by Richard Hull
“No, no, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I suppose you jumped on him rather as you jumped on me.”
“I did.”
“And he suggested that you should be searched?”
“No, I did. How did you know that?”
“That’s an interesting variation. I suppose that it was found on you?”
“It was not!”
“He didn’t manage to palm it that time then?”
Macpherson’s look of fury gradually died away.
“I see,” he said. “Something of the sort occurred before and you expected the details to be the same? I thought at first that you were contemplating believing that I had in fact removed it. Well, I don’t know what the substance was that was alleged to have been stolen the first time, but a stamp is a very brittle thing and easily damaged. You can’t put it loose in your pocket or drop it into your shoes—Cargate, by the way, tried the turn-ups of my trousers, but it wasn’t there,” Macpherson relaxed into a grin, “nor was it in my pocket-book or in any envelope in the letters in my pocket. So eventually I told him straight out that I was quite sure that he had taken it out himself and that I proposed to have no more dealings with him ever. Moreover I said that I intended to pass the word quietly round the stamp trade. At that he said that he was going to do the same about me. Well, it would have been awkward, and bringing an action against him to stop it would have only advertised it; still, I think my reputation is good enough to have stood it. But as a matter of fact I ended the controversy about that particular stamp by telling him where it was.”
“Then you knew all the time? But didn’t he say—?”
“Yes, he did. He said that those who hide can find, but I shouldn’t have hid it in his property.”
“Where was it then?” Fenby asked as Macpherson seemed to have stopped.
“In a snuffbox. At least I think it was snuff.”
It most certainly was, but Fenby saw no reason to show how very much the fact interested him. Besides he rather wondered why Macpherson had pretended to be uncertain of what the contents of it was; however, he said nothing and allowed the stamp dealer to go on.
“My saying that it was in that box was a sudden inspiration and really pure guesswork on my part. You see it so happened that I had noticed this box when I came in—a heavy, valuable gold thing with a monogram on it in emeralds—rather in the same type as the Samoa issue of 1914.” (Macpherson could never get away from stamps for more than five minutes at a time.) “It had been lying on the writing-table by the side of the album so that its initials were the right way up for me to read. But while we were arguing about which of us was going to blacken the other’s character most effectively, I suddenly saw that the box had been inverted. So I took a shot and suggested that he looked in there—and there it was.”
“Was it?” Fenby seemed to be thinking. “What happened to it then?”
“I licked a stamp mount and put it back in its place for him. I’m afraid I rather acted with intentional and obvious mock courtesy.”
“You licked the mount—or the stamp?”
“The mount of course. You may lick a stamp when you put it on a letter, but if you want to keep it mint, you don’t do such a thing, for fear, as they said on the margins of the Victorian penny reds, of ‘damaging the cement’. I always like that phrase.”
“I see. But the discovery of the stamp didn’t end the argument, did it?”
“Not really. Though we pretended that it had. Because I suggested that it must have caught on his cuff when he stretched over to pick up the box and so got in accidentally. Whereupon he said ‘Oh yes? I suppose I’m still lucky to have the box,’ which I, in my turn, pretended not to understand. He knew very well that he had been caught out.”
“Then this stamp is still there?”
“It is.”
“I wonder if you would point it out to me?”
“Certainly. It’s the first sixpenny in the St. Vincent collection. I should rather like to buy it if only for the fact that it is the only stamp that I have ever been accused of trying to steal.”
“I’ll see what I can do for you. By the way, is the back sticky?”
“I hope so. It ought to have its original gum. Of course if the gum has been replaced, it isn’t so good.”
“Good Lord! Do you mind about that even? And can you tell?”
“Yes. Though not always easily.”
“It seems to me you must be very observant people in your line of business, so I wonder if you would tell me one other detail. Did you happen to notice if there was a bottle in the room?”
“A bottle?”
“Yes. The sort of thing you get from a chemist.”
“Oh! Let me think. Yes, I rather believe that there was. Standing on the window-sill. It had a coloured label on it, red I should think, but I couldn’t see properly because the label was, so to speak, on the window-pane side.”
“I see. I said you were an observant man. Do you happen to remember whereabouts on the window-sill it was?”
“Let me think. The desk was in the window so that the sill served as a kind of shelf beyond it. It was to one’s right as one sat at the desk. The snuffbox was on the left, on the desk itself.”
“I see. Well, now, to go back to this stamp collection. I shall go and see Ley and ask him to grant your request not to do anything with it in a hurry. He can’t anyhow until he has got probate and I think he will probably say that he will not act without the consent of us both, because as you rightly said, if there is a forger about, we shall be glad to help you catch him. Pretty difficult thing to prove, though. We might have to ask you to prosecute.” Fenby started to go. “Oh, but just one last question. What made you say the snuffbox was heavy?”
“I don’t know.” Macpherson seemed rather startled by the question. “It looked it.”
Fenby went away thinking of the irony of Cargate’s remark that “he was lucky” still to have the box.
The movements of that snuffbox and of the bottle of potassium cyanide had interested Fenby from the first. But naturally when he had started his investigations at Scotney End Hall on the morning of July 14th he had not concentrated upon them from the outset. He had had, first of all, to make some explanation of who he was and why any investigations were necessary.
