Frequent Hearses (11 page)

“Are you there?” Humbleby was saying. “Is anyone there at all?”

“Calm yourself,” said Fen, “and tell me what has happened.”

“Oh, there you are at last… Well, they’ve done the autopsy on Maurice Crane, and it’s as you said: he was poisoned.”

“What with?”

“Colchicine.”

Fen frowned. “Colchicine? Well, well. It’s a pity we bothered about the coffee-cups, then.”

“Oh, so you know all about colchicine, do you? I’m damned if I did: poisoners aren’t usually so—um—esoteric in their choice.”

“How was it administered? “

“In a bottle of some tonic he was taking. Bagley routed it out when he went to the house late last night.”

“And when?”

“It could have been almost any time. The house is one of those big, rambling affairs where you can easily sneak in and out. I can’t pin it down at all.”

“Well, obviously Crane drank the stuff before leaving for the studios yesterday morning—so that must be the
terminus ad quem.”

“Yes. But it’s the
terminus a quo
that’s the trouble. The bottle says twice daily after meals, but people often forget to take medicine—or else just can’t be bothered.”

“M’m. How do you stand?”

“I’m officially in charge now. Capstick persuaded his Chief Constable to call in the Yard, and I persuaded the A.C. to let me postpone my holiday and take the case on.”

“And what have you discovered so far?”

“Nothing.”

“I see. Who gets Maurice Crane’s money?”

“Ah, that’s a point. His mother does, and there’s quite a lot of it. The father was a well-to-do manufacturer of flea-powders and laxatives and things, and he left fifty thousand to each of his children. Only they can’t touch it till they’re thirty-five, and if they die
before
they’re thirty-five, it reverts to the mother… It’s a motive, you know.”

“Thank you, I can see that. What about Gloria Scott?”

“Poor Charles has been inundated. Half of England seems to have recognised that photograph. But no one claims to have known her under any other name, or earlier than two years ago. There’s been a lot of routine investigation going on, but the upshot of it all is that we still don’t know anything more about her than we knew yesterday morning.”

“And in the cold light of a new day you’re afflicted with considerable doubts as to whether Maurice Crane’s death has anything to do with her at all.”

“Yes, I don’t mind saying I am… You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think you’re detecting things that aren’t there.”

“Indeed.”

“I think that the coincidence about the film and that ode has thrown you a bit off balance.”

“You think my mind is softening.”

“Since you insist on it, yes.”

“I don’t insist on it at all. In fact I deny it. But you people simply
won’t be told…
What are your plans?”

“We’re going through the motions prescribed for cases of murder. Something will turn up.”

“Good heavens. Micawber Humbleby, the Demon of the Yard. Are you going to keep me posted?”

“Yes, I see no objection to doing that. In the meantime, have you any
suggestions?”

“Yes. Steamship companies. Circulate Gloria Scott’s photograph to the stewardesses of passenger boats which arrived in England during the month before she turned up at Menenford. Once you find out who she was, you’ll have a line on Maurice Crane’s murderer.”

“‘That strain again’.”

“Well, if you won’t, you won’t. But don’t blame me if anything happens to the other Cranes.”

Fen rang off.
Colchicine,
he thought. Whatever the ultimate issue of the case, it would certainly become a toxicological classic. His text-books on poisons were all at his North Oxford home, but he found that he was able, without too much difficulty, to recall the chief characteristics of this particular toxin. It constituted, he remembered, one of the two active principles in the bulbs and seeds of the autumn crocus or meadow saffron, and a powerful decoction of the stuff could be obtained from those two sources without very great trouble. Its symptoms were vomiting, salivation and stomach pains, and death resulted from failure of the respiratory centre. And in one respect it was almost unique among poisons: it had no effect at all on the victim for several hours after ingestion. Fen could think of no instance in which it had ever before been used homicidally…

And in the meantime, what was to be done? As far as he was concerned, he felt, the answer would have to be Nothing. Crimes calling for routine investigation were not at all in his line, and from what he knew already the last dram of enlightenment had been squeezed—without, however, giving him the smallest clue as to who Maurice Crane’s murderer might be. Something further would have to be discovered, or to happen, before speculation could usefully be resumed. Accordingly, he went home and spent the remainder of the day eating, sleeping, reading, vilifying his children and practising desultorily on the French horn. From his viewpoint the case was becalmed; and it was not until the appearance, towards teatime on the following day, of the four o’clock edition of
The Evening Mercury
, that the winds began to blow again and the ship to veer towards new shallows, new reefs.

