The Snark was a Boojum

by Gerald Verner

  “Come on, young feller,” grunted Gale, swallowing a scalding cup of coffee in one huge gulp, apparently without any ill effects. I grabbed my own coffee, and feeling like an obedient dog, followed my master out of the room.

  Halliday was standing in front of the fireplace staring up at a portrait of Ursula Bellman that hung over the mantelpiece.

  “Hello, hello . . . Damned fine portrait that!” greeted Gale in high good humour.

  I looked afresh at the portrait and noticed it was signed S. Gale. If Halliday had noticed he didn’t say anything.

  Gale was in a jovial mood. “You’re an early bird this morning. Looking for worms?”

  Halliday turned round and there was a reproachful look in his eyes.

  “Good morning, sir. I came early to catch you, in case you had a notion to travel up to London again.”

  “Aha!” cried Gale, rubbing his hands together and grinning in huge delight. “So you know about that, hey?”

  “Properly stole a march on us there, didn’t you? You took confidential police information and acted on it without proper consultation. The Deputy Chief Constable is none too pleased. The City Police aren’t either.”

  Gale looked like a little boy who has been scolded for a moment, and then he waved away this mild rebuke. “Did you get Baker’s private address?” he asked eagerly, sidestepping any responsibility.

  “Yes we did,” answered Halliday. “Robert Lawson’s private address,” he corrected.

  I could see Halliday was dismayed Gale hadn’t taken his gentle warning more seriously, but was unsure how to handle Gale, like many I had met since my arrival in Lower Bramsham.

  Gale was rapidly rolling a cigarette from his battered box. “Where did he live?”

  “We got a bit more than that. Mr. James Lawson took us round there and let us in. Very helpful gentleman,” he said pointedly, looking straight at Gale, who was licking down the gummed end of the cigarette paper. “He lived in one of those small flats off Russell Square.”

  “What did you find, hey?” he asked, striking a match off his thumb nail. “Don’t tell me you found a Mrs. Baker?”

  “A Mrs. Lawson, sir. His real name was Lawson.”

  “Yes . . . yes!” cried Gale impatiently, lighting his cigarette and drawing in smoke with great enjoyment. He began pacing around the room, puffing so furiously at his cigarette that a little trail of sparks followed him like the tail of a comet. “You found her?”

  “No, sir,” answered Halliday. “The City Police are carrying out a thorough search as we speak. But, there was a marriage certificate. It was dated nineteen thirty-five,” he consulted his notebook. “The twenty-first of October—and the marriage was between Robert Henry Lawson, described as a lawyer’s clerk, and a Miss Hilary Nelson, spinster . . .”

  Gale stopped dead as if he’d walked slap into an invisible brick wall. He rounded on Halliday ferociously. “Hilary!”

  Into my mind flashed a vision of the dark, pretty woman in the vivid scarlet dress, who had sat next to Arnold Hope at that fateful dinner . . . Of course there were a lot of Hilary’s in the world . . . The name might only be a coincidence but . . .

  Simon Gale was glaring at Halliday, his beard bristling with excitement. “Mrs. Hilary King,” he cried. “Is it too great a leap . . .? By all the buttons on the Pearly King, could it be the same Hilary?”

  “It would be a bit of a stretch . . .” began Halliday cautiously.

  “Let’s get our coats,” interrupted Gale, making for the door. “We’ll soon find out!

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chief Detective Inspector Halliday drove us into Lower Bramsham. Keeping his eyes on the winding road, he gave a sharp glance at the large figure sitting beside him. “We heard back from the booking office at Marling Junction. Twenty-five passengers bought tickets, two for Farley Halt—he remembered those because they were unusual on account of it not being very popular. There were two passengers on that last train Monday night who got off at Farley Halt.”

  “There we are!” cried Gale wriggling in his seat with impatience, as if he was about to try to stand up. “That explains it!”

  “We visited the man who was on duty at the ticket office that night and showed him a photograph of William Baker we were given by James Lawson. He didn’t recognise Baker, or manage a description of the other passenger who purchased a ticket for Farley Halt.” Halliday looked glum. “Very disappointing.”

