Murder Underground

by Mavis Doriel Hay

  Mrs. Daymer scowled at him and he hurried back guiltily to his table. Mr. Slocomb’s dictionary slid off his knee and thumped on the floor. The three women started violently.

  “Tck! Tck! Tck!” he clucked in annoyance. “I believe I must have dropped off! At my age of course—and perhaps it is a little close in here?”

  “You should beware of dropping off, Mr. Slocomb,” Mrs. Daymer warned him. “It may become dangerous.”

  “Oh, surely not.…” But now he seemed to be infected with the spirit of restlessness. He crossed, uncrossed, and recrossed his legs, drew his eyebrows together and pulled down the corners of his mouth, but made no progress with the crossword puzzle.

  “Awkward problem?” Cissie enquired suddenly.

  Before he could answer, the door opened and Basil entered. Betty, who had heard faint sounds from the hall and had been holding her breath in anxiety, gave a gasp. Cissie jumped up, shaking off Betty’s restraining hand. She could not resist the opportunity to create a scene, although Inspector Caird, in laying his plans, had done his best to avoid one.

  “Hullo, Basil!” she exclaimed. “Wasn’t that a queer thing that came out at the inquest on your aunt this morning—that the brooch was in Pongle’s bag, not in her pocket! I wanted to tell you about it because I know it wasn’t in her bag when she started. She upset it and I helped her to pick everything up. Too mysterious, don’t you think? Who could have put it there?”

  She looked straight at Mr. Slocomb, and the others, who had been looking at her, followed the direction of that enquiring gaze from her innocent blue eyes.

  They all noticed how queer Mr. Slocomb looked as he rose slowly from his chair.

  “Must fetch—er—another dictionary,” he mumbled as he moved towards the door.

  “I was just going to tell you, Mr. Slocomb,” said Basil, standing in the doorway, “there is someone in the hall to see you.”

  Mr. Slocomb stopped short and put his hand in his breast pocket; his movements, usually so precise, were feeble and uncertain. He drew out a small black notebook and threw it into the fire.

  “Done with—no necessity to carry it with me,” he muttered, and walked to the door which Basil was holding open.

  Basil, seeing Mr. Slocomb’s action, opened his mouth and raised his hand, but seemed unable to utter a word or make any further movement. Cissie, Mrs. Daymer, and Mr. Grange were all following Mr. Slocomb’s progress with their eyes as if they were hypnotized, but Betty sprang into action. She was on her knees on the hearthrug in an instant and, without waiting to reach for the tongs, she had seized the notebook by a corner of its cover and flicked it on to the hearth, where she beat out the flames and sparks with the poker. Basil drew a breath of relief.

  Mr. Slocomb looked at him quickly, suspiciously; then walked deliberately into the hall. Basil shut himself and the others into the drawing-room.

  Inspector Caird and two constables in uniform faced Mr. Slocomb in the hall.

  “Joseph Slocomb, alias Jonah Sokam, I arrest you for the wilful murder of Euphemia Pongleton, and I warn you that anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence.”

  Mr. Slocomb swayed slightly and gripped the door-handle behind him.

  “There is some mistake. I can account for all my movements on the morning Miss Pongleton was murdered. Witnesses, who saw me enter the train at Hampstead…” His voice faded away.

  The inspector looked from Mr. Slocomb’s pallid face to his dapper feet and nodded thoughtfully. He made a sign to the policemen.

  As the car in which Mr. Slocomb sat, closely guarded, drew up outside the police-station, another car slowed down and stopped behind it. Under the two big blue lamps which proclaimed “Police” in yellow letters on either side of the gateway, the flagged path to the door glimmered strangely; it seemed to be swimming with water, though the rain had stopped some time ago. Mr. Slocomb could not avoid getting his shoes very wet, and he left several good footprints on the clean doorstep. The inspector paused to give instructions to a man who was waiting in the passage.

  “Photographs and measurements quickly, before they dry!” he commanded sharply.

  Meanwhile the two men from the second car were coming towards the door.

  “Hi! Look out!” the officer who had been left in charge of the footprints warned them. “Don’t step here!”

  The straight passage leading from the door was well lighted and Mr. Slocomb could be seen turning into a room at the far end of it. With its blue and white tiles it was suggestive of an underground railway station.

  “That’s him! That’s him!” excitedly cried one of the two men—who was in fact the witness Jones, who had been snatched, after long delay, from his evening recreation at his darts club. “That’s the chap I saw slinking away from the stairs in Belsize Park—just like that! I’d know him anywhere!”

  Inspector Caird’s case was complete.

  Chapter XXIII

  Comments by the Frumps

  “The whole affair shows,” Mrs. Daymer explained, “what a fetish we make of regular habits. Of course I suspected Slocomb from the start; but because he had apparently followed his usual routine on that fatal day, the police never gave a thought to him until I put them on the track.”

