The Snark was a Boojum

by Gerald Verner

  The weather had changed during the night. The sun was slanting in through the wide windows. There was a faint smell of burning leaves in the air and from somewhere in the direction of the sweeping lawns below the terrace, a haze of greyish smoke was drifting slowly towards the house.

  Gale looked up suddenly as if noticing my presence for the first time. “Come over here, young feller,” he growled.

  He held out the object of his attention. I saw it wasn’t a letter he had been studying so assiduously but a postcard that had been enclosed in an envelope.

  “What do you make of that, hey?”

  On the card, neatly printed with a ball-point pen was a single sentence:

  The Snark was a Boojum.

  The word was had been heavily underlined.

  Chapter Four

  I tossed the card down on the table.

  “Are you concerned about this?” I asked. “Surely somebody’s sent you this to make sure you don’t miss the joke?”

  I picked up the envelope. It was an ordinary rectangular white one, of the type that can be bought at any small stationer’s shop. It was addressed in the same neatly printed characters as those on the card: Simon Gale, Esq., Hunter’s Meadow, Lower Bramsham.

  “Look at the postmark,” Gale instructed, stabbing his finger at the postcard in my hand. “This was posted in Marling, in time to catch the five o’clock post—at least four and a half hours before Baker vanished!”

  Gale poured himself a cup of coffee. He took two large gulps from it and said irritably: “This whole thing’s wrong somewhere, d’you see? Look at the feller’s character. Can you imagine a feller like that planning such an elaborate joke? And if this is a joke, as you seem to insist it is, it could only have been carried out with his assistance . . .”

  I remembered the little nondescript, sandy-haired man who had sat at that table and kept fidgeting with his spoons and forks, and I had to admit that there was something in what Gale said, but I wasn’t about to yield to his opinion without a fight.

  “Maybe someone else put him up to it,” I suggested, going over and inspecting the dishes on the sideboard, and deciding on kidneys and bacon. “If it isn’t a joke what do you think it is?”

  “A Boojum!” answered Gale, slamming a plate of kedgeree on the table and sitting down.

  I stared at him in astonishment as if he’d lost his reason. “Are you seriously suggesting Baker was spirited away by a mythical creature that existed only in the mind of Lewis Carroll?”

  “Not a mythical creature,” corrected Gale, taking a mouthful of kedgeree. “But a Snark, nonetheless . . . A dangerous and warped mind . . . A monstrosity, young feller—I’ve met them before.”

  Maybe it was because I hadn’t slept very well and felt irritable and argumentative, that I couldn’t see the way Gale was accounting for the events as having much merit. “Why should anyone want to get rid of Baker?” I demanded, helping myself to kidneys and bacon.

  “Well if someone wanted to get rid of Baker, obviously we don’t yet know why, I supplied ’em with an opportunity, d’you see. I triggered it. I gave ’em a plan.”

  “I don’t see,” I replied, coming over and sitting down opposite him. “I think you’re creating a mystery where there isn’t one. Why would anyone want to get rid of him? I am sure before the day’s out we will have a perfectly acceptable explanation.”

  Gale grabbed a slice of toast and stabbed with his knife at a block of butter. “Before we can answer the why, we have to answer another very important question. Who was Baker?”

  I stared at him with a forkful of kidney and bacon half-way to my mouth.

  “Who was Baker?” I repeated, putting my fork down. “He was just William Baker. I would suggest no more and no less . . .”

  “That’s just the sort of remark I might expect coming from a lawyer,” he said, leering at me horribly. “The question needs answering before we can go any further. Hey? Look here, he occupied a bedsitting room in a small working-class house, and he was obviously an insignificant little feller with zero personality,” he leaned forward lowering his voice, “yet he was invited here to dinner with all the nobs of Lower Bramsham.”

  I agreed that struck me as curious.

  “Well I’m glad we agree on something,” he grunted sarcastically. “I like oddities to be explained, d’you see? I want to know a lot more about William Baker.”

  “Why not ask Bellman?” I suggested.

