Beware of the Trains

by Edmund Crispin

  “Lacrimae Rerum”

  “You chatter about ‘the perfect crime,’” said Wakefield irritably, “but you seem incapable of realising that it isn’t a topic one can argue about at all. One can only pontificate, which is irrational and useless.”

  “Have some more port,” said Haldane.

  “Well, yes, I will.… The perfect murder, for instance, isn’t known to be a murder at all; it looks like natural death, and no suggestion of foul play ever enters anyone’s mind. Only the imperfect murders are known to be murders. And consequently, to argue about ‘the perfect murder’ is to argue about something which you cannot, by definition, prove to exist.”

  “Your logic,” said Fen, “isn’t exactly impeccable.”

  Wakefield gazed at him stonily. “What’s wrong with my logic?” he demanded.

  “Its major premise is wrong. You’ve gone astray in defining the perfect murder.”

  “I have n—— How have I gone astray?”

  “The sort of thing you suggest—the apparently natural death—has one disadvantage from the murderer’s point of view.”

  “And that is?” Wakefield leaned forward across the table. “That is?”

  “At the risk of boring you all, I could illustrate it.” Fen glanced at his host and his fellow guests, who nodded a vinously emphatic approval; only Wakefield, who hated losing the conversational initiative, showed any sign of restiveness. “What I have in mind is a murder which was committed several years before the war—the first criminal case, as it happens, with which I ever had anything to do.”

  “Quite a distinction for it,” Wakefield muttered uncivilly.

  “No doubt. And it was certainly the most daring and ingenious crime I’ve ever encountered.”

  “They all are,” said Wakefield.

  “It succeeded, did it?” Haldane interposed rather hurriedly. “That’s to say, the criminal wasn’t discovered or punished?”

  “Discovered,” said Fen, “but not punished.”

  “You mean there was no case against him?”

  “There was a cast-iron case; conclusive proof, followed by a circumstantial confession. But the police couldn’t act on it.”

  “Oh, well,” said Wakefield disgustedly, “if all you mean is that he escaped to some country he couldn’t be extradited from——”

  Fen shook his head. “That isn’t at all what I mean. The murderer is at the present moment living quite openly almost next door to New Scotland Yard.”

  There was a general stir of interest.

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” Wakefield said sourly.

  “And you never will,” Haldane told him, “if you don’t stop talking and give us a chance to hear about it.… Go on, Gervase.”

  “The murder I mean,” said Fen, “is the murder of Alan Pasmore, in 1935.”

  “Pasmore the composer?” someone asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I remember it caused quite a commotion at the time,” said Haldane thoughtfully. “And then it all seemed suddenly to fade out, and one heard no more about it.”

  Fen chuckled. “The authorities were over-precipitate,” he explained, “and naturally they were anxious that their shortcomings shouldn’t be advertised. Hence the conspiracy of silence.…

  “Pasmore and his wife were living at Amersham, in Bucks. He was forty-seven at the time of his death, and at the height of his reputation; though since then he’s sunk almost completely into oblivion, and nowadays his stuff’s hardly ever performed.

  “His wife, Angela, was a good deal younger—twenty-six, to be exact. Attractive, intelligent, competent. As well as seeing to it that his house was kept like a new pin, she acted as his secretary. There was plenty of money—his, not hers. No children. Three servants. Superficially it seemed quite a successful marriage, as marriages go.

  “On the afternoon of October 2nd, 1935, two visitors came to tea.

  “One was Sir Charles Frazer, the conductor, who lived only a few miles away. The other was a wholly unimportant young man called Beasley, who worked at an insurance office in the City. Both of them, it appears, were to some extent infatuated with Angela Pasmore. Sir Charles was there by invitation; Beasley just ‘dropped in.’ And neither of them was pleased to find the other there, since at tea-time, if she were at home at all, you could be sure of having Angela to yourself. Her husband always worked from two to six in the afternoon and had his tea alone in the study upstairs.

