‘I see a snag,’ the headmaster interposed. ‘The point you’ve just made implies that x was aware of Somers’ alibi plan – and murderers, from what little I know of them, don’t confide such things to other people if they can possibly avoid it.’
Fen threw his cigarette end into the fire. ‘Agreed,’ he said. ‘I’m sure Somers didn’t confide in anyone. But I’m also sure that x, entering the common room and killing Somers, deduced from the general state of affairs exactly what I did. He may even have come on Somers heating the report forms at the fire – a complete giveaway.’
‘I grant you that, but there’s still a snag. The business of the supposedly broken watch wasn’t in any way essential to Somers’ plan: it was a trimming. So how could x have possibly known that Somers told Wells his watch was broken? – unless, that is, x was either Wells himself or Etherege.’
‘Or unless he happened to be listening outside the common room door,’ Fen amended. ‘That’s what must have happened, in fact, though since Galbraith died without speaking we shall never be certain. I thought of your objections at the time, and it seemed to me that the keyhole hypothesis must be correct – or else that Etherege was x.’
‘Why not Wells?’
‘Because Wells hadn’t any alibi, by his own account. It’s quite pointless to help make it seem that a man hasn’t been killed before five to eleven, and then not give yourself an alibi for five to eleven and onwards. No, from that moment I wiped Wells completely off the list of suspects, which was useful, as I could then safely accept his assertions as true. The watch was pretty conclusive, you know. Our x had obviously broken it in order that Somers’ assertion to Wells might seem to have been true. For if Somers’ watch was found ticking away merrily and showing the right time, the police would wonder why he’d lied; would investigate his doings closely; might well discover the invisible ink hoax. And bang would go x’s delightful alibi.
‘The other facts we turned up in the common room can be summarized briefly; thus –
1. He was shot through the left eye by a .38 revolver, probably silenced, at a distance of about six feet;
2. Unseen access to the building – and, correspondingly, egress from it – was possible by way of the downstairs windows; and
3. Somers had sprained his wrist a week previously.
‘Of these (i) was neutral, non-committal and unenlightening, (ii) confirmed my idea that Somers could have been galloping about the neighbourhood while he was supposed to be in the common room, and (iii) might, I thought, have been of incidental use to him in concocting his alibi plan. Actually – I may as well say this at once – it later proved to be meaningless or at least inessential.
‘This, then, was the position I’d reached by the time we left the common room: that Somers had either killed Love, or had been engaged, or intending to engage, in some illegal activity, between the hours of ten and eleven; that Somers’ murderer would be found to have an alibi from about ten to eleven onwards but probably not for some part of the preceding time and that therefore Wells was not Somers’ murderer, whoever else might be.
‘There are one or two other things which I ought to mention. The formulae for invisible ink are innumerable, but very few of them, as it happens, come out black when appropriately treated – and of course it was black ink Somers was supposed to be using; in fact, the only one I could remember at the time was dilute sulphuric acid. Now, I couldn’t but remember that something had been stolen from a cupboard containing, in Philpotts’ words, “for the most part, acids”. And really, it was no longer possible, in the circumstances, to regard the disappearance of Brenda Boyce as coincidental. I assumed – rashly, perhaps, but not unreasonably – that Somers had pinched sulphuric acid, that Brenda had seen him at it, that he’d tried to scare her into silence, and that subsequently, afraid she’d give him away none the less, he’d carried her off somewhere and killed her. You see, so long as he went on with this alibi scheme – and for reasons which I’ll be coming to he felt he had to have an alibi – she was an appalling danger to him. Let her once say that he’d stolen the vitriol, and the police would wonder why, and the invisible-ink camouflage would go up in smoke, and that would be the end of him. So I still believe I was justified in thinking, until we actually found her, that Brenda Boyce was dead.’
Fen yawned prodigiously.
‘I don’t pretend,’ he said, ‘that I made my deductions in quite such a turgid and laborious fashion as all that, but those, anyway, were the logical processes at the back of my mind.
