by Bruce, Leo
“Unchristian doctrines,” explained the vicar with a quick shake of his head as though he were enjoying the suspense.
“Such as?”
“Chiefly on the subject of burial.”
“Burial?”
“Yes, indeed, burial.”
“I didn’t know there were any doctrines on the subject of burial. I mean, I thought when you’d snuffed it, you’d snuffed it. And when you were dead you were finished with all that sort of thing.”
The parson gave him a patronizing smile. “You may find that you’re just, in a sense, beginning with it. But in any case I was speaking of the corporal remains. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, you know,” and he sadly shook his head, while with his right forefinger he scratched the back of his sunburnt knee. “Perhaps you’ll just excuse me while I give the boys something to do. Crocodiles! Now, boys, peg your brailing down, there’s a storm coming up. And you, Titmice,” he said to an oafish young man with an incipient moustache and his bespectacled junior, “light the fire. We’ve got to have some cocoa.”
A gentle activity began, though the members of the St. Jocelyn’s Troop were evidently impatient for the return of their scoutmaster.
The vicar returned to us. “Now then,” he said brightly.
“I want to clear up this matter of burial,” said Beef. “What was it you didn’t like about his views?”
“Ah, yes,” said the vicar, “cremation, I’m afraid.” He breathed the word as though he were confiding some unmentionable crime. “He was a staunch advocate of that offensive modern heresy.”
“What’s wrong with it?” asked Beef. “Healthy, I should call it.”
The vicar shuddered. “We don’t need to go into that,” he said. “It disposes of the prescribed ceremonies of burial.” He turned abruptly to the two members of the Titmouse Patrol. “Now, Moo,” he said, “not more than two matches, remember,” and added in explanation to us, “we always call him Moo.”
I was tempted to ask for a reason, but Beefs unimaginative face discouraged me.
“So Benson believed in cremation?” said Beef, who was working under difficulties.
“I’m afraid so,” said the vicar, “ardently, in fact.”
“Has he always done so?”
“For some time now,” returned Mr. Smyke. “The Ferrers’ old nurse who died three or four years ago was first cremated, though I understood that she herself had, in a weak moment, expressed some half-delirious wish for it, fearing, apparently, that she would be buried alive. Then their father and a garden boy who worked for them up till a year ago were also cremated. And lately there has been nothing short of an epidemic of it in my parish. All by Benson’s recommendation. I’ve suffered—in spirit of course,” he added brightly and finally.
“Benson wasn’t a churchgoer?” said Beef.
“I’m sorry to say he was not. You know that lately congregations everywhere have fallen off. Cinemas opening and such. It’s a bad example to the boys, a very bad example, when elder people no longer trouble to attend our services. We need half a dozen recruits to the choir as it is, and the boys’ club is practically empty in the evenings. A great Pity.”
I could see that Beef was fighting to keep his temper while he listened to these perpetual discursions. “Did he ever explain it to you?” he asked the vicar.
“How could he? It was heresy of course, rank heresy. Why, the garden boy whom I mentioned was in my choir, a most promising treble. I knew the parents well, but Benson had put his word in and they had made their decision. What could I do? The poor little fellow was incinerated.”
“There’s something else I’d like to ask you,” said Beef after a pause….
As we stood talking the members of the two patrols, some seven in number in all, had gradually been creeping nearer to Mr. Smyke, like the woodland animals in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Anxious not to appear impertinently inquisitive about our conversation, they had yet felt the need of their master’s presence and now began to hang round him like bats on a barn beam. One had seized his hand and stood toying with it as though it were a puppy that had been given to him, while others formed a rough semicircle in the centre of which the vicar stood facing us, his arm on the shoulder of his next door neighbour.
“And what is that?” he asked blandly.
“It’s about these stories that have been going round,” said Beef. “Have you heard anything?”
“Stories?” queried the vicar.
Beef adopted his own manner. “Yes, morality and that,” he whispered.
