Beware of the Trains (24 page)

“Polynesian,” he said now, as he swung the stave between his fingers. “Ebony. Pretty heavy. Funny thing to have about.”

“It belongs to the Maoris,” I explained eagerly. “They live in a house-boat up the canal. Or rather they did. They weren’t there last night.”

“And you think they’re the criminals?”

“I —I suppose so,” I stammered. “That is, it looks like it, doesn’t it?”

He seemed to lose interest in the subject. He stared about him. “Trim little ship,” he said, nodding at the grey, unromantic bulk of the
Vrijheid
across the canal.

“I am her Captain,” said Vanderloor.

“Eels,” the Inspector commented. “Never liked ’em, I’m afraid.” I realised now that he knew or noticed a good deal. “And what about you, Captain?” he went on. “Is your money on the Maoris?”

Captain Vanderloor shrugged. “I know so little about it,” he murmured. I noticed that he was standing stiffly, and that his manner was defensive.

“Lot of blood,” said the Inspector mildly. “He might have been knocked on the head outside that house there and then pulled to the lock and rolled in…” He spoke slowly, as though inwardly preoccupied with some other matter. “Did you hear anything during the night, Captain?”

“I could not have,” said Captain Vanderloor, “not in my cabin. I was on deck ten minutes or so before I go to bed, but I hear no sound then.”

“What time would that have been?”

“Let me see: I return from
Land of Promise
about twenty to midnight. Then I talk to my mate and engineer till about five past. Then I go out for some air.”

“You didn’t step ashore at all?”

“No. I did not leave my ship.”

“Can your people confirm that?”

“I think so. Several of them were awake.”
¹

“Uh-huh.” The Inspector flicked with the Maori stave at a blade of grass growing by the roadside. “I wonder what’s the latest time it could have happened?” He turned to me. “So you paid a visit to the Maoris and found ‘em not at home?”

“Y-yes.”

“And when would that have been?”

“About ten or a quarter past midnight. I wasn’t supposed to be out, of course.”

The Inspector grinned. “Let’s hear about it just the same. You may be a star witness.”

So I gave him a detailed account of the expedition—though unfortunately it was cut short, just as I was about to tell him of the blood on my shoes, by the doctor’s coming out of Charley Cooke’s house.

“Well, doc,” said the Inspector. “What’s the verdict?”

“Cause of death, drowning,” said the doctor shortly. He was a plump, grey-haired, self-important old man. “The skull wasn't‘t fractured, though the back of his head was pretty well battered.”

“Could this have done it?” The Inspector held out the Maori stave.

“That’s the kind of thing. I’ll analyse the stains on it if you like and tell you if they belong to his blood group.”

“Do that,” said the Inspector, handing over the weapon. “Anything definite about the time of death?”

“Only within four hours or so.”

“That’s no good.” The Inspector lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the one he was holding. “All right, doc. You’d better take a sample of this blood on the ground too, though I shouldn’t think there’s much doubt it’s his.” He spoke to the constable, who was hovering in the background. “Anything in the pockets?”

“Only a comb and a handkerchief, sir.

“No watch? No money?”

“He was sure to have been carrying money,” I put in. “He was rich, you know.”

“Uh-huh.” The Inspector nodded. “Robbery with violence, eh?, We must send out an S.O.S. for those Maoris. Who can give me a good description of them?”

“My father can,” I said.

“Fine. We’ll go and see him. You,” he said to the sergeant, “find out where this house-boat is and give it the once-over.”

And to the constable: “You drive the doc into Hartford and bring the car back again.”

“l’ll send in an ambulance to take the body away,” said the doctor.

“Fine,” said the Inspector “It’ll do where it is for the moment. Now let’s go and see your father.”

Captain Vanderloor went back to the
Vrijheid
, and the Inspector walked with me to the
Land of Promise
. We found my father limping about the bar, tidying it. He was a tall, weather-beaten man of fifty, with short red hair, and he had been a seaman until an accident with a winch had made him lame.

“Hello,” he said to me. “I didn’t know you’d been out.”

I introduced the Inspector.

“Pleased to meet you,” said my father. “We may as well sit here. Will you have a drink?”

“It’s a bit early,” the Inspector grinned, “but I think I could manage a pint. Nice little place you’ve got here.”

