Ask a Policeman

by Detection Club

  His story about the petrol is not true. The tank was full as usual, but he needed an excuse for delay, and therefore poured the petrol out of the tin when he came to a secluded place. (He displayed powers of quick thinking and resource, to say nothing of courage, throughout the whole business.) This secluded place was probably a lane on the road to the hospital, which I noted as being very suitable for such a purpose; a sharp turn, shielded by a high hedge and trees. I believe that a search along the border here to try and discover where the petrol was spilt would certainly reveal some traces, either of dead grass or earth disturbed. He drove in to this lane with Bartelmy unconscious beside him; who, however, might regain consciousness at any moment. There was much to be done, and he must have moved quickly. His immediate object was to deface the inner barrel of the revolver in his pocket before handing it over to the police, who would inevitably ask for it. He did this by a simple method which I have myself tried out, scratching the barrel thoroughly with earth or sand. This process would take five minutes; the removal of every grain of sand possibly longer. He must have filed the tip of the striking pin, which can be done with a pocket file, or a thin rough stone. It is an infallible way of changing a gun’s personality, but only a man with considerable knowledge of firearms would have thought of it. He completed his task, and arrived at the hospital at the hour he stated.

  My case is clear, but it cannot ever be proved. The bullet which killed Comstock was fired from a weapon whose characteristics have been destroyed for ever. But Alan Littleton is a man of probity and honour, and if an innocent person is accused I have no doubt that he will speak. Meanwhile, until then I shall hold my tongue, and record it as my conviction that there are occasions when killing is no murder. The late Lord C. is very much better dead.

  Irony! After all my lectures to Sally, I have my crime complete, with footprints, bloodstains, and the rest of the detection-story paraphernalia all in its right place. The only thing lacking is the motive, into which I do not propose to inquire further. I am satisfied that, in spite of the revolver in Alan’s pocket, the crime was not planned, and that the various emergencies were met with quick thinking as they arrived. I do not think this death will lie heavy upon A.’s conscience; but if Bartelmy dies, I believe the guilt of that will haunt him to the end of his days. Crimes, like sorrows, never go singly.

  N.B.—To quiet suspicion, and encourage the third-gun theory, I had better pay Sally her half-crown.

  CHAPTER II

  SIR JOHN TAKES HIS CUE

  BY GLADYS MITCHELL

  “Helen, to you our minds we will unfold.”

  “Stand, ho! Who is there?

  —Friends to this ground

  And liegemen to the Dane.”

  I

  “In fair round belly with good capon lined …

  Full of wise saws and modem instances.”

  “BUT people do not come to this theatre to see a play; they come to see Sir John Saumarez. I challenge you to disprove what I say.”

  The silky, ecclesiastical voice, as exquisitely modulated as Sir John’s own, ceased suddenly. The whole company, at table on the stage of Sir John’s own theatre, drew in a deep breath, but before Sir John or anyone else could take up the gage the challenger continued, smoothly, easily, and with that air of quiet authority which was making Sir John’s magnificent shoulders twitch irritably, although his mouth retained its genial smile of host and layman.

  “The Sir John walk; the Sir John voice; the Sir John manner; those are what your audiences come for, Nobody wants to see real acting nowadays. There is no real acting. You, Sir John, are not an actor; you are simply—and intelligently!—a set of unvarying mannerisms to which you have accustomed your public, and for which they are prepared to pay with applause, flattery, and money.”

  “And what,” asked Sir John, smiling at the wine in his glass, while the company, who were wondering, half in awe, half in pleasurable excitement, what further heresy the white-haired prelate in their midst was prepared to utter, “do you mean by real acting, my dear Pettifer?”

  The Archbishop of the Midlands refreshed himself with a sip of water, much as a public speaker will do when he feels he has made a point and wishes it to sink in.