  Cissie would not take this lying down. “Betty and I had a good deal to do with it,” she pointed out.

  “Oh yes,” conceded Mrs. Daymer; “you contributed useful pieces of information but—”

  But the story of the Coventry expedition had been told too often in the Frampton; even the dutiful Mr. Grange was unwilling to listen to it again. So he hastily interrupted:

  “Didn’t Slocomb risk a good deal in taking the train from Hampstead so much earlier than usual that morning? He must have been pretty well known at that station.”

  “He was known by those who travelled with him at nine-forty; not by people he was likely to encounter about half an hour earlier. As for the ticket collector, Slocomb was clever enough to guess that he looks at the tickets rather than at the faces of those who enter the lift, and therefore wouldn’t be likely to notice that Slocomb was so early. No, the great risk, as it happened, was that he might meet Mr. Plasher, who was probably talking to Bob Thurlow in one passage when Slocomb skulked up the other, towards the stairs.”

  “Afterwards, why didn’t he just take the train on to Leicester Square from Belsize Park,” enquired Mr. Grange.

  “That was one of his cleverest moves,” Mrs. Daymer explained. “He got back to Hampstead quickly enough to catch his train from there at his usual time, and probably made a point of exchanging remarks with several of his fellow travellers who knew him by sight, so that they would be sure to remember he was there—and it gave him what almost amounted to an alibi, in conjunction with that habit of taking a morning constitutional of which he was so proud.”

  “I suppose he may have had the affair planned out ages beforehand,” Mr. Grange speculated. “When he found that at last she had made the will leaving him the legacy he’d been angling for, he was ready, and the appointment with the dentist gave him the opportunity—”

  “And the affair of the brooch gave him a heaven-sent—well, not exactly that, perhaps—chance to plant suspicion on someone else. I believe he thought Bob probably would go up the stairs and find the body and actually steal the brooch and be caught with it on him!” Cissie elaborated.

  “It was very clever of you to remember about the contents of her bag,” said Mr. Grange admiringly. “But I don’t understand about that will—did he find it?”

  “That will probably never be known for certain,” said Mrs. Daymer mysteriously. “But you may not have noticed—though it did not escape me—how cunningly he gained possession of this chair—Miss Pongleton’s chair—on the very evening of the day she was murdered. My first thought was, of course, that he was no gentleman. But on considering it further I susp
ected that he had some motive.”

  “You mean he knew or guessed that the will was hidden there?” said Cissie. “Well, I think he had the will already. Pongle is quite likely to have given him the will to take care of. Besides, he left a fingerprint on it; that probably means he opened it before he murdered her, to make sure it did really leave him the money. Probably he was fed up at finding that it left the rest to Beryl—he had hoped to worm it out of Basil, you see. He may have waited to see if any other will turned up which would also leave him something and the rest to Basil. When it didn’t, he put the will in the chair to make sure of his own legacy. And of course he’d heard us say by then that the money would probably go to Basil in any case.”

  Mrs. Daymer was annoyed at being caught out. “Of course,” she remarked with dignity, “my own little part in the affair will never be revealed to the public, and I am content that it should be so.”

  The others did not seem to be impressed with her magnanimity.

  “Rather a joke, wasn’t it,” Cissie babbled on, “that the Porters were dragged in after all? After having put on those superior airs as if they couldn’t possibly know anything about it! Of course Nellie heard Slowgo’s footsteps when he crept downstairs on Thursday night to get the leash from the hall, but it was a good thing Mr. Porter saw him. Mrs. P.’s simply too terrified of burglars, and hearing someone creeping about she made Mr. P. open the door and look out. At the time he just thought Slocomb was fetching a book or something.”

  “Not a very perspicacious man!” commented Mrs. Daymer, implying that she would have been quite sure, had she happened to see Mr. Slocomb on that nocturnal expedition, that his intentions were sinister. “But even the most perspicacious may make a mistake, as Slocomb did in his notebook.”

  “Ah! That notebook! Betty was marvellous! But just why was it so important?” asked Mr. Grange, who was one of those people who always manage to know less than others, although constantly asking questions.

  “My own theory,” began Mrs. Daymer, “is that when young Mr. Pongleton rushed to Slocomb with his confession, Slocomb didn’t quite believe it at first—thought he had been seen, perhaps, and that this was a trap. The notes were probably a test or even a counter-trap. Perhaps being rather startled, although at the same time believing himself quite free from any danger of arrest, he relaxed his usual caution. The notes in themselves, of course, proved nothing, though they did not quite tally with the supposition that they were made by an innocent man.”

  “They gave away a good deal,” Cissie pointed out. “For one thing, the time of the murder was put down; then there were several notes about Slowgo’s own movements which looked a bit fishy, and he made one awful floater. He put himself down as leaving Belsize Park, where he pretended he’d never been, and then crossed it out and wrote Hampstead. But you could still read it.”

  MR. SLOCOMB’S NOTES

  Basil P. leaves Tavistock Sq 9.20 a.m. approx.