Fen was apt to say subsequently that he had never known a case in which the murderer was so inexorably hemmed in by mere unforeseeable circumstance. At every turn of the way Chance lay in ambush, plotting his progress as on a map, sketching in his face feature by feature, in the upshot announcing quite plainly and incontrovertibly his identity and name. And in hastening that final revelation nothing that Fen or Humbleby could do was of any avail; until such time as the Norns condescended to supply the final link which gave coherence to the whole chain of events, they were obliged to kick their heels in ignominious passivity. Although the crime presented a problem whose solution required deduction and hard thinking, the data required for that deduction and that thinking remained throughout inexorably the prerogative of blind destiny…

And on the Monday morning destiny wove the first strand of the net.

Her instrument was named Bartholomew Snerd, and by profession Mr. Snerd was a private enquiry agent. Private enquiry agents are commonly persons of integrity, but to a dishonest man their business offers certain violent temptations, and to all of these Mr. Snerd had at one time or another wittingly succumbed. He had, indeed, so often and so narrowly escaped prison that he had come half to believe that there hovered at his elbow a personal deity unremittingly sequacious of his interests; and this sense of supernatural protection had brought him, at the time of the events to be described, to a condition in which the balance between rapacity and caution was being only very precariously maintained. Mr. Snerd was aware, certainly, of the dangers of over-confidence; but the capacity of men for deluding themselves is virtually infinite, and the warnings of Mr. Snerd’s more circumspect instincts, though increasing daily in vehemence and number, were paradoxically less and less heeded by that part of him which took decisions and which acted. And it was this dangerous psychological condition, presumably, which involved him in the perilous enterprise of robbing Madge Crane’s flat.

Mr. Snerd was a personable man, well built (though tending unobtrusively to fat) and with an agreeably candid physiognomy. Though he was nearing forty he looked at least ten years younger, and the care with which he performed his toilet and chose his clothes helped to make a very presentable figure of him. In the grades and varieties of courtship he was widely experienced, and his flair for suiting his approach to his victim had proved to be one of his most valuable business assets, as well as a source of much more or less innocent pleasure to himself. He always went for the women; with men, despite his bluff and comradely manner, he was somewhat ill at case. And going for the women had this advantage in the way of business, that it frequently opened up lucrative opportunities for a little quiet blackmail—and in blackmail Mr. Snerd was an artist. It was a rigid law with him never to make an excessive demand and never to make more than one, and it was doubtless this wise and temperate plan which kept him immune from retribution. Indeed, it had developed, as time went on, into something very like a principle of ethics;
unfair,
or
ungentlemanly,
were the terms with which Mr. Snerd would have stigmatised any attempt to take the pitcher a second time to a previously plundered well; and his attitude to his victims, once they had acceded to his demands, was a kindly, paternal tolerance. In many ways, and in spite of encountering so much of life’s seamy side, Mr. Snerd had a very simple and unsullied mind; the fornication, perversions and trivial betrayals with which it was necessarily stocked made no more profound impression on it than if they had been the multiplication table; and this ingenuousness, when at last and inevitably his sins found him out, was so clearly unfeigned that if the evidence against him had not been overwhelming, his tutelary spirit—the magistrate being an impressionable man—might well have salvaged him once again.

