Dead Man Twice

by Christopher Bush

  “Yes, yes! Go on!”

  “If I may, I’ll now resort to a kind of hypothetical narrative. Hayles had written a letter, very shrewdly disguised, in what we might call pidgin Franco-English. He displays the letter to France—foreign postmark, stamp and everything—and says, ‘Look here, France—or Michael or whatever he called him—I wish you’d do something for me.’ I ought to have said they’re in Hayles’s room. ‘There was a girl I got to know at Dijon. I didn’t tell you about it because you’d only have laughed. Well, she started to get a bit of a nuisance pestering me and so on—so I had to write her a pretty stiff letter telling her I was through. This morning I got this from her and there’s something in it—Russian, I think; she’s a Pole, by the way—which I can’t make out. I wonder if you’d tell me what it is.’ Thereupon he passes the letter over to France, making pretence of covering everything except the paragraph in question. Then, of course, we imagine a bit of leg-pulling on the part of France and blushes from Hayles. France takes the letter and gives a free translation. The girl is taking it rather badly; threatening in fact to commit suicide! Hayles is scared stiff. ‘I say,’ he says, ‘that’s pretty bad for me. I’d better have that translation in case anything happens. Would you mind writing one out, there’s a good chap. And for the love of heaven, don’t say a word to a soul!’ Thereupon France sits down at the desk, takes the sheet of grey notepaper which Hayles hands him, and writes—boldly and fluently as the writing shows. He blots it on the beautiful new sheet of blotting-paper… and that’s that! What were the words exactly? Do you remember?”

  Wharton repeated them from memory—

  This is really the end of everything. I can’t go on any longer with things as they are. And they say life is worth living! Good-bye.

  “It does sound rather affected,” added Franklin.

  “You’re being wise after the event,” said Wharton curtly. “Carry on, Mr. Travers!”

  “Well Hayles takes the note and when France goes out removes the blotting-paper and on the Saturday shuts it in the blotter case in the secretaire. On the Sunday afternoon when he slipped into the house expecting to find France’s body, he got a shock. The confession he’d placed, say, on the mantelpiece, had gone. We assume, of course, that he looked for it last, after faking the suicide, so as to take it away. Then he was disturbed by Usher and Franklin and had to give up the search. And now you’ll want the proof.”

  Wharton’s eyes never left his face. His look was so concentrated that Travers thought he needed placating.

  “I do want you to understand something and that is that I had a short cut. Given the idea I’ve just outlined, you could have got the information in twenty-four hours through other channels—the press, for instance. What I mean to imply is that the apparent coincidence is of no real value. Still, here it is.

  “As Hayles didn’t know Russian, he’d have to get somebody to write that paragraph for him. First I thought of the people at Dijon, but that appeared too much of a gamble. Then that Hampstead Road business cropped up again and I wondered if he’d consulted a regular Russian of some sort. Then I remembered a place I’d seen there—one of those schools of languages—so I called up and made inquiries. Hayles had been there. He’d asked to see a Russian expert and he’d seen one—a Pole called Barinski. By the way, I’ve got Barinski where Hayles can’t get at him, supposing he gets suspicious.

  “This chap’s prepared to swear that Hayles told him he had a Russian girl who was threatening to give him up and he wanted, therefore, to scare her badly—to show her he was serious, if you like—that Barinski should write for him a paragraph in which he threatened suicide. Barinski’s English is poor but his French is perfect, so I imagine Hayles wrote down the paragraph he wanted in both languages. Barinski did what he was asked. Then suddenly Hayles thought of something he hadn’t thought of till then. Since it was supposed to be a woman writing to him, endings and so on, would have to be feminine! He got out of that by asking Barinski to transcribe it as if a woman were writing it. He was a fool there. He ought to have gone to another firm for that. As it was, the double translation fixed every word in Barinski’s mind. He’s prepared to go through the whole business with you whenever you care to see him. And, by the way, you’ll have to square his absence with his employers. And—er—well, that’s everything.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Travers,” said Wharton quietly. He sat there a good minute, thinking it over, then got to his feet. “I think that accounts for Mr. Hayles!”

