Smallbone Deceased

by Michael Gilbert

  at a quarter past ten, and I want you to get the information and meet me at the station with a police car and a good driver. I know it doesn't leave you much time, but that's the way it's got to be.'

  He rang off, thanked the stationmaster politely, and stepped out on to the platform into the arms of a deeply-suspicious guard. The time was nine-fifteen.

  Chapter Fifteen

  SATURDAY NIGHT

  Completion

  We cannot force our memories: they must come of themselves by natural association, as it were; but they may

  occur to us when we least think of them, owing to some casual circumstance or link of connection, and long after we have given up the search.

  —HAZLITT: On Application to Study.

  At about nine o'clock that evening Bohun was sitting in his upper room, underneath the portrait of the severe lady (who was his grandmother) and he was thinking about developments in automatic accounting machinery. He had seen an up-to-date model demonstrated recently. Accounts were fed into it in the form of cards, each card being punched with a combination of holes and slots representing the figures of the account. The machine would then perform any operation of addition, subtraction, proportion, collation or extraction which the abstrusest fancy of the accountant might dictate. What had particularly amused Bohun had been that on an incorrectly punched card being inserted, the machine gave a most human scream, a red light shone, and the card was ejected on to the floor. It occurred to him that this was exactly what was wrong with the proposition of Bob Horniman as murderer. Every time he presented that particular card to his mental processes they as promptly rejected it. Principally it was the matter of motive.

  One of the suggested motives might be the correct one. Both together were impossible.

  You could believe in an impetuous, hot-headed, warmhearted type who came to the conclusion that if Smallbone was capable of tormenting a dying man then Smallbone himself was better dead. One or two people might reasonably have maintained such a proposition since it seemed that the late Abel Horniman, for all his faults, had been a man capable of inspiring both loyalty and affection. On the other hand you could believe in a cold-blooded type, one who calculated that, if he shut Smallbone's mouth and thus postponed the coming to light of the Husbandmen's Mortgage fraud, he might have a chance to sell out his share in the firm and get away with twenty thousand pounds.

  It was when you made both of them the same person that you were talking nonsense.

  Apart from this there was the consideration that if Bob Horniman had committed the murder on his Saturday morning at the office, then Anne Mildmay must almost certainly have been privy to it. Their statements proved this. They said they had left the office together at ten past twelve and had parted at about twenty past. Now with Smallbone due at the office at twelve-fifteen (vide his letter) either this meant that they were both lying about times or that Bob had not left the office at all, but had got Miss Mildmay to perjure herself and say that he had. In which case she must have had more than a shrewd idea all along that he was the murderer. This Bohun refused to believe. There was something between them—you didn't have to be very observant to see that. Anne Mildmay was angry and hurt with Bob, and there was a state of emotional tension between them. But it wasn't the tension of guilty knowledge shared.

  And the night of Miss Chittering's murder: that seemed to be a singularly clumsy alibi that Bob had put up: quite out of keeping with the rest of a carefully-planned performance. And could anyone have been so incredibly careless as to drop that incriminating letter in the office by mistake? But if Bob was not the murderer, further vistas of speculation at once unrolled themselves. What about the letter? It was, more and more clearly, a plant. Put there to be found. Put there by someone who felt the breath of suspicion on their own neck and was becoming pretty desperate to avert it. Put there by . . .

  It was possible. Yes. It was more than possible.

  The clinching thought in this train of thought, the item which finally brought conviction was so trivial as to be ludicrous. It turned on nothing more nor less than the shape of an ordinary steel screw.

  Feverishly, Bohun dragged back from his memory the events which had led up to the discovery of that letter. Miss Chittering had wanted to move a mirror. Miss Bellbas—he thought it was Miss Bellbas—had suggested putting it up beside the window. He had offered to fix it for them. Just at the moment when he had everything ready Mr Craine had appeared and he had been obliged to hand over to Miss Cornel. He was not certain what had happened next, but when he reappeared—not more than thirty seconds later (Mr Craine had only wanted to give him a letter)—everything seemed to have been dropped on the floor. Miss Cornel was on her knees looking for the screws. She had found one of them by the window and the other underneath her own desk, the middle desk of the three. That was it. And it was whilst they were trying to fish the screw out from under the desk that the letter had come to light.

