Trent Intervenes

by E. C. Bentley

  What sort of clubs, Trent asked, had Freer preferred? ‘Lang and heavy, like himsel’. Noo ye mention it,’ MacAdam said, ‘I hae them here. They were brocht here after the ahccident.’ He reached up to the top of a rack. ‘Ay, here they are. They shouldna be, of course; but naebody came to claim them, and it juist slippit ma mind.’

  Trent, extracting the brassie, looked thoughtfully at the heavy head with the strip of hard white material inlaid in the face. ‘It’s a powerful weapon, sure enough,’ he remarked.

  ‘Ay, for a man that could control it,’ MacAdam said. ‘I dinna care for yon ivorine face mysel’. Some fowk think it gies mair reseelience, ye ken; but there’s naething in it.’

  ‘He didn’t get it from you, then,’ Trent suggested, still closely examining the head.

  ‘Ay, but he did. I had a lot down from Nelsons while the fashion for them was on. Ye’ll find my name,’ MacAdam added, ‘stampit on the wood in the usual place, if yer een are seein’ richt.’

  ‘Well, I don’t—that’s just it. The stamp is quite illegible.’

  ‘Tod! Let’s see,’ the professional said, taking the club in hand. ‘Guid reason for its being illegible,’ he went on after a brief scrutiny. ‘It’s been obleeterated—that’s easy seen. Who ever saw sic a daft-like thing! The wood has juist been crushed some gait—in a vice, I wouldna wonder. Noo, why would onybody want to dae a thing like yon?’

  ‘Unaccountable, isn’t it?’ Trent said. ‘Still, it doesn’t matter, I suppose. And anyhow, we shall never know.’

  It was twelve days later that Trent, looking in at the open door of the secretary’s office, saw Captain Royden happily engaged with the separated parts of some mechanism in which coils of wire appeared to be the leading motive.

  ‘I see you’re busy,’ Trent said.

  ‘Come in! Come in!’ Royden said heartily. ‘I can do this any time—another hour’s work will finish it.’ He laid down a pair of sharp-nosed pliers. ‘The electricity people have just changed us over to A.C., and I’ve got to rewind the motor of our vacuum cleaner. Beastly nuisance,’ he added, looking down affectionately at the bewildering jumble of disarticulated apparatus on his table.

  ‘You bear your sorrow like a man,’ Trent remarked; and Royden laughed as he wiped his hands on a towel.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do love tinkering about with mechanical jobs, and if I do say it myself, I’d rather do a thing like this with my own hands than risk having it faultily done by a careless workman. Too many of them about. Why, about a year ago the company sent a man here to fit a new main fuse-box, and he made a short-circuit with his screwdriver that knocked him right across the kitchen and might very well have killed him.’ He reached down his cigarette-box and offered it to Trent, who helped himself; then looked down thoughtfully at the device on the lid.

  ‘Thanks very much. When I saw this box before, I put you down for an R.E. man. Ubique, and Quo fas et gloria ducunt. H’m! I wonder why Engineers were given that motto in particular.’

  ‘Lord knows,’ the captain said. ‘In my experience, Sappers don’t exactly go where right and glory lead. The dirtiest of all the jobs and precious little of the glory—that’s what they get.’

  ‘Still, they have the consolation,’ Trent pointed out, ‘of feeling that they are at home in a scientific age, and that all the rest of the army are amateurs compared with them. That’s what one of them once told me, anyhow. Well now, Captain, I have to be off this evening. I’ve looked in just to say how much I’ve enjoyed myself here.’

  ‘Very glad you did,’ Captain Royden said. ‘You’ll come again, I hope, now you know that the golf here is not so bad.’

  ‘I like it immensely. Also the members. And the secretary.’ Trent paused to light his cigarette. ‘I found the mystery rather interesting, too.’

  Captain Royden’s eyebrows lifted slightly. ‘You mean about Freer’s death? So you made up your mind it was a mystery.’

  ‘Why, yes,’ Trent said. ‘Because I made up my mind he had been killed by somebody, and probably killed intentionally. Then, when I had looked into the thing a little, I washed out the “probably”.’

