Find the Innocent

by Roy Vickers

  “Shall we let it go at humbug?”

  “A minute ago you didn’t seem either lonely or miserable.”

  “It was the act of cursing you that broke my nerve. Pushing myself further out into the cold. My colleagues put me in this revolting position. A beautiful woman flatters me—then reveals that it was only a physiological accident, and I become a shameful secret. Before we knew about WillyBee’s death. All this police business, however troublesome, is just aftermath.”

  “D’you mean you’re still in love with her?”

  “No! That’s why I offered myself as a humbug. I couldn’t have married a pampered pet like that. And of course I would soon have wanted her to vanish. It was the crude manner of her going that hurt. I don’t blame her. She changes her moods very quickly.”

  “It is a pity you didn’t tell her you knew who she was.”

  “That’s hindsight! She cut romance with a knife and concentrated her thought on money. While we were having supper I was a little piqued, at first, that she did not tell me her name. Then she emphasised it by insisting on doing all the car business herself. One trifle was particularly wounding.”

  To her annoyance, he paused. This was the sort of talk she had been waiting for.

  “Tell me, if you feel like it,” she invited.

  “She had a dressing case. She wouldn’t let me carry it to the car. She couldn’t get to the car by herself, because it was pitch dark. Before we reached the road, she asked me not to come any farther. I supposed it was because she didn’t want The Hollow Tree driver to see me with her … I stood at the foot of the ramp, playing the beam of the torch in front of her feet to guide her, while I was thinking: ‘That girl is afraid I might blackmail her’.”

  Jill wanted to tell him that he must be wrong but the words would not come because she suspected that he was right. Veronica had shrugged off her love affair, as she had shrugged off their friendship last night.

  Eddis was slumped in an armchair, staring at his fingernails, as if he had forgotten her presence. She faced the fact that he had conjured in her mind a very vivid picture of Veronica—she refused to advance one step beyond that.

  From the road came the sound of a car—stopping.

  “They’ve switched off! It’s probably the police,” said Eddis, rising and going to the side-window. “Yes. The dear Inspector has come to give me some more help.”

  “Then I’ll clear out,” said Jill, and added: “I would have liked to stay to lunch, after all!”

  “Would you!” he echoed. “Thanks. That makes me feel better. I’m afraid you can’t slip past Curwen. It would take a long time to open that front door.”

  They met at the lock side. Curwen doffed his hat but did not speak to Jill.

  “There’s a launch of ours coming up, Mr. Eddis. Perhaps you’ll empty the lock for us.”

  Jill slipped away to her hired car, feeling that she had achieved something. As she drove back, she applied a cold douche of self-criticism. She recalled that Eddis had told her the absurd wedding ring story. He had made a substantial misstatement about the photograph in The Prattler. On the other side—what? A suddenly vivid picture of Veronica trudging up the ramp with her dressing case, while his torch played in front of her feet.

  The motor launch could be discerned at the head of the mile long reach on the Renchester side. By the time Eddis had emptied the lock the launch was at the gates, which meant that it had shattered the speed limit.

  It was a broad-beamed boat capable of seating a dozen passengers but was actually seating a single constable of the Renchester police. Conspicuous amidships were two tinlike contraptions that might have been a de luxe model of a litter bin.

  When the lock had been re-flooded Curwen stepped aboard followed by Benjoy.

  “Tell the driver or whatever they call ’em to run half a mile upstream and we’ll drift down—Turn on an easy landmark, so that we can begin again there if I’ve guessed wrong.”

  “We shan’t need the lights in this sun,” remarked Benjoy.

  “What we need is an awning,” said Curwen. “Ever noticed that the country is worse than the town in a heat wave?”

  When they turned, the local constable hitched the tins by their fitted hooks, one on each thwart, so that the ends of the tins were below the surface of the water. By looking through an eyepiece in the lid one could see the bed of the river—very clearly in the strong sunlight.

  “You’ll need your engine,” warned Curwen. “Keep her within about ten feet of the bank.”

