Trent's Own Case

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘You don’t know if my boss is ready to go—Mr Bowes, that is?’ the man asked. ‘Thank you, sir; I’ll risk it.’

  ‘You know Mr Verney, I expect, if you are here often,’ Trent said as he lighted the chauffeur’s cigarette and his own. ‘What sort of a car has he got?’

  ‘A Ludford Comet,’ the chauffeur said. ‘She’s old, but she’s a nice-looking bus still, and got plenty of work in her, makes very little noise if she ain’t shoved, good acceleration—’ The catalogue of details ended with, ‘Mr Verney told me what he gave for her, second hand, and I told him he had a bargain.’

  ‘You seem to know all about the car.’

  ‘I did ought to,’ the chauffeur said. ‘I have been looking after it for more than a year. It’s kept in our garage, where there is space for two big cars, and Mr Bowes has only got the one. Mr Verney has regularly got on the right side of the boss, both of them being as keen as what they are about this here place. I don’t say they ain’t right to be, mind you. I only wish I’d had any of them advantages in Bermondsey, when I was a young chap. When Mr Verney got his car, the boss insisted on his keeping it at our place, and he didn’t say no, which you might say it would be wicked waste if he had done, the space being going begging, and him living quite near at hand in Purvis Crescent. Besides, it’s a pleasure to do anything for a gentleman like him.’

  ‘Where does Mr Bowes live, then?’ Trent asked. ‘It’s a queer thing about this part of London, that a well-to-do district joins on to a district like this so suddenly as it does.’

  ‘That’s right, it does,’ the chauffeur said. ‘Our place, which Silkwood is the name of the house, is less than a minute’s run up the main road, corner of Pilbeam Road. Mr Bowes comes here nearly every day of his life, all but a fortnight in Torquay now and again.’

  ‘You have been there lately, haven’t you?’ Trent asked. ‘I don’t know it myself, but I know a lot of people make a habit of going there.’

  ‘We only came back a week ago,’ the chauffeur said. ‘No, it ain’t so bad. Give me Margate for a blow of sea air; Torquay makes me feel like I was in Kew Gardens of a Whit Monday. But anything for a change, I say. You can’t help liking the boss, but the life here is a bit one-sided. Might as well be a goldfish in a bowl, almost. He couldn’t take more interest in these lads, not if they were all his own sons. If we don’t come here, we go to a football or cricket match when the Randolph team is playing; or if it’s the day for one of these here steeplechases through London that Mr Verney is so keen about, the boss will sit at his window at home and watch them a-trotting past. There’d be a bit more variety, if I had my way. But there! It’s a good job, and you can’t have everything, can you?’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to have damaged your health or happiness, anyway,’ Trent said as he took his seat in his own car, and started the engine.

  ‘Yes, I’m still up and about,’ the chauffeur grinned. ‘Good-night, sir.’

  As the chauffeur had estimated, it was less than a minute later that Trent checked his car and drove slowly past the house Silkwood. This pleasing, even poetic, name turned out to be attached to a large, glum-looking, early-Victorian double-fronted mansion, its frowning portico approached by a flight of stone steps, and a cockatoo in a gilded cage gravely surveying the busy traffic of the Willesley Road from one of the front windows. In an earlier day, it could be guessed, Silkwood had afforded accommodation for a large family and a commensurate domestic establishment. The fact that it was now the residence of one unmarried old gentleman of a retiring nature was, Trent thought, among those facts with which the foreign student of English character and customs is doomed to wrestle in vain.

  The entrance to the garage was round the corner in Pilbeam Road, a smaller and much more quiet thoroughfare, with the wall of a row of tennis courts running along its opposite side. Turning into this backwater of the traffic stream, Trent stopped his car and made a brief reconnaissance. The garage, converted from its use as coach-house and stable for some Thackerayan business magnate, was entered by a high wooden double door; and one leaf of this being at the moment left open, it could be seen that it gave inwards upon a small paved yard. At the other end of the yard was the garage itself, also open-doored, clean, dry and, as the chauffeur had said, spacious enough.

