When the Wind Blows

by Cyril Hare

  The appeal was not in vain. One had only to look at Mr. Roberts to realize that he was the embodiment of law-abiding respectability. That shining bald head, those healthy pink cheeks, those ample curves beneath his waistcoat betokened sound qualities that simply did not go with any foolish notions of assisting dangerous foreign down-and-outs whom the police wanted to question. He rose ponderously from his chair and stood with his back to the fire, looking down at his wife with kindly condescension.

  “I really think you might answer the inspector’s questions, Jane,” he said. “After all, it is the duty of all of us to come to the aid of the forces of law and order.”

  “I wish you would not interfere, Herbert,” replied Mrs. Roberts, still without looking up. “You know I never meddle in your affairs. You must please let me arrange my own in my own way.”

  “But dash it all,” her husband protested, “when one is dealing with a case of murder——”

  “Don’t be silly, Herbert,” Mrs. Roberts retorted, reaching for her scissors and neatly snipping off her thread. “You know perfectly well Mr. Zbartorowski has nothing whatever to do with any murder. He is not that kind of person at all.”

  “But my dear girl, nobody has said that he has.”

  “Then I don’t know why you introduced the subject, I’m sure.” Mrs. Roberts rolled up her sewing and put it away in her work-bag.

  “Mr. Roberts is quite right, Madam,” Trimble interposed. “I am not suggesting that your friend has committed a murder——”

  “—I should hope not!”

  “—but at the same time, my instructions are to find him and put to him certain questions which may be of assistance to the police in tracing the murderer.”

  Mrs. Roberts looked at him. “Are you telling the truth, Inspector?” she asked in a tone of candid enquiry that robbed the question of all its offensiveness.

  “Certainly I am, Madam.”

  “Why didn’t you say so when I asked you just now?”

  Trimble looked uncomfortable. “I—I didn’t conceive it to be my duty to do so,” he faltered. “You must understand, Madam, that there are certain regulations to which we have to conform.”

  “Fiddlesticks,” said Mrs. Roberts simply. “I asked you a perfectly simple question and you didn’t choose to answer it. However, if you can promise me that you only want to ask Mr. Zbartorowski about this murder, which he hasn’t done——”

  “Yes, Madam,” said Trimble in desperation. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “—and not about all the things he has been doing …?” Mrs. Roberts allowed her voice to trail away and looked enquiringly at the inspector. There was a moment’s awkward silence, broken by an embarrassed cough from her husband.

  “Really, Jane!” he protested. Mrs. Roberts paid no attention to him.

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Madam,” said Trimble stiffly.

  “Then you must be a very bad policeman,” Mrs. Roberts commented in the same mild tone. “But as I was saying, if that is all you want, I’m sure Mr. Zbartorowski won’t mind telling you anything you want to know. I’ll go and fetch him.”

  “You’ll—what?” Mr. Roberts’s pink cheeks had gone a dusky crimson.

  “Really, Herbert, I wish you wouldn’t interfere. It isn’t at all like you. If you don’t mind waiting a few minutes, Inspector.” She went towards the door.

  “But where is this fellow?” Mr. Roberts demanded.

  “In the kitchen. He is really a very good washer-up. And he has been cleaning your shoes for the last three days, but I don’t expect you have noticed. House work,” she observed, “is such a nuisance when you have no servants, and now the children are away I am really glad of any help I can get. But of course the great thing was to keep him sober and out of mischief, poor fellow.”

  She was still talking, in her placid, unselfconscious manner, as she trailed out of the room, carrying her sewing in one hand while the other patted ineffectually at her untidy head of hair. Left behind, the two men stood awkwardly on either side of the fireplace, each avoiding the eye of the other. Presently they heard her returning.

  “There’s nothing to be frightened about,” she could be heard saying through the open door. “The inspector has promised me he won’t ask you about petrol coupons or things of that sort, and anyway he doesn’t know anything at all about them, so it’s quite all right. Come along like a good fellow and get it over!”

