Fen Country (8 page)

“Oh, yes.” At the other side of the desk, in the first-floor office at New Scotland Yard, Detective Inspector Humbleby nodded soberly. “Yes, I was expecting that all right,” he said. “Taken together with the rest of the evidence, it makes a pretty good case.”

“And your own report?”

Humbleby handed over a sheaf of typescript. “No verdict?” queried MacCutcheon, who had turned immediately to the final page.

“Certainly there’s a verdict.” Humbleby paused. “Implicit, I mean,” he added. “You’ll see.”

“Nice of you,” said MacCutcheon. “Nice of you DI’s to try and keep my tottering intellect alive with little games. Well, I’ll buy it. Smoke if you care to.” And he settled down to read, while Humbleby, leaning back in his chair and lighting a cheroot, reconsidered the salient features of his visit to Harringford the previous day…

He had arrived there by train, with Detective Sergeant Pinder in tow, shortly before midday; and they had gone at once to the police station. Inspector Bentinck, who received them, proved to be a bony, discontented-looking man of fifty or thereabouts.

“Between ourselves,” he said, as he led them to his office, “our County CID are a fairly feeble lot at the moment, so I’m glad the CC had the sense to call you people in straightaway. And of course, having a ruddy lord involved… You knew that, did you?”

“It’s about the only thing I do know,” said Humbleby.

“I’ve got his gun here.” They had reached the office, and Bentinck was unlocking a cupboard, from which presently he produced a .360 sporting rifle. Two slats of wood were tied to either side of the breech, and there was a loop of string for carrying the weapon.

“Not been tested for prints yet,” said Humbleby intelligently; and Bentinck shook his head.

“Not been touched since I confiscated it yesterday morning. But in any case I shouldn’t think you’ll get any prints off it except his—Lord Ellingham’s, I mean. He’d cleaned it, you see, by the time I caught up with him.”

“Well, well, we can try,” said Humbleby. “Pinder’s brought all his paraphenalia with him. See what you can get, please,” he added to the sergeant. “And meanwhile”—to Bentinck—”let’s have the whole story from the beginning.”

So Pinder went away to insufflate and photograph the rifle, and Bentinck talked. “Ellingham’s one of what they call the backwoods peers,” he said. “He’s got a big estate about five miles from here, but I shouldn’t think there’s much left in the family coffers, because he lives in the lodge, not in the manor-house—that’s shut up. He’s about fifty, not married, lives alone.

“Well now, like everyone else, Ellingham’s had his servant problems, and just recently—for the last year or so, that is—the only person he’s been able to get to look after him has been this girl.”

“Enid Bragg.”

Bentinck assented. “Enid Bragg. And a fortnight ago even she packed it in—since when Ellingham’s had to look after himself.”

“What sort of girl was she?”

“Not bad looking in a trashy sort of way,” said Bentinck. “I don’t know that there’s much else good to say about her… Anyway, point is, this Enid lives—lived—in a cottage with her parents not far from the Ellingham estate. And it was yesterday morning, while she was waiting for the 8:50 bus so as to come into town and do a bit of shopping, that someone picked her off with a rifle, presumably from behind the hedge opposite the bus-stop.

“Well, of course, when the bus came along, there she was with a hole in her head, and it wasn’t long before me and the sergeant got out there and took over. We went through all the usual motions, but the only worthwhile thing we got out of it was the bullet.”

Bentinck opened a drawer in his desk and produced a small jeweler’s box in which a squashed rifle bullet lay on a bed of cotton wool. “It’d gone clean through her and buried in an ash tree behind the bus-stop.”

“No cartridge-case?”

“Not that we’ve been able to find. So I said to myself, well, better look up Ellingham first, because I knew he’d got a gun, and after all, the girl had been working for him until just recently, and what should I find but that—”

Here Bentinck broke off at the return of Pinder, who announced that he had dusted and photographed the two or three blurred prints on the rifle, and that it was now at everyone’s disposal. Taking it from him, Humbleby squinted down the barrel.

“Clean as a new pin,” he said cheerfully. But Pinder noticed that something had made him more than usually pensive.

