Beware of the Trains (13 page)

“Is there any reason for suspecting Merrick?”

Bledloe hesitated. “Not what you’d call a reason,” he said cautiously. “But just the same, I wouldn’t put it past him: he’s the sort of relative a man’s better without, if you ask me—a waster, and worse. But if it was him, Church is going to be badly upset about it. He’s the son of a sister of Church’s who died years ago, and I’ve heard that when she was dying she asked Church to look after him after she was gone. Which he’s done, and not got much thanks for it, either… Well. If there’s nothing more you want to look at here, we’ll go and find out if he’s fit to talk yet.”

Fen assented. “And it’ll be helpful,” he observed as they went on up the path towards the front door, “to know if he really has been robbed.”

“Not much doubt about that.” Bledloe spoke with a certain gloomy relish. “Most weekends he brings diamonds and so forth back here from his shop in London, so as to look them over… Risky, of course, but he’s pretty careful with them—carries them on him during the daytime, and the house is locked up nice and tight at nights. That front door, now—that’s got three bolts on it.
and
a chain,
and
two Yale locks, and he won’t even have those catches on the locks that hold them open, because he says they get fixed like that and forgotten… Well, you see what I mean: he does take precautions.”

This information Fen was able to confirm when the door in question was opened to them by the constable on duty. Behind the constable, in a state of considerable agitation, was a thin, worn-looking elderly woman—Mrs. Ryan, the housekeeper; and at the foot of the staircase lurked a stoutish lady, also elderly but with an air of settled misanthropy, who was presumably Mrs. Ryan’s so far unlabelled visitor. The hall in which they stood appeared at a first inspection to be commonplace enough, but Fen none the less prowled conscientiously about it while Bledloe conferred with the constable, and this thoroughness was presently rewarded by an interesting, though admittedly negative, discovery. Interrupting the constable, who had at last succeeded, with great prolixity, in conveying the news that Church was better and that the doctor had authorised a brief interview, Fen picked up a newspaper which was lying on the table beside the front door, handed it to Bledloe, and said:

“Tell me if you see anything unusual about that.”

The interruption took Bledloe sufficiently unawares to make him obey Fen’s request before enquiring its motive. “No, I don’t,” he answered, examining the paper somewhat bemusedly. “Except that it’s several days old, there’s nothing unusual about it that I can make out. Why?”

Fen turned to Mrs. Ryan. “Was Mr. Church keeping this paper for any particular reason?” he asked.

“Oh no, sir.” Mrs. Ryan shook her head vigorously. “It was me as left it there, when I was laying the fires this morning.”

“I see. And it was just this one paper you left? No others?”

“No, sir. Just the one. But—”

‘Thank you,” said Fen; and glanced round him. “The house is very beautifully looked after, Mrs. Ryan.”

“It 
’
as to be,” Mrs. Ryan replied with some candour. “Very 
’
ouse-proud, the master is. More like a woman, as far as that goes.”

“With a man fussy like that,” said the stoutish lady with sudden malevolence, making her sole recorded independent contribution to the matter, “I’m sorry for his wife, and I don’t care who hears me say it.” Upon which doubtfully relevant pronouncement, Bledloe, who by now was eyeing Fen with considerable mistrust, decided that the time had come to make a move upstairs.

They found the injured man propped up against pillows with his head in a bandage. He was perhaps fifty—small, slender, large-eyed and at the moment unnaturally pale. “He’s had a lucky escape,” said the doctor, in the slightly petulant tones of one to whom an interesting fatality has been denied. “Very lucky indeed. No concussion and no amnesia. But you’re not to tire him out, mind. Ten minutes—no more. I’ll wait downstairs.” He took himself off.

