Trent's Own Case

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘Well, I have told you what were the points that I recalled from that conversation, while I was turning over the idea that Verney might be the guilty man. And then, apart from all that, I remembered one little reason I had already for thinking that Verney might not be an absolutely flawless mirror of sincerity.’

  Fairman raised his eyebrows. ‘How was that?’ he asked. ‘Most people, I believe, thought he was as guileless as an infant. I only met him a few times, quite casually, when he came to Claypoole on the business of the hospital; but he always struck me as just the sort of person one could trust—open, and frank, and a little severe; one might even say high-minded.’

  Trent shook his head. ‘That comes of being a psychological expert,’ he remarked.

  ‘Oh! I know I was wrong,’ Fairman said testily. ‘I never had him under observation, of course. And I know there is a class of pretenders who have the secret of making just that kind of impression. How was it you diagnosed his weakness?’

  ‘I’ll tell you. Verney has, you know, a rather unusual face—beaky and chinny and fine-drawn in structure, with that wide-eyed and my-spirit-beats-its-mortal-bars sort of look. Did it ever strike you, Bryan, that the least little contraction of the muscles—just a touch of the brush between the eyebrows and at the mouth-corners—would turn that expression into something rather more than severity?’

  ‘Ha!’ Fairman exclaimed. ‘You mean cruelty—yes!’

  ‘Ruthlessness,’ Trent said, ‘is rather the idea, I think. A cruel man has a positive taste for inflicting pain. Old James Randolph had that, I’m afraid; complicated with what he thought was religion—a depressing mixture. But a ruthless man will inflict pain for a purpose, and without necessarily getting any fun out of it. Now, I had seen Verney just once before I became acquainted with him. I mentioned it to you, Inspector; it was when I saw him playing roulette at Monte Carlo—and he didn’t see me. I hadn’t a notion who he might be, of course, but the look of him interested me. He had a seat at the table, and he was intent on the game.’

  Miss Yates sighed gently. ‘Sitting at the table,’ she remarked to her needles, ‘is such a bad sign.’

  ‘Yes,’ Trent said. ‘But at least he didn’t have a beastly little notebook, and jot down the results after every whirl. He knew he was playing a game of chance, and he didn’t want it to be anything else. It was easy to see he was an old hand, and his gambling face, like many other people’s, was not quite his vicarage tea-party expression. It attracted me as a portrait-painter. I thought that as a cross between Cardinal Manning and Lucretia Borgia—’

  ‘My dear Phil!’ Miss Yates interjected.

  ‘That’s to say, I thought it was a head that I was bound to recognize if I ever met it again. Then, a few years later, I did meet it again, wearing a rather more saintly expression, at Randolph’s place at Brinton; and when I said, in the tentative sort of way we polite creatures have, that I believed I had seen it before at Monte, it answered, without the flicker of an eyelash, that it had never been anywhere near the place. So that’s why Verney was filed away in my mind among those who might not, at a pinch, admit that they did it with their little hatchets.

  ‘So there you are. I had Verney before me now as a man who was capable of telling a thumping lie without the least hesitation or trace of nervousness. A man with a taste for an amusement that often gets people into tight places, and doesn’t fit in very well with the character of a fundamentally puritanical, if cheerful, social worker. A man who, when off his guard, could look more than a little sinister. A man who had seemed to me to know a trifle too much about the details of the Randolph crime, and not to know enough about Randolph’s movements before the crime. And a man who could have been, so far as height and figure went, the mysterious visitor seen by Raught. In fact, before Raught left the studio that night I was turning over in my mind quite seriously the idea that Verney might be the murderer of James Randolph.

  ‘Before I went to bed that night I had turned it over a lot more. Once I had him in mind, I saw that nothing could have been easier than for him to get hold of a razor-blade with my fingermarks on it—the thing which, as I told you, was so unaccountable to me that it nearly drove me silly. Like an ass, I never thought of its having been kept in cold storage weeks before it was planted; though in fact such marks will stay on metal for years if they aren’t messed about, and I ought to have remembered it. He must have done it when I was staying at Brinton; probably during my second visit.