  “By real acting,” he replied, dabbing his full lips with a snowy napkin, and, this time, addressing the whole table—for, as an ex-schoolmaster, he always took for granted the attention, if not the interest, of his audience—“I mean character acting. And by character acting” —the Cathedral at Bournemouth, where he had been Bishop for a number of years, was extremely high, and he had accustomed himself to a very slow delivery, unctuous and ripely articulated, eminently suited to the acoustics of the Bournemouth Cathedral, but exceptionally trying to his hearers in ordinary conversation—“I mean an absolute alteration of the tones of the actor’s natural voice, and the adoption, by him, of a completely different personality. An actor should live his part—I have coached boys for Shakespearian productions at school, so I claim to know just a very little about the subject—he should live his part. Judged by this standard—this type of acting, if you will—judged, I say, thus, what I call real acting is as defunct as the Dodo. We have no actors nowadays.”

  “The Dodo,” Sir John observed, his eloquent shoulders deploring while they acknowledged the fact, “is more than defunct. It is extinct. We now prefer our monsters, hide, fin, and feather, a little less—monstrous. ‘Legg’d like a man, and his fins like arms!’ Unfashionable, nowadays, I fear. So Mr. Crummies, of revered memory, if he returned to the English stage.”

  Sir John, a little tired of being told that he could not act, that his mannerisms and not his art were what the public came to enjoy, drank, and replaced his glass; his slender hand toyed with its slender stem. The prelate, too much the pedagogue to make an ideal guest, returned to the assault.

  “Ah, Crummles, yes.” His tolerant smile wiped Crummles out of the argument. “But, my dear fellow, I was referring to actors—to actors, not mountebanks. Now, I have seen you act several times—quite several times; and it seemed to me that with your gifts—your —shall we say?—very considerable gifts “—there was the hint of an unwifely grin about Martella’s mouth as she caught her husband’s eye—” you could break the tradition that an actor-manager is a kind of tailor’s dummy, due occasionally for a change of clothing, but, in all essentials, eternally the same.”

  He drank water again. The man on Martella Saumarez’s right said audibly:

  “The old fool’s tight.”

  Sir John still smiled. His mannerisms might possibly be a matter for argument. His charm was not.

  “One does not disappoint one’s public.” He had a momentary vision, vivid as it was fleeting, of his faithful gallery, waiting in the rain for a first night, applauding until the last instant, while the stalls collected wraps and furs; clapping when he appeared for less than an instant between car and stage-door. Sir John’s gallery queue was nearly always divided by his zealous commissionaire into two long tails, with the clear passage-way to the stage-door between them; and the stage-door was a good twenty yards from the gallery entrance.

  “One panders to it,” said His Grace drily. “Self-indulgence, my dear Sir John.”

  Sir John, who was hearing a longer sermon on a weekday in his own theatre than he was usually called upon to endure on a Sunday in church, looked resigned. Taking this for a sign of grace, the Archbishop continued: “I fear we live in a particularly self-indulgent age. One strolls where one should march; one idles the precious time away when the trumpet is calling to labour and to war.”

  Sir John, who called himself a lazy man, and yet, even as he made the admission, experienced strange doubts as to the veracity of the description, shrugged negligently, while the company, his own company, who knew their Sir John and knew of his genius in escaping the conversation of moralists and bores, glanced at one another, marvelling. Their leader’s character-acquiring eye summed up the Archbishop; a pompous, self-opinionated man w
hose natural self was overlaid with the fatty tissue of schoolmaster and church dignitary combined. The original William Anselm Pettifer, Sir John decided, had been lost to history for some two dozen years at least. Replying to the Archbishop’s concluding remarks, he answered smoothly:

  “Your tradition of the Christian soldier militates against mine of the strolling player. Yet our object is the same. We seek to entrap the unwary citizen. Make him listen to something that may make a better man of him.” He smiled. “For you, a trumpet call. For me, the still small voice—”

  “Yes, of the prompter,” said the Archbishop, with unlooked-for felicity. Sir John led the laughter. Conversation became general following his Grace’s happy quip, but, with determination and tact so nicely mingled that none realized what he had done, Sir John caught back the Archbishop into their own conversational backwater, and, after banalities, was able to observe:

  “Back to our sheep, my dear Pettifer?”

