The Snark was a Boojum

by Gerald Verner

  “Oh was there? As a rule police won’t have outsiders butting in . . .” He went over and touched the frame of a picture that hung on the opposite wall, moving it a fraction of an inch. I could see he was excited about something. “I’ve got a few ideas of my own,” he confided.

  I wasn’t quite sure what he was getting at. “Ideas . . .?”

  “This Snark business—William Baker. When I’ve got something definite I’d like to discuss it with you.”

  I wondered why he had asked me up. “Is that why you suggested a drink?”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “It was something quite different actually. I rent this flat from the bank—they own the building. When I sold my house in Marling after my wife died, I put my capital into some investments. I’m gratified to say they’ve proved very successful, very successful indeed. I wondered if I could draft a will. Could your company arrange that?”

  “Of course . . .”

  “I don’t want anyone round here to know about it,” he added hastily.

  “Of course I won’t mention it,” I promised. “I’m here for a few more days working with Mr. Bellman. Would it be all right if I telephoned when I have a few hours free, and we could go over it?”

  He looked relieved, as if a weight had been lifted off his mind. I presumed his son would be the beneficiary. But I shall never be certain, because I never again saw Franklin Gifford alive!

  Chapter Ten

  The following morning, as I came down the stairs to breakfast, the telephone rang. It stood on a small table near the front door and I saw Trenton cross the hall to answer it. After listening a moment he looked round, just as Jack Merridew appeared at the door of the dining-room.

  “Chief Detective Inspector Halliday wants to speak to Mr. Gale, sir,” Trenton explained, with his hand over the mouthpiece. “He said it was urgent . . .”

  “M-Mr. Gale’s still in his room, I t-think,” began Merridew.

  “I’ll get him,” I called, and ran back up the stairs sensing a development. As I reached the beginning of the corridor, Gale came out of his room and his bushy eyebrows shot up when he caught sight of me running towards him.

  “Hey, young feller,” he cried. “What are you doing? Going into training . . .”

  “It’s Halliday—he’s on the phone,” I interrupted catching my breath. “It’s urgent!”

  Gale’s face changed. He bounded past me and went down stairs in several swift leaps, so that by the time I got to the hall he was already at the telephone.

  “Hello, Gale here,” he shouted, in a voice that must have nearly cracked the diaphragm. “That you Halliday?”

  The telephone chattered metallically.

  Jack Merridew, still standing in the doorway of the dining-room, was staring through his glasses. His lean, lantern-shaped jaw had dropped slightly so that his mouth was a little open, and made him look rather like an astonished owl.

  “I’ll be along in ten minutes,” cried Gale, as the telephone ceased its chatter. “Don’t talk any more on this infernal thing. People listening, d’you see?” He slammed down the receiver and turned. There was a diabolical scowl on his face and his beard seemed to quiver with suppressed excitement.

  “Come on, young feller,” he bellowed, grabbing me by the arm. “We’re going down to the village . . .”

  “What’s happened?” I demanded.

  “I’ll tell you as we go,” he snapped. “Come along, I’m in a hurry . . .”

  “Yes, but . . . Look here, supposing Bellman wants me?” I protested, as he dragged me over to the door.

  “He’ll have to do without you!” he retorted. He swung round on Merridew. “Tell Mr. Bellman that Mr. Trueman has gone out with me, d’you see? Tell him it’s very urgent. An’ I’ll explain all when we get back . . .”

  Merridew nodded. His eyes behind the glasses were full of curiosity. Gale was struggling into his dilapidated mackintosh and urging me to hurry up. By the time I’d found my overcoat, and pulled it on, he was out the front door and halfway round to the garage, and I had to run to catch him up.

  “What is all the fuss about?” I asked him.

  “The Snark was about last night . . .”

  “You mean there’s been another murder?”

  “That’s exactly what I do mean.” Gale slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand violently. “It’s partly my fault, d’you see?”

  I looked at him sharply. “Your fault . . .?”

