Beware of the Trains Read online

  “None. His training had made him careful about that sort of thing, at least, and he’d certainly have destroyed anything at all revealing before leaving home to come here.… There’s this, of course.” Humbleby fished in a dossier and produced a crumpled scrap of paper. “It was evidently torn off the bottom of one of the pages of his report when the thing was snatched out of his hand.”

  Fen raised his eyebrows. “The blow came first, you know, and the snatching not till——” He checked himself. “No, wait, I’m being stupid. Head injury: cadaveric spasm.”

  “That’s it. I had the devil of a job getting this fragment away from him, poor soul.… But it doesn’t help at all.”

  Fen examined the line or two of typewriting on the paper. Literally transcribed, it ran: ‘… so that ξ in the treatment of this var eetyof cryptogam care mut be taken to…’ “Not,” Fen observed, “one of the world’s more expert typists, was he?”

  “No. All his reports were like that. And he could never resist the temptation to incorporate sermons, on the basic principles of deciphering, in everything he sent us. If only he’d stuck to the point, that bit of paper might have been useful. As it is——” Humbleby broke off at a knock on the door. “Come in!” he called, and a youthful, pink-cheeked Sergeant appeared. “Yes, Robden? What is it?”

  “It’s about the contents of Colonel Browley’s pockets, sir.”

  “Oh yes, it was you who turned them out, wasn’t it.… All the stuff will have to go to his lawyer, as there aren’t any relatives. I’ll give you the address. And do please remember, this time, to get a detailed receipt.”

  “I say, Humbleby”—Fen spoke pensively—“may I ask the Sergeant to do an errand for me? I’ve just developed the first symptoms of an idea—though it probably won’t come to anything.”

  “Well, provided it isn’t anything too elaborate or lengthy——”

  “No, just a phone-call.” Fen was scribbling some words on the back of an old envelope, which presently he handed to Robden. “And from an outside phone, please, Sergeant. I don’t want there to be any possibility of your being overheard.”

  The Sergeant glanced at the envelope and then at Humbleby, who nodded; whereupon, collecting the address which Humbleby had jotted down for him, he took himself off. “No questions for the moment,” said Humbleby, rising, “because it’s time I visited the A.C. But I shall expect an explanation when I get back.”

  Fen smiled. “You shall have one.”

  “And also I shall expect a conference about this business we’ve been speaking of. Over beer. It’s been well said that salt, once it has lost its savour——”

  “Do stop talking, Humbleby, and go.”

  “Wait here, then, and try not to meddle with things. I shan’t be long.’

  In fact he was not absent for much more than a quarter of an hour; and his return coincided with Robden’s.

  “No, sir,” said the Sergeant cryptically. “Nothing of that sort. He had sent in one or two, but they’d always been rejected, and he was so angry about that that the Editor was positive he’d never try again. There was nothing commissioned, in any case.”

  And Fen sighed. “You’re much too unsuspicious for a policeman, Robden,” he said mildly. “And much too unsuspicious for a crook. And for the two things combined, quite hopelessly gullible.”

  His tone altered. “It apparently never occurred to you that I sent you to an outside phone in order to have time to ring the Editor of Vegetation before you did. And the story he told me—and which he assured me he would tell you also when you telephoned—was rather different from what you’ve just said.”

  Robden had gone white, so that dark rings appeared round his normally candid brown eyes. He looked, and was, very young. But Fen, as he gazed out across the river at the expanses of South London, was thinking of old women in little shops who might one day go in intolerable fear because their protection against the thug and the delinquent had become a mockery and a sham; of pimps and bawds who might flourish at the cost of a few pounds slipped weekly into the right hands; of night-watchmen burned alive without hope of reprisal in well-insured warehouses, and of little girls violated by degenerates whose services were valuable to their bosses and whose immunity was therefore worth paying for. Robden’s youth and folly, weighed in the scale against these possibilities, were no better than a pinch of sand, and so Fen hardened his heart, saying:

  “It’s possible, of course, that the Editor of Vegetation did in fact tell you a story different from the story he told me. But since he agreed to have witnesses listening to what he said—very friendly of him, that, in view of the fact that he didn’t know me from Adam—that’s not a point we need argue about for the moment.”

