Trent's Own Case

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘A man I know,’ Trent said as they walked towards the tenth tee, ‘is fond of calling golf the silliest of games.’

  ‘If he plays golf,’ Verney said, ‘it’s excusable in a way. It’s only a sort of swearing. It would probably mean that he was playing below his form, and couldn’t make out what he was doing wrong. You get the extreme form of it in the man who chucks his clubs into the sea, and swears he will never touch one again, and then turns up at the first tee next morning with a new outfit. But if the man you mention doesn’t play, I should think he was the silliest of your friends.’

  ‘No,’ Trent said, ‘he is far from that. He has a very fine mind. But he believes it is his duty to lash the age, modern life being made up entirely, in his view, of follies and corruptions. So when he sees nine out of ten of the people he knows doing any particular thing, he assumes it must be wrong or idiotic, and he feels he has to castigate it.’

  ‘Well, golf will survive it, I daresay,’ Verney said. ‘If it has survived all the silly fuss that has been made about it by the golf-maniacs, it isn’t likely to be hurt by the golfophobes. Especially as so many of them get unexpectedly converted, and drive everybody frantic by talking about their own performances. Anyhow, people who lash the age don’t get too much attention paid to them, as a rule, do they?—even when what they say is perfectly right.’

  ‘I wouldn’t quite say that,’ Trent answered, as he teed his ball. ‘They get attention enough, I think—in fact, they are quite popular, and are expected to say the most amusing things. Like comic colonels when they get into bunkers.’

  Trent was sincere in his compliments upon the brilliant three which gave Verney the lead at the eleventh hole. At the next, Trent drew level again, and on the thirteenth tee the honour was his.

  This was an uphill beat, with a belt of thick wood flanking the fairway on the left side, and a high hedge on the right. Half-way up the slope could be seen white posts on either side, marking the direction of a public footpath which led straight across the fairway from a gate in the fence to an opening in the wood; and it was at this gate that Trent was glancing with the tail of his eye as he teed his ball.

  ‘It’s a funny thing about the number thirteen,’ he remarked, ‘that though the superstition about it is so strong, you never find a golf course without a thirteenth hole. It is often left out when houses are being given numbers, or almost anything else, except golf-holes. Perhaps they are immune because somebody has got to lose the hole anyhow, and that may count as the bad luck. All the same, lots of people don’t like the thirteenth, simply because of the number.’

  Verney heard this with a clouded brow. ‘I know,’ he said briefly; and Trent turned to grounding the club behind his ball.

  ‘Hold hard!’ Verney said, suddenly. ‘You can’t go yet. Someone’s crossing the fairway. You might easily hit—’ Here he broke off with a sharp catching of the breath, and the bag of clubs that he was holding fell to the ground with a clatter.

  Trent, staring at him, then up the slope before them, was the picture of bewilderment and concern. ‘Someone crossing!’ he repeated blankly. ‘You must be dreaming, my dear chap! Aren’t you well?’

  The question needed no answer; for Verney, supporting himself against a tree-trunk, was the colour of paper. His eyes still fixed ahead, he passed a hand across his bare forehead and seemed to breathe with difficulty. At length he turned a lamentable look upon Trent, and attempted to rally himself.

  ‘No, not quite well,’ he panted. ‘Nothing really wrong, though.’ He pressed a hand over his heart. ‘I get taken—this way—sometimes. Fancying things—and feeling pretty sick. It soon passes off.’

  Trent spoke words of sympathy. ‘Well, it’s a bad finish to a good game,’ he ended, picking up his ball. ‘You don’t feel like going on, I’m sure.’

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ Verney declared with vehemence, his eyes still turned fearfully towards the distant opening in the wood. ‘I can’t go on, really—not up that hill. I dare not try. These attacks—they leave me in a devil of a state. I’m terribly sorry.’ He wetted his handkerchief with water from the tee-box, and pressed it to his forehead. ‘Do you mind if we walk back now?’

  ‘It isn’t far,’ Trent said. ‘I’ll carry your clubs.’ But this Verney would not allow. He grew more composed as they made their way towards the clubhouse, but he still looked shaken, and made brief and disjointed replies to Trent’s efforts to make conversation. He refused a drink at the bar, though evidently not without an inward struggle; but he thankfully accepted a cup of coffee, and he seemed to be almost restored when he took his seat beside Trent for the run back to town.

