Trent's Own Case

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘Never mind that,’ Miss Yates said firmly. ‘You were going to say something objectionable, Philip, I know. You were sure that the man Raught saw must be a man; that’s enough.’

  Mr Bligh stirred in his chair a little impatiently. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll concede that. Let us get to the point. This interests me. Mr Trent says that Raught’s tale put him definitely on the track of Verney. That means, I suppose, that he was able to convince himself that the tale ruled out everybody else but Verney.’

  He looked at Trent, who contented himself with a polite inclination of the head.

  ‘Then,’ the inspector went on, ‘I should like to know, certainly, why it ruled out everybody else, and especially why the devil—sorry!—it didn’t rule out Verney, who at the time of the mysterious visit was supposed to be prancing about the streets with only just enough on to prevent him being arrested for indecency. I mean, that’s what you supposed, just as other people did. Taking the story at its face value, we can admit that it ruled out Raught himself. And I’m willing to agree that it ruled out Miss Faviell. Well, who else was there mixed up in the affair who the visitor might have been? It might have been yourself, to begin with. It might have been Dr Fairman here. It might have been Wetherill, who you tell me had been threatening him. It might have been Randolph junior. And of course it might have been Verney, because we know it was.’

  ‘Very well put,’ Trent said. ‘Only, by parity of reasoning, it couldn’t have been me, because I know it wasn’t. As for the others you mention: let us start with Randolph junior. Now I knew very well what he looked like; he looked just like his father; whereas the unknown man looked like Raught’s idea of how a gentleman looks. Sir Walter Scott, I remember, put the same thing another way when describing the celebrated Claver’se; he said he had the air of one whose life had been spent among the noble and the gay. I told myself, then, that even from behind, and in a bad light, neither Randolph père nor Randolph fils would make exactly that impression on a casual observer.

  ‘And I thought there was a good case for ruling out Wetherill. It was true that I had met him in the Cactus Club, not far from Randolph’s place, shortly after the unknown man was seen by Raught; and it was true that when I met him Wetherill had on much the same sort of rig that Raught described. But there was one exception—the hat. Wetherill, when I saw him, was wearing a broad-brimmed, black, soft hat. He always did. It was a vital element in his personal make-up. I mean, Eugene Wetherill had been giving his impersonation of Eugene Wetherill all his life, and he always dressed the part very carefully. I felt certain he didn’t own such a thing as a tall hat of any description; and so I didn’t believe the visitor had been Wetherill.

  ‘Then again, I didn’t see much sense in the idea that it had been Fairman, because I had seen Fairman catch the boat-train at Victoria at 8:20; and at Victoria he was wearing a brown hat and brown overcoat, terminating in brown trouser-legs and brown shoes—quite a colour-scheme, really. Of course, I knew Fairman had been at Randolph’s that evening; but it was some time after the man Raught saw. The time Fairman’s train from Claypoole got to London settled that. But suppose, I thought, Raught had been wrong about the time. Well, I still didn’t see why Fairman should have called on Randolph in evening clothes; and even if he did, how or where could he have changed out of them rapidly enough to get to Victoria and catch the 8:20? That seemed to me an impossibly rapid transformation-scene.’ Trent turned to Fairman. ‘So you see why I thought, after hearing what Raught had to tell me, that the man he had caught sight of couldn’t have been you.

  ‘And then, quite suddenly, while I was giving that wretched fellow a cigarette and a drink—’

  ‘Aiding and abetting,’ Inspector Bligh remarked gloomily.

  ‘Is that what they call a cigarette and a drink at Scotland Yard?’ Trent inquired with interest. ‘Well, I gave the poor devil what I could see he wanted. And just then, as I was saying, a notion suddenly came to me that was altogether new. While I was considering whether Fairman could have changed his clothes, the phrase “transformation-scene” had come into my mind, as I’ve just been telling you; and there it stuck, somewhere in the background. My thoughts kept catching sight of it again and again—and then, in a flash, I saw why.’