  “At four o’clock, then, tea was served in the downstairs drawing-room to Angela, to Sir Charles, and to Beasley. Five minutes later the afternoon mail arrived. It was taken from the postman at the front door by Soames, the manservant, who carried it straight to the drawing-room and gave it to Angela. It consisted of a card for Soames, several letters and cards for Angela, and a single type-written envelope for Pasmore. This last Angela immediately opened. She glanced through the letter inside and then handed it, with a slight grimace, to Sir Charles.”

  “And why,” Wakefield inquired, “did she do that?”

  “The letter,” Fen continued unperturbed, “was from another conductor—Paul Brice, to be specific. He was in Edinburgh (where, as it was afterwards proved, this letter had been posted on the previous afternoon), and there, at the Usher Hall in two days’ time, he was scheduled to conduct the Hallé Orchestra in a concert whose programme included Pasmore’s symphonic poem Merlin. Merlin was at this date quite a new work. It had had only one performance so far, under Sir Charles Frazer at the Queen’s Hall. And since the score was tolerably complicated, Brice wanted advice from the composer on a good many points of interpretation.

  “That was what his letter was about. I’ve seen it, and it consisted of a long list of things like: ‘At 3 after C, can I relax tempo in the bar and a half before the B entry?’ and: ‘At 5 before Q, string accompaniment and clarinet solo are both marked p, but clarinet doesn’t come through; pp accompaniment would blur harmonic texture; can clarinet play mf?’ and: ’At 7 after Y, do you want the più mosso as in the exposition?’ There were, I think, at least two dozen such queries. Conductors aren’t normally so conscientious, but Brice and Pasmore were lifelong friends, and Brice took Pasmore’s music rather more seriously than its actual merits warranted.

  “You will understand now”—and Fen eyed Wakefield with a certain severity—“why Angela should show this letter to Sir Charles. Having conducted the first and only performance of the work in question, he might be expected to be interested. He read the letter attentively, commenting, uncharitably one gathers, on Brice’s artistic perceptivity. Then he gave it back to Angela.

  “She in turn handed it to Soames, who was still hovering in the background, and told him to take it up to her husband with his tea, which by immutable custom was served to him at four-fifteen. This he did, testifying subsequently that at four-fifteen Pasmore was alive, uninjured and in every way normal.

  “At four-twenty Angela excused herself to her two visitors and left the drawing-room—in order, she asserted later, to ‘powder her nose.’ Beasley and Sir Charles remained together, making mistrustful small talk, until at half-past four she returned. She then stayed with them up to a quarter to five, when—as she’d previously warned them—she was engaged to drive her cook, Mrs. May, to the Chesham Cottage Hospital to visit her son, who had recently smashed himself to bits in a motor-cycle accident. Beasley and Sir Charles weren’t much pleased at being superseded by this work of mercy, but there was nothing they could do about it, so, with Angela, they left the drawing-room and went out into the hall. Here she asked them to wait while she went up to her bedroom, whose door was clearly visible at the head of the stairs. And I’d better emphasise at this point, to save futile racking of brains, that both men saw her go straight into this room, and that both were prepared to swear she couldn’t have entered any other room upstairs, let alone the study, without their knowing.”

  “There being, of course”—Haldane picked up his glass and stared pensively at it befor
e drinking—“no means of communication between the bedroom and the study.”

  “None whatever; care was taken to establish that. Moreover, Angela wasn’t, according to Sir Charles and Beasley, in the bedroom for more than a minute at most. Emerging from it, she ran straight downstairs, went to the clothes closet in the hall, disappeared into it for a few seconds, departed to the kitchen to fetch Mrs. May, returned with her immediately, took a coat from the clothes closet and put it on, and finally shepherded Mrs. May and Sir Charles and Beasley to the front door. Outside, she said good-bye to the two men and got into the car with Mrs. May. And from then on she was with Mrs. May continuously, in the car or at the hospital, until at least twenty minutes after her husband’s body was found.

  “All of which boils down to this: that if Pasmore was killed by his wife, she could only have done it between four-twenty and four-thirty, when she was away from the drawing-room.

