The Case of the Murdered Major: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  “Not a thing missing,” Ramble said. “Everything correct with the ledgers.”

  But when Travers hinted that something might happen that very night, what he had in mind was to approach the Commandant with a demand for immediate reform; in other words, to strike while the iron was hot. People at Headquarters had the habit of forgetting things; besides, Garrison Staff was a floating population, and if Colonel Caithby war transferred elsewhere—which at any moment he might be—then the chance of a lifetime would be lost.

  Then, thinking things over, Travers knew that Stirrop must say something about Mafferty, which would make an excellent opening. But when Travers went into the Mess, Stirrop was not there, and he was not in his room or his office. The orderly thought he was doing some sort of inspection of the camp with Captain Winter.

  Winter and Travers had arranged to have an early dinner that night and then to settle down to completion of the prisoners’ cards. Travers arrived first, and he had just begun his meal when Winter came in, but he made no mention of where he had been with the Commandant. Then just as the two were going out, the Commandant arrived, and as he went through the door Travers heard Winter say: “I’ll see you later then, sir.”

  When Winter caught Travers up, he explained.

  “The old man wants to see me at a quarter to nine. I rather fancy he’s springing some mine or other. You don’t happen to know what it is?”

  “He hasn’t said a word to me,” Travers told him. “Perhaps he wants to see your B.199A.”

  “Then he can wait,” Winter said bluntly. “If he thinks I’ve got twenty pairs of hands, he’s ruddy well mistaken.”

  Then a certain anxiety seemed to creep into his voice.

  “But why that extraordinary hour? Why didn’t he see me just now or wait till the morning?”

  Travers was prompt with a theory.

  “He may be wanting to get certain information. I don’t mean information that’s going to make trouble for you. After all, it’s probably something perfectly innocent he wants to see you about.”

  “I don’t know,” Winter said. “I don’t like it. And why’s he dining in Mess? He doesn’t do that once a month.”

  It was a dark night with lowering clouds, and there was a lessening of the intense cold. Travers thought a thaw was coming; Winter was prepared to bet there would more snow. But Winter’s office was cheerful enough.

  And here it should be explained that the making out of Index Cards for Alien Internees was a mightily important matter that could not be trusted to subordinates. Either the overworked Winter would have to do the whole lot, or someone with the authority of Travers must volunteer to help. Already seventy-three cards were completed except for the Commandant’s final signature, and now three copies of each were to be made: one for Home Office, one for War Office, and one for the camp to which the prisoners would ultimately be sent, and every card would need to be scrupulously accurate.

  “Here you are,” said Winter, handing over about half of the completed cards, and sufficient unused ones. “You make three copies of each of these and I’ll get on with the remainder. Whoever finishes first can help the other.”

  “Not enough cards, are there?” asked Travers.

  Winter frowned. “They might last out. If they don’t. I’ll fetch some more from my room.”

  “Good enough,” said Travers. “I don’t think I’ll work in here, by the way. We’ll only get yarning and disturb each other. Also I might just as well let those two fellows off duty for an hour or so and see to the ’phone myself. Not that anyone’s likely to ’phone.”

  So Travers settled down by himself: stoked the fire, and his pipe, and rattled off a score of cards. Then the heat of the room made him somewhat drowsy, and he happened at that moment to recall that highly successful interview of the afternoon, he began humming to himself, which effort also served to keep him from nodding over his work. Fifty more cards were done, the pipe was stoked again, and he saw by his watch that it was just half-past eight. With luck the whole job would be finished in another half-hour.

  A few more cards, and that interview of the afternoon was remembered again. Then Travers smiled once more to himself, laid the work aside for a moment and unlocked his private drawer. Out came a sheet of paper, which, he was saying to himself, would no longer be wanted.

  It was a queer sort of document—nothing less than a highly condensed synopsis of a work to be entitled The Case of the Murdered Major. Its composing had cheered many an hour and had often soothed to sleep, but there it was with that perfect alibi all worked out in detail, and how the fake incendiary bomb could be placed, and why Ramble could never be suspected.

  Travers nodded with a certain complacence, and was about to make a burnt-offering of an old friend, when there was a slam that startled him. Damn that fellow Winter! thought Travers, and then a glance at his watch showed why there had been the slam and the scurry. It was a quarter to nine.

  Travers went through to see how Winter had progressed with his cards. The light was off but he switched it on. Winter seemed almost to have finished, and Travers picked up the last card to admire how neatly the work had been done.

  “Damnation!”

  The ink was wet and he had smeared the card. Now a new one would have to be made out, and just as he was thinking that, the door opened and Winter came in.

  “The Commandant isn’t in his room!”

  “He said he’d be?”

  “Most emphatically he raid so.”

  “Well, it’s his funeral,” Travers said. “After all, I can prove that you reported. What’s he expect you to do? Stand out there in the cold?”

  Winter hesitated for a moment, then took out his overcoat.

  “Well, then, I may as well finish these few cards. I say! Who smudged this one?”

  “Sorry, I did. I’ll make another one out,” Travers told him. “I was just having a look—”

  He broke off. A padding of quick feet could be heard. His own office door opened, and he looked through to see who it was. It was Dowling, puffing away and face red from the run.

