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

by Christopher Bush

  “Now take your own case,” Wharton said, now heavily paternal. “You’re young compared with me and you haven’t come up against the rough edges. You don’t know perhaps all that gossip can do. Gossip about yourself, for instance.”

  Over Mavin’s face came a very distinct flush, and he wriggled uneasily on his chair.

  “Did you know about Sir William bringing the jewellery down last night?” went on Wharton.

  “Well, yes. He told me so himself.”

  “And about The Case of the Purloined Letter?” I asked amiably.

  “Yes,” he said, rather surprised.

  “Well, there you are,” cut in Wharton, and peered over the spectacle tops. “I take it you’re not a wealthy man Mr. Mavin?”

  “I’m not,” Mavin said. There was something else he wanted to say and it was only after he’d moistened his lips that he got it out. “As a matter of fact, strictly between ourselves, I was only too glad to take this job.”

  “Paid well, was it?”

  “Not too well,” Mavin said. “A hundred and fifty a year and, of course, I lived here.”

  “There you are!” said Wharton, and waved a triumphant hand at me. “Just what we were saying. There’s you knowing all about that jewellery. Not too well off for money—which I’m not if it comes to that. What alibi have you got for last night? None at all!”

  Mavin was blinking away like mad and a growing horror was spreading over his face.

  “What will the scandal be?” went on Wharton mercilessly. “You may not know, but I’ll tell you. That jewellery mayn’t be recovered and people will talk. Now do you see?”

  “But really, it’s too absurd,” broke out Mavin, and then was all flustered again. “I don’t mean what you were saying. I mean that I should have done . . . I mean . . .”

  “Exactly!” said Wharton. “But that won’t stop the talk and the harm to your career.” He frowned portentously and his voice lowered. “And another thing—strictly between ourselves. Miss Chaddon!”

  Mavin’s face went a tomato red.

  “You’re not engaged to her by any chance?”

  “No . . . I mean, not at all,” stammered Mavin, and though Wharton’s approach was funny in a way, I was somehow finding those little tricks of his somewhat misapplied.

  “But you’re very good friends.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “You dance together and all that sort of thing.”

  “Well, yes . . . sometimes.”

  “Exactly!” said Wharton, and gave me a look. “Just what we were saying. There’s your scandal for you. You want to marry this particular lady. But you can’t. You haven’t the money. But you know how you can get hold of thirty thousand pounds. You see it?”

  “But it’s preposterous!” The worm turned so violently that the words were almost shouted.

  “I know it is,” Wharton told him placatingly. “All the same it may do you an incredible amount of harm. Miss Chaddon knew about the jewellery. You knew that, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yes,” said Mavin and gulped.

  “Used to have little talks with her on the ‘phone.”

  “Yes, but . . . but not very often.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Wharton with another look at me. “Even her name will come into all that scandal and you don’t need me to tell you how. In fact, there’s only one thing you can do. Two things. Make up your mind to give us every possible help, and the other is to write out a confidential statement which I’ll collect in the morning. Everything you can think of in connection with last night. Everything connected with Miss Chaddon and yourself. Nothing’s too unimportant.”

  He got to his feet. Mavin rose too, moistening his lips and doubtless wondering just what that extensive assignment meant.

  “One little thing,” Wharton said, and his tone was definitely magisterial. “You’re to give me your word that you’ll not communicate with Miss Chaddon till further instructions. The precaution is for the good of both of you. I can give you my word on that.”

  He picked up those roughly bound chapters of the auto-biography, frowned as he looked at a page or two, and then turned to me.

  “Perhaps you’d better have a look through this. Just a quick look. Perhaps Mr. Mavin will wrap it up.”

  That was about all. The manuscript was duly wrapped up and Mavin was told he was to stay on at Kalpoor till instructed otherwise, and he needn’t worry about his salary.

  “If necessary I’ll pay it myself,” said Wharton with a final jocular touch to leave him at ease. “We’ll be down again in the morning but you needn’t worry about that.”

  When the door closed behind us the night looked as black as coal. The driver switched on the lights.

  “Come behind us as you did before,” Wharton told him, “I shall be walking.”

  “We’ll test the time properly,” he told me. “Just a normal pace.”

  It took us exactly five minutes, and Wharton expressed himself as satisfied. Sir William knew the way better than we did, but our long legs might unconsciously have moved us more quickly.

  “And now I’ll tell you something that mayn’t have occurred to you,” he told me as soon as the car moved off. “At what time did the four-fifty from town get in?”

  “Twenty past five,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “Then—and always provided he got off alive at Pangley Station—Sir William was well on the way for home at twenty-five past. Crack him on the skull and snatch the bag. That’s done so quickly that it doesn’t count. And what then?”

  “From whose point of view?” I said. “That of the cracker-on?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, he nips into his car if he has one. If not, then he gets a train back to town.”

  “There was a train back to town, and a fast one,” he said, and I knew then that that was what he had been leading up to. “And at five-thirty-five. Gets into town at six-five.”

  He waited a moment for applause that didn’t come; grunted, and changed the subject.

  “What did you think of that Mavin?”