  “I should have foreseen it . . . It was the logical sequence, young feller,” he growled. “I should have warned him . . .”

  We had reached the garage and we both pulled hard on the big double doors. Gale made straight for his motor-cycle, but I went resolutely over to Ursula’s Humber. I got in behind the wheel. “I won’t go on that damned thing,” I yelled.

  He gave me a malignant glare and for a moment I thought he was going to go on it without me, but then he relented. “All right! Damn it! All right!” he cried, clambering into the seat beside me and slamming the door, as I eased the car forward.

  “It would have been quicker . . .”

  I shook my head. “This is safer,” I insisted firmly.

  As we swung round the corner from the garage into the drive, I was desperate to pick up our previous conversation. “You should have warned who?”

  “Gifford, of course,” he answered irritably. “For heaven’s sake put your foot down!”

  “Gifford!” I exclaimed.

  He cocked an eyebrow at me.

  “Somebody called after you left him yesterday evening,” he said.

  A memory of that neat and tidy flat—too neat and too tidy—came into my mind. I had a sudden vision of somebody walking purposefully up the stairs and knocking on the door . . .

  “What did you mean by a logical sequence?”

  He looked up from rolling a cigarette.

  “It’s Lewis Carroll, young feller. Do you remember what happened to the Banker, hey?”

  I wracked my brain in order to correctly remember the lines of verse.

  “Don’t overtax yer brain,” he growled.

  Thrusting his cigarette between his lips, he dragged from an inside pocket a thin book. “I bought this from a little bookshop in Marling.” He held it up for me to see: The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll.

  He riffled through the pages quickly and read aloud:

  “And the Banker, inspired with a courage so new, it was matter for general remark, rushed madly ahead and was lost to their view in his zeal to discover the Snark. D’you see? Gifford was a banker, hey? I should have known he was in danger . . .”

  I did see. I suddenly saw all too clearly . . . Gifford’s words came back to me; I’ve got a few ideas of my own. I should have told Gale about this, but there had been nothing of any value mentioned, and in Gifford’s own words; when I’ve got something definite I’d like to discuss it with you . . . There hadn’t been anything definite. I’d put it down to amateur sleuthing. Now I saw that if I’d told Gale what Gifford had said, it might have been sufficient to trigger Gale into action last night. It was with regret I realised it might have saved Gifford’s life.

  “What happened to the banker?” I asked, unable to remember the lines, and feeling horribly guilty.

  He gave me a strange look out of the corner of his eye. “You’ll see in a minute.”

  There was quite a crowd gathered outside the bank when we arrived, including some reporters with cameras. I could see Miss Wittlesham at the door of the post-office opposite, her sharp, steely eyes glinting with ghoulish curiosity. I pulled up and we climbed out quickly. On guard, near the entrance to Gifford’s flat, stood a uniformed policeman who came forward as we got out of the car.

  “Mr. Gale?” he inquired, looking from one to the other of us.

  “That’s me,” said Gale. “Chief Detective Inspector Halliday upstairs?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ve got orders to take you up . . .”

  Under the watc
hful eyes of the sightseers, among which I noticed Mrs. Hilary King looking very shocked, the constable led us over to the side door and we followed him up the narrow stairs to the door at the top—the door, with its highly polished brass knocker and letterbox, through which Gifford and I had passed only the previous evening.

  It was partly open now and I could hear a mutter of voices inside. A little, dumpy woman, in an apron, was leaning against the wall of the tiny hall, staring blankly, with a scared expression, at the door of the sitting room, from behind which the voices came. She turned to look at us, as the constable ushered us in, and her eyes were frightened . . .

  There were four people in that neat and tidy room where I had enjoyed a gin and tonic last night—four people and . . .

  I didn’t see what was sitting in the chair by the fireplace at first. Halliday and Lockyer were standing in front of it, talking to the two men who had been at Farley Halt, Jepson and Rogers. They had been busy. Photographic equipment was scattered about.

