The Case of the Murdered Major: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  CHAPTER XI

  ENTER A SLEUTH

  Just after five o’clock that evening a telephone call came from Headquarters, Colonel Caithby speaking.

  “That you, Captain Travers? I thought you might like to know that Superintendent Wharton is coming down this evening. The Brigadier will see him first, and he should be with you at about eight.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Travers, and no sooner had he replaced the receiver than he knew he should have thanked the Colonel for his good offices that morning, but Travers had been too surprised for clear thinking. Wharton had been put down as a million to one chance, and now he was actually on his way. Three more hours and he would be in the camp.

  So Travers took out his notebook, reached for more paper, and began jotting down the things that would have to be told if George were to have an immediate and comprehensive view of the case. More than once in his scribbling he would look up or pause to stoke his pipe with the look of a man who has had good news.

  George Wharton—the old General, as the Yard affectionately knew him—was the most likeable personality Ludovic Travers had ever known, and the opinion was not that of a few chance meetings, but the outcome of co-operation in work that often frayed the nerves. Whenever he thought of him, Travers always smiled, for George had always about him something of the forlorn and whimsical, with his harassed pater-familias air of which the vast overhanging moustache was a kind of symbol. And there were his little tricks of showmanship: the asking of leading questions to give triumphant answers, the snorts and grunts to register contempt, and the bland assumptions of ignorance when wishful to conceal.

  But no mere mountebank can rise to be Superintendent at the Yard. At his work, Wharton was a bulldog, possessed of enormous patience and tenacity, and with a memory that went incredibly far back. Cross-examination was his speciality, and there his little tricks were his asset, for no man looked more like a patient vendor of vacuum cleaners and less like the tough, go-getting detective of novel and screen. Wharton could wheedle and cajole, he could laugh with them that laughed and mourn with them that mourned, and he could give a sudden look or make a sudden remark that would send as sudden a shiver down the spine of his listener. Of two things only had he been known to boast: that his métier should have been the stage, and that he could smell a liar a mile off. Travers could vouch for the truth of both assertions.

  Travers, like a nephew waiting a favourite uncle, was all agog that night. His own dinner had been put off and there he was, well before twenty hours, waiting in the comparative cold of the guard hut. At every car that approached he stuck out his head like an amiable secretary bird, and then at long last a car slowed down and he heard George’s voice. In Travers’s inward eye was at once the dark overcoat, the bowler hat, and that huge walrus moustache.

  Travers flashed a torch on himself for the sentry’s benefit and made for the car at once. But he was too late. Wharton was on the roadside with his bag, and the car had moved off to reverse.

  “Well, well, well,” said Wharton, as Travers flashed the torch again. ”Here you are, then. All dolled up like a real soldier.”

  “That’s right, George,” Travers said, and grasped his hand. “Let’s have a look at you.”

  “Don’t flash that damn’ thing in my eyes,” began Wharton, but he was too late.

  “My God!” said Travers. “You’re beautiful. Grey coat, grey soft hat. What’s happened? Come into money?”

  “Just had to see some of the big-wigs,” George said modestly. “This is my Sunday rig-out, when there’re any Sundays.” Then he gave his prodigious grunt. “What’re we doing? Staying here all night?”

  A waiting guard carried his bag the short distance to the Mess, Travers trying as well as he could in the dark to explain something of the lay-out. Byron and Winter were still in the Mess and were introduced, but what they saw was quite another George Wharton—a burly, dignified, and yet urbane representative of the law.

  A short drink and George was taken to Stirrop’s room, where Timms had the stove lighted.

  “Regular palaces you have here,” George said. “No wonder this war’s costing seven millions a day.”

  Travers watched him have what he called a sluice down.

  “How’d you get on with the Brigadier, George?”

  “Knowledgeable sort of chap,” Wharton said. “I liked the other one better. A Colonel Somebody-or-other. Told me you’d been trying your hand out. ‘In that case, sir,’ I said, ‘I might as well go back to town.’ He laughed.”

