Frequent Hearses (24 page)

“Our murderer does get about the country, doesn’t he?” said Fen thoughtfully. “Do you think it’s possible he has an accomplice?”

“I think it’s very unlikely indeed.”

“So do I. Do you think he has a private aeroplane?”

“An
aeroplane?”

“I’m not being facetious.”

“No, of course I don’t think he has a private aeroplane. Or if he has, he certainly wouldn’t use it for flying about from murder to murder. Too conspicuous altogether.”

“Yes. I quite agree. How long does it take to get from Doon Island to Lanthorn House, or
vice versa
—aeroplanes apart?”

“Three hours,” said Humbleby, “would be the minimum.”

Fen took his feet off the desk and stood up.

“And that being so,” he said, “you can arrest a certain gentleman straight away—provided, of course, that you ignore the possibility of an accomplice, which I think you’d be quite right to do. The point is—”

He broke off as a new thought occurred to him.

“No, I’m being a bit previous,” he said. “It’s not quite watertight… What time did you get to Lanthorn House on Monday evening?”

“About eight.”

“And David Crane was there at that time?”

“Yes.”

“So he couldn’t possibly have been on Doon Island between six and seven, poisoning the gin decanter.”

“No. Nor could Medesco, nor Nicholas, nor Eleanor Crane.”

“Then it is watertight. And the answer—”

The telephone rang, and Humbleby picked it up in no very good humour at the untimely interruption. But as he listened, his impatience vanished; and when, after a few words of warm commendation, he rang off, his tiredness had vanished and he was exultant. “Got him!” he said.

Fen smiled. “A confession? He’s been so careless that I’ve often wondered if he meant to give himself up as soon as Gloria Scott was avenged.”

“No, not a confession. Something even more conclusive. You remember you advised me to circularise the stewardesses of passenger-ships which berthed in this country about two years ago in the hope that one of them would recognise Gloria Scott’s photograph?”

“I remember,” said Fen sardonically. “At the time, you gave it as your considered opinion that my brain was softening.”

Humbleby grinned, his cheroot at a rakish, triumphant angle between his teeth. “I apologise,” he said unapologetically. “I abase myself… And that’s very generous of me, because as a matter of fact I did act on your suggestion. And it’s worked.”

“All my suggestions work,” said Fen smugly.

“Gloria Scott,” said Humbleby, with the air of one who recites intoxicating poetry, “landed at Liverpool on February 19th, 1947, from the S.S.
Cape Castle,
which had brought her and her mother from South Africa. The stewardess who looked after them on the voyage retired a year ago and went to live in the western Highlands; and since she reads no newspaper but
The Scotsman,
and
The Scotsman
was not one of the papers that published Gloria Scott’s picture, she wasn’t in the least aware that she knew anything which could help us. Mother and daughter kept to their cabin almost the whole time, so the other passengers saw next to nothing of them. But this Mrs. MacCutcheon, the stewardess, necessarily saw a good deal of them, and she remembers the couple perfectly. On that voyage, I need hardly tell you, Gloria Scott’s Christian name wasn’t Gloria and her surname wasn’t Scott.”

“As to her Christian name,” said Fen equably, “you have the advantage of me. But I can tell you what her surname was.” And he did so.

“Yes, yes!” Humbleby was vastly pleased. “You’re perfectly right. I don’t at the moment understand how you arrived at it, but you’re perfectly right. Good enough for a warrant, don’t you think?”

“Quite good enough,” Fen assented gravely. “But before you go, don’t forget to see your Assistant Commissioner and tell him that Chichley’s services will not now be required.”

“Such pleasures,” said Humbleby in a judicial manner, “come rather low on the moral scale, but they’re not the less alluring for that… Do you want to accompany me?”

“No, thanks. I’m squeamish about creatures in snares, however much they may have deserved it.”

“Yes, you’re right,” said Humbleby more soberly. “It’s never a pleasant business.” He stood up. “But if you’ll meet me later, we’ll discuss it all.”

“I’ll be at the Athenaeum,” said Fen. “Dine with me if you have time. And come there anyway.”

