Beware of the Trains (21 page)

“All I can say is”—Humbleby, too, had risen—“that I hope it really was self-defence. In the interests of justice—”

“Justice?” Fen reached for his hat. “I shouldn’t worry too much about that, if I were you. Here’s a wife who knows her husband killed her brother. And here’s a husband who knows his wife can by saying a word deprive him of his liberty and just possibly—if things didn’t go well—of his life. And each knows that the other knows. And the wife is in love with the husband, but one day she won’t be any longer, and then he’ll begin to be afraid. And the wife thinks her husband is in love with her, but one day she’ll find out that he isn’t, and then she’ll begin to hate him and to wonder what she can do to harm him, and he will know this, and she will know that he knows it and will be afraid of what he may do…

“Justice? My dear Humbleby, come and have some dinner. Justice has already been done.”

Inspector George Copperfield was of that enviable minority of policemen who have, as a rule, rather too little to do. In Lampound, where the peace of our Sovereign Lord the King was in Inspector Copperfield’s charge, traffic offences were few, drunks fewer, serious crimes virtually unknown; and the Inspector was wise enough not to make his relative inactivity a pretext—as more zealous if less sagacious officers sometimes do—for tightening the reins in connection with licensing hours, parking of vehicles and so forth. Instead he devoted his spare time to improving the prose style of his reports with the help of a volume entitled
How to Write Good English:
an innocuous occupation which in his more buoyant moments led him to suspect that he had missed a profitable vocation as an author of realistic crime-fiction in the manner of M. Simenon.

Lampound is one of those towns whose
raison d’étre
is unexpectedly difficult to explain. It has not grown up round an intersection of main roads, or a good defensive position. It is not situated at some strategic point on a river. It is not a Resort, nor a Beauty Spot. It is not a dormitory town, and there are no factories in the district worth speaking of. It is not, and never was, a market town or a see. In short, you cannot discover any consideration of a military sort, or an ecclesiastical, or a commercial or an industrial, which would adequately account for Lampound’s existing at all. And yet there the place is: neither particularly new nor particularly old; neither specially big nor specially small; neither notably rich nor notably poor; neither lively nor dull, neither attractive nor ugly: a mediocrity among towns, a waste-product of southern prosperity, without any particular interests for its fortunate Member to defend in the Commons, without any particular aim other than the universal aim of survival. ‘What then,’ it may be asked, ‘do its inhabitants
do?’
The answer is simple: they live off one another. The solicitor pays for his groceries by giving legal advice to the grocer, the grocer pays for his medicines by supplying sugar to the chemist—and so on. Lampound is not of course entirely self-contained; there are certain goods and services—to use the economists’ jargon—which it takes from the outside world. But these are paid for, ultimately, by the large number of retired Civil Servants who rediscover in Lampound, on the plane of idleness, the unexacting moods of their working lives—are paid for, not to put too fine a point on it, by you and by me. A ponderable part of our taxes, reissued in the form of pensions, goes to prevent the economic disintegration of this inexplicable, useless township.

Useless, that is, except as contributing to the happiness of its natives: they like it. Inspector Copperfield, who had been born and bred there, liked it. And only if you had asked him where Blanche Binney figured in the leisurely ceremonies of exchange which were Lampound’s main preoccupation would he have been brought to admit that the place had its black spots. Accordingly, the murder of Blanche did not, to him, represent unalleviated tragedy. It had the double merit of removing a long-standing source of nuisance and at the same time giving the Inspector something substantial to do—for he was a conscientious man who liked to give value for his wages, and it was useless to pretend that Clarity of Expression or Avoidance of Jargon were among the things which, in consideration of those wages, he had contracted to promote. The murder shocked him, of course: as an ordinarily humane person he held no brief for violence. On the other hand, if someone had
got
to be murdered in Lampound, then Blanche Binney was undoubtedly an excellent choice. The scandalous goings-on of this young woman had disrupted more than one home, and the number of men who had fallen victim to her blowsy charms was, after ten years, quite beyond computation.

