If these questions were other than rhetorical, Fen gave no sign of recognising the fact. “As a matter of interest,” he said, “how will Hilary’s story stand up in court?”
“Rather well, I should imagine. After all, James Crandall did have a very good motive for killing Eve, and as long as a jury can be induced to believe that he tried to do so, Hilary will never be censured for shooting him. Yes, she’ll get away with it all right. But I’m still not quite satisfied.”
“And Eve,” said Fen. “What became of her?”
“She was taken to hospital and is still there; but she’s pretty well recovered by now. I got her statement about what happened up to the moment the rifle bullet knocked her out, this morning.…” Humbleby paused hopefully. “Well?” he said. “Any ideas?”
But for once Fen could only shake his head. The rain, falling heavily now, drummed against the window, and it had grown so dark that Humbleby leaned forward and switched on the desk-lamp. Lightning filled the room, and Humbleby had counted aloud up to four before the thunder came.
“The storm’s going away,” he said absently. “Well, well, I suppose there’s nothing for it except——”
And then he checked himself, for Fen was staring at him with the eyes of a man half blinded by unaccustomed sunlight. “And what the devil,” said Humbleby, startled, “are you——”
He got no further. “The girl’s statement,” said Fen abruptly. “Is there a copy of it I could look at?”
“Eve’s statement, you mean.” Humbleby sought for it in the folder and passed it across the desk. “Yes, here it is. But why——”
“Here’s what I wanted.” Fen had turned at once to the final page. “Listen to this. I remember moving to one side as I heard the shot; then straight away everything went black.’”
“Well? What aboutit?”
Fen tapped the papers with a long forefinger. “Do you consider this girl’s story trustworthy?”
“Yes, I most certainly do. Why shouldn’t it be? She didn’t kill James Crandall, if that’s what you’re getting at. Quite apart from the fact that she had no motive, it’d have been a physical impossibility.”
“All right, all right. But the point is, she’s not likely to have imagined any of this?”
“No. She’s not the sort.”
“Excellent. And now, two questions—no, sorry, three. First, is it certain that there weren’t more than two shots fired?”
“Absolutely. Philip and Hilary and the postman and Mrs. Jordan are all agreed about that.”
“Good. And, secondly, is it certain that the rifle bullet knocked Eve out the moment it touched her?”
“Good Lord, yes. It’d be like a superhuman blow with a tiny hammer. There are cases on record——”
“Bless you, Humbleby, how didactic you’re getting.… And now here’s my final question: is it certain that Hilary’s shot killed James Crandall instantaneously?”
“My dear chap, his brain was puloed. Of course it’s certain.”
Fen relaxed with a little sigh. “Then providing Eve’s a good witness,” he murmured, “there’s a fair chance of getting Philip and Hilary Bowyer hanged. Their motive for wanting Eve and James dead is so overwhelming that they’ll be at a disadvantage from the start, and that one little scrap of evidence ought to tip the scales against them.”
Humbleby groaned. “God give me patience,” he said meekly. “What little scrap of evidence? You mean that in fact they did arrange it all the way I suggested?”
“Just that. I’ve no doubt they’d been contemplating something of the sort for some time past, but of course the scheme they eventually adopted, depending as it did on Eve’s settling in the deck-chair, must have been improvisation. One of them—I presume Hilary—must have fetched the guns from the house while the other got hold of James; and they could take James to the coppice on the pretext of showing him—well, perhaps rabbit-snares: that would account for their bringing a rifle, and James doesn’t sound to me the sort of person who’d know enough about guns to realise the incongruity of a Mannlicher express model in the context of rabbits. On the other hand——”
“These are happy speculations,” said Humbleby with restraint. “But I have the idea that a moment ago you mentioned evidence. If it wouldn’t put you to too much trouble——”
“Evidence!” said Fen affably. “Yes, I was almost forgetting that. The evidence of the storm—or to be more accurate, of the storm and yourself in combination. Like so many people, you counted out the interval between the lightning flash and the thunder. Why? Because light travels faster than sound, and by gauging the interval you can gauge how far away the storm is. But there are other things, as well as light, which travel faster than sound; and one of them, as you well know, is a bullet fired from an express rifle.
