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

by Christopher Bush

  “And what if she asks me point-blank?”

  “About that stuff?” cut in Wharton. “Then you try to look crafty and say that’s nobody’s business. Don’t overdo it. Deny you ever took it, if you like, and then you can weaken a bit. You get the idea?”

  It took him another quarter of an hour before he got it to Wharton’s satisfaction, and then there had to be another quarter of an hour of rehearsals, with Wharton as Marion Blaketon.

  “Keep your eyes off her,” Wharton told him for the dozenth time. “Let her think you’re shifty. You’re telling the tale, and she’s got to know it. The only thing you’ve got to get into her mind is that you’ve got that stuff salted away.”

  “You’d better wear those duds you’ve got on now,” Prider said. “Look as if you’ve got a bit of money behind you.”

  “Then what the hell am I going to her for?” Harry wanted to know.

  “Because you want to go straight,” Wharton told him with an infinite impatience, “and the police won’t let you. If necessary you say indignantly that they’re tailing you because they think you can give them a lead where you’ve cached that stuff.”

  “Which I never had.”

  “Exactly! You tell the truth and you lie like hell in the same breath. All you’ve got to get into her mind is that you know where the stuff is.”

  The first arrivals were coming in for dinner before Wharton could sound anything like satisfied. I took out a card and gave it to Harry.

  “If ever you want me, that’s where you can get me,” I said. “Better than calling my office. If I’m not in, you can leave a message.”

  “Mr. Travers is just our little present to you,” Wharton told him roguishly. “You’ll be in the clear about this business but life’s a funny thing.” The tone changed to the impressive. “Who got Fred Harris off on that Acton job. And Peeper Marks, when Prider here as good as had him in the pen.”

  Harry the Snoot was looking a bit bewildered as we got to our feet.

  “Wharton’s always kidding someone,” I told him on the quiet. “What you’ve got to know is that if the Blaketon woman tries any double-crossing, that’s where I come in.”

  Prider and Harry went first, George and I hung back and made our exit together, and turned right for Long Acre again-

  “When’s the balloon going up, George,” I asked.

  “Early this afternoon,” he told me. “They’re settling the details over a drink in the Golden Eagle.”

  I didn’t ask him point-blank why he’d taken me to that coffee-shop, for though I wasn’t sure about the part I’d been supposed to play, I did have ideas. Between Harry the Snoot and the law as represented by Wharton and Prider was a certain amount of respect and the same amount of trust. But Harry would have been at sea in trying to place one like me. Whether or not he had been influenced by Wharton’s vague threats about a Hanover Street job, I didn’t know, but I did sense that my silent presence had been intended as a kind of warning. The one thing a crook fears is what he doesn’t understand, and I was something outside Harry’s experience; something dimly threatening, like that mention of Hanover Street and Harry’s future need of a first-class mouthpiece.

  “I like your pal, Harry the Snoot, George,” was what I did say.

  “Harry’s all right,” he told me. “He’s been going straight the last two or three years. Then he saw that jewel-case and it was too much for him.”

  “What’s his job?”

  “Works for his brother. Nice little chap, the brother: has a greengrocery business in Hamilton Street. Straight as they make ‘em.”

  The sun had come out and on the lee side of Long Acre it was more like a day in April.

  “When do you expect things to happen?” I asked George.

  “No sense in hurrying,” he told me. “All this has got to work itself out in its own way. One step at a time and no rushing.”

  “Then if there’s nothing doing for me I think I’ll take that manuscript back to Mavin,” I said.

  George seemed in quite a good mood so I added that I might as well drive down.

  “I doubt if you’ll pick any more up down there,” was all he said. “Look me up when you get back, though. We ought to know then how Harry’s got on with the Blaketon woman.”

  He wouldn’t join me in a meal at the flat, so we parted company at St. Martin’s. I treated myself to a service lunch and then I rang Mavin. I got him all right, but he said he wouldn’t be in. He wanted the manuscript pretty badly and asked me to give it to Sutton.

  It was about two o’clock when I picked up my small car at the Yard. The sun had gone in again, but that didn’t worry me, for there wasn’t a sign of rain. Afterwards I was to tell myself I’d been amazingly lucky. I hadn’t either the wish or the need to take that manuscript back to Mavin, at least till the sun came out that midday. That was what gave me the sudden urge to get out to the country and revel in a wholly fictitious spring. And if I hadn’t gone, then we’d never have found things out.

  I took my time on that drive to Pangley for I’d rather thought of coming home by Bewford and joining the London road beyond Bromley. What I hoped to find at Bewford I didn’t know. Maybe I only wanted to have a look at the place, and with the hope that it might stimulate ideas about Marion Blaketon. Not that there was any special need of stimulation.

  For at last, as I could tell myself, the case had a perfectly clear pattern. Wharton had toyed, and from the first with very little purpose it seemed to me, with Francis Kenray. He had been discarded and suspicion had shifted to young Mavin, with Doris Chaddon as a very minor accomplice. Those two had gone and the attack had shifted to Marion Blaketon. That attack had looked promising and then had petered out, only to take the limelight again when Bertram Dane had become a suspect too. And now there seemed little doubt but that Dane was the man we wanted for the actual murder. One thing only was needed to clear the case up—direct evidence or such a chain of circumstantial evidence as no defending counsel could break down.

