Grecian began to talk nineteen to the dozen, but it was as though nobody had heard him. He cursed. He swore. He kicked the table, splashing old Harry’s beer. He protested. He made a regular exhibition of himself, but nobody sort of even saw him. He said he’d go to Maldon and see somebody Big. He said he’d go to Chelmsford, but nobody so much as even looked at him or the place whereon he stood.
By and by, people began to go to work. Mr Light and the policeman went off together talking about Foot and Mouth as happy and friendly as if not a word out of place had been spoken in each other’s hearing. Grecian tried everyone, even Lefty, but he wasn’t in the right kind of mood for chatting, he said. He said he’d do that on Midsummer’s Eve, he reckoned. Presently Grecian himself had to go, and he went down the road to his little old shop very nearly crying. He’s called Midsummer Grecian to this very day, and always will be.
No one was left but poor old Harry, who had been saving a little drop in the bottom of his mug to drink in quiet, as he always did. He took it at last, and sighed at the pleasure it gave him, then wiped his mouth and stood up, looking like a very thin old leathery terrier dog stretching his stomach.
Presently, when he was sure he was alone and Miss Evelina was out at the back, he took a very crumpled blue first prize ticket out of his inside pocket and looked at it. When he put it back he allowed a wicked smile to creep over his face. Sly, it was, and you would not have thought it could come out of him if you had not known his grandfather and his great grandfather before that. Regularly evil, old Harry’s smile was.
‘Har’, he said, with deep satisfaction. ‘Highly remarkable’. And he went off laughing to himself all the way back to the field where he was working.
When Miss Evelina came in later she saw he had not paid her for his pint again, but she was a good old girl, and he was a poor little old chap, so she put it on the slate and wiped it off again. ‘There’s not much for them when they’re that age’, she said to her sister, who protested. ‘What’s he got to live for, save those old cowcumbers he grows? And besides, he had a bit of a shock this morning, those two carrying on so disgraceful’.
Direct Evidence
Anthony Berkeley
Anthony Berkeley was one of the pseudonyms used by Anthony Berkeley Cox (1893–1971), founder of the legendary Detection Club, and one of the most gifted authors of Golden Age detective fiction. He was an enigmatic man who shunned personal publicity, and whose abrupt abandonment of crime writing, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, left the genre poorer.
Berkeley was fascinated by the idea that a mystery puzzle might have a variety of possible solutions, and he also loved to keep tinkering with plot ideas. After his death, two intriguing typescripts of short stories were found among his papers. “Double Bluff” and “Direct Evidence” were in essence the same story, but told differently, and with different outcomes. The former story is to be found in The Avenging Chance, a collection edited by Tony Medawar and Arthur Robinson for the American press Crippen & Landru. Until now, “Direct Evidence” has only appeared in The Roger Sheringham Case-Book, compiled by Ayresome Johns (a pseudonym for the rare book dealer George Locke), a collector’s item of which only ninety-five copies were printed.
***
“A grain of circumstantial evidence,” said Roger Sheringham oracularly, “is worth a ton of direct evidence, almost every time. Almost every time, Alec,” he repeated with emphasis.
Alec Grierson’s eyes, which had wandered to the open book on his knee, jerked themselves back, with an evident effort, to the face of his host. “A ton,” he repeated dutifully. “Is it really?”
“Well, say a couple of pounds,” Roger amended, with the air of one making a concession. “It’s the fashion, of course, to sneer at circumstantial evidence—the fashion, that is, among counsel for the defence and detective novelists. It makes their jobs so much easier. The only evidence really worth having, they say, is direct evidence. A saw B putting C’s pearls in his trouser-pocket. Then we know where we are.”
“Seems reasonable,” agreed his audience, with a wistful glance at his book.