The obvious person to whom to apply had been Joan Knox Forster whom chance had left virtually in charge of the household, at any rate until Ley should arrive. Fenby conceived at once a respect for the intelligence of the tall, clumsily built, middle-aged woman who greeted him. There was a readiness about her to face facts which Fenby found extremely refreshing.
She looked at him appraisingly through powerful spectacles and quite openly summed him up.
“I don’t quite understand,” she said, “what you are doing. I can understand that there has to be a formal enquiry as Mr. Cargate died so suddenly, but why the Coroner should desire police investigation, I don’t know. Is it usual?”
“Quite,” Fenby had lied gallantly. “Merely the normal routine enquiries.”
“But as to what? I mean what is there to enquire about? The state of his health you can get best from his doctor who is in London, not down here. That he normally travelled by car, not train, I can tell you. Also that the car was really out of order on that day and that, therefore, the train journey was necessary. Again, since the gold box studded with emeralds lying on the floor of the carriage must have caught your attention, I can also assure you that he was in the habit of taking snuff just occasionally. Rather an affectation on his part, I think,” she ended meditatively.
“I see. Did he have a chauffeur?” Fenby thought it best not to follow up the lead too quickly.
“No. There wouldn’t be very much for him to do except wash the car and keep it in order. Hardy Hall, that’s the gardener, did the washing, and apart from that he had
a service contract with a garage in London to overhaul it periodically. It saved trouble. For the rest, he preferred to drive himself. I used to do a little to help in an emergency with the second car, but as it happens he had just sold the old one and the new one had not been delivered. Then again, although he liked to have someone who could act as a chauffeur when wanted, he had only just moved down here and he hadn’t got things properly settled. In fact everything was in rather a muddle and there appears” (a trifle sarcastically) “to be a housing shortage in the village.”
Fenby nodded.
“Let’s leave out what might have been for the present and concentrate on the people who actually exist. There’s this man Hall.”
“No, Hardy, the only local man. Everyone down here is called Hardy—the man who gave the alarm yesterday was—and so they get nicknames. This Hardy was called Hardy Hall because he had worked at the Hall, that is here, for as long as anyone could remember. Only yesterday the vicar was trying to get Mr. Cargate to take on an under-gardener to be known as Scottish Hardy. In fact I think that that was what the row was about.”
“One thing at a time, Miss Knox Forster, please. Staff first. Row with the vicar afterwards.”
“Sorry. I’m not usually incoherent like this. Staff then. Myself, secretary, housekeeper and general bottle-washer. Raikes, the butler. Two housemaids. One cook, Mrs. Perriman; one kitchen-maid. I’ll write down all their names for you. Outside only Hardy Hall. I’ve been with Mr. Cargate over a year. To be accurate since April 9th last year; Raikes, for longer. He must speak for himself. The rest are new.”
“Thank you. Mr. Cargate’s business?”
“Operating on the Stock Exchange. Collecting anything and everything and sometimes reselling it. There was a stamp dealer here yesterday, but stamps he collected and very seldom sold. My job was to run the house, deal with his correspondence and have ready for him facts and figures on which to base his Stock Exchange transactions.”
“That’s got all that clear then. Now to go back a bit. You said just now that I must have noticed the snuffbox on the floor. Actually, of course, you will remember that Dr. Gardiner had taken charge of it before I arrived. But of course he told us all about it and neither gold nor emeralds are lost.” Fenby’s smile deprecated the probability of the doctor stealing the box. It also helped him to bring up his next point unobtrusively. “An unusual habit that, taking snuff?”
“Yes, but it existed.” Joan Knox Forster allowed herself to smile too, just in case the remark sounded like a snub.
“Where did he get his snuff from? Locally?”
“Gracious, no. He never got anything locally, a habit which was not making him very popular down here. He got it from a firm within a stone’s throw of Piccadilly Circus.” She mentioned the name.
“I see. By post?”
“Yes. And since you obviously want to know, the last lot came on Wednesday, and was opened by him on Thursday morning. I happen to know because when I came into the library at a quarter to ten, the usual hour, to take down letters and receive orders, he was cursing Raikes because the inside of the snuffbox was dirty. He told him to clean it out, and when Raikes brought it back I saw him open the package and fill the box.”
“So any snuff upset in the railway carriage yesterday was fresh from the makers and not opened before 9.45 a.m. on Thursday? You are quite sure of that?”
“I am. But, look here, why do you want to know?” Then before Fenby had a chance to answer she went on: “It sounds to me as if there is something behind all this and though I am a paid employee here, with no standing at all, I am more or less in charge until Mr. Ley comes. I have no desire to be obstructive in any way whatever, but I think that I ought to know a little bit more about it before you start questioning everyone like this. It’s going to start them talking and it will fall on me to keep them quiet. If I were the responsible person, I shouldn’t mind a bit, but as I am not, it makes it harder for me. Though I am bound to say that Mr. Ley is not the sort of man to turn on me and blame me for what I can’t help. All the same—”
“I understand that very well and I really do sympathize with you, but I can promise you that you are not doing anything wrong. Perhaps I ought to take you a little more into my confidence.”