  In other words, shorn of all surrounding circumstances and in the plainest language, Miss Cornel had dropped a screw over by Miss Chittering's desk under the window and had purported to find it under her own desk in the middle of the room. Her explanation had been: ‘It must have rolled.' He remembered that Hazlerigg had later measured the distance between the two desks. Ten feet. How on earth, said Bohun slowly to himself, how on earth could a screw have rolled for ten feet. Why, a screw couldn't roll one foot. It couldn't roll six inches. If you dropped a screw on the floor it went round in a circle. Even on a sloping surface it couldn't roll.

  He got up and started to walk up and down the long room. An even more deadly question had sprung, fully armed, from the dragon's teeth of his thoughts. And one way or the other it was a question which had to be decided, and decided quickly.

  Wait! There was just a chance—a very slender chance— that even now he might be wrong. He looked up a name in the desk telephone book and dialled a number.

  Perry Cockaigne, being a sports writer on a Sunday paper, was one of the few people who could be relied on to be found at his desk late on a Saturday night. He greeted Bohun with enthusiasm, and listened to him without surprise. It seemed quite natural to Perry that people should ring him up in the middle of the night with questions about the sport in which he specialised.

  'Yes,' he said. 'I remember her. She doesn't play competitive golf now. No, old boy. You must be muddling her up with someone else. She was a right-hand golfer. Of course, I'm sure. I've seen her play dozens of times. Hits the strongest tee shot of any woman I know.'

  He was now certain.

  II

  When Bob Horniman's telephone call came through, Anne Mildmay was seated in Miss Cornel's living-room. It was a comfortable, neutral sort of room. The enlargements of golfing photographs and the silver trophies gave it a masculine air which was contradicted by the Japanese flower prints and the Lalique work, and the large and carefully-arranged bowls of flowers.

  Miss Cornel answered the telephone and came back and said: 'It's for you. It's Bob Horniman. He would seem to be ringing up from Norfolk.'

  Anne was away for some time. When she came back into the room her eyes had the story in them for the older woman to read.

  'He's asked me to marry him,' she said.

  'What did you say?' enquired Miss Cornel.

  'I said Yes,' said Anne. She stood outside herself for a moment, viewing herself in the new, exciting, exacting, terrifying role of bride and married woman.

  'I shall make a rampaging wife,' she said.

  'In my day,' said Miss Cornel, 'that sort of thing was done in a conservatory, or a summer-house, at two o'clock in the morning, to the strains of the Vienna Woods Waltz. Not over the long-distance telephone from a friend's house.'

  'I'm sorry,' said Anne. 'There were complications. Perhaps I'd better explain.'

  She did so.

  'I see,' said Miss Cornel. 'And what would you have done if the report had been the other way—excuse my frankness— would you have allowed t
he child to be born out of wedlock?'

  'A bouncing little bastard,' said Anne thoughtfully. 'No. I hardly expect so. I don't know. Anyway, everything's perfect. Now.'

  'Allow me to congratulate you then,' said Miss Cornel.

  'By the way,' said Anne. 'There was one thing I couldn't quite make out. Apparently Hazlerigg was down there.'

  'Inspector Hazlerigg?'

  'Yes. You don't suppose that he thinks—no, that's absurd.'

  'What's absurd?'

  'He can't think,' said Anne with a shaky laugh, 'that Bob's a—I mean, that he did these murders.'

  T shouldn't think so,' said Miss Cornel slowly. A close observer might have noted the slight bunching of the muscles on the angle of the jaw, the very faint hardening of the grey eyes. 'Is there any particular reason that he should?'

