There's Trouble Brewing

by Nicholas Blake

  Nigel found that, lost in thought, he had wandered into the passage. He lit a cigarette and, in his absent way, dropped the match on the carpet. This reminded him of Sophie Cammison and her strictures about his untidiness. He bent down to pick it up; as he did so, he observed a faint round dent in the thick pile of the carpet; then another, then two more. Somebody, quite recently, had been standing on a chair just here—that was the obvious interpretation. Nigel called to the policemen whom Tyler had sent to search the rest of the house.

  ‘You been standing on a chair here?’

  ‘Chair? No, sir. Not investigated this passage yet.’

  ‘Good. Must be the murderer. Get me one, will you—a chair, I mean, not a murderer. Don’t leave your prints on it.’

  Nigel placed the chair-legs in the indentations. They fitted.

  ‘Um. Must’ve been this one or another of similar pattern. Find all the chairs of this size and shape of leg in the house, and have ’em tried for fingerprints.’

  He took off his coat, spread it over the seat, and climbed gingerly upon it. The passage-ceiling was now only a foot above his head. It was papered in the same loud and riotous pattern as the walls. But from his vantage-point Nigel could see four sides of a square outlined against the pattern. A trap-door! Using his handkerchief, he pushed gently upwards. The trap yielded. Only when his head was through the opening did he realise that it might be, for him, a trap in more senses than one. The murderer might be up there, under the roof, nervous as a hair-trigger, cornered! In an involuntary spasm of fear, Nigel closed his eyes an instant. Then he opened them again and looked round. There was nobody there. He hauled himself though the opening. The joists were boarded over for half the length of the attic. Some oddments lay on the boards; a few boxes, an old tin of paint, a scrap-book. But he paid no attention to them. What held his gaze was the pile of rugs and the cushion spread out beside them. Here at least was proof that the murderer had been hiding out here: no, it wasn’t proof, this might be the faked evidence—and faked with what fiendish ingenuity and self-confidence, too. Nigel inspected the pile of bedding closely. A faint odour hung about the cushion. Brilliantine. Nigel remembered the photo of Joe Bunnett in Eustace’s house, the smarmed-down hair. Taking out a pocket magnifying-glass he studied the cushion. One or two hairs were clinging to it. He put them away in an envelope. Next he noticed some crumbs lying in the crack between the boards; with tweezers and infinite delicacy he extracted them and dropped them into another envelope; taking them under the skylight he examined them; they were still soft, some of them, and some of them smelt—smelt—smelt—what was the smell?—Ah, carraway-seed.

  Nigel proceeded to ransack the boxes. It was then that he made his last and most lurid discovery. Behind the torn lining of a suitcase he found a handkerchief, spattered with fresh bloodstains. There would be no fingerprints on that poker in the study; the murderer had held its handle in this handkerchief. Nigel unfolded the crumpled square of linen. At one corner were marked the initials, J. B.

  XII

  July 20, 11.30 a.m.–5.15 p.m.

  He holds him with his skinny hand,

  ‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.

  COLERIDGE, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

  THE MEDICAL EXAMINATION bore out the self-evident fact that Miss Mellors had been killed somewhere about midnight with the poker that was lying in the grate. She had been struck down by somebody standing in front of her; which suggested, though it did not prove, that the murderer was already in the room before she entered. So, at least, the inspector read it. Nigel considered it interpretable in another way; it might mean that the murderer was known to Miss Mellors and trusted by her, otherwise he would not have risked letting her see him by getting in front of the beam of her torch. A more sinister feature of the crime was revealed when Herbert Cammison stated, with his usual objective and precise utterance, that—as far as he could tell on a cursory examination—the victim had been killed by the first blow—a right-handed one, and the murderer then must have continued wildly striking at her long after he’d known she was dead.

  Panic or hatred? thought Nigel. If it was panic, then Joe Bunnett was most likely their man; if hatred, it could be that shadowy and abominably ingenious X who—they might yet prove—had been scattering false evidence against Joe with such a light touch, such masterly discrimination and lack of over-emphasis. Inspector Tyler, after being shown the contents of the attic, was in no two minds about it. Nothing remained, as far as he was concerned, but to get a warrant for Joe Bunnett’s arrest and find him. His description would now be broadcast all over England; police at every port would be warned to prevent him embarking for a foreign country: it could only be a matter of days. Hours, more probably; for he could not move out of England till he had regained possession of his passport.

