Bodies from the Library

by Tony Medawar

  Mr Waite’s hands slackened, before the stare of a hundred horrified eyes he began to tip forward—tipped stiffly forward and before the sergeant could thrust out a hand to clutch at him, slowly, grotesquely bundled, slid out of the big chair and on to the ground. And as he died, his tongue at last with a final great effort obeyed him. He said one word. ‘Poison!’

  TUESDAY

  Inspector Port stood among the ruins of last night’s party. Sergeant Troot, his round face quite grey with fatigue and anxiety, came back from the telephone. ‘All arranged, sir.’

  ‘You’ve been a long time about it,’ said Inspector Port.

  Sergeant Troot was supposed to have been in a huddle about finger prints and plaster casts. In fact he had been talking on the ’phone to the kids at home. ‘But Daddy, Daddy, you promised you’d be back by this morning and now it’s only four days till Saturday and today’s nearly gone already …’

  ‘It’s only just begun,’ said Sergeant Troot gloomily.

  ‘But Daddy, the holidays …’

  And the car. He’d been going to give it the final coat tonight, the coat of primrose yellow to tone in with the russet covers that Mary was making for the seats. It was to have been drawn up, gloriously, at the front door when they woke up on Saturday morning. ‘Oh, Daddy, the seaside will be horrid without you.’

  ‘I’ll be there, kiddos. Don’t worry.’ But he was worried himself. And now here was the Imspector, beefing. ‘Right under your nose, Sergeant. The man was poisoned.’

  ‘Yessir,’ said Troot, listlessly.

  ‘The first husband was a chemist. Well, research chemist, not a chap in a white coat selling hot water bottles. Drugs all over the place.’

  ‘Yes, but not this place.’

  ‘Easy enough to bring some along when she moved house.’

  ‘What would she bring it for?’ said Sergeant Troot.

  ‘To murder the next.’

  ‘You don’t suggest, sir—?’

  ‘The first left a lot of money; and she married again very soon after. It’ll bear looking into,’ said Inspector Port.

  Mrs Bee, summoned, knocked timidly at the door and crept in, hands folded. Been here some weeks, no previous connection with the family, retired, lived at address given, had seen advertisement for this post and been tempted; lovely family, never regretted it, not until—until now. The poor gentleman! Mrs Bee put her apron to her eyes and wept a respectful tear. Taken so suddenly!

  ‘Your master was murdered,’ said Inspector Port, bluntly.

  Mrs Bee gave a sharp barking scream, fell into a chair and fanned herself. Murdered! She couldn’t believe it! She, who had always kept herself respectable, mixed up in a murder—Oh, get on with it, woman! thought Sergeant Troot, fuming with impatience. We shall never get through at this rate …

  The poison would have acted swiftly, reported the police surgeon: within five minutes or so the symptoms would have begun. He had described them, Sergeant Troot confirming as he went along—pallor, constriction of the throat, rigidity, paralysis, collapse. Death probably within seven minutes of absorbing the poison. Inspector Port asked: ‘What did he eat or drink just before the first symptoms?’

  ‘Nothing. He ate nothing,’ shrilled Mrs Bee, up in arms in defence of her pastries. ‘The Sergeant can tell you. “I never eat these things,” Mr Waite said; Sergeant Troot heard him say it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sergeant Troot, dispiritedly. For if not the ‘eats’—what else was there but the punch? And he himself had served Mr Waite with the punch.

  Mrs Bee described the business with the punch. (‘Get on with it, get on with it, the Inspector’s not asking for the recipe,’ moaned Troot within himself.) Aloud he said impatiently: ‘Dozens of people took the punch. I had some myself. There can’t have been anything wrong with it.’

  ‘Mr Waite’s glass—?’

  Sergeant Troot had told the Inspector a hundred times already about Mr Waite’s glass. But they must waste another five minutes over it. Mrs Bee confimed. ‘Mr Waite said he’d kept it all evening, he was always afraid of getting someone else’s. He held it out, himself, to the Sergeant, across the table. The Sergeant didn’t touch it; he just poured in the punch.’

  ‘Like I told you,’ said Troot, exasperated.

  ‘This punch,’ said the Inspector. ‘Bits of fruit and cloves and such?’