  "The Commandant, sir, I’ve just found him!”

  “Found him?”

  “Yes, sir. He’s dead, sir! Right on the far corner, sir, lying in the snow.”

  PART III

  WHO KILLED COCK ROBIN?

  CHAPTER IX

  DEATH IN THE SNOW

  Travers picked up the receiver, but knew the line was dead as soon as it touched his ear. He replaced it, picked it up again and tried dialling, but nothing happened.

  “This cursed line’s always going wrong,” he told Dowling annnoyedly. “What’re we to do now? Unless you do it, Winter. Find Ramble, and if you can’t, then send a runner yourself down to Dulling. Or better still, tell him to stop at the Green Man and ’phone from there.”

  “But what’s happened?” Winter said. “Did I hear something about the Commandant?”

  “He’s dead,” Travers told him tersely. “Dowling just found him lying dead in the snow. Now for the love of heaven get a move on, and have Dulling here at the double.”

  Winter grabbed his greatcoat and hurried out, eyes still goggling.

  “I’ll come with you,” Travers told Dowling. “If anyone rings up he’ll find the line dead, and that’s all there is to it.”

  He locked the communicating door and the office, and waved Dowling on.

  “Now tell me again what happened.”

  Dowling said he’d arranged to meet Stamp at the main door at twenty-twenty-five hours to take the count, but had had to go to main guard first, he was late when he started back but he did notice a black something in the snow just beyond the inner wire and about twenty foot from the gravelled drive. He did the count and came out again at the main door, and as he came out on the drive, Stamp noticed the black something and the two went to investigate. Almost at once they knew it for a man, but wondered how a drunk could have got through the wire gates. Stamp flashed his torch, and there lay
Major Stirrop, stone dead.

  “Any sign of a wound or anything?” Travers asked.

  “Not that I could see, sir. It looked to me as if he’d had a heart attack.”

  Stamp’s torch guided them to the spot, then it flashed down on the body. Travers got down and felt over the heart. There was no beat and the cheek was icily cold. But there was something strange somewhere, and as he got to his feet again he knew what it was.

  “Where’s his cap?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t have one, sir,” said Stamp.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Travers snapped at him. “Out here, and wearing a British warm, and a scarf—and no cap? Lend me that torch of yours.”

  He flashed it round and there lay the cap, a good ten feet from the body and nearer the building on the deeper snow.

  “How on earth did it get there, sir?” Dowling asked.

  “Thai’s what I’d like to know,” Travers said. “The wind couldn’t have blown it there, because there isn’t any wind.”

  He flashed the torch again. There was something else that was very strange. Beyond the body was a deep depression, as if Stirrop had fallen there first and then rolled over to where he now lay. And yet there were no footprints in the snow!

  For a moment or two he stood there in thought, and then gradually he began to feel something of panic. What was the correct procedure? Should the police be informed, or H.Q., or both? Or should nothing be done till the doctor had made some sort of report? But something had to be done, and quickly, and he pulled himself together.

  “Stamp, leave me your torch, but nip along and fetch four men and a table-top. Don’t say what for. And tell Captain Byron I want him.”

  Once more he stood thinking. In civil life he would have known every trick of procedure, now he feared to take even an obvious step for fear some ancient brass bat should call it in question. Then a shrug of the shoulders and he had made up his mind.

  “Dowling, I’m going to leave all this to you. If Mr. Ramble comes, let him see Major Stirrop taken to his room and put on his bed. You and I will now move him clear. We don’t want everyone trampling down the snow.”

  There was another deep impression where the body had been.

  “That’s what I wanted to see,” Travers said. “You’ll get a wrapper from stores and cover these two impressions up, so that a fall of snow doesn’t affect them. Then ask Captain Byron to keep the spot under observation all night. A stick guard will do. The cap’s on no account to be touched. You got all that?”

  Dowling duly repeated it. Travers thought of something else.

  “Don’t let anyone go near where the body was. I don’t want any more footprints than what you and I have made.”

  He flashed the torch round again, slowly, and letting it linger here and there. Then he handed it over to Dowling and made his way through the wire gates. A moment’s indecision and he went by the swept path towards the Mess. Behind him he could now hear voices and looking back he saw the flash of torches. Ramble’s voice could be heard, and Byron’s.

  He went past the Mess to his own room. A couple of walking-sticks stood in the corner, and he found some string and lashed them together to make a five-foot rod. There was a swagger stick too, and he added it to make the rod longer. Then he made his way round towards his office and let himself through the wire gates at the east corner. A procession was moving from where the body had been towards the Mess hutments, and as soon as it was clear, he made his way quickly to where Stirrop had been found.

  Now he had his own torch, and he flashed it again to make sure where his own footprints had been when he had straddled the body to move it with Dowling clear of the snow. Setting his feet carefully he stretched out with his long arms towards the cap. The curved handle of the stick just reached it, and in a couple of seconds the cap was in his hands.