  Captain Royden took up a penknife from his desk and began mechanically to sharpen a pencil. ‘So you don’t agree with the coroner’s jury?’

  ‘No: as the verdict seems to have been meant to rule out murder or any sort of human agency, I don’t. The lightning idea, which apparently satisfied them, or some of them, was not a very bright one, I thought. I was told what Dr Collins had said against it at the inquest; and it seemed to me he had disposed of it completely when he said that Freer’s clubs, most of them steel ones, were quite undamaged. A man carrying his clubs puts them down, when he plays a shot, a few feet away at most; yet Freer was supposed to have been electrocuted without any notice having been taken of them, so to speak.’

  ‘H’m! No, it doesn’t seem likely. I don’t know that that quite decides the point, though,’ the captain said. ‘Lightning plays funny tricks, you know. I’ve seen a small tree struck when it was surrounded by trees twice the size. All the same, I quite agree there didn’t seem to be any sense in the lightning notion. It was thundery weather, but there wasn’t any storm that morning in this neighbourhood.’

  ‘Just so. But when I considered what had been said about Freer’s clubs, it suddenly occurred to me that nobody had said anything about the club, so far as my information about the inquest went. It seemed clear, from what you and the parson saw, that he had just played a shot with his brassie when he was struck down; it was lying near him, not in the bag. Besides, old Hyde actually saw the ball he had hit roll down the slope onto the green. Now, it’s a good rule to study every little detail when you are on a problem of this kind. There weren’t many left to study, of course, since the thing had happened four months before; but I knew Freer’s clubs must be somewhere, and I thought of one or two places where they were likely to have been taken, in the circumstances, so I tried them. First, I reconnoitred the caddymaster’s shed, asking if I could leave my bag there for a day or two; but I was told that the regular place to leave them was the pro’s shop. So I went and had a chat with MacAdam, and sure enough it soon came out that Freer’s bag was still in his rack. I had a look at the clubs, too.’

  ‘And did you notice anything peculiar about them?’ Captain Royden asked.

  ‘Just one little thing. But it was enough to set me thinking, and next day I drove up to London, where I paid a visit to Nelsons, the sporting outfitters. You know the firm, of course.’

  Captain Royden, carefully fining down the point of his pencil, nodded. ‘Everybody knows Nelsons.’

  ‘Yes; and MacAdam, I knew, had an account there for his stocks. I wanted to look over some clubs of a particular make—a brassie, with a slip of ivorine let into the face, such as they had supplied to MacAdam. Freer had had one of them from him.’

  Again Royden nodded.

  ‘I saw the man who shows clubs at Nelsons. We had a talk, and then—you know how little things come out in the course of conversation—’

  ‘Especially,’ put in the captain with a cheerful grin, ‘when the conversation is being steered by an expert.’

  ‘You flatter me,’ Trent said. ‘Anyhow, it did transpire that a club of that particular make had been bought some months before by a customer whom the man was able to remember. Why he remembered him was because, in the first place, he insisted on a club of rather unusual length and weight—much too long and heavy for himself to use, as he was neither a tall man nor of powerful build. The salesman had suggested as much in a delicate way; but the customer said no, he knew exactly what suited him, and he bought the club and took it away with him.’

  ‘Rather an ass, I should say,’ Royden observed thoughtfully.

  ‘I don’t think he was an ass, really. He was capable of making a mistake, though, like the rest of us. There were some other things, by the way, that the salesman recalled about him. He had a slight limp, and he was, or had been, an a
rmy officer. The salesman was an ex-serviceman, and he couldn’t be mistaken, he said, about that.’

  Captain Royden had drawn a sheet of paper towards him, and was slowly drawing little geometrical figures as he listened. ‘Go on, Mr Trent,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Well, to come back to the subject of Freer’s death. I think he was killed by someone who knew Freer never played on Sunday, so that his clubs would be—or ought to be, shall we say?—in his locker all that day. All the following night, too, of course—in case the job took a long time. And I think this man was in a position to have access to the lockers in this clubhouse at any time he chose, and to possess a master key to those lockers. I think he was a skilful amateur craftsman. I think he had a good practical knowledge of high explosives. There is a branch of the army’—Trent paused a moment and looked at the cigarette-box on the table—‘in which that sort of knowledge is specially necessary, I believe.’

