Five Red Herrings (31 page)

‘Fine, thank you, sir. An’ hoo’s yersel’?’

‘Blooming, thanks. Well, Inspector, we’ve found your man for you. He’s come across with quite an entertaining story, but it’s not quite the story you want. It’s certainly important. Will you come and have a look at him or shall we send him up to you, or shall we just send the story and keep an eye on him?’

‘Well, what does he say?’

‘He admits meeting Campbell on the road that night and fighting with him, but he says he didn’t kill him.’

‘That’s only tae be expectit. What does he say he did wi’ him?’

A long chuckle rippled over the four hundred miles of wire.

‘He says he didn’t do anything with him. He says you’ve got it all wrong. He says he was the dead body in the car.’

‘What?’

‘He says he was the body — Gowan was.’

‘Och, tae hell wi’ ’t!’ exclaimed the Inspector, oblivious of etiquette, Parker chuckled again.

‘He says Campbell knocked him out and left him there.’

‘Does he so, sir? Weel, I’m thinkin’ it’ll be best I should come an’ see him. Can ye keep him till I come?’

‘We’ll do our best. You don’t want him charged?’

‘No, we’d better no charge him. The Chief Constable has thocht o’ a new theory a’tegither. I’ll be takin’ the next train.’

‘Good. I don’t think he’ll object to waiting for you. As far as I can make out, there’s only one thing he’s really scared of, and that’s being sent back to Kirkcudbright. Right; we’ll expect you. How’s Lord Peter Wimsey?’

‘Och, he’s jist awfu’ busy wi’ yin thing an’ anither. He’s a bright lad, yon.’

‘You can trust his judgment, though,’ said Parker.

‘I ken that fine, sir. Will I bring him with me?’

‘We’re always glad to see him,’ said Parker. ‘He’s a little ray of sunshine about the old place. Invite him by all means. I think he would like to see Gowan.’

But Lord Peter Wimsey refused the invitation.

‘I’d adore to come,’ he said, ‘but I feel it would be mere self-indulgence. I fancy I know what story he’s going to tell.’ He grinned. ‘I shall be missing something. But I can really be more useful — if I’m useful at all, that is — this end. Give old Parker my love, will you, and tell him I’ve solved the problem.’

‘Ye’ve solved the problem?’

‘Yes. The mystery is a mystery no longer.’

‘Wull ye no tell me what ye’ve made o’t?’

‘Not yet. I haven’t proved anything. I’m only sure in my own mind.’

‘An’ Gowan?’

‘Oh, don’t neglect Gowan. He’s vitally important. And remember to take that spanner with you.’

‘Is’t Gowan’s spanner to your way of thinkin’?’

‘It is.’

‘An’ them marks on the corpse?’

‘Oh, yes, that’s all right. You can take it those marks come from the spanner.’

‘Gowan says—’ began the Inspector.

Wimsey looked at his watch.

‘Away with you and catch your train,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘There’s a surprise waiting for you at the end of the journey.’

When Inspector Macpherson was shown into Parker’s room, there was a dejected-looking man seated on a chair in the corner. Parker, after greeting the Inspector warmly, turned to this person and said:

‘Now, Mr. Gowan, you know Inspector Macpherson, of course. He’s very anxious to hear your story from yourself.’

The man raised a face like the face of a sulky rabbit, and Inspector Macpherson, wheeling suddenly round upon him, fell back with a startled snort.

‘Him? Yon’s no the man.’

‘Isn’t he?’ said Parker. ‘He says he is, anyhow.’

‘It’s no Gowan,’ said Macpherson, ‘nor anything like him. I never saw yon ferrety-faced fellow in my life.’

This was more than the gentleman in question could put up with.

‘Don’t be a fool, Macpherson,’ he said.

At the sound of his voice, the Inspector appeared to suffer a severe internal upheaval. The man got up and came forward into the light. Macpherson gazed in speechless bewilderment at the cropped black hair, the strong nose, the dark eyes, which gazed with an expression of blank astonishment from beneath a forehead denuded of eyebrows, the small, pinched mouth, with the upper teeth protruding over the lower lip, and the weak little chin which ran helplessly away to a long neck with a prominent Adam’s-apple. The whole appearance of the apparition was not improved by a ten days’ growth of black beard, which imparted a suggestion of seediness and neglect.

‘It’s Gowan’s voice, right enough,’ admitted the Inspector.

