Beware of the Trains

by Edmund Crispin

  This latter circumstance looked like presenting a difficulty, in that Blanche Binney, throttled shortly after lunch one May day on her own sitting-room hearth-rug, was clearly yet another instance of that favourite species of English homicide, the crime passionnel: and there were so many males in Lampound, married and unmarried, young and old, overt and secretive, who might have resented the catholicity of Blanche’s affections, that the field of suspects seemed at first to be formidably large. Luckily, there were contributory factors which narrowed it drastically, chief of them the Clue of the Ring. Once, and once only, Blanche had got herself engaged—to Harry Levitt, who lived alone in an old house out on the Twelford road, subsisting on inexplicit ‘independent means’; he had naturally given her a ring—an expensive platinum one with diamonds encircling a large dark ruby; and she had not, when the engagement was broken off, returned it to him. Latterly, indeed, she would have been unable to return it even if she had wished to do so, for her sins had been rewarded with a sudden abnormal growth of flesh, and the ring was no longer, at the time of her death, capable of being removed except with the aid of a file.

  Herein lay Inspector Copperfield’s clue: for the hand which bore the ring had been hacked off, very horribly, after Blanche’s death, and taken away by the murderer—and who more likely to want the ring than Herry Levitt, whose property it morally was? Moreover, Levitt had been observed by several witnesses lurking near Blanche’s house at about the time of the murder, and the only business he was likely to have in that particular neighbourhood was with her. Nevertheless, Inspector Copperfield was not the man to act prematurely; enjoining’ silence on his witnesses (since experience had taught him that publicity assists the criminal more often than the police) he set forth to trace Levitt’s movements during the day, so far as possible, before interviewing him. And thus it was that Barney Cooper came into the affair.

  There are plenty of would-be amateur detectives in the land; but to few is it given, as it was given to Barney, to provide the authorities with conclusive proof of guilt in a murder case. The thing came about by accident rather than by expertise, for Barney was a day-dreamer, not a serious criminologist; but this was one instance where a day-dreamer rather than a serious criminologist was what the police required. For the rest, Barney was a small brown hen-pecked man, incurably doggish, incurably absent-minded; liked by his colleagues, tolerated by his superiors, given to mildly boastful pontificating on the unsolved crimes in the newspapers; one of those average people whom you never notice, who leave no perceptible hiatus even when they die or disappear. All ignorant of his exalted destiny, he arrived back at the bus-station terminus in the High Street, after the first trip of the afternoon shift on Route 18, punctually at three forty-seven. And thus was initiated the melodramatic train of events which was to end three months later in the hangman’s shed.

  Lampound would not be Lampound if there were anything in the least notable about its bus-station; and in fact you may find the pattern reduplicated in a hundred other places concrete façade with gilt letters, a tall archway into which red double-decker buses lurch like drunken elephants, the boom of voices under a glass roof, a cheerless waiting-room, an incompetent enquiry-office, and an administrative department housed in shrunken square boxes of rooms overlooking the yard. It was in one of these—the Superintendent’s—that Inspector Copperfield was awaiting the arrival of Number 18. And Barney had scarcely set foot on the ground, and was still groping in his pocket for the apparatus on which he rolled himself damp, sprouting cigarettes, when a fellow-Conductor named Crittall hailed him.

  “Hi, Barney!” called Crittall. “You’re wanted. Inspector wants to talk to you.”

  “Copperfield?” Barney stared. “What the devil for?”

  “Dunno. But ’e’s waiting in the office now. You’d better ’ave a lawyer with you, ’adn’t you?”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Barney, disgruntled, and made for the Superintendent’s room—in which, now that he came to look, the massive blue-clad form of Copperfield was just visible behind the rather grimy window.

  The Inspector was affable, however, thereby allaying Barney’s vague qualms, and as soon as the Superintendent had taken himself off, in an almost overwhelming aura of discretion, they got down to business. Lord, yes, said Barney, he knew Harry Levitt all right: who didn’t? And what about him, anyway? Not got himself into trouble, had he?—not that Barney’d die of surprise if he had, he having said all along that Levitt——

  Copperfield cut this rigmarole short by asking, with considerable abruptness, the question he had come to ask. But Barney’s reply was disappointing. It was on his bus, which did the Twelford trip, that Harry Levitt would probably have ridden if he had returned to his house immediately after the murder. Only unfortunately he had not ridden on it, not that day anyway. And with that the interview might have ended, but for the fact that the Inspector, who had long been aware of Barney’s armchair-detective ambitions and who rather liked the little man, unbent so far as to offer a concise account of what had occurred; the consequence of which was that Barney went on to operate the remainder of his shift in a haze of criminological speculation which he interrupted only in order to stare ferociously whenever the bus passed Levitt’s house.

  His meditations were not fruitful, however, until the evening; when, having eaten his supper—liver, a dish which his wife knew him to detest—and being on the way to the local, he encountered the Inspector again, this time outside the police-station, and ventured, greatly daring, to ask if there were any developments. There were, it transpired—but exclusively of a negative sort.

