Settling Scores

by Martin Edwards

  So Jon and I took him back to Ranelagh in my small M.G. and dropped him near the Alacrity bird’s usual haunt; the bird was a crane which flew when you chased it. Then I let Jon drive the car into its garage. He wasn’t allowed his car or his pipe during the last six weeks of training, and he needed a few luxuries like that. He joined me again before I reached the main house and we walked in together.

  “Your petrol’s low,” he said. He didn’t know about Jim yet but he sounded depressed, as if he knew something of the sort was afoot.

  “There’s enough for tomorrow, isn’t there?”

  “Provided the gauge is right, you’ve got half a gallon.”

  “That’s all right then. Don’t worry about the outing, Jon. Fizz night tonight.”

  Somewhere outside in the garden poor Jim Matthews was walking. I think the Alacrity bird was only an excuse because he wanted to be by himself. I was sorry for Jim. He’d have one more outing, with Davis rowing two, and then he’d go.

  Next day, as might be expected after a fizz night, everything went wrong. To begin with I left it too late to get down to the river in time, thinking I’d take my car. I was the only one of the crew allowed to go into shops, because the others were thought to be especially susceptible to flu at that stage of training, so I used to take my car with me and go out shopping after the outing. But that morning I found there wasn’t any petrol after all, so I had to run all the way across the polo grounds. They were just getting the boat out when I came, with a little boy doing my work. I pushed him aside without saying thanks, and behaved in a thoroughly bad manner. And then Davis, who was pardonably nervous, paddled on hard when I told him to touch her gently and the boat just missed drifting on to a buoy. Jim Matthews, like everyone else, sat there doing nothing, while I swore. The only incident of interest was that Jon and Harry swore back, being apparently by now aware that Davis was coming up to stroke. Davis rowed too fast. They got tired, and the coaches would accuse them of bucketing, and the boat would start stopping. I didn’t blame them for swearing. I swore too.

  The coach picked up his megaphone. “Ready, cox?” he asked. He didn’t ask it out of kindness.

  I said Yes.

  “Paddle on down to the Eyot,” he said. “Jim, make them work it up a bit once or twice.”

  Now the Eyot is a good fifteen minutes’ paddle from the boat houses, and Jim, I suppose because it was his last time at stroke, took them along really hard. When he worked it up he worked it right up, nearly to forty, and he kept it there for a full minute. Then, not so long afterwards, he did it again. And to end up with he put in a terrific burst of rowing. All the time he was steady, swinging them easily along. I could see the great green holes in the water Jon and Harry made. The boat travelled. I wondered whether the coaches were going to change their mind. No one will know that now, not even Jim. I’d noticed Davis’ blade wasn’t coming through very well at the end of the paddle, but I hadn’t thought anything else about it. When we’d easied he leant forward over his oar and stayed there, but again this wasn’t very unusual; it had been about as hard work as a paddle like that can be. After a rest I gave the order to come half forward, because we were going to do a rowing start. But Davis didn’t move.

  “Half forward, two!” I said, still angrily.

  Then apparently bow leant forward and touched him, because his body slumped forward, slid over the gunnel, and went into the water. I don’t know when he died, but he was dead when the launch reached him. Luckily Dr. Jeffreys was on the spot, waiting to see what difference the change would make. Well, he’d seen.

  If I’d ever doubted whether the coaches deserved their positions, and during training you doubt most things, I was all wrong. They took the launch on up to the London University boat house, where no one ever went during the mornings, got Solly’s car round there, put Davis’ body in it, brought it to Ranelagh without either the crew or the press or the secretary of Ranelagh seeing, and before lunch they’d got the whole crew together, and Dr. Joe Jeffreys was talking to them. One of the chief duties of the coaches was to keep the crew feeling happy.

  “Well,” said Joe, “you all saw what happened. Poor young Davis died of heart failure. I know how you feel, and you know how I feel. But there’s one thing you ought to understand clearly. The reason he died was that his heart was dicky before he started. I never tested it, but I know it was, because your heart doesn’t fail at the end of a paddle unless it is dicky. And I know all your hearts are damn sound, because I did test them. Just to make sure I’m going to test them again today.”

