Death and the Visiting Fireman

by H. R. F. Keating

  Just before going into the dining room Smithers said:

  ‘Can you come and watch the coach again tonight?’

  ‘Is it still important then?’ asked Peter.

  ‘More so than ever.’

  ‘I’ll be ready then, sir.’

  Together they entered the dining room. Everybody except Schlemberger was already there.

  ‘Where have you been, lad?’ said Joe Dagg. ‘You don’t want to go wandering off like that.’

  The snapping nerves.

  Peter stopped short. A look of bewilderment. His father shook his head dazedly and said:

  ‘I might have wanted you all of a sudden, see.’

  ‘My fault, I’m afraid,’ Smithers said. ‘I took him for a ramble. It took us a little longer than we thought.’

  ‘That’s all right, colonel,’ Joe said. ‘I haven’t felt much like entertaining the lad lately. But I’ve got to know where he is, that’s all’

  ‘If you were wandering about the countryside,’ Richard Wemyss said, ‘I suppose you haven’t heard anything of the murder hunt. There was no appeal on the wireless or picture on the TV or anything. I wonder if that means they’ve got him.’

  ‘There’s certainly nothing I can tell you,’ Smithers said. ‘Though I would advise you not to speak in quite the terms you chose.’

  ‘The fellow was damn silly to hop off, if he has hopped off,’ said the major. ‘If he’d just sat tight they’d never have cottoned on. Verbum sapienti.’

  ‘I shall be glad when it’s over one way or another,’ Daisy Miller said. ‘The longer it goes on the worse it gets. Even my chatty postman mentioned it when I met him again as I was catching the last post just before dinner.’

  ‘If it really is Schlemberger,’ Fremitt said,’ and I am reluctant to believe it can be, it really is about as bad as possible. It almost amounts to a national calamity. There are important issues involved, the tourist trade, dollars. At least so it seems to me.’

  ‘Why do you all go on about it so?’ Kristen Kett said. ‘If I’ve heard you all say that stuff once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. You’ve been round and round it all afternoon. Can’t you just shut up and wait for the end?’

  ‘A remark which I seem to have heard before this afternoon,’ Wemyss said.

  ‘Now you leave her alone, captain,’ said Joe. ‘She’s quite right for one thing. It’s over. Talking can do no good now. It’s all something to do with gangsters, that’s what I think. It all ought to be finished with. The ruddy coppers ought to leave us in peace. And we ought to forget it all.’

  ‘Very true, I dare say,’ said Wemyss. ‘But as I happened to introduce the subject I think I’ve a perfect right to point out to anybody that they’re being inconsistent in not wanting to talk about it.’

  ‘Just leave the kid alone, that’s all I asked,’ Joe said. ‘She’s a bit off colour like. Anyone can see that. So let her be, that’s all.’

  Wemyss moved his chair slightly and leant over the table towards Kristen.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘did your friend Georgie ever talk to you about this gangster Schlemberger?’

  ‘You’ve asked me that before,’ said Kristen. ‘And I’ve told you he didn’t. I’ve told you and told you and told you.’

  Joe Dagg scraped back his chair and stood up.

  ‘Listen,’ he said.

  ‘You know,’ Smithers said, ‘I was asked just now if I knew anything about a supposed hunt for Mr Schlemberger.’

  Joe sat down. Without fuss, quickly.

  ‘I said I knew nothing of a hunt, which was true,’ Smithers went on. ‘But after what I’ve just been listening to I think perhaps I ought to say that while I was speaking to Inspector Parker this afternoon he distinctly gave me to understand that Mr Schlemberger scarcely entered into the police reckoning at all.’

  Silence. Adjustments of view.

  ‘I knew it was too good to be true,’ said Daisy. ‘Not that I wanted it to be true anyway.’

  Another silence.

  ‘Damnit. Damn it,’ said Joe. ‘They’ll begin those questions again, poking and prying. Why can’t they leave us alone?’

  He jumped up from the table and left the room.