  “No wonder,’” said Travers dryly. “But to be serious, George, did he give you the outlines of everything?”

  “Only this,” Wharton said, and rehearsed twice as much as Travers had hoped for. “No suspects, I gathered. Everything nice and blank, ready for me to sign on the dotted line.”

  Travers hauled him off for dinner. No sooner was it over than he insisted on being taken at once to where the body had been found. The wrapping was removed and he spent a good few minutes with a torch, while Travers shivered in the bitter wind. Then he asked if he might see that office Travers had spoken about, and he was taken to the Commandant’s office, which was to be his own.

  “Not a bad little spot,” he said, and proceeded to light the oil-stove. “And now what about you earning your money for a change? You tell me what happened and what you really think about it—not what you told that Brigadier.”

  It was nearly eleven o’clock when Travers at last left that office. Wharton had heard all about Lading, the queer case of the extra prisoner, and, in fact, all that Travers could dig up about the case.

  “I won’t go into your suspects,” he mercifully declared. “What I’m going to do is get this camp into my bones. No work till I’ve met everybody and seen everything.”

  He took off his antiquated spectacles, replaced them in their even more antiquated case, and then his voice was so honeyed that Travers knew something was in the wind.

  “What time did you say the next count was?”

  “Seven in the morning,” Travers told him.

  “Right,” he said. “I think I’ll be there. Give me a knock at half-past six.”

  “Knock be damned,” said Travers. “What do you think you’ve got a batman for?”

  So in the cold half-light of the following morning four people prepared to take the early count.

  “Carry on just as usual, Mr. Pewter,” Travers said. “Superintendent Wharton and I will come inside with you, and that’s all. Everything’s to be done as if we weren’t here.”

  The party moved off. As Sergeant Ebbing unlocked the first door, there was no need to call the room to attention, for each man was standing at the end of his palliasse. Ebbing closed the door and stood by it. Pewter counted.

  “Thirteen?”

  “Correct, sir,” said Ebbing, and out the party went to the passage, and so to the next room. In the officers’ room, Friedemann once more made his request for an interview, and Travers instructed that he was to be brought to the Commandant’s office at ten. So the count was uneventfully completed, and it was correct. The rooms were unlocked again and the prisoners were free to circulate.

  “Anywhere handy here where we can talk,” Wharton wanted to know.

  The party moved into the store. Wharton asked if it were not a bit risky having so much valuable stuff where prisoners went by the very door.

  “Not so risky as you’d think,” Travers said. “Only three people have keys: myself, the Quartermaster-Sergeant, and the storeman. Also, since that discovery I told you about on the night of the shot, we’ve had another lock fitted—this Yale.”

  Wharton gave a grunt which probably implied that the stable door had as usual been locked after the horse had gone. Then he had a good look at the two locks, and another grunt implied that given two inches of wire and two minutes, and he’d make short work of either.

  “One thing other I’d like to clear up,” he said. “Sometimes you talk about ‘prisoners’ a
nd sometimes it’s ‘internees.’ What are these people you’ve got here?”

  Travers explained. These were actual prisoners of war, taken in action. Internees were people interned: enemy aliens, for example. The term ‘prisoners’ was just a slack way of talking, and it meant any enemy occupants of the camp.

  “I’ve got it,” Wharton said. “And now, if all you gentlemen will help, I’ll get this count business settled. Mr. Pewter, would you be prepared to swear that there was an extra prisoner on certain occasions when you took the count?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m certain there was, sir.”

  “And you, Sergeant?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That sounds good enough,” said Wharton genially. “And I take it, like two people who don’t like being beaten by anything, you’ve tried to worry out how it happened. What’re your ideas?”

