Mr. Trotman, with a sweep of his arm, consigned Doane to an imaginary limbo.
“Was Mrs. Crake in good health always...?”
“Good heavens! This reminds me of a proposal for life insurance instead of criminal investigation! Yes, of course, she was. Why do you ask?”
“I have, in the brief time I’ve been here, sir, gathered quite a lot of background about the Crake household. In Mrs. Crake I seem to see a very attractive woman married to a kindly, well-thought-of, influential local man. The kind most women would be flattered to marry. Yet, here we have a woman who, after her marriage, seems to deteriorate morally at a remarkable rate and in a very strange manner. She seems to relish dragging her husband’s good name in the mire. She is, if I may speak ill of the dead, promiscuous, carrying on love affairs here and there, even corrupting her son by making him her companion on her questionable career...”
Mr. Trotman levered himself forward in his spring chair and flung himself heavily on his desk, leaning across at Littlejohn like somebody about to practise on terra firma the leg strokes in swimming.
“Wait! Who has told you all this? It is scandalous! There has been a lot of gossip, I admit, and I admit, too, that Mrs. Crake was not above reproach. But promiscuous, promiscuous...my dear sir, never! Promiscuous...never...”
He flopped back and the chair groaned on its springs.
“Alkenet...Does the name convey anything, sir?”
“Of course it does. Alkenet is an old friend and client of mine. What of him? Crake’s neighbour at Beyle...Their two houses are in what was once called Lepers’ Hollow...Historical spot, you know...historical...”
“He was Mrs. Crake’s lover?”
Mr. Trotman actually blushed. He might suddenly have stumbled across Mrs. Crake and Alkenet indulging in their illicit amours.
“It is said so. But why bother about Alkenet...? Oh, I see...You are thinking he might be involved in the case...What do the French call it...? Crime passionel...Crime passionel...yes...passionel...Ah...Well, Inspector, in this case you have a perfect alibi. Never a better. Alkenet has for the past month been in a private ward of the local hospital with a broken neck! Yes, a broken neck. He took a bad toss whilst out hunting, broke his neck, and has been a prisoner in plaster ever since. He’s doing very well, but quite unable to move, to say nothing of committing a crime.”
“That lets him out, sir.”
“I rather think it does. And now, Inspector, will that be all? I am very occupied.”
“You are Mrs. Crake’s executor...and her husband’s, sir?”
“Yes. Why? The death of my partner, Kent, leaves me sole executor in each case now.”
“As far as you are aware, sir, did Mr. Crake leave any available monies to his daughter for carrying on the house? In other words, having left specific legacies to his wife, which he knew would eventually reach his son, did he set anything aside in cash for Nita to keep up Beyle?”
Mr. Trotman looked hard at Littlejohn and pondered deeply.
“That is really too much, Inspector...or would be had there been any such funds. The Wills have not yet been proved and it would ill become me to make them public at this juncture...Public at this juncture.”
“Thank you. Which means Miss Crake may have nothing. The house, if I’m any judge, is a liability. Funny that...A man like Judge Crake to do that. It’s not in character, especially as he was so fond of her.”
“Nothing funny about it, Inspector. Crake died suddenly and certainly was not advanced in years. He had hoped, he said, to set aside something for Nita when she and Alec were launched on their careers and no further liability in that respect...I cannot discuss the matter yet...I...”
Mr. Trotman looked annoyed at the very idea of Littlejohn’s lack of tact. Then his face changed and he rang the bell. The boy put in his head.
“Boy! Kneeshaw is at the car again, breathing on and polishing the bonnet. Tell him, for the last time, to go away!”
Littlejohn smiled to himself at the pantomime.
“O.K”
“Don’t dare to say O.K. to me...and call me...” But the red head had vanished.
Outside, the comedy was resumed. The boy approached Kneeshaw, who by now was polishing the chromium radiator cap with his own dirty handkerchief. This time, however, the junior clerk got a different reception. Mr. Kneeshaw was annoyed. He seemed to be telling the boy so and threatening him with violence. Mr. Trotman, snorting hard, rattled on the window again with his signet ring and flapped at Kneeshaw to go away. The simpleton did so with great reluctance, like a dog ordered by his master to drop his bone. At length he obeyed, but as he shambled off, he turned and faced Mr. Trotman, raised his outspread fingers to his nose and cocked a snook at him.