‘We went on to Love’s house; and that crime, as Stagge remarked, was pretty featureless. The only interesting thing about it was the unfinished statement I found in a drawer: “This is to put on record the fact that two of my colleagues at Castrevenford School are associated together in what can only be described as a fraud, which…” And the word “colleagues”, you remember, was half crossed out, as though he’d thought better of it. By the way, there’s no doubt that this document was what it seemed to be; that’s to say that it couldn’t have been a red herring. The writing was undoubtedly Love’s,’ Fen mumbled rather indistinctly, ‘and the ink showed it hadn’t been written later than the morning, and it was quite incredible that someone had forced Love to write it and then gone off, and that Love had done nothing except put it in a drawer to mislead the police after his own murder…’ Fen’s eyes closed peacefully.
‘Wake up!’ the headmaster admonished him sharply.
‘I heard you,’ said Fen irritably, and shook himself like a dog emerging from a river. ‘I was never more alert and quick-witted in my life. What was I talking about?’
‘Love’s statement.’
‘Oh, yes, I remember. Well, the paper was certainly genuine. And to me, at least, there were two very striking things about it.
‘Thing number one: “can only be described as”. As I told Stagge, that meant that the fraud Love was referring to probably wasn’t a fraud, in the legal sense, at all.
‘Thing number two: the beginnings of an attempt to cross out “colleagues”. I found nearby a corrected essay in which Love trounced some unfortunate boy for using the word “ambiguous” to apply to something with more than two meanings – real pedantry, that.’
‘Love was pedantic about words,’ said the headmaster. ‘He detested inexactness.’
‘So I thought. And that was what I was trying to demonstrate when I showed the essay to Stagge, though I’m afraid he didn’t see the point. Love had recognized that the word “colleagues” in the statement was wrong, and had set out to correct it, but then, probably, he saw that he’d have to recast the whole sentence, and decided that the statement didn’t serve any useful purpose anyway, and so abandoned it. Still, he’d written “colleagues” in the first instance, so he must have been thinking of at least one person who, while not a master, was sufficiently close in status to the masters to make the temporary aberration possible. I ruled out masters’ wives and families, of course; Love would never have called them “colleagues”. An employee of the school who was not a master was clearly indicated – or, of course, yourself, for Love’s natural reverence would obviously prevent him from calling—’
‘That will do,’ said the headmaster. ‘There were moments when I almost wondered if I was suspected.’
Fen chuckled. ‘You had an unshakable alibi,’ he said. ‘Anyway, to conclude this section of my enthralling argument, I need say no more than that the statement suggested a possible motive for Love’s murder.
‘We talked to his wife. The only useful information she gave us, to my mind, was to the effect that she was in the habit of drinking coffee with Love every evening at a quarter to eleven, and that the fact was generally known. That cleared up a difficulty which had been worrying me slightly; for if Somers had murdered Love, and arranged the ten-till-eleven alibi to clear himself from suspicion, then it was essential that the murder should be discovered before eleven, and that a doctor should get to the scene soon enough to be abl
e to assert that Love had not died before ten. Do you see what I mean? Somers presumably had no alibi arranged for before ten or after eleven; therefore his whole scheme would be vitiated if, for example, Love’s body were not found till the following morning – until, that is, so much time had elapsed as to make it impossible to say when he had died. But Somers must have expected Love’s wife to enter the study at a quarter to eleven – a habit of which, like everyone else, he knew, and which served his purpose admirably.
‘Mind you,’ Fen added in haste, ‘I still wasn’t prepared to swear that Somers had killed Love. But if he had, then that particular problem was disposed of.
‘Next morning I was still thinking about this word “colleague”, and I borrowed a school list from you in order to check the non-staff employees. I didn’t think that Love would have referred to the matron of the sanatorium as a colleague, or Sergeant Shelley, who I later found was an unashamed cockney, or the head groundsman, or Wells, or the proprietor of the school shop; but he might so have referred, temporarily careless, to the JTC adjutant, the bursar, the librarian, your secretary, or, less probably, the school doctor; so I kept them all in mind.
