Ask a Policeman

by The Detection Club

  “It is true that there are some minor inconsistencies—Mr. Mills seems to pop in and out of prison, and there are some contradictory statements here and there-but in the circumstances, since the four Solvers worked on their own, in ignorance of one another’s plans, this was no doubt inevitable. I have done practically no editing.

  “And now what is the Correct Answer? You, so I understand, profess not to know. I, on the other hand, dare not say that one of the four solutions is the right one; nor have I brains enough to produce a fifth solution of my own, incontestably sounder than the others.

  “Yet that obviously is my job; and the only way by which I can do it is by taking to myself an Editorial Liberty to invent facts and to “play unfair.” Yes: that is what I must do, and I must hope that our readers, justly feeling that they have been cheated, will realize the merits of the Rules to which my fellow-members of the Detection Club always, and I on all occasions but this, make it a point of honour to adhere. Perhaps they will find consolation in detecting for themselves the breaches of the Rules of which I shall proceed to be deliberately guilty.

  ‘’Yours ever,

  “MILWARD KENNEDY.”

  PART III

  “IF YOU WANT TO KNOW—”

  BY MILWARD KENNEDY

  MR. ANDERSON frowned at the sound of the buzzer. Slowly, reluctantly, he rose to his feet and walked through the door in the corner of the room into the Home Secretary’s presence. People are prone to suppose that the private secretary of a Cabinet Minister is some young man on the threshold of his career in the Civil Service; some, perhaps, even imagine him a kind of stenographer. They do not stop to consider the differences between a private secretary, an assistant private secretary, a secretary shorthand-typist and a personal secretary. Mr. Anderson in fact was in the early forties; he was next but one in the department to be promoted to the rank of assistant secretary—which has nothing to do with secretaryship, but implies the control of a considerable section and perhaps a numerous staff. As private secretary, Mr. Anderson drew an allowance which, in days of a falling cost of living index (the corollary being a falling salary), was extremely welcome; promotion, however, was in his opinion overdue and would be extremely welcome, and, apart from financial considerations, would confer this great benefit that he would no longer spend the day popping up and down, just in the middle of something that called for concentration, to answer a bell like a chambermaid in a crowded hotel.

  Besides, Mr. Anderson was tired of Cabinet Ministers. They might be all very well addressing huge crowds on vague political issues-Mr. Anderson could not imagine himself making a speech-but in office they were more trouble than they were worth. If they ignored the department’s advice, they got themselves and everything into a mess; if they took it-well, they could claim very little credit. In fact, they wasted a great deal of time in wondering whether or not to take it, and in discussing the problem with their private secretaries.

  Brackenthorpe was all right in his way; quite a good sort, and up at Oxford with Anderson’s eldest brother. But as an administrator-well, he simply could not get it into his head that the Home Department did things in certain ways, because those ways were best. …

  “I thought as much,” said Anderson to himself, observing that the Home Secretary had before him the file dealing with the Comstock affair. Now there was a case in point: fancy taking the whole thing out of the hands of Scotland Yard just because an Assistant Commissioner had been more or less on the scene when the thing happened.

  “We don’t seem much forrarder with this inquiry, Anderson,” said the Home Secretary.

  “We!” thought Anderson. He made no reply.

  “I—er—don’t you think we ought to get the views of—er-the departments concerned?”

  “I understood it was rather urgent,” said Anderson. (“What on earth is he getting at?” he asked himself. “Only one department is concerned, and that’s the C.I.D., and that he has ruled out.” He almost smiled as he wondered what the Chief Inspector of Factories would say if asked to express his views on the Comstock Inquiry.)

  The Home Secretary cleared his throat and glanced at the clock on his table.

  “Let’s see. There’s a Cabinet at eleven, isn’t there? I must be off. I tell you what, Anderson. You’d better look through this file and-er-let me know what you make of it.”

  “Very well, Sir Philip.”

  The Home Secretary cleared his throat again.

