The Case of the Fighting Soldier: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  He slipped adroitly down one or two side turnings before I got him back to that main question. Then he hinted that there were ramifications in the case and things that mightn’t come out in court. The fraud was bigger than the public imagined and those in the dock mightn’t be the real principals. When I pestered him to enlarge on that, all I could induce him to confide was that the Law had an eye on Joseph Passman. You may have heard of Passman. His money was made out of chain stores in the North. I knew him well. The breezy type who boasts of being self-made and talks about “the brass.” Passman also had the homely trick of referring to himself as Joe, or old Joe. “Old Joe’s too fly a bird for that,” he told me with a wink when I hinted there was money in backing Craigne in the early days. That was before Craigne married Charlotte, who was Joe’s stepdaughter.

  “But wait a minute, George,” I suddenly said. “Didn’t I read that Joe Passman gave evidence against Sivley? It was his evidence that proved Sivley was a rogue. No one else said a word against him—except Craigne.”

  “Maybe,” George said airily. “The fact that Passman gave evidence against an old employee doesn’t prove very much. He might have been ingratiating himself with the powers-that-be. He’s the plausible sort I can smell a mile off.” He gave a grunt. “Besides, there’s been some private tipping off. And we know he’s paying for Craigne’s defence.”

  “Why shouldn’t his wife be paying for it?”

  “Because she hasn’t a bean but what Passman allows her,” George told me curtly.

  Before stepping into the Assize Court you might like to have a look at the four prisoners who stood in the dock, charged with conspiring to cheat and defraud. If also at any time you may be tempted to try any variation of that scheme to swindle the bookies, it might deter you to learn what that particular scheme was, and how it fared.

  A bookmaker, as you may know, will accept a telegram timed before the result of a race. If, therefore, you can learn a result and then fake the time of the telegram, the bookmaker will pay you your winnings. But that faking has been done in many forms and the post office is alive to every variation. As soon as a telegram is sent from a sub-post office to a main post office, it is checked as to time. Suppose, for instance, you have the result of the 2.30 at 2.33, and you wire a hundred pounds on the winner, inducing the postmaster of the sub-office to put the time as 2.27. When that telegram is checked, two questions are put to the sub-postmaster. “Why did you accept the telegram? Why the delay in our receiving it, since the time is now 2.35?” If the answers are not satisfactory, the telegram is held back.

  There is another safeguard. The character of a sub-postmaster and his financial standing are most strictly inquired into before he is allowed to function. There is also the best safeguard of all—the fact that a bookmaker will not part with a considerable sum of money won on a telephoned commission unless he is sure of its genuineness and the integrity of his client. How then did this particular gang try to circumvent all the safeguards? The answer is that they banked heavily on the integrity of the parties concerned, and they mixed the two swindling bets with a loser or two and a couple of bets that were undoubtedly genuine. The rest of the scheme can be learned from a look at the men themselves, and a brief study of their biographies.

  PATRICK SIVLEY. Head chauffeur to Joseph Passman for some years, and then chauffeur to Rupert Craigne. He claimed to have saved a considerable sum of money and in the spring of 1937 retired and purchased the village shop of Gadsford, ten miles from Newmarket, and took over the sub-post office. The post office department that inquired into his character admitted that it relied principally on a glowing testimonial from Craigne. Sivley’s financial standing was impeccable, but at the trial the prosecution proved that early in 1937 he owed money everywhere, and it also endeavoured to prove that the money for the purchase of the shop had been put up by the other three accused. The prosecution sprang a surprise on the second day by putting Joseph Passman in the box to prove that Sivley did not leave his service voluntarily, but was dismissed when a long series of frauds came to light.

  CHARLES ROGERLEY. Racehorse trainer who had been warned off the course in 1911 and later reinstated. He trained for two owners, each of good standing and character, and he also trained for Rupert Craigne when that famous actor owned a couple of horses. It was horses from Rogerley’s small stable that won the two races on which the genuine bets were made, and the prosecution claimed that this was his chief role in the gang, to create confidence with the bookmakers concerned. Both horses started at reasonably short prices, and the winnings by telephoned commission amounted to less than four figures in all.

