Case with Ropes and Rings

by Bruce, Leo

  “All right, Freda,” he said. “I’m not supposing you done him in. Have a drink and we’ll talk about it.”

  “I will have a small white port,” she said faintly.

  “Do you know who I think did it?” was her opening and promising remark, when she had swallowed half the sticky liquid. “I think it was that Jones. You know, the master there.”

  “Whatever makes you think that?” I asked, but without very much hope of securing useful information. I am too accustomed to these random guesses from people connected with murder cases to attach much importance to them. Still, I thought I might as well hear what she had to say.

  “Well,” she said, “he’s a nasty piece of work, that Jones. I’ve heard a lot about him.”

  “Does he ever come in here?” asked Beef.

  “He never does anything on his own doorstep. I’ve heard he goes up to town when he wants to misbehave himself.”

  “You don’t know him by sight, then?” asked Beef.

  “Not that I know of,” Freda told him. “Only, of course, we get a good many in and out of this bar.”

  “Have you any reason for thinking—what you said about him?”

  “Well, Alf thinks so, only don’t tell him I told you. He says that that Jones had been against young Alan ever since he went to the Headmaster about him. Alf says it’s terrible the way they’ve been at one another, though. Alf says Jones has lost his job in any case, and might easily have done something like that. Alf doesn’t reckon he’s all there, rightly speaking.”

  “I see. He seems to be a gentleman of strong opinions, your friend Alfred Vickers.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Freda. “When he makes up his mind about a thing there’s no shifting him. He says that he’s going to marry me, and I shan’t be surprised if I say yes in the end.”

  Beef’s notebook was out once more.

  “How long have you known young Alan Foulkes?” he asked Freda.

  “Well, since the beginning of last term, you might say. It was only through him coming in here one day to have a drink that I got to know him at all, and I don’t think he wanted a drink really. It was just to be grown-up.”

  “Did he come in often?” asked Beef.

  “Depends on what you call often,” Freda told him. “They keep them so shut up in that place that he couldn’t have come in often if he had wanted. Once or twice a week he used to come down and see me, and perhaps take me home after closing time.”

  I was busy making a study of Freda, and my impressions on the whole were favourable. I believed that she was genuinely distressed by what had happened, and that what friendship had been between her and Alan Foulkes had been a harmless if perhaps silly affair. She did not strike me as being designing or dishonest. In fact, I liked her wide-apart, frank eyes, and thought she was rather good-looking, in spite of the intricate bad taste of her coiffure. She seemed ready to give us all the information she could, and, provided she was speaking the truth, it was a good sign.

  Beef’s cross-examination was assuming a more intimate character.

  “I wonder if you can tell me,” he asked her brazenly, “just what was between you two?”

  “That’s easy,” said Freda. “There was nothing really to speak of. I mean, he was only a kid, and I suppose he took to me, and that’s all there was to it. I mean, he used to kiss me good-night and that, if that’s what you mean, but then you know what a schoolboy is at that age. He thinks it’s grown-up to behave that way. Certainly he never tried to go too far,” she added with a slight lift of her chin.

  “I see,” said Beef. “Do you think he was in love with you?”

  “Oh, well, you know what it is. He used to say a lot of silly things, but I never took much notice of them.”

  “There was a school holiday between the time you first met him and now,” Beef said.

  “Oh, yes, he went home for Christmas and Easter.”

  “And did he write to you?”

  For the first time Freda hesitated.

  “Well, yes,” she said at last.

  “What sort of letters?”

  “Oh, a bit soppy, nothing special.”

  “And you kept them?”

  She appeared to be very indignant, though I could not help feeling that it was forced.

  “Certainly not,” she said. “What should I want to keep them for?”

  Beef put on his most innocent expression.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  His eyes went up to the ceiling in a most foolish and exaggerated way. There was a long pause, and I found myself trying to work out this odd relationship. Everything, as Freda had said it, might well have been true, and I wanted to think that it was so. Her relationship with Vickers and her very different friendship with Alan Foulkes were completely understandable. She would probably end by marrying the groundsman; in the meantime she had been flattered and amused by a flippant flirtation with the boy. If this were true—and I saw no reason to doubt it—there was nothing very sinister to be looked for at the “White Horse.”

  Beef, however, did not seem to be at all satisfied. He fixed the young barmaid with a stern eye.

  “Was he coming down for you that evening?” he said.

  Freda nodded.

  “Did he come?” asked Beef.

  “Well, yes, he did,” Freda said. “But before we go any farther, I’d like to ask you one or two things. Do you really think he did do himself in that evening?”

  Beef appeared rather shocked.

  “I mean,” went on Freda, “I don’t believe it. I think there’s some dirty work in this. If I thought that anyone had gone for that young fellow . . .”

  “Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out,” said Beef. “And if you can tell us anything to help us in the investigation—well, there you are.”

  Freda seemed to be making up her mind.

  “Well,” she said at last, “I’ll tell you all that I can, even if it doesn’t amount to much. He promised to come down that evening to tell me how he got on in the boxing. He seemed to set a lot of store by that. He was hoping to beat the Indian fellow, and I really believe the championship meant more to him than anything else. ‘Freda,’ he said, ‘I’ll be down when it’s over,’ he said. ‘If I’ve won I shall want a special kiss!’ That was the way he talked. See? And sure as fate it wasn’t hardly ten o’clock that evening before he was down.”