‘Stagge met us here. He said that both bullets had been fired from the same gun – a fact which didn’t necessarily militate against the provisional picture of events which I was building up; for Somers might well have shot Love, returned with the gun to the common room, and laid it down; while x, entering the common room, could have picked it up, shot Somers, and gone away with it. (I couldn’t be sure this had happened, please observe, but it was not impossible.) Stagge, with your assistance, did some preliminary work on alibis, and I asked you if you’d heard a car during the previous evening. I’d already calculated, you see, that it would take a quarter of an hour to walk from the common room to Love’s house, and presumably about five minutes to cycle. It was conceivable, though not likely, that Somers (insert the usual qualifications on your own account, please) had used a car, but in any case you said you’d not heard one.
‘Later on, I had two rather useless interviews – with Etherege and Sergeant Shelley. I was hoping Etherege would be able to produce something definite in the way of motive, but he was a broken reed in that respect. However, he was able to confirm the fact that everyone was aware of the regularity of Wells’ and Love’s habits – and Somers would have had to be aware of it if he had made the plans I provisionally suspected him of. Etherege also said that Love’s manner had been brooding and injured recently, which fitted in not only with the statement about a “fraud”, but also – the “injured” part of it – with the fact that Somers was Love’s particular blue-eyed boy. I asked about Somers’ sprained wrist, which I vaguely thought might have been a fake, but apparently it wasn’t. I also asked if Somers had always used black ink, and Etherege said he had; which meant that Somers would have been obliged (mental reservations as before) to use one of the rare invisible inks which turn black, for fear that suspicion might be aroused by a sudden change of colour.
‘From Shelley I got nothing beyond the fact that the revolver and silencer had been stolen from the armoury, and that it was physically possible for almost anyone to have taken them. Stagge and I searched Somers’ rooms, unsuccessfully. I noticed that he’d been reading The Fourth Forger, but didn’t make anything of it at the time. Nor did I make anything of the fact that Somers had withdrawn a hundred pounds from his bank on the morning before he was killed. We hadn’t found the money, so we assumed – and I still assume – that the murderer stole it.
‘Then came the murder of Mrs Bly. As you know, that led on to the discovery of the manuscripts sub-plot. Motive became clear, and a good many other things along with it. Somers had been going to buy the manuscript. Love – for it was almost certainly Love who had enquired for Mrs Bly at the Beacon and this only could be the “fraud” of which he spoke – had been trying to stop the transaction by telling Mrs Bly of the real value of the papers. That gave Somers an overwhelming motive for killing Love; the probability that Somers was Love’s murderer became a certainty.
‘All the same, there were problems. How had Love learned anything about the transaction in the first place? And why had he said that some third person was “associated” with Somers? I found it unbelievable, you see, that Somers should have told anyone about his find, for fear it might somehow be snatched away from him at the eleventh hour; certainly he had no need to tell anyone, for the price demanded was available in his bank – and of all the persons he might have told, Love – of whose “commercial puritanism” he must have been aware – was by far the least likely. I was inclined, moreover, to think that Love had been misled about this “association”, though against this there was the fact that an x had undeniably murdered Somers and Mrs Bly, presumably for the sake of the manuscripts, of whose existence he presumably knew. A bit hazy, I agree, but one fact emerged from the wreckage: namely, that since Somers was one of the “colleagues” in Love’s statement, and a bona fide one, then the other, conjecturally our x, must be he who had provoked Love’s incomplete amendment of the word.
‘Then came the alibi reports. And heavens, they were revealing! I wasn’t looking for a master in any case, but when I found that Mathieson, Etherege and Philpotts had no alibi for five to eleven or after – and hence had evidently not tampered with the wristwatch to strengthen the invisible-ink hoax – I wiped them off the suspects list without a further thought. Wells was cleared for the same reasons. And that left one person – Galbraith. He qualified for the murderer in every respect. He was a person whom Love might have denominated a colleague – and my other four possibles in the school employment were by some divine miracle playing bridge together at the crucial time, and so out of it. And his alibi – his only, of all men – was exactly what I’d been led to expect: not vouched for before a quarter to eleven, but impeccably vouched for, by you, thereafter.
