The Journeying Boy

by Michael Innes

  Patiently, then, Cadover retraced his mental footsteps to the point at which the theory of some impersonation had first opened before him. Take it the other way. Take it that it was the boy arriving with the dead man who was the impostor. And remember that this was a supposition sharply congruous with the social consciousness of the usherette who had believed herself to have detected something spurious about him! Cadover drew a long breath. Suppose that the tutor, perhaps newly engaged, had not in fact met his future charge until this visit to the cinema. There was nothing in the note to Miss Vane to conflict with that. Indeed, the note described the boy as ‘sounding a bit of a handful all round’. At the moment of writing, in fact, he had not met the boy. And with a boy who was a handful – resentful or distrustful, perhaps, about the arrangements proposed for his holidays – might not going to a cinema together have been hit upon as a means, so to speak, of breaking the ice? The tutor, then, comes to the Metrodrome and thinks he meets his charge. But actually he meets an impostor, and presently he is seated between this impostor and a woman who is also in the plot. And meanwhile the genuine boy has been persuaded, say, to play a prank; to be present nearby in the company of a girl-friend. For a crime is to be committed and the genuine boy to be implicated. But just before the deed is done the genuine boy somehow takes the alarm, hurries out with his friend, and is now perhaps at home, panic-stricken, and explaining the disappearance of his tutor-elect in the best way he can…

  Cadover’s career would not have been the success it had did he not possess, mingled with qualities merely solid and reliable, a streak of genius that could, on occasion, run up such effective imaginative constructions as this. But equally – a fact of which he was abundantly aware – he would have come many more croppers than he had, had he not known with what extreme caution to proceed upon them. Moreover, any confidence he might have felt in his theory was in this instance conditioned by a troubled sense of something which he found peculiarly difficult to define. The notion of impersonation had really gripped him more than it should – or rather it remained in his mind as requiring attention which, in all this of the bowler-hatted boys, it had not really received at all. Already he had felt in this affair the haunting hint of some tenuous pointer by a hair’s breadth fatally missed. And here was a similar feeling assailing him now. What the police detective chiefly needs is rather less a formidably developed power of inferential reasoning than the ‘fine ear’ upon which the successful physician also relies. And now Cadover’s ear was just failing, or so he believed, to achieve some discrimination essential to the analysis of his problem.

  He turned back to the dead man’s diary. It was the point, after all, at which the criminals had slipped up. Potentially, it had been a very bad slip indeed, for had the diary been a little less new, a little more informative, their hope to prevent or delay identification of the body would have been frustrated from the start. And, even as it stood, the diary perhaps still represented the chink or crevice through which a first leverage could be obtained on the blank wall before him.

  Smith’s 7.30.

  That had led to Miss Vane, and Miss Vane, for the time, to a dead end only. He turned to the next entry:

  Bolderwood

  Hump

  Here was something that could be investigated either swiftly or slowly. Within a couple of hours, that was to say, he could have a policeman on the doorstep of every known Bolderwood in Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and Eire, asking for any light they could throw upon the Metrodrome murder. But this might well be to sacrifice some virtue of surprise, and such inquiries should perhaps be precluded by confidential investigation in each case. Certainly the first thing to do was to hunt the directories for any Bolderwood in any way associated with a Hump; should such a one be discovered a very formidable battery would be turned upon him at once. Cadover pushed a button on his desk and spent some time delegating this task to assistants. And then he considered the two definitely Irish entries:

  N I police re guns etc

  and:

  Light railway from Dundrane.

  Neither of these entries seemed very hopeful. The second appeared to be a mere memorandum, casually written, of how the latter part of the proposed journey was to be accomplished. One does not reserve seats, or book ahead, on an Irish light railway. There was nothing, then, in this, except a general pointer to a certain tract of country. Nor did the first of the entries suggest anything in the nature of preliminary correspondence; it was merely a reminder of certain formalities to be complied with – formalities, Cadover suspected, which, during a tourist season, might not be very strictly maintained. What the entry did give was this: that the ‘Ireland’ referred to in the dead man’s letter to Miss Vane did in fact mean Eire and not Northern Ireland. It was for the purpose of taking guns into Eire – or rather of being permitted ultimately to take them out again – that some application was necessary or desirable to the Northern Ireland police. Here too Cadover set certain inquiries on foot. Then he turned to the final entry – the one which had already been prominently in his mind.

  gun for boy 1.15

  One did not note in quite this way an intention to hand over a gun; the reference must definitely be to acquiring one. And if the figures represented a time of day – as almost certainly they did – then there was surely some significance to be attached to them. A quarter past one is a slightly out of the way time to go buying an article the choice of which requires considerable deliberation. It means either an unusually early luncheon or an uncomfortably delayed one. But the fact that the entry was for the previous day suggested an obvious reason for this. The dead man’s programme had been full. And if written out it would have read something like: meet boy – quick luncheon – buy gun – Metrodrome in time for Plutonium Blonde – Irish boat train. For the letter to Miss Vane, it had to be remembered, definitely named Thursday as the young man’s proposed day of departure with his pupil. About this, of course, there might have been some later change of plan. But on the whole it seemed likely that about the entire affair this was the signal fact: the fatality in the cinema had taken place on the very eve of the Irish project.

