Beware of the Trains (19 page)

Leavis smiled feebly. “All a lot of nonsense,” he said. “When the Inspector came to see me, earlier on, I told him to take the chap away. Anyone’d think someone had tried to murder me.”

“Yes, well, someone might have, you know,” Fen countered. “We couldn’t be sure about that, till you came round.”

“Nonsense.” Leavis spoke with a throaty vehemence which verged on anger. “Utter nonsense.” And with that Fen was obliged to be content.

Outside the hospital he paused, unsure of his next move. It was a moral certainty, he thought, that St. John had pushed his father off the rocks at Nag’s Tor; but even if Leavis had been prepared to denounce his son—which patently he was not; and with the tutelary policeman removed from the room at the hospital they had now had the opportunity to patch up a story between them—even then, there was no
proof
of that odious young man’s guilt. A second attempt? Fen thought it by no means impossible: no man can be on his guard
all
the time, even if he knows in what quarter the danger lies. Moreover, Leavis now possessed a knowledge so dangerous to his son that, even if he were sensible enough to disinherit the boy immediately, he would still remain in constant peril on account of his knowledge alone. On the other hand, if the police were to find some definite indication that St. John was responsible for the Nag’s Tor affair, and he
knew
that they had found it, then the father would be relatively safe, in that another suspicious incident would be too big a risk to be worth taking. Some definite indication… But what?

Fen is not, as a rule, much impressed by the operations of chance. But he thinks it at least vaguely portentous that during these reflections he should have been wandering aimlessly into the little town of Tawton; and that on asking himself the crucial question stated above he should have returned to awareness of his surroundings to find himself gazing blankly at the watches displayed in a jeweller’s window.
14ct. gold,
he read on a label,
as new.
And reading it, he remembered something he had once encountered in a book. And remembering, he did a simple sum in his head. And when that was accomplished, he walked with a light step to Tawton police station and asked for Inspector Waycott.

It cannot be said that Waycott was pleased to see him, for Waycott was a choleric man with a streak of real viciousness in his make-up, who had all along made a point of keeping Fen at arm’s length. This had not perturbed Fen greatly, other than at the moment when the Inspector’s carelessness had obliterated the fingerprints which might have established the watch’s ownership; the only matter on which he had insisted had been the posting of a man in Leavis’s room at the hospital. But in that he had got his way only by employing crude threats concerning his influence at the Home Office (which as a matter of fact was non-existent), so that he was scarcely surprised by the unfriendly welcome he received now.

“No, sir,” said Waycott irritably. “It’s finished, I tell you. Tied up and done with. Mr. Leavis has said it was an accident, and there’s no reason, to my mind, for thinking anything different. Admittedly there’s no proof his son went into Barnstaple that afternoon, but then, there’s no proof he didn’t, either. And now, my time’s valuable even if yours isn’t, so if you’ll kindly let me get on with my work…”

“You’re ordering me out, are you?” said Fen mildly. “You’re not prepared to listen to what I have to say?”

With his clenched fist Waycott struck the desk a blow which rattled the ink-pots. “I’m telling you to get out and stay out, d’you hear? And to stop poking your superior nose into what doesn’t concern you.”

“Yes. Yes.” Fen regarded him with interest. “Just get your Chief Constable here and repeat that in front of him, will you?” His tone altered. “Listen to me, Waycott, and try not to be more of a fool than you have to. There was a watch—as even you will remember—lying beside Leavis when I found him. It’s in his room at the hospital now, and he’s just stated definitely to me—no, don’t interrupt—that his father gave it to him for his twenty-first birthday.

“But, d’you see, Waycott, it’s an English watch with a fourteen-carat gold case. And the fourteen-carat standard wasn’t introduced here till 1932, when it replaced the twelve-carat and fifteen-carat standards as a sort of compromise, a mean, between them. What follows? Well, this is 1949, and Leavis is forty-seven years old. And if you’ll do a little sum on your blotter, you’ll find that Leavis must have celebrated his twenty-first birthday in 1923, or 1924 at the latest. In other words, he’s lying about that watch. It isn’t his at all. And you can guess why he’s lying, Waycott, can’t you?”

The Inspector, whose first reaction to this lecture had been to deflect or stifle it at any cost, had grown quieter as it proceeded, and by the end was visibly shaken, with all the fight gone out of him. He sketched a gesture of defeat and slumped back into his chair. “You mean the watch is really the boy’s, and it was the boy’s pocket it fell out of?”

