The Case of the Corporal's Leave: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  As soon as I was in the flat I rang him, and he was still in.

  “Any news, George?” I began.

  “Yes,” he said. “We know he did take that four-fifty from Charing Cross.”

  That was real news, and I told him so.

  “Why are you sure?” I said.

  “That’ll keep,” he told me in that infuriating way he sometimes has. “What about you? Picked up anything?”

  “The answer’s straight from ITMA,” I said.

  “ITMA?” Then he exploded. “What the hell’s that got to do with it?”

  I gave my best rendering of Signor So-So.

  “Nothing at all,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

  Before he could tell me I was a hell of a fine detective, I hung up. What I wanted to do was to write to my wife, and then wander round to the Yard, but by the time I had opened my desk the ‘phone was ringing. It was George again.

  “Who cut us off?” he was asking indignantly.

  “Lord knows,” I said.

  “Where are you going to be from now on?” was what he wanted to know, and I told him. Then he was asking again if I hadn’t found anything at the Kenray place.

  “Nothing that won’t keep,” I told him in his own language.

  After that I got on with the letter to my wife. Not altogether a personal letter as you may be thinking, but Government business in Government time. What I told her about, and very guardedly, was that brooch affair and what it was worth. I knew she always considered it too ornate to wear except with fancy dress, and my advice to her was to sell, even though she had no need of the money. Though I’ve found it profitable and safe to be frank with my wife about the great majority of things, I didn’t see any good reason for telling her my own reasons for wanting to sell. But out of that feeling of general alarm about Pelle I had visualized a situation where Wharton—accompanied doubtless by myself—would have to make a routine questioning of Kenray at his shop, and I wanted to prove to Grace Allbeck that I had been genuine in my first reasons for calling there, and altogether without guile.

  And if you ask why I should be so squeamish, then I’m afraid I can’t exactly say. Perhaps the true answer is that I hated the idea of a woman like Grace Allbeck assessing me as merely a tout of the police. Personal snobbery, you say? Maybe. I prefer to call it the conserving of the last remnants of respectability left to me after years of contact with Wharton.

  In any case I didn’t get the chance to do much self-analysis for no sooner was that letter written than the ‘phone bell went again. Wharton’s voice was urgent.

  “That you, Travers?”

  “Who else?” I said.

  “I want you to get a move on,” he told me. “Just grab your hat and coat and be at the south side of Westminster Bridge in—What’s the time now?”

  “Half-past three,” I said.

  “That’s what I make it,” he said. “Then be there in ten minutes from now. That all right?”

  “I’ll be there,” I said. “But what’s up, George? Discovered anything?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Pelle’s body.”

  And then he rang off.

  Chapter IV

  ON THE SPOT

  I sat with George in the back of the car. As soon as I saw he wasn’t driving I knew we were bound for somewhere that would involve a journey home in the black-out. The first question I asked was where were we going.

  “To New Cross,” George said, “or rather, a mile or so on. Some sort of marshalling yard.”

  “Body found on the line, was it?”

  “In a railway truck, so they told me.”

  “Good Lord! How on earth did it get there?”

  “Maybe some ganger or other didn’t like to see the line all untidy,” George told me with heavy humour. “But what do you think I’m going down there for? To find things out, that’s why.”

  “You said he definitely took the four-fifty,” I began, and trying to anticipate. “By the way, how did you know that for certain?”

  It was Carrow, I gathered—the Chief Inspector in charge of routine—who had found that much out. People enter a train in driblets after the first rush of a queue, whereas at the exits they come as a flood. That’s why Carrow tried the Charing Cross end, and the man who’d been on duty at the particular platform gate. The man remembered Sir William well, though he didn’t known him by name. A regular little bantam cock of a man was his description of him, and before he knew who he actually was, and he owned that he’d described him like that because of a verbal scrap he’d once had with him over the wrong half of a ticket. Sir William travelled third class, and that train was packed to the very roof.

  “Then how the devil could he have got chucked out?” I demanded of George. “He couldn’t even have fallen out of a door, or someone would have pulled the cord.”

  “Maybe they were all too glad to have a bit of extra room,” George told me sardonically. “Maybe several more got pushed off or squeezed out.” He snorted. “When we get to New Cross we’ll know all about it, won’t we?”

  “I know,” I said. “He went to the lavatory and someone entered behind him and bolted the door.” Then I was shaking my head. “No. It couldn’t be that. You can’t get a body through a lavatory window.”

  “Listen,” George said, and his voice had an infinite weariness. “I’m an old man and I haven’t much longer on this earth. Would you do me a favour and let me end my days in peace?”

  “Anything to oblige,” I told him flippantly.

  “Then stop that damned theorizing. Theories!” He snorted again. “Where’d they get us to?”

  I might have said that that depended on whether they were his or mine. I possess, or am cursed with, a ramshackle, flibbertigibbet, crossword sort of brain, portions of which dart from odd corners, foray for a second or so and then pounce. I hate, even if I surreptitiously admire, the chess kind of brain that plans for an hour ahead and takes into account the permutational movements of a score of pieces. And when I put myself quick questions, I dislike and suspect obvious answers, and the tricks of both crossword compilers and criminals have taught me that. George, not without his moments of wit, once said that the fact that there are two sides to every question is for me merely an excuse to find a third.