  There was a pause, and then Tadeusz Zbartorowski appeared in the room, apparently propelled gently but firmly from behind, looking more melancholy and more seedy than ever before, and in addition evidently extremely frightened.

  “Here he is!” said Mrs. Roberts brightly, following her protégé into the room. “You won’t keep him long, will you, Inspector? I’ve several jobs for him still to do.”

  Trimble ignored her. He had suffered acutely in his self-esteem since he entered the house and now at last he was back on the familiar territory of official routine where he could be master.

  “Tadeusz Zbartorowski?” he asked.

  The Pole, looking miserably at his shabby shoes (which Mr. Roberts, had he looked in the same direction, might have recognized as an old pair of his own) nodded without speaking.

  “I am Detective-Inspector Trimble of the Markshire County Constabulary. I have reason to believe that you may be in a position to assist the police in their enquiries into the murder of Mrs. Sefton, professionally known as Lucy Carless, on the evening of Friday last. Would you have any objection to accompanying me to the police station and there making a statement in writing?”

  “Oh no!” said Mrs. Roberts, before Zbartorowski could reply. “You’ve got it all wrong, Inspector. That isn’t the idea at all.”

  “Jane!” protested her husband. “You really must not interrupt again. You’ve caused quite enough trouble already.”

  “I don’t know what you mean about causing trouble, Herbert. It seems to me I’ve been extremely helpful. This gentleman wanted me to find Mr. Zbartorowski and I’ve found him. But I never said anything about letting him be taken off in a Black Maria to the police station. It’s a ridiculous idea. If you want to ask him any questions, Inspector, you can do it here, where I can keep an eye on you and see that you keep your promise.”

  Keeping his temper with some difficulty, Trimble said, “I should prefer, Madam, to interview this gentleman in the ordinary way, at the police station. It would obviously be more convenient.”

  “It would be most inconvenient,” Mrs. Roberts retorted. “I can’t possibly spare him in the kitchen just now. Anyway, I don’t see that you have any choice in the matter. You asked him if he had any objection to coming to the police station and he has every objection. Haven’t you, Mr. Zbartorowski?”

  Zbartorowski’s large brown eyes turned towards her. He looked absurdly like a meek, devoted spaniel.

  “Yes, Madame,” he murmured.

  “That’s settled then,” said Mrs. Roberts, with a sigh of relief. She sat down again in her chair and folded her hands on her lap in an expectant attitude. “Now will you begin, please, Inspector? We’ve wasted a lot of time already.”

  Trimble acknowledged defeat. As Mrs. Roberts said, quite a lot of time had already been wasted over what should have been a quite short and simple matter, and the best thing now was to get it over and done with. He wondered whether that incalculable man, Mr. MacWilliam, had foreseen the kind of reception he would get at this house and had directed him here in order to gratify his diabolical sense of humour. There was one grain of comfort, at least—he had no witness to his discomfiture. Mercifully, he had sent Sergeant Tate to make the further enquiry at Farren’s that afternoon. It would, he felt, have been altogether destructive of discipline to endure such a reverse in the presence of a subordinate.

  “Very good,” he said resignedly. Turning towards Zbartorowski he resumed his official manner with some difficulty. “You were engaged to play an instrument in the conc
ert at the City Hall, I understand?” he said.

  “The clarinet—yes, sir.”

  “You attended the rehearsal during the afternoon?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “During the rehearsal there was an altercation between you and Miss Carless?”

  “Pardon?”

  “An altercation—a dispute. You had an argument with her?”

  “It was not a dispute nor a what you called it,” said Zbartorowski, coming suddenly to life. “She used bad words to me. She called me a —— I don’t know what is the equal of that word in English, but in Polish it is very, very bad. Then she say that if I play in the concert she will no more play, and I say, Thank you very much but if that is so I will not play with such a person and then I went away, and Mrs. Roberts here and many, many other persons who was there on the platform will tell you that what I say is true, and Mr. Evans also and Mr. Dixon, who speaks my language, he also will tell you that what this woman said to me——”

  “That’ll do, that’ll do!” With an effort Trimble succeeded in stemming the flow of words. “It’s no good running on too fast, you know. I want to know what the trouble was all about.”