  “It was Soames who found the body, when at six o’clock—again in accordance with immutable custom—he took whisky and water up to the study for Pasmore’s pre-prandial drink. There proved, on investigation, to be nothing in the immediate circumstances of the crime that could help the police. Pasmore had been stabbed in the back while sitting at his desk, and had died instantaneously. The weapon was an eighteenth-century Venetian stiletto which hung normally over the study mantelpiece. There had been very little bleeding. The room had not been disturbed, and nothing, so far as could be discovered, was missing. There were no fingerprints on the weapon, and none in the room except such as were to be expected: the servants’, Angela’s, the dead man’s. The police doctor arrived on the scene too late to be able to state the time of death with any certainty: ‘probably between four and five’ was the most he could say. A cake had been eaten and a cup of tea drunk, Pasmore’s prints being on the cup; and he had been killed, according to the post-mortem findings, between five and fifteen minutes after consuming these things. But since there was no evidence as to when he had consumed them—whether immediately after being brought the tea-tray, or later—that didn’t help either.

  “In short, the police had uncommonly little to work on; all the same, within three days Angela was under arrest.

  “Only a very brief investigation had been needed to reveal the fact that the marriage was not as successful as on the surface it appeared; that, not to be longwinded about it, Pasmore’s ménage was on the rocks. For some reason which I never clearly understood, Pasmore and Angela had recently quarrelled—a violent, fundamental quarrel of the sort that can never really be made up. And the first result of that was that Pasmore took steps to make a new will leaving the whole of his considerable fortune away from her (this, of course, was before the Inheritance Act came into force in 1938). His solicitors, thanks to some error, sent a draft of the new will to his home for his approval, and Angela saw it. So she had, obviously, a very substantial motive for killing him before the will could be signed and become operative. There was opportunity too—those ten minutes during which she had been absent from the drawing-room. Questioned about whether she’d entered her husband’s study during that time, she denied doing so. And that was fatal, since it happened that both Soames and a maidservant had seen her do so.… Mind you, all the evidence against her was circumstantial; there wasn’t, nor apparently could there be, any conclusive proof of guilt. But circumstantial evidence is quite commonly hanging evidence, and the police were perfectly justified in making the arrest. In due course a charge was preferred by the Director of Public Prosecutions, and Angela, reserving her defence, was committed for trial at the Assizes.

  “She pleaded ‘Not Guilty,’ admitting, in the witness-box, that she had entered Pasmore’s study, but stating that she left him alive and well—‘writing a letter; I don’t think he’d started his tea’—after a couple of minutes’ casual conversation about household matters. The Prosecution’s case being on the thin side, the Defence had reasonable hopes of an acquittal; and but for Angela’s own behaviour in the witness-box, they would have been fairly confident of it. Unfortunately, however, she blustered and contradicted herself and told transparent lies and in general made a very poor impression. What would have happened if the trial had run normally at the end, one doesn’t know. And the question’s academic, since it didn’t run normally at the end. At almost the last possible moment, when the judge was on the point of starting his summing-up, the Defence quite unexpectedly applied to admit new evidence which conclusively established the prisoner’s innocence. The judge allowed the evidence to be given, and as a result of it summed up in the prisoner’s favour; the jury brought in a verdict of Not Guilty; and Angela Pasmore was acquitted of her husband’s murder.

  “You’ll have guessed that the ‘new evidence’ had to do with Brice’s letter. What actually happened, during the final day of the trial, was this:

  “Angela remembered something which, she said, had been completely driven out of her mind by her husband’s death, by the investigation, and by her own arrest—namely, the existence of a reply by Pasmore to that letter from Brice which had arrived by the afternoon post. It was Pasmore’s habit to put letters which he wanted mailed on the dressing-table in her bedroom (the servants, by the way, corroborated this). And on going up to her bedroom, just prior to leaving the house with Mrs. May, she had found this reply there, had put it in an envelope and addressed it, and had taken it downstairs in her pocket, transferring it at once to the pocket of her outdoor coat, which was hanging in the clothes closet in the hall. Thereafter (I continue to quote her own account of the matter) she not only forgot to post it—as one does occasionally forget to post letters, important ones particularly—but also forgot, in the eventual confusion and distress, that the thing had ever existed. And presumably it was still in the pocket of her coat.

