Beware of the Trains (20 page)

“With that much preliminary,” continued Humbleby rather grandly, “I can go on to describe what happened last Saturday and Sunday. What happened on
Saturday
was a public quarrel, of epic proportions, between Joshua, Cicely and Penge. This enormous row took place in the entrance-hall of
The Jolly Ploughboy,
which is by just a fraction the less repellent of Cassibury’s two pubs, and consisted of (
a
) Penge telling Joshua to, lay off Vashti, (
b
) Cicely telling Penge to lay off Vashti and take her, Cicely, to wife instead, (
c
) Penge telling Cicely that no man not demonstrably insane would ever dream of marrying
her,
and (
d
) Joshua telling Penge that if he didn’t keep away from Vashti in future, he, Joshua, would have much pleasure in slitting his, Penge’s, throat for him. Various other issues were raised, apparently, .of a supplementary kind, but these were the chief items; and when the quarrelers at last separated and went home, they were all, not unnaturally, in a far from forgiving frame of mind.

“Note, please, that this quarrel was quite certainly genuine. I mention the point because Bolsover and I wasted a good deal of energy investigating the possibility that Penge and Cicely were somehow in cahoots together—that the quarrel so far as they were concerned was a fake. However, the witnesses we questioned weren’t having any of that; they told us roundly that if Cicely was acting, they were Dutchmen, and we were forced to believe them, the more so as one of them was the local doctor, who had to be called in to deal with Cicely’s subsequent fit of hysterics. No chance of collusion in that department, then. Mind you, I’m not saying that if Penge had visited Cicely afterwards, and abased himself and asked her to marry him, she mightn’t have forgiven him: she’s not, poor soul, of an age at which you can afford to take too much umbrage at the past behaviour of a repentant suitor. But the established fact is that between the quarrel and the murder next day he definitely didn’t visit her or communicate with her in any way. With the exception of a single interlude of one hour (and of the half-hour during which he must have been committing the crime), his movements are completely accounted for from the moment of the quarrel up to midnight on the Sunday; and
during
that one hour, when he
might
(for all we know) have gone to make his apologies to the woman, she was occupied with entertaining two visitors who can swear that he never came near her.”

“I take it,” Fen interposed, “that this hypothesis of Cicely and Penge working together would have solved your alibi problem for you.”

“It would have, certainly, if there’d been evidence for it. But in actual fact, the evidence completely excludes it—and you must just accept that, I’m afraid… But now let me get on with the story.” (“I haven’t been stopping you,” Fen muttered.) “The next event of any consequence was on Sunday morning, when Cicely broke her ankle by falling out of a tree.”

“A
tree?”

“An apple-tree. She‘d been picking the fruit, it seems. Anyway, the effect of this accident was of course to immobilise her and hence, in the event, to free her from any possible suspicion of having herself murdered her brother Joshua, since his body was found some considerable distance away from their cottage.”

“You think the killing was done at the place where the body was found, do you?”

“We’re certain of it. The bullet went clean through the wretched man’s head and buried itself in a tree-trunk behind him—and that’s a set-up which you can’t fake convincingly, however hard you try: it’s no use just firing a second bullet into the tree, because it’s got to have traces of human blood and brains on it… Cicely, then, is in the clear, unless you feel inclined to postulate her hobbling a couple of miles on crutches with a view to doing her brother in.

“The crime was discovered at about ten o’clock that evening by several people in a party, one of whom fell over Joshua’s corpse in the dark: none of these people features in any other way in the affair, so I needn’t specify them at all. The
place
was a little-frequented footpath on the direct route between Joshua’s cottage and the centre of Cassibury, approximately two miles from the former and a mile from the latter. And I may as well say at once, to avoid describing the scene in detail, that all the obvious lines of investigation—footprints, position of the body, threads of clothing on brambles and so forth—led absolutely nowhere. However, there was just one substantial clue: I mean the revolver—a great cannon of a thing, an old .45—which Bolsover found shoved into the hedge a little distance away, with a fine set of prints on it.

