The Man Who Hated Banks & Other Mysteries

by Michael Gilbert

  “Really, now,” said Franks. “No trouble at all?”

  “A happy, united family,” said Placket. “The children stopping at home, and not rushing off the very moment they were out of the schoolroom.”

  “Let me see. Mr. Norman is just forty and Miss Rachel is thirty-five?”

  “She was thirty-five last month. I still make them each a cake on their birthday. Thirty-five candles. It has to be a big cake.”

  “So I should think,” said the Inspector, impassively.

  “You say they were a happy, cheerful family? I suppose Mr. Mallet spent a lot of time up in town. What did the children do all day?”

  “Employed themselves as country people should,” said Placket, rather tartly. “Master Norman had his studies. He’s a great naturalist. What he doesn’t know about birds and beasts – but there! You’ll have seen for yourself. And Miss Rachel, she collects herbs. She’s published a book—”

  She went over to the shelf and pulled out a volume. It was a solid-looking book and published, Bohun saw, by a well-known firm. The Herbs and Plants of East Anglia. Their Uses in Medicine and Cookery by Rachel Mallet.

  The Inspector looked happier. “I’d like to keep that for a bit.”

  “I expect Miss Rachel would sign it for you if you asked her,” said Placket.

  “Happy family,” said Major Rix. “Don’t you believe it. I’ve never seen such a little hell-kitchen in my life. Wogs, Wops and Wuzzies – I’ve seen them all. Believe me, for real hating you want to come to the English Shires.”

  “Well, now; that’s very interesting—”

  “Old Mallet was a pirate, you see. He’d got the pirate mentality. When he’d made his haul, he liked to put it in a chest and sit on it. He liked his bits and pieces all round him, where he could see ’em. Rachel and Norman were bits and pieces. If he’d had his own way, he’d just like to have had them sitting round, quietly, as if they’d been carefully preserved and put under glass. Only human nature doesn’t work out like that. All it did was to make ’em branch out in other ways. Norman and his birds and bees, and Rachel and her herbs. That sort of thing. The more they tried to lead lives of their own, the more he tried to stop them. First he tried to argue them out of it – no good. Then he tried to laugh them out of it. Do you know, he got a chap to write a sort of skit of Rachel’s herb book – not very funny really. I read some of it. I reckon he had to pay through the nose to get that published—”

  “Rather an elaborate joke,” said Franks.

  “Oh, he was like that. Go to any lengths for a laugh. As long as it made someone else uncomfortable. Very like a man I once knew in Jamaica – trained a tortoise to drink rum. However, that’s another story. Lately it’s been leg-pulling. Country superstitions and that sort of thing. Norman knows ’em all. Swallows go up at night, good weather coming. Rooks fly round the trees, it’s going to rain. Norman believes in ’em all.”

  “There are certain scientific explanations—” began Bohun, but he caught a look from Inspector Franks and subsided.

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said Rix. “Prefer a barometer myself. However, Mallet used to pull his leg about it properly. When they had visitors. Particularly when they had visitors. I’ve heard Mallet say, ‘Oh, Morgan, when I was out in the garden this morning, I saw the bees flying backwards round the hive. What do you suppose that means?’ And Morgan would say, solemn as a judge, ‘I am given to understand, sir, that it signifies that Consols will rise two points before the next account.’ And so on. The more he bullied ’em the quieter they hated him.”

  “Not a very happy family,” said Franks.

  “You’re telling me.”

  “But you were proposing to marry into it?”

  “Yes. But I wasn’t going to live with them afterwards.”

  “You didn’t anticipate any trouble, then.”

  “Marriage always leads to trouble,” said Major Rix frankly. “It’s just one of those things you’ve got to put up with. My last wife used to shoot at me with an air gun.”

  “Hmph,” said Inspector Franks. “Now, about the evening of Mr. Mallet’s death.”

  “I know just what you’re going to say,” said Major Rix, “and I know it didn’t sound good, all that stuff I was telling you about Rachel and Norman hating their father. But it doesn’t mean they killed him. It wasn’t them at all. That sort of hating doesn’t lead to killing. You can take my word for that. It was Morgan. I never trusted him an inch myself. Then, after he’d done it he got cold feet and went out and shot himself. I’ve seen that happen before.”

