Beware of the Trains (11 page)

“No, sir,” said the landlord. “’E was staying ’ere… Mrs. Danvers,” he added with some gratification, “said ’e’d be more comfortable ’ere than with them, so there was only Mrs. Danvers in the ’ouse when young Betty did ’er bunk.”

“That was what I was getting at, yes,” said Fen. “Interesting. Has the house ever been let?”

The landlord shook his head. “Not to my knowledge, sir, never. But why—”

“And just one other thing.” Fen’s smile robbed the interruption of all offence. “Mrs. Danvers can’t stand small children and dogs, I believe.”

“That’s so, sir. D’you remember the time you went there with your Alsatian, Doctor, and ’aving to leave ’im tied up outside? In’uman, I call it, but there’s no accounting for some people. O’ course, when old Ridgeon was alive, and before ’e sold ’is collection, it’d have been silly to ’ave dogs and kids rushing about knocking valuable pieces over and smashing ’em. I dessay if old Ridgeon ’ad put all ’is vases and so forth in that room ’e ’ad got ready for ‘em, it’d ’ave been all right then. But ’e never did—and anyway, ’e di’n’t like children nor animals, nor Mrs. Danvers don’t, neither.”

With this stately procession of negatives Fen seemed very content. “In that case,” he said, “if you could just tell me whether Mrs. Danvers has a car, and something about her shopping habits…” And presently he was able to finish his beer and depart, well primed.

There was a silence in the bar after he had left. Then the doctor said: “Impressive sort of bloke. in an odd way. Formidable, somehow. I wonder what he thought he was getting at?”

The landlord grunted. “For-mid-ab-le, yes,” he agreed, pronouncing the word with the precaution which its length required. “Not the sort o’ chap you‘d like to ’ave for an enemy, really. As to what ’e was after,
I
don’t know. ’E di’n’t look like police, not to me anyway. A bit cracked, per’aps.” Then, dismissing the topic: “Well, Doctor, ’ow about another of the same? Does you a bit of good, this weather, doe’n’t it—whatever anyone may say.”

But neither of them saw the object of these varied compliments when he returned next morning—for Fen’s second visit was not one which he wished to have generally known. For all his faults, he is not a particularly expert housebreaker; but on this occasion no great expertise was required, since Mrs. Danvers had gone to the shops leaving several ground-floor windows open; and so he was able to do his work, and get away after it. without leaving any traces behind him. He had with him only a thin-bladed knife, some sheets of paper, and some envelopes. But on arriving back safely in Oxford he supplemented these with various purchases at a chemist’s; and once home, he went straight to that room which, to the disgust and apprehension of his family, he uses as a makeshift laboratory, and locked himself in. For some little time he was happily occupied with filter paper, hydrogen peroxide, and a solution of benzidine sulphate in glacial acetic acid. Then he went to the telephone…

By a stroke of luck, it was Detective-Inspector Humbleby who was eventually sent down from Scotland Yard to handle the case.

“Oh yes, it’s
blood
all right,” said Humbleby. “And what’s more, it’s human blood. And what’s even better, it’s the same group and sub-groups as Betty Ridgeon’s (good thing she was a blood-donor, by the way: that’s saved us an exhumation). So the assumption is that she did in fact cut her throat in that little room, and not in the barn where she was found.”

“You got plenty of it, did you,” said Fen, “out of those crevices between the floor-boards?”

“More than enough, even after you’d been at it. The wretched girl must have bled pints… We managed to salvage some from the barn, too—cat’s blood, most of it, part of Mrs. Danvers’s ingenious scene-setting. Apparently it never occurred to anyone to test it, at the time. So far so good, then: Betty killed herself—”

“Or
was
killed.”

But Humbleby shook his head. “No proof of that. There were all the proper suicidal signs, apparently, the little tentative cuts before the final one and so forth… Oh yes, I grant you Mrs. Danvers had
motive
enough. Betty was intestate: if she died
after
her marriage, the estate she’d inherited from her father would go to Venables, and if she died
before
, it’d go to Mrs. Danvers—as in fact it did. But we can’t hope to prosecute for murder. In my view, the likeliest way for it to have happened is this: Mrs. Danvers, in mere panic at the thought of losing the chance of old Ridgeon’s money for good, shuts Betty up on the wedding morning, and invents this very plausible tale about the girl being scared and running away. Then—”