  “Vegetation?” Humbleby echoed dreamily. He had already nudged his leg against a bell-push in the knee-hole of his desk, and now, as Robden backed abruptly towards the door, a revolver appeared, as if by some kind of noiseless magic, in his right hand; so that all at once Robden was rigid and motionless. “Vegetation?” Humbleby repeated.

  “Just so,” said Fen. “Here is a botanist with a private errand in Town. He is found standing outside the offices of Vegetation with an article on cryptogams in his hand.”

  “Cryptograms’.”

  “No. Cryptogams. A class of plants without stamens or pistils. So it seemed worth while getting in touch with the Editor of Vegetation and finding out if he was expecting such an article from Browley. And he was.

  “This article is what the murderous Mocatelli stole; and very disappointed he must have been when he found out what he’d got. But since, as we know, Browley definitely had the report on the gang’s code-letter with him, what in the world became of that? Mocatelli simply grabbed the wrong typescript and ran—he didn’t do any rifling of Browley’s pockets. Nor did anyone else, subsequently, because I myself stood guard over the body and refused to allow it to be touched. Which leaves the police. Someone was a traitor—that much was already certain. So that when the Sergeant who turned out Browley’s pockets failed to mention the code-report which must certainly have been there, I set a trap for him and he fell into it head first.”

  Out of a dry mouth Robden said:

  “Plenty of people had to do with Browley’s body before I did.”

  “No doubt. But you’re the only person so far who’s lied about the Vegetation article. And since you would come under immediate suspicion if the truth about that article were known, it’s not difficult to see just why you lied.”

  Behind Robden the door opened quiely, and at a nod from Humbleby the two constables advanced to grip their whilom colleague’s arms. For an instant he seemed to contemplate resistance; but then all the valour went out of him, and he shrivelled like a dead leaf in a flame.

  “He’ll get a stiff sentence, I’m afraid,” said Humbleby when the party had gone. “Much stiffer than he really deserves. That’s always the way when one of us goes off the rails, and you can see why.” He brooded; then: “Cryptogams,” he muttered sourly. “Cryptogams….”

  “Like formication,” said Fen. “Which, although you might not believe it, has no connection whatever with——”

  “Quite so.” Humbleby was firm. “Exactly so. And now let us get something to eat.”

  Abhorrèd Shears

  Detective-Inspecto rhumbleby, of New Scotland Yard, sipped his coffee, glanced at his watch, and sighed. In part, the sigh expressed contentment with the lunch he had just eaten; but it was also perceptibly tinged with the exasperation of a man faced with some tedious but inescapable duty, such as weeding a lawn or composing a letter of thanks. Humbleby, his moon-face aggrieved beneath his neatly-dressed greying hair, sipped his coffee and sighed. And Gervase Fen, whose guest he was at the United University Club, was moved by this plaintive noise to enquire what was wrong.

  “It’s the Bolsover case,” said Humbleby dolefully. “A person named Bolsover has been murdered, and I can’t make out how it was done.”

  Fen was
interested. “Do you, on the other hand, know who did it?”

  “No, I don’t know that, either.” Humbleby’s gloom grew. “There are three possibilities, and suspicion’s divided between them in that horrid ounce-for-ounce fashion which one associates with detective fiction.… May I smoke in here?”

  “You mayn’t, I’m afraid. We’ll go downstairs in a minute. In the meantime, have some more cheese and tell me about Bolsover. Has he been in the papers?”

  “A paragraph or two this morning, but nothing detailed. The thing only happened last night. One of his heirs killed him by putting a dose of atropine in his beer.”

  “Enterprising,” said Fen with misplaced approval. “How did it happen?”

