The Heel of Achilles: A Golden Age Mystery

by E.

  “Meaning, I take it, that the man would hardly wear a scarf round his seat.” Merry chuckled. The chuckle was too much for Inspector Mackenzie, who was feeling the effect of having not had his breakfast. He went off in a gentle explosion.

  “Do bits of fluff matter, sir?” he demanded. “The man was plainly run over by a train. You have said so yourself. What he was wearing it seems to me makes no difference to the fact that he was run over. Nor does it carry us any further as to how he came to be run over.”

  “It may make a deal of difference.” Doctor Manson corrected him sharply. “Everything that is not natural about a body matters in a case like this, Inspector. This man is found dead on the railway. It is presumed that he was knocked down and killed by a train on a section of the line which is not guarded to prevent unauthorized people gaining access to it. A great deal may depend on the condition of the man—where he had spent the night before he, presumably, climbed up to the line. I know nothing more indicative of a man’s surroundings as attachments to, or markings on, the outside of the garments which he is wearing.”

  Some glint of illumination penetrated into the mind of Mackenzie. “You mean that he may have been drunk and wandered on the line?” he asked. The doctor shook his head impatiently.

  “I have no evidence that he was drunk,” he said. “But such a state, now that you mention it, might conceivably account for his failing to notice the train, which otherwise he should have seen or heard quite easily.”

  “Perhaps he had lain down to sleep it off.” The local constable made his first contribution to the discussion.

  “Don’t be a fool, Perkins.” Inspector Mackenzie turned on the man. “Why should he walk out of his house, where he could sleep comfortably off the effect of drink, just to drop off on the railway.”

  Merry grinned. “Trouble in the family,” he said. “What next, Doctor?”

  “The head, I think.” He unwrapped the grisly relic, and looked down at it. Kenway dug Sergeant Bunny in the ribs. “Alas, poor Yorick,” he quoted. “I knew him, Horatio.” He had played Hamlet in the Metropolitan Police Dramatic Society’s production.

  “You knew him, Inspector?” ejaculated the sergeant, whose knowledge was nearer bacon than Shakespeare. Kenway let it pass.

  Doctor Manson, after a cursory examination of the features of the dead man, and the facial markings, forced open the mouth and examined the interior. “There seems to be no fracture of the teeth, Merry,” he pointed out. “And they are quite firm in the gums, you notice. That would seem to be of importance.” He probed further into the mouth with a pair of forceps, which came out with between them a minute brown fragment that had clung to the gums. The doctor examined it through his lens.

  “Seems to be a particle of tobacco leaf, probably from a cigar,” he said. “What do you make of it?”

  “I should think that is quite likely.” Inspector Mackenzie interrupted. “We found a stub of cigar some five yards down the line. It seems to have been knocked out of his mouth by the blow from the train.” He produced the exhibit. Manson took it.

  “Practically dry.”

  “Which makes it dropped after the rain last night—that would mean after 10.30 p.m.” Mackenzie emphasized it pointedly.

  The doctor looked up in marked surprise at the deduction. He smiled and nodded. Merry slipped the stub into another of the seed envelopes and labelled it. Into a third he placed a few of the hairs from the dead man’s head, which the doctor had snipped off with a pair of surgical scissors.

  Manson straightened up, and stretched himself. “Well, I think that is all we can do with the body,” he said. “Except—” He gazed at the corpse, and at the head, as if searching for something. The inspector watched him.

  “Was there something?” he asked.

  The scientist made no reply. Instead he walked to the edge of the embankment and let his eyes wander over the grass and down the slope, walking a few yards in each direction. He returned still in a state of dissatisfaction. The inspector reiterated his query.

  “Yes, inspector, there is something.” His eyebrows went up, questingly. “What has happened to the man’s hat?” he asked.

  “His hat? We haven’t seen a hat.”

  “Well, it can’t be far off. Perhaps, while you tell me your story, some of these men will make a search for it. Possibly the wind from the passing of the train whirled it away.”

  He watched the sergeant and constable separate and begin the search.

  “Now, Inspector, who and what was this man?” he asked.

  CHAPTER XII

  Inspector Mackenzie dived a hand into one of his pockets and produced his notebook. With a moistened thumb he flipped over the pages until he arrived at the collectanea appertaining to the present tragedy.

  The process was regarded by Doctor Manson with a frown. He had little enthusiasm for notebook recitals. While it was well, in fact, advisable, for facts to be put into writing as an aid to future memory and for filing, it should be, he held, within the mental compass of an inspector of police to relate the salient points of any investigation without having recourse to his notes. He waited with patient tolerance, however, until Mackenzie, having digested anew the data, began his story.

  “His name is James Canley,” said the inspector. “He is about fifty years of age, and he lives—lived” (he hastily corrected the slip) “in a cottage down the lane there.” A wave of the hand incorporated about 300 yards of the area below the railway embankment.

  “What was he?” asked Manson.

  “I don’t know. So far as we are aware he was of independent means. But we have had no reason up to now to inquire into his circumstances. I’ve never known him to be in any employment. But he used to do a good bit of race-going.”

  “Any relations?”