  The others looked at each other. No more was said while they went into the coffee room. Old magazines were much reread that evening. Everybody sat in the same room glancing at each other from time to time. Speech at a minimum. There was no surprise when Schlemberger walked in and said the inspector had let him go up to London for a few hours.

  Everybody went early to bed. Unlikely excuses for tiredness were given and accepted.

  Once again Smithers stationed himself to watch the coach house. He began Vol. 5 of The Decline and Fall His watch was undisturbed.

  At midnight he went to Peter’s room. He stood outside the door hesitating, and then tapped lightly.

  No reply.

  He tapped again. Opened the door a crack. The beam of light from the corridor fell on an empty bed.

  Ten

  Smithers slipped the half-hunter from his pocket. Three minutes past midnight. He left the room and sat in the window seat at the end of the corridor where he could see the door clearly.

  Eighteen minutes past midnight. Smithers walked back, opened the door again, glanced at the empty bed, shut the door, took a box of matches from his own room, emptied the contents and, holding the box, went along the corridor to Joe Dagg’s room. He knocked.

  No response.

  A louder knock. Still nothing.

  Smithers tried the door. It opened. The room empty, the bed still made up. A quick look round. No suitcases. No clothes in the cupboards or chest of drawers.

  Smithers went down to the hall and rang up the police station.

  ‘The inspector’s here, hold on a minute,’ said the constable who answered.

  A short pause.

  ‘Inspector Parker speaking. Is that you, Mr Smithers?’

  ‘Yes. I rang to tell you that Joe Dagg has left the hotel, taking his boy and all his luggage.’

  ‘I see. Hold on a moment, would you?’

  Faintly in the background the sound of sharp voices. Then:

  ‘I’m sorry to have kept you. Now tell me all about it.’

  ‘There’s little more to tell. I happened to run out of matches and I thought Dagg might still be up, so I tapped lightly on his door and then put my head round it. When I saw the bed was unslept in I thought it was odd, so I glanced round the room and found all the clothes gone. The boy isn’t there either.’

  ‘I see. Anything else?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Would you stay by the telephone? I may want to ring back.’ Smithers sat down and waited.

  In two minutes Inspector Parker came into the hall, jerking the door open. He was breathing heavily.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said. ‘I want a word with you.’

  A sergeant and two constables came in. The inspector ordered one of the constables and the sergeant to go upstairs. Then he turned to Smithers:

  ‘You don’t smoke, Mr Smithers, do you?’ he said.

  Smithers waved the offer aside.

  ‘I never do.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Parker.

  A spring.

  ‘Exactly. You never smoke. There is a perfectly good electric light in this hotel, and yet you want a match at midnight. There may be some explanation. The boy, Peter, disappears, so you tell us. You have produced him as a witness to some pretty inexplicable behaviour immediately following a murder. You also took him with you to London in defiance of my request to you to stay in .Winchester. I get to hear things, you know. Now, I would like your explanation.’

  Smithers heard from behind him the steady scutter of the constable’s pencil across the page of his notebook.

  ‘There is an explanation,’ he said,’ it is simply that I have lost confidence in your conduct of this investigation, inspector. At the same time I have no reasons I could properly put
to, say, your Chief Constable. Even if he would listen to someone involved in the case.’

  Nosey Parker looked at him. A scrum half waits for the ball.

  ‘Very good,’ he said. ‘I will tell you Mr Smithers what I think your motive in making that remark might be. It might well be deliberate provocation to force me to make a move before I had proper evidence. Let me make it clear. At present I have not got evidence enough to make me believe you are responsible for the crime I am investigating. All I have is an inexplicable course of conduct.’

  ‘Look,’ said Smithers, ‘I feel some of the blame for this situation rests with me. I had nothing to do with the murder of Hamyadis. On the face of it, why should I have? So any time you spend suspecting me is time wasted. About that I feel guilty. Can’t we sort it out? I have never thought of myself as likely to become a murder suspect, much less so as playing amateur detective. But that is what I have been doing. I have had to do it to protect myself. Simply because owing to your unnatural curiosity you refuse to see my perfectly valid, if a little unusual, unwillingness to gossip in its natural light.’