  “I’ll start at the beginning.” This fatuous assurance was so far below Humbleby’s normal conversational level that Fen surveyed him in some alarm; clearly he was finding the Bolsover case more than usually oppressive. “In the beginning there’s Bolsover,” he proceeded scripturally. “And Bolsover is—was, I mean—a Birmingham business man. Soap-flakes and other such—um—detergents. Fairly wealthy, as such people go. But he married—in the opinion of his wife—above him. She was a bossy sort of woman, it seems, who kept him well under her thumb and refused to have any truck with his few relatives, on the grounds that they were her natural inferiors. But about a month ago she died—I think of pneumonia—and for the first time since his early marriage, Bolsover, at fifty, found himself able to live his life as he pleased. This novel situation went to his head rather. He was apparently one of those men to whom family ties are hugely important, and as soon as his wife was safely under ground he set about making contact with such of his near relations as still survived. There weren’t many of them. Not to be tedious about it, there were only three, and none of them, it turned out, had ever met any of the others, let alone met Bolsover himself. To Bolsover this seemed a very shocking and unnatural situation; he decided that he must remedy it without delay, and his first step was to make a will leaving his entire fortune divided equally between these three relatives.”

  “He had no children of his own?”

  “None.… Having taken this ill-considered action, then, with regard to the will, Bolsover idiotically wrote to each of the beneficiaries to inform them of their agreeable prospects and to suggest a family reunion. There were difficulties about holding this in his own home in Birmingham, so eventually it was arranged that Bolsover should visit London and there combine family piety with a—a binge. He travelled up yesterday by the morning train, settled in at the Mosque Hotel, and after dinner—one of his guests wasn’t able to get away in time for the meal itself—the family reunion did in fact take place.

  “Now, Bolsover’s three heirs, whom I spent half last night questioning, are as follows. First, there’s George Laurie, his sister’s husband’s brother, a withered, vacant, failed-looking man who works in an eyewash factory at Westminster.”

  “You’re not referring——”

  “No, I’m not. Now, most eyewashes contain atropine, and the sort manufactured by Laurie’s firm isn’t any exception. Access, you see,” explained Humbleby kindly. “Laurie is colourless, fiftyish, a bachelor and a backer of horses. At the present moment he owes his bookie close on two hundred pounds.”

  “Motive,” said Fen intelligently.

  “They all have that, you’ll find. They all have access, too.… The second of the three is Gillian Bolsover, the murdered man’s niece. A frippet.” And Humbleby looked furtively about him, apparently in doubt as to the propriety of using such a word in his present urbane surroundings. “Age twenty-seven, pretty, unmarried, and employed as dispenser to a Wimpole-Street doctor. The third suspect, Bolsover’s nephew and Gillian’s cousin, is a youth called Fred Bolsover, who works as a kind of lab.-boy at a wholesale chemist’s near Watford. Very earnest and science-minded, is young Fred: the sort,” said Humbleby with all the savagery of a cornered humanist, “that reads books in his spare time about how motor-cycles work, with a widow’s peak and dotty-looking eyes behind his glasses and a brash, cocky way with him. I hope it was he who did it, but I don’t see how it can have been—I don’t see how it can have been any of them.”

  “Do get on,” said Fen restively. “The man isn’t even dead yet.”

  “He’ll be dead in a minute, don’t you fret. Well, at eight-thirty last evening these three turned up at the Mosque Hotel, and there were introductions and politenesses and—— By the way, do you know the Mosque Hotel?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s one of those great rambling places with dozens of dreary little semi-private lounges all over the ground floor, and it was to one of these that Bolsover took his relations for a drink. By the time they arrived, Bolsover himself was fairly exalted, having already had a few—but in case you’re thinking Bolsover might have been poisoned before the party began, I can assure you we’ve been into all that, and it’s quite out of the question.

  “Figure to yourself, then”—here Fen dutifully adopted an introspective, imagining look—“a dull, dusty room in the bowels of this awful hotel, too high for its furniture, too narrow for its height, and too gloomy for anything; with moulded cornices, inadequate lighting, and a blacked-out window, unopened in years, giving on a well. At the right of the empty fireplace,” said Humbleby dramatically, “sits young Fred Bolsover, at a table of his own. At the table to the left of the fireplace sit the other three—Gillian (nearest the fireplace, and facing out into the room), Bolsover (opposite Gillian) and Laurie (away from the fireplace, between Bolsover and Gillian).”

  Fen shifted restlessly in his chair. “Do these positions matter?” he demanded. “Do I have to remember them?”

