwin realized his missionary vocation while still in his teens, and Claud was messing around with chemistry sets in the nursery. However, as I said, both of them had brains. I took after my mother in mental ability—without, alas, inheriting her looks. So there was really nothing for me except to go into the Army.”

  Manciple spoke blandly, without a trace of self-consciousness. He was obviously stating a simple fact which had long ago been acknowledged by the whole family.

  He went on. “As a matter of fact, the arrangement suited the Head very well. He was absolutely determined that one of us should make his home here at Cregwell Grange and preserve the house as a nucleus for the family. Edwin would clearly be unable to do so, and Claud had to be prepared to live wherever his work dictated. I didn’t care one way or the other about the Army; it gave me an opportunity for some shooting and polo, but otherwise, quite frankly, it bored me. So I was ideally situated.

  “The Head explained all this to the three of us some years before he died. He was going to leave me this place and the bulk of his money, not to mention Mother’s jewelry, on condition that at his death I would chuck the Army and come to live here. The others agreed at once. Claud was already doing famously in his profession, and Edwin had no use for money in the jungle. So that was the agreement.

  “Well, after Father’s death the will was read, and it was all just as he had said. He named Pringle as his executor and left him some money, but as Pringle died before the Head that was automatically annulled. For the rest, one quarter of his money, as represented by stocks and shares, was to be divided equally between Edwin and Claud. The remaining three-quarters came to me t
ogether with this house and its entire contents and the strongbox containing Mother’s jewelry, which was kept at the bank. All this on two conditions. First, that I should give Aunt Dora a permanent home here, and second that I should live in this house and maintain it as a center to which my brothers and their families could come at any time. The will ended: ‘I charge my son George never to sell the said dwelling house, Cregwell Grange, but to pass it on to his children or to his brothers’ children. I have left him ample means to maintain the property.’ ” The Major paused.

  Henry said, “So you retired from the Army and came to live here.”

  “You make it sound very simple and straightforward,” said George Manciple dryly. “In fact, it was nothing of the sort. After the will had been proved, we began the business of trying to sort out Father’s affairs. It was a nightmare. Pringle had been the only person in his confidence, and apparently Pringle had been instructed to put as little as possible in writing. Pringle’s files on the Head’s affairs were full of scraps of paper with cryptic numbers and initials scribbled on them—presumably as aids to memory. But Pringle was no longer there to interpret them. In any case, my father had long since refused to take advice from anybody, but managed his own affairs—if managed is the right word. To cut a long story short—and it was a long story, Tibbett, I can assure you—when everything was sorted out we found that my father had run through the best part of his fortune in wild and hopeless speculation on the stock exchange.

  “The stockbroker who transacted his business had become resigned years since to the fact that if he recommended my father to buy more of a good stock, he would immediately sell what he had of it and put the money into whatever rickety shares his broker had particularly warned him against. It was all part of his conviction that everyone was trying to cheat him. So what it all added up to was a couple of tons of virtually worthless share certificates. Not totally worthless, of course—he had had the sense to hang on to a few sound investments—but it was nothing like the fortune we had been led to expect. It was all the more of a blow because he had never seemed short of money in his lifetime.

  “Well, the shares were sold; Claud and Edwin received their meager portions; and the rest was sensibly re-invested. This, together with my small Army pension, produced just enough for me to live here with my family, but nowhere near enough to maintain the place in its old style. There seemed nothing for it but to sell at least part of my mother’s jewelry.” Again Manciple paused.

  Henry said, “A very sensible idea, I should have thought. There was nothing in the provisions of the will to stop you.”

  “Just what I thought. I went to the bank, got out the strong box, and took the stuff to a big jeweler in London to be valued. You can imagine my feelings when he told me that the whole lot was fake. Paste and glass. Not a real stone among the lot.”

  “Good heavens!” Henry was taken aback. He had certainly not expected that.

  “I went back and questioned the bank manager. It seemed that over a period of ten years or more before his death the Head had been in the habit of visiting the bank at intervals and taking out the box. Naturally, he did not permit anyone to see what he took out of the box—or put into it. Once, the manager did venture to ask whether the listed contents of the box remained the same—and he had his head bitten off for his pains. I then found some unspecified receipts from a London jeweler among Father’s papers. I visited the man and discovered that over the years the Head had been bringing him the items of real jewelry one by one, and having them copied in paste—all in strict secrecy of course. He must then have replaced the real piece with the fake and sold the genuine article. It explains why he was never short of money.”

  “Then,” Henry began. “he must have known that he was leaving you nothing but worthless…”

  Manciple sighed. “Oh, yes, he knew all right. I suppose he simply couldn’t face telling me, poor old man. He expected to live for many years longer than he actually did, and I dare say he always hoped that one of his mad speculations would turn up trumps and restore his fortunes. As a matter of fact, before he died in the hospital he was asking for me. The doctor wrote and told me. Apparently he was not very coherent, but he was trying to tell me something. All very sad.

  “I suppose you might say that in the circumstances I was not bound to keep the house, whatever the will said. In fact my lawyers advised me that there would be no obstacle to selling. But—well—I talked it over with Violet and my brothers, and we all agreed that if it were humanly possible we should carry out the Head’s wishes.

