Ask a Policeman

by Detection Club

  Mr. Anderson knew perfectly well what the file contained; he had long since read through the Home Secretary’s “memorandum.” He knew, too, that the Home Secretary had been on the point of reminding him that the papers were secret, and only just in time had remembered that no one was better able than the private secretary both to judge whether a paper was secret and to treat it appropriately (which does not always mean secretly) if it was.

  The Home Secretary knew all this, too, and it annoyed him.

  “There’s been too much delay already. Much too much. These—h’m—experts ought all to have got to work at once. I gave ’em forty-eight hours—”

  “But not collectively,” Anderson remonstrated, in a gentle tone. “They would have fallen over one another, and perhaps there would have been a couple more murders. Besides, I understood you to say ‘forty-eight hours each.’”

  The Home Secretary particularly disliked the reference to the possibility of further murders; for Anderson at the beginning had protested against the “expert” idea. Mrs. Bradley, he argued, was possibly a murderess already; Mr. Sheringham was almost certainly an accomplice after the fact; Sir John Saumarez (“not that that is his real name “) was married to a lady who had been found guilty of murder; and the Sunday papers had more than once linked the name of Lord Peter Wimsey … and, after all, his brother the Duke. …

  “Well, it’s high time—” Sir Philip began, about to repeat his complaint of delay in the inquiry.

  “Yes,” said Anderson, glancing at the clock and instantly assuming that the reference was to the meeting of the Cabinet; and in a minute or two Sir Philip, escorted by his assistant private secretary, was on his way to Downing Street.

  When Gambrell, the Assistant Private Secretary, returned, he found Anderson frowning over the Comstock file.

  “Look here, Gambrell,” he said, “he wants us to look into this. Why, God knows. It’s no concern of ours. However, we’ve both read the papers, and I suggest that we have a bit of a conference on them. We can take his room for the rest of the morning. Miss Head can hold the fort here.”

  Gambrell was only an Assistant Principal, but he had some ten years’ service to his credit, and was almost as well versed as Anderson in the problems of administration; but on this occasion he was puzzled.

  “How do we start?” he inquired, when the couple had adjourned to the comfort and seclusion of the adjoining room.

  They sat face to face across a table at the far end of the lofty room. Anderson was tall and dark, lean-faced, with one eyebrow more uptilted than the other and consequently a permanent air of polite scepticism; he wore a double-breasted black coat and smartly striped trousers, and outside the office might easily have been thought to belong to the staff of the Foreign Office. Gambrell, in contrast, was short and chubby, with big round spectacles; he met the world with a stare of innocent wonder, and his rather shabby tweed suit completed the illusion that he was an overgrown schoolboy up in London for the day.

  At Gambrell’s, remark, Anderson’s eyebrows twitched into a slight frown.

  “I suppose we’d better treat this just like any other file—consider the action proposed, consider whether it is warranted by the facts—and, of course, whether the facts are all stated—and then consider what the results of taking the action would probably be.”

  Gambrell did not dissent, though he had some doubt whether this procedure would answer very well in this particular case.

  “Well?” said Anderson, discerning the doubt.

  “By all means,” Gambrell agreed, “only there seem to be some—well, some preliminary observations to make.”

  “Fire away!” said Anderson, pulling a pipe from his pocket, and looking very much more human.

  “It struck me,” Gambrell began, “that the experts weren’t too anxious to report their findings to us.”

  “I should not call that an over-statement,” was Anderson’s comment. “If we hadn’t managed to pinch Mrs. Bradley’s diary, we should certainly have got nothing out of her. Lord Peter Wimsey—well, we know about him. Sir John Saumarez omitted to invite any of our people to his séance, and if we hadn’t sent in a man in plain clothes—”

  “Mr. Sheringham—” Gambrell interrupted.

  “Yes, he was different. Anxious to explain his final opinions, but I gather the Yard man—yes, Moresby—had a job to get out of him all his earlier views and his facts.”

  “It really looks as if the C.I.D. have a case to go to the Treasury for extra staff for liaison duties with distinguished amateurs,” Gambrell observed, smiling. But Anderson, removing his pipe from his mouth and fingering the file, recalled him to serious affairs.