  ‘You went to fetch the boy to witness another stage in your investigation then? I take it that’s what you’ll say?’ Inspector Parker asked.

  ‘You’re quick to see all the implications,’ said Smithers. ‘I like to think that makes my actions seem all the more credible.’

  ‘Hm . .. That’s as may be. What were you going to do half an hour ago that the police in their ignorance had omitted?’

  ‘It’s not a question of ignorance. You know that. It was simply that I believed you had made a mistake about me personally and I was, if you like, trying to prevent some of the consequences.’

  ‘Stop a minute,’ said Nosey Parker. ‘Keep off the business of my so-called excess of curiosity. I don’t understand it and I don’t believe it. What I find easier to understand is the game of knowing more than a mere policeman. It’s common enough. Stick to that. Give me the facts about that, and I’ll see if they hold water.’

  ‘You’re making a mistake,’ Smithers said. ‘I leave technical matters to the expert. But I won’t press the point. As to what I was going to do, I was keeping a watch on the coach. Whoever wanted to get something from it has not succeeded yet, and they are pretty anxious about it.’

  ‘So you come back to that,’ said Inspector Parker. ‘If you can do no better I’ll find it hard to believe you. Don’t you want to tell me what you were going to do? Do you still believe you can outsmart us? Or are you simply trying to see if we’re interested in a red herring?’

  The sergeant came quickly down the stairs.

  ‘Well?’ said the inspector.

  ‘Gone, sir,’ said the sergeant.

  Inspector Parker looked hard at Smithers.

  ‘You’re perfectly certain, sergeant?’

  ‘Trabert, the man I put on duty here tonight said he saw Dagg about 11.45. The room’s been pretty well tidied up. There wouldn’t have been time to do it between then and the time we got the call. He must have had everything packed when Trabert saw him and have gone a minute or two after.’

  ‘Probably just making sure where Trabert was when he noticed him,’ the inspector said. ‘What about the boy?’

  ‘Clean sweep there too, sir.’

  ‘Are you working on the prints?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Long way to go, of course, yet, but no sign of anything but the boy, his father, and what looks like a maid so far.’

  Inspector Parker turned to Smithers again.

  ‘We don’t believe much in subtleties in the force,’ he said. ‘I’m keeping an open mind, of course, because Dagg’s one of the sort that take badly to policemen. On the other hand, he had something to hide or I’m a Dutchman. In any case from now on we concentrate all our energies on finding him. We won’t forget that gun though. As to what you’ve been doing, I don’t pretend to know. Good night.’

  As he went out he passed a constable coming in carrying a case.

  ‘Tell Sergeant Hanks I want you to relieve Trabert and I want to see Trabert at the station right away,’ he said.

  Smithers walked slowly upstairs and went to bed. He had been short of sleep since the murder and though the inn was noisy with police comings and goings all night he slept soundly.

  Round the breakfast table set aside for the coach party, the murder party, two empty places.

  ‘I happened to discover last night that Joe has left and has taken Peter with him.’

  An announcement from Smithers.

  He sat down and began his breakfast.

  ‘This time it must be all over,’ Kristen Kett said. ‘I can’t stick it much longer. Why can’t they tell us we can go back to London? Think of going and meeting people and forgetting your troubles.’

  The child’s nose pressed against the sweet-shop window.

  ‘I think we’re all a little anxious to be on our way,’ said Schlemberger.

  Wise uncle.

  ‘I guess I’m not the one to talk,’ he continued. ‘I’ve had my little jaunt. But all the same, I’m mighty glad to see the case is cleared up.’

  ‘You think it is?’ asked Fremitt.

  ‘Look at the facts,’ Schlemberger said. ‘Number one: the guy’s gone. That in itself should be enough for anyone. You can’t get over a plain fact like that. Then there’s number two: he was as nervy as a cat since the murder. I keep my eyes open. I was just watching what was going on. Right. Number three: from what I’ve been able to piece together there was no present Mrs Dagg and hadn’t been for a good while, but there is a Dagg Junior. Add to that a great deal of prejudice against foreigners and what do you get? That his wife had run away with one a long time ago. Add to that one other fact: that Hamyadis had shaved off his beard. What’s that add up to? You can see it now as well as I can. He recognized Hamyadis as the man who had seduced his wife. A pretty hard case, I’d say.’