  “Travers thinks Hayles cut the hole in the window,” said Franklin. Wharton sat down again.

  Travers dissociated himself forthwith. “Nothing of the sort! All I’d say is that it’d be absolutely consonant with what we know of him—personally and from his books—and his amnesia.” There Wharton grunted. “I should say he faked the burglary so that, if France’s body were discovered before he got back to fake the suicide, then there’d be a further red herring. It might have been assumed that whoever broke in did so in order to lay the poison trap.”

  “I quite agree,” said Wharton emphatically. And what about the letters? He wrote them?

  “I should say he did. It’s all part of that mysterious stuff he revelled in. Only, if I might venture to say so, I don’t think there was any idea of scaring France out of London. For one thing, he didn’t know anything about that Mrs. Claire business till long after that. What I think is, he wrote them as another stand-by. If it had been thought that France didn’t commit suicide, then he was killed by the chap who wrote’ anonymous threats—same chap who broke into the house, if you like.”

  “Quite so! But just one little point—about the placing of that confession. We assumed it was on the mantelpiece, under a vase. If the body were found prematurely, that confession had to be found too. Yet it had to be where France couldn’t see it! And in spite of that, Somers saw it!”

  “I think,” said Travers, “that’s a case of rather subtle psychology. I thrashed that out with my own man—you know him—Palmer. We experimented and agreed that if the note were placed with the corner protruding from under the vase, France wouldn’t have paid any attention to it. It’s not his duty to see casual things like that. He always had things given to him. But Somers—he’d be very different. The first thing he’d see—being trained that way—would be the untidy corner of paper protruding. And he did see it.”

  “Sounds all right,” said Wharton and got up again.

  Franklin turned to Travers. “About that visit to the Air Ministry. Don’t you think Hayles had to know for certain about that fog? For all he knew, France might draw the blinds back when he entered the house, and he’d be bound to leave the lights on after he was dead. A policeman might have gone round to inquire into that.”

  “What’s all this about the Air Ministry?” asked Wharton.

  “Only another small theory,” smiled Travers and nodded over to Franklin.

  Wharton sat down again.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  TRAVERS IS WORRIED

  AS soon as Travers opened his eyes on the Saturday morning, the first thing they fell on was the door leading to the bathroom, with its brand-new, oxidised silver, lever handle and the coat-hook fixed in the munting. Invisible at its side would be the hole Palmer had bored for that reconstruction they’d tried out the previous night. At the same moment Travers knew just what it was that was on his mind; what had woke him up twice in the night, and what looked like providing a worrying morning.

  It was the previous evening that had started it. The conference had, of course, been washed out; the new disclosures for one thing and Norris’s absence for another. “Where’s he gone?” Franklin had asked, and “Marfleet!” Wharton had replied, and had left it at that. “Marfleet,” of course, might have meant anything—following up the trail of Hayles, for instance—but Travers, with his mind on the final elucidation of the case, was little disposed to think so, especially in view of what happened later.

  “There’s something I�
�ve thought of,” Wharton had said, “which, if he doesn’t mind me saying so, might absolutely clinch Mr. Travers’s story. I put it to you now. You both tell me, and so did Usher, that Hayles was a sort of perennial joke with the others; not joke in the unkind sense perhaps, but someone they refused to take very seriously and who was always exciting risibility. Mr. Travers had that idea in mind when he said that as soon as he broached to France the matter of a girl in Dijon, France’d have started pulling his leg. We’ll assume that Hayles told France to keep it dark. Even then my suggestion is that France couldn’t have resisted the temptation to tell it to the others, especially to Mrs. Claire—on that Saturday night.”

  Travers had seen the point; that Saturday night—the walk in the gloom from Camden Town—a time for delicious confidences. Wharton took off the receiver and got his long distance call through to Mrs. Claire. His shrewdly guarded question and his answers told the result.

  “Oh, he did!… Any mention of locality?… I see. Merely abroad.… Oh, yes! I recognise that it’s confidential.” Then he glanced at Franklin. “Oh, just one other thing, Mrs. Claire! Did Mr. France, after you met him on the Saturday evening, say anything about a telephone call?… Nothing whatever! Thank you. How are you keeping, by the way?… That’s capital! Well, thank you, Mrs. Claire. Good-bye!”