  'Well, you know,' said Anne, 'we've both had to tell an awful lot of lies. Everything seemed to happen when we were—involved. That Saturday morning—'

  She explained about Saturday morning with modern frankness and Miss Cornel said doubtfully: 'You'd have to alibi each other then?'

  'Yes,' said Anne, 'it wouldn't be awfully convincing, I know. But that Tuesday night, when Miss Chittering got killed. That's absolutely water-tight. We went to a little place in Frith Street

  . Bob's very well known there. And he booked the table by telephone for a quarter to seven/

  'And you were there at a quarter to seven?'

  'A bit before, I should say. The waiter—that is, he's really the proprietor's brother—said something to Bob about "On time, as usual" and Bob said: "Your clock's fast. We're early." I should think we were sitting down by twenty to seven. We walked there from the office.'

  Miss Cornel, like Hazlerigg, recognised the sound of the truth. For a moment she said nothing and then she got up and went over to the cupboard. When she came back she had a dark, squat bottle in her hand.

  'We must drink to the health of the happy pair,' she said. 'Can you pull the cork whilst I get the glasses?'

  She was out of the room for a few minutes and came back with two green tumblers. She splashed in a generous three fingers and pushed the nearer tumbler across to Anne. 'You mustn't desecrate this stuff by showing water to it,' she said.

  Anne drank and gasped. 'It's strong, isn't it?'

  'It should be,' said Miss Cornel composedly. 'It's genuine pre-war Glen Livet. I had this bottle given me when I won the Open Putter on the Ochterlony course in 1938.'

  Both ladies sipped in respectful silence.

  'That one's to your address,' said Miss Cornel. 'One more for your intended.'

  T don't think—' said Anne.

  'It'll make you sleep,' said Miss Cornel genially.

  'The funny thing is,' said Anne, 'that I can hardly keep my eyes open—now.'

  Ill

  'Scotland Yard?'

  'This is Scotland Yard. Duty sergeant speaking.' 'This is urgent. Can you put me through to—' 'Is this an emergency call?'

  'It's not a nine-nine-niner, if that's what you mean,' said Bohun. T must speak to Chief Inspector Halzerigg.'

  I’ll see if I can contact him, sir.'

  'It's to do with the Lincoln's Inn murder.'

  'One minute, sir.'

  There was a silence, a click, and a new voice said: 'Can I help you? This is Inspector Pickup.'

  Bohun recognised the name vaguely as one of the inspector's colleagues. He said: 'My name's Bohun. I must speak to Inspector Hazlerigg.'

  Tm afraid that's going to be rather difficult,' said Pickup. 'The inspector was coming back from Norfolk tonight—'

  'When does the train get in?'

  'It got in fifteen minutes ago,' said Pickup. 'Apparently he stopped the train en route and telephoned for a car to meet him at the terminus. He didn't say where he was going.'

  'Is Sergeant Plumptree there?'

  'Sergeant Plumptree went in the car to meet him.'

  'Damn,' said Bohun.

  'If you have any information,' said Inspector Pickup, 'perhaps I could take it. I'm standing in for Inspector Hazlerigg whilst he's away.'

  Bohun hesitated. He visualised himself trying to explain, over the telephone, to a complete stranger, the orbit of a steel screw on an inclined plane. Or the fact that people who play a lot of golf develop strong wrists. And that if they play right-handed the development of the left wrist will probably be greater than that of the right.

  'No,' he said at last. 'It doesn't matter.'

  He rang off. He thought for a moment of trying the stationmaster's office at Liverpool Street

  , but abandoned the project before he had even reached for the phone. The train would be in by now and the passengers dispersed.

  Direct action seemed to be the only answer.

  Bohun kept his car in a private lock-up behind Bream's Buildings. It was a 1937 Morris, not one of the uncrowned kings of the road, but a steady performer if handled properly.

  Over the Thames by Blackfriars Bridge, he thought, there won't be much traffic at this time of night. I hope the lights are all right. Bohun had never driven by road to Sevenoaks before, but he knew it lay to the west of Maidstone and he guessed that if he took the Old Kent Road

  to New Cross and forked right at Lewisham he could not be very wide of the mark. After that he would have to ask.