  ‘What had happened, I guess, was that after my making that indiscreet remark about seeing him at Monte, which Randolph heard, the old man must have done a little thinking on the subject. He may have decided to look into the accounts more carefully at the Institute and elsewhere; and if he did that, and found that there had been any funny business going on in that quarter—’

  ‘Funny business!’ Mr Bligh exclaimed. ‘Why, what the auditors have found out already, since I arrested Verney, would be enough to get him two years. He had been helping himself for seventeen months, up to the middle of last January; after that the accounts are quite straight. Where the money went we don’t know yet; but a man who is in the know can always get the kind of amusement that Verney liked in London. It was the usual thing, no doubt—he meant to put things straight again when his luck changed. It’s very likely, too, that the people who ran the gaming-house got on to who he was, and threatened to inform on him to the old man, and get him prosecuted, if he didn’t dig up more money. That sort of thing often happens.’

  ‘That wouldn’t matter to Verney,’ Trent observed, ‘if once the old man had found out for himself. The point is that he stopped stealing shortly after I had unconsciously given Randolph the tip. Randolph, as I say, must have investigated after that; and then the game was up for Verney. He would be just where Randolph liked to have people—under his thumb, where he could keep them; not for any sordid pecuniary motive, but just for the pure pleasure of making them squeak. Also, everything points to his having treated Verney as he treated Raught—made him sign a confession, which could be filed away for use when required. If Randolph did all that, Verney was not the sort of young man to accept the situation without any effort to change it; and if he meant to kill Randolph, he would naturally prefer that someone else should be suspected of the crime, as well as faking an alibi for himself. What more suitable object of suspicion than the interfering fool whose remark had so completely and disastrously upset the applecart?

  ‘As for the blade, all he had to do was to visit my bedroom—while I was in my bath, say—find what blade I was equipped with, get a packet of them for himself, and then next day steal the one I had been using and fingering, and substitute another. Then—this is a point I got from Raught—he must have advised Randolph to give up his out-of-date razor, and to take to the razor and blade that I prefer, as countless multitudes of other shavers do—see advertisements. We know that Randolph did take advice from Verney about some things. For instance, from what Raught said, we know that it was Verney who persuaded him to get me to paint a replica of his portrait; whereas Verney pretended it was Randolph who had originated that very praiseworthy idea.

  ‘Anyhow Randolph certainly did change his type of razor; and once he had done that, Verney’s little bit of framework was all in readiness to go merry as a marriage bell. The man who murdered Randolph would, to all appearance, have proceeded to take the blade out of Randolph’s razor to cut the strings of the packets, and then left it lying about with his fingerprints—mine—all over it.

  ‘Then there was another thing that occurred to me while I was meditating in here after Raught had gone. I told you, Aunt Judith, how the engagement-block was found standing on the table in Randolph’s sitting-room, with the leaf for the day torn off.’

  ‘Yes,’ Miss Yates said, smiling gently. ‘The leaf which I picked up in the boat-train, and which Dr Fairman had never seen before when I suggested that he had dropped it.’

  ‘Oh well! The leaf’s adventures don’t matte
r now,’ Trent went on hurriedly, observant of Fairman’s reddening face. ‘All it did, when you enclosed it in your letter to me, was to clinch the fact that I was the only visitor Randolph was expecting at Newbury Place before his dinner engagement. The block was left in sight for the purpose of letting the police know that very important fact; and Bryan tore it off so as to prevent them knowing it. But who, I asked myself while thinking it over, could have left it in that position? Raught had declared, and there was no reason to doubt him, that it never was left out, but kept in a locked drawer. Who else would be likely to know of its existence, and where to find it, besides Raught? Only Verney, so it seemed to me; and so it seems still.’

  Trent paused to light a cigarette; and Inspector Bligh observed meditatively, ‘I’ve often heard of chaps who could talk the hind leg off a donkey.’

