The Z Murders

by J. Jefferson Farjeon

  The man without arms shifted his position slightly. His right sleeve lay in his lap, neatly directed towards the driver’s seat.

  “You have mentioned my plain speaking,” he said in his disquieting monotone, and the countryman suddenly became conscious again of the total lack of facial expression. “Here is some more plain speaking. Without fingers, hands, or arms, I am writing a letter across England. The letter Z. The letter on my forehead. The letter that was burned there as a sign that I was finished—the letter I am now writing as a sign that Ledlow is about to be finished. Ledlow knows—Ledlow understands—Ledlow is waiting for the final scratch of the pen.” The sleeve moved slightly. “And you suggest that I should leave the letter unfinished—the letter that began at Euston at 5 a.m., and that he has been told to watch?”

  He paused, and swallowed softly.

  “You are a fool, my friend. You would try and run away from the Universe. You are not even subtle. Those jewels—those coloured beads Ledlow is supposed to have hidden away somewhere—I invented them.” The countryman’s face twitched. “Yes, invented them, to keep my kind nurse interested all these years. Would you have been quite so devoted without them? Would you have loved me so much if you hadn’t believed that, one day, I would point the way to them?”

  He raised his sleeve.

  “Turn round, please. I am going to finish my letter. The pen has scratched at London and at Bristol and at Boston. It is now going to scratch at Whitchurch—and, this time, with a double flourish!”

  And the expressionless face turned towards the girl in the corner. But the sleeve remained raised towards the man in the driver’s seat.

  Chapter XXXIV

  Whitchurch

  The journey continued. Once more the car travelled towards the west. The sun rose behind it, sending its shadow before like black ink.

  But the ink should have been red, for this journey westwards was the final stroke of a crimson brain, a brain that was now tracing its last murderous line across the map of England. The line went through Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire. It would end in Shropshire, in a small cottage tucked away in enfolding hills. There the writing would be completed.

  For a long while no further word was spoken. As once before, the man without arms sat behind his driver, dictating with the voiceless gun in his sleeve. The driver himself was not in a mood for conversation.

  He thought hard, however. His ego had been insulted and his life was in danger. Despite his unenviable position, he did not admit the theory that he was finished. And indeed, as he thought, a new expression gradually grew in his sullen eyes, and the insulted ego began to feel a little happier. “Not clever enough, aren’t I?” he reflected, grimly. “Well, we’ll see!”

  They ran out of Stafford. A Cheshire labourer winked from his pre-war bicycle as they went past him. Cheshire was soon finished with. They entered Shropshire.

  “How much farther?” asked the man without arms.

  “Only a few miles now,” answered the countryman.

  His voice was quite amicable. The man without arms noticed it.

  “Feeling better about it?” he inquired, sardonically.

  “I’m not worrying,” replied the countryman. “You know best.”

  “Of course I do! Now tell me. What’s this Rose-tree Cottage like?”

  “Small, and a bit back from the road.”

  “Front garden?”

  “Front weed-dump.”

  “And at the back?”

  “Sort of waste-land. Meadow. Stubble.”

  “Leading to?”

  “A stretch of water.”

  “River?”

  “No, pond. Small lake, rather. Quite a size.”

  “And the road?”

  “What, in front?”

  “Is there one at the back?”

  “No.”

  “Then we won’t worry about it. Yes, the one in front. Much traffic?”

  “Hardly Piccadilly Circus.”

  “Please be explicit.”

  “All right. Don’t lose your wool. I’ve never seen any traffic. It’s just a lane. This car will be an event.”

  “Then we must see that the event isn’t recorded before we want it recorded. So the road’s lonely, eh? No people likely to be about?”

  “Probably not a soul.”

  “Any other cottages?”

  “Not one within sight. You can take it from me that the spot was made for you.”

  “How far is it from the town?”

  “Oh—two or three miles. More or less. I don’t know, exactly.”

