Fog of Doubt

by Christianna Brand

  Most illuminating.

  There was a gun knocking about most gaily somewhere in the big, untidy house in Maida Vale: Melissa was sure of that, but she couldn’t think where. Somebody would probably know, but they were all out at the moment. ‘You yourself haven’t seen it recently?’ suggested Cockie, fixing her with his bright eye.

  ‘No, I haven’t, not for ages,’ said Melissa, readily. ‘But anyway, he was hit with a mastoid mallet, wasn’t he? Not shot?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Cockie. ‘He was standing turned a little away from his assailant with his head bent forward, presenting just the right part of his head as a target. Wasn’t it nice of him?’

  ‘You don’t by any chance suggest,’ said Charlesworth, seeing the light, ‘that the attacker forced him into that position at pistol point? No man in his senses would obey; gun or no gun, he’d put up a fight, he wouldn’t just tamely turn round and offer his head to be bashed. I mean, what had he got to lose?—he was going to die, anyway. There’d have to be some reason given, other than the bashing.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Cockie, ‘there would, wouldn’t there?’ He said to Melissa: ‘Where do you say you were then?’

  The bureau had been taken away from the hall, the telephone that had been there, had been replaced by another; desk and telephone would figure as Exhibits 1 and 2, no doubt, at the Central Criminal Court, one of these days. Meanwhile the hall was narrowed down by the barriers the police had put round the spot where Raoul Vernet had lain; Melissa had had to squiggle round to let them in, and now they stood bunched up round the door, uncomfortably close. The more uncomfortable they were, however, thought Melissa, the sooner they would stop asking her questions and let her go. ‘I told you I was out in the fog: we were wandering about, trying to find the way to a cinema, and then trying to find the way back home.’

  ‘You and “Stanislas”?’

  ‘Have you found him yet?’ said Melissa, quickly.

  ‘No, we haven’t,’ said Charlesworth. ‘Nobody else here ever knew him, you see, and your own description wasn’t too marvellously helpful, was it?’

  ‘I can’t do more than tell you that he’s sort of middling tall and middling dark-haired.…’

  ‘Unfortunately he’s so exceedingly middling all round,’ said Charlesworth. It suddenly struck him that perhaps excessively middling would be more the word. Considering that this Stanislas was her sole alibi, she didn’t seem to be passionately anxious to lay hands on him. What if …? ‘At nine fifteen when Raoul Vernet made the ’phone call, you were wandering about in the fog? You got in some time after nine thirty and you didn’t know anything was wrong until you heard a commotion in the hall and found them all standing round X-marks-the-spot?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Melissa. (A glimpse of clay-white fingers still clutching the telephone receiver, smears of blood on the parquet floor, socks with rings going round and round them, two pointed brown shoes with their toes sticking up in the air.…) ‘It makes me feel sick,’ she said. ‘Could I go now, please?’

  There’s something or other she’s afraid of saying, thought Cockie; he had a vague impression that she had said it once and he should have observed it then, but had let it go. On the other hand … ‘There’s no evidence that she’d ever set eyes on the man,’ he said to Charlesworth, rather uneasily.

  ‘None to the contrary, of course. I wonder.… If Rosie Evans had confided in her.…’

  ‘I don’t quite see Melissa avenging a girl-friend’s dishonour with a blunt instrument,’ said Cockie. ‘More likely to blip the girl-friend, I’d have said, out of green-eyed envy.’ He added that apparently Melissa had known of a gun being available. Thomas Evans possessed one.

  ‘If you set such store by this gun idea, we could get busy right away and search the house.’

  ‘Perhaps it would be more simple to ask the owner first where it is,’ suggested Cockie, sweetly.

  Thomas Evans, coming up the steps at about this moment, replied at once that yes, he had got a gun, if you could call it a gun. It was about a million years old, a sort of species of blunderbuss, and most of the guts were missing. It had belonged to the same Uncle Huw Evans the Pink, who had provided what he supposed must henceforth be referred to as Ther Weapon. Where was it? Well, it must be in the bureau drawer, he supposed, with the other things—where Ther Weapon had been. ‘Get on to the Yard, will you, Bedd?’ said Charlesworth.

  ‘Or on the landing,’ said Thomas. ‘In the chest.’

