Death on the Last Train (10 page)

“All right, Leah. I'll deal with the man.”

Constance Claypott was entirely different. She was small, thin and faded, with a look of infinite patience, the calm of one battered into resignation by circumstance.

Leah Claypott vanished petulantly into the dark interior without a protest. Her sister seemed to have her fully under control.

“Yes?”

“I'm Inspector Littlejohn investigating the death of the the late Mr. Bellis. Is your brother in, please …? He was on the train …”

“He's not at home.”

“Will he be long?”

“I expect him any time. If you would care to wait …”

The dim lobby was like a cave. It was covered in dark, old-fashioned red paper and articles of furniture thrust themselves out here and there in the gloom. A green-painted drainpipe for umbrellas; a ponderous mahogany hatstand with projecting knobs; a chest of some sort; and a grandfather clock with a broken glass. Littlejohn negotiated these obstacles and found himself in an airless over-furnished room used as living quarters.

The place was depressing. A piano with yellow keys, tarnished brass candlesticks and a back of red satin. A revolving stool and music stand with tattered copies leaking from it. A large dining-table covered with a velvet cloth and surrounded by plush seated chairs; a heavy mahogany sideboard with a carved eagle with glass eyes perched on its topmost point. A whatnot cluttered up with finicky little ornaments; two shabby easy chairs in red worn velvet. Two or three paperbacked novels lying around.

Under the window stood a heavy desk with an old typewriter in the middle of it. Piles of envelopes beside
the machine. Miss Constance supplemented a meagre annuity by addressing circulars at a paltry price per score. Her hand was too unsteady for script.

Littlejohn felt he would never forget the faces of the two sisters. They were alike and yet so different. As though the gods had started with similar models and by a twist here and a squeeze there, altered one to an addled half-wit and the other a resigned, innocent guardian of the lives of a moron and a boozer.

The two sisters, recognisable, but with the marks of time absent from their features, evolved in a number of progressive family groups ornamenting the dark green walls. They were accompanied by a weak-looking younger boy, presumably Harold, a subdued dumpling of a mother and, standing erect and dominating each group, a stern heavy-whiskered father, who had kept them under his thumb, twisted them all, sapped their initiative and then died a dipsomaniac of two years standing after a life of hitherto total abstinence.

The horror of Emmanuel Claypott's last years had seared itself into the minds of all his children and affected each differently. Alternate bouts of heavy spirit drinking and repentance with loud anguished prayers far into the night … Cirrhosis of the liver and a dreadful end. Then, an estate leaving next to nothing instead of opulence for the family who had never learned to work. Leah had gone soft in the head … Harold, madly in love with Helen More and rejected for another, resorted to his father's habits of drinking and sullen remorse. Constance, back to the wall, fighting to preserve all that was left of the wreck.

“What do you want, Inspector? My brother hasn't. …”

“Don't alarm yourself, madam. I merely want his help in a small matter. He was on the train when the murder occurred.”

Constance Claypott started slightly and her small nose quivered. Harold was always on the train. He took his
drink out of town by night and then came home late. Sometimes he lit the fires they had laid for the next morning. That was when he took awkward. Once he had pulled over the grandfather clock on himself. He fell downstairs sometimes and the two women had to struggle to get him in bed. At others he slumped in the first armchair he could find and there they found him snoring when they got up.

Occasionally, Harold grew maudlin and religious, calling loudly on God with tears in the small hours, hunting out bibles on which to swear future pledges, dragging his sisters from their beds to bear witness.

“My brother has had a lot of trouble. A girl treated him very badly and he never got over it. He behaves strangely sometimes …”

Constance was on the defensive, gallantly protecting her brood.

“Did he know Bellis?”

“Yes, and despised him. My brother may get the worse from drink sometimes, but he has never been immoral.”

Littlejohn felt at a loss and wished he hadn't come inside. Here he was having to make conversation and Constance probing to know exactly what he was after.