  Three different sets of fingerprints were exposed in the house. One belonged to Miss Mellors, the second to the woman who ‘did for’ Joe Bunnett and had cleaned up the house on the afternoon of his departure: the third, presumably, was Joe’s, though that could not be proved till they had caught him. No fingerprints, however, were found on the few possible surfaces in the attic. This was a point slightly in favour of the hypothetical X being a reality, Nigel considered. All the other fingerprints might have been made by Joe before he went on his holiday; whereas it was unlikely—though not impossible—that, if he had been living in the attic for three days and nights, he would have left no prints. The inspector, anyway, was far too busy to listen to any such wild hypothesis from Nigel. Before the routine work in Joe Bunnett’s house was finished, Tyler received a message which made him busier still.

  The Poolhampton police were on the phone—straining at the wire, in fact. They asked Tyler to come down at once. The Gannet had been located, and they also had information about the motor-bicycle over which he had asked them to make enquiries. The inspector jerked out orders all round, put Sergeant Tollworthy in charge on the spot, and was soon racing the twenty miles to the coast, sitting in the back of the police car with Nigel.

  They were greeted at the station by Superintendent Flaxenham, a tall, red-faced man, slow of speech but evidently capable. With little preamble he pointed to a large-scale ordnance map lying upon the table.

  ‘See that indentation there?’ he said. ‘That’s a small cove, used by smugglers once, they say: deep water entrance, even at low tide—the shore shelves sharply there, you see; high cliffs on either side; and inland’—the superintendent stabbed a large forefinger at the map and tapped it several times—‘inland is Basket Down, a lonely expanse of upland uninhabited save for a few farms situated in the deep combes, typical of this countryside.’ Flaxenham was evidently deriving his inspiration at this point from the local guide book, Nigel noted. ‘For reasons which will transpire in due course,’ Flaxenham continued meatily, ‘this area has lately been rendered even more desolate than heretofore. Since receiving your message, we have been making enquiries along the coast—in the villages, camping grounds, farms and so on—relative to The Gannet. No one had seen her, nor at first did we find anyone who had noticed anything untoward on Thursday night. Yesterday afternoon, however, we received a report from Constable Harker. Harker is stationed in the hamlet of Biddle Monachorum, which—you will observe—is five miles west of Basket Cove. Harker reported that the proprietor of the Jolly Monk had laid the following information before him. On Saturday night a tramp, name of Ezekiel Penny, came into his pub and in the course of conversation commented upon a fire he had seen on Basket Down early on Friday morning. The proprietor, Harry Bean, said he’d heard nothing of any fire and hinted that Penny must’ve been properly boozed up or maybe dreamed it all. Whereupon the man Penny grew very heated, swore he was sober as a judge and had been an abstemious man all his life, and as for dreaming it—it couldn’t be that because he’d been asleep and only seen the fire when he woke up. Penny came in for a good deal of chaffing from the fellows in the bar, of course. One chap asked him had th
e fire taken the shape of a flaming serpent, and so on: but Penny stuck to it that he’d seen a glow in the sky, seaward in the direction of Basket Cove. Thought maybe it was some boat had caught fire; but it wasn’t his business, he said, so he turned over and went to sleep again.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, Harry Bean thinks this story over that night and he puts two and two together and the next morning—that’s yesterday—he decides to pass it on to Constable Harker. Harker acted very promptly. He communicated with us, and on our instructions found this Penny and pulled him in. I questioned Penny, and some further interesting facts were divulged. It’d be simplest if I read out the interview as taken down verbatim by Constable Oak.’

  The superintendent took up a sheet of paper, cleared his throat remorselessly, and read;

  ‘Q.—Name?

  ‘A.—Ezekiel Penny.

  ‘Q.—Address?

  ‘A—God’s great open spaces.

  ‘Q.—No fixed habitation. Will you describe in your own words what happened on Thursday night?

  ‘A.—I had been walking from Poolhampton. Very nice little town. Salubrious resort——

  ‘Q.—Keep to the point please.

  ‘A.—OK, General. As the shades of night fell, I found myself on the Basket Down you call it, don’t you? I looks for a place to doss down, and I sees a ruined cottage a hundred yards off the track, to my left. So I takes up occupation of same and has a bit of shut-eye. After a while I wakes up——

  ‘Q.—What time would that be?

