Death on the Last Train

by George Bellairs

  “All right, Mr. Luxmore. Thanks. Sorry I’ve taken so much of your spare time …”

  “Oh, that’s O.K., ole man. Sorry haven’t been able to give you a clue. Sure you won’t have a li’l drink for the road?”

  Cromwell felt depressed. On the way back to Salton in the train he turned the case over and over in his mind and saw no light. He changed at Willesfield and fell asleep between there and Salton. At Mereton, a party of boys from the High School got in his compartment without waking him. At the cutting the engine whistled and roused him. He thought he was still dreaming for the conversation he heard was fantastic. The schoolboys were whispering among themselves.

  “I swore, cross my heart, I wouldn’t tell, but you’re all in the gang and took the oath of secrecy, didn’t you?” said one boy in an undertone, with one eye on Cromwell who still had his eyes closed. He looked like a local preacher so the bearer of the secret thought him quite harmless.

  “Aw, you and your secrets. Spill it … We won’t tell. Suppose it’s another flop … Lot of hush-hush about nothin’ at all …”

  The boy with the burden was stung to anger.

  “Not this one … An’ if you don’t want to know it … well …”

  A large, hulking youth gave tongue.

  “Cawm on, Smithie … Out with it … Or we’ll pull your socks off and screw your toes off one by one …”

  The boys went into a huddle and Smithie breathed out his tale.

  “Gaskell and Casey stopped the train the night old Bellis was murdered …”

  It reached Cromwell like a zephyr. He almost shot to the roof in amazement.

  There was a lot more whispering, apparently challenging the statement and a lot of muttering that Cromwell couldn’t overhear. However, the gang seemed finally satisfied and voted Smithie’s news a scoop.

  “But don’t tell Gaskell. He’ll murder me if …”

  “As if we would, you big mutt …”

  The train drew up at Salton and on the scruff of young Smithie’s astonished neck there descended a large hand.

  “I want you, young feller-me-lad,” said Cromwell grimly. “Come along with me to the stationmaster’s office.”

  The young news-hawk began to whimper.

  “I haven’t done nothin’.. I’ve got my season ticket. Here it is … Look …”

  “That’s not what I’m after, young Smith. You seem to have some news about the train hold-up the other night. I want you to tell me all about it …”

  The rest of the schoolboys hung round in a ragged group not knowing quite how to react to the awful thing that had fallen upon poor Smithie.

  Then the boldest spoke.

  “Who are you, any way?” he said truculently, still mistaking Cromwell for a busybodying Sunday school superintendent.

  “I’m an officer from Scotland Yard!”

  Smith uttered a wild cry and almost fell unconscious and his pals melted away, retreating from Cromwell’s presence gingerly like someone leaving royalty and then running hell-for-leather as soon as they were out of sight.

  One of them called at the home of Mr. Wilberforce Smith, father of the young captive, told him that his son had just been arrested for the murder of Timothy Bellis and left him to think it out.

  Chapter IX

  Startling Developments

  Young Smith was taken to the Salton police station and there his father caught up with him. Wilberforce Smith was a trade union official and breathed all kinds of threats about what he would do if anything befell his son. A general strike was the least thing to be feared. He talked of habeas corpus, democracy and a riot by the dockers. His stocky frame trembled with rage, his long thin neck swivelled and shook like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy and sweat poured out from the top of his bald head to the tip of his craggy chin.

  Finally, Forrester threatened to put Wilberforce in one of the cells and give him something to rage about …

  When, at length, there was a break in his father’s oratory and indignation, young Smith was able to tell his tale. There was not much in it.

  It seemed that Wilberforce, junior, had overheard Gaskell and Casey congratulating each other behind the school wall. Gaskell was an unruly senior boy who had fallen under the influence of Casey, a lad of Irish extraction who never did anybody any good. Together they were minor terrorists. Casey captivated Gaskell with his accounts of what his relatives had done during The Trouble in Ireland and were still prepared to do in the interests of Eire and Sinn Fein.

