Trent Intervenes and Other Stories

by E. C. Bentley

  ‘She won’t be living with him for very long, I dare say,’ Mrs Hunt intimated darkly.

  ‘No. I’d marry her myself if I had the chance,’ Hunt agreed cordially.

  ‘Pooh! You wouldn’t be in the first six,’ his wife said. ‘It will be Rennie, or Gossett, or possibly Sandy Butler – you’ll see. But perhaps you’ve had enough of the local tittle-tattle, Phil. Did you fix up a game for this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes; with the Jarman Professor of Chemistry in the University of Cambridge,’ Trent said. ‘He looked at me as if he thought a bath of vitriol would do me good, but he agreed to play me.’

  ‘You’ve got a tough job,’ Hunt observed. ‘I believe he is almost as old as he looks, but he is a devil at the short game, and he knows the course blindfold, which you don’t. And he isn’t so cantankerous as he pretends to be. By the way, he was the man who saw the finish of the last shot Freer ever played – a sweet shot if ever there was one. Get him to tell you.’

  ‘I shall try to,’ Trent said. ‘The steward told me about that, and that was why I asked the professor for a game.’

  Colin Hunt’s prediction was fulfilled that afternoon. Professor Hyde, receiving five strokes, was one up at the seventeenth, and at the last hole sent down a four-foot putt to win the match. As they left the green he remarked, as if in answer to something Trent had that moment said, ‘Yes; I can tell you a curious circumstance about Freer’s death.’

  Trent’s eye brightened; for the professor had not said a dozen words during their game, and Trent’s tentative allusion to the subject after the second hole had been met merely by an intimidating grunt.

  ‘I saw the finish of the last shot he played,’ the old gentleman went on, ‘without seeing the man himself at all. A lovely brassie it was, too – though lucky. Rolled to within two feet of the pin.’

  Trent considered. ‘I see,’ he said, ‘what you mean. You were near the second green, and the ball came over the ridge and ran down to the hole.’

  ‘Just so,’ Professor Hyde said. ‘That’s how you play it – if you can. You might have done it yourself today, if your second shot had been thirty yards longer. I’ve never done it; but Freer often did. After a really good drive, you play a long second, blind, over the ridge; and with a perfect shot, you may get the green. Well, my house is quite near that green. I was pottering about in the garden before breakfast, and just as I happened to be looking towards the green a ball came hopping down the slope and trickled right across to the hole. Of course, I knew whose it must be – Freer always came along about that time. If it had been anyone else, I’d have waited to see him get his three, and congratulate him. As it was, I went indoors, and didn’t hear of his death until long afterwards.’

  ‘And you never saw him play the shot?’ Trent said thoughtfully.

  The professor turned a choleric blue eye on him. ‘How the deuce could I?’ he said huffily. ‘I can’t see through a mass of solid earth.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Trent said. ‘I was only trying to follow your mental process. Without seeing him play the shot, you knew it was his second – you say he would have been putting for a three. And you said, too – didn’t you? – that it was a brassie shot.’

  ‘Simply because, my young friend’ – the professor was severe – ‘I happened to know the man’s game. I had played that nine holes with him before breakfast often, until one day he lost his temper more than usual, and made himself impossible. I knew he practically always carried the ridge with his second – I won’t say he always got the green – and his brassie was the only club that would do it. It is conceivable, I admit,’ Professor Hyde added a little stiffly, ‘that some mishap took place and that the shot in question was not actually Freer’s second; but it did not occur to me to allow for that highly speculative contingency.’

  On the next day, after those playing a morning round were started on their perambulation, Trent indulged himself with an hour’s practice, mainly on the unsurveyed stretch of the second hole. Afterwards he had a word with the caddy-master; then visited the professional’s shop, and won the regard of that expert by furnishing himself with a new mid-iron. Soon he brought up the subject of the last shot played by Arthur Freer. A dozen times that morning, he said, he had tried, after a satisfying drive, to reach the green with his second; but in vain. Fergus MacAdams shook his head. Not many, he said, could strike the ball with yon force. He could get there himself, whiles, but never for a certainty. Mr Freer had the strength, and he kenned how to use it forby.