“Now, we haven’t, I’m afraid, so far discovered anything about this gun—its ownership and history and all the rest of it. It may belong to the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury, for all we know. But in view of the fingerprints we could afford to defer the problem of the gun’s origin for a few days anyway; our immediate plan of action was of course to uncover possible motives for Joshua’s death, get by guile the fingerprints of anyone suspicious, and compare them with the prints on the gun-and that led us straight away to Penge, because it was impossible to be in Cassibury five minutes without hearing about the Penge-Vashti-Joshua triangle in all its sumptuous detail. Penge, then, had this motive of jealousy—Vashti isn’t the sort of girl I personally would do murder for, but then, I’ve known a
crime passionnel
be committed for possession of a penniless old lady of sixty-eight, and statistics show sex to be the motive for quite half the murders committed in this country, so that in that particular department I try not to be surprised at anything—Penge had this motive, then. And a comparison of his fingerprints with those on the revolver showed the two sets to be the same.

“When eventually he was asked to explain this circumstance he told, as I’ve mentioned, a demonstrable lie: saying that he’d handled the gun three days previously when Joshua (of all people!) had brought it into his ironmonger’s shop to ask if a crack in the butt could be repaired. On its being pointed out to him that Joshua had quite certainly been in Dorchester during the whole of the day mentioned, and so couldn’t possibly have visited the Cassibury ironmonger’s, he wavered and started contradicting himself and eventually shut up altogether; in which oyster-like condition he’s been ever since—and very wise of him, too.

“However, I’m anticipating: we didn’t ask him about the gun until after we’d gone into the problem of the time of Joshua’s death. There was delay in getting a doctor to look at the body, so that the medical verdict was too vague to be helpful—between six and ten was the best reckoning we could get. But then two women came forward to tell us that they’d seen Joshua alive at seven. They said that on hearing of Cicely’s accident they’d visited the cottage to condole with her, and had glimpsed Joshua on arrival; though he’d disappeared almost at once (having met the two ladies, I can see why) and they hadn’t set eyes on him again. So clearly the next thing to do was to talk to Cicely herself. By early on Monday morning—the morning after the murder—Bolsover had taken over; and the local Sergeant, an intelligent lad, had the sense to warn him before he set off for Cicely’s cottage that she was a hysterical type who’d have to be handled carefully if her evidence was to be of any use—a diagnosis which the event confirmed. However, it turned out that by a great stroke of luck she hadn’t heard of the murder yet; the reasons for this being (
a
) the fact that Joshua had planned to be away from home that night in any case, so that his absence had not alarmed her, and (
b
) the fact that the local Sergeant, a temperamentally secretive person, had sworn everyone who knew of the murder to silence until a higher authority should release them from the vow. Consequently, Bolsover was able to put his most important questions to Cicely
before
telling her his reason for asking them—and a good thing too, because she had a fit of the horrors as soon as she heard her brother was dead, and the doctors have refused to allow her to talk to anyone since. Anyway, her testimony was that Joshua, having seen her settled for the night, had left the cottage at about eight-fifteen on the Sunday evening (a quarter of an hour or so after her own visitors had gone), with a view to walking into Cassibury and catching a bus to Dorchester, where he was to stay with friends. And that, of course, meant that he could hardly have reached the spot where he was killed much earlier than a quarter to nine.

“So the next thing, naturally enough, was to find out where Penge had been all the evening. And what it amounted to was that there were two periods of his time not vouched for by independent witnesses—the period from seven to eight (which didn’t concern us) and the period from eight-thirty to nine. Well, the latter, of course, fitted beautifully; and when we heard that he’d actually been
seen,
at about a quarter to nine, close to the place where the murder was committed, we started getting the warrant out without any more ado.

“And that, my dear Gervase, was the point at which the entire case fell to pieces.

“Penge had lied about his whereabouts between eight-thirty and nine: we knew that. What we didn’t know was that from twenty-past eight to ten past nine two couples were making love no more than a few feet from the place of the murder; and that not one of those four people, during the time they were there, heard a shot.