  ‘Certainly not. This was an iced rum punch,’ said Mrs Bee haughtily. ‘I’ve explained to you already. Quartered limes to commence with, yes, and the crushed ice; but all carefully strained.’ She continued with her recital of events. ‘I gave it a stir and passed the ladle to Sergeant Troot.’

  ‘You gave it a stir, that’s right,’ said Troot, quickly.

  ‘Yes, and then I—No, I tell a lie,’ said Mrs Bee. ‘First I poured out a glass for a guest, then I gave you the spoon.’

  And the guest who had drunk from that glass was alive and blooming. Yet the very next person to be served had been Mr Waite. And Sergeant Troot himself had served Mr Waite. He hurried the Inspector away from the punch to the matter of the cigarette passed to the murdered man just before he died.

  Inspector Port sent for Mrs Waite. She looked very pale, frightened and anxious and yet—not exactly heart-broken?

  Troot went quietly mad while Port laboured through ponderous condolences. ‘Now, Madam—who gave your husband that cigarette?’

  No one had noticed. It had been ‘one of the boys’.

  ‘That is to say Mr Timothy Jones or Mr Dal Butler?’

  And Timmy Jones made no secret of the fact that he resented Mr Waite’s interference in the matter of Gina’s marriage—that he knew that on this very evening Mr Waite had intended to force Gina’s hand. Sergeant Troot didn’t like it: in his pocket still burned Timmy’s ten-bob note towards the children’s buckets and spades. ‘Yessir,’ he said, in reply to the Inspector’s command to go and fetch Mr Jones; but within himself he decided that Mr Butler should join the party also. That rather flashy young ‘business associate’—what motive might he not have, that none of them there could know anything about …?

  But Mr Butler never did join the party after all. Mr Butler had departed—leaving no forwarding address.

  Mr Waite’s office, consulted, produced Mr Butler’s home address. Sergeant Troot, cursing his own interference, plodded up to London. A small house in a neat suburb: Mr Dal Butler had lived there with his mother, it appeared, but it was now deserted. Sergeant Troot took a busy look round. An expensive young man. Souvenirs of a university education, tip-top schools; made-to-measure shirts, suits from a very good tailor … Everything of the best, in fact; but—a perfectly ordinary telephone. Sergeant Troot looked at it with longing, resisted temptation for a little while, gave in, picked up the receiver and dialled a number. A toll call. He fished in his pocket and honourably placed his pennies on the table. ‘Mary?’

  ‘Where are you?’ said his wife’s voice. ‘What’s happening? The kids are frantic in case you’re not through with it for Saturday.’

  ‘So’m I,’ he said gloomily. He gave her a rapid resumé of events. ‘Not a clue, so far. Not a suspicion. Let alone any proof …’ His free hand played nervously with some object he had picked up from the table where the telephone stood. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted something shiny, something silver, something cool and hard to the touch. ‘It’s no good, Mary! I may as well give up, and you take them alone; at this rate, old Port’ll never let me go. Not a clue—not in any sense; we just haven’t got a clue …’

  The something shiny was a photograph frame, a small silver frame with a rather faded snapshot: a snapshot of a man with a small boy, standing holding his hand.

  Mary’s voice went on and on, but Sergeant Troot wasn’t listening. He was looking at the picture. After a little while he said: ‘Look, Mary—don’t worry. I think perhaps we may have a clue after all.’

  For the man in the photograph was Mr Waite. Mr Waite wore, curiously, dark pin-striped trouse
rs and a white linen jacket. And the boy with him was Dal Butler: and now Sergeant Troot knew why he had always had that feeling of having seen Dal Butler somewhere before.

  For the boy in the picture was the dead spit and image of the man.

  WEDNESDAY

  Sergeant Troot, dog tired from the long, unrewarding search for Dal Butler, who, whatever his relationship with the dead man was still missing—rubbed sleep from his eyes and crept out to the garage. He could slosh a first coat of paint on the car before breakfast, anyway. Not that it would be any use—the kids must go off to the seaside prosaically by train, that was now all too certain; but at least they might have a glimpse of the primrose wonder and of joys to come. He worked feverishly for a couple of hours. At nine o’clock he trudged wearily up to the Hall where the Inspector was already pursuing his unhurried investigations.

  Gina met him in the garden and drew him surreptitiously into a greenhouse. ‘I want to talk to you, Sarge, and with all these leaves in here no one will see us.’ She had been longing for him to get back from London, she said. ‘That stupid old Port—he thinks Dal did it or Timmy and that I knew in advance and that’s why I had hysterics too soon, as it were. I mean, I did, you know. Papa hadn’t really begun to be ill yet when I screamed out, “Daddy!”’