  What sort of clubs, Trent asked, had Freer preferred? ‘Lang and heavy, like himsel’. Noo ye mention it,’ MacAdam said, ‘I hae them here. They were brocht here after the ahccident.’ He reached up to the top of a rack. ‘Ay, here they are. They shouldna be, of course; but naebody came to claim them, and it juist slippit ma mind.’

  Trent, extracting the brassie, looked thoughtfully at the heavy head with the strip of hard white material inlaid in the face. ‘It’s a powerful weapon, sure enough,’ he remarked.

  ‘Ay, for a man that could control it,’ MacAdam said. ‘I dinna care for yon ivorine face mysel’. Some fowk think it gies mair reseelience, ye ken; but there’s naething in it.’

  ‘He didn’t get it from you, then,’ Trent suggested, still closely examining the head.

  ‘Ay, but he did. I had a lot down from Nelsons while the fashion for them was on. Ye’ll find my name,’ MacAdam added, ‘stampit on the wood in the usual place, if yer een are seein’ richt.’

  ‘Well, I don’t – that’s just it. The stamp is quite illegible.’

  ‘Tod! Let’s see,’ the professional said, taking the club in hand. ‘Guid reason for its being illegible,’ he went on after a brief scrutiny. ‘It’s been obleeterated – that’s easy seen. Who ever saw sic a daft-like thing! The wood has juist been crushed some gait – in a vice, I wouldna wonder. Noo, why would onybody want to dae a thing like yon?’

  ‘Unaccountable, isn’t it?’ Trent said. ‘Still, it doesn’t matter, I suppose. And anyhow, we shall never know.’

  It was twelve days later that Trent, looking in at the open door of the secretary’s office, saw Captain Royden happily engaged with the separated parts of some mechanism in which coils of wire appeared to be the leading motive.

  ‘I see you’re busy,’ Trent said.

  ‘Come in! Come in!’ Royden said heartily. ‘I can do this any time – another hour’s work will finish it.’ He laid down a pair of sharp-nosed pliers. ‘The electricity people have just changed us over to AC, and I’ve got to rewind the motor of our vacuum cleaner. Beastly nuisance,’ he added, looking down affectionately at the bewildering jumble of disarticulated apparatus on his table.

  ‘You bear your sorrow like a man,’ Trent remarked; and Royden laughed as he wiped his hands on a towel.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I do love tinkering about with mechanical jobs, and if I do say it myself, I’d rather do a thing like this with my own hands than risk having it faultily done by a careless workman. Too many of them about. Why, about a year ago the company sent a man here to fit a new main fuse-box, and he made a short-circuit with his screwdriver that knocked him right across the kitchen and might very well have killed him.’ He reached down his cigarette-box and offered it to Trent, who helped himself; then looked down thoughtfully at the device on the lid.

  ‘Thanks very much. When I saw this box before, I put you down for an RE man. Ubique, and Quo fas et gloria ducunt. H’m! I wonder why Engineers were given that motto in particular.’

  ‘Lord knows,’ the captain said. ‘In my experience, sappers don’t exactly go where right and glory lead. The dirtiest of all the jobs and precious little of the glory – that’s what they get.’

  ‘Still, they have the consolation,’ Trent pointed out, ‘of feeling that they are at home in a scientific age, and that all the rest of the army are amateurs compared with them. That’s what one of them once told me, anyhow. Well now, captain, I have to be off this evening. I’ve looked in
just to say how much I’ve enjoyed myself here.’

  ‘Very glad you did,’ Captain Royden said. ‘You’ll come again, I hope, now you know that the golf here is not so bad.’

  ‘I like it immensely. Also the members. And the secretary.’ Trent paused to light his cigarette. ‘I found the mystery rather interesting, too.’

  Captain Royden’s eyebrows lifted slightly. ‘You mean about Freer’s death? So you made up your mind it was a mystery.’

  ‘Why, yes,’ Trent said. ‘Because I made up my mind he had been killed by somebody, and probably killed intentionally. Then, when I had looked into the thing a little, I washed out the “probably”.’