“It’s no use talking about silencers, either; even a silenced report would have been heard, on a quiet night. And so that, as they say, was that. Penge certainly shot Joshua. But he didn’t do it between eight-thirty and nine. And unless Cicely was lying in order to help him—which is inconceivable; and in any case, Bolsover’s ready to swear on the Book that her brother’s death was an unspeakable shock to her—unless that, then he didn’t do it between seven and eight, either.”

Humbleby stubbed out his cheroot and leaned forward earnestly. “But he worked it somehow, Gervase. His lies alone would make me certain that he’s guilty. And the thought that he’s invented some ingenious trick or other, which I can’t for the life of me see, makes me writhe.”

There was a long silence when he had finished speaking. In Whitehall, the traffic had diminished from a continuous to an intermittent roar, and they could hear Big Ben striking a quarter to eight. Presently Fen cleared his throat and said diffidently:

“There are lots of things one wants to ask, of course. But on the evidence you’ve given me so far the trick looks fairly simple.”

Humbleby made an incoherent noise.

“If Penge’s alibi is watertight,” Fen went on, “then it’s watertight. But just the same, it’s easy to see how he killed Joshua.”

“Indeed.” Humbleby spoke with considerable restraint.

“Yes. You’ve been looking at it upside down, you see. The situation, as I understand it,
must
be that it isn’t Penge who has the alibi. It’s the corpse.”

“The
corpse?”
Humbleby echoed, dumbfounded.

“Why not? If Cicely was lying about the time Joshua left the cottage—if in fact he left much earlier—then Penge could have killed him between seven and eight.”

“But I’ve already explained—”

“That it’s inconceivable she’d lie on Penge’s behalf. I quite agree. But mightn’t she lie on her brother’s? Suppose that Joshua, with a revolver in his pocket, is setting out to commit a crime. And suppose he tells Cicely, if any questions are asked, to swear he left her much later than in fact he did. And suppose that a policeman questions Cicely on this point
before
she learns that it’s her brother, and not the man he set out to kill, who is dead. Wouldn’t that account for it all?”

“You mean—”

“I mean that Joshua intended to murder Penge, his rival in this young woman’s affections; that he arranged for his sister (whom Penge had just humiliated publicly) to give him, if necessary, a simple alibi; and that then?”

“Ah yes. ‘Then’…”

“Well, one doesn’t
know,
of course. But it looks as if the plan misfired—as if Penge struggled with Joshua, got hold of the gun, and killed his assailant in self-defence. Behold him, then, with a watertight alibi created—charming irony—by his enemy. If the lovers hadn’t been hanging about, he would have spoiled that alibi by going back afterwards—and one wonders why he
did
go back, though I imagine—”

“Morbid attraction,” Humbleby interposed. “I’ve seen it happen time and time again… But good God, Gervase, what a fool I’ve been. And it is the only explanation. The one trouble about it is that there’s no
proof.”

“I should think there will be,” said Fen, “as soon as Cicely ceases to be incommunicado and learns what’s happened. If what you say about her dislike of Penge is true, she won’t persist in the lie that exonerates him from killing her brother.” All at once Fen was pensive. “Though come to think of it, if I were
Penge—”

Shatteringly, the telephone rang, and Humbleby snatched it from its cradle. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, put him on… Bolsover?” A long pause. “Oh, you’ve seen that, have you‘? So have I—though only just… Allowed to talk to people again, yes, so you—
What?”
And with this squeak of mingled rage and astonishment Humbleby fell abruptly silent, listening while the telephone crackled despairingly at his ear. When at last he rang off, his round face was a painter’s allegory of gloom.

“Bolsover thought of it too,” he said sombrely. “But not soon enough. By the time he got to Cicely’s bedside, Penge had been there for hours… They’re going to get married: Cicely and Penge, I mean. She’s forgiven him about the quarrel—I told you she doted on him, didn’t I? Bolsover says he’s never seen a more obsequious, considerate, dutiful, loving bridegroom-to-be. And of course, she’s sticking to her story about the time Joshua left the house. Very definite about it, Bolsover says, and if she weren’t, there are always Penge’s
beaux yeux
to make her so.”

And Fen got to his feet. “Well, well,” he said, “you’ll never put him in the dock now. And yet I suppose that if he’d had the courage to tell the truth, he’d probably have got away with it.”