“I really think that you ought. Besides,” she added as Fenby seemed to be hesitating, “I’m trained to be discreet.”
“Very well then. I am sure that the whole enquiry will prove to be an unnecessary precaution on our part, but Mr. Cargate did die very suddenly and so we have to make some investigation. That being so, the first thing that we see is a snuffbox and taking snuff is, as you say, an unusual habit. Moreover, the deceased was in the very act of taking a pinch of snuff when he died. There is no reason to expect that there is any connection between the two events, but we must in duty bound satisfy ourselves that there is no possibility of an accident having occurred. Besides, all this sort of facts get carefully collected together by the Home Office and sometimes it emerges from their figures that some particular substance—as it might be snuff—has unexpected dangers, and then regulations are made.”
“The Home Office is very fond of grandmotherly regulations of that sort,” Miss Knox Forster agreed apparently with some asperity.
“They are indeed,” Fenby agreed hurriedly. He might be uttering the most unfounded slanders of the Home Office for all he knew or cared, and it was a matter of no importance whatever if he did, but it did seem to him to matter that nobody at Scotney End Hall should take his questioning as being anything other than routine, and he shrewdly considered that if he induced Joan Knox Forster to take that view, more than half his battle would be won. Beyond that he strongly disbelieved in giving anyone information that did not concern them. That ignorance was bliss was in his opinion one of the very few statements in a proverb that was ever tinged with the truth.
Accordingly he went on romancing happily and totally belying his declared intention of taking Joan Knox Forster into his confidence.
“A great nuisance to us some of those regulations are too. But to come back to this actual case, the information you have already given us is going to be of the greatest use, because, as you can see at once, it shortens the period over which we shall have to make our enquiries. We shan’t have to worry about what anyone was doing before 9.45 on Thursday morning.”
“Or after Mr. Cargate left to catch the train yesterday. But, seriously, does your last remark imply that you want to know what everybody did with every minute of their time on Thursday?”
“Why, of course! I hoped that I had made that clear.” Fenby opened his eyes in wide surprise and hoped, not very sanguinely, that he would get away with it. The broad grin on Miss Knox Forster’s face soon undeceived him. Dr. Gardiner had been right. It was not so simple to bamboozle this apparently unimportant woman as it might have seemed.
“Don’t think that I am trying to stop you for a second,” she said. “So far as I’m concerned, go right ahead with it and I’ll help you as much as I can, but please do not assume that I am quite mentally deficient. I do not believe for an instant that you would take all that trouble if there wasn’t something that you think is wrong, something fishy which you have found out, and obviously that something is prima facie concerned with the snuff. Aren’t I right?”
“How can we know anything about the snuff when the carriage that it was in was carefully washed out by the crass stupidity of the railway company yesterday?” If one was going to be untruthful, one might as well make a job of it, Fenby thought. It was all very well for Gardiner to suggest that an ally might be made of this woman, but personally Fenby preferred no civilian allies and he would much rather have her ignorant.
Miss Knox Forster seemed not in the least surprised by his last remark. Indeed she agreed to its truth.
“But you ought not,” she said, “to blame the railway company. Dr. Gardiner told them that it
would be all right. I was with him at the time and perhaps I ought to have stopped him, so you can blame me equally, but it never occurred to me that it mattered.”
“Pity.” Fenby shook his head sadly. He hoped that the red herring had been successful and that he could now get on with his job of tracing everyone’s movements with a reasonable chance of it being taken as a natural thing to do. Of course it would be simpler just to say that he intended to do so and vouchsafe no explanations at all. Very often he would have adopted that course, but on this occasion he would rather have the minimum of interest taken in what he was doing.
“It was a pity,” Miss Knox Forster’s voice roused him, “but if nothing is known to have been wrong with the snuff, then I am still more puzzled.”
“Well, as a matter of fact”—Fenby, like many other people, used the phrase frequently to introduce a thumping lie—“it was the accident that Mr. Cargate himself bought some poison in Great Barwick which has upset the Coroner. It seems that there has been some talk of country chemists not getting their registers signed properly—”
“What a perfect mare’s nest.” Joan was openly laughing now. “Or rather, what a perfect wasps’ nest.” She went on to explain just why the potassium cyanide had been bought, while Fenby, dishonestly, allowed his face to grow longer and longer.
“It does sound,” he said when she had finished, “as if I should be wasting my time. All the same, that’s all the more reason to get through it quickly.”
“The Inspector in charge of the case, my lord, commenced by compiling a careful time-table of the activities of Mr. Cargate from the moment when the snuff was opened in the presence of Miss Knox Forster at about 9.45 until the potassium cyanide was placed in the hands of the gardener at 5.0 p.m.
“It will be part of my case that it will not be necessary to consider the period after about 3.45 p.m. when Mr. Macpherson left Mr. Cargate, but lest that fact be disputed by my learned friend, I had better recapitulate that time-table in full. It will, of course, be proved to you by various witnesses, but I think that it will simplify matters if I give it you in its entirety.