Dead Man's Folly - Agatha Christie [27]
‘I think perhaps your secretary, Miss Brewis, and after that the girl’s mother.’
Sir George nodded and left the room.
The local police constable, Robert Hoskins, opened the door for him and shut it after he went out. He then volunteered a statement, obviously intended as a commentary on some of Sir George’s remarks.
‘Lady Stubbs is a bit wanting,’ he said, ‘up here.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘That’s why he said she wouldn’t be much help. Scatty, that’s what she is.’
‘Did he marry a local girl?’
‘No. Foreigner of some sort. Coloured, some say, but I don’t think that’s so myself.’
Bland nodded. He was silent for a moment, doodling with a pencil on a sheet of paper in front of him. Then he asked a question which was clearly off the record.
‘Who did it, Hoskins?’ he said.
If anyone did have any ideas as to what had been going on, Bland thought, it would be P.C. Hoskins. Hoskins was a man of inquisitive mind with a great interest in everybody and everything. He had a gossiping wife and that, taken with his position as local constable, provided him with vast stores of information of a personal nature.
‘Foreigner, if you ask me. ’Twouldn’t be anyone local. The Tuckers is all right. Nice, respectable family. Nine of ’em all told. Two of the older girls is married, one boy in the Navy, the other one’s doing his National Service, another girl’s over to a hairdresser’s at Torquay. There’s three younger ones at home, two boys and a girl.’ He paused, considering. ‘None of ’em’s what you’d call bright, but Mrs Tucker keeps her home nice, clean as a pin – youngest of eleven, she was. She’s got her old father living with her.’
Bland received this information in silence. Given in Hoskins’ particular idiom, it was an outline of the Tuckers’ social position and standing.
‘That’s why I say it was a foreigner,’ continued Hoskins. ‘One of those that stop up to the Hostel at Hoodown, likely as not. There’s some queer ones among them – and a lot of goings-on. Be surprised, you would, at what I’ve seen ’em doing in the bushes and the woods! Every bit as bad as what goes on in parked cars along the Common.’
P.C. Hoskins was by this time an absolute specialist on the subject of sexual ‘goings-on.’ They formed a large portion of his conversation when off duty and having his pint in the Bull and Bear. Bland said:
‘I don’t think there was anything – well, of that kind. The doctor will tell us, of course, as soon as he’s finished his examination.’
‘Yes, sir, that’ll be up to him, that will. But what I say is, you never know with foreigners. Turn nasty, they can, all in a moment.’
Inspector Bland sighed as he thought to himself that it was not quite as easy as that. It was all very well for Constable Hoskins to put the blame conveniently on ‘foreigners.’ The door opened and the doctor walked in.
‘Done my bit,’ he remarked. ‘Shall they take her away now? The other outfits have packed up.’
‘Sergeant Cottrill will attend to that,’ said Bland. ‘Well, Doc, what’s the finding?’
‘Simple and straightforward as it can be,’ said the doctor. ‘No complications. Garrotted with a piece of clothes line. Nothing could be simpler or easier to do. No struggle of any kind beforehand. I’d say the kid didn’t know what was happening to her until it had happened.’
‘Any signs of assault?’
‘None. No assault, signs of rape, or interference of any kind.’
‘Not presumably a sexual crime, then?’
‘I wouldn’t say so, no.’ The doctor added, ‘I shouldn’t say she’d been a particularly attractive girl.’
‘Was she found of the boys?’
Bland addressed this question to Constable Hoskins.
‘I wouldn’t say they’d much use for her,’ said Constable Hoskins, ‘though maybe she’d have liked it if they had.’
‘Maybe,’ agreed Bland. His mind went back to the pile of comic papers in the boathouse and the idle scrawls on the margin.