  But it was not on the landing, in the chest. ‘Said assailant seems to have been quite a guy,’ said Charlesworth, to Cockie. ‘In the space of roughly two minutes, i.e. between Mrs. Evans going upstairs and Vernet making the call, he’s rootled the gun out of the drawer, selected the mastoid mallet as being handy for the job, enticed the victim out into the hall, threatened him into assuming an accommodating attitude for slaughter and’—Sergeant Bedd at the telephone made a thumbs-up sign and went on talking—‘returned the gun to the drawer and closed it, as we found it.’ Bedd put down the receiver. ‘Any prints?’

  ‘Nothing positive, sir; but they wouldn’t be astonished if they was told that it had been recently handled; nothing to produce in court, they say, but it’s just got that sort of look: these chaps get to know, sir, don’t they? Handled with a handkerchief or gloves or something, of course. And what’s interesting—it was just slid down inside the front of the drawer on top of the other things.’

  ‘Might easily have slipped in there with the drawer only a little open?’

  ‘That’s what they reckon, sir,’ said Sergeant Bedd; and one up to the old man, thought Inspector Cockrill grimly to himself.

  Charlesworth thought so too; but it cut both ways. ‘We haven’t abandoned the burglar theory, Inspector, of course, and we’re still working hard along those lines; but this does seem to strengthen the idea of an inside job. Suppose for some inexplicable reason the burglar did go to the drawer and get the mallet and the gun (and, incidentally, if the gun—why the mallet too?) and was disturbed by Raoul Vernet and hit out at him—why return the gun to the drawer? He didn’t wait to pinch anything, nothing’s missing—having hit the guy he just chucked down the mallet and did a bolt. So why put the gun back in the drawer?’

  ‘If he’s found armed, his sentence is much heavier.’

  ‘Well, but why not just bung the gun down with the mallet? After all, he’ll be charged with assault anyway, not just carrying arms; and if he could show that he picked the weapon up in the house, it won’t count as carrying arms.…’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Cockie, crossly, ‘I don’t suppose he stopped to work it all out on squared paper.’ Anyway, what the hell: they all knew damn well that it was not an outside job.

  He went out to the front door steps and standing there under the rather crooked glass transom rolled himself a cigarette, looking out unseeingly at the passing stream of buses and cars and lorries and vans and bicycles and carts. His mind was terribly disquieted. Thomas Evans and Matilda; Rosie, old Mrs. Evans, Melissa Weeks—these five; plus Ted Edwards, if you liked, only Tedward had been half a mile away at his surgery. But so had Rosie. And Mrs. Evans was old and dotty and had an arthritic right arm. So that left Thomas and Matilda and Melissa. Matilda had been, quite simply, alone upstairs; alone in her bedroom, she ‘hadn’t heard a sound’ of all that violent occurrence in the hall one floor below (but then neither had old Mrs. Evans, so perhaps that cancelled that out; for the old girl was acute enough in her hearing). And Thomas had been for two hours out in the fog on a ‘fake’ errand, with nothing to prove that he had not slipped back into the house. And both Matilda and Thomas might have had vengeance as a motive. Melissa—Melissa had no alibi either, that had so far been proved; and Melissa had an odd air of keeping something back. But apart from the fact that she seemed to have no possible motive for murdering the man, could a young girl possibly have committed this crime? Cockrill had been a policeman too long, not to know that crimes are committed by t
he most unlikely people—not excluding young girls; but could any young girl have devised and carried through that business about the gun?

  The gun! I must be getting old, he thought; giving way to ‘intuitions’. But from the moment that gun business had entered his head, he had found himself stuck with the notion that it must be right. A hint of proof to the contrary and he knew that long training would have overcome ‘feelings’ and he would have abandoned the notion forthwith; but so far there had been nothing but corroboration.

  You hold a gun in your right hand; a ‘blunt instrument’ in your left. The gun is not a gun really; the victim doesn’t realize it, but the gun won’t work. You know; you know because you are an inmate of the house. So you must use the other weapon. But the other man is not going to stand still, facing you, and let you swop it over to your right hand and hit him on the head with it. You must deflect his attention, you must make him feel safe to turn away from you, or at least to allow you to get behind him—you must persuade him into such a position as will present his head at the most vulnerable angle.…

  But how? And how do you know which the vulnerable angle will be?

  As to the first ‘how’—that was easy; and it explained so much. You got him to use the telephone.

