Beware of the Trains (15 page)

“Naturally, I felt bound to tell the Superintendent what Judith had told me; and by way of response, he produced for my inspection two sheets of typing-paper which he’d found hidden away in one of Odell’s drawers. The first one I looked at bore, in faint and spidery typescript, the blackmail message I’ve already quoted—but
not
the odd superscription. The second sheet was identical with the first in every possible respect,
except
that it was addressed, like the backing-sheet Judith had found, to The Quick Brown Fox. And that being so—”

“That being so,” Wakefield interrupted, “you didn’t, I trust, have to do any very strenuous thinking in order to solve the mystery.”

Wakefield had been unnaturally silent during Fen’s narrative. And it now became immediately clear to everyone at the table that this silence had been due to some massive feat of cerebration on whose results he was proposing to lecture them. “You think the solution obvious?” said Fen mildly.

“I think it child’s play,” said Wakefield with much complacency. “With what, after all, does one associate the words ‘the quick brown fox’? One associates them, of course, with the sentence ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,’ which has the peculiarity of containing all the letters of the alphabet. To cut a long story short, Odell wasn’t
writing
a blackmail note: he was
copying
one,
in order to find if it had been typed on that particular typewriter.

“In other words, Odell was not a blackmailer: he was a blackmailer’s victim.

“He started to type out the Quick Brown Fox sentence, as a means of comparison, and then decided it would be simpler just to copy the complete message. And the original, together with his copy, was naturally enough found in his drawer. I take it that he wasn’t the man to accede meekly to blackmail, and that he’d made up his mind to find out who was threatening him; at which the blackmailer took fright and brained him while he slept… Any objections so far?”

But there were no objections—not even from Fen.

“As to who the blackmailer was,” Wakefield went on, “That’s easy, too. And for this reason:

“As I understand it, both messages
were
in fact typed on Professor Fen’s machine.” Fen assented. “Just so. Well then, between the time Professor Fen entered the house and the time Odell made his copy, what opportunity was there for anyone to use his typewriter? One, and one only—the period during which Professor Fen was playing Racing Demon in the drawing-room.

“And—well, we know there were only two people who weren’t uninterruptedly engaged in that game: to wit, Judith, who was in the kitchen, and Aunt Ellen, who was upstairs. Judith we can eliminate on the simple grounds that if she’d been the blackmailer she’d scarcely have told Professor Fen what she did tell him. And that leaves Aunt Ellen… Did you ever find out anything about Odell and Manchester and that date?”

“Yes,” said Fen. “Odell—and that wasn’t his real name—had deserted from the Army on that date and in that place. And Aunt Ellen, who’d been in the A.T.S., had had to do, at one time, with the dossiers relating to deserters. In one of those dossiers she’d seen a photograph of Odell, and consequently she recognised him the first time he entered the house.”

“She didn’t attempt to deny having recognised him?”

“Oh no. She couldn’t very well deny it, because—having discreetly checked back to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake—she’d confided the facts to Judith after Odell became engaged to Eleanor; and Judith had advised her to do and say nothing, on the grounds that Odell had a first-rate fighting record, and that his desertion, at the end of the war, was therefore a technical rather than a moral offence.”

There was a hush while they assimilated this. Then: “Well, well… It really does seem,” said someone unkindly, “as if Wakefield has made the grade for once.”

“The problem was elementary,” said Wakefield smugly—forgetting, in the utterance of this rash echo, the awful dooms which the gods have decreed for those whose self-confidence is premature. “I’m not asserting that on the case I’ve outlined you could convict Aunt Ellen of the
murder
—even though it’s pretty certain she did it. But she was arrested, I take it, for the blackmail?”

“Oh dear, no. You see, Wakefield,” said Fen with aggravating tolerance, “your answer to the problem, though immensely cogent and logical, has one grave defect: it doesn’t happen to be the right answer.”

Wakefield was much offended. “If it
isn’t
the right answer,” he returned sourly, “that’s only because you’ve not given me all the relevant facts.”

“Oh, but I have. You remember my telling you about changing the ribbon in my typewriter?”

“Yes.”