“Well, that’s it, you see,” continued Bentinck, not very lucidly. “When I got to the lodge, there was Ellingham cleaning that thing, and it turned out he’d been out on his own, looking for something to shoot, since eight o’clock. I took the gun away from him, with all the usual gab about routine, and I’ll say this for him, he didn’t make any fuss about it. And until we see whether the murder bullet came from it, that’s really all—oh, except for the autopsy. Five months gone, our Enid was.”

“Oh, Lord,” said Humbleby in genuine dismay. “Not that again. The number of times—”

“Yes, it’s common enough, I suppose. Ah, well. If you get a nasty sort of girl like Enid Bragg into trouble, you must expect a bit of blackmail. And the only certain way of putting a stop to it—”

“Damn!” Thus Superintendent MacCutcheon, breaking in violently on Humbleby’s thoughts in the first-floor office at Scotland Yard. He had finished reading the report, and now whacked it down angrily on the desk in front of him.

There was a long silence.

“Not pleasant,” said MacCutcheon at last.

“Not pleasant at all, sir,” Humbleby agreed. From the particular expression on his superior’s face he was in no doubt that the evidence had been interpreted correctly. “And I don’t think we’re going to be able to pin the murder on him, either. There’s no alibi—that much I found out before I left. And if we worked hard at it, I dare say we could establish the connection with the girl. But we’ll never find the bullet, and without that—”

“We shall have to try,” said MacCutcheon grimly. “If it’s just a charge of fabricating evidence people will think he only did it to get a conviction. That’s damaging enough, of course, but even so…”

He reached for a blue-bound book from the shelves behind him, and riffled through the pages until he found what he wanted.

“Gross’s
Criminal Investigation,
” he announced. “Third edition, page 157. ‘A rifle barrel reasonably clean on one day will show plain traces of fouling next day. In such cases the barrel sweats after it has been cleaned.’

“But when you looked at it, the barrel of Ellingham’s rifle was periectly clean.”

“Yes.”

“It oughtn’t to have been, if Bentinck’s story was true.”

“No.”

“So Bentinck, the only person with access to that rifle, had recently cleaned it.”

“Yes.”

“And there’d be no point in his cleaning it unless he’d fired it.”

“No.”

“And there’d be no point in his firing it, and subsequently lying, unless he happened to want a bullet to substitute for the real murder bullet which he dug out of the tree.”

Again there was silence. “I suppose there’s no chance we’re wrong?” MacCutcheon burst out fretfully. “I mean, there were even traces of blood and brains on that bullet he gave you… I suppose—”

“No, no chance at all.” Humbleby was definite. “As to the traces—well, after all, a quick visit to the mortuary with a—a pair of tweezers, say…”

“Yes.” MacCutcheon relapsed into gloom again. “Yes… What gun do you think he used to kill the girl?”

“His own, I imagine. I got a look at the register, and he certainly has one, and it’s a .360 all right. But his sergeant told me he’d hardly ever used it—which would account for his not realizing about the fouling.” Humbleby rose. “He had one morning’s shooting, it seems, years ago, and after that never went out again… No stomach for blood sports, the sergeant said.”

It was not until the third night that they came for Eliot.

He had expected them sooner, and in his cold, withdrawn fashion had resented and grown impatient at the delay—for although his tastes had never been luxurious, the squalid bedroom which he had rented in the Clerkenwell boarding-house irked him.

Now, listening impassively to the creak of their furtive steps on the staircase, he glanced at his gun-metal wristwatch and made a certain necessary adjustment in the hidden thing that he carried on him. Then quite deliberately he turned his chair so that his back was toward the door.

His belated dive for his revolver, after they had crept up behind him, was convincing enough to draw a gasp from one of them before they pinioned his arms, thrusting a gun-muzzle inexpertly at the back of his neck.

Peny crooks, thought Eliot contemptuously, as he feigned a struggle. And, “petty crooks,” again, as they searched him and hustled him down to the waiting car.

Yet his scorn was not vainglorious. The hard knot into which his career of professional killing had twisted his emotions left no room even for that. Only once had Eliot killed on his own account—and that was when they had nearly caught him. He was not proposing to repeat the mistake.

It was a little after midnight, and the narrow street was deserted. The big car moved off smoothly and quietly. Presently it stopped by an overgrown bomb site, blanched under the moon, and the blinds were drawn down. There they gagged Eliot, and blindfolded him, and tied his hands behind his back. When they found him submissive, their confidence perceptibly grew.

