Give a Corpse a Bad Name (23 page)

‘Which only goes to prove—'

But Toby snatched the words out of Whitear's mouth: ‘—that everyone makes a mistake some time. The proof of the platitude is in the eating. Only suicide is rather a final sort of mistake, isn't it? His trouble was that he never tried to think the business out whole. He was an opportunist; he merely made use of whatever happened to turn up. So he wasn't clear about what he'd let himself in for, lost his head, and …'

‘Maybe,' said Eggbear, ‘'twas his conscience he couldn't face, or the thought of his girl knowin'.'

‘Oh yes, he probably hadn't quite outgrown a conscience, and certainly he hadn't outgrown his vanity. But he lost his head, too, when he realized just how big a blunder he'd made—he must have. If he'd given himself time to think, he'd have been able to argue conscience and vanity into backing him up as usual. He was pretty good at that.'

‘Just which blunder,' said Whitear slowly, frowning at the ground, ‘are you referring to?'

‘The last of the letters, of course,' said Toby.

‘But it gave us what we needed against Mrs Milne.'

‘And if you think it out,' said Toby, ‘what blunder could have been bigger than that? It was a bigger blunder even than the typography. Look here, I'll run over it, and you'll see what I mean. What was the first fishy thing about this whole case?'

It was Eggbear who answered promptly: ‘The missing bottle.'

‘No,' said Toby.

‘But—'

‘We-ell, perhaps it was the first thing you could have got on to. But the first fishy thing, if you could have spotted it—and you
should
have spotted it as soon as you heard from that landlady in Wallaford—was the piece of paper in the dead man's pocket, the paper that had Mrs Milne's name and address on it. Think it out. What did that paper make you think? It made you believe that the man was on his way to visit Mrs Milne. Now if he had come from South Africa with the name and address of someone he intended visiting in England, the paper on which that name and address were written down would be an important paper, wouldn't it? A paper to be preserved with the utmost care.'

‘Well, he did preserve it,' said Whitear.

‘But a traveller has other important papers, hasn't he? A passport, for instance. But Rhymer's passport—the Maxwell passport, that's to say, which he was using as his own—was left behind in Wallaford.'

‘You mean,' said Whitear, ‘that if he'd forgotten the one he'd have forgotten the other?'

Toby nodded. ‘You can't see him carefully separating them out when he decided to change his suit, can you? You can't see him getting up in the morning, deciding to put on the more or less clean suit he'd got in his bag, going to the coat he's put on a hanger the night before, and taking out this paper with the address, but leaving everything else behind—particularly as he seems to have used his passport as a sort of pocket-book. No, he'd have taken the lot or forgotten the lot. Or so it seemed to me. That paper breathed to me a rich and promising fishiness. It meant, d'you see, that either he'd met someone who'd given him the address which he'd written down on an odd scrap of paper in his pocket, or—and this was of course the more entertaining thought—someone had seen fit to plant it on him. But in either case there was someone—someone he'd met and talked to after leaving Mrs Quantick's lodging-house. Not that any of this could be proved. It was some time before Laws let us have an actual proof that he'd met and spoken to Rhymer. But from the first I was certain that there'd been someone with whom Rhymer had spent the hour or two before his death, someone who'd got him as generally tight as he was, and then given him that final drink we knew he must have had just before he was killed. For Rhymer must have got his drink from somewhere, and we knew it wasn't from any of the pubs for miles around, and he must have done something with the bottle the last drink came out of.'

‘The flask in the car—' Whitear began.

‘I'm coming to the flask. But in any case, it could only have accounted for the last drink, not for all the others. Now let's shift to the first anonymous letter.'

‘It started us thinkin' about the flask,' said Eggbear.