  In the farther corner of it stood a car—a smaller car than Mr Bowes’s—a car that Trent sincerely wished could be endowed with the power of speech divinely conferred on Balaam’s donkey, or the horse of Patroclus.

  But if the car was dumb, the garage and its situation had plenty to say for themselves; fully as much, indeed, as Trent had dared to hope.

  When Trent pulled up, a little later, before the vast red pile of the Woburn Hotel, it was nearly half-past seven. He was told at the reception office that no one of the name of Randolph was staying in the place; but when, recollecting himself, he inquired for Mr J. B. Waters, of Salisbury, he found that he was fortunate. Mr Waters was still staying at the hotel; he had, as it chanced, come in some ten minutes before, and was probably in his room.

  James Randolph, when he came down with Trent’s card in his hand, did not appear displeased with life, but he owned to being a little tired of his own company, and immediately suggested that anything Trent wished to talk to him about could be more comfortably discussed over a drink in the lounge. ‘It was lucky,’ he remarked when he had given his order to the waiter, ‘you thought of asking for me by the name of Waters. I have used it for so many years now that it’s hard for me to remember what my right name is; but even if I had done, I should not have put up here as James Randolph. The news would have been all over the place in a minute, and I shouldn’t have had any peace till the papers had got the whole story. I don’t want to be bothered more than I can help, and it will all come out soon enough, when my application comes before the Court. I suppose I can speak to you in confidence, Mr Trent, as the inspector said. You are here about something connected with the police inquiries, I take it.’

  ‘Connected with them—yes,’ Trent said. ‘I am busy on a line of inquiry which I don’t believe the police have been giving attention to. But it has got to the point now where I am going to put all my results, such as they are, before Inspector Bligh. In fact, my intention is to put it in writing and post it to him tonight; only I wanted to see you first if I could find you.’

  Randolph looked at him warily. ‘I’ll be hanged if I see where I come in,’ he observed.

  ‘You don’t come in if you would rather not; but if you decline, Mr Randolph, it is going to make it much more difficult to prove what I believe to be the truth about your father’s death. I have a plan in my head which I should like to lay before you. It depends entirely on your co-operation.’

  ‘You can have that, and welcome,’ Randolph said; adding cautiously, ‘That’s to say, if the plan seems to me as good as it seems to you. It’s not my way to go into anything blindfold, you know; but I suppose you wouldn’t suggest that.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Trent said. ‘My idea is to put all my cards on the table, Mr Randolph, and to tell you, first, everything I have discovered, and next, the method we can try for getting proof of what I am convinced is the truth. Then, if you think I am wrong, or if you don’t like my proposal, you have only to say so.’

  ‘Well, you can’t say fairer than that,’ Randolph admitted. ‘I’m not the sort of chap that can’t say no, if he feels that way. Tell you what, Mr Trent; this looks like being a yarn that will take some time, and besides that, we might as well be quite sure we are not overheard. How about having a bit of dinner with me here—it’s none too early for me, I can tell you—and afterwards we can go into the matter in my room? I have driven up to Cambridge and back today, to look into a business there which I have some idea of taking over, and I am as sharp-set as I ever expect to be in my life. I hope you’re the same. What do you say?’

  Trent, who felt himself confirmed in his first instinctive liking for Randolph’s very direct and unornamented per
sonality, said yes, and said it with cordiality. They found a table for themselves in the large, fully-populated dining-room. Trent had never yet tested the reputation the hotel possessed, in a quiet way, for cookery of the more substantial sort; and he now found it to be very well deserved. James Randolph declared his conviction that, when you were hungry, there was nothing to touch the right kind of beefsteak done in the right way; and he mentioned the details of rightness with an assurance that told of careful thought as well as experience. He spoke highly too of boiled cabbage with a dash of vinegar. Trent, who since his schooldays had indulged a prejudice against precisely these two articles of diet, declared in favour of saddle of mutton; but he joined his host with enthusiasm in drinking what Randolph described as the best beer he had ever found in London.

