The Case of the Famished Parson (An Inspector Littlejohn Mystery)

by George Bellairs

  “Yes, isn’t it? But this isn’t so good. She put in with her usual cargo of nice things. Not only cattle, but cigarettes, stockings and other pleasant stuff….”

  Sharples jumped to his feet like a jack-in-the-box. Then he clutched the table and looked ready to faint. All the stuffing went out of Rooksby, who began to sweat visibly, a disgusting sight. Hennessy looked more annoyed than ever, and Wentworth didn’t turn a hair.

  Sharples spoke first.

  “What’s all this nonsense? Cigarettes, indeed. If there’s any smuggling been going on, it’s the crew, unknown to us…. We don’t know anything. Do we?”

  He appealed to the rest of his gang. Only Rooksby reacted.

  “No, no. We know nothing.”

  Like a drowning man eagerly clutching at a straw.

  Littlejohn stared straight ahead of him, watching the rain pouring down the window.

  “Captain Bradley’s in the local gaol. So is Father O’Shaughnessy, alias Martin O’Rourke. They’ve done their work and must pay for it. Now I’m concerned with those who started all this.”

  The room was utterly silent. Outside in the corridor the holidaymakers were noisily making the best of a bad job of weather. Fragments of conversation floated in.

  “If it’s like this this afternoon, I shall go to bed….”

  “Is there a matinée at the pictures … ?”

  “It’s a funny thing when the glass says ‘Fair,’ it always rains and when it says ‘Stormy,’ it’s a lovely day. Must be something wrong with it….”

  Up above, the roar and hum of a vacuum cleaner.

  The barmaid thrust in her head.

  “You gentlemen any orders?”

  Nobody answered, she looked astonished and then disappeared nonplussed.

  “A small line of packet-boats presents an easy chance for smuggling….”

  Littlejohn was still gazing through the window.

  “… Especially on a coast like this, with a ready-made ideal landing-place like Bolter’s Hole. Perhaps the owners of the boat didn’t think of it. Perhaps they did. Anyhow, somebody from Eire saw glorious chances as the duties on tobacco and such soared and as the black markets clamoured for things plentiful in Eire but strictly on coupons over here.”

  Dr. Rooksby had his face in his hands as though trying to shut out the truth. Hennessy actually started to write in a little notebook himself. He looked up unpleasantly at Littlejohn and spat a string of words at him.

  “I warn you, Inspector, I’ll not stand for this sort of talk. We’re not going to have a scandal pinned on us. Whatever others may have done unknown to us, we’ve kept our company free from reproach. Haven’t we Sharples?”

  Sharples didn’t seem to hear.

  “Haven’t we, Sharples?”

  Hennessy was getting annoyed.

  “Oh yes, yes …”

  “In that case I’m taking notes which I shall hand to our lawyer….”

  Wentworth threw back his head and laughed loudly.

  “What are you laughing at? There’s nothing funny as far as I can see….”

  “Just Sharples’ face….”

  “Whether the company started it or not, I don’t know. But soon an agent in Eire, an ex-gunman called O’Rourke, was regularly sending stuff across on the Patrick Creegan. They were loaded off the Irish coast and then unloaded into the ship’s boats here and put ashore at Bolter’s Hole. They then found their way down to your warehouses, Mr. Sharples….”

  “It’s a lie … I …”

  “Please don’t carry on this farce any longer, Sharples. The police were in your cellars just before I came in. They’ve impounded everything.”

  Hennessy sprang to his feet and seized Sharples by the throat.

  “Why, you little swine. What have you been at with our boat? Why wasn’t I told … ?”

  Wentworth yawned.

  “Your integrity, Hennessy, stands so high in the town. And what’s more, it’s genuine. Not like Sharples’, just a façade for a lot of crooked work behind it. Sharples and Rooksby knew they’d bust the whole show if they approached you. You’d not stand for it. Not that I’m in this. I’m small fry for Sharples. Not energetic and shady enough. He and Rooksby found the capital, I guess. You and I were the stooges, the respectable alibis for the rest. Hey! Lily! Bring drinks round. Sharples and Rooksby look to need them and a drink for the rest won’t do any harm.”