  “Yes,” said Franks. “No doubt it’s one of the solutions we shall have to investigate. Thank you very much for what you have told us. Meanwhile—”

  “There was one thing,” said Bohun. “When you found Morgan this morning – were you certain he was dead?”

  “Of course I knew he was dead. I’ve seen lots of dead men before.”

  “Did you disturb the body in any way?”

  “Did I—certainly not.”

  “To be quite specific,” said Bohun. “Did you take a key from the ring of keys in his hip pocket?”

  Involuntarily the Major turned to look over his shoulder at the corner cupboard. It was ajar.

  “All right,” he said. “Very smart of you. I borrowed the key of the drink cupboard.”

  “Why did you do that?” said Franks sharply.

  “Well, really,” said Rix. “Just because the bloody man had shot himself, I saw no reason to put all the whisky into pawn.”

  “Well, now,” said Franks. “You’ll be doing me a service if you tell me what you make of all that?”

  It was evening, the oil lamp had been trimmed and lit, and they were alone in the coffee-room of the Black Goats, an ancient apartment approached by so many twisted stairs and winding corridors that it seemed improbable that anyone else should ever find his way to it.

  “I don’t mean the routine bits,” he went on. “I shall have to wait for the reports to come in tomorrow. There’s the doctor’s report on Mallet and on Morgan and I’ve had an expert look at the gun which killed Morgan – it’s an ordinary twelve-bore sporting gun from the case in the gun room, but it might tell us something. And there’s the fingerprints and photographs and so on. They might be useful.” He spoke as a man who has not got a great deal of faith in fingerprints and photographs, but Bohun was not deceived.

  He did not know much about police routine, but he did know that most cases were solved by simple hard work on matters of detail by a great number of policemen.

  “It’s the shape of the thing that rattles me. Usually you can see which way a thing goes, right at the start. Man or woman gets killed – in nine cases out of ten it’s the husband or wife who did it. That’s one of the things about marriage. You do know where you are. Or else perhaps it’s a professional – breaking and entering and so on. You just look up the list. But this—” He spread his hands despairingly.

  “It is a bit confusing,” agreed Bohun. He got up, trimmed the lamp, and sat down again sympathetically.

  “First of all you’ve got Mallet, if that was murder. Even allowing for it being an inside job, you’ve got plenty of candidates. Norman and Rachel who hated him – according to Rix. Morgan who wanted his money—”

  “Oh, there’s nothing in that one,” said Bohun. “I’ve got the will here. So far as I know it’s the only will Mallet made, and he never had the slightest intention of changing it. Morgan got five hundred pounds in either case – not five thousand.”

  “It’s not always what’s in a will that causes the trouble,” said Franks. “It’s what people think may be in it. Can you tell me what happened to the rest?”

  “Oh yes, I think I can do that. There are a few other little gifts – five hundred pounds to Placket – the others are people in his London office. Then the rest goes into two parts. One half to Norman and one half to Rachel. Only she can’t touch her capital. It’s tied up in the usual way to prevent
a husband getting hold of any of it.”

  “Do you suppose Rix knew that?”

  “Even if he did, he was on to quite a good thing when Mallet died. They couldn’t touch the capital, but Rachel’s income would have been about six thousand a year. That would have done very nicely to pay the bills – he’d have had free board and lodging, food and drink for the rest of his life. Particularly drink.”

  “So far as money goes then, Rix and Morgan both had motives. Only Morgan’s may have been smaller than he imagined.”

  “That’s about it,” said Bohun.

  “When you look at the means,” said Franks, “there’s nothing to choose between them. We make it as difficult as we can for people to buy poison, but the law hasn’t yet got round to stopping them making it for themselves. Mallet used to have a hot whisky at nine o’clock. Almost anyone got it ready and took it up. There was no rule about it. Norman and Rachel say Morgan took it up that night. Placket says she thinks Norman did. Rachel certainly went up to see him at nine o’clock.”

  “And what about Morgan’s death?”