  “They seem between ’em to have unearthed a good many facts,” said Anderson. “But as I see it none of ’em proposes action based upon all the facts. Mrs. Bradley, for instance—she comes first in the file. The chief point in her case—her real case—is that there were only two revolvers. But thanks to Mr. Sheringham we know there were three.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I know. The third didn’t fire the shot that killed Comstock either. We know that, from the police report that came in this morning. To that extent Mrs. Bradley’s theory still holds good. But if there were three, why not four?”

  “Incidentally, the police report on the third revolver seems to do in Sheringham’s theory. They say it was two months or so since it was last fired—quite apart from the fact that this particular bullet wasn’t fired by it.”

  “Let’s stick to Mrs. Bradley, shall we?” Anderson demanded. Gambrell shrugged his shoulders.

  “I think we shall have to take things out of the order in which they happen to be in the file,” he protested stubbornly.

  “As you like,” said Anderson, obviously convinced that the concession was foolish; but then the whole business had been so irregularly handled.

  “Why not consider first who’s cleared by the various inquiries, and who is not?” Gambrell boldly proposed.

  “And begin with the Home Secretary—in theory he seems to have confessed to the murder.”

  “Plainly ridiculous,” Anderson said severely. “First of all, this business about the pistol being sent through the post, loaded—”

  “There are people who break the rules of the Post Office,” Gambrell mildly suggested.

  “Idiot! I didn’t mean that. But who ever heard of a butler handing a parcel to the Home Secretary in person just because it was marked Personal and Private and Urgent and all the rest? Aren’t those precisely the parcels which are always opened by a third party?”

  Gambrell nodded.

  “The fact is, the public imagine that a Cabinet Minister has to keep his own secrets,” the Principal Private Secretary was off upon his favourite hobby-horse. His Assistant was hard put to it to unseat him, mainly by referring to the obvious ease with which criminals could dispose of Home Secretaries if Home Secretaries and their butlers really behaved like that.

  “Quite so. And in the next place there’s this business about a single-handed trip to a by-election. Appar ently some extraordinary kind of lunch-hour gathering, too. We know, my dear Gambrell, that Brackenthorpe didn’t go off by himself like that, and never does. The chauffeur took queer, and all that nonsense. Really, the public. …”

  “The less said about motor-cars the better, in these days of economy,” said Gambrell. “If the Press got to hear about the carryings-on of the Cabinet, they’d shout louder than ever for us to have our pay docked!”

  “Anyhow,” Anderson went on, resuming his pipe, “we know that the Home Secretary’s story is absurd.” He struck a match. “And all that that implies,” he added softly. “Accordingly, we wash out the Home Secretary. Who’s next, in order of precedence?”

  “The Archbishop should have come first, I fancy?” Gambrell answered.

  “The Archbishop is obviously cleared,” Anderson pronounced, “Wimsey does that—all that stuff about the bleeding. Mills saw the Archbishop off, then ca
me back and found Hope-Fairweather polishing the parquet; then Hope-Fairweather went—and about the same time Littleton found the blood still running. The Archbishop is indubitably innocent.”

  Gambrell agreed that that was so. “But all the same,” he demanded, “why that story he—or his chaplain—told Sheringham?”

  “Isn’t that pretty plain?”

  “Is it? That lie about business with Canon Pritchard, when the Canon wasn’t in Winborough at all at the time.”

  “Don’t you see, my dear Gambrell? The Archbishop knew he was in a bit of a fix, or thought he was. As we know from the servants’ evidence, he did have the hell of a row with Comstock. And then Sir John Saumarez fairly picked on him—professional jealousy, if you ask me. And after that séance—mind you, Sir John produced no real evidence, but I daresay he reconstructed the interview up to a point—”

  “You mean that Anselm Medium went home and got his chaplain to fake up a good story?”

  “Yes. And it was a good story—all that about the signed article. Just the kind of thing the Archbishop would have liked to pull off.”