  Gale didn’t look disappointed at all. “The Snark was on that train. William Baker gets off the train, the Snark follows . . . waits until the train has pulled clear of the station . . . knocks him out . . . strips off his clothes . . . kills him . . . makes certain he’s dead, and heaves him through the waiting room window. He takes Baker’s clothes, house key, and ticket, puts on Baker’s oilskin mackintosh and a black-and-white check cap and makes his way to the village. He lets himself into Baker’s lodgings, searches Baker’s room for any incriminating evidence, and leaves fifteen minutes later seen by Mr. Freeman. He dumps Baker’s clothes, whips off the mackintosh and cap, leaves them on the pavement and hides until that chap . . .”

  “Mr. Charles Hicknell,” broke in Halliday helpfully.

  “Until Hicknell comes along and hears that cackling chuckle . . . Just before he finds Baker’s clothes in a heap.”

  We all sat in silence as this action played through our minds. As vividly as a film on a cinema screen his words conjured up the damp, misty desolation of Farley Halt, and the murderer struggling to heave that thin body through the waiting room window . . .

  “I reckon that’s just about it, sir,” agreed Halliday, with a smile of satisfaction.

  The house occupied by Mrs. Hilary King was situated at the end of a narrow lane running down beside the church, at the top of the High Street. It was not very large and of a rather depressing architecture, which I judged to be late Victorian and not in keeping with the rest of Lower Bramwell. There was an outsize conservatory, one of those monstrously ornate domed affairs of glass, built onto the side of the house, which gave it a curious lop-sided appearance. The gravel path which ran up to the front door between two oblong strips of grass was dotted with patches of weed, and the flower beds looked tangled and neglected.

  It was quite obvious Mrs. King was no garden-lover.

  She answered the door herself in answer to Halliday’s knock. She was dressed in a pair of slim-fitting black slacks and a canary yellow jumper, which showed to full advantage her admirable figure. Quite understandably she looked surprised to find three men on her doorstep. I thought I detected a hint of apprehension on her dark eyes at the sight of Halliday and the police car parked outside. It was gone almost immediately.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’m,” said Halliday, repeating his usual formula. “I wondered if we could have a word . . .”

  “I’ve already made a statement Inspector,” she replied with a puzzled frown. “I don’t know what I could add . . .”

  “Just a word, save you coming down to the station . . . Mr. Gale and Mr. Trueman are kindly helping us with our investigation . . .”

  She hesitated for a second while her eyes flickered quickly from one to the other of us. Then she said, with a bright and wholly artificial smile: “You’d better come in.”

  We stepped into a hall that might have come straight out of House and Garden. Everything was immaculate, like a show house, very modern and artistic, but rather sterile. “You’d better come through to the studio,” she suggested, leading us through a drawing room, through a glass door into the glass conservatory we had seen from the outside.

  This was the exact opposite of the rest of the house and looked lived in. There was a large work table littered with head-blocks, buckram shapes, feathers and ribbons, an electric iron, an assortment of scissors, and other paraphernalia required for creating her exclusive model hats. I learned later that these creations were immediately copied in hundreds by a firm for which she worked and circulated to all the
big stores in the country.

  She indicated some cane chairs with gaily coloured cushions. “Please make yourselves comfortable,” she said, as she helped herself to a cigarette from a box on the table inspiring Gale to roll one of his own. “What is it you gentlemen want to see me about?”

  I could tell she was putting on a show and that underneath she was nervous. The flame of the lighter into which she dipped the end of her cigarette wavered from the slight shaking of her hand.

  Halliday cleared his throat. “I’ll get straight to the point. I understand you knew Mr. Baker?”

  Hilary King shook her head. “I told you quite clearly before that I didn’t know him,” she replied a little arrogantly.

  Halliday smiled and his voice was silky smooth. “Yes you did. That is quite correct.”

  I could see her relief and a return of confidence.