‘Yes, but it started us thinking about who'd written it, too, and why they'd written it. But it was a clever letter. Of course it might have come from someone who'd actually seen Mrs Milne give Rhymer the drink, but it could also have come from anyone who knew no more than the facts made public at the inquest, plus the fact that Mrs Milne was in the habit of keeping a flask in her car. It could have been a guess, following a little shrewd deduction; there was nothing in it to prove that the writer
knew
anything. As for why it'd been written, it might have been an attempt to lead us to the truth by someone who didn't want to get involved in giving evidence, it might have been an attempt to frame Mrs Milne, or it might have been generalized spite. Mrs Milne seems to be pretty thoroughly disliked in certain quarters; spite was quite a plausible explanation. But spite—' and Toby shifted his position on his hard chair—‘spite wasn't a very interesting explanation. I liked both the others much better. I liked the idea that either she'd done a murder or was being framed for one. So on that assumption I went ahead, accepting, of course, the implication that the letter-writer possessed real knowledge of what had happened, even if I couldn't prove that he did. Someone who knew, someone who had seen the death of Rhymer, someone who had filled Rhymer up with whisky, someone who picked up Rhymer's suitcase from Wallaford, someone who wanted to land Mrs Milne in the worst trouble the law can make, someone … well, someone was taking shape, you'll agree, someone was quite concrete enough to keep me interested in this neighbourhood.'

‘Yes, but why should you decide,' said Whitear fretfully, ‘that that person had gone and done Rhymer in himself? What motive had he?'

‘I didn't decide that he had,' said Toby, ‘till I saw Adrian dead. I thought it probable, that's all. I wasn't convinced that Mrs Milne hadn't done the murder until I learnt that the flask had none of her fingerprints on it. Then I knew that the flask was part of the frame-up. You see, when Laws thought what it'd look like if he suggested to us that it was Mrs Milne who'd given Rhymer the whisky, he naturally took care that the flask should be emptied. He slipped into the garage some time on Thursday evening, I expect, and poured the whisky away. But it was only when he'd done it that it occurred to him he ought to have worn gloves for the job. He put it right as well as he could by giving the flask a polish, but that removed, of course, the fingerprints of Mrs Milne, which, as I explained before, she'd never have removed herself. I was very grateful to you for doing that bit of work on the flask, Whitear. As for motive—' Toby gave a wave of his hand, as if indicating a tropical luxuriance of motives—‘as soon as one got to know a bit about the relationships among that group of people, Laws, the Milnes and the Maxwells, the motive glared at one. Laws wanted to marry Daphne Milne. He was staying on here, leading a life he'd found disappointing and dull, in the hope that he could marry her. How much he wanted the girl herself it's no use our guessing; that he wanted her money we can be pretty sure. He hated his poverty. He hated it with malice and envy. Not that Daphne's got any money that I know of, but her mother's got a lot, and some day it'll all be Daphne's. If the mother could be got rid of …'

‘But do you mean to say,' said Eggbear, ‘that that young fellow was plannin', right from the moment he run across Rhymer, to bring Mrs Milne to the gallows?'

‘No, he did very little planning,' said Toby. ‘I told you, he was an opportunist. I think he killed Rhymer because he saw him as a competitive claim on the Milne fortune. He'd have been rather an undesirable father-in-law too, wouldn't he? I should think Laws' ideas were pretty vague when he decided on Mrs Milne's car as the one to shove Rhymer down in front of. He couldn't have thought over the bottle-letter yet, because he didn't know that you chaps were going to start worrying about that straight away. All along he made use of other people's actions rather than planning his own ahead. This is how I see him going about it; on Tuesday evening, a little after half-past six, he turned up at The Laurels in answer to a note Mrs Milne had left at his cottage, asking him to look in on her. I know he said he never got that note, and that he never came, but the two servants at The Laurels heard his car arrive, stop for a bit, then go away again. Well, I think it was when he stopped that he first met Rhymer. He and Rhymer probably arrived at the gate at the same time, and Rhymer very likely asked him if this was where Mrs Milne lived. Adrian was always interested in other people's affairs; he'd have got Rhymer talking, and then suggested that they should go out to Adrian's place. He could have pointed out that Mrs Milne had certainly gone off to her badminton club by then and wouldn't be home again until pretty well midnight. At the cottage he filled Rhymer up with whisky, and very likely got out of him the whole story of Maxwell, as well as the truth about Mrs Milne. Then he took Rhymer along in his car, which he probably left inside one of the field gates along the road, to the spot with the two bridges. He took a flask with him. Then, when he recognized the Bentley, he gave Rhymer a wallop on the head and sent him spinning into the road. He stayed behind the hedge himself until Mrs Milne went off for the police, then he came out and planted the paper with her name and address on it in Rhymer's pocket—'

‘And,' said Eggbear, ‘found the ticket for the suitcase.'

