Miraculous Mysteries

by Martin Edwards

  Of course I did the routine things at once. The dead man was a stranger to me.

  He carried loose change, a few keys on a ring, a handkerchief, a gold cigarette-case, and a box of matches—absolutely nothing else. But his clothes were good, and I found his name sewn inside a pocket of the jacket. A. G. Thorman, Esqre. It seemed familiar.

  I made one other discovery. The right ankle was badly swollen. I had been right about that limp.

  Thorman was in late middle-age, and it turned out that I was remembering his name from the great days of aviation—the era of the first long-distance flights. He had made some of the most famous of these with Sir Charles Tumbril, and he had been staying with Tumbril at the time of his death.

  But he had belonged to the district, too, having been born and brought up in a rectory just beyond Thyme Point. So it seemed likely enough that he had chosen to cut short his life in some haunt holding poignant memories of his childhood.

  I took Tumbril the news of his guest’s death myself. It was still quite early, and he came out from his wife’s breakfast-table to hear it. I had a glimpse of both the Tumbrils from the hall, and there was Thorman’s place, empty, between them.

  Tumbril showed me into his study and closed the door with a jerk of his shoulder. He was a powerful, lumbering, clumsy man.

  He stood in front of an empty fireplace, with his hands deep in his trouser pockets. I told him my news, and he didn’t say a word. ‘It comes completely as a surprise to you, Sir Charles?’

  ***

  He looked at me as if this was an impertinence. ‘It’s not for us to conjecture,’ he said. ‘What has prompted Thorman to suicide can be neither your business nor mine.’

  ‘That doesn’t quite cover the matter, Sir Charles. Our circumstances are rather exceptional here. You are in control of this experimental station, and I am responsible to the Ministry on the security side. You have three planes here on the secret list, including the P.2204 itself. Any untoward incident simply must be sifted to the bottom.’

  Tumbril took it very well, and said something about liking a man who kept his teeth in his job. I repeated my first question.

  ‘A surprise?’ Tumbril considered. ‘I can’t see why it shouldn’t be a surprise.’

  ‘But yet it isn’t?’

  ‘No, Appleby—it is not. Since Thorman came down to us a few days ago there has been something in the air. We were very old friends, and I couldn’t help feeling something wrong.’

  ‘Thorman didn’t give any hint of what it might be?’

  ‘None at all. He was always a reticent fellow.’

  ‘He might have had some sort of secret life?’

  ‘I hope he had nothing as shoddy as that sounds, Appleby. And I don’t think you’d find any of the very obvious things: money gone wrong, a jam between two women, or anything of that sort. But serious disease is a possibility. He looked healthy enough, but you never know.’

  ‘Were there any relations?’

  ‘A brother. I suppose I ought to contact him now.’ Tumbril crossed the room to the old upright telephone he kept on his desk. Then he said: ‘I’ll do that later.’

  I thought this might be a hint for me to clear out. But I asked one more question. ‘You had confidence, Sir Charles, in Thorman’s probity?’

  He looked at me with a startled face. ‘Probity?’ he repeated. ‘Are you suggesting, Appleby, that Thorman may have been a spy—something of that sort?’

  ‘Yes, Sir Charles. That is what I have in mind.’

  He looked at me in silence for almost half a minute, and his voice when he spoke was uncomfortably cold. ‘I must repeat that Arthur Thorman was one of my oldest friends. Your suggestion is ridiculous. It is also personally offensive to me. Good morning.’

  ***

  So that was that, and I left the room well and truly snubbed.

  All the same, I didn’t precisely banish the puzzle of Arthur Thorman from my mind.

  And there was a puzzle; it was a perfectly plain puzzle, which appears clearly in the facts as I’ve already given them.

  Tumbril must have felt he’d been a bit stiff with me, and that I’d shown the correct reactions. At least that, I suppose, is why I received a telephone call from Lady Tumbril later in the morning, inviting me in to tea. I went along at the time named.

  Thorman’s brother had arrived. He must have been much older than the dead man; his only interest in life was the Great Pyramid of Cheops; and he gave no indication of finding a suicide in the family anything very out of the way.