  “And did he take you home?” asked Beef.

  “No,” said Freda. “That’s the funny part about it. There was a man standing in the bar when he got in, who, as I realised afterwards, must have been waiting for him for the last half-hour or so.”

  “What sort of a man?” interrupted Beef.

  “Well, it’s hard to explain,” answered Freda. “He was tall, a bit narrow, with a little thin mouth, and he leaned on the bar as though he needed its support. It must have been just before closing time when Alan came across to see me. He told me he would be in the next night, and without waiting to hear what I had to say, led the stranger out.”

  “Ever seen him before?”

  “No, never. Well, he must have been waiting for young Foulkes, for he’d been looking around and looking at the clock for an hour when Alan got in, and no sooner were they together than this stranger drew young Foulkes into the corner and they started talking confidential.”

  “What about you?” said Beef.

  “Well, I don’t mind admitting I felt rather cross. I mean, Alan only came in here to see me, and there they were, gossiping away twenty to the dozen, till I wanted to know what it was all about.”

  “Have you any reason to suppose,” asked Beef, “that he wasn’t a local man?”

  “No, none at all,” Freda admitted. “He might well have been for all I know. All I can say is I had never seen him before.”

  “You don’t know, for instance,” queried Beef, “that it wasn’t Herbert Jones, his Housemaster?”

  Freda stared at him for a moment rather blankly.


  “Well, I don’t think it was. As you say, you can’t tell. I mean, he didn’t look like a schoolmaster.”

  “Well, from your account,” Beef pointed out, “Jones doesn’t behave like one, does he, so what’s the odds?”

  Freda sighed.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “All I can say is, if anyone has done the dirty on him I hope you catch him, that’s all.”

  “I shall,” said Beef, “if they have. You didn’t overhear anything those two said to one another, did you?”

  “No; only a young fellow who stood next to them did tell me afterwards that they were discussing boxing.”

  “Boxing, eh?” said Beef, making rapid notes in his notebook.

  “Yes. So young Walters said.”

  “So he never took you out that evening after all?”

  Freda shook her head.

  “You never saw him again from the time he left the bar?”

  This time she whispered:

  “No.”

  8

  “May as well get all the talking over while we’re about it,” confided Beef to me as we walked back to the school. “I’ll have a go at this Jones this evening. They all seem to have something to say about him.”

  I nodded.

  “But on what basis?” I said. “So far as he’s concerned you’re the School Porter.”

  Beef considered this point for a moment.

  “I shall have to tell him,” he said shortly, and left it at that.

  At four o’clock that afternoon we presented ourselves at the front door of Jones’ house. This was a grim-looking building. It was not so much that it needed a coat of paint; there did not seem to be any paint on the place at all. I found it difficult to understand why any parent could possibly consider sending a son to a house like this, which looked worse than a prison. The garden in front was, oddly enough, neatly kept, but this was no doubt due to the energies of the ground staff, and not on account of the orders of the Housemaster. Perhaps it was unfair to criticise it too harshly, for it would look like a prison in the best of circumstances, and the iron bars in front of each window in the boys’ part did nothing to dispel the illusion.

  A bedraggled maidservant presented herself with the listless monosyllable “Ye-es?” pronounced in a weary voice.

  “Mr. Jones in?” asked Beef briskly.

  “I don’t know,” said the girl. “I’ll go and see, if you’ll wait here,” and without asking our names, she walked lazily away.

  “Quite extraordinary,” I said to Beef, “that one of the houses of a school like this should treat visitors in such a manner. I should have expected the greatest courtesy. I know that at St. Lawrence College, Ramsgate, such a thing would never have happened.”

  “Oh, well,” said Beef, whose tolerance is apt to irritate me sometimes, “it may be the right one’s day off.”

  Presently the girl reappeared, followed by a man whom I assumed rightly, as it transpired, to be Jones himself. He was about six feet tall, and may once have had some pretensions to an athletic build, but now appeared stooping and round-shouldered. His face was of a greasy, yellow texture except for the nose, which stood out, a monument in veined scarlet. His eyes were rheumy and weak, and his whole presence shambling and uncertain, but when I looked at his neck, in which the cords of forgotten strength still stood out, and his wrists, which were thick and bony, I realised that however decayed the fellow might be he was not negligible as a physical force.

  “Yes?” he queried blandly, blinking at Beef. Then, as though recognising him, he added: “You’re the School Porter, aren’t you?”

  “Acting as such,” answered Beef pompously, “but in reality investigating the murder of Lord Alan Foulkes on behalf of his father, and with the connivance of the Headmaster.”

  “Murder?” repeated Jones, looking shiftily from Beef to me. “What do you mean, murder?”

  “You heard what I said,” repeated Beef. “Now, we would like a word with you if you don’t mind.”

  “With me?” said Jones.

  “Well, you were the boy’s Housemaster, weren’t you?”

  Jones seemed to consider this.