  Trent paused; and Inspector Bligh, staring at him in a slightly dazed manner, observed, ‘I’ll be damned if I know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘So will I,’ Miss Yates said, continuing to knit; and Mr Bligh stiffened for an instant in his chair.

  Dr Fairman coughed instructively. ‘What Trent means,’ he said, ‘is, to put it quite simply, that a certain concept had planted itself in his subconsciousness, where an association of ideas had taken place which abruptly emerged, quite spontaneously and unsought, in the sphere of consciousness.’

  The inspector gazed grimly at the speaker for some moments. ‘Oh! If that’s all he means,’ he said at last, ‘why couldn’t he say so? You have relieved my mind.’ He turned to Trent. ‘You had a brain-wave—is that it?—started somehow by the idea of a transformation-scene.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Trent said. ‘You see, I suddenly remembered Charles Hawtrey.’

  His three hearers looked at each other dazedly.

  ‘In A Message from Mars,’ Trent hastened to explain. ‘Didn’t any of you ever see it?’

  ‘I saw it,’ Miss Yates said, now keenly interested. ‘I went to it with the Pethertons—you remember them, Philip; their second daughter, Juliet, had very nearly married an Oriental of some sort just before that, and they were both in such spirits, I recollect, because the thing had been broken off. There was a man who came down to earth from Mars in the play, a kind of magician, who made all the furniture jump about when he got annoyed. And Hawtrey had the part of a useless rich man, very lazy and selfish. The Martian changed him into a homeless tramp, very ragged and without a shirt.’

  Trent laughed. ‘That was it—the transformation-scene. It couldn’t be better described. And do you remember, Aunt Judith, how he was dressed before he was changed into a tramp?’

  ‘Why, of course!’ Miss Yates exclaimed. ‘He was in evening dress, just going out to a dinner-party or somewhere.’

  ‘You are quite clear about the evening dress, Aunt?’

  Miss Yates considered. ‘Dear me, yes! I can see him now. A very shiny top hat—’

  ‘And a very patrician black overcoat,’ Trent added quickly, ‘and round his neck, inside the coat collar, a white muffler hiding everything up to his chin. That was all you saw of his evening dress. In fact, you didn’t see it at all, except two ends of black trouser below the coat; his feet were hidden by some small obstacle or other—do you remember? You just knew he must be in evening dress, because of the uniform, as Bryan calls it.’

  At this point Fairman ejaculated ‘Ha!’ Miss Yates, allowing her knitting to relapse into her lap, met her nephew’s eye. ‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I see now what you’re driving at, Phil.’ Inspector Bligh smiled a sphynx-like smile.

  ‘And then,’ Trent went on with animation, ‘as he stood backed up against the scene, facing you, the hat, scarf and coat were all twitched off him together from behind; all done in the twinkling of an eye, wasn’t it?—so that you could hardly see that they disappeared through an open-and-shut trap in the scene.’

  ‘I didn’t see how they disappeared at all,’ Miss Yates said. ‘They just went—and there he was, a ragged, shivering poor wretch.’

  Again Trent took up the tale. ‘And when he stepped forward, shivering and hugging himself against the cold, you could see the tattered ends of his trouser-legs and his aerated boots. There you are, then; that was the eye-opener for me. I saw it was, at any rate, on the cards that the somebody seen by Raught had been wearing the simplest and most effective of camouflage clothing. All that was needed was a pair of dress trousers—with braces ready adjusted, no doubt—an overcoat, muffler and hat.

  ‘But though I saw that much, and also that it might lead t
o something, it didn’t lead me at once to the idea of Verney. What I did began to wonder was whether the man might not have been Bryan after all, as an uncommonly quick change now seemed to be possible. He would have had to change only the trousers and shoes and hat, if the other clothes were simply being worn all the time under the camouflage. It could have been done in a taxi. Only where was the sense of it, even then? A taxi-man would certainly notice it, and remember it, if he took up a fare in one kind of clothes and set him down a few minutes later, at Victoria, in a totally different costume. Besides, if there was any humbug about the evening dress get-up, it was hard to account for that humbug except on the assumption that somebody, being about to shoot Randolph, was trying to cover his tracks in some way. And of course that was exactly what Bryan never attempted to do; quite the contrary. He simply did a public bunk, in addition to leaving his traces all about the place, and making a confession afterwards. That was what I told myself; and it was just then that another little point occurred to me.’

