Smallbone Deceased (21 page)

III

“God's fresh air,” said the stout girl in hiking shorts.

“That's right,” said her companion.

“God's free fresh air,” said the stout girl. “That's what they say, don't they?”

“That's right.”

“Like hell it's free,” said the stout girl. “Railway fares up, purchase tax on walking shoes, four and sixpence for a so-called lunch.”

“That's right,” said the yes—girl.

“Before the war,” said the stout girl, “I walked through the Lake District. Right through it. I stayed at youth hostels. I took ten days and it cost me three pounds sixteen shillings and eight pence, including fares.”

“Well, I never,” said the yes – girl. “You'd hardly credit it.”

It was nine o'clock that evening. Hazlerigg was sitting in a third-class railway carriage, on his way back to London. When he had got into the carriage it had been empty, but he had been vaguely aware that two girls had got in at Ipswich. He was deeply engaged with his own thoughts.

He was reviewing the case to see how it looked without its central character. For Bob Horniman, in his opinion, was out of it. Not that his Saturday morning alibi was worth much. He could have murdered Smallbone and been in plenty of time to catch the midday train for Chaffham. Nor could you describe as strong corroboration the evidence of the girl with whom you were in love. But on one factor of certainty, on one base of the living rock, Hazlerigg rested his conviction of Bob's innocence. The same pair of hands had committed both murders. No one, be they never so crafty or calculating, could have reproduced that fractional left-handed pull which hallmarked both killings. And if Bob had been at his Soho restaurant at a quarter to seven he could not have killed Miss Chittering. The alibi had to be verified, but he was certain he would find that it was so.

It was true, also, that Bob's explanation had not covered everything. Any explanation would have been, perhaps, open to suspicion if it had. On the subject of the letter discovered in the typists' room, for instance. Bob had simply said that he knew nothing about it. He had never received it. If he was speaking the truth, it began to look very much as if the letter might be a plant. The possibility had been in Hazlerigg's mind all along; ever since he had noticed those pin marks in the top left-hand corner of the paper. He had remembered that it was quite a common habit for a busy man to pin checks or receipted bills to blank pieces of notepaper with or without the addition of a signature. Lawyers got them every day. Indeed, now he thought of it, had not Plumptree told him that Smallbone had pinned his last rent check to a piece of notepaper and left it on the hall table for Mrs. Tasker to find. Anyone in the office might therefore have received such a missive from Smallbone. They would only have to remove the check and they could then type in what message they liked in the space between the address and the signature. Forgery without tears.

“You see them going off from Paddington,” said the stout girl. “Torquay, Paignton, and places like that. Piles and piles of luggage. I don't call that a holiday.”

“Nor do I,” said the yes – girl.

“But take a nice large rucksack,” said the stout girl, nodding down at hers, where it stood, bulging formidably, on the seat beside her.

With a sweet click the last tumbler fell into place.

“God in heaven, what idiots we've been,” said Hazlerigg loudly.

Both girls jumped. Hazlerigg, who was a bit of a lip reader, saw the stout girl forming the word “Drink.” Her companion, for once, had an opinion of her own: “Barmy.”

“When does this train stop next?” he demanded.

The stout girl felt for her alpenstock and estimated with a quick glance the distance to the corridor door. “It doesn't stop,” she said. “It goes straight through to London.”

“Then stop it we must,” said Hazlerigg. Out of the window he saw the lights of a fair-sized town approaching.

He got to his feet and before either of his travelling companions could guess his intention, he had reached up and jerked the communication cord.

He could not have timed it more perfectly. There was a momentary pause as the vacuum brake took charge: then a series of shuddering jolts, a sharp decrease in momentum. The dark world outside slowed down, the blur of lights separated out into individual windows, and with a long, indignant hiss, the train slid to a halt opposite the deserted platform of a fair-sized station.

Hazlerigg was out before it had fairly stopped.

A door marked “Stationmaster” flung open and a startled and indignant official appeared. Hazlerigg said a word to him, produced his warrant card, and fairly trundled him back into his office.

“I want to use your telephone,” he said. “You've got some priority arrangement for up calls to London. Use it, please, and get me Scotland Yard.”

The stationmaster got busy.

Hazlerigg looked back on to the platform. Heads were out all the way down the train, and he could see the bobbing of a lantern as one of the guards climbed the ramp. He reckoned the situation was just in hand.