Between them and Addison’s lot, Eliot reflected as the car moved off again, there was little or nothing to choose: petty crooks, all of then, petty warehouse thieves whose spheres of operation had happened to collide. That was why he was here.

He made no attempt to chart mentally the car’s progress. He had not been asked to do that—and it was Eliot’s great merit as a hireling murderer that he was incurious, never going beyond the letter of his commission. Leaning back against the cushions, he reconsidered his instructions as the car purred on through. London, through the night.

“Holden’s people are getting to be a nuisance,” Addison had said—Addison the young boss with his swank and his oiled hair and his Hollywood mannerisms. “But if Holden dies, they’ll fall to pieces. That’s your job—to kill Holden.”

Eliot had only nodded. Explanations bored him.

“But the trouble is,” Addison had continued, “that we can’t find Holden. We don’t know where his hide-out is. That means we’ve got to fix things so that they lead us to it themselves. My idea is to make you the bait.” He had grinned. “Poisoned bait.”

With that he had gone on to explain how Eliot was to be represented as a new and shaky recruit to the Addison mob; how it was to be made to seem that Eliot possessed information which Holden would do much to get.

Eliot had listened to what concerned him directly and ignored the rest. It was thorough, certainly. They ought to fall for it.

And, to judge from his present situation, they had.

It seemed a long drive. The one thing above all others that Holden’s men wanted to avoid was the possibility of being followed, the possibility that he, Eliot, might pick up some clue to the hide-out’s whereabouts. So whatever route they were taking, it certainly wasn’t the most direct.

At last they arrived. Eliot was pushed upstairs and through a door, was thrust roughly on to a bed. A bed, he thought: good. That meant that Holden had only this one musty-smelling room. All the more chance, therefore, that the job would come off.

He let them hit him a few times before he talked: his boyhood had inured him to physical pain, and he was being well paid. Then he told them what they wanted to know—the story Addison had given him, the story with just enough truth in it to be convincing. Eliot enjoyed the acting: he was good at it. And they were at a disadvantage, of course, in that having left the blindfold on they were unable to watch his eyes.

In any case, Holden—who to judge from his voice was a nervous, elderly Cockney—seemed satisfied. And Holden was the only one of them who mattered.

Before long, Eliot knew, the police would get Holden, and Addison, too, and their small-time wrangling for the best cribs would be done with for good and all.

That, however, was of no consequence to Eliot. All he had to do was to say his lesson nicely and leave his visiting card and collect his fee. And here it was at last: the expected, the inevitable offer. Yes, all right, Eliot said smoothly after a few moments’ apparent hesitation; he didn’t mind being their stool-pigeon so long as they paid him enough. And they were swallowing that, too, telling him what they wanted him to find out about Addison’s plans, sticking a cigarette between his bruised lips and lighting it for him.

He almost laughed. They weren’t taking off the blindfold, though; they didn’t trust him enough for that. They were going to let him go, but in case he decided not to play ball with them after all, they weren’t risking his carrying away any important news about them.

They were going to let him go. This is it, Eliot thought. And delicately, as he lay sprawled on the bed, his fingers moved under the hem of his jacket, so that, hidden from his interrogators, something slim and smooth rolled out on to the bedclothes.

Fractionally he shifted his position, thrusting the obiect, to the limit that the rope round his wrists would allow, underneath the pillow. It was a nice litte thing, and Eliot was sorry to lose it: in appearance, nothing more than an ordinary propelling pencil, but with a time-fuse inside it and a powerful explosive charge.

Addison had told him that it was one of the many innocent-looking obiects supplied to French saboteurs during the Occupation, to be deposited on the desks of German military commanders or in other such strategic places. Eliot had appreciated its potentialities. As a means of murder it was chancy, of course: this one might kill Holden, or on the other hand it might kill a maidservant making up the bed.

But that was none of Eliot’s business. He was doing what he had been told to do, and whether it succeeded or not, he was going to collect.

The return drive was a replica of the first. At the bomb-site the gag and bonds and blindfold were taken off, and presently Eliot was back at his lodging-house door, in the gray light of early dawn, watching Holden’s car drive rapidly away.