  “Would it surprise you to learn that Mr. Baker was a private detective?”

  “A detective?” She tried very hard to inject the right element of astonishment into her voice but to my ears it didn’t ring true. “It surprises me very much. I still don’t understand how that concerns me.”

  Gale lit his cigarette and, drawing the smoke in deeply, leaned forward in expectation, his eyebrows drawn down over his eyes. I knew it didn’t ring true to him either.

  Halliday’s jaw stiffened. The eyes in his round good humoured face were watchful. He was playing with her like a cat with a mouse.

  “Are you a widow, Mrs. King?”

  The atmosphere tightened, like overstretched rope before it frays and snaps . . .

  She took a long drag on her cigarette to soothe her obviously quivering nerves and slowly blew out the smoke. Then she seemed to stop breathing. She went very still and seemed to slump.

  “Why did you ask me that?” She’d cleverly answered the question with another question.

  Gale could restrain himself no longer. “Murder’s a horrible thing,” he said, with an expression on his face that would have scared a hardened commando. “Especially murder when it’s carried out by a perverted joker, with a lot of grotesque trimmings—a joker that planned two diabolical crimes, hey? A joker that first knocked unconscious, then stripped, and then cold bloodedly thrust a knife through William Baker’s skin, into his back . . .” He smacked his fist into the palm of hand.

  Hilary King visibly flinched, her eyes opened wide, and she grabbed the edge of the work table to steady herself.

  Gale continued mercilessly: “But this won’t worry you unduly because you never knew William Baker did you Mrs. King?”

  Her knuckles were white. I thought perhaps Gale had gone too far and that she might collapse.

  She swallowed and stifled a sob as she shook her head.

  The rope was fraying . . .

  Halliday sensed his moment perfectly. In a clear and gentle voice he said: “Perhaps you knew him as Mr. Robert Lawson?”

  I was watching Gale, who was watching her intently, and while she managed a superb job of controlling her emotions, we knew all pretence was over, and we had found Hilary Nelson.

  Halliday might have struck her a physical blow. She shrank back against a cabinet, groping with her hand to steady herself—and the rope snapped.

  “Get Out!” she breathed tremulously. “Get out of my house!”

  We had no choice but to leave her alone, still supporting herself by the edge of the work table as if she would collapse at any moment, her face drawn and suddenly haggard, tears beginning to run down her cheeks. I remembered her face in the crowd outside Gifford’s flat—she’d looked like that then.

  “I don’t think there’s any doubt that’s our Hilary,” remarked Halliday, as we made our way back to the police car. “But was she the woman who rang up the office—the personal caller?”

  “Why is she called King?” asked Gale climbing into the car. “And why did the Nelson-Lawson marriage break up for some reason or other? They’re obviously living apart.”

  “I’m expecting a call from the City of London police with the results of searching Robert Lawson’s flat,” Halliday told him, climbing in behind the wheel. “I’ll also be speaking to James Lawson. I’ll ask him for some family history. The investigation into Franklin Gifford’s financial affairs should turn up something very soon . . . Would you like to come back to my office?”

  “Try and stop me!” cried Gale.

  *

  It was still only just after eleven o’clock that morning when we got to the police station at Marling. Gale went at the problem full throttle:

  “We’ve got two reasons why someone should want to get rid of Gifford. Revenge for the way he treated his wife. His son perhaps hates him—they don’t get along—but a lot of people don’t get along and don’t murder one another! The other is something to do with the bank—a case of fraud—could be a dozen different things . . . But what is the connecting link between Gifford and Baker, eh? Baker was killed first, out of sequence, if Lewis Carroll’s Snark verses are adhered to. What’s the single overriding motive that links these two murders? Now make no mistake, this motive was forming in the mind of the murderer long before that Friday dinner when I dropped my resounding clanger . . . bubbling and festering in his mind, and powerful enough to drive him towards madness—I only provided him with the setting, d’you see?”

  “Remind me why he needed a setting?” asked Halliday. “Why did he need all these theatrics?”