  “Not to our knowledge. He lived alone in the cottage with a woman coming in daily to clean for him. She also prepared his breakfast and an evening meal. She—”

  “Just a moment, Inspector,” interrupted the doctor. “The cottage, I take it, has not been interfered with?”

  “No.” A touch of acidity crept into the monosyllable, a frigidity that announced a state of dudgeon that so elementary a precaution should have thought to have been neglected. “The woman,” he added, “has been told not to touch anything in the place, and there is a constable there to see that she doesn’t—and nobody else, either. She is waiting in case you wish to question her.”

  “Most commendable, Inspector.” Manson re-established amicable relations. “You were saying,” he added, “that this man Canley was apparently independent. He had no business, then, on this railway line?”

  “He had no right, officially,” replied Mackenzie. “But”—he waggled an admonitory finger—“unofficially he sort of had.”

  Doctor Manson looked bewilderment. “Sort of had?” he said. “What do you mean by that, Inspector? He was not apparently employed by the company. Therefore he had no right to be on the lines. Do you mean that he had some sort of honorary connection with the company? Either a man has a right to be somewhere or he has no right. There cannot be any ‘sort of had’ a right about it.”

  The inspector goggled, and looked inquiringly at the station-master. That official met his eyes with a blankness that conveyed plainly the message that he was not talking out of his turn. Mackenzie took the bull by the horns. “Well, sir, he had a sort of a right of way, if you get my meaning.”

  “I don’t, Inspector.”

  “Well, sir, the villagers have for years and years been crossing the lines here. They look upon it as a right of way by custom. And the company has always winked at it.”

  “I protest at that statement.” The station-master flared up at the insinuation. He had a vision of the ogre of damages for neglect looming. “There are notices posted,” he insisted, “at the extreme ends of the station platforms warning that passengers must not cross the lines except by the subway.” He added as an afterthought, “Penalty five pounds.”r />
  “But these people were not passengers,” said Doctor Manson, peeved. “And anyway they couldn’t see the notices from here unless they used binoculars.”

  “They knew it, all right,” the station-master insisted.

  “The fact remains,” the inspector swept into his interrupted stride again. “The fact remains that for years people have been crossing the lines at this spot. And as for the company not winking at it, drivers during the daytime sound their whistles as they reach the end of the curve there to warn anybody who may be on the permanent way.”

  Doctor Manson glanced down at the track. “And they have to cross two live rails,” he pointed out. “Why do they do it?” he asked plaintively.

  “As a short cut, Doctor.” Mackenzie delved into geography. “The railway embankment cuts this village into halves.”

  Doctor Manson’s eyes twinkled. “It looks a lot more modern this side, Inspector,” he suggested. “Possibly a nearer approximation to the truth is that this part of the village which I see possesses no shops, was built on the wrong side of the railway. Eh?”

  The niceties of the argument had no place in Mackenzie’s retrospect. “It still cuts the village in two, sir,” he insisted. “And it’s a good walk from this side to the village centre, shops and the popular ‘local’. I live at the back, so I know. Somebody years ago saw that if they climbed the embankment from this lane, crossed the lines, and went down the embankment on the other side, they strike the main road and are in the main street of the village in about five minutes. The cut became popular, and now, as you see, there is a regular path worn by feet up and down the embankment on each side.”

  “I see.” The doctor digested the information. “And you assume that this man Canley, while making this short cut was caught by the train and killed?” A note of combativeness crept into the scientist’s voice.

  “That is how I look at it, sir. Take the facts as we have them—”

  “How long has Canley lived here?”

  “I am not sure,” began Mackenzie. The sergeant chipped in. “Just over eighteen months, sir.”

  “Then he would know the times of the trains, I suppose?”

  The inspector acknowledged the probability that he did.

  “Sufficiently well not to cross the lines when one was due at the spot?” The scientist allowed time for the implication to sink into the inspector’s mind, and then switched with disconcerting suddenness to another line of inquiry. “What kind of night life have you in this village, Inspector?”

  Mackenzie goggled. He appeared stupefied at the suggestion. “Night life? You mean—”

  “Gilded palaces, riotous clubs, drinking dens, Inspector. ‘All the fun of the fair.’ What do the denizens do with their time?”

  “There’s nothing like that here, sir. It’s a very quiet sort of place.”

  “Not a picture house?”

  “Not nearer than the junction or the terminus, sir.”

  “No Buffalo bean-feasts, or such-like?”

  “There’s the cricket club annual dinner, which has a bit of entertainment. And there’s a dance at a local hotel on Saturday nights.”

  “Was there a cricket club dinner or a dance last night?”

  “No.”

  “Was there any festival of any kind last night?”

  Mackenzie shook his head. He was beginning to have doubts of the scientist’s ability seriously to investigate the riddle confronting him.

  “Not even a whist drive?” The doctor was plaintively insistent.

  “Nothing at all. I walked through the village myself round about ten-thirty o’clock, and there were no more than a dozen people about. Those were on their way home after closing time.”

  “That is what I should have expected in a village of this description,” announced Doctor Manson. “Now, Inspector, may I invite you to consider these facts in conjunction with the theory of the manner of Canley’s death, and try to reconcile the two.”