  Halliday looked up sharply as we came in and his good humoured face was grave and set.

  “Good morning Mr. Gale,” he greeted, and nodded to me. “This is a nasty business, sir—nastier than the other. Look . . .”

  He stood aside, motioning to the others to do the same, and then I saw . . .

  That figure, sitting rigidly upright in the small fireside chair bore no resemblance at all to the immaculate and fastidious Franklin Gifford. It was like some hideous dummy that had been balanced there. The face had been blackened with some kind of shiny pigment and the figure was in full evening dress . . .

  I heard Simon Gale’s breath hiss sharply through his teeth. He shook his head in disbelief. “This is diabolical!” He stepped forward and peered down at the thing in the chair, his face contorted with suppressed rage. “How was he killed?”

  “The same method as Baker, sir,” answered Halliday. “Stabbed in the back with a thin bladed knife. No sign of any weapon . . .”

  “He’s followed every detail, d’you see . . .” Gale straightened up. His eyes, almost invisible beneath his drawn-down brows, travelled quickly round the room and back again. “The cleaning woman found him?”

  I looked to the open door and could just see the woman in the apron hovering out in the hall.

  “Yes. Mrs. Bounce let herself in as usual when she arrived this morning. She was hysterical when she rang the police . . .”

  Gale nodded. “I can imagine,” he said, looking at the grotesque corpse. “How did he get in? The murderer, I mean . . .”

  “I think Gifford let him in, unless he had a key,” answered Halliday. “There was no sign of a forced entry.”

  “The first is the most likely,” grunted Gale. “Gifford let him in . . . which means he knew him, d’you see . . .”

  “I may have been the last person to see him alive,” I told Halliday.

  “What’s that?” Halliday looked at me in astonishment.

  “Yesterday, early evening . . . Gifford asked me up here for a drink.”

  “What time was this?” asked Halliday, very interested.

  “Just after five . . .” I answered.

  “Was there a reason for this invitation?”

  I explained to Halliday how Gifford had told me he wanted to draft a will and asked if I could help. I told him everything I could remember of the meeting. I considered that if Gifford had any inkling as to who the Snark really was, he wouldn’t have let his murderer in . . . Unless . . . unless he thought he had the situation under control. I thought of several reasons why he might have wanted to confront the Snark. Who was waiting when Franklin Gifford answered the door . . .?

  “We found this, sir,” went on Halliday, taking an envelope out of his pocket. “It was stuck in one of the dead man’s hands . . .”

  He opened the envelope and extracted a plain, white postcard; identical to the one Gale had received. On it were several lines of neatly printed verse in a ball point pen.

  He was black in the face, and they scarcely could trace

  The least likeness to what he had been:

  While so great was his fright that his waistcoat turned white—

  A wonderful thing to be seen!

  “I thought,” said Halliday, “that you might be able to explain it, Mr. Gale.”

  Gale gave a bitter laugh. “It’s another stanza out of The Hunting of the Snark, d’you see? The murderer is fastidious. He likes to get the details right, hey?” He threw down the card onto a table, dug his hand in his pocket and extracted two copies of the book he had produced in the car coming down. He handed one to Chief Detective Inspector Halliday.

  Halliday opened it up and glanced at the title page. “Thank you, sir—very considerate of you.”

  Gale was flicking through the pages rapidly.

  “Here we are,” he said stopping at a particular page. “This is how it goes on, and you see what a lot of trouble the murderer went to . . . To the horror of all who were present that day, he uprose in full evening dress, and with senseless grimaces endeavoured to say what his tongue could no longer express.”

  “We found a dressing gown and some clothes on the floor in the bedroom,” said Halliday. “I’m fairly certain he wasn’t wearing full evening dress when he answered the door.”

  “Not when he was alive,” agreed Gale grimly. “I’m sure his killer dressed him up according to his manual,” he waved the book of nonsense verse in the air.