  A glance told Trent that the yellow car was gone from its halting-place in the lane near the course. It was five minutes later, as they passed a crossroads inn, that he had another glimpse of it drawn up beside the building. He saw with satisfaction that it was empty. The affair was going according to plan.

  A long, straight stretch of houseless country road now opened before them, a few pedestrian figures dotting its length. A moment later there came a strangled exclamation of terror from the man at his side.

  ‘He’s there!’ Verney gasped in a dreadful voice. ‘He’s there—again!’

  ‘Where do you mean?’ Trent asked in a carefully casual tone, as though resolved to discourage any outbreak of hysteria in his companion.

  ‘On the footpath—right on ahead there—walking with his back to us. Good heaven! Can’t you see?’

  ‘I see two women,’ Trent replied, grimly staring before him, ‘with a dog on a lead.’ And this was true.

  ‘The old man—with his bag. We’re going to pass him. I won’t see his face!’ Verney bent down and covered his eyes with his hands, shuddering violently.

  Trent slackened the pace of the car, and said nothing while Verney gradually recovered himself. He sat crouched in his corner, a hand still shading his eyes, and never looking out of the car, right, left or ahead. When the yellow car presently overtook and passed them with a nerve-racking screech, he did not glance at it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last in a low tone, ‘for giving such a performance. I’ve never been as bad as this before—can’t understand it.’

  ‘You’ll have to see a doctor at once, won’t you?’ Trent said conversationally. ‘It isn’t any use letting yourself get worked up about it; there can’t be anything much that’s wrong. Why, you were the picture of health an hour ago. You’ll be ordered a rest, I expect, and in a short time you’ll be as fit as the proverbial flea. But now, we shall be passing my place in a minute, and you must come in and have a restorative—anything you like, from tea to sal volatile, not to mention Christian drinks. You know,’ he added seriously, ‘you seemed to be a little more upset after that second—er—attack than you were after the first. I really think you need a bracer of some sort.’ And Verney, with genuine gratitude, agreed to the suggestion.

  The car came to rest before Trent’s little house and studio in Grove End Road. ‘Here we are,’ he said, as he opened the front door and made way for Verney to enter. ‘On the right is the door of my mean and virtually uninhabitable sitting-room, as Kai Lung would say. Inside it you will find a few characterless arm-chairs, a very commonplace fire, and waiting ready for us, a few drinks guaranteed to sting like an adder and bite like a serpent. For you, perhaps, a brandy and— Why, what the devil’s wrong now, man?’

  For Verney, entering the room first, had fallen back against Trent with a cry. ‘There!’ he gasped. ‘It’s there!’

  ‘What d’you mean? Where? For the Lord’s sake, get a hold on yourself, Verney,’ Trent said roughly, and shook the trembling wretch by the shoulders. ‘Tell yourself it isn’t real, whatever it is. Tell yourself it’s fancy. Go and shove your fist through it. There’s no ghost there, Verney; it’s just your imagination—no ghost at all. Nerves out of order, that’s all that’s the matter; or tummy gone wrong—like the chap in Kipling, don’t you remember? When he saw what he thought
he saw, it got up out of the chair and walked into the back room; but there was nothing there really.’

  ‘That’s what it’s doing! That’s what it’s doing!’ Verney sobbed, clutching his arm. ‘Getting up from that chair at the writing-table—going into the other room—always with its back to me. There! It’s shut the door—didn’t you see? It’s in there—in there, I tell you! My God! If it comes out, and I see the face— Let me go, damn you! Stand away from that door, get out of my way, or I’ll kill you too! Let me out!’ And he grappled furiously with Trent, whose broad shoulders were planted now against the door by which they had entered the room.

  ‘Not till you tell me what you saw—who it was you saw,’ Trent panted, his grip locked round the other’s arms and body.

  ‘James Randolph, you devil!’ Verney screamed. ‘Old James Randolph! Let me out!’

