Beware of the Trains

by Edmund Crispin

  “And that was when it happened.

  “The village constable hadn’t confiscated Garstin-Walsh’s revolver—there was no reason, after all, why he should—and apparently Garstin-Walsh had taken it to bed with him. Anyway, he had it on him now, in a pocket of his dressing-gown, and I was just on the point of making some remark about the garden when he suddenly whipped the thing out, shouting incoherently, and fired it at me. I was simply flabbergasted, of course. I stood there helplessly trying to remember the details of Gross’s suicidal method of disarming people with guns, and Jourdain stood there goggling, and one shot smashed a vase on a table beside me, and another smashed a pane of the french windows, and a third went heaven knows where, and then, when I thought my last hour had certainly come, Garstin-Walsh waved me away—still shouting, still incoherent—and backed out of the french windows and fled. Almost immediately Jourdain went after him—and to cut a long story short, caught up with him at the bottom of the garden, where he’d stopped and was standing like a man in a trance, staring at the revolver in his hand as if he couldn’t imagine what it was or how he’d come by it. He surrendered it, and returned to the house with Jourdain, like a lamb; and he was more dazed and bewildered than I’ve ever seen anyone in my life. He knew what he’d done, all right, but he couldn’t account for his motives in doing it. ’It—it was like last night,’ he stammered. ‘When I saw you standing by those windows I remembered Brebner, and the gun was in my pocket and——’

  “Well, it wasn’t attempted murder, because plainly there was no malice; and there’s no such thing as attempted manslaughter. So we telephoned his doctor and got him to bed, still quite bemused—and in bed, for all I know, he is still. The doctor, of course, understood all about it: it was delayed shock, or post-traumatic automatism or some such thing, and the only surprising feature of the business was that I was still alive. I can tell you, I felt quite ashamed of myself for upsetting what otherwise would have been a perfect sample-phenomenon for the medical text-books.… Well, I went away, and today, as you know, travelled up here to Oxford, and——”

  “Why?” Fen interrupted. “Why did you come to Oxford? To see me?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “You’re not satisfied, then?”

  “I’m not,” said Humbleby. “Everything about the affair fits, and seems quite innocent, excepting just one obstinate little fragment.”

  “And that is?”

  “He unloaded the gun, you see. After he’d shot at me, and before Jourdain grabbed him, he unloaded the gun and threw the spent cartridge-cases away somewhere. When he handed the gun to Jourdain its chambers were empty. And why the devil, I ask myself, should he have done that?”

  Outside the windows of the first-floor room in which they sat, a clock struck six. Dusk was falling; the gleam had gone from the gilt titles of the books ranged along the walls, and from the college dining-hall you could hear the clink and rattle of plates being laid for dinner. In the broad, high room, with its painted panels, its luxurious chairs, its huge flat-topped desk and its weird medley of pictures, Detective-Inspector Humbleby gestured expressively and fell silent—and for the time being Fen seemed disposed to let the silence stay. His ruddy, clean-shaven face was pensive; his long, lean body sprawled gracelessly, heels on the fender; his brown hair, ineffectually plastered down with water, stood up, as usual, in mutinous spikes at the crown of his head. For perhaps two minutes he remained staring, mute and motionless, into the amber depths of his glass.…

  And then, suddenly, he chuckled.

  “Rather nice, yes,” he said. “Tell me, were the spent cartridges ever found?”

  “No. At the time, of course, we didn’t bother about them. But Jourdain was hunting for them yesterday, and he couldn’t find them anywhere.”

  Fen’s amusement grew. “Nor will he ever, I imagine—unless your Colonel Garstin-Walsh is a hopeless blunderer.”

  “But how are they important? I don’t see——”

  “Don’t you?” Fen lit a cigarette and reached for an ashtray. “I should imagine, myself, that they’re important for the reason that one of them is a blank.”

  “A blank?” Humbleby’s face was very much that.

  And Fen roused himself, speaking more energetically. “You’ll agree that Garstin-Walsh obviously possessed blanks; no man in his senses starts races at the village sports with live ammunition.”