Though Church was obviously still suffering a good deal of pain, he was game enough, and quite lucid. His story did not, however, incriminate his nephew George Merrick, who had left, he said, at about ten or a quarter past three. Questioned to the reason for the visit, Church freely admitted that Merrick had been trying to borrow money. “Not for the first time, either,” he added wryly. “George suffered from the delusion that jewellers are necessarily rich, because of the value of their stock. As if 
that
had anything to do with it! Anyway, this time I couldn’t afford to help him. For his mother’s sake I’d have liked to, but it was out of the question. I offered him a smaller amount than what he was asking for, but that didn’t suit his lordship, and so off he went. Then after he’d left I fetched my paint and trotted out to the garden to get on with painting the fence, and I hadn’t done more than a couple of inches before—”

“One moment, Mr. Church,” Fen interposed; at which Bledloe, balked of his climax, momentarily glowered at him. “You say you fetched your paint. But was the other stuff—brushes and so forth—already out there?”

Church was surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I took it out there immediately after lunch, and would have fetched the paint at the same time if George’s arrival hadn’t interrupted me. But I don’t quite see—”

“And you have in fact been robbed?”

“Certainly I have.” Church frowned. “Do you mean to say you didn’t—No, sorry: I’m being stupid. Of course you couldn’t possibly know. Anyway, I
was
robbed. At the time I was hit I had a bag of diamonds worth, oh, close on two thousand in my waistcoat pocket. And they aren’t there now.”

Bledloe cleared his throat. “But the point is, sir, did you see who hit you?”

“For a split second, yes. I heard him moving behind me, and swung round just in time to get a glimpse of him.”

“It wasn’t your nephew, then?”

“George?” Church snorted contemptuously. “Good God, no! I don’t hold much stock in George’s morals, but he hasn’t got the guts to go round knocking people out. No, this man—”

There followed an indeterminate description which patently conveyed as little to Bledloe as it did to Fen. “And that’s all you can tell us, sir?” said Bledloe, disappointed.

“I’m afraid so. It’s vague, I know, but you must remember that I didn’t have a chance to get a proper look.”

“Tell me, Mr. Church”—Fen had crossed the room and was gazing rather vacantly out of the window—“are you going to claim insurance on the stolen jewels?”

Church stared at him. “Look here,” he said after a moment’s pause, “who the devil are
you?
I don’t remember that I’ve ever—”

“A colleague, sir,” said Bledloe smoothly. “And if you wouldn’t mind answering his question…”

“Well, damn it, of course I’m going to claim. I can’t afford to drop a small fortune like that.” Church’s expression hardened. “If you’re implying that I hid the diamonds, and then knocked myself cut, so as to—”

“No.” said Fen with emphasis. “The one discrepancy in the evidence won’t fit
that
explanation, at all. But there’s another explanation it certainly will fit, so I think you’d better tell us the truth. Being attacked and robbed is (up to a point) your own business, and if only that had been involved, I’d have kept quiet. But claiming insurance money and at the same time lying in such a way as to hinder recovery of the jewels is another matter. We know it was Merrick who attacked you—attacked you in the virtual certainty that you’d do what you have done—namely, cover up for him for his mother’s sake and so give him time to leave the country. And these things being thus—”

“Oh, so I’m lying, am I?” Church regarded Fen with curiosity. but not with any special perturbation. “And just what makes you imagine that?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Fen. And did.

There was a silence when he had finished; then Church nodded abruptly. “Well, I’ve done what I could,” he said. “And you’re quite right, of course. George didn’t go at ten past three—in spite of the fact that I’d told him I couldn’t help him. He followed me into the garden, still arguing, and then when my back was turned—” Church shrugged. “Well, you know the rest.”

Later, over beer in the parlour of
The Three Tuns,
Bledloe sighed dismissively and said: “So that’s settled. But I still don’t understand how you could be sure.”

Fen grunted.
“Someone
must have opened the front door for Church when he went out to paint his fence,” he explained: “and since he didn’t mention that important fact, the someone was fairly obviously Merrick. The two women heard the door being opened, remember—so it wasn’t open already. Church couldn’t have opened it himself for the reason, you understand, that he was carrying that pot of paint. And he didn’t put the pot of paint down in order to open the door, because the old newspaper—the obvious and only place for a house—proud man to deposit the messy paint-tin—wasn’t marked at all.”

“But look here, he only needed
one
hand to carry the paint. So why couldn’t he have opened the door with the other?”

Fen chuckled and drank deep. “When there were
two
knobs to turn—and neither could be fixed? Well, I suppose he just
might
have used his teeth or his toes, but really, Bledloe…”

The port had been round several times, and Wakefield’s temperamental dogmatism was by now somewhat inflamed by it.