  ‘A.—Unfortunately I’d mislaid my gold bleeding wristwatch, so I can’t tell you exactly. Was still dark. Maybe two o’clock in the morning. Maybe three. Well, I wakes up——

  ‘Q.—Any particular reason? Some sound wake you up?

  ‘A.—Ah! What it is to have a brain! I’d forgotten all about it. That’s right, General: must’ve been that perishing motor-bike what woke me up.

  ‘A.—Motor-bike?

  ‘A.—Yes. I heard the sound of a motor-bike receding inland. Must’ve passed along into the lane that leads to the main road up along.

  ‘Q.—Did it sound like a powerful engine?

  ‘A.—Couldn’t say, General. I was never in the motor trade. Must’ve been pretty asterisk powerful to wake me up.

  ‘Q.—What happened then?

  ‘A.—I gets up and goes to the door of my temporary mansion, and I has a bit of a look around and I sees a sort of glow in the sky, just about where this Basket Cove would be. So I says to myself, “Something’s on fire over there,” and I lies down and goes to sleep again.

  ‘Q.—You did nothing about it? Why didn’t you report this?

  ‘A.—I ain’t a ruddy fire brigade, am I? And there wasn’t a telephone in this here cottage. Nor I don’t carry a portable wireless about with me.

  ‘Q.—That’s enough. You saw no suspicious person that night, while you were walking over the downs? Heard nothing apart from the motor-bicycle?

  ‘A.—Not a soul, General. I was monarch of all I bleeding well surveyed.’

  ‘That,’ said Superintendent Flaxenham, with a subdued twinkle in his eye, ‘was all we could get out of Ezekiel Penny.’

  ‘It’s queer, isn’t it, nobody else seeing anything of this fire,’ said Tyler. ‘Weren’t there any campers about?’

  ‘That’s just it. As I hinted before, this particular part of Basket Down is specially deserted just now. You see, the Air Ministry has bought it for bombing practice.’

  ‘Ah!’ murmured Nigel, ‘Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.’

  ‘Well, gentlemen, on receiving this information, we made further investigations. The upshot of which was the discovery yesterday evening of a sunken wreck lying near the mouth of the cove. We’re having it raised and beached now, and I’ll lay long odds on it’s being the boat you’re looking for. We’ll go over there at once, if it suits you. I’ve got hold of Elias Faulkes, the man who looked after The Gannet, and he’ll come with us. No news of Mr Joseph Bunnett your end?’

  ‘We’ve not found him yet. We’ve heard from him all right though,’ said the inspector morosely. He gave Flaxenham a brief account of their discovery in Joe’s house.

  ‘Well, now! He must be a tough customer!’ exclaimed the superintendent. ‘Bad, that, very bad: dear, dear, dear. And I was thinking we should find Mr Bunnett and Bloxam on The Gannet.’

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Nigel sharply. ‘Bloxam?’

  ‘Ay. The man he took with him. Fisherman here—or used to be when there was some fishing. Took him on board at the last moment.’

  ‘Forgot to tell you, Mr Strangeways,’ said Tyler.

  ‘But damn it, this alters the whole complexion of the case. Don’t you see——’

  ‘Doesn’t alter my theory of the crime, sir. All fits in perfectly,’ replied the inspector in his most irritatingly superior manner.

  ‘Oh, you have a theory, have you? And when does the unveiling ceremony take place?’

  ‘Wait till I’ve had a look at The Gannet, sir.’

  ‘Hmm. Well, I hope your theory explains the two extraordinary and blatant contradictions that this cruise of Bunnett’s presents us with.’

  ‘Contradictions, eh?’ said Tyler, trying to look as though he knew all about it. ‘Yes, contradictions. And what would you say the contradictions were, sir?’

  ‘Ha! Trying to pump me! Well, then, here you are. First, we know Joe Bunnett was a hardened shellback; had no use for engines; born with a sheet in his mouth.’

  ‘You hold the sheet in your hand, sir,’ said Flaxenham, ‘not your mouth.’

  ‘Of course. Stupid of me. Well, here’s this fellow, a devotee of sail, suddenly for no apparent reason installing an auxiliary engine in his boat. Contradiction number one.’

