Beware of the Trains

by Edmund Crispin

  “The next thing, obviously, was to discover which of our three suspects had opportunity to drop atropine into Bolsover’s tankard. And for our sins, we found that they’d all had opportunity. Taking them one by one:

  “Gillian could have poisoned the beer at almost any stage in the evening: when Bolsover wasn’t actually drinking, his tankard stood on the table next to her glass. So at some moment when attention was distracted in another direction, she could have done it.

  “The same consideration applies to Laurie—except that he was sitting further away from the tankard than Gillian was. On the other hand, his half-witted imitations apparently involved his getting up and striding about and waving his hands—on several occasions waving them immediately above Bolsover’s beer.

  “Young Fred had one chance, and one only, the moment when the beer was handed across for him to taste. But of course, everyone was watching him closely—they were waiting to see what his reaction would be—and moreover, Laurie, Gillian and Lucy Gamble are all agreed that his left hand was stuck firmly in his coat pocket from before he received the tankard till after he handed it back, while with his right hand, naturally, he was holding the thing. And that, I’m afraid, lets him out—the others are unanimous that he wasn’t anywhere near the tankard on any other occasion. It seems that he took only the tiniest sip, so if the atropine was already in the beer it wouldn’t have harmed him. No lead there.”

  Fen considered. “He couldn’t,” he suggested, “have been holding the poison in his mouth? And have spat it into the tankard while pretending to drink?”

  “No, he couldn’t. Not only was he speaking, immediately before he put the tankard to his lips; he was speaking with a pipe in his mouth—and it’s quite impossible to do that and keep liquid under your tongue at the same time. He’s out of it, I’m sorry to say.

  “And that’s really all. Three suspects, all of them with motive—the will—all of them with access to atropine (and if either Gillian or Fred did the murder, she or he obviously chose atropine because that was the only poison to which Laurie had access), and all of them with more or less of opportunity. No container discoverable on them, or in the room; no means by which they could possibly have rid themselves of such a container—unless you count swallowing it, which would have been so dangerous that it’s out of the question. No collusion—I’m as sure of that as one can be of anything.… So how in heaven’s name was it done?”

  “Three questions,” said Fen pensively. “Or rather, three statements, which you can confirm or deny. The watch-glass you found was a lady’s watch-glass—that’s to say a small one.”

  “Yes, it was. But——”

  “Also, it was round—not oval or octagonal or rectangular or any other of the possible shapes.”

  “Yes. And finally?”

  “Finally, the pipe Fred Bolsover was smoking was a brandnew one.”

  Humbleby nodded. “It was. But I still don’t see——”

  “Oh, come…. You told me that just before he received his uncle’s tankard, Fred Bolsover was talking with a pipe in his mouth. All right; but you don’t drink with a pipe in your mouth. So the question is, what did he do with it when he removed it? He didn’t hold it in his left hand—that was in his pocket. He may have put it down somewhere—you’ll have to enquire about that. But my bet is that he held both tankard and pipe in his right hand while he tasted the beer. You can go into any pub, any time, and see how it’s done. The bowl of the pipe nestles between thumb and forefinger; the stem projects to the left; the four fingers grip the handle of the tankard. And thus the mouthpiece of the pipe, a very good natural dropper, overhangs the edge of the tankard, and by dipping it, as you tilt the tankard.…

  “Yes. Take a new pipe—it must be new, otherwise the muck inside it will discolour the colourless atropine and betray its presence in the beer—and make sure that it’s a pipe the diameter of whose bowl decreases gradually from top to bottom. Buy a round watch-glass to fit the bowl about halfway down. Seal it in position with a drop or two of liquid rubber. Remove the pipe’s mouthpiece. Pour in atropine to fill the stem and the part of the bowl under the watch-glass. Keeping the pipe bowl-downwards, replace the mouthpiece and fill the bowl, above the watch-glass, with partly-burned tobacco for camouflage. Carry the pipe bowl-downwards in a waistcoat pocket. When you’ve used it, in the completely natural-seeming way I’ve described, to poison the beer (and if you can’t contrive, as a teetotaller ripe for conversion, to get Uncle to offer you a taste of his beer, you’re hopeless), poke about in the bowl with one of those metal things pipe-smokers use, thereby smashing the thin glass inside. Knock out glass and tobacco into the fireplace, refill the pipe and smoke it, wait confidently for the police. You will not, of course, have on your person anything that could possibly hold liquid atropine (being a lab.-boy with a scientific bent, you’re aware that analysis can and will distinguish between the liquid and powdered forms), and if either Gillian or Laurie is carrying such a container, so much the worse for them.”

