Death and the Visiting Fireman

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘If someone wanted to establish the presence of a woman in a dark room at night,’ the inspector said, ‘it wouldn’t be difficult to get hold of some of her scent, to soak a handkerchief in it...’

  Smithers stuffed his handkerchief back into his pocket.

  A bead of sweat ran suddenly down the side of the inspector’s immense nose and dropped on to the table.

  ‘... and to pull it out in the dark at the appropriate moment.’

  ‘What nonsense.’

  The improbable classroom lie put in its place.

  The inspector went back to the window.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘nonsense after all. It must be the heat in here. Thank you very much. And you will send Miss Kett to me?’

  Smithers got up.

  ‘I will,’ he said.

  The door knob slipped in his sweaty hand.

  It turned. He went out. The inspector was standing by the window, rolling up an out-of-date newspaper and eyeing the bluebottle.

  Smithers found the rest of the party sitting in the lounge. All the windows were wide open, but it was still very hot. Everybody looked listless.

  ‘You were with him long enough, brigadier,’ Joe said. ‘I thought he’d popped you inside.’

  ‘Yes,’ Smithers said, ‘I suppose it was quite a time.’

  ‘You don’t look too well,’ Daisy said. ‘Are you all right? You’re awfully pale.’

  ‘Yes, I’m all right thank you. It’s very airless in that little office, I’m afraid. Miss Kett, the inspector would like a word with you there. You look coolly dressed but...’

  ‘But it wouldn’t do to shock old Nosey Parker by changing into a bikini,’ said Kristen. ‘I only hope he doesn’t keep me too long then. I can’t stand this heat.’

  ‘It looks as if it may really come to a storm soon,’ Fremitt said. ‘That will at least reduce the temperature to some extent. I really would almost welcome a good rainy spell.’

  Kristen looked apprehensive.

  ‘I hate thunder,’ she said. ‘I really hate it. Oh well, I suppose I shall have to go and get this over with.’

  When she had gone, Daisy said:

  ‘I’m a little worried about her. This heat is really getting at her, poor kid. And I know what it’s like not being able to cope with thunder. I believe it sometimes brings it on too, only I don’t think she’s really at that stage yet.’

  Nobody said anything until Fremitt asked:

  ‘At that stage? Do I understand .. .? But perhaps ...?’

  ‘You mean you didn’t know?’ Daisy said. ‘I thought she’d almost certainly told you, even if it wasn’t so obvious.’

  ‘Obvious,’ Wemyss said. ‘Are you saying she’s going to have a baby?’

  ‘But I thought everyone knew all the time,’ Daisy said. ‘You did, didn’t you, Mr Smithers?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And I can see you did, major. Well, I hope she isn’t in that little poky office too long, not if it’s as hot as you say it was.’

  ‘I suppose it was Hamyadis,’ said the major.

  ‘That’s what the trouble between them was,’ Daisy said. ‘You wouldn’t expect him to do anything to help, would you? As soon as he saw she was going to be a nuisance he showed his nasty side, and there was plenty to show, poor old George.’

  ‘In that case . ..’ said the major.

  But he decided to keep this thought to himself.

  For a long time no more was said.

  And Kristen was away in the office even longer. One hour six minutes later they heard the door burst open and the sound of high heels tapping rapidly on the bare floor of the hall.

  As Kristen started running upstairs the sound of sobbing was easily audible.

  ‘I’ve half a mind to tell Nosey Parker what I think of him,’ said Daisy.

  ‘He’s a policeman: it would do no good at all,’ the major said.

  Daisy got up and went out into the hall.

  ‘You don’t think she’s going to remonstrate with the inspector, do you?’ said Fremitt. ‘I can’t help feeling it would be inadvisable.’

  The sound of voices came into the room. Daisy’s and a deeper one which Smithers recognized as Constable Jenkins’s.

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ the constable was heard saying.

  Daisy’s words were less clear.

  Then the constable said:

  ‘The inspector’s making a very important phone call. You can’t go in.’

  Daisy came back to the lounge.