“It seems, yes,” Roger pursued with energy. He was shaping out the lines of an article for the Daily Courier and clarifying his ideas by putting them into words, but his audience did not know that. “But how does theory tally with practice? As usual, the human factor has been overlooked. And when it comes to the human factor—well, how many women positively identified Adolf Beck as the man who had defrauded them?”
“Haven’t the foggiest,” said Alec. “How many?”
“That’s beside the point,” quickly returned Roger, who had no idea either. “What matters is that they were all wrong. How many other wrongful identifications could one remember, just on the spur of the moment? Hundreds. But circumstantial evidence eliminates the human factor. Circumstantial evidence is the only evidence by which a case can really be proved, logically and irrefutably. If the circumstantial evidence is strong enough—“He broke off, at a gentle knock on the door. “Come in,” he said, not without irritation.
His man hovered correctly in the doorway. “There is a young lady inquiring for you, sir. She did not wish to give her name. Will you see her?” He expressed in some subtle way, by the tones of his voice and the lines of his shoulders, his opinion that the young lady might, on the whole, be seen.
“Show her in here, Barker,” Roger replied.
Alec rose. “Shall I clear out?” he asked, with a gratuitously offensive grin.
“Don’t be obvious, Alec. But if in a few minutes you have a feeling that you may be a little de trop, well…Though I can’t imagine who it can be,” he added, less humorously. “Refused to give her name, too.” He crossed to the window and glanced out. “Alec, this sounds rather pleasingly mysterious. I wonder—”
His speculation was cut short by the appearance of the young lady in question. He looked at her with interest as she walked quickly past Barker into the room. She was wearing a blue knitted suit, with a small blue leather hat and brogue shoes, and her tall, lithe figure gave an impression of youthful health and energy. She was not so much pretty as good-looking, with very dark hair and a firm mouth, the lips of which were as red as nature had made them and no more so. “Mr Sheringham?” she asked tentatively, but with no trace of diffidence in her manner.
Roger stepped forward. “Good afternoon. Did you have a good run up from Dorset?”
The girl stared at him. “How did you know I had come up from Dorset?”
“I was doing the Sherlock Holmes stuff,” Roger explained, not without pride. “I’ll do some more of it if you like. You run a Morris Oxford saloon; your hobby is tennis; and you live within easy reach of the sea. How’s that?”
The girl’s astonishment was all that Roger could have desired, and even Alec look surprised. “But I’ve never seen you before in my life,” she exclaimed. “How on earth do you know all this?”
“Sherlock Holmes never liked explaining,” Roger said regretfully. “I can feel with him. I recognised you, Miss Meadows. I watched you win the final of the Ladies’ Singles in the Torquay tournament last July. I was with the Andersons, who told me all about you. And I saw your car in the street outside. That’s all. I’m sorry.”
But the girl did not return his smile. “You know the Andersons? Oh, well, that’s some sort of an introduction then. Or an excuse, shall we say? Because of course you’ll have realised why I’m here.”
Roger looked a trifle nonplussed. “That,” he admitted, “has so far escaped me.”
“Why, because of Jimmy,” cried the girl.
A great light broke on Roger. “Good heavens! You’re James Meadows’ sister?”
“Yes. Mr Sheringham, you will help me, won’t you? It’s awful cheek of me to ask you of course, but I know what you did in that Wychford business and I feel you’re the only person who can find out the truth.
You see, I know James didn’t do it. He couldn’t. It’s out of the question. So I’ve come up to ask you to—to look into it on our behalf.”
For so self-possessed a young woman, the girl was clearly on the verge of collapse. Roger pushed a chair forward and spoke in deliberately light tones as she sank gratefully into it. “Have a cigarette, won’t you? Yes, of course I saw about the affair, but I didn’t realise that it was your brother who was involved. And after the first day or two, the papers haven’t said very much about it.” He did not add that this was owing to the complete obviousness of James Meadows’ guilt, which was so glaring as largely to rob the case of interest. “But I don’t know all the facts, and if you feel up to running quickly through them—oh, by the way, you needn’t mind Grierson here. He’s my Watson. He was at Wychford with me.” He introduced the two and busied himself with arranging chairs and lighting cigarettes in order to give the girl time to compose herself.
