A Train of Powder (25 page)

But he still had no banking account. He was still an undischarged bankrupt. He still had no office. Because his ostensible business was dealing in second-hand automobiles, he had a garage in Cambridge Terrace mews, a dead end of old coach houses converted into garages, hidden away behind the stately houses that look on Regents Park. But chiefly he carried on his trade on the pavements and in the public houses and snack bars of Warren Street, that warm, active, robust, morally unfastidious area which has a smack of Dickens’ London. This meant, of course, that he was hard to tax. The Inland Revenue must have found it very hard to find out what his profits were and assess him; which meant that the assessment of all other British subjects had to go up. But it meant more than that. This is the centre of the secondhand automobile market, and there, at that time, flourished a curious medley of the legitimate and the illegitimate. Countless automobiles were bought and sold here without blame in the sight of God and man; but there was also a trade in English automobiles designed for export and banned in the home market, in foreign automobiles which had been illegally imported, in new automobiles which were not allowed to be resold under the twelve months’ covenant, in stolen automobiles, and in petrol which was drastically rationed.

Mr. Setty was active in the purely legitimate trade, but even there something strange was suggested. He was said, by those who knew him only as an automobile dealer, to do business on a scale suggesting that he had capital to the amount of about fifty thousand pounds. He bought many cars, and he often paid large prices for automobiles which used a high amount of petrol at times when the ration of petrol was still small, and would have to keep them for a considerable time before he could resell them. Yet, in 1938, when he had asked for his discharge from bankruptcy, he had represented that he was earning from two to three pounds a week, and a court which was scrutinizing his affairs with a hostile eye made no suggestion that it disbelieved this story and that he could afford to pay out a dividend to his creditors. It is hard to imagine how in the intervening eleven years he could have accumulated fifty thousand pounds’ capital. Taxation alone would have made that impossible, no matter what gifts he might have developed in the meantime. But there was no registered company behind him, and he seemed to have no associates.

He was also a curbside banker. Anybody who wanted to cash a cheque without passing it through a bank came to him and he gave them money for it with a discount, which he never made unreasonable, and passed it on to an associate who had a banking account. Here again is a field where the legitimate and the illegitimate are mingled. The most honest of undischarged bankrupts may like to have some means of cashing the cheques he receives in the way of business other than by explaining his state over the counter of his customer’s bank; and we also have a legacy handed down from Tsardom. Up till the first five years of this century Great Britain took in countless immigrants from Russia and Poland, and many of these, partly from the inferiority complex the alien feels before the native, and partly from a peasant fear of being swindled by lettered men, never learned to use a bank. Survivors of that generation, and even some of their children, go on cashing their cheques with the man who has never let them down yet and is always to be found outside the Three Feathers between five and seven, even when those cheques run into thousands of pounds. But after the Second World War the curbside banker was used more and more by people who wanted to evade taxes or cover up illegal transactions, such as currency frauds or payments for illegal imports supped in on false invoices. Nobody can tell now what branches of the profession were cultivated by Mr. Setty, since he had no papers. The figures were all in his head, which is perhaps why in the end it was cut off. But certainly every day he handled thousands of pounds.

It could be taken for granted till now that the English racketeer has been less well acquainted with violence than his American counterpart. He and his friends exchange endless cruelties, they cheat one another and squeeze one another in blackmail and railroad one another into prison, but they rarely draw a gun. A beating-up is the furthest most of them ever go, and that is not common nor drastic. But Mr. Setty had all that summer been showing signs of acute apprehension. Nothing would induce him to get into any automobile but his own, which is an unusual form of shyness in an automobile dealer, and he went less and less to his own garage; and, indeed, Cambridge Terrace mews at certain hours might feel uncommonly like a mousetrap to a nervous man. His garage lay across the dead end of the mews, and, going in or out of it, he could be covered by a single enemy. He would not go into a strange garage, or go upstairs into an office or warehouse. His clients had to seek him where he stood in the open street or in a public house. All the same, on October 4, he disappeared. He told his family that he was going to look at an automobile in Watford and drove off in his Citroën, which later was found abandoned near his garage.