Five seconds later he was talking to Sergeant Plumptree.

“Look here,” he said. “You'll have to listen and not ask questions. I've just stopped the Cromer Express and I reckon I've got two minutes. Get hold of that chap Hayman—the shop assistant in that bag shop in the Strand—yes—Miss Chittering's boyfriend. I want to find out who bought a rucksack there on the morning of—let me see—Saturday, February 20th. A large green rucksack. Play fair. Show him all the photographs. Yes, I know it's Saturday night. I don't care how you set about it. You can ask for what help you like. If he isn't at home, put out a general alert and pick him up where you find him. At the cinema, at the pub, on the streets. This train is due at Liverpool Street at a quarter past ten, and I want you to get the information and meet me at the station with a police car and a good driver. I know it doesn't leave you much time, but that's the way it's got to be.”

He rang off, thanked the stationmaster politely, and stepped out on the platform into the arms of a deeply-suspicious guard. The time was nine-fifteen.

Chapter Fifteen

… Saturday Night …

COMPLETION

We cannot force our memories: they must come of themselves by natural association, as it were; but they may occur to us when we least think of them, owing to some casual circumstance or link of connection, and
long after we have given up the search.

Hazlitt:
On Application to Study

At about nine o'clock that evening Bohun was sitting in his upper room, underneath the portrait of the severe lady (who was his grandmother), and he was thinking about developments in automatic accounting machinery. He had seen an up-to-date model demonstrated recently. Accounts were fed into it in the form of cards, each card being punched with a combination of holes and slots representing the figures of the account. The machine would then perform any operation of addition, subtraction, proportion, collation or extraction which the abstrusest fancy of the accountant might dictate. What had particularly amused Bohun had been that on an incorrectly punched card being inserted, the machine gave a most human scream, a red light shone, and the card was ejected on to the floor. It occurred to him that this was exactly what was wrong with the proposition of Bob Horniman as murderer. Every time he presented that particular card to his mental processes they as promptly rejected it.

Principally it was the matter of motive.

One of the suggested motives might be the correct one. Both together were impossible.

You could believe in an impetuous, hot-headed, warmhearted type who came to the conclusion that if Smallbone was capable of tormenting a dying man then Smallbone himself was better dead. One or two people might reasonably have maintained such a proposition since it seemed that the late Abel Horniman, for all his faults, had been a man capable of inspiring both loyalty and affection. On the other hand you could believe in a cold-blooded type, one who calculated that, if he shut Smallbone's mouth and thus postponed the coming to light of the Husbandmen's Mortgage fraud, he might have a chance to sell out his share in the firm and get away with twenty thousand pounds.

It was when you made both of them the same person that you were talking nonsense.

Apart from this there was the consideration that if Bob Horniman had committed the murder on his Saturday morning at the office, then Anne Mildmay must almost certainly have been privy to it. Their statements proved this. They said they had left the office together at ten past twelve and had parted at about twenty past. Now with Smallbone due at the office at twelve-fifteen (vide his letter) either this meant that they were both lying about times or that Bob had not left the office at all, but had got Miss Mildmay to perjure herself and say that he had. In which case she must have had more than a shrewd idea all along that he was the murderer. This Bohun refused to believe. There was
something
between them – you didn't have to be very observant to see that. Anne Mildmay was angry and hurt with Bob, and there was a state of emotional tension between them. But it wasn't the tension of guilty knowledge shared.

And the night of Miss Chittering's murder: that seemed to be a singularly clumsy alibi that Bob had put up: quite out of keeping with the rest of a carefully planned performance. And could anyone have been so incredibly careless as to drop that incriminating letter in the office by mistake? But if Bob was
not
the murderer, further vistas of speculation at once unrolled themselves. What about that letter? It was, more and more clearly, a plant. Put there to be found. Put there by someone who felt the breath of suspicion on his own neck and was becoming pretty desperate to avert it. Put there by …

It was possible. Yes. It was more than possible.

The clinching thought in this train of thought, the item which finally brought conviction was so trivial as to be ludicrous. It turned on nothing more nor less than the shape of an ordinary steel screw.