‘And on top of that, Stagge told me that Galbraith was by way of being an expert on old manuscripts – a fact which struck me as being morally conclusive. You see, the only person to whom Somers was likely to have confided his discovery was – precisely – an expert on old manuscripts. Somers was going to pay a hundred pounds for Love’s Labour’s Won out of his not very large balance at the bank. He would naturally be anxious about its authenticity, and if he could reassure himself with reasonable safety, he would, and Galbraith no doubt seemed to him, as to everyone else, a quiet, harmless fellow who was very unlikely to interfere with the transaction or to try to horn in on his own account. As a matter of fact, I asked Galbraith at the garden party if Somers had applied to him, and he was clever enough to say yes. It was, after all, a very likely thing for Somers to have done, and although if Galbraith said Somers hadn’t we shouldn’t necessarily have disbelieved him, he evidently thought it safer to say that Somers had.
‘At teatime yesterday, then, the position at which I’d arrived was this: that Somers had certainly killed Love; and that Galbraith had almost certainly killed Somers, and probably – since a third murderer was stretching coincidence rather far – Mrs Bly as well.
‘But of course, there was no substantial case against Galbraith. The ink on the reports could be analysed – in fact, it has been, with the expected result – and thereby Galbraith’s alibi would be blown to smithereens, but the mere absence of alibi isn’t proof of guilt; there were other people without alibis. Moreover, the wristwatch clue could be demolished by a clever counsel in no time at all. “Ladies and gentlemen –”’ Fen’s voice became imitatively orotund ‘“– you know, and I know, that even the best of us is subject – ha ha – to strange fits of absentmindedness. Is a man to be hanged – I put it to you as men and women of sense and discernment – is a man to be hanged for the trivial, nay ridiculous, reason, that the unfortunate victim of a brutal murder chanced to adjust his wristwatch in an unaccustomed position?” Plenty of convincing sophistries could be applied, likewise, to the half-crossed-out word “colleagues” and to the common-sens
e view that the only person Somers was at all likely to confide in was Galbraith, the expert on manuscripts. Though very significant, it was all too frail for the courtroom.
‘Besides, there was just a fragment of doubt left in my own mind. By some millions of miles Galbraith was the likeliest person to be guilty, but I wanted irrefragable proof of it for my own peace of mind as well as for the sake of a jury. So I hopefully set a rather primitive trap.
‘I asked Weems to get into conversation with Galbraith, and to retail, as a spicy piece of topical gossip, the fact that he had overheard Stagge talking to me about the case. Stagge – as we arranged it – was to have said something on these lines, “If we can break his alibi, sir, we’ve got a case to go to the public prosecutor, thanks to that chap who saw him burgle the cottage. But if we can’t break his alibi – and it looks completely impossible to me – then he gets off scot-free.” I was to have agreed, and we were then to have perceived Weems’ presence and moved hurriedly out of earshot.’
‘Burglary?’ The headmaster was puzzled.
‘Guesswork,’ Fen admitted. ‘Stagge found signs that Mrs Bly’s cottage had been burgled, and it occurred to me that before embarking on murder Galbraith would probably have tried to get hold of the manuscript by less drastic methods.’
‘Yes, I see,’ said the headmaster. ‘But what was this fictional conversation intended to make Galbraith do?’
‘During the course of the evening,’ Fen explained, ‘I was proposing to stage a bogus resurrection of Brenda. It was to be discreetly put about that she had been the victim of a murderous attack, and that she was unconscious but expected to live. And Galbraith was to be given the opportunity of trying to kill this supposed Brenda – a lay figure in a hospital bed, or something of that sort. Even if we didn’t catch him in the act, that the deed had been attempted would be proof that Galbraith had murdered Somers.’
Love Lies Bleeding Page 21
