by Bruce, Leo
“Presently the front door opens. He hears Benson and Stewart say good night, and he’s ready to speak to the doctor as he leaves. He tells him he has something important to talk over with him, as we know he had—his own affair with Sheila Benson. He’s told her to prepare the doctor for this talk, so that Benson’s already half expecting it. They take a few turns round the roads, and then on some pretext or other Peter leads him back to the house. Perhaps he suggested drawing up a memorandum of what they’d agreed, and signing it, or perhaps he said he would give him a cheque. At any rate, he got him back into the library. And when he was in the armchair, he outs with his swordstick and runs him through the neck before he could say knife.”
“Knife?” I repeated.
“Yes, knife,” said Beef. “That’s what people do say, isn’t it? But he was very careful. He’s got his gloves on, and he wipes the swordstick off on the cushion and then picks up the Italian dagger with his brother’s finger-prints on it, and digs it in the wound. Cold-blooded if you like, but you’ve got to remember the provocation. Then he notices the parcel that Benson has under his arm and sees it’s treasury notes. He leaves these beside the corpse as though they were something to do with it and steps quietly out of the front door.
“Then he has a nasty shock. Just at that moment the young mechanic comes cycling in at the front gate, to report to Benson that he can’t have his car that night. Peter hops back in the bushes and waits, leaving foot-prints that the police would have found next morning if they’d known their job, but which were washed away long before I got on the case. He sees the mechanic go up to the front door, and perhaps he hears him ring a couple of times, then, getting no answer, start cycling away. Peter realizes the danger of the mechanic’s ringing having woken someone up in the house, someone who might find the corpse, so he’s in a bit too much hurry to get away, and he bobs out of those bushes before the mechanic’s out of the drive. The mechanic spots him, or thinks he spots some movements there and turns round and calls out ‘Who’s there?” so that Peter has to dodge back again. But the mechanic doesn’t wait, and cycles away.
“Peter gets back to his car round the corner, and drives off back to London congratulating himself on having done a nice job of work. He leaves his hired car wherever he kept it and walks into his flats at two o’clock in the morning when there’s no one on duty in the hall, and is lying comfortably asleep when they call him in the morning. Oh, but I forgot something,” said Beef quickly; “before he left the Cypresses, he walked round again to the summer-house and put the swordstick back where he found it—not having touched it without his gloves on—and chucked his latch-key (which he had always had, though he deliberately hadn’t used it) into the bushes.”
“Why did he do that?” I asked.
“It was the best thing he could do,” Beef explained. “If he was found with that latch-key on him it would be proof that he could have done the job, and if he’d thrown it away anywhere else and it had happened to be found it might have been tied up with him. Whereas a spare latch-key found near the house it belonged to could have been anyone’s.”
I nodded. “Go on,” I said.
“But something had happened he couldn’t have anticipated. Old Fryer, who used to get boozed and sleep anywhere handy, had stumbled in there in the evening and gone off to sleep. Whether he was there when Peter fetched the swordstick, or whether he was only there when he put it back, or whether he wasn’t there at all until afterwards, I don’t know. But he got there before the morning, and sobering up at daylight he looked round the summer-house to see if there was something he could knock off. He saw the swordstick, and being a cunning old beggar accustomed to dealing with all sorts of goods, he knew what it was and had an idea of the value of it. So he picks it up, and he’s marching out of the gate with it when Ed Wilson comes in on his motor-bike.
“Well, you know what he did with it, and you know how we came to find it. And you remember your nasty sneers at the time because I happened to be interested in buying a dart-board. That dart-board led us to the truth!
“There’s something in this case,” Beef went on after a thoughtful pause, “that I think you’d call irony. That is that if Peter was to have kept out of it altogether the whole thing would probably have been done for him just as he wished. For why? Because Stewart himself had made up his mind to murder Benson, whose blackmailing had gone beyond all bounds. Now we know that Stewart was funny with money, we know that he’d been in the hands of moneylenders before his father died and had probably murdered his dad to get out of them. Also we know that he’d drawn out four sums of five hundred pounds each in single notes from his bank, and my guess would be that he’d agreed to pay Benson five hundred pounds a year for his part in that job, and that Benson wasn’t satisfied with this. Benson had been agitating for an extra five hundred, and in case he’d have to pay it Stewart had drawn it out ready and kept it locked up in his bedroom. That evening he’d laid his little plans for doing Benson in. Suicide this was going to look like. He had a bottle of whisky handy into which he’d poured arsenic.