  Suppose, then, that a shot-gun had actually been bought round about one-fifteen. What had happened to it? Where had it been, this last-moment purchase, while the people who had bought it were in the cinema? There seemed to be two possible answers. Either it had been sent to some private address in order to be put with other baggage, or it had been sent to a railway terminus to await the travellers there. And if Cadover was right in thinking that no journey to Ireland could well have taken place, then, in the latter eventuality, the gun might be in some railway ‘left luggage’ room still. There was a fair line of investigation in this, but it was one in which success would probably come more quickly at any other season of the year. Guns, in the second week of August, were decidedly on the move. It was true that King’s Cross and Euston no longer presented the spectacle – astonishing to the itinerant foreigner caught in the whirl – of a whole social class equipped with such weapons, and migrating, together with an infinitude of crates, hampers, trunks, upper servants, and privileged dogs, to the remoter corners of the kingdom. Nevertheless traffic of this sort was still considerable, and a single gun would be hard to trace.

  The occasion of purchase was a good deal more immediately hopeful. Considering it, Cadover indeed concluded that he had been taking too gloomy a view of the merely waiting part that might be imposed upon him. Again the season was a factor. The columns of The Times, for example, had shown him a good many people wanting to buy or sell sporting weapons, and the gunsmiths would similarly be doing a brisk trade. So again it was possible that a single purchase might take a little time to track down. Nevertheless, it could almost certainly be done, since one cannot walk into a shop and buy a shot-gun with the casual anonymity natural to the purchase of a pair of gloves or a packet of cigarettes. Indeed, Cadover, although not well versed in such matters, suspected that a good deal of ritual would a
ccompany the acquiring of fresh property of this sort. He judged it likely that a man’s gunsmith would hold something the same position – that of a species of paternal toady – as a man’s tailor. But would the dead man have, in that sense, a gunsmith? He was not, presumably, a person of any great substance; nevertheless, this was one of the likelier points at which he would be tied on to the tail of privilege. He had looked just that type. Gun for boy, then, meant, most probably, his bringing some special knowledge or connexion of his own to bear; this more probably than his acting, namelessly and unnoticeably, as agent for the boy’s father.

  But would the gun, for that matter, be bought in a shop at all? Cadover was beginning to reach an age in which, every now and then, he had to hitch himself back into the present; and for a moment he had forgotten that nowadays neither gloves nor cigarettes nor shot-guns are simply to be had for the asking. Almost everything is in short supply at one time or another; and sporting equipment is particularly likely to be so at the start of the shooting season. But on this one could get assured information quickly. Cadover picked up his telephone and rang the first large firm of gunsmiths to come into his head. It was as he supposed. They took the gloomiest view of being able expeditiously to supply a weapon suitable for a boy of fifteen or sixteen.

  Gun for boy 1.15. The man who made this confident note could not have been on any sort of waiting list for a suitable weapon, since his engagement to accompany a pupil to Ireland had not been more than a few days old. It was, of course, conceivable that he was somewhere the particularly privileged sort of customer for whom wanted articles are, in fact, produced. Alternatively, he might simply have chanced to know that some acquaintance of his own had an appropriate gun to dispose of. This second possibility Cadover eyed askance for a moment; it would be a circumstance that would pretty well destroy such hopefulness as there was in this approach to the case. But the tutor’s likeliest manner of proceeding, after all, lay yet to explore; and Cadover sent for a file of recent newspapers. ‘Articles for Sale’ was his quarry, and he kept a particularly sanguine eye upon the personal column of The Times once more. The old agony advertisements, he reflected, were not quite what they had been when they delighted Sherlock Holmes; nevertheless, there must be a little drama, and a great deal of oddity, hidden behind some of them still… Every now and then he scribbled in his notebook, and as he did so his spirits rose. As he had anticipated, a substantial – yet not too substantial – body of people had been holding themselves out of late as having sporting guns to dispose of. To question them meant another pilgrimage much like that of the previous evening, and Cadover debated whether to put a team of men on the work. He decided once more to keep the matter in his own hands, thrust his notebook in his pocket, and reached for his bowler hat.

  It will be recalled that the portion of our narrative now being offered to the reader is retrospective in cast. While Detective-Inspector Cadover is thus stepping out of Scotland Yard, with that heavy tread recalling his beat of long ago, the unknown boy with whom he is concerned, and the substitute tutor whose existence he does not suspect, are transferring to the light railway at Dundrane, with the greater part of their adventures yet before them.