  “Pardon?”

  “What was the cause of the dispute?”

  “There was no dispute, I tell you. She called me a bad word and then she say——”

  “Why wouldn’t Miss Carless play with you in the orchestra?”

  “Ah, that!” Zbartorowski shrugged his shoulders and was silent for a moment. When he spoke again the animation had died out of his face and his habitual expression of melancholy had returned. “It was personal between me and she, you will understand. Also political. It is not easy to explain.”

  “Personal?” The inspector caught at the word. “So you had known Miss Carless before?”

  Zbartorowski shook his head. “No,” he said. “Perhaps when she was a little girl. I do not know. She was not called Carless then, anyway. It is no matter. All that belongs to the long ago—to a Poland that exists no more. You will not want to hear about that.”

  “I’m quite sure you Won’t, Inspector,” Mrs. Roberts put in. “It’s a very sad story, and nothing to do with you.”

  Trimble resolutely disregarded the interruption, but he did not press the subject any further. “Very well,” he said, “so you left the concert hall in the middle of the rehearsal. What did you do?”

  “I go out. I wait till the pubs open and then I get drunk. What else have I to do?” said Zbartorowski simply. “Mr. Dixon has paid me some money in advance of the concert, so I can drink.”

  “Where were you when the concert began at eight o’clock that evening?”

  The Pole shrugged his shoulders again. “The Antelope, the Crown, the Black Horse—I do not know,” he said. “If you ask them, they will tell you. I was very drunk in all of them that night.”

  “You are sure you did not go back to the City Hall at any time?”

  “Oh, no. How could I? By eight already I was stinking.”

  “Did you arrange with anybody to take your place at the concert?”

  For the first time Zbartorowski permitted himself to smile. “As if I should do so,” he said. “This Carless who is so clever, she can play the clarinet herself for what I cared, and the bassoon also. It was nothing to me.”

  “I see.” Trimble paused for a moment, and looked at the other thoughtfully. “And since then,” he went on, “you have not been back to your lodgings?”

  “No.”

  “Nor did you turn up on Saturday night to play in the dance band where you have been employed?”

  “No.” The voice was hardly audible.

  “Why not?”

  Looking more acutely miserable than ever, Zbartorowski muttered, “Because I can no more play.”

  “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  With the tortured expression of a man confessing to an unforgivable sin, the Pole slowly raised his eyes to meet the inspector’s. “I broke my instrument,” he said reluctantly.

  “Broke it? What do you mean? Did you have an accident with the thing?”

  “No, no!” It was the voice of a man in an agony of remorse. “You do not’ understand! It was no accident! That night, I—Tadeusz Zbartorowski—of the Varsova Opera orchestre—took my clarinet—my own instrument—and smashed it up in the bar of the Antelope pub—so drunk I was—and because I might no more play in Mr. Evans’ concert orchestre! And the pieces I give to the barmaid of the Antelope—and she laughed at me, so funny it was,” he added bitterly.

  To Trimble’s extreme embarrassment, large tears were coursing down Zbartorowski’s sallow cheeks.

  “There, there!” said Mrs. Roberts in a comforting tone. “You had better go back to the kitchen now. Make yourself a good hot cup of coffee and you’ll soon feel better.”

  Casting a look of gratitude at his patroness, Zbartorowski stumbled from the room. Trimble made no attempt to detain him. He had got all that he wanted. Zbartorowski, he felt sure, might now be written off as a serious suspect in the case, though it would be necessary to confirm his story by routine enquiries at the Antelope, the Crown, and the Black Horse. Very shortly afterwards he took his leave, glad to be out of a house where he had endured such acutely uncomfortable moments.

  He found Sergeant Tate awaiting him when he arrived back at the police station.