“I don’t know what you mean,” exclaimed Mr. Smyke.
“I mean Stewart Ferrers and Mrs. Benson. At least, that’s what I heard.”
“Ah, that,” said the vicar. “Yes, whispers had reached me, but I make a point of totally ignoring such things. I have it on the best authority that the two of them were seen alone in a car parked off the road on that new building estate near my house. I was also told that they had attended dances together quite flagrantly, and that a separation between Benson and his wife had been under discussion. But, of course, I never listen to rumours. Never,” he repeated emphatically.
“But you had heard them. And what about Peter and Mrs. Benson? Had that reached your ears?”
“What, another suggestion? No, I’m bound to say I hadn’t heard that,” said the vicar with interest. “Is there anything in it, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” said Beef, “I was hoping you’d be able to tell me.”
“No, it’s quite new to me, quite new,” said Mr. Smyke, inferring that it was none the worse for that, but probably even more stirring.
Beef threw his eyes for the first time over the encampment. “Well, you seem to be nicely settled here,” he said.
“Ah, yes,” said the vicar, “splendid fellows. Full of gusto. Full of joie de vivre. Pleasantest aspect of my job. Jolly lads. Happy days.”
The last phrase aroused a faint revival in Beefs fading interest, for he imagined it to be a toast. But realizing his mistake, he shook hands hastily with the vicar, and we returned to the car.
Chapter XV
BUT when we got back to the Cypresses, we found serious news awaiting us. I, personally, was not displeased that Beef should be pulled up by something more relevant and more earnest, for this gadding about, talking to all sorts of unnecessary people, seemed to me a waste of time, and one which would, eventually, exasperate the man who was employing him.
It was Peter himself who told us. “A very strange thing has happened,” he said when we met him in the gloomy hall of his house.
“I know,” said Beef; “that publican what used to be your gardener has confessed to the whole thing.”
Peter did not smile. “Ed Wilson, our chauffeur, has completely disappeared,” he said.
Beef dropped into a chair. “Oh, he has, has he? The silly young fool. I thought that might happen.”
“But you surely don’t suspect him of murdering Benson, do you?” said Peter Ferrers with some concern.
“Suspect is a word I never use. Either I know a thing, or I don’t, and that’s all there is to it. I don’t believe in suspicions, they lead you into all sorts of funny places.”
“But did he commit the murder?” asked Peter Ferrers.
“I don’t know,” said Beef. “I don’t know yet who did commit that murder. But I don’t want to lose Wilson’s evidence. What do the police say about it?”
“Oh, the police don’t seem to worry very much,” said Peter Ferrers. “Stute told me this morning he was very sorry, but he had all the evidence he needed with or without young Wilson.”
Beef made a scornful sound. “But how does he account for his having gone off, then?” he said. “A man doesn’t sneak away for nothing.”
“Well, they don’t seem to think there’s any need to account for it. It appears that Wilson had a liaison with the girl here, and it may easily be that, like so many unattached young men, he found it easier to disappear than to let th
at attachment take him any nearer to matrimony.”
“I see, that’s what Stute thinks, is it?” said Beef. “Well, where is this girl? I’d like to have a word with her.”
Peter rang the bell, but it was Freda who answered. “Yes,” she said, puffing noisily, for she had evidently run all the way upstairs.
“Send Rose in, will you?”
“Rose, sir? She said you knew she was off. She left half an hour ago, with her suitcase and all.”
Beef chuckled. “There goes Stute’s theory again. She’s gone to join Wilson, that’s what she’s done. The two of them have been hand in glove for a long time.”
Peter Ferrers seemed completely at a loss. “Whoever else I suspected of the crime,” he said, “I never thought Wilson had anything to do with it. He was a thoroughly decent young fellow, and the girl, so far as I knew her, was straight and pleasant. I can’t understand it at all.”
“I don’t know why you should suppose now,” said Beef, “that they’re mixed up in the murder, just because they’ve chosen this time to run away together.”