  Mr Bligh, who had been listening so closely that he had forgotten to smoke, now sighed gently, and began abstractedly searching his pockets.

  ‘He knows not where is that Promethean heat,’ Trent murmured. ‘Your matchbox is on the table at your elbow, Inspector, where you put it.’

  ‘Ha! Thanks,’ Mr Bligh grunted, and attended to his relighting.

  ‘You two can be cold-blooded if you like,’ Fairman exploded. ‘I want to hear the rest.’ Miss Yates knitted on in ostentatious patience.

  ‘It wasn’t me, please,’ Trent said. ‘It was him—letting his pipe go out just when I was coming to the part that will make your six eyes, like stars, start from their spheres. The new point that occurred to me was this. Raught had mentioned that it surprised him to see a man at the door of No. 5, because he had heard no footsteps, although the window that he peeped out of was open at the top—and Raught had sharp ears, too. Now, if that was so, the visitor must have been walking with most unnatural noiselessness; and the idea presented itself to me that he was perhaps wearing rubber-soled shoes.

  ‘As soon as that notion came to me, things began to explode quite rapidly in my imagination. That is the way it works; the moment a match is really put to the train, off go the fireworks. It isn’t at all logical or scientific, I suppose; but that is how it happens. The order of ideas was something like this: Rubber-soled shoes are not commonly worn in the streets of London during the evening hours; but they are worn at that time by Verney and his lads when leaping about the highways and byways. I have not hitherto considered Verney, just because he was supposed to be on the run at the time when the mystery-man appeared. It is known that he started and finished the run, because he did so in the presence of witnesses; but is it at all possible that he could have fallen out for some time while the run was in progress? If so, could he have got to Newbury Place and away from it in the interval?

  ‘So there I was, fairly started on the proposition that Verney might be, after all, the man we were after. Then, as always does happen when you have got hold of the right idea at last, a lot of things began to fall into their places of their own accord. First, it occurred to me that rubber-soled shoes were not only suitable for roadway athletics, but would be just as useful for entering a house quietly—if one had a latch-key—and pussyfooting up the stairs without being heard by the occupier of the premises. It had been thought at first, you see, that the man who shot Randolph had had an appointment with him; that Randolph had been expecting him, and had opened the door to him himself—being alone in the place at the time. That was what he did sometimes do, according to what Raught told the police; but there was also the possibility that he had been taken quite by surprise, in the way I have described. And you see it was important for Verney that he should be taken by surprise. He didn’t want to have the old man making any resistance, or yelling for help. There was no telling what might happen if he wasn’t taken unawares.

  ‘Then I realized that, as far as changing clothes went, Verney would not have had to change at all. What he was wearing for the run was simply the equivalent of the lightest of summer under-clothing, and he would have had merely to put on the camouflage over that, and, later on, peel it off again. He wouldn’t take off his shoes at any point in the performance. They would be black shoes, you see; suitable for wearing with evening dress. By the way, Inspector, have you got them?’

  Mr Bligh turned to the others with a curt nod. ‘That was what he advised me to look for,’ he said. ‘A pair of black, rubber-soled gym-shoes. They were almost the first things I found when searching Verney’s rooms this morning. I didn’t find the weapon, though,’ he added, addressing Trent. ‘That would be too much to expect. It may be anywhere in the Home Counties, as he has had nearly a fortnight for putting it out of sight.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, fortunately,’ Trent said. ‘To go back to what I was saying: once I got started, there were a lot of things that came to me. Especially, some details from a conversation I had with Verney on the evening of the day after the murder, when he came to see me. His pretence was, of course, that he had not even known that Randolph was in London; that he had heard of Randolph’s death for the first time that morning when Inspector Bligh had called on him in quest of information. Verney said to me then that the inspector had told him nothing beyond the bare fact of Randolph’s having been murdered.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Mr Bligh put in. ‘It wasn’t for me to be giving anything away.’