  “There’s even less there. The gun was in a cupboard with the cartridges – not locked. Anyone could pick it up, follow Morgan into the spinney – and shoot him. No one would take any notice. The fields are full of those automatic bird-scarers. They go off about once an hour.”

  “Then perhaps Morgan did shoot himself.”

  “If he did,” said Franks. “All right. He’s the obvious candidate for Mallet. Then the thing’s reasonably straight. But if he didn’t – it doesn’t seem to have any shape at all. There’s a piece missing somewhere.”

  “I’m only here to make suggestions,” said Bohun. “You do the work. I’m under no delusions about that. I quite agree with what you said – the middle piece is missing, and the other pieces won’t match up till you find it. All I’ve got at the moment is three questions in my head. The first’s a tiny matter of fact. What was Morgan doing up in London last Thursday?”

  “I’ve got an enquiry going,” said Franks. “I circulated a photograph. Unfortunately it’s not a very good one – and there are quite a lot of shops in and around the Gray’s Inn Road.”

  “All right,” said Bohun. “It may be nothing.”

  The lamp was smoking again, and he got up to adjust it, first turning the flame right down, then carefully up again, talking as he worked. “The second question is, were the two deaths connected? I don’t necessarily mean, did the same person do both. But were they logically connected? And, if so, how? The third point seems to me to be the oddest of the lot. Suppose that the postmortem on Mallet shows that his stroke was a fake. Then what was the point of it? Mallet was a notorious joker, but his jokes always seemed to end with a big belly laugh for Mallet and someone else feeling all kinds of a fool. This one doesn’t seem to have worked out quite like that. What went wrong?”

  “First report,” said Franks next morning, “from the doctor, on Mallet. No sign of any cerebral congestion or haemorrhage. In plain English. No stroke.”

  “So much for old Uncle Runcorn.”

  “Yes. Not very good. But there’s more to it than that. Equivalent of three grains of hyoscine or hyosciamine in the stomach and digestive organs. Not materia medicastuit. Vegetable origin. Derived from distillation of the seeds of henbane, alias hogsbean, alias stinking nightshade. Probable that the dose was taken after Mallet had his evening meal but before midnight. To be continued.”

  “Quite enough to go on with,” said Bohun.

  “I thought you’d like it. Second report. Doctor on Morgan. Suicide barely possible, but most unlikely. Position of wounds – direction of wounds – powder burns, etc., etc. You can read it for yourself.”

  Bohun did so. “It certainly sounds acrobatic,” he agreed. “Muzzle at least twenty-four inches away from the head, but pointing practically straight at it. I really think you can rule out suicide.”

  “I had already done so,” agreed Franks. “Listen to this. Report number three. Absolutely no fingerprints on the gun of any sort. Morgan wasn’t wearing gloves. Tell me how he could shoot himself without leaving any prints on the gun.”

  “All right,” said Bohun. “That’s that. Anything else on Morgan?”

  “General state of health. State of clothing. Contents of pockets—”

  “Let’s have that one.”

  “Wallet, money, old letters, bills. Nothing recent. Handkerchief, packet of fags. Lighter. Large pocketknife. Key ring—”

  “Key ring?”

  “That checks up with Rix’s story. The key of the drink cupboard was missing – and we picked up half a possible Rix fingerprint on one of the other keys. He probably touched it when he was removing the first key.”

  “A cool customer,” said Bohun. “What other keys?”

  “Two house doors, cellar and two safe keys.”

  “Hmph,” said Bohun. “House. Cellar. Safe. Hmph?”

  “One other small point. He’d got three recent bee stings. Two on his right arm, one on his left wrist.”

  “Had he though?” said Bohun.

  He went off to telephone Craine.

  “You’d better stay down there,” said Craine. “I suppose there’s bound to be an inquest. When they’ve finished cutting him up perhaps you can get him buried. The instructions are in the envelope with the will.”

  After lunch Franks reappeared. He had a look in his eye which meant more news.

  “I’ve got a good identification of Morgan on his shopping expedition,” he said. “The shop assistant picked the photograph straight out of a dozen without even stopping to think, bless him. I’ll give you three guesses what he went up to London to buy.”