“On a hot day, sound travels at about 1,150 feet per second; but on any sort of day, over a distance of three hundred yards, a bullet from a Mannlicher rifle travels nearly three times as fast, at an average speed of about 3,000 feet per second. Therefore the shot Eve heard was not the rifle-shot at all—she couldn’t have heard that, since the bullet grazed her, and knocked her out, before the report of the rifle could reach her ears. But she did hear a shot—and since there were admittedly only two shots fired, the report she heard must have been the report of the automatic which killed James. In other words, the report of the automatic preceded the report of the rifle; which means that James was dead before the rifle was fired; which means, in turn, that it certainly wasn’t he who fired it.”
“Well, I’m damned,” said Humbleby. “What it amounts to, then, is that the Bowyers fired their two shots in the wrong order. If Eve had been killed, as they intended, that wouldn’t have mattered. But as it is——” He reached for the telephone.
“Will you be able,” Fen asked, “to get a verdict of Guilty on that evidence?”
“I think so, yes. With any luck we shall hang them.” Humbleby put the receiver to his ear. “Charge Room, please.… But it’s a pity they should have had all that trouble for nothing.”
“For nothing?”
“Yes. Mrs. Jordan took the telephone message, but there was no one about to pass it on to. It was from the nursinghome, of course.… You see, Maurice Crandall died—leaving all his money to Eve, whose will was decidedly not in the Bowyers’ favour—while they were actually carrying him out to the ambulance: that is, a comfortable two hours before the shooting started. Poor dears—(yes, Betts, you can send them up now)—they never had a chance.”
A Pot of Paint
The house itself was unremarkable—a small, trim brick villa built at a moderate cost some time between the wars. What was noticeable about it was its relative isolation: you expected a row of near-replicas on either side, but there were only fields, a coppice and a disused barn. “It couldn’t hardly have happened, else,” said Inspector Bledloe uninspiredly. “Not in broad daylight, anyhow.” He pushed the gate open, and with Fen at his heels entered the tidy front garden. “This,” he added laboriously, pointing, “is the scene of the occurrence.”
Fen examined the spot with the attentiveness which seemed to be required of him. There was a fence; there were bushes; there was a sundial in a circle of paving; there were the impedimenta with which the luckless housekeeper had been occupied when he was struck down—brushes, turpentine, and a messy tin, not large, of waterproof paint. But the assault and presumed robbery of two hours before had left no traces on the hard earth, not even blood. It was the flat of the spade that had knocked Church out, Fen supposed, and not the edge: lucky for him.
“You can see he didn’t have a chance to get much of his painting done.” Bledloe indicated the fence, on which the undried area was certainly diminutive, and the almost brim-full paint-tin; he nudged the tin illustratively with the toe of his boot, and a fragmentary green ellipse became visible on the pavingstone where it had rested. “So the way I work it out is this. We know it was twenty past three when he fetched the pain
t from the scullery——”
“That’s the evidence of the housekeeper, is it?”
“The evidence of the housekeeper and her lady-friend she was gossiping with. Which means—judging from the amount of painting he got done—that he must have been attacked round about half past. He wasn’t actually found, of course, till after four.”
Fen nodded. “Yes, I’d been meaning to ask you about that. Was it the housekeeper who found him?”
“No. It was a family party out for a walk.” Bledloe grimaced. “Five of them, including kids, so you needn’t waste your energy suspecting them. One of the kids saw his shoe sticking out from behind a bush, that’s the way it was. And then, as to the nephew——”
“Nephew?” said Fen rather testily. “This is the first time you’ve mentioned any nephew. Church’s nephew, you mean?”
“Yes. Didn’t I tell you about him? Merrick, his name is—George Merrick. He came here soon after lunch to visit Church, and——”
“And left when?”