“Then he was going to make Benson sign what would look like a last note left by a suicide, drive him in his own car to some place, put the arsenic bottle in his hand and push him in the driving-seat, leaving him there with the confession on him. It was very simple, and might have worked out nicely. Only what happened? Well, you know what happened. Benson’s car was under repair, so he came without it. Stewart saw that this wasn’t the night to commit the murder, gave him the ordinary whisky and didn’t use the bottle he’d prepared with the arsenic in it at all. But since Benson got nicely tiddled he didn’t see why he shouldn’t get the suicide note signed, seeing that it would come in handy for the next time. And Benson signed it like a bird as soon as he’d got his five hundred, mistaking it, as Stewart had meant him to, and as even the police saw he had, for a receipt. You see they’d been quarrelling, and the old question of what had happened to the poisoned medicine arose again, because that was Benson’s lever on Stewart. Benson had to bluff on that because actually Peter had taken it. But he did bluff. ‘It’s in my surgery now,’ he said, and Duncan heard it. But that was all before he’d got him tiddly, and before he’d signed the receipt.
“Then Stewart went off to bed cursing his luck that he’d had to pay out another five hundred and determined to wait for another occasion. He’d seen Benson off the premises, so he had nothing to worry about and was probably just as sound asleep as Duncan said he was when he took his tea up in the morning.
“When the hue and cry got going he never thought of that faked confession in his pocket, as after all who would, and it was still there when the police arrested him.
“There he was, fixed nicely. There never was much hope of getting him off—Peter had planted it on him too well for that—and he couldn’t say much for himself because he’d got the other murder on his hands and he’d meant to do this one. I told you he hadn’t murdered Benson, and he hadn’t, but it wasn’t for the want of trying.”
“But what made Duncan commit suicide?” I asked, with the calm inquisitiveness expected of the interlocutor on these occasions.
“Ah, now you’re asking,” said Beef. “There were so many things he might have known in that house. He might have known about the old gentleman, he might have known what Stewart was up to, he might have seen him monkeying with the whisky, he might even have realized that Peter returned to the house that evening. But he didn’t mean to give anyone in that family away.”
I sat thinking over Beefs whole theory. “It seems to me,” I said at last, “that you’ve very little actual proof.”
“I’m not saying you’re not right,” said Beef. “But there’s a lot more we could have. There’s that bit about the hired car, for instance, we could easy find that out; then old Fryer may not be so silly as he was playing up to be and might be able to tell us a thing or two if he was treated right. I mean, there’s a lot more if there was any object in getting it.�
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“Why isn’t there?” I asked innocently.
“Well,” said Beef, “I’ve got funny ideas. But I don’t see why I should have Peter hanged for that murder, even if I could prove it. I’ve told you, he was the nicest old gentleman I’ve ever met, and I’ve still got the cup he gave us for that darts championship upstairs. Peter had no means of having those two hanged as they deserved to be, but he wasn’t going to let them get away with it.”
“Still,” I reasoned, “you can’t have people taking the law into their own hands in that way.”
“Perhaps not,” admitted Beef, “only I’m not the law any longer. I’m a private investigator and I’ll do as I please. I had the destiny of those two in my hands like marbles, and I chose to let the law take its course without any interference from me. I don’t say I’ve done right and I don’t say I’ve done wrong. I heard from Peter last week. He’s married Sheila Benson and he’s left for Brazil, where he’s starting a new life. Call me what you please, but I didn’t mean to interfere with it.”
“So you ruined us in the process?”
“’Ere,” said Beef, “don’t look at it like that. I mean, this writing of detective novels and following up clues is all very well, but you can’t let it interfere with real life and all its varied emotions.”
“What have you been reading?” I asked, impressed by this spasm of poetry.
“Something nothing to do with murders,” said Beef.
“What made Peter choose you, do you suppose, and why should he have put a detective on at all if he wanted to see his brother hanged?”
“Ah, that’s where you come in,” said Beef. “You’ve made such a fool of me in telling the story of those other cases that he thought he was safe in having me. But I got to the bottom of it all right.”
“Then,” I asked finally, “you really knew the truth all along—before the trial began?”
Beef sucked thoughtfully at the ends of his ginger moustache, looked at me with a slightly pained expression as though wondering whether or not he should tell me the truth, and finally emitted at great length his favourite monosyllable.
“Ah,” he said, and he has never enlarged on it.
THE END