  Anderson laughed, and Gambrell followed suit.

  “Pretty cool, wasn’t it? To produce a letter which you haven’t posted as proof that you’re telling the truth about an interview to which the letter refers? That was what made me wonder. … But I agree with you, Anderson. Wimsey has cleared the Church.”

  Anderson awaited the next candidate for clearance.

  “Littleton,” Gambrell announced.

  “Pity we’ve washed out the Home Secretary,” said Anderson, knocking out his pipe crossly into the waste-paper basket, and then stooping to prevent a conflagration. “His evidence cleared Littleton.”

  “Incidentally, that was another weak point in his story,” Gambrell observed. “He said he stood there staring at the window, and though he saw Littleton, he never saw Hope-Fairweather. Yet Hope-Fairweather must have been in full view when he came to the drawer of the desk. Look at the plan.”

  “Besides which, is it credible that Brackenthorpe continued to stare for a long enough time for Hope-Fairweather and Littleton to go and get their cars and drive out of the grounds? But don’t let us waste time. We’ve washed out the Home Secretary.”

  His tone suggested satisfaction at the performance.

  “By the way, about this plan of Hursley Lodge,” Gambrell pursued another side track. “There’s no scale, but according to Wimsey, it’s only thirty feet from the window to the wall.”

  “Well? Pretty small, I know, but—”

  “It’s true there’s no scale—” Gambrell went on.

  “And yet the Home Secretary preferred to rely upon the local police, who produced the plan,” the other interrupted.

  “Yes. But—well, I think Wimsey guessed at the distance from the size of the room. What he ought to have done, if he hadn’t time to measure, was to judge by the garage. Ten foot wide, at least; which adds ten foot to the distance from window to garden wall.”

  Anderson fidgetted impatiently with the file.

  “I was only going to say,” Gambrell persevered, “that I don’t believe that a bullet fired from one of those little pistols would still be rising at forty feet, which further disproves the Home Secretary’s story.”

  “One theory at a time,” Anderson requested, “or since you prefer it so, one person at a time. Littleton’s next, I think.”

  “I must admit,” said Gambrell slowly, “that I don’t quite see how to clear him conclusively. We’d better look into the various time-tables—”

  “No, no. Not yet. Put him on a list of Judgment Suspended.”

  “Mills, too, in that case.”

  “If you like. It seems most improbable that he did the trick. I mean to say, to choose a time when the house was crawling with people—”

  “You don’t think that may have been the very reason?”

  Anderson frowned.

  “Gambrell, you’ve been reading detective stories. You can’t put down Mills, because Wimsey surely has cleared him. Yes; here we are. Either Littleton or Mills is cleared. If Littleton’s story is true, that the blood was still flowing when he went into the study, then Mills can’t possibly be guilty of Comstock’s murder. On the other hand, if Littleton is lying—but I don’t see what possible motive he can have unless he’s guilty himself.”

  “In either case, then, Mills is innocent,” Gambrell said, but he did not look altogether satisfied. “I suppose Wimsey is right about Mills?”

  “It’s a matter of time-table,” Anderson replied. “A good many of the details which are down on one list or another are more or less irrelevant—at this stage. I assume twelve-sixteen, as per Wimsey, for the time when Littleton found the bleeding corpse—that seems to be about right, whichever way you look at it. Now there’s a brief space of time, twelve-eleven to twelve-twelve, or say twelve-twelve and a half, when Mills was alone. But if he’d done the shooting then, the wound would not have been bleeding at twelve-sixteen. I wonder, though. If we assume another half-minute error in Wimsey’s time-table and put Littleton’s entry at twelve-fifteen and a half—that’s three minutes. I wonder whether the blood would flow as long as that?”

  “Matter for the experts?” Gambrell suggested.

  “Yes. But assuming it to be possible, it seems to me more likely that Hope-Fairweather than Mills did the shooting.”

  “I don’t see that.”

  “It’s just that Mills knew that Littleton ought to be in the drawing-room. If he really looked in and didn’t see him, it seems to me incredible that he would have then and there risked everything—with an Assistant Commissioner of Police loose somewhere, but Mills wouldn’t have known where, on the premises.”