  “Odious young devil.” Humbleby stood up. “You’re obviously right, but to clinch it, I’ll go back now and let our laboratory have that pipe. If it’s been used to hold atropine, there’ll still be traces left.”

  Fen nodded. “Ring me up here, will you?” he said, “and let me know.”

  It was little more than three-quarters of an hour later when the call came through.

  “Quite right,” said Humbleby from New Scotland Yard. “No doubt about it at all. He’s under arrest already.”

  “How old is he, by the way?”

  “Unfortunately only seventeen.”

  “You mean they won’t hang him. A pity. By the time he’s forty, he’ll be let out and able to do it again. Such are the victories of enlightenment. But don’t, for heaven’s sake, tell him it was I who suggested the method to you. Twenty years hence he’ll be so altered I shan’t be able to recognise him—and even in my dotage I hope still to be drinking beer.”

  The Little Room

  “And that door there,” said Fen: “where does that lead to?”

  They had toured the whole house from cellar to attic and were now back in the large, draughty entrance-hall. Startled, Mrs. Danvers peered about her. “Which, the which,” she said incoherently.

  “That one.” Fen pointed. “Of course, if it’s private——”

  “Not at all.” Mrs. Danvers rallied and became brisk again. “I quite imagined I’d shown it you already. But really, there are so many rooms.…” Changing course abruptly, like a small yacht in a high wind, she marched back in the direction indicated. “So very many,” she added on a note of artificial complacency, “that I feel sure that your—your——”

  “My boys,” Fen prompted her, following.

  “That your boys would fit in excellently.” And Mrs. Danvers gave a little nod, for emphasis, as she unbolted the door in question and threw it open. “Yes,” she said brightly, in the tone of one who has as yet no notion what words are to follow. “Yes.… Well, here it is, then. You could use it for—for—well, for a store-room, perhaps.”

  “Ah,” said Fen. But he could distinguish very little, he found, of what was being shown him. “Is there a light, by any chance?”

  “Of course.” She switched it on, revealing a musty square box of an apartment with a boarded floor and all the windows bricked up; there was no furniture in it of any kind. “By fixing shelves,” said Mrs. Danvers, “it would be possible——”

  “Just so.” Fen was already backing away. “Very nice indeed.”

  “Or you might even turn it into a little museum.” A Black Museum, Fen supposed: he sat on the Committee of a Society for the regeneration of delinquent youth, and it was their search for a new Probationary Home which had brought him to this ill-planned mansion. “Ah,” he said again, unimaginatively; but Mrs. Danvers, who was still talking, swamped it. She was a trim elderly woman, well laced in, with greying hair and rather hard features, and she had a good command of
that most devastating of a salesman’s weapons, uninterrupted speech.

  “It was my uncle,” she was saying now, “who had the windows sealed—against burglars, you understand—at the time when he was thinking of putting his very valuable collection of porcelain in here, rather than have it scattered all over the house. In actual fact he never did, put it in here, I mean, because the income-tax people made a quite outrageous claim against him, for years back, and he had to sell most of the collection so as to be able to pay, at least he always said he couldn’t avoid selling it, though I really think it must have been partly pique, because Betty, that was his daughter, inherited investments, really quite substantial investments, when he died, and so there you are, but most schools do have a museum, I believe, butterflies and bits of rock and things, and since that’s what it was originally intended for …”

  “I’ll keep the suggestion in mind.” Fen interposed firmly. “And now I’d better be going, I think. My Committee’s due to meet again in a few days’ time, and the Secretary will write to you.” He started edging towards the front door. “You’ve been very kind indeed, most kind.”