  As he spoke he crouched with some discomfort on the side nearer the road, while the constable took the mid-stream side. The boat was allowed to drift.

  “You take over!” said Curwen after a couple of minutes, giving place to Benjoy. He added in an undertone: “And if you see a ‘Mystery Girl’ give me a call.”

  With occasional help from the engine, while Curwen relaxed, the boat drifted to within a couple of hundred yards of the lock.

  “Here we are, sir! Mark on that willow tree. Six feet downstream—about the same from the bank. Handlebars reversed, I think. I might be able to do it with the boathook.”

  With the boathook, after some initial failures, they hauled up an aluminium push bicycle. Benjoy formally checked the manufacturer’s number and reported all correct.

  Curwen, tiring of aquatics, took advantage of a natural landing stage: the bicycle would be taken to headquarters by boat, in charge of the constable.

  “Question, sir!” ejaculated Benjoy as they strolled the short stretch to the police car. Receiving a friendly grunt he asked: “What’s the good of that bike?”

  Asking a question like that on a hot day! thought Curwen. The worst of these youngsters was that they were either no good or too good for routine.

  “I dunno!” he grunted and expanded: “I—don’t—know. It may be no good. And that’s what you’ve got to get used to.” It sounded like a rebuff, which he had not intended. “Look at it this way. What is a good detective?—I don’t mean me. A good detective is a good sorter—like a post office chap at Christmas. Hundreds of bits brought in by the staff—sometimes thousands of bits. You can’t pick out the useful bits, often, until you’ve sorted the whole lot. Meaning you don’t have to bother about theory.”

  “But surely, sir, you can’t sort the bits without a theory?”

  “Put it that way if you like,” conceded Curwen. “My theory is that if we can’t find the innocent one of those three men we’d better find the guilty instead. One will do, to start with. When we get back, find out if that Ford took a load-up of gas on the way in.”

  About to enter his car, Curwen saw the guard chatting with a rural constable. He beckoned to the latter.

  “Are you Huggins?”

  “That’s my name, sir,” answered Huggins in a strong local accent.

  “You’ve done a good job on this case, Huggins, and before I go back to London I shall remind the Chief Constable … You stand well with me and you’ll know I shan’t want to put you wrong over a trifle. How often did you drop in for a drink with those men?”

  “Mostly, sir. Meaning when I could see they were about and I wasn’t intruding, like. They were nice friendly gentlemen—used to call me ‘Inspector’, sir—and I never thought there’d be any trouble except over the Ford, which didn’t ought to be on the road, by rights.”

  “That’s all right, Huggins. Don’t think any more about it.”

  Benjoy slipped into the driver’s seat.

  “Don’t start her,” said Curwen. “You heard what Huggins said. I believe we could shake Eddis with that. You stop here.”

  He waited until Eddis had nearly finished clearing the launch through the lock. His approach was as informal as he could make it.

  “One of you gents here dumped that bike in the river,” he remarked, as if it were a thoughtless prank.

  “Which one of us?” asked Eddis.

  “That’s where I want your advice. If I tell you all I know maybe we
can get somewhere together.”

  Eddis led the way to the sitting room. It was no part of his plan to refuse to be interviewed by the police.

  “I take it, Mr. Eddis, you still wish to make no statement and—‘no comment’ isn’t it?”

  “It’s a pity you weren’t here with Miss Aspland. We went into all that. She suggested that it was childish of me to refuse to confirm facts that are common knowledge. But you will, of course, understand my intention.”

  “I wouldn’t go as far as that but I respect your point of view,” said Curwen, a little doubtful whether he was putting it over. “I shan’t nag at you to change your mind.”

  “Splendid! Unburden yourself, Inspector. Tell me everything you feel you really wish me to know.”

  Curwen had not counted on being soothed. He ploughed on.

  “Your friends have made a full statement. One of them says the girl turned up shortly after the Ford had left. The pair of ’em had drinks and sat for a bit outside, then—came in. Later they had supper. A car was called and she left shortly after two!”

  “That was in the papers.”