“And you remember my saying that one of the blackmail messages was in ‘a faint and spidery typescript’?”

“So it would be, if it was typed in the afternoon, before you changed the ribbon.”

“But you remember also, no doubt, my saying that apart from the words ‘the quick brown fox’, the second sheet was identical with the first
in every possible respect?”

For once Wakefield was bereft of speech; he subsided, breathing heavily through his nose.

“Therefore,” said Fen,
“both
messages were in faint, spidery typescript. Therefore they were
both
typed while I was playing Racing Demon. And therefore Judith’s story about Odell and the typewriter and the blackmail was a deliberate pack of lies from beginning to end.”

Haldane was groping for comprehension. “You mean the two messages were
planted
in Odell’s drawer?”

“Certainly. At the time of the murder.”

“So that in fact Odell never either sent or received a blackmail note at all?”

“Of course not. Neither he, nor anyone else.” “But the business about his being a deserter…”

“That was genuine enough,” said Fen. “But its only function in the affair was to provide Judith with raw material for her frame-up. The frame-up might well have come off, too, but for the chance of my changing the typewriter-ribbon. But for that, there’d have been no proof, other than Aunt Ellen’s word, that the blackmail attempt hadn’t in fact occurred. If Judith had had the sense to type the second copy of the message, the ‘quick brown fox’ one, after I’d gone to bed… However, she didn’t.”

Fen twisted his glass between his fingers; drained it, and reached for the cigarette-box. “And I liked her,” he murmured, as he struck a match. “That was the trouble. Until I knew the truth, I liked her very much. I liked all of them; But—“

“But you told the police about changing the ribbon.”

Fen nodded briefly.

“Yes, I told them; you see. I’d liked Odell, too…

“Under examination, Judith broke down and confessed to the murder. She was frightened—l mentioned that. didn’t I? She‘d bitten off very much more than she could chew. And since if she’d pleaded Not Guilty at her trial it would have come down to her word against mine, I was heartily relieved when she caved in. Her acting had certainly deceived
me;
and in a court-room tussle between us she might easily have got the best of it. A plea of Guilty to a murder charge is very rare, of course, but it had the great advantage, in Judith’s case, of obscuring the cold-blooded attempt to incriminate Aunt Ellen, and so making a recommendation to mercy possible. So that in the end she wasn’t in fact executed; the death sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life.”

“And her motive for the murder?” Haldane asked.

“Jealousy. She hated Odell for jilting her in favour of her sister; and if she hadn’t planted the messages in Odell’s room, and spun me her fairy-tales in a sophisticated, double-bluff attempt to incriminate Aunt Ellen, she might have got away with the killing.

“But the trouble was, she was a reader of detective stories; and what she dreamed up—in the hope that everyone would make the deductions Wakefield has just been making, and probe no further—was in consequence a detective-story device… I hope no one will imagine I’m mocking at detective-story devices. In point of fact, I dote on them. But so long as criminals take them for a model, the police are going to have a very easy time; because, like the wretched Judith, your genuinely murderous addict will dig his cunning and complicated pits for the investigators, only, in the upshot, to fall head first into one of them himself.”

At ten o’clock on the evening of July 24th, 1951, Police-Constable Albert Tyler set out on his bicycle from the little police-station in the village of Low Norton. He would be back from his night-beat, and reporting to his Sergeant, at twelve-thirty prompt—for both of them took a pride in punctuality. In the meantime, he had much ground to cover. Cycling steadily past the cottage where his wife was already retiring to bed, past the
Norton Arms
—whose only guest at the moment, he had heard, was an Oxford Professor seeking peace and quiet in order to finish a book—and beyond that past the diminutive church and the old almshouses, P.C. Tyler struck out on the road eastwards and was presently swallowed up by the night.

Thus began the curious affair of the disappearing car, the black neck-tie, and the abortive burglary.