This latter circumstance looked like presenting a difficulty, in that Blanche Binney, throttled shortly after lunch one May day on her own sitting-room hearth-rug, was clearly yet another instance of that favourite species of English homicide, the
crime passionnel
and there were so many males in Lampound, married and unmarried, young and old, overt and secretive, who might have resented the catholicity of Blanche’s affections, that the field of suspects seemed at first to be formidably large. Luckily, there were contributory factors which narrowed it drastically, chief of them the Clue of the Ring. Once, and once only, Blanche had got herself engaged—to Harry Levitt, who lived alone in an old house out on the Twelford road, subsisting on inexplicit ‘independent means’; he had naturally given her a ring—an expensive platinum one with diamonds encircling a large dark ruby; and she had not, when the engagement was broken off, returned it to him. Latterly, indeed, she would have been unable to return it even if she had wished to do so, for her sins had been rewarded with a sudden abnormal growth of flesh, and the ring was no longer, at the time of her death, capable of being removed except with the aid of a file.

Herein lay Inspector Copperfield’s clue: for the hand which bore the ring had been hacked off, very horribly, after Blanche’s death, and taken away by the murderer—and who more likely to want the ring than Harry Levitt, whose property it morally was? Moreover, Levitt had been observed by several witnesses lurking near Blanche’s house at about the time of the murder, and the only business he was likely to have in that particular neighbourhood was with her. Nevertheless, Inspector Copperfield was not the man to act prematurely; enjoining silence on his witnesses (since experience had taught him that publicity assists the criminal more often than the police) he set forth to trace Levitt’s movements during the day, so far as possible, before interviewing him. And thus it was that Barney Cooper came into the affair.

There are plenty of would-be amateur detectives in the land; but to few is it given, as it was given to Barney, to provide the authorities with conclusive proof of guilt in a murder case. The thing came about by accident rather than by expertise, for Barney was a day-dreamer, not a serious criminologist; but this was one instance where a day-dreamer rather than a serious criminologist was what the police required. For the rest, Barney was a small brown hen-pecked man, incurably doggish, incurably absent-minded; liked by his colleagues, tolerated by his superiors, given to mildly boastful pontificating on the unsolved crimes in the newspapers; one of those average people whom you never notice, who leave no perceptible hiatus even when they die or disappear. All ignorant of his exalted destiny, he arrived back at the bus-station terminus in the High Street, after the first trip of the afternoon shift on Route 18, punctually at three forty-seven. And thus was initiated the melodramatic train of events which was to end three months later in the hangman’s shed.

Lampound would not be Lampound if there were anything in the least notable about its bus-station; and in fact you may find the pattern reduplicated in a hundred other places concrete‘ facade with gilt letters, a tall archway into which red double-decker buses lurch like drunken elephants, the boom of voices under a glass roof, a cheerless waiting-room, an incompetent enquiry-office, and an administrative department housed in shrunken square boxes of rooms overlooking the yard. It was in one of these—the Superintendent’s—that Inspector Copperfield was awaiting the arrival of Number 18. And Barney had scarcely set foot on the ground, and was still groping in his pocket for the apparatus on which he rolled himself damp, sprouting cigarettes, when a fellow-Conductor named Crittall hailed him.

“Hi, Barney!” called Crittall. “You’re wanted. Inspector wants to talk to you.”

“Copperfield?” Barney stared. “What the devil for?”

“Dunno. But ’e’s waiting in the office now. You’d better ’ave a lawyer with you, ’adn’t you?”

“Oh, shut up,” said Barney, disgruntled, and made for the Superintendent’s room—in which, now that he came to look, the massive blue-clad form of Copperfield was just visible behind the rather grimy window.

The Inspector was affable, however, thereby allaying Barney’s vague qualms, and as soon as the Superintendent had taken himself off, in an almost overwhelming aura of discretion, they got down to business. Lord, yes, said Barney, he knew Harry Levitt all right: who didn’t? And what about him, anyway? Not got himself into trouble, had he?—not that Barney‘d die of surprise if he had, he having said all along that Levitt—

Copperfield cut this rigmarole short by asking, with considerable abruptness, the question he had come to ask. But Barney’s reply was disappointing. It was on his bus, which did the Twelford trip, that Harry Levitt would probably have ridden if he had returned to his house immediately after the murder. Only unfortunately he had not ridden on it, not that day anyway. And with that the interview might have ended, but for the fact that the Inspector, who had long been aware of Barney’s armchair-detective ambitions and who rather liked the little man, unbent so far as to offer a concise account of what had occurred; the consequence of which was that Barney went on to operate the remainder of his shift in a haze of criminological speculation which he interrupted only in order to stare ferociously whenever the bus passed Levitt’s house.

