Fen Country (20 page)

“To start with, we couldn’t make anything of it at all Even after we’d linked the ‘Harry’ of the signature with Harry Colonna, it was still a long while before we could make out what Barney had wanted with the thing. However, we did see the light eventually… Wait and I’ll do you a copy.”

And Humbleby produced a notebook and began to write. ‘I looked at that letter so hard and so often,” he murmured, “that it’s engraved on my heart…”

“Envelope with it?” Fen asked.

“No, no envelope. Incidentally, for the record, our handwriting people were unanimous that Harry Colonna
had
written it—that it wasn’t a forgery, I mean—and also that nothing in it had subsequently been added or erased or altered… There.”

And Humbleby tore the sheet out and handed it to Fen, who read:

You-Know-Where,

6.5.51

Dear Saul,

I’m just about fed with this dump: time I moved. When you get this, drop everything and bring the car to a little place five or six miles from here called Llanegwad (County Carmathen). There’s a beer-house called the Rose, where I risked a small drink this morning: from 6 on I’ll be in it: Private Bar (so-called). Seriously, if I don’t move around a bit I’ll go nuts. This is
URGENT
.

Harry

“M’m,” said Fen. “Yes. I notice one thing.”

“Actually, there are two things to notice.”

“Are there? All right. But finish the story first.”

“The rest’s short if not sweet,” said Humbleby. “We had Saul along and confronted him with the letter, and of course he said exactly what you’d expect—that this was the SOS Harry had sent him from the sanatorium, properly dated and with the distance from Llanegwad correct and so on and so forth. So then we arrested him.”

“For murder?”

“Not to start with, no. Just for conspiracy to defraud the insurance companies.”

“I see… Part of it is simple, of course,” said Fen, who was still examining Humbleby’s scrawl. “When an American uses ‘6.5.51’ in writing to another American, he means not the 6th of May but the 5th of June… On the other hand, Saul and Harry, having settled in England, may have decided that it would save confusion if they used the English system of dating all the time.”

“Which is just what Saul—when we pointed the problem out to him—told us they had decided to do.” Humbleby shook his head sadly. “Not that it helped the poor chap.”

Fen considered the letter again. And then suddenly he chuckled.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, “that 6 May 1951, was a
Sunday?”

“Bull’s eye. It was. Sunday in Wales. No pubs open for Harry to have even the smallest of small drinks at. Therefore, Harry was using the American system of dating, and his letter was written on 5 June, four weeks after he was supposed to have been swept overboard into the Channel. Insurance fraud.”

“And Harry getting restive in his hideout near the sanatorium, and Saul suddenly thinking how nice it would be not to have to share the insurance money…”

“So back to Brixham, unobtrusively, by night, and out to sea again in the sloop. And that time,” Humbleby concluded, “Harry really did go overboard.”

“And you have found enough evidence for a murder charge?”

“As soon as we stopped worrying about 12 May, and started concentrating on the period after 5 June, we most certainly did. Mind you, it
could
have been difficult. But luckily Saul had had the cabin of the sloop revarnished at the end of May, and we found human blood on top of the new varnish—not much, after all that time, but enough to establish that it belonged to Harry’s rather unusual group and sub-groups. Taken with the other things, that convinced the jury all right. And they hanged him…

“But you see now why I’m sometimes inclined to say a kind word for people like Barney Laking. Because really, you know, the credit in the Colonna case was all his.

“Even if I’d possessed that letter at the outset, I could quite easily have missed its significance. I only worked hard on it because it had come from Barney’s collection, and I knew he didn’t accumulate other people’s correspondence just for fun.

‘But
he
had no such inducement, bless him. With him it was just a consummate natural talent for smelling out even the most—the most deodorized of rats. What a detective the man would have made… Do you know, they gave me a full month’s leave at the end of that career as a reward for handling it so brilliantly? And it was all thanks to Barney…”

And Humbleby reached for his glass. “No, Gervase, I don’t care what novelists say. I like blackmailers. Salt of the earth. Here’s to them.”

Ericson—who was a photographer more or less permanently attached to that flourishing weekly magazine,
Pictures
—came into the cocktail bar of the Splendide at Dirlham-on-Sea that summer evening with a nasty welt visible just under his left eye.