  “By all means,” said the Archbishop, delighted with himself. “You find them interesting?”

  “Absorbing,” said Sir John. He had looked up and caught Martella’s eye. His own was penitent. His wife interpreted his look; resignedly, she accepted his unspoken declaration that the conversation was important. “Sufficiently important,” said Sir John’s expressive glance, “to keep us out of bed a little longer.”

  “Absorbing?” The Archbishop repeated, lusciously, the word. His full lips savoured it. “Indeed?”

  “This question,” said Sir John, “of what one’s public wants.”

  Sir John’s own public wanted whatever it pleased Sir John to give it. He ignored this fact. His was not the small mind that fears to be inconsistent.

  “You assume,” said the Archbishop, displaying an ability to grasp the point which caused Sir John a momentary surprise, “that you and I are actors. Both of us.”

  “I do. You have your public. You have your exits and your entrances. You effect certain alterations in your costume during the course of the service. You have accustomed your congregation to a certain William Anselm Pettifer who, in point of fact, does not exist. You imagine him. You compel your vision upon people who ‘sit under’ you. This character that you enact has certain turns of speech. He has mannerisms, inflections of the voice, attitudes—with what rich unction,” Sir John continued lyrically, “does he make his genuflexions, chant responses, and deliver the magnificent ‘curtain lines’ of the Absolution!”

  “With unction,” said the Archbishop, “but sincerely. That’s the difference.”

  “I, also, am sincere,” Sir John declared. “But my point is this. Admit you have a public to whom you have given a certain definite impression of yourself. The picture is sincere. That I admit. But it is not a picture of the whole man, nor necessarily of the whole Archbishop. Give them a different view-point—only one. What would their reaction be, I wonder?”

  “Apply the question to yourself,” his Grace said blandly. “I believe that you and I are more, not less, ourselves, when we are—acting. Oh, I admit your argument. I see the force of it. I take my little brief authority and use it towards what good I may. You in this theatre, I in my cathedral, hold sway over men’s hearts and minds. On our respective platforms we are more than human. In our appointed spheres we are a little lower than the angels. Outside them, you, at least, are a man as other men are.”

  He smiled and ruminated.

  “True, true.” Thus Sir John, complacently convinced that this was only half the truth. He, at least, was not as other men. The Marxian doctrine of the essential equality of man would have been the last item of belief in the creed of Sir John Saumarez. This was not vanity, but the result of wide-eyed experience, both of his own powers and of his world.

  “And outside the cathedral you regard yourself as something less than a man?” he said.

  The Archbishop permitted himself to smile. He lingered lovingly upon a devastating reply, but lingered half a second too long, for young Peter Varley, Sir John’s juvenile lead, coming, as he fancied, to the rescue of his chief, to whom he owed something more than to relieve him of the conversation of a bore, boldly inquired his Grace’s views on greyhound racing. His Grace, who purposed giving them to the daily press in the immediate future, and had no objection whatever in trying them on the dog to find out how they sounded, surrendered gracefully to Peter’s crisp-haired youthful charm, and gave them at some length and with enviable assurance.

  Sir John waited patiently, and then, having regained his principal guest’s attention, said, without warning:

  “I mean, my dear Pettifer, suppose for instance that you had murdered Comstock this morning, what would be the reaction of your congregation? Would they regard you as the popular hero?—as the twentieth century champion of the Church?—as a neo-Georgian Crusader, ridding the world of an infidel dog?—or how?”

  His Grace appeared perplexed.

  “You know, I was there at Comstock’s house this morning,” he observed.

  “My dear Archbishop! You really must forgive me! I have no excuse! Positively no excuse!” Sir John’s distress was evident. No one would have guessed that, in addition to the information he had garnered from the evening papers with their staring headlines, the Home Secretary had sent him all the details of Lord Comstock’s death, Lord Comstock’s household, and Lord Comstock’s visitors which the police had been able to obtain.