  Hastily, as if just reminded of the duty of hospitality, Royden lifted the lid of the box and pushed it towards Trent. ‘Do have another,’ he urged.

  Trent did so with thanks. ‘They have to have it in the Royal Engineers,’ he went on, ‘because—so I’m told—demolition work is an important part of their job.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Captain Royden observed, delicately shading one side of a cube.

  ‘Ubique!’ Trent mused, staring at the box-lid. ‘If you are “everywhere”, I take it you can be in two places at the same time. You could kill a man in one place, and at the same time be having breakfast with a friend a mile away. Well, to return to our subject yet once more; you can see the kind of idea I was led to form about what happened to Freer. I believe that his brassie was taken from his locker on the Sunday before his death. I believe the ivorine face of it was taken off and a cavity hollowed out behind it; and in that cavity a charge of explosive was placed. Where it came from I don’t know, for it isn’t the sort of thing that is easy to come by, I imagine.’

  ‘Oh, there would be no difficulty about that,’ the captain remarked. ‘If this man you’re speaking of knew all about H.E., as you say, he could have compounded the stuff himself from materials anybody can buy. For instance, he could easily make tetranitroaniline—that would be just the thing for him, I should say.’

  ‘I see. Then perhaps there would be a tiny detonator attached to the inner side of the ivorine face, so that a good smack with the brassie would set it off. Then the face would be fixed on again. It would be a delicate job, because the weight of the club-head would have to be exactly right. The feel and balance of the club would have to be just the same as before the operation.’

  ‘A delicate job, yes,’ the captain agreed. ‘But not an impossible one. There would be rather more to it than you say, as a matter of fact; the face would have to be shaved down thin, for instance. Still, it could be done.’

  ‘Well, I imagine it done. Now, this man I have in mind knew there was no work for a brassie at the short first hole, and that the first time it would come out of the bag was at the second hole, down at the bottom of the dip, where no one could see what happened. What certainly did happen was that Freer played a sweet shot, slap onto the green. What else happened at the same moment we don’t know for certain, but we can make a reasonable guess. And then, of course, there’s the question what happened to the club—or what was left of it; the handle, say. But it isn’t a difficult question, I think, if we remember how the body was found.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Royden asked.

  ‘I mean, by whom it was found. One of the two players who found it was too much upset to notice very much. He hurried back to the clubhouse; and the other was left alone with the body for, as I estimate it, at least fifteen minutes. When the police came on the scene, they found lying near the body a perfectly good brassie, an unusually long and heavy club, exactly like Freer’s brassie in every respect—except one. The name stamped on the wood of the club-head had been obliterated by crushing. That name, I think, was not F. MacAdam, but W. J. Nelson; and the club had been taken out of a bag that was not Freer’s—a bag which had the remains, if any, of Freer’s brassie at the bottom of it. And I believe that’s all.’ Trent got to his feet and stretched his arms. ‘You can see what I meant when I said I found the mystery interesting.’

  For some moments Captain Royden gazed thoughtfully out of the window; then he met Trent’s inquiring eye. ‘If there was such a fellow as you imagine,’ he said coolly, ‘he seems to have been careful enough—lucky enough too, if you like—to leave nothing at all of what you could call proof against him. And probably he had personal and private reasons for what he did. Suppose that somebody whom he was much attached to was in the power of a foul-tempered, bullying brute; and suppose he found that the bullying had gone to the length of physical violence; and suppose that the situation was hell by day and by night to this man of yours; and suppose there was no way on earth of putting an end to it except the way he took. Yes, Mr Trent; suppose all that!’

  ‘I will—I do!’ Trent said. ‘That man—if he exists at all—must have been driven pretty hard, and what he did is no business of mine anyway. And now—still in the conditional mood—suppose I take myself off.’

  III

  THE CLEVER COCKATOO

  ‘WELL, that’s my sister,’ said Mrs Lancey in a low voice. ‘What do you think of her, now you’ve spoken to her?’