  ‘I suppose I was silly really,’ she said. ‘I’m glad he gave a good enough excuse for me to give it up and save my face.’

  They sat on in silence.

  Peter, who had been playing with some ants which were coming into the room through a crack in the floorboards, got up and came across to Smithers.

  He stretched up and whispered:

  ‘Please sir, any sign of a bite? I’ve been thinking about it.’

  ‘A nibble, Peter,’ said Smithers quietly. ‘I think I can say there’s a nibble.’

  ‘Right, Jenkins.’

  The inspector’s voice. Loud, decisive.

  ‘Up we go.’

  The sound of steps on the stairs. Heavy, in time, military.

  ‘Do you think something’s happening?’ asked Wemyss.

  ‘Probably going to lunch,’ said the major. ‘These people eat extraordinarily early.’

  Then confused steps on the stairs again. Coming down. Not in step. Mingled with the clop of high heels.

  And Kristen’s voice:

  ‘I’ll have to see my lawyer.’

  The inspector’s:

  ‘All right, all right. We’ll see to all that at the station. Now for your own sake come along without fuss.’

  Twenty

  Sitting in silence in the lounge they heard the distant slam of a car door.

  Then the inspector’s voice shouting above the noise of the engine starting up:

  ‘Just wait one moment. There’s something I want to get hold of straight away if I can.’

  A moment later he came into the lounge. He looked hurried, set-faced, businesslike.

  ‘Mr Smithers,’ he said, ‘a word with you, if you please.’

  An order.

  Smithers followed him out.

  The inspector carefully shut the door of the lounge and said in a low voice:

  ‘I’ve been hearing a good deal from Miss Kett. Was it the packet addressed to her that you put in the hotel safe the other day?’

  Smithers looked at him for an instant.

  ‘Yes, it was as a matter of fact,’ he said.

  ‘I shall have to have it, of course,’ said the inspector.

  He strode across to the reception desk and pressed the bell. Until the clerk came running along the corridor he kept his finger on the button.

  When the girl appeared the inspector nodded briefly at Smithers.

  ‘I want to get that packet I deposited in the safe the other day,’ Smithers said. ‘I want to give it to Inspector Parker here and he’s in rather a hurry.’

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ said the clerk.

  They went into the little office. It was still airless and very hot in the room. The girl knelt in front of the safe - bright steel heel protectors - and fitted the key in. A click. The door swung open. She took the big buff envelope from a compartment and handed it to Smithers.

  Smithers slit it open and took out the packet addressed to Kristen in Hamyadis’s sprawling hand.

  ‘Can I give you a receipt for this at the station whenever you care to come down?’ said the inspector.

  ‘Certainly,’ Smithers said.

  ‘You can trust me not to use them unless I have to,’ the inspector said.

  Smithers looked at him.

  ‘I suppose I ought to have acted on that principle from the start. But I have always been sure they were not relevant.’

  ‘Perhaps they aren’t,’ said the inspector. ‘I’m sorry to have to ta
ke them like this. You did very well to get hold of them.’

  ‘I’m sorry I acted as I did,’ Smithers said.

  The inspector hesitated a moment and then said:

  ‘Look, I must go. I can’t afford a slip-up now.’

  He hurried from the room, ran across the hall and down the hotel steps. Smithers heard the roar of the car engine fade away.

  He went back to the others.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t ask,’ said Daisy, ‘but what did he want?’

  ‘You shouldn’t ask,’ Smithers said. He sat down.

  ‘They have arrested her, haven’t they?’ said Wemyss.

  ‘No,’ Smithers said, ‘I don’t think there’s been a formal arrest. But from the inspector’s tone I don’t think it will be long delayed. I have the impression they prefer, when they can, to do these things in a police station.’

  ‘Please sir,’ said Peter, ‘did you think this was going to happen?’

  ‘I had no idea it would all be so unpleasant,’ Smithers said.

  ‘That’s just it,’ said Daisy. ‘I don’t care whether she did it or not. It’s foul.’

  ‘Will she be properly represented?’ said Fremitt. ‘Ought one of us to do something?’