  Miss Yates, shooting a glance at him between stitches, said precisely, ‘That is all very well, Mr Bligh, but you have heard all this before, perhaps, and Dr Fairman and I have not. We find it most interesting.’

  The inspector handsomely acknowledged the hit. ‘You are quite right, ma’am,’ he said. ‘I was forgetting. Yes, I have not only heard it before, but I have filed a note of all these points which Mr Trent was good enough to draw up for me. It is in rather more official language, in some places; that’s all.’

  Bryan Fairman made a sound of slight impatience. ‘None the better for being in that language, I should think,’ he said. ‘I know, if anybody does—all research workers know—how much is missed that really matters because reports have to be written in officialese. They have to be, because a lot of us can’t take anything seriously unless you make it dull for them. But what Miss Yates and I would like to hear, Phil, is how Verney managed the carrying out of the crime. You have made it clear that he could change himself in half a minute from an athlete with hardly anything on to a diner-out in complete evening dress, and back again. But how did he do it at the same time that he was running round London with the boys, and where did he change, and how did he get to Newbury Place and get away again?’

  Trent and the inspector regarded one another with some amusement. ‘Exactly what I asked him,’ Mr Bligh remarked, ‘when he explained to me about the quick-change dodge.’

  ‘And exactly what I asked myself,’ Trent said. ‘I could see, I thought, that it was possible, or perhaps easy, for him to dodge out of the procession at some point, and to rejoin it again later, without its being spotted. They run in little groups of twos and threes, you may have noticed if you have seen them at it; so as not to impede traffic, I suppose. And none of them has much energy to spare for keeping an eye on the others. Fairly easy, I should think, for one of them to fall out to tie a shoe-lace or something, at some favourable spot; and he could join in again later, when the run was nearly at an end, by falling in at the tail of one of the groups, without his absence ever having been noticed.’

  ‘That’s right,’ the inspector said. ‘It never was noticed. All the lads who were out that night have been interrogated. It can be proved that he started and it can be proved that he finished; but there isn’t one of them who can say he had Verney in sight at any time except the beginning and the end. They never gave it a thought till they were asked.’

  ‘Good! Of course, the place where he dropped out would have to be out of sight. So it was, as I shall tell you. But when he had done his disappearing act, Verney had to get to Randolph’s, and spend some time there—ten minutes at the very least, I figured it out—and get away again; because though the line of the run goes not far from Newbury Place, it doesn’t pass it.

  ‘The only answer that I could think of was a car; and it would have to be a car that was standing all ready at some convenient place; and that place would be the place where Verney dropped out of the company.’

  ‘How clever!’ Miss Yates exclaimed.

  ‘It’s very good of you to say so, Aunt.’

  ‘It was Verney I meant, my dear Phil. He thought of it first,’ Miss Yates pointed out.

  ‘That’s true,’ Trent admitted. ‘In fact, now you put it that way, I’m dashed glad I wasn’t the criminal and he the sleuth. He would probably have had the salt on my tail much quicker than I got it on his. However—when I got to that point in my musings, the next thing obviously was to scout round for some information bearing on these matters; so when Verney rang up saying he wanted to see me about Bryan, I had the devilish cunning to say I would go round and see him at the Randolph Institute, where I hoped I might be able to pick up a thing or two. And so I jolly well did!

  ‘I won’t go into all the details about how I got at the facts, because that would be a long story. It was just by listening to some of the lads at the Institute chatting back and forth, and talking to one or two people who were there. But I came away with quite a bagful of useful knowledge. To begin with, I had had a careful look at the track of the weekly run, stuck up on the notice-board. I had also learnt that the evening for the run had recently been changed from the usual day to Wednesday, the day of the murder. I knew already that Verney possessed what he called an ancient car; and I found out now that it was a very good and reliable car, old as it was. Also, I learnt that he was allowed the free use of the garage attached to the house of a very nice old man, who was helping Verney to run the Institute. Also, that this garage was in a nice, quiet place, not far from the Institute, and just round a corner which was right on the track of the run. Also, that the nice old man had been persuaded by Verney to go away to Torquay for a rest and change, taking his own car and chauffeur with him; so that Verney had the garage all to himself on the night of the crime. And I think that was about all.’