  “Those were the very words I used. So I said he must tell me something particular and personal about this ‘Mystery Girl’.”

  “But there’s no mystery about her, surely! Miss Aspland seemed quite confident that she is Mrs. Brengast. Haven’t you satisfied yourself on that point?”

  “I can’t say anything about that—”

  “You mean that, like myself, you neither confirm nor deny that the girl in the case is Mrs. Brengast, and you will make no comment.”

  Curwen glared. Eddis went to the sideboard.

  “Beer or whisky?”

  “Beer, please.”

  During the business of opening the bottles and filling the glasses Curwen recovered his poise.

  “Cheers! … When I asked for something special your friend told me he had taken the girl’s ring from her finger and flung it into the lock!”

  Eddis’s hand jerked, spilling some of his beer.

  “How on earth did he get hold of that?”

  That was the same, Curwen noted, as saying that the tale about the wedding ring was true. When it was not true! All three, including the innocent man, telling the same lie! A lie that bounced, pronto, like a dud cheque. The whole three of ’em couldn’t be mad in the same way!

  “And I suppose they both tell the same tale?” said Eddis. “Sticky job for you, Inspector! And you can’t pick up anything about what happened after they got into the Ford except that you feel sure they must have committed a murder?”

  “We know quite a bit about the Ford,” said Curwen, carefully. “We know it started from here well before nine and that it was parked outside the depot—that bike being within a few yards of it—just inside what’s going to be the gateway—and that Ford and bike had both gone by midnight. How fast can that old crock go? I suppose it can manage thirty on the flat?”

  “Oh, yes! The old Ford magic is still there.”

  “Then the old Ford magic took at least two and a half hours to make the twelve miles between Renchester and here. Give ’em another half hour and they could have pushed it.”

  Eddis lost himself in thought. Curwen continued:

  “What I mean is—lady or no lady—you couldn’t have gone to sleep much before three o’ clock. The Ford hadn’t got home by then.”

  “Did you consider the possibility of a breakdown?”

  “First thing! The driver who took the girl away saw nothing stuck on the road, coming or going.”

  “I expect a tough murder case bristles with awful little riddles like that,” remarked Eddis, refilling Curwen’s glass. “Does it matter? You can’t seriously suppose that they drove off to murder somebody else. You’d have heard by now!”

  “This is very good beer you’re giving me,” said Curwen. “And then there’s that push bike!”

  “The problem being to find the rider?” contributed Eddis. “And you think it would help us if we were to succeed?”

  “It could help us!” amended Curwen. “Any time o’ night, Constable Huggins might have dropped in here for a drink, you gentlemen being so hospitable. So one of you—one of them I should say—came along first on the bike, to look around, while the other parked the Ford off the road somewhere.”

  “I never thought of that, Inspector!” exclaimed Eddis. “It links up. He comes up here quietly, sees the light, creeps up to the window and sees—as you will say—a girl. He signals the other to stay put and himself hangs about in the dark, watching everything.”

  Curwen had the illusion of overbalancing. This was the point at which Eddis was to have been shaken.

  “You’re going ahead a bit fast, aren’t you?” he muttered.

  “I’m galloping! Assuming the girl to have been here, he sees her face, recognises her and watches her leave the house and enter the car. He memorises the details, realising that this will enable him to tell the same tale that I would have told myself—if I had told any. One of them hit on the bright idea that if all three were to tell the same tale, each declaring the other two to be liars, the police might never be able to sort them out. But, of course, Inspector, you see the flaw in my argument?”

  “I can see a good many flaws.” Curwen was on the defensive. “I’ve a sort of idea, Mr. Eddis, that you’re pulling my leg!”

  “I’m over-simplifying, of course! And jollying it up a bit, but not in order to rag you. You tell me one flaw and I’ll tell you mine.”

  “For one thing, when they were cooking all that up like a pair o’ sea lawyers, how did they know the girl wouldn’t give them away?”

  “That’s a pretty good one,” admitted Eddis. “I can only guess that, if they did recognise the girl, they’d be pretty sure that, being WillyBee’s wife, she would think of herself first. But mine is a much bigger one than that. It seems to me to scupper the whole of my reconstruction. Don’t you see it? It stares you in the face.”

