Dead Man’s Shoes

by Bruce, Leo

  Then Maltby arrived, and after telling Carolus ironically that he was expecting to be taught his business tonight and that the story had got to be an ingenious one, however improbable, he sat down.

  The arrival of Marylin’s party was even more impressive, for Ridge’s car had followed hers to the docks, and the whole Barton Abbess contingent came at once. This caused Mr Gorringer to say “Upon my soul, Deene,” in a very feeling manner and to stare as if fascinated at Socker, who placed himself next to Mrs Roper.

  “You’ve certainly pulled it off,” said Carolus to Marylin, as he gazed at Mrs Hoppy chatting amicably to Mrs. Gunn.

  Marylin smiled.

  “It was harder than you know. But I think all hatchets are buried for tonight. Though perhaps that’s not the best way to put it.”

  Carolus spoke seriously.

  “You’re going to get a shock this evening, my dear. I know you can take it, but I wanted to warn you that for you particularly this is going to be a painful occasion.”

  “I guessed that. It’s all right, Carolus. I shall be all right.”

  The headmaster raised his eyebrows meaningly to Captain Bidlake to ask if he was going to call the company to order, and Bidlake indicated that Mr Gorringer should do so. The headmaster therefore cleared his throat with a mighty rumble and tapped on the table before him.

  “Now, Deene,” he said.

  There was silence.

  21

  BUT CAROLUS appeared to be as temperamental as a film star.

  “I think, if you don’t mind, I will sit where you are,” he said to Ronald Ferry, who had a seat commanding the door of the saloon. “And, Gunner, I should like that port-hole closed and that starboard one opened instead. Then may we have far less light, please? I shall not need to refer to notes, and this strong light is rather trying. Priggley, will you go and sit beside Mrs Sweeny? Thank you.”

  Carolus looked carefully about him. Then he began to talk in a gentle, steady voice:

  “I hope you are not expecting too much from me. You are not likely to see an arrest at the end of what I am going to tell you, for unless there is any unexpected new development there never will be an arrest in this case. The police have satisfied themselves that Gregory Willick was murdered by Wilbury Larkin and that this man afterwards committed suicide. So far as they are concerned the case is closed. I am going to tell you what I believe happened. It may, of course, leave the murderer no alternative but to prosecute me for criminal slander, in which case I should plead justification and try to prove my case. But I doubt if I should succeed.

  “All the evidence I have is circumstantial. I have no firm substantial proof of anything I am going to say, for the very simple reason that the murderer left none. He left a great number of curious facts, parallels, coincidences and inconsistencies which, considered together in the light of what I am going to tell you, are sufficient to convince me, and which will be, I think, convincing to you, which might even convince a jury, but which would never in any court secure a conviction for the murderer. They are far too insubstantial. The police were quite right, from their point of view, to drop this case. They would never have secured one of those convictions on which, as one of them has so frankly admitted, their promotion largely depends.

  “For the murderer here was interested in something more important to him than the promotion of CID officers: he was determined to kill a man and leave no proofs. Not exactly the perfect crime. He did not make the murderer’s usual mistake and try by elaborate means to remove suspicion from himself. He did not mind who suspected him. What he determined was that no one should be able to prove the case against him. In that he has been successful.

  “This, then, was a carefully planned, cold-blooded and immensely ingenious murder. It took verve, patience, and although it was in itself a cowardly crime, certain acts in its achievement took courage. It has, as I say, been wholly successful, and all I can do now is to tell you about it, without any hope that there will be retribution or justice for the murderer.

  “Gregory Willick was shot on his usual afternoon walk on Monday July 20 between the hours of 3 and 5 p.m. at a point on a woodland path by which he nearly always passed. His dog was killed at the same time, doubtless to prevent its revealing the corpse. This was hidden in the undergrowth, neither so deeply and carefully that it would not be found for weeks, nor so casually that it might be found within a few hours. It was well out of sight of the path, yet a careful search of the area would reveal it almost immediately.”