  Pewter was only too ready to talk. What he’d arrived at was this, and he drew a rough plan for Wharton’s benefit. Let there be four rooms along each corridor, with what might be called an open corridor as a connecting link at the north end. Remember, too, that during the hours of darkness, the corridors were not brightly lighted. Assume, too, that soon after arrival some prisoner had obtained or made a key to his room which, since all the locks were identical, would be a key to each room.

  A has been counted, the door locked again, and the O.O. and O.S. go inside the next room. Then the same with C, but, since they are inside C, they do not see what happens in the corridor—that the prisoner slips past the door C, or it might have been B, and lets himself into D, or any uncounted room. There he is counted again, and hence the milk in the coconut.

  “Yet, but don’t you know how many should be in each room?” asked Wharton.

  Travers explained about the hospital, though that did not excuse the undoubted absence of method there had been over the count. Also, it seemed an easy job to count a mere seventy-three prisoners in very few rooms. Dowling had got the count wrong and then had made it come right, so he had on this first occasion assumed that he himself had been wrong. On the second occasion he had been of another opinion, and then action had been taken to ensure that there could be no mistake. But it had been the late Commandant who had taken that count, and as he had preferred to trust his own memory, he had ignored the foolproof method, and the count had been wrong. After his second, and correct, count, he had been fired at and had narrowly escaped being killed.

  “That’s all clear,” Wharton said. “Ever since the proper precautions have been taken there’s been no extra prisoner. And there can’t be any jiggery-pokery in the hospital because an orderly sleeps there. And now about the night of the shot. This prisoner with the key didn’t slip into another room so as to make the count go wrong. He slipped in here.”

  “No, sir, not at first,” Pewter said. “He went into another room first and was counted twice. Then he slipped back to his own room for the second count, and as soon as his room was counted, he took a shot at the Commandant—”

  “Wait a moment,” said Wharton, consulting the plan. “The Commandant was shot at when he was outside H, and presumably whoever shot him did so from round the corner of the open corridor near E. Then why did the prisoner not slip back at once to his own room? Why should he come in here?”

  “He certainly did come in here,” said Travers.

  “Yes, but why? What was the natural procedure for you people after the shot? Why, to call out the guard and have every room searched. Catch that prisoner here, and he’d be done for.”

  “As I see it, it’s like this,” Travers said. “He did come in here, for we saw the unmelted snow off his boots. I told you about that last night. Then we went back to his room. That’s what happened, even if it doesn’t make sense. Don’t ask me why, or how he got a key to this room, because I don’t know.”

  “How do you know he went back to his room? There wasn’t a third count taken?”

  “He wasn’t to know there wouldn’t be,” Travers said. “He simply had to be back in his room.”

  “I see. And nothing’s missing from here.”

  “That’s quite right,” Travers said. “We can find no earthly reason why he should have slipped in here at all.”

  “And about this melted snow. You think it came off the Commandant’s boots, or the Sergeant-Major’s, and the prisoner picked it up on his own boots. But if the prisoner is clever enough to have a key to here, and the rooms, why shouldn’t he have one to take him outside by the back door?”

  He gave a look of complacent inquiry.

  “The doors closed well before dusk,” Travers said. “After that it’s under the direct observation of a sentry.”

  Wharton grunted.

  “Well, we’ll leave that for a bit. Now one question to you, Mr. Pewter. Just why do you think all this extra prisoner business was done? Nobody’s escaped from the camp?”

  “My idea is this, sir,” Pewter told him promptly. “I think it was a rag on the part of one of the officers. Two or three of them are just twerps, sir; you can see that by the sneering way they look at you. I think one of them did it to show how clever he was.”

  That was all. Wharton did say he would like a word with Ebbing if he wouldn’t mind waiting outside.

  “I didn’t like to hurt that young officer’s feelings,” he said to Travers, “but he was talking pure tripe. Answer me this, if you can.”

  “All right, George, but don’t glare at me.”

  Wharton grunted. “Answer me this. What’s the best use of keys in a place like this? To get out—isn’t that so?”