  “You’ll find on the file,” he said,” a memorandum which I dictated. Don’t—er—pay too much attention to its conclusion, which may be described as a little jeu d’esprit. But don’t forget that it’s all—er—rather-h’m-urgent.”

  Mr. Anderson knew perfectly well what the file contained; he had long since read through the Home Secretary’s “memorandum.” He knew, too, that the Home Secretary had been on the point of reminding him that the papers were secret, and only just in time had remembered that no one was better able than the private secretary both to judge whether a paper was secret and to treat it appropriately (which does not always mean secretly) if it was.

  The Home Secretary knew all this, too, and it annoyed him.

  “There’s been too much delay already. Much too much. These-h’m-experts ought all to have got to work at once. I gave ’em forty-eight hours—”

  “But not collectively,” Anderson remonstrated, in a gentle tone. “They would have fallen over one another, and perhaps there would have been a couple more murders. Besides, I understood you to say ‘forty-eight hours each.’”

  The Home Secretary particularly disliked the reference to the possibility of further murders; for Anderson at the beginning had protested against the “expert” idea. Mrs. Bradley, he argued, was possibly a murderess already; Mr. Sheringham was almost certainly an accomplice after the fact; Sir John Saumarez (” not that that is his real name “) was married to a lady who had been found guilty of murder; and the Sunday papers had more than once linked the name of Lord Peter Wimsey … and, after all, his brother the Duke. …

  “Well, it’s high time—” Sir Philip began, about to repeat his complaint of delay in the inquiry.

  “Yes,” said Anderson, glancing at the clock and instantly assuming that the reference was to the meeting of the Cabinet; and in a minute or two Sir Philip, escorted by his assistant private secretary, was on his way to Downing Street.

  When Gambrell, the Assistant Private Secretary, returned, he found Anderson frowning over the Comstock file.

  “Look here, Gambrell,” he said, “he wants us to look into this. Why, God knows. It’s no concern of ours. However, we’ve both read the papers, and I suggest that we have a bit of a conference on them. We can take his room for the rest of the morning. Miss Head can hold the fort here.”

  Gambrell was only an Assistant Principal, but he had some ten years’ service to his credit, and was almost as well versed as Anderson in the problems of administration; but on this occasion he was puzzled.

  “How do we start?” he inquired, when the couple had adjourned to the comfort and seclusion of the adjoining room.

  They sat face to face across a table at the far end of the lofty room. Anderson was tall and dark, lean-faced, with one eyebrow more uptilted than the other and consequently a permanent air of polite scepticism; he wore a double-breasted black coat and smartly striped trousers, and outside the office might easily have been thought to belong to the staff of the Foreign Office. Gambrell, in contrast, was short and chubby, with big round spectacles;he met the world with a stare of innocent wonder, and his rather shabby tweed suit completed the illusion that he was an overgrown schoolboy up in London for the day.

  At Gambrell’s remark, Anderson’s eyebrows twitched into a slight frown.

  “I suppose we’d better treat this just like any other file—consider the action proposed, consider whether it is warranted by the facts—and, of course, whether the facts are all stated—and then consider what the results of taking the action would
probably be.”

  Gambrell did not dissent, though he had some doubt whether this procedure would answer very well in this particular case.

  “Well?” said Anderson, discerning the doubt.

  “By all means,” Gambrell agreed, “only there seem to be some-well, some preliminary observations to make.”

  “Fire away!” said Anderson, pulling a pipe from his pocket, and looking very much more human.

  “It struck me,” Gambrell began, “that the experts weren’t too anxious to report their findings to us.”

  “I should not call that an over-statement,” was Anderson’s comment. “If we hadn’t managed to pinch Mrs. Bradley’s diary, we should certainly have got nothing out of her. Lord Peter Wimsey-well, we know about him. Sir John Saumarez omitted to invite any of our people to his séance, and if we hadn’t sent in a man in plain clothes—”

  “Mr. Sheringham—” Gambrell interrupted.

  “Yes, he was different. Anxious to explain his final opinions, but I gather the Yard man-yes, Moresby-had a job to get out of him all his earlier views and his facts.”