  “Yes, I agree about that.”

  “And two of the shots he fired at you smashed things, so they were real enough. But what happened to the third?”

  Humbleby was anything but stupid; after a moment’s reflection he nodded abruptly. “If that third shot was a blank,” he said, “then that would mean … No, wait. I see what you’re getting at, but I can’t quite work it out for the moment. So go on.”

  “We’re assuming, remember, that Garstin-Walsh got rid of those cartridge-cases advisedly—that he wasn’t, in fact, the maniac he seemed. Now, it’s possible to conceive quite a number of solid reasons for his acting as he did; but so far as my deductions have gone, there’s only one of them that covers all the facts. A blank cartridge is recognisably different from a live one. Let’s take it, then, that the spent shells were thrown away in order to conceal the presence of a blank among them, in case either you or Jourdain should be curious enough to investigate the gun. What follows? Quite simply, the fact that Garstin-Walsh fired two live shots and a blank at you. And if he did that, it can only have been because Jourdain was just about to examine the study, and there was a bullet-hole in the wall which had to be accounted for somehow.

  “Now, there was no bullet-hole in the wall prior to the Brebner shooting; if there had been, the painters would have found it and repaired it. So what would have happened if Garstin-Walsh hadn’t staged his shooting act with you? Jourdain, finding a bullet-hole in the wall, would have reasoned thus:

  “‘This hole must be the result of the single shot Garstin-Walsh fired at Brebner last night.

  “‘It can’t have been made subsequently, because Brebner and the nurse were in here all night.

  “‘Therefore when Garstin-Walsh fired at Brebner he missed.

  “ ‘But there is a bullet from Garstin-Walsh’s revolver lodged in Brebner’s skull.

  “ ‘Therefore Garston-Walsh must have shot Brebner earlier on, before he returned here and met Weems.

  “ ‘And that doesn’t look much like self-defence; it looks like murder.’

  “That Brebner was blackmailing Garstin-Walsh is obvious enough. It’s obvious, too, that Garstin-Walsh decided he must put a stop to it. So as I see it, he must have shot Brebner after Brebner left The Three Crowns, have gone to the cottage to remove whatever evidence of misappropriation of Army supplies Brebner was using, and have then returned to his house. He’d shot Brebner in the skull, and so naturally assumed that he was dead, but——”

  “Yes, that’s the difficulty,” Humbleby interposed. “The idea of a man with a bullet in his brain rushing about with a shotgun intent on vengeance——”

  “Oh come, Humbleby.” Fen was mildly shocked. “It’s not common, I grant you, but there are plenty of cases on record. John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, is one. Gross and Taylor and Sydney Smith quote others. Brain injuries don’t kill at once, and in a certain proportion of cases they don’t kill at all. They don’t necessarily involve loss of consciousness or inability to act, either: there was that fourteen-year-old boy, you remember, who tripped and fell on an iron rod he was carrying; the rod went clean through his brain; but all that happened was that he pulled it out and went on home, and he didn’t die until more than a week later, after an interlude during which he hadn’t even felt particularly ill.…

  “But Garstin-Walsh must have had a nasty turn when the man he’d left for dead burst in at his french windows. No wonder he was ‘fairly thoroughly unnerved.’ No wonder his shot went wild. But no wonder, also, that Brebner could hardly hold the shot-gun with which he intended to revenge himse
lf; no wonder he collapsed just after Garstin-Walsh fired at him.…

  “Garstin-Walsh must have rejoiced. He’d murdered a man, and now, by the queerest combination of accidents, the thing had been made to seem a perfect case of self-defence. The only snag lay in that superfluous, that tell-tale bullet-hole in the study wall. In the excitement following Brebner’s collapse it wouldn’t be noticed—the more so if a piece of furniture were unobtrusively shifted so as to conceal it. But there was no chance during the night of removing the bullet and plugging the hole; and there was very little chance that Jourdain would miss it when he examined the study next morning. So Garstin-Walsh, having heard from his housekeeper of Jourdain’s presence and intentions, and seeing no opportunity, with such a crowd of people in the house, of slipping into the study and dealing with the hole before meeting Jourdain, loaded his revolver with two live cartridges and a blank; and then—you having placed yourself conveniently in position near the french windows and the bullet-hole—staged his nervous breakdown.”