  Lady Tumbril coped with the situation very well, but it wasn’t a cheerful tea. Tumbril himself didn’t appear—his wife explained that he was working—and we ate our crumpets in some abstraction, while the elder Thorman explained that something in the proportions of his pyramid made it certain that London would be destroyed by an earthquake in 1958.

  It was only at the end of the meal that this tedious old person appeared to make any contact with the lesser catastrophe of that morning. And what he was mainly prompted to, it seemed, was a concern over his brother’s clothes and baggage, as these must still repose in a bedroom upstairs.

  The tea-party ended with the old man’s going up to inspect and pack his brother’s things, and with myself accompanying him to lend a hand.

  I suppose I should be ashamed of the next incident in the story. Waste-paper baskets and fireplaces have a strong professional fascination for me. I searched those in Arthur Thorman’s room. It was not quite at random. I had come to have a good idea of what I might find there. Ten minutes later I was once more in Sir Charles Tumbril’s study.

  ***

  ‘Will you please look at this, sir?’

  He was again standing before the fireplace with his hands in his pockets, and he gave that sombre glance at what I was holding out to him. ‘Put it on the desk,’ he said.

  ‘Sir Charles—is there any point in this concealment? I saw how it was with your arm when you stopped yourself from telephoning this morning.’

  ‘I’ve certainly had an accident. But I’m not aware that I need exhibit it to you, Appleby.’

  ‘Nor to your doctor?’

  He looked at me in silence. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘I should like to know, sir, whether Thorman was writing a book—a book of memoirs, or anything of that sort?’

  Tumbril glanced towards the piece of charred paper I had laid on his desk. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I believe he was.’

  ‘You must know what I’ve got here, sir. I had to find it.’ I was looking at him steadily. ‘You see, the thing didn’t make sense as it stood. That last message of Thorman’s could be the product only of complete spontaneity—a final spur-of-the-moment touch to his suicide.

  ‘But, although it had the appearance of having been written on the spot, there wasn’t another scrap of paper on him. That it should just happen that he had that one fragment from a notebook—’

  ‘I see. And what, in fact, have you got there?’

  ‘The bottom of another leaf of the same paper, Sir Charles. And on it, also in Thorman’s writing, just two words: paper gliders.’

  ***

  ‘I must tell you the truth.’ Tumbril had sat down. ‘I must tell you the truth, Appleby.

  ‘It so happens that I am a very light sleeper. That fact brought me down here at two o’clock this morning, to find Thorman with the safe open, and the P.2204 file in front of him on this desk. He brought out a revolver and fired at me.

  ‘The bullet went through my arm. I don’t doubt now that he meant to kill. And then he grabbed the file and bolted out through the french window. He must have opened it in case of just such a need to cut and run.

  ‘He jumped from the terrace and I heard a yelp of pain. He tried to run on, but could only limp, and I knew that he had sprained an ankle. The result, of cour
se, was that I caught up with him in no time.

  ‘He still had the revolver; we struggled for it; it went off again—and there was Thorman, dead. I carried the body back to the house.

  ‘I went up to his room with the idea of searching it for anything else he might have stolen, and there I saw the manuscript of this book he had begun. My eye fell on the last words he had written. I saw them as pathetic. And suddenly I saw how that pathos might be exploited to shield poor Arthur’s name.

  ‘My wife and I between us had the whole plan worked out within half an hour. Shortly before dawn we got out her helicopter from the private hangar—we fly in and out here, you know, at all sorts of hours—and hoisted in the body.

  ‘Thorman and I were of the same weight and build; I put on his shoes, which I found fitted well enough; and then I set out for the shore. The tide was just right, and I walked out to those rocks—limping, of course, for I remembered Thorman’s ankle. My wife followed in the machine, and lowered the body to me on the winch.

  ‘I restored the shoes and made the various dispositions which you found—and which you were meant to find, Appleby, for I had noticed your regular morning walk.

  ‘Then I went up the rope and we flew home. We thought that we had achieved our aim: to make it appear irrefutable that poor Arthur Thorman had committed suicide—and in circumstances which, although mysterious, were wholly unconnected with any suspicion of treason.’