  “It really looks as if the C.I.D. have a case to go to the Treasury for extra staff for liaison duties with distinguished amateurs,” Gambrell observed, smiling. But Anderson, removing his pipe from his mouth and fingering the file, recalled him to serious affairs.

  “They seem between ’em to have unearthed a good many facts,” said Anderson. “But as I see it none of ’em proposes action based upon all the facts. Mrs. Bradley, for instance-she comes first in the file. The chief point in her case-her real case-is that there were only two revolvers. But thanks to Mr. Sheringham we know there were three.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I know. The third didn’t fire the shot that killed Comstock either. We know that, from the police report that came in this morning. To that extent Mrs. Bradley’s theory still holds good. But if there were three, why not four?”

  “Incidentally, the police report on the third revolver seems to do in Sheringham’s theory. They say it was two months or so since it was last fired-quite apart from the fact that this particular bullet wasn’t fired by it.”

  “Let’s stick to Mrs. Bradley, shall we?” Anderson demanded. Gambrell shrugged his shoulders.

  “I think we shall have to take things out of the order in which they happen to be in the file,” he protested stubbornly.

  “As you like,” said Anderson, obviously convinced that the concession was foolish; but then the whole business had been so irregularly handled.

  “Why not consider first who’s cleared by the various inquiries, and who is not?” Gambrell boldly proposed. “And begin with the Home Secretary-in theory he seems to have confessed to the murder.”

  “Plainly ridiculous,” Anderson said severely. “First of all, this business about the pistol being sent through the post, loaded—”

  “There are people who break the rules of the Post Office,” Gambrell mildly suggested.

  “Idiot! I didn’t mean that. But who ever heard of a butler handing a parcel to the Home Secretary in person just because it was marked Personal and Private and Urgent and all the rest? Aren’t those precisely the parcels which are always opened by a third party?”

  Gambrell nodded.

  “The fact is, the public imagine that a Cabinet Minister has to keep his own secrets,” the Principal Private Secretary was off upon his favourite hobby-horse. His Assistant was hard put to it to unseat him, mainly by referring to the obvious ease with which criminals could dispose of Home Secretaries if Home Secretaries and their butlers really behaved like that.

  “Quite so. And in the next place there’s this business about a single-handed trip to a by-election. Apparently some extraordinary kind of lunch-hour gathering, too. We know, my dear Gambrell, that Brackenthorpe didn’t go off by himself like that, and never does. The chauffeur took queer, and all that nonsense. Really, the public. …”

  “The less said about motor-cars the better, in these days of economy,” said Gambrell. “If the Press got to hear about the carryings-on of the Cabinet, they’d shout louder than ever for us to have our pay docked!”

  “Anyhow,” Anderson went on, resuming his pipe, “we know that the Home Secretary’s story is absurd.” He struck a match. “And all that that implies,” he added softly. “Accordingly, we wash out the Home Secretary. Who’s next, in order of precedence?”

  “The Archbishop should have come first, I fancy?” Gambrell answered.

  “The Archbishop is obviously cleared,” Anderson pronounced, “Wimsey does that-all that stuff about the bleeding. Mills saw the Archbishop off, then came back and found Hope-Fairweather polishing the parquet; then Hope-Fairweather went-and about the same time Littleton found the blood still running. The Archbishop is indubitably innocent.”

  Gambrell agreed that that was so. “But all the same,” he demanded, “why that story he—or his chaplain—told Sheringham?”

  “Isn’t that pretty plain?”

  “Is it? That lie about business’with Canon Pritchard, when the Canon wasn’t in Winborough at all at the time.”

  “Don’t you see, my dear Gambrell? The Archbishop knew he was in a bit of a fix, or thought he was. As we know from the servants’ evidence, he did have the hell of a row with Comstock. And then Sir John Saumarez fairly picked on him-professional jealousy, if you ask me. And after that séance—mind you, Sir John produced no real evidence, but I daresay he reconstructed the interview up to a point—”

  “You mean that Anselm Medium went home and got his chaplain to fake up a good story?”