  LENNY HARPER. Better known as Lyddite Len, the heavyweight boxer. Had an up-and-down career in the ring, though his detractors claimed that it was more down than up. The mot about him was that though he wasn’t dead, he would lie down. Made considerable sums of money in his time but spent too much on the horses. At the time of arrest he was in training for the biggest fight of his career, and his training camp was at the Royal Swan at Gadsford. He sent the telegrams which Sivley pre-timed. The gang actually made £3,000 over the first telegram, but set against the previous transactions and ground-bait losses, this was a net gain of just over £2,000. On the second telegram they had no less than £7,000 to come.

  RUPERT CRAIGNE. His career has been referred to, and it should be added that for his celebrated part of Jupiter in Trouble on Olympus he grew a beard of golden brown, and this he afterwards retained. A curious megalomania that authors should be expected to write him future parts to fit an Olympian beard and a head of curly golden hair, however superb the two might be! His role in the swindle, according to the prosecution, was to appear in Gadsford post office—he had taken a furnished house in the district—about five minutes before the advertised time of the starting of the race chosen for the big swindle, and to send off two normal telegrams. While these were being dispatched by Sivley, Harper would appear. He had the result of the race, and would hand in the fraudulent telegram. Since Craigne’s telegrams would have taken some time to send, their sending made ample excuse for the delay in dispatching Harper’s. Craigne’s standing was supposed to allay suspicion, and on the first occasion it apparently did so.

  The personal appearance of the accused is rather important. Rogerley was a ferret-faced, undersized man of sixty-five who had begun life as a jockey and had become head man to a trainer when no longer able to make the weights. Harper was a giant of six foot three—just about my own height—but whereas I am only a hundred and fifty pounds, Harper scaled at least seventy-five more. His shoulders were immensely broad, and when he stood still on his pins he had a curious swaying motion. His features showed few marks of his bouts and his voice was strangely gentle, but he had the shiftiest eyes I have ever seen.

  Sivley surprised me, for I had expected to see a ferret-faced customer like Rogerley, but put him in black with a wing collar and you’d have taken him for a professional man of good standing. In height he was just under six foot, which was Craigne’s height, and he was not unlike him in build. But there the resemblance ended, for his hair was a jet black with just a touch of grey at the temples. His manner in court, till that unexpected outburst, was quiet and deferential, but his hooked nose gave his face an alertness.

  As for Craigne, you know what his personal appearance was, and all I should add is that he had a nervous trick which is not too common, of twitching his head round quickly as if he were rubbing something off his collar with his chin. He only did it once that day in court and I gathered, as I told Wharton, that he had largely grown out of it.

  Now since that trial is preliminary to the main story, there is no necessity to drag you through the whole of that last day’s events. The judge was Mr. Justice Carre (Sir Humbold Carre) and the court presented the usual appearance. The public seats were crowded and the Press seats uncommonly full, but Wharton and I had special seats just off the well of the court, where we could see everything without being too conspicu
ous.

  When I took my first look round, whom should I see to the far left of the front row of the public seats but Charlotte Craigne, and I turned my head hastily away and swivelled round in my chair. It was two years since I had seen her, and it was curious how my face flushed and my heart began to race. A guilty conscience was dimly behind all that, for Charlotte had been my life’s one indiscretion, and all that day she was somewhere at the back of my mind as an uneasiness and a depression. Yet for the life of me I couldn’t help taking more than one furtive peep at her, and wondering a considerable number of things.

  I had known Charlotte Vallants most of my life, for she had been at school with a sister of mine, but I had not become really aware of her till some seven years before my marriage. But I heard about her from time to time, for hers was the kind of personality that few people, and certainly not my sister, would be likely to forget. I knew her people well, though they were not quite my kind and belonged to that racing-cum-theatrical clique which bores me beyond tears. Brazenoak, their place in Suffolk, was one of the most charming houses I have ever known, but when Colonel Vallants died the creditors descended and the place was sold. Mabel Vallants, to the amazement of all and the consternation of most, married Joe Passman, and he bought the property back. When Mabel died, Charlotte made Brazenoak a pìed-à-terre, and with an allowance from Joe, installed herself in town. Joe and she were on admirable terms and the two would often be seen trotting round. The world’s most incongruous couple, as you will know when you meet Charlotte again.

