The Case of the Abominable Snowman

by Nicholas Blake

  ‘You’re suggesting that I’ve been trying to shield Hereward?’

  ‘Possibly. At any rate, I’d be glad of any information you could give me that would clear Mr and Mrs Restorick of the suspicion of having killed your sister – and attempted to kill you.’ Blount paused. ‘If they could be cleared of the attempt upon you, even, it would diminish the possibility that they murdered your sister.’

  The firelight, gleaming on Blount’s bald pate, furrowed Andrew’s face with shadows. He looked both worried and perplexed.

  ‘I wish I could give you some information about it,’ he said at last. ‘But I didn’t hear Hereward that night, and I can’t tell you any more about who put the poison in my milk. I presume Charlotte or Hereward aren’t the only people who could have done it.’

  ‘No. Dr Bogan could have. But why should Dr Bogan want to get rid of you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Andrew slowly. ‘Unless he thinks I’m in possession of evidence which would incriminate him over Betty’s death.’

  ‘And why should he think that,’ Blount’s voice flashed out smoothly as a cat’s paw, ‘when you claim to have been asleep at the time of the murder?’

  Andrew laughed, the light, excited laugh of a fencer admitting a touch. ‘Search me. Maybe it’s just his guilty conscience. Maybe I have evidence without being aware of it. I’ve given you my reasoned grounds for thinking Bogan did it; if I had proof, I’d certainly not keep it back.’

  ‘Oh well, we shall have to leave it at that, then. And now I’m going to tell you a few things about this – e’eh – bête noir of yours. About Dr Bogan.’

  Nigel stared at his toes, puzzled. It was both unusual and unprofessional of Blount to be so confidential among suspects, but the inspector, like a canny Scot, seldom gave things away without the prospect of a good return. When he cast his bread on the waters, it was always well baited. He was attempting now, Nigel surmised, to push Andrew Restorick into further disclosures.

  Dr Denis Bogan (said Blount) had come to England ten years before, with good medical degrees from the Johns Hopkins University. The American police had nothing against him, and certainly no proof of any connexion between him and the mysterious Engelman who peddled marijuana. They were now investigating Bogan’s own statement of his activities during the period Engelman had met Elizabeth Restorick. The only suspicious fact unearthed up to date was that, though as a student in America he had been a comparatively poor man, when he arrived in England there were indications that he possessed ample means. His own explanation of this, freely given to Blount, sounded plausible enough. Soon after he had begun to practise in the States, he had been left a legacy by a woman patient and had plunged successfully with it on Wall Street. After his acquisition of wealth, he had travelled about America for some while – this was the period when Engelman had been at work – and then come to England. The American police were working on all this part of his story, but Blount was not sanguine as to their chances of following a scent that had grown so cold.

  After coming to England, Bogan studied for a while at Edinburgh, was naturalized, and presently placed upon the Medical Register. His reputation in medical circles was still very fair, though the unorthodox methods he adopted did not endear him to his more conservative colleagues. His professional success, however, particularly with rich female patients, was resounding. He had the luck, or the opportunism, to start a new fashion amongst a clientele to whom new fashions were life itself. In the early 1930’s the craze for psycho-analysis was beginning to ebb, and rich neurotics were ready to jump at a new craze. Not that, apart from his fairly regular use of hypnosis, there was anything very revolutionary in his methods: it was the man, more than the work, they fell for. A less impressive personality could have specialized in the nervous diseases of women and used similar treatment till all was blue. As one of Bogan’s wealthy hypochondriacs told Blount, it was like being treated by St Luke and Rasputin rolled into one. They certainly got their money’s worth of sensation – and quite often of cure as well.

  So much (said Blount) for Dr Bogan’s background. Nor was there anything necessarily suspicious in the fact that many of his patients were drug addicts. But drugs loomed so large in the Restorick case that Blount had decided to follow up a statement made by Eunice Ainsley. He accordingly got in touch with the girl whom Nigel had later inquired about. Blending persuasion with official firmness, Blount, after a great deal of reluctance on her part, got at the facts about ‘Miss A’, as he called her.