  Halliday sighed, in a rather defeated way, I thought. He slipped the book into his pocket and stared at the body. “The press will have a field-day with all this crazy stuff.”

  There was a heavy palpable stillness in the room.

  I could hear the rasping of Gale’s breath as he continued reading the next few verses to himself.

  A heavy lorry went through the village. As it went past the whole room shook with the vibration.

  The figure of the dead man gave a momentarily life-like jerk, toppled slowly sideways, and fell clumsily across the hearth.

  PART TWO

  THE HUNTING

  They sought it with thimbles, they sought with care;

  They pursued it with forks and hope;

  They threatened its life with a railway-share;

  They charmed it with smiles and soap.

  The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll

  Chapter Eleven

  Chief Detective Inspector Halliday’s office at Marling police station was small and cheerless on that cold and frosty Friday morning, and rather overcrowded.

  In the chair behind the shabby, ink-stained desk, fiddling with a pencil, sat Major Wintringham-Smythe, the Deputy Chief Constable for the county. Facing him, his good-humoured expression replaced by a worried frown, and uncomfortably balanced on a rickety chair borrowed from the Charge Room, sat Chief Detective Inspector Halliday with an open notebook on his broad knee. Leaning against a filing cabinet, the fingers of one hand twisting his beard, and puffing furiously at the remains of one of his rank cigarettes, to the detriment of the already stuffy atmosphere, stood Simon Gale. I sat near the window, from which a persistent and icy draught froze the tip of my right ear, and stared at the shining toecaps of Sergeant Lockyer’s large regulation boots, planted firmly where he stood, almost rigidly at attention, beside the door.

  An old fashioned gas-fire in the small and rusty fireplace emitted a continuous high-pitched whine, like the last rush of air from one of those childish toys known as a dying pig, and filled the room with melancholy sound.

  We had attended this conference at the express wish of Halliday. Major Wintringham-Smythe had raised no objection to our presence, though he had intimated, quite tactfully, that he considered it a little unorthodox and that all matters discussed were to be kept strictly confidential.

  He was a pleasant-faced, dapper man, running slightly to fat, with a bald circle on the crown of his head and a surprisingly deep voice for a man of his small stature.

  Halliday had just completed
an admirably concise statement of the facts, covering the ground from Simon Gale’s humorous analogy at the dinner table at Hunter’s Meadow to the gruesome discovery in Franklin Gifford’s flat on the previous day.

  In the silence that followed, the infernal whine of the gas-fire seemed to grow louder and more irritating until Halliday turned it off.

  The Deputy Chief Constable, still twiddling the pencil between his fingers, looked across the desk at Halliday. He said, clearing his throat: “It’s incredible . . . Absolutely incredible . . .”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Halliday stolidly.

  “I can’t make any sense out of it,” admitted the Deputy Chief Constable.

  “No, sir,” agreed Halliday.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” added the Deputy Chief Constable, “it’s going to be a damned difficult task to catch this blighter.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Halliday for the third time.

  “It seems pretty obvious to me,” went on the Deputy Chief Constable, making little digging motions into the blotting-pad with the point of his pencil, “that we’ve got a lunatic to deal with . . .”

  “Plenty of rhyme and not a lot of reason, eh?” interposed Simon Gale, dropping the end of his cigarette on the floor and crushing it with his foot. “I wish we could be certain of that.” He paused. “But we can’t be certain, d’you see?”

  Major Wintringham-Smythe turned his head sharply. “Can you suggest any sane reason for these two murders?”

  “No,” answered Gale. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one, hey?”

  I didn’t think Gale was being helpful, particularly as I felt we were both privileged to be there at all. I was listening, but determined, unlike Gale, to keep my nose out of police business.

  The Deputy Chief Constable frowned. “Let us agree that it’s very unlikely,” he retorted, “if you take into consideration all the circumstances . . .”

  “That’s just what I am doing, d’you see?” interrupted Gale, scowling horribly. “And there’s one thing that doesn’t fit in with your conveniently easy solution . . .”