  “I thought you handled him well,” I said. “But I’d bet a good deal he had nothing to do with the murder.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said. “Because a man’s been to Oxford or Cambridge, that doesn’t make him God Almighty. What about that night club gang just before the war?”

  I couldn’t help smiling at that. Mavin and night clubs seemed rather funny, and I said so.

  “Well, he and that Miss Chaddon have been to night clubs,” he told me. “Does he look like one who can hold his liquor? Not he. He chattered and she chattered, and there you are.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep all these things to yourself and then spring them on me,” I told him irritably. “But you asked me for an opinion and I gave it, for what it’s worth. Mavin would wince if he had to wring a chicken’s neck.”

  “He didn’t have to. All he had to do was crack the old man on the skull in the dark.”

  I said nothing.

  “And what about his manner back there? Scared stiff, that’s what he was.”

  “And no wonder,” I said, “with that grilling you gave him!”

  He chuckled at that and then was asking me for a cigarette. I was feeling tired and a bit hungry. George had wolfed most of what had been on the tray.

  “Nothing else to-night?” I asked.

  “Not for you, unless something’s turned up,” he said, and with a hint of reproach. And then I remembered something. Old Bertram Dane and his visit to Kenray’s shop.

  “He’s a lad,” said Wharton, and chuckled hugely. “Still carries that umbrella, does he?”

  Then he said he could tell me some tales about Dane.

  I said such as what.

  “Well, there was that little business of Toby Nelder’s,” George began, “but that would be before your time. Toby was then the big tea man. Little fellow and piles of money. Had a fine place near St. Albans. Keep th
is well under your hat, by the way.

  “But about Dane. He and Toby were pals, in a way. Both collectors, only Toby’s was stamps. Now Toby—his real name was Tobias, and a hell of a name too—he had a grandmother who was incredibly old. Lived in Eaton Square, or somewhere there, and she had a ring that Dane wanted. This all came out in camera, by the way. Dane offered Toby a quid pro quo if he’d get it from the old girl, but Toby couldn’t. Then Dane called on the old lady and the ring was missing. I believe there was the very hell of a row between him and Toby and it looked like ending in a case. We were actually called in and then everything was hushed up. Dane swore that if it was gone, then Toby had taken it. You never heard such a couple of liars. And then the ring turned up. Sent back to the old lady anonymously through the post.”

  “Dane had it?”

  “Of course he had,” George said with a snort. “Then got the wind up and sent it back. Talk about collectors being honest people! They’re the biggest thieves and liars unhung. It’s a disease. The only genuine kleptomania I know.”

  Before he could get going on further reminiscences we were crossing Westminster Bridge. I was run up to Trafalgar Square and George said he’d ring me if anything had happened.

  Service meals were still obtainable at the flats and I stood myself a dinner and a tankard in my room. Just as I lighted my first pipe, George rang. His first news was that he was now in sole charge of the case and Carrow was handing over at once. To me it sounded good news too that we had no worries about Pelle and his personal affairs. The Powers-that-Be, as George called them, were making themselves responsible for the interment and all that. The bare news of death was being released.

  “That stuff on his overcoat,” he was going on. “It was sugar all right. Ordinary granulated sugar.”

  I’d rather forgotten about that, but George was going on.

  “And they rushed through the time of death. About half-past five last night, if someone we know was telling the truth.”

  It was Doris Chaddon and the cakes that he meant. I cut hastily in.

  “I take it we shan’t be at Pangley after midday, shall we? What I mean is, I might overhaul that young lady myself.”

  Silence apparently gave consent, for he was giving the time of the morning’s rendezvous—eight-thirty at Westminster Bridge.

  “Nothing else?”

  “Don’t know that there was,” he said, and then remembered something. “Oh, yes. About that skull of his. So thin that they’d like it as a medical curio in a bottle of spirit.”

  I started to chuckle, then changed it artistically to a cough.

  “Right-ho, then George,” I said. “Eight-thirty in the morning,” and hung up.

  Then I had my chuckle to myself. That mention of keeping Pelle’s skull in a bottle had reminded me in some queer way of something my wife had once said about George himself, and in some outburst of affection—that if anything ever happened to him, she’d like to have him stuffed.

  Chapter VI

  THE ACE OF TRUMPS?

  There has always seemed to be a considerable amount of sense and reason behind the standard jokes of music-hall comedians. If you consider the statement a digression, you may later change your mind.

  Take what I call the Anglo-Indian jokes, for instance.

  I remember annoying considerably a bore of my acquaintance, whose sole topic was India, by bringing forward that argument about comedians making cracks, however stale, against the Poona type of Army man, and I claimed that there was in this case no smoke without fire. The worst comedian doesn’t persist in jokes that won’t tickle the risibility of his audience. It may be for the same reason, I added to his still greater annoyance, that the old-school-tie gags are always popular.

  Or take mothers-in-law, who are the comedians’ stand-by. The popularity of that particular joke seems to me to be a general resentment against interference. Mothers-in-law are only too apt to regard their own offspring’s spouses, whatever their ages, as in need of perpetual advice, reminders and supervision; Peter Pans in real life, in fact, and never allowed to grow up.