“Explicit.”
Humbleby moved to the door.
“Explicit
the Crane case. From now on the lawyers take over… Till this evening, then.”

An hour and a half later he was knocking at a certain door. It was opened to him by a maidservant—a slatternly, full-bosomed girl, irresistibly suggestive of the low-life episodes in an eighteenth-century novel. No, sir, she said, the master ‘adn’t been ‘ome, not since morning. And no, she ‘adn’t a notion where ‘e might be. Bin out a lot the last few days, ‘e ‘ad. Funny goings-on, if they asked ‘er. Oh yes (sniffing haughtily), they could come in and ‘ave a look round if they didn’t believe ‘er…

They went in and had a look round, and the house’s owner was certainly absent. Humbleby posted two men there against the contingency of his return, and drove off resignedly with his sergeant. The sergeant was not moved at being personally involved in the
denoument
of a case which the whole country was discussing. He was of the old school: as far as he was concerned, a murder was a murder, whether the victim was a film star or a vagrant, and all arrests were alike in representing an ethic vindicated and job done. Having cleared his throat loudly, he did, however, permit himself to address a sociable question to his superior. “Think ‘e’ll be able to slip out of the country, sir?” he enquired conversationally.

Humbleby grunted. “I hope not. And nowadays it isn’t easy, is it?”

“Not with all these Government regulations it isn’t, sir. I know they ‘elps us in some ways, but I’d as soon be without ‘em, just the same. The more red tape you ave the more petty wangling there is for us to dirty our fingers on. And there’s a lot too much of it, if you ask me.”

Humbleby concurred in these strictures. “Still, red tape’s useful in this case,” he observed. “The odds on our fellow’s escaping are—oh, at least ninety-nine to one…”

But unless natural death claims him, Evan George will no doubt still be congratulating himself, many years hence, on the fact that it was the hundredth chance which came off.

To Professor Gervase Fen,
c/o Leiper Films, Inc., Long Fulton Studios, England

Mexico, April 1949

My dear Professor Fen:

You’ll be surprised, I dare say, that I should write to you rather than to the police; we were, after all, only very briefly and slightly acquainted. But I’ve always felt a great admiration for your talents in the criminological as well as the scholarly field, and I should like you to be the legal owner of my confession, which I don’t doubt will earn some little notoriety in the history of crime. You will of course pass it on to the police, so that the affair can be definitively wound up and any remaining uncertainties cleared away… As you can see, I’m not repentant: those three odious young people deserved to die. But it’s strange how spiritually empty I feel now that the job is done.

My one regret is that it wasn’t possible for me to follow the course of the investigation. I should like to have known whether you had any inkling of the truth
before
my flight gave the game away. In view of your ability, and of my own deliberate carelessness, I imagine you had much more than an inkling.

Please note that I say
deliberate
carelessness. I flatter myself that if I had chosen to do so, I could have covered my tracks so effectively that even you would never have suspected me. But of course, the one thing I could not hope to conceal for long was the identity of ‘Gloria Scott’, and since that in itself was bound to incriminate me, the precautions I took as regards the actual killings were never more than sketchy, never intended to do more than give me time to finish what I had set out to do.

One thing at least will be clear to you by this time: the girl you knew as ‘Gloria Scott’ was in fact my daughter Madeline.

And I adored her.

Note the tense of the verb. I don’t use that tense merely because Madeline is no longer alive. Something—a quite unexpected psychological
volte-face
—happened to me when I saw Maurice Crane die that Saturday…

But you shall hear all about that in its proper place.

‘Gloria Scott’ was my daughter. And to make you understand why I killed the Cranes I must take you back to the time of my marriage, nearly twenty years ago.

I suppose there never was a less sensible union. Dorothy and I were incompatible in almost every respect. I met her in Johannesburg, where I was born and where I spent the first thirty-seven years of my life. And looking back on it, it seems incredible to me that I could ever have thought her attractive in any way. None the less, I did. You must realise that I didn’t begin writing, didn’t acquire a reputation and a decent income, till quite late in life. At the time I first encountered Dorothy I was a very insignificant person, earning a wretched pittance as a clerk in the Johannesburg office of the De Windt Diamond Company, and Dorothy came from a higher economic level altogether. Her parents, like mine, were dead, and she had a private income—nothing enormous, but quite adequate to live on. Even at that time I was hankering after a literary life, and if I was to write, I needed unearned money to keep me going while I established myself.