  And he did, and he was quite right; there was nothing wrong with any of the toughs.

  But in the middle, when Jon had just gone out and Solly, Joe and I were alone in the room, Joe suddenly stopped.

  “I did test Davis’ heart,” he said.

  Well, Solly made a rather typical crack about the value of tests, but apparently this was a pretty sound test. Anyway we went and rang up the police.

  “That kid was murdered,” said Joe. I suppose Solly thought he was just humouring him. Another of the duties of coaches is to keep the other coaches feeling happy. Those last weeks of training are the devil all round.

  It was rather typical of the way the Boat Race gets a grip on people that the crew went out that afternoon. Solly insisted he was only doing it to allay any suspicion about Davis in the minds of the press. But anyway the boat went out, and, with Jim stroking beautifully, they rowed the best two minutes they’d ever done, clearing their wash by yards at thirty-six. When Jim was there, that was as good a crew as any.

  The police were around when we got back, but that didn’t bother us much. You see, we all knew each other pretty well; you don’t have murderers rowing with you. Murderers are professionals, probably, as they’ve worked with their hands. Anyway, you don’t.

  Well, they found out what had killed Davis. We’ll call it diphenyl tyrosine; Jim and I knew what its real name was because we happened to be medical students. Joe Jeffreys knew it too, of course. The odd thing about it is that it’s a component of quite a common patent medicine. That’s all right, because it only quickens up your heart for a day or so; but when you start with a quickened heart and then row hard in a Boat Race crew your heart gets very quick indeed, so quick that it doesn’t really function adequately. It starts to jump about a bit, and then it starts to fibrillate, to quiver all over in rather a useless way. Then, if it’s the ventricle fibrillating, you die. Davis had plenty of guts; he went on just as long as his heart did. He had the guts of a good stroke, but he wasn’t Jim Matthews. I was sorry for Davis, but, for the crew’s sake, I was glad Jim was safe. The funny thing was that whoever killed Davis must have known that he’d got guts.

  Now they started in on a long investigation of the crew’s movements during the day before. It had to be the day before because they’d got a very interesting bit of evidence. A man had come into a chemist’s in Putney and he’d asked for this patent medicine, as no doubt men did every day. He’d worn a mackintosh and an old hat.

  But underneath the mackintosh the chemist had noticed he was wearing those queer white blanket trousers the crews wear out of the boat.

  The policeman who was doing the detective work then had two very frustrating conversations which he described to us with fair relish.

  He’d asked the chemist if the purchaser in the white trousers had been a big man. The chemist said, Yes.

  “Bigger than me?”

  “Well, maybe.”

  “Sure he wasn’t fairly small?”

  The chemist considered. “Well,” he said, “you might call him small.”

  “Could you draw a line against the wall showing just his height?”

  The chemist stepped forward confidently, stopped, tried to think, and then said:—

  “No. Not exactly, somehow.”

  “What colour was his hair then?”

  “Oh,” said the chemist, “if I noticed the colour of all my customers’ hair I’d be in a pr
etty state.” He became a little irritable. “All I know is,” he said, “he had white trousers on.”

  The other conversation was the sequel to the discovery that Jon and I brought my car back when the rest of the crew came in. They wanted to find if anyone went out of Ranelagh in a car like mine.

  The detective people went to the porters at the two gates. “Did you see a small black sports car go out of the grounds?” they asked. “After 5.30.”

  Those were the days when Hornets and M.G.’s were as common as sneezing. One porter said he’d seen four, colour unnoticed; the other had seen seven, three of them black or dark-brown.

  “Well,” said the fellows, “did you see any coming back again?”