  “I’ll buy it,” grunted Curwen.

  “The wedding ring story, of course! Let us suppose for argument’s sake that I took the lady’s wedding ring off and threw it in the lock. That is a stock theatrical gesture with a married woman, if you’re sure you can buy a new ring. But that comes at a comparatively early stage in the proceedings. One does not do dramatics with a wedding ring when the girl is about to rush off home. So how could they know about the wedding ring?”

  Curwen felt that he was losing ground. Eddis was again speaking as if the wedding ring story were true. It couldn’t be true! That engraved wedding ring was on the Brengast woman’s finger—and she would have had no time to have another engraved.

  “You say they couldn’t have witnessed the wedding ring act because they must have been in Renchester at the time.” Curwen was being blunt. “All right! Either there wasn’t any wedding ring act—or there was. And the innocent man—let’s say it was you—told the others about it.”

  “Inescapable!” agreed Eddis, with profound approval. “One or other proposition must be true.”

  These men had a trick of agreeing with you when you least expected it.

  “We’ll find out which is true,” said Curwen, rising to go. “We’ll drag the lock.”

  “It would look well in the papers,” conceded Eddis. “Goodbye, Inspector! I’m glad we’ve had this informal chat. I expect we shall both be bobbing up at each other with little discoveries during the next few weeks—or d’you think it will be months?”

  Some of it was deliberate leg-pull, Curwen told himself as he returned to the car. But some of the things that sounded pure cheek turned out to be true. The crooks always tried to put themselves over as sensible men behaving sensibly. These—scientists they were supposed to be—seemed to enjoy explaining what fools they had been—which probably meant they were not fools. A silly trick, throwing a wedding ring in a river! And still sillier if you said you’d done it when you hadn’t!

  Benjoy, who had found that discipline cou
ld be very useful, one way and another, refrained from asking whether his superior had had any luck. He refrained with such correctitude that Curwen was goaded into speech.

  “Sea-lawyers, all three of ’em! They’ve cooked up that legal riddle and dug themselves in. But they don’t know any more about our work than that old stuffed owl who’s Stranack’s solicitor. Come to that, nor do the judges, though some counsel know more than’s good for ’em, if they want to keep their wigs on.”

  “I suppose he handed you backchat, sir?”

  “Never despise the lawyers, boy! Some of ’ em are good at their own game. But you don’t want to be overawed either. D’ you know the weak spot of a lawyer which he can’t help?”

  “No, sir,” said Benjoy, correctly.

  “Some of the best brains in the country!” ejaculated Curwen, waving his hand generously at Bar and Bench. “Remember this! It doesn’t matter how brilliant the lawyer is—his knowledge and his whole bag o’ monkey tricks has to get to work on what they call ‘the facts before the court’. Our hands are not tied like that. Take Miss Aspland, f’r instance. She’s not a fact before the court.”

  Curwen gazed out of the window. It looked as if no more were coming through.

  “What is she in aid of, sir?”

  “Could be that she’s only trying to keep her friend out of trouble. With these properly brought up girls of good family you never know where you are. They’re not reliable like the crook girls.”

  “And could be she’s doing a spot of narking on her own?”

  “You oughtn’t to say ‘narking’. Not right, for a girl like that. Besides, it wouldn’t be narking in her case—she gets a hundred thousand extra under the old man’s Will if anything goes wrong with the marriage settlement. It isn’t narking to stand up for your own rights … About that bike. See that driver from Weston’s again and get some more out of him.”

  “Driver from The Hollow Tree—yes, sir.”

  There was plenty of desk work waiting for Curwen. Where hard evidence is scarce the paper piles up faster than ever. In the middle of the afternoon Benjoy returned to headquarters.

  “Routine first, sir. Canvey stopped me in the street and asked me to accept formal notice that he intends to go to London tomorrow to see his solicitor. When I asked the solicitor’s name he—he gave a facetious answer and walked away.”