Death and the Visiting Fireman

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘I plead not guilty,’ Smithers said.

  No one laughed. A challenge had been issued. Ambiguous but impelling.

  Wemyss, who had been lounging back with studied amusement since the major had made out a case against him, sat forward. Daisy let her embroidery fall to the ground and made no move to pick it up.

  ‘You know, major,’ Smithers went on, ‘what you have just been saying reveals a remarkable state of affairs. Here are nine people caught up in the deliberate killing of a man whom some of them hardly knew. And yet each of them seems to have been in a position to have been the killer.’

  ‘My point,’ said the major.

  ‘Joe,’ Smithers said, ‘I want to ask you something.’

  ‘As long as it isn’t whether I killed Hamyadis or the date of the battle of 1066 I’ll do my best, brigadier.’

  ‘Joe, I know you were getting restless before you and Peter left us, but, tell me, did you get a word of warning or anything that finally sent you off?’

  Joe looked puzzled.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘there was. But I’m damned if I can remember it now. I know it was something I couldn’t understand at the time.’

  ‘Something about being an accessory before the fact?’

  ‘That was it, brigadier. I thought I could take it all till the major there happened to say about that. I didn’t understand what it meant, of course. But as soon as I knew I was up against the law as well as the police I quit.’

  ‘Now Fremitt,’ said Smithers.

  An incisive turn of the head.

  ‘The theory of the transferred bullet just now, it wasn’t new to either of us, was it?’

  ‘No,’ Fremitt said, ‘I had had that idea and felt it my duty to tell you so. Or at least...’

  Feeling his way.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘To be strictly accurate the idea didn’t occur to me spontaneously. I was led to it in conversation. I think it must have been with you, major, because we seem to have gone on to arrive at the same point.’

  ‘I don’t remember it,’ said the major.

  ‘Fremitt,’ Smithers said. ‘When you were telling me about the idea, you used a couple of Latin phrases. Not something you usually do, I think?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Fremitt said. ‘Latin tags are more in your line of country, major, if I may mention it.’

  Smithers turned and looked at Wemyss.

  ‘Now, I am about to reveal, in part, a confidence, but I shall refer to nothing that will embarrass anybody.’

  The major tapped the iron fender noisily with the heel of his pipe.

  ‘Ssh,’ Daisy said.

  ‘One of us’, Smithers said, ‘suggested to Schlemberger in a private talk not so long ago that he was the person who killed Hamyadis. I came to learn of this conversation. The person making this accusation used two words quite uncharacteristic of their way of speech. They said they had taken a tip “verb sap”. I think it’s not difficult to see where the tip came from.’

  The major took a pace into the centre of the room. He looked down at Smithers.

  ‘You’re implying that I have been responsible for the atmosphere of suspicion we have lived in,’ he said.

  ‘I am saying that you persuaded one of our number to suspect Schlemberger, and that you sowed the seeds of a particularly nasty idea in Fremitt’s mind. I happened to detect your hand in this because of some uncharacteristic uses of Latin tags. In the case of Schlemberger, I believe your plan succeeded better than you hoped and something was unearthed which might have meant that Hamyadis was blackmailing him. However, evidently the police have decided that he had no more than a possible motive. As for Peter, you concocted an extravagant idea which if it came to the point could have been simply enough disposed of by those ballistic experts you despise so much. I find that hard to forgive.’

  ‘The man who stood aside from all the tittle-tattle,’ said the major.

  ‘I am saying that you played on Joe’s fear of the police and filled him up with a lot of nonsense about being an accessory before the fact, which he clearly never was, so that he made off and drew suspicion on his own head,’ Smithers went on.

  The indictment.

  ‘I am saying that it was you who made the mock attack on Peter, partly to confuse the situation further, and partly to provide yourself with an alibi. Did you think no one would see that it was perfectly easy for you to have ridden one of the horses back here and cut the time for the journey by half or more? Did you think that you had only to stir up enough mud - even mud against yourself in that staged confession - and no one would ever see through it? Did you think you were clever enough to get away with murder?’

  A glove at last thrown.

  The major’s bright blue eyes left Smithers’s face for an instant.

  In the room silence.

  Then the major said:

  ‘The elephant has laboured and brought forth a mouse. Well done, sir, you’ve concocted a fine omnium gatherum. I won’t stay and listen to such rubbish.’

  He strode to the door.

  ‘Major,’ Smithers said.

  The major stopped, his hand on the door knob.

  ‘I took certain steps to confirm this accusation.’

  Major Mortenson turned to face Smithers again.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  The others sat watching, at the bullring.

  ‘You told me once that I was an interfering old maid for letting Miss Kett accuse Miss Miller of the murder,’ Smithers said. ‘You were quite right, I did that. I wanted to see what a wanton attack on someone you obviously liked would produce.’

  ‘And what did it produce? I simply told you what I thought of you. I’ll repeat it if you like.’

  ‘What did you tell Inspector Parker when you saw him before breakfast this morning?’ said Smithers.

  ‘I left him a message about the horses. I didn’t see him.’

  ‘And on the strength of a message about the horses he was going to omit you from his interviews today? I suggest that you did see him. And that you made your last and most serious accusation. To punish Miss Kett for her attack on Miss Miller you tried to secure her arrest by telling Inspector Parker that she was going to have a baby by Hamyadis.’

  ‘So that’s the best you can do, is it?’ said the major. ‘Then I think I can match it.’

  He took two paces towards Smithers.

  ‘We’re not half-way there yet,’ said Smithers.