So you see how it happened. It wasn’t Dorothy I married, but her Deposit Account at the bank.

She was a slim, tall girl, very fair, with washed-out blue eyes. As you know, I’m small and dark, and I’ve noticed that men of my physical type are often infatuated with women of hers. And in some obscure fashion she must—since she did marry me—have been attracted to me, outwardly unimportant though I was. I should like to think that she divined my talent, but that would be to flatter her. Actually, I believe she regarded the marriage from the first as a licence and an opportunity for unrestricted bullying. And I was stupid enough to fall into the trap.

After the first few weeks my married life was a hell. With my physical smallness and my absolute dependence on Dorothy for money, I was impotent, hamstrung. Little men who are maltreated by big wives are normally matter for farce, but I can assure you from personal experience that the situation is not funny… If she had had any respect for my writing I might have put up with the other things, but at first I was very unsuccessful, and she never missed an opportunity of jeering at my work. And sexual intercourse, when she allowed it at all, was a condescension, an unspeakable mockery.

But then Madeline was born.

Artistic creation apart, Madeline provoked in me the strongest emotions I’ve ever known. Love, as other people experience it, has never come my way, and I’ve had no deep, enduring friendships, and so emotionally I was frustrated, bottled up, and all the affection I was capable of was available for Madeline when she came. I doted on her—it was a love so strong that nothing, not even my work, had a chance against it. I can’t pretend to myself, now that I’m able to look at things more clearly, that it was a healthy state of mind; on the contrary, it was an obsession which intensified as the years went by to the point, almost, of dementia. But I’m not writing this letter in order to justify my feeling for Madeline—only to explain how it came about that I embarked on anything so melodramatic as a career of vengeance.

My wife hated and despised me. And because I worshipped Madeline, my wife came to hate and despise Madeline as well. She was not physically cruel to the child—though I think she would have been, and enjoyed it, if she’d dared—but she thwarted Madeline in every way she possibly could, so that even when Madeline was an infant I could see that she was becoming secretive and twisted and mistrustful. I understand that Madeline was not popular at the studios, or at the Menenford theatre where she worked. But can you wonder that she wasn’t frank and free and straightforward, after the upbringing she’d had? I believe that if she had not died she would have fought off, in time, the effects of that upbringing, because she had a naturally sweet and candid nature; but you can’t chain a girl for seventeen years to a mother who hates her without warping her character badly.

I can manage to look at Madeline objectively now. She grew up to be rather conceited and silly and wild. I wouldn’t say these things about her if they had been her fault. But Dorothy was responsible, Dorothy and—

I was going to add ‘no one else’, but that wouldn’t be true. Indirectly, I was responsible, too.

Because, you see, Dorothy divorced me and the court gave her custody of Madeline. And that meant that from then on Dorothy was able to indulge in her subtle beastliness to Madeline without any restraint at all.

I needn’t go into detail about the divorce. All I need say is that my home life was abominable, and I slept with a girl and Dorothy found out about it. Of course, she jumped at the chance to get rid of me, and but for Madeline I would have been delighted to get rid of
her;
by that time I’d sooner have starved, or given up writing, than lived on her detestable money any longer. But I adored little Madeline—she was six then—and the thought of parting with her was unbearable to me. Dorothy knew that, and obtaining custody of Madeline was her great triumph, the most succulent and satisfying part of her revenge on me. I did everything I could to get the decision reversed, but it was impossible. I went so far as to contemplate suicide, but I felt that would be a betrayal of Madeline, because there was always the chance that one day, however far distant, I might be able to be of service to her. What I did in the end was to get drunk and leave South Africa. I was drunk continuously for three weeks, and then when my money ran out I worked my passage on a boat bound for England. I had the right to see Madeline once a month, but I thought it would be better to make a complete break.