  “Ask me what?” inquired the dry voice of Joshua Bellman.

  He must have come in very quietly for neither of us had heard him. He was fully dressed, and he stood blinking a little in the doorway as though the sunlight hurt his eyes.

  “Baker’s vanished,” retorted Gale.

  Bellman’s small, brown eyes contracted slightly.

  “Ah-ha, that surprised you, hey?”

  Bellman pulled out a chair and sat down. “When you reach my age very few things can be said to surprise you,” he answered in a level voice. “Tell me about it.”

  With great gusto and a wealth of detail, Simon Gale told him. He listened without comment, examined at the postcard, and shrugged his shoulders.

  You seem to have started something,” he remarked calmly. “Of course, this is the result of what you said on Friday. Rather a childish joke in my opinion.”

  I looked triumphantly at Gale.

  “I agree,” I said.

  “Surely there can’t be any question of taking it seriously?” inquired Bellman, his thin lips twisting into a faint smile. “I should imagine that it was probably Lance Weston’s idea. It’s just the kind of thing that would amuse him.”

  There was the merest trace of contempt in his tone.

  I remembered Lance Weston turning up at the pub. He hadn’t looked the perpetrator of a practical joke. He’d looked shaken. The incident had plainly shocked him. I looked at Gale. I could see he didn’t think Weston was involved in Baker’s disappearance either.

  “What sort of a feller was Baker?” Gale asked scowling at both of us.

  “I know nothing about him whatsoever,” answered Bellman surprisingly.

  We both stared at him.

  “You invited him to dinner . . .” Gale began. Bellman interrupted him with a sharp, impatient gesture.

  “I invited him because he did me a service,” he said curtly. “I repaid him for it by inviting him to dinner. Beyond that I know nothing at all about him and I have no particular desire to know anything . . .”

  “What service did he provide?” demanded Gale curiously. This time Bellman laughed outright.

  “You really are the most persistent fellow Simon,” he said. “If you must know it was a very simple one. I was out walking in the woods, trod on a rotten branch, and sprained my ankle. It hurt like hell. I couldn’t walk and would have been stranded if Baker hadn’t come along and helped me.”

  As simple as that!

  We left Gale glowering fiendishly at an inoffensive dish of marmalade and went up to Bellman’s study for another session with the acquisition.

  *

  Having missed her at breakfast, I had been looking forward to seeing Zoe Anderson again at lunch, but she’d gone out with Ursula somewhere, so there were only Bellman, Gale, Merridew and myself, marooned at one end of the long table.

  It proved to be one of the dullest meals I’ve ever had the misfortune to sit through.

  Simon Gale, still immersed in his own thoughts, scarcely spoke a word throughout, and Bellman ran him a close second. Jack Merridew never said very much and, although I tried to make some sort of conversation, nobody seemed the least bit interested, so I gave it up and joined in the general gloom.

  There was only one bright spot. Bellman was going out in the afternoon, so any further work on the acquisition was postponed until the following day, which cheered me up considerably. I found it very difficult to concentrate on dusty legal clauses just then.

  Gale went off somewhere as soon as lunch was over. I had
nearly run out of cigarettes so I decided to walk down to the village and get some more. I needed fresh air after that depressing luncheon.

  *

  The first people I ran into in the High Street whom I knew were Mr. & Mrs. Hope. Mrs. Hope was shoe-horned into a tailored suit and Mr. Hope wore a suit of plus-fours in a hideous shade of ginger. They spotted me before I could find a way of dodging them, so I resolved to make the best of it, praying Hope wouldn’t start another of his share deal sagas.

  “What’s this I hear, eh?” demanded Arnold Hope, after we had exchanged the usual greetings. “Something happened to that feller Baker?”

  “It’s quite extraordinary isn’t it?” added Mrs. Hope, hungry for any scrap of information, her eyes protruding and looking more washed out than ever. “I can’t understand it at all. Fancy a shy little man like Mr. Baker taking all his clothes off and leaving them in the street. What could have happened to him? Where did he go?”