  ‘Perhaps because we’re travelling in precisely the wrong direction,’ said the major. ‘I can see I’ve been too magnanimous in not making it plain how Hamyadis really met his death. Only one person could in point of fact have committed that murder: only the man with the technical knowledge. I’ve read your travel history, Smithers. You had that knowledge.’

  ‘What possible reason could I have for killing Hamyadis?’

  ‘And what possible reason could I have? You’ll have to do better than that.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Smithers. ‘You have said that I had the necessary knowledge to kill Hamyadis in that way. So I may have done. But if I did, how much more did you. You had more than the general knowledge needed, you had the particular information. You were the person who played on Hamyadis’s vanity to make him leave the weapon in the coach the night before the murder. It depended on you alone that everybody learnt how to melt the lead out. You were the person who charged the Durs Egg pistol with plenty of powder so that its noise was sure to mask the silenced gun.’

  The tense watchers move. Glances exchanged.

  ‘All very clever,’ the major said. ‘But you have most carefully avoided the key question. I repeat: what possible reason could I have to murder George Hamyadis?’

  Smithers looked steadily at him.

  ‘Because he was not George Hamyadis but George Brown,’ he said.

  ‘Brown. You ...’

  The major jumped back. His hand fumbled in his jacket pocket. The hard blue eyes looking at Smithers with
mounting passion. Then suddenly the hand jerked out of the pocket and a pistol was held pointing unwaveringly at Smithers’s stomach.

  A Durs Egg pistol.

  ‘The second of my pair,’ said the major. ‘And make no mistake. This one is loaded to kill.’

  ‘Put it down,’ said Smithers. ‘It’s over now. You’ve nothing to gain.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure of that. I fought you all every bit of the way. I’ll fight you to the end. You thought I was beaten when you found Brown’s gun in the coach, didn’t you? But I heard you boast to the boy where you would hide it. I turned the tables then, I’ll turn them now.’

  ‘Brown?’ said Daisy. ‘Who is Brown?’

  ‘You’ve heard all about George Brown, my dear,’ said the major.

  His eyes never left Smithers. Intense, probing.

  ‘I had to tell the story of how he betrayed Anamapur to make sure that the man I knew as Hamyadis was Brown. He looked almost the same without the beard, but he’d grown fat - fat on his pickings. But after all the years I caught him. I thought I’d lost him for ever when I recovered after my wounds there. Especially when I found that, thanks to the official mind, he’d been welcomed as nearly the saviour of the town and then had left India for good. But a big beard and a spell in America: they weren’t enough to protect him after all.’

  ‘I see,’ said Daisy.

  The major still looked at Smithers.

  ‘But how you got to know’, he said, ‘is beyond me. I’ll admit that. I laid the trail so well. All the talk of America. Never a word about India.’

  ‘One word about India,’ said Smithers. ‘Pani: your little trick to see if the Armenian Hamyadis knew it was Hindustani for water. You couldn’t conceal how tense you were as you played it, and it stuck in my mind. Now give me that pistol.’

  ‘One step,’ said the major, ‘and I shoot.’

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Smithers said. ‘I am not going to let you go.’

  ‘Except that I hold the final argument,’ the major said. ‘One shot from this’ - the pistol in his hand jerked a little - ‘what you might call the argumentum ad baculum.’

  A twisted smile.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘I’m going to leave you. You will all be so good as to turn your backs.’

  Nobody moved.

  ‘Daisy, please,’ said the major.

  ‘Oh, well,’ Daisy said, ‘I suppose it’s cowardly, but I shall be able to think of some good excuses later on.’

  She turned.

  ‘Fremitt, Wemyss, Joe.’

  Slowly they turned round.

  ‘Smithers.’

  ‘No,’ said Smithers, ‘give me the gun.’

  Glances met. Steady, questioning, hard.

  ‘Take one single step,’ the major said, ‘and I’ll blow your brains out.’

  ‘You’re aiming too low, major,’ said Smithers.

  And stepped forward with a hand out to take the gun.

  The others heard the soft footfall on the worn carpet of the lounge. There was no other sound to mask it.

  They half turned.

  Smithers was advancing. A second step.

  The major fired.

  In the tense silence shattering noise.

  And a whirl of movement. The major turning and leaping for the door almost the instant of the shot. Smithers falling. The door flung back in the major’s face. Inspector Parker. A grapple. A heavy chair sent flying. Smithers groaning. Daisy running towards him.

  And as suddenly as the noise, silence again.

  The major limp underneath the kneeling inspector. Smithers still and white. Daisy without a word tearing at his clothes feeling for the heart. The others dumb.

  Then Inspector Parker, Nosey Parker, spoke.

  ‘I’d give a great deal to know just exactly what’s been going on,’ he said.

  ‘He’s breathing,’ said Daisy.

  ‘Of course he is,’ Nosey Parker said. ‘Didn’t you see the wound in his thigh?’

  Smithers opened his eyes.

  ‘Hallo, inspector,’ he said. ‘You came very opportunely.’

  ‘I’d just heard from the forensic people,’ the inspector said. ‘Horse dung on the pillow used for that bit of trickery over Peter. It came from the farm where the coach horses were kept.’

  ‘So science did the trick in the end,’ said Smithers.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Nosey Parker said. ‘But I thought our troubles were far from over. Thank you for taking a hand.’

  ‘Never again,’ said Smithers. ‘I prefer not to have to deal, with anything more dangerous than a catapult.’

  He fainted.

  This electronic edition published in July 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

  Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

  Copyright © 1958

  First published by Gollancz 1958

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  ISBN: 9781448201297

  eISBN: 9781448202614

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