“I'm sure my brother had nothing to do with the murder. He had been with friends at Mereton and was the worse for drink when he got home. I heard him come in … They shouldn't play on his weakness. He has never been strong and cannot take drink like other men men …”

“Did your brother know the late Mrs. Bellis?”

“Yes. They were friends in their younger days.”

The look she gave Littlejohn told the rest of the tale.

“I believe Mr. Bellis treated her badly.”

“Very badly. Harold was very agitated … An old friend, you know. But he could not interfere between man and wife …”

Her voice trailed off as she realised she was perhaps saying things damaging.

“Connie … Connie …”

Leah was plaintively wailing on the other side of the door. Constance hurried out and Littlejohn heard them talking in low voices in the lobby.

“No … no. It's only a little information he wants … Harold hasn't done anything wrong …”

Leah was quizzing anxiously about Littlejohn's visit.

Quietly Littlejohn walked to the typewriter. He examined the pile of addressed envelopes, and took one from the middle.

Cardus Chaunt, Esq.,
The Gables,
            Tite Road, Salton.

Cardus Chaunt! What a name! Like an amateur detective.

Littlejohn pocketed the envelope.

Footsteps on the asphalt and a key being inserted in the lock. It was Harold home from the bowling-green. He was on the committee of the Salton Temperance Bowling Club and spent his afternoons hanging about the billiards-room, used on winter nights and in wet weather by the frustrated bowlers. He was often alone, but there was no bar and he fought a solitary fight against fierce inclinations to take to the bottle before the appointed hour. In the mornings he did book-keeping jobs for small tradesmen …

“You want me?”

Claypott wore a raincoat and his bowler hat was still on his head. He removed it and revealed a long skull thatched in grey hair, and a good brow. Thence the face tapered into weakness. The typical Claypott features. Jaw like a pike, with receding chin and prominent lips and teeth. And the small nose, like his sisters', but altered in constitution by his habits, livid purple and coarse pored like a piece of pumice. Perched before his watery blue eyes an old fashioned rimless pince-nez with bleary glass and pinched deeply into his flesh.

“You want me?”

He stood there like a petulant schoolboy, his well-kept fingers never still, twitching, jerking, picking …

“I believe you were on the last train from Mereton on the night Mr. Timothy Bellis died, sir.”

Claypott didn't know what to say, so took refuge in anger.

“I don't want to hear anything about Bellis. Scum … Swine. Not fit to live. Better dead …”

The voice rose to a shrill treble and Claypott beat the air with his hands and arms like a man driving off a swarm of bees. The day was getting on and he was feeling the frantic need of his usual remedy to give him strength to carry on.

Constance entered and Leah peeped round the door. Harold grew quiet and sullen.

“You were friendly with Mrs. Bellis in the past, your sister says …”

Claypott glared at Constance who returned his stare without flinching.

“What has that to do with it?”

“I wonder if you could suggest anyone who might have taken revenge on Bellis for the way he treated his second wife. She had many devoted friends …”

That got Harold on a raw spot and Littlejohn felt bad about rubbing salt in an old wound.

“Well, I didn't kill the swine, even if she was my friend once. No business of mine. Wouldn't have thanked me for meddling. Why don't you go to Dr. Cooper or some of the others. Cooper was mad about her and wanted to marry her once. Go to him. Why pick on me?”

“So you think Dr. Cooper …?”

“Who said I thought Dr. Cooper …? For God's sake leave me alone. What's it got to do with me? I didn't stop the train and kill him …”

“How did you know the train stopped? I heard you were asleep in the guard's van …”

“So some kind friend's told you that, have they? No doubt they told you I got up with the guard there and
stopped the train without him knowing. And then I got out, killed Bellis and got back without the guard seeing me. I'm not the invisible man!”

“Now, Harold. Don't be annoyed with the Inspector. He only wants to know if you saw anything that night. He's not accusing you, are you, Mr. Littlejohn?”

“No, I'm not, Miss Claypott. . .”

Outside, Leah could be heard whimpering as though the lot of them were being arrested.