  ‘James Randolph is dead, Verney. James Randolph was murdered. How could you see a dead man? Why should he come for you, Verney? Why should he come for you, Verney? Why should he—’

  ‘Because I did it, because I killed him! Now will you let me go? Ah! You won’t, because I tried to put it on to you— Yes, I did, I confess it, only let me go, for pity’s sake, Trent. Have mercy! I’ll tell everything, I’ll give myself up for the murder, I’ll do anything you ask, only let me— Oh God!’ For he had caught a slight sound from the direction of the door leading to the studio. ‘Look! The door’s moving, it’s opening!’ And again he struggled madly to escape.

  A horrible sound broke from Verney’s lips as he felt a light touch on his shoulder. But the figure that met his starting eyes as he whirled round was no phantom. A tall, ungainly man with a basilisk eye stood there: and he said, ‘Henry Malcolm Verney, I am a police officer, and I arrest you for the murder of James Randolph by shooting him on the twelfth of this month.’

  Inspector Bligh then administered the usual caution.

  CHAPTER XXI

  AUNT JUDITH KNITS

  CHIEF INSPECTOR BLIGH lowered himself by sections into an armchair in Trent’s studio, on the evening of the day following that of Verney’s arrest and removal. Bryan Fairman, who had been ‘bound over’ at Newhaven that morning, and Miss Yates, just returned from her visit to Rome, were already there. They had been Trent’s guests at dinner; and the old lady’s fingers were actively busy with some kind of knitting that seemed not to prevent her taking the keenest interest in all that passed.

  ‘He went quietly enough,’ Mr Bligh told them. ‘In fact, he was pretty well prostrated by what he had been put through. But he had got enough hold on himself, by the time he was charged at Marlborough Street this morning, to refuse to say anything at all. He’ll need to do a lot of thinking to get himself out of the fix he’s in. He’s the kind that will very likely try to short-circuit the case by doing himself a mischief; but they’ll see after that at Brixton. As it is, we shall have everything in order very nicely for the adjourned inquest on Friday. You’re a clever dog,’ he added, turning a thoughtful eye on his host.

  ‘If rather a dirty one, you mean,’ Trent suggested, clasping his fingers behind his head. ‘It’s true, I didn’t feel disposed to deal very gently with a man who had been plotting for weeks to get me hanged for a murder he did himself. Verney is a dangerous, treacherous beast, but there wasn’t enough evidence for you to go on, as you said yourself, and I had to try and get what was wanted, simply in self-defence. To tell the truth, it worked out better than I ever hoped.’

  ‘Same here,’ said Mr Bligh succinctly; then he laughed a little. ‘I wish you could have seen Bloom’s face—that’s my shorthand man—when Verney got as far as saying he would give himself up for the murder. I started for the door when we heard that, and Bloom cocked his eye at me, grinning, as much as to say, “Don’t you wish we could put over these sort of games?”’

  ‘And why can’t you?’ Miss Yates inquired.

  ‘Because, ma’am,’ the inspector explained stiffly, ‘if a person in authority induces a suspected person to make a statement, it isn’t evidence. That was why Bloom grinned. But there wasn’t much grin about Mr Randolph,’ he added reflectively. ‘Why, when he came in to us through that door, what with the farmer’s hat, and the little bag, and the set look on his face, he was so exactly like his father that it almost made me jump. He slung down the hat and bag, and he says to me, “If you need any assistance in taking him, Officer, I’m your man. If it was legal,” he says, “I’d handle him myself, and be glad of the chance.”’

  ‘Well, you and he might have liked the job: I didn’t,’ Trent said, ‘I simply wanted that engaging young fellow put in a safe place, where he couldn’t get at me or anyone else he happened to take a dislike to. I shall be stiff for a week, I think. As for what the law will do to him now, it is no business of mine, but he will deserve it a lot more than many men do who have to face the same thing.’

  Fairman confirmed this with a judicial nod. ‘He ought to have been content with shooting Randolph,’ he said severely.

  ‘Just so; there ought to be moderation in all things,’ Trent agreed.

  Miss Yates, still knitting composedly, observed without looking up, ‘I know very well what it is that Inspector Bligh has very nearly taken out of his pocket half a dozen times in the last five minutes. Philip knows I haven’t the least objection, so will you all please smoke?’