  “You keep all this under your hat, mind,” said the Inspector. “I didn’t ought to be saying anything about it, not rightly, but still, seeing as it’s a hobby of yours.… What Levitt says to account for being near Blanche’s house is that he went there to ask for the ring back for the umpteenth time, and then at the last moment thought better of it. That’s possible, I suppose, but it sounds a bit thin to me.”

  “M’well,” said Barney judicially, “you never quite know, do you? We all of us behave a bit queer at times.… No fingerprints, I suppose?”

  “None that are any good, not even on the coal-axe that did the chopping.”

  Barney nodded. “Premeditation,” he observed. “You don’t wear gloves indoors, do you, not unless you’ve got a good reason for it.… I’m taking it the axe and so forth hadn’t been wiped.”

  “Then you’re taking it wrong,” said Copperfield goodhumouredly. “Because they had. No, it was done on the spur of the moment, if you ask me, in a sudden passion. And Harry Levitt——”

  “Levitt’s got a temper all right,” agreed Barney. “Still, so’s others.”

  “Always investigate the obvious first,” said Copperfield didactically, “and you can’t go far wrong. Which is what I’ve been doing. For instance, I got a search warrant for Levitt’s house and garden—almost the first thing I did, that was.”

  “Any luck?” asked Barney eagerly.

  But Copperfield shook his head. “Nope. Not a sign of the hand or the ring.”

  “Ah,” said Barney. “No secret panels, eh?”

  “No secret panels. And now I must be off.” The Inspector squared his shoulders in a policemanly manner. “Mind you don’t say nothing, Barney, not to anyone. We haven’t got enough evidence yet, not for an arrest, and in the meantime there’s such a thing as slander to reckon with.… We’ll be searching the house again tomorrow, and I’ll let you know if anything runs up. But remember—mum’s the word.” He went, and Barney very thoughtfully resumed his interrupted progress towards The Pheasant.

  ‘No secret panels.…’ He had spoken facetiously, without thinking, but it now occurred to him, as he drank his evening pint, that he might have spoken truer than he knew. For Barney’s grandfather had been a builder; had built, among others, the house Harry Levitt occupied; and had made something of a speciality of secret hiding-places—in part because, prior to the invent
ion of modern safes, such caches had been genuinely useful, and in part because of a naturally rather infantile mind Barney was unable, off-hand, to remember if any such theatrical feature was incorporated in ‘The Elms’, where Harry Levitt lived; but at least it was obvious, from what the Inspector had said, that the police had overlooked the possibility of such a thing, while at the same time there was a good chance that Levitt, after ten years’ residence, had discovered it, if indeed it existed.

  That evening Barney left The Pheasant earlier than usual. The bar was humming with the news of the murder, and more than once he was requested, half-frivolously and half in earnest, to give his opinion of it; but he waved these demands aside with so obviously genuine an air of abstraction that his silence created a greater impression than any amount of talking could have done. It impressed his wife, even, when eventually he got home. Where Barney was concerned she was not normally at all an impressionable person, but on this particular evening there was, as she said later, Something About Him, and she remained as nearly mute as she was capable of being while she watched him climb the stairs to the attic.

  Now, it was one of Mrs. Cooper’s recurrent grievances that the house was too large for them; and in this matter she had fairly good reason to complain. Barney, however, clung to his home, in spite of the inordinate rates he was obliged to pay, from an obscure sense of family piety which he would have found it difficult to justify or explain but which was none the less one of the very few things he was ever obstinate about. His grandfather had built the house, he said, his grandfather had built it. And that—he seemed to feel—was explanation enough. His grandfather had not as a matter of fact built the house very well; but he had certainly built it big. And the attic being correspondingly sizeable, not to mention crammed with the accumulated rubbish of three generations, it took Barney almost half an hour to locate his forebear’s business papers, and another twenty minutes to disinter from among them the faded, yellowing plans of ‘The Elms’. The search proved well worth while, however, for it turned out that ‘The Elms’ really did possess a cache. The rosette mouldings to right and left of the study fireplace were movable, it seemed; turn one clockwise, and the other anti-clockwise, and you released an iron centre-panel with a cavity behind it. Just the thing, Barney reflected, if you wanted to hide an amputated hand. And that being so.…

  By the time he got downstairs again his wife had made a full recovery from her pristine awe of him, and the news that he was proposing to leave the house once more was ill received. It is interesting to speculate about what would have happened if her indignation had prevailed. But it did not prevail: for once Barney was too excited to reckon the domestic consequences of argument and disobedience, and he had slammed out of the front door before Mrs. Cooper had got really into her stride. Outside, his excitement waned slightly. Harry Levitt was notoriously a tough customer, and to burgle his house with him in it would be, for little Barney, a very risky undertaking indeed. Luck was with him, however: a neighbour whom he met outside the gate told him that Levitt had just been brought in to the police-station for further questioning. Barney retraced his steps and fetched his bicycle. Copperfield wanted evidence, did he? Well, he, Barney Cooper, would see to it that he got it.