  It was a question, I discovered, that nearly the whole of Lower Bramsham was asking.

  Just after five o’clock on that Tuesday afternoon that question was dramatically answered.

  *

  Lower Bramsham, having a small population, doesn’t have a railway station of its own. The nearest is Farley Halt, a good two miles outside the village, and remotely situated in open country. Farley Halt consists of two dilapidated wooden platforms, a small booking office and a waiting room, both of which are kept locked up. Trains only stopped there by request. Most of the inhabitants of Lower Bramsham preferred to go on to Marling Junction. It was a little further but less trouble. As a consequence of this Farley Halt had sunk into dilapidation and was practically unused but not totally neglected.

  Once a week, usually a Tuesday morning, a Mr. Liphook, a railway official, who combined the duties of station master, porter, ticket-collector and everything else, would ceremoniously unlock the small waiting room, sweep it out, and lock it up again. An emergency dental visit had delayed him until late in the afternoon.

  When he unlocked and entered the dim and dusty waiting room he received a shock. Lying on the floor under the window lay the dead and completely naked body of William Baker.

  Chapter Five

  Simon Gale first heard the news of Mr. Liphook’s discovery. He was in a small, white-washed cottage, which did duty for a police station in Lower Bramsham talking to Sergeant Lockyer and Chief Detective Inspector Halliday, when the news came in.

  Mrs. Tickford had reported the disappearance of her lodger to Sergeant Lockyer, who in turn had reported it to the police at Marling. As a consequence Chief Detective Inspector Halliday had come over shortly after lunch to find out more about it and make a few inquiries. He had been preparing to return to Marling, with the meagre information as he had been able to gather, when Simon Gale dropped in seeking fresh news. They discovered they knew each other.

  Halliday was the brother-in-law of Detective Inspector Hatchard, who was connected with the police in Ferncross, the village where Gale lived. They had met earlier that year and were reminiscing when Mr. Liphook made his frantic call, putting an end of gossip and conjecture and spurring them into action.

  I was just out of the High Street, on my way back to Hunter’s Meadow, when I heard the skidding of tyres and Gale’s booming voice shouting at me excitedly. Looking round I saw he was leaning out of the window of a police car that had drawn up behind me.

  “Hey, Trueman!” he bellowed waving. “Come on, get in!”

  “What’s happened?” I demanded.

  “Get in! You’re holding things up!”

  The car door opened and I moved to the open door about to ask some more questions when an arm reached out and grabbed me by the shoulder and dragged me inside. I found myself crammed on a seat between Gale and a thin-faced man with greying ginger hair and a moustache who was wearing the uniform of a sergeant of police. The car accelerated and swung round to the right of the Green.

  I opened my mouth to protest . . .

  “Baker’s dead,” interrupted Gale. “His body has been found at a place called Farley Halt. That’s where we’re going.”

  “Dead?” I couldn’t quite believe it.

  “Not such a joke now, eh?”

  A broad-shouldered, round-faced man, who was sitting in the front seat beside the driver, was cautious. “We’re not definitely sure yet that it’s Baker’s body, sir. There’s been no identification.”

  Gale snapped his fingers irritably. “Splitting hairs, eh? Of course it’s Baker’s body. You’re not suggesting there could be two . . .”

  “I’m not suggesting anything,” the man broke in, “but we can’t take it as a fact until the body has been identified.”

  “Well, Trueman and I can soon settle that,” retorted Gale, “eh, young feller?”

  We sped along a bleak and open country road. Dusk had come and it was beginning to rain. Away to the far right on the crest of a low embankment ran the railway line and, beyond that, a fringe of shadowy trees that was fast merging with a charcoal sky. I was trying in my mind to picture what had actually happened. “Assuming the body to be Baker’s,” I said, “where was it found, when was it found, and who found it?”

  Gale told me of Mr. Liphook’s grim discovery in the disused waiting room late that afternoon.

  Not a joke at all . . .