  I think that knowledge that the case was almost over was the real cause of my dawdling, but at any rate it was nearer three o’clock than two when I got near Kalpoor. What made me draw up the car just short of the house was remembering the night when Kenray had slipped through the hedge. Now I thought I could see the very gap through which he had slipped, though that straggly hedge had gaps in plenty. Beyond the hedge was a kind of common, and there were gorse clumps here and there’ with the gorse in bloom.

  I didn’t enter the drive but left my car parked on the verge by the front gate. There wasn’t a sign of Sutton so I went through a privet arch to where I guessed the kitchen garden would be, and there he was, spreading wood ash for an onion bed. He scraped his boots on his spade and came to meet me. Mavin had told him about the parcel, he said, and he’d take it to his cottage for safety.

  “And how’re things with you, Sutton?” I said.

  “Can’t grumble, sir,” he told me. “I don’t get no younger—that’s all.”

  “It’s a curious thing, but that’s how I feel myself,” I said, and then was wondering if he was brooding over a failure in that Home Guard examination he’d told me about.

  “Oh, no, sir,” he told me with a knowing grin. “I got through all right. Heard the result only this morning.”

  “A pity there isn’t a handy pub,” I said, “and then we could celebrate.”

  He didn’t make any comment on that, perhaps because he was too eager to tell me about his manoeuvring.

  “What I had the wind up about,” he said, “was that Sten gun. Never had no real chance to study it. The old Northover—that was my job, till they took ’em all away.”

  He opened the front gate for me and it seemed only right that I should hear the rest of the story, so I went on walking.

  “There’s a young chap,” he went on, “who’s stationed at Manwood. Service Corps he is really, but what they call mechanically minded. Nice fellow he is. A corporal. Got an eye on my daughte
r—the one that works in that big fishmonger’s in the High Street. So he came along and put me through it.”

  Sometimes I amuse myself trying to trace back a train of thought from the point at which I stop to the point where it began. It’s an easy enough feat when confined to one’s self, though a certain client of Sherlock Holmes found it almost black magic when applied to himself. But I don’t propose to make a logical analysis at how I arrived just where I did when Sutton mentioned his daughter. I did remember staying with my sister and her asking me to bring some fish from a certain market town on a Monday, and how I found the shop shut and how later she’d apologized for troubling me since fish-shops were always closed on Mondays, and she should have remembered it. Maybe that corporal had fixed the coaching of his future father-in-law for the Monday since the daughter would be there, and at that point I tried pulling Sutton’s leg about it.

  “Did he come to coach you, or see your daughter?”

  “A little of both, I shouldn’t be surprised, sir,” he told me with a grin. “Not that he stayed very long. He had to be back pretty sharp.”

  “Let me see now,” I said, and frowned in thought. “That would be on the Monday night when Sir William was missing.”

  “That’s right, sir,” he said, and then halted in his tracks.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking that your corporal friend had anything to do with that. What I was wondering was if he heard or saw anything suspicious when he came out.”

  “That I can’t say, sir,” he said, and then added a shrewd rider. “Depends what you mean by suspicious.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “All the same, I’d like to have a talk with him. In our game you never know what might turn up.”

  Trigg was the name, he said. Corporal Ernie Trigg, and stationed at Manwood Junction Supply Depot.

  “It isn’t all that important,” I said airily. “Any time I’m that way will do.”

  I might have saved myself a heap of trouble if I hadn’t been so Machiavellian, but I didn’t want Sutton to see that I was more than politely interested. But no sooner did I leave him than I was pushing the car on. My map showed a side road that would bring me to Manwood and that was the road I took. And why?

  The reason was this. By Sutton’s cottage the grass verge was uncommonly wide. Alongside his very gate was a rut made by a lorry, and that lorry might have been the one in which Sutton’s corporal came to the cottage that Monday night.

  CHAPTER XIII

  SATURDAY HOP

  Manwood was little more than a hamlet and when I drew up by the church I had seen no sign of a Supply Depot. Then I hailed a couple of soldiers and they told me it was at the station, and I’d come to that if I kept straight on for somewhere round half a mile.

  The station seemed a busy little place and it had quite a decent little marshalling yard, much of which was new. Forty or fifty lines of tracks perhaps, and row after row of army huts alongside, both for storage and personnel. I drew up the car by the nearest one and got out.

  A passing sergeant told me where I could find the O.C. Depot and that happened to be in the second hut. A waiting runner challenged me and then told me to knock on a certain door, There I was told to fill in a form stating my business and after that came five minutes’ wait. The O.C. was a R.A.S.C. Major and he had my chit in his hand when I was shown in. I produced my credentials.

  “Damn those fellows of mine!” he said. “Always up to some ruddy mischief—or worse.”

  “Nothing like that this time,” I said. “Something purely formal.”

  He looked relieved at that and asked me to sit down and passed me a packet of cigarettes.

  “You do have a Corporal Trigg here?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, and I knew he had been making inquiries during my five minutes’ wait. “At the moment he happens to be on seven days’ leave.”