  ‘Miss A’ was the daughter of a rich industrialist, in the social swim, a cocaine addict – her parents were unaware of her addiction. As the habit grew upon her, she feared its effects would become manifest to her parents. The consequences would be disastrous, for her father was a strait-laced, unforgiving sort of man. She had therefore, like several of her acquaintances, put herself in Dr Bogan’s hands for a cure. The cure was apparently successful, but, a few months after the treatment ended, the girl relapsed. And that was not the worst of it. She began to receive letters threatening to inform her parents of her cocaine habit unless she paid a large sum of money through certain channels. She obeyed. But the demands of the blackmailer became so exorbitant that she could no longer meet them. In an agony of fear and desperation, she wrote a letter imploring the blackmailer to give her an interview. A rendezvous was fixed, at night, outside one of the gates of Regent’s Park. The blackmailer, to Miss A’s surprise, turned out to be a woman. She was heavily muffled-up, smartly dressed, and entirely merciless. Miss A’s entreaties had not the least effect upon her.

  Miss A, faced with a hopeless situation, did what she should have done all along. She confessed to her parents. There was a terrible scene with her father, but in the end he relented and she was sent to another doctor, who succeeded in effecting an absolute cure.

  Before this, however, something had occurred which seemed of peculiar significance to Blount. Immediately after her interview with the blackmailer, Miss A had decided on an impulse to go to Dr Bogan and ask for his help. She walked to his private house. When about fifty yards away from it, she saw by the light of a street lamp a woman emerge and hurry away from her down the street. It was the woman whom, an hour before, she had met outside Regent’s Park.

  Of course, she could have no logical proof of this. But, as far as she was concerned, there was no mistake about the recognition. She had been so shocked by the sight of that horrible creature that she abandoned her project and took a taxi home – so shocked, too, that at first she did not ask herself what the woman had been doing there. The thought then passed through her mind that Dr Bogan must be another of the blackmailer’s victims, and she reasoned that he therefore could be of no help to her. But later she remembered that, during their interview, the mysterious woman had mentioned something connected with the relationship between Miss A and her father which she could not possibly have known, unless she had heard it from Dr Bogan, for, during the course of his treatment, the doctor had required her to give him the fullest, most intimate details of this relationship.

  ‘So, you see,’ Blount concluded, ‘if Miss A’s evidence is to be trusted – and I believe it is over this – we have established a connexion between Bogan and a blackmailer. As it stands, it wouldn’t hold water for a moment in a court of law, and I doubt if Miss A would be able to recognize the woman again, after so long an interval, even if we could find her and bring them face to face. The point is, what Bogan did in one case he may have done in many others. If he was behind the blackmailing of Miss A, there may have been blackmail of some kind in the case of Elizabeth Restorick.’

  Andrew’s breath came hissing through his teeth. ‘God, what a foul racket!’

  ‘Clever, if it’s true,’ said Will Dykes. ‘A man of that sort’d be able to worm out any woman’s secrets. But Bogan could do it under a cloak of perfect professional respectability. D’you suppose he deliberately engineered it so that Miss A’s cure shouldn’t be complete?’

  ‘Th
at’s impossible to say. There’s no question that he has effected many bona-fide cures. We’re in a position, now, to investigate his private nursing-home and his practice very thoroughly. We’ll know soon enough. He’s been in an extraordinarily strong position, just because many people who come for that kind of cure want it hushed up.’

  ‘When I think of poor Betty in that swine’s hands, I could break his neck,’ cried Andrew.

  Nigel reflected, not for the first time, on the way genuine emotions call up the most theatrical clichés.

  ‘Betty could look after herself, I reckon,’ said Will Dykes.

  ‘And who knows he didn’t start some of them on their drug-habits?’ Andrew went on. ‘Neurasthenic patients. He admitted he gave Betty sedative drugs. He could create morphia addicts that way, then have them blackmailed for it – and I’d not put it past him to supply the drugs, too, through some go-between. A goldmine out of a cesspool.’

  ‘We’re looking into all that.’

  ‘Looking into it!’ exclaimed Andrew. ‘You’ve got to stop it now, before he does any more damage. Haven’t you arrested him yet?’

  ‘The drug side of the case is being taken over by our experts in that branch. It’s the murder I’m investigating, Mr Restorick.’