  There was a long silence. Then Humbleby said: “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. But it’s all conjecture, of course.”

  “Oh, quite,” said Fen cheerfully. “If my theory’s false, there won’t be any proof of it. And if it’s true, there won’t be any proof of it, either. So you can take your choice. The only possibility of checking it would be if the——”

  He was interrupted by the shrilling of the telephone. “That might be for me,” Humbleby told him. “I took the liberty of asking Jourdain to get in touch with me here if there was any news, so.…”

  And in fact the call was for him. He listened long and spoke little. And presently, ringing off, he said:

  “Yes, it was Jourdain. He’s found those cartridge-cases.”

  “In a place where he’d looked previously?”

  “No. And none of them is a blank. Which means——”

  “Which means,” said Fen as he picked up the whisky decanter and refilled their glasses, “that on this side of eternity there’s at least one thing we shall never know.”

  The Drowning of Edgar Foley

  In a room in Belchester Mortuary—a plain room with a faint smell of formalin, where dust-motes hung suspended in a single shaft of sunlight—the financier and the labourer lay on deal tables under greyish cotton sheets, side by side. The scene was of a sort to evoke facile moralising, all the more so since the labourer had left his wife moderately well off, whereas the financier had died penniless. But neither Gervase Fen—for whom, thanks to the repetitious insistence of the English poets, such moralising had long since lost its first freshness—nor Superintendent Best—who like most plain men felt that the democracy of death was too large and obvious and absolute a fact to require comment—was moved to remark, or even to reflect on, the commonplace irony of it. In any case, they were not, as yet, fully informed: at this stage the financier was not yet known to be a financier, was not yet docketed and filed as the undischarged bankrupt who had changed his identity, fled from London, and at last, in God knows what access of fear or despair, cut his own throat with the ragged blade of a pocket-knife in a lonely part of the moors. To the authorities he was still no better than an anonymous suicide; so that when Fen, after a brief scrutiny of the shrunken, waxy face, was able to announce that this was in fact the stranger with whom he had recently talked in the hotel bar at Belmouth, and whose touched-up photograph, issued by the police, he had seen in that morning’s papers, Superintendent Best heaved a sigh of relief.

  “That’s something, sir, anyway,” he said. “It gives us a starting-point, at least—and there’s things in that conversation you had with him that’ll narrow it down quite a lot. So if you wouldn’t mind coming back to the station straight away, and making a formal statement…”

  Fen nodded assent. “No other reaction so far? To the photograph, I mean?”

  “Not yet. There’s almost always a bit of a time-lag, you know.”

  “Ah,” said Fen affirmatively; and his eyes strayed to the shrouded occupant of the further table. “Who’s that?” he demanded.

  “Chap called Edgar Foley. Drowning case. They picked him out of the water yesterday, and his widow’s coming along this morning to have a look at him.” Best consulted his watch. “And talking of that, I think it’d be a good thing if we were to clear out before they——”

  But he was too late; and he was destined to reflect, later, that it was just as well he had been too late—for if Fen had never set eyes on the widow of Edgar Foley, the topic of Foley’s death might well have lapsed, and in that case an unusually mean and contemptible crime would probably have gone unpunished. For the moment, however, Best was merely embarrassed, since the room possessed only one door, and with the arrival of the newcomers his retreat was cut off. He moved back against the wall, therefore, waiting; and with Fen at his side was witness to what followed.