  “It hasn’t been easy, I can assure you. I have had to sell a lot of the original land, and finally the Lodge itself; and a lot of the better pieces of furniture and pictures have gone, to say nothing of my father’s library, as I told you. But we manage, you know. We manage.

  “I may say, however, that I have never regretted my decision to stay on here, never for a single moment. And we’re over the hump now. My daughter Maud, who has blessedly inherited the brains that by-passed me, has at last finished her expensive education and has gotten herself a good job. So things are looking up, you see.

  “As far as I am concerned, I have achieved what I set out to do, what the Head charged me to do. This house is still the center of the family, the focal point, as Father wished. Maud was brought up here, and when I am gone, she and her husband will take over the place and bring their children up here. Do you understand now, Mr. Tibbett, why I turned down Mason’s offer?”

  “Yes,” said Henry slowly. “Yes, Major Manciple, I understand. What I don’t understand is why was Raymond Mason so keen to buy this house?”

  Manciple shifted in his chair a shade uneasily. “I hardly like to say this, Tibbett,” he said, “but the man was a social climber. As I told you, I found him pleasant enough at first, but people like John Adamson never really took to him. He tried to impress people, you see. John’s told me, for instance, that if Mason spotted him coming up to the Lodge he’d quickly shove away the lurid paperback he was reading under a cushion and whip down some learned-looking tome, so that he could greet John with—‘Ah, Sir John. I was just dipping into Horace,’ or some such nonsense. That was just the sort of thing that annoyed John, but then he’s a bit of a snob I fear. English, of course. One has to make allowances. And then the Village people—they didn’t regard Mason as—as well…” Manciple cleared his throat loudly. “You know what villagers are like. Worst snobs of the lot. I suppose Mason imagined that if he owned Cregwell Grange they’d have to accept him as a landed gent.”

  “He could surely have bought a large country house anywhere in Britain,” said Henry.

  Manciple smiled and shook his head, “Oh, no. Dear me, no. That wouldn’t have done at all. I can tell that you never knew Mason or you’d realize that the one thing he would never accept was defeat. Cregwell it was that had given him the cold shoulder, so Cregwell it was that had to be conquered. I never saw a man’s mind more set on anything. It was as if the devil himself was driving him.”

  It seemed to Henry that the Irish brogue was growing more pronounced.

  “Now, what are the big houses around here? Well, there’s Kingsmarsh Hall, which has been the seat of the earls of Fenshire since the sixteenth century. Mason could hardly have bought that. There’s Priorsfield House, but that includes several hundred acres of arable farming land, and Mason had no mind to be a farmer. So that leaves Cregwell Manor, John Adamson’s home, and this place. Now, John’s a wealthy man and certainly wouldn’t dream of selling. Whereas, I—well—let’s say that I looked a pretty fair bet.”

  “I see what you mean,” said Henry.

  They looked at each other and there was the suspicion of a twinkle on each side of the desk.

  “So,” Manciple went on, “Mr. Raymond Mason made up his mind that he would buy Cregwell Grange. And then he found that it wasn’t for sale. So what did he do?”

  “Proposed to your daughter,” said Henry.

  “No, no, no.
That came later. His next move was a campaign of deliberate persecution directed against me, trying to make my life such a misery that I’d up and leave the place of my own accord.”

  “What sort of persecution?”

  “Every sort you can think of. First of all, it was the little bit of a garage that I had Harry Simmonds build for Maud’s little car. Mason tried to prove we’d no right to put up more buildings on the land. Then he found some right of way or other across the fields from the Village to the river and accused me of blocking it. Fortunately, I was able to prove that not a living soul had used it for a hundred years so that it had safely lapsed. But it was all very unpleasant. Then he started on about my range. He knew very well that shooting was my great hobby, clay-pigeon shooting. Well—not precisely clay pigeons, because they’re so devilishly expensive; I’ve invented a device of my own I’ll show you later. Anyhow, he knew how keen I was and that I had this range built in the garden. Miles away from Mason’s cottage, of course, but still he had to complain—about the noise. About it being dangerous. Petitioned the Council about it. Well, of course, I had him there. I simply rang John Adamson and Arthur Fenshire, who pretty well run the Council between them, and his petition was dismissed. Still—it wasn’t nice, you know.

  “Then he began reporting me to Sergeant Duckett for riding my bike without lights; said my chimneys were smoking; objected to my compost heap; claimed I had no license for the new boxer pup, and her only three months old. I really can’t describe what I suffered at that man’s hands, Tibbett. That was why I was so prompt about reporting it to Duckett when that gun disappeared. I wouldn’t have put it past Mason to take it himself and then run me in for not reporting it.”

  “I thought that things were better lately,” said Henry.

  “I don’t think I’d call it better,” said Manciple gloomily. “Out of the frying pan into the fire. When he found his foul schemes weren’t working, he suddenly changed his tactics to something even more sinister. Became charming and affable, the good neighbor. He flattered my wife, brought her plants for the rock garden, and so on. And then it came out that he was making up to Maud. Can you imagine the bare-faced cheek of it? He actually proposed to her!”