  Mackenzie applied himself laboriously to the elucidation of this problem, and then, finding the effort too much, abruptly abandoned it. “I don’t see what you are getting at, sir,” he confessed.

  “No?” The doctor looked surprised. “Not in the time of death?” he asked.

  The inspector shook his head. “It must have been the eleven thirty-five train, sir. That is certain. The body would have been noticed by the driver of a train either on the up or down line if an earlier train had caused the death.”

  “Doubtless. That is not the point I am trying to convince myself of, Inspector. Granting the time of death was eleven thirty-five, and the cause of death the last train, do you not find something peculiar in the circumstances of the man being on this line?”

  “Everybody used the line, sir.”

  Doctor Manson made a gesture of despair. “So you have told me before,” he said, testily. “What for?”

  The inspector looked stupefied. The Scotland Yard expert, it seemed to him was either lacking in memory or was singularly hard of hearing. “What for?” he echoed. “I have told you—to get to the other side of the village.”

  “To go somewhere, in fact?”

  “That is so, sir.”

  “Where do you suppose Canley was going at eleven thirty-five o’clock at night, Inspector? Where could he have been going?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “No, and neither do I. That is what I meant. It is the time of death that has intrigued me from the start. Dash it all, Mackenzie, look at the circumstances. Here is a man in a village which is sound asleep at eleven o’clock. He is drinking comfortably in his own home apparently, from what you tell me, alone. He leaves that home shortly before midnight, and takes the short cut into the village—the short cut over a dangerous route in the dark, mind you. Where was he going? There wasn’t a place open. There wasn’t any kind of entertainment in the place.”

  “Might have been going for a walk before bed, sir,” suggested the inspector. “I take a walk myself often.”

  “On a foul night like it was last night, Inspector? When he was comfortable at home with a drink, and so on?” Doctor Manson waited for any comment; none was forthcoming.

  “All right,” he said. “We will suppose that like you, he occasionally took a late before-bed walk. He has a mile or so of road on this side of the line, nice country roads from what I remember of them. He could indulge in a nice walk round the houses. But, instead, he takes a dangerous route down a lane, up a railway embankment and across lines which have two separate live rails to touch, either of which could mean death. And there he allows himself to be run down by a train. Why, Inspector? Do you take your nightly stroll over the railway lines? You live on this side, don’t you?”

  “Had the footsteps been mounting the path on the other side of the rails there would have been a certain degree of probability. He might have been coming back from some carousal and on the way home. As his cottage is within 200 yards of this spot he might well have taken the short cut.”

  “That is precisely my point, sir.” The interruption emanated from the railway doctor. It came emphatically. “I maintain,” he asserted, “that this man was trespassing on the company’s premises for some unlawful purpose—”

  “What unlawful purpose?” demanded Mackenzie.

  “Something, I should say, in connection with this train,” replied the doctor. “Otherwise there is no doubt that he would both have seen and heard the train. He could not have been knocked down by mischance.”

  “You can add to that that I should have seen him—almost certain,” put in the driver.

  Inspector Mackenzie looked from one to the other. The investigation, he thought, was going haywire. Doctor Manson broke the strain.

  “I cannot go with you about the something unlawful.” He addressed the railway doctor. “But I will go so far with you as to state that there are, to my mind, strong indications discounting the accidental knocking down.”

  A satisfied sigh escaped the station-m
aster. His face took on cheerfulness of relief. Inspector Mackenzie, on the other hand, darkened. He confronted the scientist.

  “Indications?” he snorted. “Such as? The man’s head is cut off. If he was not knocked down how did he come to be killed?” A thought struck him. “Are you suggesting that he cut his own head off?”

  “Suicide,” said the railway doctor, “was one of the unlawful purposes I had in mind.” He sought confirmation from the scientist.

  Doctor Manson shook his head. “I rule out suicide by lying on the rails,” he said.

  There was an uneasy silence at his words. It was broken by the inspector suddenly banging excitedly on his notebook and becoming slightly distraught.

  “If he wasn’t knocked down by the train and he didn’t commit suicide, then what the hell did happen?” he demanded.

  He looked quickly round at the spot where the body was lying, as if expecting to find that Canley had, in the meantime, behind his back, resurrected himself and taken to flight. Reassured, he felt more strengthened.

  “He’s dead—in two parts. He’s on the railway lines.” The inspector became passionate. “The engine wheels have blood on them. Is this a debating society? For the love of Mike tell me, what did kill him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Doctor Manson. He was apologetic. “By the way I ought to have asked before, what time do you medical gentlemen say he died?”

  Both doctors began to speak, and stopped in confusion. The police surgeon was the first to recover. “From the temperature of the body when I saw it, and from the minimum temperature of the night hours,” he said, “I put the time of death as between ten-thirty and midnight. If I were pressed to give a more definite time, I should say eleven-thirty or thereabouts. I admit”—he became self-excusing—“that I am influenced there by the fact that the last train on this line was at eleven thirty-five last night.”

  The railway company’s doctor confirmed. “I agree with my professional colleague,” he snorted. “It is about the only point on which I am in concert with him,” he added.