Case for Sergeant Beef (2 page)

She was a horse-faced woman in her forties. Really horse-faced. It was impossible to look at her without thinking of stables. And she wore the kind of severe tweeds and shapeless felt hat which went with her equine features. She sat on a straight chair, accepted a cigarette from me, and began to talk in a loud, cheerful voice.

‘I want you,' she said, ‘to investigate the death of my brother. The fools think it was suicide.'

‘What fools?'

‘Everyone. I'm told you're more competent than you look. The police will do nothing, and I won't have one of these pansified snobs who are supposed to be brilliant investigators hanging around. You can count on me for your fees and expenses. And you can bring your boy-friend with
you.' She gave me a jerk of her head. ‘Only you must get cracking.'

‘I think I ought to explain …' I began.

But Beef boomed out before I could finish.

‘No need for explanations now,' he said. ‘I'll take the case. Now what's the address?'

So against my better judgement, against all my resolutions, I found myself back in the world of crime, found myself following Beef down to Barnford in Kent, and once more watching while he set about the elucidation of a mystery. And a mystery it really looked.

S.B.-I
*

A
BOUT
a year earlier Mr Wellington Chickle had begun to write his Journal. This Journal is now one of Sergeant Beef's most prized souvenirs, though it only came into his hands long after the Shoulter Case was concluded, and no one knew of its existence, still less had any access to it, while the investigation was proceeding. It is an astonishing document written in large curious handwriting, full of flourishes so ornamental and detailed that they are almost like the illuminated capitals of an old manuscript. It is clear at a glance that the man who wrote it loved his work and probably had nothing to do but perfect it. The Journal opens in March 1945. Its first entry gives the key to the whole thing.

I have decided to commit a murder. And before I go any farther I want to try to give my reasons for this as accurately as possible. They will be so very important to the psychologist of the future when the Wellington Chickle Murder Case has taken its right place as one of the great historical crimes, when such names as Crippen and Landru will be obscure in comparison with my name. Not, of course, that my name will be associated with the crime during my lifetime. After I have finished my days in peace this Journal will be given to the world and then for the first time it will be realized that the brains of Scotland Yard have been outmatched by the genius of one who seemed no more than a sober, gentle, retired watchmaker.

The reasons, then. But again I must digress to explain what are
not
the reasons. I shall not commit murder for gain, for revenge, for love, for the sake of brutality, for escape from a blackmailer or bully, for spite, for hatred or as a protest against anything whatsoever. In fact – and this
is the very crux of the matter –
I shall have no motive.
And because I shall have no motive I shall never be found out. In other words my murder will be art for art's sake, murder merely and entirely for the sake of murder. It sounds simple. So do all great ideas.

I am perfectly sane, of course. I am considered rather a nice old gentleman, fond of books and gardening and devoted to children. A hundred people could testify to my sanity. I am not even an eccentric or a solitary. I am generally liked, even respected.

So my reasons are these. I am going to commit a murder because I have found the key to successful murder – to have no discoverable motive. Because I want to achieve something before I die which will make my rather odd name live in the annals of time, and murder seems the surest way of achieving this. Because I really have nothing much to do with the remaining years of my life, no absorbing interest, and I think that the planning and carrying out of this will give me what I need. Because I think that there's too much fuss made about life and death and cannot see that it matters that death should come to one man or woman a few years before it would normally have happened. Because it will be fascinating to watch the police blundering in all the wrong directions, and to know that I, and I alone, am aware of the truth. And because I remember, fifty years ago, a schoolmaster saying to me in class that I should never set the Thames on fire, never amount to anything much, never achieve anything worth while; and if I were to die now it would be in the knowledge that he was right, whereas if I carry out my plan and do what so many others have failed to do and commit a successful and undetected murder I shall know that I have proved him a hundred times wrong.

So that is
why
I am going to do it. And as time goes by I shall make up my mind where, how, when, and to whom it shall be done. I shall not hurry these decisions. I shall take my time to think, to plan, to ensure absolute success. Even the thought of the great day, towards which I am already looking eagerly, on which I can say that I have done it, that
I have achieved the all-but-impossible, shall not cause me to rush or scamp my preparations. It is said that a murderer always makes one mistake. I shall be the exception. I shall make no mistake.

It is a week since I wrote the above. I have decided not to put dates in this Journal, but to let it be a more or less continuous narrative. It will be easier to read like that. Not that it will in any case lack eager readers, for to know the truth at last about a mystery which has baffled the world for years will be incentive enough to scan even duller stories. And to the psychologist this could not be dull. Think, my friend, you are looking into the mind of Wellington Chickle, the man who beat detection, the coolest and most brilliant murderer of the century. You have the chance to study and analyse a brain more complex than that of a great poet or statesman. Do you not realize your good fortune?

So I will make it a straightforward story. And I start with this premise. Murder without motive, if a few simple precautions are taken, is a problem impossible to solve. If a man of good character waited in a suitably lonely spot and murdered
the first person who came along,
his guilt would never be suspected. Why? Because even if he shouted and called a dozen witnesses and so was known to have been on the scene of the crime, there would be nothing to connect him with it. Motive is
always
the connecting link. Always. So my first resolution is to murder someone I don't know, someone in whose death I could not possibly have any interest. That will not be difficult.

The next thing is to find the place. What a huge advantage I have over other mere slaves in the art of murder. They, poor fellows, are tied down by necessities. Where their victims are their crimes must be. They must, either by artificial means-and everything artificial is easily discovered-bring their victim to the spot, or choose a spot to which their victim goes. For me there are no such limitations. I choose my spot from the wide map of the earth and wait for
the first arrival. And in case I am seen I give myself a good everyday reason for being in that spot. Too easy, once I have the crucial idea.