‘I think,’ said Parker, smothering his amusement, ‘that you find the removal of the beard and moustache a little misleading. Put on your hat, Mr. Gowan, and wrap your scarf about your chin. Then, perhaps—’

The Inspector gazed with a kind of horror, as this metamorphosis was accomplished.

‘Ay,’ he said, ‘ay, ye’re right, sir, an’ I’m wrang. But losh! — I beg your pardon, sir, but I couldna’ ha’ believed—’

He stared hard, and walked slowly round the captive as if still unable to credit his own eyes.

‘If you’ve quite finished making an ass of yourself, Macpherson,’ said Mr. Gowan coldly, ‘I’ll tell you my story and get away. I’ve other things to do than fool around in police-stations.’

‘That’s as may be,’ said the Inspector. He would not have spoken in that tone to the great Mr. Gowan of Kirkcudbright, but for this unkempt stranger he felt no sort of respect. ‘Ye have given us an awfu’ deal o’ trouble, Mr. Gowan, an’ them servants o’ yours will find theirsel’s afore the Fiscal for obstructin’ the pollis in the performance o’ their duty. Noo I’m here tae tak’ yer statement and it is ma duty tae warn ye—’

Gowan waved an angry hand, and Parker said:

‘He has been already cautioned, Inspector.’

‘Verra gude,’ said Macpherson, who by now had regained his native self-confidence. ‘Noo, Mr. Gowan, wull ye please tell me when an’ where ye last saw Mr. Campbell that’s deid, an’ for why ye fled fra’ Scotland in disguise?’

‘I don’t in the least mind telling you,’ said Gowan, impatiently, ‘except that I don’t suppose you’ll be able to hold your tongue about it. I’d been fishing up on the Fleet—’

‘A moment, Mr. Gowan. Ye wull be speakin’ o’ the events of the Monday, I’m thinkin’.’

‘Of course. I’d been fishing up on the Fleet, and I was driving back from Gatehouse to Kirkcudbright at about a quarter to ten when I nearly ran into that damned fool Campbell at the S-bend just beyond the junction of the Kirkcudbright road with the main road from Castle Douglas to Gatehouse. I don’t know what the man thought he was doing, but he had got his car stuck right across the road. Fortunately it wasn’t at the most dangerous bit of the bend, or there would probably have been a most unholy smash. It was on the second half, where the curve is less abrupt. There’s a stone wall one side and a sunk wall the other.’

Inspector Macpherson nodded.

‘I told him to get out of the way and he refused. He was undoubtedly drunk and in a very nasty mood. I’m sorry, I know he’s dead, but it doesn’t alter the fact that he always was one of Nature’s prize swine, and that night he was at his very worst. He got out of his car and came up to me, saying that he was just about ready for a row, and if I wanted one I could have one. He jumped on my running-board and used the foulest language. I don’t know now what it was all about. I had done nothing to provoke him, except to tell him to take his cursed car out of the way.’

Gowan hesitated for a moment.

‘I want you to understand,’ he went on, ‘that the man was drunk, dangerous and — as I thought at the moment — half off his rocker. He was a great, broad-shouldered, hefty devil, and I was jammed up behind the steering-column. I had a heavy King Dick spanner beside me in the pocket of the car and I grabbed hold of it — purely in self-defence. In fact, I only meant to threaten him with it.’

‘Is this the spanner?’ interjected Macpherson, producing the instrument from his coat pocket.

‘Very likely,’ said Gowan. ‘I don’t profess to know one spanner from another as a shepherd knows his sheep, but it was a similar spanner at any rate. Where did you find that?’

‘Go on with your statement, please, Mr. Gowan.’

‘You’re very cautious. Campbell had got the door of the car open, and I wasn’t going to sit there to be hammered into a jelly without defending myself. I pushed out from behind the wheel into the passenger’s seat and stood up, with the spanner in my hand. He aimed a blow at me and I landed him one with the spanner. It caught him on the cheek-bone, but not very heavily, because he dodged it. I should think it must have marked him, though,’ added the speaker, with appreciation.

‘It did that,’ said Macpherson, dourly.

‘I can’t pretend to be sorry to hear it. I jumped out at him, and he got me by the legs and we both rolled out into the road together. I hit out with the spanner for all I was worth, but he was about three times as strong as I was. He got his hands round my throat as we struggled, and I thought he was going to choke me. I couldn’t shout and my only hope was that someone would come along. But by a damned bit of luck the road was absolutely deserted. He let go my throat just in time not to strangle me altogether and sat on my chest. I tried to get another one in with the spanner, but he snatched it out of my hand and threw it away. I was horribly impeded all this time by having my driving-gloves on.’