  “I thought I was to do the answering,” Travers said mildly. “But you’re right. And you’re going on to ask why a prisoner should give himself away by using for a rag what would be a vital thing if he wanted to escape.”

  “Oh?” glared Wharton. “Then answer me this. Was the shot all part of the rag? Nearly got him, didn’t it? And suppose it had really got him. What advantage would that confer on the prisoner who did the shooting?” He made a noise that sounded like the most profound and contemptuous disgust. “Ask the sergeant to come back for a minute.”

  In came Ebbing, looking none too happy. He was a huge lump of a man, concerning whom Byron once remarked that if he were boiled down he would make the nucleus of a brewery.

  “You’re a re-enlisted man?” Wharton fired at him.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ebbing nervously.

  “Patriotism, or safety?”

  Ebbing’s mouth gaped. He obviously didn’t get it.

  “Last May,” Wharton said waggishly, “you were a witness at the Old Bailey in a certain arson case—and I’ve heard better witnesses. So had the judge.”

  Ebbing licked his lips.

  “Well, got any fresh ideas about this extra prisoner business?” asked Wharton amiably. “Anything you didn’t like to say in front of the officer?”

  Ebbing licked his lips again, then said he hadn’t.

  “Right,” said Wharton, and look a step forward. “I’m holding nothing against you, neither is Captain Travers, while you do your job here. You got that?”

  Ebbing said he had. Another lick of the lips, some sort of a salute, and he departed.

  “Nothing like having a memory,” Wharton announced complacently. “When I was on Intelligence in the last war I walked into a little café at Rouen and sat down right against a bloke I’d wanted for months. When I said, ‘How’s the printing trade these days, Charlie?’ you ought to have seen his face. It was a picture. So it was when I stood him a drink. Which reminds me. When do I get any breakfast?”

  Travers led the way out, and towards the Mess. “And what after breakfast?” he asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Wharton said in that non-committal tone which meant he had something already up his sleeve. “I think I’ll just mooch round and see what there is to see. Nothing like knowing your way about.”

  Travers went on to the office and found him a set of keys that would admit him anywhere, and wr
ote an official pass to admit and pass out at all hours.

  After breakfast Travers left the old General reading the Telegraph, and got to work on the morning’s mail. Miss Dance arrived only five minutes late, and once she was at work too, he settled down to something he had promised Wharton—a list of suspects with comments. Between ’phone calls and callers he got his rough notes down, and then typed them himself, well out of the way of Miss Dance’s inquisitive peerings:

  DULLING.—If Stirrop had known family history, D. would almost certainly have been dismissed. S. always harping on spies and aliens, and mouthing against “the old Bosche.” If D. lost the job, he lost £1 a day. £365 not bad for a job done between surgeries and visits. Suggest find out: (a) D’s financial position, (b) How he got the job.

  BYRON.—Loathed S. Had been publicly insulted by him at various times, and virtually put under arrest. Expressed himself to me as at the end of his tether, and proposing to take the law into his own hands. Had also the welfare and treatment of own officers to consider. S. often gave them very bad time.

  DOWLING and PEWTER—See BYRON.

  TESTER.—A queer fish. Near camp that night and brazenly entered with D. Why? Lied about it to me. Jealous of S. Had threatened to sock his jaw.

  MAFFERTY.—Worst grievance of all. No alibi. Under influence of drink at 20.15. Brainiest man in camp.

  N.B.—Cases stated are against, not for. Additional suspects:

  EXTRA PRISONER.—???

  EBBING.—? Had been unmercifully rated by S.

  Then Travers began to wonder about Ramble, He certainly had grievances, and was the kind of one to stick at nothing. As he lay back in his chair, eyes closed, Travers could hear Ramble at reminiscences of the last war—all of them obviously true and unadorned. “I simply let him have it clean in the guts, sir.” “One of our chaps threw a bomb and I threw another, and blew the bastard’s head clean off.”