The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries

by Michael Gilbert

  “Odd sort of memory you’ve got,” said the Commercial jovially.

  “Don’t I know your face?” said Grandpa. “Strike a light, but it’s my old friend Chief Inspector—what’s the name?—Horsebox? Has been? Hazlerigg. That’s it. The racket-buster. The man who’s put more food-and-drink thieves behind bars than the rest of the Flying Squad put together.”

  The high old voice had a venomous edge to it.

  Sam looked shocked almost out of his wits. The Commercial had his mouth wide open. The girl had gone white, her companion red. The boy sidled unobtrusively towards the door.

  “And what brings you to these parts?” said Grandpa.

  “Murder,” said the Chief Inspector.

  The word stilled all movement.

  “There now!” said Sam at last. “And who’s gone and murdered who?”

  Curiously enough, he seemed relieved, as did Grandpa and the boy.

  “Murder, eh?” said Grandpa. “That’s a new lay for you, Inspector.”

  “It’s the oldest lay in the world,” said Hazlerigg mildly. “Elderly husband, found dead. Young wife disappeared. Lover with her. Certain indications that they’ve gone north. Nothing more at the moment, but I expect we shall hear of them before morning.”

  “Travelling as husband and wife, I expect?” said the Commercial, bringing himself back into the picture.

  “That’s it,” said Hazlerigg. He gave a short laugh. “I’ve no doubt they’ll make all the usual mistakes.”

  “Mistakes?” said the Commercial.

  “Oh,” said Hazlerigg, “you know the sort of thing I mean. Posing as man and wife, but he asks her if she takes sugar in her coffee. Or perhaps she takes out a cigarette and looks round for matches, not realising that he’s handy with a lighter. A hundred and one little things like that, if you keep your eyes open.”

  The man and the girl seemed to become aware that the centre of interest had shifted to them.

  “Perhaps we ought to be getting along,” said the man defiantly, rising to his feet.

  “Well,” said Hazlerigg. He had his head on one side and seemed to be listening.

  They all heard it.

  A slithering noise of tyres trying to grip on the ice. Then, twice, the gentle thud of bumper on bumper.

  Two other cars had joined the queue.

  “Now I want you all to stand quite still,” said Hazlerigg. “That’s my reinforcements arriving. The ones I phoned for. Oh, come in, Inspector. These are your birds.”

  He indicated Sam, Grandpa and the boy. “Something a little more serious than rationing offences this time. Fifty thousand cigarettes stolen in Hounslow last night. Sam brought them up in the back of his lorry. And he was expected. The boy helped him unload them as soon as he arrived. A planned job, and they’re all in it.”

  “Do you mean to say,” said Grandpa furiously, “that all the skite about murder was just to keep us quiet while the troops turned up?”

  “That’s right,” said Hazlerigg. “Easy now. There’s room for all of you in the cars. You’ll probably have to manhandle them up the slope.” A policeman appeared from the rear parts, staggering under a carton.

  “That looks like some of it,” said Hazlerigg. “The rest’s probably still on the lorry. Get moving.”

  “I think,” said the man to the girl, “that perhaps we’ll get moving too.”

  Nobody said no. They went out. Hazlerigg finished his coffee. It was still hot. The Commercial was almost beyond speech.

  “What about that couple?” he said at last. “Were they—did they—I mean, do you think—?”

  “Not thinking about them at all,” said Hazlerigg. “One thing at a time. Not my job. Goodnight.”

  Reveille, March 1, 1955.

  AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

  “IT HAPPENED A LONG TIME AGO when I was only a girl,” said Great Aunt Emily.

  “In fact, it was the year I came out, because I remember I was staying with my sister Alice and her husband, Bill, in their house in Stanford Gate.”

  “Bill?” said Bohun casting his mind through the ranks of his great uncles. “That was the one in phosphates who had a weakness for Gaiety Girls.”

  “Any girls,” said Emily. “However de mortuis—”

  “Alice must have been a good deal older than you, though,” said Bohun. “She had quite a family by then, hadn’t she?”