  17

  In estimating the course and tempo of the inquiry lying before him, Cadover had neglected a consideration that ought to have been sufficiently obvious. Persons with sporting guns for sale are commonly persons owning other sporting guns as well, and having a predisposition to put these into use in the second week of August. Working systematically through his list of advertisers, he found himself seeking a surprising number of people who were now out of Town. As he abandoned none of these until he had obtained from them by telephone or telegram, or through the agency of local police, particulars of anyone who had bought, or considered buying, the weapon they had advertised – and, moreover, as many of the replies received involved the instigating of further inquiries for which several assistants had to be briefed – the shades of evening had fallen as he drew towards the end of his list.

  Now he rang the bell of a small flat in Hampstead. The house was retired and shabby, and its conversion into a dwelling adequate for several households had been carried out uncompromisingly on the cheap. A seedy retired major, Cadover speculated, who had felt a powerful urge to raise the price of a crate or two of whisky. The door opened before him. ‘Does Mr Standage live here?’ he inquired.

  For a decayed sporty major, if such there was to be, was not yet visible; Cadover found himself regarding, in a gloom not very convenient for precise observation, a sombrely dressed woman in late middle age, who appeared to look back at him with completely expressionless eyes. ‘I am Mrs Standage,’ she said; ‘and I live alone. Will you come in?’ She let him past and closed the door. ‘This way, please.’ And she led the way into a room on the left.

  Here it was darker still and Cadover waited for his conductress to turn on the light. But the lady – she was emphatically that, and the more evidently in being a person from whom all other species of emphasis had drained away long ago – merely motioned to a chair and herself sat down with a straight back which seemed to speak uncompromisingly of a merely business occasion. ‘I think I ought to tell you at once,’ she said, ‘that I have had an offer. An offer from a clergyman.’

  Cadover, who was weary, had for a moment a confused impulse to offer congratulations, as if what had been confessed to him was the prospect of some imminent matrimonial success. His perception of the folly of this left him just presence of mind to repeat, ‘A clergyman?’

  ‘For use in his parish hall. And I should, of course, be very pleased to think of the instrument as being employed for what would be, virtually, purposes of piety. Two of my uncles were archdeacons.’ Mrs Standage paused, but not from any consciousness of irrelevance. ‘Unfortunately the offer he was able to make was far from meeting my mind in the matter. Perhaps you would care to try the touch and tone.’

  Glancing round the room, Cadover saw that what was being offered to him was the species of instrument known as a baby grand. ‘It looks very nice,’ he said politically. ‘But I have not, as a matter of fact, come to buy a piano. I must explain to you that I am–’

  ‘Then it’s the rug.’ Mrs Standage, who kept her eyes fixed somewhat unnervingly over her visitor’s left shoulder, spoke with a shade of chagrin. ‘Unfortunately, it is already sold – as was to be expected, I’m afraid. So fine a Persian rug would scarcely remain on – on the market long. But if a small Aubusson carpet would suit your needs equally well–’ Here she broke off, as if aware of salesmanship of a somewhat too precipitate order. ‘You may wonder why I should be anxious to dispose of things of such excellent quality – heirlooms, as they might be called. The fact is that I have had somewhat to contract my living quarters of late, and I am above all things fond of space. This is the sole reason for my having decided to part with something here and there.’

  ‘I see.’ Cadover barely did see, for the dusk was now deepening rapidly. But the room in which he sat, in addition to being faded, seemed already singularly bare; and by his head he could just detect a square patch on the wall from which a picture must recently have vanished. He was in the presence, in fact, of dire poverty in one of its most distressing forms. ‘But you must understand,’ he said gently, ‘that I have not come to buy anything you still have to sell. I am a detective-inspector of the police, and I have come to make inquiries about something you have already sold. I mean the shot-gun which you advertised about a week ago.’

  Mrs Standage bowed, and it could be seen that a faint spot of colour had risen to her cheek. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said stiffly. ‘The misunderstanding was due entirely to my own carelessness. And any questions you have to ask I shall, of course, answer if I can. I hope I have not been culpable. It did cross my mind that formalities unknown to me might attend the – the disposal of firearms. The gun belonged to my late husband.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Cadover was infinitely soothing. ‘But I don’t thi
nk you will find us raising any questions of that sort.’

  ‘It was taking up room.’ Mrs Standage appeared to feel this a little tenuous and to cast about in her mind. ‘And falling over. It made me decidedly nervous. I was not assured that the mechanism was entirely safe. So it appeared best to sell the weapon and be rid of it.’

  ‘You acted very wisely, ma’am. Firearms can be extremely dangerous to those unfamiliar with them.’ Cadover paused on this vacuous sentiment and then plunged decisively. ‘And the gun suited the boy?’

  ‘The gun suited the boy very well. He was delighted with it. It pleased me to feel that my husband’s old companion was going to give such pleasure.’

  For almost the first time in the cinema affair, Cadover felt a strong leap of hope within him. ‘And the offer made – um – met your mind in the matter?’