He gazed about him while my father drew the beer. There was only one bar in the
Land of Promise
, and I’ve seen nothing like it elsewhere. It served, really, as the family sitting-room, and Aunt Jessica, Anne, and I all sat there during the evenings. Consequently there were quantities of personal belongings—books, sewing, and whatnot—scattered about it, and they contributed to a much more friendly, informal atmosphere than is usual in such places.

“We like it,” said my father noncommittally. He gave the Inspector a description of the Maoris, and the Inspector phoned it through to Hartford. While he was doing this Aunt Jessica shuffled in, wearing her carpet slippers and a curious, shapeless garment of grey and purple wool. She was insatiably curious and hated to miss anything, whether it concerned her or not. She settled down in a leather chair, sitting bolt upright, and began knitting.

The Inspector had finished with the telephone. “Well, Mr. Foss,” he said, “have you got any ideas about all this?”

My father, who had not stopped his tidying, shook his head. “That’d be your job, wouldn’t it?” he said doggedly. And since the Inspector made no answer, resuming his abstracted inventory of the room: “I’m not sorry he’s dead,” my father added. “I didn’t like him.”

Aunt Jessica looked up from her knitting. “We should speak no ill of the departed, George,” she remarked.

I thought that my father was going to spit, but he restrained himself.

The Inspector drank his beer. “Any special reason for not liking the chap?” he said.

My father nodded. “You might as well know,” he said. “You’d hear about it sooner or later. He said he intended to get me kicked out of my job here—looking after the Yacht Club gear. He could have done it, too.”

“That would have been a nuisance?”

My father grunted. “’Tisn’t easy to make ends meet.”

The Inspector turned to Aunt Jessica. “And were you fond of Mr. Murchison?” he enquired.

The click of my aunt’s knitting-needles ceased abruptly. “He was impure. They say nowadays that the woman’s as much to blame as the man. but I know it isn’t so.
He was impure,”
she repeated with sudden vehemence.

The Inspector accepted this comment with perfect equanimity. “Were both of you up and about round midnight last night?” he asked.

My father answered him clumsily, like one repeating a lesson inadequately learned. “I played chess with Vanderloor until about twenty to twelve. Charley Cooke left here at midnight. About a quarter past I found this kid had done a bunk, and Anne came along with me to Mrs. Porteous’s house to see if Margaret had gone out with him. Jessica was there—weren’t you, Jessie?”

“Since half-past eleven,” my aunt supplied. “I often go along for a little gossip before bed.” Her ball of wool rolled on to the floor, and the Inspector picked it up for her. She smiled graciously at him by way of thanks.

“Well, Margaret wasn't‘t in bed, either,” my father continued rather uneasily. “I knew they must be somewhere along the canal, so I decided to go after them.”

“I saw you come out of Mrs. Porteous’s house,” I said audaciously, “about twenty past twelve.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” There was a grimly humorous look in my father’s eye. “Anyway, the moment Anne and me left Mrs. Porteous, we were held up by finding Charley Cooke clinging to his own door-post. We’d seen him, as a matter of fact, lying in a drunken stupor when we first went into the house, and I’d made a note to get him indoors as soon as I had a moment—”

“Uh-huh,” the Inspector interrupted. “You didn’t think it was very urgent, then?”

“No. That sort of thing’s happened before. Anyway, he was on his feet again by the time we reached him.”

“Just a minute. I take it that Charley Cooke’s house and Mrs. Porteous’s are next door to one another?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you sure the man you saw lying there when you went into Mrs. Porteous’s house was Charley Cooke?”

My father hesitated. “I suppose I'm not, really, now I come to think of it. It was just a black huddle in the shadow of the house. But it never occurred to me it was anyone else.”

“How long were you in Mrs. Porteous’s house?”

“Four or five minutes, I’d say.”

I was interested. For the first time the Inspector seemed to be asking definite questions with a definite purpose.

“And whereabouts,” he went on, “was this person lying?”

“Just outside Charley Cooke’s door.”

“Where that pool of blood is?”

“Yes. Somewhere there.”

“And after you’d pushed Charley Cooke indoors—” The Inspector stopped, looking at the oddly elusive expression which had appeared on my father’s face. “Well?” he said.

“Well what?”

“Did you by any chance notice that Charley Cooke had blood on his clothes?”

“Yes,” said my father slowly. “Yes, he had blood on his clothes.”

“And after you left him?”