  You have taken the gun and the mallet out of the bureau drawer; you know they are there because you are an inmate, or a familiar, of the house. You attract his attention and he comes out into the hall. You stand there with the gun in your right hand, the mastoid mallet, concealed from him, in your left. You gesture with the gun. ‘Pick up the receiver. Dial the number I’ll give you.’ He’s astonished; but he’s mightily relieved. All you want him to do, apparently, is to make a ’phone call. Uneasy, no doubt, alarmed, no doubt, he is nevertheless to a great extent disarmed. He picks up the receiver and stands in the characteristic attitude of a man starting a telephone call: bent a little forward over the dialling part of the instrument, which stands on the not very high bureau; right forefinger poised, head bent, looking down. He has seen so many films in which a man forces another man to telephone by poking a gun in his ribs; he is not astonished when you slip round a little behind him. You change the mallet into your right hand—and strike. Still clutching the receiver, he pitches forward across the desk. You chuck the mallet down, you drop the gun back into the half-open drawer, pushing it closed with your knee in an automatic gesture; you walk quietly out of the house. He does not move. After you are gone, it is true, he comes-to and, finding the receiver still in his hand, summons up strength enough to dial the number which, with the word DOCTOR, all in huge letters, is written on the wall, just within his line of vision. But that doesn’t matter; you wanted him to be dead, that’s all, and he as as good as dead, he will certainly die. You know that, because …

  You know that for the same reason that you knew which would be the most vulnerable spot.

  You know because you are a doctor.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE last patient, clutching the last signed form, sailed off out of the surgery as though she owned it (which, as a matter of fact, reflected Thomas, she more or less did what with State Medicine and all that), and he was free to go home to lunch. He scratched his name on the bottom of a few more forms, pushed the whole lot into a folder, scribbled a note to Tedward who would be taking the evening surgery, and hitched down his hat from its peg; there was a knock at the door and, without even troubling to be resigned about it, he hitched the hat back again, sat down at the desk again, and called: ‘Come in!’

  But it was not a patient; it was Detective Inspector Charlesworth, very palsy-walsy and civil-spoken but obviously not at all at ease. Would the doctor mind running round to the station with him—he had a car outside. There were just a few questions.…

  Thomas went very white. ‘I see. Yes. Can I just telephone first to my wife?’

  But to Matilda he only said that he was frightfully busy and would get a snack across the road before starting out on his afternoon rounds. He knew that Charlesworth watched him alertly, even while he telephoned; watched that his hand didn’t go to a drawer and slip out a nice little suicidal pellet, watched that he didn’t suddenly dart round the table and make a run for it. He tore up the note for Tedward and left another for the secretary who was out at her lunch; would Tedward cope with the afternoon’s rounds, somehow. ‘O.K. Inspector. That’s all. Let’s get on with it.’ It was hideous and uncanny to feel how closely at his shoulder Charlesworth walked; guarding him—guarding him, Thomas Evans, just an ordinary person, just a rather shabby, rather hard-up, rather overworked little general practitioner, who was being ‘taken to the station’—to be charged with murder.

  They gave him some sandwiches and a large cup of tea with masses of unwanted sugar already in it. There was a uniformed man there, a sergeant; and Sergeant Bedd—and Mr. Charlesworth in his natty grey suiting. They all sat on stiff wooden chairs round a small wooden table. ‘Just a few questions, doctor. Now, about this message on the telephone pad.…’

  At first he thought they were a bit dense; they asked the same questions over and over again, suddenly, irrelevantly; coming back to the message, leaping forward to his return to the house, shooting back again to his wanderings in the fog. ‘You say you telephoned home, but you got no answer?’

  ‘The line was dead. He’d ripped out the cord as he fell, if you remember. I suppose that was it.’

  ‘When did you mention that you first tried to ’phone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Thomas, shrugging. ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘Funny little things turn out to matter,’ said Charlesworth sententiously. ‘Where did you ’phone from?’

  ‘A call box,’ said Thomas. ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘You said it was—where?’

  ‘I told you I hadn’t a clue and I still haven’t. I saw the light glimmering through the fog, I thought I might try and find out a bit more about the message that might help me, I mean Melissa Weeks might be back and of course I thought it was she who had taken the message. I couldn’t get any reply so I gave up and came home.’