  ‘Of course. But good heavens, surely –’

  ‘No.’ Blount’s mild yet almost inhumanly penetrating gaze was fastened upon Andrew. ‘No, I see no special reason yet to think Bogan is a murderer.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  ‘The wicked flee when no man pursueth.’

  PROVERBS

  LYING IN BED next morning, Nigel had to admit that Blount’s reasoning was sound. Bogan might be seven kinds of devil, but that did not prove him a murderer. He reviewed Blount’s logic. First, if Bogan wanted to get rid of Elizabeth, why do it in such a manner and amongst her own family, where the risk would be so great? How much easier to give the impression that she had committed suicide if he had killed her in his own nursing-home or in her London flat – an overdose of cocaine. Second, why should he want to kill her? Certainly not, had he been successfully blackmailing her. But, as Blount told them, there was no evidence of this. Inquiries at her bank had not shown any large withdrawals from her account which could not be explained otherwise. The only possibility was that she had been collecting evidence against him. Blount’s recent investigations had proved there was plenty of evidence to be collected. On the other hand, after exhaustive inquiries among her friends and Bogan’s patients, he had not discovered a single fact to suggest that Betty had been trying to collect this evidence. She had not even mentioned Bogan to one of them, except as a friend and her doctor.

  So there we are, thought Nigel, back at the beginning again. As far as means and opportunity went, anyone at Easterham Manor might have killed Betty, and they all had motives of a sort, but no one had a motive which could be called really adequate, and premeditated murders are not committed on flimsy motivation. For an hour, while his coffee grew cold and the bitter wind tormented the branches of the trees in the square, he racked his brains and ransacked his memory for some new light on the tragedy. He then reached for the telephone.

  Four hours later, he was sitting at a secluded table in the Poisson d’Or. Dr Bogan faced him, diligently plying a toothpick. They had talked on neutral subjects during lunch, and Nigel had been reminded more than once of Georgia’s description of Bogan – a mansion you’re being shown over by a caretaker. What thoughts, what secrets or iniquities lay behind that strangely opaque personality, in rooms which the master of the house had told the caretaker to keep locked? There was something else Georgia had said, at Easterham. Remembering it, Nigel asked abruptly:

  ‘Why has Andrew Restorick got his knife into you?’

  The doctor set down his toothpick amid the remains of his chocolate cake.

  ‘A fixation on his sister, perhaps, as I originally suggested. Perhaps some other, equally irrational antipathy.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that. But such antipathies don’t usually push people into incriminating the object of them for murder.’

  ‘Oh dear, has he been trying to do that?’

  ‘You should know.’

  Dr Bogan’s long fingers combed his beard. He gazed contemplatively at Nigel, as though debating what kind of treatment this patient would best respond to.

  ‘That stupid trick of the burnt paper, you mean?’

  ‘Not only that.’ Nigel was determined that Bogan should make his own running.

  ‘You figure it was he who put the potassium cyanide in the milk?’

  ‘That’s what you think, isn’t it?’

  ‘There’s no evidence for it, surely?’

  ‘The question of evidence is irrelevant. If you hadn’t believed he’d poisoned his own glass of milk, in order to incriminate you, you’d not have poured some of it into the milk jug.’

  ‘Why now, Strangeways, you know as well as I do that’s a gross petitio principii,’ replied Bogan with a sudden, almost falsetto chuckle. He seemed perfectly in command of the situation. The wicked, reflected Nigel, flourish as the bay-tree.

  ‘I’m not going to chop logic with you, doctor,’ he said. ‘A girl, one of your patients, has been murdered. Attempts have been made to incriminate you. These attempts have at least been successful enough to compel the police into a most stringent inquiry about your private affairs. As a result of them, you may for all I know be ruined professionally and suffer a long term of imprisonment. I’m not interested in that, however. The question is, whether you wish to be hung. You’re going the right way about it, certainly, if you do.’

  Dr Bogan’s liquid brown eyes became unfocused. It was the only reaction he gave to Nigel’s blitzkreig.