  Some forty minutes later, standing before the fireplace in the left front ground-floor room of “The Elms’, with only a pocket-torch for illumination, he felt rather less confident. For one thing, he was still slightly breathless after his hectic ride. For another, it had turned unexpectedly chilly, with an unseasonable wind which blustered distressingly at the window through which he had entered. For a third, there was a dog howling somewhere close at hand; a dog whose voice rose and fell on the night air with a monotonous persistence which became, after a few minutes, extremely trying… Levitt’s dog? There hadn’t been any barking, but that was no guide. And whatever noises there might be outside the house, inside, by an irony, it was much too quiet for comfort. Funny, the atmosphere of an empty house. Funny how——

  A switch clicked and the light went on. Shotgun in hand, Harry Levitt stood in the open doorway.

  He was a big man, and in middle age he had lost none of his native vigour. The light shone harshly on his pitted, weatherbeaten face, and his small eyes were pitiless. From Barney, immovable with fright, his gaze shifted slowly to the fireplace. Then, without speaking, he crossed the room, twisted the rosettes and opened the iron panel. Groping inside, he produced the stiff, bloated hand of a woman, with the end of one finger cut away.

  “So you thought you’d keep the ring, did you?” he said. “You thought the hand would incriminate me enough without it. What a fool. What a greedy fool. What a stupid murdering little bastard.”

  From behind the curtains in the corner Inspector Copperfield emerged. He said: “Barney Cooper, you’re under arrest for the murder of Blanche Binney. And it’s my duty to warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence at your trial.”

  But Barney said nothing. He had fainted.

  “Yes,” said the Inspector, when a Sergeant and a Constable had at last taken Barney away: “I’m sorry about all that pantomime of pulling you in for questioning. The only thing was, I was afraid he’d never dare come here unless he thought you were out of the way. I’d planted the idea earlier on this evening, see, by telling him that we hadn’t got enough evidence against you, and that we were going to search the house a second time. And when he talked about secret panels, jokinglike, of course I didn’t mention this one you’d already showed us of your own accord. So now he’s cooked his own goose by trying to frame you: done to a turn.”

  Levitt grinned, and spat into the fireplace.

  “It’s a laugh, isn’t it,” he said, “me helping the cops out, at my time of life. I’ve been inside once or twice—as you’ll know—and you don’t forget about that sort of thing in a hurry. But murder’s something different. I’m not saying that bitch didn’t deserve it, mind. But just the same, she was the only girl ever took me seriously, and I owe her something for that, even if she did double-cross me when it came to the point.… Ah well. That’s all over and done with now. Did he kill her for the ring, d’you think? It wasn’t worth all that much.”

  “I doubt it. Taking the ring was an afterthought, if you ask me. No, jealousy’s why he killed her. He kept his affair with her pretty secret——”

  “Affair!” Levitt interrupted. Blanche! That shrimp!” He spat again, contemptuously.

  “Ah. That shrimp, yes. But you know what sort of a home life he had.…”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t want to.” Suddenly Levitt guffawed. “Barney Cooper in bed with Blanche—my God, what a thought! But then, Blanche never did have any taste.… You’ve got your evidence he was fooling around with her?”

  Copperfield nodded. “You can’t ever hide that sort of thing from anyone as is really looking for it, so I didn ’t have toomuch of a job digging it all up.”

  “There’s one thing I don’t see, though,” said Levitt. “And that is, what put you on to him in the first place. After all, half the men in Lampound have mucked about with Blanche one time or another. So how did you come to suspect him?”

  “Just a bit of luck,” said Inspector Copperfield with unconvincing modesty. He collected his cap, finished the beer Levitt had offered him, and stood up; in his mind’s eye he was already conscientiously substituting when I got there for the more natural-seeming on proceeding to the scene of the occurrence in the wording of the report which he must write when he arrived back in town.… “Just a bit of luck,” he repeated. “A lapsus lingui, as you might say—not but what the best authorities regard it as pedantic to use foreign words and phrases when an English equivalent is available. However … Point is, I called in at the bus-station this afternoon, see, so as to find out if you’d been on Barney’s bus. So I’m up there in the office, and I hear one of his pals shout to him, ’Hi, Barney!’ this chap says, ’Inspector wants to talk to you.’ And ’Copperfield?�
�� says Barney, straight off….”

  The Inspector moved towards the door. “Well, I ask you. A busman, chap who has officious blokes in uniform looking at his passengers’ tickets every day of his life, saying a thing like that. ‘Barney’s expecting me,’ I said to myself. ‘He’s got something on his mind.…’

  “And he had.”

  Deadlock

  Captain vanderloor had never understood the English licensing laws, and on the evening in question he came rattling at the bar door of the Land of Promise at a quarter past six, quite unaware that since his previous visit we had changed to the summer hours. He got his drink, however (as always, it was gin and bitters) because my father sent me to see who it was, and of course I took the Captain round to the back door and my father served him in the kitchen. That often happened—at any rate, with people my father approved of. Strictly speaking, it was against the law, but the Hartford police hardly ever visited us at the Basin, and the local folk, and one or two of the yachtsmen, had been used to drinking in the kitchen for so long now that we had all more or less forgotten there was anything wrong about it.