“There’s really very little to tell you,” she began, when they were ready. “Jimmy and this woman—”
“No, right from the beginning, Miss Meadows, please,” Roger interrupted gently. “As if we knew nothing at all. I want not only the facts, you see, but your angle of looking at them.”
“Oh. Very well; I’ll try. Jimmy and I are orphans, then, and I’m four years older than him; he’s twenty-three and I’m twenty-seven. Our mother died when I was nine, and father about three years ago. We’re quite comfortably off and we live at a little place called Monckton Regis in Dorset, not far from Bridport. Jimmy went down from Oxford this summer.
“I don’t know if the Andersons pointed Jimmy out to you at Torquay, but if they didn’t I must tell you that he’s not a bit like me. Except that we’ve both got dark hair, we hardly have anything in common at all. I’m fond of games, Jimmy’s fond of books; I hate using my brains, Jimmy does nothing else (he took a double-first at Oxford, by the way; Honour Mods and History); I’m physically as sound as a bell, Jimmy’s health isn’t any too good; I’ve got eyes like a hawk’s, Jimmy has to wear glasses; I’m noisy, Jimmy’s quiet. And so on. So if you can sum me up and then take the exact opposite, you’ll get a pretty fair idea of Jimmy. Which, if you take what people say about marriage, may be the reason why we’re so fond of each other.” She looked a little defiantly at Roger, as if defending this reference to sentiment. He nodded.
“Well, about two years ago Jimmy showed signs of being distinctly attracted towards a woman called Mrs Greyling. She and her husband live in our neighbourhood and I suppose she was all right, but she wasn’t my type; she was small and fluffy and appealing, with big blue eyes and tiny little hands and all the rest of it. She must have been at least eight years older than Jimmy. Well, he fell pretty badly. Of course I saw it all happening; I knew the woman was a scalphunter, and she just wanted Jimmy’s scalp to hang with all the others at her belt. I did what I could to warn him, but of course Jimmy wouldn’t hear a word against her. In fact we had one or two quite large-sized rows over the woman, which is a thing we never, never do in the ordinary way.
“I don’t want you to think there was anything wrong. If I knew Mona Greyling, she was the kind that will take anything and give nothing. Not that Jimmy would have taken anything she had to give; he’d put her on a pedestal and used to talk about his ideals to me till I was nearly sick. I mean, Mr Sheringham—well, when you know someone’s a little rotter, and—well, it was rather awkward.”
Roger nodded again, sympathetically. “And it’s no use saying anything either, of course. Yes?”
“Well, to add to the trouble, Mr Greyling was horribly jealous of his wife—as well he might have been! I don’t think he trusted her further than he could see her; which I should think was very wise of him. Anyhow, about three weeks ago, so Jimmy told me, he forbade her to have anything more to do with Jimmy at all. They’d been in the habit of going motoring together and all that sort of thing, and naturally people were beginning to talk. Well, that was to stop and they were to meet in future only in public. I was thankful to hear it, but I was rather worried by the way Jimmy told me. He didn’t seem to care a bit; he was more amused than anything. And curiously excited, too. I didn’t take much notice at the time, but I’ve realised since that the reason was because they’d agreed to meet secretly, and that must have been much more exciting for a boy of twenty-three—meeting a married woman secretly after her husband had forbidden it, and all that sort of thing.”
“It would have been a compliment to him too,” Roger put in. “It meant that the husband was taking him seriously.”
