Death of a Commuter

by Bruce, Leo

  “If the C.I.D. man in charge is at all reasonable I’ll let you know. It’s quite an interesting story though rather a gruesome one.”

  “Then à tout à l’heure, Deene. I shall await your summons.”

  When the headmaster had gone Mrs. Stick entered, followed by her sister and brother-in-law. Mrs. Stick seemed preoccupied.

  “I should like to introduce my sister” she said. “And Mr. Grimthorpe.”

  “We’ve heard so much about you, Mr. Deene. We’ve followed all your cases. It must be ever so interesting to investigate crime like that I tell my sister she’s a lucky girl to work where so much is going on.”

  “Mrs. Stick has always told me you disapprove of it,” said Carolus mischievously.

  “She doesn’t have to put up with it like I do.” Mrs. Stick sounded sullen. “Not with never knowing if it’s a murderer coming to the door.”

  “I don’t say I should like that” said Mrs. Grimthorpe. “But think of knowing what’s happening before the papers get hold of it! My husband says the same. He’s always reading about some crime or other.”

  “Yes. I must say I like a good murder,” said Mr. Grimthorpe genially. “Got anything on hand at the moment Mr. Deene?”

  “Now that’s enough of that!” said Mrs. Stick. “As if I hadn’t enough to put up with, what with Stick pushing himself in. I’m ashamed of you, Edie, really I am.”

  Mrs. Grimthorpe smiled.

  “Oh, don’t be so old-fashioned,” she said. “You talk like your auntie used to. We like to be with it, Mr. Deene. Good luck to you, I say, if you know more than the police do. Anyway, it’s very kind of you to ask us down for a couple of days. We’ve often wondered how my sister could spend her life in a musty old town like Newminster!”

  “I always say, you want to know how the other half live,” pronounced Mr. Grimthorpe. “I couldn’t do without the Dogs, myself.”

  Mrs. Stick was making desperate signs to her sister and after some minutes was successful in ushering her cheerful relatives from the room.

  “If I’d known how it would Turn Out,” she told Carolus when they had gone, “I’d never have asked them down. I don’t know what’s come over my sister at all. She was always the one who thought what people would say. It was as much as you dared to have a bit of a joke with her when we were girls. It must be since her husband sold his business. One of the big combines have taken it over, it seems, and they think of nothing but enjoying themselves. I’ll do what I can for lunch but there’s not much time.”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Stick. Where’s Priggley?”

  “That’s another thing, sir. I don’t know what’s come over the young gentleman. He’s always been so quiet since I’ve known him, but he seems to have taken to my sister and her husband and now he’s as bad as they are. Mr. Grimthorpe says he knows more about the Dogs than what he does and between them they’ve been winning every night and staying out till all hours. What they find to talk about I don’t know.”

  “I do,” said Carolus.

  “I suppose men are all the same,” said Mrs. Stick with some hostility. “Not that he isn’t always respectful to me, only you should see the way the three of them carry on.”

  A sound of loud laughter came from the Sticks’ sitting-room.

  “Hark at them!” said Mrs. Stick disapprovingly. “Like a lot of magpies. It’s a good thing we’re not all like that.”

  It was not until six o’clock that day that Carolus received the call he was expecting from the C.I.D. He had been wondering what their attitude would be. They might quite seriously suspect him. They knew from Beckett that he had discovered the body. They would have found out by now that he had been staying in the same house as George Catford and they could easily have discovered that he had a firearms certificate for a pistol. Even if they did not suspect him their attitude might be hostile, even threatening. They could take him in for enquiries and expect to learn everything he knew by a gruelling cross-examination. But if they were intelligent, or knew that on previous occasions he had been helpful to the police without wishing to claim any credit for what he had done, they might treat him with consideration and friendliness and learn much more than they would by any other method.