“Just the same,” he said, irrupting on a discussion whose origin and purpose no one could clearly remember, “detective stories
are
anti-social, and no amount of sophistries can disguise the fact. It’s quite impossible to suppose that criminals don’t collect useful information from them, fantastic and far-fetched though they usually are. No one, I think”—here he glared belligerently at his fellow-guests—“will attempt to contest
that
. And furthermore—”

“I
contest it,” said Gervase Fen; and Wakefield groaned dismally. “For all the use criminals make of them, the members of the Detection Club might as well be a chorus of voices crying in the wilderness. Look at the papers and observe what, in spite of detective fiction, criminals actually do. They buy arsenic at the chemists, signing their own names in the Poisons Book, and then put stupendous quantities of it in their victims’ tea. They leave their fingerprints on every possible object in the corpse’s vicinity. They invariably forget that burnt paper, if it isn’t reduced to dust, can be reconstituted and read. They spend, with reckless abandon, stolen bank-notes whose serial numbers they must know are in the possession of the police…

“No, on the whole I don’t think criminals get much help from detective stories. And if by any chance they
are
addicts, that fact by itself is almost certain to scupper them, since their training in imaginary crime—which as a rule is extremely complicated—tends to make them over-elaborate in the contriving of their own actual misdeeds; and that, of course, means that they’re easy game… For instance, there was the Munsey case.”

“It has always been my opinion,” said Wakefield to the ceiling, “that after-dinner conversation should be general rather than anecdotal. Moreover—”

“I’d known all the family slightly,” Fen went on, unperturbed, “over quite a long period of years; but I suppose that it was George Munsey, the head of the house, whom I knew best. Chance threw us together in Milan in 1928, when I was lecturing at the University there and he was engaged in some prolonged financial transaction to do with motor-cars. And although his household, which I met later, proved to be a pleasant one, I never got to know any of its members well enough to be able to regard them as individuals—as other, I mean, than the natural appendages of George. George himself was a little, round, chuckling man who’d made money on the Stock Exchange; but I’ve always felt that he must have made it more or less accidentally, because he had none of that appalling narrowness which you normally get in people who are engaged in breeding money from money. On the contrary, in fact: George was a man with hobbies—collecting ghost stories; running a toy theatre which he made and wrote the plays for, himself; bird-watching; illuminated manuscripts; and heaven knows what not else—and that fact made him livelier and more intelligent and more human even than the average non-business-man—a novelist, for instance—whose interests are necessarily fairly wide. He was thirty-seven when I first encountered him; so that in 1947, when the events I’m speaking of occurred, he was getting on for sixty—though his cherubic looks belied that, and his baldness was the only sign of aging in him that I could see.

“I’d traveled up from Oxford to London to deal with some odd scraps of business and to get myself a new portable typewriter (eventually it was a second-hand one I bought, in Holborn). On the following morning I had to attend a Ministry of Education conference, and I was proposing to stay overnight at the Athenaeum. At lunch-time, however, I happened on George Munsey in the Authors’ Club bar, and when he heard how I was placed he suggested I should stay with him instead; it was several years since we’d met, and he said the family would never forgive him if he allowed me to go back to Oxford without paying them a visit. I warned him I’d have to do some work while I was in the house—there was a long memorandum to be typed out for presentation at the M. of E. conference—but he was quite agreeable to that; and so at about half past two in the afternoon I duly appeared on his doorstep, typewriter and all.

“The Munseys’ house was in St. John’s Wood: a tall, narrow, grey-stone place with a long, narrow, rather sooty strip of garden behind it. They don’t live there now; with a single exception, I’ve no idea of the whereabouts of any of them these days, and there are good reasons why I shouldn’t enquire. But in 1947 they were old-established residents who’d survived two wars and were well-known and popular in the neighbourhood. And I rang their bell with the vaguely guilty, vaguely nostalgic feeling one has about people from whom, for no adequate reasons, one has allowed oneself to drift apart.

“I rang their bell; and the door was opened to me by Judith, the younger daughter.