  ‘Enough too, I should think,’ Mr Bligh grumbled. ‘I wish I ever had such luck.’

  ‘Perhaps you often have, and took it to be the result of dazzling detective genius,’ Trent suggested amiably. ‘You wouldn’t think it to hear him now, Aunt Ju, but he was quite pleased when I told him all this a few days ago. It gives you the raw material of the crime, so to speak. Verney had the car waiting for him in the garage before they started on the run. In the car were the hat and the clothing and a loaded revolver, probably with a silencer on its nose. He dropped out and dodged in there, shut the garage door, slipped on the camouflage—not forgetting a pair of gloves—then took out the car and was off and away to the West End, looking the complete swell. He left the car at the entrance to Newbury Place, stepped across to No. 5 in his rubber-soled shoes, opened the door quietly with his key, slipped upstairs, and very likely shot Randolph without the old man ever hearing or seeing him. Then he pocketed the revolver, took Randolph’s keys from the table, opened the safe, and took out the packets. He could tell at once which was the Verney packet, as they were all docketed on the outside; so Bryan has told us. Probably he shoved that in his pocket straight away, unopened. Then he took the blade out of Randolph’s razor and pocketed that; got out my blade that he had been saving up for me, and used that—very delicately, so as not to blur my fingermarks—to cut the strings of the remaining packets.’

  ‘Why did he take the trouble to do that?’ Fairman wanted to know.

  ‘Because there had to be a reason for the blade being taken from the razor and left on the floor. So he just cut them all open and left them there, where Bryan found them and walked off with them.’

  ‘Abominable!’ Miss Yates remarked with emphasis. ‘Other people’s disagreeable secrets left lying about for the police to find!’

  Mr Bligh grunted expressively. ‘A fat lot he cared about that! Of course,’ he added a little wistfully, ‘they would have been very interesting.’

  ‘But why,’ Fairman persisted, ‘did he use your blade for cutting the strings, when he had to take pains not to blur the marks? He could have used Randolph’s blade for that, and made a quicker job of it, not having to be careful.’

  ‘Verney is clever, as my aunt says. He knew that a very fine edge which has been used for sawing through a lot of string bears very plain
traces of having been misused in that way. Even with the naked eye you can see them. The blade with my marks on had to bear those traces. Well, when that job was done, he took the keys again, went downstairs, got out the engagement-block from the drawer where he knew Randolph usually kept it when he was at Newbury Place, and stuck it up where it could be seen.’

  ‘That wasn’t so clever,’ Mr Bligh observed. ‘I should have found it soon enough without that; and its being left out like that wasn’t quite natural. He ought to have realized that.’

  ‘Yes; it was a slip,’ Trent agreed. ‘You wouldn’t have done it yourself, Inspector. But Verney hadn’t had your experience, you see. Now I come to think of it, it seems likely that all the really perfect crimes are committed by officers of the C.I.D. However, that was what he did; and then, I think, all he had to do was to make his exit and get back to his car. One thing he did was to leave the front door not quite shut, as Bryan found it later on. He didn’t want to make any unnecessary noise, you see. To walk in an unhurried manner from the door to the spot just outside the archway, where I think he must have left his car, takes about ten seconds—I’ve timed it myself.’

  ‘Why, Phil!’ Miss Yates exclaimed. ‘Ten seconds! That is no time at all!’

  ‘A very generous allowance, I assure you,’ Trent said. ‘So many people think a second is the sort of time it takes to blink your eye. But a man can run a hundred yards in ten seconds—some men can, anyhow. And in America it has been proved that a good murderer can shoot up six people in one second.’

  ‘Well, but suppose,’ Fairman said, ‘he had met somebody coming in by the archway as he went out. His face would have been seen and remembered.’