Feverishly. Bohun dragged back from his memory the events which had led up to the discovery of that letter. Miss Chittering had wanted to move a mirror. Miss Bellbas – he thought it was Miss Bellbas – had suggested putting it up beside the window. He had offered to fix it for them. Just at the moment when he had everything ready Mr. Craine had appeared and he had been obliged to hand over to Miss Cornel. He was not certain what had happened next, but when he reappeared – not more than thirty seconds later (Mr. Craine had only wanted to give him a letter) – everything seemed to have been dropped on the floor. Miss Cornel was on her knees looking for the screws. She had found one of them by the window and the other underneath her own desk, the middle desk of the three. That was it. And it was while they were trying to fish the screw out from under the desk that the letter had come to light.

In other words, shorn of all surrounding circumstances and in the plainest language, Miss Cornel had dropped a screw over by Miss Chittering's desk under the window and had purported to find it under her own desk in the middle of the room. Her explanation had been: “It must have rolled.” He remembered that Hazlerigg had later measured the distance between the two desks. Ten feet. How on earth, said Bohun slowly to himself, how on earth could a screw have
rolled
for ten feet? Why, a screw couldn't roll one foot. It couldn't roll six inches. If you dropped a screw on the floor it went round in a circle. Even on a sloping surface it couldn't roll.

He got up and started to walk up and down the long room. An even more deadly question had sprung, fully armed, from the dragon's teeth of his thoughts. And one way or the other it was a question which had to be decided, and decided quickly.

Wait! There was just a chance – a very slender chance – that even now he might be wrong.

He looked up a name in the desk telephone book and dialed a number.

Perry Cockaigne, being a sports writer on a Sunday paper, was one of the few people who could be relied on to be found at his desk late on a Saturday night. He greeted Bohun with enthusiasm, and listened to him without surprise. It seemed quite natural to Perry that people should ring him up in the middle of the night with questions about the sport in which he specialized.

“Yes,” he said. “I remember her. She doesn't play competitive golf now. No, old boy. You must be muddling her up with someone else. She was a right-hand golfer. Of course, I'm sure. I've seen her play dozens of times. Hits the strongest tee shot of any woman I know.”

“Thank you very much,” said Bohun, and hung up.

He was now certain.

II

When Bob Horniman's telephone call came through, Anne Mildmay was seated in Miss Cornel's living room. It was a comfortable, neutral sort of room. The enlargements of golfing photographs and the silver trophies gave it a masculine air which was contradicted by the Japanese flower prints and the
Lalique
work, and the large and carefully-arranged bowls of flowers.

Miss Cornel answered the telephone and came back and said: “It's for you. It's Bob Horniman. He would seem to be ringing up from Norfolk.”

Anne was away for some time. When she came back into the room her eyes had the story in them for the older woman to read.

“He's asked me to marry him,” she said.

“What did you say?” inquired Miss Cornel.

“I said yes,” said Anne. She stood outside herself for a moment, viewing herself in the new, exciting, exacting, terrifying role of bride and married woman.

“I shall make a rampaging wife,” she said.

“In my day,” said Miss Cornel, “that sort of thing was done in a conservatory, or a summer house, at two o'clock in the morning, to the strains of the Vienna Woods waltz. Not over the long-distance telephone from a friend's house.”

“I'm sorry,” said Anne “There were complications. Perhaps I'd better explain.”

She did so.

“I see,” said Miss Cornel. “And what would you have done if the report had been the other way—excuse my frankness—would you have allowed the child to be born out of wedlock?”

“A bouncing little bastard,” said Anne thoughtfully. “No. I hardly expect so. I don't know. Anyway, everything's perfect. Now.”

“Allow me to congratulate you then,” said Miss Cornel.

“By the way,” said Anne. “There was one thing I couldn't quite make out. Apparently Hazlerigg was down there.”

“Inspector Hazlerigg?”

“Yes. You don't suppose that he thinks—no, that's absurd.”

“What's absurd?”

“He can't think,” said Anne with a shaky laugh, “that Bob's a—I mean, that he did these murders.”

“I shouldn't think so,” said Miss Cornel slowly. A close observer might have noted the slight bunching of the muscles on the angle of the jaw, the very faint hardening of the grey eyes. “Is there any particular reason that he should?”