  When they arrived, two large, serious, middle-aged men, Carolus quickly perceived what tactics they had decided to adopt. It was one used frequently with suspects, particularly young and inexperienced ones, and with them was usually successful. It was known among criminals as ‘The good bloke and the bastard’. One appeared reasonable, friendly, kind, the other acted as though he could with difficulty be withheld by his associate from carrying out all sorts of threats from beating-up to arrest. This combination often broke down the resistance of juvenile delinquents. Carolus realised that he was going to find it difficult to avoid discomfort and perhaps humiliation. However, at the moment he held all the high cards for since the result of the inquest on Parador the police had dropped the case while he had worked on it. Moreover he knew the truth, and though they already probably had inklings of it he could save them a great deal of time.

  They were of equal rank. One showed Carolus his official identity card, Detective-Inspector Hemingway, and introduced the other, Detective-Inspector Haggard. Hemingway was to be the good bloke, evidently.

  “You made a report to the sergeant in charge at Brenstead last night, I believe, Mr. Deene?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You had discovered the body of a dead man in the car park of the Great Ring?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you doing there?” asked Haggard fiercely.

  Carolus answered neither flippantly nor evasively, but took the wind out of the detective’s sails by saying calmly, “I had followed Catford there.”

  “You followed him there! What for?”

  “I wanted to see whom he would meet.”

  “What business was that of yours?” shouted Haggard.

  “Just a minute, Mr. Deene,” put in Hemingway in a conciliatory tone, as though it was Carolus who had shown excitement. “Are we to understand you knew the dead man?”

  “Oh yes. I knew him. I had moved into his boarding-house especially to make his acquaintance.”

  “Why?” asked Haggard.

  “That is a question I’m not at the moment prepared to answer.”

  “Oh, you’re not. Do you realise that you’re under very grave suspicion in this case?”

  “No. I do not. I have more respect for the intelligence of the police than that.”

  “Then why are you refusing to give us information?”

  Hemingway smiled.

  “You see, Mr. Deene, we have a heavy responsibility. We naturally want to know what you can tell us. Catford was shot through the head with a pistol at close range.”

  “Yes. I thought so from the casual look I took at the corpse. Probably while he was putting his motor-cycle on the stand, wasn’t it?”

  “Well ask the questions,” said Haggard. “Have you got a revolver?”

  “Yes. Want to see it?”

  Carolus crossed to his desk and was about to open a drawer when Haggard said, “Never mind that now.”

  “Now look here,” said Carolus. “You’re going about this altogether the wrong way. You know perfectly well I didn’t shoot Catford. You also believe, quite rightly, that I’ve got a lot of information for you …”

  “So we’re going about it the wrong way?” said Haggard sarcastically. “What way would you suggest we went about it?”

  “I’ll tell you. It’s quite simple. First we all have a drink. Then we relax and start again. Then instead of one of you wheedling and the other bullying you let me tell you the story in my own way. Then if you have any questions I can answer I will undertake to answer them. Because, you know, really we shan’t get anywhere like this.”

  The two men exchanged glances.

  “What story?” asked Haggard, still with hostility. “We haven’t come here to listen to fairy
stories, you know. We’ve come to get the truth.”

  “It’s quite a long story,” said Carolus. “But it’s not about The Good People. On the contrary I don’t think I’ve met a more horribly cold-blooded murder in the whole of my experience.”

  “You talk of your experience. If you’d had what we’ve had you wouldn’t think so much of the murder of George Catford. We’ve both known worse than that.”

  “Catford? I wasn’t thinking of that. An everyday little affair. I was thinking of the murder of Felix Parador. But let’s have that drink we were talking about.”

  He went to the house phone and asked Mrs. Stick for the tray of drinks she usually brought in at this time. It was just as she was entering that Haggard said sarcastically, “So Felix Parador was murdered, was he?”

  “Yes,” said Carolus. “Oh, Mrs. Stick, telephone Mr. Gorringer, will you, and tell him the two detective-inspectors I was expecting are here if he likes to come across.”

  Mrs. Stick gave Carolus a withering look.