  “Only four then. Bertha, Tom, Augusta, and Brian. It all happened on June tenth.”

  “You’ve a remarkably accurate memory,” said Bohun approvingly. He was an accurate man himself.

  “There’s no question of accuracy. I remember it because it happened on June tenth. It was Bertha’s birthday. She was five. Alice always had a tea party on her children’s birthdays. And a big cake – she used to ice it herself – and animal biscuits for the children and sandwiches for the grownups.”

  “Grownups were invited, too?”

  “Oh, certainly. Miss Twomey was one of them.”

  “She was the one who—?”

  “That’s right. She died – the next morning. In terrible agony. Poor woman.” Emily pursed her lips. The horror of it was still with her after all those years. She added. “She was a harpist, you know. Quite famous in her way.”

  Bohun refrained from a facetious comment. Indeed, he looked unusually serious. “Who else was at the party?” he said. “Tell it all to me.”

  “I remember it,” said Emily, “as if it were yesterday. There were six of us grownups – Alice, myself, poor Miss Twomey, the Vicar of All Souls Lavender Hill and a splendid man, though he afterwards became an agnostic and sold sewing machines in America – and his wife, rather a dull little woman – and Mrs. Armstrong.”

  “And she was not a dull little woman.”

  “Far from it,” said Emily. Her voice had acquired the detached coldness which the older generation reserved for Certain Topics and Certain People.

  “A merry widow?” suggested Bohun.

  “Well,” said Aunt Emily. “We must speak no evil of her either. She’s dead. In fact she died soon after the party I was telling you about. She slipped, on a very wet night, and fell under a horse-bus. Alice was walking with her at the time and it was a great shock to her.”

  Bohun preserved in his own mind a picture of his great Aunt Alice. She had been very old, and he had been very young. But he had not been deceived. An amiable-looking woman of mild disposition and gentle manners, but under it all a character and determination beside which concrete was soft and steel yielding.

  “Tell me more about the birthday party,” he said. “A lot more.”

  “Let me see, then,” said Emily.

  “I’ve told you who were there – the six of us grownups and the four children. I think I can even remember how we sat. The vicar on my right. His wife on his right. Mrs. Armstrong on my left. Then Miss Twomey.

  “Where was Alice?”

  “She hardly had time to sit down. At the moment I visualise her”—Emily screwed up her birdlike eyes—“she is cutting the cake. A lovely birthday cake. I don’t think she made it herself – one didn’t in those days, you know. But she’d certainly iced it, and very pretty it was. In the middle was the name Bertha in green icing – green was the child’s favourite colour. Then on the bottom edge Five Years Old in blue – and on the top edge the year, in red figures.”

  “Remarkable,” said Bohun. “Remarkable.”

  Emily accepted this is a tribute to her memory. “But of course,” she explained, “we all talked about that tea a good deal afterwards. The inquest, you know.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “Poor Miss Twomey. Three hours later – while she was changing for dinner. The most agonising cramps and—er—other things. Acute arsenic poisoning. She died at dawn.”

  “And the tea party naturally came under suspicion.”

  “Well, it couldn’t have had anything to do with it,” said Emily. “How could it? That was the whole point. Cook was furious. Sh
e had made all the sandwiches herself. And the cake. Everyone ate the sandwiches and the cake. And they ate nothing else.”

  “I see,” said Bohun. “That did make it awkward. Had Miss Twomey had anything else to eat recently?”

  “She had luncheon alone, in a Station Restaurant.” Emily’s tone expressed very clearly what she thought of people who ate in Station Restaurants. “It was impossible to prove anything, but it was just when Home Rule was becoming troublesome again and one of the waiters was an Irishman.”

  “Did Mrs. Armstrong take sugar in her tea?” asked Bohun.

  “Mrs. Armstrong?” Emily brought her mind back with some difficulty to the gay widow. “No. I don’t think she did. Nor milk either. Why do you ask?”

  “Fascinating,” said Bohun. “Fascinating. After all these years. By the way, I don’t think you told me. Was it 1896 or 1906? No. Come to think of it, it could hardly have been as late as 1906. Bertha must be well over sixty.”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Emily, “it was 1896. What horrible ideas are you turning over in that head of yours?”