  ‘“Dad!”’ corrected Sergeant Troot. ‘You screamed out “Dad!” first: and later, “Daddy!” He eyed her keenly, and yet with a sort of protective anxiety. He had known her since she was a kid. ‘Miss Gina—I’ve realised now it wasn’t really “Dad!” you called out, was it? It was a name that sounded like Dad.’

  She shrank back against the great, spreading leaves of some giant exotic plant. ‘A name that—?’

  ‘Your step-father was usually rather florid. Gone suddenly pale in the face like that—he reminded you of someone: didn’t he?’ She said nothing. ‘Miss Gina—this young man that your step-father was encouraging you to marry, was almost forcing you to marry—you suddenly realised in that one moment who he was. It was “Dal!” that you cried out: wasn’t it? Because you suddenly knew that Dal Butler was your step-father’s own son.’

  She did not deny it. Indeed, she seemed almost pleased that he should know it, eager about it. ‘Because, you see what that means? Dal can’t be suspected now. He’d hardly have killed his own father.’

  ‘So why did he run away?’

  ‘He … well, he’s told me now, Sarge. You see, he and his father between them, they’d—they’d fiddled our money, my mother’s and mine that my own father had left us. He’d left a lot: he was rich and he was heavily insured. He was a great believer in insurance, he taught my mother to be too: and a jolly good thing because she made my step-father take out a big insurance in her favour in case he died before her; and now that’s all we shall have. All the rest’s gone.’

  ‘Mr Waite and his son have embezzled it?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know what they’ve done exactly, but they’ve spent it. It wasn’t all Dal’s fault,’ she said, unhappily. ‘He was only a boy when my mother married his father. It was all spent on giving him a terrific education, all the advantages his father hadn’t had. Then, when he grew up, the two of them started gambling to repay it before it was found out. So they lost the rest; and then the only thing to do was to try to get Dal married to me before I came of age and it was all found out.’ She flushed. ‘Not very flattering, Sarge, was it?’

  ‘Yet you forgive Mr Butler?’

  ‘He was only a child when it started,’ she said again. ‘It was his father’s influence.’ But she suddenly looked at him surprised. ‘How do you know I’ve forgiven him?’

  ‘You continue to harbour him.’

  ‘I?’ she said, startled. ‘Harbour him?’

  ‘You’ve got him hidden somewhere—or when has there been time to explain all this to you?’ And he looked round the greenhouse, casually, and said: ‘All right, Mr Butler—you may as well come out now.’

  Mr Butler came out with a rush that upset several large green plants but not Sergeant Troot. But it was not very nice of Mr Butler to have secreted a knife when Gina brought him his smuggled-in food, and to attack her friend, Sergeant Troot, with it. Troot caught at the stabbing hand and wrenched the knife away. Dal with his free hand picked up a pot of cactus, flung it through the wall of the greenhouse and snatched up a piece of broken glass resulting from the smash. ‘Let me go or I’ll slash your face with it.’

  ‘Cor lummy,’ said Sergeant Troot, astonished. ‘What a nasty little brute you are!’ He held the squirming young man off, quite easily, at the end of a long right arm as rigid as iron. But over his shoulder he said to Gina: ‘Get outside, Miss.’

  ‘Sarge, I can’t—’

  ‘Get outside Miss, please.’ If there was going to be a rough house, it was a bind having women cluttering things up.

  ‘I don’t like to leave you—’ she began, distressfully. But she stepped outside the door and stood uncertainly in the path. ‘Now,’ said Troot to the struggling Dal, ‘chuck that piece of glass away. Come on—chuck it!’