  He replaced the receiver with a nod that had considerable meaning. “Just one thing occurred to me as I was talking. Can Mrs. Claire be kept out of it?”

  “It’ll depend upon Hayles,” said Franklin. “If he makes a clean breast—”

  “I wouldn’t rely on him,” said Wharton. “He’s the sort that wriggles like an eel on a fish-hook.”

  “What was that telephone business?” Franklin asked.

  “Oh, that!” with a perfect air of matter-of-fact. “I just wondered why France should go straight to the cloak-room when he came in. Did Claire telephone him to go there, when he made that call at Liverpool Street?”

  Franklin apparently had no desire to press the point, and that had ended things till the very last moment when Wharton was seeing them out of the door. Then he’d called Travers back with an, “Oh, just a minute, Mr. Travers! Aren’t you a great authority on cars?” Travers, as he lay there, could recall the very gesture that accompanied the remark.

  “I wouldn’t go so far as that!” he’d said.

  “I suppose you know all about the modern use of asbestos tubing?” Wharton asked, disinterested as you like.

  Travers determined to draw him out. “Asbestos tubing! What on earth’s that for?—outside a kitchen.” Wharton had laughed genially, made a doesn’t-matter-a-damn gesture and ended with a sorry-you’ve-been-troubled sort of dismissal.

  “What was that idea about the telephoning?” Franklin had asked when he rejoined him. “Does that imply that Claire called France up and reminded him of something connected with the cloak-room so that he should go there?”

  “Lord knows!” Travers had answered. “It seems rather elaborate.”

  “Elaborate! It’s damned ridiculous! Claire couldn’t have had a confederate waiting in that cloak-room. We’ve already knocked the bottom out of that argument.”

  * * * * *

  That was what was weighing heavily on Travers’s mind. In the matter of the death of France, Wharton, in the words of the children’s game, was getting very warm. The arrest of Hayles was being held up only in view of that further development. At any moment Wharton might swoop down on the murderer of France, and the reason Travers felt the certainty in his bones was that he himself knew, not only who did the killing, but the circumstances in which that killing had been done!

  At breakfast, Palmer noticed the unusual preoccupation. Travers, as a matter of fact, was getting more and more anxious. Then over the morning papers came the first consolation. Dare Wharton make an arrest? Where, unless he had got hold of some vital evidence of which he himself was unaware, could he produce sufficient to justify a warrant? He could neither force a statement nor run the risk of exposing his hand in a coroner’s court. Thereupon Travers’s outlook became temporarily less cramped—he actually read a column of his favourite financial leader-writer—until it occurred to him that a shelving of the main problem wasn’t the same as abandoning it. Sooner or later Wharton would succeed, as he always had done, in worming his way into some subterranean and buried essential.

  Palmer was still more intrigued when he was ordered to ring for the Isotta. It looked as if the week-end in Sussex wasn’t coming off after all.

  “And the arrangements stand for twelve-thirty, sir?” he asked.

  “Don’t know. Don’t pack anything… yet. I really can’t say. And will you order that car!”

  Palmer, looking as if his pet canary had suddenly savaged him, bobbed, and bolted for the phone.

  At Durango House, Travers went in search of Franklin. Cresswold reported that he’d come in early and had gone out after receiving a telephone call—where he couldn’t say. Back went Travers to his room and started the daily round. Then he suddenly thought of something else. Was it, or was it not, at midday that Claire was starting on that attack on the record? He ran the answer to earth in the Sports’ Diary column.

  MOTOR-RACING. Brooklands. 11.0 a.m. Attempt by Peter Claire on the 200 kilometre record.

  At that very moment, fortunately for Travers’s peace of mind, the telephone went—Franklin ringing him up from the-Lord-knows-where, and positively spluttering with excitement. He’d just left No. 23, where he’d been with Wharton. The old General had turned up the ace of trumps as usual! Perfectly astounding!

  Travers cut in quickly. Wharton definitely knew who did it? Franklin chuckled. Did Wharton know! and in a sentence gave the game away. Travers cut in again.