“Well, what's he badgering me for? I know nothing about it.”

“You'd been making merry that night and your friends saw you to the train?”

“You seem to know it all.”

“Do you recollect anything that might be helpful to me?”

“No. I've told you I don't. The fresh air took hold of me when I got out of the club and my friends helped me … I must have fallen asleep … I don't remember anything till the guard woke me at Salton and then I went home.”

That was putting it mildly! Littlejohn didn't press the point.

“So you can't suggest who might have killed Bellis?”

“How should I know? Scores of people hated him. He swindled 'em out of their savings. Thank God we'd nothing in his blasted building society …”

“Don't swear, Harold dear …”

Constance stroked the lapel of his raincoat gently, like calming an unruly boy.

“I'll swear if I like … And don't you keep butting in. I can't help at all. I don't want pestering any more. … I've to go out to-night and I want my tea . .”

“You shall have it, dear. It's all ready for you. Some nice cowheel pie … the sort you like.”

“What again! I don't want cowheel pie again. Boil me an egg!”

Littlejohn was embarrassed. The sooner Harold drank
himself to death and put his sister out of her misery the better, it seemed. Although probably it would break her heart.

“Well? What more do you want? Haven't I said enough? I can't give you any idea who did it. I didn't like Bellis, I hope he rots in hell and that's all there is to it…”

“Harold!”

“Leave me alone … Nag, nag, nag. Can't I carry on my own business without being treated like a child? And now, Inspector, I'm going to have my tea, and unless you want to stay and have it with me, I'll wish you good-day … Well, what are you standing there for, Connie? Get my egg on …”

“We haven't any eggs … You've had your ration for the week and the new ones don't come till tomorrow.”

“You mean the pair of you've eaten 'em …”

“You know you've had ours as well as your own …” Littlejohn might not have been there at all.

“I don't want any tea, then …”

“Excuse me. I must be off. Thank you very much. …”

Littlejohn made an exit like an amateur actor who's forgotten his lines.

“I never saw such a swine in my life,” he told Forrester when he reached the police station. “How they put up with his tantrums, I don't know. They ought to hit him on the head with the poker …”

“Inspector!!”

Littlejohn grinned.

“By the way, Claypott has a typewriter. I got a sample of the type …”

He handed Forrester the envelope he had stolen from the pile on the desk, hoping inwardly that Constance didn't suffer thereby.

Forrester took the anonymous letters from his drawer and with a magnifying glass compared them with the sample.

“By Jove, Littlejohn! Just look here. We've found out who wrote these letters. They were done on Claypott's machine!”

Cromwell threaded his way through the mud of the camp like a cat on hot bricks. When he reached the orderly room where Harry Luxmore was a clerk, they told him Harry wasn't in.

“He's probably down at the
Green Man
in the village,” said an upstanding young sergeant. “That's his haunt, I believe, when he's off duty.”

The
Green Man
was packed to the door with service men and girls. Cromwell was passed from one to another in his search for his quarry. Finally he ran him to earth at a table with two Waafs. They were all drinking double whiskies. Luxmore was doing all the talking, swanking to the girls who giggled and rolled their eyes at him.

Luxmore was tall, thin and pasty faced, like a second rate dance-band maestro. Black hair, plastered down and combed back from a narrow forehead, straight nose slightly askew, little heavy-lidded eyes, a big mouth with loose lips and a streak of black moustache on the top lip, and hardly any chin.

The main thing you noticed about his companions was their elaborate coiffures, straw-coloured and escaping from beneath their service caps.

“Want me?”

Luxmore gave Cromwell a bold look, fortified by the drink he had absorbed.

“I'm from the police. I'd like a word with you.”

That took the wind from Luxmore's sails. There was apparently a soft spot somewhere in his conscience.

“Can we talk privately?”

“Come outside. We'll sit on the bench by the 'bus stop. Won't be long, girls. Order again if you like …”

Cromwell told Luxmore what he wanted. The man's confidence returned when he found he wasn't involved.