  Actually, Casey’s parents were decent law-abiding English citizens but the boy had found “Injustice to Ireland” a good slogan on which to pin his love of mischief.

  Gaskell had admiringly told Casey how some train robbers in a Wild West tale, which he had studied instead of homework, had held up a train. Casey had scornfully told him he knew a better way employed by his imaginery uncles in The Trouble, and forthwith challenged his satellite to join him in trying it out. Their fathers were in the forces and their mothers couldn’t control them.

  It all boiled down to the fact that these two champions of United Ireland by adoption had halted the last train from Mereton to Salton at the cutting. They had hidden in the siding and witnessed the complete success of their scheme.

  Under pressure from their respective angry mothers, assisted by two policemen, a probation officer, Cromwell and Forrester, the two terrorists confessed in full. They were both hulking freckled lads of fifteen, one with an Irish face, blue eyes and upturned nose and the other with a black eye, a red nose and two teeth missing from fighting against enormous odds on the dockside just before the police had pulled in the pair of them.

  Luckily for Smithie, who might never have survived the betrayal, neither Gaskell nor Casey knew he had overheard their mutual back-slapping and as his name was not mentioned, he escaped unscathed.

  It amounted, then, to this. The murderer of Timothy Bellis had played no part in the hold-up of the train, unless, of course, Gaskell and Casey had crowned their efforts by gun-play as well. Which was out of the question. An enquiry concerning this point struck them dumb with terror, Gaskell dissolved into tears and Casey began to call on the Virgin and all the Saints to help him and bear witness of his innocence.

  The boys swore, too, that they had seen nothing untoward going on in the train when it halted. In fact, they had run away as soon as their scheme began to work. They had been afraid of somebody searching the siding and finding then crouching in their coal truck.

  The malefactors were allowed to go home for the night and appeared before the magistrates on the morrow. By a majority of five to one, those worthies agreed to treat them as first offenders, placed them on probation for twelve months and imposed the indignity of reporting twice weekly to the probation officer. Mrs. Beaglehole, the dissenting member of the bench, wanted them sending to Borstal, if possible for life!

  Whilst this startling turn of events was in progress Littlejohn was again at the Claypotts’. On the way there he had met Harold hurrying to catch the Mereton train on another drinking bout. By threatening to arrest him if he did not do so, Littlejohn persuaded Claypott to return home with him. There, there occurred a family turmoil of the first order.

  Harold craving for his stimulant and forcibly withheld from it, was on edge and almost in a frenzy. Constance, surprised to see the unusual return of her brother accompanied by a policeman, was seized with tremblings and nervous rigours. Leah, fearing the worst, collapsed and had to be put on the couch and given a drink of brandy. Her brother took advantage of this ministration to take a copious dose of the medicine himself and became braced and truculent therefrom.

  “What the hell is all this about?” he asked in shrill rage.

  “Don’t start swearing, dear,” protested Constance feebly.

  “I’ll bloody well swear if I want …”

  Littlejohn decided that if he was to avoid a lot of domestic bickering and side-issues he had better establish control at once.

 
“You’ll not swear whilst I’m here, Mr. Claypott. If I’ve any more exhibitions of truculence, I’ll take you to the police station and you can cool off in a cell until you’re fit to speak to …”

  “Oh … oh, Inspector, don’t, don’t. He’ll be good, won’t you, Harold?”

  Littlejohn came to the point. He put the six anonymous letters faces upwards on the table.

  “Do you know anything about these, Mr. Claypott?” he asked.

  Claypott fumbled with the papers in his hand, which trembled with nerves.

  “No. Why should I? What is this, a guessing game?”

  “No. Those are anonymous letters received by Mr. Timothy Bellis before he died. Read them.”

  Claypott adjusted his pince-nez and putting the letters close to his face blinked at them and read them. His eyes watered with the effort and he had to pause to wipe them and his glasses.