“But look here,” Fen interrupted fretfully, “what the devil can the Danvers woman have imagined she was going to
do
with the girl, after she’d locked her up? She’d either have to let her out eventually, and take the consequences, or else silence her for good. So that, surely, is reason enough in itself for supposing—“

“It isn’t, you know.” Humbleby was unexpectedly brusque. “In my view, Mrs. Danvers simply acted without thinking. What I will admit as likely is that she deliberately gave the girl a sharp kitchen knife to eat her food with; and that the girl, unhinged by her imprisonment and by whatever psychological warfare, on the subject of Venables and the marriage, Mrs. Danvers chose to subject her to, eventually used the knife on herself: it was only her fingerprints that were found on it, you know…
Afterwards
, Mrs. Danvers must have taken the body and the knife by night to that barn, in her car, and dumped it there with the cat’s blood.”

“Fingerprints,” Fen grumbled. “As if they proved anything. But if what you say is right, it was
morally
murder.”

“Oh, quite. Only unfortunately our law doesn’t punish people for moral murders.”

“Well then, at least there’s the imprisonment—assault, battery, unlawful restraint or whatever you call it.”

“My dear Gervase, we’ve no
proof
of that whatever. The
only
thing we can prove is that Betty Ridgeon died in that little room, and not in the barn. And you know what sort of a charge that leaves us with, to punish that abominable woman? Concealing a body in order to prevent an inquest. Seven days, if the magistrates are harsh. That’s a nice, fat, satisfying revenge for poor Betty, isn’t it?”

Fen contemplated him gloomily. “The father,” he ventured, “Ridgeon, I mean—”

“Died naturally. The post-mortem was done yesterday, immediately after the exhumation, and the Home Office isn’t a bit pleased at our having dug him up and not found anything, even though we warned them it was a gamble… Mrs. Danvers isn’t saying anything, by the way—anything at all, I mean. She refuses to make a statement or answer questions until she’s charged.”

For a long while after that both men were silent, angry at the law’s impotence. Then Humbleby said:

“The only thing I
don’t
see is what put you on to it in the first place, before you knew anything about Betty.” “Oh, that… I should like to think that it would help,” said Fen, “but I’m afraid it won’t. Here was this room, you see, with the windows blocked up, so that there was no question of burglars from outside getting through it into the rest of the house. And the house had never been let, and there had never been any small children or dogs in it, to be excluded from the room in case of damage they might do…

“So can
you
think of any reason—other than imprisonment, I mean—why there should have been a bolt on the
outside
, the hall side, of that door?”

The lightning winked over Westminster, and office workers queueing for buses in Whitehall looked up apprehensively at the lowering grey of the late afternoon sky. The day had dawned hot, so that most were without their coats and many without umbrellas, and the odds were against their reaching their homes before the rain began to fall. Distantly, above the rumble of rush-hour traffic, the thunder spoke. And in a room high up in a corner of New Scotland Yard, Detective-Inspector Humbleby walked to a window, looking out and down.

“Here they come,” he said. “And whether they’re guilty or innocent the Lord alone knows.” His eye followed the two diminutive, foreshortened figures until they disappeared with their uniformed escort into the doorway below.
“If
they’re guilty, then their nerve must be colossal. But presumably nerve is one of the things experienced big-game hunters do acquire, so…” He completed the sentence with a shrug.

“They’re both that?” Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, spoke out of a cloud of cigarette smoke. “The wife as well as the husband?”

“Oh yes, certainly—though I understand that the woman isn’t quite as good a shot as the man…” Rummaging, Humbleby had unearthed an old copy of the
Tatler
. “This.” he added as he handed it across, “will give you an idea of what they
look
like.”

They looked slightly like giraffes, Fen concluded as he studied the photograph in question; and you would have taken them for brother and sister rather than for husband and wife. The woman was older than he had expected
—
forty at least. Her lean and apparently sunburned countenance wore a hard unspontaneous smile showing large buck teeth, and her short hair had been permanently waved by no niggardly hand. Her long nose was almost duplicated by her husband’s, and the eyes of both of them were disagreeably small. It was he, however, who contrived to look the younger and the more human of the two; a large pipe projected manfully from his lips, and he was in the act of lighting it with a frown of preoccupation and a vesta match. The caption stated that also present (at a charity garden party) were Mr. and Mrs. Philip Bowyer, recently returned from a big-game expedition in Tanganyika; and
“Mrs. Bowyer,”
the
Tatler
hastened to explain, fearful of being thought to include mere
polloi
in its Society pages,
“is the second daughter of Sir Egerton and the late Lady Joan Wilmot, of Wilmot Hall in Derbyshire.”