“Anne and I were just setting out to look for the kids, when we met Helen Porteous. She’d come across the foot-bridge from Murchison’s launch.”

The click of my aunt’s knitting-needles ceased again.

“Uh-huh. And you talked to her?”

“Only for a moment. We left her with her mother.”

“Then?”

“Then Anne heard these kids scuttling along the tow-path on the other side, so we went back to the
Land of Promise
.”

“Did you pass the lock?”

“No. We went the back way, through Mrs. Porteous’s garden. It’s a bit quicker.”

“Ah.” The Inspector sighed deeply, as though exhausted by so many questions. “And you, Miss Foss?”

“When my brother came to Mrs. Porteous’s house,” said Aunt Jessica primly, “I saw that it was after a quarter past midnight—a very late hour for me—and so I returned here.”

“With your brother?”

“No. I was ahead of him.”

The Inspector lit a fresh cigarette as the black marble clock on the mantelpiece struck a quarter to ten. And then came the moment I had been dreading all morning. Every week my father sent me off on my bicycle to ten o’clock Sunday School in the Baptist Church at Hartford. At the best of times this was a misery. This particular Sunday, with the police at the Basin, I felt that it would be a monstrous imposition to be made to go, and I had been desperately hoping that in the general excitement my father would forget about it until it was too late Unfortunately he heard the clock.

“Well, Daniel, time for you to cut along,” he said.

“Oh, but Dad …” I began.

“There’s no ‘but’ about it, my lad. Off you go.”

Protests were useless. I went, and I don’t think I’ve ever passed a longer hour. I remember that we were given the story of Nebuchadnezzar, but even the exploits of my namesake failed to arouse the smallest spark of interest in me, and when asked for my view of the incident of the fiery furnace I expressed the opinion, very sulkily, that it was all a trick with chemicals. Needless to say, this theory wasn’t well received.

However, even Sunday School must come to an end some time, and shortly after eleven I was back again at the Basin. Luckily I had not missed a great deal. It is true that the Inspector, by some means known only to himself, had succeeded in the interval in acquiring a good deal of general information about us all; true also that his interview with Charley Cooke had resulted in what the newspapers call ‘dramatic revelations’. But as regards these last, Margaret Porteous had been enterprising enough to eavesdrop, and when I returned she told me what she had heard.

What it amounted to, in brief, was that on getting back from the
Land of Promise
Charley Cooke had found Murchison lying unconscious almost on his doorstep, had been seized with the fear that he would be implicated in the crime, and had dragged the body to the edge of the lock and left it there.

Unfortunately he was quite vague about the details of the affair—times and so forth. For instance, he was dimly aware that at some stage or other he had ‘passed out’, and again, he thought that he
might
have entered his house before moving the body, but could not swear to it.

“But what I don’t see,” said Margaret, “is why he moved the body but didn’t try to hide all the blood.”

The only explanation I could suggest was that he had been drunk—as to which there was no doubt whatever. Admittedly the story wasn’t very plausible (I was half-inclined to think that Charley had not only dragged Murchison to the lock but pushed him into it as well), but at the same time it struck me that Charley’s account corresponded pretty closely with what any drunken, timorous, not very intelligent old man might have done in the circumstances. He would consider the area round the lock a sort of no-man’s-land; and in the darkness even a sober person might have failed to observe the blood.

I was asking Margaret for more details about the interview when Mrs. Porteous called her indoors to talk to the Inspector. I’m sorry to say that the temptation to do some eavesdropping myself proved too strong for me. I knew that the Inspector would be in the sitting-room at the back, and I knew also that at the expense of a few wall-flowers I could listen beneath the window. Scarcely more than a minute after Margaret had left I was settled at my station.

I risked a look into the room. It was shabby and comfortable, with the big black stove along one side, and the kettle simmering on it, and Pip, the canary, sitting rather dejectedly in his cage. There were hunting-prints on the walls, and the glass and crockery gleamed on the dresser. The Inspector was sitting with his elbow on the oilcloth which covered the table. A cup of tea was in front of him. Mrs. Porteous was in a wicker armchair which creaked every time she moved. Helen, with her scarlet lips and large eyes, was propped up against the dresser, evidently sulking. And Margaret, thin, nervous, and slightly elfin, with her fair hair in a tangle over her eyes, was repeating the story of our night’s expedition.