‘Ah!’ said the Inspector.

‘Ah, what?’

‘That explains a lot, doesn’t it?’ said Parker.

‘I don’t follow you.’

‘Never mind, Mr. Gowan. Carry on.’

‘Well, after that—’

Gowan seemed now to have got to the most distasteful part of his story.

‘I was in a pretty bad way by this time,’ he said, apologetically, ‘half-choked, you know. And whenever I tried to struggle, he lammed me in the face. Well, he — he got out a pair of nail-scissors — and he was calling me the most filthy names all this time — he got out his scissors—’

A twinkle — unsuppressible — gleamed in the Inspector’s eye.

‘I think we can guess at what happened then, Mr. Gowan,’ said he. ‘Forbye we found a nice wee hantle of black beard by the roadside.’

‘The damned brute!’ said Gowan. ‘He didn’t stop at the beard. He took off hair, eyebrows — everything. As a matter of fact, I didn’t know that till later. His final blow knocked me out.’

He felt his jaw-bone tenderly.

‘When I came to,’ he went on, ‘I found myself in my own car in a sort of grass lane. I couldn’t think where I was at first, but after a bit I made out that he’d run the car up a sort of cartway just off the road. There’s an iron gate that you go through. I daresay you know the place.’

‘Ay.’

‘Well — I was in a hell of a state. I felt frightfully ill. And besides — how on earth could I show myself in Kirkcudbright like that? I didn’t know what to do, but I had to do something. I jammed my hat on, wound a scarf round the lower part of my face, and hared home like hell. It was lucky I didn’t meet much on the road, because I was all to pieces — couldn’t control the car. However, I got home — somewhere about a quarter past ten, I think.

‘Alcock was a brick. Of course I had to tell him everything and he concocted all the plot. He got me up to bed without meeting his wife or the girl, and gave me first-aid for cuts and bruises and a hot bath, and then he suggested that I should pretend I’d gone off to Carlisle. Our first idea was to say I was ill, but that would have meant visitors and fuss, and we should have had to have had the doctor in, and square him. So that night we decided to pretend I’d gone to Carlisle by the 11.8 from Dumfries. Of course, we never supposed there’d be any inquiry, and we didn’t think it worth while to send the car out specially. My housekeeper was roped into the conspiracy, but we thought it better not to trust the girl. She would be certain to talk. It was her night out, as it happened, so she wouldn’t need to know when I came in, or anything, and the only person who’d know anything would be Campbell. He might talk, of course, but we had to risk that, and, after all, when he came to his senses, he might realise that he’d be letting himself in for a charge of assault if he wasn’t careful. Anyway, anything was better than going about in Kirkcudbright and being commiserated.’

33

Gowan wriggled on his chair.

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Parker, soothingly. He passed the back of his thumb carelessly down his own profile as he spoke. It was irregular, but the chin was reassuringly prominent. He was clean-shaven and could, he felt, stand it reasonably well.

‘Next day,’ said Gowan, ‘we heard the news about Campbell’s death. Naturally, we never thought but that it was an accident, but we did realise that it was just possible somebody might want to ask me whether I’d seen him the evening before. It was then that Alcock had his bright idea. Hammond had actually been over to Dumfries the evening before at about 8.45 to do an errand, and Alcock suggested that he should tell everybody that I’d taken the 8.45 to Carlisle. Hammond was quite game to back up the story, and as people would have seen the car go, it all looked quite plausible. Of course there was the chance that I’d been seen driving home later than that, but we thought we could bluff that out as mistaken identity. Apparently the question didn’t crop up?’

‘Oddly eneugh,’ said Macpherson, ‘it didna. At least, not while a gude bit later.’

‘No. Well, Alcock was marvellous. He suggested that I should send a letter off by Tuesday afternoon’s post, addressed to a friend in London — you know, Chief Inspector, Major Aylwin, through whom you got on my track — enclosing a letter from me to Alcock with directions that it was to be posted immediately. The letter was written as from my club, telling Alcock that he and Hammond could take the saloon and go for a holiday, as I should be detained for some time in Town. The idea was that they should smuggle me away with them in the car and drop me just outside Castle Douglas, in time to catch the train to Town. I knew that I should never be recognised there without my beard, though, of course, Hammond or the car might have been identified. The letter duly came back to Alcock by the second post on Thursday, and we carried out the rest of the plan that night. Did it work?’

‘Not altogether,’ said Macpherson, drily. ‘We made oot that part o’t pretty weel.’