“Ah. That’s one of the things I’m not sure of. You see, the housekeeper and her lady-friend, they were out in the back garden till a quarter past three, so they didn’t hear him go. The only thing was, they naturally assumed he’d left because of Church fetching that paint from the scullery at twenty past, just after they’d come back in to make a cup of tea.”
“Yes, I see. The two women didn’t hear Church talking to anyone, then?”
“No. They heard the front door open and shut when he came out here with his paint, and that was all.”
“Is there any reason for suspecting Merrick?”
Bledloe hesitated. “Not what you’d call a reason” he said cautiously. “But just the same, I wouldn’t put it past him: he’s the sort of relative a man’s better without, if you ask me—a waster, and worse. But if it was him, Church is going to be badly upset about it. He’s the son of a sister of Church’s who died years ago, and I’ve heard that when she was dying she asked Church to look after him after she was gone. Which he’s done, and not got much thanks for it, either.… Well. If there’s nothing more you want to look at here, we’ll go and find out if he’s fit to talk yet.”
Fen assented. “And it’ll be helpful,” he observed as they went on up the path towards the front door, “to know if he really has been robbed.”
“Not much doubt about that.” Bledloe spoke with a certain gloomy relish. “Most weekends he brings diamonds and so forth back here from his shop in London, so as to look them over.… Risky, of course, but he’s pretty careful with them—carries them on him during the daytime, and the house is locked up nice and tight at nights. That front door, now—that’s got three bolts on it, and a chain, and two Yale locks, and he won’t even have those catches on the locks that hold them open, because he says they get fixed like that and forgotten.… Well, you see what I mean: he does take precautions.”
This information Fen was able to confirm when the door in question was opened to them by the constable on duty. Behind the constable, in a state of considerable agitation, was a thin, worn-looking elderly woman—Mrs. Ryan, the housekeeper; and at the foot of the staircase lurked a stoutish lady, also elderly but with an air of settled misanthropy, who was presumably Mrs. Ryan’s so far unlabelled visitor. The hall in which they stood appeared at a first inspection to be commonplace enough, but Fen none the less prowled conscientiously about it while Bledloe conferred with the constable, and this thoroughness was presently rewarded by an interesting, though admittedly negative, discovery. Interrupting the constable, who had at last succeeded, with great prolixity, in conveying the news that Church was better and that the doctor had authorised a brief interview, Fen picked up a newspaper which was lying on the table beside the front door, handed it to Bledloe, and said:
“Tell me if you see anything unusual about that.”
The interruption took Bledloe sufficiently unawares to make him obey Fen’s request before enquiring its motive. “No, I don’t,” he answered, examining the paper somewhat bemusedly. “Except that it’s several days old, there’s nothing unusual about it that I can make out. Why?”
Fen turned to Mrs. Ryan. “Was Mr. Church keeping this paper for any particular reason?” he asked.
“Oh no, sir.” Mrs. Ryan shook her head vigorously. “It was me as left it there, when I was laying the fires this morning.”
“I see. And it was just this one paper you left? No others?”
“No, sir. Just the one. But——”
“Thank you,” said Fen; and glanced round him. “The house is very beautifully looked after, Mrs. Ryan.”
“It ’as to be,” Mrs. Ryan replied with some candour. “Very ’ouse-proud, the master is. More like a woman, as far as that goes.”
“With a man fussy like that,” said the stoutish lady with sudden malevolence, making her sole recorded independent contribution to the matter, “I’m sorry for his wife, and I don’t care who hears me say it.” Upon which doubtfully relevant pronouncement, Bledloe, who by now was eyeing Fen with considerable mistrust, decided that the time had come to make a move upstairs.
They found the injured man propped up against pillows with his head in a bandage. He was perhaps fifty—small, slender, large-eyed and at the moment unnaturally pale. “He’s had a lucky escape,” said the doctor, in the slightly petulant tones of one to whom an interesting fatality has been denied. “Very lucky indeed. No concussion and no amnesia. But you’re not to tire him out, mind. Ten minutes—no more. I’ll wait downstairs.” He took himself off.