  ‘You didn’t get Operator to check or anything?’

  ‘No, I just gave up.’

  ‘You gave up pretty easily?’

  ‘You think it’s suspicious because I didn’t give up trying to find the address; and now you think it’s suspicious because I suddenly did. I’d been out for two hours, I was cold and weary and fed up, it was the end of a long, long day. Yes—I gave up pretty easily. You can say if you like that I was rather thankful for the excuse to pack up and come home.’

  ‘What time did you try to ring?’

  ‘I don’t know. I started home straight away, so you can try working backwards if you like.’

  ‘And how long did the return journey take you?’

  ‘I’ve told you, I don’t know. It seemed a long time crawling through the fog, but between half an hour and a quarter of an hour, I honestly couldn’t say.’

  ‘So we can’t try working backwards, after all?’

  ‘No, so you can’t,’ acknowledged Thomas with a rueful grin.

  ‘Anyway you arrived home at _____?’

  ‘At about ten to ten,’ said Thomas patiently.

  ‘To find this man murdered?’

  ‘Yes. They were all still standing around the body—the whole family were there, and Dr. Edwards.’

  ‘You were naturally frightfully shocked?’

  ‘I was mildly surprised,’ said Thomas.

  ‘And yet you were calm enough to consult your watch—for the first time that evening, apparently—and discover that it was ten to ten?’

  Thomas dropped his hand on his knee with a little clop of exasperation. ‘My dear, good Inspector! The body was discovered at about twenty to ten, everyone says I came in about ten minutes later. You can work it out for yourself. I did.’

  ‘Anticipating that you would be asked?’

  ‘I worked it out the first time I was asked,’ said Thom
as. ‘This is the fourth time. I’ve got it by heart now.’

  ‘The minute you got in, you sent Dr. Edwards for the police?’

  ‘Not the minute I got in; fairly soon afterwards. At least I didn’t send him—he volunteered to go.’

  ‘Well, well, which ever way it was.…’

  ‘Funny little things turn out to matter,’ quoted Thomas savagely.

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to just go over that again.…’

  ‘I wouldn’t like it at all, but if it’s necessary to your case against me, by all means let’s. I got in at—whatever time it was; about ten minutes after they’d found the man dead. I asked or they told me, I can’t remember which, about sending for the police; they pointed out that the telephone cord had been ripped out by the fall and they hadn’t been able to ring. I said perhaps one of us had better go round by car and Dr. Edwards said he would. As you know, he fetched up at the police station about ten minutes later, which further confirms the madly important point about what time I got home. A police sergeant came back with him and took over. That’s all I know.’

  ‘You didn’t—as the owner of the house and all that—you didn’t think of coming yourself for the police?’

  ‘What the bloody hell did it matter who fetched the police?’ said Thomas, furiously.

  ‘It didn’t matter a bit, of course, as far as the police were concerned. But why didn’t you go?’

  ‘I haven’t a clue why I didn’t go. Tedward said he’d go and that’s all there was to it.’

  ‘It wasn’t because you’d put your car away in the garage and didn’t want to get it out again?’

  Thomas was absolutely silent for a moment. He repeated at last: ‘It was simply because Edwards offered to go.’

  ‘Had you in fact put your car away?’

  ‘I always put it into the garage when I get home.’

  The garage at the Maida Vale house ran in under the kitchen on the left of the front door, at the basement level of the house. The ground rises up from Maida Vale to St. John’s Wood and the houses there are built into the side of the rise, over semi-basements, with the front door up some steps, fifteen or twenty feet above the level of the wide thoroughfare of Maida Vale, which forms an extension of the Edgware Road, through to Kilburn. A straight drive led into the garage, across the pavement. Charlesworth said, slowly and steadily: ‘On this occasion—did you, in fact, Dr. Evans, put your car away as soon as you arrived?’ As Thomas once again hesitated, he stopped him altogether. ‘Doctor, I think perhaps at this stage I ought to caution you. You seem to be finding these questions difficult and the last thing we want is to trap you in any way. You’ve got a right, if you want to, to refuse to answer anything more without your solicitor present; anything you do answer from now on will be taken down and may be used in evidence.’ He added miserably: ‘I’m sorry to have to do this,’ and ground the butt of his cigarette into the ash tray. Mr. Charlesworth was really a very nice young man.