  Captain Royden took up a penknife from his desk and began mechanically to sharpen a pencil. ‘So you don’t agree with the coroner’s jury?’

  ‘No: as the verdict seems to have been meant to rule out murder or any sort of human agency, I don’t. The lightning idea, which apparently satisfied them, or some of them, was not a very bright one, I thought. I was told what Dr Collins had said against it at the inquest; and it seemed to me he had disposed of it completely when he said that Freer’s clubs, most of them steel ones, were quite undamaged. A man carrying his clubs puts them down, when he plays a shot, a few feet away at most; yet Freer was supposed to have been electrocuted without any notice having been taken of them, so to speak.’

  ‘H’m! No, it doesn’t seem likely. I don’t know that that quite decides the point, though,’ the captain said. ‘Lightning plays funny tricks, you know. I’ve seen a small tree struck when it was surrounded by trees twice the size. All the same, I quite agree there didn’t seem to be any sense in the lightning notion. It was thundery weather, but there wasn’t any storm that morning in this neighbourhood.’

  ‘Just so. But when I considered what had been said about Freer’s clubs, it suddenly occurred to me that nobody had said anything about the club, so far as my information about the inquest went. It seemed clear, from what you and the parson saw, that he had just played a shot with his brassie when he was struck down; it was lying near him, not in the bag. Besides, old Hyde actually saw the ball he had hit roll down the slope on to the green. Now, it’s a good rule to study every little detail when you are on a problem of this kind. There weren’t many left to study, of course, since the thing had happened four months before; but I knew Freer’s clubs must be somewhere, and I thought of one or two places where they were likely to have been taken, in the circumstances, so I tried them. First, I reconnoitred the caddy-master’s shed, asking if I could leave my bag there for a day or two; but I was told that the regular place to leave them was the pro’s shop. So I went and had a chat with MacAdam, and sure enough it soon came out that Freer’s bag was still in his rack. I had a look at the clubs, too.’

  ‘And did you notice anything peculiar about them?’ Captain Royden asked.

  ‘Just one little thing. But it was enough to set me thinking, and next day I drove up to London, where I paid a visit to Nelsons, the sporting outfitters. You know the firm, of course.’

  Captain Royden, carefully fining down the point of his pencil, nodded. ‘Everybody knows Nelsons.’

  ‘Yes; and MacAdam, I knew, had an account there for his stocks. I wanted to look over some clubs of a particular make – a brassie, with a slip of ivorine let into the face, such as they had supplied to MacAdam. Freer had had one of them from him.’

  Again Royden nodded.

  ‘I saw the man who shows clubs at Nelsons. We had a talk, and then – you know how little things come out in the course of conversation – ’

  ‘Especially,’ put in the captain with a cheerful grin, ‘when the conversation is being steered by an expert.’

  ‘You flatter me,’ Trent said. ‘Anyhow, it did transpire that a club of that particular make had been bought some months before by a customer whom the man was able to remember. Why he remembered him was because, in the first place, he insisted on a club of rather unusual length and weight – much too long and heavy for himself to use, as he was neither a tall man nor a powerful build. The salesman had suggested as much in a delicate way; but the customer said no, he knew exactly what suited him, and he bought the club and took it away with him.’

  ‘Rather an ass, I should say,’ Royden observed thoughtfully.

  ‘I don’t think he was an ass, really. He was capable of making a mistake, though, like the rest of us. There were some other things, by the way, that the salesman recalled about him. He had a slight limp, and he was, or had been, an army officer. The salesman was an ex-Service man, and he couldn’t be mistaken, he said, about that.’

  Captain Royden had drawn a sheet of paper towards him, and was slowly drawing little geometrical figures as he listened. ‘Go on, Mr Trent,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Well, to come back to the subject of Freer’s death. I think he was killed by someone who knew Freer never played on Sunday, so that his clubs would be – or ought to be, shall we say? – in his locker all that day. All the following night, too, of course – in case the job took a long time. And I think this man was in a position to have access to the lockers in this clubhouse at any time he chose, and to possess a master-key to those lockers. I think he was a skilful amateur craftsman. I think he had a good practical knowledge of high explosives. There is a branch of the army’ – Trent paused a moment and looked at the cigarette-box on the table – ‘in which that sort of knowledge is specially necessary, I believe.’