  ‘John,’ Daisy said, ‘I can’t go on any longer without knowing about this one way or the other. It turns out to be much more horrid than I’d ever thought possible. John, is she guilty?’

  Fremitt: a pink of pleasure at the unexpected christian name. Then indecision.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know. The police must be right, I suppose.’

  ‘It isn’t a good enough answer,’ Daisy said.

  Sadness. Weariness.

  ‘John, I shall have to ask straight out. Did you kill George?’

  Round the corner and into the full force of a bucket of water.

  The utterly blank face.

  Daisy smiled.

  ‘You don’t have to answer that one now,’ she said. ‘I suppose I’ve made a fool of myself again. But tell me just one thing. Didn’t you know about the postman? Didn’t you know that that postman is so incurably chatty that he’s always late? Didn’t you know that the last collection from that box is always at least a quarter of an hour after the right time, and that you hadn’t got any sort of alibi for the attack on Peter?’

  ‘But it said on the box: 7.30 p.m.,’ Fremitt said.

  A new order of things to be slowly mastered.

  ‘I can see now that you would never think it didn’t go just then,’ Daisy said. ‘But you always seemed to dislike poor George so much. And then you had been to America, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I had been to America.’

  Fremitt got up and began to walk out.

  ‘You can’t know how sorry I am,’ Daisy said.

  ‘But you don’t need to be,’ he said. ‘In the circumstances you couldn’t have thought anything else. It was just that I had no idea.’

  He saw a chair and sat down again.

  ‘So I suppose it really is Kristen, after all,’ said Joe. ‘Poor kid. And this is the end of it all.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ the major said. ‘It’s nowhere near the end. It’s unpleasant enough I grant you for the girl, but she’s by no means a wilting flower. She hasn’t hesitated in the past to accuse other people of murder. The boot’s on the other foot now. It won’t do her any harm. After all, they can’t hope to secure a conviction.’

  ‘Can’t they?’ said Smithers. ‘Why should you think that?’

  ‘They don’t stand a chance,’ the major said.

  He got up and leant against the empty fireplace.

  ‘You’ve only got to think over the events of the past few days and put yourself in the place of a clever defending counsel,’ he said. ‘The girl herself would supply him with his first argument. We know that the case she made out against Daisy was trumped up, but it sounded nastily convincing. Think of what an unscrupulous Q.C. could make of it.’

  ‘How would this happen?’ Daisy said. ‘Would there be a big court scene with me in the box? I played one once. I kept thinking then how nice it would be. Only I suppose real life would be different as usual.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be the only one to be accused, though,’ the major said. ‘Look at you, Joe.’

  ‘Not in that way,’ Joe said. ‘I had enough of that to last a lifetime before I took to the fresh-air cure.’

  ‘The police apparently are satisfied that you had nothing to do with the murder,’ the major said. ‘But nothing’s happened to alter the facts. The case against you is as good as ever. Better, in fact. We all know the sort of man Hamyadis was. He was perfectly capable of using the information Joe gave us the other day to play cat and mouse with him.’

  ‘You don’t have to pretend about that any more,’ Peter said. ‘I made Dad tell me. Mr Smithers says it’s always best to face things.’

  ‘You’ll face a thing or two if you don’t hold your tongue, my lad,’ Joe said. ‘And if we are going to have this sort of talk I think you’d better run out and play. I’d forgotten you were here.’

  The boy looked crestfallen for a moment. Then he said:

  ‘Okay, Dad.’

  When he had run from the room, the major said:

  ‘Well, isn’t what I’ve told you true? Hamyadis would have been pretty unpleasant about the boy, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Only he didn’t know about him,’ Joe said. ‘Nobody did till I told old Nosey.’

  ‘No, he didn’t know. But what proof of that is there?’

  ‘Look here,’ said Joe. ‘Am I being got at? Because if I am, captain, there might be murder done yet.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ the major said. ‘I wasn’t making out it was true. But that attitude wouldn’t look too good in court. Still let’s concentrate on someone not present and avoid unpleasantness. What about our American friend? There again, he’s been officially cleared. But, you know, he behaved pretty suspiciously at times. That business of rushing up to London was never satisfactorily explained.’

