House That Berry Built Read Online Free PDF Page B

odd jobs in the town before midday: so we drove to the Place Royale and berthed the car. Then we sat down beneath the chestnuts and ordered some beer.
    As I lighted a cigarette—
    “Hullo,” said Jonah, “there’s Shapely. He looks as though he has heard.”
    I looked up, to see the fellow whom I had seen in Lally by the side of his caravan. But now he was well turned out. His suit was grey, and I saw that his tie was black. He was standing still on the other side of the Place , as though he had just come out of the Hôtel de France. His underlip caught in his teeth, he gave the impression of a man confronted with duties he does not like, who is seeking to make up his mind how best to begin.
    “D’you think we should speak to him?”
    “Not unless he sees us,” said Jonah. “We hardly know the man – and we like him less.”
    Here Shapely looked up and saw us.
    As he crossed the Place , we stood up.
    “Hullo,” he said. “Thank God for a face I know. Can I sit down with you?”
    “Of course,” said Jonah. “Is beer all right for you?”
    “Please,” said Shapely. And then, “I assume you know.”
    “Saw it in The Times ,” said Jonah. “We’re all most awfully sorry. I take it you’ve only just heard.”
    “Last night,” said Shapely. “At Argéles. I’m roving, you know, with a van. I was going on up the Tourmalet. But I happened to pick up a paper, and there it was.”
    “You were called on the wireless,” I said.
    “I know. I never heard it. I drove into Pau this morning, shoved the van in a garage and went to the Bank. A sheaf of wires there, of course, and a letter from Joan, my sister, telling me all she knows. Funeral’s today, at Woking.”
    “Yes, I saw that,” said Jonah. “Not your fault you’re not there.”
    Shapely shrugged his shoulders.
    “I can’t get away even now. There isn’t a train till six.”
    “You’ve missed,” said I, “a lot of unpleasantness.”
    “That’s very true,” said Shapely. “All the same, I ought to be there – as a matter of form.” He drank and set down his glass. “I’m not knocked out, you know. Old R was – well, nothing to me. In fact, we didn’t get on, or I shouldn’t be here. But he had no relatives, and so it’s up to me to do what I can.”
    “What can you do?” said Jonah.
    Shapely crossed and uncrossed his legs.
    “I really don’t know,” he said. “But the murder was done in my home, and Old R was my stepfather.”
    “And you were in France. You can do nothing, Shapely. Even if you had been there, you couldn’t have done very much. The matter’s out of your hands. You may, of course, have some suggestion to make.”
    “Regarding the identity of the murderer?”
    “Yes.”
    Shapely shook his head.
    “You may know more than I do. I haven’t seen a paper, except the one last night. But as soon as I read the news, I assumed it was a crime of revenge. Old R was ‘a hanging judge’, and he fairly weighed out time. There must have been plenty of felons who wanted to do him in.”
    “He was always just,” said my cousin. “It is the unjust judge that gets under the criminal’s skin. But we know nothing at all. The police are holding their tongues.”
    Shapely pulled out a letter and found a place in its text.
    “This is what Joan says,” he said, and began to read.
     
    “… Old R was found by Still – that’s the butler – at seven a.m. Still had come in, as usual, to open the room. The French windows were still wide open, and the reading-lamp was burning beside his chair. Poor Old R was in the chair, dead and cold – with a length of flexible cord tied round his neck. The cord had been cut from the other standard lamp. The doctor says he knew nothing, because he had been chloroformed first. The pad of gauze and wool had been burned on the hearth. As far as I know, they found no finger-prints. When the brute had done it, he went to the coach-house and took the family car. You know, the Humber Snipe.