by Leo Bruce
“No, I don’t think anyone here has been thought of in connection with the murders, though in a sense the whole town is suspect.”
“Indeed? A wide net, Deene, a wide net.”
Carolus noted that the headmaster had drawn from his pocket a large pipe of the shape usually associated with Baker Street. This he now proceeded to fill and light.
“My chief preoccupation,” he said, “is the continuing goodwill of Mrs Dalbinney. I intend to call on her this afternoon. What reassurance may I take to her from you?”
“Tell her she’s not a suspect.”
The headmaster managed a grudging smile.
“You were ever addicted to flippancy,” he said. “By what wild flight of the imagination could it ever be supposed that Mrs Dalbinney, a member of a distinguished family, the mother of two sons educated at the Queen’s School, Newminster, a lady whom I have considered inviting to distribute the prizes on the occasion of our next Speech Day, that such a person should slay her fellow human beings with a hammer intended for coal-breaking?”
“One of the noteworthy points about the first murder was that a child could have done it. It needed no particular strength of arm.”
“Ah Deene, Deene,” the headmaster chuckled pointedly. “There are times when your sense of humour is sadly wanting. The absurdity of even considering Mrs Dalbinney did not lie in any physical disability. But let be. As Mrs Gorringer once said, with her clever sense of plaisanterie and apropos, there are times when one is tempted to speak of you as the Gloomy Deene. But to return to our moutons. What shall I tell Mrs Dalbinney when I see her?”
“Oh nothing from me. I don’t know yet whether I shall ever have a strong enough case even to put forward, and if I have it will be useless unless I can persuade the Detective Inspector in charge that it is worth a try.”
“What do you mean by a try, may I venture to enquire?”
“A search for supporting evidence. Of that I can promise none. But if the police are satisfied that there may be reason for it, they will find that fast enough.”
“In those circumstance your task will have been fulfilled?”
“Yes.”
“Anonymously, I take it?”
“Of course.”
“In that case you would scarcely have any claim on the good nature of the members of the Rafter family, and certainly none on their pockets.”
“On the contrary, I should put in my bill at once.”
Just then Locksley Rafter entered. Carolus had never seen him in this bar before and Doris, as Carolus discovered later, was unacquainted with him. He joined Carolus, who introduced him to ‘Mr Hugh Gorringer, headmaster of the Queen’s School, Newminster’.
“Nay, Deene,” said Mr Gorringer, “As I have told you I am travelling incognito. I am a simple citizen for the nonce.”
“Queen’s School myself,” said Locksley unexpectedly. “Before your time.”
Mr Gorringer, who found it hard to recognize that there had been a Queen’s School before his time, said, “Ah yes. Very likely. You’d find a great many changes now. Numbers have trebled since I took up the reins of office.”
“Quality, in my time,” said Locksley curtly, leaving Mr Gorringer somewhat baffled.
Carolus relieved the slight tension.
“Do you know,” he asked Locksley, “whether on the night your brother was killed a phone call was received at your house?”
“It was,” said Locksley.
“From whom?”
“Identity unknown.”
“Male?”
“Yes.”
“What did the caller want?”
“To speak to me.”
“Did he give any indication at all of his identity?”
“Yes. A relative.”
“Anything else?”
“He had tried the others. No reply.”
“By the others presumably he meant your brother and sisters?”
“Presumably.”
“You did not tell me this when I saw you.”
“No. You made no enquiry.”
“It was of some considerable importance. We knew that Ernest had been to the telephone but did not know whether he had spoken to anyone. Who took the call?”
“My wife.”
“Did she make any conjecture about it at the time?”
“Probably. Women are given to conjecture.”
“Did she know of Ernest?”
“No.”
“Not even that such a person had existed?”
“Nothing.”
Locksley left them and Mr Gorringer approached the bar with the intention, it seemed, of inviting Carolus to have a drink. Carolus followed closely.
“Can I persuade you? “Mr Gorringer asked Carolus tentatively.
“Thanks. I’ll have another Scotch.”
“And for me a Guinness,” said the headmaster. “I wonder whether this modest hotel of yours provides a good luncheon, Deene? I begin to feel that some reinforcement would not be amiss.”
“There’s stewed rabbit today,” said Doris. “It’s ever so nice the way cook does it with pearl barley.”
“Simple fare,” commented the headmaster, “but not unpalatable, I think. What say you, Deene?”
But before they went to try it, Carolus was called into the hall of the hotel by Mr Rugley. He found John Moore waiting for him impatiently.
“You were right, Carolus,” he said at once. “Bella Lobbin was not killed with the hammer that was beside her. A much smaller and lighter one was used for the actual blows. The one I found had been placed there and blooded on purpose.”
“Thank God,” said Carolus.
“Why? What exactly are you going to argue from this?”
“It means that Lobbin did not do it.”
“It suggests that he did not. It does not make it certain.”
“There is no certainty in this case. I saw Mrs Cocking, by the way. She talked.”
“Yes?”
“She saw someone go to Lobbin’s last night and be admitted by Bella while Lobbin was out.”