  “I didn’t ask you exactly. Do we have to go through Whitchurch?”

  “I think only a part of it. By the station. But we don’t touch the chief streets.”

  “So much the better. Where’s this we’re coming to?”

  “This is Whitchurch.”

  The reply nipped the next question in the bud. The man without arms closed his half-open mouth, and was suddenly silent. His eyes became little black dots.

  They ran by the station. They curved into the outskirts of the little low-roofed town. They did not enter the heart of it, and soon its ancient inns, its old-world shops, and the picturesque tower of St. Alkmund’s Church fell away on their left, swallowed up by the brooding greyness. They twisted out of one lane into another. Up a steep hill. Down a steeper one. More twists. More hills. The hedges on each side of them grew closer. They did not pass a soul. The car slackened. The countryman half-turned in his seat.

  “Almost there,” he reported. “Do you know your plan?”

  The man without arms did not reply. He was looking at a low wall that replaced the hedges round a curve. Beneath ran a railway track.

  They crossed the bridge at a crawling pace.

  “Stop,” ordered the man without arms.

  “I was going to,” replied the countryman.

  Now the car was still. The countryman descended from his seat, and stood beside the door. “Where’s the cottage?” asked the man without arms.

  “Round the next bend,” answered the countryman. “Just round.”

  “Then we won’t take the car any farther,” said the man without arms.

  “Not a yard farther,” agreed the countryman. The man without arms smiled at him. The countryman smiled back. But, all at once, his expression changed. “Look out!” he cried. “The girl’s coming round!”

  “That’s an old trick,” said the man without arms. “I’ve just given her another dose. Try something else.”

  The countryman’s forehead grew damp. “Damn him!” he thought. It was a bad moment for his ego.

  “So you still want to get rid of me, eh?” queried the man without arms.

  “What d’you mean?” stammered the countryman. “I thought—”

  “No, that’s your trouble. You can’t think. You need me to think for you. Well, there’s a pond over there. How about dropping me in and drowning me? It looks a nice, secluded spot for a body.”

  “See here!” exploded the countryman. “If you’re not careful, I’ll do it!”

  “If I’m not very careful, you’ll do it,” agreed the man without arms. “That’s why I’ve got to be very careful, isn’t it? You see—everything would be so nice and easy for you afterwards, wouldn’t it?”

  “What the hell are you driving at?”

  “Why, here’s the girl. You’ve only got to hide her, too, and you can use her as a hostage. For barter.”

  “Barter? What for?”

  “For that little packet of beads you think I lied to you about. You did think I lied to you just now, didn’t you? You thought I lied to put you off the scent again. And, thinking that, you went on thinking. You thought you would get rid of me. You thought you would go to Ledlow and say, ‘Don’t worry
about your life, old chap. Worry about your granddaughter’s. But you can have her life back, too, if you want, for twenty thousand pounds’ worth of diamonds. Where are they?’ ”

  “You’re a devil, if there ever was one!” blazed the countryman.

  “And you’re a fool, if there ever was one!” answered the man without arms. “Think I can’t see an expression when it’s reflected in glass? And read it? You should keep your face better—as I do.”

  The man without arms presented his expressionless face to the countryman. The countryman saw it through a red haze. In a sudden frenzy of combined anger and fear, he hurled himself upon his tormentor. The next moment, astonishment replaced the anger and the fear.

  The man without arms was hanging limply in his own.

  “God! I’ve got him!” thought the countryman, holding tight.

  The man without arms still hung limply. It was as though the countryman’s hugging arms had squeezed the life out of him. He seemed to be dead; to have shrunk out of existence; but whether he were dead or alive made no difference to the immediate position. He was impotent!

  The countryman’s mind worked swiftly. He noted with satisfaction, and praised himself for his forethought, that he had brought the car to a standstill by a little clump of foliage. He had driven a yard or two off the surface of the lane to secure this sanctuary, and a passer-by, if he noticed the car at all behind its half-screen of overhanging branches, would merely assume it to belong to some picnic party.

