by Bruce, Leo
So, I said to myself, I was in part to blame, and there seemed to be nothing in the world I could do about it. If Stewart Ferrers had been a woman, or an imbecile, or if circumstances could have been produced which would have made the murder of Benson in any way forgivable, there might have been a chance of persuading the Home Secretary to listen to a public appeal signed by a great number of influential people. But the murder had been a brutal one, and the actions of Stewart, as presented by the police, merited as severe a punishment as that given to any murderer. There seemed to be no hope.
After fighting for some days against the inclination to return to London, I suddenly decided to pack my bags and go back. It was not that I felt I could do anything, but at least I wanted to be on the spot and not showing so much indifference to the hideous fate of the man who was to be hanged. I found Beef himself in a somewhat agitated state, though not as profoundly stirred as one would have expected.
“Where it comes in,” he said, “is when you’ve had years and years of dealing with all sorts of things. You get blunted. I remember a young fellow sent to prison for a month over a house-breaking job. And it turned out he’d only been frightened into doing what he had done by a whole gang of men what we arrested nicely afterwards. And there was another case of a lady suspected of robbing a mission box who…”
“Don’t let’s go into your past achievements as a policeman,” I said sharply. “This is much too serious.”
“I know it’s serious,” Beef returned. “I’m only saying that I’m accustomed to having tragedy through my hands.”
“What has been done since I was here?” I asked.
“Well, I sent my letter off to the Home Secretary telling him all the reasons I had for thinking it wasn’t Stewart. I only had a printed slip in reply saying that it had been received.”
“Did you expect anything more?” I asked.
“Well, it was a long letter, wasn’t it?” Beef pointed out.
“So that the poor chap’s going to be hanged on Thursday?”
“That’s right. Horrible business too.”
“And you don’t think it’s your fault?”
“’Course it isn’t,” said Beef. “You don’t blame a doctor when he works to save a patient and can’t, do you? I’ve done my best, as I’ve told you before.”
I got up hurriedly, feeling that I could not stand any more of Beefs complacent murmurings. Beef followed me into the hall, and just at that moment the telephone bell rang.
“Here, wait a minute,” said Beef, picking up the receiver, “it might be something.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said coldly; “at least a wrong number,” and I went on towards the door. But something in Beefs voice as he answered the ’phone stopped me with my hand on the knob.
“But what is it?” he kept insisting, and then after a few moments of puzzled listening, “Hallo? Hallo?” He put the instrument down and looked at me almost guiltily.
“It’s something new come up,” he said. “That was that antique-dealer’s wife. She said it was important, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. Said we was to come down.”
This time I made no protest as the two of us got into the car. By now the journey had become something of a penance, and I knew that Beef understood my protest without my taking the trouble to make it. But what, I thought viciously to myself, could that interfering old woman have discovered now that would be worth driving across London for. That Fryer was not the old tramp’s real name, or some such useless piece of inquisitiveness, I supposed. Now that Beef had started her off on the idea that anyone could be a detective, she looked like being something of a menace.
Beef was silent as we drove along, and I had time to attempt to clarify my thoughts about the whole case. While I had been away in Norfolk the danger in which Stewart stood of being hanged had tortured me. But now that I had returned to London the whole atmosphere seemed to have changed. Somehow it was inconceivable that this thing could come about. I had accepted the fact that a crime-writer’s detective could actually fail to discover the guilty person in a case, or, as in the present one, be incapable of saving an innocent man’s life. But was it really possible? It was a thing that had never been allowed to happen before, and with that huge and influential precedent behind it, could it happen now? Since the case had started in such a stereotyped way, was it possible that it would finish with a last-minute rescue? This seemed the only possible ending. We had begun the whole thing under the worst possible conditions. Perhaps Beef was really to blame, not for being inefficient, but for being so naive as to set up near Baker Street. I began to feel that, even more important than saving Stewart from the gallows, I must rescue the case from the hackneyed ending of a last-minute rescue. Perhaps in this very drive down to Sydenham I was helping to bring to light just the one piece of evidence that Beef needed.
But I need not have worried myself about this, for the first words the antique-dealer’s wife spoke when we drew up once more in front of the shop were exciting enough even if they were half expected.
“She’s run away,” she said even before the car had stopped moving. “I don’t know what it means, but it seems very queer to me. I said to myself, there’s one man who ought to know about this straight away, and that’s Sergeant Beef, I said. He may not have been able to find enough to get Mr. Ferrers off, I said, but perhaps this is just the evidence he’s been waiting for.”
Beef spoke without moving from the car. “And what have you found out?” he said. “Who’s run away?”
“Why, Mrs. Benson,” said the woman with surprise. “Left without telling nobody. Sold all her furniture to my cousin who’s got a second-hand business near the Crystal Palace, and took the first price he offered without arguing. ‘It’s not natural,’ he said to me, and I could see it had given him quite a shock, and him with his bad heart. Anyway, there it is, and if you go up to Doctor Benson’s house you can see that I’m not telling you a lie.”