  ***

  When Appleby had concluded his narrative neither of his hearers spoke.

  ‘My dear Appleby,’ the Vicar said presently, ‘you were in a very difficult position. I shall be most interested to hear what your decision was.’

  ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’ And Appleby smiled at the astonishment of his friends. ‘Did you ever hear of Arthur Thorman?’

  The Doctor considered. ‘I can’t say that I ever did.’

  ‘Or, for that matter, of the important Sir Charles Tumbril?’

  The Vicar shook his head. ‘No. When you come to mention it—’

  And Appleby picked up his novel again. ‘Didn’t I say,’ he murmured, ‘that I was going to tell you a story? And there it is—a simple story about footprints on the sands of Thyme.’

  Beware of the Trains

  Edmund Crispin

  Edmund Crispin took up detective fiction while still an undergraduate at Oxford; the authors who exerted the most profound influence on his writing were Michael Innes, and, in particular, John Dickson Carr. Crispin’s biographer, David Whittle, quotes him as saying that ‘a seminal moment in my career’ came when he read Carr’s The Crooked Hinge. Not surprisingly, his first novel, The Case of the Gilded Fly (1944), paid homage to the master of the locked-room mystery, with an ‘observed room’ problem. In other words, the question for Professor Gervase Fen is how someone was shot in a locked room that had been kept constantly under observation. Swan Song (1947) offers another variant on the concept of the impossible crime, but Crispin’s most famous novel in this vein is the witty and inventive The Moving Toyshop (1946), long regarded as a classic of the genre.

  Crispin’s real name was Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921–1978). He earned distinction as a composer as well as in the field of crime fiction, but his successes in both fields were curtailed by ill health. By the time he was in his mid-thirties, he had written almost all his best detective novels and short stories; the remainder of his life is a story of gradual decline that is all the sadder because of the exuberant high spirits of his fiction. ‘Beware of the Trains’ is a characteristically clever story showing Fen at his best.

  ***

  A whistle blew; jolting slightly, the big posters on the hoardings took themselves off rearwards—and with sudden acceleration, like a thrust in the back, the electric train moved out of Borleston Junction, past the blurred radiance of the tall lamps in the marshalling-yard, past the diminishing constellations of the town’s domestic lighting, and so out across the eight-mile isthmus of darkness at whose further extremity lay Clough. Borleston had seen the usual substantial exodus, and the few remaining passengers—whom chance had left oddly, and, as it turned out, significantly distributed—were able at long last to stretch their legs, to transfer hats, newspapers and other impedimenta from their laps to the vacated seats beside them, and for the first time since leaving Victoria to relax and be completely comfortable. Mostly they were somnolent at the approach of midnight, but between Borleston and Clough none of them actually slept. Fate had a conjuring trick in preparation, and they were needed as witnesses to it.

  The station at Clough was not large, nor prepossessing, nor, it appeared, much frequented; but in spite of this, the train, once having stopped there, evinced an unexpected reluctance to move on. The whistle’s first confident blast having failed to shift it, there ensued a moment’s offended silence; then more whistling, and when that also failed, a peremptory, unintelligible shouting. The train remained inanimate, however, without even the usual rapid ticking to enliven it. And presently Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, lowered the window of his compartment and put his head out, curious to know what was amiss.

  Rain was falling indecisively. It tattooed in weak, petulant spasms against the station roof, and the wind on which it rode had a cutting edge. Wan bulbs shone impartially on slot-machines, timetables, a shuttered newspaper-kiosk; on governmental threat and commercial entreaty; on peeling green paint and rust-stained iron. Near the clock, a small group of men stood engrossed in peevish altercation. Fen eyed them with disapproval for a moment and then spoke.

  ‘Broken down?’ he enquired unpleasantly. They swivelled round to stare at him. ‘Lost the driver?’ he asked.

  This second query was instantly effective. They hastened up to him in a bunch, and one of them—a massive, wall-eyed man who appeared to be the Station-master—said: ‘For God’s sake, sir, you ’aven’t seen ’im, ’ave you?’