  “If he’s lying—if he did see Littleton in the drawing-room?”

  “In that case, would he have gone, the second after he’d shot Comstock, to interview Hope-Fairweather? One unwelcome visitor had already walked in unannounced into the study that morning—and that really is the strongest argument of all, it seems to me, for Mills’s innocence.”

  Gambrell still looked a little uncertain.

  “Well, if you still aren’t convinced, put down Mills with Littleton on your ‘Still Suspected’ list; but I insist that you put an asterisk against his name, to indicate ‘Highly Improbable.’ Now who’s next?”

  “I suppose it ought to be Hope-Fairweather. But after what you’ve just said—about the time-table ruling him out unless there’s a fairly substantial error in it—”

  “I don’t deny that there may be. It’s pretty difficult to estimate to a second how long it took Mills to see the Archbishop off, for example.”

  “Still, before we tackle him, how about the unknown lady?”

  “Mrs. Arbuthnot, you mean. Well?”

  “There’s this much to be said against her, Anderson, that the easiest way to have shot Comstock was from outside.”

  “Nonsense,” said Anderson. “Shot in the left temple —the ‘inside’ one, so to call it!”

  “Yes, but obviously if a lady appeared at the window, Comstock would have turned towards her. … Remember the marks of a lady’s shoes outside the window? Mrs. Bradley found them, or Mrs. Bradley’s girl friend.”

  Anderson laughed, all “man-of-the-world-with-more-experience-than-you-my-young-friend.”

  “Quite a number of ladies walked on Comstock’s grass from time to time,” he said. “But that’s only one point. The other is about the temple. When I read that someone has been struck on the temple, I always mean right on the side of the head. You know, ‘going grey on the temples,’ and so on. I dare say that technically the temple includes the forehead above the eye; but at all events I made inquiries in this case—the bullet entered the side of the head, from the side. That clear? Very well: then whoever shot Comstock wasn’t standing face to face with him. And I really don’t see him making a point of presenting his profile to a lady who appeared from nowhere outside his window.”

 
“All right,” Gambrell agreed hurriedly. “All the same, there’s some funny stuff about Hope-Fairweather and his lady friends. All this about Lady Phyllis and—”

  “I don’t see it, Gambrell. The story which Sheringham put together may very well be true. I imagine that Hope-Fairweather dined with his niece by marriage before he went on to the party where he met Lady Phyllis. I imagine that Mr. Mills was ‘acting a lie’ when he let Mrs. Bradley assume that his affair—oh, perhaps only an affair of business—had been with a typist. And I can quite understand that Lady Phyllis was thoroughly upset when she heard that her dear Sir Charles was mixed up in the Hursley Lodge business—either because he’d been there with an unknown female or because Mills obviously wasn’t above a bit of quiet blackmail.”

  “That’s all very well,” Gambrell objected, “but remember that Hope-Fairweather’s companion was only his deceased wife’s niece. To suggest that Lady Phyllis would have been jealous—”

  “It’s not an important point,” Anderson admitted, refilling his pipe. “But it’s pretty plain that Hope-Fairweather’s journey—or its purpose—was a thing he would want to keep quiet from Lady Phyllis. Mrs. Arbuthnot, qua Pytchley, may be a desirable relative, but if Comstock was blackmailing her … On the other hand, the news that Hope-Fairweather had been to Hursley Lodge and might have heard something from Mills would upset Lady Phyllis pretty thoroughly. It seems to me that both of ’em had good reason for being a bit secretive.”

  “I see that,” said Gambrell slowly. “You think it’s certain, then, that Mrs. Arbuthnot didn’t do the shooting?”

  “No, I won’t go so far as that—yet. In my opinion, we can’t consider her without considering Hope-Fairweather’s story. And the Home Secretary’s.”

  “What, again?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Anderson answered; his smile was not so much apologetic as self-satisfied. “Let’s consider Hope-Fairweather’s story. But before we do that, tell me what is the outstanding quality in a good Chief Whip?”