  It was noted that as Carolus talked he kept his eyes for the most part on the area of dimly lighted deck-space beyond the open door of the saloon, but that he seemed to see nothing to interest him there.

  “Let us first eliminate a few so-called suspects. I must confess that although I felt bound to consider every possibility here, I never had any serious doubt about any of the persons who, in point of time and place, were in a position to be guilty and who at the same time might be said to have motive, of sorts. It happened that a number of them had no alibis that afternoon, but I was not much impressed by that, for I know how rarely any of us, not deliberately creating an alibi, have a sure one at any hour of the day or night.

  “Ridge, for instance, says he was in the churchyard collecting gravestone inscriptions, and it’s just about improbable enough to be true. Mrs Sweeny went into Cheltenham by car, but the only person who could vouch for her, the librarian, saw her last between 2.45 and 3.0. Socker’s alibi, if it can be confirmed at all, is even more ambiguous.”

  “Big what?” broke in Socker. “She had big …”

  “Silence, please,” said Mr Gorringer pontifically. “Pray continue, Deene. We are all ears.”

  “Gilbert Packinlay had no alibi at all. He went, he says, to see an old cottager who did not answer the door, either through deafness or absence. The Vicar, Mr Gusset, not only had no alibi, but was admittedly in the vicinity of the place where Gregory Willick was murdered at the very time when this happened. Mrs Hoppy has only her husband to vouch for her presence in the house. Mrs Packinlay has no one at all until four o’clock or so, when Mr Gusset arrived.

  “None of these can disprove, by that simplest and surest of means, a cast-iron alibi, that he was not the murderer. All of them, except Mrs Sweeny, were beneficiaries under Gregory’s Will. A few suggestions of other motives have been made. It has been hinted that Gilbert Packinlay might have reason for jealousy or pressing financial troubles, that Mr Gusset and Ridge were both angry with the dead man. But these are nothing to the gross improbability of it. There was and is no possible reason for thinking that any of them committed, participated in, or even witnessed the murder.

  “It may be a dangerous line of argument for a detective, but I for one refuse to discount the human element, the ordinary sound principle of probability based on character. I am not saying that none of those people could commit a murder—I suppose there are circumstances in which any of us might do that. But I am saying that I did not and do not believe that any of them could have committed this particular murder. It would have meant that he or she schemed for weeks, was utterly without human feelings or conscience, was prepared to take a wild and extravagant risk, owned a revolver and had some experience with one, could run like a hare and did so that afternoon, needed his or her bequest so urgently that he would chance hanging to get it more quickly, was strong enough to have pulled Gregory’s body into the undergrowth, and was actor enough, and coldblooded enough, to have behaved for the rest of that day and ever since as though nothing had happened. None of these people fitted into more than two of these categories and some into none of them. So far as I was concerned they were never really suspects at all.”

  Carolus paused here, and asked for a drink, which set up a buzz of conversation, particularly among those who had been freed from the shadow of suspicion.

  “Not that I ever thought anything like that,” said Mrs Gunn to Mrs Hoppy. “But it’s nice to hear him say it wasn’t you, isn�
�t it? I mean you don’t want a thing like that round …”

  “Your neck for the rest of your life. No. Still, I’m surprised to find him so sure about the Outside Staff.”

  “Oh, well, he knows what he’s saying, and he’s going to tell us in a minute who did do it. I know that Socker’s a bit of a monkey. Always has been. But I don’t think he’d do anything like that.”

  “I wonder what the lads will say,” Gusset confided in Packinlay, “when they hear I’ve been a murder suspect.”

  “My wife always says she’ll do murder one day—only that’ll be to me,” retorted Packinlay.

  Mr Gorringer was clearing his throat.

  “So one returned, inevitably, to Larkin,” Carolus went on, as if there had been no break at all. “Indeed, there seemed at first very little reason to look farther. Larkin who could so easily have brought a ’38 revolver and ammunition from Tangier. Larkin who was at the scene of the crime and was seen returning from it afterwards. Larkin who hurried into the hotel, paid his bill and rushed off to London in time to get a plane for Tangier before the body had been discovered. Larkin who asked the way to Barton Place. What more could one want? Obviously nothing, especially when he apparently committed suicide rather than face enquiry.