  That’s when I cussed myself for not talking a bit more with Sutton.

  “He’s due back at midnight on Monday,” he was going on. “You could see him on the Tuesday morning if that will do.”

  “Where’s he on leave?”

  “Wolverhampton,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I was only thinking I could have seen him direct and short-circuited you people. Not that it’s anything important. The fact is that we think he’s known a certain man we want to interview—a man with whom he was once billeted.”

  “That would be at Colchester?” he asked, consulting some record or other.

  “That’s it,” I said. “We want this particular man badly and we think Trigg might help.”

  “I’ll fix it,” he said, and got ready to make notes. “See he doesn’t leave camp on the Tuesday morning, till you get here.”

  “Fine,” I said, and left it temporarily at that. An eye went cynically round the room. “No fewer Army Forms than in my time?”

  “You were in the Service yourself?”

  There followed a good ten minutes of yarning and it was with a sigh of reluctance that I rose to go. He wanted me to have tea in the Mess but I said I had to get home before the black-out.

  “One thing you might do for me,” I said. “You can save me a hell of a lot of trouble by sending Trigg to me instead of my coming down here to him.”

  He was only too willing and we looked up trains. I said the one that got to Charing Cross at nine-twenty would suit me fine. I’d be at the barrier and Trigg could be furnished with a description of me.

  “You won’t mistake Trigg,” he said. “A nice-looking chap with black hair, and a grin on his face. About five foot nine.”

  “Good,” I said. “I don’t think I’d tell him, by the way, just what he’s coming up for. Spin him some yarn about a new job. Once these fellows start to worry, they don’t talk so freely.”

  We were almost sworn brothers when I left, and I had to travel pretty fast, for dusk was in the sky and I didn’t want the black-out to descend on me till I was in familiar streets. But I was on the best of terms with myself for all that. Never had a Supply Depot been more conveniently situated for everything that I was now beginning to have in mind. And if the deductions were correct—and already they seemed pretty near fool-proof—then Wharton would be a mightily surprised man when Corporal Trigg and I walked into his office on the Tuesday morning. And so, for that matter, would Corporal Trigg.

  It was best part of six o’clock when I got to the Yard. Wharton was out but I got hold of Prider.

  “How did things go this afternoon?” I asked him.

  “First class,” he told me. “Harry turned up trumps.”

  “Tell me all about it,” I said, and he was off the mark at once.

  First of all Harry had given the typist the tract with his name written on it. After a bit of a wait he had been called in.

  “I’ve got a copy of his statement here,” Prider said. “You read it for yourself. It’s a fair scream.”

  There definitely were some amusing touches and a piece or two of rhyming slang that I’d never run across. Harry had been asked for his complete record and Marion Blaketon had entered the details on a form. Everything was highly confidential, she had told him. Papers were not even left overnight in that office but were taken to her house and locked in a safe. When Harry told her that he might come round and see it some night, she thought it a priceless joke. After that a comfortable time was had by both until she began asking why he hadn’t kept on going straight. Harry reckoned the game, as he called it, was in his blood. Then she was wanting to know why he had come there if that was the case, and Harry reckoned it was because he was bringing disgrace on a hard-working brother. And he worked the gag about being tailed by the police.

  Naturally she wanted to know why he should be tailed, but Harry shrugged his shoulders. Then she started finding out in her own way. (“Regular human ferret, she was.”) Hadn’t that sentence of twelve months’ hard been pretty stiff for snatching a case? Harry gave her a suspicious look at tha
t, and then she became really confidential. Could it be that he still had the jewellery? Harry got a bit truculent. (“What happened to them sparklers, lady, is between me and myself, and I don’t want no nosy business—see?”)

  Next came a little Salvation Army work. (“Nearly had me crying me perishin’ eyes out.”) How could he make a fresh start if he didn’t clear up the past? Harry said he wasn’t worrying about the past, but about the future. And he wasn’t worrying too much about that. He wasn’t without something behind him. If it weren’t for that brother of his and them perishin’ coppers he’d never have come there.

  Marion Blaketon told him—and I could almost hear the heartiness of her tone—that she thought a way could be found. If he gave a definite promise to go straight, he might be found work that would take him out of the ken of the police. Harry asked what sort of work, and she hinted at something in his own line. Not greengrocery actually, but, say, gardening. Harry said that would suit him a treat, and then she had artistically hedged. Everything would have to be thought over. Perhaps he had better come back again on the Monday morning. Harry said he would be there.

  At the parting (“Shook hands with me as if I was a regular toff”) there was a bit of cryptic advice. Harry wasn’t in the meanwhile to do anything rash. That was covered by the statement that the job would be well paid, if still available. It would be with one of the Society’s warmest supporters, and might be worth as much as five pounds a week, all found.

  That was the end of the statement. Here and there in the margin were pencilled lines and I asked Prider what they meant.

  “Just things that struck the Gen.”—he caught my eye at that slip into George’s nickname, and ventured on a grin— “the Super and me. That one, sir. The crafty way she led him on about that jewellery. And this bit specially, where she tells him not to do anything rash.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.