His meditations were not fruitful, however, until the evening; when, having eaten his supper—liver, a dish which his wife knew him to detest—and being on the way to the local, he encountered the Inspector again, this time outside the police-station, and ventured, greatly daring, to ask if there were any developments. There were, it transpired—but exclusively of a negative sort.

“You keep all this under your hat, mind,” said the Inspector. “I didn’t ought to be saying anything about it, not rightly, but still; seeing as it’s a hobby of yours… What Levitt says to account for being near Blanche’s house is that he went there to ask for the ring back for the umpteenth time, and then at the last moment thought better of it. That’s
possible,
I suppose, but it sounds a bit thin to me.”

“M’well,” said Barney judicially, “you never quite know, do you? We all of us behave a bit queer at times… No fingerprints, I suppose?”

“None that are any good, not even on the coal-axe that did the chopping.”

Barney nodded. “Premeditation,” he observed. “You don’t wear gloves indoors, do you, not unless you’ve got a good reason for it… I’m taking it the axe and so forth hadn’t been wiped.”

“Then you’re taking it wrong,” said Copperfield good-humouredly. “Because they had. No, it was done on the spur of the moment, if you ask me, in a sudden passion. And Harry Levitt—”

“Levitt’s got a temper all right,” agreed Barney. “Still, so’s others.”

“Always investigate the obvious first,” said Copperfield didactically, “and you can’t go far wrong. Which is what
I’ve
been doing. For instance, I got a search warrant for Levitt’s house and garden—almost the first thing I did, that was.”

“Any luck?” asked Barney eagerly.

But Copperfield shook his head. “Nope. Not a sign of the hand
or
the ring.”

“Ah,” said Barney. “No secret panels, eh?”

“No secret panels. And now I must be off.” The Inspector squared his shoulders in a policemanly manner. “Mind you don’t say nothing, Barney, not to anyone. We haven’t got enough evidence yet, not for an arrest, and in the meantime there’s such a thing as slander to reckon with… We’ll be searching the house again tomorrow, and I’ll let you know if anything runs up. But remember—mum’s the word.” He went, and Barney very thoughtfully resumed his interrupted progress towards
The Pheasant.

‘No secret panels
…’ He had spoken facetiously, without thinking, but it now occurred to him, as he drank his evening pint, that he might have spoken truer than he knew. For Barney’s grandfather had been a builder; had built, among others, the house Harry Levitt occupied; and had made something of a specialty of secret hiding-places—in part because, prior to the invention of modern safes, such
caches
had been genuinely useful, and in part because of a naturally rather infantile mind Barney was unable, off-hand, to remember if any such theatrical feature was incorporated in ‘The Elms’, where Harry Levitt lived; but at least it was obvious, from what the Inspector had said, that the police had overlooked the possibility of such a thing, while at the same time there was a good chance that Levitt, after ten years’ residence, had discovered it, if indeed it existed.

That evening Barney left
The Pheasant
earlier than usual. The bar was humming with the news of the murder, and more than once he was requested, half-frivolously and half in earnest, to give his opinion of it; but he waved these demands aside with so obviously genuine an air of abstraction that his silence created a greater impression than any amount of talking could have done. It impressed his wife, even, when eventually he got home. Where Barney was concerned she was not normally at all an impressionable person, but on this particular evening there was, as she said later, Something About Him, and she remained as nearly mute as she was capable of being while she watched him climb the stairs to the attic.

Now, it was one of Mrs. Cooper’s recurrent grievances that the house was too large for them; and in this matter she had fairly good reason to complain. Barney, however, clung to his home, in spite of the inordinate rates he was obliged to pay, from an obscure sense of family piety which he would have found it difficult to justify or explain but which was none the less one of the very few things he was ever obstinate about. His grandfather had built the house, he said. His
grandfather
had built it. And that—he seemed to feel—was explanation enough. His grandfather had not as a matter of fact built the house very
well;
but he had certainly built it big. And the attic being correspondingly sizeable, not to mention crammed with the accumulated rubbish of three generations, it took Barney almost half an hour to locate his forebear’s business papers, and another twenty minutes to disinter from among them the faded, yellowing plans of ‘The Elms’. The search proved well worth while, however, for it turned out that ‘The Elms’ really did possess a
cache.
The rosette mouldings to right and left of the study fireplace were movable, it seemed; turn one clockwise, and the other anti-clockwise, and you released an iron centre-panel with a cavity behind it. Just the thing, Barney reflected, if you wanted to hide an amputated hand. And that being so…