  Hastily, as if just reminded of the duty of hospitality, Royden lifted the lid of the box and pushed it towards Trent. ‘Do have another,’ he urged.

  Trent did so with thanks. ‘They have to have it in the Royal Engineers,’ he went on, ‘because – so I’m told – demolition work is an important part of their job.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Captain Royden observed, delicately shading one side of a cube.

  ‘Ubique!’ Trent mused, staring at the box-lid. ‘If you are “everywhere”, I take it you can be in two places at the same time. You could kill a man in one place, and at the same time be having breakfast with a friend a mile away. Well, to return to our subject yet once more; you can see the kind of idea I was led to form about what happened to Freer. I believe that his brassie was taken from his locker on the Sunday before his death. I believe the ivorine face of it was taken off and a cavity hollowed out behind it; and in that cavity a charge of explosive was placed. Where it came from I don’t know, for it isn’t the sort of thing that is easy to come by, I imagine.’

  ‘Oh, there would be no difficulty about that,’ the captain remarked. ‘If this man you’re speaking of knew all about HE, as you say, he could have compounded the stuff himself from materials anybody can buy. For instance, he could easily make tetranitroaniline – that would be just the thing for him, I should say.’

  ‘I see. Then perhaps there would be a tiny detonator attached to the inner side of the ivorine face, so that a good smack with the brassie would set it off. Then the face would be fixed on again. It would be a delicate job, because the weight of the club-head would have to be exactly right. The feel and balance of the club would have to be just the same as before the operation.’

  ‘A delicate job, yes,’ the captain agreed. ‘But not an impossible one. There would be rather more to it than you say, as a matter of fact; the face would have to be shaved down thin, for instance. Still, it could be done.’

  ‘Well, I imagined it done. Now this man I have in mind knew there was no work for a brassie at the short first hole, and that the first time it would come out of the bag was at the second hole, down at the bottom of the dip, where no one could see what happened. What certainly did happen was that Freer played a sweet shot, slap on to the green. What else happened at the same moment we don’t know for certain, but we can make a reasonable guess. And then, of course, there’s the question of what happened to the club – or what was left of it; the handle, say. But it isn’t a difficult question, I think, if we remember how the body was found.’
/>   ‘How do you mean?’ Royden asked.

  ‘I mean, by whom it was found. One of the two players who found it was too much upset to notice very much. He hurried back to the clubhouse; and the other was left alone with the body for, as I estimate it, at least fifteen minutes. When the police came on the scene, they found lying near the body a perfectly good brassie, an unusually long and heavy club, exactly like Freer’s brassie in every respect – except one. The name stamped on the wood of the club-head had been obliterated by crushing. That name, I think, was not F MacAdam, but W J Nelson; and the club had been taken out of a bag that was not Freer’s – a bag which had the remains, if any, of Freer’s brassie at the bottom of it. And I believe that’s all.’ Trent got to his feet and stretched his arms. ‘You can see what I meant when I said I found the mystery interesting.’

  For some moments Captain Royden gazed thoughtfully out of the window; then he met Trent’s inquiring eye. ‘If there was such a fellow as you imagine,’ he said coolly, ‘he seems to have been careful enough – lucky enough too, if you like – to leave nothing at all of what you could call proof against him. And probably he had personal and private reasons for what he did. Suppose that somebody whom he was much attached to was in the power of a foul-tempered, bullying brute; and suppose he found that the bullying had gone to the length of physical violence; and suppose that the situation was hell by day and by night to this man of yours; and suppose there was no way on earth of putting an end to it except the way he took. Yes, Mr Trent; suppose all that!’

  ‘I will – I do!’ Trent said. ‘That man – if he exists at all – must have been driven pretty hard, and what he did is no business of mine anyway. And now – still in the conditional mood – suppose I take myself off.’

  III

  The Clever Cockatoo