  *

  Farley Halt, when we reached it, turned out to be even more dreary and desolate than I had imagined. The entrance was up a slight incline, bordered on either side by ragged hedges that led directly to the narrow wooden platform via a swing gate. In the centre of this platform was a low-roofed structure, little more than a shed that backed on to a slope of rough grass-land, dotted with trees and bushes. It was obvious to me this was the waiting room in which resided the remains of William Baker. Remains I was about to come face to face with. A man was standing near the building I assumed to be Mr. Liphook. He looked more than agitated. He seemed at his wits’ end.

  Across a double set of railway lines was another platform, bare and without shelter of any sort, at the back of which ran a fence of open wood palings. All around was nothing but an expanse of open country dotted with patches of woodland.

  “Thank the lord you’ve come,” he said. “I don’t think I could have stood it much . . .”

  He stopped when he heard the train . . .

  We all stopped, frozen in time, as a train pulling a long line of good wagons thundered through. When it had passed we all came alive again and followed Mr. Liphook to the open door of the waiting room.

  If the outside had been dreary and desolate the inside was worse. The paint which had once been green and brown had lost its colour and was worn and flaking. The fireplace was empty. Above it was a torn and fly-specked poster in a cracked glass frame extolling the virtues of the Lake District. Beside it was a single gas bracket with a broken mantle that wavered in the draught, the light alternately flaring whitely or dimming to a ghostly blue. There was a great damp stain on the floor where rain had seeped in through the discoloured ceiling. The atmosphere was dank and smelt of mildew.

  Under the grimy window facing the door ran a narrow bench. In front of this bench lay the nude and twisted body of William Baker. Beneath one thin and narrow shoulder-blade was a bluish-red wound round which a little blood had crusted.

  No longer any kind of a joke . . .

  Chief Detective Inspector Halliday stared down at the naked corpse, his face hardened to sternness, aware of the maliciousness of a murderer who would leave their victim in such an undignified state. “Can you identify him sir?” he asked, without looking round.

  “It’s Baker,” grunted Gale. “No question about it.” His bushy brows were drawn down over his eyes and his fingers were tangling and untangling his beard. The expression on his face I didn’t like. It was the expression of a man filled with a fierce and terrible anger . . .

  “Murder, without a doubt,” commented Halliday, bending down and examining closely the
entry wound. “That’s where the knife went in . . .”

  “Poor devil,” muttered Gale. “This is what I was afraid of.”

  Outside it was raining more heavily. The rustle of it on the fallen leaves and bushes was like the whispering of many voices . . .

  “Where’s that doctor?” asked Halliday impatiently. “I telephoned Marling before we left. Should be here by now.” He looked at his watch. His eyes shifted to where a green-faced Mr. Liphook hovered by the open door looking as if might be sick at any moment. “Is this place always kept locked?” he asked.

  I looked across at Mr. Liphook expectant for his answer, and saw a scraggy, wizened man with many wrinkles on his leathery face, nearly white hair, a worn peaked-cap, a uniform too big for him . . . No smart railway official would have fitted in with the dilapidation of Farley Halt. Mr. Liphook was a perfect match.

  “Yes, sir.” Mr. Liphook pulled himself together with start. “’Cept on Tuesdays when I sweep the place out . . . This afternoon . . .”

  “When you unlocked it this afternoon,” said Halliday, “did it seem as if the lock had been tampered with?”

  Mr. Liphook scratched his pointed and bristly chin looking down at the lock in question. He shook his head. “I didn’t notice nothing different,” he answered. “I put me key in like always. It opened right enough.”

  “You’re quite sure the door was locked?”

  Mr. Liphook was certain the door had been locked.

  “The last time this door was opened to your knowledge, apart from this afternoon, was last Tuesday, eh?”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “How many keys are there?” asked Halliday.

  Mr. Liphook dragged a bunch of keys from out of his trouser pocket and held them up. He selected a particular key. “Only this one,” he said.

  “Would it be possible for anyone to get hold of your keys?”

  Mr. Liphook shook his head, stowing the keys back in his pocket. “When they’re not with me they’re on my bedside table.”