  “And you will remember to tell them that it’s a new house, won’t you?” With a skilful flanking movement, Mrs. Danvers got ahead of him, thereby temporarily cutting off his retreat. “I mean, so many of these huge places are old and falling to bits that the mere size of it may give a wrong impression, but this was built only just before the war, the 1939 war that is, and although I’ve had to keep so many of the rooms shut up it really is in very good condition, no one but the family has lived in it, it’s never been let even, and as to small children and animals, so destructive don’t you think, they just haven’t been allowed inside, not ever, so you see it really has been looked after.”

  Mumbling assent, Fen made a break for it and gained the doorstep. “Very kind,” he said. “Put you to a lot of trouble, I’m afraid.… Other houses being looked at…. Can’t be sure what my Committee will decide.… Let you know as soon as possible.” Emitting other such reassurances and farewells, he fled.

  The house wouldn’t do, of course, he reflected as he turned into the road through the ornate lodge-gates: it was grotesquely inconvenient for almost any purpose. There was one aspect of it which had aroused his curiosity, however, and he remained pensive, weighing and rejecting alternative hypotheses, as he strolled into the little town.… Presently, coming to the Market Square, he halted uncertainly. He had intended to catch the 6.13 bus back to Oxford, and so be in time for dinner in Hall; and it would be inconvenient, from the point of view of eating, if he missed that bus. On the other hand, he was by nature voraciously inquisitive, and the oddity he had observed, though apparently trivial in itself, would remain, he knew, to perplex and irritate him so long as he made no attempt to investigate it. In the end, curiosity triumphed. Retracing his steps, he made his way back to a public-house which he had noticed quite close to the house he had been inspecting.

  Its landlord proved affable; and on learning Fen’s mission in the neighbourhood, became voluntarily informative. “’Ti’n’t the sort of place I’d want to buy,” he confided, breathing heavily with the effort of keeping his massive form adequately supplied with oxygen. “All right for a school, I dessay, but that’s all. What old Ridgeon wanted to build it so big for, I really don’t——”

  “Ridgeon?”

  “Ah. Old chap as collected china and stuff. You’d think he’d had a family of twenty-seven, what with the size of the place, but there was only the one daughter. But ‘’Iggs,’ ’e used to say to me, ’I just can’t abide these little rat-traps of houses. A gentleman,’ ’e’d say, ‘ ’as to ’ave space to move about.’ Well, sir, I ask you, what a line to take, with the servant situation being what it is. It wa’n’t so bad then, mind. ’E started off all right, with three or four. But then there was the war, and by the time that was ’alf over ’e’d only got one left, and ’alf the rooms ’ad ’ad to be shut up. Foolishness, I call it. Arrogance. And that one maid, even she left when ’e died, a couple o’ years ago, and the niece, Mrs. Danvers, ’oo’d come to ’ousekeep for ’im, ’ad to do everything ’erself, and there was more rooms shut up, and it’s small wonder she’s trying to get shot of it.”

  “What about the daughter, though?”

  “Ah, Betty ’elped, o’ course. Only she wasn’t really the practical sort, and then when it came to the tragedy——”

  Fen stiffened slightly. “The tragedy?”

  “Didn’t you never ’ear of that? But I dessay you wouldn’t, being a stranger ’ere. Real shocking, it was.” And here the landlord addressed himself to the bar’s only other occupant, a quiet, well-dressed, middle-aged man who was drinking a double whisky in a corner. “None of us ’ll forget that in a ’urry, Doctor, shall we?”

  “It was atrocious.” The doctor spoke in a low voice, but with unexpected vehemence. “And when you think that there are still a lot of damned vociferous fools who go around saying children oughtn’t to be taught about sex.…” He checked himself, shrugging and smiling; finished his drink and ordered another. “But you’d better not get me on to that subject.”

  “What happened?” Fen asked.

  The doctor studied him, and appeared to decide, by some process of intuition, that the question was prompted by some better motive than mere sensation-seeking.