  A Sergeant, helmet under oxter, led the way; he stood aside, holding the door, until his two companions had entered. Inevitably, it was the smaller of the two, the man, who claimed attention first: for this was an imbecile in the technical sense of the word, an ament—flat-topped skull, decaying teeth, abnormal ears, tiny eyes, coarse skin; well below average height, but with long ape-like arms, muscularly well developed. The age—as so often with these tragic parodies of humanity—it was impossible to guess at; but you could see the terror mastering that feeble, inarticulate brain, and you could hear the whimpering as the deformed head moved from side to side.… Suddenly, with a sort of howl, the idiot turned and bolted from the room at a shambling run. And the woman who was with him said hesitantly to the Sergeant: “Shall I …?”

  “He’ll be all right, ma’am, will he?”

  “‘Im’ll wait outside,” she said. “Won’t get run over nor nothing.”

  “Ah. Well, my orders were, he wasn’t to be forced to do it if he didn’t want. So long as he’s safe…”

  “Yes, he’s safe,” she said. “He won’t go away from where I am.”

  And without so much as a glance at Fen or Best, she moved forward to where the body of her husband lay.

  She was perhaps thirty-five, Fen saw: an uneducated country-woman with an impassive, slow-moving dignity of her own. Straight black hair was drawn back to a coil at the nape of her neck; her skin was very thick and smooth, ivorycomplexioned; she wore no make-up of any kind. Her black coat and skirt were cheap and shabby, and her legs were bare; and because she was not dressed to attract, you overlooked, at first, the matronly shapeliness of her. She was calm, now, to the point almost of dullness; when the Sergeant drew back the sheet from the face of the man she had married, her expression never altered.

  “That’s ’im,” she said emotionlessly. “That’s Foley.”

  It was dispassionate and quite final. Replacing the sheet, the Sergeant ushered her out. And Fen, who had been unconsciously holding his breath, expelled it in a sigh.

  “Rather a remarkable woman,” he commented. “How did her husband come to be drowned? Accident?”

  Best shook his head. “It was the idiot. The idiot pushed him in—according to her, that is: there wasn’t any other witness, and the idiot can’t talk at all, can’t even understand what you’re asking him, most of the time.…” Best crossed to the body of Foley, and uncovered the dead face; Fen joined him. “Not pretty, is he? Wasn’t any too pretty when he was alive, either.”

  “M’m,” said Fen. “It looks as if he must have been in the water a week or more.”

  For a moment Best was surprised; then abruptly he smiled.

  “I was forgetting,” he said, “that you knew about these things.… Six days, actually.”

  “And badly knocked about, too.” Fen had pulled the sheet further down and was contemplating the body with some interest. “Rocks, I suppose: currents.”

  “Rocks,” said Best. “And currents and rapids and weirs and deep pools.”

  “Rapids? Weirs?” Fen looked up. “The river, you mean? I was imagining he’d been
drowned in the sea.”

  “No, no, sir. What happened—d’you know Yeopool?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Well, you probably wouldn’t: it’s only a tiny village, just down off the edge of the moors. Anyway, Yeopool’s where Foley and his wife lived, and that’s where he got pushed in. It’s a treacherous bit of the river there, even for anyone who can swim—and he couldn’t: so I don’t imagine he lasted long.… Afterwards, he must have got tangled up under water somehow or other. It was fifteen miles downstream, at a village called Clapton, that they picked him up yesterday, and by that time he’d been so battered that he didn’t have a shred of clothing left on him anywhere.… That’s not uncommon, sir, as you’ll know.”

  “In a fast-moving river,” Fen agreed, “you could almost say it was the rule. Except of course for the——”

  But at this point a Mortuary attendant looked in; and: “O.K., Frank,” called Best. “All finished. Has that other lot gone?” Frank indicated that it had. “Then we’ll go, too.” Best pulled the sheet back into position. “Don’t you waste your pity on Foley, though,” he said to Fen as they left the room. “If you should feel like being sorry for him, just keep in mind what he was doing at the time the idiot shoved him in.”

  “Which was?”

  “He’d hit his wife and knocked her on to the ground,” said Best calmly, “and he was kicking her with his heavy boots. Not for the first time, either.… Yes. He’s where he belongs. And if his widow isn’t exactly inconsolable, you can hardly blame her, can you?”