  The countryman noticed two other things with satisfaction. One was that the large pond was easily accessible from this spot. Just over a bit of broken fence, and then a hundred yards down a gently-sloping field. The other was that the girl in the car was still motionless.

  Nevertheless the girl was a grave consideration, and necessitated the quickest action. She might begin to come round at any moment, despite that extra dose she’d just been given, and the countryman would have to be by her when that happened. Yes, and this flabby thing that had once been functioning flesh would have to be out of the way. Safely deposited in some place where it would lie snugly for awhile—with no questions asked!

  Suddenly the countryman laughed. The wizened creature hugged like a bear’s victim against his stomach shook with the movement of the laughter, responding limply to its communicated convulsions. The countryman was a little hysterical.

  “‘There’s a pond over there,’ is there?’’ he quoted deliriously. “‘How about dropping me in it and drowning me—it looks a nice secluded spot for a body!’ Damned good idea, Mr. Z! Damned good idea!”

  He moved to the broken fence as he spoke. Now he was stepping over it, his victim clasped close. He had carried him before, many a time, but never before had he noticed the wasted fellow’s lightness!

  He continued to laugh, though now more softly.

  “Yes, I did think you lied about that packet of beads,” he chuckled. “And I do think you lied! And if Ledlow doesn’t hand the beads over—or what he has left of ’em—in exchange for the girl’s life, or maybe his own life, he’s not the worm I take him to be.”

  The pond grew nearer. As he staggered over the coarse stubble the reeds became more distinct and the tangled, bordering bushes loomed larger.

  “Clever, by God, weren’t you?” grinned the countryman. He had to keep this up, to fortify him for the horrible moment that was coming. “Clever’s not the word! Fancy seeing my expression in the wind-screen, and reading it like that! It was smiling, wasn’t it?”

  He reached the edge of the pond. No, too open here. Just a bit to the right, through those bushes. No chance of anything being seen there.

  “Well, it’s still smiling!”

  A spot of rain descended on his forehead and made a little cold point amid the sweat. Now he was at the water’s edge.

  “And what’s yours doing?”

  Then a noiseless train passed through his body. He ceased to be a complete piece of flesh, but became, outrageously and illogically, merely edges of solidarity, edges that receded dizzily from the great hole in his middle and could not get back to close the hole up. The world turned round. A thousand suns appeared, fighting madly. The pond rose up, and swallowed him.

  On the edge of the pond stood the man without arms.

  “I could never have carried you here myself,” he said, to the widening circles. “Thank you.”

  Chapter XXXV

  The Silent Cottage

  The drizzle had increased to a downpour and the wind to half a gale when, after a dizzy journey through mud-splashed roads, Temperley and Diggs reached Whitchurch.

  They found it a depressing and desolate spot. The roads were rivers, and only those who had to be were out on them. Never a centre of liveliest activity, Whitchurch now seemed drowned, and the life it possessed remained, for the most part, unseen beneath sodden roofs. They came upon the town before they realised they had approached it. “’Allo—there’s the railway station,” said Diggs, as it suddenly loomed on their right. “But it’s the police station we want, ain’t it?”

  “No, it’s Rose-tree Cottage we want,” answered Temperley. “Keep your eyes skinned for somebody we can ask.”

  Diggs frowned. He’d missed a night’s sleep and driven through a hundred miles of wet roads at a reckless pace, and he wasn’t feeling the bravest man on earth. He thought that a bobby ought to do the ringing and the knocking at Rose-tree Cottage. But when he began to point this out he was cut short very definitely.

  “The police will already be at Rose-tree Cottage,” Temperley told him. “After getting my note Inspector James will have ’phoned through from Boston.”

  “Then what ’ave we been ’urryin’ for?” muttered Diggs.