  Dal Butler chucked it—straight into Sergeant Troot’s face. As Troot instinctively ducked, caught unawares, his hand for a moment lost its grip. In that moment Dal was outside and the door slammed in the sergeant’s face. There was a further shower of broken glass, blinding him temporarily; he covered his face with his arms, thrust his shoulder to the wooden frame of the door and at once was free. But Butler had snatched up a second piece of glass and now, thrusting a terrified Gina before him, was tearing down the path in the direction of the garages. Gina’s own car stood in the driveway. He shoved her in before him, the dagger of glass held close to her cheek. Sergeant Troot, chasing after them, saw the gesture and it brought him to a halt. Butler yelled: ‘One step nearer and I’ll use it!’ You could see the words giving him confidence, giving him new hope. One foot half into the car he shouted again: ‘I’ll use it! If you follow me, if I find I’m being followed, tracked down—anything—I’ll use it, I’ll cut her to ribbons.’ And it was true. Liable to heaven knew what charges of embezzlement and fraud and now to new charges for murderously attacking a policeman—nothing he could do to get free would be not worth the risking. Short of murder, perhaps; but the destruction of her beauty might be not so very much less terrible to Gina than death itself …

  Sergeant Troot watched them out of sight and turned and ran into the house, and now he gave no thought to a little yellow car still not half painted, or to a seaside holiday for two young hopefuls.

  Inspector Port’s reproaches were hard to bear. He took over control himself and Troot found himself left all alone at the Hall, sick with anxiety, remorse and a terrible feeling of helplessness. Had Port really understood and appreciated that threat? And if he had not, and Butler found himself pursued, was it not all too certain that he would put it into action? What, anyway, would be his next move? For if to give chase would endanger Gina, then anticipation was the only chance. Troot sat with his head in his hands at the big kitchen table while Mrs Bee, anxious and trembling, plied him with cups of unwanted tea. ‘If he harms her, if he kills her …’

  ‘He won’t kill her.’

  ‘If he kills her, they’ll hang him.’

  ‘They won’t. But anyway, it wouldn’t help Miss Gina.’ He lifted his sad head. ‘What’ll he do next, Mrs Bee?’

  ‘Go abroad?’

  ‘Abroad?’ said Mrs Bee. ‘But no. If he turned up at the airport or the station, dragging the girl—?’

  ‘He might get rid of her.’ Mrs Bee gave a sharp scream and he shook his head impatiently. ‘I mean, lock her up somewhere.’ But where? ‘If only one could work that out in advance and be there.’

  ‘Yes.’ She thought it over for a long time. She said at last, slowly, and all her faded foolishness seemed to be gone for a moment in this hour of sick anxiety: ‘To go abroad he must have ready money.’

  ‘He has no money.’

  ‘No money in the big sense, perhaps. But a bit in the ban
k, I don’t suppose he’s as broke as all that, is he?’ She said again in that slow, thoughtful way: ‘And to get cash out in a hurry from the bank, he’d have to go there.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘Sergeant—he mustn’t kill that girl. If I was you …’

  Sergeant Troot was already halfway out or the kitchen.

  But it was someone else who went—at Sergeant Troot’s earnest suggestion—to Dal Butler’s bank. Troot himself was on his way elsewhere.

  So that when a white faced girl, whose male companion stood very close to her, dropped in at her bank to cash a cheque on her own account for as much as it contained—she found a curiously slow and delaying clerk behind the counter; and while he yet dillied and dallied, the swing doors opened and a man came in, breathing heavily as though he had been hastening—and two big hands grasped the young man’s arms and jerked him violently backwards. And something fell from his hand that smashed into harmless smithereens on the stone floor of the bank.

  THURSDAY

  So Master Butler was under lock and key and there was at least one suspect eliminated from the unenviable distinction of being a murderer: for what Gina had said was true—there was no reason to believe Dal (ready though he might have been to kill Sergeant Troot), the destroyer of his own father. Gina, young and resilient, had by Thursday morning recovered from the shock and terror of her involuntary few hours ‘on the run’ with him. Sergeant Troot could feel pretty pleased with himself.

  Inspector Port was hardly grateful, smarting, perhaps beneath the superior strategy of the Sergeant in having anticipated Dal Butler’s forcing Gina to obtain cash from her bank. ‘Twenty four hours skulking here in the greenhouse under your very nose: and then you’re actually in there with him and you let him go.’

  During those twenty four hours Sergeant Troot had been up in London and if Butler had been under anyone’s nose it had been Inspector Port’s. And if Port had had splintered glass held close to his eyes …! But it would not encourage the Inspector to sympathy in the matter of Sergeant Troot’s seaside holiday with the kids—even if all hope of getting off by Saturday had not by now perished. Moreover, Port was now assailed with advice and instruction from higher quarters, the question of calling in Scotland Yard nagged at him like an aching tooth. In some mysterious way, of course, it was all Troot’s fault.