  ‘Come,’ said Fremitt. ‘He must have offered some explanation to the police. He was not bound to repeat it to us.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Major Mortenson said. ‘But remember he was the only one of our party with firm links with the United States and it’s pretty generally known Hamyadis behaved in a very shady way over there. Defending counsel could make quite a bit out of that.’

  ‘A bit thin,’ said Wemyss.

  Deliberate words.

  ‘All right,’ the major said turning to face him. ‘Let’s see how you’d fare in the box, my boy. What would you answer when you were asked about your relations with the Kett girl?’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with the case,’ Wemyss said.

  A flush. A glint of anger in the eyes.

  ‘Look at that,’ the major said. ‘A cross-examiner wouldn’t ask for better. The very picture of someone hit in a vital spot.’

  ‘Now listen,’ Wemyss said. ‘Your thesis is interesting enough, but there’s no need to go muck-raking in that way. Stop it, that’s all.’

  ‘I say no more. My point is proved twice over. A plain case that would appeal to a jury as something they could understand.’

  ‘Oh, come, a lot of poppycock when all’s said and done.’ Wemyss sat gripping his chair arm. Betrayed by the too studied tone.

  ‘We’ll go no further,’ the major said. ‘Let’s hark back to absent friends. But first let me make it clear that what I am about to say is pure fantasy. But nevertheless, something that might raise doubts in a jury’s mind. Let’s think about young Peter.’

  He glanced at Joe.

  ‘All right,’ Joe said. ‘I won’t eat you this time.’

  ‘Good. Well then, consider the possibility that two guns were not fired simultaneously when Hamyadis was killed after all. You know on the face of it it is very unlikely. You’d need steady nerves and a keen eye to do it.’

  ‘I think this is a bit I�
�m not going to understand,’ Daisy said.

  ‘It does depend on looking at the whole business vice versa,’ Major Mortenson said. ‘But all it means is this: that it might have been possible to fire a bullet belonging to an automatic out of the Durs Egg pistol. Young Peter could be the killer.’

  ‘Could I really?’

  The boy’s head appeared over the sill of one of the open windows. Jack-in-the-box.

  ‘Peter,’ said Joe, ‘I thought you took it a bit calmly when I buzzed you off.’

  ‘You certainly heard no good of yourself,’ Smithers said.

  ‘But you don’t exactly look a picture of guilt.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the major. ‘I had no idea the boy was there.

  I’d never have suggested all that if I’d known.’

  ‘It was jolly exciting,’ Peter said.

  ‘And now,’ said Smithers, ‘it’s time you really did leave us. I want you to go down to the big stationer’s where we went the other day and ask them if the issue of Edward Gibbon Studies I ordered has arrived yet. It might be here and I’d like to see it as soon as possible.’

  Reproachful eyes.

  ‘You wouldn’t like it if you did stay,’ Smithers said. He smiled.

  ‘Okay, if you say so,’ said Peter.

  The head bobbed down.

  Joe went across to the window and leant out.

  ‘He’s gone this time,’ he said.

  ‘I’m making my point plain, I hope,’ said the major.

  ‘You mean that any one of us could have done the murder,’ Daisy said.

  A statement.

  ‘Exactly, even I myself. After all I confessed to it once just to make that point. The case against me could be made out to be pretty nasty.’

  ‘And what about Mr Smithers?’ Daisy said. ‘Or has my counting gone wrong again?’

  ‘I’ll complete the round if you like,’ said the major. ‘There is in point of fact a case of sorts to be made out against every one of us. Now just listen to the Kett girl’s counsel asking Smithers here why he came on this trip at all. It was plain from the start he didn’t like it. Yet he came, and he stayed. It’s odd, you know. And since the murder he’s taken a pretty active hand in things. It looks suspiciously like confusing the trail. Suspiciously. Add to that the fact that he’s studied the history of coach travel in all its aspects. The technical knowledge required would come very easily to him. Well, Smithers?’