  “All of this Angela communicated to her Counsel. And he, naturally, wasn’t slow to see the importance of it. If Brice’s letter had not reached Pasmore till four-fifteen, as it probably hadn’t; if he had written a reply to it; if that reply had taken him more than fifteen minutes to write, as it probably had—then Angela could not have murdered him, since the only opportunity she had had was between four-twenty and four-thirty. Someone was sent off post-haste to Amersham. The letter was found. Handwriting experts were unanimous in agreeing that Pasmore had written it—that no part of it was forged. Tests established the fact that the absolute minimum time required to write it must have been twenty minutes. As to its contents that was a seriatim answer to Brice’s queries, such as Pasmore could only have produced with the details of those queries in front of him. The arrival of Brice’s letter by the afternoon mail was sworn to, beyond the possibility of contradiction, by the postman, by Soames, by Beasley and by Sir Charles. And Brice was emphatic that by no conceivable means could Pasmore have become acquainted with the questions about Merlin prior to the arrival of the letter. You’ll see what all this evidence added up to: Pasmore couldn’t have been killed before twenty-five to five at the earliest; and therefore it was not Angela who killed him.”

  Finishing his port, Fen lit a cigarette and leaned back more comfortably in his chair.

  “As for myself,” he went on after a moment’s consideration, “I had no personal contact with the affair until after the trial was over. I read about it more or less attentively in the papers, and that was all. But about a week after Angela’s acquittal I was dining with the Chief Constable of Buckinghamshire, and he, knowing I had a lay interest in criminology, showed me the dossier of the case. Most of it was just a repetition and expansion of what I already knew. There was also, however, a complete typewritten copy of Pasmore’s letter to Brice. And something in the last paragraph of that letter sruck me as being ever so slightly odd.…

  “The bulk of the thing, as I’ve told you, was simply a point-by-point reply, impersonal and businesslike in tone, to Brice’s queries. The final paragraph, though, ran like this:

  “‘Forgive me if I don’t write more. I’m in the middle o
f scoring Ariadne (with a concert on my next-door neighbour’s wireless—lacrimae rerum!—to help me along) and am anxious, as you know, to get it done as quickly as possible. Good luck to the performance—I am sorry I can’t be there. Yours——’ and so forth.

  “Well, the police had checked this business of the concert at the time Pasmore’s letter was produced in Court: and Pasmore’s neighbour’s radio had, in fact, been on between threethirty and four-forty-five. So far, so good. But ’lacrimae rerum’—somehow that particular tag was wrong in that particular context. One’s neighbour’s radio is often tiresome, no doubt. But one doesn’t use, as a comment on it, a phrase intended to express the profound, essential melancholy of all human activities—and more, of existence itself; the nuisance is too trivial and localised. And it occurred to me, as a consequence of this disparity, that ’lacrimae rerum’ might carry some specialised meaning for Brice and Pasmore—might in effect be a sort of private joke. Luckily, Brice was conducting at Oxford three or four days later, and I was able to make contact with him and to ask him about it. And my notion turned out to be right. Brice and Pasmore had been at school together, and had been close friends there, united in a passionately earnest devotion to music—a devotion whose naïvety occasionally bordered on the ludicrous. And on one occasion, when they had been listening together to Tchaikowsky’s Sixth Symphony, Pasmore had remarked, in solemn, awestruck tones: ’Lacrimae rerum, Paul; it sums up the whole tragedy of humankind.’ Brice had been much amused by this pretentious gloss on the music, and thereafter ’Lacrimae rerum’ had been often used between them as a means of referring to that particular work.

  “So naturally I went away and hunted through back numbers of the Radio Times until I found the programme of the concert which had been broadcast on the afternoon of Pasmore’s murder. It consisted of two works, the Walton Symphony followed by the Tchaikowsky Sixth; and there was no difficulty in calculating that the Tchaikowsky must have begun at about a quarter past four and gone on until the end of the concert at a quarter to five. All quite straightforward, you see; no discrepancy with the suggestion that Pasmore’s reply to Brice had been written more or less immediately after receiving Brice’s letter at four-fifteen.