  “Well,” she said, but she infused the monosyllable with seething indignation.

  “What will you have, Detective-Inspector? And you? Yes, Parador was murdered. Soda or water? So was Catford, of course, but that was a simpler matter. Your good health.”

  “I give it up,” said Haggard. “I’ve never heard anything like this in my life. I don’t know what I’m doing letting you rattle on. I must be out of my mind. When I ask questions I expect to get them answered, not listen to a lot of fantasy.”

  “You’ll get them answered,” said Carolus.

  “I hear you’re in trouble with the Buttsfield police as well,” went on Haggard. “Smashing windows or something. Do you go about smashing windows, Mr. Deene?”

  “Not really. But look at that one,” and he pointed to the window through which he had fired.

  “This was done by a revolver shot!” said Haggard, examining it.

  “Yes. Fired from where you are now. It didn’t hit anyone, though.”

  Haggard turned to Hemingway. “We oughtn’t to be listening to this man,” he said. “He’s barking mad.”

  “Better hear him out.”

  At that moment Mr. Gorringer entered, beaming.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. “We are in for a rare treat, I opine. Our good Deene is about to take us into his confidence with one of his famous elucidations. Splendid. As an old hand, let me warn you that there will be moments which will seem to you frankly incredible. There will be suggestions which you will think conflict with reason. But be patient and you will find that all becomes admirably clear.”

  If Detective-Inspector Hemingway had looked with wonder at Detective-Inspector Haggard before, they now stared at one another and at Mr. Gorringer with amazement.

  “I came here to ask some perfectly simple questions about the circumstances of a man’s death last night,” said Haggard.

  Mr. Gorringer raised his hand.

  “You will be given a perfectly simple explanation,” he said graciously. “Come, my dear Deene, proceed!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “WHAT FIRST INTERESTED ME ABOUT THIS CASE,” BEGAN CAROLUS quietly, “was the man in the railway compartment. Here we have Parador’s five fellow commuters waiting for him to travel to London with them when instead comes a mysterious creature in dark glasses dressed all in black who announced that Parador won’t be coming.

  “It has been pointed out that he might have been a stranger justifying himself for taking an empty seat and meant merely that no one would be coming so near the departure of the train, but the men who heard him did not get this impression at all. They felt, even at the time, that he knew something. When I began to learn about his movements from the car park man at the station I became convinced that he had deliberately chosen that carriage for some purpose of his own. (By the way, car parks play a very large part in this case as you will see, just as they play a large, far too large, part in our lives.)

  “He rode up that morning, left his Criterion motor-cycle, registration number BYY 018, and bought a first-class ticket and entered this carriage. Moreover, as I discovered later, he had been out on his motor-cycle the night before and had only been back to his aunt’s private hotel to put on the black suit, socks and tie she had bought him for his uncle’s funeral a year ago. Finally, I knew from the car park man that he had only had a couple of hours or so in London because he was back on a train which left London at one o’clock, and after trying to ask some questions about commuters which the car park man would not answer, he set off on his motor-cycle.

  “I was convinced then that when he said in that deep voice of his ‘He won’t be coming’ and, being asked what he meant, repeated, ‘Just that. He won’t be coming’, he was not excusing himself for taking an unofficially reserved seat, but speaking deliberately to one or more of the five men present And that he had taken great trouble and gone to some expense to make that announcement in that particularly impressive and dramatic way.

  “Why? What could his object be? There could really be only one—intimidation. And intimidation, it was fairly safe, though not quite safe to say, with the object of blackmail. He knew something about one or more of those five men in connection with the death of Felix Parador which put him in a position of power. He was showing his future victim or victims that he knew it and was going to act on it. That much was fairly obvious and nothing else accounts for the extraordinary behaviour of George Catford that morning.

  “But what did he know? And which of the five men was concerned? And how concerned—directly or indirectly? This I decided to discover, and I set out in my own way, listening to a good deal of idle chatter and irrelevant information in order to do so.”

