Beware of the Trains

by Edmund Crispin

  “There I might have left it, but for the chance that I was lecturing in Amersham a week or so later, and having an hour or so to spare, decided to go and interview Pasmore’s neighbour—he of the radio. He turned out to be a pleasant little man—something to do with the Home Office, I fancy—and naturally enough he still remembered the events of the crucial afternoon quite clearly. He’d had that concert on all right, from beginning to end, but beyond that there didn’t seem to be anything of value he could tell me. And I was on the point of leaving, in a welter of civilities, before he quite unexpectedly let the cat out of the bag.

  “‘Of course, the police questioned me about it,’ he said, ‘and even though that wasn’t till several weeks afterwards, I had no difficulty in recalling the concert—partly, no doubt, because of the change in the advertised programme.’

  “I must have looked as though I’d seen a ghost. ‘Change?’ I echoed.

  “ ‘Why, yes. For some mysterious reason of their own, they played the Tchaikowsky first and the Walton second.’

  “And they had. I checked with the B.B.C., and it was true. Owing to some kind of mismanagement, the orchestral parts of the Walton hadn’t been in the studio at the start of the concert, and the Tchaikowsky had had to be played while they were searched for. Therefore, the Tchaikowsky—‘lacrimae rerum’—had finished at four o’clock; and therefore, if the reference in the final paragraph meant anything at all, Pasmore’s letter to Brice had been completed by four o’clock.”

  Fen chuckled suddenly. “And given that, it didn’t really require much thinking to deduce how Angela’s alibi had been contrived. The police, as I discovered, had worked it all out for themselves—but not, unfortunately, until after the acquittal.”

  Fen paused, and Haldane shook his head. “I’m afraid that for my own part——”

  “Oh, come.… Brice’s letter had been posted in Edinburgh on the previous afternoon. It arrived at Amersham, of course, by the morning post on the day of the murder. Angela opened it—I’ve mentioned, I think, that she acted as Pasmore’s secretary—and saw in it her opportunity. She destroyed the envelope in which it arrived, made a note of Brice’s queries, typed a fresh envelope, inserted the letter, stamped it, and posted it again. She could thus be fairly sure of its arriving a second time, in the presence of the invited and infatuated Sir Charles, by the afternoon post. And in the meantime she went to her husband and said something like this:

  “‘Brice rang up from Edinburgh while you were out. He’s written you a letter about Merlin, but it struck him that it might possibly not arrive soon enough for your reply to reach him in time for the final rehearsal. I’ve made a note of his queries, and if you write off to him some time this afternoon, that should be all right.’

  “Pasmore would believe this—why shouldn’t he?—and the reply to Brice would be written. And all that Angela had to do after that was to destroy the notes she’d made of Brice’s queries and the envelope, typed by herself and with a local postmark on it, in which Brice’s letter arrived at the house for the second time. Between four-twenty and four-thirty, of course, she entered Pasmore’s study and killed him.”

  There was a brief, astonished silence; then: “Brilliant!” Haldane exclaimed. “Really brilliant.… Only”—his enthusiasm waned slightly—“there are a lot of things which could have gone wrong. Pasmore might just have omitted to write the reply; or it might not have been long enough—though I suppose that in view of the number of queries he had to answer it was bound to be fairly long; or it might have contained some very definite reference to the hour of day at which it was being written. Or Sir Charles mightn’t have turned up; or the letter—life being what it is—mightn’t have arrived by the afternoon post; or——”

  “Yes, yes, I know all that,” said Fen. “But you must realise that all those possible accidents and possible flaws in the scheme have one thing in common: if they were going to happen at all, they would happen before the murder. So if anything had gone wrong, Pasmore would quite simply not have been killed—not on that day, and in that particular way. Angela, I can assure you, is a cautious woman as well as a clever one.”

  “Is,” said someone sombrely; and again there, was silence.

  “I suppose she missed the point of ’Lacrimae rerum,’” said Haldane at last. “Interpreted it, that’s to say, as just a general comment on neighbours’ radios.… She’d read the letter, of course, before killing Pasmore.”