  Philip Trent, newly arrived from England, stood by his hostess within the loggia of a villa looking out upon a prospect of such loveliness as has enchanted and enslaved the Northern mind from age to age. It was a country that looked good and gracious for men to live in. Not far below them lay the broad, still surface of a great lake, blue as the sky; beyond it, low mountains rose up from the distant shore, tilled and wooded to the summit, drinking the light and warmth, visibly storing up earthly energy, with little villages of white and red scattered about their slopes—like children clustered round their mothers’ knees. Before the villa lay a long, paved terrace, and by the balustrade of it, from which a stone could be dropped into the clear water, a woman stood looking out over the lake and conversing with a tall, grey-haired man.

  ‘Ten minutes is rather a short acquaintance,’ Trent replied. ‘Besides, I was attending rather more to her companion. Mynheer Scheffer is the first Dutchman I have met on social terms. One thing about Lady Bosworth is clear to me, though. She is the most beautiful thing in sight, which is saying a good deal. And as for that low, velvety voice of hers, if she asked me to murder my best friend I should have to do it on the spot.’

  Mrs Lancey laughed.

  ‘But I want you to take a personal interest in her, Philip; it means nothing, I know, when you talk like that. I care a great deal about Isabel, she is far more to me than any other woman. That’s rather rare between sisters, I believe; but when it happens it is a great thing. And it makes me wretched to know that there’s something wrong with her.’

  ‘With her health, do you mean? One wouldn’t think so.’

  ‘Yes, but I fear it is that.’

  ‘Is it possible?’ said Trent. ‘Why, Edith, the woman has the complexion of a child and the step of a racehorse and eyes like jewels. She looks like Atalanta in blue linen.’

  ‘Did Atalanta marry an Egyptian mummy?’ inquired Mrs Lancey.

  ‘Not by any means—priests of Cybele bear witness!’

  ‘Well, Isabel did, unfortunately.’

  ‘It is true,’ said Trent, thoughtfully. ‘That Sir Peregrine looks rather as if he had been dug up somewhere. But I think he owes much of his professional success to that. People like a great doctor to look more or less unhealthy.’

  ‘Perhaps they do; but I don’t think the doctor’s wife enjoys it very much. Isabel is always happiest when away from him—if he were here now she would be quite different from what you see. You know, Philip, their marriage hasn’t been a success—I always knew it wouldn’t be. It’s lasted five years now, and there are no children. Peregrine never goes about with her;
he is one of the busiest men in London—you see what I mean.’

  Trent shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Let us drop the subject, Edith. Tell me why you want me to know about Lady Bosworth having something the matter with her. I’m not a physician.’

  ‘No, but there’s something very puzzling about it, as you will see; and you are clever at getting at the truth about things other people don’t understand. Now, I’ll tell you no more. I only want you to observe Bella particularly at dinner this evening, and tell me afterwards what you think. You’ll be sitting opposite to her, between me and Agatha Stone. Now go and talk to her and the Dutchman.’

  ‘Scheffer’s appearance interests me,’ remarked Trent. ‘He has a face curiously like Frederick the Great’s, and yet there’s a difference—he doesn’t look quite as if his soul were lost for ever and ever.’

  ‘Well, go and ask him about it,’ suggested Mrs Lancey. ‘I have things to do in the house.’

  When the party of seven sat down to dinner that evening, Lady Bosworth had just descended from her room. Trent perceived no change in her; she talked enthusiastically of the loveliness of the Italian evening, and joined in a conversation that was general and lively. It was only after some ten minutes that she fell silent, and that a new look came over her face.

  Little by little all animation departed from it. Her eyes grew heavy and dull, her red lips were parted in a foolish smile, and to the high, fresh tint of her cheek there succeeded a disagreeable pallor. There was nothing about this altered appearance in itself that could be called odious. Had she been always so, one would have set her down merely as a beautiful and stupid woman of lymphatic type. But there was something inexpressibly repugnant about such a change in such a being; it was as though the vivid soul had been withdrawn.