  “A moment!” said Mr. Gorringer. “How did you identify this man?” Carolus smiled.

  “The police were good enough to do that for me. I had the number of the motor-cycle he had left in the station car park that morning and I faked a small accident to my car, reporting his as the other party. They discovered the owner and his address. I shall really have to apologise to Sergeant Beckett but there was no other way of learning the facts quickly.”

  The faces of Hemingway and Haggard remained unmoved.

  “From this point, and for a long time, I was reduced to guesswork. I was faced with a number of questions, some of which were unanswerable, and yet I believed that some theory existed which would make sense of all of them. If Catford knew something important enough to enable him to attempt such a barefaced piece of blackmail it could only be one thing—the fact that Parador had not died by his own hand. Yet how else? Who could possibly be responsible? For what motive? I tried all manner of combinations, but nothing seemed to fit. Until, on a certain occasion I will describe to you, I heard one sentence of nine words which satisfied me that one of the possibilities I had seen was not a possibility at all but a certainty. Thereafter everything fitted into the pattern and I knew the truth.

  “I must start with a love-story. Two years ago James Rumble lost his wife and, a lonely and introspective man, he fell desperately in love with Elspeth Parador. I have seen them together and apart and I have no hesitation in saying that this was more than sincere love, it was blind, agonising, ruthless, the love of Abelard and Heloise, if you like, or if you are more cynical, of Thompson and Bywaters. For a long time it was secret, but secrecy only added to its intensity. The two had to see one another occasionally and their method of covering up on this was for Elspeth to appear to be equally friendly with several men in the place, entertain them and talk about them to Felix, the principle of safety in numbers. Boggett told me of these, Hopelady, Thriver, the younger Limpole. Even to Boggett’s crafty and observant eye, James Rumble was only one of the men who occasionally came to the Old Manor. For over a year Elspeth and Rumble—I can only use the common but pregnant expression—were madly in love.”

  What proof have you of this?” asked Haggard impatiently.

  “Only my own observation and
instincts—and the events which followed.”

  “But let us cry halt for a moment,” said Mr. Gorringer to smooth over this awkward moment “It is the custom of those privileged to hear Deene’s lucid expositions to give him a moment’s respite de temps en temps while we refresh ourselves.”

  “I’ve heard no lucid explanations yet,” grumbled Haggard. “Only an admission of having brought a false charge against a motor-cyclist and a lot about love based on personal instinct. What I want to know …”

  “What you want to know, you will know; rest assured of that my dear sir, and in the meantime let me fill your glass.”

  Carolus, looking rather seedy and troubled, said nothing while the headmaster was busy. Then he went on.

  “Elspeth was so taken up with James Rumble and the difficulties of keeping the secret of their love in a place hungry for gossip, that she did not even know her husband was keeping Henrietta Ballard and going to Buttsfield to see her. Yet she had been fond of Felix and perhaps in her way was fond of him still. Love like that obsessive and aching, can blind people to everything else. She was actress enough to follow her usual life so far as others could see, even so far as Felix could see.

  “But this could not continue. As time passed she and James Rumble imagined for themselves a sort of paradise, somewhere abroad, perhaps in Spain, where they could be together for the rest of their lives. At first perhaps, they thought of it as ‘one day’, meaning after Felix’s death, for Felix was a considerably older man and believed at one time that he had cancer. At first it was as harmless as that—the Great Possibility in the future. But months passed and Dr. Sporlott decided that there was no sign of cancer and at last, in desperation, they began testing each other by allusions and suggestions. ‘One day’ became ‘if anything were to happen to Felix’. Finally they decided to kill him.”

  “Good gracious me!” said Mr. Gorringer.

  “Once they had admitted to one another that this was their intention, they began to plan how it could be done without the slightest risk to themselves. They were not going to have their paradise snatched away by years of imprisonment for murder. And they nearly succeeded. So nearly that even now one of them, at least may escape the consequences.