His family were quick to take alarm. Very soon they offered a thousand pounds reward to anybody who could find him for them. Remoter relatives, including a sister named Mrs. Sadie Spectreman, converged on the apartment house, the other tenants of which were startled by their new knowledge of their neighbour. A Miss Constance Palfreyman told the reporters that no, a day had never been actually fixed for the wedding, but they had hoped it would be soon. While this group mourned and wondered, the police remained quite calm. Three days after Mr. Setty’s disappearance his sister and her husband reported a bizarre circumstance: they went out for the afternoon, after turning the key in two mortice locks in the front door, and came back to find it swinging wide open. Coldly the police issued a notice to the effect that they had found no indication that the apartment had been entered. There was as cold a tone about all their announcements. Indeed, they inspired an announcement which was bound to leave any reader suspecting that they thought that Mr. Setty had come to no harm and had left home for his own purposes.

Then, suddenly, part of Mr. Setty appeared. Off the Essex coast, some distance north of the Thames estuary, there is a marsh, a curious springy cushion of mud and grasses, patterned with a net of rivulets, and frequented by a great many duck and widgeon. On October 22, Mr. Sidney Tiffen, a farm worker who was taking a week’s holiday but not leaving home for it, went out in his punt to get some game. He saw something grey being lifted off the hummocks by the tide and thought it was a drogue, the target, not unlike the windsock of an airfield, which a training plane trails behind it in fighting exercises. As he had earned five shillings often enough by picking up these drogues and taking them back to the RAF station not far away, he paddled over to it. When he got there he found that it was not a target but a grey bundle tied up in a thick piece of felt, like the carpet of an automobile. It was so carefully secured with such stout rope that he deduced the packers must have thought it valuable, and wondered if this was flotsam from a wreck. As it was too heavy and unwieldy to take in his punt, he cut it open and found himself looking on a body, swaddled in a cream silk shirt and pale blue silk shorts, from which the head and legs had been hacked away. He drove a stake into the mud and tied the torso to it, then paddled ashore and went two miles over the marshes to fetch the local policeman. Eventually the body was carried ashore and its fingerprints were taken. The murderer who hopes to commit the perfect crime should exchange references with his victim. Mr. Setty’s enemy had not known that he had ever been convicted, so he had not cut off his hands. Thus Scotland Yard was able to identify his body in a few hours. Seven days later a man of twenty-nine named Brian Donald Hume, owner of a radio shop in a London suburb and managing director of a small factory producing gadgets for domestic and workshop use, was arrested and charged with the murder of Mr. Setty. In court he was accused of having dropped the body on the marshes from an airplane.

Very soon the experienced newspaper reader began to suspect that Mr. Tiffen was, in some way, an exceptional person. The legal restrictions on crime-reporting in Great Britain are far beyond American conception. They are admirable, and it should be our pride to obey them, for they go far towards preventing trial by prejudiced juries. If a gentleman were arrested carrying a lady’s severed head in his arms and wearing her large intestine as a garland round his neck and crying aloud that he and he alone had been responsible for her reduction from a whole to parts, it would still be an offence for any newspaper to suggest that he might have had any connection with her demise until he had been convicted of this offence by a jury and sentenced by a judge. Therefore the veins swell up and pulse on the foreheads of reporters and sub-editors, and somehow their passion seeps into the newsprint and devises occult means by which the truth becomes known. The experienced newspaper reader can run his eye over the columns of newspapers which are paralysed by fear of committing contempt of court (and this fear has justification—only the other day the editor of an English tabloid was sentenced to three months in jail for stating, quite truly, that a man had confessed to a murder for which he was afterwards hanged, and served every day of it), and can learn with absolute certainty, from something too subtle even to be termed a turn of phrase, which person involved in a case is suspected by the police of complicity and which is thought innocent. It was at once apparent that Mr. Tiffen was regarded by the police as guiltless of any part in Mr. Setty’s murder, although his story was precisely that which would have been told by an accessory after the fact who had been paid to take Mr. Setty’s body out to sink on the flooded marshes, had found it more difficult to do than he had anticipated, and had in panic resolved to try to clear himself of suspicion. There was also discernible to the eye of any newspaper writer the sort of block round Mr. Tiffen’s name which comes when a reporter would like to write more fully about a person or an event but is stopped by some consideration, most probably lack of space, but sometimes a matter of emotion.