And indeed it was quite obvious that the woman had not invented the story even from the gateway of the house.
“But, Beef,” I protested as he began to get out of the car as if he were going to make sure that the house was indeed empty, “what does it matter if she has gone? You couldn’t expect her to live in that house by herself. The obvious thing for her to do was to move. I expect she’s moved into a furnished flat in town somewhere. I don’t see that this has the slightest importance.”
“Well, you can’t tell,” said Beef cautiously. “But why that silly woman couldn’t tell me over the ’phone…”
It was with something of a sense of flatness that I dropped Beef at his house in Lilac Crescent. There was a feeling of incompleteness about this stage of the affair which I could not pin down to any special causes. I merely felt that something should be done on this last day. Surely, I thought, Beef should be seeing people, searching, at least doing something instead of going home like a comfortable shopkeeper at the end of his day. Tomorrow, unless he could prevent it, Stewart would be hanged. Even if I could achieve nothing useful I felt impelled to see some of the people involved and find out if anything was being done. With this feeling for activity for its own sake I drove round to the block of flats in which Peter lived.
The porter on duty was the same man that Beef had interviewed, and I told him that I wanted to see Peter Ferrers.
“Mr. Ferrers is not in,” he said shortly.
“What time will he be back?”
“He won’t be in to anyone,” the man said, eyeing me with some hostility.
Thinking perhaps that Peter felt that he should be left to face his tragedy alone, I left without further protest, only asking the porter to tell Mr. Ferrers that I had called.
What else could I do? Where else could I go? While I was quite willing to admit that this last-minute rushing round London was useless, I felt, too, that it was inevitable. No one could stay still and passively wait. But there was one man who, I felt, would give me a more satisfactory int
erview, and that was Brian Wakefield. I had not called on him at his flat before, but I remembered his address in Blackfriars from a conversation between Beef and Peter Ferrers. Now I drove over, and after a little difficulty in locating it—Peter had said it looked like a block of offices—knocked on the door.
Wakefield seemed quite pleased to see me and invited me in. Quite cynically, I think, he had made a quick analysis of my state, and the r6le of psychoanalyst pleased him. But I was too worried to resent his rather friendly, superior tone when he said:
“Well, what’s on your mind?”
Yet in a way this interview was as hopeless as the other. I myself could scarcely explain the unrest which I felt, and although Wakefield must have sensed it, there was nothing he could do.
“What do you think about this case now?” I asked him at last. “Now all the evidence has been sifted and the trial over, what do you think about the verdict?”
Wakefield sucked slowly at his pipe and seemed to be considering the question, although in reality he was wondering how far he could be frank with me.
“Well, to be perfectly honest,” he said slowly, “I think Stewart did it. Of course, you’ll remember my saying some time ago that I thought he was capable of commiting a murder. The police’s case seemed pretty water-tight to me.”
More than his words, it was his attitude which affected me. He might have been sitting back watching a minor chemical experiment taking place. In any case, I could see that the hanging of Stewart Ferrers, whether innocent or guilty, meant very little to him.
“Let’s see,” he went on, “the hanging is tomorrow morning, isn’t it? That is something which has always interested me—the psychological state of man during those few last hours before he is hanged. You have, of course, read that superb passage of Dostoevsky’s in The Idiot where the Prince describes his feelings under similar circumstances?”
But my mind was preoccupied with the more immediate thought of the present condemned man. “What does Peter think?” I asked.
“I have not, of course, told him what I think,” said Wakefield. “He himself seems to hold out some hope of a last-minute reprieve. Really, I hadn’t the heart to disillusion him.”
There was clearly no peace of mind to be gained here, but somehow I had not the energy to move. Wakefield talked amazingly well, and his voice was like a drug to me in my present condition. It took my mind completely away from what had been its foremost consideration during the greater part of the last few weeks, and when at last I left some time after midnight I felt that at least I should sleep soundly. I had arranged to meet Beef fairly early to take him round to the prison.
Long before nine o’clock on that fatal morning Beef and I walked along in a light drift of rain near Pentonville prison. The street about us was reasonably busy, but it was a gloomy street for all that, with greyish Victorian buildings the stucco of which was decaying.
Beef scarcely spoke until we reached a young policeman on point-duty.
“Where do they show the black flag?” he asked abruptly.
“Eh?” said the policeman.
Beef coughed. “I’m ex-Sergeant Beef,” he explained. “I’ve been concerned in the Ferrers case, and I’ve got to see the last of it. D’you mind telling me where the black flag goes up?”
“You’ll see it round the other side,” said the policeman rather grumpily, disapproving perhaps of anything so morbid.
In a wider but a less busy street we found a group of bedraggled people who had evidently come here with the same object as Beef and I. None of them were familiar to us, and I was relieved, though perhaps a little puzzled, by the absence of Peter Ferrers. These people seemed somehow dispirited and bottlenecked, and I wondered that their curiosity should be strong enough to keep them standing in the rain for the gloomy satisfaction of knowing that a man had been hanged.