  The barmaid quickly brought the order and scuttered out again, scared by the ominous looks on the faces of the men.

  “Go on, Inspector,” added Wentworth. “What next?”

  Littlejohn didn’t touch his drink, but lit his pipe.

  “Sharples had an arrangement with the watchman on the quayside. There’s a road-widening scheme been going on there which has been abandoned, but our friend in his capacity as chairman of the Highways Committee had arranged for the site to be watched and lamps strung round it at night. The order of these lamps, which are visible at sea, told Bradley on the Patrick Creegan whether or not the coast was clear. Any sudden emergency and the order of the lamps was changed, the contraband was jettisoned and the Patrick Creegan sailed in normally.”

  “Now, had the Customs been alert in the port, it might not have been so easy. As it is, Dunblow, the chief official, is just hanging on for his pension and doesn’t care a hoot. Provided he keeps a check on incoming goods at the port, he never bothers about the rest of the coast. So it was simple….”

  Rooksby having swallowed his drink, grew bold.

  “I know nothing about all this. I want my lawyer. I shall protest …”

  Sharples rose livid with fury.

  “You’re in this just as much as I am and you’ll go through all I’ve got coming with me. I guess you’ll say you were joking when you put the idea in my head. You were always hard-up and ready for easy ways of making money on the sly….”

  “Be quiet, you two. You’ll have a chance to settle all this later. Your scheme worked a little while and then a bishop arrived who’d some strange freaks about meditation and he took to prowling the coast round Bolter’s Hole. He caught your men at it and you’d the devil’s own work keeping him from going to the police at once. His interference for the first time caused Harry Keast to panic, give the signal for retreat and cause Bradley to jettison several hundred pounds’ worth of stuff. I guess you reported it by telephone to your man, O’Rourke, who came over hot-foot. Perhaps you didn’t know, perhaps you did, but he was an ex-gunman who’d stop at nothing. Well-known to the Dublin police who’d lost track of him and who’s served a stretch or two for things like robbery with violence. He came over here at once, dressed-up as a priest on holiday. Rather an ingenious way of allaying suspicion….”

  Sharples turned green.

  “I knew nothing about that. I’d nothing to do with murdering anybody.”

  “All the same, you made yourself an accessory, because you knew of the crime and guessed who’d done it. Yet you never told the police … Lily! Get some brandy for Mr. Sharples, he’s not well …”

  Sharples eagerly drank off the order.

  “O’Rourke, calling himself O’Shaughnessy, saw that if he didn’t act quickly the whole scheme would bust and the police would be after the lot of you. Reckless, as usual, he arranged for Keast to decoy the bishop down to Bolter’s Hole and there pushed him over the cliffs, after knocking him on the head. But just in case the police got too importunate, he provided himself with an alibi. He tacked on to Shearwater, a harmless sort of fellow, and had the nerve to tell him he was an amateur detective investigating smuggling or something and anxious to get a step ahead of the police. Shearwater believed his tale and good-humouredly provided false alibis. After the telephone call which got the bishop to Bolter’s Hole, O’Shaughnessy hurried Shearwater to bed, and then pretended to go to his own room. He realistically took off his boots for the night porter to collect and clean and not having another pair, had to help himself to some from another room. He chose Cuhady
’s….”

  Wentworth roared.

  “Well … My God! I must send Cuhady a postcard about this. He’ll be tickled to death to hear of O’Shaughnessy’s trick. The priest was the one who quietened him off by some sort of spiritual comfort….”

  “Will you stop laughing…. This isn’t funny. It’s damned awful….”

  Hennessy, too, had lost all his spirits and sagged in his chair.

  “Keast got conscience-stricken about the murder of the bishop, so O’Rourke had to silence him. He took a shot at me, too, with a rifle he bought from a lad in the country and later hid in the luggage-boot of Shearwater’s car. We’ve found it there. O’Rourke left it to throw suspicion on Shearwater if it were discovered….”

  “I knew nothing about all this….”

  Sharples was pawing the air like a madman.