  ‘I know. It was for him to give himself away.’

  ‘Which he didn’t,’ the inspector said. ‘He handled the situation beautifully, I will say. Quite cool at first; curious to know what I wanted. Then his distress when he heard the news—why, it was a treat to watch him.’

  Trent turned to Miss Yates. ‘He isn’t such a brute, really,’ he assured her. ‘He only means it would have been a treat if he had known Verney was the guilty man. That’s the police idea of a bit of fun—watching the criminal tie himself in knots, thinking he’s going to get away with it.’ Mr Bligh’s austere features relaxed into a grin. ‘You see; that’s when they smile a smile more dreadful than their own dreadful frown. But as I was saying—Verney told me he had learnt practically nothing from the inspector; and when the evening paper appeared, it gave merely the fact that Randolph had been shot through the heart, and had been found lying dead on the bedroom floor. And yet when Verney called on me, he was full of indignation about the cowardly atrocity of shooting a defenceless old man in the back. And that “in the back” really was a blunder. It puzzled me when I came to think about it, after he had gone. All the same, at that time the notion of Verney really knowing something about the crime seemed to me ridiculous; and I came to the conclusion, I regret to say, that Inspector Bligh had been a little more communicative than he need have been when putting Verney through it.’

  Mr Bligh directed a withering stare at the speaker; and Miss Yates, still knitting, placidly inquired, ‘Through what, Philip?’

  ‘The mangle,’ Trent explained. ‘An apparatus used by the police for making people come clean. Of course I was wrong to come to that conclusion, and this case will always be a lesson to me to think only beautiful thoughts about officers of the law. If I had done so then, I might have got properly on to Verney sooner. But there were some other things in what he had said to me that seemed odd, though I took no more than a passing notice of them at the time. For instance, his professing not to have known the old man was in London on that day. Even I knew, from the way Randolph had talked while he was sitting to me, that he was particularly pleased with himself as an important figure in the Worshipful Company of Tabarders, and never missed their dinners on any account. It was strange, I had thought at the time, that Verney should not have known about that engagement.

  ‘Then again, he had spoken repeatedly of the late Randolph as if he had been a totally unspotted saint upon earth—said he had a veneration for him, and that he didn’t know of the old man having an enemy i
n the world. Now I didn’t know much about Randolph then—less than I do now—but I did know enough to take him out of the class of prodigies of spiritual loveliness; and I didn’t quite believe that Verney, after two years of him at close quarters, could genuinely take that view of him.

  ‘One thing more I recalled about that talk I had with Verney on the day after the crime. He had said one or two things that sounded like fishing to find out whether I had or hadn’t been at Randolph’s place that Wednesday evening. I didn’t rise to it, because I had gone there on purpose to give Randolph an unpleasant quarter of an hour; not to talk about doing a job for him, as Verney believed. My purpose was no business of Verney’s, so I just left him guessing whether I had kept the appointment or not. He couldn’t ask me straight out, because he was pretending not to know that Randolph had made any appointment with me. It must have been maddening for Verney; because my going there was necessary to his little plan. If I had stayed away for any reason, I should probably be able to prove an alibi if I was ever suspected at all. You see, he had come round to call here in the confident expectation of finding that I had already been scooped in by the iron talons of the law. Then he saw me grinning out of the window as if nothing at all had happened; and being already, no doubt, a bit edgy—he must have been having a pretty anxious day—it made him jump as if he had been shot. So he came in, to try and find out how the land lay, and work off a lot of lies about how broken up he was by Randolph’s death. I thought at the time that he was rather more shattered than was altogether natural in a healthy young fellow in first-class condition. What was really the matter with him was a very nasty jar on top of a murderer’s conscience.

  ‘Verney isn’t cut out for a murderer, really. He is a daring man, and like a good gambler, he doesn’t mind taking risks that the average man would funk. But he has another of the gambler’s traits: he is devilish superstitious. I could tell that from several things I had noticed in him; and when the time came, I played on it without any hesitation.