  “Those seven,” said the porter, who wasn’t colour-blind, “was going both ways.” He wasn’t shaken from this peculiar belief. In short they didn’t get any change out of porters or chemists. Someone in the crew did buy this patent medicine and someone could have gone out in my car. They never found the bottle, of course. There were hundreds of ways to get rid of it—you might put it down the lavatory and pull the plug, for instance. It was one of those small bottles. You’ll be guessing its name in a minute but, luckily, you’ll guess wrong.

  Then, also in front of me, someone realised that if the chemist had been at all an efficient man he’d have made the fellow in the mackintosh sign for the medicine, simply because, technically, it was poison if you had a whole bottleful. So one of them went off to find out if the chemist was as efficient as all that, and the other started to find out where we’d all been.

  Now the curious thing about all this investigation was that it had taken a very short time. It was still only the day after the murder. As soon as they knew it was murder they’d started thinking about heart drugs, the sort you might mix up in someone’s milk as they went to bed, or drop in a glass of fizz; so they thought of diphenyl tyrosine and, sure enough, there it was when they did an autopsy on Davis. No one knew when he’d taken it; but they’d decided it must have been in his fizz. Personally the mechanism of this seems pretty difficult to me, but that’s what they said. I suppose they’d had experience of that sort of thing. Anyway he’d certainly not have been looking out for it; very few people expect to be poisoned in the middle of a fizz night. They seemed so certain about it all, quite rightly as it turned out, that we didn’t like to doubt their word. So we were all terribly efficient when it came to describing our movements.

  They only wanted to know about the time between 5.30, when we all came back from the outing, and six. The chemist said the purchaser in the white trousers had come in at about 5.45, and the reason he knew was that it was a quarter of an hour before he closed at six, and the fact that no other customers had come in afterwards had made him think he’d been a sap not to close quarter of an hour earlier. This looked pretty good evidence to me, and the detective fellows liked it a lot.

  Most of the crew had been together from 5.30 till six, all in the big games room. Jon, Jim and I hadn’t been there at first. We knew where Jim was, outside with the Alacrity bird. The three of us got back from the outing a little later than the rest of them because of that talk with the coaches, and Jim had come into the house again at ten to six. We were sure of that, or very nearly sure, because by six o’clock, when the news came on, he’d played a complete game of ping-pong with Ronnie. That left quarter of an hour of Jim unaccounted for.

  Jon said he’d been in his room all the time till six, when he came down for the news.

  I said I hadn’t been in the games room at all. First of all I’d done the crossword and then I’d been signing autographs for the crew.

  “How do you mean ‘for the crew’?” one of them asked.

  I told him that the rest of them could never be bothered to sign autograph books. All the coxes after Peter Bryan’s time had had to forge the signatures of everyone else; it was one of their duties. So long as you had two or three different nibs and patience you could make a very good job of it indeed.

  “Oh,” they said, laughing. “That’s dangerous.”

  I said not so dangerous as they thought.

  Well, one of the detectives walked to the chemist’s and back. It took twenty-five minutes, walking hard. That meant that Jon or I could have gone on our feet or by car, while Jim could only have gone by car. On his way there he met the detective who’d been to see if anyone signed. Someone had, all right, but it was probably not his name. A. G. Gallimage, someone had written.

  They went to work on this clue, rather ingeniously. The detective said he wanted a genuine autograph, and went round to each member of the crew with some sentimental story about his daughter being ill in bed and only needing a genuine autograph to recover. It’s wonderful what rowing men will swallow. Jim was the only one who made a fuss. He was playing ping-pong again and he said, as rudely as usual:—

  “The cox can forge mine.”

  The detective said he knew that. His daughter wanted a real one. After that Jim signed, a bit grudgingly; and went on playing.

  He signed in a writing very like Gallimage’s.

  This more or less meant Jim or me. I forgot to say that they’d checked up on Jon and found that a maid had seen him in his room between 5.40 and 5.50. She didn’t say so, but I expect he went up there for a smoke. He thought it improved his rowing but nobody else’s. So Jim and I were left, and the signature did very well for either of us. It was typical of the effect of the Boat Race atmosphere that the detectives came and asked Solly if they could arrest both of us. I know they did because I was in the room at the time.