Among his more legitimate activities the pursuit and detection of marital infidelity easily preponderated, and his neat and tasteful office off Long Acre had witnessed many distressing confessions of conjugal mistrust. It is one of the advantages enjoyed by private enquiry agents that, since the middle and upper classes resort to them only furtively, they are ranged in no universally recognised hierarchy of reliability and competence such as exists among tradesmen and even, to some extent, among lawyers, doctors and other professional persons who do not have to be consulted under the rose; and the consequence of this is that, as the clients of private enquiry agents are obliged to select them at random, the plums of the profession are not reserved to the more sober and experienced firms, but fall with reasonable frequency into the laps of quite lowly practitioners. It thus came about that there appeared one day in Mr. Snerd’s office the wife of an eminent film magnate who had, it transpired, reason to suspect her husband of adulterous inclinations and practices, and who for reasons into which Mr. Snerd did not enquire was anxious to have proof of these goings-on; and one of the considerable list of supposititious
inamorate
with which she assaulted Mr. Snerd’s ear was Madge Crane.

The progress of Mr. Snerd’s investigation—which was interesting as well as profitable—need not be related here. It is sufficient to say that although a fair proportion of the film magnate’s wife’s guesses turned out to be well founded, that relating to Madge Crane was, so far as Mr. Snerd could ascertain, wholly unjustified. And there the matter might well have ended, but for the fact that Mr. Snerd’s examination of Miss Crane’s private life had involved his making acquaintance with Miss Crane’s personal maid, an attractive brunette called Felicity Flanders. Miss Flanders, thanks to the fame of her mistress, was a supercilious young woman, not to say cagey, and even for one as practised as Mr. Snerd the process of gaining her affections (and thereby such confidential information about Miss Crane as she might possess) had been a long and arduous one. Once gained, however, those affections were revealed as being of so passionate a sort that Mr. Snerd began to fear he would never again be able to disentangle himself from them. Miss Flanders was, he perceived, the sort of girl whom it is not politic to jettison too abruptly. And so, long after his original motive for establishing the relationship had ceased to be operative, long after the film magnate’s wife had paid him off and departed with the ammunition against her luckless husband which he had provided, Mr. Snerd continued to pay his attentions to Miss Flanders. When all was said and done it could hardly be described as a penitential exercise, for Miss Flanders was good-looking, complaisant and not, apparently, at all zealous to regularise the granting of her favours with bell and book. At the time of Maurice Crane’s death, therefore, Mr. Snerd was still able to regard the association as an agreeable one; and when Felicity, informing him that her mistress was away for the week-end, for the first time invited him to the luxurious little Westminster flat, Mr. Snerd cancelled his other plans and accepted the invitation with genuine pleasure.

That was on the Sunday, the day following those events at the Long Fulton studios which have already been described. At nine o’clock that evening Mr. Snerd met Felicity for a sandwich supper and a drink or two at “The Queen’s Head” in Great Peter Street, and heard from her such details of yesterday’s catastrophe as she had succeeded in picking up.

“Not that Madge was all that upset,” she said; behind Miss Crane’s back Felicity always referred to her by her baptismal name, since she liked to be thought of as a confidante of that famous young woman rather than as a servant. “There wasn’t any love lost between her and Maurice, if you ask me. And I don’t wonder at it, either, not with him being the sort of man he was.”

“Ropy type, eh?” Mr. Snerd, though he had ingeniously evaded conscription in the late war, was prolific of Service slang.

“No better than a—than a satyr, he was. The way he used to behave to me!”

“Ah, I know the sort.” Mr. Snerd nodded sagely. “Can’t keep their hands off a girl’s ins and outs.” He winked. “Not that I really blame him, darling, where
you’re
concerned.”

Felicity giggled. “Oh, go on with you, Peter,” she said (Mr. Snerd had not thought fit to entrust her with his own name; or with his vocation, since she supposed him to be in the motor business). “You’re
awful,
really you are.”

“Well, how’s about shutting out the horrid sight with another of the same?”

“D’you think I could have a gin this time?”

“Better stick to beer, ducks.” Mr. Snerd was careful with his money. “Upsets the old tum-jack to mix ’em.” He ordered another round. “Look here, you’re sure it’s safe for me to come up to the flat? I don’t want you to get into trouble if she was to come back unexpectedly.”

“She won’t come back, don’t you fret. She spent last night with her mother and today she’s gone on to her cottage.”