“That is indicated, yes.”

Waycott considered the implications of this. “Well, if it
is
the boy’s,” he said, “there oughtn’t to be much difficulty about proving it…” Then he frowned. “But so long as the father insists it was all an accident, there’s no
case
. He can just say his son
lent
him the watch, or something like that.”

“Only that isn’t what he’s just told me,” Fen pointed out. “Of course, the danger is that he’ll retract that particular lie about the watch as soon as he gets a hint of where it’s leading us—that he’ll say he was tired and ill and bored and in pain, and simply mumbled the first thing that came into his head in order to get rid of me… On the other hand, if we could get him to
repeat
the lie, we really should have something. I say, Waycott, how about you going along to the hospital now, on some pretext, and seeing if you can induce him to tell you the same story? It’s a pity to
use
the poor man so ruthlessly, when he’s trying to shield his ghastly son, but it’d be for his own protection.” And Fen explained just how he believed it would be for the elder Leavis’s protection.

Without another word, Waycott got up and went; and in under twenty minutes he was back again. “Yes, he did repeat it,” he said. “So if it’s ever needed, it’ll be pretty awkward to explain away. But there’s still no
case
, mind. All we can do now is go to that young devil and tell him what we know, and hope that that’ll keep him quiet for the future.” He hesitated. “I suppose that’s
my
job, really, but unless I’m actually
charging
him with something…”

“No,” said Fen. “Not your job at all. I’ll do it.”

And so it came about that on that same evening, in the inn at Chigfold, Gervase Fen paid a visit to the bedroom of the only man who has ever seemed to him to be definitely evil. In the public bar below they heard voices raised, and presently the landlord saw Fen coming away with a sweat and a pallor like sickness on him. What was said in that bedroom no one has ever learned. But the landlord will tell you that Fen got precious little sleep that night, to judge by the look of him when he paid his bill next morning and left.

Seven o’clock.

The gathering darkness was accentuated by a fog which had appeared dispiritedly at about tea-time. Looking across the river, you could no longer make out the half-demolished Festival buildings on the far side; and although October was still young, the sooty trees on the Embankment had already surrendered their stoic green to the first spears of the cold, and there were few homekeeping folk hardy enough to resist the temptation of a fire. Presently, to a servile nation-wide juggling with clocks, Summer Time would officially end. In the meanwhile, it seemed that Nature’s edict had anticipated Parliament’s by a matter of several days; so that more than one belated office-worker, scurrying to catch his bus in Whitehall or the Strand, shivered a little, and hunched his shoulders, as he met the cold vapour creeping into London from the Thames…

In a room high up in a corner of New Scotland Yard, a room where the lights had had to be turned on more than two hours ago, Detective-Inspector Humbleby produced a sherry decanter and two glasses from a filing-cabinet implausibly marked ‘Jewel Thefts’, and displayed them to his visitor, who said: “I didn’t know you were allowed to keep drink on the premises.”

“We’re not.” Humbleby poured the sherry without any special sign of perturbation. “And I,” he added, “am the only officer in the entire building who does. There’s discipline for you… But look here, Gervase, are you sure you wouldn’t like to go on to the club, or wherever we’re dining, and let me join you as soon as this call has come through?”

“No, no.” And Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature in the University of Oxford, shook his head emphatically. “It’s perfectly comfortable here. What’s more, your sherry”—he sipped experimentally, and his face brightened—“your sherry is too good to leave. But what is the call? Anything important?”

“A routine report. From a pleasant though rather ponderous colleague called Bolsover, of the Mid-Wessex C.I.D.. They dragged me in to work with him on a case,” said Humbleby without relish, “arising out of primitive rustic passions. Tuesday and Wednesday I was on the spot where the thing happened, but then yesterday I had to travel back here so as to give evidence this morning at the Elderton trial, and Bolsover promised to telephone me here this evening and let me know if there was anything new.”

“What sort of a case?”

“Murder. It makes my twentieth this year. There are times when I wish I’d specialised in art forgeries, or something peaceful and infrequent like that. Lloyd Jones, who’s our best man for that kind of thing, has done practically damn-all for the last six months… However, it’s no use moaning, I suppose.”

“Will you have to go back to Wessex?”