“Yes, of course. The place they’d agreed on for their meetings,” the girl went on, in the same direct, straight-forward way, “was a little dell in some woods, called Tommy Deaton’s Hole. They met there a few times for a fortnight or so, and they’d arranged to meet there last Tuesday afternoon. It’s very secluded, I should say; right off the main roads and down a little lane where nobody goes from one year’s end to another. In fact, so far as being seen went, they couldn’t have hit on a better place. And that was just the trouble, because nobody saw Jimmy waiting there the whole of Tuesday afternoon for the woman, who didn’t turn up.”
“He did wait there?” Roger put in impassively.
“He did, Mr Sheringham,” the girl replied, with a dignity which Roger found impressive. “He told me so.” She eyed him for a moment as if to challenge him to question her brother’s word, and then resumed. “While he was waiting there, Mrs Greyling was murdered, in full view of nearly a dozen people—shot through the head on the main road just outside the village. And every one of those dozen people swears it was Jimmy who did it!” She paused and swallowed. “He came up in the car, they say, and—”
“Yes, I know the rest of the details,” Roger interrupted, anxious to spare her. “And of course the police are satisfied it was your brother. Naturally. They couldn’t be anything else. It’s a deuced awkward situation, Miss Meadows.”
“Don’t I realise it?” said the girl pluckily. “But I’m going to fight it for all that. Now, Mr Sheringham, I don’t know whether you ever undertake private work of this kind, but I’ve come to London to appeal to you to find the real murderer.” She flushed in obvious embarrassment. “As I said, we’re quite comfortably off, and whatever your—your fee might be, I—we—should be only too willing to—”
“Fee?” ejaculated Roger, both pained and indignant. “My dear girl, if there’s any question of fee it’s the one I owe you for inviting my help. And what you’ve told me throws a new light on the affair; I feel there’s quite a chance for your brother now, after all. When will you be ready to start back for Dorset? In half an hour? I’ll ring for tea to be got ready while we’re packing.”
The girl, who had risen to her feet, stammered inarticulate thanks, evidently almost overcome again by this successful end of her mission. Roger, who had a dread of scenes, hastily bundled himself and Alec out of the room.
It took him less than five minutes to throw what things he would need into a bag. Then he sought out Alec, who was a slower packer.
“This is a bad business, Alec,” he remarked, throwing himself into a chair.
Alec paused in the act of putting his hair brushes tidily into their case. “Oh? I thought you sounded quite hopeful just now.”
“I had to keep that poor girl’s spirits up; but so far as I can see there isn’t the faintest doubt that her brother shot the woman. As she said, there were about a dozen witnesses to it. How on earth can one get round that?”
“Direct evidence, eh?” observed Alec. “And I thought you were saying not long ago that direct evidence isn’t worth anything?”
“If I was saying that, then there must be something in it. I wonder—” He jumped up and ran out of the room.
A minute later he was back, a newspaper in his hand. “Here’s the report of it, in yesterday’s paper. I’ll just go through it again.” He ran his eye
rapidly over the column. “Yes, it doesn’t appear to leave young Meadows much of a loop hole. Apparently he was driving in his car along the road to the village and met Mrs Greyling not more than a hundred yards from the last house in it. There were a couple of labourers in a field, a woman in the garden of the nearest house, another woman at the window of the next house, and two or three people in the village street. All of them saw the whole thing and their reports agree exactly. Young Meadows stopped his car and began to upbraid the woman quite loudly, leaning out of the window of the car. There were the beginnings of a very pretty quarrel, of which the onlookers could not distinguish more than an unimportant word or two.
“Just as things were working up, a car came round a bend of the road behind them, about two hundred yards away. Meadows glanced round at it and then whipped out a revolver, shot the woman through the head, slipped in his clutch and drove off as hard as he could straight on through the village, leaving her lying in the middle of the road. Not only did all the onlookers recognise him, but the two occupants of the oncoming car, strangers to the neighbourhood, seeing that something was happening, took a note of Meadows car number. And lastly both he and the car were recognised in the village street, where he nearly ran over a child as he tore through it. Do you see any loop hole there, Alec?”
Serpents in Paradise Page 19