  “I see,” he said at last. “Come in.” And he led us into a musty room which led out of a tiled hall.

  Jones’ study had none of the character of a scholar’s den. True, it was crammed full of books, but these all seemed to be textbooks from which he had to teach unwillingly to unreceptive small boys. The atmosphere of the study appeared to derive from the stale fumes of whisky and a particularly foul brand of tobacco. All the windows were tightly shut, though had they been open they would have been able to do little to combat the gloom of the place. On the mantelpiece there was an imposing array of tarnished silver cups, which had obviously not been touched for months, and now looked more like brass, and on the walls not occupied by shelves there were old cricket groups of his Cambridge and England days, and even these were blurred with the accumulated dust and nicotine of ages.

  So this, I thought, looking round me, represented the present quarters of H. R. D. Jones, who had once skittled the Australians out for less than a hundred at Lord’s. Well (and I remembered last night’s exploits) it is strange what drink will do for you.

  He was dressed in the seedy sports-coat and slate grey flannel trousers and clumsy shoes which are the almost invariable uniform of the schoolmaster, and round his neck, inconsequentially it would seem, a frayed ribbon of the gaudy tie of the M.C.C.

  “Now, Sir,” said Beef. “I understand you didn’t get on too well with this young gentleman.”

  “I don’t know in the least what you mean,” said Jones. “He was by no means the most satisfactory of my prefects, but I had no specific cause to grumble.”

  “Not when he split on you to the Headmaster?”

  Jones turned to me.

  “I find this person intolerably rude,” he said, and I noticed that his hands were trembling. “You seem to be a gentleman, Sir. Perhaps you will tell me by what authority he asks these questions?”

  I tried to explain.

  “Sergeant Beef’s methods are a little crude, but his heart is in the right place. I think that if you will give him the information he requires you will not regret it.”

  Jones nodded.

  “Well, nobody cares for slander,” he said, “and it was nothing but slander in this case. I had gone so far as to consult my solicitors in the matter. It was only the persuasion of the Headmaster which made me desist from action. I may say that he has done his best to safeguard my future after I resign my post here, so that I no longer feel bound to take the matter to Court.”

  Beef nodded without apparent interest.

  “So you had it in for young Foulkes, all right,” he persisted.

  “That is completely untrue,” snapped Jones.

  I could see that he was in an extreme state of nervous tension, and I was quite prepared for it to break out in some violent way.

  “Was it your custom to go round the house at night and see that it was all locked up?” asked Beef.

  “It was my invariable custom at one time,” Jones told him. “But just lately I haven’t been well. A great deal of worry, you know. It may have escaped my notice once or twice.”

  “So that if one of the boys was in the habit of breaking out, you wouldn’t know anything about it?”

  Jones sat bolt upright, as if he had received a serious shock.

  “Breaking out?” he repeated. “I should hope not. I mean, I hope I should know; I mean, I don’t think such a thing is possible. One of my prefects would have reported it to me.”

  “Ah, but supposing it was one of your prefects?” said Beef triumphantly.

  Jones looked bewildered.

  “Do you mean to say . . .?” he began. “Not young Foulkes?”

  “At any rate, you didn’t know nothing about it?”

  “Nothing at all,” said Jones. “Certainly not.”

  “When was the last time you saw Alan
Foulkes?”

  Watching Jones, I thought that the question had done more than embarrass him. He looked plainly frightened.

  “The last time I saw him? Let me think. It must have been in the gymnasium after the championship fight. I went up to congratulate him, of course. I couldn’t have seen him again because . . .”

  “Because what?” asked Beef. “What did you do that evening?”

  Jones hesitated, and his hands trembled on the table in front of him.

  “I . . . I returned to my room.”

  “To this room?”

  Jones nodded.

  “What for?”

  “I . . . had work to do.”

  “What work?”

  “Correcting papers.”

  “Do you mind giving me details of these?”

  Jones suddenly jumped to his feet.

  “This is monstrous,” he said. “I will not be questioned in this way. I’m not a junior boy. I am quite willing to tell you anything to help you in your investigation, but I am not to be treated as a child.”

  “You look as if what you need is a livener,” said Beef stodgily.

  “Well, yes,” said Jones, and went with some alacrity to a cupboard on the far side of the room, from which he drew a bottle of whisky and some glasses.

  “I’ll get some water,” he said, and left us.

  Beef picked up one of the glasses and held it to the light.

  “Not polished,” he commenced. “Did you ever see such a house? I can’t see why your brother wants to leave that nice little place of his for this. It’s a regular churchyard.”

  Jones, returning, interrupted. The neck of the bottle rattled on the rim of the glass as with trembling hand he poured out three portions. He did not look as if he could stand much more.

  “What else do you want to know?” he asked when he had drunk.

  “I was just asking you about that evening. You say you never saw Alan Foulkes after you congratulated him in the gymnasium?”

  Beef was leaning forward and speaking with tremendous emphasis.

  This time, as if encouraged by the alcohol, Jones replied with more firmness.

  “That is correct,” he said.

  “You didn’t, for instance, run into him in a little public-house called the ‘White Horse,’ I suppose?”