  But while George is always scornful of my theorizing, he is never too proud to profit—if with a difference. I claim that a third of my theories turn out right and I claim too, that that’s an exceptional average. George ignores the third and argues on the basis of the other two. As soon as my one third looks like being a winner, George, in some subtle and imperceptible way, begins appropriating it and by the time it has proved a winner, that theory has been George’s from the very outset. Another of his little tricks is much in the same vein. When things go right, George talks about ‘me’, which is himself. When they go wrong, then it’s sometimes blatantly ‘you’, or, if he can’t wriggle out of all responsibility, he makes it ‘we’.

  “You and your theorizing!” he went on. “You tell me what happened to-day. What was Kenray’s place like?”

  I gave him a guarded version but I sealed and delivered it with the final assertion that Kenray was a man beyond all possible suspicion. I told what Luddly had said and added Tom Fulcher’s revelations.

  “What’s his financial status?” George wanted to know.

  “My God, George, you expect something from a casual visit!” I told him. “How should I know what his status is? All the same I’d bet both he and his sister are more than well-off by any standards. And they have something more valuable than money—a high reputation.”

  He merely grunted.

  “But in terms of money,” I went on. “She could afford to give to charity, and merely because her dead son had once been a pilot in India, something worth a thousand pounds.”

  Over George’s face came that smile which always reminds me of the one that might have come over the face of a lion that suddenly discerned a particularly succulent Christia
n.

  “She might have given it, but it might have been his. And I wouldn’t mind giving you a thousand quid—if I had it—if I’d only got to crack you on the skull and take it back again.”

  “That’s an idea,” I said, for it struck me as ingenious. “Kenray donates a valuable piece of jewellery because he knows he’s going to get it back. That means we’ve got to look into his alibi.”

  There you have it, you see—my flibbertigibbet, dart-hither-and-thither sort of brain. Already, in the presence of a new theory, I was ignoring my own claims that Kenray couldn’t have been the killer.

  “Pelle was murdered, I take it?” I asked George.

  “He was murdered all right,” George told me grimly. “What did you find out at his office, by the way?”

  I gave him what I hoped was a humorous account, and he was as blasphemous as I’d hoped. The Chaddon girl might have blabbed to half London, he said, and that old fool Pelle too. And advertising the fact that he was taking thirty thousand quids’ worth of stuff in an attaché-case!

  “Tell me something, George,” I said. “You’re better up in the law than I am. Suppose Pelle hadn’t been murdered as well as robbed. If someone snatched the bag and got clear, what would his responsibility have been?”

  The car swerved as it took the left-hand fork at the Marquis of Granby and that rather upset his snort.

  “Responsibility? After what you’ve told me, he’d have been lucky to have got off without a charge of criminal negligence.”

  “He’d have had to pay up?”

  “Of course he would!” George snapped at me. “If he was a man of honour, he’d have paid up straightaway.”

  “And if he hadn’t the money?”

  “That was his funeral,” George said. “But what’s the use of going into that? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  I said no more for several reasons. One was that we were turning into a side street and I knew we were getting close to our destination. And I didn’t say that even if he was dead, then his estate might have to pay, for that might have induced George to ask me more about Pelle’s office and the last thing I wanted to do was to give him the faintest hint of that really promising theory that had come to me earlier that afternoon. Then the car turned sharp right and there was the marshalling yard. A man was standing by the open gates and George introduced him as Carrow. A dour, pertinacious cove he looked to me, and with plenty on his mind.

  We walked round and even under trucks and across what seemed miles of track and then all at once came on a solitary truck near which stood a small group of people. One was a porter and another an assistant traffic manager, and there was a youngish man in spectacles. There were also a plain-clothes sergeant and a couple of his men.

  “This is it, sir,” Carrow said, and waved a hand at the truck.

  As far as I was concerned it was very much of an anti-climax for there was nothing to be seen, for that truck was covered by the usual tarpaulin. But the situation must have been rehearsed, for as the inspector finished speaking, the sergeant moved forward and drew back a corner, and there was something that was probably Pelle.

  “A very high wind last night, sir,” Carrow told Wharton. “This corner rope got snapped, as you see. Otherwise we mightn’t have discovered the body till the truck was unloaded.”

  Wharton didn’t see, but he nodded. Then in his mildest voice he was telling the onlookers to get back a few yards if they didn’t mind, and when he wanted one of them, perhaps he’d be good enough to come forward.

  “How much do they know?” he asked Carrow when the sergeant was moving them off.

  “Not a thing, sir.”

  “No idea who he is?”

  “No, sir. Except Mr. Mavin.”

  “Which one’s he?”

  “The young gentleman in the glasses, sir. Sir William’s secretary. I got him here for formal identification.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t talk to the others,” Wharton said.

  “He’s been warned, sir,” Carrow told him. “And there’s a man there.”

  There was also a man with us who hadn’t been introduced. Wharton was giving him an inquiring look when Carrow anticipated. It was the police doctor. Wharton gave him a shake of the hand and a genial smile, and then was asking to be given a leg-up. I got one too, and Carrow drew the tarpaulin well back.