  “Yet I ask you to consider Larkin as the murderer of Gregory Willick and see if you don’t agree with me that there is something very odd about it. He had a motive and made no secret of it. Lance Willick told me that Larkin had no suspicion that he had been cut out of Gregory Willick’s Will and expected something really handsome. He left Tangier with the avowed intention of ‘running down to see old Gregory’. He apparently stayed a few days in London, then hired a self-drive car and ran down to Barton Abbess. On his way he stopped in the small country town, scarcely more than a village, of Northleach and purchased at the only boot-shop a pair of hob-nailed boots of a distinctive pattern. He arrived at the Barton Bridge Hotel, the nearest pub of any kind to Barton Place, and booked in under a false name. He stayed in bed next morning so that no one at the Place knew that any such person was in the vicinity and Gregory, who presumably would recognize him, had no chance to see him.

  “After lunch he went out, leaving one of his two suitcases locked and the one on top unlocked. Right on top of this he left his passport in his own name, Larkin. He must have made straight for a place in the woods which Gregory would pass and wearing his hob-nailed boots left plenty of prints of them there. He shot Gregory, we must presume, with a ’38 revolver fitted with a silencer, pulled his body into the undergrowth with that of his dog, which he had also shot, and walked away. He allowed himself to be seen coming from that direction by Smite. When he first met Smite he behaved in an extraordinary and guilty manner, making to go back, then coming on and shouting ‘Good afternoon!’ in his distinctive voice.

  “Back at the hotel he went up to the manager in a hurried and agitated condition, and although he had booked his room ‘for some days’, said he wanted his bill, as he was leaving at once. He rushed upstairs and made quite sure that Mrs Gunn had looked at the passport, afterwards drawing more attention to this by reporting it to Habbard the manager. He hurriedly packed and left, leaving in the waste-paper basket an envelope addressed to himself, Wilbury Larkin, with a Tangier postmark on it. He drove up to London, and was on the plane for Tangier that night.

  “Now I ask you. What kind of a murderer was that?”

  Carolus paused rhetorically and sipped his whisky-and-soda.

  “It does seem funny, now you come to think about it,” said Mrs Gunn.

  “Hush,” said Mr Gorringer.

  “Yes,” continued Carolus. “What kind of a murderer could this be? A madman? A madman with such a mixture of lunacy and logic in his mind that he could successfully kill his victim and get out of the country, but at the same time leave such a trail of evidence behind him that he would be extradited at once? Or something else? Something far more sinister. A murderer who wished to make his guilt absolutely clear. Who wished there to be no doubt in any one’s mind that he, Wilbury Larkin, had killed Gregory Willick. Who took every care to show that he had come with the express purpose of doing it.”

  “But why?”

  It was Appleyard who asked this, but the question must have been in the mind of everyone following Carolus.

  “Yes, Deene,” echoed Mr Gorringer, “why should he do such a thing?”

  There was real tension in the room as Carolus looked up to answer.

  “Because he knew, with fatalistic certainty, that Wilbury Larkin would cease to exist. That Wilbury Larkin would soon be at the bottom of the sea. As he is, thank God.”

  There was silence in the dimly lit and crowded saloon. Then suddenly things happened. A large dark figure was framed in the doorway, and everyone turned to see the man who stood there.

  Marylin Sweeny suppressed a scream.

  “God!” cried Mrs Roper.

  For there could be no mistake about it. Even to those who knew him only by description, it was obvious. The heavy body, the thick spectacles, the high stiff collar, the old-fashioned clothes—it was Larkin. Had there been any doubt, it would have been dispelled by the voice when he spoke.

  “If any one moves from his place,” he said, “he’ll be dead.”