“What happened?” Gervase Fen signaled the barman for another Martini. “Did you run into a door? Or is it just that some holiday-maker didn’t want to be circulated to two million households in company with his neighbor’s wife?”

“Actually, neither.” Ericson took the glass from the barman and drank gratefully. “Thanks. Cheers… Your second guess gets near it, though. And look,” he added defensively, “for heaven’s sake don’t go imagining that if it
had
been a matter of someone else’s wife, I shouldn’t have willingly given the chap the negative to destroy. I’m human. I don’t go out of my way to make trouble for people…”

He brooded. “But this man was alone. That’s one of the things that make it so odd.”

“Did he smash your camera?”

“He did. And when they get angry enough or frightened enough to want to do that (this chap was more frightened than angry, I’m inclined to think), I just step aside and let them get on with it. They can almost always be made to pay… He paid, anyway. Took me back to his house and wrote a check. He was quite apologetic, too, after he’d cooled down a bit. Said he was sorry, but he just hated to have his picture taken.”

“Some people do,” said Fen. “There isn’t necessarily anything suspicious about it.”

“Agreed, agreed. But in his case there’s more to it than just that I there are some things I haven’t told you yet—enough to make me go along to the office of the local paper this afternoon and make some inquiries.

“He’s a resident here, you see, not a visitor. Age about fifty. Name of Edgar Boynton. Unmarried. Settled here five years ago. Independent income—nothing spectacular, apparently, but more than enough for comfort. By way of being a prominent citizen, too—ex-councillor, sits on half a dozen committees, a patron of the hospital, all that sort of nonsense.

“And here’s the queer thing:
he’s never objected to being photographed before
—in fact, being on the smug side, he positively encouraged it. He actually had his picture in one of the national papers not so long ago, end they say he was as pleased as Punch.”

Fen was interested. “Exactly what was this picture you took?” he inquired.

“Oh, the usual sort of thing you get on the beach. Only about eight people in it altogether. Kids making a sand-castle. Old lady in a deck-chair. A couple of girls with a beach-ball. And in the foreground, Boynton lying on his back in the sand in bathing-trunks.”

“M’m, said Fen. “Some people are a bit sensitive about their figures, you know.”

“No need for him to be. For a man of his age he’s in wonderful shape. And here’s another odd thing: when I took that picture he had a newspaper spread over his face.”

Fen stared. “That really does make it extraordinary. Unless—were there any distinguishing marks on his body?”

‘Not one.” Ericson assured him. “Not a mole or a tattoo or anything.”

“Perhaps,” Fen mused, “there
ought
to have been something—but in that case he’d hardly have dared to appear undressed in public at all… So what it boils down to is that here we have a man who doesn’t mind having his face seen and photographed; and who doesn’t mind having his body (on which there are absolutely no identifying marks)
seen,
but was frightened enough to break an expensive camera when someone takes a picture of it.”

He reflected. “I can think of one possible explanation of that. Tell me, is there anything unusual about Boynton’s face?”

It was Ericson’s turn to stare. “Yes,” he said. “Though it beats me how you guessed it. Boynton’s face has been pretty thoroughly patched up at some time in the past. Car-crash, he says. But what does that prove?”

“Nothing,” said Fen pensively. “Nothing—yet. But I say, Ericson, I’m getting very bored with Dirlham. I think I shall go off on my own for a few days.”

Informed of this decision, Fen’s family accepted it with resignation. Ever since their arrival they had observed the signs of restiveness mounting, and they knew that no protest was likely to do any good.

On the following morning, therefore, Fen took a train to London, where he contacted an old friend at Scotland Yard. Subsequently; having acquired there the information he sought, he paid a visit to an elderly widow, a Mrs. Chandler, who lived alone in a cottage near Wycombe. Fen liked Mrs. Chandler; it seemed to him a pity that the closing years of her life should have to be spent in an incessant struggle to make ends meet. So it was pleasant to be in a position to help her…

Back in Dirlham, he telephoned Ericson at the office of
Pictures.

“Can you get down here for a night?” he inquired. “What I want…” And he proceeded to explain. From the other end of the wire came strangled cries.