  “I’m not that good,” said Bohun. “You tell me.”

  “A dictaphone. The sort of thing a businessman keeps on his desk to breathe his secret thoughts into. Not very big”—Franks demonstrated with his hands—“A small dispatch-case would hold it. But powerful, and up to date. Records on a roll and the typist plays it back later into earphones.”

  Bohun digested this.

  “Have you found it yet?”

  “I’ve got every man I can lay hands on, busy now taking the house apart. If it’s there I’ll find it before dusk.” Dusk came. And dark. But no dictaphone.

  At one o’clock in the morning Bohun was sitting by himself in the wheel-back rocking chair in the coffee-room. He had got the wick of the lamp adjusted to a nicety now and the oil flame spread its low, warm, kind light over the dingy old room.

  He was not asleep, nor even sleepy, because he suffered from parainsomnia and rarely slept more than an hour in any night. None of the doctors who had examined him had agreed about any point in his rare complaint except that one day he would drop down dead.

  He knew, by experience, when he was due to sleep and until that moment it was a waste of time even to go near his bedroom. He found the night hours useful. Sometimes he wrote, sometimes he read, sometimes he thought – a luxury which few normal people can fit into their crowded waking lives.

  He was thinking at that moment and he was making quite reasonable progress. For example, he was certain, now, that the double murderer was Norman Mallet. He was the only man with a real motive. As Major Rix had pointed out, people often got angry over their family’s idiosyncrasies, but they very rarely killed each other on account of them. With Norman it was different. If he believed that his father was using his money to coerce Rachel into a loveless marriage with Rix, then he might well think it his duty to stop it. More particularly if he was convinced that his father was dying already. And most particularly if he saw a lawyer coming to the house. Lawyers meant settlements and new wills or codicils. From that point of view his own visit had probably timed the murder. It had set it off. And this despite the fact that both Norman’s assumptions were false. His father had not been dying, and Bohun’s visit had been nothing to do with his will.

  Where motives were concerned, as the Inspector had so truly remarked, it wa
sn’t what actually happened, but what people thought was going to happen that produced results.

  As for the killing of Morgan, Norman had given himself away at his very first meeting. Bohun had not observed the fact at the time, but had remembered it afterwards. Apologising for not coming to the station to fetch him, he had said, “Morgan always keeps the keys of the car on him.” Now that was not true. Search of Morgan’s body had shown a number of keys, but they were house keys, not the garage key, and not the car key. It seemed logical to suppose that the reason Norman had been unable to meet him was that he had been too busy murdering Morgan.

  Why he had done so, and what sort of connection it could have with the death of Mr. Mallet, was the final step in this tangled business.

  Franks had been right about that. There was a piece missing. It was the middle piece of the jigsaw puzzle, and when he saw it, all the other little edges and twists would fall into position, and a recognisable whole would appear.

  What had been the point of Mallet’s last great pointless practical joke?

  What connection had it, if any, with his previous jokes? His ridiculing of his children’s love of birds and animals and country life and country superstitions?

  What use had he for a dictaphone? Why had it to be obtained secretly? And where was it now if it wasn’t in Humble Bee House?

  How had Morgan managed to get his wrists and arms stung three times?

  There is enormous virtue in sequence. It is conceivable that if Bohun had asked himself these questions in any other order he might not have spotted the truth which, by now, was staring him in the face.

  Feeling a little shaken in spite of himself he got to his feet and made his way to his bedroom. From his suitcase he took a torch and from the pocket of his coat a pair of gloves. It would be dark but there would be light enough for his purpose. And in any event, night was the best time, as Morgan had no doubt discovered. As he was leaving the inn he saw, in the corner of the hall, a heavy stick, and after a moment’s hesitation he added this to his equipment.

  Half an hour later he was standing once more at the gate of Humble Bee House. The driveway was a tunnel of darkness. It was the hour of false dawn, and, standing quite still, he could hear life moving in the thickets which bordered the drive. He opened the gate as quietly as he could, and the ghost of a wind set the leaves whispering, so that the news of his arrival seemed to run ahead of him up the drive.