  ‘This beer reminds me,’ Trent said, ‘of all that the poets have ever said about beer. It is more than you might think, Mr Randolph. You may not care about poetry; I like it myself. This stuff makes me think of what one of them calls it—“that mild, luxurious, and artful beverage, beer.’’’

  ‘It isn’t only the beer; it’s the way it’s looked after,’ Randolph answered thoughtfully. ‘As for poetry, you are quite right, it isn’t much in my line; but any poet that understands beer is a poet I can understand—anyhow, when he’s on that subject. I am going to be a rich man now, by what I can see of it; but I don’t reckon I shall ever give up beer till it gives up me. Some chaps have to knock it off, you know, in their old age; I only hope I shan’t be one of them.’

  ‘When you say you are going to be a rich man,’ Trent hazarded, ‘you mean that there isn’t any difficulty about your claim to your father’s estate.’

  ‘Nought to speak of,’ Randolph answered. ‘Muirhead & Soames say they have ought to have old Mrs Waters’s evidence about my identity, and she is laid up with a sprained ankle, so they can’t get it till she is able to travel. But they treat me as if it was all settled. They know there isn’t a will, you see. The old man made it quite plain to them, before his death, that there wasn’t one, and never had been one, and that he was for the first time in his life thinking about making one. In fact, he even told them the name of the person who would probably come in for most of the money. It would surprise you to hear who it was, if I was at liberty to tell you.’

  ‘I don’t think it would, really,’ Trent said. ‘You see, your father told her himself, just before his death.’

  ‘Did he, by gum?’ exclaimed Randolph.

  ‘Yes; and she told me, only two days ago. I know her very well. In fact, I thought it was right for me, as a friend, to advise her that she had nothing to expect as a result of your father’s death, because the idea of her being his nearest living relative was not correct.’

  James Randolph shot a queer glance at his guest, the while he helped himself prodigally to toasted cheese. ‘So that was your advice to her,’ he remarked after a slight pause. ‘Well, we were going to keep private matters for our talk upstairs, now I come to think of it.’ He turned the conversation back to the subject of food, mentioning the curious substances that many people nowadays preferred to eat. One of his best mechanics, he said, a man who earned good money, insisted on having a pound of tinned salmon for his evening meal every day of his life.

  Trent wanted to know if this epicure had ever tried the fresh variety of salmon. ‘He told me,’ Randolph said, ‘he had tried it now and again, but it hadn’t got any taste, and it was waste of money to have it, costing so much more, not to mention the Worcester sauce it needed to make it eatable at all. Then there is another fellow I know who never has but one meal a day, which he takes at lunch-time. There might be some sense in that, perhaps, if it had been something like what we have been having this evening; but all he ever has is porridge and apples and nuts.’

  ‘What does he do for a living?’ Trent inquired.

  ‘It’s nought that requires much hard labour, you may depend,’ Randolph said. ‘He is a quantity-surveyor, if you know what that is.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Trent admitted. ‘But I remember reading of another famous one-meal-a-day man who might be said to have surveyed quantities, in a sense—Dr Fordyce, a professor of chemistry, who lived in days when people dined at four o’clock. You never heard of him? For more than twenty years he always had his one meal at the same chophouse in the City, beginning with half a chicken and a gill of brandy, then a pound and half of grilled rumpsteak with a quart of strong beer, and finally a bottle of port. Afterwards he used to stroll down to Essex Street and lecture to his chemistry class.’

  ‘I should think the chemistry of his inside would have made a lecture worth hearing,’ Randolph observed. ‘And now, Mr Trent, if you feel like a bottle of port on top of your beer, say the word—though you must excuse me from joining you. No? Then let us go upstairs and make ourselves comfortable while you tell me about this business of yours.’ He led the way to the lift, and thence to a large bedroom on the third floor.

  They sat facing each other in the two arm-chairs after Randolph had produced a box of cigars. ‘Before you start,’ he said, ‘there’s something I should like to tell you, as you say you are a friend of Miss Faviell’s. It’s this way. When I heard from the lawyers about all the mess and trouble that was going to result from the old man not having put his affairs in order, I made up my mind that if the money came to me I should do what he ought to have done. Don’t think I mean sharing it all out among other people—no fear! I can use a big fortune myself; I have got my business ideas, and I mean to try them out. But it’s these hospitals and charities and that, which he founded himself, and called by his name, and used to finance entirely out of his own pocket, from hand to mouth, as you might say. My notion is to make a sufficient settlement on each of them, so as they will know where they are.’