  He crossed the river and ran through the Elephant and Castle roundabout, coldly deserted under its neon lights.

  For the first time he spared a moment's thought to wonder what was going to happen at the other end.

  Supposing he found the two ladies virtuously asleep. Could he order Anne Mildmay to leave with him and return to London ? Ought he to give even that amount of indirect warning to Miss Cornel? Even if every supposition he had made was correct, still was Anne in any danger?

  Look out! Oh, a cat,

  Whether she's in any danger or not, said Bohun, following the tramlines round the Lewisham bend, it's my fault that she went down there, and it's my responsibility that nothing happens to her. The best thing I can do is to let them both know I'm there and I'll camp out in the garden until morning. I shouldn't think even Miss Cornel would dare make a move with me on her front lawn.

  Where was Hazlerigg?

  An A.A. scout, coming home from a late call, gave him some directions and he swung south through Bromley.

  His thoughts reverted to Miss Cornel.

  He wondered if everybody was always as slow and as stupid as they had all been, at seeing what lay under their noses. Of course, neither of her alibis was worth the paper it was written on. To start with, her companion at the office on that Saturday morning had been Eric Duxford. He could guess how much that meant. Eric no doubt arrived, put in a nominal ten minutes' work and then went straight away to his other office. In fact, now that Bohun thought of it, had there not been an entry in Eric's 'private' appointment diary for eleven o'clock on February 10th—the very Saturday morning in question? Then, again, was it pure luck that Miss Cornel should have been at the office with such an accommodating partner? He rather thought not. It had originally been Miss Chittering's Saturday. Miss Cornel's story was that Miss Chittering had asked her to change Saturdays. What would Miss Chittering's version have been—if anyone had thought to ask her?

  And was that one of the reasons why Miss Chittering had been—steady! Road fork. Sevenoaks, nine miles. He was getting on. That was the weekend they should have concentrated on from the start. They knew Smallbone was alive up till Saturday morning. Instead of trying to find out how he spent the next week they should have realised . . .

  But did one ever realise that the obvious explanation, the simple explanation was the right one?

  All that speculation about the key of the deed box! Of course the one person who could most easily lay hands on it was Miss Cornel. Or about the difficulty of getting Marcus Smallbone to attend at the office at a given time. Who would be more likely to fix such an appointment than Miss Cornel? Or as to how the letter intending to in
criminate Bob got under Miss Cornel's desk? And why it wasn't found before it had to be? Then there was the Tuesday of Miss Chittering's death. Miss Cornel really had no alibi at all. It was the very simplicity of the idea which had made it so difficult to get hold of. Probably she had not gone to Charing Cross that night. There was no reason for her to do so. She could catch the train just as well from London Bridge or Waterloo. There was the very slight risk of meeting a passenger who knew her. She lived alone. Of course, the confusion caused by the electricity cut had been a help.

  Steady again! He must be near by now. He remembered that Sergeant Plumptree, describing his visit to Sevenoaks, had said that Miss Cornel's bungalow lay north of the town. He would have to take a left fork soon.

  His headlights picked out a signpost; then he saw the policeman standing in the shadow of the hedge.

  He braked sharply.

  'Excuse me,' he said. 'I'm looking for a bungalow called Red Roofs. A Miss Cornel lives there.'

  'Five hundred yards along on your right, sir,' said the policeman impassively.

  Bohun thanked him. He was moving when it occurred to him to wonder if it would have been wiser to have asked the policeman to come with him.

  Then another thought struck him. The policeman had answered his question very promptly. And, though he had looked for it, he hadn't seen the bicycle which he would have expected if the man had been on patrol.

  He had more the look of someone posted. . . .

  Here it was. A neat garden. A low hedge. Bohun cut out the engine and cruised the last hundred yards. Then he got out and switched off his headlights.