“She wouldn’t tell me that,” said Moore.
“She wouldn’t tell you anything. She doesn’t like policemen.”
“Do you know who it was Bella Lobbin let into her house last night?”
“I think so.”
“The murderer?”
“I think so.”
“You’d better give me the full results of all this thinking, then,” said Moore impatiently.
“I will. But I want to go over some notes first and get ideas straightened out.”
“All very nice. But as usual you fail to appreciate our practical difficulties. I can’t hold Lobbin much longer.”
“Come round here at six this evening if you like.”
“Not earlier?”
“No. I should like to let Gorringer be here. It does give the old boy such pleasure to be ‘in on the ground floor’ as he calls it.”
“I’ve no objection except that you seem to be treating the whole thing rather lightly.”
“I’m not, John. I can’t help being a facetious creature, but I never take murder lightly and certainly not these murders.”
Moore looked at him curiously.
“I should have thought these … after all one was a collaborator and the other a scold. Not people to arouse one’s quickest sympathy.”
“It’s not a question of sympathy. I’m not thinking of the victims. However, you shall hear what I think this evening.”
19
“LET me say at once,” began Carolus when the three of them were sitting in a small room which Mr Rugley had provided for them, “let me say at once that I have never had so little to offer. There’s scarcely a scrap of real evidence in the lot of it, and all I can do is to put forward a possibility, a fantastic and gruesome possibility, and leave it to you, John, to decide whether you think it’s worth examination. If you put your whole resources into it you will, I believe, find the proof you wan
t, but in the meantime I can do no more than sketch a crazy outline.
“I come to it by that most dangerous of ways of thinking in matters of crime—the improbability of all others. When I first began to meet the people connected with the case, who for want of a better word we may call suspects, I found it flatly incredible that any of them could have murdered Ernest Rafter for the motives attributed to them. Apart from other forms of improbability, could one conceive of any of the members of that highly respectable family caring so much about the return of Ernest from the dead that one of them would waylay him in a lonely shelter and smash his skull in with a hammer? And that, even if any of them, apart from Emma, knew that he was alive, or if any of them at all knew that he had come to Selby? They were, it has been suggested, somewhat avaricious or pettily mean in different ways, but could you conceive of one of them in his senses wishing to murder Ernest rather than pay him out with a probably quite modest sum of money? It was unthinkable and, as Bertrand pointed out to me, anyone could have foreseen that the murder of Ernest would bring wide
and unpleasant publicity for the family, as indeed it did.
“No, family pride or family avarice as a motive for murdering Ernest simply could not be considered seriously and when I came to the other so-called motives I found the same thing. Revenge as a motive for murder has always seemed highly suspect to me even when it is revenge for some specific injury suffered. Revenge, in a general sort of retributory way for what a man may or may not have done to his fellows twenty years ago, is more unbelievable still. As soon as I talked to Lobbin and Bodger, both of whom were supposed to come under suspicion because they had particular reasons for hating collaborators of the Japanese, I was convinced that whatever their feelings had been or were they did not provide a motive for a particular murder.
“I looked for other possible motives and of course robbery had to be considered. I knew from Doris that Ernest had a roll of notes in an envelope in his breastpocket while he was in the bar that evening, and I knew that it was not on the corpse when it was found. Doris assured me that he had only pulled it out once that evening, that almost certainly no one except herself and perhaps Vivienne had seen it, but I could not know this for certain. It was just possible that someone in the bar of the Queen Victoria had seen that Ernest had money on him and so had armed himself with a coal-hammer, followed Ernest down to the promenade and killed him for the sake of it. Or that someone (like Mr Biggett for example), who was not in the bar that night, knew of it and did the same. Or that some thug who knew nothing of Ernest was lying in wait near the last shelter to murder and rob the first person who came to it.
“But honestly—look at the improbabilities involved here. There was no one ‘out of the ordinary’ in the bar that night and can one reasonably suspect the quiet folk who frequent the place of carrying out such a brutal and dangerous crime for the sake of a roll of notes of unknown value? Or can one make oneself believe in some mysterious stranger following Ernest from London because of this modest sum and, guessing that he would go to the last shelter, waiting there for him? Or can one really suppose there was an unknown thug with a weapon ready? In any of these cases one must remember, too, that Ernest could probably have been robbed fairly easily without the extraordinary violence of the attack. So I did not believe in robbery as a motive.
“That left me with a huge question mark, not who had killed Ernest, but why had he been killed. If I could answer that the rest would be easy. Not family pride or avarice, not revenge, not robbery. What was left? Only, it began to seem to me, one thing—madness. A murder without a motive. A murder for the lust of killing. Or a murder for some abstruse psychopathic satisfaction which I could not follow.
“At first it seemed monstrous and as improbable, almost, as the other explanations, but as I thought about it I saw that it accounted for several things which were otherwise unaccountable. I began to work on it as a macabre but increasingly attractive hypothesis.