  Now he crouched down on the gravel and, opening his British warm to shield the light of the torch from observation, he had a good look at the cap. What he could see, even by that over-concentrated light, made him snap his eyes. There was no blood, just as there was no blood on those impressions which the body had left in the snow. But the cap was discoloured by something yellow and a feel of it showed that it was sand. Then with his long fingers he felt between the lining and the top, and now he was utterly puzzled. There seemed to be sand inside the lining of the cap itself.

  A moment or two and he was making his way towards his office. That there was something more than fishy about the death of Stirrop had been plain from the moment he had caught sight of that cap, and now he knew in his heart of hearts that it was no question of anything but Ramble. Take the body, for instance. It had been just off the gravelled drive and yet there was never a footprint between it and that drive. The snow lay heaped as it had been when the drive was first cleared. In other words, Stirrop had been killed elsewhere, and his body laid where it had been found. What the second impression meant he had no idea, but whoever had laid the body down had remembered the cap, but had not dared to go near the body again, and therefore had thrown the cap to the body. Unfortunately for him the throw had been hurried and the cap landed ten feet from where it should have dropped.

  At the wire gate Travers halted, and his fingers went fumblingly to his glasses. There was one other thing. The body had been found in the shadow, where the dim light that shone down from the wire surround could never reach it. It. was by chance that Dowling had seen it. And yet it had been placed so that it must be found. If Dowling had not found it, then it must have been seen by the N.C.O. of the guard who came that way with the nine o’clock reliefs.

  In his own room Travers made straight for the safe, and locked that cap up. A second or two and Winter came in.

  “Sorry to be so long, but I fixed that job up. Found a man with a motor-bike and sent him along. The doc. ought to be here at any minute.”

  “You’re a good fellow,” Travers told him. “What’s beating me still is if I ought to ring Garrison and let them know. Or should I wait and hear what the doctor says. And there’s the question of his wife. What about her?”

  “’Phone all right?”

  “Lord!” said Travers, “I’d forgotten the ’phone.”

  But when he picked up the receiver, the ’phone was alive again. Even then he seemed to be wondering what to do.

  “What do you think it was?” Winter said. “A heart attack?”

  “Ask me another. I didn’t know he had a heart.”

  Winter frowned. “The whole thing happened so quickly that I still don’t know if I’m on my head or my heels. And what’s been worrying me is what on earth he was doing out there in the snow when he was supposed to be seeing me! The whole thing doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know. It is queer, hut this camp’s been a damn-queer place. Go outside there and stand in the dark where the body was, and then you’ll feel it. The whole place has been sort of shot through with loathing of Stirrop. It got to be like a weight pressing on people’s minds—not your own, perhaps, but there were plenty of others.” He got to his feet. “Perhaps I’d better go and meet Dulling. Wait a minute, though. There ought to be someone here. Be a good fellow and get those two orderlies back.”

  Winter went towards the communicating door.

  “Wait a minute,” Travers said. “You’d better have the key. I locked—”

  But Winter’s hand had already gone out and the door was open.

  “That’s a queer business,” Travers said. “I’m damn-sure I locked that door when I locked my own.”

  Winter switched on the light and gave a look round.

  “Nobody’s been in here.” he said. “Wait a minute, though. What the devil’s that? Who’s been spilling water?”

  On the floor well inside the outer door was quite a small pool of dirty water.

  “Someone has been in,” Travers said. “Someone came in with snow caked on his boots and stood behind the door. It couldn’t have been the orderlies coming back and into this room because t
hey couldn’t get into mine. They wouldn’t stand behind the door.”

  “Good God!” said Winter. “I’ve got some stuff here that’s regular dynamite. If the Commandant ever found—” He broke off, shaking his head. “For a moment I was talking as if he was still alive.”

  The telephone went and Travers nipped back. It was Main Guard reporting that the doctor had come through. Then by sheer chance the two orderlies turned up.

  “You see if anything’s missing from here,” Travers said to Winter. “Or better still, first get hold of Colonel Caithby at Garrison and make a report as from me. If I’m wanted I shall be somewhere round the Mess.”

  The doctor had had his car to park, and he had been in Stirrop’s room only a very few moments before Travers arrived. Who should be with him but Tester, wearing that fur-collared coat and looking as unconcerned about being in a prohibited area as if the said area was his own home. Ramble sprang to attention as Travers came in.

  “This is a bad business,” began Dulling heavily. “You could have knocked me over with a feather. Did I understand he was found out in the snow?”

  “Yes,” Travers said laconically. “Excuse my butting in, as a layman, but can you more or less determine the cause of death—say in a few minutes or so?”

  Dulling made a wry face. “I can try.”

  Travers nodded. “Good man. Get to it. And you might as well light this oil-stove. It’s none too warm in here.”

  Tester’s voice came suitably hushed at his ear.

  “I say, I’m awfully sorry about this. Perfectly dreadful affair.”

  “Yes,” said Travers. “Can you spare me a minute? You too, Mr. Ramble?”

  He led the way to the deserted Mess. A bleak- looking orderly appeared but was waved away.

  “How is it you are here, Captain Tester?”

  “Well,”—he smiled sheepishly—“I happened to be with the doctor in his car. We agreed he’ll have to take me home, so I came in with him.”