“Oh...” exhaled Mr. Trotman, as though somebody had knifed him in the lungs. “Oh...”
He sagged in his chair at this affront to his dignity.
“Is there really anything more. Inspector?”
He was pleading to be left alone.
“No more, sir, thank you.”
Littlejohn left him and Mr. Trotman took a long drink from a whisky decanter in his filing-cabinet, sat in his swivel chair, put his head in his hands and made little moaning noises, very sorry for himself.
The telephone bell rang; listlessly he unhooked the instrument and what he heard galvanized him back to life...
Littlejohn joined Cromwell at the police station.
“What are you doing here, sitting like a patient in a doctor’s surgery...?”
“The Super’s turned me out of his office. Can’t work, he says, with anybody else in the room. The sergeant-in-charge says Simpole’s going potty.”
“I’m very sorry for Simpole. He’s got a lot on his mind. Let’s go for a coffee somewhere and talk.”
They found a café and compared notes over coffee cups.
“If you’re wanting a word with Willie Kneeshaw, as he’s called — sounds like a made-up name to me — I think you’ll find him back from his grocery round. He caused quite a diversion while I was at Trotman’s by a desire to polish Trotman’s swell car by breathing on it and rubbing it down with a filthy handkerchief, greatly to the annoyance of the owner. In fact, I left them in a state of hostilities, with Willie thumbing his nose to Trotman...”
Cromwell found Kneeshaw emerging from the coal-hole of Bright’s Buildings where, presumably, he had been stoking the boiler and trying to creep up the flue. His hands and face were coal black.
“Hu,” said Willie in response to Cromwell’s polite good morning. He tried to wipe the dirt from his hands on the rag he’d used for Trotman’s car; his grimy face seemed to satisfy him and he left it alone. There was dust in his bristling hair and on his shaggy moustache. He was tall and well nourished, with large ears and a cranium as shallow as a saucer.
“I want a talk to you, Willie,” said Cromwell and handed Kneeshaw a shilling to encourage him.
Willie bit the shilling to make sure is wasn’t cardboard, pocketed it, sat down on a box in his cubby-hole under the stairs, and tried to light a short clay pipe. Cromwell offered him a cigarette, which he tore up, and inserted, paper and all, in his pipe. He lit it and puffed out clouds of smoke, a sight which gave him so much satisfaction that he laughed aloud and called the sergeant’s attention to the fact that his pipe was smoking. This he did by pointing to it and ejaculating “Zmoaking”, with great glee. He began to regard Cromwell favourably as the author of this natural phenomenon and indicated a chair without a back on which Cromwell sat himself.
You a bit of a singer, Willie?”
“Good zinger...I like a good zing.”
“Carol singing?”
“Ah. Comfort and joy...”
“Comfort and joy...Oh, yes...”
Cromwell’s infinite patience and quick wit brought to light, at length, that Willie was a member of Tom Trumper’s waits and his sole and solo function during their carolling was to put in the repeat bass-line, “Comfort and jo
y” of God Rest you Merry Gentlemen, at the top of his voice. He gave Cromwell an example of this with such power that people in the offices above put their heads round the doors to see if there was a fire.
When quiet had been restored, Cromwell again began his patient inquiries, in the meantime maintaining good relations with Willie by breaking up his stock of cigarettes and stuffing them in his pipe. He did this with certain hard feelings, for they were of an expensive brand especially bought for him at Christmas by his mother-in-law. However, he consoled himself by calculations of the difference due to him on his expenses sheet.
“Did you go to Judge Crake’s...no...I mean Mr. Kent’s carolling this year...?”
“Ah...we did. Got sent away. Made me mad. We allus got a good feed from Mrs. Kent. Mr. Crake was there, ill, so she sent us off...Got no feed.”
He said it with intense annoyance, as though Crake had no right to be breathing his last with Willie in good voice and the Christmas bakemeats waiting for him after his Comfort and Joy.