  From the quick descriptions I’d overheard I should have recognized Pelle at once. Wharton gave a grunt.

  “Proper little bantam, isn’t he.”

  I had long learned not to wince at Wharton’s reactions to corpses. To him, and to Carrow for that matter, they were like radishes—twopence a bunch. And Pelle did look fierce and bristling in his miniature way as he lay there, body slightly curled and eyes glaring full at us.

  “Body been moved at all?” Wharton asked.

  “Not to make any difference,” Carrow said. “And we’ve had him photographed.”

  “Damn these castings!” exploded Wharton as he nearly wrenched an ankle in moving forward. They were heavy steel castings rather like those that hold railway metals to the sleepers, only ten times the size and burnished and the whole floor of the truck was covered by their two layers, with the tarpaulin to protect them against rust. Pelle had certainly ended up on a hard enough bed.

  “The body was placed here,” pronounced Wharton.

  “That’s right, sir,” said Carrow. “It couldn’t have been chucked in. The tarpaulin would have stopped that.”

  “Actual cause of death?” asked Wharton with a lifting of eyebrows at the doctor.

  “Blow on the back of the skull, just here,” the doctor said. “An abnormally thin skull, I’d say.”

  Wharton grunted then stooped gingerly over the body. A grasp of the shoulders and he turned it on its face.

  “Hallo!” he said, “What’s this?”

  This was a patch of white that was thickest at the corpse’s rump and showed less plainly up the back of the overcoat. Wharton felt it.

  “Sticky,” he said, and then put his fingers to his tongue. “It’s sugar!”

  Carrow craned up to look and then had a taste.

  “Sugar it is, sir.”

  “Very curious indeed,” Wharton said slowly. “Still, it shouldn’t make things any harder. What about time of death?”

  “We’ve got that to a nicety,” Carrow said, “or rather, we can get it. He had some tea and cakes at just after half-past three yesterday afternoon, so the stomach content ought to give the right answer.”

  “Pardon me,” I said, “but did you learn that from Miss Chaddon?”

  “That’s right,” said Carrow, and looked a bit surprised. George gave me a glare, but that didn’t worry me. I wanted to know just what that young lady had told the police and Wharton wasn’t going to stop my finding out.

  “Clear his pockets out,” Wharton said, “and I’ll take whatever there is. Make a duplicate list. Have all his clothes tested and especially his overcoat and his boots. How did the body come to be found, by the way?”

  Carrow, busy at three jobs at once, said it had been seen by a Horace Edward Grampy, an official of the Ministry of Supply and from whom a written statement had been obtained. He was travelling that morning from Sevenoaks to town by the ten-thirty and as his train halted outside Batmore Junction with the signals against it, a goods train crawled by on the near side. The wind, still blustery, drew back the tarpaulin flap and showed what he thought was a body.

  “Thought?” demanded Wharton indignantly.

  “He didn’t see it till it was almost by him,” Carrow said. “Also, by the time his train was on the move again, the goods had turned off into a siding. Then when he got to his office he thought it over and gave them a ring at New Cross. By that time it was nearly midday.”

  “How was he able to see into this truck?” asked Wharton. “It was closed, wasn’t it?”

  “It’s all in his statement, sir,” Carrow told him imperturbably. “The goods was on a lower line that comes
to the same level about half a mile on, so he could see right down on it.”

  Wharton cast an eye up at the sky. Dusk was none too far off and his tone took on an impatience.

  “I’d better have a talk with some of those people. Who actually found the body?”

  The traffic man and the porter were called over but it was at the far side of the truck and out of sight of the body that Wharton did his interviewing. The traffic man was the only one who really mattered, and Wharton honoured him by taking down his answers. As I’d hate to bore you with a quarter of an hour of talk, here is a summary of what Wharton learned.

  1. That particular goods train and the four-fifty from town were never within miles of each other.

  2. With regard to the four-fifty, the number of passengers getting out at Hurstham would not make any appreciable difference to the crowding in the carriages, since they would be filled by those standing in the corridors. In other words, Pelle could not have been killed on the train and his body thrown out.

  3. Pelle did not go to sleep and overshoot Pangley Station. The next stop was Sevenoaks, the terminus, and inquiries had been made there.

  “In other words,” said Wharton, “he”—that was how he alluded to Pelle throughout—“took the four-fifty and got off at Pangley alive and well. The train was on time?”

  “Dead on time,” he was told. “There was no fog and we have to keep on time with these locals.”

  But what mattered most was the movements of the particular truck in which he had been found. They were as follows.

  That truck was shunted on the goods train at Sevenoaks in the afternoon. The train then moved on to Manwood Junction and there was a good deal of shunting there till about ten at night, when the train moved on then to Bat-more. More shunting and then it moved on to New Cross Yards.

  “Devil of a slow business, wasn’t it?” asked Wharton.

  “None of it priority stuff,” he was told. “Night shunting is a slow job, sir, in the black-out, especially when it’s as dark as it was last night. None of the stuff on the train was all that important.”