  “That’s a jack-pot question. The method dazzles us, the sleight of hand . . . and that’s the point! It’s all designed to sensationalise, to mask a simple plan to murder one person, Franklin Gifford. Baker was killed because he got in the way. During his three weeks poking about, did he discover his wife was living in the village or did he know it all along . . .? Did he stumble upon Bellman, who had just injured himself, or was that Bellman’s excuse for inviting him to dinner—for getting him to Hunter’s Meadow to meet the other dinner guests?”

  “It covers a clandestine meeting in the woods to discuss the real reason Baker had come to the village?” I suggested.

  Gale nodded. “Bellman knew, through his friendship with Hilary, she had been married to a private investigator, so it wouldn’t be unnatural to ask her to telephone and arrange for him to come down here . . . Hilary didn’t have to know the real reason she was calling him—and I don’t think that reason was the Ursula and Weston relationship—I don’t believe that has anything to do with the murders, though it’s a tempting solution. Something else—maybe this acquisition you’re working on, or something that goes a long way back to the founding of his business empire, a fraud, a double-cross, that someone knows about . . . blackmail . . . and Bellman wants Baker to investigate—find out who it is . . . but they’re on to him and they quickly put a stop to it!” Gale glared at us. “Enter the Snark and Exit Baker!”

  I tried to work this out. “Suppose Gifford was the one who was blackmailing Bellman, and Gifford found out Baker was investigating him, then Gifford had a motive to kill Baker.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Gale.

  “But then who killed Gifford?” I asked. “Bellman?”

  Gale ran his fingers through his thick chestnut red hair until it stood up from his head like Shock-headed Peter, or Struwwelpeter, that German book of poems that terrified me as a child.

  “That would mean two Snarks,” commented Halliday wryly.

  Gale roared with laughter. “Distinguishing those that have feathers, and bite, from those that have whiskers, and scratch,” he quoted.

  A package arrived from the City of London Police that provided us with some interesting information. There was a report on their search of Robert Lawson’s home, and a sepia photograph of him with his wife. It was faded, but there was no doubt it was Hilary King.

  “I’ll apply for an arrest warrant,” stated Halliday angrily. “I’m going to get her in for questioning, with the strong possibility she will be charged with withholding information from the police and p
erverting the course of justice.”

  “That should open her up like a can of beans . . .” growled Gale.

  A long telephone conversation with James Lawson added to Mrs. Hilary King’s history. Apparently after two years of marriage to Robert she had begun an affair with a buyer at Selfridges, a Mr. Ross King, which resulted in her leaving her husband and going to live with him. James said his nephew was heartbroken, always hoping that she would return to him. Despite protestations from the family, Robert told everyone he would forgive her. Then fate took a hand and King died suddenly. The tables were turned, and heartbroken herself she went to live alone at lower Bramsham calling herself Mrs. Hilary King, though they were never married.”

  “So a telephone call to Robert Lawson would have brought him running, hey?” grunted Gale frowning. “Having told everyone she was Mrs. King—wishful thinking I suppose—she couldn’t have him near the place, or wouldn’t—so he was forced to keep his distance lodging with Mrs. Tickford posing as William Baker.”

  Sergeant Lockyer came into the office and handed Halliday a report. He opened the file and looked up. “The investigation into Franklin Gifford’s financial affairs . . . preliminary results . . .” After flicking through pages with nothing but columns of figures, he reached a summary page. He looked up with an intake of breath. “It appears Mr. Gifford died a rich man . . . Let me see . . . In various accounts, a total of over twenty thousand pounds!”

  “Enough to kill for?” I asked.

  “A bit obvious if you’re the son and you inherit the lot!” growled Gale. “I presume his son does inherit?”

  “I’ll look into that,” promised Halliday.

  I thought of Franklin Gifford’s desire to draft a new will and considered that whoever did inherit under the terms of the original will, the timing was very fortunate for them. A few days later and it might all have changed. The beneficiary under the proposed new will has lost out. I wondered who it was, and reminded Gale and Halliday of this fact, but they had not forgotten.