“Did you see Judge Crake? I mean was he at the window when you were singing, Willie?”
A cunning look crossed the simpleton’s face. Then it turned to glee, as though, even if he were simple and publicly acknowledged as such, he still had a bit of power of his own, something people wanted which he could only divulge if he liked.
“Hu,” he said and grinned all the more.
Cromwell passed him another of his threepenny Christmas cigarettes.
“Ask Tom Trumper,” said Willie after he had got his pipe burning again. “Ask Tom Trumper.”
“I have done. He says you saw him. Did you?” Willie paused and rubbed his dirty chin.
“Ask Tom Trumper.”
Cromwell rose with a show of petulance. In his hand he held half-a-crown for Willie to see. Then he shrugged his shoulders, tossed the coin jauntily in the air, and thrust it back in his trousers pocket. Willie grew very disturbed. He indicated the broken chair and his pipe, which was empty again.
“No, Willie, I’m off. I thought you were a clever chap. This isn’t getting us anywhere, you know. I’ll go and ask Mr. Trotman.”
Willie rose to his feet shouting maledictions against Trotman, thumbing his nose again at the lawyer’s imaginary presence, and uttering epithets against him too indecent to print.
“To ’ell with Trotman. He doesn’t know nothin’. He wasn’t singin’. He didn’ hear Tom Trumper say as he see Judge Crake fightin’ with Mrs. Crake at winder. An’ he didn’t hear Tom Trumper a’ tellin’ of me to say as I seen ’em, as well. Trotman don’t know nothen...”
And then Willie chuckled as if something had tickled his unusual sense of humour.
“He don’ know nothen’...Neether does Trumper and neether does Willie...”
“So it was all just a tale...?”
“Trumper gave me a job and a Christmas pudden...”
“So’s you’d say you saw the judge...?”
“Ah. But don’t you go tellen. Don’t matter much, though. Me job’s finished now as Christmas’s over and the pudden’s eat and can’t be got back...”
Willie bit the half-crown and placed it with great satisfaction in a purse from his pocket. He seemed more engrossed in the box containing the last of the expensive cigarettes which the sergeant gave him than in the contents. There was an embossed gilt replica on the lid of the medals won by the makers with their products, and Willie indicated that he proposed to cut out the panel and ornament the wall of his home with it. He led Cromwell from his lair in friendly fashion, gripping his arm like a long lost buddy, saw him to the door, spat on a highly polished car standing there, and then returned to contemplate the medals again.
Ten – Panic in Tilsey
AT two in the morning Littlejohn was wakened by Shelldrake knocking on his door.
“Chief Constable on the telephone, Littlejohn.”
Colonel Morphy didn’t waste much time in explanations.
“Simpole’s committed suicide. Can you come at once?”
Littlejohn had barely time to wash and dress before a police car arrived at the hotel and took him back to Tilsey.
“You would be a policeman,” said his wife as she sweetly answered his good-bye and nestled back under the bedclothes.
Simpole had been working late into the night. The sergeant-in-charge had expected that; it was nothing uncommon. The Superintendent usually packed up about midnight. He’d recently been so keen on nobody disturbing him that the bobby had hesitated even to take in a cup of tea when the light continued to burn at well after one. There had been an ominous silence in the private office and, in the end, Sergeant Budd had tapped and peered round the door, thinking the boss had fallen asleep. Instead, he found him hanging from a hook on the wall. The picture of the Tilsey Watch Committee, 1897, which had occupied the hook for more than fifty years, had been carefully placed in a corner. Simpole had used a long ventilator cord from his window and if it had stretched another six inches under his weight, he wouldn’t have died, for his feet would have met the floor. The police surgeon said Simpole had been dead an hour when they found him.