  Diggs was a middle-aged man in the centre of life. He was not a young man at the beginning of it. Youth splashes through mud to reach the youth it loves; it cannot delay its rejoicing or its weeping. With middle-age, comfort supersedes Cupid.

  But it is youth that rules—particularly when the middle-age is merely a rather tired taxi-driver—and when a peripatetic sack sprouted two small legs beneath it and turned out to be a diminutive Whitchurchian under an improvised umbrella, Diggs slackened dutifully and growled out: “Oi! Where’s Rose-tree Cottage?”

  Rather surprisingly, the diminutive Whitchurchian knew it. Once he had been a greengrocer’s boy and had delivered potatoes at Rose-tree Cottage, and so he knew the way despite its deviations and its distance; and, since his ambition was to end up as an A. A. man, he explained the route with painstaking and praiseworthy clarity. Diggs, not to be outdone, and also because he wanted to avoid the necessity of stopping again, interpreted the directions with equal skill, and when the boy had finished he declared he could get there blindfold.

  “Don’t forget the railway bridge,” said the boy, earnestly. “It’s where it curves and you go over it and then you’re nearly there and—”

  “And there’s some water, but you keep that on your right and the cottage is round the next bend,” interposed Diggs. “Yes, I got it, sonny, and thank you very much.”

  As the car restarted, a shilling sailed out of the window. Diggs had got it. He did not have to inquire again, which was fortunate since, once the small town had been shaken off, they did not encounter a soul. The lanes curled and narrowed. The hedges dripped. The clouds became lower, as though to join in the process of closing them in. “What a spot!” muttered Temperley.

  Jolly enough in the sunlight, perhaps, but just now, in these dismal conditions, the last spot on earth!

  They began to take an abrupt curve.

  “Bridge,” reported Diggs.

  They crossed the bridge, leaving it with another curve. Like an S. Or a…

  “Water,” reported Diggs.

  He did not refer to the rain. The rain was self-evident. He jerked his head towards his right shoulder as the car swung r
ound to the left. A hundred yards away was the troubled surface of a large pond teased by rain-drops. “Slow down, man—we’re there!” ordered Temperley, his heart beating fast.

  Diggs was already doing it. They glided along a short stretch, rounded another bend…

  There it was! Rose-tree Cottage, with its name faintly showing on its moist little gate. Rose-tree Cottage, the end of a long and tortuous journey that had began before Boston—before Bristol, even. It had began at Euston, some thirty-six hours earlier. And here, in this desolate, insignificant, unpopulated spot, it concluded! But the nature of the conclusion was yet to learn. It would not be learned until that little gate had been passed, and a patch of tangled grass had been traversed, and a weather-stained door had been opened.

  “Don’t see no rose-trees,” grunted Diggs.

  It was not the lack of rose-trees that worried Temperley. It was the lack of policemen.

  Unlike Diggs, however, he made no comment, but sprang from the car and hurried through the gate. The long neglected grasses clawed at his feet as he squelched through them. “Go away—people don’t live here,” they seemed to be muttering. The door, when he reached it, was equally unwelcoming. So were the little windows that stared silently at him and gave away no secrets. He found a bell in a tangle of creeper and pulled it. He heard it tinkling inside. No one answered it. He rang again. Again it tinkled uselessly.

  “Nobody at ’ome?” asked Diggs, behind him.

  “I don’t like it!” muttered Temperley.

  “I ain’t lovin’ it meself,” replied Diggs. “Try knockin’.”

  Temperley knocked. His knuckles had never made a more eerie sound. “Well, sir,” said Diggs. “If nobody’s ’ere, nobody’s ’ere.”

  “What’s worrying me, Diggs,” answered Temperley, “is that nobody seems to have been here.”

  “’Ow d’you know that, sir?”

  “I don’t know it. Maybe it’s only an idea. Still, there’s certainly no sign of it.” His eye left the door, and stared at a window. The window was heavily curtained, and there was no sign of light or of life inside.