  The Archbishop, waving plump white hands, besought him not to distress himself, especially upon so interesting and happy an occasion.

  The occasion was the “last-night” supper on the stage of Sir John’s own theatre—the Sheridan—at the end of a seventeen months’ run. Sir John, who had not taken a single day’s holiday during that time, had promised himself at least two months’ rest, except for the inevitable rehearsals of the new play which he was producing in the autumn. Meanwhile it was June, and the long run was over. The usual floral tributes for Martella and the ingénue, the laurel wreath for Sir John, the “last-night” enthusiasm of the loyal gallery, and the speeches of thanks, had preceded the supper. The supper itself was almost over, and the darkened auditorium on the other side of the curtain held only the ghosts of by-gone playgoers. The clock in Martella’s dressing-room, whither she repaired the moment the guests had been speeded on their way, showed ten minutes past one. The end of a long run always left her feeling stale, flat, and unprofitable, and on the morrow they were due, she and Johnny, at a vicarage garden party. Absurd, thought Martella, rebelliously. It was ridiculous of Johnny I And to have asked that insufferable old idiot of an archbishop to the supper!

  Her husband’s voice without said quietly:

  “I say, Martella, may I come in?”

  “Of course.” She opened the door. Sir John assisted her with her wrap and walked with her to the stage-door. It took a little time to respond to the farewells, but at last they were left alone.

  “What’s the matter, Johnny?” Martella said.

  “Nothing. But—would you mind going home alone, Martella? I can’t come just yet. I won’t be very long.”

  He knew how tired she was; how near to tears; realized, with tenderness, exactly how she felt at the end of the long run. His voice was very gentle.

  When, hat in hand, Sir John had watched the tail-light of the car disappear at the first turning, he became aware that His Grace the Archbishop of the Midlands was standing just behind him on the pavement.

  “Ah, Pettifer,” he said superbly. The Archbishop, as nearly as was possible to so self-possessed a man, seemed ill at ease.

  “Ah, Saumarez,” he said. “A pleasant night, is it not? I was wondering—one does not sleep these hot nights unless one has one’s stroll after dinner—or, as in this case, supper. And I have not thanked you for your hospitality, my dear fellow. A charming occasion, charming; and, to me, of course, unique—quite. Yes, thank you a thousand times. Shall we—ah—walk a little of the way?”

  “There is nothing,” Sir John said—sighing to
himself, for he had supposed that they would sit and talk, in which case he could have handled the conversation so as to keep his promise to Martella; if they began to walk there was no telling how long they might be—“nothing I should enjoy better. The Comstock case, of course?”

  There were, he realized, several more tactful openings leading up to the same point, but time was fleeting and very precious.

  “The Comstock case.” The Archbishop fell into step, and they moved off down the deserted street. “Most tiresome and unpleasant; and dreadful, of course. Most dreadful. Such a promising fellow. An old pupil of mine, you know. A clever lad. A clever, promising lad. I was with him, as I told you, almost immediately before his death.”

  There was silence, except for the echoing of their footsteps; a silence which Sir John was resolved not to break. His patience was rewarded in a few moments.

  “And so—you won’t misunderstand me, my dear Saumarez—the whole thing is both upsetting and exceedingly embarrassing for me.”

  “Quite,” said Sir John.

  “I have interviewed everybody who can possibly matter,” his Grace went on, “but the fact remains that while the time of death is so extraordinarily vague, my position in the matter is, to say the least, unsatisfactory in the extreme. So unsatisfactory is it, that, if I did not fully realize how utterly impossible it is that I should be implicated in the affair, I should be very seriously perturbed. Very seriously perturbed indeed, Saumarez.”

  There was another long pause. Sir John, who apprehended perfectly whither these preliminary remarks were tending, wished that the Archbishop would come to the point and let him go home to bed. It took his Grace another five hundred yards to do so. Sir John took advantage of his companion’s preoccupation to lead the way towards his own flat in Berkeley Square, so that when the conversation terminated he would be within measurable distance of his beauty sleep.