  “I have taken a supplementary statement from Farren, sir,” he said, and laid upon his desk a neatly typed copy.

  Trimble glanced through it. It was short and clear enough. Farren was quite positive that on the evening of the concert he had received only one telephone message ordering a car to go to Eastbury Junction.

  “Oh!” said Trimble. It required all his self-control to confine himself to that one monosyllable, and he hoped that he had uttered it in a manner calculated to impress the sergeant with his omniscience and self-confidence. But he was by no means sure that he had succeeded.

  14

  Blue-bottle’s Progress

  “Buzzing about like a blue-bottle, the inspector is,” remarked Sergeant Tate to his wife, as he left her to go on duty a few days later. “Just like a blooming blue-bottle—with about as much idea of where he’s going, and about as useful.”

  It was perhaps an unfair comparison, because in point of fact Trimble’s investigations had been by no means fruitless. Working on the list which he had compiled after his conference with the Chief Constable, he had succeeded in clearing up a number of points. Zbartorowski, with the assistance of the barmaid at the Antelope, had been eliminated so thoroughly that it did not seem worth while to get his photograph for submission to his fellow clarinettist in the orchestra. Next, he had painfully extracted the information which, unknown to him, Mr. MacWilliam had already derived from Pettigrew over the lunch table. The number of potential clarinet players was not increased and the mystery surrounding the engagement of Farren’s. car remained in statu quo. He had then gone on to unearth one fact that might be of genuine importance—at least one positive grain of truth to set against the disappointing mass of negatives which was all he had to show so far for his work. The fatal stocking, by a fortunate chance, had been identified, through some technical peculiarity which Trimble did not begin to understand but which was as clear as noonday to the manufacturers, as being one of a consignment delivered during the month of October to Messrs. Chapman and Frith, the one and only departmental store in Markhampton.

  So far, so good. But having advanced to this point, the inspector again found himself at a dead end. Chapman and Frith, with the best will in the world, could not assist him further. The stocking that had been destined to choke the life out of Lucy Carless had reached them in a parcel of some twenty dozen pairs, and had been sold together with its fellows over the counter for cash (accompanied, their manager begged to assure him, by the appropriate coupons). The whole lot had gone off in the course of one fervid morning. The assistants at the hosiery counter still shuddered as they recollected the
scene when the stocking-starved maids and matrons of Markhampton and the surrounding countryside had stampeded into the shop and cleared the place of the first fully-fashioned sheer, superfine nylons that had been seen in the city for many a long month. They could not possibly begin to identify any individual among that eager, clutching crowd, any more than could the constable on duty who had marshalled the waiting queue outside before the shop doors opened.

  But at least it was something to know that the thing had been bought locally. Although the fact was not conclusive evidence that the murderer came from Markhampton or the immediate neighbourhood, it certainly gave reason for thinking so, and Trimble was not sorry to be able to eliminate the possibility of an outsider in the crime, since it also strengthened his hand in resisting the suggestion that an outsider should be brought into the detection of it. Sergeant Tate, indeed, in his blunt, unscientific manner, remarked as soon as he saw the statement from the stocking manufacturer, “Well, that lets Sefton clean out of it.” Trimble thought it his duty to rebuke him for jumping at conclusions, but very shortly afterwards two further morsels of information reached him which convinced him that Tate was right.

  The first came in the form of a confidential report from Scotland Yard, in response to a request which Trimble had put through immediately after his conference with the Chief Constable. It indicated that whatever other vices he might have Sefton was not what MacWilliam called a “crypto-clarinettist”. The Yard reported that discreet enquiries had been made into his musical career. He had studied at the Royal College of Music, where his principal subject had been, naturally enough, the pianoforte. His second instrument there had been the violin and he had left the College without, so far as could be ascertained, having so much as touched a wind instrument. Ever since he had been professionally occupied as a concert pianist and accompanist, and there was no evidence whatever that he had had the opportunity or the inclination to do anything else.