  Fen nodded. “Certainly she would. It’s to be presumed that Pasmore put it in her bedroom about four o’clock, and that she read it there, at twenty past four, before going to the study and killing him.… I don’t know why I say ‘presumed.’ By Angela’s own admission, that’s what in fact happened. I wrote to her, you see, and by return of post she sent me congratulations on my perspicuity and a circumstantial account of the crime. It’s a queer document—unique, of course: no trace of vanity or megalomania, and yet it makes me shiver every time I look at it.”

  “She got Pasmore’s money, then?”

  “Oh, yes. And has lived very comfortably on it ever since.”

  “But look here,” said Wakefield with sudden energy, “you can’t possibly maintain that she arranged for Pasmore’s letter to be her alibi and then forgot about it.”

  “Of course she didn’t forget. She only pretended to—that was the whole point of her scheme. We’re back where we started, you see; this is where the business of the ‘perfect crime’ comes in. Your murder which looks like natural death—well, it’s satisfactory up to a point; but the murderer can never be quite sure that one day, perhaps years after, some accident may not reveal the truth and send him to the gallows. His only road to absolute immunity from punishment is to be tried and acquitted, for it’s a basic principle of English Common Law that nemo debet bis vexari—that no one may be tried a second time for the same offence. Angela wanted to be tried, in order that she might be acquitted and live afterwards in perpetual immunity. Hence Pasmore’s letter was ’forgotten’ until the right moment for its use arrived. Angela took a great deal of risk, of course. But it worked out very nicely for her in the end.”

  “Well, I consider it’s abominable,” said Haldane with disgust. “When one thinks that nothing—nothing—can be done to punish the woman…”

  “There are those”—Fen spoke very mildly—“who would maintain that such injustices are invariably rectified at a higher court.”

  “Ah.” Wakefield sat up abruptly. “And why do they maintain that? They maintain it because they believe the Universe to be subject to Laws, and they believe that because the phenomenal flux, without the concept of Order, is psychologically intolerable. Aldous Huxley——”

  “Have some more port,” said Haldane.

  Within the Gates

  It was immediately outside the entrance to an office building, within a stone’s throw, almost, of New Scotland Yard, that the thing happened.

  The Whitehall area is sacred—if that is the right word—to Government. Trade leads a hole-and-corner existence there, and a house given over to non-ministerial purposes is enough of a rarity in the district to attract fleeting attention from the idle passer-by. Thus it was that Gervase Fen, ambling with rather less than his usual vigour from St. Thomas’s Hospital, where he had been visiting a friend, towards St. James’s Park, through which he proposed strolling prior to dinner at the Athenaeum, paused to examine the brass plates and signboards flanking this particular doorway; and in so doing found himself shoulder to shoulder with a man who had just half a minute to live.

  At this time—eight o’clock in the evening—the street was almost empty, a near-vacuum shut away from the Embankment traffic on one side and the Whitehall traffic on the other. A street-lamp gleamed on the brass and the white-lettered wood: trade journals mostly, Fen noted—Copper Mining, Vegetation, the Bulb Growers’ Quarterly, Hedging and Ditching. A little beyond the doorway, an elderly woman had halted to rummage in her shopping-bag; and immediately outside it,
a neatly dressed man with a military bearing, who had been preceding Fen along the pavement, glanced up at the streetlamp, drew from a pocket three sheets of typewritten foolscap clipped together with a brass fastener, came to a stop, and began reading. Fen was beside him for no more than a moment, and had no cause to notice him particularly; leaving him still scanning his typescript, he walked on past the woman with the shopping-bag and so up to the end of the street. Behind him, he heard a car moving away from the pavement—presumably it was the black sedan which he had seen parked at the entrance to the street. But there was no way in which he could have anticipated the tragedy that followed.