  His two sisters stood in frozen silence, for Leah, unable to contain her curiosity, had also risen and was craning her neck along with Constance to see what it was all about. There was no sound save the loud breathing of the Claypotts and the flapping of the paper as it trembled in Harold’s fingers.

  “Well! What’s all this rubbish got to do with me?”

  He faced Littlejohn unsteadily and glared at him with dim eyes.

  “It has a lot to do with you, sir. Those letters were written on your typewriter!”

  “What!! It’s a lie! You’re trying to accuse me of something I know nothing at all about. I’ll see my solicitor … You can’t bully me. I know the law … Nearly qualified as a solicitor myself …I … I …”

  It was dreadful. Harold befuddled, trying to think straight, Constance uttering little whimpering cries like an injured animal, and Leah, back on the couch, flat on her face, sobbing her heart out.

  “It’s a lie …”

  “It’s nothing of the kind, Mr. Claypott. The identity of the typewriter which wrote those letters has been definitely established. They have been compared with a sample of the type which I took from the machine on the desk there when I was last here …”

  “It’s a foul, dirty trick. I know nothing about it. You can’t prove I did it; and I didn’t. Somebody must have come in and done it when we were out … somebody … somebody … .”

  He gave it up and stood there wild-eyed like a creature at bay.

  “Now, tell me the truth, Mr. Claypott. You’ll save us and yourself a lot of trouble. It doesn’t necessarily follow that whoever wrote those letters killed Bellis, but unless you make a clean breast of it, I shall have to arrest you on suspicion …”

  “You what!!! I didn’t do it. I swear I didn’t. Leah, fetch me father’s bible. I’ll swear to you on the bible …”

  “No need for that, sir. These have been written on your machine and there’s no getting round it. I must now ask you to accompany me to the police-station and give an explanation of it all.”

  “But, I didn’t …”

  “I did it.”

  Constance’s lips seemed to open and close automatically. She stood there like a little doll, her mouth moving mechanically. Her face seemed carved out of cork, angular, craggy, and dark coloured from emotion.

  “You what?”

  Littlejohn himself was flabbergasted.

  “You did it, Miss Claypott?”

  “Yes, I did it.”

  Harold began to flail the air with his arms.

  “Oh, tommy rot. You’re beside yourself. How could you have done it? Don’t be silly, Connie. None of us did it.”

  “I did it. I’ve seen you suffer so much, dear, from the way Bellis treated Helen, that I wanted to pay him back. I read in a book about a thing they called the poison pen …”

  “But this is preposterous, Connie. You couldn’t have.”

  Claypott fumbled with the letters.

  “Look here …! ‘By God, you’ll pay’ … . ‘You’ve paid, but not by a long chalk’ … ‘You’ve paid with all except your life …’ Those aren’t the sort of things you’d write, Connie. You’ve not been brought up that way. You were always genteel in your talk …”

  “All the same, I wrote them. I found them in Leah’s books.”

  Miss Claypott bent and from the bottom shelf of the whatnot produced a number of dog-eared paper-backed periodicals with lurid jackets and printed on coarse paper. Cheap novels. Gangsters. Romance. Blood and Thunder. The stuff in which Leah steeped herself in her plentiful spare time.

  “I got the words from these. I wouldn’t have known how to express it frightfully enough otherwise.”

  Littlejohn mopped his forehead. What a case!

  “So you admit that you wrote the letters, Miss Claypott?”

  “Yes, Inspector. Are you going to arrest me?”

  She was quite calm and seemed relieved that she had got it all off her mind.

  Her brother looked at her dumbfounded. Leah lay, face down, like one dead.

  “But Constance, you surely didn’t bring all these things on Bellis and then kill him?”

  “Of course not, dear. I just brought them more vividly to him by reminding him of his sins. I thought to terrify him. I was intent on avenging you for all you’d suffered by the way he treated Helen. His behaviour broke her heart and you know it broke yours when she died. You were just beginning to break off your drinking … . Then you broke out worse than ever …”

  Claypott burst into tears. Harsh, noisy sobs, mostly of self pity. The tears ran down his cheeks and mingled with his ragged moustache and ran off his bit of chin. He took no heed. Constance put her arms round him and patted his head.