  He had a revolver in his right hand. He raised his left to his glasses as if to remove them.

  In that moment a short square figure seemed to materialize behind him, his right arm was jerked up and there was the curious sound, like a volcanic gasp, of a pistol, fitted with a silencer, being fired. A shot splintered the ceiling.

  In a moment the man was completely overpowered. Gerard Prosper, who was sitting near the door, had one arm and the man who had entered behind Larkin the other. The revolver crashed to the ground.

  Carolus came forward, rather white, but quite calm.

  “Thank you, Mr Booth,” said Carolus, for it was the Third Officer who held Larkin’s right arm.

  Maltby took command efficiently and without fuss.

  “Could you send for a couple of the Port policemen, Captain Bidlake?”

  Bryce was dispatched. Appleyard went out and came back in a moment with a pair of handcuffs, which Maltby put on without much difficulty.

  The remainder of those in the saloon were admirably calm. Perhaps those from Barton Abbess, already a little out of their depth, were too stunned to do more than stare at the big man, who had grown rather limp and helpless. There was a thin smile on Kutz’s face. No one spoke, but those who had drinks beside them sipped.

  It seemed a very short time before the police arrived. One of them knew Maltby, and he gave them brief instructions.

  “Keep him in your lock-up here till I come over. There will be a charge against him presently. Take the usual precautions against possible suicide—he hasn’t been searched yet. I’ll come over when I’ve finished here.”

  When they had gone, the din of general conversation gradually rose. Like people everywhere who have passed through some tense crisis, these wanted to chatter, congratulate one another, return to normality.

  Rupert Priggley came up to Carolus.

  “You’ve had it this time. You’d just said he was at the bottom of the sea.”

  “He was.”

  “Listen, sir. You’ve got to pull yourself together and talk your way out of this. You stand to look pretty silly just at the moment. And don’t try anything supernatural, for heaven’s sake. That was no ghost who was handcuffed and taken away.”

  Mr Gorringer seemed no less perturbed, though there was a suggestion of huffiness in his manner.

  “So you were misleading us, Deene. I am indeed surprised.”

  “I was doing nothing of the sort.”

  “But unless my ears deceived me you had just said that this man was at the bottom of the sea. A moment later, hey presto! And here he is with a pistol in his hand.”

  “It was a desperate thing to do. But perhaps he was right. It may have been the only thing.”

/>   “It seems to me, Deene, that you owe us all an explanation.” The headmaster tapped on the table. “I think I speak for all of us when I say that Mr Deene owes us an explanation for this extraordinary apparition. He had given us clearly to understand that Larkin was no more.”

  “Well, that was him, all right,” said Mrs Gunn. “D’you think I shouldn’t know after doing his room and having words with him? That was him as sure as eggs is eggs, the nasty horrible thing.”

  “Captain Bidlake,” said Mr Gorringer, “you had Larkin on your ship. Are you satisfied that this was the same man?”

  “Quite satisfied. That was Larkin.”

  “Yet Mr Deene has told us that he was drowned. Come, Deene. There is some mystery here.”

  “You don’t mean it?” muttered Rupert Priggley.

  Maltby intervened.

  “I think I have some inkling of the matter. I rather think that Mr Deene’s explanation is going to cover everything. Were you anticipating that interruption, Deene?”

  “I thought it a possibility, I must say. I wondered whether he was desperate enough and took me seriously enough, but I suspected it so strongly that I enlisted Mr Booth’s aid.” He turned to Captain Bidlake. “I am glad now that I made Mr Booth’s acquaintance on that trip to Tangier. He certainly saved my life, and perhaps some others. But the incident has done more than that. I said that my explanation would not be followed by an arrest ‘unless there is any unexpected new development’. There has been. There will be a conviction now, all right. There cannot be anything else. He might have been safe if he had not risked this intrusion tonight. But it goes with the man’s character.

  “However, let’s talk no more at cross-purposes. I will begin at the other end of the case, as it were, and tell a straightforward story. You need not be in the dark any further.”