“Well, you know,” said Anne, “we've both had to tell an awful lot of lies. Everything seemed to happen when we were-involved. That Saturday morning—”

She explained about Saturday morning with modern frankness and Miss Cornel said doubtfully: “You'd have to alibi each other then?”

“Yes,” said Anne, “it wouldn't be awfully convincing, I know. But that Tuesday night, when Miss Chittering got killed. That's absolutely watertight. We went to a little place in Frith Street. Bob's very well known there. And he booked the table by telephone for a quarter to seven.

“A bit before, I should say. The waiter—that is, he's really the proprietor's brother—said something to Bob about ‘On time, as usual' and Bob said: ‘Your clock's fast. We're early.' I should think we were sitting down by twenty to seven. We walked there from the office.”

Miss Cornel, like Hazlerigg, recognized the sound of the truth. For a moment she said nothing and then she got up and went over to the cupboard. When she came back she had a dark, squat bottle in her hand.

“We must drink to the health of the happy pair,” she said. “Can you pull the cork while I get the glasses?”

She was out of the room for a few minutes and came back with two green tumblers. She splashed in a generous three fingers and pushed the nearer tumbler across to Anne. “You mustn't desecrate this stuff by showing water to it,” she said.

Anne drank and gasped. “It's strong, isn't it?”

“It should be,” said Miss Cornel composedly. “It's genuine prewar Glen Livet. I had this bottle given me when I won the Open Putter on the Ochterlony course in 1938.”

Both ladies sipped in respectful silence.

“That one's to your address,” said Miss Cornel. “One more for your intended.”

“I don't think—” said Anne.

“It'll make you sleep,” said Miss Cornel genially.

“The funny thing is,” said Anne, “that I can hardly keep my eyes open-now.”

III

“Scotland Yard?”

“This is Scotland Yard. Duty sergeant speaking.” “This is urgent. Can you put me through to—”

“Is this an emergency call?”

“It's not a nine-nine-niner, if that's what you mean,” said Bohun. “I must speak to Chief Inspector Hazlerigg.”

“I'll see if I can contact him, sir.”

“It's to do with the Lincoln's Inn murder.”

“One minute, sir.”

There was a silence, a click, and a new voice said: “Can I help you? This is Inspector Pickup.”

Bohun recognized the name vaguely as one of the inspector's colleagues. He said: “My name's Bohun. I must speak to Inspector Hazlerigg.”

“I'm afraid that's going to be rather difficult,” said Pickup. “The inspector was coming back from Norfolk tonight—”

“When does the train get in?”

“It got in fifteen minutes ago,” said Pickup. “Apparently he stopped the train en route and telephoned for a car to meet him at the terminus. He didn't say where he was going.”

“Is Sergeant Plumptree there?”

“Sergeant Plumptree went in the car to meet him.”

“Damn,” said Bohun.

“If you have any information,” said Inspector Pickup, “perhaps I could take it. I'm standing in for Inspector Hazlerigg while he's away.”

Bohun hesitated. He visualized himself trying to explain, over the telephone, to a complete stranger, the orbit of a steel screw on an inclined plane. Or the fact that people who play a lot of golf develop strong wrists. And that if they play right-handed the development of the left wrist will probably be greater than that of the right.

“No,” he said at last. “It doesn't matter.”

He rang off. He thought for a moment of trying the stationmaster's office at Liverpool Street, but abandoned the project before he had even reached for the phone. The train would be in by now and the passengers dispersed.

Direct action seemed to be the only answer.

Bohun kept his car in a private lockup behind Bream's Buildings. It was a 1937 Morris, not one of the uncrowned kings of the road, but a steady performer if handled properly.

Over the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge, he thought, there won't be much traffic at this time of night. I hope the lights are all right. Bohun had never driven by road to Sevenoaks before, but he knew it lay to the west of Maidstone and he guessed that if he took the Old Kent Road to New Cross and forked right at Lewisham he could not be very wide of the mark. After that he would have to ask.

He crossed the river and ran through the Elephant and Castle roundabout, coldly deserted under its neon lights.

For the first time he spared a moment's thought to wonder what was going to happen at the other end.

Supposing he found the two ladies virtuously asleep. Could he order Anne Mildmay to leave with him and return to London? Ought he to give even that amount of indirect warning to Miss Cornel? Even if every supposition he had made was correct, still was Anne in any danger? Look out! Oh, a cat.