“It’s precisely that,” said Peter Ferrers. “The fact that they have chosen this time. Wilson must know that he calls suspicion down on himself.”
“Then the best thing I can do,” said Beef, “is to find them.”
Peter Ferrers smiled. “I certainly agree with you,” he said. “That at least would be useful work.”
“It may mean expense,” warned Beef.
“That’s all right. I have my brother’s authority to meet expenses within reason.”
“Very well then, I’ll do my best. Though I shouldn’t count too much on it helping your brother, Mr. Ferrers. Even if I do catch this young Wilson, as catch him I will, I haven’t any great faith in what he can tell us.”
Beef slammed his notebook, stood up, and marched towards the front door with me hurrying after him.
“Where now?” I asked, as he crawled into the car.
“Edgware,’ he said. “I’ve got the sister’s address. We’ll see what she says about this. The silly young fellow. Still, there may be no great harm done.”
I was not present at Beef’s interview with Wilson’s sister, but I gathered when he returned to the car that it had been a successful one. She had always found it difficult, it appeared, to make Ed Wilson out. He was too ambitious by half, and meant to get somewhere, whatever stood in his way. But she didn’t believe he’d have done anything terrible, and she was sure he had nothing to do with the murder.
He had certainly seemed a little on edge since it had happened, but that, the sister had assured Beef, was only natural. He had not told her that he was going away, and certainly at no time had talked of the place to which he might go. I asked Beef if he believed that, and he said that he did. He knew when anyone was lying to him, and Wilson’s sister had been speaking the truth. One thing that he had elicited from her was that Wilson, at any rate to the best of her knowledge—and she said she could be pretty certain on that point—had never had a passport. If he had he’d taken it out in the last few days.
Beef thoughtfully returned home, and I went with him. In these last few days he had grown so reserved, at any rate about the conclusions he was drawing, that I no longer tried to press him. But I did not feel it was a very hopeful Beef who stepped across to his telephone and got himself in connection with Scotland Yard.
“I want to speak to Inspector Stute,” I heard him shout into the instrument. “Stute,” he repeated, “S-T-U-T-E,” and after a long pause, “Inspector Stute,” I heard him say again. Without troubling to put his hand over the mouthpiece he said aside to me, “Bad organization. Now if they’d offered me a post there, as they might well have done when I’d found two murderers for them, I’d soon have seen things were efficient…. Is that Inspector Stute?” he suddenly bellowed.
The conversation that followed had best be spared the reader. It consisted of a clumsy and repetitive persuasion by Beef to get Stute to do what he wanted. It appeared that only with his authority could the passport office be approached in order to ascertain whether Wilson had obtained a document within the last few weeks. Beef used every argument in his power, since Stute was, presumably, most unwilling. He started with man-to-man professionalism as though he never doubted the other’s acquiescence. He then tried heavy-footed flattery, saying that a man of Stute’s eminence would scarcely mind doing a little thing like that for a beginner. He went on to argue that it was only fair, and used the extraordinary word “sporting” to suggest that if Stute did not comply he would be taking an advantage over a confrere who had not the facilities of the Yard. Finally, and perhaps most effectively, he made a modest plea on the grounds that Peter Ferrers had particularly asked him to find Wilson, and that, apart from any question of the case, he wanted to carry out the wishes of the man who was employing him. It seemed that this won the unwilling inspector, and he put down the receiver with a sigh of relief. “He’ll ring through and tell me in a few minutes. Soon as ever he’s been on to the passport office,” he said. “We’ll soon know.”
“Have you any idea at all?” I asked him.
“Only something his sister let slip. She doesn’t know where he is, but she does know he’s abroad.”
I smiled. “That covers a fairly large area,” I said.
“Not if he hadn’t got a passport, it doesn’t,” returned Beef triumphantly. “There’s only two or three trips he could have gone on that I know of, and at the most it’s three or four.”