  “Poor dear …”

  “I’ll never touch another drop. I promise, Constance. I won’t. I’m sorry … Leah, get me the bible …”

  “Come, come, come,” said Littlejohn, intensely embarrassed by this sentimental domestic scene. “Sit down Mr. Claypott and calm yourself whilst I talk to your sister …”

  “I won’t have you bully her … I know the law. I was in the law myself once. So you can’t …”

  “Sit down!”

  Claypott sank on the faded velvet and put his head in his hands.

  “Now, Miss Claypott. Tell me all about this, please.”

  “You might think it very wicked, but I’m not sorry. No. I don’t regret it in the least. Bellis made my brother suffer terribly and I made up my mind he should do the same.”

  Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright and she seemed to have grown taller in added dignity. There was no sign of guilt about her.

  “After Helen died, I was so angry at Harold’s grief that I sent the first message. I copied it, suitably altered, from one of Leah’s books. I daresay I could find the passage …”

  “Don’t bother, Miss Claypott. Go on, please.”

  “Well, by luck or providence, just after I’d written the letter, there was the building society crash. It looked as though the letter had been a warning. I sent another then to press home the point.”

  “My God!”

  “No need to take God’s name in vain, Harold. Then, I sent another. I’d seen a passage in one of my favourite books, by dear Charles Lamb. He suffered like we have done from family troubles. Speaking of the Duchess of Malfi, he says : ’ To move horror skilfully, to touch the soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wear and weary a life till it is ready to drop … ’.” Constance Claypott recited it pat in her gentle voice. The whole business seemed incompatible with her nature. “. . . I made up my mind that I would do that to Bellis for all he’d done to Helen and Harold. Not that Helen deserved much from us. She refused Harold long ago and broke his life. But she did it kindly and afterwards was his constant inspiration. We felt that whilst she was alive and happy, he had someone to live for. Then Bellis married and killed her. Nothing was too much for him to suffer.”

  She snapped her jaws and gnashed her teeth.

  “Then, by another strange freak, his house was burned down. I was quick to send another not
e. And one day as I was out shopping, I saw him coming from the police station looking afraid to death. I guessed he’d been asking for protection. I sent him a letter mocking him.”

  “I can’t believe it, Constance …”

  “It’s true and I don’t regret it. I’d known of his affair with that horrible Emmott woman, even when Helen was alive. Harold used to rave about it. I saw something in one of Leah’s novelettes … something about a man who committed suicide because his mistress was unfaithful to him. I sent a letter about Bessie Emmott, although I knew nothing of her. Do you know the end of the quotation from Charles Lamb? Well, it’s this: ‘and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit’.”

  She stood erect like an avenging little Nemesis.

  “I didn’t intend to kill him, of course. How could I have done? But I made up my mind to exact the utmost fear. I wrote the last letter threatening his life. I would at least give him the final turn of the screw, as Mr. Henry James has it.”

  “And you did turn it, Miss Claypott. He became a nervous wreck in terror of his own shadow.”

  “Then I am satisfied. But I didn’t kill him. How could I be stopping trains and climbing in and out of railway carriages, to say nothing of firing a revolver? I’ve never even seen a revolver.”

  “I think, madam, that if someone else hadn’t done it, Bellis would have killed himself.”

  “He is better dead, whatever way it is accomplished. But I was quite incapable of doing it.”

  Claypott raised his haggard, tear-stained face.

  “What are you going to do, Inspector?”

  “Nothing for the present. But I want you to call at the police station in the morning, Miss Claypott, and sign a statement. We will then decide what to do further. Needless to say, I have your word not to try to leave town?”

  “Why should I want to leave town? Or even the house? All I love is here. And I promise not to try to do myself any violence. I see from Leah’s books that that sometimes occurs with criminals.”

  She smiled grimly. The word seemed to please her.