  “As far as I can see,” said Humbleby annoyingly, “they don’t matter in the slightest. I was just filling in the picture, that’s all.… Gillian is drinking gin and lime (she’s the sort of girl who does), Bolsover has a pint pewter tankard of bitter, Laurie has Guinness, and Fred, odious young prig, has refused alcohol and is rotting his guts with grapefruit squash. There’s only one other person in the room, but she’s important—a spinster named Lucy Gamble, who’s on her own, drinking coffee, and who being temperamentally inquisitive sees, hears and remembers everything that goes on during the whole of the relevant period. She’s thoroughly reliable, in my opinion, and her evidence agrees with the evidence of the Bolsover heirs in every possible respect. She’s got no connection with any of them, either, so we really can be sure what happened—which isn’t often the way.

  “Well, the Bolsover party talked of this and that, and Gillian showed her legs, and teetotal Fred was jocosely persuaded to try a sip of his uncle’s beer, and Laurie did imitations——”

  “Imitations?”

  “Yes. He rather fancies himself at imitations. Did one for me, at half past two this morning. Churchill.” Humbleby shook his head. “Not good. It seems to have amused Bolsover, though—as you’ll have gathered, he was rather a simpleminded man, and in any case, he was half tight. They’d not been together much more than half an hour before it began to appear that he was completely tight, and whichever two of them were innocent don’t seem to have had the wit to realise that an unfinished pint of bitter couldn’t possibly, of itself, have produced the sudden deterioration they witnessed. In actual fact, of course, Bolsover’s apparent drunkenness was the atropine working. Eventually he fell into a coma which they mistook for sleep; and though at that stage a stomachpump would probably have saved him, they let him stay slumped in his chair while they went on talking and drinking among themselves for an hour or more. Then Gillian said it was time for her to leave; and on their attempting to rouse Bolsover, they found he was dead.

  “About midnight, the Divisional Superintendent rang up the Yard, and that was how I became involved in the affair. By the time I arrived, most of the spade-work was done—the story elicited in outline, poison diagnosed, and the remnants of Bolsover’s beer impounded. From the look of the body, I was able to s
uggest atropine straight away to the night staff of our analytical laboratory, and it didn’t take them more than half an hour to test the beer for it and find it there in quantity. In liquid form, they said—and obviously if you shook a powder into a man’s drink, he’d be only too likely to notice it before it was all dissolved.

  “Well, liquid has to have a container of some sort; you can’t carry it about loose in your pocket, or in the palm of your hand. And that looked like a promising line, because, by a combination of circumstances which I needn’t trouble you with in detail, no one in that room—not even Lucy Gamble—had any chance to dispose of such a container, elsewhere than in the room, up to the time they were all searched. But could we find anything? We most certainly could not. I had a theory about cigarette-lighters or scent-bottles, but there weren’t any cigarette-lighters or scent-bottles. There wasn’t, in fact, anything on these people capable of containing liquid atropine, and I can assure you that between us we scrutinised their clothes and their belongings pretty thoroughly.

  “Having failed there, we went on to search the room—and to be brief about it, I’m ready to swear that there wasn’t a single thing in it, of any description, which could possibly have held atropine; we made quite certain, too, that nothing had been thrown out of the one window, or in some fashion palmed off on the waiter who served the drinks.”

  “Glasses?” Fen enquired. “Couldn’t an extra glass have been brought in, emptied of its poison, and then removed by the waiter under the natural impression that it belonged to the hotel?”

  But Humbleby shook his head. “I thought of that—and there isn’t a chance of it. The waiter was able to account for every glass he carried back or forth that evening—and like Lucy Gamble, he’s a reliable, and innocent, witness. By the way, we did, early on in the proceedings, think we’d made a find. One of the first places we searched was the grate. It was full of rubbish—pipe-dottle, cigarette-stubs and cigarette-packets mostly—and obviously it hadn’t been cleared out for weeks. And among that rubbish we found a lot of splinters of thin glass, which we happily and quite prematurely concluded were the remains of a phial. Well, they weren’t; we fitted them together, and they were the remains of a broken watch-glass. None of the suspects’ watch-glasses were broken, none of their watches had been used to carry atropine—and so that was that: probably the broken glass had been in the grate for days.