A friend had a legitimate reason for visiting Mr. Tiffen, so one evening, after a fifty-mile drive from London, we came to a little town on the east coast just north of the Thames estuary and got out in the high street. In a tower a big clock, pale orange like a harvest moon, bright above the low mist, told us that it was too late to look for Mr. Tiffen at his home some miles away. We found a hotel and dinner, and then went out to find a public house where Mr. Tiffen might go, for it was Saturday night and not impossible that he might have come in from his village for a glass of beer and a game of darts.

We found the public house which was Mr. Tiffen’s favourite port of call, but he was not there. A man can be judged by his public house, and we left thinking well of Mr. Tiffen. We had settled down to watch a game of darts, and only gradually realized that we had strayed into a private room, reserved by custom for the use of some friends who met there every Saturday night. But the people saw that we did not know and made us welcome; and they were pleasant too to a girl who belonged to that wistful company who love playing games and are duffers at them all. Each time she lifted her hand to throw a dart her eyes shone like a begging dog’s; and each time it fell somewhere out of the scoring areas, often right off the board into the wall behind. They were just right for her, not so sorry for her that they rubbed in how bad she was, but sorry enough to dispel any suspicion that they were knocked speechless by her ineptitude. By such signs a gentlemanly society reveals itself, and it looked as if Mr. Tiffen might be a gentleman. We went back to our beds, and the next morning showed us the river like grey glass, with a hundred or so little boats lying in the harbour basin. On the opposite bank the sea walls which kept the estuary from doing harm were darker grey, the trees rising above them were black and flat like so many aces of clubs, and some barns were red. Yachtsmen and yachtswomen came down and breakfasted, glossy with content because they were presently to get into their boats and sail off into the shining water, as if taking refuge in a mirror. We drove away through the little town, at the very moment when the lie-abed leisure of Sunday morning changes to the churchgoing bustle, into a countryside that was the simplest arrangement of soil conceivable. It was featureless as the flats of Holland and Belgium it was facing across the North Sea. Some force had patted this piece of it into rising ground, but not very hard; the plateau was quite low. It was cut up by hedges into green pastures and fields of fat black earth. There were a few trees, some farms and cottages, no great houses. It could be seen that a ragged and muddy coastline had kept the railways out of this corner of England, and the sea winds and heavy soil had limited the size of the settlements. Here society had been kept simple; and what simplicity can do if left to itself was shown to us when we halted at a cottage to ask the way, and a woman, young but quite toothless, with several tubby children at her tubby skirts, stared at us without answering, without ill will, without good will, neutral as dough. I wondered whether the reporters’ pencils had halted on Mr. Tiffen’s name because he belonged to this recessive phase of the bucolic, and it had struck them as painful that the worst of town life, in this murdered body, should in its finding have come in contact with the worst of country life.

Before long we found his village. We passed a prim edifice with “The Peculiar People” painted across its stucco forehead, towards which some lean and straight-backed men and women were walking with an air of conscious and narrow and splendid pride. That strange faith which has no creed and no church organization but believes simply in miracle, in the perpetual recreation of the universe by prayer, is about a hundred and ten years old. Each death which has occurred during that period is a defeat for it, since all sickness should be prayed into health by the faithful, but these people walked away from us with the bearing of victors. People were streaming towards the church too. We stopped a boy of twelve or so, who must have been a choirboy, for he was carrying a surplice, and asked him the way to Mr. Tiffen’s house. He smiled at us; the little frown between his eyebrows registered not ill nature but his sense of a conflict between duties. He had to hurry if he was to be in time for church; but one had to be polite to strangers. So he paused to give us full directions, detailed enough to bring us to the housing estate where Mr. Tiffen lived. A few houses built of yellow wood stood among others built of alternate slabs of concrete and breese on land which had obviously been a field till about five minutes before.