Incidents on P.C. Tyler’s extensive but not populous rural beat had hitherto belonged infallibly to one or other of three categories: (
a
) lost wayfarers; (
b
) poachers; and (
c
) burning ricks. Sergeant Beeton was consequently a good deal startled when at a minute to midnight Tyler rang him up to report murder. “Chap bashed on the head with a stone,” gabbled Tyler, whose misfortune it was to always sound much more agitated than he actually felt. “Middle-aged. Reddish hair. Raincoat and black tie. It’s at ‘The Moorings‘—you know. Might be that chap Derringer, who rented the place, but I’ve never seen him close to, so I can’t be sure. He’s lying in the road, just outside the gate… Dead? Lord, yes: he’s dead all right.”

Our police forces err, if anything, on the side of economy: despite the extent of the district under his charge, Beeton had never been granted the use of a car. As a result of this, it was more than half an hour before, winded from cycling at top speed up a succession of hills, he arrived at the scene of the crime; and it was an hour more before the doctor came.

“Yes, it is Derringer,” said Beeton, as he contemplated the huddled form in the shadow of the gate-post. “Poor devil…” He stooped lower. “But it’s queer about the clothes, Bert, isn’t it? He can’t have been to a
funeral
, can he?”

For the one really puzzling thing about the body was that along with the brown sports suit it wore a neat, plain black tie.

“Nor,” said Sergeant Beeton somewhat pedantically, in the police-station next afternoon, “is that the only strange feature of the affair… But look here, sir”—he recollected himself suddenly—“it’s not right I should be bothering you about it, and—”

“No bother at all.” Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, regarded the Sergeant out of mild blue eyes. “All I’m afraid of is that I may be wasting your time. But Humbleby did tell me to look you up while I was here, so you must forgive me if I’m a nuisance… You worked with Humbleby for a time, didn’t you?”

“I did indeed, sir. But I found C.I.D. stuff wasn’t my line, so I got a transfer back into the Uniform Branch and they sent me here. Suits me a long sight better, really… As to you keeping me from my work, all I’m doing now is just marking time till the County C.I.D. man gets here. It’d be nice to be able to hand him the murderer all nicely tied up and ticketed, but the fact is, I’m downright dizzy with it all.
Nothing
makes sense.”

The police-station in which they sat resembled, in all outward essentials, a small private villa. As well as being a police-station, it was Beeton’s home. And its personnel consisted of Beeton and Tyler exclusively—for in spite of the overcrowding of our islands, there are still many country areas where the houses are few and far between, areas where the police-constable’s beat is a dozen times the length of a city beat, where ten or fifteen square miles support as few as a couple of hundred souls, and where the tiny branch railway-lines are for ever in peril of being pronounced redundant and closed down. Such areas—of which Low Norton was one—do not require anything very elaborate in the way of policing and their police headquarters can afford to be homely as well as diminutive. It is true that Beeton, being an earnest man, not to say conscientious, had striven to give his office an official look; but in this he had not been completely successful. Thus, there were a few portentous books on the mantelpiece—
Police Regulations,
Kenny’s
Criminal Law,
Stone’s
Justices’ Manual;
but their impressiveness was marred by a piece of knitting which had been put down on top of them. And there was a safe containing heaven knows what explosive secrets, which also contained, however, several bottles of stout and a broken toy aeroplane, belonging to Beeton’s small son, which Beeton had promised several weeks ago to repair and which had been swept hurriedly out of sight, and hence forgotten, on the occasion of an unexpected visit from the Chief Constable. All this was comfortable and pleasing. And Fen, settled in a wicker chair which creaked every time he shifted his weight, looked on it with an approving eye.

Outside the open window, the village drowsed under a hot sun. Beeton’s coat was unfastened; and from the room adjoining, where Constable Tyler (whose gruesome experience had left him in a state of very ill-suppressed emotion) was supposed to be writing a report, came the sound of liquid being poured from a bottle into a glass. This roused Beeton, and he resorted to the safe on behalf of his visitor and himself. And having seen to that small matter: “Yes,” he said, “it’s a funny business altogether. I don’t know if it’d be of any interest to you to…”

“It would,” Fen assured him. “Where crimes are concerned, I’m the one and only original Elephant’s Child.”

“Ele—Ah, I get you. ’Satiable curiosity.” Beeton grinned. “Well then, where do you want me to begin?”

“The first thing is, who
was
Derringer? I mean, what did he do?”