  “Yes. And it was a good story-all that about the signed article. Just the kind of thing the Archbishop would have liked to pull off.”

  Anderson laughed, and Gambrell followed suit.

  “Pretty cool, wasn’t it? To produce a letter which you haven’t posted as proof that you’re telling the truth about an interview to which the letter refers? That was what made me wonder. … But I agree with you, Anderson. Wimsey has cleared the Church.”

  Anderson awaited the next candidate for clearance.

  “Littleton,” Gambrell announced.

  “Pity we’ve washed out the Home Secretary,” said Anderson, knocking out his pipe crossly into the wastepaper basket, and then stooping to prevent a conflagration. “His evidence cleared Littleton.”

  “Incidentally, that was another weak point in his story,” Gambrell observed. “He said he stood there staring at the window, and though he saw Littleton, he never saw Hope-Fairweather. Yet Hope-Fairweather must have been in full view when he came to the drawer of the desk. Look at the plan.”

  “Besides which, is it credible that Brackenthorpe continued to stare for a long enough time for Hope-Fairweather and Littleton to go and get their cars and drive out of the grounds? But don’t let us waste time. We’ve washed out the Home Secretary.”

  His tone suggested satisfaction at the performance.

  “By the way, about this plan of Hursley Lodge,” Gambrell pursued another side track. “There’s no scale, but according to Wimsey, it’s only thirty feet from the window to the wall.”

  “Well? Pretty small, I know, but—”

  “It’s true there’s no scale—” Gambrell went on.

  “And yet the Home Secretary preferred to rely upon the local police, who produced the plan,” the other interrupted.

  “Yes. But-well, I think Wimsey guessed at the distance from the size of the room. What he ought to have done, if he hadn’t time to measure, was to judge by the garage. Ten foot wide, at least; which adds ten foot to the distance from window to garden wall.”

  Anderson fidgetted impatiently with the file.

  “I was only going to say,” Gambrell persevered, “that I don’t believe that a bullet fired from one of those little pistols would still be rising at forty feet, which further disproves the Home Secretary’s story.”

  “One theory at a time,” Anderson requested, “or since you prefer i
t so, one person at a time. Littleton’s next, I think.”

  “I must admit,” said Gambrell slowly, “that I don’t quite see how to clear him conclusively. We’d better look into the various time-tables—”

  “No, no. Not yet. Put him on a list of Judgment Suspended.”

  “Mills, too, in that case.”

  “If you like. It seems most improbable that he did the trick. I mean to say, to choose a time when the house was crawling with people—”

  “You don’t think that may have been the very reason?”

  Anderson frowned.

  “Gambrell, you’ve been reading detective stories. You can’t put down Mills, because Wimsey surely has cleared him. Yes; here we are. Either Littleton or Mills is cleared. If Littleton’s story is true, that the blood was still flowing when he went into the study, then Mills can’t possibly be guilty of Comstock’s murder. On the other hand, if Littleton is lying-but I don’t see what possible motive he can have unless he’s guilty himself.”

  “In either case, then, Mills is innocent,” Gambrell said, but he did not look altogether satisfied. “I suppose Wimsey is right about Mills?”

  “It’s a matter of time-table,” Anderson replied. “A good many of the details which are down on one list or another are more or less irrelevant-at this stage. I assume twelve-sixteen, as per Wimsey, for the time when Littleton found the bleeding corpse-that seems to be about right, whichever way you look at it. Now there’s a brief space of time, twelve-eleven to twelve-twelve, or say twelve-twelve and a half, when Mills was alone. But if he’d done the shooting then, the wound would not have been bleeding at twelve-sixteen. I wonder, though. If we assume another half-minute error in Wimsey’s time-table and put Littleton’s entry at twelve-fifteen and a half—that’s three minutes. I wonder whether the blood would flow as long as that ?”

  “Matter for the experts?” Gambrell suggested.

  “Yes. But assuming it to be possible, it seems to me more likely that Hope-Fairweather than Mills did the shooting.”

  “I don’t see that.”