  Trent began to say what he thought of this intention, but Randolph cut him short impatiently. ‘That’s nought to make a fuss about. They have got a claim, which any chap that wasn’t a hog would be bound to respect. Besides, they stand in my name, like. As for the others—the charities that had my father on the list of their supporters—they will have to take their luck. I don’t consider myself bound to anything, as far as they go; I haven’t even inquired what they are. What I contribute to charity will be off my own bat, whoever it goes to. But there is one other thing. It is quite certain that the old man meant to do your friend Miss Faviell a bit of good; and now I have stepped into her place.’ Here Randolph showed some signs of embarrassment, and the trace of Yorkshire in his speech became something more apparent. ‘Now this is the point, Mr Trent. I hear from you—I didn’t know it before—that she was informed by the old man of his intention to leave her the residue of his estate, which would have been a lot of money. Now she is a near relation; she had been led to expect something; and I think my father’s intentions ought not to be disregarded altogether. When things are all settled up, I should wish her to accept something substantial, which she could regard in the light of a legacy—and there you have it.’ Randolph leant back in his chair, drew long at his cigar, and gazed through half-closed eyes at Trent.

  ‘It is most generous of you to think of such a thing,’ Trent said.

  ‘It’s nowt o’ t’sort,’ Randolph said atavistically and abruptly. ‘What I mean is, Mr Trent, it’s her having been told about it that makes the difference to me. It she hadn’t been, I shouldn’t have thought of it, I dare say. It’s my own credit I am thinking about.’

  ‘Put it how you like,’ Trent said laughing. ‘It’s quite possible she would refuse to accept anything, from what I know of her. She can support herself well enough—and if she did accept anything,’ he added a little bitterly, ‘it wouldn’t stay in her possession long, probably.’ He was thinking of the insatiable Wetherill; for the news of the death of that ornament of English letters had not yet reached him.

  ‘If you mean that she is a brass-finisher, she is not the only one of her sex, by what I hear,’ Randolph remarked. ‘Anyhow, tha
t’s her business. Well, keep all this to yourself, Mr Trent, if you please. I only mentioned it to you in the hope of hearing what I have just heard—I mean, what sort of a position she is in. We’ll see what she says about my notion when the time comes. And now, what was it that you were wanting to put before me?’

  Trent put it before him.

  James Randolph listened with close attention, his face grown set and harsh. Now and then he shot out a question, but he made no comment.

  ‘There!’ Trent said in conclusion. ‘That’s my case, as the lawyers say. What do you think about it?’

  Randolph’s answer was brief and blasphemous, but it made very clear his conviction that Trent’s case was a sound one. He rose to his feet, squared his shoulders, and thrust his hands deep into his pockets. ‘Now, Mr Trent,’ he said, ‘let’s hear what you propose. There’s nought much I wouldn’t do, after what you’ve told me; so fire away.’

  As Trent set forth his scheme, Randolph’s features relaxed into a grim smile. ‘It’s a rum notion, sure enough,’ he said at last, ‘but it might come off, and it’s well worth trying, if what you say about me is correct. Come to think of it, Inspector Bligh said the same, that day I turned up at Newbury Place; and he put it pretty strong, too. All right; you can count me in. It’s not as if you had given me much to do—what they call a walking-on part, and short at that. It’s lucky it is, because I’m no actor.’

  ‘You haven’t got to act at all,’ Trent assured him. ‘You have only got to be yourself. Now about the arrangements. Tomorrow is Saturday, and I have to see Dr Fairman—in the prison infirmary, you know, as I told you. But we have got to look over the scene of action and get it all properly planned out; so on Sunday morning, if it’s convenient, we can do that. Then on the Monday morning we can see about getting your own little adornments; and then—’