  It was in 1936 when she married Rupert Craigne. That he was the only man with whom she had ever been really in love I was perfectly well aware, and for the life of me I couldn’t help thinking that she was in love with him still, in spite of what Wharton had said about her leaving him and the rumours which I myself had heard. Perhaps you see the other complications. Joe Passman had come to hate Craigne like hell. What Joe couldn’t stand was the way Craigne squandered the brass; he himself had been forced to clear up more than one financial mess. So, as I saw things, there was Charlotte dependent on Joe, as madly in love with her husband as ever, and yet having to cut herself adrift. And knuckling down to circumstances wasn’t Charlotte’s way. She was always the sort to flout circumstance and go through hell and high water for what often seemed to be the mere whim of being different.

  During the lunch interval I asked George how he thought things were going.

  “Rogerley’ll swing clear,” he said. “Bet you a new hat.”

  “No, you don’t,” I told him. “But what about the others?”

  “A couple of years apiece,” he said, but more tentatively. “Craigne may get less.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, if he only got six months he’d be damned,” he pointed out. “Whatever he gets, his career’s over. Only one thing left for him to do, and that’s to go abroad, or blow out his brains.”

  “If he does that, he’ll take care to have a good audience,” I said. “It’ll be the most spectacular suicide you and I’ve ever known. Craigne’s the perfect fit for Chesterton’s description of the famous novelist—always at the head of the procession, beating an outsize in drums and with a sunflower in his buttonhole.”

  Just before the judge’s summing-up I saw Joe Passman sidle into an extra seat alongside Charlotte, and he stayed there from then on. George’s prediction turned out to be amazingly accurate, for the jury found Rogerley not guilty, and he was discharged by the judge.

  To Craigne the judge spoke with considerable pity, as to a man who had been his own enemy. There was a slight curl of the lip as he reviewed his extravagances and the madness of self-adulation that had ruined a great and honourable career. Craigne had fallen like Lucifer, but from high Olympus, he said, and a rustle ran through the court at that apt allusion. No punishment that the Law could give would equal the devastating completeness of that fall.

  Two years was the sentence. I glanced quickly up at Charlotte Craigne, and she made never a gesture, but I did see that she had drawn a veil down from her black hat and over her face. To Harper the judge spoke in something of the same terms, and he too got two years. To Sivley the comments were more biting and almost vindictive, and he was given two years on the major charge, and six months on a minor one, the sentences to run concurrently.

  The warders made a movement and then came Sivley’s outburst. His eyes must have fallen on Passman, the man whose evidence had shattered his whole defence. His voice was a sudden scream, and in the deadly silence of that court, it was as terrifying a sound as ever I heard.

  “You fat swine! By God, I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do.”

  He was shaking his fist at Passman, and then like a lightning flash he was hurling himself across the dock. Harper was brushed aside as if he were a featherweight, and he was making for Craigne.

  “You too, you bloody lying swine!”

  Then the warders had him and mouthing and yelling he was carried below. When I looked up again, Charlotte Craigne had gone, and Passman too. I came out at once to the street for a breath of air, and was in time to see Joe ushering her into that big Rolls of his, and that was the last I was to see of Charlotte Craigne for the best part of two years.

  Wharton stayed on for quite a time, and when we were driving back to town I asked him if he had gathered anything from the day’s observations.

  “If you mean Passman,” he said, “then I wouldn’t like to say. If he was in it, then he’s covered up his tracks. Not that we mightn’t find something yet.”

  Some months later, when George and I were together on a certain case, I asked him much the same question, and the answer was quite a different one, in fact it was in George’s best vein. He glared at me indignantly.

  “Passman? Who said he had anything to do with it!”

  I was so taken aback that I couldn’t make even the feeblest retort. What I did gather, however, was that either the police had been barking up the wrong tree—misled perhaps by the anonymous communication to which George had referred—or that Passman had been wilier than ever and had only too effectively covered up his tracks.

  Published by Dean Street Press 2018

  Copyright © 1942 Christopher Bush

  Introduction copyright © 2018 Curtis Evans

  All Rights Reserved

  The right of Christopher Bush to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by his estate in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in 1942 by Cassell & Co.

  Cover by DSP

  ISBN 978 1 912574 16 2

  www.deanstreetpress.co.uk