“Suppose someone, man or woman, wanted to commit a murder merely for the sake of it. It might be a perfectly normal human being outwardly, a respected citizen, a good father or mother, someone undistinguished from his fellows except by this single schizophrenic craving which was kept secret. Suppose such a person was looking for a place in which to carry out his intention—where better could he find than the deserted promenade of a small seaside town in winter? And on that promenade, where better than the last shelter, visited only occasionally by the hardiest exercise-takers?
“My monster was beginning to become real to me, though I could not yet decide with certainty on the sex. I imagined him visiting the shelter from time to time—not often enough to attract attention—always armed with the weapon he had most intelligently chosen, an old well-used hammer which he may have kept for the purpose for years. His idea was to wait till the circumstances combined in his favour, then commit his murder and walk away as carelessly as he pleased, secure that even if seen no one would suspect him, for he had no motive. He could wait as long as he pleased for the right occasion, for a great deal of his satisfaction, I thought, was in anticipation.
“He did not have to wait for some particular kind of victim, if I was right, for this was not a sexual thing or a piece of sadism. It was a calculated wish to have killed a human being, nothing more nor less. So the murderer could pick the first arrival when the circumstances were propitious.
“At first I knew very little about him or her. I could not guess whether he was a resident of long standing or a new arrival, whether he was one of those seen on the promenade that night or not, whether he was young or old, male or female, a respected person or a tramp; I only knew that he had probably spied out the land long before that evening and laid his plans very carefully.
“That was one of the things that had mystified me most about the murder of Ernest Rafter. It was a planned murder, that was certain. The place chosen, the weapon carried, everything suggested long and careful planning. Yet no one seemed to have known that Ernest was still alive, let alone that he was coming to Selby on a certain night and would walk on the promenade late and choose that particular shelter. The only conclusion I could draw from this was that the murder had been planned without a particular victim in mind.
“There was one possible alternative to this—that Ernest had been murdered in mistake for someone else. But I dismissed this again on the grounds of improbability. There was enough light in the last shelter, in fact, to make it more than unlikely. So I began to sketch out a picture of an unknown murderer waiting of an evening in a special place for an unknown and unimportant victim.
“But the details of the picture entirely eluded me. If, as I conjectured, it was someone who showed no sign of abnormality in ordinary life it could have been almost anyone we knew was on the promenade that night—Lobbin, Bodger, Biggett, Stringer, Paul or even Sitwell himself. Or it could have been one of the married people who were there in pairs, the Morsells or the Bullamys. But it could also have been someone who was not seen at all, or who was briefly seen but not recognized, like the man crossing the road. It could have been someone who came from the public garden or someone who came from the beach, it could have been someone seen walking away or someone who afterwards remained hidden in the garden or on the beach …”
“No,” interrupted John Moore. “Those were searched, of course.”
“Some time later. Indeed, so little was known of my hypothetic murderer-for-the-sake-of-it that I remember thinking he would never be discovered. He had calculated that a murder without motive was a murder for which no one would ever be hanged, and it looked as if he was right.
“Yet I believed in him, for, fantastic though the thing was, he made the very people whom I had dismissed because their motives were incredible suspects again. That Bodger would not have killed Ernest because his son had died on the Burma road seemed certain to me, but I could not be sure that Bodger was not secretly a madman determined to kill the first human being conveniently in a certain
place at night. The same applied to Lobbin. And with some of the others, like Morsell, for instance, and Bullamy it actually provided—if not a motive in the strict sense of the word, at least a madman’s reason for the thing. It made the whole town suspect.”
Mr Gorringer raised his hand to halt the argument. Clearly he wished to pronounce.
“It is time, I feel, that we refreshed ourselves. The ingenious Deene is apt to be carried away by his theories and we are left—high and dry, may I say? Inspector, may I suggest a drink?”
Carolus rang a bell beside him and George appeared. While he was bringing the drinks they had ordered, Mr Gorringer expressed his approval of Carolus’s wild theorizing.
“Though, as you yourself admit, my dear Deene, your notions have elements of the fantastique, I must say I like them. The case itself is not without fantasy and you have matched it. No motive, eh? That is indeed something new. It certainly seems to have rendered detection exactingly complicated. Do you argue then that if I, for example, were to walk out into the night and murder the first stranger I met I should remain undetected?”
“Probably. Unless you were caught in flagrante delicto.”
“Curious,” said the headmaster. “Highly curious. I had not considered it before. But in this case it seems to have hard logic behind it. And what I particularly like is the fact that your theory (if you substantiate it) instantly disposes of one of the most undesirable and ridiculous features of this case—the absurd suspicions which have attached themselves to members of the Rafter family.”
“Why?” asked Carolus.
“I beg your pardon?” said Mr Gorringer, who was taken aback by this interrogative monosyllable.
“Why does it dispose of the Rafters?”
“Surely you must see, my dear Deene, that the only thing (and that in my mind an ignis fatuus) which could be held to connect even remotely with the crime these highly respected citizens, was that they were supposed to have something accounted a motive for wishing to dispose of Ernest. If you show that such a motive (or pretence at one) had nothing to do with the murder, you at once show that they had nothing to do with it. Not that such a demonstration was necessary.”