  Warren St. station 9.30

  reaches Belsize Park ? 9.45

  Euphemia Pongleton leaves Frampton 9 a.m.

  J. S. leaves Frampton 9.5

  E. P. on stairs, Belsize Park 9.15 onwards

  G. Plasher on stairs, Belsize Park 9.16–?9.18

  Murder 9.22–9.25

  J. S. leaves Belsize Park Hampstead 9.40

  B. P. leaves Belsize Park ? 10

  reaches Golder’s Green ? 10.10 Say 9.50

  Kutuzov’s studio ? 10.30 Say 10

  Leash. Thursday.

  Bob Thurlow in hall, Frampton 8.30 p.m.

  Basil P. in hall, Frampton 11.20

  Leash not in hall after 8.30

  “It is just the sort of futile carelessness that a clever criminal is apt to commit,” remarked Mrs. Daymer with an air of great experience.

  “And have you heard about Bob?” enquired Cissie. “Basil has persuaded his father to find work for Bob in the garden of their house in Yorkshire, and Nellie is to be housemaid there until Bob can marry her. Betty thought all that out; she’s too marvellous!”

  “I should not have thought Bob Thurlow’s experience in the underground would give him much knowledge of gardening,” Mrs. Daymer remarked coldly.

  “Most gardeners know a sight too much,” Cissie assured her. “They’re always telling you you’re wrong. It’d be a jolly good thing to have one who didn’t know.”

  “And Basil Pongleton will inherit his aunt’s fortune, after all, in spite of the last will?” Mr. Grange asked, perhaps because he feared that the subject of gardening would let Mrs. Daymer loose on her favourite theme of Nature.

  “Yes, he’s to have it as a wedding present,” Cissie explained. “My hat! Betty is lucky—thirty thousand pounds! But she deserves it—don’t you think so?”

  “I’m inclined to think that Basil Pongleton is the lucky one,” said Mr. Grange.

  Basil would have agreed with him. He was convinced that his luck was greater than any good fortune that had ever befallen any human being. As for Betty, he was sure that she deserved any luck she might get.

  They walked across the Heath one spring morning to see how Kutuzov was getting on with Beryl’s portrait. Woolly clouds streamed across a pale blue sky above the bleached and limpid colours of the earth. Betty strode briskly along, swinging a daffodil-hued beret in her hand.

  “D’you remember the last time we were on the Heath?” Basil enquired, with a sideways look towards her.

  “Why, no. When was it?—Oh! Of course…We sat on a tree down there near Ken Wood. One of those times when you were being such an utter ass!”

  “I wasn’t such an ass as I might have been.” He looked at her again, cautiously. What a dear she is, he thought. “Did you know that I was nearly hugging you that night, on the log? I wanted to. I was pretty wretched and just aching for a little comfort, but I thought just in time that it would have been rather caddish to make love to you then, when I was asking you to involve yourself in my trouble in order to help me. So I didn’t. Did you know, Betty?”

  “Yes, I knew.” There was a twinkle of amusement in Betty’s brown eyes, but she put out a hand to meet his.

  “Would you have minded?”

  “Well—of course I was feeling rather angry with you; I hated being kept in the dark.”

  “But that wasn’t my fault; you know what a rush I was in; there wasn’t a moment to explain. And besides, the less you knew, the less you were involved.”

  “You darling idiot!”

  “Betty, you did always believe in me?”

  “Ye-es. I’d have done anything to help you, Basil, and of course I never thought you had killed Aunt Phemia, but I rather wondered just what you had done and just how far it was—well, not criminal, but illegal.”

  “I believe Beryl thought I was capable of anything.”

  “Oh, she didn’t! Beryl behaved like a brick! And so did Gerry. Poor old Gerry! Do you remember how he was kept waiting at the police-station for years and years on that Monday night when Slocomb was arrested, because everyone forgot about him? And he began to think that they must be going to arrest him after all! And poor Beryl had a ghastly time trying to keep the family calm and thinking the police-station had swallowed first you and then Gerry without a trace!”

  “It was a pretty foul occasion altogether. Do you remember how we sat on the sofa at the Frampton while Slowgo talked to the inspector?”

  “Don’t I!” Betty squeezed Basil’s hand. “D’you know, at that moment, when you seemed to be in the most awful mess, as we sat on the sofa I was suddenly absolutely definitely sure that I was—was very fond of you, enough for anything and for ever!”

  “Just at that moment? Queer—I believe it was just then that it came over me that the whole beastly affair was bound to turn out all right because I really did care about you so much that it was simply impossible that it could all be waste
d!”

  Everyone knows that when two young people who are in love for the first time begin saying, “Do you remember?” and recalling their feelings on this and that marvellous occasion, their conversation becomes utterly idiotic to any third person. So we will leave Betty and Basil to their reminiscences as they swing across the Heath in the sunshine.

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