“Do you think,” I asked Beef, “that there may be still a chance? Wakefield told me last night that Peter still had hopes. It wouldn’t be an unheard-of thing if the Governor had received last-minute instructions, would it?”
Beef made no answer except for a sudden grip of my arm and an indication to where, high on that dismal building, a small square of black had suddenly started to flutter against the grey sky.
“Stewart’s hanged,” he said, and then as he turned away, “And I suppose I’m ruined.”
Chapter XXX
EVEN then, Beefs reputation, or what there was of it, might have been saved if it had not been for his inordinate vanity. Within forty-eight hours of the curt paragraphs which appeared in the daily press to announce that Stewart Ferrers, the Sydenham murderer, had been hanged that morning, Angus Braithwaite, the star crime reporter of one of our most popular dailies, heard, it appears, of Beefs part in the investigations. The case had not been an exciting one from the journalistic point of view, and Braithwaite was not satisfied with the many and varied intimate sidelights he had thrown on it. His interview with Sheila Benson had not been as revealing as one might have supposed, and his story about Ed Wilson and Rose, “building life anew on the shambles of this ugly case,” though in the tradition of his paper, had not satisfied him.
So Braithwaite at least blessed Beef. Like everyone else who reads crime novels as well as studying crime, Braithwaite had frequently been irritated by the ease and assurance with which private investigators strolled through the maze of evidence, calmly taking the one preordained path towards veracity. He had felt, as he had observed the masters in action, from Holmes and Blake to Thorndike and Mason, peeved by their certainty of success. And now at last, he realized, a private investigator had failed. With immense delight he sharpened his reporter’s pencil, jumped into a taxi, and made for Lilac Crescent.
And Beef, of course, fell right into it. As he told me afterwards, he was accustomed to giving the details to the reporters on the local papers in the various places in which he had been stationed as a policeman, and this more impressive journalist did not disturb him.
“Sergeant Beef?” Braithwaite asked with a smile, and, like Snow White receiving the Witch, Beef accepted the apple of his cordiality and asked him in.
“I’m from the Daily Dose,” said Braithwaite, “and we’re very interested in your work in connection with this Sydenham case.”
“Oh yes?” said Beef, delighted, I imagine, by this attention.
“We have heard,” Braithwaite went on, “that you collected some remarkable evidence which was never produced in Court.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Beef. “I think Sir William Petterie used everything I gave him that could be any help. The trouble was I couldn’t say who had done it.”
I can imagine Braithwaite’s difficulty in suppressing his pleasure at those artless words. He sat there talking to the Sergeant for the best part of an hour, and without much difficulty got the whole story. How he had been successful in two previous murder mysteries, how he had set up on his own, how Peter Ferrers had come to him as being, he told Braithwaite, the man most obviously possessed of brilliance, insight, intuition, psychology, and all the other qualities which the Sergeant most envied in his rivals, how he had undertaken the case and set about the investigations. He went on to explain in detail his conviction that Stewart was innocent, and the odds and ends of evidence he had unearthed and which the police had ignored. Without realizing apparently the harm he was doing himself, he enlarged on his disappointment at failing to discover the real murderer, his chagrin at not being called as a witness, his sense of responsibility for the hanging of Stewart Ferrers when, as he still maintained, “Stewart had no more murdered Doctor Benson than he, Beef, had.” He described our visit to Pentonville and our sense of dismay when the black flag had eventually appeared. And he showed Braithwaite out, unconscious, I am convinced, that this criminologist as he called himself took with him a story that would flutter the dove-cotes of crime fiction, and bring the Sergeant into hopeless and irrevocable discredit.
It was not until next morning
when he went out to purchase the Daily Dose in the vain and complacent belief that he would see no more than a photograph of himself with a caption explaining that he had done good work in the Sydenham murder case that Beef was aware of the truth. The photograph was there, the caption was different.
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR FAILS
VILLAGE SHERLOCK HOLMES COULD NOT SAVE MAN FROM GALLOWS
Sergeant Beef, Amateur Detective Hero of Two Novels, Makes History by Defeat
I sat today in the small front room of a house near Baker Street and talked to a man with a broken heart. Since Sherlock Holmes chose it Baker Street has been considered the Harley Street of detection, and when some months ago ex-Sergeant William Beef decided to set up as a private investigator, he selected this district. Full of hope and confidence, he displayed his name-plate. He had solved two murder mysteries, and his biographer, Lionel Townsend, believed that he could solve others.
Today he is a fallen star. For the first time in the history of crime or crime fiction, the private investigator, the superhuman detective, the Holmes, the Sexton Blake, has failed to solve a mystery.
For Sergeant Beef, hero of Case for Three Detectives, and Case Without a Corpse, believed that Stewart Ferrers, the Sydenham murderer, was innocent. He was employed by Ferrers’s brother to prove this and to find the guilty person.