  ‘For a celebrated investigator, you’re extraordinarily ingenuous,’ he said. ‘However, I’ll humour you. My professional reputation will look after itself. But I certainly don’t want to be hung. I take it what you’re after is this – if the incidents of the poison and the burnt paper were attempts to incriminate me, they must have been made by the murderer: if they weren’t, I must be the murderer?’

  ‘That seems to be a basis for discussion, at any rate,’ replied Nigel, his pale blue eyes non-committally scrutinizing the doctor.

  ‘Well, if it’s any help to you, and since there are no witnesses present, I don’t mind telling you that it was I who poured the poisoned milk from the glass into the jug.’

  ‘So I imagined,’ said Nigel briskly. ‘Why?’

  ‘Your active imagination should give you the answer.’

  ‘Because you lost your head for a moment. You suspected the poison might be another attempt to incriminate you, and you felt it would create more confusion if it seemed that the poisoning had not been directed against Andrew Restorick alone. You also had a pretty good notion that it was Andrew who had poisoned the milk.’

  Dr Bogan gave Nigel a quizzical glance. ‘I congratulate you. That was really most plausible. But I don’t lose my head. What actually happened was that I acted purely on impulse – it was a piece of mischief – I just wanted to see how everyone would behave. That is the truth, but, naturally, I don’t expect you to believe it.’

  ‘Since we seem to be playing the truth game,’ Nigel said, to the intense astonishment of a waiter who was passing, ‘did you kill Elizabeth Restorick?’

  ‘Since there are no witnesses present – all right, waiter, you needn’t listen – or rather, in spite of that fact, I can assure you that I didn’t.’

  ‘Did Andrew, then?’

  Dr Bogan’s shrug reminded one of his Latin blood. ‘Who knows? A puritan. Repressed. An embittered man, for all his surface charm and insouciance. It is not impossible. But why ask me?’

  ‘We agreed that, if you aren’t the murderer, the man who tried to incriminate you is. We agree that Andrew is very likely this planter of incriminating evidence.’

  ‘Oh no, that won’t do. Not so fast, my dear young man. If Andrew is the would-be incriminator,
as I dare say he may be, that doesn’t make him the murderer. Logically, it means nothing more than that he is using the murder situation to get me into trouble. He hates me. Admitted. He would like me to be the murderer. And from that it’s a short step for one of his temperament to believing he’s justified in making me the murderer.’

  ‘You and Andrew are at great pains to be fair to each other,’ remarked Nigel sardonically, ‘in spite of your deadly enmity.’

  Dr Bogan took a lump of sugar on his spoon, soaked it in his coffee and crunched it vigorously. His white teeth were excellently preserved.

  ‘But the vendetta seems rather one-sided,’ Nigel went on. ‘I mean, you let him get away with some pretty outrageous insinuations against you at the Manor.’

  ‘I am well accustomed to the irresponsible behaviour of neurotics,’ replied the doctor, with a return to his professional dignity.

  ‘No doubt,’ said Nigel. ‘But you normally take precautions against it, I presume?’

  ‘I don’t quite follow you.’

  ‘Whether Andrew is or isn’t the murderer, he’s exceedingly dangerous to you. I shouldn’t underestimate him. He’s still hard at work trying to pin this crime on you – this crime or some other crimes. I’m certain of that.’

  ‘You chill my blood, sir.’

  ‘And I fancy he may still be keeping back certain knowledge of his till he has a complete case. He’s hinted that to us often enough, anyway.’

  ‘Thank you for your solicitude, Strangeways. But I’m sure the police will give me adequate protection.’

  Dr Bogan, gracefully thanking Nigel for the lunch, rose to go. No, one gets no change out of him, thought Nigel, watching the bearded, stooping figure, reflected in many mirrors, make its way out of the restaurant. What had impressed him most was not Bogan’s handling of the murder discussion, but the absolute calmness with which he had received Nigel’s hint that the police were investigating his professional affairs. Only an innocent man, or a past master of villainy, could have refrained from asking more details of this. Here was a man who, unless Blount’s deductions were hopelessly at fault, used his professional position as a cloak and an instrument for the most abominable iniquities. Yet, when told the police were investigating it, he never turned a hair. Nigel half-raised his hand in a sardonic salute to Bogan’s receding figure.