The whole business shook everybody at the police station. Simpole had been rather repulsive in appearance, with his pale diabolical face and the waxed moustache which did not improve it and made him look more like Mephistopheles than ever. He had, too, been unbearably officious and stern, at times, intolerant of mistakes, asking no help and volunteering very little. A queer, lonely man whose way had been increasingly lonely and barren since the recent death of his mother, of whom he thought a great deal. His mad infatuation for Dulcie Crake, known only to the few, had jeopardized his career and made him a problem to his superiors. Now, he’d taken a way out. With all his faults, he never earned hatred from his men, however hard he treated them. He was capable of sudden acts of great kindness and humanity. He reserved for himself alone the right to deal with wrong-doing or slackness in the force. Whatever he did or said to the men, he always stood between them and defended them against anybody else, no matter who it might be. And every Christmas he handed to the treasurer of the policemen’s treat for the poor of Tilsey, a packet containing fifty one-pound notes and threatened what he would do if their source was made known.
“He must have driven himself out of his mind with one thing and another. He’s had too much on his plate,” said Colonel Morphy, when he and Littlejohn got together alone at last. They were in the Superintendent’s room, the body had been removed, but nothing else had been disturbed.
There was no suicide note, no message to indicate the cause of it all. The “In” tray on the desk was empty and the” Out” tray full, as though the dead man had finished his day’s work, risen without any fuss, and simply hanged himself.
“Yes, and on top of all his troubles, Simpole was going blind.”
Littlejohn’s voice was full of compassion.
“What? He never said anything to me about it.”
“Did you expect him to? I only discovered it by mistake. It was the way he behaved at the inquest on Mrs. Crake that made me suspect it. He seemed lost in the room like somebody in a fog and gallantly struggled not to reveal it. I looked at his eyes and, if you got them in the right light, it seemed obvious the man had cataracts coming...”
“Still...That would have been curable...An operation and he’d have been all right.”
“I agree. He’d got pretty near total blindness, too. My colleague told me he caught him this very afternoon using a magnifying glass, which he quickly concealed when anybody entered. That’s why he said he couldn’t work with anybody else in the room. Think of it...a policeman...It must have been hell.”
“But it’s all so daft, when an operation would have put him right.”
“An operation would have involved wearing spectacles afterwards, which is hardly to be contemplated for a man of his type and in his position...A Superintendent with bad eyesight, you know. But apart from that. Have you thought what his greatest trouble must hav
e been? It was that he’d have been off duty during the unravelling of this Crake case. Simpole was terribly upset when you sent for me. He showed me how much he resented my presence here, yet tried, in his way, to be decent personally, but not officially. Why? I think because he was afraid I’d come across something which would incriminate him and blast his career in his absence. What could it have been?”
“I’m damned if I know. You’re not suggestin’ that he might have had a hand in the murders?”
“No. I don’t think that. But suppose I came across something in my inquiries which incriminated him...say some letters among Mrs. Crake’s correspondence. They might have been in her desk, or even in her box at the bank. And all the time these inquiries were going on, Simpole was a lame duck, half blind, pretending to see, or else in hospital with his eyes bandaged. Nobody can tell the agony Simpole must have suffered if what I think is true.”
“Poor devil...She seems to have driven him quite off his head...”
The clock on the tower struck five. It was dark and damp outside and Littlejohn, looking from the window to the square below, could see the reflected lights of the police office glowing on the wet pavements. It was all terribly quiet. Not a sound or a footstep, as though all the constables were moving on tiptoe or else sitting in silence out of sorrow for the man they found so difficult, yet respected so much whilst he was alive.
Morphy sat down heavily. He was a tall, lean retired Army man, one of the last of his kind in police administration. Simpole had never been very close to him; too cold and inhibited, but a very efficient officer for all that. A constable entered quietly, laid down a tray with tea on it, and withdrew after a silent salute.
“Thanks, officer...”
Littlejohn filled his pipe and lit it.
“Now what?”
“Had we better look through his desk, sir? That will be the first thing.”
“Better get it over, then.”
They examined the papers spread on the top of the desk first. Nothing but official documents. The drawers, too, neat and orderly, contained only official stuff. If the dead Superintendent had any private papers, they must have been in his rooms; he had recently sold his house. The tragic reading-glass was tucked among some papers in the top drawer along with a diary, official issue, marked “Superintendent Simpole” on the outside.
Crime In Leper's Hollow Page 12