  Mr Bligh thankfully accepted this suggestion, and Fairman, being supplied with a long cigar, did likewise. Miss Yates’s faintly-clicking needles now seemed to signal expectation in a code of their own, and Trent responded to it.

  ‘I had been telling them all about the case before you came,’ he said to the inspector, ‘and I had just finished speaking of the visit paid to me by that poor devil Raught.’

  ‘That dangerous criminal Raught, you mean,’ Mr Bligh growled. ‘When I think of that fellow lying up all that time under our very noses, where I could almost have put out my hand and touched him—’

  ‘Now I think,’ Miss Yates interposed, ‘we ought not to talk of the poor wretch like that now he is dead—even if he did shoot a man nobody is likely to miss.’

  ‘Never mind,’ Trent soothed the disconcerted inspector. ‘You’ll get over it in time. As I was saying, I had been telling them all about how he came here, and all that he said, just as I told you last week—including the strange story of the man that he caught sight of going into No. 5 a little after seven o’clock on the night of the crime. And I was going to tell them how it was that that story put me, for the first time, definitely on the track of Verney.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me that,’ the inspector observed.

  ‘No; because it wasn’t of any immediate importance just then. I told you the material points of the case that built itself up against Verney, once I began to take him seriously as a suspect. But I thought all of you might find it interesting to hear what it was that turned my nose in his direction, so to speak, because it shows how useful luck is in matters of this sort. Inspector Bligh would admit that, if he ever admitted anything. He would tell you that he would rather have a good fat slice of luck in any investigation than the most brilliant piece of sleuthing work.’

  The inspector, apparently rapt in contemplation of the toe of his left boot, made no remark.

  ‘In this case,’ Trent resumed, ‘it was just a chance recollection that came to me while listening to Raught; something that I hadn’t remembered for years until then. It started from Raught’s saying that the man he saw going into Randolph’s place looked like what he called a gentleman. He explained that by saying that the man carried himself well, and was in evening dress, and was, he thought, not a short man. Now you remember that all he saw was the fellow’s back-view, and that for only a few seconds; so I got him to revise his impressions, and he then added that the man was wearing an overcoat, a white scarf and a tall hat.’

  ‘Well, naturally,’ Fairman interjected. ‘A coat and scarf and a tall hat—it’s a sort of uniform when you’re in evening dress. But I
don’t see how that could help you to spot the wearer. For all you could tell from Raught’s account, it might have been one of hundreds who would be about at that hour of the evening in the West End.’

  Trent waved him a cordial assent. ‘O wild West End, thou breath of London’s being, as the poet sings. As you say, there might have been hundreds of them. Put the figure higher if you like. Ten thousand times ten thousand, in sparkling raiment bright, may have been thronging up the slopes of Piccadilly or any neighbouring thoroughfare at the time. But I was thinking about the rather smaller number of people who were more or less mixed up in the Randolph affair, and I was wondering which of them this rear elevation described by Raught might have belonged to.’

  ‘There seem to have been enough of them, at that,’ Fairman observed grimly. ‘And as for the description, the visitor might have been any of us in this room, as far as I can see.’

  Miss Yates, still knitting, remarked tranquilly: ‘It couldn’t have been me.’

  The sniff evoked by this frivolity was not quite suppressed by Fairman; but the sound of it was lost in Trent’s immediate comment.

  ‘There you are! That’s the point, or one of the points. If you remember, Inspector, once in the dim damned days beyond recall there was some morbid idea—which you refrained from mentioning to me—about a lady being in the case. But the mysterious visitor wasn’t a woman.’

  Mr Bligh, challenged, eyed him with severity. ‘So you say now,’ he remarked. ‘We all know who it was now. But how could you be sure then that what Raught saw wasn’t a woman masquerading as a man?’

  Trent laughed. ‘Oh well! You can argue that. It might have been the Mayoress of Bruddersfield dressed up as the Ruritanian Chargé d’Affaires. But really the only woman who was in question at all was Eunice Faviell, wasn’t it? We all know what she looks like. We all know that, however she was dressed, and from whatever angle she was regarded, she couldn’t possibly suggest the idea of a gentleman. No gentleman would suggest such an idea. If she impersonated a man at all, she would look like something that—’