“Look,” said Ericson, when at last he was articulate again. “I have a job to hold down. Lord love us, Professor, if I try anything like that I’ll have had it, for good. Look—”

“I’ll come with you,” said Fen reassuringly, “and if there’s any trouble, I’ll shoulder it. But there won’t be any trouble for the simple reason…” and for a couple of minutes he talked almost without interruption.

“Well, that’s different,” said Ericson, finally. “I still don’t like it much, but—all right, I’ll come. Wait, though: doesn’t he go down to the beach any more?”

“No. Not in bathing-trunks, anyway. That once was enough. He isn’t risking any more prowling photographers.”

“Okay, I’ll buy it,’ said Ericson. “Hang on while I look up a train.”

With the result that next evening, when Edgar Boynton went to his bathroom to take his regular six o’clock bath, a flash bulb suddenly illuminated him from behind the macintosh curtains of the shower, and simultaneously a shutter clicked. Mr. Boynton was not pleased at this, and showed it. But thanks to a previously worked out plan of campaign, the intruders contrived to escape from the house unharmed, and by eight, when a constable arrived to take them along to the police station, they were drinking innocently together in the bar of the Splendide. At the police station they found not only an Outraged Citizen with a serious complaint to make, but also a neat, graying man with a cheroot in his mouth who was introduced to Ericson as Detective Inspector Humbleby of Scotland Yard.

“First and foremost,” Boynton was saying, “I must insist that the film be handed over to me untouched. After that—”

“But it’s already been developed, you know,’ Fen told him. “And printed.”

Boynton paused, licking his lips. Then, speaking with markedly less assurance, he said: “Hand me that material—all of it—and I shall perhaps be prepared to overlook this disgraceful prank, and to proceed no further in the matter.”

Fen, who had done the developing and printing himself, using Ericson’s apparatus, produced an envelope. “Here it is. But I think that before I let you have it, Inspector Humbleby here may perhaps be interested to see—”

That was when Boynton turned and tried to run.

But a constable, forewarned, put out a foot and tripped him—completing the maneuver, to everyone’s great admiration, by contriving to catch his victim before he hit the floor.

“I’m afraid, sir, that we must ask you to remain here for further questioning,” said the local inspector, not without relish. “Our information is that your real name is not Edgar Boynton, but James Bennett. And I must warn you—”

But Bennett alias Boynton heard nothing after that. He had fainted.

Later, over supper, Fen said: “He’d done time, you see, for stealing the Chandler jewels, back in 1934; but the jewels themselves were never recovered… A pity he wanted to live a respectable life: ambition, to my mind, should be made of sterner stuff.

“However, since that was what he wanted, clearly a little plastic surgery had to be done on his face, in case anyone should recognize him and start inquiring into the original source of the income he was living on so comfortably.

“I’m afraid he’s not going to be quite so well off from now on, because the law doesn’t allow a man to profit from his crime, even after he’s been punished for it, and so of course the value of the jewels, or as much of it as possible, will be recovered from him and given to Chandler’s widow, who, as it happens, can do with it—which, of course, was just what he was afraid of. That was why he smashed your camera.”

“Listen,” said Ericson, ‘there just was no distinguishing mark on that man’s body. None.”

“To the naked eye, no. But now look at this picture you took of him in his bathroom.”

“About time, too…” Ericson gazed., then whistled. “Well, well. Quite a distinctive scar that one; faint, but it’s there all right. You mean—”

“I mean that black-and-white photography always emphasizes all reds and blues; the camera can see a healed-over scar where the eye can’t. It really did seem the likeliest thing, you know—so what I did, of course, was to get hold of a sample of his fingerprints and take it to Scotland Yard. James Bennett, ten years for theft, loot never recovered. Unusual zig-zag wound across the ribs acquired while resisting arrest—

“Easy, isn’t it? Once you know.”

“The ass of the philosopher Buridan,” said Detective Inspector Humbleby, “on being placed precisely mid-way between two equally succulent bundles of hay, was unable to see any logical reason why it should proceed toward the one rather than the other; and consequently starved to death. It’s rather like that with the Tidgwick case.”