‘That's right,' said Toby. ‘He went off to Wallaford next day, and to pick up the suitcase thoughtfully put on the wig he'd worn as the Chinese murderer in some theatricals here a few months ago—a sleek, black wig; you've seen the photograph. He got the suitcase, took a look inside it, and decided to plant it on Mrs Milne. So he deposited it at Knightsteignton and sent her the ticket. Daphne picked it up—you know that bit of it. That evening he ran across me in the Ring of Bells, and decided to use me in elucidating the puzzle in the way he wanted.'

‘And that,' said George, ‘is where he made his biggest mistake of all—eh, Tobe?'

Tobe nodded gravely. ‘Yes, his attempts to lead me by the nose were a touch too crude. That's how I first got thinking about him. When I went up to the Milnes, asking if they'd take me to the Maxwells, it was he who offered to do it, after Mrs Milne had definitely refused. Then, when we got there, it was he who arranged how I was to approach Lady Maxwell. He didn't know why I wanted to go there, but he took good care that I should hear all her reasons for insisting that the dead man wasn't her son. Again, why? So I started giving some attention to Laws. He seemed to have it in common with the writer of the letter that he wanted to help me to find out—well, at least a certain amount. And I recognized his motive. Major Maxwell, to whom I gave a certain amount of thought, had a motive for killing Rhymer, since he wanted to marry his wife, but none that I could see for involving Mrs Milne herself in trouble. But Laws had a motive that cut in both directions. The only other serious suspect was Mrs Milne herself—seriously suspected by the major as well as by you, Whitear, and now and then by me. Even so, there was that letter-writer hanging around and needing smelling out. So I concentrated on him, and let the murder take care of itself.'

‘As it did,' said Whitear.

‘We-ell,' said Eggbear, ‘you got to remember that telephone call of Toby's. Not quite, it didn't take care of itself.'

‘I'm coming to that,' said Toby. ‘Laws didn't think we were getting on fast enough, so he sent me the second anonymous letter. Like the first, it contained nothing that proved that the writer had ever met Rhymer. We all knew about the coat that had been left at Mrs Quantick's, and that the suitcase was missing, and the whole village could have known that Mrs Milne was making a bonfire on Thursday afternoon. Anyone with a nasty mind could have put the three facts together. But when we get to the third letter—yet, come to think of it, Laws made a mistake even with the second. An odd little one. It wasn't in the letter itself, it was up at the Maxwells, when I got Mrs Milne to go there to show them the letter. They were all there, old Maxwell and his wife, the major and Laws. Major Maxwell gave the letter to Sir Joseph; Lady Maxwell wanted a look at it and it was handed over to her; Major Maxwell took it from her and examined it. But Adrian—inquisitive, interested Adrian—never touched the thing. He looked at it, but only from a distance. I know it's nothing much to go on, but because it struck me as thoroughly unnatural—after all, one always wants to get one's hands on a thing like that—I stored it up and went on considering the case of Adrian Laws with more curiosity than ever. And then came letter number three …'

Toby interrupted himself to give a sudden, wide yawn in the faces of his listeners. ‘Late, isn't it, Sam—or is it just that I've been getting up too early? Well, that third letter couldn't have been written by anyone who hadn't had a good talk with Rhymer. The information in it couldn't have been deduced from the surrounding circumstances. You can't deduce the dates and places of marriages from surrounding circumstances. Rhymer had
told
Laws where and when he and Anne Milton were married. And he hadn't told him a thing of that kind inside two or three minutes' conversation somewhere on the road; he'd taken quite a while to get round to the subject, and probably quite a few drinks. From the time I got that letter I knew that the letter-writer was the person who had been with Rhymer up to the time of his death … and it was from that same letter that I also became certain that Laws was the letter-writer. I'll explain: Both of the other letters were put together with letters clipped out of ordinary daily papers; so was this one, except for the one word ‘November'. That was in an odd sort of type; only a very precious kind of production would use it. Well, when I was out visiting Laws—I wanted to ask him what he'd been doing on the Wednesday morning after the accident, in case he'd any sort of an alibi for the time I believed he'd been picking up and getting rid of the suitcase, and, as a matter of fact, he hadn't—'