“Yes, tomorrow—unless in the meantime Bolsover’s solved the thing on his own. I’m rather hoping he has, and that that’s why he’s late with his call.” Humbleby raised his sherry-glass to the light and contemplated its contents with solemn gloom. “It’s been an exasperating business, and the sooner it’s done with, the better I shall be pleased. I don’t like Wessex, either. I don’t like any sort of bucolic place.”

“Well, but what is the problem?”

“An alibi. We know who
did
the killing—we’re morally certain, that is—but the wretched fellow has an alibi and I can’t for the life of me see the flaw in it.”

A little superciliously, Fen sniffed. His long, lean form was sprawled gracelessly in the office’s only tolerable chair, his ruddy, clean-shaven face wore an expression of incredulity, and his brown hair, ineffectually plastered down with water, stood up, as usual, in mutinous spikes at the crown of his head. “Perhaps there isn’t a flaw in it,” he suggested. “It wouldn’t be the first time a moral certainty had turned out to be a total delusion. What sort of a moral certainty is it, anyway?”

“It’s a question,” said Humbleby, “of fingerprints. A certain man’s fingerprints were found on the weapon with which the murder was committed. The prints were slightly blurred, I’ll grant you; someone wearing gloves
could
have used the gun subsequently, and left them intact. But then, this man’s explanation of how they came to be there is a demonstrable lie—and what’s more, he has a strong motive for the crime. So you see how it is.”

“I’m not sure that I do,” said Fen. “Not so far. But since we’ve got to wait for our dinner, we may as well pass the time usefully: tell me about it.”

Humbleby sighed, glancing first at his wrist-watch and then at the telephone which stood mute by his elbow. Then, abruptly reaching a decision, he got up, pulled the curtains to across the windows, dispensed more sherry, and finally settled himself back into the desk-chair with the air of one who is now prepared to stand a long siege. Groping for a cheroot, “Cassibury Bardwell,” he began suddenly, “is the scene. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there?” Fen shook his head. “Well, it’s a hybrid sort of place, too big to be a village and too small to be a town. The houses are almost all built of a damp-looking grey stone, and the rain-water pours down the surrounding hill-slopes into the main street from all points of the compass, all year round. The nearest railway-station is miles away, and the people are in every sense inbred. They’re chiefly occupied with—well,
farming,
I suppose,” said Humbleby dubiously. “But it’s not, in any event, a very prosperous locality. In the countryside round about there are, apart from the farms, a few remote, inaccessible, horrid little cottages, and in one of these, tended only by a sister of advancing years, lived the protagonist of my tale.”

“More matter,” said Fen somewhat restively, “with less art.”

“Unconscious of his doom”—Humbleby had at last found a cheroot, and was applying fire to it from a desk lighter—“unconscious of his doom, the little victim, aged about thirty and by name Joshua Ledlow, which goes to show the potency of the tradition of Biblical nomenclature in these less accessible rural places—the little victim… What was I saying?”

“Really, Humbleby…”

“Here is this Joshua, then.” All at once Humbleby abandoned frivolity and became business-like. “Thirty years old, unmarried, of a rather sombre and savage temperament, socially a cut above the farm labourer and living modestly on money left him by a farmer father. He is looked after by his sister Cicely, five to ten years older than he, who shows no particular fondness for him and who would in any case prefer to be looking after a husband, but who remains unwooed and, having no fortune of her own, housekeeps for Joshua as a respectable substitute for earning a living. Joshua, meanwhile, is courting, the object of his fancy being a heavily-built girl called Vashti Winterboume, who appears to have cast herself for the role of Cassibury Bardwell’s
femme fatale.
She didn’t seem to me, when I met her, to be physically very well suited for this task, but the local standard of female beauty is extraordinarily low, so I suppose… Well, anyway, you see what I mean.

“Now, as you’d expect, Joshua isn’t alone in his admiration for this rustic charmer. He has a rival, by name Arthur Penge, by vocation the local ironmonger; and it is clear that Vashti will soon have to make up her mind which of these suitors she is going to marry. In the meantime, relations between the two men degenerate into something like open hostility, the situation being complicated latterly by the fact that Joshua’s sister Cicely has fallen in love with Penge, thereby converting the original triangle into a sort of—um—a quadrangle. So there you have all the ingredients for a thoroughly explosive mixture—and in due course it does in fact explode.