  ‘Seen whom?’ Fen demanded mistrustfully.

  ‘The motorman, sir. The driver.’

  ‘No, of course I haven’t,’ said Fen. ‘What’s happened to him?’

  ‘’E’s gorn, sir. ’Ooked it, some’ow or other. ’E’s not in ’is cabin, nor we can’t find ’im anywhere on the station, neither.’

  ‘Then he has absconded,’ said Fen, ‘with valuables of some description, or with some other motorman’s wife.’

  The Station-master shook his head—less, it appeared, by way of contesting this hypothesis than as an indication of his general perplexity—and stared helplessly up and down the deserted platform. ‘It’s a rum go, sir,’ he said, ‘and that’s a fact.’

  ‘Well, there’s one good thing about it, Mr. Maycock,’ said the younger of the two porters who were with him. ‘’E can’t ’ave got clear of the station, not without being seen.’

  The Station-master took some time to assimilate this, and even when he had succeeded in doing so, did not seem much enlightened by it. ‘’Ow d’you make that out, Wally?’ he enquired.

  ‘Well, after all, Mr. Maycock, the place is surrounded, isn’t it?’

  ‘Surrounded, Wally?’ Mr. Maycock reiterated feebly. ‘What d’you mean, surrounded?’

  Wally gaped at him. ‘Lord, Mr. Maycock, didn’t you know? I thought you’d ’a’ met the Inspector when you came back from your supper.’

  ‘Inspector?’ Mr. Maycock could scarcely have been more bewildered if his underling had announced the presence of a Snab or a Greevey. ‘What Inspector?’

  ‘Scotland Yard chap,’ said Wally importantly. ‘And ’alf a dozen men with ’im. They’re after a burglar they thought’d be on this train.’

  Mr. Maycock, clearly dazed by this melodramatic intelligence, took refuge from his confusion behind a hastily contrived breastwork of outraged dignity. ‘And why,’ he demanded in awful tones, ‘was I not hinformed of this ’ere?’

>   ‘You ’ave bin informed,’ snapped the second porter, who was very old indeed, and who appeared to be temperamentally subject to that vehement, unfocussed rage which one associates with men who are trying to give up smoking. ‘You ’ave bin informed. We’ve just informed yer.’

  Mr. Maycock ignored this. ‘If you would be so kind,’ he said in a lofty manner, ‘it would be ’elpful for me to know at what time these persons of ’oom you are speaking put in an appearance ’ere.’

  ‘About twenty to twelve, it’d be,’ said Wally sulkily. ‘Ten minutes before this lot was due in.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t ’ave occurred to you, would it’—here Mr. Maycock bent slightly at the knees, as though the weight of his sarcasm was altogether too much for his large frame to support comfortably—‘to ’ave a dekko in my room and see if I was ’ere? Ho no. I’m only the Station-master, that’s all I am.’

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry, Mr. Maycock,’ said Wally, in a tone of voice which effectively cancelled the apology out, ‘but I wasn’t to know you was back, was I? I told the Inspector you was still at your supper in the village.’

  At this explanation, Mr. Maycock, choosing to overlook the decided resentment with which it had been delivered, became magnanimous. ‘Ah well, there’s no great ’arm done, I dare say,’ he pronounced; and the dignity of his office having by now been adequately paraded, he relapsed to the level of common humanity again. ‘Burglar, eh? Was ’e on the train? Did they get ’im?’

  Wally shook his head. ‘Not them. False alarm, most likely. They’re still ’angin’ about, though.’ He jerked a grimy thumb towards the exit barrier. ‘That’s the Inspector, there.’

  Hitherto, no one had been visible in the direction indicated. But now there appeared, beyond the barrier, a round, benign, clean-shaven face surmounted by a grey Homburg hat, at which Fen bawled ‘Humbleby!’ in immediate recognition. And the person thus addressed, having delivered the injunction ‘Don’t move from here, Millican’ to someone in the gloom of the ticket-hall behind him, came on to the platform and in another moment had joined them.