Now I remember many years ago during a walking tour in Kent finding a village called Barnford. It was a pleasant village with oldish red-brick houses and a square church tower. And near it was a wood through which ran a public footpath. I have been thinking that this will make the ideal spot. Lonely, but one could be sure of someone coming along sooner or later. Plenty of cover, before and after. The body to be found quickly if one wanted it found quickly, or not for a long time, if one wanted it concealed. And the sort of area in which I might well be living in the unlikely event of my having to give an account of myself. I shall go down there to-morrow and prospect.

I have been luckier than I could have hoped. I found an empty bungalow at Barnford, right on the outskirts of Dead-man's Wood. (Yes, that is actually its name. Is it not appropriate? I could scarcely repress a smile when I heard it!) The bungalow is called ‘Labour's End', which again is very fitting, as I said quite truthfully that I wanted to retire and grow roses. The soil, I am told, is splendid for them. I have bought the little place not too expensively – I am in any case not perturbed by the outlay as I shall certainly stay there even after the Great Event. It will be pleasant in my declining years to visit the scene of my triumph.

I shall have a few neighbours. On the other side of the wood lives a Miss Shoulter who breeds spaniels – far enough away, I learn, for their yelping to be inaudible. And in the wood itself there is a larger house in which a family named Flipp lives. But they have their own way in from the road and do not use the footpath I remembered.

That footpath is just as I hoped – a narrow rather winding track between the trees which cuts right across the wood from near Miss Shoulter's bungalow to mine. I could be walking along it at any time of day or night without
arousing the faintest suspicion, even on the night of a murder. Yet it is lonely enough to provide a dozen points at which the thing could be done, and done in the confidence that there were no witnesses. Ideal. I hope to move in next week.

I am comfortably established at Labour's End. It is really a very pleasant little house overlooking a sweep of country only cut by the railway line nearly a mile away. I have brought my own furniture down after it had been in store three years, since, in fact, I sold my business.

Mentioning that reminds me that I should give some account of myself, for when the facts about my murder come out after my death, it is certain that there will be a good deal of research into my past and the results may not be accurate. I want the true facts to be known.

I was an only son. My father was employed by a firm of stonemasons, and spent his life in chipping at memorial crosses for people who deserved no memorial. He was, by the standards of his time, well paid, and our little home in South London though dingy and cramped never knew the miseries of want or hunger.

I was given a better education than most sons of artisans and remained at school till I was nearly seventeen. Then I was apprenticed to an old watchmaker, a friend of my father, who taught me the trade which has served me ever since.

My father was an honest decent man, but an incurable sentimentalist with a taste for military history. He could reconstruct almost every battle fought by British armies and would bore his fellow customers in the saloon bar of the Mitre, which he ‘used' for forty years, with detailed accounts of Waterloo or the Nile, until they told him to come off it. It was this passion of his which caused him to name me after the Iron Duke, and it was an unfortunate choice considering our curious surname. And when I failed to grow above five feet four inches it seemed even more out of place. However, both my father and my mother, a plump
easy-going woman who took me to chapel on Sundays, delighted in it, never abbreviated it and could be heard shouting ‘Wellington!' down our back-garden when they wanted me to come indoors.

At twenty-five I started my own watchmaking business in what was then a little town separated from London by open country, but which became, I'm glad to say, one of the busiest suburbs. My little shop thrived, and a quarter of a century later, when I was employing a dozen men and women and had a fine establishment, I sold it at the top of the market and retired on the proceeds, together with my not inconsiderable investments.

I forgot to say that I married at thirty a girl who brought me the initial capital I needed for enlarging my business. She failed to bear me a child and died some years before I retired.

Since I sold the shop I have been living in rooms, waiting for a chance to settle in the country.

That is my uneventful story and from it you will see, perhaps, why I have made up my mind to distinguish myself now. The man who bought my business has already changed the name, so that unless I achieve my great ambition no one twenty years hence will have heard of Wellington Chickle. But I shall achieve it.

I have been unpacking and arranging my books. It is a pleasant task, although my anxiety to get them all into place so that I can refer to them easily has made me overtire myself a little. My library consists entirely of criminology in all its forms and I have spent a great deal of money over many years in accumulating it.
Old Trials,
the
Newgate Calendar, Lives of the Highwaymen,
a formidable row of books on Criminal Jurisprudence, and everything that is worth while in modern detective fiction, from Poe and Gaboriau down to Bentley and Agatha Christie. I am really proud of some of the more unusual items, and get great amusement from dipping into the
Famous Trials
series and seeing the idiotic mistakes made by blundering murderers of the past. How little finesse most of them possessed. They approached the delicate matter of murder as though it were a pick and shovel job and allowed their passions to betray them into every kind of impatience and risk. I smile when I realize my superiority over that sort of violence, for in my crime there will be
no
passion and so no risk at all.

I took a walk along the footpath through Deadman's Wood to-day, and found it bright with bluebells. I should like my murder to be in spring, I think, while these beautiful blue flowers make a shining carpet underfoot. Only I should have to be careful of trampling them in any indicative way. However, I have not begun to consider such details yet. I am still concerned with the Place and I think I have found it. A fallen tree beside the path would give excellent concealment and it is roughly half-way through the wood at a point where the trees on either side are thickest. With tremendous inward excitement I decided to test the
hiding-place behind that tree and to find out whether one could see a person approaching. I crouched down and peered over the trunk. Excellent. At dusk I should be quite invisible and should see anyone from at least twelve yards away. Exactly as I hoped.