  And that’s the kind of thing that often annoys me about George Wharton. Fifteen years ago I was a kind of apprentice, and learning my trade, and in his eyes I have remained much the same ever since. I don’t mind his profiting by any of my chance inventiveness, for I’m in the game because it fascinates me, and it’s a job worth doing. Kudos doesn’t interest me and I’m actually scared of publicity, but that’s no reason why George should regard me as someone to tag at his heels. Rarely am I allowed to see the pattern of the case. I know that he has a pattern or plan for attack, even if it is such a simple one as the gradual elimination of this and that suspect, but my sole knowledge of it comes generally from an apt reading of his mind. That’s why our cases are so higgledy-piggledy at the outset. He works in the dark because it’s his way, arid I work in the dark, and surreptitiously, because it’s the only way I can do work that seems to me progressive and worth while.

  Take that morning at Pangley. If ever I wasted a morning, it was that. George had a couple of men with him and we made a methodical search of the grass verges and hedges all the way from the first fork to Pelle’s garden gate. There wasn’t a lot of traffic except military, but a voice from a lorry full of troops asked Wharton if he was looking for fag-ends, and I found the question funnier than George did. Only after an hour of searching did I venture to ask him just what we were looking for.

  “If he was hit on the skull he had to fall somewhere?” he told me. “And wasn’t there mud on his knees, and the front of his overcoat?”

  I couldn’t say anything to that last retort for presumably I should have noticed Pelle’s knees when I saw him in the truck, but I did remind George that only the previous evening I had had my head bitten off for suggesting that Pelle had been on the four-fifty.

  “Well, we know he was on it,” George said, and then told me why.

  Mavin had been in a state of panic when we left him the previous night, and he felt it was up to him to lend a hand in the case. What he did was to call on a man who lived in the first of the semi-detached villas on the side road from the station, and there he struck oil. The man had been delayed at the barrier, and his friend, who occupied the other villa, had waited for him. Then they had walked briskly home and, just short of the first gate, had almost overtaken Sir William. Though they had only identified his steps they knew him well enough, having seen him out for walks on Saturdays and Sundays, and, of course, he was one of the big men of their little district. The second man confirmed everything, and each said he had seen or heard nobody else on that road. Wharton was arranging to see the two men.

  But there you see the kind of thing that Wharton kept to himself. There was no point in getting annoyed with him about it. As a matter of fact I was busy with thoughts of my own, and I was feeling uncommonly pleased. I told you I had the beginnings of a theory. George’s information made that theory even more promising.

  “About that sugar on the overcoat,” I said. “Do you think he might have been knocked down by a tradesman’s van? A van, say, that had been delivering sugar. The driver dumped him inside and then dumped the body in a railway truck to divert suspicion from himself?”

  Rather crude that, but I was only wanting to be sure of the first part—if a car might have caused that injury to the skull. And then what should emerge but the fact that George had spent a great deal of the previous night in consultation with various people over that very same problem.

  “Never a chance,” he said. “How could a man’s body be in such a position that a car should hit the base of his skull? If he’d been stooping down and doing up his bootlace then a car might have hit the top of his skull.”

  “Then why was the body taken away,” I said.

  “Well, you weren’t so far out,” he told me. “What we think is that he was knocked down and the attaché-case taken. Then along came a car and saw him. The driver thought he might be implicated som
ehow so he put the body in the car—tradesman’s car probably—and moved it off.”

  That seemed as footling a theory as I’d ever heard. I gave him a look but it seemed he wasn’t pulling my leg. When I asked what he was doing about it he said he had a man or two making inquiries about local vans and their overnight movements.

  “Where’s the nearest point where a van driver could have had access to the truck?” I asked him.

  “Why, here, of course!” he told me. “The railway runs right alongside the road by the station, doesn’t it?”

  “Of course,” I said, and tried to sound apologetic, but all the same it didn’t sound right to me. A tradesman’s van that had been carrying sugar by all means, but transporting a body which that van hadn’t knocked down and then depositing it in a local truck, most certainly not.

  We were getting near the house and all at once Mavin joined us. His eyes looked a bit puffy as if he had had a trying night. Wharton hailed him with all the friendliness in the world.

  “Would you mind if I used your telephone?” I asked him, and told George it was something personal.

  Sutton, the gardener, a sturdy-looking man of about fifty, was sweeping up the twigs that the last gale had blown across the lawn. He touched his hat to me and we had a minute or two’s chat. It was a bad business about Sir William, he said. And he had his own theory, that a tramp or casual soldier had done the murder.

  “What made you think of murder?” I asked him quickly.

  Then it transpired that Mavin had been with him the previous afternoon when word came about the body. And since Sutton had seen us searching grass verges and hedge bottoms he had put two and two together and decided that Sir William had been killed on his way home from the station.

  “That’s what people don’t think of,” he told me. “Some won’t hear a word against a soldier, but I look at it this way, sir. Everyone is called up, aren’t they? Well, they call up the honest men and the crooks, and them that enter the Army as crooks, then they stay crooks. And burglars. And murderers.”