Though Church was obviously still suffering a good deal of pain, he was game enough, and quite lucid. His story did not, however, incriminate his nephew George Merrick, who had left, he said, at about ten or a quarter past three. Questioned as to the reason for the visit, Church freely admitted that Merrick had been trying to borrow money. “Not for the first time, either,” he added wryly. “George suffered from the delusion that jewellers are necessarily rich, because of the value of their stock. As if that had anything to do with it! Anyway, this time I couldn’t afford to help him. For his mother’s sake I’d have liked to, but it was out of the question. I offered him a smaller amount than what he was asking for, but that didn’t suit his lordship, and so off he went. Then after he’d left I fetched my paint and trotted out to the garden to get on with painting the fence, and I hadn’t done more than a couple of inches before——”
“One moment, Mr. Church,” Fen interposed; at which Bledloe, balked of his climax, momentarily glowered at him. “You say you fetched your paint. But was the other stuff—brushes and so forth—already out there?”
Church was surprised. “Yes,” he said. “I took it out there immediately after lunch, and would have fetched the paint at the same time if George’s arrival hadn’t interrupted me. But I don’t quite see——”
“And you have in fact been robbed?”
“Certainly I have.” Church frowned. “Do you mean to say you didn’t—— No, sorry: I’m being stupid. Of course you couldn’t possibly know. Anyway, I was robbed. At the time I was hit I had a bag of diamonds worth, oh, close on two thousand in my waistcoat pocket. And they aren’t there now.”
Bledloe cleared his throat. “But the point is, sir, did you see who hit you?”
“For a split second, yes. I heard him moving behind me, and I swung round just in time to get a glimpse of him.”
“It wasn’t your nephew, then?”
“George?” Church snorted contemptuously. “Good God, no! I don’t hold much stock in George’s morals, but he hasn’t got the guts to go round knocking people out. No, this man——”
There followed an indeterminate description which patently conveyed as little to Bledloe as it did to Fen. “And that’s all you can tell us, sir?” said Bledloe, disappointed.
“I’m afraid so. It’s vague, I know, but you must remember that I didn’t have a chance to get a proper look.”
“Tell me, Mr. Church”—Fen had crossed the room
and was gazing rather vacantly out of the window—“are you going to claim insurance on the stolen jewels?”
Church stared at him. “Look here,” he said after a moment’s pause, “who the devil are you? I don’t remember that I’ve ever——”
“A colleague, sir,” said Bledloe smoothly. “And if you wouldn’t mind answering his question …”
“Well, damn it, of course I’m going to claim. I can’t afford to drop a small fortune like that.” Church’s expressior hardened. “If you’re implying that I hid the diamonds, and then knocked myself out, so as to——”
“No,” said Fen with emphasis. “The one discrepancy in the evidence won’t fit that explanation, at all. But there’s another explanation it certainly will fit, so I think you’d better tell us the truth. Being attacked and robbed is (up to a point) your own business, and if only that had been involved, I’d have kept quiet. But claiming insurance money and at the same time lying in such a way as to hinder recovery of the jewels is another matter. We know it was Merrick who attacked you—attacked you in the virtual certainty that you’d do what you have done—namely, cover up for him for his mother’s sake and so give him time to leave the country. And these things being thus——”
“Oh, so I’m lying, am I?” Church regarded Fen with curiosity, but not with any special perturbation. “And just what makes you imagine that?”
“I’ll tell you,” said Fen. And did.
There was a silence when he had finished; then Church nodded abruptly. “Well, I’ve done what I could,” he said. “And you’re quite right, of course. George didn’t go at ten past three—in spite of the fact that I’d told him I couldn’t help him. He followed me into the garden, still arguing, and then when my back was turned——” Church shrugged. “Well, you know the rest.”
Later, over beer in the parlour of The Three Tuns, Bledloe sighed dismissively and said: “So that’s settled. But I still don’t understand how you could be sure.”
Beware of the Trains Page 10