  “I was thinking,” said Bohun, “that you never know when you stand in the greatest danger. The Mafeking Celebrations? Zeppelins? Buzz bombs? Traffic? Don’t let them kid you. You’ll never be nearer death than you were at tea that afternoon in 1896.”

  “Now you must explain what you mean – at once!”

  “It’s very simple,” said Bohun. “Dear Aunt Alice. A tigress in defence of her mate. She must have known or suspected – more than you thought about Bill and Mrs. Armstrong.”

  “Yes, there was something in it, I believe. But when Mrs. Armstrong had her accident—”

  “Accident my foot,” said Bohun. “Alice pushed her good and hard. It was her second attempt – after the first had misfired, don’t you see, and carried off poor Miss Twomey.”

  “Really,” said Emily. Curiosity struggled with repugnance. “How did she manage it?”

  “The only way she could pick on one individual – particularly if that individual was awkward enough not to take sugar in her tea. That would have been simple, of course, because she could have impregnated a lump and popped it into her cup when she served her. However, she didn’t do too badly.”

  “You are being irritating and obscure,” said Emily. “How?”

  “The icing. It must have been. First, she’d spread the white icing over the whole cake. Then she’d get one of those nice little icing-gun gadgets and put on the words and letters. Only right at the end, when she was putting on the last letter of the year 1896, she recharged the gun, with a special dollop of red icing plus arsenic. That was the only poisonous part of the whole cake, you see – the final letter in the date – the letter 6.”

  “Then when—oh, yes, I see.”

  Even after the years Emily turned pale.

  “That’s right,” said Bohun. “You’ve spotted it. After she’d cut the slices she got them turned round. Mrs. Armstrong got the 9. Miss Twomey got the 6 … You know, it might have been any of you.”

  “It might, indeed,” said Aunt Emily.

  She recovered herself.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Alice is dead now. And you’ve no proof. And it all happened a very long time ago.”

  Finally, firmly, she buried it after all these years.

  London Evening Standard, July 10, 1954.

  EVERY MONDAY, A NEW LETTER

  CURIOUSLY ENOUGH, CONSIDERING the tortuous ramifications of his own mind, Bohun had never been attracted to mathematics. The routine of his schooldays had carried him to the fringe of statistics but a merciful twist of fate had then diverted him into the byways of history and literature.

  A knowledge of quite elementary mathematics had, however, once enabled him to solve an unpleasant problem without moving from his desk in his Lincoln’s Inn office.

  Mr. Taylor was a new client introduced by the country firm for whom they did agency work. He was a pleasant-looking, rather pale-faced man of about thirty, with indeterminate-coloured hair, a modest smile, and a tie which proclaimed that he had been to the same public school as Bohun himself.

  “It’s the terrible regularity of it,” he said. “Wasn’t there a Chinese torture – drops of water – well, that’s the effect it has had on me. Every Monday morning, a new letter. It’s been going on for nearly three months now.

  Bohun examined the letters spread out on the top of his desk. There were eleven of them, all put together in the same way, with words and letters cut from newspapers and pasted onto paper.

  None of the letters was pleasant, but it was difficult to put a finger on their exact unpleasantness. They jeered. They probed. They twisted. They did not threaten – at least, not directly.

  You always were a coward, said one, who would rather cry, than sing for his supper.

  Afraid of the dark? said another; have you ever thought that, for the blind, darkness goes on forever?

  Bohun turned the pieces of paper over thoughtfully. He could sympathise with Mr. Taylor. One of them might be laughed off. A weekly dose for nearly three months was a good deal less than funny.

  “Have you told the police about them?” he said.

  “They hardly seemed to be a police matter,” said Mr. Taylor. “They’re sort of intimate family things. Not really criminal.”

  “Crime often flourishes inside the family circle,” said Bohun. Nevertheless, he was inclined to agree – it was not a police matter. The dogs of war, said a third message; by the way, you never liked dogs did you? War was more fun. Are you still wearing your wound stripe for that Mess party at Catterick?