  ‘It’s a good case, sir,’ said Major Mortenson,’ but there have been others.’

  ‘That’s a pretty charitable sentiment,’ Schlemberger said. ‘Butlet me add one more circumstance I didn’t think it necessary to refer to just now. Let us call it the incident of the major’s confession. That’s a piece of the jigsaw all right, and it’s got to fit. Major, won’t you tell us right now that you confessed to keep your old friend Joe Dagg out of trouble. Didn’t you borrow your account of the beard business from him, from the truth as he told it to you in his trouble?’

  The major looked at Schlemberger across the table. Bright blue eyes glittering.

  ‘I prefer to make no comment on that,’ he said.

  ‘I guess perhaps you couldn’t,’ Schlemberger said.

  ‘Has nobody considered the possibility that Dagg has not run away?’ asked Richard Wemyss. ‘Kristen seems to be in a dreadful hurry to pin the crime on to the first person she can and hurry back to London, but personally I’d rather be sure. And after all, there’s no hurry. We’re very comfortable here.’

  ‘What do you mean about Joe not running away?’ Kristen said. ‘Richie, I don’t know what’s got into you lately. We used to be such friends, and now you seem to say anything you can just to upset me.’

  ‘Not just to upset you, dear,’ Wemyss said. ‘Just to keep the record straight. Joe Dagg may have been murdered, you know. It would account for his disappearance just as well as this flight from justice everybody is so keen about.’

  ‘The police have discounted that theory,’ said Smithers. ‘Joe apparently packed before he left.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Wemyss, ‘he may have gone off for other reasons. Just because he’s not here, it’s too easy to say he must be the murderer.’

  ‘I certainly agree we must avoid jumping to conclusions,’ Fremitt said. ‘He had an obvious dislike of the police. He was the sort to be so scared that he might run off. We ought to keep open minds, or at least to wait as long as possible before saying we know, or think we know.’

  ‘Personally,’ Wemyss said, ‘thi
s disappearance clears the man in my eyes.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Daisy, ‘the longer this has gone on the less I’ve understood. If anyone was to ask me, and thank goodness no one ever does, I’d say that because someone ... No, that’s too complicated - I’d say that because poor old Joe has run away it must mean he was the one who killed George. And I’m sure he had good reasons whatever they were.’

  For Daisy’s surmise quick official confirmation.

  Hardly had she finished speaking, leaving a silence, when Inspector Parker came in.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said. ‘I hoped I might find you all together. I dare say Mr Smithers has told you the news.’

  A sharp survey of faces. The thrush on the lawn misses nothing.

  ‘I see he has. Well, we haven’t located them yet, but we have found most of their clothes and personal possessions hidden in a suitcase at the farm where the coach horses are. With other evidence this has led us to believe that they are very likely not attempting to leave this district. There’s a pretty wide expanse of downs round about and it wouldn’t be hard to hide out there at this time of year. There are dozens of odd little hollows and pockets of land they could use, beside copses here and there or even ditches.’

  ‘Why are you telling us this, inspector?’ asked Smithers.

  ‘I have my reasons,’ the inspector said. ‘To begin with we don’t as yet know a great deal about Dagg’s state of mind. He may be just thoroughly frightened and on the run, or he may not be. He may be desperate and ready to act.’

  ‘I suppose one of us is likely to know something he’d rather we didn’t,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Exactly,’ said the inspector, ‘there’s been one murder and I intend to see there isn’t another.’

  ‘You mean the man may be waiting to kill one of us?’ Wemyss said.

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Then 1 think you ought to know that he and I have quarrelled on a number of occasions. I always thought him pretty overbearing, and I’m afraid I didn’t bother to conceal my opinions. In the circumstances I think I ought to get back to London as soon as possible. I’m ready to go this morning if you’d prefer it.’