  ‘But we were told that he did this because he felt he was getting beyond sailing the boat single-handed.’

  ‘Exactly. But if the reason for installing the engine was that he should be able to run the boat single-handed, why did he then take on a paid hand at the last minute? Contradiction number two.’

  Inspector Tyler scratched his chin meditatively. ‘Ah. Clever of you seeing that, sir. But I think—yes, it all fits in. It doesn’t invalidate my theory.’

  ‘The sphinx of Maiden Astbury, on being questioned, declared that he had nothing to say. The oracles are dumb, no voice nor hideous hum runs through the arched roof in words deceiving. Except, perhaps, the hideous hum of a motor-bike.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tyler. ‘The motor-bike. That just about proves it, I think.’

  ‘Well, if you gentlemen have finished telling riddles, we’d best be getting along,’ Flaxenham said slowly.

  Elias Faulkes, a bronzed, taciturn man, was introduced to them, and the four bundled into a police car and set off. On their way to Basket Cove, Tyler plied Faulkes with questions. This auxiliary engine, now—when had Mr Bunnett decided to install it? Faulkes did not know when he had decided; all he knew was that Bunnett had advised him of his intention about three weeks ago and had come down to supervise the fitting of the engine shortly afterwards. Faulkes himself knew a fair bit about marine engines and had lent a hand. Tyler appeared to be very interested by this. He asked for the exact date when the engine was installed. The third and fourth of July. Had Joe stayed in town on the night of the third or returned to Maiden Astbury? Stayed: the same hotel as usual. What sort of a man was this Bloxam? Reliable? He was all right: a good fisherman: a bit lazy. Was he accustomed to marine engines? No. But anyone could pick up the hang of them things in ten minutes. Why had Mr Bunnett chosen him, and why had he left it so late to engage him? Faulkes didn’t know why it had been left so late; but Mr Bunnett could always be pretty sure of getting Bloxam to sail with him, because Bloxam made a living now hiring out rowing boats to visitors, and his lad, Bert, could do that while he himself was away earning good extra money on The Gannet; besides, Bloxam would do anything for Mr Bunnett—Bunnett had rescued young Bert from drowning a few years ago when his sailing-di
nghy had capsized in a squall.

  ‘Dinghy!’ exclaimed Nigel, awaking apparently out of a deep slumber. ‘Where’s The Gannet’s dinghy? Joe must have had one, didn’t he?’

  ‘He had one in tow when he started, he did all right,’ affirmed Elias Faulkes.

  ‘I’ve no information about any dinghy,’ said Flaxenham.

  ‘Well, if that is The Gannet sunk in the cove, the dinghy must be somewhere about. There’d be no point in Bunnett swimming ashore.’

  Nigel looked questioningly at Elias Faulkes, but the man remained silent as a bronze image.

  ‘Smugglers!’ Nigel said, after a short and frenzied groping in his memory. ‘Basket Cove was used by smugglers. Maybe there is a cave there?’

  ‘There might be,’ replied Faulkes cautiously. Then, turning his head and gazing at Nigel as though he was a ship hull-down on the horizon, ‘But what’d he go for to put his dinghy in a cave, mister? It isn’t sense.’

  In a little over thirty minutes they turned off the Poolhampton-Bridmouth road into a lane whose offshoots seemed to multiply and run riot like bindweed. Approaching the sea thus deviously, the lane soon degenerated into a rough track climbing on to the bleak solitude of Basket Down. They passed a number of notices warning in official language whomsoever it might concern that this land was the property of the Air Ministry and trespassers would only have themselves to blame if they got their heads blown off. The tang of salt and thyme was in the air, and the ghostly cries of gulls. Bright sunlight turned the cliff-faces to an almost dazzling gold on either side of the cove; the water was green as crême de menthe. The track along which they had been driving became a bridle-path, trodden once no doubt by the ponies of smugglers, leading down the cliff in great loops. On the little sandy beach at its foot a blackened hulk was resting, guarded by two policemen. The salvage gang was there, too, and several small boys who had sprung up in their mushroom manner as it were out of the ground. A number of sightseers sprawled along the top of the cliff, throwing banana-skins and cartons negligently down into the cove. Someone was playing ‘I’m in heaven’ on a mouth organ; the last perfect touch of the macabre, Nigel reflected, that the scene demanded.