  There were others in the same strain.

  “What’s all this about dogs?” said Bohun.

  Mr. Taylor turned a little pink. “I was bitten in the ankle by a dog when I was four years old,” he said. “I’ve always had a—a thing about them. I can usually control it now – but if it happens unexpectedly – if a dog comes running out of a garden and starts yapping at me – I’m quite likely to take to my heels.”

  “Elephants react in exactly the same way,” said Bohun. “Are the other things founded on truth as well?”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Taylor, uncomfortably but defiantly. “I suppose it is true that the only actual wound I did get was when I fell off the billiard table after a Mess night at Catterick and broke my ankle – I was in Signals.”

  “Lots of people didn’t hurt themselves even that much,” said Bohun. “And the fear of darkness – I suppose that’s a childish inhibition, too.”

  “That was a long time ago,” said Mr. Taylor. “I got over that before I went to school.”

  “You were at Slaughterhouse, I see.”

  “That’s right – were you?”

  “Before your time, I imagine. I happened to notice, in the first note I read, the reference to ‘singing for your supper.’ An old Slaughterhouse custom. Most unnerving.”

  “It unnerved me,” said Mr. Taylor. He seemed to be easier now that he had actually started on the confessional. “I think I was the only one of the new boys who was actually reduced to tears.”

  “It’s curious,” said Bohun. “Very curious. Not your being reduced to tears – I remember feeling that way myself. But the selection of these particular events. In some ways they seem to hang together. In other ways, they’re curiously unrelated. Perhaps you’d better tell me. We shall have to come to it sooner or later. Is there anyone you actually suspect? It must be someone who knows you pretty well.”

  “That’s what makes it so disturbing,” said Mr. Taylor. “And I most particularly don’t want to be disturbed just now. I’m holding down a new job – which is ticklish enough – and – well, I’m getting married.”

  “Congratulations,” said Bohun. He was a bachelor and had every intention of remaining so. “Do you live at home at the moment, then?”

  “I share a flat with my elder sister, Constance. My mother and father are dead.”

  “Ah,” said Bohun. He wrote down C
onstance on the blank piece of paper in front of him. “By the way, you didn’t tell me your fiancée’s name.”

  “Miss Holman – Valerie Holman.”

  Bohun wrote down Valerie.

  “And you haven’t told me yet whom you suspect,” he said.

  “It’s all so indefinite,” said Mr. Taylor. “However – yes – there is someone. It’s Bill Bayes. I’ve known him, oh—a long time. He was at Slaughterhouse with me. And after that in the Army. Not the same crowd, but I keep running across him.”

  “Sounds promising,” said Bohun. “Very promising, indeed. But is there any particular reason why Bill should feel that way about you?”

  “There could be,” said Mr. Taylor. “You see, this job I got – if I hadn’t got it, he would have had it. I think he felt it.”

  Bohun added Bill to Constance and Valerie and stared thoughtfully at his little list.

  “Is there anyone at all, outside these three, who would know enough about your affairs—”

  “But look here,” said Mr. Taylor, angrily, “I never said I suspected Connie. And as for Val – the idea’s absurd.”

  Nevertheless, though he spoke explosively, there was something in his voice that gave Bohun the courage to persevere.

  “I can’t pretend,” he said, “to understand people who are in love. They hurt themselves. They hurt each other. And as for your sister, has it ever occurred to you that she might be jealous? I don’t mean of your fiancée, but of the idea of your getting married.”

  “It’s a possibility,” said Mr. Taylor.

  “Then let’s get back to my question. Could there be anyone else?”

  Mr. Taylor considered the matter. “I don’t really see that there could,” he said at last.

  “Well, then, we’ve got somewhere,” said Bohun. “Now. Take these four incidents. I take it that your sister would certainly know about your fear of the dark and your fear of dogs. You might have told her, in the holidays, about your experiences at school. That makes three. But the fourth – I take it you never told her about Mess nights at Catterick.”

  “I don’t think I ever told her about school either.”