We sat there waiting silently and grimly for the telephone to ring. Mrs. Beef, a woman of great compassion as far as I was concerned, brought us in two large cups of tea, which I should have enjoyed more if it had not been for Beefs somewhat noisy habits of drinking any hot beverage, which contrasted with his easy and silent disposal of beer.
When at last the bell rang, his replies were limited to knowing negatives: “He didn’t?” “No, I thought he wouldn’t.” And finally there was a somewhat fulsome expression of gratitude.
Beef turned to his reference shelf. “Keep all these handy,” he said with a wink at me. “Time-tables from all over Europe,” and I saw the English and the Continental Bradshaws.
“Now presuming that that girl was going to join him,” he said artfully, “she’d be hopping off tonight, wouldn’t she?”
“That’s if she’s not returning to her home, going to another job, staying in London, or one of the hundred and one things she may have left the Cypresses to do,” I said coldly.
“She’s after him,” pronounced Beef. “Otherwise why did she sneak off sudden like that? Now you listen to what I’m saying. What we’ve got to do is to watch all the boat trains from Victoria what leave today. She’s almost sure to go from there. In case she doesn’t we can get Stute to put some men on the direct lines, or on the ports would be better in case she tried to go down by bus or something. But it’s pretty sure to be Victoria. You and I will be watching all the trains, and watching them well.”
I could picture it. Beef watching a train was Beef “on the job.” I half expected him to suggest disguises, or at least coloured glasses to wear when he took up his position on the platform. But I said nothing.
“If we see her,” he said, “it’s the Continent for us. And even if we don’t, I don’t see we should be doing any harm having a run over for a look round.”
“But, Beef,” I said, “is that altogether fair? Peter Ferrers certainly agreed to pay expenses, but this virtually amounts to a holiday. And you know perfectly well…”
“I know perfectly well what I’m doing,” said Beef. “Didn’t Stute find out what he wanted in that last case by us slipping over to Paris?”
“That was entirely different, and you know it.”
“I know I’m going to lay hands on this young fellow, and I know how I’m going to do it. If you don’t want to come, say so. If you want to miss the best bit of action you’re likely to get over this caserne pursuing a runaway chauffeur in a Continental
resort—then stay at home by all means. But if you take my advice, you’ll come with me to Victoria.”
I took his advice.
Chapter XVI
WE took up our positions near the entrance of the Continental boat-train departure platform, but I was surprised and rather disappointed to find that Beef at first behaved with a sobriety and conventionality that was most uncharacteristic of him. He had bought an evening paper, and held it spread in front of him. And although his eyes were over the top of it as soon as a new group of passengers approached the platform, he made no ostrich-like attempt to conceal himself behind it.
I felt the whole thing was rather forlorn. There was, as Beef had pointed out, a reasonably fair chance that the girl would join Wilson. But since Beef appeared to have elicited from Wilson’s sister that the chauffeur was abroad, it was also quite possible that she would be crossing the Channel. One could further assume that since she had left her job today she would be making the journey tonight. And one could guess that she would be leaving Victoria. But each of these was no more than a probability, and for each of them I could have suggested half a dozen alternatives. However, the eternal optimism of Beef was infectious, and I found myself watching the faces of everyone who approached, half expecting to find Rose among them.
We had not been waiting for more than twenty minutes before Beef turned to me with a familiar look on his face.
“Well,” he said, “there are only two trains she could be going on tonight. The first one’s the eight-twenty for the Newhaven-Dieppe crossing, and the other one isn’t till eleven. That’s the Dover-Ostend.”
“But what about the trains that went before we got here?” I objected, for we had not arrived at the station until well after seven.
“There weren’t none,” said Beef triumphantly. “At least, none that she could have gone on. The Folkestone-Boulogne was at four-thirty and she couldn’t have got that—not without leaving the Cypresses before she did. No, it’s one of these two, or none at all tonight.” He looked up at the station clock, and then came to the point which I had foreseen nearly five minutes before.