Fen was still digesting this information when a telephone rang on the desk, and Humbleby picked it up.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I saw them come in. Keep them downstairs for a few minutes, will you? I’ll let you know when I’m ready for them.” He replaced the instrument with a grimace. “Cowardice,” he observed. “Procrastination. But I thought that perhaps you wouldn’t mind hearing about it, and telling me what you think.”

Fen nodded. “By all means. Your story’s been rather scrappy so far, and I’m still not really clear about what happened.”

Lightning flickered again in the narrow room, and this time the thunder was close after it; the storm was coming in fast from the south-west, and at its coming the wind had risen. spattering a handful of rain-drops against the panes. Humbleby put his hand up to the sash, shut the window, returned to his desk. The heat had dishevelled his accustomed neatness, and he wiped sweat from his forehead as he slumped into the revolving chair.

“Here’s this girl, then,” he said. “Eve Crandall. Twenty-four, brunette, as pretty and graceful as you expect a mannequin to be, sharing a tiny flat in Nottingham Place with another girl. She has a rich old uncle, Maurice Crandall, who’s made her his heiress. She has a big-game-hunting cousin, Philip Bowyer, who’s at present downstairs with his wife Hilary. And she has a studious cousin, James Crandall, who teaches at an elementary school in Twelford.”

“James Crandall?” Fen was frowning. “In my undergraduate days, there was a James Crandall contemporary with me at Magdalen. A gawky, conscientious, desperately dull sort of man with thick-lensed glasses and a stammer. He was one of those unfortunate people who are obviously doomed to come to nothing however hard they try, so that an elementary school, twenty years later—”

“Yes, he could be the same one. I can vouch for the gawkiness and the glasses, though as to the rest,” said Humbleby a shade grimly, “I just wouldn’t know—not at first hand, anyway…

“Still, that’s by the way. The real
point
about all this set-up of uncle and cousins is this: that if Eve predeceases Maurice, the estate will be shared on Maurice’s death by Philip Bowyer and James Crandall; and that if both Eve
and
James Crandall predecease Maurice, the estate will go to Philip Bowyer intact. In other words, and not to be too delicate about it, schoolmaster James has a motive for killing Eve, and big-game hunter Bowyer (together with his wife) has a motive for killing both Eve
and
James. Clear so far?

“Now, Uncle Maurice has carcinoma of the lungs. He may live two months or two weeks or only two days, but in any event he’s dying, and like most of us he has no particular relish for dying among strangers in a nursing-home. So he asks Philip and Hilary Bowyer, the most well-to-do of his relatives, to take him in at their house near Henley.”

“A rather sanguine request.” Fen commented, “in view of the fact that he hadn’t willed them his money.”

“Oh, he’d left them something; the bulk of his fortune was to go to Eve, but he’d left the Bowyers
something
—and he was quite capable of canceling that arrangement if they refused to have him in their house. The Bowyers aren’t, it turns out, as well off as they look—not well enough off, in any case, to sniff at the chance of an odd thousand or two: no doubt big-game hunting is an expensive hobby. Anyway, they agreed to have him.

“They agreed to have him, and on the day he was due to arrive, rather more than a week ago, Eve traveled to Henley to see him settled in. That was to be expected; what was not to be expected was that James Crandall should forsake his little boys and turn up too. Turn up, however, he did—in the hope, maybe, of wheedling a rather larger bequest out of Maurice than the five hundred pounds he was destined for as things stood—and by the early afternoon they were all, excepting Maurice who was presumably still
en route
in an ambulance from the nursing-home, on the spot.

“The Bowyers’ house stands on high ground overlooking the town and the river, about a mile out. It’s biggish—ten-bedroom calibre—and like a lot of biggish houses these days it’s going to seed for lack of an adequate staff. But Philip and Hilary are the sort of people who prefer pretension to comfort, so there they stay—and it may be that they’re attracted by the fact that there’s quite a lot of land attached, with things to shoot on it: though rabbits, I take it, must be something of a come-down after lions. There’s just one servant, a wretched overworked little woman who makes one feel that there’s something to be said, after all, for the independent, take-it-on leave-it type that’s cropped up since the war. And it was this Mrs. Jordan who opened the door to Eve Crandall when at about three o’clock she arrived in a taxi from the station.