  “Hallo! Are you there?… I say; come along and tell me all about it!” He slipped the receiver back, then stood thinking for a good half minute before pushing the bell. “Find out the next train to Weybridge… or better, bring me the Southern time table!”

  He looked at the clock—just gone ten. He’d never do it in the Isotta. Might take most of that time to get clear of London, if traffic blocks went wrong. In came the time table with a train leaving Waterloo at 10.20 and arriving 11.0. If he remembered rightly, there’d be plenty of taxis at the other end outside the station. And Claire would almost sure to be late in starting. A hasty order that if Mr. Franklin looked in, he was to be told that he’d been suddenly called away, and where nobody was to know—and he was off.

  A minute before that train left, he was in it and with a scribbling block on his knees, was wondering to just how much he dared commit himself. The train arrived dead on time and he hopped into a taxi—“Brooklands—and drive like hell!”

  The driver set off with apparently that object in view, and they shot away up the hill through the woods. If Travers had had eyes for it, he would have seen the leaves a golden yellow, the road a brilliant carpet, and the distant hills warm with the November sun. As it was he caught the sharp tang of the oak leaves—a smell he was never likely to forget.

  They swerved round the bend and shot wildly along the drive—Travers flourishing his member’s ticket as they passed the barrier. Just short of the members’ bridge he tapped on the window and the car drew up. He stuck his head out of the window and listened. In the air was a hum; the hum became a snarl, then a raucous sort of grind as a car roared towards the bend. A quick pop-pop! from the exhaust as it checked below the bridge—the roar became a snarl—then a hum that receded.

  “Someone travelling down there, sir!” remarked the driver of the taxi.

  Travers grunted. “Hm! Push on to the Paddock!”

  The car ran through the tunnel and drew up inside the enclosure. Travers, putting out his head, caught sight of a yellow-capped paddock attendant and motioned him over.

  “Is that Mr. Claire on the track?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s going round now.”

  “Where’s he being timed from?”

  “Fork Timing B
ox, sir; up there—opposite Vickers!”

  “Am I allowed to take the car up?”

  “Certainly, sir!—as far as the Fork.”

  Travers signalled to his driver and the car shot off again. Exactly what the plan of campaign was to be, he hadn’t much idea at the moment; all he did know was that it’d be a remarkably awkward business. Then the car drew up at the Fork and he waited for the Bentley to roar by.

  Under the timekeeper’s window, Claire’s two mechanics were watching. One of them recognised him and flicked his fingers to his cap.

  “Morning!” said Travers. “How’s he going?”

  “Not too well, sir. Air’s a bit heavy this morning. Track’s pretty good though.”

  Travers smiled. “You can’t have it all ways. Also he’s not warmed up yet. What time’d he start?”

  “This is the sixth lap, sir.”

  Travers nodded. “Then it won’t matter so much if I get the timekeeper to flag him—”

  “Flag him, sir!”

  “Yes! Something most frightfully important and private. As the Bentley hurtled by, he hurried in to make his request. By the time he was out again it was checking towards the Box. Thirty yards past it, it drew up. Travers sprinted towards it.

  * * * * *

  Five minutes later, as the taxi breasted the hill at the end of the tunnel, Travers stopped the car and again went up the bank to the members’ bridge. He looked at his watch. Plenty of time to catch that 11.35 back to town. He ran up the steps and as he got there, heard the roar of the racing car as it approached the Fork. It came round the bend, hugging the line, and as Travers peered below and saw it like a momentary, clamorous beetle, it was gone by the railway embankment. He watched it out of sight round the far banking, then took off his glasses and shook his head perplexedly. Then he felt a trickle of moisture down his cheek, and the handkerchief, as he mopped his forehead, came away wet.

  An hour later he was back in his rooms at St. Martin’s Chambers and Palmer was announcing lunch. Travers ate little and what he did eat was mechanically. Palmer cleared away, then came cautiously back for instructions. He was hustled off at once for an evening paper-far too early, as Palmer reported—then was told the week-end was probably off. Then Travers changed his mind. He didn’t know. He’d decide definitely later.