  “Would you mind if we arrested Matthews and your cox?” they asked.

  “Yes, old chap,” said Solly. “We can get another cox, but we haven’t any more strokes. Leave them both if you can.”

  The detective looked serious. “Evidence is bad,” he said.

  Solly leant back in his chair. “Trot it out,” he said. “The cox and I will spoil it. The cox does the crossword in half an hour every morning.”

  “Twenty-five minutes with Jon,” I said. “That was two days ago.”

  Then I shut up.

  The detective trotted out the evidence. At the end I pointed out a flaw. It wasn’t half as hard as the Times crossword, let alone Torquemada.

  “But if Jim went,” I said, “he must have used the car.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there wasn’t any petrol in the car.”

  “Sure?”

  “Quite sure. You see Jon and I both saw the gauge reading half a gallon. Only next morning it still read half a gallon and there wasn’t any petrol in her. It foxed me completely.”

  “It certainly did,” said Solly.

  “You realise what you’re saying?” asked the detective.

  “No,” I said.

  “If Jim Matthews didn’t take your car, then someone walked to the shop. That means you walked, because Jim didn’t have time.”

  “He could have run,” I said.

  “Ah,” said the detective. “That’s where you’re wrong. He wasn’t out of breath.”

  I suppose I looked pretty shaken by this bit of information, because Solly patted me on the back in a very kindly way. “That’s all right,” he said. “It’ll turn out not to have been either of you. Glad you remembered about the petrol.”

  I was a good deal comforted by this. “Well,” I said, “that fellow who coxes the Isis is a damn fine cox, and I’ve got one Blue already. I know we’ll win. But I wish they had wireless sets in prison.”

  “We’ll try and let you know all about it,” said the detective. This seemed to me a pretty decent way to speak to a murderer.

  That isn’t all, and it won’t be all either. Oxford won, of course, with one of Jim’s beautifully timed spurts. He couldn’t have made it without Harry and Jon and they couldn’t have made it if he hadn’t been there, swinging them along so steadily and easily that you’d have thought they were paddling. That is, until you saw how the boat moved.

&n
bsp; Furthermore those detectives forgot one thing. Perhaps you saw what it was. Of course my petrol gauge is a bit odd; they can easily test it and show that it sticks on the half-gallon mark.

  I’m sorry for Jim. I wish it hadn’t happened. To be honest, I don’t see any other way we could have won; but even Jim, who was a casual ambitious fellow, didn’t mean to pay that price for it. He thought Davis would feel ill and give up in the middle of the paddle. But Davis went on rowing till his heart stopped.

  ‌The Swimming Gala

  ‌Gladys Mitchell

  Gladys Mitchell’s enduring popularity as a detective writer is evidenced by a comprehensive tribute website, The Stone House, www.gladysmitchell.com, established by Jason Half and containing interesting articles as well as valuable bibliographic material. In an essay about the appeal of detective fiction, Mitchell argued that: “Modern literature is full of plays and films that end nowhere; novels and short stories that leave the playgoer or the reader suspended in mid-air, forced either to impotent irritation or else to having to invent their own outcome. Detective stories, by their very nature, cannot cheat in this way. Their writers must tidy up the loose ends; must supply a logical solution to the problem they have posed; must also, to hold the reader’s attention, combine the primitive lust and energy of the hunter with the cold logic of the scholarly mind.”

  Mitchell (1901–83) was a school teacher by profession who had a lifelong love of sports, notably athletics and swimming; she taught games and coached pupils in hurdling. Her interest in athletics led to her becoming a member of the British Olympics Association and is from time to time reflected in her fiction, notably in the third case of her series detective Mrs. Bradley, The Longer Bodies (1930) and Adders on the Heath (1963). This little story originally appeared in the Evening Standard on 25 July 1952, and was more recently collected in Sleuth’s Academy, edited by Nicholas Fuller.