  “You can tell that to the magistrates…. At any rate, you were so greedy for gain that you pooh-poohed Captain Bradley’s caution. With the police around, he didn’t want to ship contraband at all, but you insisted. You thought us too dumb to guess what you were at. Then Shearwater vanished and you didn’t hear of it till too late to stop the shipment by ’phone at the Irish side. Instead, you got Jeale, the watchman, to give the alarm on his lamps. We saw that the wrong signal was given and caught the Patrick Creegan at it red-handed.”

  “What’s going to happen to the company, now?” said Hennessy. He was beginning to think of his own money.

  “Oh, shut-up, you. You and your damned money. As if we hadn’t enough …”

  “For two pins, Sharples, I’d break your blasted neck….”

  Wentworth laughed.

  “The hangman’ll do it for you. He’s an accessory….”

  They had to give Sharples some more brandy.

  “We managed to get hold of Shearwater before O’Rourke got at him. He’d certainly have killed him if he could, because Shearwater had the power to smash all O’Rourke’s alibis and put the rope round his neck. Shearwater fell in with our scheme. We had him dodge up to the hotel on the pretext of borrowing some money from Allain and then Allain on the way to the safe just whispered to O’Rourke who was, as usual, keeping out of the limelight in the billiard room. That put O’Rourke on Shearwater’s trail. He followed him to the Patrick Creegan where Shearwater was to pretend to bargain for a passage with the captain to Eire. Bradley, hoping to mitigate his own punishment, helped us, too, and left Shearwater alone in his cabin, with three of us listening at an open porthole. O’Rourke wasn’t long in taking his chance. He went to kill Shearwater and throw him overboard as the ship made her way back to Eire, for he didn’t know we’d caught them smuggling and that Bradley was under arrest. In a fit of bravado, egged on by Shearwater, rather pluckily, I think, O’Rourke told the whole tale. We kept it all dark until now, just so that we could see the reactions of you four gentlemen. There’s no doubt about you and Rooksby, Sharples….”

  He nodded to Bowater, who had been quietly taking it all in, looking thirstily at his drink, yet not daring to touch it because he considered himself on duty. Cromwell, having taken his revenge on O’Rourke for shooting Littlejohn, looked very pleased with himself.

  Bowater cleared his throat and rose.

  “Arthur Wellesley Sharples, I arrest you …”

  Then he called a constable from outside and turned to Rooksby to read a warrant to him.

  Doctor Rooksby fainted.

  The pair of them had to be carried to the waiting taxi, thereby causing an exciting finish to a rainy, boring morning for the visitors who had stayed indoors.

  “And I must ask you two gentlemen kindly to stay in town. We shall need you….”

  “It’ll be a pleasure,” said Hennessy.

  “I shan’t stir,” drawled Wentworth. “But I wonder if you and Bowater would like to make up a four at cards now and then. I don’t know how I’m going to pass the time….”

  A week later Wentworth was taken to a private asylum. It seems he’d been going that way for a long time. Hennessy entered into the prosecution of his former colleagues with the greatest relish.

  O’Rourke was hanged and Bradley and Sharples got long terms of imprisonment. Rooksby didn’t even come before the local magistrates. He hanged himself on his shoelaces the night he was arrested. The strain of the case so upset Bowater that he had a brief breakdown which placed him at the tender mercies of Dr. Tordopp, who gave him such hell that he was well and about again more quickly than is usual in such cases.

  In spite of the need for a longer holiday and the willingness of Scotland Yard to grant it, Littlejohn went home and recovered quickly after spending sunny days on Hampstead Heath near his home. He passed a lot of time seated on the grass in the sun and air, reading detective stories, which are one of his favourite diversions. They appeal to his irrepressible sense of humour.

  An extract from George Bellairs’

  The Case of the Demented Spiv

  AT the Oddfellows’ Arms, Brockfield, they had come to the end of a perfect day and with the help of Drake and his merry, merry men had laid the enemy low. Or rather Jack Stansfield had done it with the assistance of several pints of beer, a tinny piano and a reedy tenor voice. To mark their approval the occupants of the bar parlour clapped unanimously or banged their pots on the beery table-tops, and one occupant, half-seas-over, emptied his glass in the piano in gratitude for its share in the victory.