  The note of the car’s engine altered; one of its doors clicked open and there were rapid footsteps on the pavement. Then, horribly, the woman with the shopping-bag screamed—and Fen, swinging round, saw the soldierly-looking man grapple with the stranger who had emerged from the waiting sedan. It was all over long before Fen could reach them. The assailant struck viciously at his victim’s unprotected head, snatched the typescript from his hand as he fell, and scrambled back into the car, which slewed away from the curb with a squeal of tyres, and in another instant was gone. Pausing only to note its number and direction, Fen ran on and bent over the huddled body at which the woman was staring in dazed, helpless incomprehension. But the skull was crushed; there was nothing, Fen saw, that he or anyone else could do. He stood over the body, allowing no one to touch it, until the police arrived.

  And at eleven o’clock next morning: “Very satisfactory,” said Detective-Inspector Humbleby of the Metropolitan C.I.D. “Very satisfactory indeed. Between you, you and that Ayres woman are going to hang Mr. Leonard Mocatelli higher than Haman. And a good riddance, too.”

  “The man must be quite mad.” As was allowable in an old and trusted friend of the Inspector’s, Fen spoke somewhat petulantly. “Mad, I mean, to commit murder under the noses of two witnesses. What did he expect?”

  “Ah, but he hadn’t got a record, you see.” Humbleby lit a cheroot with a new-fangled pocket-lighter which smelled of ether. “He didn’t think Scotland Yard had ever heard of him, and it must have given him a nasty turn when we hauled him out of bed in the middle of the night, and brought him along here. He was the only member of the group whose viciousness was likely to extend to murder, and that being so——”

  “Wait, wait,” Fen interposed fretfully. “I don’t understand any of this. Who is Mocatelli? Whom did he kill, and why? And what is the ‘group’ you mentioned?”

  At this, Humbleby’s satisfaction diminished visibly; he sighed. “It’s not,” he said, “that I’m personally unwilling to give you the facts. But there’s a certain rather delicate matter involved, and …” His voice trailed away. “Well, there you are.”

  “Discretion,” said Fen with great complacency, “is my middle name.”

  “I dare say. But very few people use their middle names.… Calm, now: because I think I shall tell you about it in spite of everything. It’s possible you can help. And God knows,” said Humbleby seriously, “this is a case where we can do with some help.”

  He had been standing by the window. Now, with an air of decision, he turned and planted himself firmly in the swivelchair behind the desk. His office, to which they had returned immediately after the identification parade, was high up, overlooking the river, in a corner of New Scotland Yard: a small overcrowded room with a large number of (illegal) gas and electric stoves over which you tripped every time you attempted to stir. Filing-cabinets lined the walls; queerly assorted books were piled in tottering heaps in the corners; and the decorations ranged from a portrait of Metternich to a photograph of an unattractive pet Sealyham which had passed to its reward, at an advanced age, in the year 1919. Scotland Yard is as strictly run as any other office, and more strictly than most. But Humbleby’s position there was a peculiar one —in that for reasons which seemed good to him he had always refused to be promoted to Chief-Inspector—and so to a considerable extent he was allowed to legislate for himself in the matter of his surroundings. To that eyrie had come many who had allowed its untidy domesticity, and the tidy domesticity of its occupant, to make them over-confident. And not one of a long succession of Assistant Commissioners, on first introduction to it, had been short-sighted or stupid enough to do anything more than smile.

  Sprawled in the one armchair, Fen waited. And presently Humbleby—having outlined on the blotter, to his own immense satisfaction, a fat bishop—said:

  “We start, then, with this more than ordinarily cagey, more than ordinarily well-organised gang. It’s two years now since we first became aware of its existence; and although we’ve got a complete, or almost complete, list of the members’ names, together with a certain amount of good court-room evidence, we’ve been avoiding making arrests—for the usual reason that there’s been nothing very damning so far against the man we know to be in charge, and we’ve been hoping that sooner or later his agents, if left to themselves, will incriminate him. In that respect we’re not, even after last evening, very much better off than we were at the outset; and I think it’s quite likely that in view of Mocatelli’s arrest, which but for the murder we shouldn’t have contemplated, the head man will pack it up and we’ll never catch him. However, that remains to be seen.”