  “There was this girl, you see,” he said. “This girl Betty—Ridgeon’s daughter, Mrs. Danvers’s cousin. A nice girl. Very pale ginger hair, and brown eyes with it. But nervous—highly strung. About a year after her father died she met a chap called Venables, Maurice Venables, and fell for him in a really big way.”

  “Fair daft about ’im,” confirmed the landlord. “Fair daft about ’im, she was.”

  The doctor grimaced. “To tell you the truth,” he said, “I rather liked Betty myself. But after she met Venables, there just wasn’t a chance for anyone else. He was a good chap, too, I’ve got to hand it to him.…

  “Well, they got engaged, and the wedding was all set for a day last June. And then, on the actual morning of her weddingday, Betty disappeared.”

  Fen’s eyebrows lifted; and if the doctor had been less engrossed in his story, he might have seen an odd look, almost like satisfaction, flicker across the stranger’s face. “Disappeared?” Fen echoed.

  “Vanished. Went. Some time in the very early morning, they thought. She took some cash with her, but they never traced where she went during the fortnight that followed.”

  “But what reason——”

  “Well, she was frightened, it seems—frightened about the physical side of the marriage. Mrs. Danvers knew that, and there were one or two girl-friends who confirmed it. She wasn’t cold, mind you, not that sort at all; just scared.” The doctor’s brow darkened. “Why they don’t teach these girls something about it.… However. Oh, and by the way, I’m sure it wasn’t Venables’s fault. He’s a nice gentle chap. No, it’s just that the girl was both ignorant and highly-strung, and the combination turned out fatal. In spite of being so much in love with him, she funked it at the last moment. Poor kid.…”

  He brooded while Fen ordered fresh drinks for himself and for the landlord. Then, resuming:

  “Anyway, for a whole fortnight she vanished,” he said. “And then, one night, she came back. No one saw her, and she didn’t go to the house. Instead, she seems to have slept in an old barn just outside the town, Abingdon way. But you can imagine what she was feeling. She must have felt she could never face Venables again—though, Lord knows, he’d have forgiven her all right. With him gone, everything was gone. So she got hold of an old kitchen knife somewhere—they never found out where—and cut her throat with it, and that was how they found her.”

  There was a brief silence, broken only by the landlord’s asthmatic wheezing. Then, dismissively, the doctor said:

  “They’d searched for her, of course. It was quite a to-do, I can tell you. Everything ready—cake, reception, parson and all the tri
mmings—and then Mrs. Danvers had to ring up Venables and the police and meet them at the gate and tell them what had happened, and you can imagine how everyone felt. Though that was nothing to what they felt when the body was found….”

  “Who,” Fen demanded abruptly, “was to have given her away?”

  The doctor looked at him in surprise. “Why d’you ask? It was an old friend of her father’s, actually, because the only relative she had living was Mrs. Danvers.”

  “And was he staying at the house?”

  The doctor’s puzzlement visibly grew; but it was the landlord who answered.

  “No, sir,” said the landlord. “‘E was staying ’ere.… Mrs. Danvers,” he added with some gratification, “said ’e’d be more comfortable ’ere than with them, so there was only Mrs. Danvers in the ’ouse when young Betty did ’er bunk.”

  “That was what I was getting at, yes,” said Fen. “Interesting. Has the house ever been let?”

  The landlord shook his head. “Not to my knowledge, sir, never. But why——”

  “And just one other thing.” Fen’s smile robbed the interruption of all offence. “Mrs. Danvers can’t stand small children and dogs, I believe.”

  “That’s so, sir. D’you remember the time you went there with your Alsatian, Doctor, and ’aving to leave ’im tied up outside? In’uman, I call it, but there’s no accounting for some people. O’ course, when old Ridgeon was alive, and before ’e sold ’is collection, it’d have been silly to ’ave dogs and kids rushing about knocking valuable pieces over and smashing ’em. I dessay if old Ridgeon ’ad put all ’is vases and so forth in that room ’e ’ad got ready for ’em, it’d ’ave been all right then. But ’e never did—and anyway, ’e di’n’t like children nor animals, nor Mrs. Danvers don’t, neither.”