  It was an October Saturday night and raining cats and dogs outside. That hadn’t kept the regulars away, of course. The crack of doom couldn’t have done that. But the casuals were missing and that irritated the landlord. He almost struck the man who’d lubricated the piano, but the offender was silly with drink and kept on grinning and saying it was a “good ole pianner.” What can you do with anyone like that? But it caused an awkward lull in the good-feeling for a bit. They asked Stansfield to sing an encore and after a florid introduction, played by ear by the paid accompanist, he started “Absent.”

  Sometimes, between long shadows on the grass.…

  It floated out feebly into the deserted street and made the solitary policeman, standing under a gas-lamp, his cape shining like jet with the rain, wish he were in the warm, steamy pub instead of outside. He’d still four hours of this to endure. The red lamp on the top of the police-box nearby began to twinkle and he hurried to answer the telephone in the cupboard underneath it. Some children had been letting off fireworks prematurely and were keeping an old lady on tenterhooks waiting for the next bang. He’d better go and see about it.

  “Very good.… I’ll go.…”

  Nothing exciting ever happened in Brockfield. A few drunks, kids with fireworks, cats left in lock-up shops over week-end, stray dogs.… The constable sighed. He was fed-up.

  The church next door to the Oddfellows’ Arms was a blaze of light. They were holding a revivalist rally. Brockfield has more pubs and churches per square mile than any other town in England. Any of the burgesses will tell you that. Of course, other towns boast the same thing, but we can’t waste time refuting it. The fact was that the big, well-illuminated church was full of people and they couldn’t begin the service because the organist was missing. The deputy organist was laid-up with lumbago, too, and they were in a fix. The only other person who could play was the preacher himself, and as it was quite impossible to work the people up satisfactorily without a rousing hymn beforehand, the parson had to keep leaving the pulpit, playing a verse or two and then hurrying back to say what he had to say before the congregation went off the boil. It was hard work. Everyone was annoyed with the fugitive organist, to say the least of it. Strains of Drake and his merry, merry men and Absent floated in now and then from the Oddfellows’ next door, and they had to close the windows on that side, although the church was like an oven from congestion.

  Rain lashed the street as the dripping constable returned to his stand under the gas-lamp. He had effectively silenced the young pyrotechnicians, who, on account of the rain, had been lighting
their thunder-flashes under their jackets and then throwing them into convenient dust-bins to go off. Now the bobby had nothing to do but get wet. He longed for a drunken brawl to break out, or even a serious road accident. Anything where he could behave with efficiency and earn a pat on the back from his superior officers, who were beginning to regard the hush of law and order in the town with suspicion. The police always missing when they were wanted, so to speak. As if P.C. 132 could help it.…

  Now they were singing “Abide with me” in the church and the strains having reached the Oddfellows’, the occupants of the bar parlour took it up, and chapel and pub side by side echoed the same hymn. P.C. 132 stopped his troubled thinking to listen and said to himself it sounded very nice and that people weren’t always as pagan as you thought they were.…

  Suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, trouble invaded the sodden, silent street. A closed van with headlamps full on, dazzling the eyes until they pained, and lighting up the floods of water rushing to the gutters, zigzagged dangerously down the incline of shining cobblestones and pulled-up with a frightful squeal of brakes in front of the Oddfellows’ Arms. The door opened and was closed again with a bang and a flying figure ran into the pub. P.C. 132 ponderously crossed the road and began to examine the vehicle.…

  “Give me a double brandy,” the newcomer was saying inside the inn. Unable to find anyone at the little bar at one end of the long corridor which led from the vestibule, he had opened the door of the bar parlour.

  At the sight of him, the occupants suddenly stopped singing. Some of them left their mouths open in surprise, the song suddenly cut off from them.

  “Give me a double brandy.…”

  “We haven’t any,” said the landlord, still in a bad temper. He had some hidden away for special occasions but he wasn’t serving it to any Tom, Dick or Harry who had the cheek to call on the off-chance and ask for a double.

  “Give me anything.…”

  “Only rum.…”

  “For God’s sake… Rum… Anything.…”