  “Any speciality?” Fen asked.

  “No. They’ve been very versatile: blackmail, smuggling, smash-and-grab, arson—all the fun of the fair. From our point of view it hasn’t been any fun, though, and that for more reasons than one. So there was a good deal of rejoicing the other evening when one of the gang, a man named Stokes, got drunk, picked up one of these crazy children who start painting their faces and wearing high-heeled shoes at the age of fourteen, and attempted a criminal assault in an alley within five yards of a constable on his beat.

  “We didn’t rejoice at the actual event, of course: that was as nasty and depressing as these things always are. But it did enable us to arrest the man and to search his rooms. There, in due course, we came on a letter addressed to him and typewritten in code; and it wasn’t exactly difficult to deduce that this letter had something to do with the operations of the gang.

  “As you know, we’ve got a biggish Cipher Department here on the premises; and you’re aware, too, that complex ciphers—such as this one obviously was—are dealt with by quite elaborate team-work, helped out by machines. That’s as it should be, of course—but at the same time it tends to be rather a slow business: method, as opposed to intuition, always is slow. On the off-chance, then, of getting results more rapidly, I gave a copy of the cryptogram to Colonel Browley, and——”

  “Browley?” Fen interrupted. “You mean the man who ran the Cipher Department of M.I.5 during the war?”

  “That’s him. He retired in 1946 and went to live in Putney, where he’s been spending most of his time on botany and scientific gardening and stuff like that. But we still used him as a consultant expert from time to time, because there’s no doubt that he had a real flair for codes, and could sometimes solve them by a sort of inspired guess-work.”

  Fen nodded. “Putney,” he said. “Direct Tube-line to Westminster—and that was about where I picked him up.”

  “Oh yes: it was Browley who was murdered, unhappily. And having got that far, you’ll easily see why.”

  “You mean that he’d succeeded in decoding this letter; and that the letter was so important to the gang that they had to silence him and steal his report.”

  “Exactly.… I can’t say”—here Humbleby wriggled uncomfortably—“I can’t say that any of us liked Browley very much. He was one of those men who somehow contrive to be fussy and careless at one and the same time—an exhausting combination—and latterly his mind had been going to seed rather: he was getting on for seventy, you see, though admittedly he didn’t look it.… Well anyway, to get back to the point, Browley rang me up yesterday afternoon about this letter. I was out, as it happened; so he just mentioned his success and told the constable who answered
the phone that he’d be coming here with his report during the evening—by which time I myself would be back. I’d warned him, you see, that the report was to be delivered to me and to me only.”

  There was a brief silence; then:

  “Oh,” said Fen, in a particular tone of voice.

  “So that when the constable offered to have it collected from Putney, Browley said that he had to come in to Town in any case, on some private errand or other … with the result you witnessed. From what we knew of this gang, Mocatelli was by far the likeliest man to have done the job. So we picked him up, and you and the Ayres woman have now identified him as the murderer, and that’s that.”

  “The sedan,” said Fen, “was waiting for Browley—not following him. It was known that he was coming.”

  And reluctantly Humbleby inclined his head. “Oh yes,” he said, “there’s a leak all right. There’s a leak somewhere in this Department. That’s half the reason why Mocatelli and his merry men have been getting away with it so easily—though since I first suspected a leak, some weeks ago, I’ve been keeping the more important information about the gang unobtrusively to myself; I imagine that if I hadn’t done that, we’d hardly have found Mocatelli at home when we went to call on him last night.… Well, there it is: not a nice situation. Rare, thank God—miraculously so, when you compare our salaries with what a well-heeled crook can afford to offer—but very bad when it does happen.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m seeing the Assistant Commissioner about it in five minutes’ time. If you’d like to wait till I get finished, we can have lunch together.”

  Fen assented. “And you’ve no notion,” he added, “about what was in the stolen report? You didn’t find any rough notes, for instance, in Browley’s house?”